We Have Spent Over $100 Billion More on Gas Thanks to Trump’s War

The Iran war has slammed the American pocketbook, costing the public billions more dollars at the gas pump.

Americans have collectively spent $107 billion more on gas and oil since the war began seven months ago, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night. The estimate came from the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University, which has been tracking the mounting costs.

Consumers have spent roughly $59 billion more on gas and $48.6 billion on diesel, according to the university’s tracker. That breaks down to an increased price tag of approximately $822.20 per U.S. household.

The price differential has been hardest felt in the Western half of the country, particularly in Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and New Mexico.

But it’s unlikely that the economic fallout will end anytime soon. Some of Donald Trump’s closest advisers—including Vice President JD Vance and State Secretary Marco Rubio—have reportedly discussed the conflict’s potentially extended timeline with the president, exploring the possibility that Tehran could continue to resist U.S. pressure and effectively push the war beyond Inauguration Day 2029.

Despite the dire reality of the closed-door conversations, Trump has invariably echoed his administration’s forecast for the war to the American public. Speaking with reporters earlier this month, Trump pledged that the conflict will end “immediately” after the midterm elections in November “because they can’t hold out any longer.”

The war has been remarkably unpopular, and the financial toll has only further hurt the president’s image. A poll published Wednesday by the Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs found that support for the war fell by 6 percent since April, sinking to a 40 percent approval in August.

Seventeen percent of Republicans reported that they believed Trump made a mistake in attacking Iran, while 16 percent said that they believed the war had made the U.S. less safe.

The world’s largest animal rights organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, is horrified that FBI Director Kash Patel is making it easier for people who have engaged in bestiality to become FBI agents.

After a ridiculous exchange between Patel and senators in a Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, PETA co-founder and president Ingrid Newkirk is making her condemnation known.

“No one in America supports humans having sex with animals, and to think an FBI agent might be such a cruel pervert is unconscionable and unacceptable,” Newkirk said in a statement obtained by MediasTouch. “Director Patel must immediately cancel this abominable misstep. It cannot happen.”

The baffling new FBI hiring standards came out in a memo quietly issued by the bureau in June, which announced that applicants who had previously hired sex workers, stolen from employers, or engaged in bestiality and animal cruelty (as long as it happened before an applicant turned 18) are no longer disqualified from becoming federal agents.

“What we did was, we did not want to punish victims of bestiality—victims who were trafficked,” Patel told Senator Dick Durbin in the committee hearing, somehow conflating bestiality with human trafficking.

“Applicants who have engaged in bestiality means they were victims of bestiality because they were forced to do so,” Patel continued. “And at this FBI, we are not going to criminalize and prevent victims from serving the United States of America and the premier law enforcement agency in the world.”

Even Republican senators were confused.

“What about the bestiality?” asked Senator John Kennedy.

“It automatically disqualified any individual who participated on either side of it,” Patel said.

“Either side of what, the bestiality?”

“Yes.”

“So you disqualified the animal?”

It’s no secret that the FBI under Donald Trump yes-man Patel has fallen into chaos and ruin. At best, these new hiring policies make the FBI a joke—at worst, they suggest that the agency is ready to elevate and dignify the very worst of human behavior.

Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who is supposed to be a Democrat, met with Fox News executives at a retreat in Montana two months ago. 

The Washington Examiner, a conservative publication, reports that the Murdoch family, who own Fox News, invited Fetterman to their ranch in the state along with other network leaders. Fetterman took part in a panel focused on social media, along with Republican Senator Katie Britt, during the event.  

“I was invited to go there,” Fetterman told the Washington Examiner when asked about his attendance, adding that he’s happy to speak with anyone who wants to have “conversations in a straight way.”

It’s the latest in a series of pro-conservative moves for the Pennsylvania politician, who entered the Senate with progressive credentials as the mayor of the Rust Belt small town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. In Trump’s second term, however, Fetterman has voted to confirm many of the president’s appointees, taken a hard-line stance supporting Israel, and broken ranks with his party on immigration and the Iran war. 

Last week, Fetterman drew praise from the MAGA right for showing up in a video message at the Republican midterm convention supporting Pennsylvania’s other senator, Republican Dave McCormick, and praising Trump’s help to the Keystone State’s steel industry. To Democrats, however, it was another example of Fetterman blowing off the people he represents and those who voted him into office to curry favor with the right. 

Fetterman continues to insist that he’s a Democrat and doesn’t plan on switching parties. But his actions are increasingly in line with what Republicans want, and music to the ears of conservative media. The Murdoch family wouldn’t have invited Fetterman to their ranch if they didn’t think highly of him, and they clearly have more plans for him in pursuit of their right-wing agenda. The question is what Fetterman is going to do in the next two years before he’s up for reelection. 

Flock cameras are recording even more than you think.

A hacker collective known as stegan0gram tore down a Flock camera, scoured its insides, and shared the results with WIRED Wednesday, revealing that the proliferating surveillance devices are capturing and logging far more than license plate numbers.

A joint analysis of the camera’s data indicated that it had captured millions of images over the span of just a few weeks, cataloguing people, bicycles, and even small details such as bumper stickers. In one instance, the Flock camera identified an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s bag.

Those images are then uploaded to Flock’s servers, where they are sorted, filed, assessed for other identifying details (such as car type and manufacturer), and ultimately sold to police departments across the country—a business model that has catapulted the company to a $8.4 billion valuation.

Even America’s smallest cities are under a close eye. The Flock cameras in Alpharetta, Georgia—which has a population of nearly 67,000 people—are accessible to more than 2,000 agencies, according to another WIRED report. Those entities included police departments, colleges, airports, as well as the federal General Services Administration’s Office of Inspector General.

Some local legislatures have banned sharing the sensitive data with outside agencies, but cops in some of those areas have still performed lookups on behalf of inquiring federal immigration agents, 404 Media reported in May.

Flock Safety has deployed tens of thousands of cameras across the country to record and document the movements of everyday Americans, regardless of whether they’re suspected of a crime. The cameras’ sudden prevalence—and erosion of privacy—has triggered a national backlash. Some people have even taken matters into their own hands, risking the threat of jail to hunt and destroy the surveillance devices.

But choosing to dissect one of the devices that have cumulatively put Americans in a digital panopticon was a no-brainer, according to one stegan0gram member.

“Why just destroy them when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?” one of the hackers told WIRED. “We liberated hardware in the field, disarmed them, and proceeded with reverse engineering of the cameras and associated solar equipment.”

A plane split in two, a charred armored vehicle, flattened trailers, and smoke rising from a structure at Camp Buehring, Kuwait: New photos released by CBS News depict dramatic damage to American military infrastructure in the Middle East as a result of Iranian missile and drone attacks. The Iranian military, it seems, is alive and well.

These photos, released Tuesday night, follow an account published by the Department of Defense inspector general Monday that reveals far more damage to American military capabilities in the Middle East than had previously been disclosed. Despite the U.S. spending upward of $33.4 billion in the war effort so far, the military has lost dozens of drones, fighter jets, helicopters, and refueling tankers. Hundreds of buildings on U.S. bases in the Middle East, like those depicted in these photographs, have been damaged or destroyed by Iranian missile and drone attacks.

The new photos were reportedly sent to CBS News by active service members who have been on the ground at Prince Sultan Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia and Camp Buehring and Camp Arifjan in Kuwait.

“This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public,” one service member currently deployed overseas told the news outlet. “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”

Still, according to President Donald Trump, the U.S. already “won” the ongoing war against Iran—a claim he has repeated at least 66 times in the past six months.

If Trump’s definition of “winning” includes the deaths of at least 18 American service members; $184 million in damages to diplomatic facilities in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE; skyrocketing gas prices; damage to the global economy; a critical missile shortage; a U.S. naval base in Bahrain blown to “hell”; and historic unpopularity for his party ahead of a critical midterm election, then sure. Agree to disagree.

“We’re not defending these bases,” the service member added to CBS. “We’re just watching them get destroyed.”