The Ben Shapiro Show - RADICAL LEFT VIOLENCE: Man OPENS FIRE On Border Patrol

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July 8, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:10:46

RADICAL LEFT VIOLENCE: Man OPENS FIRE On Border Patrol

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	Already a stacked show today: a shooting incident at a border patrol station in Texas.
	Where is that coming from?
	Why are Democrats talking again about defunding ICE?
	Plus, the latest on this awful Texas flood.
	President Trump issuing new threats of trade barriers, and Tucker Carlson interviews the president of Iran Total Softball interview.
	We'll get to all of it.
	But first, the Daily Wire has officially joined forces with EveryLife to bring real tangible help to families in central Texas who are suffering devastating losses from historic flooding.
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	All righty, folks.
	So a terrible story out of Texas yesterday.
	Aside from the obviously terrible story of the Texas flooding, which we'll get to in just a moment, there was a story in which a 27-year-old man with a rifle and tactical gear, according to CNN, was killed on Monday morning after exchanging fire with law enforcement officers at a Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas.
	A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said that the man, quote, opened fire at the entrance of the U.S. Border Patrol sector annex and that Border Patrol agents and local police helped to neutralize the shooter.
	Two officers were injured.
	One was shot in the knee.
	The suspected shooter, we don't mention the names of mass shooters or attempted shooters on the show, unless they are still outlaws.
	The suspected shooter apparently was connected to a Michigan address and a vehicle with Michigan tags.
	And according to the chief, he was loaded for bear.
	He had another rifle and another assault weapon that was found in the suspect's car.
	And apparently he got off dozens of rounds before he was killed by federal agents.
	Now, motive is still in question.
	With that said, the suspect's vehicle was spray-painted with the phrase cordis die, which appears in a Call of Duty video game.
	According to local law enforcement, apparently that Call of Duty reference is to some sort of anarchic globalist group that is on the left wing of the political spectrum.
	And that's, of course, why you would show up at a Border Patrol station.
	Now, the parents of the man said that this person had a mental deficiency.
	That, of course, is not a gigantic shock because in a wide variety of cases of this sort, the person who does the shooting has some sort of mental problem.
	With that said, we have seen a massive spike in the number of attacks on ICE agents over the course of the last six months.
	Since President Trump took office and decided we were actually going to enforce our border, ICE has come under significant fire.
	Tom Holman himself said attacks on ICE are up something like 700%.
	Here was the borders are.
	Look, you're the typical protesters that go from protesters to criminals.
	The attack on ICE offers, you've covered it many times, is up nearly 700%.
	Now, we were talking 500% a couple weeks ago, so it continues.
	The Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks, he added that obviously left-wing anti-ICE red rick is having something to do with the uptick in violence.
	We've seen our assaults go up dramatically.
	And you know what?
	These Border Patrol agents are out there doing their job.
	They're enforcing the law.
	They're protecting the communities.
	We've got Border Patrol agents on the river right now in the Guadalupe assisting with rescue efforts.
	These agents are outstanding Americans.
	They're just trying to enforce the law.
	But all of the rhetoric and the false information that's being put out by the left is just increasing violence against our agents, and it's just unacceptable.
	Now, again, the left has been claiming for a very long time that if you use rhetoric that is too colorful, if you say things that are borderline, this can lead to quote-unquote stochastic terrorism.
	This is an act of stochastic terrorism that essentially what you're doing is creating a permission structure for terrorism.
	And as I've said before, unless you are actually excusing or inciting violence, you are not responsible for that violence.
	With that said, when you raise the temperature, what that means is that there will be people who bubble over.
	That doesn't mean that Bernie Sanders is responsible for the congressional baseball shooter, for example.
	What it does mean is that when you keep saying over and over and over that Republicans are going to kill your kids when they take away Medicare or some such nonsense, if you say that sort of thing and then somebody goes and shoots a bunch of Republican congresspeople who are playing baseball, you at the very least should consider whether the kinds of language that you used were well calibrated.
	And this is the problem.
	The sorts of language that are currently being used with regard to ICE, with regard to border patrol by the left are extraordinary, extraordinary.
	And they set up a permission structure that causes people who are unhinged to then take it to the next step in the same way that if you keep saying that President Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler, at some point someone might take you seriously and go and try to kill Hitler.
	Well, this is the same sort of thing with Border Patrol agents.
	Here is just a few examples of members of the high-ranking left going after ICE and Border Patrol in language that is completely unhinged.
	Donald Trump's modern-day Gescapo is scooping folks up off the streets.
	They're in unmarked vans wearing masks, being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons.
	No chance to mount a defense, not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye.
	I don't know of any police department that routinely wears masks.
	We know that there are other groups that routinely wear masks.
	It's felt like we're part of a grand experiment.
	What happens?
	How far will the public tolerate the federal government intervening and seizing power from a governor?
	The combination of these Gestapo-like tactics with the fact that these are nonviolent, non-criminal immigrants doing things the right way.
	I mean, in that last facility, I was not safe from the officers in that facility.
	But when the nation, when these political factions divided the nation between slaveholders and slave catchers, when they made everybody, with the fugitive slave law, all of us had to, if someone escaped, all of us had to return that particular piece of property to these folks.
	With ICE running around LA, forcing people to make choices, will they protect their friends, their neighbors, their family members?
	You know, my dad served in the Second World War.
	He fought the Nazis in Northern Africa.
	He fought the Nazis on the Italian peninsula.
	And I think he's looking down right now and he's happy that I'm fighting today's Nazis.
	Okay, so as you can see, those are a lot of prominent Democratic figures.
	I mean, there you're talking about Tim Molls, former vice presidential candidate, current governor of Minnesota, Mayor Michelle Wu of Boston, Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, Representative Dan Goldman of New York, AOC of New York, Eddie Gloud, who's over on MSNBC, and a representative Stephen Lynch.
	Okay, that sort of language is going to have some sort of consequence.
	Again, it doesn't mean they're responsible for a person trying to shoot Border Patrol agents if you keep increasing the temperature and if you keep excusing violence on the other end, which is the other thing that Democrats have been doing for quite a long while here, ranging from the sort of violence we saw during the BLM riots of 2020 to the excusing of the alleged murderous actions of Luigi Mangion on the streets of New York.
	When you do that sort of stuff over and over and over, you're obviously going to lead to an uptick in violence.
	I mean, this is really obvious.
	And you may not like President Trump's immigration policy.
	That is your prerogative.
	It is also the law of the land that you are not allowed to cross our southern border illegally and just live here.
	That is the law of the land.
	If you don't like that law, maybe you should talk to your congresspeople.
	If you don't like that law, perhaps you should try to change that law.
	That's how it works in a democracy.
	You don't get to simply call the people who are enforcing the law Nazis and Gestapo and then act all surprised when people attack the supposed Nazis and Gestapo in our midst.
	There's a point made by Caroline Levitt over at the White House yesterday.
	Does the White House expect Democrats to tone down their rhetoric in light of what we've saw today in the county, Texas?
	We certainly call on Democrats to tone down their rhetoric against ICE and Border Patrol agents, who, again, are everyday men and women.
	I would encourage AOC and other Democrats to actually meet with the United States Border Patrol.
	These are honorable Americans who are just simply trying to do their job to enforce the law.
	They go home to their families every night, just like we all do, and they deserve respect and dignity for trying to enforce our nation's immigration laws and to remove public safety threats from our communities.
	All righty, coming up, an ice raid in LA, and LA's mayor is doing the performative work Democrats love to do.
	First, you know, there's a lot of great stuff the administration is doing, ranging from actually enforcing the border to an excellent foreign policy, which we'll get to a little bit later on in the show.
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	Okay, so all this culminated yesterday with a face-off between members of ICE and Board of Patrol agents and Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles.
	So yesterday, federal agents accompanied by members of the National Guard, according to Fox News, conducted an immigration raid in Los Angeles.
	This is on Monday.
	They did this in an area near MacArthur Park, which has a large immigrant population.
	That part of the city is heavily Hispanic.
	There's a lot of MS-13 in that particular part of the city.
	MacArthur Park, for anybody who used to live in Los Angeles, is not exactly the kind of place that you go to hang out with your kids like a normal weekday.
	It may look that way because all the federal agents have shown up at this point, but very often you're looking at open-air crime, drug trade, gang members hanging out.
	It's not a safe place, MacArthur Park.
	This has been known in LA for a very, very long time.
	In any case, U.S. Border Patrol agents were seen on horseback in the park.
	Law enforcement military-looking vehicles were stationed in the area.
	Nobody was actually arrested, but the minute that the cops showed up, everybody sort of ran away.
	At that point, Mayor Karen Bass appeared at the scene and demanded to speak with the ICE leadership, saying they needed to leave right now.
	They need to leave because this is unacceptable.
	And she showed up to yell at the border patrol agents.
	The border patrol chief, Gregory Bovino, told Fox News he got on the phone with Karen Bass and she demanded the raid be stopped.
	And he said, I don't work for Karen Bass.
	Better get used to us now because this is going to be very normal soon.
	We'll go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.
	And then she said, well, this is awful because minutes before there were more than 20 kids playing and then the military comes through.
	Okay, so first of all, I'd just like to point out that the military were not going to shoot the kids.
	They're not going to arrest the kids.
	This very bizarre notion that exists on the left that anytime kids see a member of law enforcement, that that's some sort of traumatic event.
	I just got to tell you, my kids see law enforcement all the time, all the time, really, because my kids go to a Jewish school, which means they're constantly surrounded by law enforcement.
	The idea that if law enforcement or ICE shows up, that immediately some kid has been deeply traumatized, the military is coming through.
	This is like Serbia or something.
	Can you stop, please?
	Really?
	She said, there is no plan other than fear, chaos, and politics.
	Home depot one day, a car wash the next, armed vehicles, and what looks like mounted military units in a park the next day.
	What happened to the criminals, the drug dealers, the violent individuals who are in the park today?
	Were children who was their summer day camp?
	Those kids now have no activities.
	Well, no, actually, they showed up for like an hour and then they left.
	They were ushered inside so they didn't get exposed to the troops.
	Wow.
	I mean, God forbid that they should see a member of ICE.
	Wow.
	That would just be terrible.
	As far as what happened to the criminals, the drug dealers, the violent individuals, well, I mean, what happened is that you declared yourself a sanctuary city and said you wouldn't work with ICE.
	It turns out that cities that are working with ICE are generally, when they arrest people, turning them over to ICE after checking their immigration status.
	But that's something that Los Angeles does not do.
	Protesters then quickly began showing up in the area.
	There are reports of a tire on a federal vehicle being slashed.
	Objects were thrown at the vehicles.
	Of course, Governor Gavin Newsom called the events at MacArthur Park a, quote, message from the polluted heart of President Donald Trump.
	He said, I want folks to know that we have your back.
	We'll continue to come back and do what we can to protect our diverse communities, to protect the spirit that defines the best of the city and our state, and to push back against this cruelty being perpetuated by the president of the United States.
	And Karen Bass called this inhumane.
	Okay, well, again, if you obstruct federal law enforcement, you should not be surprised when they do not ask for your permission or help when they go to a place like MacArthur Park to find MS-13 members.
	But this is all part and parcel of the Democratic attempt to turn immigration enforcement into the actual crime.
	It really is quite insane.
	Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader who hopes to be Speaker after the 2026 midterm elections, he was asked about defunding ICE, and he wouldn't rule it out.
	I mean, this is where Democrats have now gone.
	By the way, immigration policy remains the most popular plank in President Trump's agenda right now.
	Now, some Democrats, amid the criticisms of ICE right now due to these ICE raids, have started calling for defunding ICE.
	Do you think that's effective going into the midterms and do you support those calls?
	Well, I definitely think that we need aggressive oversight as it relates to the overly aggressive behavior that we've seen from ICE, from the Department of Homeland Security.
	It's not what the American people actually, in my view, voted for.
	So he's not ruling it out.
	So maybe there will be defunding of ICE.
	Who knows?
	Who knows?
	Well, again, the more the left pushes back against this, the more that is going to give President Trump room to run.
	The borders are said, listen, rounding up and deporting 3,000 illegal immigrants per day, that's not going to be enough.
	There are just too many criminal illegal immigrants in the country.
	Here is Tom Homan.
	And for those that say 3,000 a day is too much, I want to remind them, do the math.
	We'd have to arrest 7,000 every single day for the remainder of this administration just to catch once Biden releasing the nation.
	Meanwhile, in other news that is being, again, promoted by a left-wing media, and it's just not true, with regards to the Texas flooding, the left media refuses to move away from the lie that the National Weather Service was somehow cut or underfunded to the extent that this caused the death of all of these people, particularly children in Texas from these flash floods.
	CNN's Juliet Kayem, she knows better, but she's still out there suggesting that she doesn't know if there's a direct line between these NWS cuts and flooding.
	But you should not make the suggestion unless you have the data.
	These sorts of unsubstantiated allegations are not good.
	They are bad journalism.
	And by the way, just bad practice as a human being.
	These cuts to the National Weather Service, to NOAA, to FEMA, the potential elimination of FEMA, we will miss them when they're gone.
	I think we need to say that now.
	I don't know if there's a direct line between the National Weather Service and cuts and what happened, but this is what government's for.
	It's to help people and prepare them for the damage and the devastation.
	Again, just perpetuating the narrative, despite there being no evidence, this is the stock and trade of the left-wing media at this point.
	Amisha Elsendor, who's a Washington correspondent for NBC News, she used one of my favorite tactics here, which is you accuse the Trump administration of something, and it's not true.
	And the Trump administration pushes back.
	Now they're being defensive.
	How dare they be defensive?
	The White House is also pointing to meteorologists that we've seen in Texas saying that there were staffing concerns, but that there were no staffing issues that led to ample warnings not giving out in the way that they were.
	We at NBC News have also talked to some people, meteorologists and others, who say that the National Weather Service had the staffing that it needed.
	Even though, again, that there were concerns about staffing.
	We've also, of course, I'm sure Julian's going to tell us about the lawmakers that are now wanting this issue to be more investigated.
	But the White House here taking a really defensive posture on the idea that anything that President Trump did hurt the people in Texas.
	And the White House press secretary also saying that the president wants to give Texas any of the resources it needs in this moment.
	So how dare they take a defensive posture when you accuse them of something totally false?
	What are they supposed to do?
	Sit there and say, okay, you're lying.
	When you say things that are not true, of course they're going to take a quote-unquote defensive posture.
	If you punch somebody and they tried to defend themselves, they didn't do anything wrong.
	They're defending themselves.
	Here's Caroline Lovitt ripping the fake news surrounding the National Weather Service staffing accusations.
	These offices were fully staffed.
	The San Angelo office was fully staffed with 12 forecast meteorologists.
	There were no vacancies.
	The San Antonio office was operating with 11 forecasters.
	And as Brian said, the union themselves said that there was adequate staffing.
	So I think those words speak for themselves and the numbers speak for themselves.
	This was a once-in-a-century flash flood, a tragic natural disaster, and the administration is doing all that we can on the ground to help these families.
	So again, is that defensive or is that just her telling the truth?
	Meanwhile, no story in America can be complete without some sort of nonsense racial angle added to it.
	A former Houston city official, appointee, mayoral appointee, has been raging apparently over the coverage of this girls' camp, Camp Mystic, which she says is only being covered because it's largely white.
	As though if a bunch of black kids got washed away by a flash flood, that wouldn't be a story.
	Okay, so I'm old enough to remember when a lot of that sort of stuff happened during Hurricane Katrina.
	And actually, it was a much bigger story because of the race of the people who were being disproportionately killed in Hurricane Katrina, because then the president of the United States was accused of being a racist.
	So this is just false on the merits, but it also shows how race talk can just warp your brain.
	I know I'm probably going to get canceled for this, but Camp Mystic is a whites-only girls Christian camp.
	They don't even have a token Asian.
	They don't have a token black person.
	It is a all-white, white-only conservative Christian camp.
	If you ain't white, you ain't right.
	You ain't getting in, you ain't going, period.
	And I think that context needs to be said in this matter.
	It's not to say that we don't want the girls to be found, whatever girls that are missing or whatever right now, but you best believe, especially in today's political climate, if this were a group of Hispanic girls, especially with them being in East Texas, it should be most likely Hispanic.
	If this were a group of Hispanic girls out there, this would not be getting this type of coverage that they're getting.
	No one would give a f ⁇ .
	She then went on to say that the parents of these little girls would be saying things like, they need to be deported.
	They shouldn't have been here in the first place.
	What is wrong with people?
	Honest to God.
	Coming up, the Big Epstein revelation.
	There is no Big Epstein revelation.
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	Social media has just rotted brains.
	It has created these echo chambers where you believe that you can say things that are completely specious and truly ugly, and that real people do not exist in the real world who will be upset about that.
	And that's just unbelievably silly.
	I mean, that is the line that links all of this together is this belief that what you say online has no real world consequences.
	Obviously, it does.
	Obviously, it does.
	Now, again, that doesn't mean that you're responsible for terrible things happening if you say something terrible.
	What it does mean is that being responsible about the language that you use and the ways in which you approach issue, that should actually be a prerequisite to being taken seriously in the world.
	And that's really on us.
	It's on everybody who's consuming.
	It's on the audience to determine who to take seriously and who not to take seriously at this point.
	Okay, meanwhile, President Trump has unleashed the tariff talk again.
	He has sent a series of tariff letters to a bunch of countries on Monday, pairing new rates with an explicit warning that even those could change at any time.
	This is according to Axios.
	After months of threats, President Trump is abruptly re-escalating the trade war.
	So he posted copies of the letters to Truth Social, starting with South Korea and Japan, both of which were hit with 25% tariffs.
	Those are effective as of August 1st.
	They have not kicked in again.
	The idea is going to be that this is sort of a final push, final chance for them to get something done before those higher tariffs kick in.
	Those tariff rates are similar to what the White House announced on the April 2nd Liberation Day before swiftly pausing the implementation for 90 days.
	He then posted similar letters to Myanmar, 40% tariff, Laos, 40% tariff, Thailand, 36% tariff, Cambodia, 36% tariff, Serbia, 35, Bangladesh, 35, Indonesia, 32, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 30, South Africa, 30%, Kazakhstan, 25, Malaysia, and Tunisia, 25.
	Many of those rates were slightly lower than April or unchanged.
	Cambodia's rate dropped 13 percentage points from the original target.
	According to the letter, quote, if you wish to open your heretofore closed trading markets to the United States, eliminate your tariff and non-tariff policies and trade barriers, we will perhaps consider an adjustment to this letter.
	That's what the letters to the South Korean and Japanese leaders say.
	Later, President Trump told reporters at the White House the August 1st deadline was firm, but now 100% firm, saying that he would be open to listening to offers.
	He said, if for any reason you decide to raise your tariffs, whatever the number you choose to raise them by will be added onto the 25% charge that we will drop on you.
	This, of course, caused a drop off in the S ⁇ P 500 because people got a little bit freaked out by all the tariff talk.
	Although, honestly, I think it's all baked into the cake at this point.
	People understand that Trump is going to threaten things.
	He's going to back off some things.
	Other things are going to happen.
	Secretary Scott Bessant, he said, listen, we're going to announce a bunch of deals over the course of the next 48 hours.
	And this is what is keep, as always, it is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant that is keeping the markets on an even keel here.
	If it were Howard Luttnick talking, the markets would be going nuts right now.
	We are going to have several announcements in the next 48 hours.
	And Joe, I think what President Trump is concerned about is the quality of the deals, not the quantity.
	My mailbox was full last night with a lot of new offers, a lot of new proposals.
	So it's going to be a busy couple of days.
	So I'm going to once again point out that what we are talking about here in terms of the tariffs that we are going to charge on Japan or South Korea, supposedly because how they've been going after American goods, these rates are nonsense.
	I'm just going to point That out right off the top.
	I checked with my friends and sponsors over at Perplexity.
	What were the average effective tariff rates charged on American goods by Japan and South Korea as of January 1st, 2025?
	Before any of this started, Japan, effective average tariff rate, approximately 1%.
	This figure represents the ad valorem equivalent tariff rate across all industries as calculated by the World Bank and UNCTAD databases.
	Most U.S. goods, especially industrial and manufactured products, face very low tariffs in Japan due to existing trade agreements.
	Notably, tariffs on U.S. autos and auto parts are 0%.
	Agricultural tariffs have been reduced to trade equivalent to the TPP agreement.
	South Korea ranged somewhere between 0.19% and 2.87%.
	According to trade data from the Korea Customs Service and analysis by the Korea Economic Institute, the effective weighted average tariff on U.S. imports in 2024 was within this range.
	The vast majority of American goods, about 95%, entered South Korea tariff-free under the Koreas FTA, with most remaining tariffs affecting a narrow range of agricultural products subject to quotas.
	Okay, so you might ask, what about non-tariff trade barriers, like subsidies to various products and goods in these particular areas?
	Well, it turns out those are also pretty low.
	According to, again, our sponsors over perplexity, the average non-tariff barrier rate for Japan against American goods is about 1%.
	For automobiles, non-tariff barriers are notably higher with advalorem equivalents estimated at somewhere between 8% and 11%.
	And those stem from regulatory requirements, non-recognition of U.S. safety standards, and distribution challenges.
	Agricultural products, non-tariff trade barriers for vegetables are about 3%.
	For seafood, they're close to zero.
	Rice faces really, really high tariffs, about 400%, but U.S. rice often enters under duty-free quotas.
	So the NCB impact is less pronounced for quota imports.
	And again, the reason Japan is trying to protect its domestic rice industry is because that is a key food staple in Japan.
	So it's almost a security issue for them in Japan.
	In South Korea, the non-tariff barrier rate, well, there are significant non-tariff barriers in South Korea that include regulatory and emissions standards, approval processes, distribution requirements.
	For agriculture, there are certain standards that American products supposedly do not meet.
	Generally, again, according to our sponsors over at Perplexity, NTBs can add the equivalent of 3% to 10% to the cost of U.S. exports.
	So if you're talking about total, they are nowhere near the 25% that President Trump has been talking about.
	With all that said, this is why I expect that Secretary Besson is going to come up with some sort of win-win for President Trump or Trump is going to get to declare some sort of trade victory.
	But we are going to avoid these gigantic tariffs that he is set to drop on a wide variety of countries, including Japan and South Korea.
	As a general area of policy, we should not be dropping gigantic tariffs, particularly on countries that we are trying to ally against China.
	Japan is threatened by China.
	South Korea is threatened by China.
	We should be trying to draw those people in, not trying to alienate them outward so that they are going to trade more with China.
	If you wish to box in China, you have to set up a ring of trade fire around China.
	And that would involve more free trade agreements, not fewer free trade agreements with places like Japan and South Korea.
	Okay, meanwhile, in the most controversial story of the day, the Epstein files, there are none, apparently.
	Now, again, a lot of people were shocked by this.
	I'm less shocked by this than some.
	The reason being, whenever there's this level of speculation without any sort of supporting evidence, it's not a shock to me when all that sort of falls apart.
	Michael Tracy, a journalist with whom I frequently disagree on a wide variety of issues.
	Michael Tracy has a thread on X where he explains, he said, the key Epstein victim who made the most sensational claims of being trafficked to powerful third-party individuals, Virginia Giufre, was not even called by prosecutors as a witness in the 2021 Ghislaine Maxwell criminal trial because her credibility was in such tatters.
	The whole mythology around this case is largely based on the claims of one mentally unstable serial fabulist, Giufrey, who eventually had to admit in a civil settlement she had falsely accused Alan Tershowitz of depraved sexual crimes for nearly a decade.
	Nonetheless, she was able to eventually extract a few million pounds from Prince Andrew, the only other third-party individual she actually sued, despite naming a huge array of prominent individuals over the year with zero credible evidence, and despite having the dogged assistance of some of the most high-powered attorneys in the world.
	Prince Andrew, as Michael Tracy points out, was in the throes of a PR disaster after his infamous 2019 BBC interview.
	So opting for a settlement with royal family funds rather than standing trial in the United States was probably the sensible course of action from his perspective.
	This was the sole third-party settlement Giufre ever successfully reached, despite claiming she was trafficked to an extraordinary cross-section of prominent individuals, including George Mitchell, Bill Richardson, Marvin Minsky, etc.
	None of the women who testified in the Maxwell criminal trial claimed they were trafficked to third parties.
	Jiufre, clearly in the grips of a worsening psychological crisis, died earlier this year.
	Unfortunately, but doesn't change the fact that so many of her wild, extravagant claims turned out to be totally baseless, despite serving as the evidentiary foundation for this blinkered Epstein mythology, which continues to persist despite an increasingly tenuous connection to any observable reality, having been egged on recently, playing to the fevered imaginations of right-wing social media.
	The entire Epstein saga, says Michael Tracy, has long since turned into an enormous cash cow, with even J.P. Morgan settling for $290 million simply because Epstein was a former client.
	The feeding frenzy litigation has been endless from every angle and is still ongoing.
	We're supposed to believe that not one of these rich and powerful American men, to whom everyone assumes Epstein must have trafficked scores of children, could have been successfully sued at any point in the past 10 plus years and coerced into a generous settlement, particularly in the context of Me Too Mania, from which this affair gained such outsized cultural notoriety.
	Epstein himself was clearly a dirtbag and openly confessed to a pathological obsession with procuring teenage girls for himself.
	But the grander web of creepy conspiratorial intrigue that's enveloped this case and turned it into a weird, tantalizing, unfalsifiable mythology that won't go away is just an extension of the unhinged fabulism pioneered by the original accuser.
	That seems to me the most obvious answer to what the hell was going on here.
	And again, open questions are open.
	But at a certain point, if the FBI and the DOJ not run by Democrats, first of all, we should point out Democrats running the FBI and the DOJ would have had a pretty large incentive, would they not, to have dumped an Epstein file on, say, Donald J. Trump?
	Would they not?
	I mean, we know for a fact that in 2016, the intelligence community coordinated to set up an entire op surrounding Donald Trump's supposed collusion with Russia.
	Do you think that under the auspices of Joseph R. Biden and the rest of the Biden administration, if they had one single iota of evidence, for example, that Jeffrey Epstein had been trafficking underage girls to Donald Trump, that that wouldn't have been on the front page of every single newspaper in the world the next day, like the day after Joe Biden was elected.
	Are we really to believe that?
	Seriously?
	It strings credulity.
	And as far as the accusations about these other men, again, these are very prominent men.
	Michael Tracy is making a good point.
	The burden of proof in a civil trial is much lower than the burden of proof in a criminal trial.
	All you have to do is win by preponderance of the evidence.
	And when you're talking about young girls, now young women or middle-aged women suing powerful older men, the possibility of a settlement is very high.
	So why weren't there any of those things?
	A lot of that was studiously avoided during all of the Epstein talk, which again was spicy and interesting and fascinating because conspiracies are usually spicy and interesting and fascinating.
	And of course, Epstein's death was suspicious.
	And by the way, the memes were funny.
	I mean, let's be real.
	The memes were funny of Hillary Clinton sneaking into jail at night to get Bill Clinton off scot free because he was trafficking in girls.
	And Jeffrey Epstein was a weirdo with pictures of Bill Clinton in a dress, aside from being a sick sexual deviant who should have been arrested and executed a long time ago for his crimes against children.
	Okay, so put all of that aside.
	What does this demonstrate?
	Well, it demonstrates that once a conspiracy theory gets going, it becomes utterly unfalsifiable, utterly unfalsifiable.
	And no matter how much evidence is provided, and even if the people you trust are put in charge, it's still even more unfalsifiable.
	So listen, it's justifiable for people like J.D. Vance, who was the vice presidential candidate at the time before the election, to call for the release of an Epstein list because, frankly, people thought there was an Epstein list.
	However, the evidence suggested there really was not an Epstein list if you were watching this case with any sort of eagle eye.
	This is J.D. Vance before the election.
	Everybody in politics has a vice that's much worse than alcoholism is the way that I put it.
	But we release the list.
	Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list.
	That is an important thing.
	Okay, so the problem is that when you feed this, when you feed this, when you feed this, at a certain point, it's going to blow back on you when it turns out that you open Al Capone's vault, like Geraldo Rivera, and there's nothing there, which is actually what seems to have happened right here.
	The person who's receiving the most blowback on this, of course, is Attorney General Pam Bondi, because Attorney General Bondi back in February had suggested that the Epstein list was sitting on her desk.
	Don't say this sort of stuff if you don't got the goods.
	If you don't got the goods, don't say it.
	Again, this goes to our social media-driven age where you are likely to score points and garner loyalty for making commitments that you can't actually cash in.
	The DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients.
	Will that really happen?
	It's sitting on my desk right now to review.
	That's been a directive by President Trump.
	I'm reviewing that.
	I'm reviewing JFK files, MLK files.
	That's all in the process of being reviewed because that was done at the directive of the president from all of these agencies.
	And again, one of the things that's come out with regard to pretty much all of this stuff is that what we knew is what we knew, right?
	There was nothing new in the JFK files.
	Legitimately nothing new that was revelatory or even interesting about what was released in the JFK files.
	It didn't matter.
	The internet tried to spin it into a conspiracy theory anyway, because that's what happens.
	Caroline Levitt was forced into the uncomfortable position yesterday at the White House of trying to retcon those comments from Pambandi.
	According to the report, this systematic review revealed no incriminating client list.
	So what happened to the Epstein client list that the Attorney General said she had on her desk?
	Well, I think if you go back and look at what the Attorney General said in that interview, which was on your network on Fox News, John Roberts said, DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients.
	Will that really happen?
	And she said, it's sitting on my desk right now to review.
	Yes, she was saying the entirety of all of the paperwork, all of the paper in relation to Jeffrey Epstein's crimes.
	That's what the Attorney General was referring to, and I'll let her speak for that.
	Okay, fine.
	And I mean, fine.
	That's not how it reads.
	That's not how it sounds.
	But okay.
	I mean, I suppose that you could make that case.
	Bottom line is this.
	When everybody engages in outsized speculation, the outsized evidence better stack up at a certain point.
	And if it doesn't, if your expectations of a gigantic conspiracy don't come true and you have no counter evidence, none except for your speculation, I'm sorry, but that's on you.
	It is.
	I mean, if you want to provide counter evidence, I'm happy to hear it.
	Seriously.
	If you want to provide me the actual, not just your speculation, not just your sort of suggestions, not your wild, outlandish theories, speciously based on nothing, right?
	And all of that is open.
	But I'm sorry, when you put Cash Patel and Dan Bongino in charge of the FBI, and we put Pam Bondi in charge of the DOJ, and then it turns out that there's nothing there, I don't know what more you expect.
	What do you think?
	They're all part of the conspiracy.
	And the answer is, of course, yes.
	That is always the next step.
	You're seeing people online suggesting now that Cash Patel is being blackmailed by his girlfriend because his girlfriend works for PragerU.
	I mean, like, give, and Prager and Dennis Prager is Jewish.
	Of course, you can always go down the next conspiratorial rabbit hole.
	That's the beauty of conspiratorial rabbit holes.
	When one of them gets to both, you just dive right into the next conspiratorial rabbit hole and they all tie together in a gigantic bowl of spaghetti that is a global unifying world theory that in the end is about some sort of conspiratorial elite controlling your life.
	Or maybe, or maybe fact and evidence should be necessary when you make outsized allegations.
	Outsized allegations require outsized evidence.
	Again, this doesn't mean that conspiracies never take place.
	There was a conspiracy with regard to, for example, covering up the possibility of Wuhan lab leak.
	That was a real thing that happened where Anthony Fauci and members of the health establishment attempted to legitimately silence people who made the case that COVID was leaked from a Chinese lab.
	Those things happened, but here's the thing.
	There's evidence that they happened.
	There's evidence that they happened.
	Before that, you could speculate maybe that was true.
	And if you kept an open mind, you say, okay, if there's new evidence, I'll change my mind on that stuff.
	Then when the evidence emerged, then you could say, hey, look, evidence.
	This is why I've been asked before, are there any conspiracy theories that I believe?
	And, you know, the question is to whether I believe a conspiracy.
	There are conspiracy theories that could be plausible, but I don't believe in any conspiracy theory unless there's Actual evidence that makes it not a conspiracy theory anymore, just a conspiracy.
	That's when you should believe in things, is when there's evidence of them that is at least plausible in nature.
	But as you can see, the conspiratorialists are very, very upset with the Trump administration.
	Now they believe the conspiracy goes even deeper.
	So, Alex Jones, who has yet to find a conspiracy he doesn't believe in, is about to go throw up, which frankly might be good for his weight loss program.
	I just got to the office.
	I'm going to go throw up, actually.
	And this only happens every few years when something really, really bad happens or something.
	I mean, I'm physically going to puke probably right now.
	My mouth is watering right now.
	Because I have integrity.
	And, you know, I just really need the Trump administration to succeed and to save this country.
	And they're doing so much good.
	And then for them to do something like this tears my guts out.
	Guys, he has integrity.
	In fact, he's been called by some a prophet.
	Tucker Carlson literally called him a prophet on his program.
	So actually, this is a person whose own lawyer made the case in a custody hearing with his ex-wife that he was a performance artist.
	This wasn't even the Sandy Hook trial where he tried to make the same case.
	His lawyers claim that this man of integrity is, in fact, a performance artist.
	Quote, he's playing a character and is nothing like his online persona.
	Attorney Randall Wilhite reportedly insisted in a Texas courtroom at a pre-trial hearing ahead of the right-wing Radio Jocks custody battle with ex-wife Kelly Jones.
	Judging Jones by his Infowars performances would be like judging Jack Nicholson by his depiction of the Joker on Batman.
	That's his own lawyer saying that.
	His own lawyer is saying that he was a performance artist.
	His wife was making the case that actually he's just unstable.
	Quote, he's not a stable person.
	He says he wants to break Alec Baldwin's neck.
	He wants J-Lo to get his lawyer was like, no, no, no, he doesn't mean any of that.
	He's a performance artist.
	Okay, so those are your choices.
	So I'd just like to point out once again, at this point, you can watch whatever you want.
	It is a free country.
	You can watch Alex Jones.
	You can believe Alex Jones.
	You can think Alex Jones is a pro.
	You're entitled to any of those beliefs.
	That's fine.
	It's a free country.
	On a moral and intellectual level, it is not so fine because it turns out that people who consistently traffic in conspiracy, it turns out that people who consistently traffic in trash, people who spend your time, your few brief breaths on this planet, filling your mind with stupidity, playing a WWE character.
	Listen, if you want to watch Alice Jones in the same way that you watch WWE, because you know that the WWE is people who are fake jumping on each other and you find it dramatic and interesting, you know, more power to you.
	But if you're watching WWE and you think it's real, that makes you the stupid person.
	Don't do it.
	Don't do it.
	Seriously, it makes you dumber.
	It just makes you in the end, you're responsible for the information that enters your brain and your independent judgment of that information.
	But if people are consistently being inauthentic, if people openly acknowledge that what they're saying to you publicly and what they say privately are two different things on the same matters, well, then maybe you ought to take what they say with a grain of salt rather than suggesting that, for example, Donald Trump is lying to you about Jeffrey Epstein or Dan Bongino, with whom I am friends, is lying to you about Jeffrey Epstein, or Cash Patel, the head of the FBI, is lying to you about Jeffrey Epstein.
	Because those are your only two choices here.
	Either Alex Jones, as is usual, blew a conspiracy theory out of proportion, and so did the rest of the internet, or Dan Bongino and Cash Patel and Donald Trump are all lying to you.
	Those are your choices.
	There is no third choice.
	President Trump, for his part, says, quote, the FBI, under the direction of Director Cash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, is back to the basics, locking up criminals, cleaning up America's streets.
	We have the greatest law enforcement professionals in the world, but politics and corrupt leadership often prevented them from doing their job.
	That is no longer the case.
	And now they've been unleashed to do their jobs and they're doing just that.
	Keep it up.
	Make America safe again.
	So that's President Trump defending the people that he selected for these jobs.
	And again, I'm just going to point out for the thousandth time here, Dan Bongino and Cash Patel were both suspicious of the Epstein list stuff.
	They were.
	They were both into the theorizing.
	And then they saw the evidence.
	And like the honest people they are, they came to a conclusion about that evidence.
	Period.
	You may not come to that same conclusion, but now you should be forced to provide your evidence before you call people like Cash Patel and Dan Bongino.
	And by the way, the president of the United States, liars on this matter.
	So why is there such resistance?
	Now, once the conspiracy is essentially exploded by people like Cash Patel and Dan Bongino and President Trump and Pam Bondi and all the rest, once that happens, why do people double down?
	And the question has to be answered by looking at the mentality of people who do the doubling down.
	Again, you can believe this stuff or speculate about this stuff, but once the evidence comes out, that's a different class of people who've decided to double, triple, quadruple down and look for a way to somehow weasel their way out of having to provide any evidence.
	It's a worldview.
	And that worldview basically says that there is always an elite that is controlling the events in your life.
	And those elite are able to get away with literally anything.
	They have almost godlike powers over your life.
	And once those elites are unmasked, then suddenly the world will become a better place.
	And so every time it turns out that a conspiracy theory is untrue, it undermines your case, unless you make the case that actually the elites got away with it again, in which case you are strengthening your case.
	Actually, a conspiracy debunked in many cases for these folks actually strengthens their broader great conspiracy theory, which is that there is a group of small elites who are running every aspect of your life and they get away with everything.
	And when they get away with this one, it actually makes you more passionate about the fact that they got away with it, as opposed to maybe taking a look at your core theory, which is, no, maybe there isn't this like small group of elite who's controlling every aspect of your life.
	Again, this doesn't mean that every conspiracy is untrue.
	There are conspiracies that exist and we don't even argue on them.
	Alex Jones and I may agree that there was a conspiracy to silence the Wuhan Lab League theory.
	The question is, why double down on theories that are already debunked?
	Why double down on theories that are widely derided as dumb?
	Why double down on theories that have no evidence to them?
	And the answer is, those are precisely the theories you must double down on.
	You must, because if there is a group of unanswerable, unpunishable elites, it excuses all of your day-to-day life.
	It excuses your activities.
	It excuses your failures.
	It excuses why you're so angry at quote unquote the system.
	And it requires no actual action from you other than railing at the moon.
	All right.
	Meanwhile, to the great disappointment of so many, President Trump lives in the world of reality.
	Again, my common refrain with President Trump, he lives in the world of reality.
	So remember all that talk by a wide variety of people inside and outside the administration About how Ukraine needed to be abandoned.
	In fact, there were members of the administration, high-ranking members of the administration, who said they didn't care what happened to Ukraine.
	And then there were realists, actual foreign policy realists, you know, people who believe in American interests abroad, who said, you know, what would be bad is Vladimir Putin taking the rest of Ukraine and ingesting it and then being on the borders of Hungary and being on the borders of Poland.
	That would actually be quite bad.
	Remember that?
	Well, it turns out that now President Trump has come to the correct conclusion because reality was there and he acknowledged it.
	And that reality is Vladimir Putin is not interested in a deal at this current time.
	President Trump yesterday announced he would continue to provide weaponry and funding to Ukraine.
	In fact, he might even up it, depending on how intransigent Vladimir Putin is being.
	And are you planning to send more weapons to Ukraine?
	We're going to send some more weapons.
	We have to.
	They have to be able to defend themselves.
	They're getting hit very hard now.
	They're getting hit very hard.
	We're going to have to send more weapons.
	You have defensive weapons, primarily, but they're getting hit very, very hard.
	So many people are dying in that mess.
	Okay, so again, great disappointment.
	You can hear the wails, the gnashing of teeth from the people who called the president of Ukraine rat-faced and sweaty for the great crime of saying he didn't want to be invaded by Vladimir Putin.
	Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said, quote, at President Trump's direction, the Department of Defense is sending additional defensive weapons to Ukraine to ensure the Ukrainians can defend themselves while we work to secure a lasting peace and ensure the killing stops.
	President Trump even told Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in a telephone call on Friday, according to the Wall Street Journal, he was not responsible for the halt in weapons shipments to Kyiv.
	He said he had directed a review of Pentagon munition stockpiles after the U.S. struck Iran's nuclear sites last month, but had not ordered the department to freeze the arms deliveries.
	So, you know, that does actually raise the question as to who in the Defense Department was telling the deliveries to stop.
	That ought to be investigated because that should not happen unless the president of the United States gives a sign-off, which apparently he did not.
	The call with Zelensky came shortly after Trump publicly said he was very disappointed and did not make any progress on a Ukraine peace deal in a separate call Thursday with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
	He said, I'm disappointed, frankly, President Putin hasn't stopped.
	He lives in the world of reality.
	And in reality, it is not in America's interest for Russia to be treated as an ally of the United States while they invade a sovereign country, Ukraine, try to kill its leadership and take over the entirety of the country, which borders on multiple NATO countries.
	This is perfectly obvious to President Trump.
	It's the reason why he is now doing the thing that people like me have been suggesting that he do, which is, sure, of course, look for an off-ramp.
	But if no off-ramp is available, because Vladimir Putin is not providing an off-ramp, you have to acknowledge reality.
	It turns out that Vladimir Putin's interests are not the United States' interests.
	That's what it turns out.
	And meanwhile, speaking of which, it turns out that there are also countries all over the world, many countries all over the world that do not share America's interests, that have their own independent interests.
	And those interests are very often at odds with the interests of the United States of America.
	I know this comes as a shock to many, but it shouldn't because China, for example, has its own interests.
	Those interests are adversarial to those of the United States.
	Russia has her own interests.
	Those interests include being a regional power.
	In fact, not just being a regional power, being a global power, even if they don't have the capacity to do that.
	Another country that has its own interests is Iran, which brings us to the much ballyhooed interview between Tucker Carlson and the president of Iran.
	So the president of Iran is a man named Masoud Pezeshkian.
	You haven't heard of him because frankly, the president of Iran is pretty much irrelevant.
	He is selected by the Ayatollahs.
	The only people who can run in the election are already pre-selected by the Ayatollahs because Iran, of course, is a Shia Islamic theocracy.
	A radical Islamic theocracy that has spread its terror tentacles all over the Middle East is responsible for the deaths of thousands and thousands of people ranging from countries like Iraq and Syria to Lebanon to the Gaza Strip to Yemen.
	They've got their tentacles all over the globe in terms of sleeper terror cells all over the globe, according to every single major intelligence agency in the West.
	Well, Tucker Carlson obtains an interview with President Pazeshkian, and Tucker explained that the reason he was doing this interview was not to get to the absolute truth.
	He was not interested in getting to the absolute truth.
	And this is the part that's sort of fascinating, not what Pazeshkian had to say, because of course he repeated a bunch of lies, easily demunkable lies that we will explain in a moment.
	What is fascinating about this interview is Tucker Carlson's approach to the interview.
	So Tucker has a particular approach to certain figures.
	So we'll begin by showing you how he treated Ted Cruz.
	This is how you would treat an adversarial interview.
	Okay, so he treated Ted Cruz as an adversary because Ted Cruz was an advocate of the president of the United States striking the Iranian nuclear facilities, which, by the way, again, Tucker was directly at odds with the president of the United States over it.
	He made a series of horrifyingly bad predictions.
	Those predictions were predicated in a series of lies that he has told himself and his audience about the way that the world works, particularly in the Middle East.
	That's why he was so wrong on that.
	In any case, here is his approach when he decides to be adversarial with a guest.
	Okay, here he was with Senator Cruz.
	This, again, is, I think, two weeks ago, asking him about the population of Iran, as though this was the most relevant issue with regard to Iran.
	How many people live in Iran, by the way?
	I don't know the population.
	At all?
	No, I don't know the population.
	You don't know the population of the country you seek to topple?
	How many people live in Iran?
	92 million.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	How could you not know that?
	I don't sit around memorizing population tables.
	Well, it's kind of relevant because you're calling for the overthrow of the government.
	Why is it relevant whether it's 90 million or 80 million or 100 million?
	Because if you don't know anything about the country.
	I didn't say I don't know anything about the country.
	Okay, what's the ethnic mix of Iran?
	They are Persians and predominantly Shia.
	Okay, this is not even.
	You don't know anything about Iran.
	So I am not the Tucker Carlson expert on Iran.
	You're a senator who's calling for the country.
	You're the one who's the government.
	You're the one who knows anything about the country.
	No, you don't know anything about the country.
	You're the one who claims they're not trying to murder Donald Trump.
	You're the not saying that, who can't figure out a saying you need to kill General Suleimani, and you just said it was bad they're trying to murder Trump.
	Yes, I did because you're not.
	So again, this is what an adversarial interview looks like from Tucker Carlson, right?
	Badgering people, asking them for very specific, Sometimes red herring statistics on matters.
	By the way, the answer to whether the Ayatollahs ought to run the country does not lie in whether half the country is Persian or 75% of the country is Persian.
	The answer is about 48%, by the way, but it doesn't really matter very much.
	The reason being, it can turn out that an Islamic theocracy is not in the best interests of the United States.
	If the Ayatollahs were to fall, whatever comes next is likely to be better than the current regime.
	Okay, but put that aside, it is the way he's approaching the interview.
	And again, this was the constant, this was the constant theme of the interview with Senator Cruz, was him badgering Senator Cruz, being incredibly adversarial.
	So bottom line is when Tucker wants to grill people, he absolutely knows how to do it, but he saves his ire for Senator Cruz.
	He does not save his ire for some of the worst leaders on planet Earth who hate America and literally chant about it.
	So for example, another clip from that Cruz interview.
	Here he was asking Senator Cruz about his biblical beliefs with regard to Israel.
	Hold on, define Israel.
	This is important.
	Are you kidding?
	This is a majority Christian country.
	Define Israel.
	Do you not know what Israel is?
	That would be the country you've asked like 49 questions about.
	So that's what Genesis, that's what God is talking about.
	The nation of Israel, yes.
	So is that the current borders, the current leadership?
	He's talking about the political entity called Israel?
	He's talking about the nation of Israel.
	Yet nations exist, and he's discussing a nation.
	A nation was the people of Israel.
	Is the nation referring to in Genesis?
	Is that the same as the country run by Benjamin Netanyahu right now?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Okay, so again, notice the attitude.
	Okay, now, fast forward to his interview with Masood Pazeshkian.
	Again, Tucker can interview whomever he wants.
	It's not about who he interviews or whether you find his interviews interesting.
	That's fine.
	I mean, frankly, I think Tucker's a wildly talented guy and very intelligent.
	With all of that said, if you cannot discern his worldview from the way he approaches these things, I don't know what to tell you.
	So he leads off before the interview is even released.
	He explains why he's interviewing and he says, we were not intending to get to truth, so I didn't ask him any tough questions effectively.
	And there are all kinds of questions that I didn't ask the president of Iran, particularly questions to which I knew I could not get an honest answer, such as, was your nuclear program totally disabled by the bombing campaign by the U.S. government a week and a half ago?
	There's no chance he's going to answer that question honestly.
	I didn't bother to ask it.
	The answer, in fact, from an American perspective, even from the CIA's perspective, is unknowable.
	So we dispensed with those, and I asked him very simple questions, such as, what is your goal?
	Do you seek war with the United States?
	Do you seek war with Israel?
	Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
	Again, the purpose of this was not to get to the absolute truth.
	That's impossible in an interview like this.
	The purpose of the interview was to add to the corpus of knowledge from which Americans can derive their own opinion.
	Learn everything you can, and then you decide.
	That's the promise of America.
	The promise of America is you asking absolutely unskeptical questions to the dictator of Iran, who has his people shouting death to America and recently tried to attack an American airbase in Qatar and is responsible for the death of thousands of Americans in Iraq and service people in Lebanon and the deaths of tens of thousands of people around the region.
	You need absolutely unskeptical questions of the president of that country in order so that you can make up your mind, apparently.
	So what did Pozheshkian do?
	He just lied straight out to Tucker multiple times and Tucker had no follow-ups.
	Now, when Tucker wants to ask follow-ups, he certainly knows how to do it.
	So, for example, here was Pozheshkian saying, we never wanted a nuclear weapon.
	It was Netanyahu, since 1984, has created this false mentality that Iran seeks a nuclear bomb.
	And it has insinuated that Iran is trying to develop a nuclear bomb in the past.
	And it has put it in the minds of every U.S. president since then, and to make them believe that we would like to have a nuclear bomb.
	But the truth is that we have never been after developing a nuclear bomb, not in the past, not presently, or in the future.
	Well, that's super, that'd be a super opportune time for Tucker to ask a series of very simple questions, as he put it.
	Like, for example, just a quick question.
	So why do you need nuclear energy?
	We're in the most oil and natural gas-rich regions on the planet.
	So why do you need nuclear energy?
	Here's another question.
	Why are you enriching to 60% uranium enrichment?
	Why?
	Because it turns out that actually you don't need that level of uranium enrichment for civilian nuclear purposes.
	According to the Institute for Science and International Security, in front of the inspector's eyes, Iran is undertaking the near-final step of breaking out, converting its 20% stock of enriched uranium into 60% enriched uranium at a greatly expanded rate.
	There is no, no actual civilian use for 60% enriched uranium.
	You don't need to do that.
	So why are you doing that?
	These would be very basic follow-up questions.
	No follow-up questions.
	No questions, Your Honor.
	None.
	None.
	Okay.
	By the way, it was Caroline Levitt, the White House press secretary.
	Tucker, by allowing these lies to go unchallenged, and he won't challenge them on his show, I would imagine, by allowing these lies to go unchallenged, Tucker is directly at odds with the White House.
	Here's Caroline Levitt, June 19th, saying that Iran has everything it needs to achieve a nuke.
	All they need is a decision from the Supreme Leader.
	When the president said a few weeks away, did he mean obtaining enough enriched uranium to start building a weapon?
	Or did he mean Iran is a few weeks away from completing the production of a weapon?
	I'm glad you asked that, Ouija.
	It's an important question, and it's one, frankly, the media has been getting wrong.
	Let's be very clear.
	Iran has all that it needs to achieve a nuclear weapon.
	All they need is a decision from the Supreme Leader to do that.
	And it would take a couple of weeks to complete the production of that weapon, which would, of course, pose an existential threat, not just to Israel, but to the United States and to the entire world.
	And that is something that the entire world, including countries like Russia, is in agreement with, that Iran should not and cannot obtain a nuclear weapon.
	And that's why the president believes that, and he has believed that again, not just his political career, but frankly, his entire life.
	Okay, so you may have noticed that that would make a good follow-up question that was not asked.
	Well, then, Mazoud Pazeshkian suggested that actually the diplomacy was going amazing.
	Israel just destroyed the diplomacy with its preemptive strike on the nuclear facilities.
	And we were going to have the next Round of the talks very soon.
	But in the middle of it, suddenly Israel torpedoed the negotiating table.
	We were sitting at the negotiating table when it happened.
	And by doing this, they totally ruined and destroyed diplomacy.
	Well, that's weird because the Trump administration said over and over and over, actually, that Iran was basically jacking around the United States, that he gave them 60 days to negotiate, and then they didn't actually negotiate in good faith.
	They kept saying over and over and over they would not give up their nuclear facilities, period.
	Steve Woodkoff, who was very much biased toward a deal, was unable to make any sort of deal.
	You can ask members of the administration this.
	No follow-up questions, none.
	Zero follow-up questions on this particular matter.
	Well, how about the Iranians claiming that the IAEA had full access?
	So Tucker asked about the IAEA, and here was the response.
	There have been news reports that you believe your government believes that the IAEA was spying on the government of Iran and passing information to Israel.
	Do you believe that?
	And if so, do you have evidence that that's true that the world could see?
	I would like to tell you that we were, yes, somehow pessimistic about the activities of the IAEA because somehow we realized that Israel could get information from the inspections which were carried out by the IAEA, but it never prevented the IAEA from carrying out their activities inside Iran.
	And they had full access to supervise and to have surveillance over our nuclear facilities.
	Okay, so first of all, this blows up a couple of Tucker's already existing narratives.
	One is that there was no ongoing nuclear program and that Israel basically sold the lie to the United States to get the B-2 bombers to fly over Fordo.
	Well, that is the president of Iran acknowledging, according to him, that the IAEA had full access, was leaking the intel to the Israelis who were then giving it to the Americans.
	So actually, the intel came from on the ground in Iran, according to the Iranians.
	But put that aside, he's lying when he says the IAEA had full access.
	Here is a piece, March 9th, 2020, from the IAEA.
	Quote, the agency has identified a number of questions related to possible undeclared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities at three locations that have not been declared by Iran, says IAEA Director General, Rafael Mariano-Grossi, calling on Iran to cooperate immediately and fully with the IAEA and provide prompt access to locations, which it has refused to let agency inspectors visit.
	Just June 12, 2025, 19 of the 35 countries on the board of the IAEA backed a motion declaring Iran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in 20 years.
	So that doesn't sound very like, that would be a great point to, you know, maybe ask a follow-up, like a little bit of pushback.
	Now, my favorite, I think, here is once Tucker asks about death to America.
	And the president of Iran says, no, by death to America, it's just like when when, it's just like when Julius Malema in South Africa says killed the boar.
	He says, kill the boar.
	It's just figurative.
	It's just a figure of speech, death to America.
	When they say death to the United States, it doesn't mean death to, they don't mean death to the people of the United States or even to the officials of the United States.
	They mean death to crimes, death to killing and carnage, death to supporting, killing others, death to insecurity and instability.
	This is, have you ever heard that Iranian killing an American?
	Have you ever heard that?
	Or a terrorist that was Iranian and he carried out a terrorist attack against the Americans?
	No, it was your president who confessed that the Americans created the ISIS in our region and they were responsible for this wrong image that is portrayed of religion or the Muslims in the world.
	No pushback, none.
	So the president of Iran literally just said that Iranians have never killed Americans.
	Yes, they have.
	Yes, they absolutely freaking have.
	Yes, they have.
	Iranian-backed militias Hezbollah in Lebanon murdered hundreds of American Marines.
	Iranian-backed militias in Iraq killed thousands of people, including over a thousand Americans in Iraq.
	Iranian militias all around the region have threatened Americans, including, again, Iran directly firing a missile.
	I understand that they pre-coordinated it with the United States so the United States did not blow them away, but they did in fact fire a missile at a U.S. base two weeks ago in Qatar.
	I remember because Tucker Carlson was almost crying about it on air, saying it was a tragedy for his friends in Qatar, his allies in Qatar.
	He doesn't know what an ally is when it comes to Israel, but apparently Qatar is a deep and abiding ally.
	By the way, again, this puts Tucker in his failure to ask any basic follow-ups at odds with the President of the United States here as President Trump, June 22nd.
	For 40 years, Iran has been saying death to America, death to Israel.
	They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs with roadside bombs.
	That was their specialty.
	We lost over a thousand people, and hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East and around the world have died as a direct result of their hate, in particular.
	So that might have made a good follow-up question.
	Tucker also provided a forum for the president of Iran to suggest that there was no actual fatwa on Donald Trump, that they've not been trying to kill Trump at all, actually.
	Of course, he sort of has to say that now that he suggested openly in his interview with Senator Cruz, that if people had attempted to kill Trump at the behest of the Iranian government, we'd have to nuke Iran.
	Here is Tucker Carlson with the Iranian president.
	To the best of my knowledge, they have not issued decrees or fatwas against any individual, against Donald Trump.
	And first off, it has nothing to do with the Iranian government or to His Eminence, the Supreme Leader of Iran.
	What they actually meant by the fatwa was In condemnation of an insult to a religion or religious personalities.
	And they were actually saying that this is deplorable, this is unacceptable.
	So it was not directed towards the U.S. president or any other individual.
	Well, I mean, that's kind of weird because actually, here's a video of the IRGC commander in 2023 saying that, God willing, they'll be able to kill President Trump.
	That's awkward a little.
	But it would be awkward if he had been asked the question, but he wasn't asked the question because, of course, no follow-ups.
	God willing, he'll be able to kill Trump or Pompeo or General McKenzie or the military commanders who gave the order.
	Those are the ones who should be killed.
	But regardless, they had taken military action.
	We had to take military action in response.
	And by the way, there are two separate actual fatwas that have been issued against President Trump.
	One from Grand Ayatollah Makrim Shirazi, another from Ayatollah Hossein Nouri Khamedani.
	And you may have noticed, as I said at the top, that Iran is an Islamic theocracy.
	It is a dictatorship.
	People are not issuing random fatwas in Iran on the basis of their own opinions.
	That is not how any of that works.
	So no follow-ups.
	But it's the approach that's notable.
	Notice the difference in approach between how he approached Senator Cruz and how he approaches an absolute fabulous serial liar on behalf of an enemy regime of the United States that declares death to America with the greatest, with the greatest of care.
	Zero follow-ups, zero pushback.
	And of course, that's not a shock.
	He did the exact same thing with Vladimir Putin.
	And when Tucker Carlson interviewed Vladimir Putin, everything that he did with regard to Vladimir Putin was designed to allow Vladimir Putin to basically tell lies unhindered.
	Here, for example, was Tucker Carlson with Vladimir Putin again.
	This is just a year and a half ago.
	As soon as the political leadership decided to use the U.S. dollar as a tool of political struggle, a blow was dealt to this American power.
	I would not like to use any strong language, but it is a stupid thing to do and a grave mistake.
	Again, I would like to point out at this point that after Tucker's absolutely sycophantic interview with Vladimir Putin, and again, I don't blame Tucker for letting Putin talk for a very long time.
	At the time, if you go back and listen to what I said, you know what?
	I can't judge Tucker's motives.
	I'm not sure exactly why he's doing what he's doing.
	I think his motives have become rather clearer over time, which is that he's quite fond of regimes that do not like the United States.
	He seems to be quite fond of those.
	And I think that's because he has a view of the United States that is rooted in the idea that America has essentially perverted herself since World War II.
	That is something that he has suggested openly multiple times on his pro.
	Whatever the rationale, what he is doing is very clear.
	I mean, right after that interview with Vladimir Putin, he did another interview, this one, I believe, in Dubai, in which he was asked why he didn't ask Vladimir Putin about tossing people out of third story windows.
	And he said, well, listen, every leader kills people.
	They all kill people.
	Every leader kills people, including my leader.
	Every leader kills people.
	Some kill more than others.
	Leadership requires killing people.
	Sorry.
	That's why I wouldn't want to be a leader.
	That press restriction is universal in the United States.
	I know because I've lived it.
	I've, you know, asked my former, you know, I've had a lot of jobs.
	And I've done this for 34 years, and I know how it works.
	And there's more censorship in Russia than there is in the United States, but there's a great deal in the United States.
	Again, that sort of moral equivalence, it is necessary in order to promote some of the world's worst regimes.
	That sort of moral equivalence.
	By the way, what did Vladimir Putin actually think of Tucker Carlson's interview?
	Quote from Politico.
	This was just last year, February 15th, 2024.
	Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday said he didn't get complete satisfaction from his interview with Tucker Carlson.
	He said he thought Carlson was a dangerous person because I honestly thought he'd be aggressive and ask so-called trap questions.
	And I wasn't just ready for that.
	I wanted it.
	It would have given me the opportunity to respond sharply and kind, but he chose a different tactic.
	So essentially, he said he couldn't believe that Tucker was that soft with him.
	Now, again, I don't know explicitly what Tucker Carlson's motives are here.
	All I can say is when Tucker wants to be aggressive, he's quite aggressive.
	There's a reason he's not being aggressive with the president of Iran.
	There's a reason he wasn't aggressive with the dictator of Russia.
	There's a reason he's not aggressive with the Qataris.
	There's a reason for that.
	And none of that says to me, if you're being super generous with those people, but extremely aggressive with, say, Senator Ted Cruz, I'd love to see how that stacks up as America first.
	Truly, I would love to see that.
	And I'd love to see him explain to President Trump why it is that he is allowing the president of Iran, without any sort of pushback at all, to make claims like death to America is essentially an empty chant that just means we don't like bad things, or that they're not trying to kill President Trump, which is not true, or they're not trying to develop nuclear weapons, which is not true.
	No pushback whatsoever.
	Folks, how you consume information is your business.
	It's a free country.
	I'm not telling you not to listen to Tucker or enjoy his programming or recognize that he's a super talented guy, which obviously he is.
	What I am telling you is you ought to take it with a grain of salt.
	You ought to actually look at the things that are being told to you and wonder what are the motivations of the people who are telling them to you?
	What is it that they are saying?
	Are they actually being open, honest, and truthful about what they mean?
	Are they saying something different behind closed doors than what they are saying publicly?
	Those are all questions you should be asking.
	It's a very dissolute informational environment.
	Lots of information coming from a lot of different places all the time.
	And that puts a greater onus on the audience to try to discern what's true from what's false.
	But the answer for that is a stronger filter, not no filter at all.
	All righty, coming up, we'll get to Elon Musk, who is now talking about a third party.
	The show continues right now.
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