Benny Johnson and Steve Hilton dissect Islamabad peace talks, Iran's Strait of Hormuz tensions, and JD Vance's moral obligation to expose alleged lies by Netanyahu and Zelensky. The discussion highlights CIA intelligence deeming Israeli claims "farcical," FCC actions against Disney's The View, and Hilton's accusations of fraud against Gavin Newsom regarding California funds. Ultimately, the episode questions if American politics has devolved into an "idiocracy" where tribal disputes mimic ancient kings' children fighting to the death, suggesting vengeance belongs solely to God. [Automatically generated summary]
High stakes talks are scheduled this weekend in Islamabad, Pakistan, aimed at creating an agreement to end the war.
With the temporary ceasefire in place, international focus remains on the Strait of Hormuz.
Overnight, President Trump took to True Social to say, quote, Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable, some would say, of allowing oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz.
That is not the agreement we have.
With just eight vessels reportedly passing through the Strait in the first 48 hours of the ceasefire, a statement was released via state media.
From Iran's new supreme leader saying, quote, and certainly we are entering a new era with management of the Strait of Hormuz.
We did not and do not seek war, but we will not give up our rightful rights in any way.
And for this, we consider all the fronts of resistance as one.
The region is waiting to see the outcome of the talks in Pakistan, as Iranian officials and U.S. officials appear to be discussing a different set of terms.
Iraq's foreign minister spoke this week about the talks.
We do know talks are scheduled directly between Israel and Lebanon next week, aimed at creating peaceful relations between the two countries and disarming Hezbollah.
unidentified
Excellent choice.
Too bad I got on three rounds.
It's still on the clock.
Oh, shit!
You gotta do something.
I'm the Deki Matsui.
I just took my whole outfield.
Sorry, Charlie.
What is this?
Baby.
What the f is this?
That's our fantasy baseball draft.
We said no wives.
I told you all about this.
Got Matsui.
Hey, don't let the door hit you in the vagina on the way out.
Now, we are the subject of some major drama because we started criticizing foreign governments and foreign countries.
And for that, I would like to apologize.
For absolutely nothing!
Because it's my obligation as a free person, as an American, as somebody who loves only my country, to be suspicious of every other nation who presumably loves only their country and wants what's best for their country.
Fine.
In fact, that's a moral and dignified and defensible position.
Criticizing another government, being wary of foreign influence and entanglements, is how we got America in the first place.
Your forefathers really didn't like foreign governments so much that they fought wars against them to be rid of them and free of them.
And many would argue our most famous forefather sorry, we don't have the George Washington, the cringe George Washington AI to bring up.
George Washington, a wife beater, smoking a zigzag.
What do you think?
Nope.
But we do have this, like George Washington's farewell address, where he says, please, for the love of God, like, don't get involved in other.
Foreign entanglements.
The world is a messy place.
We got a country to build here.
And you should be suspicious, quite frankly, of other countries' morals and what they want to do to this great and rich land.
And that's what George Washington said.
And I'm like down with that.
And I just want to say, as somebody who is America first, who voted three times for Trump, who wants Trump to succeed, it is our obligation as people who love this country and love his administration to call balls and strikes.
And that's just all we've done.
It's gotten us in a bunch of hot water with exactly the people you'd assume.
And I don't care because it's righteous and moral.
And let me tell you my major motivator here, actually, because loving your homeland doesn't mean you hate other people.
It's the opposite of that.
It means you want what's best for providentially what God tells you to actually care the most about, which is your children, your family, your neighborhood, your block.
And That's my chief motivator.
Proverb says, A righteous man and a good man leaves an inheritance for his children's children.
And my only motivation is not hatred of any other country, although it is my right and obligation to question things when I see that they are wrong or when our leaders are being lied to, my president's being lied to.
I want to apologize for that.
No, no, no.
My motivation is simply this.
Preserve this place for my children.
And that's it.
I want a peaceful, prosperous, safe, clean America to leave to my children.
You know, some people would be wise to like learn that they're not commander in chief.
I support President Trump.
I still support President Trump.
I want him to be successful.
I don't want my president to be lied to.
And it is my obligation with this humble audience to declare that when I catch other world leaders lying to Trump, disrespecting my president in the White House, it makes my blood boil.
So here's what I said, and we're going to unpack this.
Certainly don't want some other nation to walk into our White House and to lie about an operation to our president.
And that's what happened.
That's what Israel did here.
It's unforgivable as far as I'm concerned.
You should never want that.
China doing that, Russia doing that, or if it were the UAE or Saudi Arabia walking in and lying to us, lying to our president, and then getting Americans killed, I would also be rightly furious.
So it shouldn't happen anyway.
I think that Bibi Netanyahu should be banned from the White House, as far as I'm concerned, along with any other world leader that behaves in a duplicitous fashion.
And Zelensky should be on that list.
Zelensky should be on that list.
We can go there, ladies and gentlemen.
Here's the article that I was talking about in that clip.
But with the detail, first off, these are the two like Trump stenographers.
Trump has given exclusives to these reporters before.
He sat down with these reporters before.
He knows these reporters before.
I'm not saying Trump leaked all this.
I'm saying that these are the Trump stenographers at the New York Times.
They're the stalkers, practically, of President Trump at the New York Times.
It ain't been perfect.
But the exquisite detail of this piece begs the question like, how did these reporters get access to all of this?
And you'd have to assume it's somebody that is working on retelling the story from inside of the White House.
That's what I assume.
I don't know.
But like, the detail is precise, down to the placement of where everyone was seated.
The White House also has not come out against this report.
The White House regularly nukes from space.
Fake news and righteously so.
But they haven't done that to this report.
And what does this report show?
I'm just going to give you the top line, and then the link is up on my social media.
You can read it for yourself, okay?
I'll never ever tell you again to read the New York Times.
My goodness, I mean, the number of people who've come after me for this.
Here's the top line BB Netanyahu went into the White House and gave faulty intel to Trump.
Did he know he was lying?
Were they actively lying?
Doesn't matter.
Like malevolence or ignorance.
At some point, it's totally indistinguishable.
It doesn't matter.
It was wrong information.
Marco Rubio, Trump asked our own intelligence agencies to run all of BB's information and to assess it.
And here's what the CIA director came back with.
This is farcical, Mr. President.
Scroll down to that.
It's a giant black word, farcical.
John Ratcliffe said it's farcical.
It's not true.
The information he gave you about the Iran war and how it's going to go down is not true.
You'll find it, Klein.
Just scroll through.
There you go.
It's not, that's what our CIA director said.
What did Marco Rubio say?
I support Marco Rubio.
I really like Marco Rubio.
He's such a sharp cookie in the White House.
He said it's total bullshit.
That's what Rubio said.
What about Raisin Kane?
Don't we love Dan Raisin Kane, the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
I certainly do.
He's an American hero.
Dan Raisin Kane says, listen, this is standard operating procedure for the Israelis.
They exaggerate, their plans are not well developed, he says.
Perfect.
Thank you, Klein.
And they oversell.
They're hard selling you because they want a war with Iran.
I'm not saying Trump is like, I'm not saying Trump went in like some sweet summer child.
Trump made a decision based on our intelligence assessment to take out two objectives out of four.
The two objectives were kill the Ayatollah and extremely diminish, grind to powder, Iran's ability to project power and make war in the region.
And they accomplished that.
Trump accomplished that.
That's what the article says.
He went in clear eyed about those two objectives.
But Bibi's other objective, saying, oh, we can topple the regime.
We have some goofball in Bethesda, Maryland, who will suddenly be the new warlord of Iran.
That's silly.
That was bad intel.
And I don't like my president getting bad intel.
You shouldn't either, because American lives are on the line.
And that's critically important.
You should demand, in fact, that world leaders who come to the White House give the dignity and respect of giving good and accurate and precise information, especially when American treasure, lives, political will is on the line.
Like that, that is the America first position.
That is a logical position.
That's the position of a patriot.
And so that's what I said.
So there it is, ladies and gentlemen.
Not apologizing for anything.
That's what's in the article.
The other, a couple of interesting things of note in the article.
Trump went in clear eyed.
It's not like saying that Trump's an idiot or anything.
Like Trump went in clear eyed with the two objectives he wanted to accomplish.
And so when Trump says, I've accomplished my objectives, he did.
The article says those are the two things he wanted to do.
And that is exactly what we did degraded their military down to.
Practically powder.
They have no navy, no air control, no ground control.
We can build forward operating bases deep in enemy territories and go get our pilot.
Okay.
And then kill the Ayatollah and like a couple strata down of Iranian leadership.
JD Vance, totally and completely against this war.
That's the other big takeaway from this article.
JD Vance was like, no, we are not going to, we should not be going to this war.
We should not be doing it.
And JD Vance was like, straight up, like, You know, but if you want to do it, we should get it over as quickly as possible because there's a lot of dangers here.
And it, you know, goes through the detail, it goes through the thought process.
I think it's fascinating, it goes through the thought process of everybody in the Trump administration.
It makes me love the Trump administration even more.
It seems like the thinking here was clear, and President Trump simply made a decision based on his gut.
And you get good Trump with bad Trump, don't you?
If you voted for Trump, then you voted for the guy that's been saying since the 80s he wants to bomb.
The shit out of Iran.
That's exactly what he said.
He said that like a million times, those exact words.
The White House has not denied this report, they haven't come out and called it all fake news.
And so, you know, I'm just going to pivot off this and say for those of you who think that I'm like, oh, how dare you pick on Israel?
You're so mean to Israel, anti Semite.
You're like every single thing you could possibly say, you know.
Did you have the same problems when it was Zelensky?
Because I have these clips.
We don't have time to play them, but I have these special clips from like about 16 months ago of Zelensky going to the White House, lying his ass off to Trump.
Because one person or 10 people or 100 people came in legally and contributed to the United States of America, does that mean that we're thereby committed to let in a million or 10 million or 100 million people a year in the future?
We cannot have an immigration policy where what was good for the country 50 or 60 years ago binds the country inevitably for the future.
There's too many people who want to come to the United States of America, and my job as vice president is not to look out for the interests of the whole world.
It's to look out for the people of the United States.
My job, your job as a patriot, is not to look out for the interests of the whole world.
Your job as a patriot is to look out for the interests of your country.
Of the United States.
Now, JD Vance was talking, of course, about open borders, but the principle applies.
JD Vance is on a plane right now to go negotiate peace.
You can see here, here's the update.
JD Vance warns Iran not to play us, says he's going to go negotiate peace with Iran.
That's awesome.
I cheer that on.
I pray for the Trump administration.
I'll come alongside of them and fight with them.
I want America first.
And President Trump out this morning saying, The world's most powerful reset.
Good.
I like this energy, ladies and gentlemen.
The world's most powerful reset.
Fantastic.
Ladies and gentlemen, somebody who fights alongside the president all the time in a very important arena, which is, of course, the arena of truth and accuracy, good reporting and responsible broadcast, is the great chairman, Brendan Carr of the FCC.
He joins us live right now.
Mr. Chairman, I just had to get some things off my chest.
What was interesting about this story is CNN ran this headline that said, Iran basically claims victory.
And that was not at all the statement that Iran had itself put out.
I mean, obviously, President Trump has been winning.
Unbelievably over there, and to say Iran claims victory isn't right.
If you actually look at the actual statement from Iran, which President Trump himself posted, it was very different than that.
And I think perhaps maybe CNN got a statement from some component of the Iranian government.
But that's like having Elizabeth Warren put out a statement and having someone run a headline saying, you know, United States claims X. You know, there's all kinds of weird people over there that can claim all sorts of things.
But when you're in such a sensitive moment in this middle of this combat, I think it's important to be very clear about where these statements are coming from.
Look, CNN is cable, they're not broadcast.
They don't have a license or a public interest obligation.
But I still think it's important for all of us to express our views on this.
Yeah, so Congress long ago passed a regulation equal time, equal opportunity.
So if you're going to have one political candidate on, you have to offer comparable time and placement to others because Congress didn't want media gatekeepers deciding the outcome of elections.
They wanted individual people to do that.
Now, there's an exception to that rule for things that are called bona fide news programs.
And Congress had in mind things like the old school meet the press.
Now, flash forward to today, in every Broadcast TV show apparently thinks that they're bona fide news, including The View.
The View, Disney's product, is literally asserting that they are a bona fide news program and therefore do not have to comply with equal time.
And we have launched an enforcement matter in that.
We have welcomed them to file a petition with the FCC to try to obtain bona fide news status.
And if they do that, we're going to take a look at it.
But I think it shocks a lot of people to think that Disney's The View is itself bona fide news.
I mean, is it, you know, it's given the fact that this is a publicly licensed broadcaster.
I mean, having a table full of five screeching, shrieking left wing women agitating and campaigning against the president every chance they get, telling lies about the president, you know, on Epstein Island and so on, as they've done, getting handed a note every seven seconds right by their lawyers for corrections.
I mean, is this something that ABC should be really broadcasting?
Well, part of the bona fide news analysis asks, and this is just in FCC case law for decades, is are you motivated by partisan political purposes in the production of the program?
And so when the view comes forward, either on its own or part of our investigation, that's what we're going to look at.
We also have a policy at the FCC for broadcasters that goes to conflict of interest.
So if you have a personal political conflict of interest on a matter that you're covering on a program, our rules say that you should disclose that.
We're not saying you can't.
You know, be politically active, but in terms of, you know, just, you know, transparency being the best disinfectant.
So we're also taking a look at do we need to reinvigorate the FCC's personal political conflict of interest policy with respect to broadcasters?
Well, look, I think it's got to be a tough time emotionally for people like Colbert and Kimmel.
They're used to being at the top of the media game and apparently having a lot of people care what they think, but clearly those days are in the rear view mirror.
And so that's got to be a tough time for them.
But look, it's just not popular with people.
And I think it's great that these broadcasters now are responding to their viewers and hopefully they'll get something on that's actually either entertaining or funny or actually informative.
And then a final question for you, Mr. Chairman, about something that bubbled up a month ago the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime show.
I know there were multiple people calling on you, members of Congress calling on you to investigate that for profanity because when you translate the actual words that Bad Bunny was singing, they were quite profane.
And some of the actions, obviously, that were being broadcast and displayed were quite grotesque as well.
Well, originally, people thought that uh, there couldn't potentially be uh, even the possibility of FCC rule violations because the singing was done in Spanish, but there is no Spanish language exemption in the FCC's rule.
So, if you violate you know, profanity, indecency, obscenity, whether it's Spanish or English, there's something there.
Uh, one of the issues that we saw when this was raised was a lot of people were pointing to the traditional lyrics in those songs, which Probably would have been an issue, but there was a lot of changing of the actual lyrics when you look at the transcript itself.
But again, I think it's more fundamentally is this really a popular thing?
If you're a broadcaster, is this the type of thing that is family friendly viewing for the Super Bowl?
And actually, the other thing I just want to convey to you and everyone watching and listening, Benny, is not just the fact of it and the fact that it's going to be such a boost going into our California Republican convention, which is happening this weekend in San Diego, of course, into the primary, so we can be a united party and then take the fight to whichever unbelievably unimpressive Democrat they send to run against me.
We'll get to that in a second.
But the positive thing is this.
The president and I had a wonderful conversation about the incredible opportunity, not just for California, but for our whole country.
If we get to that beautiful scenario where I'm elected in November, take office next January, and then you're going to have the biggest state in our country, by far the biggest economy of all the 50 states, the leadership of that state, instead of endlessly fighting the president and his team when they are trying to do common sense things.
That we will be working together to open up energy production.
We have massive oil and gas reserves in California to do forest management.
We have enormous forests that can harvest timber that we can use in our country to find and stop the fraud, as you've been reporting.
We are the epicenter of the fraud, bigger than all other states combined.
We're going to be working with the vice president and the task force to stop it and prosecute it, to enforce our immigration laws in California.
We have the largest number of illegal immigrants wherever you look.
It's going to be transformational For not just California, but all of our wonderful country.
So there's so many different places to start with this, but let's just jump right in.
Gavin Newsom going viral again, getting ratioed for claiming credit for fixing the fraud in California.
It's pathological.
So guys like me go to California, guys like Nick Shirley go to California.
We do our best to uncover fraud, but like you're just a YouTuber.
He called Nick Shirley a predator.
He made a meme about Nick Shirley being some type of like.
Predator or creep like hunting for children is great.
It's completely and totally grotesque.
I mean, he attacks everybody who comes there to cover fraud.
And then now that they're doing mass arrests and uncovering what you've uncovered, which is hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in fraud, he's claiming credit.
Here's the tweet.
I can't believe it's true, Steve.
California is leading the charge against large scale identity theft and hostage fraud.
The level of lying and the shamelessness of the lying, the brazen speaking things that everyone can see.
It's not just not true, it's the direct opposite of the truth.
It is pathological.
There's something really wrong with someone who's able to behave like this.
And of course, it's just so shameful when it's our money that's been stolen.
And many of these are federal programs.
So it's taxpayers across the country that have been completely ripped off by Gavin Newsom for all these years.
And the Democrat machine.
Remember that this fraud, some of it is individual people who are stealing it to benefit themselves personally.
Bill Asale, my friend, who's the U.S. Attorney, doing a fantastic job on behalf of President Trump and the federal administration prosecuting fraud.
Sometimes it's individuals stealing it.
But more often than not, this is what we've revealed through Cal Doge the money that's been stolen by Gavin Newsom from California and national taxpayers is going to finance their political machine.
That's where it's going.
It's not just buying luxury vacations or whatever for individual criminals.
The majority of it is going to Democrat groups, activists, the unions for voter registration and Democrat political activity to entrench their power.
Taxpayer money.
I mean, it's absolutely sick.
And we need to see prosecutions of the politicians, the politicians, because this cannot be allowed to go unpunished.
Newsome and all these Democrats stealing taxpayer money to finance their political machine.
Just to dig down a little lower, deeper, a level deeper there, Steve, because you say that it's going to finance them and their political operations.
James O'Keefe proved that right here.
And I know you've seen it, I know you've commented on it, I know you've worked with James in exposing how they're using the homeless that we went out to cover, the homeless industrial complex, in order to get all of their petitions signed.
This is critical, by the way, to get anything done in California.
And this is a great example of what you just said.
Like it's an on camera example of what you just said.
Total and complete fraud on camera.
Is this what you're alluding to, or is there more, Steve?
And I met with James that weekend when he was doing this incredible work.
And so you and I saw the front end of it, where you see the fake homeless service provider where there's nothing there, just a parking lot with a porta party, and that's it.
So that's where the money was not being spent.
And then James provides the other end of it.
That's where the money is actually going.
Cash handed out through nonprofits that are supposed to be working to help the homeless, actually getting them to sign up for ballot initiatives and even to register to vote under fake names and fake addresses.
I'll give you another example that we found at Cal Doge.
This is $1 billion since 2015 that was supposed to have been spent through part of their climate nonsense on installing.
Solar panels on low income apartment buildings, right?
100 million every year since 2015.
We looked into it.
Total amount of money actually spent on solar panels, 72 million.
928 million, nearly all of the billion actually went to Democrat groups doing exactly what James filmed there voter registration and activism in the communities that were supposed to be getting solar panels.
It's just completely corrupt.
Like, this is absolute banana.
Republic level corruption from Gavin Newsom and the Democrat machine.
And you and James O'Keefe and Nick Shirley, and we are exposing it and we're going to shut the whole rotten corrupt enterprise down.
All their lectures about gender equality and women's rights and Me Too and all the rest of it, they don't care.
It's all BS.
They just want their puppet.
And this is the arrogance of this Democrat machine in California, 16 years of one party rule.
They have complete contempt for the voters.
They lie.
They are total hypocrites.
They don't believe in nothing except their own power.
So they're perfectly fine.
To go along with someone with these allegations.
We'll see if he continues.
But I mean, who else have we got to choose from?
I mean, look, you've got, as the president would say, as we discussed, they're not sending their best.
You've got Swalwell.
You've got Katie Porter.
You've got the self hating billionaire climate fanatic, Tom Steyer.
That's it.
Those are your choices for governor from the Democrats.
There you are.
I'm leading.
I'm on 22%.
And there's Swalwell on 18%.
By the way, that was a poll commissioned by the unions supporting Eric Swalwell.
um this is the and then they put out a social media post swalwell personally saying i'm leading i'm leading the race he meant he's leading against the other democrats he literally took me off the top and just put a graphic that exact one that you're showing with me removed from the top from his own poll these people are just unbelievable So,
if these allegations play out, and if in fact Eric Swalwell has this deluge and avalanche of credible allegations against him from all of these young women who work for him, which is what's bubbling up right now, which is what's being talked about right now, should he drop out?
Meanwhile, we have the worst roads in the country, like 50th out of 50 states for the quality of our roads.
I the thing I say, Benny, about high speed rail, which by the way, their actual official plan they just admitted they need another 125 billion dollars to finish it.
And even on their own plan, the final stage of it from Bakersfield to LA is a bus that's that's the actual plan.
They're not even talking about finishing it with trains, it's a high speed bus, by the way, not no, LA traffic.
No, it's true, and sometimes that that trip.
From Bakersfield to LA, we do it many times.
That can take two and a half hours when you're going in a car or bus.
So they were saying originally it was two and a half hours from San Francisco to LA.
Now it's two and a half hours on the final leg on a high speed bus from Bakersfield to LA.
These people is just believable.
So the line I always use at my events, my town halls is, yeah, of course, I'm going to stop that thing in its tracks, except they haven't laid any tracks.
Speaking of foreign governments, Hunter Biden, never met a foreign government, enemy of America they wouldn't take money from, like Ukraine, Russia, or Algeristan, whatever the hell.
Like, how many bags were delivered to the Biden family through Hunter Biden?
The court filing bluntly states that Mr. Biden lives abroad and argues that the first son cannot afford to pay off his outstanding fees.
And the law firm, the defendant Hunter, and his tax and gun crimes and other legal battles claims that he failed to pay his bills in excess of $50,000.
Podcast appearance, he said he was $17 million in debt.
The Hunter Biden spoke, the Biden family spokesperson declined to comment to the Daily Mail and did not specify where in the world Hunter Biden lives, but it's not America.
Just a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, when President Trump goes, he doesn't have the cards, he doesn't have the cards, that what happened next was this.
After Zelensky got sort of his little beat down here at the White House, what happened next was Zelensky showed up in a suit.
And all the various criticisms that we had against Zelensky, things changed a bit, they got ship shape.
Right, this is what you should want from world leaders.
This is what you should want for your government.
You should want respect, uh, you should want circumstance, pomp, but above all else, you should want honesty when there are lives unaligned, when there are big decisions to be made, when there are fortunes to be dashed against the rocks or upheld, when there are entire nations, peoples, and civilizations at hand.
You need our president to one have all the right and correct intelligence, and then two.
As we believe, as we believe as Christians, to have prayer and to be calm, to be at peace.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will inherit, for they will be called the children of God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.
Trump orders Benjamin Netanyahu to calm down.
ALX, can we do one more?
Can we call for one more exciting clip?
Can I get the don't know what the F they're doing clip?
This is about Trump and Israel last year.
Israel, Iran, bashing up against each other, a ceasefire deal.
Gave us one of the most legendary Donald Trump moments.
Sorry, that was my coffee here.
One of the most legendary Donald Trump moments.
Give me that.
Yeah, there it is.
Yeah.
Trump says, Net BB, calm down, right?
Please.
Remember, he got Zelensky to wear a suit talking like this.
Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs, the likes of which I've never seen before.
The biggest load that we've seen.
I'm not happy with Israel.
You know, when I say, okay, now you have 12 hours, you don't go out in the first hour and just drop everything you have on them.
So I'm not happy with them.
I'm not happy with Iran either.
But I'm really unhappy if Israel's going out this morning because the one rocket that didn't land, that was shot, perhaps by mistake, that didn't land.
The scriptures are not about calling us to be the lowest form of ourselves, but calling us to be enlightened and the highest form of ourselves that we can create God's kingdom on this earth, or at least a little part of it.
And so let God have what is God's, right?
God is the author of life and death.
Let the vengeance be the Lord's, ladies and gentlemen, and carry on with us.