Dec. 1, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:13
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| President Trump pledges an end to third world mass migration. | ||
| We get into it. | ||
| All the details surrounding the Afghan national terror attack against two members of the National Guard. | ||
| Also, Somali welfare fraud, all of it tying together. | ||
| We'll get into it first. | ||
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| Well, over the course of the Thanksgiving weekend, President Trump went into high gear talking about the necessity to deport all migrants from the third world and to stop further third world migration into the United States. | ||
| This has been a long time coming. | ||
| Obviously, the president of the United States had said this all the way back in 2015, 2016. | ||
| When he took office in 2017, you'll recall that one of the very first things that he did was attempt a migration moratorium from a series of countries where it'd be very, very difficult to vet people. | ||
| Well, now all of this is coming to a head. | ||
| On Thursday, President Trump said he would permanently pause all immigration from what he called third world countries, according to NBC News. | ||
| He demanded a program of reverse migration as he intensified his rhetoric after a National Guard shooting that happened in Washington, D.C. While we were out on Thanksgiving break, there was a horrifying shooting, two National Guard members shot in Washington, D.C. by an Afghan refugee who had apparently been working with the CIA while he was in Afghanistan and then migrated to the United States as part of Joe Biden's gigantic shipment of Afghan refugees into the United States. | ||
| The vetting process could have been flawed or he could have been radicalized. | ||
| We'll get into that in a moment. | ||
| President Trump said, quote, even as we have progressed technologically, immigration policy has eroded those gains and living conditions for many. | ||
| I will permanently pause migration from all third world countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden's auto pen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States or is incapable of loving our country, end all federal benefits and subsidies to non-citizens of our country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any foreign national who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western civilization. | ||
| These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal auto pen approval process. | ||
| Only reverse migration can fully cure this situation. | ||
| Other than that, happy Thanksgiving to all except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for. | ||
| You won't be here for long. | ||
| Again, all this happening in the aftermath of a dual set of stories, one of them being the Afghan national shooting up a couple of members of the National Guard and killing one. | ||
| The other story being this unbelievable story of Somali welfare fraud happening in the state of Minnesota. | ||
| Christine Ohm of the Department of National Security, she said that President Trump is determined to stop all processes from third world countries. | ||
| Here is what the Secretary of Homeland Security had to say. | ||
| The president is absolutely determined to stop all processes at this point in time from third world countries until we can have a thorough opportunity to go through these individuals, know that they're here for the right intentions, and that they even should be in our country to begin with. | ||
| The State Department then announced immediately that they would pause visa issuance for individuals traveling on Afghan passports and said, quote, the department is taking all necessary steps to protect U.S. national security and public safety. | ||
| Again, all of this is happening in the aftermath of that terror attack by an Afghan national who worked with a CIA-backed group during the war in Afghanistan. | ||
| According to the Washington Post, that National Guard shooting suspect was in one of the CIA's so-called zero units. | ||
| The zero units were units that were working with the CIA in order to ensure security in Afghanistan. | ||
| According to the Washington Post, the person whose name was Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, apparently drove across the country to carry out Wednesday's attack and was detained moments after opening fire on Sarah Bextrom, 20, an army specialist from West Virginia and Air Force Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, 24, used a 357 Smith and Wesson revolver. | ||
| Beckstrom died of her injuries. | ||
| Wolf is critically injured as well. | ||
| Now, apparently, he came to the United States in September 2021. | ||
| You'll remember that is when Joe Biden disastrously withdrew from Afghanistan in the most ignominious defeat in modern American history. | ||
| He just decided to pull out full scale and hand the country back to the Taliban with no plan for transition, no security protocols followed nothing. | ||
| And then, because the United States was abandoning 38 million people to the predations of the Taliban, the United States under Joe Biden decided to bring in tens of thousands of Afghan refugees. | ||
| Be very difficult to vet all of those people, considering, again, the security situation in Afghanistan, a terror-rich haven, not particularly good. | ||
| Apparently, this person worked with the U.S. government, including the CIA. | ||
| He entered the United States in 2021 as part of Operation Allies Welcome, a Biden-era program. | ||
| And then he was actually granted asylum under President Trump this April, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation. | ||
| He had worked with the U.S. government, including the CIA. | ||
| CIA Director John Ratcliffe said that the shooter was a member of a partner force in Kandahar. | ||
| He was part of one of the CIA's zero units. | ||
| They were involved in combat missions to seize or kill suspected terrorists. | ||
| They were involved in anti-terror raids. | ||
| Now, as we're going to discuss in a moment, unclear whether he was a radical when he was shipped to the United States or whether he self-radicalized while in the United States. | ||
| Elliot Ackerman, writing for the Free Press, describes what the Zero units did. | ||
| He said the CIA-sponsored counterterrorism pursuit teams, later known as Zero Units, were created in the days after 9-11 to hunt senior members of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. | ||
| The Zero units, unlike the Afghan Army, work directly for the United States government. | ||
| They're recruited from throughout Afghanistan, given specific military training, and performed many dangerous missions, among them night raids against high-level targets. | ||
| The zero units existed for the entire duration of the war, and given their classified nature, they allowed administrations of both parties to have more troops operating in Afghanistan than was reported to the United States public. | ||
| At any given time, the number of zero unit soldiers numbered in the thousands operating from bases all around the country, including Kandahar. | ||
| So, as Elliot Ackerman points out, the zero units were people who were working closely with the United States military. | ||
| Also, this person would have been vetted, according to Elliot Ackerman, to join Elite Zero Units. | ||
| He writes, Afghan volunteers were subjected to extensive vetting, including background checks and polygraphs. | ||
| This shooter first entered the Zero Units in 2012 and served under both the Obama and Trump administrations. | ||
| He was granted humanitarian parole into the U.S. in 2021, and then again was granted asylum when his case came under review in 2025 under the Trump administration. | ||
| Christy Noam, Department of Homeland Security head, she says actually that when he was shipped in, he wasn't a problem. | ||
| He was radicalized later through connections already in the country, which, by the way, is significantly more dangerous. | ||
| Okay, that is a massive problem, like a much worse problem than just bringing people in from cultures that are non-communicative and non-coalescing with Western civilization. | ||
| That you can stop, right? | ||
| That you can do what President Trump is saying, just stop immigration from third world countries, as he says. | ||
| But if, in fact, there are people who are being brought in who initially are somewhat friendly to the United States or have worked with the United States and then are being radicalized in the United States, you have to start asking some pretty serious questions about which organizations in the United States here, like at home, are actually radicalizing people. | ||
| And again, this would fit with a different pattern. | ||
| The pattern would not be, we're bringing in migrants who are then committing crimes, right? | ||
| An illegal immigration problem. | ||
| Then what you'd really be talking about is an Islamicization problem, a radical Islamicization problem inside the United States. | ||
| And it would fit with lone wolf attacks, ISIS-inspired attacks, or ISIS-connected attacks. | ||
| And there have been a whole list of people in the United States who have been radicalized inside the United States by ISIS, associated groups, social media. | ||
| And that ranges from the Fort Hood shooting all the way through the 2025 New Orleans truck attack, in which an ISIS-inspired person killed 14 people. | ||
| It's amazing how terrorist attacks like that get completely memory-bohl. | ||
| Like you don't even remember that happening in 2025, but it killed 14. | ||
| I mean, that was again the beginning of this year, and it killed 14 people. | ||
| And we've already forgotten about it because the way that the media works, if somebody is inspired by ISIS or a radical Islamic group and they commit a terror attack in the United States, we just memory hole it. | ||
| The same thing happened in 2016 by the Orlando nightclub shooting, in which a shooter killed 49 people. | ||
| You remember at the Orlando Pulse Nightclub, the deadliest mass shooting in American history at that time. | ||
| And the shooter, in that case, pledged allegiance to ISIS. | ||
| And instead, we got a national debate about whether Christians were too intolerant toward gay people, even though it was an Islamic terror attack, or the 2015 San Bernardino terror attack, in which a couple of people who communicated with ISIS via encrypted messages killed 14 people and injured 22 others. | ||
| Okay, so radicalization in the United States is a massive problem. | ||
| And by the way, requires the FBI and the DOJ to actually do the thing that they are supposed to do. | ||
| Track down the groups doing the radicalizing, follow them around, monitor the places where the radicalization is occurring. | ||
| And that is a significantly harder problem to solve, really, a much harder law enforcement problem to solve than just shutting the borders, which is what President Trump is attempting to do. | ||
| By the way, these are not mutually exclusive. | ||
| You can shut the borders to immigration and mass migration from third world countries, and we should. | ||
| But also, in this particular case, it seems like the problem, maybe he was letting the guy in the country in the first place. | ||
| That's a fair argument. | ||
| But at the time, if he was working with the zero units and had been vetted, then the real problem is how he got radicalized after he came to the United States. | ||
| Again, you can say he shouldn't have come in anyway, because if you're coming from a third world country, why is your first place of respite the United States? | ||
| Go somewhere else. | ||
| There are plenty of other countries on planet Earth. | ||
| We believe he was radicalized since he's been here in this country. | ||
| We do believe it was through connections in his home community and state. | ||
| And we're going to continue to talk to those who interacted with him, who were his family members, talked to them. | ||
| So far, we've had some participation, but anyone who has the information on this needs to know that we will be coming after you. | ||
| Apparently, there are warning signs. | ||
| Apparently, there are always warning signs. | ||
| The New York Post reports that a leading national refugee agency was warned multiple times. | ||
| The Afghan terrorist suspect accused of murdering one National Guard member and critically injuring another was spiraling into mania and mental illness beginning in 2023. | ||
| Again, that goes to the theory that this person was, in fact, vetted when he came into the United States. | ||
| That's why presumably he was granted asylum by the Trump administration in 2025. | ||
| Remember, entered in 2021 under Joe Biden. | ||
| Four years later was granted full asylum by the Trump administration. | ||
| And we'll get to Christy Noam's kind of non-response response to that problem in a moment. | ||
| Apparently, the shooter's behavior was so disturbing, a local community advocate reached out to a refugee organization for help, according to emails to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants seen by the Associated Press. | ||
| The community member wrote, quote, Rahmanullah has not been functional as a person, father, and provider since March of 2023. | ||
| He quit his job that month. | ||
| His behavior has changed greatly. | ||
| The community member said he feared that LeConwal had become suicidal. | ||
| The 29-year-old Afghan refugee, of course, was brought to the United States in 2021, and he moved to Bellingham, Washington with his wife and their five young sons. | ||
| Apparently, he struggled to assimilate, which again goes to mass migration from third world countries, failed to hold down a steady job or commit to learning English. | ||
| Apparently, alternating between periods of dark isolation and reckless travel, he sometimes spent weeks in his darkened room not speaking to anyone, not even his wife or his older kids. | ||
| These manic episodes, he would take off in the family car and drive non-stop. | ||
| He failed to stay in contact with the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services as was mandated by the terms of his entry into the United States, except for interim weeks where he would do the right things according to the email. | ||
| And apparently, when his wife would leave him with the kids for a week, traveling to visit relatives, his kids would go to school unwashed in dirty clothes without even having eaten. | ||
| Apparently, there were concerns raised about his kids. | ||
| So red flags, aplenty, and nothing was done. | ||
| We'll get to more on this in a moment. | ||
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| Now, Kristen Welker over at NBC News was asking Chrissy Noam about this, and she points out, you know, you're pointing out he shouldn't have come in 2021. | ||
| That's fine, but you guys granted him asylum in 2025. | ||
| I just want to be very clear about this because his asylum was approved in April of this year on the Trump administration's watch. | ||
| So just to be very clear, was there a vetting process in place to approve that asylum request? | ||
| Yeah, the vetting process all happened under Joe Biden's administration. | ||
| Was he vetted when he was granted asylum? | ||
| Are you saying he wasn't vetted when he was granted? | ||
| Vetting is happening when they come into the country, and that was completely abandoned under Joe Biden's administration. | ||
| Okay, so, you know, again, yes and no. | ||
| I mean, the answer here is yes and no. | ||
| And two problems can be problems at once. | ||
| One can be the original vetting procedure or whether the initial place for Afghan refugees to go in the aftermath of Joe Biden's cowardly withdrawal from Afghanistan should have been the United States. | ||
| My answer there would have been no. | ||
| It should not have been the United States. | ||
| We should have figured out someplace else for people to go. | ||
| But then again, I was also not an advocate of withdrawing precipitously from Afghanistan in the first place without any sort of transitional plan for the government to remain. | ||
| And then there's the second question, which is the radicalization question, which remains a very, very hot topic. | ||
| Meanwhile, again, this is a bigger issue than just this one shooter. | ||
| Apparently, according to the Department of Homeland Security, investigators arrested an Afghan national over the weekend who allegedly made a social media post about building a bomb and threatening to blow up a building in Fort Worth, Texas. | ||
| Mohamed Dawouk Alikoze's arrest took place on Tuesday, according to Trisha McLaughlin, an assistant secretary with DHS. | ||
| This person was arrested on state terror charges and is now being held at a corrections center in Terrence County, Texas, according to court records. | ||
| Apparently, this particular would-be bomber posted a video of himself on TikTok indicating he was building a bomb with an intended target of the Fort Worth area. | ||
| So at least he picked up the American custom of posting all your worst ideas on TikTok. | ||
| At least that. | ||
| That's how he was caught. | ||
| He was arrested on Tuesday by the Texas Department of Public Safety and the FBI as well. | ||
| So even Democrats are on the defensive about this at this point. | ||
| Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona was asked about the vetting of Afghan immigrants. | ||
| He said, Listen, I don't think there's any question that everybody needs better vetting. | ||
| There's no question about that. | ||
| Are you saying that all 190,000 Afghans in America should be revetted, that the process... | ||
| No, I am not saying that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| People should be vetted. | ||
| Hey, if you identify a certain number of individuals that you have another question about, I think that's fine to do that. | ||
| There needs to be an investigation and find out, you know, why did this guy do this? | ||
| Was he radicalized in Afghanistan or here in the United States? | ||
| And if it makes sense to change some things, I think we need to do that. | ||
| Okay, so obviously that is true. | ||
| Now, this connects with another gigantic story that broke over the course of last week. | ||
| And that, of course, is a big story from the New York Times about a huge amount of Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota. | ||
| Now, of course, there have been serious questions to be asked about the widespread fraud and, yes, terrorism connections in the Somali community in Minnesota. | ||
| My checks with our friends and sponsors over at Comet, that is a project of perplexity about the history of Somali migration into the United States. | ||
| How many Somali immigrants have entered the U.S. since 1990? | ||
| Where do they live? | ||
| According to Perplexity, between 1990 and 2025, the U.S. has seen significant Somali immigration, with estimates suggesting between 140,000 and 167,000 Somali immigrants have settled in the country over this period. | ||
| Okay, that is up from 2,500 total Somali population in 1990. | ||
| It has grown due to refugee resettlement and family reunification. | ||
| Minnesota has the largest Somali community. | ||
| Ohio and Washington state also have large Somali communities, 21,000 and 15,000 Somali residents, respectively. | ||
| Well, the New York Times did a bit of journalism, like an actual bit of journalism, when they went ahead and actually reported serious welfare fraud problems in these areas of Minnesota. | ||
| According to the New York Times, the fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness. | ||
| Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the COVID-19 pandemic. | ||
| At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency, but as new schemes targeting the state's generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality. | ||
| Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota's Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that build state agencies for millions of dollars worth of social services that were never provided. | ||
| Federal prosecutors say 59 people have been convicted in these schemes so far and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers' money has been stolen in three plots they are currently investigating. | ||
| That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its entire Department of Corrections. | ||
| Minnesota's fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans, and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors. | ||
| Outrage has swelled among Minnesotans. | ||
| Fraud has turned into a potent political issue in a competitive campaign season. | ||
| Governor Tim Walz and fellow Democrats are now being asked to explain how so much money was stolen on their watch. | ||
| President Trump weighed in, calling Minnesota a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity and saying that Somali perpetrators should be sent back to where they came from. | ||
| So apparently, there are about 80,000 people in Minnesota, Somali Americans in Minnesota. | ||
| And debate over the fraud has opened new rifts between the state's Somali community and other Minnesotans and has left some Somali Americans saying they're unfacing a new they're facing a new layer of suspicion against all of them rather than the small group accused of fraud. | ||
| But of course, the reality is that importing gigantic waves of Somali immigrants into Minnesota of all places might create some culture clash, actually. | ||
| Now, when you read down in the story, one of the things you find hilariously is that when allegations were first made about welfare fraud in Minnesota, the first response was, we can't look into this. | ||
| It's racist. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I can't believe it either. | ||
| According to the New York Times, the first public sign of a major problem in the state's social services system came in 2022 when federal prosecutors began charging defendants in connection to a program aimed at feeding hungry children. | ||
| The prosecutors focused on a Minneapolis nonprofit organization called Feeding Our Future, which became a partner to dozens of local businesses that enrolled as feeding sites. | ||
| State agencies reimbursed the group and its partners for invoices, claiming to have fed tens of thousands of kids, but all of it was fake. | ||
| The meals were non-existent. | ||
| Business owners instead spent the funds on luxury cars, houses, even real estate projects abroad. | ||
| Behind the scenes, federal investigators realized that this was not an isolated incident. | ||
| In one case, hundreds of providers were reimbursed for assistance they claimed to have provided to people at risk for homelessness, but apparently none of those services were actually provided. | ||
| The program's annual cost ballooned to more than $104 million last year from a budgeted projection of $2.6 million when it began in 2020. | ||
| So again, some of this is culture, for sure. | ||
| Some of this is migration, for sure. | ||
| And some of this is gigantic sacks of cash very often tend to be stolen by malign actors. | ||
| So again, much of this was ignored, specifically because of the culture clash issues, because of concerns about racism, concerns about bigotry. | ||
| When we talk about the Rotherham scandal in the UK and the fact that the authorities literally covered up grooming and raping of children for years, white kids, at the hands of largely Pakistani immigrants. | ||
| And it was covered up for fear that that story might lend gravitas to anti-immigration folks on Britain's national party right. | ||
| When we talk about, understand that same sort of sentiment exists on the left in the United States. | ||
| According to the New York Times, red flags in the meals program surfaced in the early months of the pandemic. | ||
| The money kept flowing anyway. | ||
| In 2020, Minnesota Department of Education officials who administered the program became overwhelmed by the number of applicants seeking to register new feeding sites and began raising questions about the plausibility of some invoices. | ||
| Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit group that was the largest provider in the pandemic program, responded with a warning. | ||
| In an email, the group told the state agency, failing to promptly approve new applicants from minority-owned businesses would result in a lawsuit featuring accusations of racism that would be sprawled across the news. | ||
| And then Feeding Our Future sued the agency. | ||
| So, again, perfectly obvious what was happening here. | ||
| Kaisa Magan, a Somali American who formerly worked as a fraud investigator for the Minnesota Attorney General's office, said elected officials in the state were reluctant to take more assertive action in response to allegations in the Somali community. | ||
| McGann said, quote, there's a perception that forcefully tackling this issue might cause political backlash among the Somali community, which is a core voting block for Democrats, saying the quiet part out loud right there. | ||
| Pretty incredible stuff. | ||
| President Trump responded to this again by doubling down on his suggestion that third world migration be reversed. | ||
| President Trump actually suggested that Ilhan Omar be thrown out of the United States. | ||
| She's the representative from this area, of course, over allegations that she married her brother. | ||
| He said while speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Somalia, where you have a congressman, goes around telling everybody about our constitution, but she supposedly came into our country by marrying her brother. | ||
| If that's true, she shouldn't be a congressperson. | ||
| We should throw her the hell out of the country. | ||
| And then he said, we don't need people coming into the country telling us what to do. | ||
| Which again, the president is right. | ||
| The president also went after the governor of Minnesota, who is presiding over all of this and called him retarded in the process. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In that same post, you mentioned Tim Walz, and you called him what many Americans do find in a fixed word retarded. | |
| Do you stand by that claim of calling Tim Walz retarded? | ||
| Yeah, I think there's something wrong with him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Sure. | ||
| Do you have a problem with him? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I think there's something wrong with him. | ||
| Anybody that would do what he did, anybody that would allow those people into his state can pay billions of dollars out to Somalia. | ||
| We give billions of dollars to Somalia. | ||
| It's not even a country because it doesn't function like a country. | ||
| It's got a name, but it doesn't function like a country. | ||
| There's something wrong with Walls. | ||
| I mean, he ain't wrong. | ||
| And I understand the media are now going to call a ticky-tack foul on President Trump for using the word retarded, which, again, I'm sorry, but has re-entered common parlance. | ||
| Not to get into a linguistic dispute about the word retarded, but every time in the United States there is an attempt to wipe out of the language some term that people use that is edgy about people who they believe are stupid, it is then replaced by another term. | ||
| That's just the history of these terms. | ||
| But Tim Walz is attempting to grasp onto that to avoid the consequences of his own failed governance. | ||
| Here he was being very offended by the use of the word retarded in relation to him, but apparently not all that offended by billions of dollars in fraud from the Somali community that votes consistently Democratic. | ||
| Donald Trump insulting me is a badge of honor for me, but I think we all know as both as an educator for a couple decades and as a parent, using that term is just so damaging. | ||
| It's hurtful. | ||
| We have fought three decades to get this out of our schools. | ||
| Kids know better than to use it. | ||
| But look, this is what Donald Trump has done. | ||
| He's normalized this type of hateful behavior and this type of language. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| So your defense here is that it's offensive to use the word retired. | ||
| Like this is not a top 100 priority for Americans. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| If you're trying to avoid responsibility for what just happened in your state over the course of years by saying that the president is a bad man for using the word retire, good luck to you on that one. | ||
| Douglas Murray has a great column over in the New York Post talking about this. | ||
| He says, you cannot just leave borders open or allow in large numbers of people with totally different value systems from your own. | ||
| This is the mistake many European countries have committed in recent years. | ||
| They've opened their homes up to people from almost every part of the world where there is civil strife, war, or just a lower standard of living. | ||
| The results can be seen everywhere. | ||
| It's the reason why a country like Sweden, that used to be such a placid, decent place, has become one of the most violent countries in the world, not actually at war. | ||
| Grenade attacks and gang warfare, these things were recently alien to Sweden, not anymore. | ||
| It's the same here in the United States. | ||
| The effects are more dispersed, so the problem can be covered up for longer. | ||
| But Douglas Murray says all of this begs the question: why should a group of people be given sanctuary in the United States, presumably saying they were fleeing from terror, only to use their time in the United States committing fraud to send to terrorists? | ||
| How does that make any sense? | ||
| The president of the United States, of course, is right about this particular issue, and Democrats are freaking out about it, as they should. | ||
| We'll get to more on this in a moment. | ||
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| Now, I have to say, there is a clip that is going around of a New York Times contributing op-ed writer named Wajahat Ali, and it is so telling and astonishing. | ||
| He basically spells out the United States, why the United States failed in allowing mass migration from third world countries. | ||
| He means this as a sort of, as a sort of brag, I suppose, a sort of audacious statement in the face of Trumpian racism. | ||
| But what he actually ends up doing is justifying Trump's entire program. | ||
| Here's Wajahat Ali. | ||
| You have lost. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You lost. | |
| The mistake that you made is you let us in in the first place. | ||
| That's the thing with brown people. | ||
| I'm going to say this as a brown person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's a lot of us. | |
| Like a lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's like 1.2 billion in India. | |
| There's more than 200 million in Pakistan. | ||
| There's like 170 million in Bangladesh. | ||
| Those are just the people over there. | ||
| I'm even talking about the folks who are expats or immigrants. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's a bunch of us. | |
| And we breed. | ||
| We're a breeding people. | ||
| I mean, my goodness, my goodness. | ||
| So, all of the white supremacists who've been talking about so-called replacement theory, the idea that migrants are going to be brought into the United States to replace the domestically born population, you're just saying the thing they're saying, but in the reverse way. | ||
| What in the hell? | ||
| And of course, this speaks to the reality, which is forget about the color of the people coming in, because that is irrelevant to character. | ||
| The character of the people coming in, the cultures from which they come, the countries from which they come, the concepts and religious beliefs they hold dear. | ||
| These things, of course, matter to the definition of a country. | ||
| And when you bring people in en masse, that is going to change the cultural fabric of a country. | ||
| Duh. | ||
| That's the whole point, apparently, according to Wajahat Ali and people like Wajahat Ali. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| You've lost? | ||
| What is the thing that they lost? | ||
| What is the thing they lost? | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| Presumably, what he means is you've lost the country. | ||
| You've lost the country to people like Wajahad Ali and their belief systems. | ||
| I mean, has there ever been a stronger case made for restricting mass migration and reversing much of the migration that's happened into the United States? | ||
| All this is coming to a head for a reason. | ||
| It's coming to a head, not just because of isolated incidents like what's happening in Minnesota, which was more systemic than isolated, or what happened in Washington, D.C. with the shooting of the National Guard members. | ||
| This is happening all over the West because the West, apparently, many in the West have decided to wake up to the fact that they never should have allowed, through their niceness and their kindness, their civilizations to be eaten from within by people who enter and then take advantage of all the benefits on offer only to fight that civilization and destroy that civilization. | ||
| And again, I go back to the original point with regards to the shooter in Washington, D.C. | ||
| That person came to the United States after working with the United States in Afghanistan, apparently, according to what we know. | ||
| And that person was radicalized in the United States to hate the United States. | ||
| Something is deeply wrong. | ||
| There are cancerous centers inside the United States that are spreading nasty and terrible anti-American ideologies and radicalizing people in the United States. | ||
| So now you have a cancer from without and within. | ||
| People attempting to enter who have the wrong ideas, who have bad ideas about the world and bad ideas about our civilization, and then come here and take advantage. | ||
| And I talk about in my book, Lions and Scavengers, the Barbarians. | ||
| And then you have people who are radicalized by people in the West. | ||
| These are existential problems for the West. | ||
| When President Trump talks about ending third world migration and reversing the migration and fighting this growing cancerous problem in the United States, and again, I'm not talking about humans as cancers, I'm talking about ideologies as cancers here. | ||
| Then, when you talk about reversing the process that has happened, which is the hollowing out of the American body politic by sectarian groups seeking to destroy Western civilization from within, then when you talk about that, no wonder that is an increasingly popular political program, not only in the United States, but in Europe as well. | ||
| So, meanwhile, Democrats are attempting to spin up allegations that the president of the United States is issuing illegal military orders. | ||
| So, you'll recall that Senator Mark Kelly, along with Senator Alyssa Slotkin from Michigan and a bunch of other Democrats who had served in the military or in the CIA, that they put out a video calling on members of the military to reject what they called illegal orders. | ||
| The problem with that argument is that they are going to post facto determine what an illegal order constituted. | ||
| So, that's kind of risky. | ||
| If you're a member of the military and you follow an order, any order, and then later Democrats get elected to the presidency and determine that the order was in fact illegal and they move to prosecute you based on following that order, that is a problem. | ||
| That is why it's kind of dangerous what's happening with these Democrats. | ||
| So, the president of the United States, the DOJ, they've talked about the possibility of court-martialing Mark Kelly because, of course, he's a veteran. | ||
| And here he was responding. | ||
| In my case, Secretary Hegset said, prosecute him under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for, by the way, reciting the Uniform Code of Military Justice. | ||
| It's obviously ridiculous. | ||
| Dana, I'm not backing down. | ||
| These guys don't scare me. | ||
| They're not serious people. | ||
| I mean, the president of the United States and the Secretary of Defense, neither of them. | ||
| Meanwhile, Senator Chris Van Holland, perhaps the dumbest member of the Senate outside of Maisie Hirono of Hawaii, says that when Democrats say they should disobey orders, members of the military, they're just citing the law of the land. | ||
| So we have here six real folks who have been dedicated to our country in the military who simply cited the law of the land, which is that our men and women in the military should follow lawful orders, which clearly has become more important than ever right now, now that we have this disclosure about Secretary Hegseth essentially saying kill them all. | ||
| Now, the reality is it's going to be very difficult to punish these senators for saying what they are saying because, again, they can hide behind the shield of the sort of rhetoric of the law, which says, of course, of course, no member of the military should obey any legal order. | ||
| As the Associated Press reports, some say the Pentagon is misreading military law to go after Kelly as a retired Navy fighter pilot. | ||
| Others say the Arizona Democrat can't be prosecuted as a member of Congress. | ||
| And then, of course, there are former military prosecutors who say that he didn't do anything wrong. | ||
| Now, again, there have been courts martial of retired service members in the past decade. | ||
| However, this would be pretty unusual, obviously. | ||
| And again, Kelly is going to claim that he didn't do anything illegal. | ||
| He just said don't follow illegal orders. | ||
| The problem, of course, lies in how do you define an illegal order? | ||
| And is it, in fact, dangerous for members of the military or past members of the military to go around telling current members of the military, quote unquote, don't follow illegal orders without actually defining what that means. | ||
| And this issue is coming to a head over alleged war crimes that have been committed by the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. | ||
| And so all of this is being fostered by an article in the Washington Post about the destruction of these Venezuelan drug boats. | ||
| According to the Washington Post, the longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs. | ||
| Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. | ||
| The order was to kill everybody, one of them said. | ||
| A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. | ||
| For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. | ||
| As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt. | ||
| Two survivors were still clinging to the smoldering wreck. | ||
| The special operations commander overseeing the September 2nd attack ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth's instructions, according to two people familiar with the matter. | ||
| The two men were then blown apart in the water. | ||
| So the argument is that the second strike here amounts to a war crime. | ||
| That once people are in the water, once they have essentially been disabled, that at that point, killing them is a war crime. | ||
| According to the Washington Post, the alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an armed conflict with the United States, according to officials and experts. | ||
| Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats amounts to murder, according to Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised special operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaigns. | ||
| There's two separate arguments being made. | ||
| One is you can't blow up the drug boats without authorization from Congress because you're not at war. | ||
| So if you kill those people, it's happening outside the purview of an authorized action by Congress, and therefore this is illegal. | ||
| And that's a pretty weak argument considering the use of drone warfare by the Obama administration all over the world, for example. | ||
| Then there is the secondary issue, which is killing people after the boat has been disabled or destroyed. | ||
| So Secretary of Defense Hegseth, he put out his own statement, quote, as usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland. | ||
| As we said from the beginning and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be lethal kinetic strikes. | ||
| The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco boats, and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people. | ||
| Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a designated terrorist organization. | ||
| The Biden administration preferred the kid gloves approach, allowing millions of people, including dangerous cartels and unvetted Afghans, to flood our communities with drugs and violence. | ||
| The Trump administration has sealed the border and gone on offense against narco-terrorists. | ||
| Biden coddled terrorists. | ||
| We killed them. | ||
| Our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers up and down the chain of command. | ||
| Our warriors in Southcom put their lives on the line every day to protect the homeland from narco-terrorists. | ||
| I will always have their back. | ||
| Okay, so you will notice that in that statement, there's nothing that denies the charge that he said kill everybody. | ||
| So the question becomes, is kill everybody here a war crime? | ||
| Democrats, of course, are immediately saying that it is, which, by the way, would mean that the officers who carried out the strikes engaged in war crimes, right? | ||
| This is how it ties into their argument that you can't carry out illegal orders. | ||
| Because now, presumably, everybody who's in that chain of command who followed the order would be guilty of a war crime and could theoretically go to federal penitentiary. | ||
| Senator Chris Van Holland is making that argument. | ||
| Here he is. | ||
| Oh, I think it's very possible there was a war crime committed. | ||
| Of course, for it to be a war crime, you have to accept the Trump administration's whole construct here, which is we're in armed conflict at war. | ||
| But even if you accept their legal theory, that it is a war crime. | ||
| And so I do believe that the Secretary of Defense should be held accountable for giving those kind of orders. | ||
| Okay, the problem is once you say that he gave an illegal order, then everybody who carried out the illegal order is also subject to prosecution. | ||
| And this is a left-wing attempt very often to basically hamstring any military in the performance of its duty. | ||
| There's always a battle in all kinetic conflicts, always, between the legal side and the people on the ground who actually have to do the fighting, who actually have to do the thing. | ||
| This is why rules of engagement are really important in war zones. | ||
| What are our forces allowed to do? | ||
| What are they not allowed to do? | ||
| How do you ensure that they don't commit human rights violations while allowing them the ability to protect themselves and protect others and carry out their mission? | ||
| These are very, very murky boundaries because war is a foggy place for sure. | ||
| Senator Markelli is also claiming that this is a war crime. | ||
| Do you believe if there was a second strike to eliminate any survivors, that that constitutes a war crime? | ||
| It seems to. | ||
| If that is true, if what has been reported is accurate, I've got serious concerns about anybody in that chain of command stepping over a line that they should never step over. | ||
| Okay, so there actually is an open and interesting debate over whether there was, in fact, some sort of war crime here. | ||
| According to Andrew McCarthy, who writes for the National Review and who is, of course, a fan of President Trump generally, he says that if all of this happened, as described in the post report, it was at best a war crime under federal law. | ||
| I say at best because as regular readers know, I believe these attacks on suspected drug boats without congressional authorization under circumstances in which the boat operators pose no military threat to the United States, and given that narcotics trafficking is defined in federal law as a crime, not terrorist activity, much less an act of war, are lawless. | ||
| And therefore, the killings are not legitimate under the law of armed conflict. | ||
| Nevertheless, even if we stipulate, arguendo, that the administration has a colorable claim our forces are in an armed conflict with non-state actors. | ||
| The laws of war do not permit the killing of combatants who have been rendered or to combat, meaning out of the fighting, including by shipwreck. | ||
| So if the boat gets hit and now the thing is just kind of floundering in the water and there's no threat, you can't just nuke them again. | ||
| So that's Andrew McCarthy's claim. | ||
| He says it is not permitted under the laws and customs of honorable warfare to order that no quarter be given, to apply lethal force to those who surrender or who are injured, shipwrecked, or otherwise unable to fight. | ||
| Echoing Andrew McCarthy's statement is a group of former U.S. military lawyers, the former JAG working group, saying, quote, that they unanimously consider both the giving and execution of these orders to constitute war crimes, murder or both, right? | ||
| So that would mean that every member of the military chain of command who is involved in the carrying out of this order would now be subject to criminal penalties. | ||
| Okay, so the other side is being taken by Professor Brian Cox, who is a professor of law at Cornell. | ||
| And he says, let's start with the decisive flaw in their statement. | ||
| Not once does it use or consider the term military objective. | ||
| He says, if the boat were destroyed, there would be nothing serviceable left of it. | ||
| But if it's disabled, that is, if the decision maker believed it could still be used to call other narco-traffickers to retrieve their cargo, the boat still qualifies as a military objective, and military objectives can be intentionally attacked. | ||
| So he's saying is: okay, if the thing is floating and it has a radio and they can call the other narco-traffickers to come pick them up as well as the drugs, then the thing is still a threat, and that means you can nuke it. | ||
| He says, quote, a military objective is any object which, by its nature, location, purpose, or use, makes an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture, or neutralization in the circumstances ruling at the time offers a definite military advantage. | ||
| So, how about a disabled boat? | ||
| He says, if the commander believes it can call for assistance and allow it to continue its mission, it is by definition an object which makes, by its use, an effective contribution. | ||
| In short, according to the factual scenario reported in the Washington Post story, the boat still qualified as a military objective after the initial attack, and therefore the second strike was not a war crime. | ||
| So, again, the basic idea is that, well, these people may have been on a boat that was blown up. | ||
| The boat wasn't totally blown up. | ||
| It was disabled. | ||
| It wasn't destroyed. | ||
| And therefore, it still could have been used as a military objective or for a military objective by the narco-terrorists. | ||
| He says that if they were shipwrecked, then they were out of combat. | ||
| But again, if they are not shipwrecked, meaning that, you know, again, they can call for help and then they can get back in the battle, then you can presumably still hit them. | ||
| So this is going to be an open legal debate. | ||
| And again, these debates, I don't want to pretend that these debates aren't serious or that we shouldn't be having debates over this. | ||
| We certainly should. | ||
| But we are now in, shall we say, dangerous territory, ideologically and legally. | ||
| The reason being, if you're a soldier and you receive an order from a member of the chain of command, and that order lives where such orders usually live in the murky area that is war. | ||
| And in the murky area that is war, you are afraid that a Democrat is elected president in three years and you find yourself on the wrong end of a prosecution. | ||
| Basically, what you're going to end up with very often is a version of what we had in policing called the Ferguson effect, where cops decided they were simply going to stop enforcing the law because they were so terrified that if they did, they would end up prosecuted. | ||
| And you can't have that for a successful military. | ||
| You just can't. | ||
| That's why it's quite dangerous what Democrats have been doing talking about illegal orders and not illegal orders. | ||
| If they can name an illegal order that should not have been followed, then they presumably should go ahead and do something about it with the full investigative power of Article 1 of the Constitution. | ||
| If not, then these sort of broad statements not only are not helpful, they do a disservice to members of the military who have to make the hard calls as to what to do every single day with deadly force. | ||
| Okay, meanwhile, all the targeting of the narco-terrorists in the Caribbean, all of that has to do with an attempt to box in Venezuela. | ||
| So the Trump administration is clearly now making an attempt to pressure the Venezuelan regime into folding. | ||
| That is what is happening here. | ||
| Over the weekend, President Trump apparently told Venezuelan dictator Maduro, Nicolas Maduro, that he should leave. | ||
| According to the New York Post, Trump gave Maduro a strongly worded ultimatum as tensions flared with the South American nation, telling him to resign and leave or else, according to a bombshell report. | ||
| According to the Miami Herald, during a call between Trump and Maduro, the socialist president demanded that he be allowed to maintain control of Venezuela's military if he paved the way for free elections there. | ||
| He also reportedly sought global amnesty for all of his alleged crimes. | ||
| Trump's refusal on both counts was said to be swift as he followed up with an offer that Maduro may not be able to refuse leave now or else. | ||
| The question is what the or else looks like at this point. | ||
| U.S. Senator Dave McCormick told Fox News Sunday: we have a war that's coming through fentanyl, through opioids, through cocaine. | ||
| It killed 100,000 Americans last year. | ||
| That's twice the number of people that died in eight years of Vietnam: 4,000 Pennsylvanians. | ||
| The president then announced he was closing the airspace around the South American country. | ||
| The USS Gerald F. Ford, which is America's biggest warship, and a Marine expeditionary unit capable of amphibious invasion are floating offshore as well. | ||
| And he warned that military operations inside Venezuela could begin very, very soon. | ||
| Unclear what those would target or how the targeting would happen. | ||
| Now, how exactly that no-fly decree is going to be enforced? | ||
| That is an open question. | ||
| We do have F-35s that are there. | ||
| We don't have international authority to really be over Venezuelan airspace. | ||
| However, it is also clear that everyone is being very, very careful. | ||
| Venezuela has revoted, revoked, apparently, operating rights to Iberia, TAP, Avianca, LATAM, Colombia, Turkish Airlines, and GOL. | ||
| So they're basically now locked down. | ||
| They're in a state of complete lockdown. | ||
| Maduro and his allies are saying this is American colonial aggression, saying the United States wants to seize the country's vast oil reserves, which, of course, is untrue. | ||
| It is Venezuela's nationalization of oil resources that has led to the complete impoverishment of the country in the first place. | ||
| So clearly, the Trump administration would love to see the Maduro regime fall. | ||
| Ordinary Venezuelans are preparing for the possibility that there will be some sort of kinetic action inside Venezuela, not just off the coast. | ||
| According to the Washington Post, U.S. fighter jets escorted a strategic bomber near the coast one day this week. | ||
| State-controlled media showed video of Venezuelan soldiers firing into the sky, which, again, that is always the mark of a strong military power, is firing rifles at F-35s and such. | ||
| A supermarket in East Caracas filled with people raiding the shelves to lay in supplies. | ||
| The next day, the sky was quiet. | ||
| The capital returned to normal. | ||
| People don't know exactly what to expect at this point. | ||
| Maduro has mobilized his troops. | ||
| He's called on citizens to join militias to defend the country. | ||
| And where'd things go from here? | ||
| Open question for sure, given the fact that Maduro, apparently, his jet has now flown to Brazil. | ||
| That is according to the Express. | ||
| So, you know, things are getting spicy. | ||
| President Trump issued a statement over the weekend to all airlines pilots, drug dealers, and human traffickers: please consider the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela to be closed in its entirety. | ||
| Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. | ||
| And again, the presidential jet in Venezuela, that's Maduro, who's the dictator, flew from Caracas to the border of Brazil. | ||
| So it hasn't actually entered Brazil. | ||
| Lula, of course, is friendly with Maduro because Lula is a horrible leader. | ||
| Now, what should the United States do? | ||
| What are the options here? | ||
| So, pretty clearly, the United States is playing chicken with Maduro at this point: ratcheting up the tensions, closing the borders, fostering the possibility of military action. | ||
| In order for there to be a true change in regime, it's not going to be enough for people to get out in the streets. | ||
| We've already seen that. | ||
| We already saw years ago when Juan Huaido was elected in an actual election. | ||
| So, Juan Huaido was probably elected in 2018. | ||
| There were disputed elections. | ||
| Huaido was leader of the opposition, and that led to a crisis that lasted for approximately three years over Maduro retaining power, despite the fact that he almost certainly was not the person who won the election or was wanted by the people of Venezuela. | ||
| But it turned out that getting people out in the streets between 2019 and 2021 didn't actually do much. | ||
| That in the end, Maduro just consolidated his control. | ||
| And so, the question now is whether there is something more. | ||
| So, the fact that the United States is blowing up a source of revenue, those narco-trafficking boats, that the United States is closing the airspace, that the United States is doing all these things ratchets up the pressure. | ||
| You have to imagine the only reason the United States would be doing this is if they have actual allies they can work with inside the business elite or the political elites or certainly the military elite inside Venezuela, because the mark of regimes that tend to be able to withstand Western pressure are ones that have a very solid chain of command in the pay of the dictator. | ||
| That is true in places like Russia. | ||
| It's true in Iran. | ||
| It's true in North Korea. | ||
| The question is whether it's true in Venezuela, because if you look at the history of coups in Latin and South America, if you look at the history of regime changes or dictators who are removed, what you will see is a few factors in common. | ||
| Usually there is a split or a defection inside the security forces surrounding the president or the dictator. | ||
| That the president or dictator relies on the ability in the end to point guns at the people and tell them to stand down. | ||
| And if there is a break, then the regime tends to fall. | ||
| Usually you have to have somebody, a regime elite, right? | ||
| Somebody second, third, fourth in command, who's willing to take the lead in the opposition, which of course is risky because if you lose, you die typically. | ||
| And then international pressure and economic crisis points can create the impetus for the overthrow of a regime. | ||
| So you have to imagine that the only reason the Trump administration would be pursuing this is if they have some sort of serious intel that there is in fact a break inside Maduro's security organization, that there is somebody who's willing to take up the baton and that additional pressure forces Maduro to flee and the military to make a move to defenustrate him, replace him with a transitional figure, or to hold free and fair elections. | ||
| Again, there's a long history of this in South America, Paraguay in 1989 or Panama in 1989, Haiti in 1986, Bolivia in 2019. | ||
| This sort of stuff is not infrequent in Latin and South America, but those preconditions better be there. | ||
| And I will say that the Trump administration is up the ante so much that if Trump backs down at this point, it's going to look pretty bad for the United States. | ||
| Okay, meanwhile, negotiations continue over at Ukraine. | ||
| One of the theories is that what's going on in Venezuela is connected with what's going on over in Ukraine in a couple of ways. | ||
| One is the idea that the United States is, in sort of soft fashion, acknowledging a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe while simultaneously solidifying its own sphere of influence in South and Latin America and even a Chinese sphere of influence in the Far East. | ||
| That is the most cynical and negative view of what's going on. | ||
| Another view is that by freeing up the Venezuelan oil supply, and Maduro goes down, suddenly the oil supply from Venezuela kicks back up again, and the United States is no longer as dependent on Russian oil or can facilitate the flow of Venezuelan oil over to Europe so that Europe is less reliant on Russian oil, which would be a good thing. | ||
| The United States has been making a very hard push to get to the end of the Ukraine war, largely by putting serious pressure on Ukraine. | ||
| There have been no indicators that I have seen thus far that the Russians are willing to make any sort of deal that is doable for the Ukrainians at this point. | ||
| Nonetheless, there were meetings in Florida between U.S. and Ukrainian officials for hours of talks. | ||
| According to NPR, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters afterward the session was productive, but that work remains in search of a peace deal. | ||
| Here is what Secretary Rubio had to say. | ||
| So this is not just about ending a war. | ||
| This is about ending a war in a way that creates a mechanism and a way forward that will allow them to be independent and sovereign, never have another war again, and create tremendous prosperity for its people. | ||
| So the question is whether that is true or not. | ||
| Meaning, the original plan that was proposed by Steve Witkoff last week was a bleep show. | ||
| It was a plan that basically was a list of Russian demands, and the Ukrainians were very upset with it. | ||
| And now it seems that Rubio had to step in, and so did Jared, in order to push back against what was a bad plan and come to something that appeared to be in the middle. | ||
| Rustem Umarov is head of Ukraine's Security Council, and he responded to Rubio by expressing his country's appreciation for U.S. efforts. | ||
| He said, U.S. is hearing us. | ||
| U.S. is supporting us. | ||
| U.S. is working beside us. | ||
| Unclear what progress has been made in the talks. | ||
| Now, again, all this is happening at the same time that there is serious pressure on the Ukrainian government to make changes at the top. | ||
| A person named Andrei Yermak, who is the top aide to Vladimir Zelensky and one of the key peace negotiators, he apparently has now resigned after anti-corruption agencies raided his home. | ||
| I mean, it is well known, by the way, that the Ukrainian government is rife with corruption. | ||
| This has been true for legitimately decades, not a shock at all. | ||
| The top members of the Ukrainian government made their war profiteering off of this war. | ||
| That would not be surprising at all. | ||
| Zelensky said, I want no one to have any questions about Ukraine. | ||
| Today, we have the following internal decisions. | ||
| There will be a reboot of the office of the president of Ukraine. | ||
| The head of the office, Andrei Yermak, has written a letter of resignation. | ||
| Apparently, he said that he was cooperating with the authorities. | ||
| Now, let's just be clear: corruption in Ukraine does not mean siding with Russia. | ||
| Corruption in Ukraine, if the United States uses the excuse of corruption in Ukraine to side with one of the world's most corrupt and evil regimes in the Russian regime, that would be a giant failure. | ||
| We work with corrupt and terrible regimes all over the world against people who are even worse than they are. | ||
| The Saudi regime is not famous for its non-corruption or non-violence. | ||
| The United States must work with the Saudi regime in order to hem in, for example, the threat of Muslim Brotherhood takeovers or against the Iranians. | ||
| That's just the way international politics works. | ||
| It's a series of terrible choices. | ||
| With that said, the Ukrainians, of course, are still very concerned that the United States may put too much pressure on Ukraine and not enough on Russia. | ||
| Here is the former Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmitro Kuleba, talking about the U.S. peace plan. | ||
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I don't think it's a revelation to anyone that just copy-pasting Russian ultimatums, as it was done once again, clearly tells you where all this comes from. | |
| You know, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's probably a duck. | ||
| So if it looks like a Russian ultimatum, then probably it comes from Russia. | ||
| Okay, so, you know, again, we will see whether that is the case and what is pushed forward here. | ||
| A bad deal that leads to a further war between Ukraine and Russia two years from now is not a win for the United States, nor is any sort of cap on the Ukrainian military forces. | ||
| I haven't seen what sort of pressure is being applied on the Russians thus far to get them to the table, because all I've seen is the Ukrainians giving and giving and giving and the Russians not giving a single inch. | ||
| The Ukrainians have been saying they're willing to do a ceasefire since February. | ||
| The Russians have not ceased fire for a single second. | ||
| So at some point, we're going to have to ask a pretty simple question: what is Vladimir Putin willing to do? | ||
| All righty, as we continue here on the show for our members, we'll get into the question of when Social Security is going to go bankrupt. | ||
| Because remember, we as a country are still running a gigantic debt. | ||
| And the big drivers of our debt are those social welfare programs. | ||
| Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member. | ||
| If you're not a member, become a member. | ||
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