Regime Change Begins at Home

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Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices and I are both being
financially bled by the same thing — and it isn’t each other.
The pig in Charlie Munger’s parable is wearing a federal badge.
We’re Both Getting Dirty
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
OPINION | May 24, 2026
Charlie Munger said it plain. “Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.” I want to say something today that an opposing party in active litigation almost never says. Berkshire Hathaway and I are both being hurt. By the same thing. And it isn’t each other.
Let me state my interest plainly. I am the pro se plaintiff in Case No. CI 26-1752, Douglas County District Court. I sued Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices entities for breach of a Buyer’s Listing Agreement and defamation. Separately, I have a federal civil rights and FOIA enforcement case pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska, Case No. 8:26-cv-00101-SMB-RCC, against components of the DEA, DOJ, and DHS.
Those two cases should have nothing to do with each other. They do.
Here is what I believe, in plain English. A federal officer, acting outside the lawful boundaries of their office, has reasons to want my state defamation case bogged down. Discovery in my state case touches my federal case. If my state case never produces discovery, their exposure shrinks. Delay protects them. Resolution exposes them.
That is the pig in the pen.
Now here is what most writers would never admit. Berkshire is not the villain in this story. Berkshire is bleeding too.
Count the costs. Defense counsel fees, billed by the hour, in a case the math says should have settled. Insurance reserves tied up. Brand exposure every week the case stays in the news. Discovery motions, depositions, sanctions briefing — none of that comes cheap. Every dollar Berkshire’s insurer spends defending this case past the point where settlement made sense is a dollar shareholders will not see. Charlie Munger could have done that arithmetic on a napkin.
And me? I am a pro se plaintiff carrying my own load on two fronts at once. Filing fees, transcripts, expert costs, the unrecoverable hours of my own life. Reputation hits in a small civic-journalism market. Stress I will not pretend does not exist.
Both sides of the “v.” are losing money. The only party making a return on this litigation is the federal actor who benefits from delay.
Which raises the only question that matters: why is this case still being fought the way it is being fought?
I do not believe Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, as a sophisticated business defendant, would choose to fight a routine state defamation and breach-of-contract case this way.
The conduct does not match the math. Defenses calibrated for delay, not resolution. Discovery resistance that costs more than the underlying claim. A posture that drives up fees on both sides while the actual exposure sits unchanged.
When the math does not work, somebody else is doing the calculations.
I believe — and I will say it directly — that the defense strategy in this case is being shaped, influenced, or coordinated by interests outside the four corners of the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices contractual relationship. A third party. One with its own reasons. One whose interests are not Berkshire’s interests, and are certainly not mine.
If that is true, Berkshire is not the defendant. Berkshire is the host. And I am the bait.
Charlie Munger warned about exactly this. When you wrestle with a pig, the pig sets the rules. The pig picks the venue. The pig decides how long the fight goes. And when it is over, the pig walks away clean while everyone else is covered in mud and short on cash.
So I will say what a writer and a plaintiff can say at the same time. Berkshire, look at the bill. Look at who benefits. Look at who keeps pushing for more depositions, more delay, more motion practice in a case that should have closed months ago. Whose money is paying for this? Whose strategy is this actually serving?
And then look at the door. I am open to resolution. I have always been open to resolution. A buyer’s agency dispute is not a constitutional crisis. It is a contract and a duty of care, and grown adults find a number. If Berkshire’s actual decision-makers want to talk — not the defense apparatus, the actual decision-makers — the door is open.
What I am not willing to do is keep wrestling indefinitely while a federal officer profits from our fight.
That is the story. A pig in the pen. Two parties getting bled. One actor laughing.
Charlie Munger told us how this ends. We both get dirty. The pig likes it. The question for Omaha, for Berkshire shareholders, and for every lawyer billing on this case, is whether anyone is going to do the obvious thing: stop wrestling each other, and look at who let the pig in.
The author is the pro se plaintiff in Case No. CI 26-1752, Douglas County District Court, and in the matter docketed as Case No. 8:26-cv-00101-SMB-RCC, U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska. The opinions expressed are the author’s own and reflect allegations and beliefs based on the public record and the author’s observation of the proceedings. Nothing herein is intended as a finding of fact against any party. All parties named are presumed entitled to a full and fair adjudication on the merits. Honest Politics welcomes responses for publication.

MEMORIAL DAY IS THE ONLY DAY RESERVED ENTIRELY FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT HERE TO OBSERVE IT.
Veterans Day belongs to the troops who came home — and who, most proudly, carry the duty of honoring the fallen comrades they could not bring back with them. Memorial Day belongs to the others.
THE FAMILIES OF THOSE WHO DID NOT COME HOME SURELY DESERVE TO KNOW, EACH NIGHT, WHETHER THEIR LOVED ONE’S DEATH WAS WORTHY OF THE SACRIFICE — A QUESTION ONLY THEY CAN ANSWER. BUT THEY ALWAYS DESERVE OUR RESPECT.
The numbers do not numb. They indict. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 651,031 American servicemembers have been killed in battle since the Revolution. Another 539,054 have died in service from disease and accident. Add the more than 7,000 lost since September 11 and the total exceeds 1.2 million dead in uniform.
One-point-two million numbers. One-point-two million families.
But the true arithmetic does not stop at 1.2 million. Each of those Americans had a mother and a father — that alone is 2.4 million parents who buried a child they had raised. Most had a brother or a sister, many had a spouse, a son or a daughter waiting at home, and every one of them had aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents who, in the years that followed, would remember the face that no longer appeared in the family photograph. Counted honestly, the number of Americans across our history directly broken by these 1.2 million deaths runs to fifteen million or more. The flag at a graveside is small. The grief it covers is not.
A TIME OF HEARTACHE
A mother who opened the door to two officers dressed in blue and knew before they spoke.
A father who could not finish the eulogy.
A young spouse handed a folded flag at a graveside.
A young child too small to remember the face of a parent, a brother or a sister they never got to know.
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
Many names on many stones are the results on decisions made in Washington. The casualty lists were directly related by the signature of a Commander in Chief and the votes of a Congress. The grief at those gravesides did not arrive by accident.
Most of us, given enough years, learn the weight of losing someone we love. Grief becomes an accepted tax on the privilege of having lived. But to lose someone to a war that did not have to be fought is a different kind of grief. It does not soften. It hardens. And it leaves every one of those 1.2 million families with the same burning question.
“Was it really worth it?”
This is the question Memorial Day should make us reflect and ponder “did we do everything as a citizen and voter to mitigate this sacrifice in the past or in the future?”
TWO NEBRASKANS WHO KNEW THE WEIGHT
Senator Chuck Hagel earned two Purple Hearts as an Army infantryman in Vietnam, serving in the same squad as his brother Tom. Senator Bob Kerrey lost part of his leg leading a Navy SEAL team in 1969 and received the Medal of Honor and the Purple Heart.
When Hagel and Kerrey rose to speak about the use of force, they spoke with the moral authority of men who had bled under the flag they swore to defend. Hagel, a Republican, broke with his party on Iraq. Kerrey, a Democrat, was equally clear-eyed about what combat does to a soldier’s conscience for life.
NOT ALL UNIFORMS CARRY THE SAME WEIGHT
A second category of public officials deserves an honest accounting: those who put on the uniform but served entirely from a stateside base or a quiet rear-echelon posting. Their service is honorable. No modern army functions without quartermasters, clerks, mechanics and drivers.
Rash political action does not only cost American lives in uniform. It also produces preventable civilian deaths abroad — children, mothers and the elderly. In this writer’s opinion, those who have witnessed death and caused death in a war understand best that it must always be a last resort.
A soldier who pulled three years at a stateside motor pool and was honorably discharged has every right to call himself a veteran. What he has not earned — and what no honest combat veteran will tell him
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he has earned — is the moral standing to speak with finality about sending other people’s children into the kind of war that produces Purple Hearts and Medals of Honor.
Reporting death and witnessing death are different things.
THE DEFERMENT CLASS
Beneath both ranks of veterans sits a third class: the senators, representatives, governors and presidents who reached the highest offices in this country on multiple medical deferments, fortunate timing, well-connected fathers, or draft numbers that simply never came up. The list is bipartisan.
A bone spur here. A college deferment there. A National Guard slot quietly arranged while the sons of farmers, steelworkers and schoolteachers shipped out to a war their classmates of means would never see.
This is not an argument that service must be a prerequisite for office. It is an argument for honesty: the people most casually willing to send other people’s children to die in countries whose names they cannot pronounce are very often the people whose families never had to weigh that risk at the dinner table.
BENEATH THE DEFERMENT CLASS
There is one final disgusting category, and on Memorial Day 2026 it requires being named. Donald J. Trump received four educational deferments and a medical deferment for bone spurs during the Vietnam War, placing him by his own record squarely in the Deferment Class. That alone would not warrant naming him here.
What warrants it is what came after. By credible national reporting and the on-the-record testimony of his own former White House Chief of Staff, retired Marine General John Kelly, Mr. Trump has repeatedly referred to the American war dead — the fallen heroes whose names are carved into the marble of Arlington and the stones of the American cemeteries above the beaches of France — as “suckers” and “losers.” That disrespect is repugnant to every standard of decency this country has ever claimed for itself.
And in this writer’s opinion, plainly stated: if you continue to support the disrespectful Donald J. Trump or the nominees he has installed in office, knowing what he has called the Americans who died bravely for the flag he asks you to salute, then — by this writer’s own opinion — you are a sucker, and you are a loser.

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!