The Straight Jacket of Hormuz

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.

We Were Warned in 1973. Fifty Years and Trillions of Dollars Later, Middle
East Oil Is Still Destroying Our Finances,Our Health, and Our Children.
PAID FOR BY BRENT LAMBI | WWW.HONEST-POLITICS.COM
Brent Lambi is a graduate of the University of Northern Iowa and the Creighton University School of Law.
New Website Launch: www.honest-politics.com
I’m excited to announce the launch of my new website. Simply scan the QR code to visit.
The site features a dedicated space for readers to share feedback and ideas. I welcome your thoughts and
suggestions for future topics — your input helps shape this ongoing effort. The new site will also feature
podcasts discussing my work.
As always, I’m deeply grateful to those who have supported this campaign through contributions. If you’d
like to get involved, please visit www.honest-politics.com to learn how you can help.
In October 1973, OPEC turned off the
spigot. Gasoline lines stretched around city
blocks, the economy convulsed, and every
serious person in America understood that
Middle Eastern oil was an existential threat
to the Republic. That was fifty-three years
ago. What followed was not energy independence.
Not a national ethanol program.
Not a wind buildout. Not a serious solar
mandate. What followed was five decades
of choosing the oil lobby’s quarterly earnings
over the national interest. Every consequence
America now faces—every war,
every soldier dead, every trillion borrowed,
every child breathing carcinogenic exhaust
— was foreseeable in 1973. The warning was
given. It was ignored. That is not a policy
failure. It is amoral one.
The Strait of Hormuz—twenty-one miles
wide between Iran and Oman — carries
twenty percent of the world’s oil supply
daily. Britain, France, and Germany are
not on board with American military escalation
toward Iran. They carry war memory
that Washington’s political class apparently
does not—and they understand that a Hormuz
closure collapses the global economy,
triggers cascading recessions on every continent,
and creates the precise conditions
under which world wars ignite. Any leader
confronting Iran while blocking wind, solar,
and ethanol is either serving interests that
are not America’s, or has learned nothing
from a half century of catastrophic, entirely
preventable evidence.
“The 1973 embargo was the warning.
$8 trillion borrowed, 7,000 Americans
dead, 50,000 wounded, and poisoned air
in every city was the price of ignoring it.”
THE ETHANOL SOLUTION: CLEANER,
DOMESTIC, READY NOW
The antidote is growing in Iowa,Nebraska,
Kansas, and Indiana right now. Brazil
stopped being strangled by oil markets decades
ago—its fleet runs on E27 or higher as
a national standard. Ford,GM, and Chrysler
once built E85 flex-fuel vehicles at scale.
Millions remain on American roads today.
A pump modification costs a few thousand
dollars. Washington let that infrastructure
atrophy and chose Big Oil’s margin over national
leverage. Mandate E20 immediately.
Bind E30 into law within 36months. Restore
E85 nationwide. The infrastructure exists.
The farmers are ready. The only thing missing
is the will. And ethanol is not merely a
strategic substitute for oil—it is a cleaner
one by every measurable standard.
Corn ethanol reduces lifecycle greenhouse
gas emissions 40 to 50 percent versus
gasoline. Cellulosic ethanol cuts them by up
to 90 percent. At the tailpipe, carbon monoxide
drops 30 percent. Particulate matter—
the microscopic soot that penetrates
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
lung tissue and drives asthma, cardiovascular
disease, and early death —falls sharply.
Most critically, ethanol eliminates the BTEX
compounds entirely: benzene, toluene, ethyl
benzene, and xylene, the carcinogenic
fingerprint of petroleum combustion. Benzene
is an EPA and WHO Group 1 human
carcinogen — no safe exposure threshold, a
direct cause of leukemia—released by every
gallon of straight gasoline burned near every
school, playground, and hospital in this
country. Ethanol contains none of them.
Moving from E10 to E30 is not just energy
policy. It is the largest preventable public
health intervention available to this government.
Period. Full stop. No asterisk.
THE COST OF FIFTY YEARS OF
WRONG DECISIONS
Every wind turbine built and every ethanol
blend point gained is a direct, permanent
reduction in the leverage Iran, Russia, and
OPEC hold over American decisions. No
foreign regime can embargo Nebraska wind
No cartel can price Iowa corn. No tanker
through Hormuz carries American sunlight
These are not green talking points. They
are geopolitical facts—and the American
people have been paying in blood and borrowed
money for the refusal to act on them
since 1973.TheUnited States has spent a
conservatively estimated $8 trillion on Middle
East military operations since 1990. The
Gulf War. Afghanistan. Iraq. Carrier strike
groups permanently stationed in the Persian
Gulf at $10 billion per group per year.
More than 7,000 American service members
killed in post-9/11 wars. More than 50,000
wounded— limbs gone, traumatic brain injuries,
PTSD that never fully heals. Every one
of those dollars was borrowed. Every one of
those deaths was preventable. The corn that
could have powered American cars sat at
below-break even prices in Midwest bins.
The wind that could have lit American cities
blew unharnessed across the Great Plains.
Good decisions in 1973—an E30 standard,
a wind buildout, a serious solar program—
would have made most of those deployments
unnecessary. The failure was not ignorance.
It was a choice, made repeatedly,
by politicians collecting oil money in the
morning and sending young Americans to
the Middle East in the evening.
“Middle East oil is America’s financial
demise and physical health demise.
Both were entirely preventable. Both
were chosen. It is time to collect the
accounting that was never given.”
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