Ben Shapiro examines airport safety failures following the murder of Sheridan Gorman, arguing Democratic defunding of DHS enabled illegal immigrant Jose Medina's presence. He critiques sanctuary city policies and contrasts ICE abolition calls with reality, noting ICE officers currently assist TSA lines despite partial government shutdowns. The discussion extends to Iran negotiations, oil price drops below $100, and Marine deployments near the Strait of Hormuz, while addressing leaks involving Joe Kent and Charlie Kirk. Ultimately, the episode suggests current security lapses stem from political gridlock rather than inherent system flaws, urging accountability over blame-shifting. [Automatically generated summary]
When you get to the airport next week, and 171 million of us will get on a plane this spring, a new record, will you be safe?
When you look at the southern border or when you read about Sheridan Gorman, 18 years old shot in the head while going out for a walk with friends to see the northern lights, do you feel safe?
We're going to spend today's show answering that question.
I want to take you through the evidence the way a prosecutor would because there is an answer and it is worse than what they are telling you on CNN.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Now, you may be listening to or watching this show right now at an airport waiting in line, probably for hours.
If you are, that is because Democrats decided to shut down funding for the Department of Homeland Security in order to punish immigration and customs enforcement ICE, which is a part of DHS, for enforcing the law.
Doesn't matter that ICE's legal authority has not changed for decades.
It doesn't matter that under President Trump, they're just doing their job for the first time in decades.
DHS must be closed down because ICE is doing their job.
See, that's the thing.
Democrats don't want to enforce the border.
If they get the chance, they will return to Biden-era open borders as soon as possible.
Let's start with this horrible story about Sheridan Gorman, an 18-year-old student at Loyola University in Chicago.
She was murdered by a masked man while she was walking in Rogers Park last Thursday.
According to CBS News, quote, the shooting happened early last Thursday as Gorman, who was 18 years old, was walking with her friends near the pier at Toby Prince Beach to see the Northern Lights.
Prosecutors said as Gorman and her friends were talking toward the lighthouse shortly after 1 a.m., Gorman told her friends she saw someone hiding behind the lighthouse.
When Medina came out from behind the lighthouse, Gorman and her friends ran away, and then Medina shot Gorman in the back.
Okay, so terrible story.
The police quickly arrested a suspect, one Jose Medina.
As it turns out, the alleged murderer was a Venezuelan national in the United States illegally.
According to the New York Times, the Department of Homeland Security said on Sunday that Mr. Medina was released into the country under the Biden administration in May 2023 after coming into contact with Border Patrol agents.
I know.
Gigantic shock, right?
Federal officials said Mr. Medina was arrested on suspicion of shoplifting in Chicago about one month later in June 2023 and then released.
So you should be asking yourself, if you get arrested for shoplifting and you are an illegal immigrant, why are you still here?
The answer, of course, is that Chicago is a sanctuary city.
That means that the city and state of Illinois prevent local officials from cooperating with federal law enforcement.
That is why Medina was freed to allegedly commit a cold-blooded murder.
You see, if local law enforcement had notified ICE that they'd arrested an illegal immigrant and then held him until ICE arrived, Gorman would probably still be alive.
Republicans, up to it, including the president, have pointed out the simple fact.
Senator Ted Cruz correctly pointed out, quote, Sheridan Gorman's killer was an illegal alien who should never have been in our country.
Joe Biden's open border policies and Governor Pritzker's refusal to accept President Trump's help are the reasons why she is not with us today.
Hey, well, that's right.
And here was President Trump being questioned by Daily Wire's Mary Margaret Olihan about the situation.
Here was a Chicago alderman named Maria Haddon saying that actually it might have been Gorman's fault.
You see, when you get shot in the back of the head by an illegal immigrant who was hiding while you were out seeing the northern lights, it's possible that it's your fault for startling that illegal immigrant.
It's sort of like walking into an endangered species arena at the zoo or something.
It's your fault if something bad happens to you.
unidentified
They go out on the pier, they walk around.
So the kids were out doing normal, normal things people do in the neighborhood.
And it sounds like this might have been a wrong place, wrong time.
Running into a person who had a gun.
They might have startled this person at the end of the pier unintentionally.
Other Democrats, of course, are claiming that this is all happening because we incarcerate too many criminals.
This is the big Democratic move.
It's been true for decades.
The idea is that criminality happens because too many criminals are in jail.
Sort of like the argument that if you kill too many terrorists, you're just creating new terrorists, which is weird because when you kill terrorists, then they're dead.
And the same thing is true of people who are in jail.
When they're in jail, you know what they're not doing?
They're not on the streets shooting people.
And yet, this is the typical Democratic take.
It is idiotic.
Here with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson back in November 2025.
Well, I feel like it's a great way actually to drive violence down.
Again, keeping criminals in jail is a great way for them not to commit crimes against people on the streets because they're in jail.
That particular theory of crime, that we have to stop crime by freeing criminals, has cost the city of Chicago both lives and cash.
The free press reports this morning, Illinois has already paid some $1 billion to ex-gang members who stop crime in Chicago.
Spoiler alert, it doesn't work all that great.
Here is the free press quote.
While the mayor is supportive of community violence intervention, a key member of his public safety team said that CVI is a revolving door for gang members.
Some of these guys who are collecting money through CVI are still committing crimes, the public safety team employee said.
It's a huge problem.
Governor J.B. Pritzker, who has been losing weight in expectation, I assume, of a presidential run, which again is misbegotten in the extreme, his office issued a statement, quote, our thoughts are with the family, friends, and Loyola University community grieving the senseless murder of Sheridan Gorman.
Violent crime has no place in our streets.
We expect the alleged perpetrator to be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.
The Trump administration needs to stop politicizing heinous tragedies and instead focus on real solutions, like reinstating federal funds to prevent violence that support our public safety efforts.
That's crazy.
That's crazy.
Politicizing heinous tragedies instead of focusing on real solutions, it is not politicization to point to the specific policy that could have stopped this murder in the first place.
In fact, it is playing politics to ignore that policy for political reasons.
But Democrats are addicted to playing politics on illegal immigration.
They've decided that illegal immigrants are the finest among us and deserve our undying sympathy, and that we ought to defund the agency that houses ICE in order to facilitate illegal immigration.
Representative Eric Swalwell, who is running for governor of California, I don't know why.
I mean, man, Eric Swalwell.
Here he was yesterday saying he wants to abolish ICE, just running far to the left.
And if Democrats take control of the House, I hope we strip out your funding from the root to the stem because I can't speak for us, my colleagues, but I want to apologize.
Okay, the reason that he's saying he wants to abolish ICE is not because he actually wants to abolish ICE.
It's because he wishes to win a Democratic primary in the state of California.
He wishes to become the Democratic nominee, and he feels like the more radical he is, the more he can vault himself to the top of the pile.
In just one second, I'm going to get into our cultural arbiters playing offense on behalf of illegal immigrants, you know, like Miss Rachel.
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Okay, Savvy, we are going to check in with our members, folks.
As you know, if you're a member, you can ask me questions live during the show.
If you're not a member, you just have to sit there and take it.
So you should probably become a member.
Savvy, what are they saying?
The people.
unidentified
The people have spoken.
Paul wants to know: how were Clinton, Bush, Obama so successful with deportations?
Is it purely partisan politics slowing things down?
The answer is that when it came to Bill Clinton, there was an enormous amount of illegal immigration.
George W. Bush, serious illegal immigration, and the biggest, of course, was Obama.
There was serious illegal immigration under Barack Obama.
It really exploded under Joe Biden.
The counts that you are seeing, when it says that, for example, Obama deported more people than Trump, that's because they are counting turnaways at the border.
There are almost no turnaways of the border these days because President Trump has made it clear that if you show up at the border, you will be turned away.
So those numbers are kind of wildly inflated from past presidents.
And yes, of course, things are more partisan now.
Nobody on the Democratic side of the aisle in the 90s was saying that we needed to abolish ICE.
That was just not a thing that was being said.
If you go back and you watch 1992, Bill Clinton's acceptance speech at the DNC, he was a moderate on illegal immigration by today's standards.
So back to our cultural arbiters.
They have been playing offense on behalf of illegal immigration.
Miss Rachel, that is the radically political children's host who spends her days playing an overgrown child and also standing for terrorist groups like Hamas.
While she has now sounded off on ICE's supposed evils, she headed down to an ICE facility in Texas to lecture Americans on why we must allow illegal immigration to run unchecked across the country, you know, for the kids.
unidentified
Do you really miss your school and your friends?
Very much.
Don't you be there to be happy.
If you could help us to live this life.
I don't know if I need to be here anymore.
Don't want to be here anymore.
You miss good here.
Oh, I'm so sorry.
A lot of people want to try to help.
I wouldn't let her go to the snowy indeed.
You have a real gift for spelling.
You're so smart.
When I deflect from here, my stomach starts hurting.
That is Miss Rachel programming to your five-year-old child.
Yes, as long as she cosplays as a little girl, as an adult, you know, kind of blues clues style, then it's fine for her to be as politically left-wing as she wants to be.
Popular TV shows, too, are pulling out all the stops.
The Pitt, an HBO medical drama that I actually enjoy with my wife because she's a doctor, so she likes to analyze it.
It recently featured this particular scene in which ICE raids an ER.
And that is the lead doctor telling the nurse not to talk to ICE.
And I promise we'll get you out.
Because this is how it goes.
Just people being randomly arrested in ERs and obstructing the working of ERs because ICE, of course, is totally evil.
That is the key.
ICE is a bunch of monsters.
They're even arresting ER nurses, not like the ER nurses who are out in the streets, you know, actively obstructing things, like ER nurses in the ER, mostly just to be particularly cruel.
Democrats must be high on their own supply at this point.
They are just drinking from this cultural well.
They think that shutting down the Department of Homeland Security is good politics.
At least House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries seems to think so.
He is saying that it's good to shut down the DHS funding because, of course, the GOP won't agree to keep ICE away from polling sites.
Now, I have a question.
Why are illegal immigrants at polling sites?
I mean, if ICE is there, like if ICE shows up at a polling site and I show up at a polling site, I'm not worried about ICE because I am not an illegal immigrant.
It seems to me that actually making sure illegal immigrants do not show up at polling sites is not a horrible use of ICE, actually.
Anyway, here is House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries saying we must withdraw taxpayer funding from the DHS.
I sort of get schools because the idea is that you have a lot of kids of illegal immigrants who are going to schools, and so you don't want them to have to worry about mom and dad getting pulled out of line and then thrown out of the country.
I kind of get it, like on a humanitarian level.
The polling sites, I really don't get.
In any case, the partial DHS shutdown has had the effect not just of defunding ICE, but of defunding, of course, the TSA, the Transportation Security Administration.
This has led to these gigantic lines around the country at airports.
In response, the administration has said that they will deploy ICE officers to man the TSA lines because you see ICE actually has some leftover funding from the last round of funding.
He's taking that agency that is recklessly out of control and bringing them to our airports under the lie that somehow this is going to help deal with the long lines that he created in the first place.
Now, again, I assume here that President Trump doesn't want to deal with the Democrats because he believes that they basically own the shutdown, which is probably true.
According to Punch Bowl, President Trump threatened he would slam Republicans if they left town for recess coming up.
According to Punch Bowl, quote, the president wants Republicans to stay in D.C. and keep fighting with Democrats over DHS funding and the Save America Act, the GOP's voter ID and proof of citizenship bill.
So this begs the question of whether President Trump is right on the politics.
There's a new CBS News YouGov poll.
It shows only 31% of Americans believe Democrats are right to cause the partial government shutdown.
36% believe the Democratic position is not worth it.
So President Trump isn't totally wrong to browbeat Democrats with their own peculiar shutdown position.
Meanwhile, in better news, DHS does have a new secretary, so it is no longer Christy Noam, of course.
That person is Mark Wayne Mullen, who was confirmed yesterday.
Now we can only hope he actually has a fully funded department to actually run.
Now, speaking of the situation in the country, small business is the beating heart of the American economy.
We all know this.
We are a mid-sized to small business.
There are 36.2 million small businesses across the country, and 70% of them say they need additional capital at least once a year.
If you ever run a business, this is a constant necessity.
Sometimes you just have cash flow issues.
Sometimes you need a little bit of an advance so you can get to the next pay period.
Big banks have been tightening underwriting.
They've been approving fewer loans than ever.
There's a lot of bureaucracy, tons of red tape, endless paperwork.
It can turn that whole process into a marathon.
Sometimes it takes months, and that's too late.
So if you want bank rates without the bank delays, you need to check out cardiff.co/slash Shapiro for up to 500 grand in same-day funding.
You need to check them out.
They're the largest privately held small business lender in America.
They've already funded over $12 billion since 2004, $12 billion.
Again, as a business owner, you're constantly sort of running from behind.
It is drinking from a fire hose.
And so if you get caught up short, you really need everything to move quickly.
And sometimes banks can't move that quickly.
Very often, they're trying to lock out small businesses, but Cardiff has the key.
Big banks may not want to approve your business loan.
Cardiff does.
If you've been in business for at least a year, if you're pulling in 20 grand a month in revenue, apply now for up to $500,000 in same-day business funding at cardiff.co/slash Shapiro.
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Okay, Savvy, so we're checking in with the Facts Fam for more questions.
What are they asking?
unidentified
So Antonio asks: The Cato Institute has argued against mass deportations based on analysis that illegal immigrants cost less than they contribute to the economy.
Daniel D. Martino and Manhattan Institute have released a study showing the opposite.
So what methodologies lead to these findings?
How do we accurately estimate the cost of illegal immigration?
So very often institutes like Cato Institute will not take into account the cost of, for example, children of illegal immigrants.
So let's say that you're an illegal immigrant.
You come here and you have a couple of kids.
And now your kids are going to be going to public school.
They're not illegal immigrants themselves, or maybe they are.
Maybe they're dreamers, right?
Meaning they came here as minors through no fault of their own, but they're illegal immigrants.
And now we have to pay for their schooling and their health care and all the rest.
So it depends how holistically you actually measure taxpayer costs.
If you holistically measure taxpayer costs, then overall illegal immigration does cost Americans more than they receive from whatever taxes people are paying into the system.
And this has also been suggested by the Center for Immigration Studies and Mark Crocorium.
Alrighty, folks, speaking of our airport, scary footage out of LaGuardia on Sunday night, according to the Associated Press.
An Air Canada jet carrying more than 70 passengers collided with a fire truck while landing at New York's LaGuardia airport late on Sunday, killing the pilot and co-pilot, injuring several other people, according to officials.
The impact severed the cockpit, hurled a flight attendant who was still secured to her seat far from the crash site, according to her daughter.
The flight attendant actually survived.
The firetruck was crossing the tarmac just before midnight after being given permission to check on another plane that had aborted its own takeoff.
Before the collision, you can hear an air traffic controller on airport communications telling the fire truck to stop.
Here's the CCTV footage.
Scary stuff here.
So you can see the plane.
It has landed.
And then here comes the fire truck and the plane just plows directly into the fire truck.
Terrible stuff right there.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's really, really bad.
And here you will hear the audio of the air traffic controller who admits that he messed up.
What if we privatize both TSA and air traffic control?
There are a lot of other countries that actually do this, including ones that are to our left, Canada, the UK in part, Australia, Germany, Switzerland.
That'd be a smart move.
It would cost us a lot less money.
You could have the airlines actually pay for TSA, essentially.
You'd have them control their own security into their airlines.
It would also prevent the government from being able to shut down air travel whenever politicians fight.
And by the way, it would create massive incentive for better service and more reliable service from the airlines.
If the airlines want you to be able to move more quickly in and out, then they will facilitate that.
It would also separate the FAA from service providers.
So if you have regulatory oversight of private agencies, that is better than the same people who are making the rules also implementing those rules.
It would create an incentive for people to actually follow the law because instead of people working for the FAA, creating the regulations and then failing, and then the liability lies with the agency that created the regulation, meaning the taxpayer, it lies with the airlines.
That would make a lot more sense.
But again, one of the biggest problems with a big government is that it is sclerotic, it is inefficient.
And if you take that back to the TSA and to DHS, it ends up with the American public significantly less safe.
In just a second, we're going to get into the idiotic socialists who traveled to Cuba as a PR stunt.
Truly, the most ridiculous thing that I have seen, at least this week.
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And I think that the reality is the American people by polling data are much more focused on people with a criminal record than they are on sort of people who are down at the Home Depot looking to do some gardening.
And so this is always the delicate balance.
One of the things that has happened is an enormous amount of self-deportations.
A lot of people who see that the administration is not going to allow them to overstay their visa, simply leaving and going home.
And I think that will solve part of the problem.
But the idea of us mass deporting 15 to 20 million people, which is probably the number of illegal immigrants in the country, that I think is a non-starter in just realistic political terms.
And so we need to tranche this.
We need to make priorities.
And then sort of like tier one is criminals.
Tier two are people who are net draws on the welfare system.
And then you get to tier three, tier four, tier five.
Meanwhile, speaking of people who truly wish to undermine America's interests at home and abroad, the so-called Nuestra America convoy has ended.
I know it's sad.
Nuestra America, that's a group associated with Code Pink, which of course is a radical left-wing, partially foreign-funded group that brought rich and famous left-wingers to Cuba to yell about how terrible America is while enjoying drinks on the beach and some unearned feelings of moral superiority.
Now, as we've talked about, Cuba is a communist hellhole.
It has been for decades.
There's an average annual salary there of $156, not per day, not per month, per year, $156.
But Nuestra America didn't come to call for the liberation of the island nation.
They came to cover how terrible it is there and blame it on America and to cry America's evil.
And of course, do a little bit of poverty tourism.
Here are our communist friends enjoying a nice outing amongst the proletariat.
You can see them on one of these little buses here.
And they're singing and having a good time.
And then they're going to go take pictures of some of the poor people.
Exciting stuff.
They're all wearing, half of them are wearing masks, by the way.
Because you have to make sure that you're masked up.
Good people.
Don't worry, good little communists.
The best kind of communists are the ones who don't have to live in the communist countries.
Genius level stuff here.
Ah, yes, poverty tourism.
Well, according to Fox News, the far-left group Code Pink sponsored flights to the communist-led island, and the group was joined by Isra Hersey, the daughter of Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and left-wing Twitch streamer Hassan Piker, an ally of Democratic socialist New York City mayor, Zorhan Mamdani.
Well, here's how it went.
So, Isra Hersey, that would be Representative Ilhan Omar's kid, she goes to Barnard, showed up.
There, she engaged in some light poverty tourism and stayed at a Ritzy five-star hotel.
Her group then joined a concert led by Kneecap.
That's the Irish band most famous for screaming about the evils of Israel.
Here's some footage of that magical concert.
Again, people just, you know, starving just off camera.
Well, I'm glad they're having a good time.
That's the important thing, is the rich people flying in from abroad to celebrate amidst the dire poverty.
Meanwhile, Cuba is in a state of rolling blackouts.
The poverty tourist hotel, it is lit.
Everywhere else, ain't no power.
unidentified
So this is Cuba, and there is no electricity anywhere because there's no oil, there's no energy.
And this is what it looks like.
Except that hotel, because it's a five-star hotel.
Well, at least the communists, you know, from abroad are having a good time.
While defending herself, Hersey tweeted, quote, yes, I am in Cuba.
People are here from across the globe to express solidarity with the Cuban people, people who are standing against the oppressive blockade exacerbated by the Trump administration.
I am honored to be here.
I am honored to make history an Eid Mubarak to all.
Yes, she's making so much history.
People generations from now will remember the spoiled brat child of the luckiest immigrants in history going to communist nations to decry the nation that took them in.
So to get this straight, this person is the daughter of an immigrant from one of the most impoverished and terrible parts of planet Earth.
Her mother was elected to Congress.
She goes to one of the most prestigious and expensive colleges in America.
Tuition plus room and board over at Barnard is $90,000 per year.
Per year.
I mean, just to do some brief like mental math right there, it would take a lot of years of Cuban salary to pay for that $90,000 per year.
Like a lot.
Like a lot.
Like 70 years or something.
She stays at five-star hotels in Cuba.
And according to Isra Hersey, America is the bad guy.
Like mother-like daughter, of course.
Ilhan Omar is one of America's greatest attractors.
She is a seething cauldron of sneering vocal grind who sympathizes with terrorists and commies all over the globe.
She put out a statement, quote, I am incredibly proud of Israel.
I can't really do her voice.
It's like down here.
And everyone who made the trip to Cuba, they took tons of aid to make sure the people of Cuba knew that there are so many people across the world who stand in solidarity with them.
Cuba has always sent aides to country, has always sent aid to countries in need and has trained thousands of physicians across the world, including my childhood physician.
In reality, Cuba tried to export revolution during the 1960s and 1970s to large swaths of Africa and joined with some of the worst, most repressive regimes on planet Earth in doing so.
Ilhan Omar says, Isra Hersey is more than just my daughter.
She is a brilliant young leader who has always worked hard to advocate for a more just world.
She inspires me and so many people with her leadership and dedication.
I am forever fortunate to have her as my daughter, but I am even more fortunate to know her as the unflinching justice warrior for justice she is.
Well, joining Hersey was Nepo Baby Socialist and dog-zapping fashioniste, Hassan Piker.
That is a man whose love for communism is matched only by his taste for Cartier jewelry.
One day soon, perhaps he'll finally get his life stream and end up in a thrupple with Mojd Ab Khomeini.
But this week, he was in Cuba where he was explaining that he had to stay.
He had to.
He had to stay in a five-star hotel, guys.
By law, he had, but here's the thing.
The island peoples out there, they love having no power.
They love having no power.
So while he was relegated to the air-conditioned hotel, they out there, they were fine.
Communism, it's doing great, but he's blaming America.
I love that he is hanging out with Ben Rhodes.
Again, remember, Hassan Piker, who is one of the worst people in the commentariat, a person who routinely sympathizes with terrorists, like all over the world, that guy is hanging out with Zorhan Mamdani and he's doing interviews with all the Democratic politicians.
It's pretty incredible.
Now, by the way, you heard him mention right there, a cure, right?
Supposedly, it is an Alzheimer's working solution.
Well, not really.
It's actually an ongoing trial in Canada.
It is not being blocked because of U.S. embargo.
The original study itself actually says more research is necessary.
But here's the important thing.
The important thing is that Hassan Piker believes he's doing something virtuous.
And so do the rest of these clowns.
And so they perform sensual massages on the planet's worst dictators, from Cuba to Iran to terrorist groups, all in the name of their magical principles.
And then they say their critics are the problem.
If you ever want to hear somebody self-pitying beyond all belief, listen to this one.
He's doing things by taking a flight over to Cuba, taking pictures of all the poor people, and then proclaiming that he is virtuous.
Is there any way that we can just give him a one-way flight to Cuba and he can just stay there?
Well, speaking of America's enemies, the war in Iran continues.
It appears that Saudi Arabia and UAE may be getting closer to direct involvement against Iran, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Quote, U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf are inching toward joining the fight against Iran, getting tougher following persistent attacks that have disrupted their economies and risk giving Tehran long-term leverage over the Strait of Hormuz.
Now, all that makes perfect sense because our Gulf allies do not really want an Iran that survives and continues to prey on the oil industry in the Persian Gulf.
That is not something they're interested in.
And an early withdrawal or Iran still being in dominant position in the Strait of Hormuz means they can cut off oil supply at any given moment.
Now, President Trump, for his part, seems to be pursuing a dual track.
Negotiations with the possibility of even harsher action.
Yesterday, President Trump suggested that there were, in fact, negotiations with Iran happening.
So, who is it that Trump could be talking to, considering that the current titular leader is probably either dead or in a coma?
Well, according to the Jerusalem Post, the answer is that it is a person who is the parliament speaker and longtime IRGC higher up in Mohammed Baker Khalibaf.
Khalibaf is a hardliner, of course.
Not a lot of not hardliners at the top of the Iranian government, as per usual arrangement.
As political reports, quoting one Ali Vaez, senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group, quote, Khaliba is a quintessential insider, ambitious and pragmatic, yet fundamentally committed to the preservation of Iran's Islamist order.
It makes him an unlikely candidate to offer Washington any meaningful concessions.
Even if he were inclined to test the boundaries, Iran's military establishment and the broader security elite would almost certainly constrain him.
For his part, Khaliba is denying any contact.
He put out a tweet saying, our people demand the complete and humiliating punishment of the aggressors.
All officials stand firmly behind their leader and people until this goal is achieved.
No negotiations with America have taken place.
Fake news is intended to manipulate financial and oil markets and to escape the quagmire in which America and Israel are trapped.
And of course, on Sunday, Khaliba also threatened the United States on X.
He said, in addition to military bases, those financial institutions that fund the U.S. military budget are considered legitimate targets because Treasury bonds are tainted with the blood of Iranians.
If you proceed to purchase them, you are in fact attacking your own assets in primary headquarters.
We are monitoring your investment portfolios.
The Iranian foreign minister is denying outright any negotiations, so President Trump laughed at them yesterday.
After all, it does make some sense to keep the phone line open in case Iran decides to give up the ghost into a Dulcie Rodriguez situation over in Iran, like Venezuela.
Second, even the possibility of an off-ramp talks down the oil prices.
So yesterday, oil prices fell by over 13%.
Brent crude futures had fallen around 17 bucks or 15 percent, down below $100.
U.S. West Intermediate Texas had fallen $13, about 13.5%.
Third, this all does buy time for some more resources to reach the region.
The Wall Street Journal reported last night, quote, thousands of U.S. Marines are slated to arrive in the Middle East on Friday, according to two U.S. officials, the day President Trump has set as the deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
The Japan-based amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli, the amphibious landing dock USS New Orleans, and roughly 2,200 Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit will cross into U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for U.S. forces in the Middle East.
On Friday, the officials said it would take another few days for the unit to get to the Strait of Hormuz.
The Pentagon has also ordered another Marine unit to CENTCOM, the California-based 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard the USS Boxer Amphibious Ready Group.
The unit will depart in a few weeks.
It won't arrive in CENTCOM for a few weeks after that.
So, you may recall that President Trump negotiated with Iran for weeks while American aircraft carriers made their way to the Middle East just a few weeks ago.
So, this could be a similar situation.
Meanwhile, the Grievance Party having a very rough time of it.
Senator Chuck Schumer, who has constantly decried the evils of the Iranian regime, he is having a very tough time answering whether it is good or not that President Trump went after Iran.
And he just cannot answer the question on Morning Joe.
Is it a good thing that Iran, and I think you would agree with me, epicenter of terrorism in the world since 1979, is it good that their military infrastructure is being degraded to the degree that it is, yes or no?
So you have a military side, but I can show you my chart.
But I think I threw it away.
You have the military side, you have the political side.
I'm simply asking on the military side, is it good, regardless of whether we agree with going in or not, is it good that Iran's military infrastructure has been seriously found?
It's incredible that he's unable to just say the obvious, which is, yes, it is good that we have destroyed an enormous amount of Iran's military arsenal.
And what happens next, we don't know, but that at least is good.
Meanwhile, Joe Kent, who you remember is the former national director for the counterterrorism center, the one who quit amidst a full-scale federal investigation into leaking, he is still making the rounds and he's pretending to be a principled critic of the administration.
Well, it turns out President Trump probably should not be quite as sympathetic to people who beg him for a job.
Turns out that Kent was almost certainly using his slot as director of National Center for Counterterrorism to leak information about Charlie Kirk's murder to Candace Owens.
When Candace said she had a source inside the federal intelligence apparatus, I think it would be hard to believe it was not Joe Kent.
So Andrew Colvett made clear over at TPUSA.
So Andrew is a high-ranking member over at TPUSA, very close friends with Charlie.
Obviously, after Charlie was killed, there's a lot of speculation about foreign involvement, driven largely by Candace.
And Andrew Colvett actually gave texts that he had had with Charlie Kirk.
There were texts that ended up in Candace Owens's hands.
And what he says is that he had sent those texts to Joe Kent, and then magically they ended up in the hands of Candace Owens.
Well, that's weird.
I'm not sure why we want the National Center for Counterterrorism head to be on a first-text basis with a person who is acting in totally psychotic ways, but all right.