5️⃣ Vance Campaigns for Orbán
Vice President JD Vance spent day two of his Budapest visit openly campaigning for Viktor Orbán ahead of Hungary’s April 12 parliamentary election, a vote Orbán’s Fidesz is trailing in for the first time in more than a decade. Zev called the trip a transparent audition. “Vance is desperately trying to position himself as being outside of this war, being anti this war, being anti-Israel, so he can assume the mantle as the next president of the United States,” he said. “He might be sounding very reasonable these days compared to the president, but that’s all showmanship. Behind all of this is a dictator in waiting who’s going to be probably more brutal and more calculating than the current one we have.” The VP of the United States, interfering in a NATO member’s election on behalf of a leader Zev described as “another fascist dictator who lives at the mercy of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin,” was treated in Washington as a footnote. It isn’t one.
4️⃣ Bondi Defies the Epstein Subpoena
Former Attorney General Pam Bondi informed the House Oversight Committee today that she will not appear for her April 14 deposition on the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files. The DOJ, now run by Deputy AG Todd Blanche, argues the subpoena became moot the moment Trump fired her last week. The committee, which issued the subpoena with five Republicans voting in favor, disagrees and is weighing contempt. “Pam Bondi is not going to appear in front of the oversight committee. That’s a big deal,” Zev said. “The reason she was fired is because she doesn’t want to testify. So by firing her, by losing her position as the Attorney General, she no longer feels like she needs to comply with a subpoena, which means she’s obviously hiding something — obviously hiding something from the American people and protecting the president of the United States of America for the crimes he committed.” Five House Republicans already broke ranks on the subpoena. Contempt needs three.
3️⃣ Israel Bombs Lebanon — 100 Strikes in 10 Minutes
Within hours of the Iran ceasefire announcement, Israel launched what the IDF is calling its largest coordinated strike of the war: more than 100 targets across Beirut, southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley in under ten minutes, without warning. Lebanon’s Health Ministry reported at least 89 killed and more than 700 wounded in the initial wave, with later reports citing 250 dead. Israel says the ceasefire does not cover Hezbollah. Pakistan, the mediator, says it does. “Israel has decided to use this opportunity when America had the ceasefire to go after, indiscriminately, it looks like, civilians in southern Lebanon and Beirut,” Zev said. The campaign now carries an official IDF name: Operation Eternal Darkness.
2️⃣ Iran Shuts the Strait of Hormuz — The Ceasefire Is Already Dying
Less than 24 hours after President Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran, Tehran halted all oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for the Israeli strikes on Lebanon. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard aerospace commander warned, “Aggression towards Lebanon is aggression towards Iran.” The White House called reports of a closure “false.” Markets disagreed — WTI fell nearly 20 percent and Brent fell as much as 16 percent, both trading around $95. “The ceasefire has collapsed, it seems, because there is no current open Strait of Hormuz,” Zev said. And the cost isn’t only military. Iran now says it intends to charge $2 million per tanker as a toll to transit the strait — “trillions of dollars of revenue for both Oman and for Iran,” Zev said. That toll gets passed to the American consumer. “Everything that you touch, that you buy, that was delivered to you,” he warned, is about to cost more.
1️⃣ Someone Knew: The Oil Insiders Who Cashed Out on the Iran War
The Fivestack led today with a Narativ exclusive investigation Zev wrote overnight: an exhaustive analysis of market data between February 28 and April 7, 2026, documenting 100 percent correlation between 13 presidential Truth Social posts on Iran and corresponding moves in Brent crude. Every escalation post drove prices up. Every de-escalation post drove them down. Thirteen for thirteen. “I was trying to figure out whether Donald Trump and his network of oil syndicate allied countries benefited from running up a pump and dump scheme on the oil prices during yesterday’s so-called ceasefire announcement,” Zev told viewers. The April 7 timeline is the smoking gun. At 8:06 AM, Trump posted “WHO KNOWS?” — language Zev read as “a man performing uncertainty about a decision that had already been made.” At 12:02 PM, Brent crude began falling 7.3 percent on no public news at all. Twenty-one minutes later, Axios published a story citing U.S. and Israeli officials confirming de-escalation. At 3:50 PM, the Polymarket Iran ceasefire contract surged from roughly 2 percent to 38 percent on about $60.5 million in pre-announcement volume — three hours before Trump announced the deal publicly at 6:32 PM. By Tuesday morning, Brent was at $90.13, down 18.5 percent in two sessions, the largest two-session move since the Gulf War. “Donald Trump has been so cynical about this, that he’s actually just in it to make money for himself, make money for Russia, make money even for the Iranians, definitely make money for the Israelis and the Saudis and the UAE,” Zev said. “This has been a bit of an exercise in running up the stock price or the price of oil per barrel.” Thirteen American servicemen came home in caskets while someone was thinking about selling high. Someone knew when the bombs would fall, and someone knew when the guns would go quiet.
Five stories, one throughline: the people running this war made money on it, and the moment the trade stopped working they lit Beirut on fire.
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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