Today’s three-story edition covers the religious vocabulary being used to sell the Iran war to American troops, the undisclosed Chabad connections of the three world leaders most central to the Russia-Ukraine-Middle East triangle, and what Schneerson actually taught about the borders of Israel, the theology Tucker Carlson was pointing at when the entire political establishment tried to destroy him for pointing at it. The mainstream press will not report any of this. The evangelical press does not have the courage to. We do both, and we did.
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REMEMBER THAT “SIGNAL FIRE” REMARK? I SNIFFED IT OUT.
By now, you’ve probably heard about the military pep-talk that received more than 200 complaints in more than 30 installations, in 40 different units, and from every branch of the military. No doubt, Christian media is portraying it as the dirty atheists again, who hate God and who don’t want Jesus to bless the military. I have written about this previously, in several places, and given my perspective, which basically amounts to, “Maybe U.S. service persons don’t want to go into battle hearing about how they serve in God’s apocalyptic plan to usher in the plot of Left Behind and grow Israel’s Abrahamically-promised border.”
But there was something about that phrase that just didn’t sit right with me. Immediately, I knew it wasn’t biblical. It’s not a Scriptural allusion, and although it certainly sounds like one if they’re unfamiliar with the Sacred Scriptures, I’m what you might call “vaguely familiar with the Bible,” and it’s just not in it. But in thinking about it (having to hear it over and again in the news reports), I wondered, is there any chance that’s actually a Jewish thing? I mean, surely they wouldn’t give a talk that was about God anointing Donald Trump for an End Times plot from a Christian perspective and use Jewish Scriptures to do it. Right? Surely not.
It came from Hegseth’s desk. If not in the pep-talk word-for-word, it was at least in the bullet points. The complaints were so widespread and clearly all came on the same day, and about the same event, it was coordinated. And it was Hegseth who built the culture that produced it, invited Pastor Doug Wilson to lead Pentagon prayers just a week before, the guy who runs monthly Pentagon prayer services, and has framed this conflict in explicitly religious terms from the moment the first bomb fell on Tehran. He is the accelerant. So to some extent, the commander who uttered the phrase, "President Trump has been chosen by God to light the signal fire,” lands at Hegseth’s feet.
The imagery of biblical eschatology runs on trumpets, harvests, riders, seals, vials, and the shout of an archangel. It does not run on signal fires. The phrase does not appear in Revelation. It does not appear in Daniel. It does not appear in the Olivet Discourse. It does not appear in any of the Hebrew prophets. A person with a working knowledge of Scripture reads the words “light the signal fire” and something registers as absent, as borrowed, as coming from somewhere else entirely. The question is where.
But the pep-talk’s term “light a signal fire” was indeed a specific phrase from antiquity and not just an on-the-spot metaphor, as I suspected. And that phrase did not come from the Bible, also as I suspected. It came from the Mishnah. This, I didn’t know without some research.
Specifically, it comes from the Mishnah, Tractate Rosh Hashanah, chapter two, and it describes something pretty neat, actually, and in specific detail about the ancient system the Sanhedrin used to celebrate the New Moon to Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora. And I’ll start by saying that the literature says that it was used to “signal” the New Moon, but I find surely that word is metaphoric or something, because I’m pretty sure the new moon signifies the new moon. I mean, look up. Rather, it was more of a celebratory tradition as opposed to a “If you don’t want to look up, look over here” type thing.
In any event, bonfires were lit on mountaintops in a chain beginning at the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Each fire signaled the next mountain, which lit its own fire, which signaled the next, moving outward through the Jewish world until the entire Diaspora was illuminated. The Mishnah names the mountains in sequence, describes the wood that was used, explains how the torches were waved, and concludes with the image of the man on Beth Biltin waving his fire until he saw the whole of the Diaspora before him like a single bonfire. The entire system rested on one principle: one flame in Jerusalem sets off a chain reaction that reaches every corner of the earth.
Given that the tradition was started at the Mt. of Olives, it would appear to me that it was a type and shadow of Christ that God benevolently gave the Jewish people to point them to Jesus. The starting point of the location has got to be more than a coincidence.
In any event, that’s what the signal fire is in Jewish religious vocabulary. It’s not a Christian metaphor, and certainly not about God's rebuilding of the Jewish temple or the accumulation of land for Greater Israel, not in the Biblical sense. It’s Jewish, though. Rabbinic. Mishnaic. Not Christian.
I’m not claiming that the commander who delivered that briefing was working from a tractate of the Talmud. He may not know what the Mishnah is. But someone upstream of him did. The religious vocabulary of this war, from the Temple Mount patches on IDF uniforms that Hegseth highlighted approvingly in 2018, to the briefings framing Iran as the prophetic battlefield, to this particular phrase, is not coming from the pages of the Bible, nor even from the Scofield Reference Bible. It is coming from a much different library.
That phrase was placed, not improvised, and it was put there by someone familiar with the Jews' sacred texts, and it was passed off as Christian. And that’s exactly why I wrote Hyphenated Heresy, because that’s straight up Judeo-Christian, and not Christian-Christian. It blurs the line where there should definitely be a large, bold line.
Sadly, several news outlets have claimed this is the consequence of “Christian Nationalism.” But that’s not Christian Nationalism. That pep-talk was Judeo-Christian Nationalism and the brave men of the U.S. Armed Services shouldn’t have been subjected to it.
I’ve not heard anyone else point out the origin of this phrase. I don’t think they have. But now you know.
THE THREE LEADERS NOBODY IS CONNECTING
Tucker Carlson named Chabad-Lubavitch on Wednesday night as the organizational force behind the Iran war, and the political establishment’s response was to freak out. And I mean, they lost their ever-loving mind. Donald Trump finally turned on Tucker, and we all knew he eventually would, just not when. I knew Tucker had been summoned to the White House twice (turns out, it was three times), obviously to get a good talking-to. That’s more warning than most get for crossing him. I don’t think POTUS wanted to turn on Tucker, if it’s any consolation. He’s been patient with him compared to most. But naming the actual cult running Washington? A bridge too far.
By the way, I told you about the cult about five weeks ago, and gave you a thorough debriefing way before it made the headlines. I informed you of its dead Messiah and its most powerful and influential followers (Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, Jared Kushner, etc). You can read it by clicking below.
Anyway, Trump dismissed Tucker’s concerns about Chabad by claiming Tucker was not smart enough to understand MAGA, and insisted that he had “lost his way.” The Republican Jewish Coalition called his comments disgusting and “opprobrious” (scornful and disgraceful). Chabad’s own spokesperson called it “a dangerous blood libel” (obviously, everything is). The entire apparatus of acceptable opinion closed ranks within forty-eight hours, and the conversation was declared over before most people had a chance to examine what Tucker actually said. All we were told is that he’s a bad man for saying a bad thing about great people, and how dare he.
What Tucker actually said was that Chabad, headquartered in Brooklyn, has been quietly pushing for the reconstruction of the Third Temple on the Temple Mount, and that the Iran war needs to be understood in that theological context. He was right about the theology, imprecise about a few details (impertinent and unimportant ones), and 100% correct to name the organization for Greater Israel, and therefore, war in Iran. But the conversation moved so quickly toward discrediting him that nobody paused to ask an obvious question. What are the documented relationships between Chabad and the world leaders most central to the conflicts everyone is watching?
Yeah, so let’s look at that.
Vladimir Putin’s relationship with the movement is so extensively documented that the mainstream press gave Chabad’s chief rabbi in Russia a nickname, “Putin’s rabbi” His name is Berel Lazar, and Schneerson himself sent him to Russia just before his own death. Putin and Lazar opened the Moscow Jewish Community Center together and lit Hanukkah candles there in 2000. Putin gave Lazar the Order of Friendship. He gave him the Peter the Great Order. He gave him the Medal for Sixty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. At the sixtieth anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz, Lazar awarded Putin a Salvation Medal as a symbol of the Jewish people’s gratitude to Russia. In 2013, Lazar walked nineteen miles on foot through the night rather than ride in a car on the Sabbath, because a state event Putin had asked him to attend ran long and the sun had set (because Moses explicitly forbade riding in cars on the Sabbath, lol). Sources close to the rabbi told the Israeli press that the willingness to make that journey was an example of “the special connection between Lazar and Russia’s president.” The point is, the Chabad and Putin are allegedly his closest religious connection in Russia, even closer than with the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.
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Volodymyr Zelenskyy held his first formal meeting with Jewish leadership since the war began in his presidential office for Rosh Hashanah 2023. Thirty-two Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis attended. He gave medals to Jewish soldiers at the same ceremony. At the 2024 Hanukkah lighting, he was flanked by eleven Chabad emissaries. At that ceremony, a Chabad rabbi presented him with a menorah engraved with the image of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. The Chabad rabbi from his hometown of Kryvyi Rih has stated publicly that Zelensky’s parents are active, engaged members of the local Chabad community. Zelensky has been careful to downplay his Jewish identity throughout the war, but the rabbis standing next to him are not downplaying anything. Oh, and get this…the owner of the television station that gave Zelenskyy his national program and made him famous? He’s a member of and the nation’s largest donor to Chabad. In other words, the Chabad made Zelenskyy.
Javier Milei of Argentina (I’ve been a big fan, so this saddens me) made his first foreign trip after winning the presidency to visit Schneerson’s grave in Brooklyn. He came to see the dead Rabbi, not the U.S. president. He walks onto campaign stages to the sound of a shofar. At his inauguration, he invoked the Maccabees in his inaugural address and framed his own electoral victory as a Hanukkah miracle (I kid you not). At the conclusion of that ceremony, he handed a Chabad menorah to Zelenskyy, who had flown to Buenos Aires for the event, and the handoff was captured on live television. The night before his inauguration, he lit Hanukkah candles with the families of Israeli hostages and Israel’s foreign minister. He has vowed to move Argentina’s embassy to Jerusalem. And when he met Netanyahu, Milei gave him a painting of a photograph of when Netanyahu met Schneerson, the Chabod Messiah, in 1984. Milei is converting to Judaism through his local Chabad group.
Now here is the part that removes all ambiguity about whether these relationships are merely cultural or something more coordinated. As recently as August 2025, Chabad was running a formal diplomatic initiative to use Trump, Netanyahu, and Milei simultaneously as a pressure bloc against Putin over the Schneerson Library, a collection of over twelve thousand rare manuscripts held in Russia that Chabad has been trying to recover for decades. Working groups comprising Chabad representatives and close advisors to all three leaders had already been meeting. The initiative was reported in Chabad’s own publications. One Chabad source described the moment as a rare window of opportunity created by the fact that both the American president and the Argentine president have close ties with the movement, while the Chabad leader in Russia was meeting with Putin on their behalf, successfully pulling off Jewish-related diplomacy even while the Russia-Ukraine peace talks were stalled.
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