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Friday’s Final Word – HotAir

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April 10, 2026
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Friday's Final Word – HotAir

Our links are alive, and so we begin, foolishly laying our tabs on the table …





Ed: I don’t think this falls under the ambit of the intel community. It’s pretty obvious what the IRGC wants to do with the Strait, The question is how long we intend to let them get away with it. 

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Al Jazeera: With key differences in the Iranian and American positions seemingly intact, Pakistan is aiming for what officials describe as a realistic – if modest – outcome from the negotiations between the two warring nations set to commence in Islamabad on Saturday.

The aim: to get the United States and Iranian negotiators to find enough common ground to continue talks. …

Experts and sources close to the mediation effort said there was little expectation that a major breakthrough would be reached on Saturday. But by setting a more realistic ceiling – an agreement in Islamabad to continue deeper negotiations aimed at finding a lasting peace deal – Pakistan is hopeful it can help build on a truce that led to a collective sigh of relief globally.

“Pakistan has succeeded in getting them together. We got them to sit at a table. Now it is for the parties to decide whether they are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to reach an eventual solution,” Zamir Akram, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United Nations, told Al Jazeera.

Ed: If Iran continues to threaten shipping in the Gulf, this conversation will be very, very short. Trump made that clear today. The Iranians keep trying to add conditions to talks as though they have any leverage other than piracy and terrorism, which all but demonstrates the necessity of destroying this regime once and for all.

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Ed: And this explains the necessity of Israel as a Jewish state in the place where Jews have lived for thousands of years. No one else can be relied upon to defend Jews except Jews, and no one else in the region has created a democracy as robust as the Israelis have. 





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Amit Segal at The Free Press: Roaring Lion was a significant operation, but success isn’t binary. It delivered a substantial reduction in nuclear capabilities, an even greater crippling of ballistic assets, and a potentially fatal blow to the regime’s long-term survival. Iran now resembles a movie character, but one from a comedy, not an action film: the armless, legless Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, threatening to bite at Israel and the U.S.’s shins.

Its funding apparatus in ruins and sanctions still in place, the regime’s resources are stretched incredibly thin, forcing an agonizing financial dilemma. With its still-depreciated rials, it must choose between rebuilding a ballistic missile industry, outfitting a brand-new navy, or investing in air defense. It could also try investing in improving the lives of its population, but that is far less likely.

As early as the second week, it became clear that the regime would not fall from airstrikes alone. The U.S. and Israeli strategy pivoted: Hit them hard, then allow internal pressure to build while the U.S. military remains in the region as a passive deterrent against mass repression. The recent prospect of negotiations complicates that signal to the Iranian public, but the core strategy may still hold.

While the Iranian threat has been at least temporarily defanged, a new long-term threat is rising: U.S. public opinion.

Ed: We have not yet won the war. We can’t really lose this war, but we could still lose the peace by not seeing the war through to the end. This is an excellent read by Segal, and a pretty daunting consideration of how easily the TDS-afflicted media and populace could ruin the one opportunity to end the threat Iran has posed to the US and our interests for 47 years.

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Now he takes a two-week pause, lays down 15 demands, and warns that if there is no acceptable deal, including on Hormuz, military action resumes. Perhaps he is not blinking. Perhaps it’s not TACO. Perhaps it is coercive diplomacy backed by force. Perhaps he will return to major military operations with even more force if diplomacy fails. 

And, on Hormuz, are we writing the ending before the story is finished? 

Ed: Or are we all working the refs to some extent to push one direction or the other? We see through this glass darkly, as is true for all wars. The trouble for us is that Trump has an extemporaneous style that creates these ambiguities, and so we have less clarity than we might otherwise have. Dubowitz makes a good argument for patience here, especially since Trump has already done far more to restore American credibility on the use of force than any president in regard to Iran. 

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Zineb Riboua: What makes this moment significant is that Operation Epic Fury has accelerated a reckoning that was already underway. The Arab world is watching the proxy architecture Iran spent decades constructing get dismantled, and it is processing the implications for its own political future.

The first thing that has emerged from this is a demonstration of capability that no one predicted. Gulf states that absorbed thousands of rockets and drones while maintaining full civilian life and political composure have revealed a military steadiness that decades of condescension from Western and Arab nationalist commentators had written off as impossible.

The second is a region at a genuine inflection point, one where the destruction of Iran’s proxy architecture opens a real possibility of Arab states governing themselves without external interference for the first time in a generation.

Western observers who followed this war through the lens of Iranian social media accounts have been watching a carefully produced performance. The Arab world has been watching something else entirely, the first serious challenge to an ideology that was never democratically adopted, never welcomed, and imposed through violence and subversion from the moment of its founding.





Ed: This may be the smartest read of the day. Outside of Hot Air, of course. It’s lengthy but well worth the time. 

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Ed: The community notes on this are enlightening. There are multiple examples from the Old Testament where the Lord not only blesses conflict but orders the Israelites into battle. He ordered the utter destruction of the Amalekites, as just one example. This is lazy pacifism as fashion, not Christianity, especially in the context of war against a regime that just murdered over thirty thousand unarmed civilians less than two months before the war began. Unfortunately, the Vatican has pursued the fashion rather than actual justice for some time, not just with Pope Leo XIV. 

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Jim Treacher: It’s Thursday, April 9, 2026. I’m allegedly Jim Treacher. And I just learned a new acronym. You just heard it.

Okay, let me try this: MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+.

That stands for: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, and additional identities.

Again, that’s MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+. I find it helps to go three letters at a time. Like when you’re giving your account number to the customer service guy, who says his name is Steve but he has an Indian accent.

Ed: It’s worth noting that the politician who used this is not a member of Canada’s government, but a backbencher in its parliament. Still, this is less political than it is cultural, and woke is about the only thing that won’t get MAID-ed north of the 49th Parallel. Woe, Canada. Speaking of which …





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Ed: I have no doubt that they are all British nationals. I also have no doubt that they didn’t illegally enter the US to teach cricket or enforce the Oxford comma. 

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Politico: Kamala Harris just gave the Democratic Party the most explicit sign yet she’ll run for president in 2028.

“Listen, I might, I might. I’m thinking about it,” Harris told the Rev. Al Sharpton at the National Action Network convention on Friday, when he asked her whether she will run again in 2028. “I’ll keep you posted,” she said as she walked off the stage, concluding a roughly 40-minute appearance that was peppered with cheers and a standing ovation from attendees.

The former vice president has toyed with the idea before, but her comments Friday took on a new meaning in front of an audience full of Black lawmakers, influential power brokers and voters at what amounted to the first major cattle-call for the potential 2028 Democratic field.

“I know what the job is and what it requires,” she told Sharpton on stage.

Ed: Good luck with that! Republicans are cheering you on, Kamala. Also, she never demonstrated the slightest grasp of what the job is and what it requires. Harris spent 107 days running away from the press, and her only executive decision of note otherwise was to appoint Governor JazzHands McSnitchLine to the ticket. This won’t matter anyway, as Harris is too incompetent to compete in any election not handed to her outright – and EVEN THEN …

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Ed: This is my nomination for Tweet of the Day, regardless of your position on the war. I felt burning envy from the moment I read this. 

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Jonathan Turley: It is true that Kavanaugh went to elite schools, but so did Sotomayor, who graduated from Princeton and Yale.

Both of Kavanaugh’s parents were indeed lawyers, but it is odd that Sotomayor would miss the compelling story of his mother, Martha. She was a history professor who went to law school while raising a family and eventually became one of the minority of women on the state bench. That would also seem to be “gender origins” that Sotomayor previously cited as key in her view of impactful judging.

However, what was most striking was Sotomayor’s backhanded suggestion that Kavanaugh “doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.” The suggestion is that he has avoided — and continues to avoid — interactions with people who get paid on an hourly basis — while she is more inclusive in her circle of friends. It is obviously false, but more importantly, petty and unfair.

The attack suggests that, while she is a “wise Latina,” Kavanaugh is a privileged prig on the Court. The fact is that many blue-collar (if not most) workers identify more with aspects of Kavanaugh’s jurisprudence. 

Ed: The woke dogma lives loudly within Justice Wiselatina. What a classless display of classism. 

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Ed: This may be the most intriguing tweet of the day. It demonstrates the failure of Marxism, which rests on the premise of “late stage capitalism” that becomes a corporatist stasis. Lots of leftists argued at that time that we’d reached that stage, and … look at all of the innovation and entrepreneurial energy that has been unleashed since that point. The most impactful event within that time may well be the anti-trust case against AT&T, which unlocked all sorts of innovation within the telecom sphere. 





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Ed: Welcome home to Earth! We would have cleaned the place up for you, but … well, you know… 


Editor’s note: If we thought our job in pushing back against the Academia/media/Democrat censorship complex was over with the election, think again. This is going to be a long fight. If you’re digging these Final Word posts and want to join the conversation in the comments — and support independent platforms — why not join our VIP Membership program? Choose VIP to support Hot Air and access our premium content, VIP Gold to extend your access to all Townhall Media platforms and participate in this show, or VIP Platinum to get access to even more content and discounts on merchandise. Use the promo code FIGHT to join or to upgrade your existing membership level today, and get 60% off!





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