Sunday Message by MeidasTouch

Hey everyone, it’s Ben Meiselas, co-founder of MeidasTouch, here with my Sunday message. This is my favorite post of the week, where we get to reflect on what’s happened, where we’re heading, and what else is on my mind.

I want to again thank all of our subscribers for making this Substack community one of the largest there is, and for helping this independent media network keep growing. If you aren’t subscribed yet, please subscribe now, and consider becoming a paid subscriber.

All right, let’s get into it.

As I think about the network you’ve helped build, I keep coming back to Trump’s speeches over the past few days. Mobile, Alabama. Texas. Ohio. Oklahoma. Each one more deranged than the last.

I’ve been hearing from so many of you about the same thing. You begrudgingly watch corporate news, and they say he was “on message” or “surprisingly disciplined.” Then you watch the MeidasTouch coverage and see what actually happened: some of the most psychotic, deranged behavior, not just for anyone in politics, but for anyone, period.

This is not normal human behavior.

Corporate news grabs a few seconds of clips and makes him look normal, even when he’s mocking the press and attacking the First Amendment. It’s strange, especially since they’re his targets. But once you understand corporate consolidation, and that corporate news is interested in protecting the oligarchy, it all makes sense.

We’ve seen this for over ten years now, and it’s never been more obvious than in how they’re covering these speeches as the midterms approach.

That’s why independent news matters so much right now. I know my coverage of these speeches isn’t easy to sit through. But I fact-check everything, I show his clips in context, and I interject so we can all reflect on what we’re actually seeing.

And the good news is that what we’ve built is now watched by far more people than much of corporate news.

We had to build this independent news machine, here and internationally, to fight back, and I’m proud to see it in motion at such a critical time for our country. It makes corporate news look small.

A related point: corporate news is now pushing Trump’s line that as much oil, or even more, is getting out of the Strait of Hormuz as before the war started. This propaganda is outlandish. It’s farcical. And it’s deadly, because it’s just not true.

They’re literally putting out fake numbers.

It’s easy to debunk with common sense. If all this oil is getting out, why do diesel and crude prices keep going up?

More importantly, why would the U.S. need to draw down 40 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve? And why would Europe be essentially extorted by Trump into immediately releasing 100 million barrels from its own crude and diesel reserves?

The reality is that it’s still a fraction of the oil getting out. I’m reporting on tankers getting struck every damn day by Iran.

When was the last time you heard corporate news mention that eight tankers have been struck in the Strait of Hormuz in the past three days?

But here’s the bigger point that deserves attention. Assume, for the sake of argument, or as we’d say in the legal field, assume arguendo, that 100% of the oil is getting out at pre-war levels.

Here’s what we know. Sending a VLCC (Very Large Crude Carrier, the supertankers that move crude) through the Strait now costs roughly $1.3 to $1.5 million per ship. It’s about 47 times the pre-war cost. The overall risk premium created by Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz is adding about $33 per barrel.

So Iran can sit back, strike one or two ships a day, and achieve its outcome. Trump and the rest of the world face a daily slow bleed. That isn’t being discussed nearly enough.

It’s also a major reason refinery prices are so high. I’ve talked about the crack spread, the difference between what refineries charge and the paper price of crude, Brent and WTI, which are basically futures contracts. Even those manipulated futures prices keep going up and up.

But I’m focused on what people are actually paying right now. Crude has to be shipped, it has to get to a refinery, and it has to be refined. You have to look at the whole process. It’s pretty basic, and it’s why gas and diesel prices are surging the way they are.

It’s also important to reflect on what’s happening militarily in the Middle East.

The U.S. has pulled one of its aircraft carriers. The USS George H.W. Bush, one of the two main carriers forming the so-called blockade, is now in Phuket, Thailand. That leaves just one carrier strike group in the Middle East.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group, along with an amphibious assault group, just left San Diego. It’ll arrive in mid-November, after the midterms. By then, the USS George Washington, which came over from its Pacific base more than a month ago, will have been out for a very long time as part of the blockade, and it will be worn down. And right now, we don’t have a carrier in the Pacific.

Iran knows all of this. This is basic stuff.

We never should have been involved in this catastrophic, unlawful war in the first place. Trump is a war criminal. Hegseth is a war criminal. Anyone involved in the slaughter of children in this war deserves to be tried at The Hague.

But  on top of the malicious, evil, war-criminal behavior, there’s another layer: they’re incompetent. They purged top generals and admirals, and Hegseth was bragging this week about getting rid of 20% of them.

Strategically, we’ve run out of interceptors, removed a carrier from the Pacific, removed a carrier from the Middle East, and we’re down to one. We don’t even have the means to carry out Trump’s reckless, evil threats.

We need to talk about that, and I’ve been covering it in detail.

I’ve brought on a lot of perspectives this week, including the Ansarallah reporter from Sana’a again. The war in Yemen keeps escalating. Ansarallah is making new gains in Taiz and other areas. The Saudi-backed PLC says it will send 100,000 troops to try to retake Sana’a, and the Houthis responded by striking refineries in Riyadh, Yanbu, and elsewhere in Saudi Arabia. That’s going to add to diesel and crude prices too.

I’m not trying to be hyperbolic, but we have a real full-scale regional war in the Middle East right now.

Then there’s the war between Russia and Ukraine, which is escalating to whole new levels.

Putin’s plan is to hit energy grids and bridges and create the most brutal winter possible for Ukraine. Zelensky has made clear that Ukraine will match it, making sure Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the rest of Russia feel the pain too.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is making deranged posts about a “super intelligence force,” whatever the hell that even means, and talking about peace deal this and peace deal that.

We have multiple massive regional wars happening at the same time. Another name for that is a world war, even if people don’t want to use that phrase right now.

Everything MAGA warned Biden would do, they’re doing, and making far worse, while still blaming Biden heading into the midterms.

I also dropped my interview with Tim Snyder, and I hope you enjoyed it. Tim and I got deep into the weeds on military equipment, drones, and technological developments, his trips to Europe and Ukraine, and the new multilateral world order.

He’s currently teaching at the University of Toronto. Shout out Meidas Canada.

He made a fascinating observation:

Trump doesn’t believe in the concept of countries.

He only believes in which gangster is stronger.

Trump places himself in a gangster hierarchy where he sees himself above the South and Central American strongmen he installs, but beneath Putin and Xi. That makes him easy for Putin and Xi to manipulate.

Snyder also pointed out that Trump’s view of the Western Hemisphere is precisely Putin’s view of Eastern Europe.

The way Trump is interfering in Brazil’s election, and in elections across South and Central America, uses the exact same tactics Putin uses in Eastern Europe.

That’s why I’ve been spending so much time covering Trump’s coups and interference in South America.

It deserves far more attention.

I’ve been reporting on Bolivia, where Trump and Marco Rubio worked with President Paz, whom they essentially installed, to go after the independent prosecutor investigating Fernando Cerimedo, Trump’s guy in the region, who has steered right-wing campaigns across Latin America.

Cerimedo is accused of directing two hit men to kill his pregnant girlfriend, who allegedly knew too much about how Trump worked with Paz and other Latin American dictators and the actual narcos.

They had the prosecutor arrested and claimed he was involved in corruption and drug trafficking, when he was the one going after the traffickers and the corruption.

We’ll keep covering it.

So we’ve got a busy week ahead. The polls show Democrats surging in both the House and the Senate, and it looks like they can take control of both. Republicans are panicking, and Trump’s circus speeches are just reminding people of everything they hate about him.

We’ll keep doing what we have to do here at the MeidasTouch Network: growing together, building out our international coverage, and expanding our presence here in the United States.

We’re able to do this because of you, and I’m grateful for every one of you this Sunday.

Oh, and while I’m on it: lots of you were pleasantly surprised to learn that our book, WTF America, has an audiobook, and that I read it with my brothers.

We spent a lot of time in the studio recording it, on top of the massive amount of time we spent writing it.

It’s out in ebook and hardcover too, but I’ve seen so many comments thanking us for mentioning the audiobook. It officially comes out October 20th, but please pre-order now if you can. Pre-orders really help.

Thanks, everybody. We’re grateful for you, we love you, and I’m going to go make some videos now.