Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday, April 21, 2026, Yom HaAtzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) begins tonight. Yom HaZikaron (Israeli Memorial Day), meanwhile, concludes tonight. It’s National Tea Day, National Bulldogs Are Beautiful Day, and National Chocolate-Covered Cashews Day.
1789: John Adams was sworn in as the first U.S. Vice President (nine days before George Washington’s inauguration).
1820: Danish scientist Hans Christian Ørsted is the first to identify electromagnetism when he observes a compass needle.
1865: Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train leaves Washington.
1914: U.S. Marines occupy Vera Cruz, a major Mexican port; they will stay for six months.
1940: The first $64 question on Take It or Leave It airs on CBS Radio.
1956: Elvis Presley’s first hit record, “Heartbreak Hotel,” reaches number one.
1957: Pope Pius XII publishes the encyclical Fidei Donum (Gift of Faith).
1984: After 37 weeks at No. 1, the Footloose soundtrack knocks Michael Jackson’s Thriller out of the top spot.
1986: Geraldo Rivera opens Al Capone’s vault on live TV and finds nothing, except great ratings for his spectacle.
Birthdays today include: Catherine the Great, German-born Empress of Russia (1762-96); John Muir, Scottish naturalist; Max Weber, German sociologist, economist and historian; Efrem Zimbalist Sr, Russian-American violinist, composer, and educator; Anthony Quinn, Mexican-American actor (Zorba the Greek, Lawrence of Arabia, Lust for Life); Werner Groebli, Swiss ice skating clown (Frick in ice skating act Frick & Frack); Queen Elizabeth II; Gerald Flood, British actor (Doctor Who, Patton); Paul Davis, American country-rock-pop singer-songwriter and piano player (“I Go Crazy,” “Cool Night”); and Tony Danza, American boxer and actor.
If today’s your day, have a great one.
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Much has been made of the on-again, off-again negotiations over the Strait of Hormuz. The claim here in the States from a few under-informed individuals is that Donald Trump was lying to us about the status and that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, yada, yada, you know the drill. Of course, it’s untrue, but I want to take a few minutes this morning to explain why it’s untrue.
The Islamic Regime in Iran is engineering its own destruction. The reason amounts to a civil war in Iran. To understand why, you must first understand what the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) actually is — and isn’t.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been studying the IRGC, its makeup, and its original purpose, as well as who controls it in the end. With that understanding, we can have a better idea of the reason behind the on-again, off-again blockade situation we’ve seen over the last several days.
Let’s bust a widely held misunderstanding right out of the gate. The IRGC is not a conventional military. Its founders did not build it to defend Iran’s borders. They built it in 1979 with a specific mandate: protect the Islamic Revolution and the clerical regime’s ideological order, suppress internal dissent, and project what they called “revolutionary power” across the region. The BBC called it a “business empire” back in 2010 — and that description still holds. The IRGC answers to no elected official. It reports directly to the Supreme Leader, bypassing the defense ministry and the civilian government entirely.
The IRGC commands land, naval, and missile forces, plus the Quds Force — the arm that funds, arms, and directs allied militias like Hezbollah and the Houthis. It also controls the Basij, a paramilitary force whose sole purpose is to keep Iran’s civilian population in line. The widespread killing of Iranian civilians over the past month is the Basij at work. As you may have picked up, the entire idea of the IRGC is permanent resistance and interference of the West, which, by the nature of the thing, includes the United States and Israel. That last point is the very reason for its existence. Absent that, the IRGC wouldn’t have any reason to exist at all.
Militarily, the IRGC is built for asymmetric warfare — an idea those of us who lived through Vietnam would recognize immediately. It is not designed for the swift, overwhelming force that conventional militaries such as our own pursue. It is designed to make any conflict long, painful, and costly. Threatening regional stability and choking energy flows isn’t a side effect of IRGC strategy — it is the strategy. The IRGC runs a parallel power structure inside Iran, and it answers to no one but the Supreme Leader. In that position and by design, it controls perhaps 40% of Iran’s economy. Say, construction companies, Telcom nets, and oil, to name a few items. I suppose that in some business sense, the IRGC is comparable to the East India Company.
With all that in mind, let’s turn to a piece in the Jerusalem Post from March 29:
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian is reportedly clashing with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) chief Ahmad Vahidi over the economic and social impact of the war with the United States and Israel, Iran International reported on Saturday, citing Iranian sources.
According to the London-based Iranian opposition outlet, Pezeshkian criticized the IRGC’s approach of increasing tensions in the region and attacking neighbouring countries, warning of the long-term effects that these movements could cause on the Iranian economy.
The report also mentioned that Pezeshkian has been demanding that executive decisions regarding the war be made by the Iranian government rather than the IRGC, a demand Vahidi did not accept.
In response, the IRGC criticized Pezeshkian’s inability to implement structural reforms in the Islamic Republic to address several problems within the system before the current war began.
The report comes as Iran’s already dying economy keeps being pushed toward full collapse after several weeks of war.
So this tells us many things. Among them, the civilian government is, and has been bucking the IRGC, with somewhat less than complete success.
So we see that when Iranian President Pezeshkian, who seems, as a rule, more pragmatic than the IRGC, signaled he’s ready to be reasonable and will negotiate, the IRGC didn’t follow along, but rather launched a war against Iran’s civilian government. It is the IRGC who have been working against every diplomatic channel that Pezeshkian has been trying to open.
He’s not hiding by any means. Within the last 72 hours, Pezeshkian has been seen delivering a speech at Iran’s Ministry of Sports and Youth in Tehran, where he addressed the ongoing conflict with the US and stated that Iran is seeking to end the war “with dignity.” He’s also been in conference with Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, ostensibly to discuss the current war. Both Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi have been at the center of reported internal tensions with the IRGC. It is the IRGC that’s been contradicting both Pezeshkian and Araghchi on the negotiations over Hormuz.
Now, just because Pezeshkian seems more reasonable than the IRGC in some senses, doesn’t mean he’s not saying publicly things the IRGC wants him to say:
Iran is seeking to end the war with the US and Iran “with dignity,” the country’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said Sunday, arguing that US President Donald Trump has no right to deprive Tehran of its nuclear rights, Anadolu reports.
“Trump says Iran should not use its nuclear rights, but does not explain what crime Iran has committed,” Pezeshkian said during a visit to Iran’s Sports and Youth Ministry, the ISNA news agency reported.
He also called for the nation to stand “firm against a bloodthirsty and brutal enemy.”Iran must manage the current atmosphere in a way that “does not portray us as war-mongers” as “we are defending ourselves,” he added
It seems an open question of how much of that is his heartfelt position, and how much of what he’s saying is because he fears a permanent reprisal from the IRGC, as has happened to some 40,000 of Iran’s citizenry. Catching a few IRGC bullets tends to limit your political power. Indeed, I’m amazed that it hasn’t happened yet. Really, the celebration we saw at the White House over the last weekend, about how the Iranians had agreed to give up the enriched uranium, I believe, was designed to provoke the IRGC into doing exactly that.
Remember that, as I indicated above, the IRGC can only survive if it’s seen as standing up against the United States.
Remember as well that the IRGC controls energy. That’s part of its assigned task. It has a long history of strangling the Strait of Hormuz to work its will on the world. It has a habit of threatening to close that passage, and each time the U.S. backed down. Just off the top of my head, this happened in 2012, 2018, 2019, and I’m sure others I can’t recall at the moment, going all the way back to 1979.
Since that threat is, in reality, the one tool Iran has internationally, it shouldn’t shock anyone. President Trump, knowing this, is using a different tactic, which is perhaps best labeled “Two can play that game.” He proceeded to block shipments to Iran. Not only is this costing Iran billions, but food and fuel are also getting scarce in the country. The message to Iran is clear: “You’re not the ones in control here.”
The IRGC, in its role of controlling oil in Iran, now finds itself being the only one that is suffering the circumstances it intended to impose on the rest of the world. They’re now finding that the lone tool in their toolbox is useless. As a result of all this, oil is flowing more or less freely, and the price of oil is running around $90 per bbl as of this morning.
As an aside, the Chinese, who historically get around 80% of their crude from Iran, are having to source their oil elsewhere, which means it’s being paid for in U.S. dollars, not in yuan, as has been going on with Iranian oil. Where is the rest of the world now buying oil? The U.S. Sounds like a win-win to me.
At this point, the IRGC is toast no matter what. It can’t negotiate without violating their mandates. It can’t fight, having been decimated already, and under threat of further attack. It can’t ignore the situation and hope it goes away without getting sent back to the 14th century by American bombs. No matter what it does, it’s already over.
Unless, of course, its friends in the Democrat party here in the States manage to make some kind of legal move. At this point, that’s Iran’s last hope, and even that doesn’t amount to much.
Thought for the Day: “A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.” –Don Marquis
Have a great day, kids. I’ll see you tomorrow. As always, smack that heart on the lower left and bring a friend when you come back tomorrow.
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