Episode 5138: Rise Of The Digital God From Our Automated Overlords; Stopping H1B Fraud
Brendan Stenhauser warns AI’s "agentic revolution" could disrupt 40% of global jobs, with Fortune 100 CEOs now silent due to PR backlash, while 75-80% of Americans demand safeguards against tech-driven "digital overlords." Meanwhile, Stephen K. Bannon and Rosemary Jenks link H-1B fraud—where workers earn 16-30% less—to broader immigration risks, urging Congress to eliminate OPT and green card sponsorships. Bannon also explores a potential U.S.-Iran low-enrichment deal, contrasting Netanyahu’s "mowing the lawn" strategy with Trump’s cautious diplomacy, while cautioning Gulf investments face missile threats. The episode ties AI labor shifts, immigration reform, and Middle East tensions to systemic power struggles, urging public pressure before irreversible automation reshapes society. [Automatically generated summary]
Is already transforming work, one delegated task at a time.
If the transformation unfolds slowly enough and the economy adjusts quickly enough, the economists may be right.
We will be fine or even better.
But if AI triggers a rapid reorganization of work, compressing years of change into months, affecting roughly 40% of jobs worldwide, as the International Monetary Fund projects, the consequences will not stop at the economy.
It's one of those issues that touches all aspects of a civilization.
And the civilization that we have is letting us down.
So it starts with the economists who really are restrained by the data they have.
And the data they have right now says there's no evidence that AI is yet affecting the labor market.
And some economists say, well, we should plan in case it does, right?
Some don't.
The CEOs who are in charge of the Fortune 100 CEOs who are in charge of a lot of America's workforce were really sounding off about a year ago about philosopher kings about AI and their theories of what it was going to do.
Because I think they realized from their PR teams, hey, you know, when you talk about what might happen to America's workforce, it doesn't sound great.
And you don't want to be associated with that.
So maybe we should stop doing that.
And so all at the same time, that stopped.
I did talk to a lot of people on background, a lot of CEOs who say, look, I love my workforce.
Wall Street is going to insist after years and years of investment in AI that I show some results.
And if the AI magic miracle isn't here, the results will be cutting costs.
And those costs will be cut now.
And then on the sort of last leg of this little triathlon, you have politics.
And so historically, when big disruption comes to the most important thing, American jobs, the right and the left get together and figure out, well, for our own political self-preservation, we better have a plan.
And what I discovered when I talked to America's political class is that not only do they have a plan, not only are they ignorant of AI, they actually think that the current federal plan of just let it go, it's going to work itself out, is fine, with two exceptions.
On the left, Bernie Sanders, who's written a really ferocious report about what we should be demanding from companies and from government for the future of the American workforce.
And on the right, the person who said to me multiple times, I agree with Bernie Sanders was Steve Bannon.
And so when you get those two political forces aligned, you're going to see change and disruption.
And so what I came away with is this is the most important issue in American culture that no one is talking about.
It's Thursday, 12 February in the year of our Lord 2026.
Brendan Stenhauser is with us.
Steinhauser is with us in Rosemary Drinks.
Brendan, I've got to hand you a compliment, well deserved, you and a handful of others.
In that cold open, he said, We went to a period where the philosopher kings of AI, and that's the leaders, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the four, uh, what are they, the four labs, the four advanced labs, I think, would get out and make these pronouncements of what AI was going to do and how great it was going to be.
I mean, Elon's still doing it.
Elon's telling us that the only way out of here of the highly leveraged bet is robots.
We'll get to that in a second, but which I know sounds childish because it is childish.
But you and others bringing this in front of the American people, like on War Room and other platforms like this, the PR departments, listen what the guy said.
The PR departments went to them and said, Hey, you better tone this down because it's working against us.
Talk about first the philosopher kings and how wrong they were in misleading the American people before you and a handful of others started just hammering them every day.
And now their communications teams are saying, Hey, we're checking the polling.
It's not working.
The American people don't trust you and they're starting to hate you, sir.
I appreciate the opportunity to come on your show and talk about this.
And yeah, it's something we've been paying a lot of attention to the last few years and sounding the alarm and then watching as these big tech CEOs just go out there and promise the world.
They promise utopia.
And as one of my good friends, Mark Beale, who you've had on the show, has said, every time we're promised utopia, it ends up in the gulag.
So we've been very concerned about this.
We've been out there talking to regular people around the country.
I just gave a speech the other night in Austin, Texas.
I've been traveling around giving talks.
My team has been doing that.
And I can tell you what the gentleman said earlier on that show in MSNL is totally true.
If you're speaking to conservatives, to liberals, to libertarians, they're all in.
I get very little resistance when I talk about what we need to do.
There is huge skepticism of these big tech companies.
They don't trust Sam Altman.
They don't trust any of these CEOs to tell them the truth.
They see that what they're trying to build in Silicon Valley is a digital God.
They want us all to worship the digital God.
They want us all to pay homage to the digital overlords and these CEOs.
And that's something that the American people reject.
We cannot keep up with the amount of people that are joining our cause every day who are signing up on our website saying, we want to help you.
We want to support you.
So it's a deluge.
We want people to continue to support us and we'll give them ways to get involved in this fight.
We'll give them ways to take action to light up the cause, light up the phone mines on Capitol Hill and in states around the country, because that's what it's going to take to make this go the right way.
Here's what you and Mark Beale and others, our own Joe Allen, others, you've given a permission structure for people because before they said, well, I can't criticize this.
These are the tech oligarchs.
They've supposedly made America so great.
They've done all the social media.
They've done all this.
They're so great.
I see them everywhere, right?
They all came and paid homage to President Trump after he won.
And remember, I said all those guys, except for Elon, all became MAGA at 10 o'clock Eastern Standard Time on election night when Pennsylvania and Michigan were called.
Next thing you know, they're down in Mar-a-Lago.
So people needed a permission structure.
And that's what you guys have gone around and do.
I just want you to say it again.
As you go around the country, because Joe Allen says the same thing, you go around the country and you give talks to conservative groups or to libertarians or even to liberal groups.
It's virtually unanimity that people come up to you and say, I don't trust these guys.
I'm highly skeptical.
I think we're going down the wrong path.
Tell me what I can do.
Is that I just, I don't want to put words in your mouth.
And I'm sure there might be a few people in the crowd that come in skeptical or maybe they're more kind of pro-AI than maybe some of the other folks in the crowd.
Almost never do I get outright, you know, hostile opposition or people that are really on the other side, the side of the big tech pros.
It almost never happens.
And again, we're speaking in cities, we're speaking in suburbs and rural areas.
And I have friends and allies who are doing this work as well, constantly traveling around, doing a roadshow, talking to people, faith leaders, teachers, police officers, nurses, doctors and lawyers, welders and plumbers and electricians.
I mean, everywhere you go, people are concerned about this.
They're worried about their jobs.
But as I had one pastor tell me the other day of a huge church, he said, you know, I'm worried about the spiritual component of losing work.
I'm worried about human dignity and purpose.
It's not just the job.
It's not just the income, which we're worried about for our parishioners and for our people, but I'm worried about the spiritual aspect of what can happen to human beings in this new environment that we're stepping into.
So there's a lot of concern for people that are out there wondering, yeah, you're not alone.
In fact, 75%, 80% of Americans support safeguards on AI.
That's bipartisan.
It's a cross-party affiliation.
It's across demographics.
And I think the other sort of 25%, some of them are unsure, maybe 1% with the big tech pros, but most people support safeguards and they want to get this right.
One, we had Joe on for a couple of years and we were warning people of this, talking about transhumanism, all this.
And then ChatGPT went to the World Economic Forum and showed that the large language models were far ahead of where people were.
And I said at the time, the venture capital and the private equity and the hedge funds are going to pour into this.
And so if you had any chance of keeping this in the barn, you just lost it because now capital is going to pour and that's what's happened.
Here's what's concerned me recently, even before this leverage bet, which has just kind of become clear in the last couple of months.
I notice if you watch sports or you watch news and we watch sports for entertainment, but we watch, we curate the news.
The advertising cycle to businesses is all centered around agentic, having an agent.
And they're convincing businesses and business people.
If you want to succeed in business as a mid-level, even junior person, you have got to basically build and work with an agent, a digital agent of yourself.
This agentic revolution.
This is where I think it gets even scarier.
Can you walk us through that for a second and why this could be particularly very scary?
Well, I think the agents are being built by these companies to replace human work, to replace human workers.
And this is just the beginning of this.
These things are getting more and more sophisticated every few weeks, every few months.
The capabilities are rising exponentially.
And so the very stated purpose of why they're creating these agents is to take over white collar work.
And then when you couple that with robotics, and I know robotics is sort of a little slower to develop, it's hard to get it right.
But if you have robots that are increasing in versatility and in dexterity, the ability to use their fingers to grasp things and do these precise movements, you power them with AI agents.
And now you look at what that impact will be on blue-collar work.
And so automation is the purpose.
It's the design of a lot of these companies.
They want to basically capture the value of the labor force.
They want to basically get wealthier themselves.
They want to capture the value of that labor.
They want to get massively wealthy.
They want to be the first trillionaires in history.
And I think they realize this.
They've said publicly that they fear what could happen when people realize this and when people start to see what's happening to them.
I mean, they have used the term that they fear the mob.
Well, yeah, you should fear.
And it's not, it's not a mob when you're just basically capturing the value of people's labor.
You're putting them out of work.
You're using companions to get their kids addicted and hooked.
You're encouraging this situation where we have AI psychosis and delusion.
People are losing their minds because they're going down this rabbit hole.
So they're creating all these societal problems, which by the way, they created these same problems with social media.
AI is just going to make that exponentially worse.
And so, yeah, people are upset.
They don't trust the big tech CEOs.
They don't trust the companies.
They don't like what they're seeing.
And they have every right to be concerned and to be worried.
And they are.
And what we're asking people who are watching this to do is to take action.
Rosemary Jenks, this makes your whole crusade to rid this country of these phony work visas, the ones that come through college and lead right to H-1Bs that flooded the nation with essentially low-skilled tech workers even more important because AI is first coming to take out, as I say, lower managerial, administrative, and tech.
And so this makes the clarion call, it's one of the reasons that the tech bros, the oligarchs don't want to get rid of H-1B visas.
They want this transition with, and they don't care about flooding the country with people that can't be assimilated.
It's not their problem.
They're living in a whole different, you know, it's like the Middle Ages.
They're living in these fortified, you know, basically enclaves, and they don't have to worry about the healthcare.
They don't have to worry about the social breakdown.
They don't have to worry about, and here in Texas, this is why I tell people we are here for the Sharia law and for because nobody wanted to talk about it.
And we gave a permission structure to do that starting the conference a couple of weeks ago, and it's caught on fire.
The New York Times has an article from, I think, two days ago saying all of a sudden it's become the number one issue in the Republican primary out of nowhere.
The care and the Muslim Brotherhood, nobody saw this coming.
I tell people now that we've shifted the show down here because we're here until at least the 3rd of March with the primary.
I tell people right below the interest in stopping Sharia law and really stopping this Islamic invasion is this issue of H-1B visas.
It's everywhere I go, every meeting I'm in, everything I talk, people pull me aside and say, hey, this is huge and I'm all in and we're dedicated, but these H-1B visas, you guys have got to work on stopping this because it's destroying the state of Texas.
And now you couple it with artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence, the companies alone, besides equity, are going to put in, they're raising, I think, 800, they're going to spend $800 billion in capex over and above government assistance.
And a lot of that, Bloomberg's reporting right now, a lot of that's going to be, is going to be borrowed.
And it's just making a huge leverage bet on this technology.
And this technology's principal purpose initially is to eviscerate jobs to drive margin.
Yeah, well, Steve, if you leave AI aside, we have already gone well down the road to decimating our domestic labor force with our immigration system.
So the fact that we have made cheap foreign labor available to employers means that American workers are second choice already.
So you add AI on top of that.
American workers become third choice.
And there's a new study that has just come out by George Borjas, who's a Harvard economist who is fantastic.
It's done by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
And it shows that H-1Bs across the board are paid 16% less than American workers in the same jobs.
However, if you drill down to occupations like software developers, the difference is 30%.
So employers can save almost a third of the wages by hiring an H-1B instead of an American.
So that means that even if you have a $100,000 fee on top of the H-1B approval process like President Trump did, the employer makes that back within four years and it's pure profit after that.
So we have put American workers second already, and now we're talking about putting them third.
That is not sustainable.
We cannot have this.
And, you know, the first thing we need to do, in my view, is get rid of these visas so that we can stop replacing Americans with cheap foreign labor.
And then we're going to have to deal with AI because we don't have a country if we don't have solid work where people can earn a living and have the, you know, the moral support and values that work entails.
We are going to, first of all, have to get the Senate to move to the talking filibuster.
There's no other way that we can get serious election integrity legislation done.
The Save America Act passed the House yesterday.
It only got one Democrat.
So we know we're not going to get Democrats in the Senate except for potentially Federman.
I don't know.
But we're going to have to get that to President Trump's desk.
And quite frankly, I don't care how they do it.
They have got to do it.
I will say the filibuster has saved America from amnesty several times in the past.
But going to the talking filibuster does not require a rule change.
It is not the nuclear option.
So we are in favor of that.
In terms of getting immigration legislation, we're just not there yet with Congress.
And you're absolutely right.
It's because of the donors.
You know, there are members of Congress whose own children are in tech fields, have graduated with STEM degrees, and they can't find jobs.
So the message is getting through, but they still need the cash for reelection campaigns.
We have got to defeat the message of the donors.
And the way we do that is constant pressure on members of Congress.
If you look at our website, iapaction.com, you can find out, as Steve said, exactly where your member of Congress, both the House and the Senate, stands on immigration issues.
It is a ranking system based essentially on sports rankings that tells you everything you need to know about what your member of Congress believes or doesn't believe and is willing to stand up for or not.
And they need encouragement when they do good things and they need to be held accountable when they do stupid things because unfortunately it's the stupid things that tend to prevail.
Let's go through that because as you know, we said this thing can't be reformed.
It's too corrupt.
It's allowed too many people in.
And they say, oh, it's only like $50,000 a year.
That doesn't include the universities, doesn't include all these other businesses.
They're letting in millions.
The reforms President Trump tried to do in the executive order.
They're clearly not.
This is my take.
They're clearly not going to work.
If you were sitting down with President Trump and said, hey, I think we need to tweak or recast the executive order, what would be your recommendation to him?
Well, first of all, we absolutely must get rid of the OPT program, the optional practical training, because that is the pipeline that goes directly from our universities that carries foreign students to these tech jobs and gives the employers a tax break to hire the foreign students instead of American graduates.
And then they go straight into the H-1B.
So if we break that pipeline, we can essentially prevent more.
It won't be full scale, but we can prevent more people from getting to the H-1B system because the employers won't know about them because they haven't hired them as OPT students.
So that's one major thing.
This study that I referred to, the Borjas study, actually looked at the president's $100,000 fee and said that's not enough to make employ to disincentivize employers from hiring H-1Bs because they save so much money.
And one of the reasons they save so much money with this 30% discount in wages is because they can keep the H-1B indefinitely.
You know, it's supposed to be a three-year visa that's renewable once.
Instead, they're staying here for 40, 50 years because the employers sponsor them for a green card.
That needs to be shut off.
Unfortunately, Congress has to do that, but it needs to be done.
And that would go a long way toward making it so that H-1Bs are not, in fact, cheaper than Americans for these employers.
And that's the key.
You have to make hiring a foreign worker more expensive than hiring an American.
Welcome back with everything else President Trump's trying to juggle.
We're trying to juggle maybe another massive war in the Middle East.
Kurt Mills joins.
Kurt, what I found interesting, there's really not been a readout, or maybe I missed it, but it hasn't been a lot.
They had a three-hour meeting yesterday with Netanyahu.
I think it's the sixth time he's been over.
They had the, in the pre-meeting, had about the Board of Peace.
And in the meeting, they talked about that.
They also talked about the redevelopment of Gaza, which is a very high priority for President Trump, that the Qatar and the Turks, Qatar will provide the financing, most of it, or organize it, and the Turks will oversee the security.
And he's pressing forward with that as his advisors, Jared and company, are doing it.
But we didn't hear a lot hasn't leaked about what's going on, although there's still assets.
Yeah, so I think yesterday was a big deal for potentially avoiding a war with Iran.
Number one, as you flagged yesterday, the prime minister of Israel's entrance into the White House was unusual.
It was done through the side door.
That's not really how a head of state is generally treated.
Mark Arubio looked a little bit uncomfortable with him, and the Israeli press has picked up on this, saying that Netanyahu's visit this time was done with much less pomp and circumstance and that that was relevant.
Secondarily, the Turks, most notably the foreign minister Faidan, is messaging explicitly, it's unclear if this is true, but they haven't gotten anything wrong yet.
They are messaging explicitly that the administration is weighing a low enrichment deal with the Iranians.
This is a big deal.
So essentially what this means is that the U.S. would agree to a deal that would have a lower, much lower potentially level of enrichment than the Obama-era JCPOA.
But so it's a better, it's a stronger deal, but it also avoids a war.
Yeah, but this would be totally, I mean, I thought President Trump's been pretty adamant.
And this is why Netanyahu wants to expand the conversation.
It was zero enrichment, zero ability to make weapons, and also going to the ballistic missiles, no delivery systems.
In fact, I think even shorter ballistic missiles that can hit Tel Aviv on a tactical basis.
Bibi wants that expanded to that at a minimum.
Plus, he wants to talk about additional efforts for regime change.
I mean, they want to start shooting immediately, but even in the negotiation discussion, it's some sort of regime-drain discussion.
How do we go from that agenda?
I mean, one, from the march to kinetic war to the broader agenda now to an agenda.
Looks like that looks like something a deal can get done because as you said yesterday, and so many people I've talked about, a lot of the Persians, particularly RGC guys, saying, hey, if we're going to get stripped of everything, let's just get it on now.
And that's one of the reasons Qatar, these meetings, the three hour meetings took place yesterday and Qatar and in other places are saying, hey, we're exposed here.
These guys are going to be lighting off rockets all over the place.
We don't have the defenses that other people have.
They're going to take down our oil and gas industry for maybe half a decade, sir.
I think that the first point you make, there's some ambiguity.
The president has been most adamant about no nuclear weapon.
He hasn't been, and has been very conspicuous throughout this process.
He hasn't been adamant, generally speaking, about no enrichment or no ballistic missiles.
These are the Israeli asks, and he has not been messaging that unless it's like a true social that occasionally seems almost like it was written for him or an off-the-kind of off-the-cuff comment.
The clear messaging is no nuclear weapon.
That was reiterated yesterday by Vice President Vance, which I think was also notable because I don't think Vice President Vance would talk out of turn from the president.
So the administration's policy at the top level seems to be no nuclear weapon.
If that is the policy, then there is a deal to be struck that is better than the Obama JCPOA with the Iranians.
And that seems to be what we're talking about here.
If the deals criterion are widened to, quote, zero enrichment, which means zero nuclear, you know, basically we're talking about zero versus 1.5 at this point.
If it's widened to that and it's widened to no ballistic missiles from the perspective of the Iranian regime, they'd rather just go to war because they may survive the war and keep their weapons.
You know, President Trump has had a long-term relationship with Erdogan.
And let's be blunt, he thinks quite highly of him.
When President Trump went to Knesset, and you had those two meetings, you had one at the resort, I think on the Red Sea, that was going to be the signing of the actual document.
This is the Gaza peace document in the redevelopment document.
President Trump went to the Knesset first.
Then he went and it was announced when he was getting ready to leave that Bibi was now invited, was going to attend.
As President Trump's heading there, Erdogan's coming in his jet and puts out, and I think tells people, hey, if Netanyahu, I can't have Netanyahu in a meeting there.
And then all of a sudden, Netanyahu came up with some reason that they had a religious holiday or he had to go to a religious observance.
The president has also been very adamant about, and he's been, he hasn't budgeted on this, that Qatar is going to have a major role here in what I call the two-state solution in Gaza, the foothold into Israel, where you're going to have 2.2 million Palestinians, Qatar money.
And if you look at the drawings, it's a new Tel Aviv or a Miami beach on steroids.
That's what they're committed to build.
And Qatar is talking about putting up a kind of money.
The Turks will be security and they'll be organizing the Egyptians and UAE and other military forces.
Now, people I talk to in Israel Tom say that's never going to happen.
That's all a fantasy, et cetera.
But talk to him about this foreign minister today.
He was pretty adamant that they actually are in discussions for a low level of enrichment.
And given President Trump's relationship with Erdogan, and you heard the vice president, what he said yesterday, no one in the American government has countered that.
And given President Trump's relationship with Erdogan, there may be something there.
And I think it's interesting that you link the Iran and Palestine files.
It's something that I was told sort of overnight by someone who would know is that there are elements of the administration, even potentially people like Jared Kushner, who are, I think, ambiguous players on Middle East politics, who think solving the Iran issue nonviolently is potentially the key to also solving the Palestinian issue nonviolently.
Now, of course, this isn't what Benjamin Netanyahu wants.
I think he wants the continuation of the war on both fronts.
And so this would be bad for him politically.
And thus, that's why he's lobbying here in Washington.
But as to the Turkish relationship, yes, it's probably one of the most underexplored, if not the most underexplored, relationship in geopolitics.
Trump and Erdogan quietly have gotten on for some time since the first term, as I think you allude to.
And the Turks have been very, very careful players throughout all of this.
There's no love loss between Turkey and Iran.
And Turkey repeatedly, both on and off the record, will assail the Iranians for use of proxies in the region.
But what they don't want, what they don't want is an all-out U.S.-Israeli regime change war in the region.
Number one, they don't want to deal with a flow of refugees.
There's been tons of refugees that Turkey has handled from the Syria war.
But number two, they know that they'll be next on the hit list for Israel if Israelis are able to convince the Americans to get involved.
Frankly, I have heard when Netanyahu comes to Washington, half the time he talks about Turkey as much as he talks about Iran.
Yeah, I mean, look, the ancient enmity between those two, the Turks and the Persians, is a historical fact.
Look, I think Erdogan sees himself as a man of history, a historic figure, maybe even a world historic figure.
And he is trying to reverse World War I. He's trying to reverse, you know, General Allenby and Lawrence Arabia, the Arab revolt, all of it that took the two holy sites away from the Ottoman Empire.
And he's working with Qatar.
I believe he wants to leave with an Ottoman Empire and a caliphate that controls the two holy sites.
Now, that is quite controversial, but I think his plan is pretty straightforward.
And like I said, he sees himself as historical figure.
And President Trump has a strong relationship with him.
You can see that every step of the way here, President Trump has a strong relationship with him.
So that's going to happen.
I want to go back to that point you make that not enough people talk about.
The two files kind of working together.
President Trump's a man of peace and he's a business guy.
You can tell that the Abraham Accords is not a political deal.
The reason you were having sign up from it is that it's a business and financial deal.
Remember, the people running the Gulf Emirates, because these are not democracies, they're not politicians.
They're business people.
They're business people in the area of oil and gas.
And now they're taking their excess cash and they're putting it.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work, but they're trying to be high-tech.
Both Qatar, UAE, the Saudis, they're putting in, they are business people and they look at things to a business perspective.
That's why the Abraham Accords, as kind of shaky as that's been, has actually worked.
Here, you actually have another business transaction.
It's not a political transaction.
It's a real estate development, massive capital.
You got to have security that has a political oversight from it.
But it's a very high priority for President Trump.
Anybody that doesn't get that doesn't understand what's going on.
And that's why he's been adamant with all this thing.
He says these are small issues and we can decide them.
The disarming of Hamas.
And people I know in Israel, I know some very well, are saying that's not a small issue.
They got to be disarmed.
But that's why I think they've linked now going forward with the Turkish and the Qatar involvement to a broader perspective.
I would just tell you, I think people in the region fear that the opening couple of salvos on any type of military interdiction, they're not prepared for and could have massive business consequences for people like Endoha and Abu Dhabi, in Dubai, and other places when missiles start hitting.
No, I think you're quite right to pick up on this business element as the potential actual wedge between the U.S. and the Israelis at this point.
The fact is, war will be bad for the kind of business, the sort of investment and building infrastructure in the region that both the administration wants to get involved in and also Trump's own family.
These investments in the Gulf won't be worth anything if they're basically target practice for Iranian missiles.
And so I think this is, while, you know, Trump has gone pretty far with Netanyahu, this is actually a potential point of departure between their visions, because this is not the Netanyahu vision.
The Netanyahu vision is to atomize and to chop up the Arab and Muslim worlds.
And he views that as basically mowing the lawn and ensuring Israeli security.
I'm not so sure that that actually ensures Israeli security, but that's his vision for his country since the 90s.
And that is pretty, pretty at loggerheads with a expanding financialized Arab world where Trump and his family can build hotels and Kushner can build hedge funds based in Riyadh.
And so I think this is actually what could actually stop an all-out war at the 11th hour.
And at this point, you got to take what you can get.
If this prevents a war, I think that's a sort of re-emergence of financial peace theory.
You'd have to go pretty far to look at as bad a guys as the Alitollas and the Mullahs.
The point I make, number one, having been over there at the beginning of this fiasco, is that as I remember, the people in the streets now and their parents, they overthrew.
We were involved.
I mean, Persia and the Shah of Iran in Iran, that was our ally like nobody else.
That's all, you know, from Johnson to Nixon.
These were the guys.
You know, they had the biggest armament, the biggest army.
They bought the most weapons.
They had the most modern military.
And, you know, the Shah was far from being a perfect guy.
They had, what, SAVAC and these terrorists, and they were turfed out.
And they were turfed out because people wanted an Islamic Republic.
And guess what?
Since 1979, they've got one.
And you can tell the country's shattered President Trump and these economic sanctions, plus Scott Besson, the U.S. media hasn't said a lot about it.
But if you look at the regional media, they're all over.
Scott Besson went and destroyed their currency.
I mean, he crushed it.
It's one of the reasons that they took to the streets.
The economic sanctions are working.
Now, Netanyahu keeps saying, and Levin and these guys keep saying, you can't trust the Moolahs.
You can't trust any deal.
I think the one thing they're missing is that the president has trust, whether you like it or not, he has trust in Qatar and he has trust in Turkey and the UAE.
Let's take a short commercial break.
I want Kurt to stick around.
We've got to talk more about this in a moment.
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In the war, remember the names of those today or the streets of the Empire.
We are a magazine founded by Patrick J. Buchanan and other conservatives in 2002 against the Iraq War.
We are the Encore generation that are working against a new Iran war today in the 2020s.
And you can find my own information at Kurt Mills at C-U-R-T-M-I-L-L-S on X.
And yeah, you can find me there.
And I think, you know, look, very quickly, the point you made about 1979 is very useful.
You know, a lot of times, you know, Lindsey Graham is arguing that Trump should be, quote, Reagan plus, putting aside the hilarity that Trump doesn't really seem to like that name.
Something that Trump actually should avoid is becoming Carter plus.
When the Iranian Revolution first happened, what occurred is that the hawks and proto-neocons around Brzezinski urged them not to work with the new regime.
You don't have to like the new regime, but the fact is they controlled Iran.
They argued for accepting the Shah to the U.S.
They argued for the special operations, Operation Eagles Claw that failed.
And so, yes, Trump is probably pretty high on the special forces operation in Venezuela at the Cap Maduro, but it's not clear with the military options here.
And there's tons of risk and not a lot of hot upside.
And the President of Trump would not want to repeat Jimmy Carter's mistake by doing intervention in Iran.
I don't think we should go back into it or go into Iran.
I don't think, I mean, if we can bomb them again and get away with it, that's one thing.
But how many times can we do that and get away with it cleanly?
I think, you know, this Venezuela thing went smooth, but I think we're going to get in trouble attacking Iran.
I don't think we can get away with doing it over and over.
There's Chinese aircraft landing in there all the time, all the time.
There's a Chinese railroad that goes into Iran.
They're partnering up with Russia.
They've helped Russia extensively in Ukraine.
Now it's Russia's turn to help Iran.
So I think if we get tangled up in Iran again, it's not going to be clean like the last time and like Venezuela.
I think it's going to get dirty.
And then if it does turn into a boots on the ground thing, there's going to be a wave of refugees.
And guess where they're going?
To America and Europe.
And we already have enough of that.
Look what's going on in Texas dealing with the Muslims down there setting up Sharia law and invading the country.
There's already 50 million Muslims in Europe.
And that's because of the 2011, 2012 Arab Spring from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
They toppled Syria, Libya, and all the other countries in the Middle East.
And the wave of refugees flooded Europe.
And that's what will happen.
If this thing goes sideways and we end up in a prolonged kinetic conflict in Iran, there's going to be waves of refugees and they're going to flood the West.
You guys, this is we have nine months before the election.
We've got to take the attention off of these protests and stuff and put it back on the biggest fraud this country's ever seen and the Sharia law that's going on in Minnesota.
This has to be our focus.
We have to get back to that.
And so I look at it as a good thing.
I mean, the president's very smart.
He's playing this long game rather than, okay, let's stay there and hold our line or whatever.
But this is, it's a good thing, everybody.
Be optimistic.
Trust me on this.
We have to focus on what started this, the fraud in Minnesota.