Episode 5044: National Evolution In Iran; Hegseth To Strip Mark Kelly Of Military Rank
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Aired On: 1/5/2026
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The United States military, magnificent and what it accomplished over the weekend, but also an earthquake out of Minnesota as we've been kind of driving that to focus here.
And you've got this complete scandal that's spreading state to state.
President Trump did come out last night on the way back from Mar-Lago.
He gave one of those open press avails on Air Force One.
And he said, I think he said he's cutting off money to Illinois, California, all these big blue Democratic states where they're fighting him on bringing in ICE agents and federalizing the National Guard, where there's a constant fight.
He's going, hey, about these scandals, the Somalian scandal, I'm cutting off the money.
You're not getting any daycare.
You're not going to get any of this crap until you can show me that it's not being spent on just the invasion of this country with a bunch of illegal, whether they're asylum seekers or migrants.
You call them anything they want.
They're illegal.
And every one of these programs is a scam.
That's why here in the war room, we have called for a 10-year moratorium, 10 years on all, underline all, including student visas, all, a moratorium on any type of immigration in this country.
It is so screwed up and such a such a scam of what we're funding, our own demise, our own destruction, and the destruction of working class men, whether you're Hispanic, black, or white.
It's got to stop.
And the way to stop it is cut off the money and cut off the access and then do away with things immediately like the H-1B programs.
No need for a moratorium there.
So a lot going on.
I want to bring in Eric Prince.
Eric, so Walls resigned.
Walls is not running again.
That's an earthquake.
They think they're going to throw a clobature in there and carterize the wound.
That's not going to happen.
This thing in Minnesota is spreading like a disease.
You've got Maduro at 12 noon.
Walls is going to, and this is the tale of two cities.
You're going to have Minneapolis and Walls basically saying, I'm essentially resigning.
I'm not going to run for a third term.
And they're going to turf him out here as quickly as possible as a governor because he's going to be having to spend time on his criminal defense.
And then you've got Lower Manhattan, Caracas, Lower Manhattan, where you brought in Maduro.
And I keep saying, look, Maduro is a guy.
And I realize, you know, he hit Trump's tripwire.
As you know, negotiations have been going on a long time with this guy to figure out something.
And he's a bus driver.
It's not like this guy's not Chavez, right?
This guy's a bus driver who's a union guy.
I mean, the bad ombres, as you've identified around him, are also, you know, I think if you're going to clean this mess up, you're going to have to do something with them.
But talk to me about.
So last time we left you on Saturday morning, you said, hey, this is, you know, a great extraction, but we can't do a nation building, right?
I don't want to, I don't want to see us.
We can't have any troops on the ground, no boots on the ground.
President afterwards said, hey, I'm thinking about boots.
We got to do it.
We got to do it.
The VP is going to work with us.
She said no.
Then President Trump says, well, she's going to say yes.
She has said yes.
Now she's coming out and saying, hey, I understand what they're doing.
They're putting pressure.
The president's already called for a quarantine of any of the oil going out.
And now you've got some more of the bad ombres there.
They're not letting people go out in the streets.
They're restricting access, etc.
Talk to me about the current situation.
You had kind of warned, hey, taking this guy out's great.
You got to take some more out, but you don't want to get too involved in this thing because it could get messy, sir.
Well, and that's just to close a thought on the Minnesota debacle that was a money laundering operation.
Those illegal daycare centers provided $35 million of funding to the Democrat Party.
So of course they want to cover it up.
Of course they want to flood the area with more illegals because they become their reliable illegal voters.
Now to Venezuela, as I said, there is a criminal gang.
It's not just Maduro.
Celia Flores, his wife, who was also arrested and indicted, she was Chavez's lawyer.
She's the one that picked her reliable husband to be the next ruler after Chavez was taken out by cancer.
So yes, the cut has to go deeper, at least now when Trump negotiates with the other remaining parties, the Del C, the Jorge Rodriguez, the Dias Dado Cabello.
And then you've got the vice president who's in charge.
Her family is, they're like a Venezuelan mob family, even before Chavez came up and the socialists and the communists, they were a mob family from the beginning.
I mean, she's tough as bootleather.
This girl comes, this girl's like Tony Soprano's daughter, right?
Well, and her father, you know, when you say extortionists, he made his money.
I think kidnapping American oil executives was part of his part of his business.
These people are, it's a very dangerous crew down there.
These are not good government types.
They also, though, Maduro and his henchmen had a geos, they're not dumb.
Okay, they had a geostrategic plan to become a world power.
And that just wasn't on the biggest reserves or the second or third biggest reserves in the world, depending on how you calculated.
But they looked at their next door neighbor, Guyana, and they realized with the military intrusion down there.
When you got people like Biden and Obama and these people that are very passive, a military intrusion into Guyana, if you get Guyana's reserves or even part of them and put them with the reserves of Venezuela, you have a superpower, do you not, sir?
So the fastest economy growing in the world last year was Guyana because of the Starbrook formation, which is a massive offshore gas, oil and gas discovery made by Exxon.
They went into production and obviously Guyana's economy really exploded.
Then to distract from the corruption, incompetence, and socialism of the Maduro government, Maduro trotted out a 130-year-old border dispute, which had been settled 130 years ago on an area called the Esequibo area, which is about 30% of the land mass of Guyana that suddenly Venezuela claimed again.
That's where all the oil was.
And they started rattling their sabers and putting special forces across the border and all the rest.
It would have actually seizing that would have grown the Venezuelan economy by more than a third.
It would have truly made them an energy superpower.
Already, Venezuela has more proven reserves than any place on earth.
Add to that the Starburgh formation and the other extensions from that.
It would be truly extraordinary.
Venezuela has unbelievable natural resources.
Much of it is still unexplored.
There's a reason they called it El Dorado, the city of gold.
Under better, even semi-sane leadership, the country will be enormously more wealthy and peaceful and not be seeking to export millions of people to its neighbors.
I'm just in Europe now, and you see little spontaneous demonstrations of people wrapped in Venezuelan flags.
There are Venezuelans living in various European cities celebrating what Trump did last Saturday.
What you've kind of had this construct, and you came on the show a number of times, said, hey, put a bounty on him and you can extract him.
But you also said in broader geostrategic, one of the ways you can get leverage here is quarantining the ghost fleet or wherever the ships are coming out.
President Trump has basically said this.
They're not going to go in and actively, as of right now, step in and run the thing, although he is going to use his leverage to quote unquote run it.
Just explain to the audience what that means.
What does it mean to have a quarantine here and to use that quarantine as leverage to make sure that Del C and the rest of that mob does what President Trump wants without putting boots on the ground of American troops?
The three ways that Venezuelan government makes money right now is on tolling narcotics coming out of the rest of Latin America, particularly cocaine and some fentanyl and meth.
Two, gold, which is largely flown to Turkey and to other Middle Eastern refineries.
And of course, crude oil.
So, if the president enforces a control mechanism over how much of that gold gets, how much of the oil gets produced and shipped, that really affects their funding.
And he's effectively done that when he shut the airspace, it also shut down their ability to ship to airship that gold.
So he's taken a lot of steps already to have a better control in that economy.
Remember, the Padrino, the Minister of Defense, Diestado Cobeo, the Minister of Interior, already have multi-multi-million dollar bounties on their heads for murder, narcotics trafficking, all sorts of bad charges.
So the president also has a means to escalate by saying, ah, okay, instead of the bounty being $25 or $15 million for information leading to the arrest of Diestado Cobeo, he could just say, Diestado Cobeo, dead or alive, $15 million.
And now a lot of people around them will see them as a payday and a retirement path if they bring him into whatever U.S. official will issue them the check.
It's a very instant way for Trump to change the internal calculation that those people would be using.
And President Trump, and there's more reporting now, he did try to work with these people and said, hey, I want this to happen quickly.
I want it to happen with very little American involvement.
Let's figure out a deal.
But all the deals, including for his henchmen, they had to leave the country.
He would not buy off my understanding on internal exile because that would be like them not leaving.
Part of that was an option to actually go to Turkey.
And a reason for that is the relationship that Maduro and his senior, his colleagues, his cabal, have with the Turkish government, Erdogan, around gold.
But they turned that down.
Is that your understanding?
They turned down every option that President Trump gave them just to demand to stay in the country.
Well, it's much bigger than it even looks on maps when people look at it because of the Mercator projection.
It is unbelievably laden with significant mineral value.
And it is part of our northern flank.
And as the Arctic Sea becomes more navigable and there's more transits, it becomes super relevant for global shipping.
Right now, it's effectively a protectorate of Denmark.
The Danes pay the bill for all the defense, even though we pay largely the bill for all of Denmark's defense, of Europe.
There's, I think, 29 or less than 50,000 people total that live in Greenland.
I think if you open it up to a vote for them, they would vote to become American citizens and to open and make it a protectorate like Puerto Rico.
I think even what Trump offered them was that if we did that, Greenland would still get a 50% carry on any mineral value extracted.
So they get none of the costs they have to bear and 50% of the upside with American naval protection and all the American capital markets plowing capital into developed the various completely uninhabited parts of Greenland for the betterment of Greenland citizens.
So to me, it makes sense.
There will be some Danish nationalists or just some Danish socialists that will not like that idea, but those are to be negotiated.
Remember, America grew mostly by acquisition, by paying money for land, whether it's Alaska, which was called Seward's Folly.
And again, that Secretary of State was, well, they call it Seward's Folly.
I think we ended up paying two or three cents per acre for all of Alaska.
The Louisiana Purchase purchase from Napoleon weakened at the end of the Napoleonic, the French Revolution.
We bought land, and this is another opportunity to do something similar.
Seward didn't think much of him when he won the presidency, but he became as big as Samara.
Seward was a giant in American history.
I want to ask you quickly about Tehran.
And then I got two breaking news items: one from Switzerland, one from Caracas, both of them about Venezuela.
And I got Poso on deck and Brian Kennedy.
Tehran, this thing's expanding because of the economic collapse of the mullahs, and we haven't cut them off from oil yet, which we've been advocating here for years.
But now the word is, you know, the IDF just can't, Mossad can't help themselves, IDF can't help themselves.
There's all this discussion about the Israelis want to go in and stir up the pot.
Wouldn't that be the dumbest thing possible now that you got the Persian people up in arms against the Mullahs?
Just let nature take its course.
They showed in 79, they got a pretty good, you know, when they're fed up with something and they're talking about putting the Shah's son, right?
And if you've ever studied the original revolution, it's not that the Shah and this crowd had a great run, okay?
Your thoughts on that, Eric Prince, the natural evolution of what's happening in Tehran versus foreign interdiction.
But the problem is, yes, it's great that the people are in the streets protesting.
But the sad thing is that regime will kill its way to success, meaning they will kill as many protesters as they need as long as they can continue to sell their oil.
They have a customer, China, will buy their crude that will keep the regime alive.
There is a surprising amount of military technology.
Their Shahad drone, a long-range, effectively cruise missile drone, they've sold a lot of those, thousands and thousands of those to Russia as part of the Ukraine war.
I've long advocated that covert action, enabling the Iranian people to rise up and just clip enough of the regime to take away its inevitability is the way to bring that house of cards down.
I don't know that anyone has done the work to build that preparation in the field with a few hundred, a few thousand Iranian dissidents to do that.
But until you can chop away the IRGC, the Kudz force, the MOIS forces, it's going to be bad.
Is let's cut off the oil to the Chinese Communist Party?
I think it's part of the play in Venezuela.
They're not getting any more.
Although the President Trump says, we'll give them access.
I think that's getting cut off.
Kennedy's going to talk about that in a second.
Isn't the play here at least the next part of the play?
Let's see how the Moodles do with no incoming cash, right?
We can do that easy and see what the people think.
Hey, I'll get back to you.
I want to get these two news items.
The two news items are Reuters is reporting, Eric, breaking from Caracas.
Venezuelan authorities have ordered police to find and arrest anyone involved in supporting the U.S. attack.
Do you think they're just doing that for PR?
Or do you think they're going against President Trump's wishes and desires and actually going after people that assisted the military in the extraction process?
I have no doubt that the gangster class that still remains in Venezuela will definitely test the wire and see if it's electrified or not.
So, you know, having done one on Saturday, there might need to be two or three more done remotely for people to get the full memo of what is expected from them by the United States.
Switzerland's just announced, the Swiss government's announced they have frozen all assets related to anybody associated with Maduro or his government.
That's, I don't know that Switzerland was harboring many of those resources.
I think a lot of that money was in Russia and in Turkey and in the Gulf.
But great if Switzerland wants to get ahead of that.
There's an enormous. asset recovery effort to be done in searching out because it was, look, it should have been the most per capita, the wealthiest country in the Western hemisphere, but it's been looted systematically for the last 30 years.
So there's a lot of wealth to be tracked and recovered.
I am on X at Rio Eric D. Prince, and they should also check out an unplugged phone, because if they're serious about communication security, if they're serious about communication security, you can buy it at unplugged.com slash warroom.
We designed this phone to protect your digital survival, your digital sovereignty, to protect your First and your Fourth Amendment rights of the Constitution.
Dave's just sent a letter of censure to Mark Kelly and Pete Hegseth has designated the Secretary of the Navy to look into every alternative of how to basically effectuate that censure, I assume, including calling back to active duty.
Do you believe that Kelly should be called back?
He's a captain and they probably are going to get busted down.
But do you believe he should be called back and tried in a court martial, sir?
It is very dangerous for the over-politization of our officer corps in the Civil War.
It was super political.
It was ridiculous.
I think it's one of the things that contributed to a civil war.
And so letting officers, letting military officers be military professionals, fantastic.
If they want to take their uniform off and retire, do that.
But don't elicit subversion like he and the other clutch of Democrats were trying to do by what they did, claiming it was, don't follow illegal orders, yet they couldn't identify one specific order that was illegal.
Minneapolis, Waltz is throwing in the towel because he's got to spend time on his criminal defense, just like Maduro's got to do in southern Manhattan in federal court.
Well, Steve, this is exactly what you and I were talking about over the Christmas, New Year's break, those 15,000 U.F. sailors, the flotilla that is off the coast of Venezuela right now, the pressure that's being put on the regime.
Obviously, now, of course, with the stunning events of the last weekend now coming into focus.
And you look at, look, you know, my own personal feelings are, of course, I fully support the policy of blackbagging communists and taking them to Guantanamo Bay.
And in fact, I have a list if anyone would like to check it out.
But when it comes down to it, it always comes.
And if you go back and look at the human events series that we ran last week, regime change, tales of regime change.
We talk about Iraq.
We talk about Afghanistan.
We talk about Ukraine 2014.
We talk about Syria.
The question always comes: what comes next?
Now, Venezuela is a different situation.
Secretary of State Rubio pointed that out.
This is a very different country than someplace over in the Middle East.
It's a very different set of characters.
It's a very separate cast.
And, Steve, what did I say here on the show on Saturday?
I said, is this a full-on regime change or are they just taking out one guy?
And it appears to be that that's what the president and Marco Rubio said afterwards because the president said we are not installing Machado.
He was very clear about that.
Cold water all over it.
And then Rubio coming out and saying that he was having discussions with the vice president of Venezuela, who had been sort of this henchwoman for Maduro.
But of course, she's off there.
It kind of looks like she's going into business for herself as it is.
I had Eric on here about this whole situation in Tehran, the spontaneous self-organizing demonstration against the Mulas, and we're still letting the Chinese Communist Party get oil, monetize it.
Now there's reports out of Paris that the Israel's Israel is going to actually in discussions now with Syria about actually reaching some sort of rapprochement.
You just informed me that it's Witkoff and Kushner that are putting this together.
And they just announced, I guess, Zelensky is going to go over there because Orban said this morning, no Budapest meeting because there's nothing really to talk about now.
Putin's not going to come.
Trump's not going to come.
I thought this might happen right after Davos.
And my understanding is the president's going to Davos.
Well, Steve, when I was at the Pentagon, I had the opportunity to question this from the press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, over at the Department of War, and specifically on Mark Kelly and the seditious video that came out.
At that point, it was under review by Secretary Phelan over at the Navy Department.
And now that the review has been done, it was submitted to the overall Secretary of War.
He's come down and said, we're going to see, number one, it will be this administrative action.
And number two, we're going to see a reduction in rank and the opening, the opening of a broader investigation and proceedings against him.
This is unprecedented.
We have not ever seen something like this happen to a sitting United States senator.
And potentially, yes, this could include, depending on the way they go with it, it could include the full return to active duty.
People are saying it's the best podcast series they've seen on these regime change situations that have gone on the last 30, 40, 50 years all around the world.
Why these things happened?
Why the history happened?
Incredible reviews.
I want to say thank you to War Room and the entire War Room engine room, Grace and everybody for gigging it up and streaming it across the war room platforms and, of course, putting it out there.
If you haven't had a chance to listen yet, well, folks, you know, I can't say that I was privy to all the information regarding the Venezuelan actions, but let's just say it's kind of there are there are no conspiracies, but there are no coincidences when Human Events Daily is running a regime change special right when Maduro gets arrested.
Well, since Jack already said Minneapolis, I'm going to go with Caracas.
Of course, Minneapolis is important because if we can't solve the Somali problem in Minneapolis, Minnesota, what are we doing here?
We have to get that right.
And that's a very high priority.
But in Caracas, Venezuela, the reason the president went in there was because he thought it was something more than just drug dealing by Nicolas Maduro.
He thought it was something existential about the fact that you had Russia, China, and Iran, who are enemies of the United States, some more than others, of course, who are operating in Venezuela in defiance of what he termed the Monroe Doctrine.
So I think here, Steve, this is a major strategic shift on the part of the president to take seriously for the first time in my lifetime this idea.
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Silver blew up to 80, backed off a little bit.
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So much going on.
Brian Kennedy, you're one of the intellectual architects of the America First concept and construct.
Now, you know, this is regime change.
Is it nation building?
The hemispheric defense, which I think we need to articulate even more because it's such a brilliant construct, completely thought of by President Trump.
And now he's taking ownership of it, not just the Monroe Doctrine, because of the Don Roe Doctrine, which I love.
The Danes right now are in total freak out because President Trump is saying, look, I got to stop the Russian submarines.
I need Greenland.
Your thoughts, sir, is this, have you gotten soft on us?
Have you gone from America first or hardcore to kind of Marco Rubio's wingman, sir?
Well, I do think Marco Rubio is doing overall a pretty good job here for the president.
I disagree with him on a few things.
I'm not sure why Maduro is in a New York prison, not in some hole in Gitmo.
I'm not sure what due process Nicholas Maduro deserves today, if in fact he's a narco-terrorist, which I think he is.
The neocon view would be we need to democratize Venezuela.
We need to democratize Latin America and South America.
And we need to make sure the world is safe for democracy.
The America first view is we need to make sure that the world behaves itself so that the United States is secure and free and tranquil and prosperous.
That's, I think, what President Trump is doing here with his calling out the Monroe Doctrine.
During the period when Monroe Doctrine was in 1823, it was written by mostly by John Quincy Adams.
He thought then, as did most Americans up until really the early 20th century, that the European powers should not get a foothold anywhere in the Americas.
Because if they did, they'd be able to exert influence that would not be in the interests of the United States.
What has happened over the last 50 years, especially, is you have China, Russia, and now Iran in a place like Venezuela and throughout Latin America and South America exerting all sorts of influence there in ways that are detrimental to U.S. interests.
What matters from the Monroe Doctrine point of view is that whatever is nearest is dearest.
We're not talking here about Ukraine.
We're not talking about Africa.
We're talking about South America.
You look at Venezuela on a map.
Missiles that are put in Venezuela, like missiles that are put in Cuba, could reach the United States.
We don't know what the Russians, the Chinese, or the Iranians have put in Venezuela over the last decade.
These are bad actors.
This is a communist regime that means harm to the United States.
President Trump is saying we're not going to live anymore with nations that are enemies of ours so close to us exerting this kind of influence.
Getting rid of Maduro is one thing.
I agree with that.
But now you have to take the next step and make sure that you have a regime in Venezuela that removes from Venezuela the Chinese and all of their investments there, the Russians and the Iranians.
What are the Chinese, Russians, and Iranians doing in Venezuela but staging an operating hub, as it were, to be able to cause harm to the United States, whether it's drug trafficking, which the Russians have always been involved in, or the building of terrorist bases to import into the United States, or weapon systems that can be used, advanced missiles, including potentially nuclear missiles aimed at the United States.
Again, this is not the Middle East.
This is not Eastern Europe.
This is our hemisphere within, as I say, 30 minutes reach of the United States.
That's something the president saw, and he thought that was intolerable.
Now we have to take the next step in this hemispheric defense and make sure the Chinese are out of South America, make sure that the limitations on any foreign power in those places is absolutely minimal.
And we do that not for the people of those countries, Steve.
We do that for the people of the United States to make sure that we, the United States, are secure from any of their nefariousness.
I won't have you back on because we need to drill down on this and like, take the six o'clock hour drill in on this so that we have, we can work this, work it through, because people need to understand this, because there's a lot of confusion.