President Trump crushes doubters by achieving three of four Iran war goals, reopening the Strait of Hormuz via blockade and securing a 10-day ceasefire with Rubio and Caine to dismantle Hezbollah. While Iranian AI bots flood social media with 1.1 million followers, Trump stabilizes senior voter support against attacks from Tucker Carlson and Pope Leo XIII. Meanwhile, Democrats face backlash over Zohran Mamdani's Tax Day celebration, California's proposed wealth tax, and alleged Medi-Cal gender surgeries for illegal immigrants, all while advocating military cuts despite $60 trillion in social welfare spending versus $8–$10 trillion in defense costs since 2000. [Automatically generated summary]
When you strike someone down, they usually stay down.
And if they recover, you can strike them down again.
The spirit of Iran is not going to teach Luke Skywalker how to blow up the Death Star.
That's not how this works.
It is not clear how you get stronger by being alienated from every single country in the region, from Jews to Muslims, or how somehow you're getting stronger if all your leaders are dead and you're walking around as a regime pretending that an impotent, comatose dude with no leg is your actual leader.
Weekend at Mullahs.
Or how you get stronger when your missile launch capacity has been so degraded, so radically degraded, that you're being forced to physically unbury the missile launchers you buried.
They buried a bunch of missile launchers to hide them, and now you're being forced to unbury them just so you have something to shoot, and we can see you doing that.
And so, if there's another round here, we will just blow those up too.
Or, how do you get stronger if your Navy is at the bottom of the sea?
Or, how do you get stronger if your Air Force, which was a bunch of Vietnam era crap, is now a bunch of shrapnel?
How are you stronger when your economy is totally non existent?
When in a few weeks, you're not going to have money to pay your IRGC thugs?
But, okay, fine.
Say the panicans and the liars.
The Iranians will still win.
They will win by outlasting.
So, here's the thing.
Staying alive isn't winning unless we're doing the Hunger Games, which we're not.
So, just to take a similar example, is Cuba winning right now?
Is Cuba winning?
Cuba, the Cuban communist regime has survived.
Are they winning or are they on their last legs?
Pretty clear they are losing.
And so is the regime in Tehran.
So, the regime in Tehran had three methods of resistance, and they've been building all three of these methods of resistance for years and years and years and years.
First, the so called axis of resistance.
This would be all of the terror proxies they put all over the region from Hamas.
To Hezbollah, to the Houthis, to terror groups in Iraq.
All of those members of the Axis of Resistance were supposed to be Iran's forward army.
That was their forward capacity.
And since October 7th, 2023, Israel has steadily degraded andor destroyed those terrorists for forward capacity.
So, Hamas, for example, no forward capacity at this point.
They're stuck in a small section of Gaza.
They may be trying to rebuild, won't matter.
Israel will go in and blow them up again.
Hezbollah has been so greatly reduced as a power in the region, as we'll talk about.
then now they are in danger of complete evisceration.
The Houthis could have gone active any time during this war.
After all, they're Iranian allies, and they didn't.
And they didn't for a reason.
They knew that if they had, they would have been obliterated too.
So the terror proxies that Iran had been funding for generations basically defenestrated.
That was their number one mode of striking back.
Number two was the nuclear program.
Okay, so the nuclear program, that was what they were attempting to develop.
They're racing toward a nuclear bomb to protect their regime, and that is what caused all of this to happen.
If they had given up their nuclear program years ago, they would have had normalized relations with a lot of different countries.
The sanctions would not be on them.
But they decided that they were going to race forward with that nuclear program and they got the hell bombed out of them.
And then finally, there was the Strait of Hormuz.
Okay, so the Strait of Hormuz, they shut that down, right?
And them shutting down the Strait of Hormuz was supposed to be their trump card.
That was the thing that was supposed to stop everything.
This is where all of the panic ends and all the liars and the people who hate Trump and hate Israel and all the rest, this is where all of them started to say, well, you know, the Iranians, they really showed you they shut the Strait of Hormuz.
They shut the Strait of Hormuz.
Well, it's open now.
In just a moment, we'll get to President Trump's announcement that the Strait of Hormuz is in fact open.
First, you spend roughly a third of your life sleeping.
That's not just a fun fact.
That is a massive chunk of your existence where your body is either recovering or falling apart.
If you're sleeping on a saggy, generic mattress, you're not setting yourself up for success.
Helix actually builds mattresses for you.
You take a quick sleep quiz online, it matches you to one of their many models based on how you sleep, your body type, and whether your spouse thrashes around at night.
They deliver it right to your door free in the United States in a box you can actually move.
Plus, you get a 120 night sleep trial so you can actually try that mattress out at night rather than laying on it once in a showroom and hoping for the best.
I've got that Helix sleep mattress.
Now, notice I am on the road right now.
You know what that means?
It means I'm not on my Helix sleep mattress.
Wondering why I look tired?
That would be the reason why.
Helix also offers a limited lifetime warranty backed by their Happy with Helix guarantee.
So, you can rest easy knowing your nights are covered.
This is also one of the most awarded mattress brands out there, reviewed by outlets like Forbes and Wired.
So, you know, it's top of the line.
Head on over to helixleep.comslash Ben for 25% offsite wide.
That's helixleep.comslash Ben for 25% offsite wide.
Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you.
helixleep.comslash Ben.
So, as of this morning, the President of the United States put out a statement The Strait of Hormuz is completely open and ready for business and full passage, but the naval blockade will remain in full force and effect as it pertains to Iran only.
Until such time as our transaction with Iran is 100% complete.
This process should go very quickly, and that most of the points are already negotiated.
Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Trump.
Okay, so it's open now.
So remember that time when they said that we would never be able to open the strait?
We would never be able to.
So what did we do?
We said, you guys can close the strait, but if you do, we are going to stop all ships going in and out of Iranian ports.
And then you just won't have an economy, and then you are dead in the water.
And guess what?
Guess what?
Within a week and a half, they opened the strait.
They stopped messing around in the strait because they didn't have the forward operating capacity.
Their navy was, in fact, at the bottom of the sea.
The Persian Gulf was littered with the hulks of their ships.
The reality is that their pathetic mine laying capacities, and I say pathetic because they were actually just putting mines in the water and losing them out there.
We are now demining the Strait of Hormuz because they weren't even competent enough to do that.
The president put out some more truth socials on this subject.
Quote Now that the Hormuz Strait situation is over, I received a call from NATO asking if we would need some help.
I told them to stay away unless they just want to load up their ships with oil.
Again, this deal is not tied in any way to Lebanon, but we will make Lebanon great again.
I'll explain why that one is important in just a second.
And the president said, Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again.
It will no longer be used as a weapon against the world, President Trump.
And of course, the reason this happened really is because the Chinese said, we're not doing this game.
That's really what happened here the Strait of Hormuz closing hurt the Chinese way worse than it hurt us.
The Chinese presumably brought pressure to bear via Pakistan on the Iranians, and the Iranians decided to open the Strait.
So that is a victory.
Now, there are people saying, well, it wouldn't have been shut in the first place if you hadn't attacked Iran.
Okay, but the point is the reason that Iran did that is because they were desperate.
Again, there were only three things that they could do to preserve their regime long term.
One was the axis of resistance, been defenestrated, been destroyed.
This is why what Trump said about Lebanon and the Lebanon war is important.
Two, nuclear program, defended, by the way, by a shield of ballistic missiles.
One of the reasons why the United States and Israel went now is because Iran was ramping up its development of ballistic missiles beyond the capacity of various THAAD systems and Patriot systems to shoot them down.
And so Israel and the United States said, you don't get to build an umbrella of missiles and then build your nukes beneath them.
And so that's what prompted all of this.
Okay, so that was their other capacity.
We'll get to the nukes in a second.
And then third was the Strait of Hormuz.
And two of the three capacities have now been removed, and the third is well on its way.
So, yes, that's a victory.
Again, look at the shifting goalposts.
A week ago, people were saying he'll never be able to open this.
Literally, one week ago.
He'll never be able to open the Strait of Hormuz.
It won't happen.
The Iranians just have a stranglehold.
They have total control.
Weird, because like 10 days later, it's open.
And by the way, the only ships that are not free to transit the Strait are the ones that we are locking up.
I don't know how that doesn't sound like a victory to you.
It is a victory, in fact, when oil dives back down dramatically.
And we've been told that that was the chief element that was somehow going to undermine the war.
When Brent crude dropped 11% at the beginning of the morning, Down below 90 bucks, and it's going to drop further.
How is that not a victory, by the way?
And one of the reasons, by the way, that Iran had to give up the ghost year is because of all of the airstrikes that we did in Iran.
Miyad Maleki points out from the Foundation of Defense for Democracies that the six plus weeks of strikes before the blockade actually made it far more devastating for the regime.
70% of their missile launchers had been destroyed or disabled, 200 air defense systems were struck.
The U.S. and Israel had achieved full air superiority within 24 hours.
Missile launches plummeted from 350 on day one to 50 by day four.
And most importantly, Iran could not reroute its oil over land, which meant that they were done.
If they couldn't export their oil by building pipelines in other ways, right, when the Strait of Hormuz shut, Saudi immediately started building pipelines in other directions.
Iran could not because we had struck their capacity to do so.
Their two biggest steel plants shut down.
That meant 70% of their steel capacity disrupted.
85% of their petrochemical export capacity was knocked out.
The South Power strikes alone took out 12% of Iran's total gas production.
So, what does this mean?
Well, it means, again, go back to those things that Iran supposedly was holding over the United States and Israel and all of our Gulf allies its terror proxies, ballistic missile and nukes, and the Strait.
Well, the Strait is now open.
The ballistic missiles have been devastated.
The nukes are on their way, as we'll get to in a moment.
And so, all that was left was basically the terror proxies.
And the terror proxies had been largely destroyed.
The reason why.
The United States and Israel had the unique capacity to go after Iran right now is because Israel spent the last couple of years destroying Hezbollah.
The great threat in 2022, if you ask any Israeli, was from the northern border, Hezbollah, possibility of them shooting targeted rockets by the tens of thousands into Israel.
And Israel ended that threat and then moved forward to completely end the threat in the middle of this war so that Iran had no forward capacity.
So Iran is trying to save face now.
Iran is trying to claim that it's not because the president of the United States put a blockade on Iranian ships.
that they are giving up control of the Strait of Hormuz.
They're lying.
They're saying that the only reason for the ceasefire is the ceasefire in Lebanon.
So, simultaneous with this happening, the President of the United States pushed forward a ceasefire in Lebanon.
So, while all eyes have been on the situation in Iran, Israel has been doing heavy operations in the south of Lebanon to finally, once and for all, extirpate the threat from the south of Lebanon.
For those who don't know their history, Hezbollah has been a dominant force in southern Lebanon since the early 80s.
So, if you look back at Lebanese history, it's amazing.
There's so many people.
Who hate Israel and who are purportedly doing so because, in some way, they supposedly love Christians, which, again, I find a bizarre contention since literally the only country with a naturally growing Christian population in the entire Middle East is Israel.
But if you want to look at who kills Christians, take a look at Lebanon.
Take a look at Lebanon.
Lebanon used to be a thriving Christian country, it was, in fact, a majority Christian country.
And then it became more and more Muslim.
And then, even beyond that, it turned into a Palestinian chaotic hellhole.
The reality is that the Palestinians arrived in Lebanon in the mid 70s after they were expelled from Jordan.
They took up residence at the southern border and they started murdering Lebanese politicians, Christian politicians, and they started attacking across the border into Israel.
That is what led to, for example, Israel's incursions into Lebanon in both 1978 and 1982.
And the Israelis were told not to do that in 1982.
By the way, a great tragedy because if Israel had been able to finish off the PLO, In 1982, it would have forestalled the collapse of the Lebanese government, ending in a bizarre power sharing arrangement in Lebanon in 1989 that eventually led to essentially the domination of the entire government of Lebanon by the Iranian terrorist group Hezbollah.
Okay, so that's the actual backstory here.
So the president announced that the Lebanese government, which since Israel has been attacking Hezbollah over the course of the last couple of years, in retaliation, by the way, for Hezbollah joining in a couple of days late on the October 7th attacks.
Because Israel did such damage to Hezbollah, the Lebanese government, which has always had a very, very raw and difficult relationship with Hezbollah, which is both a terrorist group and also they have a political presence in the government of Lebanon, the Lebanese government has never truly wanted to be run by an outside terrorist group run from Iran, which is what Hezbollah is.
And so there are now talks, open talks, between the Lebanese government, which says they oppose Hezbollah and the Israeli government.
Now, the big problem in Lebanon is that Hezbollah has a lot of weapons.
The Lebanese government and the Lebanese army have been particularly weak.
You'll remember there was a quasi settlement that was signed between the Lebanese government and the Israelis about a year ago.
And the goal of that agreement was to allow the Lebanese government to strip Hezbollah of its capacity against Israel.
And that would lead to some sort of peace agreement.
And Lebanon was unable to achieve that.
Hezbollah was rebuilding below the Latani River.
The Latani River is a river that runs east west in Lebanon, located about one quarter of the way from the southern border of Lebanon.
Okay, so in the last couple of weeks, Israel did a massive operation in Lebanon.
They took out something like 1,700 Hezbollah fighters.
They cleared the Hezbollah population from southern Lebanon.
They moved all the way up to the Latani River and they blew up the bridges.
And then they moved north of the Latani River also, because the idea is.
Never again will Israel allow Hezbollah to routinely fire rockets by the thousands into northern Israel.
There were hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens who, for legitimately two years, were living away from their homes at kind of apartments, other places in Israel.
The entire north of Israel was emptied because of Hezbollah's rocket fire.
And so Israel said, We're not doing that anymore.
And while we are taking out the Iranian forward capacity, we are going to take out their true forward capacity in Hezbollah.
And Hezbollah panicked and freaked out.
And they called on the Iranian government to help them.
And the Iranian government couldn't do much.
And so, what the Iranian government is now trying to claim is that the only reason why they are opening the Strait of Hormuz is because they somehow pride a concession out of President Trump and Israel with regard to saving Hezbollah.
That is the thing that they are promoting.
Now, President Trump immediately put out a statement and he said that that is not actually what is happening here.
He said that this had nothing to do, the opening of the Strait of Hormuz had nothing to do with Lebanon.
Quote Again, this deal is not tied in any way to Lebanon.
But we will make Lebanon great again.
So what is exactly happening there?
Well, the president announced, I just had excellent conversations with the highly respected President Joseph Ayoun of Lebanon and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel.
These two leaders have agreed that in order to achieve peace between their countries, they will formally begin a 10 day ceasefire at 5 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday.
The two countries met for the first time in 34 years here in Washington, D.C. with our great Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
I have directed Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Rubio, together with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Raisin-Kane, to work with Israel and Lebanon to achieve a lasting peace.
It has been my honor to solve nine wars across the world.
This will be my 10th, so let's get it done, President Trump.
Now, notice who else is sitting there?
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Nan Kane.
Why?
Because presumably any negotiation will have to have some guarantee that the Lebanese government will actually take action against the Iranian forward proxy, Hezbollah.
And if they don't have the capacity, presumably Dan Kane, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is going to help out Lebanon in fulfilling its commitments.
Because otherwise, there ain't going to be a lasting deal here, and the president knows it.
Prime Minister Netanyahu put out a statement, quote, This is something that hasn't happened in over 40 years.
I answered that call.
I agreed to a timeout or more accurately, a temporary 10 day ceasefire to try and advance the agreement we began discussing during the meeting of ambassadors in Washington.
There are two demands that Netanyahu is making for the peace talks.
The first is the disarmament of Hezbollah.
The second is a sustainable peace agreement, peace through strength.
So, in other words, Israel is not going to simply sign away its security at its own northern border because Iran is asking it to.
Hezbollah wanted two conditions first, that Israel withdraw from all Lebanese territory back to the international border.
And second, a ceasefire based on the quiet for quiet model, meaning if you don't fire, we don't fire.
And Netanyahu said, I agree to neither of these.
And indeed, these two conditions are not being met.
We're remaining in Lebanon in a reinforced security buffer zone.
This is not the five points that existed before Operation Roaring Lion.
This is a security buffer that starts at the sea and continues to Mount Dove and the foothills of Mount Hermon up to the Syrian border.
This is a security 10 kilometers deep, which is much stronger, more intense, more continuous, and more solid than what we had previously.
That is where we are, and we are not leaving.
This allows us, first and foremost, to block the danger of an invasion into our communities.
And secondly, it allows us to prevent direct anti tank fire into our communities.
The residents are now protected from these two dangers.
Of course, there are still problems, says Netanyahu.
They still have rockets left.
We will have to deal with that as well as part of the progress toward a security agreement and a continuous peace treaty.
But there's something else, and I want to tell you what it is.
I've spoken with President Trump over these last two days, says Netanyahu, and he told me he is tremendously determined to continue the naval blockade and to bring about the dismantling of Iran's nuclear capability, what remains of it.
Okay, so the Iranian foreign minister, trying to seize some form of face saving here, put out a tweet suggesting that the ceasefire in Lebanon is what led to the opening of the Strait of Hormuz.
And the president, again, already rejected that.
Quote, the Iran deal is in no way subject to Lebanon.
And then he thanked Saudi, UAE, and Qatar for their great bravery and help in demanding all of this.
One thing is very clear the Israeli government, and they know this, the Israeli government will not stand if they allow for the reconstitution of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
Any peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, remember, Lebanon is not Hezbollah.
Israel has not been at war with the Lebanese government.
Israel has been at war with Hezbollah, a terrorist group that has been nothing but horror for the Lebanese people.
And one of the things that Israel has been doing when it moved into southern Lebanon, they said if you're Christian, you can stay because you're not the problem.
If you're a member of Hezbollah, you need to go.
That's what actually has been happening.
So, what does that mean?
Again, the Iranians only had a few cards to play.
Card number one was their axis of resistance that has been heavily, heavily defenestrated.
Two, the Strait of Hormuz, now open.
And finally, three, their nuclear program.
And the president says that's going to go too.
That's going to go too.
And again, the president is setting some pretty significant lines here.
All the talk about tacoing, the president said from the very beginning, he's been saying it for legitimately 40 years.
Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
And again, when it comes to the sort of rhetorical battle that he's having with Pope Leo, in which the Pope seems far more critical of the president for trying to disarm a terrorist regime that is anti Jew, anti Christian, anti Sunni Muslim, and anti civilization.
The Pope seems to be spending all his time on how upset he is with the president and with Israel, making vaguely worded statements.
The president has the moral upper hand there.
He does.
He does.
That's just a reality.
The reality is that the moral side is to oppose the Iranian regime, not to oppose the people trying to stop the Iranian regime.
In any case, and again, I say that with respect for the Pope's moral stature.
But there's a difference between the underlying moral principle, war is bad, or just war theory, or all the rest, and the application of that in practice.
Here is the president talking about all this.
He says, listen, you can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon.
There's a lot in your life you have to keep track of.
You've got dozens of passwords stored in three different places.
Your kids' school and sports schedules are a disaster zone.
Your small business to do list is never ending.
Well, there's a lot of stuff we do remember, but then we forget about sometimes the big important things like, God forbid, what happens to your family financially if you should plot, if you fall over, if you keel over.
Well, the responsibility of protecting your loved ones and planning for the future is heavy.
Trying to navigate life insurance on your own can be a total mess.
Our sponsor, Policy Genius, makes that process dramatically easier by acting as an online insurance marketplace, not an insurance company.
So you can compare quotes from some of America's top insurers side by side for free and actually understand what it is you're buying.
Their license team works for you, not for the insurance carriers.
So, they care about your needs, your budget, your family.
They help you figure out coverage amounts, prices, terms, all of it.
So, there's no guesswork, just clarity and peace of mind.
And listen, I have life insurance, which makes me feel a lot better about going and just being in the world.
The same will happen for you.
Policy Genius will answer your questions, handle the paperwork, and advocate for you throughout the process.
That's why they've racked up thousands of five star reviews on Google and Trustpilot from people just like you and me.
Protect your family with a policy that grows with your life.
With Policy Genius, you can see if you can find 20 year life insurance policies starting at just $276 a year for a million dollars in coverage.
Head on over to policygenius.comslash Shapiro to compare life insurance quotes from top companies.
See how much you could save.
That's policygenius.comslash Shapiro.
Okay, so the President of the United States then took on the rumor that he was only asking for a 20 year limit on Iranian nuclear development.
He said, nope, they're going to agree to no nuclear weapons.
If the Pope wants to speak out morally, then he should do so.
Now would be an excellent time.
And listen, I understand that the papacy has routinely had to deal with the real world politics of the fact that there are Christian minorities living in majority Muslim countries where they're heavily mistreated, and so they don't want to tick off those regimes.
However, you don't get to sign in to chat on some areas of supposed immorality, like fighting the bad guys while being silent on the bad guys.
In any case, the president of the United States was asked about whether there would be an extension of the U.S. Iran ceasefire.
He said, Nope, I don't think we're going to need it.
We're probably going to get to the end of this pretty quickly.
As far as the stories, there are a bunch of stories that now the Iranians are really going to have their revenge because they're digging out their missile launchers.
Yeah, they didn't want to have to do that.
They're digging them out.
And you know what we can see them doing?
Digging them out.
And you know what's good about that?
If they dig them out, they're no longer sheltered.
And if they're no longer sheltered, then we can just blow them up if we go back to actual forward activities.
Meanwhile, again, our military is extraordinary at what they do, and they work with extraordinary firms like Palantir in order to actually upgrade our military capacity.
Great piece from Pirate Wire is talking about what Palantir does.
Palantir is capable of going through intelligence at an extraordinarily rapid rate instead of spreadsheets that it used to be done on a person to person basis.
You'd have to go through a spreadsheet more than 1,000 times a day.
In order to just get information on the kill chain and make sure that the proper people were being struck.
Now, according to Pirate Wires, manufacturers can ditch spreadsheets in favor of warp speed and app the draws from the alphabet soup of various agencies.
Further, AI agents can actually do actually work.
They can do shipping manifests, stock levels, past disasters, and use all the logic and forecast models to come up with a reallocation plan.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon, taking the advice of people like the CTO over, At Palantir Shamsankar, who's been a guest on the show, is starting to go to various domestic manufacturers and tell them to boost weapons production.
According to the Wall Street Journal, GE Aerospace and the vehicle and machinery maker Oshkosh were among the companies involved in the talks with defense officials.
The Defense Department is committed to rapidly expanding the defense industrial base by leveraging all available commercial solutions and technologies to ensure our warfighters maintain a decisive advantage.
Dual use technologies, in other words, which is a good thing.
It means that we actually have flex capacity, which is really important.
Okay, meanwhile, the only other thing so the Iranians, again, the way they were fighting back straight at Hormuz, no longer.
Terror proxies, they got a problem.
They're nuclear, looks like they are on the verge.
So the only thing they have left is the fifth columnist.
The only thing they have left are the members of the Grievance Party, the anti Semites on the left, the Grievance Party members on the right who join hands with them.
And so the Iranians are basically trying to use X to end the war.
Massoud Pateshkian, the Iranian president, and Tucker Carlson guest said, Last year at the UN General Assembly, I urged a return to the golden rule of Islamic Christianity and Judaism and human conscience.
Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself.
A universal principle so blatantly violated by the Zionist regime.
Nuclear weapons for one regime, but war against an entire nation over its peaceful nuclear program.
Scientists assassinated in Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
Children killed in Minab.
Has human conscience died in some world leaders?
Okay, so first of all, we have always believed that some regimes should have nukes and some should not.
Like the ones we're allied with, we don't really have a problem with them having nukes.
It's, you know, terrorist regimes that threaten the obliteration of our allies, both Muslim and Jewish, as well as threats against Europe and the rest of the world.
Yeah, that's a problem.
The reason that he says this sort of stuff is he figures that he will find allies, which of course he does.
And the bizarre coalition of the pseudo dispossessed continues.
I have to say, there's a peculiar.
A peculiar Scheudenfreude for me in watching Ilhan Omar praising Marjorie Taylor Greene and Candace Owens.
Of course she is.
Of course she is.
I mean, because they're on the same side.
That would be the reason.
Ilhan Omar, who's yet to meet an Islamist terror group that she doesn't have some warm feeling for, is out there praising Marjorie Taylor Greene and Candace Owens because they're on the same side.
The thing that has been very fascinating, especially about Marjorie and Candace, is that they are not just coming out like the other ones that you'd mentioned, where they're saying, This action is wrong, right?
Meanwhile, Graham Plattner, who is running for Senate in Maine, it turns out that back in 2014, When Hamas raided a military base near Kibbutz Nahal Oz, he praised the actual operation.
Looks like an all around well executed and successful small unit raid to me, is what he said on Reddit at the time.
This is where the mainstream left is going and quickly.
Bernie Sanders put forward a resolution to try to defund aid to Israel in the middle of a war where they are our ally.
They have planes in the sky and we have planes in the sky and they are flying the same missions and talking to each other.
And the Democrats are trying to defund only them, which is amazing.
And it does demonstrate something, which is that the hatred for Israel on the part of the left is indeed springing from the same place as the anti Americanism of Bernie Sanders.
Bernie hates America's place in the world.
Bernie is anti American.
And so it's not a surprise he's also against America's allies.
It's all coming from the same anti American place over and over and over again, like a lot.
Well, Graham Plattner is part of that.
Presumably, he would join the 40 Democratic senators who voted in favor of not selling bulldozers to the Israelis because what?
You think the Israelis can't build their own bulldozers or find it from someplace else?
My guess is they can probably find some bulldozers.
Amazing stuff from the Democrats.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is trying to undermine the war.
She's digging at gas prices.
Man, she is just.
I hope they nominate her, truly.
I mean, she did such a great job last time.
She is now doing the Hillary Clinton 2016 routine where she goes to like Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and drinks a beer.
So she went out in the middle of some town somewhere, I think it's North Carolina, I think, and stood outside a gas station and pretended that she cared about gas prices.
By the way, if she cared about gas prices, she should check them out in California.
I'm in California right now.
I will tell you, the gas prices here in her home state are like twice as high, and it's not because of the Strait of Hormuz.
It is because of the vast regulations and taxes placed on gas consumption in the state of California.
Here's Kamala Harris digging at gas prices.
Again, watching Democrats dig at gas prices after spending my entire lifetime trying to undermine gas production in the United States, it's a thing, man.
So I'm here in Charlotte since the start of Trump's war of choice.
It's 15.
More dollars every time you fill up your tank of gas.
The price of diesel has now gone up 80% since the start of the war.
And you best believe that's going to carry over to how much you're paying for all the goods that are being transported on those semis.
We've got a president who is paying more attention to what he thinks is in his best political interest and personal interest as opposed to what is in the best interest of working people in America.
Tucker Carlson, Tucker Carlson, who full scale promotes the Marcion heresy, is the true Christian in all of this.
Again, just say what you want to say, dude.
Israelism.
There's no religion called Israelism.
You know what you want to say, and we all know what you want to say.
Anyway, the President of the United States put out yet another truth social, an accurate one.
Quote, who's dumber, Tucker Carlson or Joe Kent?
It's very interesting.
I met Joe Kent at Dover Air Force Base along with numerous others who had lost their loved ones in war.
I said hello to all of the families.
Ken horribly lost his wife.
Her casket was being brought into Dover, along with the rest, although he married again quite quickly, in my opinion, in any event.
A number of years later, I noticed the same person was running for Congress in Washington state and lost.
I then noticed a couple of years later he was running again and lost.
Well, I didn't know him other than our brief Dover encounter, but feeling sorry for him after the two election losses, I told my people hire him for the White House, give him a job, make him feel good.
He lost his wife and two elections.
They did, and while I rarely saw him, I certainly didn't expect disloyalty, but that's what I got.
He was really a sleazebag.
And some would say, on top of it all, a leaker.
I don't know whether or not that was true, but next time, no more Mr. Nice Guy.
Kent is a loser, just like Tucker, Candace, Megan, and the rest of them are losers.
There's not a damn thing they're going to be able to do about it, President Trump.
And then he continued along these lines It's easy.
Tucker is a low IQ person, always easy to beat and highly overrated.
So are Megyn Kelly, Candace, really dumb and mentally ill, and bankrupt Alex Jones, who's completely fried.
There are others also.
Then we have some that are very good, true MAGA all the way and smart.
I should do a list of good, bad, and somewhere in the middle.
Wouldn't that be fascinating, President Trump?
I mean, I would read it.
Okay, so here's the thing all of this fifth columnist nonsense that's being pushed by Iran, as we'll discuss in just a second, is having no impact with regard to President Trump's approval rating, particularly among his chief constituents.
In fact, as Harry Anton at CNN points out, one of the reasons why Republicans may actually outperform low expectations in the midterms is because the group most likely to vote is still holding steady with Trump.
President Trump is more than holding his own amongst a very large portion of the electorate, a very reliable voting block, and that is senior citizens.
Take a look here, okay?
Trump's approval rating age is 65 plus.
In March of 2025, 46%.
Look at where it is now.
It's basically the same.
Seniors have not moved.
He's at 44% now.
And the key nugget here is for all this talk about young people in the electorate, such as myself, or at least I like to include myself in that block, it turns out that older voters, Senior citizens vote in far larger numbers.
So Republicans look at this number and they say, hey, you know what?
We can actually potentially do some real damage or at least hold our own in the midterms because President Trump is holding his own with this very important voting block.
Okay, so again, all the talk about how Trump is, he's totally fried, he's cooked.
Not true.
Okay, but what's actually happening here?
So our reporter, Cassie Akiva, she's a foreign affairs reporter here at the Daily Wire, has a fascinating piece.
Data has been provided by Network Contagent Research Institute and shared with us at the Daily Wire.
And here's what they show creative content, including everything from Lego style war videos to Jeffrey Epstein cast as the devil manipulating Trump into war, pushed across more than 70 accounts, reaching over 1.1 million followers.
They are leveraging the algorithm to attack the United States, President Trump, and Israel, and doing so effectively.
Before Operation Epic Fury, many of these Iranian embassy accounts posted sparingly, often fewer than 10 times a day.
Then a switch flipped.
Data from 69 of the accounts shows a clear surge to between 50 and 200 posts per day, flooding feeds with a nonstop stream of content, according to data compiled by the NCRI.
Here is a graph.
You can see the daily tweet volume.
Look at that gigantic spike that happens at the beginning of the war.
Beginning of the war happens, and boom, it just jumps.
It just jumps because they are creating an echo chamber in order to take advantage of the algorithm.
And you can do this.
If you have a bunch of accounts that are all retweeting each other and promoting each other and saying the same thing, you end up with a gigantic spike in particular narratives.
Look at the massive spike beginning with the war in the Iranian embassy accounts, weekly keyword mentions of Trump, Israel, or the United States.
Look at that gigantic spike.
An analysis of 18,246 tweets shows a spike in mentions of those topics beginning in early March.
And again, that is juicing the algorithm.
Well, joining us on the line is Cassie Akiva, our foreign affairs reporter.
So, what you're reporting here really does explain this vast gap between, for example, Republican public opinion, as taken by every single poll during the course of this war, and the notion that you are definitely receiving when you go on X, that 90% of Republicans, of people on the right, are somehow opposing President Trump.
So, first, we've heard for years the Iranian bots, right?
There is this whole conspiracy about it, actually quite true, that there were so many Iranian accounts based in Iran, anonymous, pushing propaganda.
Iran has taken a new approach where they are being blatant about it.
They're being out there with it.
And they're using what we're calling propaganda slop or slopaganda, which is using AI to create really low quality, low cost content.
And they're pushing it out there.
And a lot of them are actually quite funny and they're going viral in American audiences.
And that's because they're weaponizing AI.
If you had to make this content before AI, it costs a lot of money and it would take a lot of time.
But now what they're doing is they're tapping into what's going on in American domestic conversations and they're pushing it.
When President Trump posted that picture of himself as Jesus, or he says he was a doctor, they tapped into that and they've made hundreds of pieces of content based off of that.
So they're listening to us and they're trying to get into our ecosystem and it's working.
So when you say that it's working, obviously the amount of material that is now replete on social media is really, really high.
What sort of effect do we think that's actually having in terms of bleed over?
Because I remember when I was much younger, I would talk about the radicalism on college campuses and people would say, well, people in the real world don't believe that.
And pretty soon, a lot of people in the real world started to believe that sort of nonsense.
What kind of bleed over effect is this having in terms of public opinion on the war, for example?
Well, meanwhile, the Democrats continue to push forward massive taxation policies.
So yesterday we discussed the smarmy mayor of New York, our smarmy socialist friend, who did an entire video celebrating Tax Day, which, again, it's such a weird thing.
Tax day is bad.
No one likes paying their taxes.
It's like going to somebody's funeral and being like, Happy Funeral Day!
But that's exactly what Momdani did.
You liked that guy, Dad, didn't you?
Happy Funeral Day.
Happy Tax Day.
We're going to go after those guys over there.
Well, President Trump had some words for Zoran Momdani yesterday while he was in Las Vegas.
I mean, he may be nice to his friends, but I'm not sure what relevance that has to the fact that he's trying to literally target the earners in his city.
Meanwhile, Zorn Mamdani is saying that democratic socialism can flourish anywhere.
It can flourish literally anywhere.
I mean, it's doing great work all across the country in blue cities, except for like all of the blue cities, which are not doing amazing right now.
I mean, I am sure that that politics can flourish anywhere because envy lies in every human heart.
It's not that hard to find people who want to do class warfare.
It's been an issue for literally all of human existence on planet Earth.
So that means that Democrats are very excited to push their brand of taxes.
The Philadelphia mayor, a woman named Sherelle Parker, who things are going really, really well in Philadelphia.
I'm being sarcastic, they're going really poorly.
She is now reiterating her plan to tax $1 per ride in Philadelphia for ride shares for Uber and Lyft, which, again, is a regressive tax because many of the people who are using ride shares are people who don't own cars.
They're not exactly loaded.
And then she says, You don't get to tell me how to tax you.
I mean, we literally do in the United States get to tell our politicians how to tax us.
In fact, some might say we fought a revolution in order to be able to tell our politicians how to tax us.
But how dare you tell me, as mayor of this city, to tell the people in this city that we cannot and should not enact what is one of the most limited powers that we have, and that is to decide how we will drive revenue to the school district of Philadelphia.
I mean, she's the queen of Philadelphia, apparently.
But meanwhile, this sort of nonsense is being pushed everywhere.
California is about to just shoot itself directly in the face with regard to its own economy.
They're pushing a wealth tax, which is insane.
It's a 5% wealth tax, a tax on all wealth, meaning like unrealized capital gains.
Like you own a company and you haven't cashed out of your company, and they just tax you on the value of your company.
So you could easily be paying more every year in taxes than you actually make from a company if you are a stockholder in your own small company, for example.
As Stephen Moore points out in the New York Post, If California were to adopt that 5% wealth tax, California would overnight become the least competitive state in America.
In America.
And people are already fleeing.
I'm talking to Californians all the time.
And there's a reason the real estate market in luxury real estate in Miami is just booming right now.
And then my favorite part about this is that Democrats then try to claim that fiscal responsibility is the thing they care about.
Guys, for Democrats, the point is the tax.
It is not what they spend the money on.
They want to spend money on everything.
There are no limits to what they want to spend money on.
No limits.
But it's not because they want to take money in order to spend it.
They want to take money in order to take it, and the spending is the excuse for the taking of the money.
That is the real thing here, which is why, for example, Chris Rufo, senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal, has now uncovered the fact, along with other reporters at Manhattan Institute, that illegal immigrant Californians are now being given sex change surgeries on the taxpayer dime.
And by the way, this is being touted by the office of Gavin Newsom.
Quote, undocumented Californians don't get special treatment.
Everyone on Medi Cal gets the same access to care.
If you want to call California woke for not letting politicians interfere with doctors or not wanting people to die in the streets, then go ahead.
I will note here that fiscal responsibility does not come into it because it turns out that Gavin Newsom had to freeze new Medi Cal enrollments for illegal immigrants because there weren't enough dollars.
I mean, this is a very clear instance of that pattern on the left, especially in these.
Blue states where they say, no, that's not happening.
And then after a short period of time, they say, yes, it is happening and it's a good thing.
And in this case, all we had to do was go to a number of homeless shelters in San Francisco on the ground and talk to people who told us these trans migrants said directly to us, we came from Honduras, we came from Mexico, we crossed over the border illegally because we knew that we could get free hormones, free breast implants, and free genital surgeries from the state Medi Cal program.
We have them on the record.
We have all sorts of corroborating evidence from documents within California's healthcare system.
And it was apparently the evidence was so overwhelming that Gavin Newsom had no choice but to admit that it was happening.
So, Chris, one of the things that's amazing about all of this is that you would imagine that if you were, let's say, a Democratic legislator or governor, that you would want to show people that your use of taxpayer dollars is actually good, that that's what justifies the tax.
In the same way that Democrats in the 90s left behind safe, legal, and rare with regard to abortion, and now it's just shout your abortion, it seems like they left behind the entire logic that they used to use with regard to taxes.
I'm old enough to remember when Democrats made the argument that you need tax dollars in order to pay for critical services.
And now it seems that they just make the argument that tax dollars are in and of themselves an inherent good.
That's the only way that I can explain their willingness to embrace every crazy cause for tax dollar use.
And also, by the way, to try to bar investigations into fraud.
I mean, the California government right now is considering an act.
That is designed to outlaw the sharing of photo or personal data of healthcare providers and various welfare providers on the internet because they're afraid that people might actually call into question, for example, all these people getting subsidies from the state government.
Again, if you're a fan of spending taxpayer dollars, shouldn't you want to oppose fraud?
So, Chris, as somebody who ran away from California with my company and with large swaths of my family, it seems to me that basically California is now in a death spiral.
And I know there's a lot of enthusiasm about the possibility that maybe through the bizarreness of the open primary system in California, maybe Republican suddenly gets elected to the governorship.
Even if that were to happen, he would face down a Democratic super legislature.
So a super majority in the legislature.
So it wouldn't matter a lot, a lot.
Do you see any possibility that places like California reverse themselves?
Or at this point, have they basically hit critical mass?
They've alienated everyone who earns.
And now they are in a full scale death spiral because they've convinced so many people in California that, again, the point is removing money from the people who earn.
I love the state, it's the most beautiful place on earth.
But it's going to be very difficult.
And the reason it's difficult, and this plays into the whole fraud story, is that all of this money, including billions of dollars in fraud, somehow trickles into the coffers of the labor unions, which Spend about a billion dollars a year on political activities, supporting campaigns, supporting these political movements.
And so California's kind of opposition needs to get very smart and launch a series of ballot measures to take money out of the hands of those unions, those NGOs, those publicly subsidized organizations that right now have a stranglehold on the state.
It's going to be hard, but I think California's productive class is starting to wake up.
If they don't make significant changes right now, if they don't challenge the one party power structure within the state, It's going to be very hard going in the future.
He, of course, is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal.
Now, speaking of the nonsense promoted by Democrats on these sorts of matters, it is always amusing to me when Democrats suddenly become fiscal conservatives, but only for things like aggressive action against our.
Evil, tyrannical opponents.
So it's always very funny to me when Democrats who will spend money on transgender sex surgeries for illegal immigrants, they're like, we have to cut the military spending.
That's the thing.
It's, you know, every dollar that's being spent to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is a dollar that could be spent cutting the penis off an illegal immigrant.
You guys are brilliant.
Here's Hakeem Jeffries doing this routine yesterday.
We are now in the midst of an ongoing war of choice.
In the Middle East, that is reckless and costly, where billions of dollars are being spent every day, while Republicans are unwilling to spend a dime to make life more affordable for the American people.
So, again, this idea that he is determined to make life affordable for the American people, blue cities raise costs.
And one of the great lies in American politics is the idea that it is America's military that is our chief cost.
That is not true.
Even if you include all indirect costs to the federal government of all military spending, wars, veterans affairs, DHS anti terror efforts since 2000, over the last quarter century, that number pencils out to somewhere between $8 and $10 trillion.
How about just social welfare spending?
Again, that doesn't include state level, just federal social welfare spending.
$60 trillion.
$60 trillion.
But of course, Democrats believe that all of that is the stuff that's justified, not the collective defense, which is the reason you institute a government in the first place.
All righty.
Coming up, we'll jump into your questions.
Remember, you have to be a subscriber to have those questions answered.
Become a member.
Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.