The World is Watching – And it is Not Applauding 02/15/26

Regime Change Begins at Home
Budapest votes. Rome prays. Washington pardons. The world sees what Congress will not.
OPINION | May 13, 2026
FOR SIXTEEN YEARS, Viktor Orbán was
Vladimir Putin’s most useful man inside the
European Union. On April 12, 2026, Hun-
garian voters fired him. Péter Magyar’s Tisza
party took 138 of 199 parliamentary seats on
53.6 percent of the vote — the largest man-
date in modern Hungarian history. Ursula
von der Leyen replied from Brussels in four
words: “Hungary has chosen Europe.“
The world is moving. The question
is whether the United States is
moving with it – or against it.
When the President of the United States
and the President of the Russian Federa-
tion agree on most things — on a Ukrainian
“peace” that rewards invasion, on the dem-
olition of multilateral institutions, on the
disposability of allies. Every American of ev-
ery party should be alarmed. I am alarmed.
So, increasingly, is the free world we used
to lead.
CONSIDER THE COMPANY WE
NO LONGER KEEP!
After Trump started what I believe to be
an unjustified war in Iran. Spain’s Prime
Minister Pedro Sánchez called the U.S. and
Israeli strikes “illegal.” Italy denied Ameri-
can bombers use of the Sigonella airbase in
Sicily. Spain closed Rota, Morón, and its air-
space to U.S. military flights tied to the war.
Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz said
the United States “is being humiliated by the
Iranian leadership.” The Pope – the Pope –
called for negotiation, and the President of
the United States called him “weak on crime”
and “terrible for foreign policy.” Prime Min-
ister Giorgia Meloni, once Trump’s closest
European friend, called Trump’s attacks on
the Pope “unacceptable.”
The president’s response to a continent of
allies refusing to be dragged into what I con-
sider to be an unprovoked war was to call
other NATO leaders “cowards”, threaten to
withdraw American troops from Italy and
Spain, and then instruct the Pentagon to float
suspending Spain from NATO altogether.
THREATS TO SEIZE AN ALLY
In the same months, the president re-
newed his demand that the United States
take control of Greenland – sovereign terri-
tory of Denmark, a NATO founding mem-
ber. France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain
and the United Kingdom issued a joint
statement defending Danish sovereignty.
The country that wrote the postwar order is
now threatening to disassemble it.
When Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the
United Kingdom, Denmark, and the Bishop
of Rome are all telling Americans that we
have lost the plot – we have lost the plot. We
are no longer the leader of the free world –
we are its liability.
AND WHILE PRESIDENT TRUMP was
punishing democratic allies for refusing
his war, he was rescuing a convicted nar-
co-trafficker.
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
On December 1, 2025, President Trump
pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández – a
former President of Honduras who a fed-
eral jury, in 2024, convicted of conspiring
to import more than 400 tons of cocaine
into the United States. The U.S. sentencing
judge found Hernández used “considerable
acting skills” to pose as a drug warrior while
deploying his country’s police and military
to protect the Sinaloa Cartel. “El Chapo”
Guzmán routed roughly $1 million to him
through his brother.
The Trump Administration pardon was
announced three days before the Hondu-
ran presidential election. I believe it was
conditioned on the success of Hernández’s
National Party candidate. This was what I
believe to be an electoral bribe paid to a for-
eign nation in the currency of cocaine.
And read the trial record. Hernández was
convicted of using cartel money to finance
his own campaigns and commit voter fraud
in 2013 and 2017. Drug-money-into-elec-
tions is not a hypothesis. It is the crime of
conviction. President Trump has now re-
leased him into a hemisphere where the
same administration is openly hand-pick-
ing ideological winners.
Congress should ask the question,
plainly: where is Hernández now?
Whose campaign is he in contact
with? What financial networks does he
still command? In my opinion, after
President Trump pardons one of the
largest cocaine importers in American
history, oversight is not optional.
Meanwhile, the same president who freed
the architect of 400 tons of American addic-
tion has ordered the U.S. Navy to obliterate
small fishing boats in the Caribbean and Pa-
cific. At least 80 people are dead!
SO LET US NAME IT.
The President of the United States is more
aligned today with Viktor Orbán, Vladi-
mir Putin and Juan Orlando Hernández
than with the Prime Ministers of the Unit-
ed Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and
Spain – or with the Bishop of Rome.
READ THAT SENTENCE AGAIN!
A democratically elected American presi-
dent has placed himself, in deed and in word,
in the company of an autocrat who invaded
Ukraine and a convicted cocaine trafficker
who deployed his nation’s army to move 400
tons of poison into ours. He has placed him-
self against Britain, France, Germany, Italy,
Spain, Denmark and the Vatican.
Hungary’s voters answered this on a Sun-
day in April. The Pope answered it in Rome.
Six European capitals answered it in a joint
statement. The U.S. Senators across two
parties – Grassley, Paul and Warren – an-
swered it on the Senate floor.
When will Congress as an institution final-
ly answer it?
NOVEMBER IS COMING. VOTE
SUPPORTERS OF THIS UNETHICAL
ADMINISTRATION OUT OF OFFICE!

On Saturday, May 2, I sat with thousands
of shareholders inside the CHI Health Center
for the first Berkshire Hathaway annual
meeting of the post-Buffett era. Greg Abel
ran the show. Warren Buffett, ninety-five,
watched from the front row as a jersey bearing
the number 60 — his years as CEO — was
raised to the rafters. What we got, beneath
the folksy banter and Cherry Coke jokes,
was a warning shot fired across the bow of
the global economy.
Six minutes in, a video of Warren Buffett
opened the Q&A. “Hi. My name is Warren
from Omaha,” he began, then joked about
his recent change in role before asking Abel
why shareholders should hold long. Abel answered
with the usual confidence — strong
operating businesses, a record $397 billion
cash hoard. Then Abel pulled the rug out.
That wasn’t Warren. That was a deepfake,
scraped from publicly available footage
with, by Abel’s account, zero input from
Buffett!!!
Even with the disclosure, I still walked
out half-convinced I had heard Buffett
himself! If a deepfake fools me in the room
where the fakery is announced, what
chance does an unwitting person have
to detect AI is being used to fool them?
The bright side of AI also got its airtime —
productivity, automated claims, lower labor
costs. Ajit Jain, Berkshire’s insurance chief,
called AI a potential “game-changer.” Then
he said something that belongs on the front
page of every newspaper in America: Berkshire
is sitting on the cyber insurance sidelines.
They are not ducking competition.
They are ducking the math. On AI-enabled
cyber, Jain is not sure how bad, bad can be.
TOO BIG, TOO DANGEROUS, TOO
UNQUANTIFIABLE TO INSURE AT ANY
PRICE WE WOULD WILLINGLY TAKE.
Read that again. The largest, best-capitalized
property and casualty operation on
earth — the firm that quotes pandemic policies
and Strait of Hormuz war risk before
lunch — looked at AI-driven cyber exposure
and effectively said: too dangerous, too unquantifiable
to insure at any price we would
willingly take.
Now stack the deepfake on top of the uninsurable.
The next Bernie Madoff is not
lurking in Manhattan; he is renting GPUs,
cloning voices, and forging wire authorizations
faster than any regulator can match.
If Berkshire tells you the losses cannot be
priced, ask who is left to absorb them. The
answer is you.
Now consider who Washington proposes
to govern all of this. On February 27, the
President ordered federal agencies to cease
all use of products from Anthropic, a leading
American AI developer, and the Defense
Secretary — now styled “Secretary of War”
— designated the firm a national security
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
supply chain risk, a label by statute reserved
for foreign firms like Huawei. Anthropic’s
offense? Refusing to let the Pentagon use its
models for mass surveillance of Americans
or lethal autonomous weapons.
Read the federal court ruling. On March
26, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin called the
Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic “Orwellian”
and found it amounted to retaliation
that likely violated the First Amendment.
The government’s own files showed
the designation was triggered not by any
security review but by an internal Pentagon
complaint about the company’s conduct
in the press. The security assessment was
completed only after the punishment had
already been decided.
Translate that out of legalese. A private
American company said: not warrantless
mass surveillance, not autonomous kill decisions.
The federal response was to brand
the company a national security threat —
punishing it for the very limits the Fourth
Amendment and the laws of war already exist
to enforce.
On the home front, the same posture appears.
Last August, the President fired the
Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics
hours after a weak jobs report, calling
the numbers “rigged” without evidence.
The institution that produces our benchmark
unemployment and inflation data is
being told: deliver favorable numbers or
pack your desk.
“Branding an AI company a national
security threat for refusing warrantless
surveillance is not oversight.”
Combine the trajectories. A government
that wants AI for surveillance and lethal
force but no AI it cannot bend. An insurance
industry that cannot price the resulting losses.
That is the kind of economy capital flees.
Berkshire, once again, is the canary in
the coal mine. When CNBC’s Becky Quick
asked Buffett about the morning’s deepfake,
the man who has watched seventy
years of American capitalism answered in
two words: “It’s scary.” When the people
who price risk for a living tell you they cannot,
you should listen. When the federal government
moves to silence the company that
drew the red line, you should listen harder.
Do we have the ethical team in Washington
today to set the rules for technology this
powerful? In my judgment — and this is
opinion — we do not. An administration that
withdrew more than fifty of its own nominations
in a single year and has cycled Cabinet
and agency heads from Justice to the CDC
has not earned the credibility to govern how
the most powerful technology ever built is
used against Americans. Branding a domestic
AI company a national security threat
for declining warrantless surveillance is not
oversight. It is the removal of guardrails by
the hands that should be installing them.
The Oracle has left the building. The version
on the screen isn’t real. And the people
in the current government are not, in my
opinion, the ones who should regulate this
new threat. That is the warning Berkshire
just delivered. We had better hear it.
A PERSONAL NOTE
FROM THE AUTHOR
THEY HAVEN’T THROWN ME FROM A
WINDOW — BUT THEY ARE TRYING
In Putin’s Russia, dissidents have a way of
falling from hospital windows. Businessmen
who speak inconvenient truths meet inconvenient
ends on staircases and balconies
across Moscow. I am writing this from Omaha,
Nebraska. I have not been thrown from
a window.
THE IRS AS A WEAPON OF SILENCE
But I am being thrown out of something
just as vital: my life savings. What I am experiencing
is what I believe to be a targeted,
methodical IRS assault — not random,
not routine, not coincidental. It follows my
speaking out. It follows my refusal to be silenced.
In Russia, they silence critics with
gravity. In America, I think they are learning
to do it with audits, paperwork, and financial
ruin — stripping away everything a
person has built until the cost of their voice
becomes too steep to bear.
See Lambi V. United States of America, et al
Case # 8:2026cv00101
U.S. District Court for the District
of Nebraska
SLANDER THROUGH TRUSTED
INSTITUTIONS: THE BERKSHIRE
HATHAWAY CAMPAIGN
And the IRS is not the only instrument
being wielded against me. I believe I have
also been the victim of deliberate, government-
sourced slander — lies spread to
professional contacts who had no reason
to doubt what they were told. I believe that
honest, hardworking realtors employed by
Berkshire Hathaway — one of the most respected
real estate companies in America,
built on a foundation of integrity — were fed
false information about me by government
actors. These were decent professionals
simply doing their jobs, used as unwitting
vectors of what I think is a smear campaign
designed to isolate me professionally, damage
my reputation, and ensure that doors
would close before I could even knock on
them. This is not the free market. This is not
the rule of law. This is the deliberate destruction
of a private citizen’s livelihood by government
machinery set in motion to punish
dissent. I believe that Berkshire Hathaway is
as much of a victim in this as I am.
See Brent Lambi, Pro Se V. Berkshire
Hathaway Home Services, et al
Case # D01CI260001752
Nebraska District Court, Douglas County
I AM STILL STANDING
This is the American version of defenestration.
No broken glass. No headlines. Just
a man — his savings under assault, his name
poisoned in his own community — meant to
serve as a quiet warning to everyone watching.
The message is clear: speak up, and we
will take everything. Your money. Your reputation.
Your future.
I am still watching. I am still writing. I am
still standing. And I intend to be heard.
The opinions expressed above are solely those
of the author.

On Saturday, May 2, I sat with thousands
of shareholders inside the CHI Health Center
for the first Berkshire Hathaway annual
meeting of the post-Buffett era. Greg Abel
ran the show. Warren Buffett, ninety-five,
watched from the front row as a jersey bearing
the number 60 — his years as CEO — was
raised to the rafters. What we got, beneath
the folksy banter and Cherry Coke jokes,
was a warning shot fired across the bow of
the global economy.
Six minutes in, a video of Warren Buffett
opened the Q&A. “Hi. My name is Warren
from Omaha,” he began, then joked about
his recent change in role before asking Abel
why shareholders should hold long. Abel answered
with the usual confidence — strong
operating businesses, a record $397 billion
cash hoard. Then Abel pulled the rug out.
That wasn’t Warren. That was a deepfake,
scraped from publicly available footage
with, by Abel’s account, zero input from
Buffett!!!
Even with the disclosure, I still walked
out half-convinced I had heard Buffett
himself! If a deepfake fools me in the room
where the fakery is announced, what
chance does an unwitting person have
to detect AI is being used to fool them?
The bright side of AI also got its airtime —
productivity, automated claims, lower labor
costs. Ajit Jain, Berkshire’s insurance chief,
called AI a potential “game-changer.” Then
he said something that belongs on the front
page of every newspaper in America: Berkshire
is sitting on the cyber insurance sidelines.
They are not ducking competition.
They are ducking the math. On AI-enabled
cyber, Jain is not sure how bad, bad can be.
TOO BIG, TOO DANGEROUS, TOO
UNQUANTIFIABLE TO INSURE AT ANY
PRICE WE WOULD WILLINGLY TAKE.
Read that again. The largest, best-capitalized
property and casualty operation on
earth — the firm that quotes pandemic policies
and Strait of Hormuz war risk before
lunch — looked at AI-driven cyber exposure
and effectively said: too dangerous, too unquantifiable
to insure at any price we would
willingly take.
Now stack the deepfake on top of the uninsurable.
The next Bernie Madoff is not
lurking in Manhattan; he is renting GPUs,
cloning voices, and forging wire authorizations
faster than any regulator can match.
If Berkshire tells you the losses cannot be
priced, ask who is left to absorb them. The
answer is you.
Now consider who Washington proposes
to govern all of this. On February 27, the
President ordered federal agencies to cease
all use of products from Anthropic, a leading
American AI developer, and the Defense
Secretary — now styled “Secretary of War”
— designated the firm a national security
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
supply chain risk, a label by statute reserved
for foreign firms like Huawei. Anthropic’s
offense? Refusing to let the Pentagon use its
models for mass surveillance of Americans
or lethal autonomous weapons.
Read the federal court ruling. On March
26, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin called the
Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic “Orwellian”
and found it amounted to retaliation
that likely violated the First Amendment.
The government’s own files showed
the designation was triggered not by any
security review but by an internal Pentagon
complaint about the company’s conduct
in the press. The security assessment was
completed only after the punishment had
already been decided.
Translate that out of legalese. A private
American company said: not warrantless
mass surveillance, not autonomous kill decisions.
The federal response was to brand
the company a national security threat —
punishing it for the very limits the Fourth
Amendment and the laws of war already exist
to enforce.
On the home front, the same posture appears.
Last August, the President fired the
Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics
hours after a weak jobs report, calling
the numbers “rigged” without evidence.
The institution that produces our benchmark
unemployment and inflation data is
being told: deliver favorable numbers or
pack your desk.
“Branding an AI company a national
security threat for refusing warrantless
surveillance is not oversight.”
Combine the trajectories. A government
that wants AI for surveillance and lethal
force but no AI it cannot bend. An insurance
industry that cannot price the resulting losses.
That is the kind of economy capital flees.
Berkshire, once again, is the canary in
the coal mine. When CNBC’s Becky Quick
asked Buffett about the morning’s deepfake,
the man who has watched seventy
years of American capitalism answered in
two words: “It’s scary.” When the people
who price risk for a living tell you they cannot,
you should listen. When the federal government
moves to silence the company that
drew the red line, you should listen harder.
Do we have the ethical team in Washington
today to set the rules for technology this
powerful? In my judgment — and this is
opinion — we do not. An administration that
withdrew more than fifty of its own nominations
in a single year and has cycled Cabinet
and agency heads from Justice to the CDC
has not earned the credibility to govern how
the most powerful technology ever built is
used against Americans. Branding a domestic
AI company a national security threat
for declining warrantless surveillance is not
oversight. It is the removal of guardrails by
the hands that should be installing them.
The Oracle has left the building. The version
on the screen isn’t real. And the people
in the current government are not, in my
opinion, the ones who should regulate this
new threat. That is the warning Berkshire
just delivered. We had better hear it.
A PERSONAL NOTE
FROM THE AUTHOR
THEY HAVEN’T THROWN ME FROM A
WINDOW — BUT THEY ARE TRYING
In Putin’s Russia, dissidents have a way of
falling from hospital windows. Businessmen
who speak inconvenient truths meet inconvenient
ends on staircases and balconies
across Moscow. I am writing this from Omaha,
Nebraska. I have not been thrown from
a window.
THE IRS AS A WEAPON OF SILENCE
But I am being thrown out of something
just as vital: my life savings. What I am experiencing
is what I believe to be a targeted,
methodical IRS assault — not random,
not routine, not coincidental. It follows my
speaking out. It follows my refusal to be silenced.
In Russia, they silence critics with
gravity. In America, I think they are learning
to do it with audits, paperwork, and financial
ruin — stripping away everything a
person has built until the cost of their voice
becomes too steep to bear.
See Lambi V. United States of America, et al
Case # 8:2026cv00101
U.S. District Court for the District
of Nebraska
SLANDER THROUGH TRUSTED
INSTITUTIONS: THE BERKSHIRE
HATHAWAY CAMPAIGN
And the IRS is not the only instrument
being wielded against me. I believe I have
also been the victim of deliberate, government-
sourced slander — lies spread to
professional contacts who had no reason
to doubt what they were told. I believe that
honest, hardworking realtors employed by
Berkshire Hathaway — one of the most respected
real estate companies in America,
built on a foundation of integrity — were fed
false information about me by government
actors. These were decent professionals
simply doing their jobs, used as unwitting
vectors of what I think is a smear campaign
designed to isolate me professionally, damage
my reputation, and ensure that doors
would close before I could even knock on
them. This is not the free market. This is not
the rule of law. This is the deliberate destruction
of a private citizen’s livelihood by government
machinery set in motion to punish
dissent. I believe that Berkshire Hathaway is
as much of a victim in this as I am.
See Brent Lambi, Pro Se V. Berkshire
Hathaway Home Services, et al
Case # D01CI260001752
Nebraska District Court, Douglas County
I AM STILL STANDING
This is the American version of defenestration.
No broken glass. No headlines. Just
a man — his savings under assault, his name
poisoned in his own community — meant to
serve as a quiet warning to everyone watching.
The message is clear: speak up, and we
will take everything. Your money. Your reputation.
Your future.
I am still watching. I am still writing. I am
still standing. And I intend to be heard.
The opinions expressed above are solely those
of the author.