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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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New culture war news, from the secret squirrel cloak and dagger part of culture war.

And it is top tier blockbuster spy thriller tale. Tom Clancy might be dead, but his spirit is marching on.

Inside Israel’s Secret Operation to Cultivate Ahmadinejad

The yearslong effort to groom the former Iranian president as an intelligence asset culminated in a dramatic effort to take him to an Israeli safe house in the early days of the war. But the plan fell apart.

Inside the Mossad Plot to Install Israel's Arch-enemy Ahmadinejad as Iran's Leader

A Haaretz investigation reveals how Mossad agents brought former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on board, the shock within Netanyahu's cabinet and the recruitment of collaborators inside Iran

True if big, but is it big enough? What is really going on?

1/ All true news, you can always trust NYT and Haaretz. No one can resist Mossad grooming, even old revolutionary and God fearing true Muslim like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. All resistance is futile.

2/ All fake news, designed both to enhance Mossad reputation and depress Iranian morale. If even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was traitor recruited by the Zionist entity, who can be trusted? All resistance is futile.

Any way, Israel looks strong, but far from all powerful.

Speaking of Mossad and Iran, check out what the vice president just said https://x.com/BulwarkOnline/status/2077462242488971283

Rogan: Most people think Epstein was Mossad.

Vance: "Ya. Mossad or CIA or some other deep state, whether in America or Israel…He clearly had connections to the highest levels of American intelligence. He clearly had connections to the highest level of Israeli intelligence."

Now as we can all assume that just like Trump, Vance would never lie or act irresponsibly in his position at the top level of government so we should take him seriously when he said that Israeli and American intelligence clearly had connections to Epstein. And Epstein had a known interest in Iran.

One has to wonder how all these things may be connected, and why the Trump administration continues to cover up valuable parts of the Epstein files implicating American and Israeli intelligence communities. I wonder if it could have anything to do with what a former top advisor to the admin once said before being forced to censor himself. Did we get into the war because our president is being blackmailed by Israeli intelligence? I doubt it, he doesn't act like he's being blackmailed. And blackmailing when you're also guilty is a weird strategy. It seems more likely that the Israel/Epstein/Trump connections aren't blackmailing each other, but instead collaborative even now. They all scratch each other's back, and while there's a predator shaped chain wrapped around each one, the MAD situation gives them lenience too.

Epstein was an intellectual dilettante who would have been a second-rate shitposter here. I don’t think he was particularly well informed. He was likely very intelligent, but that is different.

Vance: "Ya. Mossad or CIA or some other deep state, whether in America or Israel…He clearly had connections to the highest levels of American intelligence. He clearly had connections to the highest level of Israeli intelligence."

And how does that make you feel, JD? There is almost no greater piece of evidence that the Epstein thing is overplayed than this kind of comment.

People who are actually of extreme value to intelligence and centrally important to some kind of secret organization don’t get arrested after being the target of an impossible to hide FBI investigation for years, subject to hugely public legal proceedings, and then die in allegedly mysterious circumstances in a Manhattan jail, before their lover / accomplice is sensationally also arrested and subject to years of public proceedings and media/public outrage that pressures congress into releasing tens of thousands of related files. They just die, quietly, and a few lines are written about them in newspapers. “Epstein died some years after serving a brief sentence for sex crimes. There were embarrassing photos of him with Prince Andrew. He died in his sixties in Paris of heart failure.” Fin.

Vance plays along even though he knows it is ridiculous for a sitting vice president to acknowledge a government conspiracy that occurred, allegedly, under the nose of then-President His Running Mate and Most Noble boss, but he also knows that the most controversial thing for Rogan’s normie followers would be for him to deny an Epstein theory, which is now not even the midwit position but the entirely normal one.

People who are actually of extreme value to intelligence and centrally important to some kind of secret organization don’t get arrested after being the target of an impossible to hide FBI investigation for years, subject to hugely public legal proceedings, and then die in allegedly mysterious circumstances in a Manhattan jail, before their lover / accomplice is sensationally also arrested and subject to years of public proceedings and media/public outrage that pressures congress into releasing tens of thousands of related files. They just die, quietly, and a few lines are written about them in newspapers. “Epstein died some years after serving a brief sentence for sex crimes. There were embarrassing photos of him with Prince Andrew. He died in his sixties in Paris of heart failure.” Fin

That could be true, but it's also rather unfalsifiable. Are there known examples of this happening we can point to? Well no, given that their success would be a secret after all. So it could be the case that all the intelligence connections just die silently, but it could also be that they don't just off people either.

We might see it happen in the failures, where someone almost died and then whistleblows. But I don't know if there's many of these.