5️⃣ DOGE Bros Can’t Define DEI Under Oath
Viral deposition clips this week showed DOGE staffers testifying under oath about how they gutted America’s government — and it was worse than anyone imagined. A GSA-embedded staffer admitted the team used ChatGPT to generate a “Yes/No DEI?” column to decide which National Endowment for the Humanities grants to kill, then wiped their tracks by conducting all communications on Signal, the encrypted app banned on government devices. “They relied on AI that was given to them,” Dean said, pointing out they couldn’t do the job they were hired to do without a deep understanding of the programs they destroyed. In one exchange that captured the absurdity, a questioner asked whether the staffer could find “heterosexual” or “white” anywhere on the DEI target list — the young man in his college cardigan searched for thirty seconds and said no. Over $100 million in humanities grants were retroactively canceled, 65 percent of NEH staff fired, and Jewish-themed grants flagged and cut. Zev called it a complete failure: DOGE saved nothing on the deficit while causing immeasurable damage to the people who relied on that funding.
4️⃣ Trump Hedges on Sleeper Cells
When asked about Iranian sleeper cells inside the United States, Trump said he’d been briefed and that “we know where they are, we have eyes on all of them” — then added two words: “I think.” Zev zeroed in on the qualifier, asking why the president only thinks he knows, and warned it could be pretext-building for a future false flag event. Dean recalled that just days earlier on the Fivestack, they’d predicted a false flag targeting U.S. interests in Canada — and the next day, someone shot up the U.S. embassy in Toronto. “You can literally set your watch to the Putin playbook with this regime,” Dean said, drawing the line from the executions of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Preddy to the Iran war to Venezuela, all justified by the same formula: they were going to come after us, so we had to go first. Zev noted Trump immediately pivoted to blaming Biden’s border policies, wetting the ground so that when something happens, the narrative is already built.
3️⃣ Kushner’s Nine-Day Peace Mission
Jared Kushner was quietly appointed Special Envoy for Peace on February 19. Nine days later, Trump launched a war on Iran. Zev called him the most financially conflicted person in the history of the U.S. presidency — billions from the Saudis through Affinity Partners, huge payments from Leon Black’s Apollo while he was in the White House, and a relationship with Netanyahu that goes back to childhood, when the Israeli prime minister used to sleep in Kushner’s bedroom during visits to the family home. Dean laid out the real architecture: the appointment gave Kushner government immunity, shielding him from prosecution as a private citizen taking foreign money. CREW sent a letter this week demanding Kushner file his legally required financial disclosure within 30 days of his appointment — a deadline he’s expected to miss because, as Zev put it, filing would show exactly how much he stands to gain from the war he was supposed to prevent.
2️⃣ Oil Hits $100 — Largest Disruption Ever
The International Energy Agency said it in plain language: the Iran war has caused the largest supply disruption in the history of global oil markets. Twenty million barrels a day used to pass through the Strait of Hormuz; the IEA now calls it a trickle. Dean reported three supertankers sinking and on fire in the strait as they spoke. Thirty-two IEA member states agreed to release 400 million barrels from strategic reserves — the biggest coordinated release ever — and it didn’t stop the climb to $100 a barrel. Even Lindsey Graham acknowledged the U.S. has run out of ammunition, something Dean noted didn’t happen at the end of World War II. Meanwhile, Trump told crowds the Strait of Hormuz is in fine condition and declared victory.
1️⃣ Khamenei Promises Escalation
Trump stood in front of a crowd in Kentucky and declared “we won” — then in the same speech said “we don’t want to leave early, we’ve got to finish the job.” Hours later, Iran’s new supreme leader answered him. Mojtaba Khamenei, whose wife, sister, and niece were killed in the February 28 opening strikes, issued his first statement: the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, every U.S. base in the region will be attacked, and the Axis of Resistance fights on. Dean warned the situation is far worse than the administration admits, pointing to 93 million Iranians, tens of thousands of Shahed drones and missiles still in storage, and an asymmetric insurgency that hasn’t even begun. U.S. intelligence assessments completed after the war started found absolutely no sign of the regime weakening — the opposite, in fact, as the bombing has only hardened public support. “Donald Trump hasn’t just put you in danger in the interim,” Dean said. “9/11 might be light work compared to what we might see over the next several years.”
The through-line: an administration that uses AI and banned apps to gut institutions without accountability, builds false-flag pretexts while blaming Biden, hands immunity to the most compromised man in government, and declares victory in a war its own intelligence says is nowhere close to over — all while Americans face generational consequences they haven’t begun to understand.
The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.
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