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June 12, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:20:18

The Parasites Who Want To Run America

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	Already, folks, a ton to get to on today's show.
	The new frontrunner in the New York mayoral race is like an actual communist.
	Plus, continued riots in Los Angeles.
	Is Gavin Newsom the new frontrunner?
	And what the hell is going on in the Middle East where the United States is removing staffers from embassies is something big in the works.
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	Well, folks, we leave the show today with a tragic story.
	Apparently, a plane, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, an Air India plane carrying 242 people, crashed just after taking off from an airport in Ahmedabad, India.
	On Thursdays, according to Daily Wire, it was headed to the Gatwick Airport.
	In Britain, the aircraft apparently crashed into a civilian area near the airport, striking a doctor's hostel at a medical college.
	Apparently, of the 242 people on board, 11 were children.
	Most of the passengers were Indian.
	There were 53 British citizens, 7 Portuguese, 1 Canadian.
	There are videos that have been circulating on X, and you can see the plane slowly descending over the residential area before it disappears, and then you can see the explosion in the video.
	According to the earlier reports, no survivors at this point will bring you more details.
	As this tragic situation becomes clearer.
	Well, folks, Democrats have been wondering about what happened to their party.
	Why is it that Donald Trump has been elected twice in a three-election span?
	Why is it that the Democrats are currently riding in the 20 percentage mark with regard to their popularity in American life?
	Where did Democrats go wrong?
	Well, I wish to show you a clip from one of the protests in Los Angeles that says so much about why Democrats are losing support nearly everywhere.
	This clip comes courtesy of an account called Frontlines TPUSA.
	And it is a clip of two white people.
	One is a man-bunned soy boy and a middle-aged, short, haircutted woman.
	And they're confronting a younger black woman who's attempting to go to work.
	All she wants to do is get to her job.
	She says she has kids at home.
	All she wants to do is get to her job.
	And these people, on their bicycles, carrying their energy beverages.
	Are standing there obstructing her ability to get to work because they are protesting President Trump's immigration policies.
	And here's how the exchange goes.
	You're not gonna block people from going to work?
	Look at this violence you guys are causing.
	I'm not causing no problems.
	I'm not trying to, we're just trying to leave.
	Thank you.
	Okay, so that guy's perspective, which is incredible.
	And again, you can see behind him people carrying signs with Palestinian flags and Mexican flags and all the rest of it.
	This white guy telling...
	And then when he is asked by a reporter on the scene, why don't you worry about this woman being able to get to work?
	He says, oh no, work.
	Oh no, work.
	These folks are leeches on the ass of American society.
	That's what they are.
	You want to talk about white privilege?
	That right there is white privilege in a nutshell.
	This person should be on every Republican commercial for the next 20 years.
	Oh no, work.
	Man Bun McBicycle over there, who is telling the young black woman with kids at home, That it is not important if she goes to work because he has a political point to make.
	And that means that she has to be stuck in traffic for hours on end while he stands there mentally masturbating.
	It's unbelievable.
	But this is so much of the left wing right now.
	Because when you look at the figures who are being put forward by the left as the most salient, the most important, the most brilliant thinkers, the people who need to lead the country, they're all from Man Bun McSoy Boy's neck of the woods.
	All of them.
	The AOC self-congratulatory Democratic Socialists of America wing of the Democratic Party, people who have barely held a job, a huge percentage of them have gotten a college education on the dime of their parents.
	Most of them are white.
	The vast majority of them are white.
	And they are taking over the Democratic Party, particularly in the primaries.
	One of the things that has broken the country, truly, is the primary process in both parties.
	But largely in the Democratic Party.
	That primary process, which said that the most motivated left-wingers are going to decide who the nominees are, that has completely skewed the nature of American politics.
	And as the left has gotten more censorious, they've pushed more and more people over to the right.
	You wonder why President Trump has made gains with virtually every minority group in America.
	The reason is because you have a bunch of privileged white people who don't have to have jobs in the middle of the day and can therefore march for their quote-unquote values.
	While holding up people who need to get to work from getting to work.
	That divide is the whole thing in a nutshell.
	And it's not just materializing in Los Angeles and California, as we'll talk about in a few minutes.
	It is also materializing in New York.
	So there's a brand new poll showing that the new frontrunner in the New York mayoral primary is not Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor who's now running for mayor in New York.
	Again, he was not a good governor, ended up being ousted from office.
	Over a relatively sketchy sexual harassment claim.
	But he was leading in the mayoral race, in this mayoral primary.
	Eric Adams, who was a Democrat, is now running as an independent.
	The new frontrunner is a person named Zoran Mamdani.
	According to a new poll by Public Policy Polling, the poll shows Mamdani now beating Cuomo 35% to 31%.
	Cuomo has been the constant frontrunner, according to Politico, since his March 1st entrance into the race to oust Mayor Eric Adams, with most publicly released polls showing him with comfortable leads.
	The new survey, which should not include a ranked choice voting simulation, so there's a ranked choice voting process in New York.
	The way the ranked choice voting works in the city of New York is that there are five slots for you to rank your candidates, like one, two, three, four, five, in order of preference.
	If a candidate wins more than 50% of the vote, that candidate immediately is declared the primary winner, and that person becomes the Democratic candidate.
	If nobody wins 50%, then the person who's lowest on the totem pole gets knocked out.
	And so if you had ranked that person number one, then that ranking now goes away.
	And whoever is your number two becomes number one for purposes of the voting.
	So it's unclear how that's going to shake out.
	It makes the process a lot more complicated.
	With that said, the poll of 573 likely Democratic voters was conducted between June 6th and June 7th after that first televised debate, which was a complete bleep show.
	The following day, AOC endorsed.
	Momdani.
	39% of the poll's responses came from landline, 61% from text messages.
	That's a methodology that obviously is going to favor Momdani because the people who support this guy are a bunch of white privileged lib college students.
	That is his base.
	Now there's a Cuomo campaign poll that was conducted earlier this week and found Cuomo ahead 56 to 44. That'd be after eight rounds of voting, eliminating all the other candidates.
	There's another poll from Data for Progress.
	And that found Cuomo only up by two after eight rounds.
	Bottom line is this is now a two-person race between Andrew Cuomo, who again was responsible for the COVID policy that ended with lots of old people in lots of old age homes dead of COVID.
	And shockingly, he is not the worst candidate.
	The worst candidate by far is Mamdani.
	So who exactly is Zoran Mamdani?
	He's a state lawmaker from Queens.
	He's an open democratic socialist.
	And he is, again, one of these privileged, Highly educated people who is completely disconnected from real life, completely disconnected.
	He is the son of a Hollywood director and a college professor at Columbia University.
	And this person who is 33 and has never held a real job, apparently, he full-on believes every left-wing, far-left trope you can possibly imagine.
	And this person could be the next mayor of New York.
	By the polling data, he's at least running close to even with Cuomo.
	And if he's the Democratic candidate for mayor, then it would be up to Eric Adams to beat him as an independent.
	And Eric Adams has his own set of issues, ranging from the criminal indictment that was originally brought against him and then tossed to his sort of, shall we say, colorful manner of leading the city of New York.
	Alrighty, folks, in just a few minutes, we're going to get to Dr. Phil, who's actually in the ICE ride-along.
	That turned into the L.A. riots.
	We'll get to that in a moment.
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	So what are Mamdani's beliefs?
	Well, he says in an interview with the New York Times this week that the best mayor of New York City in his lifetime is Bill de Blasio.
	Literally the worst mayor of New York City in modern history, Bill de Blasio.
	That's his favorite.
	He also suggests, for example, that there ought to be city-run grocery stores.
	Because the problem with grocery stores, they operated a profit motive.
	So he's a full-scale Bernie Sanders nutcase.
	Here's Zarin Mamdani talking about city-owned grocery stores and why those are better than, you know, profit-driven grocery stores, the kind of things that have provided food to Americans at a rate unseen in all of human history.
	We will redirect city funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores, whose mission is lower prices, not price gouging.
	These stores will operate without a profit motive or having to pay property taxes or rent, and we'll pass on those savings to you.
	That's not how that works.
	That is not how that works.
	The Soviet Union tried to operate, quote-unquote, stores without profit motive.
	And you know what ends up happening?
	Misallocation of resources.
	What ends up happening is shortages.
	Because the profit motive is what determines how you control supply, what you are going to bring into the grocery store, and what you are not.
	Like, that's crazy towns.
	City-owned grocery stores is his solution to the problem of high cost of living.
	He says openly, by the way, that he's fighting for socialism.
	And when he says socialism, he means socialism.
	He doesn't just mean like Norway.
	He means socialism, socialism.
	Here is Mamdani talking about fighting for socialism.
	Where we have to make it very clear that people cannot eat words.
	People need to have actual food.
	People need to have actual houses to live in.
	People need to have actual schools that they can go to.
	And I think it's so critical that this journey into understanding the way in which we should relate to power, this journey and understanding that it is socialism that we are fighting for, is a journey that should begin as soon as possible for every single person in this country and in this world.
	Thank you.
	How radical is Zoran Mamdani?
	He said in 2020, That the New York Police Department, that is in 2020, while the riots were going on, should be removed from high crime areas.
	Again, these are luxury beliefs.
	These are beliefs that nobody who actually lives on the ground in New York City holds, except for white libs and their allies.
	Mamdani isn't white, but his voting base is predominantly white.
	The New York Times even asked him about his voting base and the fact that they are predominantly white.
	Quote, the polls show you're doing really well with younger, whiter, more progressive voters.
	Why do you think you're having a harder time with voters of color?
	We seem to be supporting former Governor Cuomo, says the New York Times.
	And then he suggests that it's just because the vast majority of New Yorkers have yet to tune in to the race.
	And he says the polling obscures Asian New Yorkers who are not listed as a category.
	Yeah, that's not why, my dude.
	The answer is because the luxury beliefs that are held by white college-educated liberals are at complete odds with reality.
	And it's all about, for them, the value signaling.
	Do you need to even work, bro?
	Who cares about your work, bro, your job, your community, your safety?
	What really matters that you're holding the right lawn sign.
	Here's Zoran Mamdani talking about how the police should be defunded in 2020.
	money.
	Thank you.
	I absolutely think that what we need to do is give support and funding to institutions that are trained to deal with these kinds of issues.
	As you said, if you're having an argument with someone and there's a risk of it escalating.
	Who is better positioned to de-escalate it?
	Someone who is well-known in the community, or someone who has been trained specifically in de-escalation, or a stranger who has a gun?
	And we see so many situations where encounters with police, the police arrive, and all of a sudden the tension rises even astronomically to what it was prior.
	And I think that we need to say and ask ourselves, look at how policing is done in the suburbs.
	In wealthier, whiter America.
	When people make mistakes, the answer is not to throw them in jail.
	The answer is not to, you know, put them in a cage and throw away the key.
	The answer is to try and find a non-carceral solution.
	Absolutely.
	Community service, something where, you know, they learn from their mistakes, there's a sense of accountability and growth, all these kinds of things, which for many people in this country, especially black people, are not offered the same opportunity.
	Then why aren't black people supporting him?
	I am in favor of defunding the police.
	Okay, that's the guy who's on the verge of becoming mayor of New York City, the most populous city in the United States.
	That guy.
	That's the one.
	This is how off the rails the Democratic Party is.
	And again, Mamdani is a representation in human form of the Omni Clause.
	Of this idea that the left-wing agglomeration of grievances amounts to one giant cause.
	Here he was in February 2024, screaming about genocide while wearing a keffiyeh.
	It has been four months of protesting a genocide.
	It has become harder and harder to wake up every morning Now, it's this guy, right?
	This is the one.
	He is one of these rioters, one of these protesters.
	That is his ideology.
	That is where he stands.
	And he's on the verge of becoming New York City mayor.
	The question is not why people like Mamdani exist.
	We know why.
	They've been churned out by the university system, by a far left in this country that is taking control of the commanding heights of American popular culture and education and the media.
	That is why.
	That is where he is coming from.
	And yes, some of these people are imported from other countries and then indoctrinated with left-wing values from the centers that were originally created in order to promote American values.
	And civilization within an American context.
	But wherever they came from, they certainly have gained extraordinary power within the Democratic Party.
	And that's why more and more Americans are disillusioned with the Democratic Party.
	I mean, here's Mamdani shouting about the workers' struggle.
	Tell me the difference between Zoran Mamdani and Greta Thunberg.
	Seriously, like name one political difference between the obnoxious Swedish woman child and Zoran Mamdani, obnoxious.
	A union that understands that the workers' struggle is a global struggle.
	And I will come to this site fighting for workers in New York City and standing side by side with workers wearing kafiyas, understanding that that fight is a fight from here to Palestine.
	Like, what the hell is he talking about?
	He's talking to UAW workers on strike about Palestine and kafiyas.
	Right?
	Because that is the whole thing.
	As I've been saying, the new book that I have coming out, Lions and Scavengers, which is largely about the conflict between people who wish for success and a system that promotes success and meritocracy and people who are aggrieved by that system in which to tear that down.
	That is what we are watching in a nutshell.
	We're watching it in the riots in LA.
	We're going to see it on the streets all across the United States this Saturday, which we'll get to in just a moment.
	And this is why Gavin Newsom, has now become a quasi-frontrunner for the Democratic Party in 2028.
	Not because he has governed California well.
	He has not governed California well.
	I left California because Gavin Newsom was governing the way that he was.
	California has become unlivable for people.
	Truly unlivable.
	The cost of living in California, it is the most expensive state in America for middle-class families.
	Some estimates suggest that the cost of living in California imposes about $26,000 a year in additional costs compared to the national average.
	California has spent tens of billions of dollars on homelessness.
	And the homeless have washed over the entire L.A. County area.
	Where I used to live, which was a nice suburb, was thoroughly honeycombed with homelessness.
	Open drug use on the streets.
	California's public education system has declined across every single demographic.
	NEA progress scores show 72% of 8th graders failed to reach proficiency in reading in California in 2024.
	That's up from 70% in 2019.
	And statewide, two-thirds of students fail math standards.
	More than half do not meet English standards.
	Gavin Newsom's, all the crime stats in California are completely skewed because California has decided, particularly in major metros, not to count misdemeanors as crimes anymore, which is why shoplifting, for example, in San Francisco has become a way of life.
	It's why everything you see at any store in San Francisco is locked up behind glass.
	Because they're afraid that people are going to walk in, shoplift, and walk out, and the cops won't be able to do anything about it.
	The insane welcoming of criminals to California has meant reclassification of crime and then obscuring the crime statistics.
	So you'll see Gavin Newsom say the crime has declined under his watch.
	The reality is that enormous swaths of crime have been reclassified from crime to not crime or from felonies to misdemeanors.
	Or from second-degree misdemeanors to third-degree misdemeanors or whatever the case may be.
	And all of it can be seen in people leaving the state.
	Not just me and my family and my company.
	Since 2019, California has lost 1.5 million residents through net domestic migration.
	One and a half million people left California net.
	Not gross, net, meaning that for every person who came in, Somehow, this guy is the frontrunner.
	Why?
	Because for the Democratic Party, it has become all about sounding off.
	It's all about the performative.
	It's all about the resistance.
	It's not about being good at your job.
	This is a big difference in the Democratic Party.
	It truly is.
	If you go all the way back to 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president of the United States, one of the things that he was running on was the idea that he was a successful Capable governor of Arkansas.
	Whether that's true or not, that's what he actually ran on.
	That he was actually fairly decent as a governor of Arkansas.
	And now it's all the performative.
	It's completely performative.
	It's been true since the Obama era when Barack Obama became president despite having zero record in the Senate because of his airy-fairy ideas about how international politics should work and how domestic politics needed to be kinder, gentler, and then he immediately polarized and racialized American politics.
	But this is what the Democratic Party has become.
	Indeed, being competent is sometimes a drawback because if you're competent, very often to be a competent Democratic governor, that means you have to be a little bit more moderate in your policies, which means you can't be as performative.
	It means that you might actually have to do some things that Republicans might like from time to time.
	And that invalidates you with this Democratic base that likes the Zoran Mamdani's and that yells at black people going to work.
	This is why Gavin Newsom, it's an amazing thing.
	Again, Gavin Newsom, if he wanted to campaign on being a great governor, successful governor of California, he could try it.
	But let's be clear.
	The reason that Gavin Newsom is popular right now is because Gavin Newsom is yelling at Donald Trump.
	It is that simple.
	You can see it.
	The whole Democratic Party is this now.
	Cory Booker, the ridiculous senator from New Jersey.
	Mr. Potato Head.
	He puts on his angry eyes for 24 hours and speaks about nothing.
	And the entire Democratic Party goes, well, he's leading the resistance.
	Look at the signaling.
	Look at the resistance signaling.
	He must be a new leader.
	It's all about the talk and never about the governance.
	And then you wonder why people are looking at a more pragmatic politician like Donald Trump and saying, maybe that guy.
	Why the Democratic Party is at all-time lows?
	Because you guys can't do the basic stuff.
	You're not capable of doing the basic stuff.
	But here's the kind of stuff making Gavin Newsom popular with the Democratic base for 2028 right now.
	All right, coming up, Gavin Newsom, 2028 frontrunner.
	Despite being a horrible governor, Dr. Phil is coming up as well.
	And are we about to bomb Iran?
	Is Israel about to bomb Iran?
	We'll get to all that.
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	Here he was the other day saying, Donald Trump's government is traumatizing our communities.
	It seems to me that California was traumatized by you.
	You're the governor.
	You're the one in charge.
	Why is California not a great place to live?
	Why?
	Donald Trump didn't have to do with that.
	You had to do with that.
	And him enforcing federal law and then bringing the National Guard to ensure that law enforcement officers aren't abused by rioters.
	That's not Donald Trump's fault.
	That's your fault.
	But according to Gavin Newsom, it's all about Trump traumatizing the community.
	Donald Trump's government isn't protecting our communities.
	They're traumatizing our communities.
	And that seems to be the entire point.
	California will keep fighting.
	It will keep fighting on behalf of our people, all of our people.
	Just obnoxious.
	And by the way, you see other prospective 2028 candidates who are now doing this routine.
	So Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who actually is, apparently, a pretty competent governor of Pennsylvania.
	I don't agree with a lot of his politics, but he is not bad at the job of being governor of Pennsylvania.
	Well, Josh Shapiro, that's not enough for him.
	He must signal.
	He must signal his resistance membership.
	So he spoke with the Washington Post and he talked about President Trump.
	He said, there's no question in everything this president does, he tries to inject chaos.
	He's injected chaos into the world order.
	He's injected it into our economy.
	He's trying to inject chaos into our streets by doing what he did with the Guard in California.
	We will be prepared to make sure people can peacefully protest and that we do not have violence in our communities.
	And then he said, should the guard be needed, it would be deployed at my direction following a legal process, not the way it's been done in California, which I think has been really dangerous.
	So again, that is Shapiro trying to jump in on the game.
	If you're a Democrat, the way you become prominent is not by being good at your job.
	It's by yelling a lot and yelling a lot of impractical things.
	That is the way that it is actually done.
	I mean, look at Karen Bass right now.
	Karen Bass is the most incompetent mayor in the country right now outside of Brandon Johnson in Chicago.
	And she's getting all sorts of positive headlines from the media.
	While she blames ICE for the riots, here's Karen Bass, the failed mayor of Los Angeles yesterday.
	A week ago, everything was peaceful in the city of Los Angeles and in all of the representatives behind me in their cities as well.
	Things began to be difficult on Friday when raids took place, and it's important that I begin there.
	Because that is the cause of the problems that have happened in the city of Los Angeles and other cities.
	And then Karen Bass says, well, you know, in the end, all of this is really just part of an experiment.
	It's part of an experiment that's taking place in Los Angeles by the federal government, those evil, evil feds.
	It is completely unnecessary.
	What are they going to do?
	The 100 National Guard soldiers that are downtown Los Angeles are guarding one federal building.
	So there is no need for this.
	The city handled things perfectly last night and will continue to do this.
	I do believe, though, that this is all part of an experiment that's taking place in Los Angeles, and I hope other cities was maximizing.
	I know they are because I was on line with about 50 other mayors who are concerned about what's happening in our city because it could easily come to theirs.
	So, she's saying everything is peaceful, everything is fine, everything is being handled, we don't need the feds.
	I'm talking to people in LAPD.
	Every day I'm talking to people in LAPD, again, I have many, many friends in LAPD.
	One of the things that has been happening at these protests, this happened, I know this happened, fireworks have been loaded with shrapnel and launched at officers.
	And that's different from just a firework.
	The firework is just gunpowder.
	Firework with shrapnel inside is effectively an IED.
	And some of these are being thrown at officers.
	And the police officers are being given basically zero guidance by their higher-ups or from the politicians on what they are supposed to do if somebody hurls an IED at them.
	Again, these are effectively military-grade small weapons.
	And the police are being left out there, hanging out there to dry.
	And we're being told that the failure here is the failure of the feds.
	And meanwhile, Why are you so worried about work?
	Those same schmucks, those same people are very much in line with the violent groups that have been hijacking these protests and using them.
	There's a very bizarre phenomenon that exists in some parts of the psychology of the left that suggests that when left-wing groups get violent, It is not that what they are doing is really, truly wrong.
	It's just they're too passionate.
	They're just too passionate.
	You know, they have too much of a head of steam.
	And so if somebody, if some left winger shoots a UnitedHealthcare CEO, you know, we might not love it, but we understand where it came from.
	And really, isn't he just a representative of all of our rage and all of our anger and all of our passion?
	It's an amazing thing.
	I don't really see a ton of that on the right as a sort of comp.
	You see it occasionally, but I don't see it as sort of a thoroughgoing, philosophic issue with the right in the same way that it is with the modern Western left.
	But left-wing violent groups have, in fact, been infiltrating a lot of these protests and then using them.
	Report out of NBC News today.
	It was approaching nightfall in Los Angeles on Sunday when black-clad demonstrators began to torch a row of self-driving Waymo taxis.
	Within minutes, videos of the fiery scenes began to pop up on social media.
	More, more, more, more.
	A group known as Unity of Fields posted on X. Along with a video of the flaming vehicles.
	The post was not an anomaly since the start of the demonstrations against immigration raids in LA.
	The Unity of Fields X account has been pumping out messages urging people to wreak havoc in the streets and give them hell.
	It's all part of a far-left online ecosystem that has proliferated in recent years, experts say.
	Some of the groups behind the accounts express contempt for peaceful resistance and glorify acts of violence and even murder, like those of the United Healthcare CEO and two Israeli embassy staffers.
	The leftist networks tend to be different from right wing groups, says this new study, in that they are typically decentralized with no leadership structures, but they are highly adept at using social media.
	Some have been working hard to amplify and celebrate acts of violence protesters in L.A., Thank you.
	Joel Finkelstein, co-founder of the Network Contagient Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that has done a lot of these studies, says whether they directly throw a Molotov cocktail is actually not as essential as the ecosystem of encouragement and coordination they have created.
	And you can see how this stuff sort of bleeds into Everyday legacy media coverage.
	So, at the same time that this violence is happening, and absolutely it is happening, you have people like Jimmy Kimmel out there basically saying it's no big deal.
	Here was Jimmy Kimmel the other night saying, don't worry, the riots aren't happening.
	He wants there to be a war going on here, and he doesn't care who gets hurt in it.
	There's a riot outside.
	We have more so-called unrest here when one of our teams wins a championship.
	But that's not what you're seeing on TV.
	Someone sets a fire in a garbage can, 12 camera crews go running toward it.
	It's no big deal.
	Again, luxury beliefs.
	It is no big deal, according to Jimmy Kimmel, because Jimmy Kimmel lives in an extraordinarily expensive part of LA, I assume with private security.
	And so it doesn't matter as much to him if people are torching Waymos in downtown.
	Why should it?
	When's the last time Jimmy Kimmel took a Waymo?
	It's not a thing.
	Luxury beliefs are costing Democrats the country.
	And good.
	I mean, really, they deserve it.
	They do.
	Already coming up, President Trump has a big military parade planned this weekend.
	Are the leftists going to disrupt it?
	Plus, Tulsi Gabbard put out a very weird video.
	The DNI put out a very strange video suggesting that America was bad for using the A-bomb to end World War II.
	And all the updates from the Middle East where Iran is getting feisty and things could be getting spicy.
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	Well, joining us on the line to discuss what has been happening in L.A. and the legacy media's false coverage of what's happening in L.A., Dr. Phil McGraw.
	He is now hosting Dr. Phil Primetime on his own network, Merritt Street Media, where he stands for common sense and free speech.
	He was in an ICE ride-along, actually.
	So, Dr. Phil, what was that like?
	You were doing a ride-along with ICE when all of this started.
	What was that?
	Well, Ben, one thing that Tom Holman, Homeland Security and ICE want is transparency about what they're doing.
	And I did interview Tom before the operation started, and I was at ICE headquarters in L.A. to talk about it before it began.
	I was not embedded with the agents when they made the actual arrest, but I was with Tom.
	And we hung back and let them do what they were doing.
	And then we got back on the streets when the protests started.
	And one of the things that I've been impacted by is how different what actually happened is with what's been reported by the legacy media.
	What actually went down here is this was an interagency operation.
	And not all the agencies were involved with every stop on the way, but this involved the U.S. Marshals, the FBI, ATF, ICE, and some of the other agencies.
	And the one that is getting all the attention, there was a search warrant.
	Issued by a federal judge.
	And as you know, you have to show probable cause to get a search warrant.
	And so there was a tremendous amount of evidence presented to a federal judge about this one organization that's alleged to be a criminal organization.
	And the evidence suggested that they had undervalued imports $80 million or more.
	Some of it counterfeit inventory that they had brought in, that they had underpaid tariffs like $17 million.
	Half of their workforce were illegal immigrants.
	And so they got a search warrant to go in and find out if these things, in fact, were true.
	And so they executed this search warrant.
	It wasn't just ICE.
	And when they did, they found a lot of illegal immigrants in there.
	And among those, We're drug traffickers, some with domestic violence, a 55-year-old illegal alien from the Philippines that was convicted of burglary, penetration with a foreign object, assault with an attempt to commit a Mexican national with a rap sheet that included shooting up a house and a vehicle with people inside, battery of a spouse or cohabitant.
	Willful cruelty to a child, driving under the influence, assault with a semi-automatic weapon, an illegal alien from Vietnam with a criminal history that included a conviction for second-degree murder.
	These were not just your moms and dads.
	And look, nobody questions the humanity of some of the people that come across the border illegally, but that doesn't make them immune from the law.
	So they made these orderly arrests of those people that were here illegally while they were executing the search warrant.
	The IRS was involved.
	They seized a lot of records, and it took seven or eight hours to process at these places.
	And when they came out, people had organized protests.
	And I don't think these were spontaneous.
	I think they were clearly.
	But look, Ben, you know, they're attacking street agents, ICE agents, throwing rocks off of overpasses, setting their cars on fire.
	Do they think these agents made these laws?
	I don't understand that.
	And Dr. Fultz, one of the things that's really amazing about this is, as you say, the way that the legacy media portrayed the raids themselves was that the raids were essentially – And what you're saying is that that was not the purpose of the original raids in the first place.
	No, it was not.
	And look, this is the thing that they talk, they scare these people and say they're going to be treated horribly.
	I did have an opportunity to be in the federal building when some of these people were brought in.
	They are treated with dignity and respect.
	They're not thrown into some overcrowded cell.
	If they're hungry, they're given something to eat.
	If they're thirsty, they're given something to drink.
	They're given due process, and they're treated with dignity and respect.
	And one of the things that's making Tom Holman want to be so transparent is they're giving people an opportunity.
	to avoid all this.
	You know, there is an app that ICE has where people can choose to self-deport.
	They're saying, look, if you're in the country illegally and you want to self-deport, you can go to this app, you can register.
	We'll give you time.
	I don't know if it's 30 days, 60 days, whatever.
	When they get there, they give them $1,000 to get back on their feet in the country that they came from so they can get things going again.
	But look, these are laws that were passed by the elected officials of the people in the part of California that they're now doing these protests.
	These laws are not suggestions.
	They're not optional.
	They weren't passed by the officers on the street.
	They were passed by the legislators that they elected.
	If they don't like them, then change the law.
	I get it.
	If you don't like it and maybe they're not the best laws, then change them.
	But don't attack federal officers that are out there on the street or you're going to jail.
	So, Dr. Phil, one of the lines that's been used by the Democrats and, again, some of the legacy media is that Really, there's nothing big going on on the streets in Los Angeles at all, that this was all ginned up by the Trump administration in order to polarize the debate, that these are all peaceful protesters, there's no violence, there's no graffiti, there's no crime actually going on, and that it's all being played up.
	What did you actually see in L.A.?
	Well, I can tell you that there were law enforcement vehicles that were set afire.
	There were dozens of people on overpasses that were throwing.
	Rocks, scooters that you can pick up and use around the city, throwing those down, breaking out windshields.
	They were throwing full bottles of water at federal agents.
	All kinds of projectiles, whatever they could find, hitting these people.
	And look, this is assault with a deadly weapon.
	They were throwing rocks as big.
	I mean, as much as you get your hand around and launch, it could clearly kill somebody if they hit them in the right place.
	They were setting things on fire.
	Look, LA's had enough problems with fire.
	You saw what happened in Altadena.
	You saw what happened in the Palisades, and it's dry out there, and they're setting things on fire.
	And, Ben, this is not a negotiation for justice.
	This is a demand for surrender.
	I heard people on loudspeakers as late as last night demanding that these people be released en masse.
	That's never going to happen.
	Calling for the abolishment of ICE, that's never going to happen.
	What do you suppose would happen if they said, hey, okay, look, we'll just en masse release these people?
	45 people, 50 people, whatever the final number is, we'll just release them en masse since you guys are upset.
	That's not going to happen.
	Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass are siding with these protesters.
	They took an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and enforce the laws on the books.
	And they're not doing that.
	I don't see how...
	And you can't nullify federal law with local resistance.
	It just doesn't work that way.
	Just because locally there are a small group of people that don't like it, so they're just going to negate federal law, that doesn't work.
	Well, Dr. Phil, really appreciate your time and your insight from On the Ground in L.A. Thanks so much.
	I appreciate it, Ben.
	Thanks for talking about this.
	Well, folks, all of this is likely to come to a head on Saturday.
	Saturday, of course, is the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the United States Army, and President Trump is going to celebrate it by having a gigantic military parade.
	According to CBS News, the event, according to Army officials, is expected to include about 6,600 soldiers, as well as about 150 vehicles and over 50 aircraft in the celebration.
	Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to attend the festivities, according to D.C. officials.
	Now, again.
	The media are trying to make this out to be about President Trump's 79th birthday.
	That is not why this is happening.
	This is happening because the Second Continental Congress on June 14th, 1775, voted to establish official companies following the fighting at Lexington and Concord against British troops.
	So it can be fairly said to have effectively led off the American Revolutionary War.
	Apparently, the festival and parade could cost somewhere between $25 and $45 million.
	The Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said the United States has an amazing opportunity to tell a story about the Army.
	So, the left, of course, is using this as an opportunity to launch further protests.
	And you have to understand that as part of their broader narrative scheme here, the idea is that President Trump activating the National Guard in Los Angeles to stop rioting and looting in that city, that is the predicate to an authoritarian takeover.
	And the imagery of authoritarianism is the United States Army marching in celebration of its establishment 250 years ago in Washington, D.C. And so a group called No Kings President Trump, for his part, he says, listen, if they get violent or something, then we will actually stop it in Washington, D.C. And we're going to be celebrating big on Saturday.
	We're going to have a lot of, and if there's any protest that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force.
	By the way, for those people that want to protest, they're going to be met with very big force.
	And I haven't even heard about a protest.
	But, you know, this is people that hate our country, but they will be met with very heavy force.
	So, again, he doesn't mean people who are just protesting.
	He means people who violate the law, presumably.
	Well, the No Kings protests are supposed to take place across the country.
	Supposedly, there are 1,800 protests planned across the country for June 14th, according to Newsweek.
	Now, not all of those protests are going to be huge.
	The way that you start a protest, apparently, is you go to the No Kings website and then you essentially register yourself as a protest.
	So it might be However, this is the first kind of major nationwide protest movement against President Trump since his re-inauguration in January.
	Of course, this sort of stuff was commonplace during the first Trump administration.
	We saw the Women's March every single year.
	You would see various Black Lives Matter marches in 2020 and then riots in 2020.
	This is the first big one.
	And it is all coming together around the idea that President Trump is a would-be dictator.
	According to organizers, the No Kings protests are being held to stand up against, quote, authoritarianism, billionaire first politics, and the militarization of our democracy.
	What are these protests, really?
	It's all the same groups who are getting together in order to essentially create a hubbub about how much they hate President Trump.
	So, a list of the sponsors of the No Kings movement includes Bernie, like his movement.
	Greenpeace, the ACLU, Dem List, Human Rights Campaign, Move On, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the Organization for Black Struggle, all the usual suspects.
	So it is the random agglomeration of left-wing causes who just hate President Trump.
	That's all this is about.
	If you go to the No Kings website, what exactly are they suggesting that they are protesting?
	They say, quote, they've defied our courts, deported Americans, disappeared people off the streets, attacked our civil rights, and slashed our services.
	The corruption has gone too far.
	No thrones, no crowns, no kings.
	And if you then dig down into what exactly they're looking for, they released a document explaining what exactly you should be pushing.
	What are the messages you should be pushing if you are a no kings activist?
	So here's the messaging.
	Quote, he's using our tax dollars to pay for his party.
	President Trump's birthday celebration is expected to cost millions of our tax dollars, all while Republicans claim there's no money for Social Security, SNAP, or Medicaid.
	First of all, there's been no cut to Social Security.
	When it comes to Medicaid, we are talking about work requirements for Medicaid.
	We've talked about better authorization of SNAP funds to make sure that people who need it are the ones who are actually getting it as opposed to others.
	And again, this isn't a birthday party for President Trump, so that's not going to work.
	We are united against kings.
	That's what no king says.
	President Trump has already indicated he's aiming for at least a third term.
	They're so insane.
	They're so insane.
	No, he is not.
	Stop it.
	Stop it.
	You sound stupid.
	And now he's planning a self-aggrandizing military parade in D.C. But the American people don't put up with kings.
	Unless presumably you're a member of the Kennedy family or the Clinton family or the Obama family.
	Together, says No Kings, we will mobilize in huge numbers to reject this corruption and abuse of power.
	It's in our DNA as a country.
	They've gone too far.
	This is bigger than political disagreement.
	They've defied our courts.
	You're going to actually need to note where the defiance of the courts has happened.
	Where's the thing where they've defied the courts?
	It appears that actually they've abided by court orders.
	There's an open question as to whether lower courts have the capacity to issue nationwide injunctions.
	That's not quite the same thing.
	Deported American citizens.
	Can you name them?
	Because if they're deporting American citizens, like true, actual American citizens, We should probably hear about that.
	Disappeared people off the streets and slashed our services, all while orchestrating a massive giveaway to their billionaire allies.
	Enough is enough.
	For anyone who thinks he's gone too far, this movement is for you.
	Hilariously, they are claiming that this protest better represents the establishment of the army than the parade for the United States Army.
	Quote, the army's birthday isn't about parades or pageantry.
	It marks the beginning of America's rejection of kings.
	So you are protesting the U.S. Army.
	It's a move.
	It's a move.
	That's why we say no thrones, no crowns, no kings.
	No kings is about defending the ideals they fought for.
	This country doesn't belong to strongmen.
	It belongs to the people.
	Well, if you're worried about kings and inherited power and wealth, it's a little ironic that one of the chief sponsors of No Kings is a person named Christy Walton, who, of course, is an heiress of the Walton family, as in Walmart.
	Some people are trying to organize a boycott of Walmart based on this.
	Again, she is the heiress.
	I'm not sure that the entire chain is responsible for her stupidity.
	The views expressed were solely those of Christy Walton, according to the Walmart group.
	She put up an ad and put up the money for the ad, suggesting, quote, the honor, dignity, and integrity of our country is not for sale.
	Show up, attend your town halls, be civil.
	And some of the things that she wants, we uphold and defend the Constitution.
	We care for veterans and children.
	Okay, so now we're getting law and sign politics.
	If they think that this is going to in any way inhibit the presidents of the United States from enforcing the law, good luck on that.
	Meanwhile, in other good news for the Trump administration, Elon Musk has now ended his feud with President Trump.
	That didn't last very long at all.
	Again, I predicted late last week that probably the feud would peter out because there really was no serious interest on either side for the feud.
	Elon Musk wants to continue to provide SpaceX vehicles to the United States government.
	The United States government would like to continue using those SpaceX vehicles.
	So the sort of extension of this snafu was in no one's best interest.
	Elon put out a tweet yesterday on X, quote, I regret some of my posts about President Trump last week.
	They went too far.
	Hey, that makes sense.
	And then President Trump said that he was open to rekindling a relationship with Musk.
	Presumably, he'll be a little bit cautious about that.
	That's not particularly surprising.
	But that is a good thing for the Republican Party.
	You don't want those two in open warfare for a prolonged period of time.
	Meanwhile, one of the things that's so fascinating about the Trump era is that because President Trump is a larger-than-life figure, and because he is a post-ideological figure, because he doesn't have any thorough-going governing philosophy, there's all sorts of debate that happens under the hood inside the GOP, generally.
	As I pointed out before, the GOP is not a conservative movement, really.
	It is an anti-left movement, and that draws people People from the isolationists on foreign policy to the more hawkish on foreign policy.
	People who are pro-choice on abortion.
	People who are pro-life on abortion.
	People who are pro-same-sex marriage.
	People who are anti-same-sex marriage.
	People who are pro-gigantic government.
	People who are very much in favor of limited government.
	The only glue that holds that coalition together is President Trump as a human.
	That's it.
	That's the glue.
	That and the fact that the left is so out of their minds.
	And so people have reacted to the left by moving over to the GOP.
	So the GOP is sort of a bag of marbles rather than a sort of cohesive unit.
	That's made clear almost every day from inside the administration.
	So, two days ago, Tulsi Gabbard, who is the Director of National Intelligence, put out a bizarre video.
	Like a very bizarre video.
	And it does speak to Tulsi Gabbard is a lifelong Democrat.
	She joined the Republican Party only recently, of course.
	She was noted for her almost Chomsky-esque foreign policy views, even when she was a Democrat.
	And now she put out a video while she's DNI, which is strange, right?
	You don't normally hear from the director of national intelligence.
	When's the last time you heard from Dan Coates or something?
	John Ratcliffe is the head of the CIA.
	When's the last time you heard from him?
	But Tulsi Gabbard, of course, has presidential aspirations of her own.
	And she put out a very bizarre video that I think speaks to the horseshoe theory connection between the isolationist right and the Howard Zinn left, which sound almost identical at this point.
	This has consequences in a couple of senses.
	One, it has consequences because obviously this is a very open debate inside the Trump administration.
	You have people ranging from the hawkish, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, on foreign policy, to the incredibly dovish, borderline left wing, like Tulsi Gabbard.
	And your own political biases could definitely play into that.
	In any case, this video made a lot of waves for good reason, mainly because many of the things she's saying here are pretty egregious.
	Here is Tulsi Gabbard, the DNI.
	I recently visited Hiroshima in Japan and stood at the epicenter of a city that remains scarred by the unimaginable horror caused by a single nuclear bomb dropped in 1945, 80 years ago.
	Oh, no.
	It's hard for me to find the words to express what I saw.
	The stories that I heard, the haunting sadness that still remains.
	This is an experience that will stay with me forever.
	This attack obliterated the city, killed over 300,000 people, many dying instantly while others died from severe burns, injuries, radiation sickness, and cancer that set in in the following months and years.
	Nagasaki suffered the same fate.
	Homes, schools, families.
	All gone in a flash.
	The survivors, the hibokusha, they carried the pain of extreme burns, radiation sickness, and loss for decades.
	survivors of this attack were asked to put in paintings and drawings their own memories and how they felt and what they saw and those paintings
	Okay, so, first of all, that is straight out of like a Howard Zinn documentary.
	Okay, yes, dropping an atomic weapon has massive consequences.
	Yes, there is carnage that emerges from dropping a nuclear weapon.
	Everyone knows this, and no one is taking that lightly.
	But why is she dropping this?
	It's such a strange thing.
	This happened in 1945.
	It is now 80 years later.
	And she is dropping a video about how terrible the dropping of the A-bomb was.
	So first of all, to pretend there's no political undertone here is silly.
	There are a bunch of people on the right, including Tucker Carlson, some of his historian guests, who have suggested that the United States was evil for dropping the atomic bomb.
	That's the word they use, evil for dropping the atomic bomb.
	And she's speaking into that.
	There's no question that's what she's doing.
	And so I think at this point it is worthwhile noting.
	That the dropping of the atomic bomb, ending World War II, was better than the alternative, which was a full-scale invasion by the Russians from the North and the Americans into Japan.
	That was the alternative.
	And the alternative would have been horrifying for both the Japanese and for the Americans.
	This kind of bizarre retcon of American history, where America was the bad guy in World War II because we dropped an A-bomb, actually two A-bombs, in order to end.
	World War II.
	That is historical revisionism of the highest order.
	The historian named Mark Rigg recently came out with a book called Japan's Holocaust, talking about the fact that the Japanese have sort of gotten off lightly in the view of many historians based on their conduct between the 1920s and the end of World War II, responsible for the killing of at least 30 million people in China, throughout the British-occupied areas of Southeast Asia, through India, through the Philippines.
	Mark Rigg points out that if you were to spec out how many Japanese would have died during a full-scale invasion of the four main Japanese islands, the answer was astonishing.
	Because actually, there were places that the United States fought the Japanese on Japanese-controlled and populated islands in the Pacific.
	And at least 50% of the Japanese civilians in those areas died during battles like Saipan, Tinian, So, if that had been applied to Japan, more broadly speaking, you're talking about millions of Japanese civilians who likely would have died in Japan if the United States and Russia had been forced to invade the nation's four main islands.
	As Rigg points out, throughout the summer of 1945, over 3,000 ships were being readied for this invasion.
	Millions of Allied troops trained for it.
	Historian Richard Frank said, quote, in face of the evidence, it is fantasy, not history, to believe the end of the war was at hand before the use of the atomic bomb.
	According to the records, allies would have encountered up to 10,000 kamikaze planes.
	And that'd be suicide pilots.
	Vice Admiral Takejiro Onishi believed that if the nation was willing to, quote, sacrifice 20 million Japanese lives in a special attack effort, victory will be ours.
	That was the Vice Admiral of the Navy.
	According to Rigg, during the planning of the last-ditch operation, Japanese mobilized all of their citizens, all of it, out of a population of 71 million people.
	They had 6 million servicemen and an additional 18 million citizen soldiers.
	That'd be men between the ages of 15 and 60 and women between the ages of 17 and 40. Children were even trained to carry backpacks of explosives to throw themselves under the treads of tanks as what they called Sherman carpets.
	Conservative estimates of Japanese deaths for the total invasion numbered upwards of 10 million.
	The Secretary of War at the time, Henry Stimson, his staff estimated that conquering Japan would cost It would have cost the Japanese somewhere between 5 and 10 million dead, according to the Americans' estimates.
	To understand the way this works, you have to understand that the Japanese had been trained by the emperor and by his entire system to die for the emperor.
	This was a big part of the war.
	Half of the 381,550 Japanese in the Philippines and more than a third, if not half of the 300,000 civilians on Okinawa and 40,000 on Saipanian died or killed themselves during those battles.
	In preparation for an invasion of Japan, America produced half a million Purple Hearts.
	And by the way, even after the dropping of the atomic bomb, there was an attempted coup to stop a recording of Hirohito surrendering from actually being made public.
	Apparently, So, again, tremendous suffering takes place in war.
	War is awful.
	War is, in and of itself, a horrifying thing, obviously.
	But what is she attempting to convey with this video?
	It's not just that, that, There's no way to take this video as anything but a critique of America dropping the A-bomb during World War II, and that is more broadly connected to a critique of American foreign policy that suggests that when America is muscular in pursuit of its own interests, this raises the prospect of nuclear war, and that's where she goes next.
	This one bomb that caused so much destruction on Hiroshima was tiny compared to today's nuclear bombs.
	The bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of just 15 kilotons of TNT, whereas today's nuclear warheads range in size from 100 kilotons to over 1 megaton.
	A single nuclear weapon today could kill millions in just minutes.
	Just one of these nuclear bombs would vaporize everything at its core.
	People, buildings, life itself.
	The shockwave would crush structures miles away, killing and maiming countless people.
	And then comes the fallout.
	Radioactive poison spreading through the air, water, and soil, condemning survivors to agonizing deaths or lifelong suffering.
	A nuclear winter could follow with smoke and ash completely blocking the sun.
	Plunging the world into darkness and cold, Okay, yes.
	I mean, sure.
	Nuclear war is bad, yes, we all agree.
	This isn't some made-up science fiction story.
	This is the reality of what's at stake, what we are facing now.
	Because as we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.
	This is where she's going, right?
	This is the Tucker Howard Zinn.
	Tulsi Gabbard horseshoe theory that includes top members of the Trump administration.
	It's a debate inside the Republican Party.
	The idea here is that if you wish to stand up to aggressors against America's interests or to enemies of the United States, somehow you're fomenting nuclear war.
	First of all, let's make a quick point.
	Presumably one of the things she's talking about here is Iran.
	Because Iran is attempting to gain a nuclear weapon.
	And many of the same restrainers, so-called restrainers in the administration, who spend their days leaking to Politico, like all day long, just leaking to Politico.
	From the White House, many of those same restrainers are suggesting that a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities would somehow raise the possibility of nuclear war.
	Question, how?
	How?
	If nuclear weapons are bad in their use and their fallout, all of which I agree with, if that's the case, why would you want a bunch of radical Islamists to have one?
	Why would that be a thing that you want to pursue?
	A question she never answers.
	But again, it's all about the idea.
	That when America pursues her interests, or America's allies pursue her interests, this foments nuclear war.
	When China expands its authoritarian structure around the world, when Russia tries to invade sovereign countries, when Russia threatens nuclear war openly, apparently that's of no consequence.
	The big problem is when America stands up for her interests.
	This new cult restrainer philosophy, it's not a restrainer philosophy.
	It's the same crap that we heard from the left in the 1960s in the United States when they were suggesting that we needed to capitulate to the wishes of the Soviet Union.
	In order to avoid nuclear war.
	And it turns out the best way to avoid nuclear war with the Soviet Union is for the Soviet Union to collapse.
	That was the best way.
	Now here is Tulsi Gabbard finishing up.
	Perhaps it's because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won't have access to.
	So it's up to us, the people, to speak up and demand an end to this madness.
	We must reject this path to nuclear war and work toward a world where no one has to live in fear of a nuclear holocaust.
	Now, what exactly is she even talking about here?
	So the idea is that if you want America to stand up strongly for interest, you know, peace through strength, President Trump's actual pitch for over a decade, she's the one disagreeing with Trump here, that if you wish to do that, because I don't see President Trump unilaterally attempting to get rid of our nuclear weapons.
	If you do that, it must be because you're building a nuclear bunker for yourself somewhere.
	This is just paranoid, delusional fantasy from the director of national intelligence.
	It is a very bad look for the director of national intelligence.
	I think Tulsi's smarter than this.
	I don't think there's a reason why she needs to do this.
	And there's only one reason to do this, and that is, again, to push a particular perspective that was very prevalent during the Obama administration, that if you oppose a dovish foreign policy, an isolationist foreign policy, a foreign policy, That withdraws from Ukraine, for example, and gives Russia the upper hand there.
	Or that plans to abandon Taiwan, the predations of the Chinese.
	Or plans to allow Iran to go nuclear.
	That if you oppose that, somehow you want nuclear war.
	Precisely the opposite is true.
	No one wants nuclear war.
	No one.
	The reason hawks are in favor of protecting America's interests and standing with America's allies is because the best way to prevent a nuclear war is to stand down We know this because we did this for half a century against the Soviet Union.
	Again, this part of this kind of scare tactic.
	What if I show you the impact?
	It is all tied to, again, a deep, rootable.
	The reason she's going to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and doing a propaganda video about how bad it was that America dropped the A-bomb is to once again suggest that America is the moral bad guy in the world since World War Two, a proposition that has been put forward by many on that.
	And it is wrong.
	It is untrue.
	And President Trump does not agree with it by all available evidence.
	But there are certainly some in his administration who do.
	And that's a battle that's going to have to be fought ideologically over the course of coming months and years inside the Republican Party for sure.
	That battle over foreign policy and America's role in the world may in fact be coming to a head with regard to Iran sooner rather than later.
	So yesterday the news broke that the United States has been moving.
	Members of its embassies away from various parts of the Middle East, redeploying forces in different parts of the Middle East, presumably in preparation for either an Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear reactors or maybe even the possibility of an American airstrike on the Iranian nuclear reactors.
	That, of course, is following the revelation, which I think everybody knew, that Iran is determined to develop a nuclear weapon.
	That was something that was said by the Secretary of Defense yesterday in testimony.
	That Iran is actively working toward a nuclear weapon.
	Senator Cotton of Arkansas pointed out, today the Secretary of Defense confirmed Iran's terror regime is working toward a nuclear weapon.
	For the sake of our national security, the security of our allies, and millions of civilians in the region, this cannot be allowed to happen.
	The IAEA actually sounded off on this.
	The IAEA brought out a new report saying that they are violating Iran, its nuclear limits.
	That is a shocker, by the way, because again, the IAEA is not a right-wing organization by any stretch of the imagination.
	But according to NPR, the UN Nuclear Watchdog's Board of Governors on Thursday formally found Iran is not complying with its nuclear obligations for the first time in 20 years.
	Iran immediately reacted, saying they will establish a new enrichment facility in a secure location and that other measures are also being planned.
	And again, Iran is not being shy about what it believes.
	Iran is saying this stuff just right out loud.
	So Iran, for example, has now been That presumably is one reason why the Israelis might want to go by themselves, because if the Israelis attack Iran, and then the Iranians fire back hundreds of missiles at Israel, and Israel and its allies, including the United States, knock down a lot of those missiles, will that implicate U.S. forces in the region?
	By the way, the worst move the mullahs could make would be to strike U.S. forces in the region in any serious way.
	If they start trying to hit, like, Al-Udeid airbase in Qatar, Or if they start trying to strike American forces in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, America will just bomb their oil fields and that will be the end of the regime.
	Understand that the place where Iran is most vulnerable is not, in fact, its nuclear facilities.
	Its nuclear facilities are its hope for the preservation of the regime.
	Because what Iran hopes is that by getting a nuclear weapon, they will be able to deter any and all activity that their regime does not like.
	They'll be able to rearm all of their proxy terrorist groups all over the region.
	With the threat that if you try to stop them, then they'll fire a nuke at somebody.
	And that is their goal.
	The nuke gains them leverage in the same way that a nuke has gained North Korea leverage.
	But the real vulnerability for the regime is not the nuclear facilities per se.
	Like if you bomb the nuclear facilities in Iran, the regime likely doesn't fall.
	If you bomb the oil fields in Iran, the regime likely does fall.
	And so what they want to avoid, even if their nuclear facilities get hit, is anything that would provoke strikes on their oil facilities, because if their oil facilities go...
	The only export that Iran has at this point is oil and natural gas, which had been shipping out to third parties like China.
	But if they can't do that anymore, then there is no economic lifeline for the regime in Iran.
	So there'd be an unbelievably foolish move for Iran to actually do that.
	Iran likes to talk a big game on this sort of stuff.
	This is their way.
	They're always talking about unleashing hell, unleashing fire.
	When the United States, under President Trump the first time, killed Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian terror master, the response by Iran, Was a few desultory attacks on American bases in Iraq.
	And that was basically the end of the story.
	By the way, again, the idea that the Iranians are like begging for peace.
	As I mentioned Tucker Carlson earlier, he had on Jeffrey Sachs, who effectively is a Chinese spokesperson at this point.
	And the two of them were talking about how Iran has sought peace for 10 years.
	There's not only no evidence of that, there is extraordinary counter evidence of that, including their support for literally every major terror group in the region.
	Just this week.
	The commander of the IRGC, that's the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, said, quote, our enmity with the United States is ideological.
	This battle will never end as it is rooted in our core beliefs.
	Unlike Russia and China, our conflict with the United States is not geopolitical or economic in nature and leaves no room for reconciliation after the fight.
	So what?
	Iran is somehow not oriented against the West in some way?
	Now again.
	I think there can be open questions about what America's involvement ought to be in a strike on nuclear facilities.
	What are the risks?
	What are the rewards?
	There are downsides and upsides to every single policy.
	But the idea that it is in the best interest of the United States to let Iran go nuclear, somehow that is the least risky option, that's the one that seems totally insane to me.
	On what basis can you make the argument that the least risky option is for Iran, a malacracy that hates the United States, hates Saudi, hates UAE, hates Bahrain, hates Israel, hates Europe?
	Having a nuclear weapon, how would that be the best outcome?
	Of all the available outcomes, how is that the best outcome?
	Please explain.
	Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, no foreign policy, great shakes, she tweeted out, I don't know anyone that even thinks about Iran.
	I mean, I see that even many of her ideological allies think about Iran a fair bit.
	Americans don't want to bomb Iran because the secular government of Israel says that Iran is on the verge of developing a nuclear bomb any day now.
	Now, it's very, her characterization here, the secular government of Israel, as opposed to what?
	The Christian government of Israel, the Islamic government of Israel, the Jewish government of Israel?
	I don't even understand what she's implying there.
	And by the way, it's not just Israel that suggests that Iran is on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon.
	Iran says that Iran is on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon.
	The IAEA says that they're on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon.
	The Defense Department says they're on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon.
	She says, we've been told that for the past 20 years, the same story.
	Everyone I know is tired of U.S. intervention and regime change in foreign countries.
	Again, no one's talking about a full-scale invasion of Iran or regime change even in Iran.
	It would be better for the world if that regime didn't exist.
	But the question is always not whether what would be best for the world is best for the world.
	But what is doable?
	What is practical and what is the most useful given all the risks and the rewards of any particular policy?
	Every policy decision is a trade-off.
	No one in the American foreign policy establishment, with very few exceptions, Even the most hawkish is talking about like a full-scale invasion of Iran.
	I certainly have never called for anything like that.
	People aligned with me ideologically have not called for anything like that.
	Airstrikes on the Iranian nuclear facilities seems more like airstrikes on the Iraqi nuclear facilities by the Israelis back in 1981 in Osirak or Israeli airstrikes on the Syrian nuclear facilities in the middle of the last decade.
	It seems more like that, actually.
	And it seems like a full-scale invasion, but again.
	This is the scare tactic we see from Tulsi Gabbard.
	Nuclear war will suddenly break out.
	Russia and China are going to fight.
	Based on airstrikes on the Iranian nuclear facilities, how?
	Marjorie Taylor Greene says, Everyone I know is disgusted with Democrats for supporting a literal war against America by foreign nationals and communist anarchists waving Mexican flags while they violently burn and attack police in American cities.
	I mean, okay, agree.
	Everyone I know wants us to fix our own problems here at home.
	And these are not mutually exclusive.
	The goal of the Quote, not bomb other countries that have nothing to do with our own self-inflicted problems.
	So, first of all, not all the problems that we're looking at here in the United States are self-inflicted.
	There is, in fact, foreign intervention in the American body politic.
	That is a reality.
	It's happening via social media, largely.
	But, beyond that, Again, this idea that you can't walk and chew gum at the same time.
	What do we have a military for then?
	That doesn't mean we should use the military in this particular situation.
	Make a case that we shouldn't.
	Maybe we shouldn't.
	But the real question is, as far as America's foreign policy goes, given the menu of options, which is the best and which is the worst?
	The worst option is for Iran to go nuclear.
	Because then you have a permanent Islamic state with a nuclear weapon threatening all of its neighbors, including core American allies.
	In a region where America turning away means that China gains power.
	That is the actual geopolitical calculus happening in the Middle East right now.
	And President Trump understands that.
	The thing is that the sort of Marjorie Taylor Greene position here or the Tulsi Gabbard position or the Tucker Carlson position is not the position of President Trump.
	It has never been the position of President Trump.
	Here was President Trump literally yesterday.
	He was asked why forces are being moved around the region, why people are being removed from embassies.
	And here's what he had to say.
	Well, they are being moved out because it could be a dangerous place and we'll see what happens.
	But they are been we've given notice to move out and we'll see what happens.
	Okay, so, again, the position of the President of the United States, It has.
	And so all of these people claiming it is not a core American interest to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon, that is certainly not the case that President Trump has been making.
	Now, with all of this happening, Steve Whitcoff, the Middle East envoy, is apparently still planning to meet with Iran for a sixth round of talks on the country's nuclear program in the coming days, according to two U.S. officials.
	With that said, obviously the administration has gotten a lot more pessimistic.
	About the possibility of an agreement, given the fact that Iran has gotten intransigent.
	Listen, Iran was never going to give up their nuclear program.
	Again, Iran requires two things to remain in power.
	One is a continued functionality of its oil resources.
	And two is the nuclear program.
	Because the minute they give up the nuclear program, that is the minute that they have guaranteed that they are no longer going to be able to terrorize their population until the end of time.
	And again, The Trump administration was weighing options regarding how to support Israeli military action without leading it.
	Those options could include aerial refueling or intelligence sharing.
	But the U.S. official is unaware of any commitment.
	This has always been my supposition, was that the United States probably would not directly participate in an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities, but might stand back and allow the Israelis to do so.
	Because after all, Israel is an independent country, and then it would be in the interest of the United States, in order to prevent a wider regional conflagration, to shoot down some of the incoming ballistic from Iran.
	And that remains, I think, the most probable outcome right now in the Middle East, given the fact that, again, Iran cannot give up their nuclear facilities.
	They can't.
	And they're lying.
	They don't want nuclear enrichment for peaceful energy.
	Of course, of course, everyone knows that unless they're a complete dunderhead.
	And meanwhile, one of the things that's truly amazing about the Gaza conflict, about the Israelis attempting to wipe out Hamas, all the same people who have been complaining about a quote-unquote genocide in the Gaza Strip are apparently totally unaffected by the murder of Gaza aid workers by Hamas.
	Totally unaffected by it.
	So Israel has been shipping in literally tons of food aid every single day.
	For months and months and months and months at this point.
	And now they're working with something called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
	They weren't willing to work with the UNRWA because that was a tool of Hamas.
	The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, run by somebody named Johnny Moore, has basically taken it upon itself to make sure that the aid that is brought in doesn't get to Hamas.
	So, yesterday, Hamas just shot a bunch of the aid workers to death.
	Just killed them.
	Now, if Israel killed a bunch of aid workers, that is front page news in every major newspaper in Hamas murders aid workers.
	For the purpose of stealing the aid?
	Radio silence.
	The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation put out a statement tonight.
	At approximately 10 p.m.
	Gaza time, a bus carrying more than two dozen members of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation team, local Palestinians working side-by-side with the U.S. GHF team to deliver critical aid, were brutally attacked by Hamas.
	At the time of the attack, our team was en route to one of our distribution centers in the area west of Hanunis.
	We are still gathering facts.
	What we know is devastating.
	There are at least five fatalities, multiple injuries, fear some of our team members may have been taken hostage.
	We condemn this heinous and deliberate attack in the strongest possible terms.
	These were aid workers, humanitarians, fathers, brothers, sons, friends who are risking their lives every day to help others.
	By the way, that death toll is apparently now up to eight.
	And the world, total silence.
	But I thought, wait, I thought that it was all about getting humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.
	But no, everybody's too worried about Greta Thunberg.
	I have a feeling it was never about the humanitarian aid to Gazans.
	It was always about something more.
	The reason people are pissed off, by the way, at GHF, the reason that the left is angry at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is specifically because it is not run by Hamas.
	Specifically because it is not run by the UNRWA.
	Specifically because it is getting aid to Palestinians who do not want to work with Hamas.
	That's the reason that they are upset.
	That is the whole thing.
	All right, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.
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