Another shooting by an ICE agent in Minneapolis touches off actual violent riots in Minneapolis.
We'll get into all of that.
Plus, the latest in Iran and Venezuela.
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Well, a second shooting by ICE of somebody who actually attacked an ICE officer has now broken into the news.
Last night, there was violence against the police.
There were some riots in Minneapolis.
This all started, according to the New York Times, when a federal agent shot an injured man in Minneapolis on Wednesday evening, according to federal officials.
An incident that touched off hours of clashes between protesters and law enforcement officers and came just one week after an immigration agent killed a woman in the city.
Now, of course, that is typical New York Times coverage.
The agent shot the woman after she attempted to drive her car at him, or at least he perceived that as the case.
Trisha McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the DHS, who, of course, is on the show just a couple of days ago, said in a statement that federal agents were trying to arrest a man from Venezuela who was in the country illegally in a targeted traffic stop around 6.50 p.m.
Apparently he fled from agents.
When the officer caught up to him, according to McLaughlin, he began to resist and violently assault the officer, and two people came out of a nearby building and, along with the man who was being sought, attacked the officer with a snow shovel and a broom handle.
Well, I mean, you do that, you're going to get shot.
That's just the way that law enforcement works.
Attack an officer with a weapon, you will be shot.
The officer feared for his life and fired shots, striking the man whom agents were seeking in the leg.
The agent and the man who were shot were in the hospital, according to McLaughlin.
The other two people she accused of attacking the agent were apparently in custody already.
The city suggested that the person shot had non-life-threatening injuries.
Here's Fox News reporting on the situation last night.
Like, I was going after a Venezuelan illegal alien who had been caught and released at the border by the Biden administration in 2022.
That person crashed a car, crashed into a parked car, got out and fled.
ICE was chasing him down.
And then while they were wrestling on the ground, two people came out of a nearby apartment and then started attacking the ICE officer with shovels.
And during that ambush attack, that is when the officer pulled out his weapon, fired, and hit one of the suspects, who again is stable.
Well, this prompted the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, to then take some gasoline and pour it right on the fire.
He went on X last night and he tweeted, state investigators have been on the scene in North Minneapolis.
I know you're angry.
I'm angry.
What Donald Trump wants is violence in the streets, but Minnesota will remain an island of decency, of justice, of community, and of peace.
Don't give him what he wants.
So he's saying don't get violent, but he's kind of winking and nodding at the violence.
He actually put out a TV statement that essentially urged on the protesters.
Here's what it sounded like.
Let's be very, very clear.
This long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement.
Instead, it's a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.
Last week, that campaign claimed the life of Renee Nicole Good.
We've all watched the video.
We've all seen what happened.
And yet, instead of conducting an impartial investigation so we can hold accountable the officer responsible for Renee's death, the Trump administration is devoting the full power of the federal government to finding an excuse to attack the victim and her family.
So tonight, let me say once again to Donald Trump and Christy Noam, end this occupation.
You've done enough.
Let me say four critical things to the people of Minnesota.
Four things I want you to hear as you watch the news and look out for your neighbors.
First, Donald Trump wants this chaos.
He wants confusion.
And yes, he wants more violence on our streets.
We cannot give him what he wants.
We can.
We must protest loudly, urgently, but also peacefully.
Indeed, as hard as we will fight in the courts and at the ballot box, we cannot and will not let violence prevail.
You're angry?
I'm angry.
Anger is not a strong enough word, but we must remain peaceful.
Second, you are not powerless.
You are not helpless, and you are certainly not alone.
All across Minnesota, people are learning about opportunities, not just to resist, but to help people who are in danger.
Thousands upon thousands of our fellow Minnesotans are going to be relying on mutual aid in the days and weeks to come, and they need our support.
Tonight, I want to share another way you can help.
Witness.
Help us establish a record of exactly what's happening in our communities.
You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities.
So carry your phone with you at all times.
And if you see these ICE agents in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record.
Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.
Minneapolis then put out a statement demanding that ICE leave the city.
Let's put it clearly here.
There is no power in Minneapolis for them to eject ICE agents from the city.
That is not how federal law enforcement works.
You cannot just tell federal agents enforcing federal law to leave the city.
And so the Minneapolis government and the Minnesota state government have been ramping all of this up.
So it was not a surprise that last night after this shooting, which again, it sounds like the ICE agent was literally attacked, like physically assaulted before he shot and wounded the person they were attempting to arrest.
Doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter at all.
The agitators, protesters turned into rioters last night.
Are you coming up more on these riots, violent altercations in Minneapolis?
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According to Fox News, agitators and federal law enforcement clashed in Minneapolis on Wednesday night into Thursday morning after a second ICE-involved shooting in the city.
As local officials continued to demand the agency leave, and ICE agents shot that alleged illegal immigrant in the leg.
This comes after the incident with Renee Good, obviously.
Protests continued on Wednesday after the latest shooting with demonstrats and whistles and officers deploying tear gas and pepper balls.
There were at least 100 people at the scene where officers were dispersing pepper spray, throwing pepper balls, using flash bangs as rioters tossed items at the agents.
Demonstrators were yelling at ICE to leave the city and holding signs with phrases like F-ICE.
The Minneapolis police chief Brian O'Hara said the crowd was committing unlawful acts, including throwing fireworks at the officers and urged people to leave immediately.
And we do have some tape of Minneapolis rioters looting a gun locker from an ICE vehicle.
They apparently were able to break into an ICE vehicle and they got into the gun locker that's in the trunk of the vehicle.
here's what that looked like.
So things are going well in Minneapolis.
And of course, this has been pressed forward by a Democratic Party, which insists, insists that basic law enforcement action against illegal immigrants, particularly criminal illegal immigrants, is some sort of violation of the American Compact that puts you apparently in league with like the Iranian Ayatollahs in terms of your tyranny.
That is a case that is currently being made by the chair of the Democratic National Committee, which is nuts.
That is nuts.
So he did an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
And in this interview, he said essentially that the Trump administration is similar to Tehran, to the Ayatollahs in Iran.
On social media, he wrote, quote, From Tehran, to my birthplace in Minneapolis, people are rising up against systems that wield violence without accountability.
Solidarity across borders means opposing authoritarian power everywhere and defending the right to live free from fear and state violence.
By the way, tremendous irony in the leader of the DNC, a party that has treated Hamas, Hezbollah, all the various terror arms of Iran as some sort of half-political organization, treated the Iranian government as a quasi-innocent in the region, now citing Iran as the repressive power to compare to President Trump, the president who actually struck Iran back in June of last year, blowing up their nuclear facility at Fordo.
Also amazing to just compare, you know, the Ayatollahs who are legitimately shooting people in the streets.
And we'll get to that in a bit.
Probably have shot thousands of people to death in the streets with ICE agents going out and enforcing criminal law who are obstructed by benighted people, misguided people, and then bad incidents ensue.
He wrote, quote, if comparing the U.S. to Iran makes you angry, ask why.
Killing protesters, killing protesters?
The Trump administration is not unleashing ICE to mass shoot protesters.
That's insane.
That's psychotic.
And it's disgusting, by the way.
Ken Martin comparing, again, the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, unleashing live fire on protesters en masse, attempting to arrest and then possibly execute thousands of protesters in Iran with the Rene Good situation in which officers let her obstruct traffic for three full minutes while they were attempting an ICE operation and then went to her car and tried to remove her from the car to arrest her.
And then she hit the gas while an officer was in front of her car and got shot in the process.
Those are not even remotely the same thing.
And Ken Martin is out of his mind.
He's just out of his mind.
He said, killing protesters, crushing dissent, kidnapping and disappearing legal citizens, ignoring courts, threatening critics, terrorizing communities.
That's authoritarian behavior anywhere.
That is insane.
Absolutely insane, obviously.
And the fact that Ken Martin would say such things is demonstrative of how disconnected the Democratic Party is from reality at its top levels.
He's not the only one who's saying this, by the way.
Representative Eugene Avinman of Virginia, he said the same thing on CNN.
They're protesting largely peacefully on the streets and they're being attacked and murdered.
And I think, you know, there's an irony, obviously, in what we see with ICE on American streets, but just to say focused on Iran, I think it means putting enormous pressure on the regime so they recognize that suppressing their own population through violence is not going to work.
Again, attempting to compare the Trump administration to Iran is nutty.
It is nutty that there's irony in the Iran.
There's no irony here.
These are not comparative situations.
There's not comparable.
Peter Baker of the New York Times was on MS Now.
Again, that's what we now call MSNBC, MS Now, which again sounds like a charity for multiple sclerosis.
In any case, Peter Baker did the same thing.
People are watching this split-screen situation of mass protests in Tehran and mass protests in Minneapolis.
And of course, they're looking to see how a president handles each of them.
And while you really can't compare the substance of these two very important issues happening for different parts of the planet, you can, I think, look at the rule of thumb that Donald Trump brings to it.
And I think the rule of thumb is pretty simple.
If you're protesting against a regime he disfavors, he opposes, then you're heroes.
If you're protesting him or his policies, then you're illegitimate.
You're radicals.
You're radical left lunatics.
Well, I mean, yes, if you protest, that's ridiculous.
If you are protesting the Ayatollah's regime, the one where they murder you if you protest, the one where women are forced to wear hijab, the one where they spread terrorism all over the region while impoverishing their people to the tune of no water or power in their capital.
They were talking about literally emptying out their entire capital just a couple of months ago.
I don't see how that is comparable to you looting gun lockers in ICE vehicles in Minneapolis.
Why do Democrats, why does the left have to embrace this equivalence?
By the way, they would not even embrace, as I say, the reverse equivalence.
The truth is that they make excuses on a consistent basis for some of the worst people in the Middle East and rip into governments that attempt to fight those people in the Middle East.
There's been significantly more ire from the mainstream media at Israel for its action in the Gaza Strip, targeted action against a terrorist group hiding behind civilians than there has been against the Iranian government thus far.
Meanwhile, Ilhan Omar, she's out there saying that Renee Good died, not because she was involved in an altercation with law enforcement, in which apparently there are reports that the officer who was hit by her car, and he was hit by her car, actually suffered some internal bleeding.
Here she was saying that she died because she chose love and solidarity over fear.
That's weird because, you know, I think that a vast majority of Americans every single day choose love and solidarity over fear and don't die in altercations with ICE officers after hitting the gas and hitting the officer with the bumper of their car after obstructing ICE operations for three minutes.
The enemy of good sense is the failure to just speak basic truth.
Okay, the basic truth about the Renee Good situation is that it is a tragedy.
And also, Renee Goode was involved in federal crime.
That is a federal crime to obstruct law enforcement in the pursuit of its legal obligations.
But instead, we're now going to pretend that Renee Good just apparently died while walking down the street doing nothing at all.
She was not involved in anything.
It was just a pure murder.
Here's Ilhan Omar doing her routine.
In the face of state-sanctioned violence, we have organized and protected each other.
That is what Renee stood for.
She died because she chose love and solidarity over fear.
And we will make sure the world never forgets her name.
Why?
Why can't we just say the truth about this situation?
You want to cool the temperature?
You want to make sure that the law actually gets enforced?
That's what most Americans want.
A cooler temperature and the law gets enforced.
You know how that could happen really easily?
Cooperation with law enforcement in the pursuit of legal duties.
That's how that would happen.
But there is a deeper agenda at work, of course, and that deeper agenda has to do with a democratic point of view that suggests that importation of large people from outside the United States inherently makes the United States culturally stronger.
They don't even believe in the economic point.
They just like the idea that more immigrants, particularly from third world countries, somehow make the country culturally stronger in some way.
Pramila Jayapal, the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus yesterday, she suggested that America was built by Somalis, Indians, Latinos, and Africans.
I mean, like equally, or are there proportions?
What do white people have to do with any of this?
This sort of language is so obfuscatory and dumb.
Truly dumb.
It does not enlighten.
It confuses.
If she is saying that the country was built by Somalis in the same way that it was built by African Americans, meaning like American descendants of slaves, that is ridiculous.
Or that it was built by Somalis the same way that it was built by Latino immigrants to the United States.
And also, again, do like white people from a wide variety of countries have anything to do with this?
How do we stack this up?
Do we have to have rankings?
Do we have to have like NCAA rankings of the importance of various races in building the country?
Is that the way we're supposed to do this?
Apparently so, according to Pramila Jayapal.
The majority of Americans across the country, regardless of political party, know that immigrants from all over the world, Somalia, India, wherever they're from, Latin America, Africa, that immigrants have built this country and make this country what it is today.
These like broad statements, immigrants have built this country, like which ones?
There's some immigrants who have built the country for sure.
And there are some immigrants who are really terrible for the country.
And promoting the idea that there is this thing called immigrants, just a class, like a giant class of immigrants, and that all immigrants are of equal merit in entering the United States is stupid.
It is baseline idiocy.
It is a category that is far too broad.
It is both over-inclusive and under-inclusive.
It's over-inclusive in the sense that it includes a lot of people who shouldn't be here.
And it's under-inclusive in the sense that a lot of the people she thinks of as immigrants are actually American citizens who are children of immigrants.
But again, this is all part of a broader agenda, which is just don't enforce immigration law.
Senator Chris Van Hollen, a truly dunderheaded senator from Maryland, was out there doing an ICE out rally, meaning just ICE should be defunded, suggesting that the United States government should simply take away the money from ICE.
So I guess no interior immigration enforcement.
These are people like Christy No.
Directed by people like Steven Miller.
People like JD Vance, who was lying through his teeth the other day.
And of course, headed by the liar in chief, the lawbreaker in chief, Donald Trump.
So we are here to say not one more dime for Donald Trump's ICE operations.
Now, there's only one problem.
The ICE operations that are currently being pursued are very, very similar, in fact, to some of the ICE operations that were pursued during the Obama administration.
This is a point that's being made by Todd Lyons.
He's the director of ICE.
Here he was yesterday.
You know, ICE is doing our same law enforcement mission.
We're doing everything the same, if not better than we did back and then.
I can say, again, first-hand experience.
But unfortunately, there is just such a hatred for President Trump right now that it's blocking the views of what law enforcement is doing, and it's really putting a target on ICE.
He is right about that.
Again, there's this narrative that is being promoted by the Democrats and by the legacy media.
The narrative is that ICE is willy-nilly going and just mass arresting people for no reason at all based on the color of their skin.
And it's not true.
It's not true.
The vast majority of people that ICE is detaining and then pretty much everybody that ICE is actually arresting after detention.
Those are people who are criminal illegal immigrants.
They have another crime on their ledger sheet, on their rap sheet, other than just entering the country illegally.
This is a point that J.D. Vansweis, president of the United States, made on X quote.
This argument is just entirely fake for two reasons.
One, in the Obama administration, they counted being turned away at the border as a deportation.
A person would show up, be sent back and counted as a deportation.
We have to do deportations from the interior of the country because Biden and Harris let them walk in.
Two, in the cities that are not sanctuary cities, the deportation process is orderly and normal, like most law enforcement.
In Minneapolis and a few other sanctuary jurisdictions, local jurisdictions and a few left-wing agitators have decided to wage war on all immigration enforcement officers.
They are hoping a little chaos will convince us to give up on immigration enforcement.
They are wrong.
That is correct.
Well, in any case, if this sort of violence continues in Minneapolis, the president has now said that he will invoke the Insurrection Act.
He put out a statement on Truth Social earlier this morning, quote, if the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don't obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the patriots of ICE who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the Insurrection Act, which many presidents have done before me and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great state.
Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Trump.
Now, again, if there are riots and if the local authorities not only refuse to quell that, but they're actually seeming to facilitate it, then this is a completely legitimate use of the Insurrection Act to put down.
Again, the language that Walls is using right here and it has been using for days, the language used by Jacob Fry, ice out.
We're going to obstruct the procedures of the federal government.
I mean, that's a pretty good time to invoke the Insurrection Act to protect your agents in doing what they need to do.
This is, by the way, having a large-scale impact on immigration to the United States generally.
It turns out that net migration is probably negative at this point in time, according to the Brookings Institute, meaning that fewer people are attempting to cross the border, both legally and illegally.
So more people are now leaving than people who are coming in because out migration is so high.
So you still have relatively high levels of in-migration, but you also have very high levels of out-migration at this point.
And net net, it seems as though there are more people leaving than coming in at this point.
Some of that is ICE removals.
Some of it is voluntary exits.
And some of it is sort of normal out-migration, just people who decided to go home.
The U.S. is also freezing visa processing for some 75 countries, including Somalia, Russia, and Iran.
That is according to Fox News.
The State Department memo seen first by Fox News Digital directs consular officers to refuse visas under existing law while the department reassesses screening and vetting procedures.
Countries include Somalia, Russia, Afghanistan, Brazil, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Nigeria, Thailand, Yemen, and more.
The pause will begin January 21st, will continue indefinitely until the department conducts a reassessment of immigrant visa processing.
So 75 countries, the immigration will be paused.
Obviously, the Trump administration taking a very strong stance on migration to the United States after years and years of open borders under Joe Biden.
Okay, meanwhile, the other big story of the day, obviously, is what continues to happen in Iran.
So, just so we know, as of 48 hours ago, and again, we don't know everything that's going on in Iran because the internet has been shut off.
So, anything the Iranian government is telling you could very well just be a lie.
If they were not worried about transparency, they would not be shutting off the internet for six days at this point, which is insane.
By the way, they're not just shutting off the internet, they're shutting off international phone calls.
They're shutting off domestic phone calls in Iran.
That's how worried they are about the uprising that is occurring.
Here is some video that escaped.
This is from Wednesday showing Iranian security forces firing directly into crowds.
Last night, Iran closed its airspace in expectation of a possible American strike because President Trump, of course, had said that help was on the way.
Yesterday, Iran actually threatened the president of the United States.
They put out a statement suggesting that there would be another assassination against Trump, and this time it would succeed.
That was the Islamic Republic state TV.
They aired an image of President Trump after an attempted assassination with a Persian message reading, This time the bullet won't miss.
So, yeah, Iran, not exactly a trustworthy state.
However, yesterday, President Trump announced that the other side claimed that the killing of Iranians had stopped.
Here's the president of the United States yesterday afternoon at the White House.
We were told that the killing in Iran is stopping and it's stopped, it's stopping, and there's no plan for executions or an execution or executions.
So, I've been told that on good authority, we'll find out about it.
I'm sure if it happens, we'll all be very upset.
Well, he also discussed the possibility of military action yesterday.
He declined to say who offered those assurances.
He added that there were supposed to be a lot of executions.
The executions had been postponed.
Now, we're hearing a lot of mixed reports.
Some of the reports suggest that the killing has stopped, but one of the reasons the killing has stopped, apparently, is because the Iranian government has put tanks and troops in the streets.
And if you walk outside, they will just shoot you, which is one reason why people are not out in the streets.
So, that is not the Iranian government going weapons down against their protesters.
It is them going full-on weapons up against their protesters and threatening that if you put your foot on the street, you will die, which is not precisely, I think, what the president was trying to achieve when he wanted the shooting to stop.
And unclear at this point what the president's intent is with regard to action against Iran.
And of course, any action has to be carefully calibrated to achieve its desired result.
There was a report yesterday, I believe from the Washington Post, talking about the president saying that if there are strikes available, they should obviously have maximum impact, meaning possibly the decapitation of the regime.
That he doesn't want to do a sort of pinprick Obama-style strike, hit a camel in the ass, and walk away.
And with that said, if nothing is done, then obviously the president's red line has been crossed pretty much willy-nilly by the Iranians.
Remember that the president did say last week before the shooting began that if the Iranians were to shoot people en masse, then it would necessitate action.
And then they did.
Possibly over 10,000 people.
We still don't know the full numbers.
We know at least thousands of people.
The question is: how many thousands of people?
Iran temporarily postponed some public executions because they don't want the president taking action.
There was news yesterday that non-essential troops had been moved away from Al-Udaid airbase in Qatar, presumably as a way to shield them from possible Iranian retaliation.
And then they were stood down, and a lot of those soldiers ended up back on the Al-Udaid airbase.
So, in other words, there's just a lot going on right now.
We actually don't know what is going on.
Don't know what options are on the table.
There's supposed to be apparently a meeting of the United Nations Security Council called by the United States on Iran.
Totally useless, by the way.
Totally useless.
If this is a substitute for some sort of concerted action, I don't see it.
Going to Russia and China to utter some empty condemnations while they continue to fund the oil coffers of Iran isn't going to accomplish a lot.
The UN, of course, the most highly of international politics, a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
According to the AP, they scheduled an emergency meeting on Thursday to discuss Iran's deadly protests at the request of the United States.
And I don't even know why the United States is bothering with that.
The UN is trash.
It has always been trash.
President Trump hailed as good news reports that a death sentence has been lifted for an Iranian shopkeeper arrested in a violent crackdown on protests.
But again, if the tacit deal here is Iran can shut down the protests by threatening to shoot everyone and all they have to do is not publicly execute people, they'll just wait a couple of weeks and then shoot them in the back room.
That doesn't really solve the problem in any real way.
And again, it is possible that the president is pursuing other options.
Cyber operations, airlifts of weaponry, attacks on the Iranian ghost ships that have been traveling around the globe in violation of sanctions.
There are a lot of options that are on the table.
And so you wouldn't want to forecast what those are.
Plus, the president does like to play a poker ham pretty close to the chest here.
You'll recall that there's a lot of speculation that he was not going to hit the Fordo nuclear facility.
And in fact, there were open announcements that negotiations were probably going to take place.
And then he hit the Fordo nuclear facility.
So it could be that we are hearing different messages publicly than what is being planned privately.
Suffice it to say that if what is happening publicly is the end result, then the Iranians will have gotten away with it.
If what happens publicly is that the Iranians, again, were able to kill some 10,000 people, 12,000 people over the course of a few days to no real effect, then it would behoove, honestly, everyone.
It was bad when Barack Obama would draw red lines and then they would be crossed because it violated the credibility of the United States.
I think President Trump knows that and knows that really, really well.
The G7 is warning of more sanctions.
I mean, again, the Iranian economy is already trashed.
You can trash it further.
That might prevent the IRGC from being able to pay off its sort of top lieutenants.
That's one possibility here.
Meanwhile, the Iranian foreign minister appeared on Fox News where he proceeded, his name is Abbas Arahi, he proceeded to blame the Israelis for Iranians in the streets protesting.
The reason I have to explain, and this is important, why they started to shoot at people for one reason.
They wanted to increase the number of deaths.
Why?
Because President Trump has said that if there are killings, he would intervene.
And they wanted to drag him into this conflict.
And that was exactly an Israeli plot.
They wanted to drag the president of the United States in this conflict.
So they started to increase the number of deaths by killing ordinary people, by killing police officers, by starting a kind of fighting inside the different cities.
Okay, so the claim of the Iranian government, knowing full well about the horseshoe right, is very fond of these sorts of conspiracy theories.
The claim of the Iranian government preying on precisely that is that the Israelis infiltrated the crowds and started shooting soldiers or that they themselves shot Iranian civilians in order to increase the death toll.
Evidence provided zero, of course.
A point that Brett Baer made when he said that is not true.
Like what you're saying, so your suggestion is that the Israelis precipitated the shooting while your own forces are literally mowing people down.
Brett Baer was properly skeptical of the foreign minister.
And then Iraqi warned the United States not to repeat the mistake they made in June.
By the way, the mistake they made in June was bombing the Fordo nuclear facility and setting back the Iranian nuclear program by many, many years.
So it wasn't such a mistake, actually.
My message is: do not repeat the same mistake that you did in June.
You know, if you try a failed experience, you will get the same result.
You know, in June, yes, you destroy the facilities, the machines, but the technology cannot be bombed.
And the determination also cannot be bombed.
Now, Iran proved to be ready for negotiation, for diplomacy.
We have proved that in the past 20 years, in 2015, in 2025, every time.
But it was the U.S. who always escaped from diplomacy, who cut the diplomacy and opted for war.
My message is between war and diplomacy, diplomacy is a better way, although we don't have any positive experience from the United States, but still, diplomacy is much better than war.
You'll notice that even here, he is admitting, number one, in this interview, he admitted that at least hundreds, thousands of people had been shot.
He also admits right there, right there, their determination to move toward nuclear facilities maintains, which is incredible.
You get bombed.
And you're saying the United States did the wrong thing in bombing you.
And then you say, our determination remains to develop nuclear capacity.
Anyone who believes that the Iranian government requires civilian nuclear infrastructure, you're out of your mind.
They're one of the most oil and natural gas-rich regions on planet Earth, and they are not concerned about, say, green environmentalist issues.
Absolute nuttiness.
Abbas Iraqi denied on Fox News that Iran intended to execute the protesters.
He said hanging is out of the question.
Again, if you believe the Iranian regime about pretty much anything, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, since they have not held to any commitment that they have ever made.
But we will see where things go from here.
And we will see if any sort of if what the Iranian government said was happening was happening, meaning it's all calm and peaceful.
Everybody went home.
Nobody is worried about what's going on in Iran anymore.
You would imagine they would turn the internet back on.
Pretty good indicator that we are not being told the full truth by the Iranian government when the internet remains off.
Meanwhile, while conflict engulfs the Middle East, Venezuela continues to be an interesting development.
The president of the United States put out a statement yesterday via Truth Social about a conversation he held with the current dictator of Venezuela, Delci Rodriguez.
And she is the current dictator of Venezuela.
She's not a democratically elected leader.
She is, of course, aligned with Nicolas Maduro.
The question is whether there is a plan to basically squeeze her such that the United States is able to eventually achieve elections in Venezuela along with the economic transition that would be necessary.
The president put out a statement, quote, this morning I had a very good call with the interim president of Venezuela, Delcio Rodriguez.
We're making tremendous progress as we help Venezuela stabilize and recover.
Many topics were discussed, including oil minerals, trade, and, of course, national security.
This partnership between the United States of America and Venezuela will be spectacular for all.
Venezuela will soon be great and prosperous again, perhaps more so than even before.
There are reports today that when it comes to Venezuela, the United States may be attempting to use private contractors in order to secure a lot of the oil facilities that would actually be necessary in order to ensure economic security there.
According to CNN, the Trump administration is preparing to use private military contractors to protect oil and energy assets in Venezuela rather than deploying U.S. troops, according to two sources familiar with the plans, setting up a potential boon for security firms with experience in the region and ties to the administration.
While President Trump has not ruled out a possible U.S. military presence in Venezuela, sources close to the president say he's wary of putting American boots on the ground for an extended period of time.
Not a shock there.
The president does not like the idea of gigantic numbers of American troops on the ground in places like Venezuela and using contractors here is a pretty interesting workaround.
Multiple private security companies are jockeying, apparently, to get involved in the U.S. presence in Venezuela.
Interest is high given the potential payday.
The United States could end up spending a lot of money on this sort of thing.
However, it is important to recognize when it comes to Venezuela that the actual impact of getting rid of Maduro and essentially seizing control of their oil resources is to cut China out of the loop completely.
This is a point made in the Wall Street Journal today.
For years, China made inroads into Latin America, coaxing countries to abandon support for Taiwan with loans to build roads, ports, rail lines, making significant purchases of commodities like soybeans and oil, mining metals such as copper.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Maduro was China's most important ally, an anti-American leader with oil resources, earning Venezuela the rare distinction of an all-weather partnership as China's highest diplomatic honor and a status held by no other country in Latin America.
Now, Beijing is no longer seeking to make new advances into the region in the near term.
Instead, the discourse in China's policymaking circles has shifted toward a potential trade-off.
If the Western hemisphere belongs to the Americans, the Taiwan Strait belongs to the Chinese.
It'll be interesting to see whether the Trump administration goes along with this.
This has always been a sort of fascinating conversation happening in Trumpian foreign policy circles.
And it's unclear what Venezuela sort of means.
Is Venezuela a muscular attempt by the Trump administration to intervene in a strategically important part of the world?
And does it mean that the United States will also intervene in strategically important parts of the world that are not in the Western hemisphere?
Does it mean that if China tries to take Taiwan, the United States will try to deter that?
Does it mean the United States will continue to work with NATO to deter Russian aggression in Eastern Europe?
Does it mean that the United States has an interest in preventing further Iranian aggression?
These are open questions, or, as China apparently seems to believe, is this the beginning of a new era in which the United States remains in control essentially of the Western hemisphere, but China is granted a gigantic sphere of influence in Southeast Asia spanning all the way across to Africa.
And Russia presumably expands its sphere of influence into Eastern and Western Europe as well as into the Middle East.
Are we about to carve up the globe into kind of old-style 1840s geopolitics, spheres of influence?
That is the big question at the moment.
China seems to believe that it's the latter, which would be actually quite grave because the United States, Latin America, that alone does not mean the United States maintains its global strength and comparative presence.
The United States, as the unilateral hegemon on planet Earth, is better for the United States than a world with two other alleged superpowers expanding their spheres of influence at the detriment of the United States.
According to the Wall Street Journal, this calculation does not mean that China considers the U.S. action in Venezuela a green light for an immediate action to take back Taiwan.
Rather, U.S. action against Maduro by force bolsters China as it gives priority to its core interests, chiefly bringing Taiwan under its control.
Beijing issued a policy paper on Latin America in December, suggesting it would not give up its ambitions there.
But then, after New Year's Day, Xi dispatched a special envoy to Venezuela with a mission to stop the bleeding.
Apparently, the goal was to secure what Beijing called Ji Ben Pan, the strategic foundation of China's Latin American influence, which meant ensuring repayment of some $10 billion in outstanding debt owed by Venezuela and continued access to the world's largest crude reserves.
Now, of course, all of that is in the rearview mirror thanks to the Trump intervention in Venezuela.
Now, China has a stack of IOUs from Venezuela and is dealing with a regime that has to put a priority on Trump.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said restoring American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere involves enlisting established friends to help bolster mutual security in the region and cultivating new partners in the region.
Apparently, again, China may expect the United States will beat a strategic retreat in the Taiwan Strait.
Other enticements that Chinese officials are considering involve Beijing potentially agreeing to purchase billions of dollars of long-term treasuries in order to fund the American debt.
There's an April summit between Xi and Trump in Beijing.
And it'll be interesting to see whether China believes that America First means America abandons the Far East or whether China understands that America First does not quite mean that.
According to the journal, Chinese leadership is hoping to gauge whether Trump's America First focus on the Western Hemisphere is an opening for China to exert more control over its own periphery or if the Venezuelan operation was merely the first chapter in a global reassertion of American power.
And that is the open question at this point.
And it'll be interesting again to see whether some of the people in, say, the Trump Defense Department, like Elbridge Colby, who suggested shifting resources from the Middle East toward facing down with China, were serious about that, because facing down with China means preventing their expansion of power in the Far East.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans derailed their effort by Democrats to rebuke President Trump on Venezuela.
There was a procedural vote that killed a measure designed to force Trump to seek congressional approval before taking any further military action against Venezuela.
Now, realistically, that wouldn't have made a difference.
The president has inherent Article II power.
Very difficult to argue that the president must inform Congress before any further strike, like a single one-off strike on Venezuelan targets.
The chamber was deadlocked 50-50.
Josh Halley, Todd Young of Indiana, they both ended up voting against the legislation.
The Republicans who voted in favor of the Democratic-led piece of legislation, the resolution, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and of course Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Democrats are still preparing to force a war powers vote on Greenland because President Trump continues to talk about his desire to take Greenland at all costs and make it our 51st state.
The Danish foreign minister came out and said that he doesn't know what Trump is talking about, basically, that there's no Chinese presence in Greenland.
So when President Trump says the United States must actively control the entirety of Greenland, as opposed to what we have right now, a security agreement with Denmark in order to build bases in Greenland, pretty much willy-nilly, he's like, well, you know, China doesn't have bases in Greenland.
The United States does.
We haven't seen Chinese warship in Greenland for a decade or so.
There's absolutely no Chinese investments in Greenland.
When I served as Prime Minister, I served Prime Minister twice.
We avoided any kind of Chinese investments in infrastructure.
You know, 10 years ago, the roller belt initiative, what you have seen in Africa, we avoided all that.
We now build new international airports in Greenland.
They are funded by Danish money.
We had an abandoned American military installation years ago.
There was a global tender.
I personally intervened in this in order to avoid, you know, any Chinese footprint.
So there's absolutely no Chinese footprint in Greenland.
So he is right about that on a technical level for sure.
He then said that the United States and Denmark have agreed to disagree over the future of Greenland, which, yeah, again, I don't think the United States is going to be flying F-35s over to Greenland anytime soon.
But the president likes this sort of language, apparently.
We therefore still have a fundamental disagreement, but we also agree to disagree.
And therefore, we will, however, continue to talk.
We have decided to form a high-level working group to explore if we can find a common way forward.
The group, in our view, should focus on how to address the American security concerns while at the same time respecting the red lines of the Kingdom of Denmark.
So we'll see what happens there.
President Trump did have a funny line.
He was asked about acquiring Greenland by force and a buildup.
And he was like, they have a force buildup in Greenland.
And the problem is there's not a thing that Denmark can do about it if Russia or China wants to occupy Greenland, but there's everything we can do.
You found that out last week with Venezuela.
There's everything we can do about things such as that, not going to happen.
We're not, you know, I can't rely on Denmark being able to fend themselves off.
You know, they were talking about they put an extra dog, and they were serious about this.
They put an extra dog sled there last month.
They added a second dog sled.
That's not going to do the trick.
Fair enough.
Except, again, the United States already has the legal ability to do a force buildup in Greenland if we so choose.
Meanwhile, the Democrats left, they are still having an extraordinarily difficult time on social issues.
Obviously, the Supreme Court heard a case yesterday in which the side the Democrats would associate with could not define the word woman.
It happened again in the Senate yesterday when a person named Nisha Verma, a doctor, could not define the word woman.
Senator Josh Halley asked for a specific definition.
And we are a society that is so smart that we've become apparently incredibly stupid.
Can men get pregnant?
Again, the reason I paused there is I'm not really sure what the goal of the question is.
The goal is just to establish a biological reality.
You just said a moment ago that science and evidence should control, not politics.
So let's just test that proposition.
Can men get pregnant?
I take care of people with many identities, but there are many women that can get pregnant.
I do take care of people that don't identify as women.
Can men get pregnant?
Again, as I'm saying.
Let me just remind you, you testified to a moment ago.
Science and evidence should control, not politics.
So can men get pregnant?
You're a doctor.
Science and evidence should guide medicine.
Do science and evidence tell us that men can get pregnant?
Biological men.
Can they get pregnant?
I also think yes, no questions like this are a political tool.
No, yes, no questions are about the truth, doctor.
Let's not make a mockery of this proceeding.
It's unbelievable.
I guess the idea here from Democrats is that the personal identity of people, how they self-identify is so important that we can't just say they're wrong.
We can't just say they're wrong.
That sympathy must outweigh biological fact.
The longer Democrats keep moving down this road, the worse it's going to be for them for sure.
When it comes to the economy, which of course is going to be the deciding factor in 2026, also in 2028, the question is going to be the future of the American economy.
There's been a lot of talk about affordability and campaigning on affordability.
President Trump has issued a wide variety of overtures toward affordability over the course of the last couple of weeks.
Virtually all of them would have belonged squarely in Democratic circles about five seconds ago.
Whether that is capping credit card interest rates at 10%, which of course only means that if you have a bad credit score, you won't be able to obtain credit cards.
And then you'll have to go to some sort of payday lender or banning institutional investors from buying single-family homes.
Again, the evidence that corporate investors are lowering the housing stock in the United States is nil.
It does not exist.
So that's not going to do it either.
The idea of the federal government buying up mortgage bonds so as to artificially inject liquidity into the mortgage market, which, by the way, will, in the short term, decrease the prices, but in the long term, increase the prices because it'll create inflation, or issuing $2,000 tariff refund checks, which, again, is just helicopter money.
And none of this is geared toward what we actually need, which is inflation being held steady and wage increases.
Nonetheless, the president is a solid politician, and what he's doing is politically popular, according to Harry Enton at CNN.
Here is Harry Enton talking about President Trump's credit card policy.
Oftentimes, we see issues that divide Americans, liberals and Democrats on one side, conservatives and Republicans on the other.
But take a look here: percentage with credit card debt: 49% of Democrats, 48% of independents, and 51% of Republicans.
It is a bipartisan problem in this country.
So all of a sudden, Donald Trump is saying, hey, let me find an issue in which I can unite the different factions in this country behind something that I am trying to propose here.
This is it, baby.
This is an issue that unites Democrats, Independents, and Republicans because the percentage with the credit card debt amongst Republicans, Independents, and Democrats is pretty much gosh darn equal.
Okay, so again, a lot of people have credit card debt.
That does not mean that good policy is made off the back of simply acknowledging that people have problems.
You actually have to have solutions to those problems that don't involve just taking a hammer and smacking something random.
The real question is whether in the future we are going to be able to out-compete our near competitors, like, for example, China.
Really interesting piece by Patrick McGee over at the Free Press talking about what China is focused on versus what the United States is focused on.
What McGee suggests is that the United States is very focused on software and the Chinese government is very much focused on hardware.
What he says is that there is a risk here that America's grand bet is outgunned by China's more mundane and pragmatic AI strategy.
While American companies concentrate resources on a moonshot, investing in frontier models to create a super intelligence to tackle every problem, Chinese companies are rapidly applying good enough AI to leverage their existing superiority in manufacturing and logistics.
For the average American, AI means chatbots.
Big tech firms are pouring unprecedented sums into chips and data centers to accelerate deep learning.
In China, the emphasis is more on deploying similar deep learning networks into every nook and cranny of the economy, giving machines increasing autonomy.
AI algorithms are being used to guide robotic arms in factories, screen patients in hospitals, and eliminate defects on the production line.
The U.S. is framing AI as a race with a single winner emerging into what a White House report last year called the new golden age of human flourishing.
China is making a more expansive bet.
It's not promising a new era that will arrive as soon as AI models scale enough to hit the magic artificial generative general intelligence moment.
It's deploying deep learning models into sectors where it's already strong, like manufacturing, to deliver more immediate results.
Google Deep Mind CEO Demi Hasabis has said he expects AGI to arrive in as little as five to 10 years and says it'll be 10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution.
Chatbots, says this writer, have made mesmerizing progress, but compare that to what's happening in China.
Tech giants Baidu and Alibaba are trying to keep up with their competitors in the United States, and they're deploying it in real-world scenarios.
If China succeeds in their approach, sometimes called embodied AI, the world will grow even more dependent on China in manufacturing and other areas in which robots and other machines can replace humans.
More than 150 Chinese companies are engaged in manufacturing human-like robots, which are trained on complex visual data that could enable them to mimic real workers.
China already deploys more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, and they need it because, of course, they have a huge demographic problem.
They don't have enough people, actually.
So, the question is whether China is going to be able to bootstrap itself to such manufacturing superiority that it won't matter even when we hit AGI.
It's sort of a fascinating trade-off.
Alrighty, folks.
Coming up, we'll jump into the latest in the Gaza Strip, where there has been an announcement by the Trump administration that phase two is about to begin.
What exactly does that mean?
We'll get into it.
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What was it like, Merlin, to be alone with God?
Is that who you think I was alone with?
Maradin, I knew your father.
I am yet convinced that he was not of this world.
All men know of the great Taliesin.
You are my father, that the gods should war for my soul.
Princess Garris, savior of our people.
I know what the bull god offered you.
I was offered the same.
And there is a new pirate work in the world.
I've seen it.
A god who sacrifices all he loves for us.
We are each given only one life, singer.
No.
We're given another.
I learned of Yezu the Christ, and I have become his follower.
He's waiting on Meru, and I think you can give him one.
Trust in Yezu.
He is the only hope for men like us.
Fate of Britain never rests in the hands of the Great Life.
Great Light, Great Darkness.
Such things mattered to me then.
What matters to you now, Mistress of Lies?
You, nephew.
The sword of a high king.
How many lives must be lost before you accept the power you were born to wield?
Still clinging to the promises of a god who has abandoned you.