Morning Edition — Monday, March 9, 2026

# The Stovall Report: Morning Edition — Monday, March 9, 2026

Good morning. It's Monday, March 9, 2026. The Stovall Report.

We're tracking a week that fundamentally reshapes the Middle East—and the American relationship to war itself. Iran's chosen a new supreme leader without popular legitimacy just as bombs fall on civilian infrastructure. The Trump administration is treating kinetic warfare like cable television entertainment. American tech companies are signing weapons contracts they won't let you read. And the institutions that used to hold power accountable have been systematically dismantled. That's the landscape we're walking into this Monday morning.

Let's start with the seismic shift that nobody saw coming the way it's actually unfolding.

**Iran's Succession and What Comes Next**

Iran's Assembly of Experts has selected Mojtaba Khamenei—the old supreme leader's 56-year-old son—as his successor. And here's the thing that matters: this isn't actually how the Islamic Republic is supposed to work. This is a dynastic succession in a system that theoretically rejected dynastic rule. Mojtaba's never been elected to anything. He's got ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, but no real record of governing anything or anybody. He's basically untested.

And Donald Trump has already signaled, pretty bluntly, that this succession isn't happening without Washington's approval. His exact words: "not going to last long without approval." That's not diplomatic language. That's a statement of intent to destabilize Iran's new leadership structure.

Here's why this actually matters beyond the usual geopolitical scorecard. When the Islamic Republic lost its founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, back in 1989, the succession crisis that followed weakened the state's capacity to act for years. Power factions fought. Legitimacy was contested. Competitors circled. Now we're potentially watching that same movie again—except this time with Israel targeting whatever infrastructure the new supreme leader uses to consolidate authority, and the United States explicitly stating it wants this succession to fail.

You're looking at a situation where internal Iranian stability is about to crater, where multiple factions within the IRGC may see opportunity in the chaos, and where external powers—Israel, the U.S., possibly Saudi Arabia—are all positioned to exploit whoever emerges. That's the watch: whether Mojtaba can actually consolidate power, whether the IRGC splinters around competing leaders, and how quickly Trump moves to accelerate the instability through covert action.

**The Deeper Story: How Totalitarianism Actually Works**

Jonathan Rosen, writing in The Free Press, just published something that reframes the entire 45-year arc of the Iranian revolution in a way that's worth thinking about carefully. His piece is called "The World the Fatwa Made," and it's about Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa against the writer Salman Rushdie.

What Rosen argues—and he builds the case methodically—is that ideological weapons, religious authority deployed as a tool of totalitarian power, are actually more durable and more dangerous than military capacity. That fatwa didn't require an army to enforce. It required believers spread across the world who accepted a religious authority's right to pronounce a death sentence on someone who hadn't committed any crime. The West essentially capitulated to it. Publishers stopped releasing the book. Bookstores wouldn't stock it. The intellectual infrastructure of free speech, at least regarding Islam, silently retreated.

That fatwa became the template for how modern totalitarian movements export their power—not through military conquest, but through ideological capture. Through the creation of a competing loyalty structure that supersedes the nation-state.

It's contrarian analysis, which is why it matters, because it's pushing back against the conventional wisdom that military capacity is what matters most. And it directly applies to what's happening right now: whether Mojtaba's regime will attempt to continue that fatwa tradition, whether the West will capitulate again, and whether we'll wake up at some point and realize we've lost the ability to defend free speech against religious totalitarianism because we never organized a serious counter-ideology.

That's worth watching.

**Domestic Terror, Institutional Priorities, and What's Being Silenced**

On the security front, there's something happening that's not getting the attention it deserves. The FBI's joint terrorism task force has opened a full terror probe into homemade bombs discovered in New York City that are linked to ISIS. The devices themselves—TATP explosives, nails, bolts, fireworks configured for maximum fragmentation—match known ISIS weapon profiles almost exactly.

The two suspects both have Turkish and Afghan heritage. Both traveled recently to Istanbul, which, it's worth noting, is a known ISIS networking node. This is the same radicalization pathway that was operational back in 2015 and 2016 when ISIS was running recruitment cells in the United States targeting diaspora youth through online radicalization.

So: we have a credible domestic terror threat with international coordination, an actual cell that got far enough along to build functional explosive devices, and suspects with direct connections to known ISIS infrastructure.

And here's what's troubling: New York's mayor, Mamdani, issued a statement about the incident that essentially obscures the perpetrators' actual motivation and connection to ISIS, while using the incident as an opportunity to name a political opponent—Jake Lang—as a threat. That's an institutional priority inversion. When you're sitting on credible evidence of ISIS-inspired domestic terrorism, and your public response is to minimize the actual threat while amplifying a political rival as dangerous, you've revealed something about how institutional power actually works.

This is one of those stories where the silence is the story. The national security apparatus knows this happened. The details are documented. And it's getting buried under noise about political opposition rather than being treated as the serious domestic threat it actually represents.

The watch here is whether there are additional cells, whether the Istanbul connections lead to broader networks, and whether this gets serious resources or continues to get minimized for political reasons.

**War That's Become Entertainment**

Now let's talk about what's actually happening in the Middle East, because this has escalated beyond the usual proxy conflict dynamics into something more dangerous and morally corrosive.

The Iran war—and we need to actually call it that now—is on its ninth day. Israel has struck oil depots, THAAD radars, fuel infrastructure. At least 41 people have been killed in Lebanon, at least one U.S. serviceman is dead. The Strait of Hormuz is disrupted, which means oil prices just spiked to $93 a barrel and your national average gas price is now sitting at $3.45. That has real consequences for inflation, for energy policy, for the entire supply chain.

And Trump has essentially admitted, in his own statements, that Iran's borders "probably will not" remain unchanged. That's him saying, out loud, that territorial partition or dismemberment is on the table. You have to go back to the post-World War I mandate system to find historical precedent for that kind of territorial reorganization.

But here's what's actually corrosive about what's happening: the Trump administration is treating this war like entertainment. Cardinal Blase Cupich, one of the major voices in the American Catholic hierarchy, just issued a statement denouncing the administration's "gamifying" of the Iran conflict. He cited specific evidence: White House social media posts treating bombing as entertainment, a school bombing on February 28 that killed 160 civilians, mostly children, and Stephen Miller's dismissal of any restraint as "politically correct."

There's also a prediction market—Kalshi—where people are betting on when the Iranian supreme leader will be assassinated. That's not geopolitics. That's civilizational pathology. That's what happens when war becomes spectacle, when violence becomes entertainment, when the moral seriousness that used to separate leadership from brutalism collapses completely.

Cupich's indictment is important because it names something that's actually happening and that we're watching in real time: the collapse of the moral frameworks that used to constrain military conduct. Augustine wrote about Rome's gladiatorial spectacles as the hollow core of a dying civilization. That's not ancient history we're reading about. That's what we're watching now.

The watch is whether this spectacle framing continues to escalate, whether it faces institutional pushback, and what happens to civilian populations caught in the middle of a war that's become entertainment for cable news and prediction markets.

**What They're Hiding From You**

There's a story that's deeply buried in tech news that deserves to be front and center because it's civilizationally important. OpenAI just won a Pentagon contract. The contract's supposed to include prohibitions on domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. But OpenAI refuses to disclose the actual contract language. They're asking you to trust them. Trust. No verification. No transparency. Just: believe us when we say the safeguards exist.

This is important because Anthropic—a competitor company—faced the same Pentagon pressure and publicly rejected those contracts rather than accept opaque terms. So we know it's possible to say no. But OpenAI said yes, took the contract, and is now insisting the specific language remains classified.

Think about that dynamic. A private company has signed a government contract involving surveillance capabilities and weapons autonomy, and there's no public accountability mechanism. No Congressional oversight of the actual terms. No disclosure to the people who are supposedly being governed and protected.

This echoes a permanent pattern in how state power expands: it's justified by claimed safeguards that are deliberately kept opaque. The citizen believes he's free while the apparatus of control grows around him. The constitutional answer to that is simple: transparency. Public contract language before the governed. But that's what's missing.

The watch is whether that contract language ever gets released, whether Congress actually demands it, and whether the intelligence agencies use "follow-on modifications" language to quietly expand the initial terms.

**The Information War About the Actual War**

And then there's the systematic destruction of independent military journalism. The Pentagon issued 21-page credentialing rules designed to lock out major news outlets from covering the war. Those outlets rejected the rules. So the Pentagon's replacing them with cable news personalities and conspiracy figures—I'm talking about Mike Lindell, I'm talking about Laura Loomer—who will cover military operations without the messy complications of actually asking hard questions.

That's wartime information control. It's not new historically, but it's distinctly un-American. During the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan—the coverage was inadequate, the access was restricted, but there was still a briefing infrastructure where military officials had to answer questions. That's being dismantled now. Replaced with loyalists who'll amplify narrative and minimize accountability.

It's worth asking yourself: how do you know what's actually happening in the Iran war? Where are you getting information that hasn't been filtered through cable news entertainment or Pentagon narrative control? That absence of independent verification is dangerous in itself.

**What This All Means**

We're tracking a moment where multiple systems are failing simultaneously. Institutional legitimacy is eroding in real time—the press, the Pentagon's credibility, the intelligence community's capacity to act as a check on power. Military operations are being conducted with a spectacle mentality rather than strategic seriousness. Technology companies are signing contracts for weapons and surveillance that the public never gets to read. Domestic terrorism is being minimized for political reasons. And the moral frameworks that used to constrain how states behave toward civilians are being actively dismantled.

The through-line connecting all of this is the same: opacity, control, the systematic elimination of any institutional mechanism that might hold power accountable.

So when you're tracking the news this week, pay attention to what's being silenced alongside what's being amplified. Watch for whether Mojtaba Khamenei can consolidate power or whether internal Iranian factions splinter the regime. Monitor the oil markets and gas prices—that's your early warning system for how badly this escalates. And pay attention to whether any institutional voice emerges to actually challenge the spectacularization of war, because that's actually the moral moment we're in.

That's your morning briefing from The Stovall Report. Stay informed. Stay curious.