More of the Same
Six dead in Iraq. Iranian drones in California? $2 billion a day in bombs. A synagogue in flames. And the government can't fund its own security. This is the weekly roundup for Friday the 13th.
Opinion by Friendo Media Editorial Staff
There is a phrase that should haunt this country for the rest of its natural life.
When asked what the United States needs to do to end the war with Iran, a war now in its second week, a war that has already killed American service members, a war costing taxpayers what some estimates put at nearly $2 billion per day — the President of the United States answered with three words:
“More of the same.”
No timeline. No endgame. No defined objective. No metric for success. No exit. Just more. More bombs. More money. More caskets draped in flags. More gold star families learning their loved ones died for a policy that nobody in power can articulate.
That is the state of the union on Friday, March 13th, 2026. And it only gets worse from there.
Six Americans Came Home in Caskets This Week. The News Barely Flinched.
On Thursday, a U.S. Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker, an aerial refueling aircraft supporting operations over Iraq as part of Operation Epic Fury, went down in western Iraq. All six crew members aboard were confirmed dead.
Six Americans. Not politicians. Not generals. Not the architects of this war. Crew members. The people who fly the planes, who refuel the jets, who follow the orders issued by men who will never sit in a cockpit or feel the turbulence of a warzone.
The Pentagon confirmed the loss. The news cycle absorbed it like a pebble dropped in the ocean. By evening, cable news had moved on.
That is what “more of the same” looks like in practice. It looks like six families destroyed and a country too numb to notice.
We covered this story the moment it broke. Watch on TikTok.
The FBI Warned California That Iran Might Strike U.S. Soil. Read That Again.
While the war machine grinds forward overseas, the FBI quietly sent an intelligence bulletin to every law enforcement agency in California warning that Iran "allegedly aspired" to conduct a drone attack on the West Coast, launched from an unidentified vessel off the coast. The timing, method, and target were all unclear. But the warning was real, and it went to every police department in the state.
The White House responded not by addressing the threat, but by attacking the press. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt demanded ABC News retract the story, calling it "based on one email" from "a single, unverified tip" and insisting that "no such threat from Iran to our homeland exists, and it never did." She did not deny the bulletin was sent.
Meanwhile, the President himself told reporters the threat was "being investigated." Governor Newsom said there is no imminent threat but confirmed he is "in constant coordination with security and intelligence officials" over threats tied to the conflict.
So which is it? Is it being investigated, or does it not exist? The administration can't even get its story straight on whether Americans are in danger, and its instinct when confronted with that contradiction is to go after the journalists who reported it. Independent creators were the first to question the story's implications, asking how a nation with limited long-range drone capability would pull off a transoceanic strike. The mainstream press, as usual, ran with the official line first and asked questions later.
We broke this down on TikTok. Watch the full video.
$11.3 Billion in Six Days. And Congress Can’t Agree on How to Pay for It.
The Pentagon shared preliminary cost estimates with Congress this week. In the first six days of the Iran war, the United States spent $11.3 billion in munitions alone. That is roughly $1.9 billion per day. In bombs. Not in bridges, not in hospitals, not in schools, not in the crumbling infrastructure that kills Americans every year through neglect.
Bombs.
Congress is now scrambling to figure out how to fund a war that nobody voted for and nobody can define. There is no authorization for use of military force. There is no congressional debate. There is a president who said “more of the same” and a legislature too fractured and too cowardly to challenge him.
Every missile that hits a target in Iran is a meal that doesn’t reach a family in Ohio. Every sortie is a school that doesn’t get built. Every billion is a choice, and the choice, as always, is violence over survival.
A Synagogue and a University. Two Safe Spaces Shattered in One Day.
Thursday was also the day that reminded us the violence is not only overseas.
In the Detroit area, a suspect carried out a shooting and vehicle-ramming attack at Temple Israel synagogue. The suspect is dead. The FBI is investigating. A rabbi told reporters the congregation had completed security training just last month. They had prepared for this. They had drilled for this. And it still happened.
Seven hundred miles south, at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, an active shooter sent students fleeing from campus. Details are still developing.
A house of worship. A university. Two of the spaces where Americans are supposed to feel safe: where we pray, where we learn, where we gather to become better versions of ourselves. Both violated on the same Thursday afternoon.
And the country barely had the bandwidth to grieve, because the war consumed the oxygen and the government shutdown consumed the rest.
DHS Is Still Shut Down. The Senate Just Failed Again. The Reason Is Voter Suppression.
The Department of Homeland Security has now been operating under a partial shutdown for nearly one month.
This week, the Senate voted 51-46 to advance a funding bill. That sounds like a majority. It is. But under Senate rules, you need 60 votes. And the bill failed because it was tied to the SAVE America Act, Trump’s voter ID legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Follow the logic: the department responsible for domestic security is running on fumes during an active war with a country that the FBI says might attack U.S. soil, and the reason it cannot be funded is because one party is holding it hostage over a voter suppression bill.
That is not dysfunction. That is design. The shutdown is not a crisis for the people who engineered it. It is leverage. It is a bargaining chip made of human suffering, played by people who will never miss a paycheck.
While Nobody Was Watching, They Gutted Climate Protections
There is a pattern to this administration that is as predictable as it is effective: start a war, dominate the news cycle, and quietly dismantle the regulatory state while the cameras point elsewhere.
This week, the Trump administration rescinded a 2009 policy aimed at regulating greenhouse gas emissions. It happened without fanfare. It happened without protest. It happened because every major newsroom was covering Iran and the shutdown and the shootings, and nobody had the column inches left for the environment.
That is the playbook. It has always been the playbook. And every time we fall for it, another protection disappears, another regulation dies, and the people who will suffer the consequences. The same communities already squeezed by everything else, lose another inch of ground.
The Week in Summary
Six service members dead in Iraq. Drone threats on the California coast. Eleven billion dollars in bombs in less than a week. A synagogue attacked. A university under fire. The government partially shut down over voter suppression. Climate protections gutted in the dark.
And the president’s plan: more of the same.
This is why independent journalism exists. Not to tell you what to think. Not to perform outrage for clicks. But to make sure you actually see what is happening, all of it, at once, without the filter of a corporate newsroom deciding which stories deserve your attention and which ones get buried.
The news does not stop. Neither do we.
This is the first edition of the Friendo Friday News Roundup, a weekly dispatch every Friday, running the week’s most critical stories through the lens of independent, community-powered journalism rightr to
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