Tucker Carlson Responds to Israel’s War on Iran

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So whenever something big happens, particularly something really big,

like a war that will change world history,

the first four questions you have to ask are these.

One, why did this happen?

Two, what was the point of it?

Three, where does it go from here?

And four, how do we respond?

So let's assess the war in Iran now ongoing in its second day

and try to answer those four questions.

First, why did this happen?

Now in this case, there's a really simple answer.

This happened because Israel wanted it to happen.

This is Israel's war.

This is not the United States's war.

This war is not being waged on behalf of American national security objectives

to make the United States safer or richer.

This war is not actually even about weapons mass destruction.

Nukes, chembio,

know this war is waged,

purely because Israel wanted it to be waged.

Now why say that out loud?

This early in the conflict, isn't that

dispiriting for, say, American troops fighting this, where yes it is?

And we thought a lot about whether it was wise or decent,

even to say something like that out loud,

and have decided that it is for the following reason.

First, because the truth is always the only basis for wise decision making.

When you lie to yourself or you lie to your people, you don't only commit,

well, a kind of moral crime by lying, but you also

tend to hurt yourself.

Hubris is the product of lies, for example, and get way over your skis if you're not honest

with yourself and the people around you about what's happening and why it's happening.

But long term, that is also true.

In other words, it's important to say why this war is happening because

50 years from now, people may not know.

Your grandkids may learn that this war started because the Ayatollah showed up in Miami and

started machine-gunning people on a shopping mall, and so we responded.

There was a kind of Iranian Pearl Harbor.

You don't know what the future will believe about the present.

You don't know how history will be written.

And if you're skeptical of that, if you're asking yourself, well, how could historians,

popular historians, how could future culture, so misunderstand something so big?

How could people lie about something so obvious, so giant?

History is your guide.

A lot of the big events we think we understand, including wars,

from the past and not so distant past, are completely distorted in our memories.

In other words, that's not actually what happened at all.

And the truth is, if enough people lie about something at a high enough volume,

and they do it for long enough, loudly enough, while threatening anyone who refuses to lie about it,

over time, their lies become conventional wisdom.

Everyone believes them.

There is something about repeating a lie over and over and over again,

that's almost like a spell or an incantation, it's almost a form of witchcraft.

It assumes reality, or a version of reality, an ersatz reality, a fake reality,

but reality nevertheless.

And if you're interested in all in history, going back thousands of years, or even more recently,

you know that the understandings of certain events that you grew up hearing about,

probably totally inverted the opposite is true, but you didn't know that until you dug a little deeper,

in some cases a lot deeper, to find out because they have been distorted in the retelling.

And because they have been, because a lot of our most basic assumptions are based on untruths,

we wind up getting into the same mess as again and again.

So it's just important to tell the truth about this now in the early stages.

This is, by the way, widely known.

This is not a conspiracy theory.

Everyone's saying it out loud now, because it's true.

The United States committed troops to this conflict, because the prime minister of Israel,

not Israel's nation, but the guy who runs it, Benjamin Netanyahu BB, demanded it.

Seven trips to the White House over the last year.

And the point of those trips never varied.

The United States needs to commit to regime change in Iran.

We need the US military to overthrow the government of Iran.

And BB himself has basically said that.

That it wasn't that we thought Iran was going to get nukes this week.

And that's why we did this.

Nobody's even saying that now.

They will be in the future when our memories get a little dimmer and they can manipulate

us more. But right now they're admitting, no, actually they were not in the verge of getting nukes.

BB himself said, you can pull up the video.

I've been dreaming about this for 40 years.

We've finally done it.

So this is the culmination of a long time plan of strategy.

And actually, if you look at it backwards and try to assess recent events,

even in this country, an American political life over the past several years, certainly

over the past six or eight months, you can see that a lot of what was happening here was

preparation for where we are right now.

In other words, people who wanted war in Iran were softening up the public for it.

We're manipulating the US government in order to affect it.

And we're doing their very best to silence anyone who doubted its wisdom.

A lot of the things we have seen in the recent past are, and now it's very obvious,

they were all designed to get us to where we are now, war with Iran on behalf.

Israel. Now, just to caveat at the outset,

just because the Prime Minister of Israel wanted to regime change war with Iran,

does not mean in any sense that it was a wise idea for Israel.

It certainly wasn't a good idea for the United States.

That's no one just really disputes that.

But was it a good idea for the country or for the Prime Minister who advocated for it?

No, probably not actually.

Just because we want something doesn't mean it's good for us.

Sometimes when we get what we want most were destroyed by it,

hope that doesn't happen in Israel, of course, or anybody, but it could.

So when you get to the truth of things and you see who's pushing for them,

that doesn't mean that person understands his own best interest or his country's own best interest.

Often they don't. Often we don't.

But it doesn't change the fact that we got here because Israel lobbied for it.

And virtually every one in the US government, certainly in the Pentagon.

Understood the risks.

The risks were obvious from day one.

First, if you knock off a government, we have a long history doing that. It's not that hard.

The individual bravery of the US military personnel, the soldiers who do it is

lot of impressive, amazing sometimes. But that is we have learned the easy part.

Killing Saddam, okay, amazing. What comes next?

et cetera, et cetera. This is all very, very well known. And it was very well known

48 hours ago that there was no real plan to replace the government we were hoping to topple

at which point what? Well, now you have a country around the size of Western Europe

with 92 million people, a country that's only a little over half Persian that has its own

internal divisions and dynamics and rivalries. You have that country potentially breaking apart.

And what does that mean? Well, I mean, hard to see that as a good thing for the rest of the world

on so many levels, which we pray don't become more obvious, but they're even now becoming obvious.

That could be a true, true disaster. So why would we want that? Well, of course we wouldn't

want that. The only country that seems to want that are the only leader to be fair. Once again,

not speaking for every Israeli any more than Joe Biden or Donald Trump or anybody else who runs

this country speaks for every American, of course, but Benjamin Netanyahu wanted that. He thought

that was his mission, but more than his mission, maybe his destiny, he suggested that in his

remarks today. And that's why. But nobody in the US government, whatever talk to, heard

quoted on TV, seemed to believe that this was primarily in America's interest. There might be

ancillary benefits. I mean, you hear these analyses of how the world is changing and

it went from being unipolar to multipolar, all true. The United States ran the world uncontested

from the summer of 1991 until, I don't know, pick a date pretty recently, the rise of China.

And all of a sudden you have multi-poles, you have more than one great power,

vying for control of the world and its trade routes and its resources, etc., etc.

And that somehow knocking off the government of Iran would be good for us in that complex just

game. And that's a real argument. I guess these things are kind of hard to understand.

And any wise person looks at the world and says, okay, there's no stopping the rise of China.

They're manufacturing capacity. Their economic power is really the world's largest real economy

is not going to end tomorrow. So there has to be a way to strike a kind of power sharing agreement

with China, with the East. The United States doesn't rule the world uncontested. And

for the foreseeable future is probably not going to. So how do we live in some semblance of peace

and preserve our own interests? And again, you enter into some informal power sharing agreement

with the other great power or powers. Probably can't stop that process. It's probably too late

to stop China from controlling the East at this point. Killing the United States is probably not

going to do it. So there's probably a better way to do this. But anyway, there are people who disagree

and, you know, if we do this, it'll be better for us long term. And at least you have to give

them credit for trying to think of a way in which this might benefit the United States.

But most people who assess this new, nothing whatsoever to do with us. This is Israel's war.

That's what it is. It's not an attack. It's not an attack on Israel. By the way, it's hardly anti-Semitism.

Or Jew hatred. It's just, it's a fact. A head of state came to our country. A head of state of

9 million people came to a country of 350 million people and demanded that we help them, or in effect,

do it ourselves, topple the regime. And Teirano, how did they leverage to do this? That's a complicated

question. And it's something really worth thinking about. But how did this tiny country with no

resources and 9 million people convince the world's great superpower with the greatest military

and history to do its bidding in a way that was going to hurt it? Well, again, many layers to that

question. But the most obvious and immediate answer is because BB told the President of the

United States, you can join me or not, but I'm going. And the Secretary of State Marco Rubio

said this in a call to Congressional leaders yesterday. He said Israel said they were going.

And at that point, you really only have two choices. You can get on board and try and help,

or contain Israel's war. That's part of the calculation here. Israel's going. Let's try and keep

this within bounds. Let's try to be a moderating force on this adventure, whatever it turns out to be,

or you can tell Israel no. And they'll just do it. And if they did it, that would not protect us

because there are hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Middle East, both in uniform and out,

civilians and military personnel. And there are also the world's most important oil projects,

oil, energy infrastructure, oil and gas, which has more than any other factor determining

effect on the global economy. So everybody needs their oil and gas period. You can't change that.

Sorry. And so if that infrastructure is damage or destroyed, it affects all of us,

all of us, everybody, but us. So you can't just let Israel go and do this. Now, of course,

there's a third potential theoretical option, which you say to Israel, which is a client state,

which we pay for, whose creation we made possible. You say, no, we're not doing that. I get it,

you don't like, yeah, I told you don't like Iran, but this is bad for us. And we're not going to

let you do this. And if you do it, we're going to, I don't know what cut off aid, something. We

can apply the pressure that is inherently ours to apply since we're paying for all of this.

But that was not even on the table. That's never been on the table. No one is ever,

in the last 63 years, considered doing that. Really, the last president to do that was John F. Kennedy

in 1962, and he got in a, not as famous as it should be, dispute with the founding prime minister

of Israel, then the prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion over Israel's nuclear program at

Dermona. And then president Kennedy said, no, I don't believe in nuclear proliferation.

This is one of the pillars of my administration. And you can't keep testing. And I'm demanding inspections.

And of course, he was not able to make good on those promises because he was killed in November

of 1963. And the person who took his place is Vice President Lyndon Johnson, gave a green light

to the Israeli nuclear program. So that was the last time an American president said, no,

hard no to Israel, tried to restrain its core ambitions. Not like, you know, be nice to the

Palestinians, the West Bank, but no, you can't have nukes or no, you can't, I don't know,

bomb Lebanon or whatever. That was the last time. So that's not for some reason, even on the table.

So the choice was, do you go along with what Israel is doing, try to constrain it, or do you just

sit back and then inevitably get drawn into it. So the truth is, and this is hard to say,

as a proud American and as someone who wants the United States to remain powerful in the world,

force for decency and order in the world, but above all wants America to remain prosperous and

peaceful at home in the country that we actually live in. It's hard to say this. But the United

States didn't make the decision here. Benjamin Netanyahu did. And again, it's important to say

that not to discourage anybody or make anybody feel despondent or hopeless. There's no reason for

hopelessness at this point. But in order that it doesn't happen again, tell the truth so people

can learn, hopefully improve and grow, but tell the truth no matter what. So then the question

becomes, we know why it started because Israel wanted it and demanded the US military in order to

do it. Why would Israel want this? We've already established that this may or may not be a good idea

for Israel, but why would they want it? What was their thinking here? If it was really about

the threat of Iran building and deploying a nuclear weapon or a nuclear-tipped ICBM aimed at Miami

in New York, as Mark Levin told his poor listeners the other day. None of that's true.

But if it was really about that, how could this threat have lasted for 40 years? How could,

as Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday, how could Iran's nuclear program bid on the very

verge, the cusp of building and deploying a nuclear weapon for 40 years? Of course, it wasn't.

What we can argue about Iran's aims with nuclear weapons, they probably wanted one who wouldn't

want one. Look at what happens to countries that don't have one. Everyone wants a nuclear weapon,

but were they actually about to get one? No. So what was the point? What is the point of this,

from Israel's perspective? Well, the point is regional hegemony. Super simple. Israel has been around

for almost 80 years. Israel has nuclear weapons. Israel's got a pretty robust tech economy,

but above all, Israel has big ambitions. And by the way, not an attack on Israel, which growing

country doesn't have greater ambitions, and which megalobanac leader of said country, and there are

many of those around the world, by the way, wouldn't want regional hegemony. Regional hegemony means

you get to control your region, kind of a Middle Eastern Monroe doctrine. Israel wants to be able

to determine, roughly speaking, what happens in its region, and it doesn't want constraints

on its own behavior. In the same way, again, trying to be as generous and universally minded as

possible here in this analysis, because it's true. Who wouldn't want that? Do we want that? Of course,

we do. We're not, you know, we put up with a lot from Mexico and Canada, but if they all of a sudden

started constraining our actual ambitions, we do something about it. I think, or the old America

would have a normal country would. And Israel wants to control the Middle East, and they're the

only announced nuclear power in the Middle East. Are they the only actual nuclear power in the Middle

East? You could debate that. People can guess, but they're the only country we know for certain

has a big nuclear arsenal. So they want to be unrivaled in their power in their region. Again,

this is not a conspiracy theory or something weird to want. It's what every country wants,

and they want it. And BB wants it. And he sees himself as a figure out of history,

not simply as a prime minister who's, you know, fighting to keep his job, which he also is,

but as a great man. There's a modern Moses or whatever, as a figure. And men like that,

men of destiny, change the calculation for their nation forever. They don't take small steps.

They take big steps. They think big. He thinks big to his credit or detriment, but it's a fact.

And so this war is an effort, not simply in addition to everything else. No, no.

It is exclusively an effort on the part of Israel to achieve regional hegemony, total control.

So what does that mean exactly? Well, it means you have to sweep away your enemies. And in the case

of Iran, Iran wasn't enemy in Israel, by the way. And Iran was also funding insurgencies

and militant groups in the region to kind of pick at Israel and hassle Israel kills Israelis.

That's all true. Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran funded absolutely. Who these Iran funded? Absolutely.

Iran was doing that. That's true. And Israel didn't like it. Why would they?

But it's also true that, and this is not to make excuse for anybody, but these are all dynamics.

You know, one country does one thing. Another country does another thing. I mean, like a marriage.

No parties wholly responsible for what went wrong or what went well. This is a relationship.

And people act against each other with each other, but always on each other. Each action provokes a

reaction. And so this history goes back a long way and historians can untangle it a few honest

ones left. But if you want to control the Middle East and your Israel, you have to decapitate

Iran. You don't have to rebuild it. Probably don't even want to. It's too big. It has too much

mineral wealth. It has too much energy. That huge gas field, they share with Qatar, etc., etc.

You probably just want to decapitate it and make it helpless. You want to turn it into a hellscape

because it's better for you because you can dominate a hellscape. Now, that may cause massive

downstream problems for everybody else. You could have like a refugee crisis in Europe. Well,

that already happened when Israel destabilized Syria. You could have this open bleeding wound.

Oh, that already happened when Israel destabilized Lebanon, when Israel pushed the United States to

kill Qaddafi in Libya. This is an ongoing thing. It launches the biggest and the final.

So getting rid of the Iranian government had one purpose to give Israel the ability to do exactly

what it wants in the Middle East without getting hassled. And what it wants among other things

is territorial expansion, small country. They want parts of Libya,

rather excuse me, they want parts of Syria, parts of Lebanon. They're an expansionist power,

like most powers. Actually, let's demystify this. It's not about the Jews. It's about a nation state

that is growing and trying to exert its power. That's simple. Take all the spooky stuff out

and just see it in terms of conventional geopolitics and it makes total sense.

And part of the reason we can't see this clearly is because we've been so propagandized in the

United States to see every contest between nations as a moral contest in which we somehow have to

pick a side and somebody's Churchill and somebody's Neville-Chain Berlin and somebody's Hitler and

absurd template which narrows our vision and prevents us from seeing that this is just

what's always happened, which is a contest between powers for primacy.

But there's another, actually two other components, two other speed bumps on the way to regional

dominance for Israel. And the first is something called the GCC. The GCC is an informal

alliance, maybe a little more formal as of today, but it's the six Gulf monarchies. It's the

energy producing Gulf states. And those would be Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, and Saudi.

And these are some of the biggest, most important energy producers in the world. They're all

Sunni, Arab states. They're all rich and all of a sudden they are all now internationally or

some of them are internationally influential because they are the site of global diplomacy.

They are filling the void left by Switzerland, which not to get too boring about it, but basically took

sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and is therefore kind of not really a place where

people can negotiate in good faith. They are, in a fact, controlled by the EU and NATO. They

would never admit that to Swiss, but they are. They give up their banking secrecy. They're

basically not non-aligned anymore. But some of these Gulf states are as close to non-aligned as you

can possibly get. Certainly Qatar is. And all of a sudden, every conflict around the world is

being negotiated in Qatar, or most recently in Oman. And so they have a kind of moral authority

on the global stage, right? They have very effective diplomacy. People like them. People also

go through on vacation. They have the best airlines in the world. They are the obvious regional

travel hub for the globe. They're literally where East meets West. So if you're flying from

New York to Delhi, you're going to stop and Dubai. And they have government subsidized

airlines that are absolutely fantastic. So people have a familiarity, a firsthand familiarity with

these countries, which were mysteries to most Westerners 25 years ago. And 9-11 happened.

So the first time I went to the Gulf, most Americas has never been there. Unless you're in the oil

business or something, you've never been there. And she could imagine that it was all belly dancers

and camels and slavery or whatever you thought. But all of a sudden, you know, like every other

rich person in America has been to Dubai because they're all traveling. They're going in safari

and Africa. So people, it's been demystified to the West and people like it. These are societies

with problems, of course. But they're also orderly and clean and elaborately polite and welcoming

to outsiders and rich. And kind of a little less gaudy than you would expect. Actually,

some of the most functional societies in the world. And people like them, despite a lot of

propaganda. And by the way, despite some complications, there are plenty of things about the Gulf states

that Westerners won't like and or some things anyway. And certainly parts of their foreign policy

that make you wonder. But these are not North Korea. They're the opposite. These are actually

very civilized countries. And they're not all on board with Israel's programs because they've got

populations that disagree with how Israel has treated the Palestinians. In the case of Saudi Arabia,

they have Mecca and Medina, the two holiest places in Islam. Every Muslim mechanic is required to

go to Saudi Arabia on the Hodge to go visit Mecca. So these are countries with inherent power in

the Islamic world, growing power globally and resources. And so they can't be ignored. And if

they were ever to get together, if these six countries were ever to form state like a real

military alliance, they would be a massive threat to Israel. So Israel has spent decades

fomenting dissent between them, of course. And that's not necessarily just an attack on Israel. I mean,

anyone can tell you who spent time in the Middle East, the Arabs, many great qualities,

but love to fight with each other. It's like their favorite hobby.

More than camel racing like they, it's very easy to get Arab nations bickering and fighting.

And the distrust goes back a long time and it's impenetrable to the outsider. But if you were trying

to divide six countries from each other, it's not that hard. And the Israelis have worked really,

really hard to do that. But the truth is, if you really want control of the Middle East,

you kind of have to degrade if not destroy the Gulf States. And just to the Israelis knew,

and the Americans knew as well, maybe not quite as realistic an assessment, but they had some sense,

the Israelis definitely knew that if you start lobbing missiles into Iran, and if you start

killing the leadership of Iran, and if you were to say kill the head of state slash

religious leader of one branch of Islam, the Itollah, if you were to do that,

it would provoke a military response that would hurt the Gulf badly,

and that it would in some countries like Bahrain, side of the Fifth Fleet, you could potentially

stoke like a true revolution because that country is almost, I think, half-sheat. So you could

cause massive chaos in the Gulf if you were to do this. Now, that wasn't a risk from the Israeli

standpoint. That was the point. That was the point. They wanted to diminish the Gulf. And in two days

they have, and I think anyone who likes decency and order and cleanliness is hoping that the Gulf will

recover. The Gulf has done a threat to us. We have military bases in these countries. These are

some of our closest allies. All of them are closer allies than Israel by far. There are friends,

but they've been really hurt. In a place like Dubai, which is basically part of a country,

it's an Emirate within the United Arab Emirates, but it's also a luxury brand, basically.

People go to Dubai because it's beautiful and rich and clean and above all because it's safe

and orderly. It's got the busiest airport in the world. You start seeing video and Instagram

of smoke in the Dubai airport and you're like, I think I'm going to combo this here. Oh, sorry,

drug cartels, whatever. Maybe you could have Sedona this year. It really, really hurts these

countries. And Israel wanted to hurt these countries. That's the point. Wanted to hurt these

countries. Wanted to sow chaos and disorder because they are rivals of Israel. So it's probably not,

hasn't been reported, but it's a fact that last night in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, authorities

arrested Mossad agents planning on committing bombings in those countries. Now that's weird.

That doesn't make any sense. Why would these rallies be committing bombings in two Gulf countries,

which are also being attacked by Iran? Aren't they on the same side? No. No. Israel wants to hurt Iran

and Qatar and UAE and Saudi and Bahrain and Oman and Kuwait. And they've succeeded.

And the third thing you would have to do if you wanted true control over the region,

which as we've established, Israel wants and shouldn't be attacked for wanting. It's a natural

thing to want. But the final thing you'd have to do is get the US out of the Middle East.

Since 1948, the United States from Harry Truman till present, US Presidents, and as noted with

diminishing success, but have tried to constrain or shape Israel's policies. It's foreign policy.

And we've a right to do that because we're the most powerful country in the world and have been

since 1945. And also because we pay for it. Israel couldn't exist without us right now.

And we give them the defense umbrella. We defend them in their wars. And so why would you want the

United States out? Well, because the United States, while not doing a very good job of constraining

Israel, has been issuing requests in any case to Israel for a long time. And that's very annoying

imagine if we were getting the same kind of communicates from, I don't know, Ottawa. And they were like,

you can't do this, you can't do that. We'd say buzz off at a certain point. Back off Canada,

we're doing what we want. We're a great power. So you have to get the United States out.

And this war is designed to do it because the Israelis who are very well aware of domestic

American politics know that there is no appetite whatsoever for casualties

among the American public. That this word did not have anything approaching majority support.

In fact, it had small minority support. And that's shrunk even in 36 hours. And that this would

cause a political crisis in the United States. And that it would most critically convince our

Arab allies in the region, meaning really the Gulf States and Jordan, poor Jordan, wonderful

country. It would convince them that the United States is a bad ally. Why? Because the second you

hit Iran and the Persians are not stupid at all, you know that they're going to hit American

bases in those countries, which they have. Except don't want. But in the other six they have

and you know those countries are not going to be defended by the United States. And they haven't been

very well. Some of these countries are on fire right now and they feel completely vulnerable

and they are low and not letting loose with any operational secret that you can't find on the

internet. They're running low on missile defense. And so a country like Saudi or UA or Qatar,

Bahrain or Kuwait, I mean they're all right on the Gulf directly across Iran. They live on

their energy production and that's being damaged and no one's protecting them.

A Saudi or Ramco facility went up last night. Saudi Ramco being the, you know, longtime joint

US Saudi energy production company, biggest oil company in the world. And part of it's on fire

today. The Iranian said they didn't do it. Why would they say they didn't do it? What

possible Israel did it? Why wouldn't they? Because if you think about it, scaring our other allies

in the region, letting them know that they can get attacked and the US will not defend you,

you put up with all this crap for decades because you got American troops on your soil and your

population doesn't like it, but you do it anyway because you've been told if there was ever a problem,

the US will come rescue you. Well, guess what we just learned? The US is not coming to rescue you.

There are hundreds of thousands of Americans, civilians caught in the Middle East and it can get out.

And the governments of those countries are panicked and they're enraged and the message to them is

the US is not a reliable partner. What's the point of this partnership? What's the point of

allowing you to have an air base in my country if when missiles come raining down or drones

attack our airport or international airport, you're not going to do anything about it. That's how

they feel and you can understand why they do. So what's his message to them? There's no upside.

In dealing with the United States. There's no upside in foreign investment in the United States.

You go to any of these countries, you just go to the airport, go to a restaurant. Who do you run

to American businessmen? Some of them have good ideas, some of them have ideas that are so stupid

that they couldn't sell them in Silicon Valley. They couldn't go to VCs in the United States and

raise the money. So they go to the Gulf and it's not that the Gulf Arabs are dumb. In some sense,

they're doing this because they see the United States as their only real ally. So they're investing

in American business ventures. A lot. Hundreds of billions of dollars. And part of that is economic

calculation. They think these companies are going to grow and they're going to make money. Part of it

is friendship. You're an ally and have been all these years since the British left.

What do they think now? Well, they don't feel that way quite as much because for them, this is very

serious. I mean, these countries don't grow their own food. So if you close the airport

and the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea are closed, in effect, what do you get your food? That's

a real issue. These are countries that are supplied by, in some cases, desalination plants,

pulling sea water through a membrane and then piping it to the urban centers.

What happens if those pipes get blown up? You have no water. There's millions of millions of

people. So you can see, without getting too into it, just how vulnerable these countries, our strongest

allies in the region now feel and how their calculation about the United States and the region

has changed dramatically. The British lost their influence in the Middle East. In 1956,

and what is known as the Suez crisis, it was so complex, it's hard even to understand it now,

70 years later, but the net effect was the UK was not able to restore order in the region. They

had less power than people thought they did. And that was it. That was the true end of Britain's

empire. And certainly the end of its control over the Middle East. That's what this is. And it's

on purpose. They did this. The Israelis want us out and they did this on purpose. And then as

the last sort of footnote, there's another big loser in this war, in Israel's war. And this was

obvious years ago, and that's Europe. Europe, who cares about Europe? The Neocons care about Europe

for reasons that are not entirely clear. But you often hear that Neocons, the war hawks,

Chilis for Israel, whatever you call them, but people who supported what we're seeing now.

And they're mad at the Shiites and the Itola and the Arabs. And of course, got it. But if you

listen carefully, there is a deep hostility hatred, in fact, toward Western Europe. Now, where does

that come from? Someone should think deeply about this because it's had a big effect over the past

80 years. It doesn't even matter where it comes from. The hate Western Europe. And maybe the biggest

loser of all right now is Western Europe. So last night, Qatar shut down its LNG exports. LNG

is liquefied natural gas. Without getting boring about it, LNG is essential to the global

economy. It's essential to Asia, South Korea, subsists on Qatari LNG exports. China is a huge

consumer of them. And Western Europe, Britain, 40% of homes in Britain are powered by Qatari LNG.

Lots of reasons for this. We blew up the mainstream pipeline as one of them, but it doesn't matter.

That's the truth. So when you shut off natural gas from Qatar, and it's now shut down, it's 20%

of the world's total supply is shut down. Well, you're all kinds of effects on that. It crushes

markets. It hikes inflation. It can wreak havoc on the global economy, say, a prayer that it

doesn't, but it could. But the first thing that it does is totally shafts Europe. And then here's

the second order effect, refugee crises. Let's say that this operation achieves its only real

state a day in which is to decapitate the government of Iran. It doesn't seem to have happened yet.

I mean, who knows what's actually going on. But the Itolla was killed. Government's still

sending missiles, so someone's making decisions. But let's say over the course of however long

this takes, chaos becomes this data play in Iran. The thing just falls apart. It's chaos. It's a huge

chaotic country with no one in charge and lots of different ethnic groups and religious splinter

groups fighting with each other heavily armed. And the normal things start to break down like

food distribution and water schools. What do you have? Well, you have what we've had in Lebanon and

Syria. Delete every country that Israel has destabilized on purpose. You have a refugee crisis.

And where do they go? Well, of course, a lot will come here. Of course. But a lot will go to Europe,

just as Syrians flooded into Europe 10 or 12 years ago in the aftermath of that conflict,

which was underneath it all, fermented by Israel in order to destabilize its neighbor in order to

increase its own authority in the region. That's a fact. So if you think Europe's in bad shape now,

oh boy, give it a year. So it's Europe, the United States, and the Gulf states. Those are the

losers. And if you're trying to ascertain motive, which is hard, and you probably should pull back

from that most of the time. But if you're trying to understand why this is happening, why would you

want that? Look at the effects. Don't look at the ideology they're telling you about or whatever

motive they're claiming they have or that you have. Shut up. She. Okay. Look at the effects.

The point of the system is what it does. And what does this system? What does this war do?

Hurts the Gulf states, crushes the Western Europeans. And it hurts the United States.

That's the point. And if you doubt that, if you doubt that that's actually what's going on,

this is a long time, Israeli politician, leader, Neftali Bennett, explaining Israel's next step.

Here's where they're going next. Watch. A new Turkish threat is emerging. I want to be very clear.

Turkey and Qatar have gained influence in Syria, are seeking influence elsewhere and everywhere

throughout the region. And from here, I warn Turkey is the new Iran.

Erdogan is sophisticated, dangerous, and he seeks to encircle Israel. We can't close our eyes again.

He's sophisticated and dangerous. It's hardly an endorsement of Erdogan or Erdogan,

the Turkish leader, hardly an endorsement of him to say when Bennett says he's dangerous,

what he really means is he sovereign. We can't tell him what to do. We don't fully control him.

We can influence him, and it's clear that Israel and Turkey did have some kind of

relationship in the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria last year, just to guess.

But the real problem with Turkey is it can't be controlled. So it is therefore a threat to Israel.

And again, not a second Israel. That's true. That is true. In the same sense that when we have

hostile leaders in big countries in our hemisphere, it really bothers us. And sometimes we kill them,

regime change them. And we make up this whole, no, it's really important. The people of country

X need to be free, but really we need to be unconstrained because we're a great power. That's what it is.

It's important to say this not to allege some sort of dark conspiracy by the Israelis,

but to explain that it's not unusual at all. It's the most usual thing in the world. What's

unusual is to live in a country that is so controlled whose media environment is so

precisely constructed to keep you from knowing anything that matters. We're seeing the most

obvious things. And that it has been constructed, not a conspiracy theory, over the course of many,

many years, to keep you from not knowing. Barry Weiss may run CNN. Who ever thought that would

happen? Okay, now, but the, you know, the point of these moves is to, in the media,

is to control the way things are described. So you can't see things clearly. And to muddy the

conversation with anti-Semitism, the Nazis, no, no, Mrs. Classic Great Power Competition. And we

just can't see it because we have been so thoroughly propagandized. We think that this is some sort of

like, effort to liberate somebody. It's not. But then the question becomes like, what is our role in

this? So now that we know, and by the way, it's, it's perilous that we know. And one of the reasons I

almost didn't do this, not that I'm like saying anything that isn't obvious. It's all very obvious.

But to say it out loud, does not make things more stable. In other words, once you have a war going

on, and everybody knows that it's not being waged on behalf of the people who are dying in it,

or the families they leave behind, then, you know, things can, things don't get more stable.

So, and no one wants to add to the present instability. But I just think it's important

to know the truth and to know what our leaders have planned because, as you already know, they lie.

And they have no scruples at all. And there are very few people in Washington who have fewer

scruples than Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. I hate to say that, no, well. But this clip from

the yesterday, from a Sunday show, which apparently still exists yesterday, really tells you a lot

about how they're thinking and about where they'd like to take us next. So this is Senator Tom

Cotton of Arkansas yesterday.

Good morning, Margaret. The president of the United States warned the American public that there

could be casualties. American casualties. Does that mean the U.S. is putting boots on the ground?

No, Margaret. The president has been clear that what we should expect to see is an extended

air and naval campaign that's designed not only to continue to set back Iran's nuclear

ambitions, but most importantly, to destroy its vast missile arsenal. Many more missiles in the

United States and Israel have air defenses combined, as well as the missile launchers and

its missile manufacturing capability. Now, obviously, one risk of that kind of campaign is that

an aircraft could be shot down and the president would never leave a pilot behind. So no doubt we have

combat search and rescue assets in the region that are prepared to go in and extract any down pilot.

But borrowing that kind of unusual circumstance, Margaret, the president has no plan for any kind

of large-scale ground force inside of Iran. The president has no plan for any sort of large-scale

ground force, large-scale ground force, in Iran. Oh, really? So a small-scale ground force.

Is that what you're saying? Well, that is what he's saying. And the Secretary of War was just

interviewed moments ago and pressed on this little bit and he said, it's possible because, of course,

it's possible. And by the way, you shouldn't even attack people for telling the truth ever.

You should attack people who try to prevent you from telling the truth. And what Secretary

War petex has just said is, of course, obviously, true and was always true. There's not one person

who understands a situation like this, kinetic war, who thinks that you can affect regime change

from the air. But you know what's ever thought that? No one thinks that now. If you're sincere

about changing the leadership of a country, if, by definition, requires you to get in there,

not, well, of course, not you, but some young guy, some younger man. It's fighting for freedom

to get in there and risk his life to do it. You need troops, ground troops, boots on the ground,

whatever dumb euphemism they're using for putting young Americans in the path of potential death.

And so, of course, that's always been the plan. And shame on the rest of us for not just saying

that out loud. Shame on the rest of us for being so cowed by their relentless incantations,

whatever they are. No ground troops. The point is not regime change. It's to stop their nuclear

program. Some of us understood, Charlie Kirk understood, back in June. That was a lie.

The point was, Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. Nobody wants a rendezvous nuclear,

but why does Israel have a nuclear weapon? What does France have a nuclear weapon? Nobody wants

nuclear weapons, okay? Nobody thinks that Iran should have a nuclear weapon outside of Iran.

But no honest person believed in June. And now, those people have indicated that this was about

stopping them from getting a nuclear. But as a regime change, and regime change requires ground

troops. And therefore, if you're serious about it, you're going to get ground troops.

The only group left out of this calculation was the American public who probably had no idea,

and probably still don't have any idea that that would even be a remote consideration given

everything that's going on in this country right now, and given the tiny percentage relatively

speaking of Americans who wanted this, who voted for it, who supported it. The leaders of both

parties supported. Chuck Schubert supports it more fervently than Trump. MSNBC just did a long segment

on this, I watched, about this war, and it's the fall to the Gulf States. So it's the Gulf States,

yeah, it's Qatar again. Barely even mentioned Israel. They're all in the same page. They're all

neocons. When it comes right down to it, they'll support this. But the public doesn't support it,

and it's terrible for the United States. And by the way, if you think it's a good idea for the U.S.

to get out of the Middle East, which it might be, by the way, that's not a crazy desire.

This is not the way to do it. Humiliated. With American dead, that's not the way to get out of

the Middle East, but that's how Israel wants it out of the Middle East. You won't come back.

They can pivot to their new partner, China. And Israel can provide the tech that will even up the

match against the Chinese tech that Pakistan used in their last confrontation, scared China.

They realize, we need better tech. China's like, oh yeah, we've got the better tech. So it's a

natural alliance. And there are other reasons it's a natural alliance. But Israel's moving on to

India. And the United States is, if Israel gets its way, going to be humiliated and weaker

morning, it's dead and very resistant to getting involved in Middle East politics ever again.

Do you want to annihilate every last child in Gaza? Go ahead. You want to kick the Palestinians,

the Christians out of the West Bank and fill it full of people from Brooklyn? Go ahead. We're

not going to do anything about it. That's the goal right there. So along the way to that happening,

Americans are going to die. The Department of War has said that has confirmed that there are four

Americans who've died. That's what they've said. They have not done their normal briefings. They

haven't told us any information as of Monday afternoon, which is what it is right now. They've

not told us more. But it's pretty clear that that un tragically more have died. And I think that's

upsetting to people in the administration. I don't think that they make these decisions lightly.

And I think a lot of the commanders who sent those young men into this war had ambivalent feelings

about it. I mean, they did for sure. So it's not attacking anyone who gave the order because,

again, their employees giving orders. But the people who advocated for this, their attitudes

about the death of young Americans, really the best Americans that we have on behalf of a foreign

power that really has contempt for us. Is there any other world leader who has more contempt for

the United States than Benjamin Netanyahu? No. No. There's just isn't. There's pure contempt for

the United States. And these people died for him. If you're commenting on this, if you're trying to

understand it from afar, you've got to grieve over that. It's so unfair. It's so wrong.

And yet the people who've advocated for this don't seem to care at all.

Here is someone who's been advocating for a war against Iran. I'm not going to go to motive and

accuse them of being paid to advocate for it, be interesting to know. But Frank Gaffney, who's been

around Washington forever and nonprofits and think tanks. There's no place on the planet where

less thinking takes place than a think tank. But they're basically lobbying organizations with

tax exempt status. And he has been lobbying for a war with Iran. Well, I don't know since I

started shaving probably. But here he is yesterday on the possibility of Americans dying.

This isn't going to be over tomorrow. I pray it will be, but I don't think we should expect that.

Will we take more casualties? I'm more in the loss of three American servicemen as much as anybody.

But this is essentially cost-free to us at this point. Will there be more losses? You saw

Rabbi Wolicki talking about the ministerial? Of course there will. Should we be operating on any

basis other than this is likely to be a slog, a hard slog. But the fight is is incalculably important

because if we do in fact render a decisive defeat of Sharia's supremacism in Iran, it will help

us with all of the other places. So I want to put that up there not because Frank Gaffney is the

worst person in Washington or because that's the most insane thing anyone said in the last 24

hours, but because it's so perfectly representative. So at first there's the sort of pro forma nod to we

really were mourning, repaying, I'm mourn for the deaths. When in fact what you're seeing in America

right now from people like Frank Gaffney is a total disrespect for death, a refusal to be

reverent in the face of death, which is always and everywhere a sign of refusal to be reverent in

the face of life. If you can't appreciate death, if you don't bow before it in silence, knowing

that you don't fully understand what it is, but that it's bigger than you. If you refuse to do that

and instead, wow, so glad he's dead, no matter who it is. If another human being has died and you

don't pause and acknowledge that you didn't create that life because you can't because you're not

God. And if there is something mysterious about death, something bigger than you, if you don't,

you are dangerous. Even animals do that. You're bringing your dog to the vet and the dog doesn't

want to go in. Why? Because a dog can smell death. And the dog is afraid of death. The dog isn't

all of death as we should all be. But almost no one in Washington feels that way about death.

Just cremate them and throw them away like you never existed. Functional countries more in their

dead. They bury them and they visit them. Why? Because functional countries understand that

they're not in charge of life because they don't have that power. And people who forget that are

seized by something called hubris, which is always the beginning of the end for people and civilizations.

And so the, oh yeah, so three died. We mourn there. Do you know where sang prayers? Really?

What kind of prayers? Have you said it, said a prayer? Do you know their names? Oh, their names

aren't public. That might get us thinking about it too much. But despite, or maybe because of,

and you just heard Gaffney say, it's not being mean, not being unfair. He said, this is essentially

cost-free for us. Really? Three Americans just died for BB in a war that nobody wants in a war

designed to hurt the United States. And that's cost-free. And it's a lot more than three. And I say that

with real sadness, it's that attitude that got us here. But it won't stay that way. It's already

changing. The thing that people need to remember is that war accelerates trends in progress.

Nothing accelerates change like violence. And that's true for big broad social changes,

women in the workforce that happen after World War II, integration after World War II. I mean,

good and bad, right? But things change fast once people start dying. Not just because of demographic

changes, because a lot of people die and you need others to move into their jobs and they're

abroad so the women, no, it's more than that. A different spirit descends on a society in war.

And lots of things happen. People become way less free. That's the greatest lie of all embedded in

neocon theology. We're killing these people so we can be free. Oh, right now.

Find a war in which people in the homeland became more free. Oh, no, it's always the opposite.

The second Britain went to war. What do the British government do? In turn, their opposition,

their domestic opposition, with their families, with their wives, for the duration of the war for

years. That was in Britain, which was at least we thought a pretty free country that gave us the

Magna Carta. Yeah. So no, countries don't become more free. They become much less free during war,

a spirit of violence descends. And people change fast and calculations change. Political

calculations change really fast. Social trends change really fast and people's attitudes change.

And part of it is not political or temporal. It's spiritual. You can feel on people the bloodlust,

the hate, and it accelerates. And that explains what you're watching right now,

which is the rage of the neocons, which doesn't make sense. That doesn't make any sense.

They've been advocating for years that the US government on behalf of Israel kill the itola

Camini. They've been saying that for years, I've been in this 35 years and I've heard that every single

year, they got it yesterday. Camini got killed. Okay, you got what you wanted. It's Christmas morning.

You just opened the present. Why are you mad? They're angrier than ever. This is the key to their

psychology. And it's a spiritual principle. Bloodlust is never sated, just like any other kind

of lust. It's never sated. Nothing is ever enough. You taste it and you're trying to

you want more. It's like eating candy. It doesn't satisfy you. You're always hungry for more.

And killing is the same. Always. But there's a specific psychology at work here.

And it's a graceless anti-human psychology that has no room for forgiveness or good sportsmanship

or decency. The second people like this win, they want to kill the people they've vanquished.

So imagine this were, I don't know, a tennis match. And you win. If you're a sort of normal

western person, you walk up to the net and you say, good game. Trying to display what your father

beat into your head as a child, which is good sportsmanship. Just grace in victory. Don't lord it over

them. Don't hurt them. You already won. Be graceful. What you see in the advocates of this war

in the neocons is the opposite. You beat someone on tennis match. You leap across the net and beat

them to death with your racket. That's what you're seeing now. And so you're seeing this crazed

hysterical, in fact, effort to purge anyone in the conservative movement or MAGA, whatever those

are, to purge anyone who had any doubt about the wisdom of this war. And not just to purge them,

but to discredit them. You're an Islamist. Islamist. A lot of these people are like sincere

Christians, right? Who opposed unreligious grounds. You're an Islamist. You're taking money.

And of course, it's all projection. You accuse people of what you're actually doing yourself. Of course.

But it's more than that. It's bloodlust. They shouldn't just be silenced and deplatformed and

preventive from speaking at this or that conference or from having a podcast, but they should be

interned. They should be arrested. How long before it's they should be killed? Not long.

That's how quickly these things are moving because a spirit has been unleashed. And violence does

this every time a spirit of violence and hate has been unleashed. My personal advice, having thought

a lot about this is don't feed it. This is demonic influence clearly. This is not rational.

Of course, why would you be angry when you win? Why would you be matter when you got what you

wanted? That tells you this is not in the realm of normal human desire. You wouldn't be.

And these people feed evil itself feeds on hate. They project hate, but they also intend,

consciously or not, to inspire hate because hate makes them stronger. And this happens not just

in this country, not just in 2026. It happens every single time. War brings people like that to the

four and it makes them more powerful. And that's why you're seeing as you have for the last several

years an increase in true radicalism in this country. And by radicalism, I mean, we hate these people

because of how they were born and we want to hurt them or kill them. That's, I think, all would

agree actual radicalism. That's not, hey, what happened to the USS Liberty? That's not radicalism.

That's like an honest question. And the answer, of course, is Israel targeted on purpose because

we're in their way. Just like they're doing now. That's not radicalism. Radicalism is, hey,

let's kill people who we don't like. And you're seeing a massive increase in that in this country,

in Israel, would Ben Guevier or Smotrich, or they even have been conceivable 20 years ago,

of course not. No one, no one like that had power in Israel 20 years ago. I was there.

It was nothing like that. Well, it's nothing like it was because war has unleashed this and it's

empowered people like we have figures like that in this country, several of them who have actual

power, not in government yet. Thank heaven. But certainly on its periphery and certainly influencing

government, yes, they do. More power than ever. And it's also true by the way in Iran.

And one of the reasons it's going to be difficult to get out of is because this war has already

a day and a half in radicalized the leadership to extend it still exists in Iran. Oh, but

weren't they so radical already? Yes, some were. Some weren't. The huge country. Lots of

divisions and differences within it. Very complicated country. Anyone who tries to learn anything

about Iran or deals with Iranians will tell you, if he's being honest, oh complicated, hard to

understand. So yeah, there are radical factions and there were less radical factions. And now, of

course, maybe you could have predicted this if you're planning to kill the Pope of Shia Islam,

the radical elements are more powerful than they were because the gates of hell have been opened.

That's the truth. And the people who do this knew they would be. And so in a moment like this,

chaos and violence being its hallmarks in a moment like this, only the worst people benefit.

And that's true of every conflict like this, every single time. If chaos breaks out,

any place, what's the first effect, the police, the military, the melt away? There's no civil

authority. There's no legitimate authority. Who's in charge? Drunk 15 year olds with automatic

weapons. They're in charge. They make all the life or death decisions. That happens in governments

as well as intersections. That's just a constant fact. That's why you build civilization

is to protect the weak and to make sure that drunk 15 year olds with automatic weapons don't have

all the power. That's the whole point of it. But now they do once again. So how do we respond to this?

I could, because this is only 36 hours in and because you don't want to make things sound

worse than they really are, we could go through all the many, many risks, some of which are becoming

even clearer than they were. Don't go through them all. But clearly the United States

is not going to benefit from staying longer in Iran. And sorry Tom Cotton putting troops on the ground,

boots on the ground, whatever you call it, committing young American men to go die in Iran is not

in our interest at all. And it would cause not simply heartbreak in the families of those killed,

but it would cause potentially real turmoil here domestically and render already fragile,

fragile social fabric. So where do you go from here? Well, get out right away. It's just that simple.

Of course, it's also incredibly complicated. But the first step is deciding that we're leaving.

You know, it's only been less than two days, but it's pretty clear that we're not going to gain

anything more. And how do we know that? Because no one has explained what we're there to gain.

No one has described the mission. Ask anybody what's the point of how we know we've won?

And some of us spent 20 years asking, what are we doing in Afghanistan? Shut up! Are you pro Taliban?

No, but I would like to know when we've won. Sorry, you can't know that it's classified. Okay.

But now is the time to be totally honest, we're not going to get anything more than we've already

gotten, assuming we've gotten anything by staying. And the longer we stay, the greater the risk.

What are the risks? Oh, well, here are just two that you should be paying attention to.

One is that Israel gets really hurt. And in case you think this is a long video attacking Israel

for Nazi reasons or anti-Semitic reasons, it's not. It's really an effort to try and think through

what's good for the United States. But also, as someone who wishes Israel no harm to think through

clearly what's going to be terrible for Israel. And one thing to be terrible for Israel is getting

hit with a hypersonic missile, which as of right now, Iran has not yet fired. And they may never.

But let's say they did. What would Israel, which is a country the size of Maryland? How would it

respond? How could it respond? Well, it might respond with nuclear weapons, which it has and which

is threatened to use before and which is it has implied it might use many times. One of the reasons

that you can let Israel go alone is they imply like, Hey, don't make us go crazy and do something

wild. And that would include the use of nuclear weapons. Not saying it's going to happen. God

forbid. But it could. And if Israel was legitimately threatened, not performatively threatened,

but actually threatened like with a hypersonic missile into downtown Jerusalem,

then yeah, it might. And in that case, who knows? Because nuclear weapons have not been used since

August of 1945, but a number of countries have them, including Pakistan and possibly others.

And so it could get there. And you'd hate to be in a spot where you were relying once again,

as we did in June on Iranian restraint, relying on the Iranians to, you know, call your airbase

and Qatar before hitting it and giving you a warning. You hate to say that. But if you find

yourself in a place where you're relying on the restraint of a country you have described as

morally diseased, a terrorist nation and Nazi countries that are telling you unfox,

if you're relying on their reasonable behavior, you may have exposed yourself a little bit.

So if this continues, you could see potentially things going really crazy. And of course,

the craziest of all would be a nuclear exchange. And that could happen. That's not off the table,

ask anybody who's dealing with this or thinking about it. Doesn't mean it's going to again,

God forbid, but it could. And the possibility, even then, it could. It's terrifying. That's number

one. Number two is oxamask in Jerusalem, which was built on apparently built on the site of

the second temple. If you've been to Jerusalem, a big gold dome, a whole complex. And that is one

of the holiest sites in Islam, not an expert in Islam, despite many accusations. But it is,

that appears to be co-equal in Islam from what I can tell with Mecca and Medina. It's a huge deal.

And since 1967, it's been under the control, the military control of Israel. It's actually

controlled legally by Jordan. But it's a holy place for every Muslim, about two billion of them.

And there are people, Orthodox Jews in Israel, not all, some. And some evangelical Christians in

Texas, not all, but some who would like to see it blown up and replaced by this third temple.

And I'm not going to get into theology of it, which is deranged and demonic, actually. But it's

a fact that people want this. And that is the beginning of really, of the end for the world,

is we know it because that would set off looking for religious conflict.

Killing the Ayatollah didn't get you there. Okay, blow up the mosque. And then you will be there.

And that's not good for anyone. It's not good for the United States. And if this continues,

there are already people in Israel at least one well-known rabbi is calling for a false flag against

that mosque. Just blow it up and blame the Iranians. And the truth is whether the Iranians blow it

up intentionally or unlikely. But let's just say, or by mistake, or there's a false flag by Israel,

it blames Iran. It doesn't matter. If it blows up, that's not a solvable problem. That's the end

of everything that we know. And that's an enduring generational thousand years, as long as the

world lasts, religious conflict that no one wants to be a part of. Only the craziest, darkest people

want. Any part of that at all. That's the opposite of what we want. And that could happen. So the

point is once things start getting crazy, they can potentially, indeed, they tend to get really

crazy. And so stop the craziness. So how would we affect that, to the extent that we can at this

point declare victory and go home or pull back? It's hard to negotiate with the Iranians. They've

turned down our offer three times. Yeah, true. Iran has decided to the extent they decide anything

who knows who's actually making the decisions. Clearly they're being made by compartments.

It seems that way. But to the extent that the Iranian government can respond as a cohesive whole,

they have responded, no, we're not negotiating with you. Okay, she can't negotiate with them.

We're stopping. Defensive measures only we don't want this. The global economy is at stake.

The global order is at stake. American lives are at stake. American prestige is certainly on the line

our ability to control anything beyond our borders or maybe even within them. We're out.

We killed the itola. We came. We did it. We're going home. At this point, that would be a wise

decision. And it was very clear from the outset, whatever revisionism people want to add to the

story, but it was very clear that Donald Trump did not want an extended war. And Iran certainly

didn't want a protracted boots on the ground war. Certainly doesn't want the kind of war that Tom

Cotton wants, obviously. And we are on the way to getting that really quickly into a lot of

suffering. So declare victory, get out. That would be move one. Second, at some point, the United

States has to get BB under control. Sorry, anti-Semitism is ahead of state whose decisions are

getting Americans killed and affecting the history of the world and the fortunes of literally

the fortunes, but also the future of the United States. At some point, very soon, the United

States has to say to the government of Israel, you are not in charge. And no president has noted

since John F. Kennedy has been willing to say that, but no administration has paid a higher cost

for going along than the current administration and is tragic when you think about it. And of course,

it's not simply the administration. The president and everyone who works for him, it's the country

and the people who voted for this president in the hope that he would improve their lives.

And none of that will be possible if this continues. And the fault, of course, is with anyone who

went along with BB's demands or threats or whatever, but it's their fault for going along with this.

But the root cause is BB and his ambitions. And so somebody immediately needs to say, no,

third thing that we need to do is protect Americans abroad. Hundreds of thousands of Americans

live in the Middle East. A lot of them are stuck in the Gulf right now without getting too

specific about it. But Americans who live at work there, of course, Americans in uniform at our

military bases, which are getting hammered and not just in the Gulf, but in Iraq and Jordan,

and other places getting hammered, dying. But Americans who work in the embassies,

who are their invocation, kids on spring break, who are stuck in the Abu Dhabi or Dubai airports,

there are a lot of those right now, and they kick it out. And to its great shame, the State

Department did not order an evacuation of even embassy employees before these strikes because

they didn't want to give away when the strikes were. Maybe they didn't know. But all of us who are

watching here, when you something was likely to happen and the State Department did not encourage

these people to leave and they didn't help them leave. And as noted, hundreds of thousands of

Americans are still stuck there and in some places they can't get out. Without making it

sound more dire than it really is, just point out that it actually could be dire. These are

countries that are highly dependent on imports for food and water. And if you close the sea routes

out and close the airports, they're pretty stuck. So right now you're seeing Americans try to get

into Oman, the one Gulf country not under attack from Iran, and fly out. You're seeing people pay

hundreds of thousands of dollars to get out, which are not seeing as of right now anyway,

is the US State Department make an effort to prioritize Americans. So it's possible in Doha,

for example, that Polish citizens will be assisted by their government in getting out of the

Gulf before Americans are assisted by their government. There's no excuse for that at all.

The point of the US government is to serve Americans, the point of US diplomats is to serve

the country they represent and to serve Americans in need abroad.

And this has been degrading for a long time, a long time, if you ever go into an embassy in

Mexico, because you got arrested for something, you know what I'm talking about. But the point is,

when a war breaks out started by your country, you have an expectation of help from that government

when it breaks out, and they haven't received it, and it's outrageous.

And the fact that the US government moved apparently a thad battery or some kind of anti-

missile defense from Saudi, where it would protect critical infrastructure and Americans,

or a lot of Americans in Saudi to Israel, not only Shaft Saudi, a critical partner in the world,

a much more important partner than Israel has ever been or ever will be, it's Shaft Saudi,

but it's Shaft's Americans. How many energy employees American energy employees live in Saudi?

There's a direct flight to Houston from Riyadh, like what is this? Underneath at all,

at its core is the obligation of the US government to serve the people it represents,

who pay for it, in whose name all these things happen. And they've completely lost sight of that.

And that gets to a deeper and more taboo problem, which is a real problem, and whose fruits

we're seeing now, which is there are a bunch of people in the US government who do not put the

United States before the interest of Israel, period. And you saw that very clearly with

Mike Huckabee, we interviewed him last week in Tel Aviv, and there was no sense at all that he

represents the United States, or is any interest in what happens to the United States at all. His

party is in defending Israel. Now Huckabee, thank heaven, is not Jewish, he's like some kind of,

who knows what his religion is, but he's not Jewish, so you can't, you know, it's not anti-Semitic

to say that it's a fact. Mike Huckabee's loyalty is to Israel over the United States,

but he's hardly alone in that. How could there possibly be in 2026, a dual citizen

sharing citizenship with any other country, including Israel, but not limited to Israel,

any country? How could there be any dual citizen at a high level of government?

You can't serve two masters. You can't be loyal to two countries simultaneously.

This is why we're against polygamy in the West, right? Right?

But we allow it. Why? Because no one wants to be called names if they oppose it.

And it's not just dual citizenship. It's a confusion about whose behalf we're working on.

And in some cases, it's unintentional. No one has spelled out the rules. It's, it's not

malign. It's just dumb. No one has had the brass to say, hey, you work for the US government,

every decision you make has to put at the top of the Q American citizens. Is this good for my

nation or not? No one ever gets that lecture. There's no culture of that. And it's not under

this administration. It's every administration of my lifetime. Certainly since 9-11,

we need to have a government that has as its stated goal the protection of American citizens.

Period. And if other nations benefit from that, great. We're not against anybody.

But the point has to be America and serving America's interests. And if it idea sounds good,

but it's going to hurt the United States, we're against it. That's our official position as a

country. And if you work for the government and you don't share that view, you can't work for

the government. And you certainly can't serve it a foreign military. What are we even doing?

That's so real. All these people in public life have served in the Israeli military,

but not the US military. That's fine. But you can't have influence over my country at that point.

You served in a foreign military and not in ours. And no one just wanted to talk about this,

but it's going out a long time. Bill Clinton famously said when he got out of office during

the speech, I wish I'd served in the IDF. Really? He dodged the draft. It's not a defense of the

Vietnam War, which was idiotic. But it's a clear statement of priorities. I would serve in a

foreign country's military before my own. Well, you can't be in my leadership then. Sorry.

You're not a loyal American. How are we defining loyal? Like putting on a uniform,

putting on a uniform of a foreign military and showing up in the US Congress waving

a foreign flag in the US Congress. Those are totally disqualifying acts.

And the fact that we've lost the capacity to see that says that we're all but under some kind

of spell. Hopefully it breaks now because you can't continue with the system that we have. It's

not an attack on anybody. It's the standard that Israel would apply to itself or any sovereign

country would apply to itself. You have to be for us or you can't work here.

And we very much don't have that.

Most, upsettingly, really is the possibility of what might happen here. And that's the next

thing we need to do is brace for a lot of domestic change. As I said, the spirit of violence of hate

of killing has been unleashed. And you see it in people, if you read online commentary,

you certainly see it in evidence there. People are angry. They taste blood on the tongue and they

want to kill. You don't want that here. You don't want that in New York country. That defeats

the whole point. The only reason we have a military is to ensure peace and prosperity in the

United States. That's it. And if military action increases poverty and violence in your country,

which it always does, it's bad. So you are seeing now a concerted effort by

people acting on behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu, some technically American citizens,

to foment religious conflict here.

Pate the Muslims. I'm not sure what I think about Israel, but we have the same enemies.

No, the only enemies we have are enemies of the United States. And we know who our enemies are

by what they do to us, how they treat us, what they demand of us. And by that measure,

Israel is not an ally. And I don't know who these Muslims you're talking about are. If you're

against mass immigration, of course, how do we get mass immigration? Does anyone know? We got it

after we got mass Muslim immigration after 9-11. And the people who pushed it, because I was here,

and I remember it very well, are the very same people, in some cases, literally the same people

who are now screaming about how Islam is our enemy. It's not an endorsement of Islam at all.

As a Christian, I don't endorse Islam. But I hate lying, because it's never accidental. It's

always in the service of some darker end. And in this case, it's in the service of the darkest

of all ends, which is to divide this country against itself, along religious lines.

And yet people are standing up and saying something and never would have said 20 years ago,

hate all Muslims. How is that better than hate all Jews? I'll pause while you explain.

And of course, they can't explain, because it is in no sense better than I hate all Jews. It's

the same thing. And I hate all Christians for that reason, matter. But you are seeing a concerted

effort to do that. And you will almost certainly see, as we have seen before, acts of violence that

may or may not be organic, designed to move public opinion strongly in one direction to benefit

people outside our country. It's just a fact. And if you think that's not a fact, if that's

a conspiracy theory, if that's an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, oh, you're alleging a false flag?

Oh, yeah. They've been documented at length. But there is a way to end this argument.

We don't need to debate this. We can declassify it. We just classify it. We can know the truth.

We can let, as Justice Brandeis said, sunlight in, which will disenfact. Why don't we do that?

And we'll start with the Kennedy assassination 63 years ago. Those documents have not been

declassified. Why is that? Why are there thousands of Kennedy assassination-related documents that

have not been declassified? That's a fact. Despite an executive order last January, acts of Congress

over 63 years, I don't know. We're just speculating now. Let's find out. Why are there millions of

9.11 documents still classified? And the same people who call you a nut for speculating as to why

they might be classified, demand they remain classified. There's no justification for it.

Secrecy abets evil. That's the point of it. There's no national security consideration at play

in the Kennedy documents, the 9.11 documents. I call BS and that you're lying.

So let's end it. And by the way, if you wanted hate and ethnic strife and conspiracy theories,

if you wanted to make Americans distrust and dislike each other, if you wanted to eliminate

all confidence in government, if you wanted no authority to have legitimacy in a country,

you would make everything secret. So everyone had to speculate as to what was actually going on.

You would create a nation of conspiracy mongers. That's the effect of classifying over a billion

federal documents. You end democracy, because you can't really meaningfully participate in a government

if you don't know what it's doing. There's no democracy with a billion classified documents. It's

gone. It's an oligarchy. And you would make the population suspicious. You would make them distrust

each other. You would sow division, which is what you always do when you want to dominate and control

anybody. You divide them from each other. And of course, you would hide your own crimes.

So, but there's a way to end that. So Kennedy assassination, 9-11. But let's start with the

purported assassination attempts on Donald Trump. Now, why are those significant? Because yesterday,

the president of the United States said, I did this. And by this, I mean, killed the head of state

of Iran, the Itolla Khameini. He tried to kill me twice, but I got him first. It's almost

a verbatim quote from the president who who thinks that he's been told that. Get it.

What do we know about that? Where did that intelligence come from? That proved that the government

of Iran run by the Itolla, this religious leader, tried to assassinate the president of the United

States twice. Do we know where that came from? Oh, it came from Israel. That's where that

intel came from. Well, let's see it. Why not? At this point, he's dead. What can't we see that?

Oh, sources and methods tough. We want to war over this. Americans are dead because of this.

You can't hide behind that anymore. Show us. And maybe we'll find that there's really good intel.

And it just absolutely shows that the government of Iran run by the Itolla, tried to assassinate the

president of the United States. That might have been a good reason for war right there.

But maybe it doesn't show that because this country has certainly been manipulated a lot

by Israeli intelligence and other foreign countries' intelligence, but certainly by Israeli

intelligence. That's why we thought there were weapons of asked destruction in Iraq.

So I'm Hussein was paying the families of suicide bombers in Israel, which is bad.

Not endorsing that. Israel wanted him out. Get it. Why did we do that? Because Israeli

intelligence told us that he was working on chembio weapons and a nuke. Totally false. We got that

from Israeli intelligence. So at that point, the track record suggests, hey, and no offense to

Ted Cruz or all the other dumbos are always saying, no, we get all this actionable intelligence.

It's so important. We need them so desperately. Really, let's evaluate the quality of that intelligence.

And what percentage is true? What percentage is sincerely mistaken? And what percentage is

designed to manipulate us into military action on their behalf? Maybe interesting to know.

And until we do know, the rest of us are going to just speculate that some of us will put breaks

on our own imaginations and try not to be too dark about it, trying to imagine evil where there's

no evidence for it. But others will let their imaginations go. And you can see why.

Does that bring the country closer together? No, it makes people hate each other.

So the next person who talks about anti-semitism and the rising tide of anti-semitism,

fair. But it's real. It's bad. Totally bad. How do we fix it? We'll declassify the 9-11 files.

And then all those people in the internet were like, oh, the dancing Israelis, they did it. Israel

had four knowledge of 9-11. They were text messages sent to Israel. Warning of 9-11. All true, by the way.

What does that add up to? Maybe nothing. I don't know. They won't declassify the files. They lie about it. Why?

Just tell the truth. And by the way, if there are ugly truths involved in the dump of documents,

people can generally handle it. What they can't handle is being lied to generationally and then

attacked for trying to figure out what the omissions amount to, which is exactly where we are now.

And so they're telling us today that they're going to be attacks in the United States by

Iranian sleeper cells. Maybe sounds plausible. They blew up our base in Bahrain. They hit the air

basin outside Doha. Okay. I mean, they're, I believe it. But if those things actually do happen

in the United States, we're going to need to believe it. If there is any real doubt, if there is a

sense that actually maybe the FBI manufacturer, they're not telling us everything. If we have the

same feeling about whatever those attacks, pray they don't happen, but about whatever those

attacks turn out to be, as we had about say January 6th, or Charlie Kirk's assassination.

Can you imagine a more divisive thing to happen to this country? If you really wanted to bring

America low, that's what you would do. So it's actually essential that the government has the

trust of the governed. Absolutely essential. Not just morally, but operationally. It won't work

without it. And the only way to do that is to tell the truth. And to call out people who lie,

scream at you, call your names, we're going to turn you, throw you a jail. All right. But first

to classify the 9-11 files, and then we can all calm down. How's that? That's not just a provocation,

that's sincere. The next thing we need to do is get foreign lobbies under control. And it's not

just a pack. It's not just Israel. It's a lot of them. It's a lot of them. And the downside to

mass immigration, of course, is that you can import other people's conflicts and ancient ethnic

rivalries into your own country and then be destroyed by them. And this was well known at the

turn of the century when the United States had its last biggest, second biggest wave of mass

immigration people fleeing Eastern Europe mostly. And the sense strongly was this can work. We can

use them for their labor. Actually, the population hated it, to be totally honest, it's always hated

it, but no one cares what they think. But a more evolved and selfless and wiser class of leaders

at the time thought to themselves, this can work for feeding our factories with the labor we need.

But we could also get a lot of trouble. So let's invent this concept called the melting pot,

where everyone is welcome. We'll put a little plaque on the set of liberty kind of explaining

this idea. But everyone has to kind of share in a common culture and common values. You leave

your ancient grudges behind. It doesn't matter. Kind of like if your ancestors killed my ancestors,

we're not going to kill each other. And that's the only way it's going to work. And they were

absolutely right. And we've abandoned that, of course, and it was intentional. It was an

effort to divide the country against itself in order to dominate it and lead to events like today.

But it's accelerating to a point where the country won't hang together unless we get this under

control. And people don't seem aware of this from maybe they are, but are pretending it's not

happening. But in the last two conflicts today being one, Venezuela, on January 3rd being the

other, but you could pick a bunch more. You had really active lobbies of exiles from those countries

lobbying the US government and its military to overthrow the dictatorship they left because

they're mad. And that's not a good reason for the US government to act. Like people who've been here

for a while or born here as ancestors fought in the Civil War founded the country. They have a say

too. And they don't want anything to do with that. They built this country actually. And they have

a right to say no, you know, if you're mad, go back and fight for that country's freedom. But now

you're an American. But we've gotten to a point where, well, here's CNN from yesterday. Watch

this. The largest Iranian populations outside of the Middle East, you see the gathering there

behind her. Julia, how is the Iranian community responding?

Well, this gathering has only grown Jessica over the past few hours, excuse me, since we've

gotten here. It has a vast large number of people. And the celebration is striking. So,

the Persians in LA are really psyched. And by the way, if you ever run into Persians in LA, great

people, Muslims, Jews, probably a few Christians, but great people. Hilarious, interesting, super

successful, fun to be with. Really one of the most entertaining and reaching immigrant groups,

just to be honest, having dealt with them a lot. They're great. Handsome people too. Smart.

However, their anger at the Ayatollah should play precisely no role in what our military does.

It's just not relevant at all. Making this specific group of voters happy because they

were thrown out of a country or their parents were thrown out of a country. I mean,

that is talk about wag the dog. And that's not Israel. In this case, it's the Persians of LA,

on the west side of LA, where it could be the Cubans of South Florida. Another awesome group, great

people. Lindsey Graham said yesterday, next stop,

deranged by hubris. Ron has gone so well, we're going to overthrow the Cuban government next.

Go believe me. Okay, now, after 65 years. But the point is Lindsey Graham

was worked into a frenzy by the very awesome, super nice, productive, smart, attractive,

everything great about them. Cuban lobby in South Florida. Very conservative. Christian,

they're great. Love them. They can't have control of America's foreign policy. No ethnic group can

have control of American foreign policy, whether it's the Venezuelans. How many South Asian immigrants

are in this country now? No one even knows. A ton. Talk about a region driven by ethnic strife.

Ever been there? I mean, there's obviously Pakistan and Bangladesh and India, but then even

within India, libraries and books have been written about this. If you were to import those conflicts

into your country, you'd be Canada, where there's like a Bengali killing a Punjabi and a high

profile assassination, no one who was actually born in Canada understands, it's a nightmare.

It's not an attack on the Bengali's Punjabis or anyone else. It's just the very obvious point

that these are functional countries, the Anglosphere, they were created by Anglo-Saxon immigrants with

a certain system and they work and everyone wants to move here because they work. And the fastest

way to keep them from working is to import the bad habits or centuries old grudges of the homeland.

So come here, bring your ambition, your kindness, your decency, your commitment to the American

project, but don't bring your lobbying efforts to get us to go to war with anyone, not Iran, Cuba,

Venezuela, anybody because if we allow this to continue in 10 years, we will be fighting a war

in Somalia on behalf of the Somali state of Minnesota or Portland, Maine or whatever. If you

import the stuff here, this country will fall apart. And here's the last point, which I think

needs to be made, is that this is a spiritual war. And you hear that thrown around, it's been thrown

around for the last, I don't know, five or six years as people are paying attention,

it began to realize there's no rational explanation for a lot of things that we're seeing

transgenderism or that just love of abortion for its own sake. Like, what's that? Well, it's obviously

it's human sacrifice, like the minds of the Incas and the Canaanites and never other civilizations,

human sacrifice. You kill a human being to appease the gods and to get power for yourself. It's

the oldest religious ritual there is. And we're just seeing its modern manifestation of it. So

people are more familiar with this term spiritual war. But its manifestations are not always so obvious.

But if you look back at various points in history, two things become really clear. One,

underneath it all, it's aimed at Christians. It's aimed at sincere Christians. They are always

the main victims. Everyone lies about it. No, the Bolshevik Revolution really wasn't about Christianity.

Really? The French Revolution really was about Christianity. Why are they beheading nuns? Spanish

civil war, same thing. The Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 lasted four and a half months.

What's the first thing they did? Execute all the Christians, the clergy, of course.

So the spiritual war can have a little finer point on it. It's Jesus who's like the center of this,

actually. Prove me wrong. Ask an Armenian. So, okay, what do you do with that information?

Well, first just know it. If we go to war in Iraq on false pretenses and the group that suffers

more than any other group disproportionately, more than any group by far turns out to be the Christians

who weren't really raising arms against anybody, that kind of proves the point.

If Syria goes upside down and the first people to get genocide are the Christians,

if Christians in Bethlehem can't actually drive the 12 miles or whatever it is to the Church of

the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem because who knows why, they're the target. Of course. Why is

Western Europe being destroyed? Why do you think? Because that's where Rome moved, obviously,

because it's the seat of Christian civilization. Of course. Of course.

So that's what's actually happening. And one of the things that you need in order to understand

that and to fight against it is strong, consistent spiritual leadership. I'm military

leadership. You need that in another realm, but in the spiritual, I mean, strong spiritual

leadership. And you'll notice when that leadership becomes completely corrupted,

like truly corrupted when the leaders of Christianity or parts of Christianity in the

United States are not simply like wrong or flawed or off base. That's all of us,

but are actively trying to lead people in the wrong direction.

When Paula White was like some crazed, totally discredited televangelist who commands her followers

in church to give her money or they're not going to be saved or something is like

female Jimmy Swagger. When she's the head of the White House faith office, literally,

then you know there has been a concerted attempt to corrupt your spiritual leaders so that you

won't know what's going on. You see that with Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist preacher.

And one of the ways this happens is subtle and not obvious to a lot of American Christians,

but that's the endorsement of violence. Franklin Graham, who's the son of a great man,

of course, one of the most Billy Graham was his dad, advisor to many presidents, great

evangelist, probably the greatest evangelist this country has ever produced. Franklin Graham is his

son, a kind of evangelist and sort of a aid worker of sorts who flies around the world,

you know, plain giving food to people, but consider a Christian leader in the United States,

gave a sermon, if you could call it that, at the Pentagon, I think over Christmas,

in which he described the Christian God, and I'm quoting now, as a God of war.

We follow a God of war. And we don't, actually, not a God of physical war,

not a God of dropping bombs on kids. That's not the Christian God. That's not Jesus. And there

is no place in the gospels that suggest that. In fact, there's a lot that suggests just the opposite.

And so if you find yourself in a position where, as a Christian, trying to figure out the right

position to take or the right spirit to have, the right approach, what do I do?

And you find yourself listening to a Christian leader who is endorsing violence against

innocence. You know, without attacking the guy personally, you're not hearing the Christian

message. That's not the gospel. That's the opposite of the gospel. And yet it's everywhere.

The acceptance in the United States by Christian leaders of violence against

innocence should be shocking to our ears, but we have spent so many decades listening to it

that it seems normal. And it's not normal. It's a deception. And it will lead to people's

destruction, not just the people being bombed, but the people calling for the bombings.

And then, of course, there are examples like John Higgy, one of the most prominent evangelical

pastors in the United States, head of Christians United for Israel, sort of the face of Christian

Zionism, politically active, a huge proponent of the war we're currently in. And he is even now

considered a Christian leader. Here's John Higgy in case you're not familiar with him.

Or not, we should send military assistance to Israel. We must continue to provide Israel with the

specific capabilities and intelligence support they need to target and destroy these

savages once and for all. We should sink any Iranian naval boats that threaten international

shipping. If you don't really fully understand what I've just said, let me say it to you in plain

Texas speech. America should roll up its sleeve and knock the living daylights out of

Tehran for what they have done to Israel. That's not Frank Gaffney. That's a Christian preacher.

That's a man who tells you he is proclaiming the gospel, demanding the US government

sink Iranian boats and kill these savages. That is not Christianity and it is a deception.

It's a heresy and it is the path to total destruction, not simply of our bodies, but of our souls.

We had a reading in church yesterday, which I'm going to try to get through without getting

emotional, that provides I think a different path than the right path. This was written in the 19th

century by John Henry Newman. This was the peace collect. It was the collect for the day

in our church yesterday. My wife wrote it out for me and I just want to read this on the way out

because I think this is the truth. Eternal God, in whose perfect kingdom no sword is drawn,

but the sword of righteousness, no strength known, but the strength of love. So mightily spread a

broad year spirit that all peoples may be gathered under the banner of the Prince of Peace

as children of one, father to whom be dominion and glory now and forever. Amen.

John Henry Newman, who was both a Protestant and a Catholic priest. That is the truth right there.

No sword is drawn, but the sword of righteousness. God bless this country. Pray for it every day

and we'll be back. Thank you.