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Regarding the ongoing situation in Iran, I know there has been a lot of speculation amongst all of you in the media regarding the President's decision-making and whether or not the United States will be directly involved. | ||
In light of that news, I have a message directly from the President, and I quote, Based on the fact that there is a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks. | ||
That's a quote directly from the president for all of you today. | ||
As for correspondence between the United States and the Iranians, I can confirm that correspondence has continued. | ||
As you know, we were engaged with six rounds of negotiations with them in both indirect and direct ways. | ||
And implementing a peace through strength foreign policy agenda. | ||
And with respect to Iran, nobody should be surprised by the president's position that Iran absolutely cannot obtain a nuclear weapon. | ||
presidential candidate, but also as a private citizen. | ||
In fact, I have some quotes for you. | ||
In 2011, President Trump said, America's primary goal with Iran must be to destroy its nuclear ambitions. | ||
We cannot allow this radical regime to acquire a nuclear weapon that they will either use or hand off to terrorists. | ||
In 2015, the president said, The president has repeated that in his first term as president and his second term as president as well. | ||
That's why he was adamantly opposed to the disastrous Iranian nuclear agreement that was implemented by President Obama. | ||
And it's why he has given great latitude and given a lot of effort to achieving a diplomatic solution. | ||
But he's been very clear. | ||
Went for 60 days when he gave them that 60-day warning without coming to the table. | ||
On day 61, Israel took action against Iran. | ||
And as I just told you from the president directly, he will make a decision within two weeks. | ||
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When you are in a pivotal moment for a presidency, which I think it is fair to call this moment, and the decision of this magnitude arises, what do those conversations normally look like? | |
And then compare that to what we are seeing from this administration. | ||
I don't think you should compare this administration to anything else in American history, this collection of jokers and crackpots and crooks. | ||
We should not allow the drama of the moment to efface from our minds what we know about this administration. | ||
It is vacillating. | ||
It is weak. | ||
When President Trump says he needs two weeks, that means he's looking for a way not to make a decision, not for a way. | ||
To make a decision. | ||
That he enjoys the feeling of power in his hands, but he flinches from the consequences of responsibility. | ||
He staffed his administration with people who shouldn't be in positions of public trust. | ||
One obvious move that the Iranians would have, for example, if the United States struck at them, would be to activate terror networks inside the United States and inside America's, what remains of America's networks of all our allies after Trump's attacks on all the allies. | ||
So we've got to... | ||
You've got a Department of Homeland Security that has spent millions and millions of dollars on an advertising campaign to say thank you, Trump. | ||
Again, with kind of play-acting. | ||
You've got a defense department who's under the leadership that no one would put this defense department under on the way to war. | ||
It just doesn't add up. | ||
So Trump loves bluster. | ||
He loves talk. | ||
One other thing that the Israelis need to keep in mind, and my friends in the pro-Israel community need to keep in mind, Trump betrays everyone who trusts him with one exception, and that is Vladimir Putin, not Israel. | ||
He's betrayed his creditors. | ||
He's betrayed his investors. | ||
He's betrayed his wives. | ||
He's betrayed his children. | ||
He will betray you too. | ||
Be wary of putting your trust in him. | ||
And Israel's not a very exposed position. | ||
It's begun a war with magnificent success, but it doesn't have an obvious way to bring the war to a successful conclusion. | ||
It was counting on Trump to help them. | ||
They must have relied on indications. | ||
But this two weeks, two weeks, that's what Trump does when he's about to fold his cards. | ||
As you noted, Fox is pretty heavily in the, you know, go to war with Iran camp. | ||
You know, they've been pushing this for a very long time, this they see as an opportunity, and they know that they have Trump's ear. | ||
I mean, even though the last election, there was much to be made about the podcast and the internet, you know, so these online shows that Trump deployed and used, that's not his go-to day-to-day. | ||
The lens through which he sees the world, even still as president, is cable news. | ||
And Fox News is the main vehicle for that. | ||
That's why when he was criticizing Carlson, he said, look, tell him to get a TV network, and then maybe people will listen to what he has to say, because that's still the mindset. | ||
So Fox is all in on this, and they are reflective of, Why, Angelo? | ||
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Why are they all in on this? | |
I mean, look, part of it is straight bigotry. | ||
And they really, you know, they have really spun this narrative. | ||
We shouldn't forget about that, that Islam. | ||
And even though Hexeth has been a little bit sidelined in terms of his day-to-day involvement in this particular decision, let's not forget that Pete Hexeth, who is very reflective of the Fox News worldview, was somebody that described the great conflict, not as one between the United States and China or other great powers, but as between Christianity and Islam. | ||
And that we had to go out there and do everything we can, including using our military. | ||
to put that back in check so they see this larger geopolitical world through that framework and that is something that they've been pushing for a very long time aside from just having that that is also part of their foreign policy their They don't believe that you should democratize other countries. | ||
They're just, they're warmongers. | ||
They believe in might makes right. | ||
And even though they are repeating Trump's line of peace through strength, they actually don't mean peace through strength. | ||
mean strength first and then, you know, have peace because you have nothing left after that. | ||
I mean, that's honestly what they're actually saying. | ||
It also plays really well on TV. | ||
Like, we shouldn't lose the sight of that. | ||
You know, Rupert Murdoch cut his teeth in the tabloids, and one of the big things that he always did was find the most horrible, horrific things that he could tell stories about crimes, violent things, and exaggerate them, but also lay them into a demographic fight. | ||
That's part of how he came to be. | ||
He sees news through that storytelling perspective. | ||
And then you have people like Carlson and Bannon who have their own worldview, and a lot of it is hyper-nationalist, and we shouldn't be celebrating that, even though they are taking a position here that seems more reasonable. | ||
It's coming from a really scary place. | ||
It is coming from either straight-up bigotry, you know, anti-Semitism, or a real deep, intense nationalism that is... | ||
That's the part that doesn't get sort of carried through here, is that they see the real threat not as foreign entities, not as foreign entanglements, but as you and me. | ||
As members of the media and as advocates and people that are participating in civic spaces, that's who they see as the real target right now, as enemy number one. | ||
So we shouldn't lose sight of why they're advocating for peace. | ||
But the net effect of all of this, though, and I think Senator McCaskill really illustrated this well in the first segment, is that this is the confusion. | ||
This is why Trump is on the sidelines. | ||
If Bannon and Tucker were either quiet or... | ||
And because part of how he sees the world is through these stories, he's trying to see how this particular chronicle plays out a little bit. | ||
You know, who wins in this narrative for hearts and minds, for audience share? | ||
And that's a big part of this, is seeing how the story plays out. | ||
Because he honestly isn't sure there's something grounding him. | ||
And now it's just, what's going to end up capturing the imagination of his base, of his audience, and where is he going to get the best ratings for himself? | ||
This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
Pray for our enemies. | ||
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Because we're going medieval on these people. | |
I got a free shot on all these networks lying about the people. | ||
The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
It's going to happen. | ||
And where do people like that go to share the big line? | ||
MAGA Media. | ||
I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | ||
If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
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War Room. | |
Here's your host, Stephen K. Vance. | ||
It's Thursday, 19 June, the year of our Lord 2025. | ||
Of course, today, President Trump talks about a two-week delay. | ||
We're going to get to all of that, but I want to talk about one of the building blocks I think that everybody in town is talking about. | ||
Jack Posobiec joins me. | ||
Jack, thank you. | ||
We're very lucky to get the one and only Hugo Lowell from The Guardian that wrote this, quite frankly, amazing piece about actually the tactics that we're talking about in the lethality of the... | ||
Jack, I want you to jump in here and ask any questions. | ||
Hugo, I want to start. | ||
First off, if the team in Denver can put up the Guardian article. | ||
Walk me through, because this was based on, I guess, a report, a bomb damage assessment or some report. | ||
Talk to us first. | ||
What is the Pentagon report? | ||
Who is this group, DTRA, that carries so much weight? | ||
And why did this story have such a big impact around Washington today? | ||
So DITRA is the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. | ||
It is the component inside the Defense Department that actually tested and developed the... | ||
They developed them. | ||
They helped develop them. | ||
They helped test them. | ||
And when the new admin came in at the start of the year, they kind of gave their assessment of how effective these bombs actually are. | ||
And the way DITRA does this is they look at a bunch of underground facilities around the world and they say, okay, it's at this depth and at this depth, and how far can our regular conventional ordnance penetrate? | ||
And the assessment that was basically shown to a number of senior Pentagon officials this January was it doesn't get to the bottom of the Fordow facility, the critical enrichment, the uranium enrichment facility that the Iranian regime is using. | ||
And so it's really important if you think about why Donald Trump wants to or is considering striking. | ||
Iran's facilities because if you cannot take out this critical facility, then what's the point? | ||
And that's sort of the discussions that have been going on inside the White House that I know you're aware of. | ||
This bomb weighs 30,000 pounds, dropped at 30,000 feet, but the actual TNT explosives of it is not like a mother of all bombs as far as the explosive capacity. | ||
It's really the ability to pierce through. | ||
Steel, pierced through granite, stone, whatever, to a certain depth, correct? | ||
Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment. | ||
It's hard encasing, and at the tip it can kind of go through kind of concrete, and then its explosion and its shock waves will reach to a certain depth. | ||
And that's the idea. | ||
And this means that – and what did the assessment say of how many? | ||
Because the headline said – Was that the conclusion of the report? | ||
Well, OK. | ||
So I think this is where it gets nuanced, right, is what does success entail? | ||
Is it you're going to set the program back, what, one, two, three years because you want to bury it with a bunch of these bombs and, you know, you collapse some tunnels? | ||
That's one thing. | ||
If you want to totally eliminate the facility all the way down to 300 feet, which is even deeper, which is how deep the facility goes, according to Israeli intelligence, then the assessment of DITRA is you would have to drop a nuke down there. | ||
You would have to drop a nuke to take it all the way down. | ||
The Iranians, the Persians were smart. | ||
They built it at this depth. | ||
This was built for a reason, correct? | ||
To be able to avoid the West being able to come in and stop it with bombing runs? | ||
Yeah, look, in the 1980s, Israel had a bunch of strikes on an Iraqi enrichment facility. | ||
And the Iranians looked at that and said, well... | ||
And so this is the predicament we find ourselves in now. | ||
Jack, any observations or comments before we go to break? | ||
Well, it just goes to show you that when you're dealing with precision munitions or even these semi-guided munitions like the GBU-57s, that it all comes down to battle damage assessment. | ||
And even as a junior intel officer when I first joined the service, that you're always trained that you take a hit and you got to take a look because you never really know, even despite your best estimates, what is going to happen to whatever facility or whatever compound. | ||
Hugo, hang on for a second. | ||
I want to thank our sponsor for this afternoon, Birch Gold. | ||
In fact, Philip Patrick is going to be joining us, I think. | ||
We've got Philip Patrick leading to show. | ||
We're packed today. | ||
Actually, we're going to go out to the main artificial intelligence conference in the Bay Area. | ||
Our own Joe Allen is there. | ||
Incredible news coming out of artificial intelligence. | ||
In fact, I think Elon Musk actually put out a tweet and said, hey, I'm kind of done with politics. | ||
That's like picking up a thing called needles on a beach. | ||
He's focused on artificial intelligence, I think 100%, because he said this is going to come in a tsunami. | ||
That's what we're trying to get the audience in front of, the tsunami. | ||
Birchgold.com slash Bannon, end of the dollar empire. | ||
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Short break. | ||
Hugo and Jack on the other side. | ||
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Welcome back. | |
Eric Daugherty's got a big Twitter following. | ||
Prime Minister Netanyahu announces Israel does not need help to reach its goals in Iran. | ||
He says they can accomplish their goals alone when it comes to Iran's nuclear facilities. | ||
Boy, I guess he's watching War Room. | ||
Hugo, yesterday you were the pool reporter. | ||
Tell our audience what's a pool reporter because you've got all these major news organizations hanging around the White House. | ||
What is a pool reporter? | ||
So it's a small group of reporters. | ||
You have a couple of TV people, a couple of radio people, and a couple of print people who, because of the wider, And it rotates every day, right? | ||
It rotates every day. | ||
Different people. | ||
And you were one of the print guys for yesterday. | ||
Yeah, I was the secondary print pooler yesterday, and we got to see the president several times, three times in fact, for pretty prolonged periods. | ||
it was very striking because we saw him in the morning when he was doing his flag pole raising event and then we saw him again in the evening just before he was going into his intelligence You know, if you read the body language and, you know, it's kind of speculative, right? | ||
But if you read the body language and if you kind of see how he responded to the questions, he really didn't want to talk about Iran. | ||
You've covered Trump. | ||
You know Trump pretty well. | ||
You've covered him for a number of years, correct? | ||
Yeah, more than four years now, yeah. | ||
Jack Posobiec, your thoughts and observations of what was announced today and what does it mean? | ||
Well, Steve, we know that there was an intense lobbying effort to push President Trump to make this quick decision, a rush to judgment, a rush to war. | ||
Many have called it regarding this strike on Ford. | ||
which should be separated from the IC assessment here, as we've been discussing earlier. | ||
And so I think that President Trump, he's not going to be manipulated. | ||
President Trump is not someone who's going to be pushed into one decision or another. | ||
He is his own man. | ||
He has always been his own man. | ||
And on questions of war and peace, he understands the Iraq war. | ||
Is what destroyed the Bush dynasty. | ||
And he was the first man to walk out onto a Republican stage and say to a scion of that Bush dynasty that your brother made a mistake, that you never apologized for this, and to all those wounded warriors who came home with bits and pieces blown off and scars all over their faces and moms and dads and children that never came home, that these things are deadly serious. | ||
And so, look, it's like I said this morning, Steve. | ||
He's the one who appointed Secretary Besant to work on the economic side of this and appointed Steve Witkoff to work as his special personal envoy to Iran, Russia, and potentially even to China. | ||
And if there's anyone who can make a deal that interlocks all of those together, well, that'd be the dealmaker-in-chief, President Donald J. Trump, the man who wrote the art of the deal. | ||
You've covered him for a number of years. | ||
You've been following this quite intensely. | ||
Reporting on this has been kind of second to none. | ||
How did you take that announcement today? | ||
What is your assessment? | ||
Because it wasn't totally definitive. | ||
You know, he's looked at a range of alternatives on the military side. | ||
You've been there and seen, you know, the Pete Hegsess and the Marco Rubios and the John Ratcliffe's. | ||
He's got his top national security people in and out all day long, right? | ||
What's your interpretation of this two-week delay? | ||
I think, you know, That's always his thing. | ||
And more so because the military leadership at the Pentagon is somewhat split. | ||
You have two real forces here in the situation room. | ||
You have kind of the Pete Hegseths and the General Keynes, who's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who are kind of looking at a more restrained package if there is a military involvement. | ||
And then you have the General Curlers of the world, who is going to be retiring in two weeks. | ||
I want to describe to our audience, one of the most powerful institutions in this town is CENTCOM. | ||
The difference between Corella, this is critical. | ||
I want you to repeat that because CENTCOM is a thing in and of itself. | ||
Obama tried to pivot to Asia and couldn't do it because of the power of CENTCOM. | ||
CENTCOM would be, ladies and gentlemen, Central Command. | ||
It is really where the Middle East is, and he's a combatant commander. | ||
And right now with the structure, you know, post what Sam Nunn's restructuring, when I was in the service, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Army Chief of Staff, they were the kingpins. | ||
They're really now to build the overall military and to guide it. | ||
The combatant commanders are like gods on Earth, right? | ||
These are warlords. | ||
Kurilla is CENTCOM, and he is enormously aggressive here, is he not? | ||
And you have the Pentagon with really raising Cain and Hegseth that is actually more restrained than the combatant commanders. | ||
Is that basically a correct assessment? | ||
I would say so, and threaten the other wrinkle, right? | ||
two weeks is actually really critical in this conversation because General Corolla is set to retire as the chief of CENTCOM in about two and a half weeks. | ||
So when you have that thrown into play... | ||
Maybe it's coincidental, maybe it's not. | ||
Trump likes to say two weeks to a lot of things, so you've got to bear that in mind. | ||
But it is interesting to me that if you think about the window of time that is available now, And I don't know. | ||
I have to think that weighs into Trump's calculus because the biggest guy pushing to strike Iran is going to be General Corilla, the gorilla, right? | ||
That is his nickname. | ||
He's had Iran in his sights for a long time. | ||
Well, Steve, when you mention about CENTCOM is exactly right. | ||
And I could say that as, you know, I've talked about here many times that I spent most of my time as a PACOM officer focused on China. | ||
That's always been my bailiwick. | ||
I spent time there, learned the language. | ||
But you get to Washington, D.C., and PACOM guys are few and far between. | ||
This is a CENTCOM city. | ||
And what I mean by that is Washington, D.C. is by and large a one-industry town. | ||
It started under the Bush years, then it continued under Obama. | ||
There's so, and when you say CENTCOM, Steve, what the War Room audience, because, of course, War Room audience knows, you've got to follow the money. | ||
The money flows from Central Command, which means focus on the Middle East. | ||
So that means all the think tank money, all the defense contractor money, all of these issues, of course, is directly tied to the flow of what? | ||
The flow of oil, right? | ||
Cherchez la petrol, follow the oil, we were saying the other day. | ||
Because, and don't tell me for a second that those Arab Gulf monarchies aren't eyeing up the oil fields right across the Persian Gulf right there. | ||
20% that flows out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz. | ||
So when you're telling people that we're going to wind down these wars in the Middle East, suddenly, you know, DC being a essentially a one industry town, when so much money flowing to analysts and think tanks and all the rest of it going towards conflict in the Middle East, It's a one-industry town. | ||
So you're going at people's lifeblood. | ||
You're going at their livelihoods. | ||
So that's why this town tried so hard to throw President Trump out the first time that he tried to shut down the Middle East wars and wind down our true president in Syria, which he has wound down, Afghanistan, of course, at the time, and also Iraq, where we still do maintain a garrison of about 2,500 troops. | ||
But a lot of this really does come down to the fact that Washington, D.C., the blob, as Mike Benz likes to call it, really does run off of money that originates from CENTCOM. | ||
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them. | |
And you're reporting, and as you observe this, you talked about the internal pressures, you've got Hegseth, you've got the new Raisin Cain, who President Trump thinks the world of, you've got Corilla, other forces of intelligence, but the outside forces, particularly the outside forces of Fox News, etc. | ||
What's your assessment of that? | ||
How big a role has this played, you think, in coming to decisions? | ||
It's a good question. | ||
I don't know. | ||
I frankly think, you know, Stevie would have a better read on it than I would at this point. | ||
I think, you know, Trump has had a lot of people in his ear saying a lot of different things. | ||
But I come back to the reporting and kind of what we put in the story today, which is everything that we have heard comes down to the fact that Trump still wants to know if the U.S. were to go in and. | ||
And I think the endgame on that is it's kind of unclear. | ||
It's a moving scale and a shifting kind of definition of what success is. | ||
I mean, if you're going to set back the enrichment facilities, I don't know, three, five years. | ||
Maybe that's success in some terms, but you kind of also kick the can down the road. | ||
On the other hand, I think it's really tricky, and I don't know how much Tucker and people are involved in this. | ||
Go ahead, Jack. | ||
If I could just throw in, you're right, though, Hugo, in the sense that you can end the current facilities, but you're talking about a knowledge base here, scientists, engineers, and it'd almost be like saying you're going to bomb away Bitcoin, right? | ||
Bitcoin exists as a knowledge base, it's technological, and that's essentially what we're talking about here. | ||
So, yes, we know that you could bomb the facility and potentially if you use these multiple strikes that it would take and maybe attack the moon. | ||
But you're never going to get rid of the technology completely without regime change. | ||
And regime change is the only way they could do that. | ||
Well, can you stick around for a part of another... | ||
We're going to figure this out. | ||
We've got Hugo and he's instituted. | ||
Other than a deal. | ||
I want everybody to read this story today because you're going to get a lot smarter. | ||
Just don't think this thing has gone away. | ||
It has... | ||
I mean, President Trump, with everything else he's got going on, on Capitol Hill, with immigration, with just every aspect of this, is spending, you would agree, an inordinate amount of time on this because this is war and peace, Hugo? | ||
Look, he's having briefings on this every day now through the weekend. | ||
And, you know, it comes at a critical time because he's also got the NATO summit next week. | ||
NATO summit. | ||
We'll have to see how many days he's going to go to NATO. | ||
Short commercial break. | ||
We're going to return. | ||
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And in times of turbulence, I don't know, Financial Times saying it's a pretty good asset. | ||
Back in a moment. | ||
Very exposed position. | ||
It's begun to warm with magnificent success. | ||
But it doesn't have an obvious way to bring the war to a successful conclusion. | ||
It was counting on Trump to help them. | ||
They must have relied on indications. | ||
But there's two weeks, two weeks. | ||
That's what Trump does when he's about to fold his cards. | ||
Okay, this is the reason the worm's so upset. | ||
David Frum right there, one of the smartest guys, a Bush guy, one of the smartest guys around in Bushland. | ||
Hugo, he says it right there. | ||
There was no way, this is what Max Boots said on Abbey Phillips the other night with the battle maps out there. | ||
The Israelis never had a capability, and you know this from your reporting on the bomb, they never had a capability to militarily bring this to a conclusion if just getting the nuclear program done was a conclusion versus regime change. | ||
And from just, once again, reinforces that, correct? | ||
Yeah, you know, the only option I have heard being discussed around the White House in terms of what the Israelis could do by themselves remains the same option it has been for decades, which is to basically send in a bunch of attack helicopters, drop in some special force kind of commandos, and then take over and blow up the facility. | ||
That plan or that thinking doesn't seem to have changed since the first time they came up with it decades ago when the Fordow site was nowhere near as developed and more kind of even buried further underground than it is currently. | ||
And so I'm struggling to understand where the endgame was from the Israelis if they didn't think that the U.S. were going to buy it. | ||
In your reporting, what is the sense of urgency? | ||
They had to go last Thursday. | ||
And they never had an endgame because if you don't take care of that facility, you have not shut down their entire nuclear program, correct? | ||
So you must. | ||
That must go. | ||
Then what was the thinking on the urgency? | ||
And now, quite frankly, we'll answer that first. | ||
Then we want to get to Jack Posobiec's upsell, the upsell on the regime change. | ||
I don't think that's clear. | ||
I mean, apart from maybe trying to have some sort of momentum or trying to press, you know, Trump like max, max pressure into involving the U.S. Because even if even if the U.S. were to be involved and let's just say for the moment that the GBU-57 bombs could penetrate to the bottom of Fordow, the way a strike package like. | ||
know there was a lot of reporting yesterday about how trumpet approved or reviewed these attack plans those kind of attack plans what you're thinking basically is a bunch of f-35s or fighter jets going in and taking out kind of soft targets around the facility you got to soften the ground you have to take out any gps jammers because the gbu-57 relies on gps to be guided into whatever shoot or kind of entranceway and then you would have to send b-2s in pairs hours later to or you | ||
And by the time those B2s come in, The Iranians will already know what's going on. | ||
They will know that Fordow is being targeted. | ||
And so it's not a particularly, like, clean operation necessarily where you just have B-2s kind of stealth come in, drop bombs, and then leave, and it's done really quickly, like, I don't know, like the Osama bin Laden raid. | ||
It's much more complicated. | ||
Or when they took out Solomon, right? | ||
Solomon, when all of a sudden, boom, he's got a cruise missile on top of his head, right? | ||
It's much more complicated than that. | ||
And, you know, even getting the B-2s over there, you know, you'd have to have them refuel mid-flight from Whiteman. | ||
We're going all the way into Iran. | ||
And so this is nowhere near as simple an operation as whether it's killing Soleimani or anything else that, frankly, any other, I think, president has done since the Iraq or Afghanistan campaign. | ||
And by the way, when I was there in the Iranian, we practiced month after month. | ||
We departed, and I think a month after we departed, guys continued to work, work, work. | ||
They did the raid, and Carter didn't have enough lift capacity. | ||
They had the tragedy in the middle of the desert at the refueling zone, and it was a complete abject failure. | ||
Jack Posobiec, your thoughts on this and the complexity of actually doing the raid itself? | ||
Well, Stephen, as you know more than anyone else, I mean, you were part of, as you've said before, a young naval officer. | ||
You were part of the Operation Eagle Claw, which was Carter's failed attempt to return the American hostages at the U.S. Embassy after the 79 revolution there in Iran. | ||
Look, this is a mountainous country. | ||
By the way, that's the operation that led to the current structure of JSOC because we didn't have a strong way to have that unified command for special operations. | ||
That's really what JSOC grew out of. | ||
And so when you're looking at these things, look, there's a history of having issues with it in the past. | ||
This is not some magic button that can be pressed. | ||
Military operations and anyone anyone telling the truth, no one's going to question the strength and the training and the patriotism of our our soldiers, sailors, pilots or airmen or Marines. | ||
But the but the at the idea that President Trump is not going to weigh all that against. | ||
The potential consequences. | ||
And that was the problem that these lobbyists had. | ||
They never talked about what could be on the other side of the coin. | ||
They tried to do this entire High-pressure sales tactic of the time urgency, low-time urgency. | ||
We've got to go now. | ||
We've got to go now. | ||
The deal's going to be done the minute you walk off that lot. | ||
And then with the upsell of, well, you know, if you're here anyway, you might as well get the regime change. | ||
You had Lankford, Tom Tillis out there publicly calling for a regime change. | ||
And then Mark Levin shooting off last night saying that President Trump isn't allowed to have any more meetings. | ||
unidentified
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I'm sorry. | |
I didn't vote for that guy. | ||
I voted for President Trump. | ||
As you're around the White House and doing reporting, this pressure of it's got to happen, it's got to happen now. | ||
And President Trump is clearly, and he announced today, he wants at least two weeks to go through. | ||
I think he still wants what I would call maybe coercive diplomacy to try to work now. | ||
In this upselling regime change, up until you heard this the last couple of days. | ||
In all the time that President Trump has said they can't have a nuclear program, they can't have a nuclear program, they cannot have nuclear weapons, have you ever heard President Trump utter a word about regime change? | ||
No, not at all. | ||
And it was kind of put to him softly yesterday, and his response was, look, we don't want to get involved in a long, drawn-out operation over there. | ||
Like, if we were to go in, if the US were to go in Like, there is no way that Trump wants to be involved in a prolonged operation. | ||
And I think that was very, very clear throughout the day. | ||
It was clear at 10 a.m. and it was clear, I think, at 4 p.m. | ||
When you say one-and-done, what do you mean? | ||
A package like you're saying, the fighters going first? | ||
Like a strike package. | ||
Strike package, yeah. | ||
And how do you interpret then today There's nothing about the Israelis stand down. | ||
I think President Trump's giving them enough latitude to continue doing what they're doing as he's taking the path that he always had to try to do some diplomacy. | ||
Is that how you read the statement today? | ||
I think that's fair. | ||
I mean, there's nothing in that statement that suggested he doesn't want Israel to not continue whatever they're going to do. | ||
Like, I think for him, it has always been... | ||
And really, the discussion that I've had with people in the West Wing and elsewhere, I mean, that's really all the discussion has been. | ||
It's like, are we going to be involved in taking out this enrichment facility because that benefits all of us? | ||
There's never really been a discussion about regime change. | ||
And the one thing I'll mention is as early as Monday, there were people in the White House who... | ||
And, you know, I was going around asking, like, you know, "There are B-2 bombers in Europe. | ||
Like, is this indicative of anything?" And the general response was we wouldn't read too much into that. | ||
So how do you how do you square that? | ||
With what you hear coming out of Israel, out of Tel Aviv, and what you hear coming out of Fox News? | ||
Well, I can't speak for, you know, kind of Fox News, I guess. | ||
But, I mean, I see it. | ||
Like, I don't have any skin in the game, right? | ||
Like, I see why Israel would want U.S. help now. | ||
It would contribute to, you know, momentum, I suppose. | ||
It would contribute to them having a bigger joint operation. | ||
You know, there is something funny about all of this, which is the U.S. hasn't really ever done joint operations with Israel, especially on things like this. | ||
And so it's I think we're still trying to figure out the contours of what exactly people expected or people thought might happen. | ||
Everyone that I've spoken to at the Pentagon who and these are kind of senior politicals and we're not talking about like Korea guys like these are senior politicals who kind of shuttle between people at the White House and kind of the leadership at the Pentagon is. | ||
If the U.S. were to be involved, the U.S. would be doing its own thing with its own jets and its own bombers and its own ordnance. | ||
We wouldn't be partnering with people, especially the Israelis, because we just haven't done joint operations together in that way. | ||
I just thought that was very interesting. | ||
Jack, any observations? | ||
Well, that's right. | ||
And in fact, I had some discussions with members of my former profession after the taking of the hostages in 10-7, saying, you know, would there be possibility? | ||
And there was some discussion at the time of possibility of U.S. Special Forces working with IDF or potentially working to do some of the hostage rescue or go into the tunnels, this type of thing. | ||
And that's exactly the same thing that they said to me. | ||
This isn't, you know, some country where we would go in and run the operation. | ||
They said these guys have the training. | ||
They have their own operations. | ||
They have their own operational force. | ||
It's just really not something that you see them conduct these joint types of operations together. | ||
And, of course, that seems to have been the impetus for these conversations was, of course, all generated around President Trump's Stated goal of getting rid of this nuclear program, but you would see this mixing back and forth from so many of these people who wanted Trump to get in to say we need regime change to regime change is the only other option and yet they never talk about what that actually looks like or what comes after which of course was the quagmire that we got into | ||
in Iraq the quagmire we got to into in Afghanistan because what came after was in fact much worse than was there before Before we let you go, I want to thank you for coming by. | ||
Since you've been covering President Trump and you see, like, Los Angeles a couple weeks ago, what we're doing on the border. | ||
As you know, his hardest core followers and supporters on mass deportations and what's happening on the big, beautiful bill, which you don't even hear about now. | ||
It's not even in the D-block. | ||
Given everything is going on, did this strike you as like coming out of nowhere? | ||
All of a sudden we're having a discussion about... | ||
I think it was a confluence of several things, right? | ||
You know, Israel had its... | ||
Was it Thursday? | ||
I think it was Thursday. | ||
We're a week into it. | ||
Right, and by the next day or through the weekend, I think that's been pretty widely reported at this point. | ||
And so he was more amenable to, you know, thinking, you know, maybe we, you know, the U.S. would be involved. | ||
And, you know, I think based off that, then there was Israeli thinking that spoke to, well, if Trump is more amenable, maybe now is the time to make overtures to get the U.S. involved. | ||
Maybe now is the time to apply pressure. | ||
And I think a lot of these things came together and one thing led to another. | ||
And then, you know, by Monday or Tuesday. | ||
You know, clearly Trump was bored at the G7. | ||
That's not his favorite venue. | ||
And, you know, things are escalating in the Middle East. | ||
And I think all of these events came together to place us in the perfect storm. | ||
And yet, you know, even yesterday, as far as I could tell, having just watched him for a while, he did not seem like someone who was suddenly really eager to go and bomb Iran. | ||
And I think the statement today was very revealing in many respects, including that. | ||
unidentified
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Hugo, where do people go to get your reporting? | |
TheGuardian.com or you could just follow me on Axe at HugoLevel. | ||
Thank you, sir. | ||
Thank you for coming and tour. | ||
I really appreciate it. | ||
Jack, can you stick around for a moment? | ||
I'm here. | ||
Okay, we've got Philip Patrick's going to join us from Birch Gold. | ||
We are packed. | ||
We're going to go to the Artificial Intelligence Conference out in the Bay Area. | ||
We've got a ton going on. | ||
Short commercial break. | ||
Make sure you go to birchgold.com. | ||
Promo code BANNON, the end of the dollar empire. | ||
It's a seven-part series, all free. | ||
We're focused on the Rio Reset. | ||
I'm going to post or I'll talk to Philip when he comes on about the Chinese have announced, hey, they got an idea. | ||
Maybe we have an alternative currency based around the yuan, the yuan or the RMB, whatever they call it, right? | ||
Maybe backed by gold. | ||
I have some sort of gold certificates. | ||
We find it quite interesting. | ||
The Rio Reset is going to happen July 6th, and Philip Patrick and the team are going to be down there taking tough duty in Brazil to report for. | ||
Short commercial break. | ||
unidentified
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back in the warm in just a moment here's your host Stephen K. Band Jack, a very big day. | |
And President Trump, I think, has made a pretty definitive statement in saying two weeks. | ||
He's got Witkoff working and the vice president working on some alternatives. | ||
He ain't going to be rushed. | ||
He's commander-in-chief, and he's going to weigh and measure and take his time, and he's not going to be rushed. | ||
And I think people out there that have tried to rush him should be ashamed of yourself, okay? | ||
The president is going to take his time. | ||
This is a monumental decision about going to war, about putting troops in harm's way. | ||
You just heard Hugo, right? | ||
He talked about this story this morning. | ||
It's so important. | ||
I want everybody to read it. | ||
About the actual, can the bomb work? | ||
Then he talked about the strike packages. | ||
You were putting, and people on TV, on certain networks, praying for the pilots. | ||
Don't sit there and pray for the pilots after you're sitting there with the pom-poms. | ||
Saying, we gotta go, we gotta go, we gotta do something. | ||
We can't be sitting on beach chairs. | ||
Gotta go, gotta go. | ||
Then you see somebody serious like you go, and the serious people at the Pentagon that are working through this. | ||
We're not just putting in harm's way. | ||
The initial pilots and the initial strike packages. | ||
You're putting in harm's way soldiers, marines, airmen, sailors that'll have to get involved in this conflict after that happens. | ||
Jack Posobiec, your closing thoughts for this afternoon's show, sir. | ||
Steve, I think President Trump understands. | ||
Measure twice, cut once. | ||
He's going to look at all the options available to him, and he's going to remember the promises that he made Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, everywhere, that he's going to put the interests of this country, the United States of America, come first. | ||
And world peace is something that he has also been fighting for, whether it be the Middle East, whether it be Europe, whether it be Asia. | ||
So he's fighting for peace on all of those fronts. | ||
But just because he says he wants that, that doesn't mean that he views someone else's view of peace or how you get an end to a nuclear deal as exactly what you want. | ||
And I understand there's people that were looking for one way on this, and they were looking to push his hand in one direction, and he still will ultimately make his decision within that two-week time frame. | ||
But I think that President Trump is showing the entire world that he alone is firmly in control. | ||
Amen. | ||
And he's going to think this thing through, look at a couple of courses of action, maybe try a couple of three things, and then come some conclusion about the way forward. | ||
Jack Basovic, thank you. | ||
So much great work on yourself on this project. | ||
Where do people go to get your show and to get your social media, sir? | ||
Well, of course, Human Events daily, 2 p.m. Eastern every day. | ||
Thought Crime, myself and Charlie Kirk also runs. | ||
We're going to be doing it on Friday this week because of scheduling, so that'll be up tomorrow. | ||
And then, of course, we're always right here on the Great Real America's Voice Network. | ||
By the way, Steve, it occurs to me that the two-week time frame, two weeks from today, is just the day before the 4th of July. | ||
So two weeks from now is the 4th of July. | ||
It's amazing on the timing of that. | ||
Providential. | ||
Jack Posobiec, great. | ||
And Charlie Kirk, the new power player in Washington, D.C. You never know where Charlie's going to turn up in this city, in the imperial capital. | ||
We're glad we can get him for his show. | ||
Jack, thank you so much. | ||
Appreciate you. | ||
Great work. | ||
God bless. | ||
Happy Feast of Corpus Christi, by the way. | ||
Thank you, sir. | ||
Anybody who wants to keep up to speed with what's doing, stick on Poso's Twitter account. | ||
A lot of information there, folks. | ||
Lots of information. | ||
Philip Patrick, I'm going to talk about Taib maybe when you come back through the break, but I've got to ask you right now, with geopolitics, President Trump is there weighing and measuring about actually going to war, right? | ||
Even in the limited, if they decide just a limited strike on the nuclear facilities. | ||
Which can be expanded because the Israelis are talking about regime change. | ||
How is that turbulence, given everything else is going, given the Ukraine war, what's happening in Taiwan, particularly you got the big, beautiful bill, people over there, Ron Johnson is screaming about the deficits. | ||
I mean, have you ever seen, it seems like things are accelerating, accelerating rate. | ||
Have you ever seen the world as turbulent from a capital markets and geopolitical perspective in your entire life, sir? | ||
Absolutely not. | ||
It's painful to say What drives gold? | ||
It's global instability. | ||
It's war. | ||
It's uncertainty. | ||
It's currency devaluation. | ||
It's inflation. | ||
It's trade wars. | ||
I mean, this is the climate for precious metals. | ||
The world is heating up. | ||
So it's an exciting time to be alive, but it is frightening. | ||
And I can say that I'm glad we have a steady hand. | ||
President Trump taking his time to I know that's what you were pushing for for a long time and I think it's the smart move at this point because we need to make the decisions and we need to do it right. | ||
As Jack said, you measure twice and you cut once and I hope that's what they're doing because we're playing with fire. | ||
Such a bring it time to bring that up. | ||
This is also when you cut to it, ladies and gentlemen, if you think about it, gold, right? | ||
Think about precious metals. | ||
Why has it been a hedge? | ||
In times of turbulence for 5,000 years. | ||
You're seeing it right now. | ||
I mean, isn't that it? | ||
Because the world goes through cycles of wars and trade wars and turbulence, Philip Patrick, and you're in a fourth turning right now. | ||
You happen to be living through one of those, and it ain't going to end next week, sir. | ||
It's exactly right. | ||
And we're starting to see history repeats itself, right? | ||
And we're starting to see those trends over and over again. | ||
I always say that what we've seen since World War II, relative peace, prosperity, economic boom, that is unheard of in human history for that length of time. | ||
And I think what we're seeing now is a reversion to the norm, the breaking down of the old system and the creation of a new system. | ||
And that's why I say timing right now is so important. | ||
The decisions we make today are so important. | ||
There are countries around the world looking at our position as global leader. | ||
They are vying to take that over. | ||
Now is our time. | ||
We need to be smart, we need to be fiscally prudent, and we need to make the right decisions. | ||
We're a little backed up, as we should be. | ||
A day of a lot of breaking news, and we want to explain to you the kind of building blocks, the smart building blocks, that you can start to think this through on your own and see the path forward. | ||
Right? | ||
That's why all this over the last week, not here to waste your time, here to make the best use of your time. | ||
We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
Phillip's going to stick with it. | ||
We got him stacked up in the second hour like planes over LaGuardia on a Friday night with a good air traffic control system. | ||
Birchgold.com. | ||
Make sure you get up to speed. | ||
We're not trying to make you the smartest person at the barbecue, the smartest person in the room. | ||
Or the dinner party. | ||
We're trying to give you access to knowledge so in your own personal life, in your community life, your family life, and most importantly, maybe in your political life, you can help make smart decisions. | ||
Birchgold.com slash bandit, the end of the dollar empire. | ||
Not that we want the dollar empire to end, but it may be because of a lot of bad mistakes. | ||
The Rio reset. | ||
The BRICS nations. | ||
All of it. | ||
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