John Paul Jones

🧵 Ever wondered how Hezbollah rose to dominate Lebanon 🇱🇧, built a vast criminal empire, and how Israel is now systematically dismantling its terror infrastructure? This thread 🧵 dives deep into the history to deliver clear, factual insights into the past and the ongoing conflicts shaping the region. Beirut was once considered the Paris of the Middle East. Lebanon had a thriving Christian population and a vibrant, cosmopolitan society. That slowly changed as Hezbollah gradually altered the demography through its rise, alliances, and growing influence in Shia areas. Hezbollah (“Party of God”) was founded in 1982 during Lebanon’s brutal 15-year civil war and Israel’s invasion to push out PLO fighters. The Islamic Republic of Iran's Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) provided funding, training, and ideology, turning a loose Shia militia into Iran’s key proxy. It quickly gained fame for guerrilla attacks on Israeli forces in southern Lebanon. Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2000 was spun as a Hezbollah “victory,” skyrocketing its popularity. The 2006 war with Israel further cemented its image as the only group to “defeat” Israel militarily. Hezbollah became a state within a state. It built vast social networks - schools, clinics, and welfare - in Shia areas, winning genuine grassroots support. Exempted from the 1989 Taif Accords disarmament as the “resistance,” it entered politics in 1992, joined cabinets from 2005, and won veto power. By the 2010s–2020s, its armed wing dwarfed Lebanon’s army, controlling southern Lebanon and parts of Beirut while rearming in violation of UN Resolution 1701. Hezbollah’s criminal empire turned it into a transnational terror group. It ran massive drug-trafficking networks: cocaine from Latin America through cartels and the Tri-Border Area, hashish and captagon from the Bekaa Valley and Syria, plus money laundering, arms smuggling, and human/sex trafficking rings that exploited Syrian refugees. These operations generated hundreds of millions annually, funding its military wing across five continents. This criminal stranglehold, combined with political veto power, Syrian war entanglement, and Iranian alignment, brought Lebanon to a complete halt. Once a regional banking and tourism hub, the country collapsed into hyperinflation, bank runs, over 80% poverty, mass emigration, and total infrastructure breakdown by 2019. Hezbollah also has a long history of terror operations targeting Jews and Christians. It carried out the 1992 Israeli embassy bombing and the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, killing over 100 civilians, mostly Jewish. In Lebanon it clashed violently with Christian communities during the civil war, using assassinations and attacks that deepened sectarian divisions. Hezbollah was deeply implicated in the October 7, 2023 attacks, coordinating with Hamas, publicly praising the massacre, and immediately opening a second front with thousands of rockets that killed Israeli civilians and displaced entire northern communities.

America should leave NATO—and let Europe finally savor the full, unfiltered taste of its “100% freedom.”

🚨 BREAKING 🚨 🇺🇸 US Treasury just bought back $2,000,000,000 of its own debt.

The greatest crash out you've ever seen is coming.