NOTE: What I am presenting here is my brain run amok. I’m not saying this is true—but what I am asking is, what if it is? Or what if it’s close? I don’t know the answers, and this is fair warning that you can disengage now if you think this jumps the shark.
A CORKBOARD WITH WAY TOO MUCH RED STRING, FORT WAYNE, INDIANA (The Daily Whatever Press)—Tucker Carlson says the United States of goddamned America may be days away from dropping a nuclear bomb on a mountain in central Iran, and I have spent my entire Monday morning in front of a corkboard with a spool of red yarn, a box of pushpins, and the thousand-yard stare of Fox Mulder in season three.
I know what this looks like. I know what I look like. I’m pinning the dots up anyway, one at a time, and testing every single one of them, because an honest dot-connector also pins up the boring explanation. Sometimes dots really are connected. Sometimes they’re just two dots that happen to be the same shade of terrifying.
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get ya, and sometimes just because the dots connect, it doesn’t mean that there’s a nefarious plot.
But sometimes? Sometimes it does.
Dot one: the mountain
Sunday night, Carlson posted a long, breathless post on X claiming that “under pressure from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Trump administration may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran.” The target is Pickaxe Mountain, where, he writes, Israeli intelligence claims Iran has restarted enrichment under 300 feet of granite that “no conventional weapon in the American arsenal” can crack. His source for the juiciest line, “Bibi calls Trump about it every day,” is “an informed observer.” His deadline: Trump decides by November 7. The post has more than 49 million views as of this writing.
Pickaxe Mountain sounds like a mine-cart ride that Six Flags shut down in 1987 after some kid lost a shoe. It’s real, though. It’s a tunnel complex near Natanz that satellite analysts have watched Iran dig deeper for years, and Iran says there’s no nuclear work happening there. It should be noted for the record that none of the entities or sources mentioned so far have a single shred of credibility between them. And yet…
