What Happened Today - 13 March 2026
What Happened Today – 13 Mar 2026
Iran War
Attacks here in the US
Update on Military Leaders and “God’s Divine Plan”
Fed Chair Update/Budget Update
Epstein Update
Tarriff Update
Where is Major General William Neil McCasland?
USAF KC-135 crash
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Iran War
At this point calling this anything but a war is just gaslighting. We’ve got U.S. and Israeli forces bombing Iran, Iran hitting ships and bases, kids getting killed, the Strait of Hormuz basically turned into a shooting gallery, Russia feeding intel into the mess, oil markets on fire, and Washington still trying to sell it like some “limited operation.”
On the Pentagon side this morning, Hegseth and Caine stayed on the same script they’ve been running since day one: “decisive progress,” “historic results,” “America is winning decisively, devastatingly and without mercy,” all that chest‑thumping about Operation Epic Fury while carefully tiptoeing around the actual human cost. They bragged about thousands of targets hit, ballistic missile launches down more than 80 percent, drone attacks dropping, and Iran’s naval and missile infrastructure supposedly getting wrecked. What they did not want to dwell on was civilian deaths, including kids killed in strikes around the region, or how much more dangerous they’ve made the Gulf for everyone who isn’t flying a U.S. jet. When reporters tried to get at casualties, blowback, and escalation, Hegseth basically ducked, pivoted back to football metaphors about Iran being “out of plays,” and wrapped it all in that “this is an incredible demonstration of American power” nonsense.
On the “war that’s not a war” front: Iran’s new supreme leader is openly vowing to keep the Strait of Hormuz effectively shut, and tankers are literally being hit with missiles and drones. U.S. officials are promising to reopen the Strait and say the Navy will escort ships “as soon as it’s militarily possible,” while Trump is out there telling ships to “show some guts” and push through even as vessels are being attacked and in some cases blown up. Oil prices have spiked hard, with the price over $100 and agencies calling this one of the biggest supply hits on record, which is exactly the opposite of those “I’ll bring prices down” promises we were fed. This isn’t just a short‑term blip either; analysts are already warning that a prolonged Hormuz disruption plus expanded conflict into the Indian Ocean means long, grinding economic fallout, not some quick “surgical” moment.
On Russia, the reporting is brutal: U.S. intel leaks and media investigations say Moscow is providing Iran with satellite and other targeting information on the locations and movements of U.S. troops, ships, and aircraft in the region. The picture is Russia acting as Iran’s “eyes in the sky,” passing along coordinates that can be used to aim missiles and drones at American forces, even if the intel docs dance around saying it’s explicitly for targeting. At the same time, shipping data shows Iranian oil exports are actually up compared to last month, even with all this chaos in the Strait, which means money is still flowing into Tehran’s war machine while Russia keeps selling its own oil and gas into markets that never fully shut the doors. You put that together and it looks like the worst of both worlds: the sanctions “maximum pressure” talk on TV, and then in practice enough loopholes and easing that Iran and Russia both keep cashing in while American forces and civilians eat the fallout.
On Trump’s role and the “wartime sacrifices” line: the administration is trying to frame this as something Americans just have to suck up—higher prices, supply chain shocks, risk to troops, and now even risk to commercial shipping—because “freedom isn’t free.” That quote you mentioned about “Americans need to accept wartime sacrifices” fits right into the vibe: nobody voted for this specific escalation, but they’re using the language of duty and patriotism to retroactively justify it. Meanwhile, you’ve got Trump publicly taking a hard line about “finishing the job” with Iran while downplaying just how close we are to a full regional explosion, and offering basically nothing concrete about pushing back on Russia’s intel games or clamping down on the oil money flows that are feeding both Tehran and Moscow. The disconnect is wild: you’re told this is not really a war, just a necessary operation, but then you listen to the Pentagon briefings and market alerts and it’s obvious we’re in a shooting war whose costs—from kids killed in Lebanon and Iran to ships hit in Hormuz to Americans on bases under fire—are going to haunt us for years.
On the cyber side, U.S. officials have been warning that Iran is leaning hard on cyber operations alongside the physical attacks—trying to probe U.S. government networks, defense systems, and critical infrastructure, and hitting regional targets tied to U.S. and Israeli interests—but the Pentagon’s public briefings are super vague and carefully framed as “contained” and “disrupted” to avoid admitting how fragile things really are. What you’re not getting from Hegseth & Co. is a straight conversation about how blended this is—missiles, drones, tankers, cyber, proxies—because once you say that out loud, you’ve basically admitted we’re in exactly what they keep insisting we’re not: a full‑scale war with Iran that’s bleeding into a Russia‑backed confrontation and reshaping the global economy in real time.
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Attacks here in the US
The synagogue attack and the Old Dominion shooting are exactly the kind of violent, hateful garbage that keeps getting oxygen in this MAGA‑soaked environment, where extremist rhetoric is nonstop and accountability is nowhere to be found.
In Michigan, a guy literally rammed his vehicle into Temple Israel, one of the biggest Reform synagogues in the country, while armed with a rifle. He crashed through the doors, the vehicle caught fire, and he came out with what witnesses say looked like an assault‑style weapon before security shot him dead; the FBI and local authorities are treating it as a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community. There was a preschool and early childhood center inside, kids on site, and the Michigan governor flat‑out said this could’ve been “another Sandy Hook” if the guard hadn’t stopped him and if the security prep this congregation has been forced to live with wasn’t in place. No kids were physically hurt, but that doesn’t change the fact that Jewish families are now explaining to their preschoolers why someone tried to drive a truck and a gun into their synagogue in the middle of a weekday.
Then you’ve got Old Dominion University, where a former Army National Guard member with a prior terrorism conviction walked into an ROTC classroom and opened fire. He killed an Army lieutenant colonel who was an ROTC instructor and wounded two other service members before ROTC students themselves helped take him down; the shooter was killed and the FBI director has already labeled it an act of terrorism. This guy had already done prison time for trying to help ISIS, shouted “Allahu Akbar” before firing, and still somehow had a gun in a college classroom with minimal warning for students beyond a last‑minute “active threat” alert. It’s the same tired pattern: we “honor the heroes,” offer thoughts and prayers, and then go right back to shrugging at the ecosystem that lets someone like this get armed up and walk into a campus building.
And all of this is happening in a country where MAGA media and politicians have spent years pouring gasoline on every kind of grievance and conspiracy—against Jews, against Muslims, against universities, against “globalists,” against anyone who doesn’t fit their idea of a “real American.” You don’t get men driving trucks into synagogues and armed extremists storming classrooms in a vacuum; you get there by normalizing the idea that your enemies are less than human and that violence is some kind of patriotic correction to a country that’s “under attack.” They’ll all rush to say “this is not who we are,” but the truth is these brutal attacks are what you get when a movement keeps feeding rage and dehumanization, blocks any serious action on guns, treats domestic extremism as a culture‑war toy, and then acts shocked when the hate spills out of the screen and into a synagogue lobby and a college hallway.
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Update on Military Leaders and “God’s Divine Plan”
his whole “Armageddon and Trump is protecting us” thing is not just a rumor—it’s coming straight out of real complaints from inside the military, and it’s completely unhinged.
What’s come out is that multiple commanders have been telling troops that the Iran war is “part of God’s divine plan,” literally invoking the Book of Revelation and framing this as an end‑times, Armageddon‑style showdown. In one complaint from an active‑duty NCO to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the commander opened a combat readiness briefing by saying troops shouldn’t be afraid because this was all laid out in prophecy and that President Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” The NCO says the commander was grinning while saying it, like this was some glorious destiny instead of a real war where people are bleeding and dying.
MRFF says they’ve been flooded—hundreds of complaints—from across the services and dozens of installations with the same basic theme: commanders framing this war as a biblically sanctioned, Christian nationalist holy fight, Trump as the chosen instrument of God, and troops being told to see their missions in Iran as part of ushering in the end times. You’ve got service members saying this is wrecking morale, blowing up unit cohesion, and outright trampling their rights because they’re being preached at instead of briefed like professionals in a secular military.
And instead of slamming the brakes on this, the Pentagon’s public line has been to point back to Hegseth’s chest‑thumping speeches about Operation Epic Fury and Trump’s “steady leadership,” while dodging the core issue: commanders injecting apocalyptic religion into war‑fighting and using Trump as the messianic centerpiece of the story. Lawmakers and watchdogs are now pushing for investigations into both the commanders and Hegseth’s own biblical rhetoric, because this is straight‑up Christian nationalist fantasy being sold to people who signed up to defend the Constitution, not to be told they’re soldiers in some holy war Trump is supposedly leading on God’s behalf.
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Fed Chair Update/Budget Update
For once it feels like an actual grown‑up walked into the room: a federal judge basically smacked down Pirro’s fishing expedition into Powell, blocking those subpoenas and saying, in polite legalese, that there is zero real evidence he lied about the Fed building renovations and that DOJ/Pirro didn’t come close to justifying a grand jury dragnet on the central bank. That’s a direct hit on the whole MAGA narrative of “Powell the criminal” and a win for anyone who thinks maybe we shouldn’t turn monetary policy into a Trump‑loyalty test enforced by a U.S. attorney with a Fox primetime brain.
Pirro, of course, is doing what Pirro always does: doubling down and acting like she’s the victim of some deep‑state protection racket around Powell. She’s out there pushing the line that her office “politely reached out” and was ignored, that “no one is above the law,” and that the Fed is just mad it got treated like any other target—carefully skipping over the part where the subpoenas landed the day after Trump publicly raged about prosecutors not going hard enough on his enemies and then somehow Powell ends up under criminal threat for answering questions about construction costs. The lies here are all about framing: she keeps implying there’s some big, serious criminal case while every independent read so far is that this is political pressure dressed up as law enforcement, and now a judge is essentially saying, “Yeah, there’s nothing here you can justify in court.”
On the budget, Democrats are still saying no because Trump and Republicans are trying to use DHS funding as leverage to keep ICE and Border Patrol fully powered up with zero reforms after federal agents literally shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis—and then they want extra enforcement money on top of that. Dems have been clear: they’ll fund TSA, Coast Guard, FEMA, cyber, all the non‑immigration parts of DHS, but they are not signing off on more cash for ICE/CBP without changes to how those agencies operate and how abuses are handled. Republicans, with Trump cheering from the sidelines, are refusing any carve‑out because they don’t want a scenario where everything except ICE and Border Patrol gets reopened and then those two never get their new funding bump, so we’re stuck in this hostage situation where the whole department is shut down because Trump wants his deportation and border machine untouched.
The consequences are exactly what you’d expect and exactly what they were warned about: TSA agents are now missing paychecks and a chunk of them are walking. DHS won’t give clean numbers, but union reps and industry groups are talking about escalating call‑outs, resignations, and transfers—people just tapping out because they can’t afford to work for free while politicians posture on TV. Airports are seeing “hours‑long” security lines in multiple hubs, especially at big coastal and vacation‑heavy airports, with DHS itself admitting the shutdown is driving long waits while Republicans then go on Fox and somehow still blame Democrats for “playing games” with national security. Business groups are warning about the hit to travel and commerce, airlines are quietly panicking about spring break and summer, and everyday people are stuck in snake‑line hell at TSA because Trump refuses to move on immigration and Republicans would rather protect ICE than keep the basic travel system functioning.
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Epstein Update
Epstein’s longtime money guy just spent about seven hours with House investigators, and it was very on‑brand for these dudes: a lot of “I knew nothing, saw nothing, it was all very normal,” with just enough new detail to piss you off but not enough to feel like real justice.
Richard Kahn – the accountant who handled Epstein’s cash for years and now helps run his estate – sat in a closed‑door deposition and basically painted himself as the clueless bookkeeper. He told the committee his relationship with Epstein was “strictly professional,” claimed he didn’t know about the “terrible and unforgivable” abuse of women and girls, and said all the shell companies and endless entities were just standard rich‑guy tax and business stuff. He admitted he knew about Epstein’s 2008 conviction but said Epstein framed it to him as a one‑off “mistake” and that he believed it wouldn’t happen again, which is absurd given the scale of what we now know.
Lawmakers who’ve been in the documents for months clearly do not buy the innocent‑bystander act. Democrats came out afterward calling him a “fixer,” saying his name is all over shell entities that moved money for everything from tuition to victim payments, and arguing Epstein’s trafficking machine literally couldn’t have functioned at that level without Kahn’s financial architecture propping it up. They’re basically calling him willfully blind at best, complicit at worst: you don’t sit on top of 64 entities, tens of thousands of pages of banking records, and more than a billion in suspicious wires and just “miss” the pattern.
On what we actually learned: a few important points slipped out. Republicans (Comer and crew) rushed to highlight that Kahn said he never saw any financial transactions between Epstein and Trump or his family, and are using that to scream “Trump cleared again” even though that doesn’t touch anything non‑financial. On the other side, Democrats pointed to testimony that someone who had accused Trump received a settlement from Epstein’s estate, through the victims’ fund Kahn helped administer, which tells you there’s still overlap between his world and Trump’s orbit even if the pay came from Epstein’s pot and not directly from Trump. Kahn also confirmed the ridiculous scale of Epstein’s setup—dozens of entities, over 40,000 pages of bank material already reviewed, hundreds of millions moving through big banks, and that victim compensation fund paying out more than $120 million to over 130 women, all of which shows how big this thing was and how many people had to look the other way.
Bottom line: we got more confirmation that Epstein’s operation was massive, sophisticated, and deeply financialized, and that his accountant sat at the center of the money web while now claiming he was basically just a guy doing QuickBooks. We did not get the big, clean list of powerful names people are hoping will finally drop; instead we got another round of powerful men shielded, half‑answers in a closed room, and a system that still seems a lot more interested in “protecting institutions” than fully airing out how far this network really went.
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Tarriff Update
Trump’s tariff circus is back on, and now he’s getting sued from basically every direction: states, small businesses, big importers, you name it.
After the Supreme Court smacked down his earlier global tariffs in February and said he abused emergency powers, Trump turned around and tried to reboot the whole thing under a different law—Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act—by slapping a new 10% global tariff on most imports and openly threatening to jack it up to 15%. That move triggered a coalition of about two dozen states, led by New York, California, Oregon, Arizona and others, to sue in the Court of International Trade, arguing he’s blowing past the Constitution and the statute: tariffs on this scale are supposed to be Congress’ job, and Section 122 was meant for short, narrowly tailored balance‑of‑payments issues, not a never‑ending MAGA trade war. On top of that, small businesses and importers are filing their own lawsuits saying the new tariffs are just an illegal rerun of the old ones and that Trump is misusing an outdated law on top of already refusing to quickly refund the billions in tariffs the Supreme Court just ruled unlawful.
Where this goes: it’s headed for another big court fight, and Trump is on thin ice legally. The states are asking the trade court to block the new tariffs entirely and force refunds, arguing he doesn’t meet the legal standard (no real “balance of payments” crisis, just his obsession with trade deficits) and that he can’t just hop from one statute to another every time a court slaps him down. Meanwhile, companies are already in court to claw back money from the old, illegal tariffs, and the administration is dragging its feet, which is exactly why thousands of refund cases are piling up. Economically, every serious analysis says the same thing: Americans eat most of the cost through higher prices, with one Fed study pegging it around $1,200 a year per household—so this is Trump’s “America First” trade policy translating into “you pay more for everything while he picks more fights.”
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Where is Major General William Neil McCasland?
this whole thing is peak “what the hell is going on” energy: a retired Air Force major general with real UFO/UAP ties vanishes, the FBI gets pulled in, and it all happens right as Obama jokes about aliens and Trump loses his mind claiming Obama spilled classified secrets.
The missing general is William Neil McCasland, 68, a retired USAF major general who used to run the Air Force Research Lab at Wright‑Patterson AFB—yes, the same base long wrapped up in Roswell/UFO lore and rumors of crash debris and bodies. He left his house in Albuquerque on foot around late morning February 27, left his phone behind, and hasn’t contacted anyone since, which is weird as hell for a guy with a “medical issue” serious enough that the sheriff put out a Silver Alert. Local deputies, Kirtland Air Force Base, and now the FBI have been canvassing his neighborhood and the Sandia foothills, talking to hundreds of homeowners, running searches, and say they’ve found no evidence of foul play yet—but they’re “considering all scenarios,” which is law‑enforcement speak for “we have no idea what happened, so we can’t rule out much.”
The UFO piece isn’t just internet conspiracy noise; there is real history here. McCasland oversaw research at Wright‑Patt, has been named before in the context of UAP programs, and after retirement he briefly worked with Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars outfit that digs into UFO and “exotic tech” stuff, which made him a low‑key figure in that community. His own wife is trying to tamp down the wild theories, saying yeah, he had a “brief association” with the UFO world, but insisting he doesn’t have secret knowledge about “ET bodies and debris” from Roswell and that this connection is not a reason for someone to abduct him. She even joked that maybe the best hypothesis is “aliens beamed him up to the mothership,” then pointed out there’s been no giant mothership spotted hovering over the Sandias, which is her way of saying: calm down, let the investigators work.
Now layer on the Obama/Trump alien drama. Obama goes on a podcast and does the classic half‑winky thing: says UAPs are real in the sense that there are things in the sky we can’t fully identify, jokes there’s no secret alien bunker under Area 51 “unless there’s a huge conspiracy and they hid it from the president,” and generally treats it as “interesting but not proof of little green men.” Trump immediately seizes on that and tells reporters Obama “revealed classified information,” claiming he “took it out of classified” channels and “made a big mistake,” while refusing to actually say whether aliens are real or point to any specific leak—just pure vibes and innuendo. In the same breath, Trump says he might “get him out of trouble” by declassifying alien‑related files and then puts out an order telling agencies to start releasing government records related to extraterrestrial life and UFOs, clearly trying to look like the big reveal guy while throwing Obama under the bus.
So what’s the actual update tying all this together? Right now, there is no hard evidence that McCasland’s disappearance has anything to do with aliens, UAP programs, or the Obama/Trump back‑and‑forth—law enforcement and his family are both saying that out loud, even as they acknowledge his UFO‑adjacent background is why the story blew up. The FBI is in because you don’t just have a two‑star general with sensitive past work go missing and treat it as a routine lost‑hiker case, but publicly they’re still calling it a missing‑person investigation with no signs of foul play, and they haven’t linked it to any national security or UAP issue. On the political side, Trump is using the UFO/alien talk as another culture‑war toy—accusing Obama of leaking classified info, teasing declassification, and feeding the “they’re hiding things from you” narrative—while the actual people who might know something (like McCasland) are either missing, clamming up, or being filtered through cautious family statements and FBI press blurbs.
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USAF KC-135 crash
First, deep love and sympathy to the families, friends, and units who lost people in that tanker—this is the nightmare side of a war most Americans are being told is “limited” while crews are literally dying in the dark over Iraq.
What we know so far: it was a U.S. Air Force KC‑135 Stratotanker, a refueling plane that’s been the backbone of American air operations since the Cold War, flying a combat support mission for Operation Epic Fury when it went down in western Iraq Thursday night. There were two tankers involved; both were KC‑135s, one crashed and the other—badly damaged, including to its vertical tail, according to photos—managed to limp back and land safely. CENTCOM is adamant this was not hostile fire and not friendly fire, and people familiar with the initial read are saying it looks like a midair collision during or around refueling operations in “friendly” airspace, which just makes it feel even more like a senseless, grinding‑tempo loss than an enemy shot.
All six airmen on board the crashed tanker have now been confirmed dead, making this the first Air Force fatalities of this Iran war and bringing total U.S. deaths in the conflict into double digits. The names are being withheld until families are fully notified, which means somewhere right now there are knocks happening on doors and units trying to figure out how to go right back into the sky while they’re still processing that they just lost a whole crew. These aren’t the guys whose faces get put on cable news chyrons either—it’s tanker crews, the people who sit in flying gas stations so the fighter and bomber stories can be told, and now their deaths are being written off in the official line as “not due to hostile action” while everyone avoids saying the obvious: this is what an overworked, nonstop war tempo looks like.
There’s still an investigation underway into exactly what went wrong—procedures, maintenance, airspace deconfliction, the whole thing—but nothing they say later changes the bottom line: six people are gone who shouldn’t be, lost in a war the White House keeps trying to downplay even as it racks up bodies, and the least we can do is say their lives mattered and their families shouldn’t be carrying this alone.
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It’s the weekend…the news isn’t gonna stop – but if you need to step away to get some clarity – you should. Keep your peace, speak truth and thanks for continuing to stay engaged.
Speak Truth! Keep speaking TRUTH!
Don’t Give up the Ship!
Go Cause Good Trouble, with Your Elbows Up!
These are facts that I researched and verified – AI helped put together some sentence structure, but the words and tone are mine. These are my views based upon facts, research and thoughtful consideration using logic. I own the copyright to any images used. I’m comfortable to stand alone to uphold truth. Feel free to check me, but do not attack me. I am only causing good trouble.