Episode 5184: War Continues In Iran As Game Day Kicks Off For Texas Primaries
Episode 5184 dissects how Trump’s Iran strikes—backed by Saudi-Israel pressure and framed as "America First"—ignited a Gulf crisis: six U.S. deaths, Hormuz closure (threatening 30% of global oil), and $50B energy market spikes, all while Texas primaries proceed amid low turnout. Military leaks reveal dissent over the regime-change strategy (targeting IRGC, Khamenei) and depleted CENTCOM stockpiles, with Iran’s hardened strikes—like an eight-hour Tel Aviv barrage—exposing U.S. tactical gaps. Domestic fallout includes MAGA grassroots gains (e.g., Pennsylvania’s Sharia ban) clashing with establishment Republicans, while analysts warn of prolonged chaos, comparing it to 2003 Iraq, as Iran’s "steel claws" outmaneuver U.S. planning in a conflict risking NATO base attacks and midterm election overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
We don't know why Donald Trump just started this war in Iran.
The Washington Post reported this weekend and the New York Times reported today that Trump did it basically as a favor.
That there was no U.S. intelligence that Iran posed any imminent threat to us, but Saudi Arabia and Israel told Trump to do it, and so he did it.
Because, hey, you know, America first.
Strongman.
We're just going to put our military at the disposal of other countries because they can tell Trump what to do with it?
Quote, the attack came despite U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran's forces were unlikely to pose an immediate threat to the U.S. mainland within the next decade.
But he did it anyway.
Because Israel and Saudi Arabia told him to, and he apparently does what they say.
And now six American service members are known to have been killed and many more injured.
There's also new reporting tonight that the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia has been hit by two drones.
The Washington Post is now also reporting that two Defense Department employees, U.S. Defense Department employees, have been wounded in an Iranian drone attack on a hotel in Bahrain.
And I mean, in terms of what we are heading into and the kind of risk we're heading into, these are the sort of headlines that we're seeing tonight.
Quote, earthquake in the Gulf.
Iran war expands to a dozen countries in 72 hours.
Just 72 hours after the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran, the war has already consumed nearly the entire Middle East, reached the gates of Europe, and raised new fears of attacks on American soil.
This is the front page of the New York Times that we woke up to today.
U.S. troops killed as blasts jolt Mideast.
Fear of wider war after Iran's response.
Reuters, dueling headlines here.
Iran conflict widens to Lebanon.
Kuwait mistakenly downs U.S. jets.
That's there right next to Iran says Strait of Hormuz closed.
Warns it will attack ships trying to pass.
And indeed, just on the global energy front, we have seen natural gas prices spike by 50% in Europe.
One of the world's largest exporters of natural gas is Qatar.
Qatar now says they have stopped all production of natural gas.
And indeed, Iran says it has closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes 30% of the world's oil and 20% of the world's natural gas.
I'm trying to have a very serious conversation in front of the American people.
The men making these decisions have my utmost respect.
This is less about you and everybody making these decisions.
And this is about the American people understanding the investment that lies before them.
Do we understand the objectives?
We've seen the price in the past of having unclear objectives.
And maybe you do, and maybe the Secretary of War does, but I think the American people also need to understand.
And when you lay out the way that Iran has behaved towards the United States, it is a justification, but it's a justification for regime change.
And I just heard something different from the Secretary of State.
The reason I think this is a point of clarification that I need, and I think that a lot of the American people need, is because degrading their missile capability requires a different investment than regime change.
So, what I want to be clear about is what level of investment are we looking at here?
I mean, what we're trying to do is take down what sustains this regime and keeps it able to function.
That is their governance system with leadership, the IRGC, the Bazaar militia, and the police that are repressing the people, and strip away all of that capability.
And what I'm talking about is U.S. and Israeli objectives here, because this is a combined operation.
That is critical to success here.
And then it becomes: what are we doing about their capabilities to attack us?
And that has been pretty clear.
We're going to strip away all of that, Will.
We're going to take down the ballistic missile systems, the drones capability, and whatever they had.
They made the decision to recover their nuclear weapons, but they haven't done much about it.
And whatever that not done much about it is, we're going to take that down as well.
So we're going to have a regime that is very challenged to govern.
It stripped away its leadership capability to do it.
The infrastructure that supports and sustains that on the governance side as well as on the military and police side and people that are repression, repressing the people, and then take down all the weapons.
That is very clear.
And then, when you bring in the Israelis, they are attempting to set conditions to put this regime on a pathway for its collapse.
They're not saying they're going to force its collapse.
They're saying they're setting the conditions for its collapse.
I think those objectives are pretty clear in terms of what we're trying to do here.
Well, Michael, I think this is the second time this century that the United States has made a drastically bad mistake in terms of engaging in conflict in the Middle East.
The first one was in 2003 when we invaded Iraq, and that ushered in then years and years of chaos and violence and terrorism that gave birth to ISIS.
And we're just getting over 20 years of that confusion and chaos.
Voters have already arrived here to a polling side in Dallas as they are preparing to cast their votes in two increasingly competitive primaries in this race for U.S. Senate.
On the Republican side, you have Senator John Cornyn, who is fighting for political survival as he is facing a challenge from the state's conservative Attorney General Ken Paxton and Congressman Wesley Hunt.
Now, this has been one of the most closely watched races of this cycle so far, and it's already drawn in a lot of money.
The GOP and the Democratic primaries here in Texas amount to the most expensive Senate primaries in U.S. history.
Now, Cornyn has tried to argue that some of the political baggage surrounding Ken Paxton relating to his past legal and personal scandals, that that would be detrimental to Republicans here in Texas in November if he is nominated.
But Paxton so far has maintained a lot of support with a conservative base here in Texas.
Now, polling has shown this three-way contest incredibly tight, and if no Republican receives a 50% majority, this will head to a late May runoff.
We've been covering the varying explanations offered by Donald Trump and his cabinet for the war in Iran.
Well, hours after launching the war in Iran, Donald Trump took to social media and seemed to link the military strikes to conspiracy theories that Iran was somehow responsible for his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
Those claims could be dismissed as wackadoo or bogus, but our next guest warns that it is actually a sign of what Donald Trump will try to do in our upcoming elections.
Mark Elias writes in Democracy Docket This, quote, Donald Trump is planning to use his attack on Iran to justify a power grab over voting in the 2026 midterms.
He adds that Trump's posts about Iran in the immediate aftermath of the strikes are, quote, just the latest instance of Trump citing foreign interference as the motivation or justification for unilateral executive action.
Trump is setting the stage to claim extraordinary powers to take over the 2026 elections, from banning mail-in voting to imposing new obstacles to voting registration.
All of this will be justified on the grounds of national security, an area where presidents enjoy their broadest powers and typically receive the greatest deference from the courts.
What's clear to me is that Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long wanted to have this type of military operation against Iran, he was able to bring Trump along and got him to engage in something like this.
The rationale that Marco Rupio gave today?
Well, they were going to get hit, so we knew that they were going to lash back, and that's why we had to hit them.
We could have said to the Israelis, you do not go forward because we're not going to help you.
But going ahead, and with these types of strikes, when we were engaged in negotiations with Iran, this is for the second time in a year, and for the second time in a year, while negotiations are underway, they get hit.
So clearly, there's been deception to the Iranians.
And my view is that Donald Trump, irrespective of the intelligence, irrespective of the fact that the nuclear program has been damaged and hobbled significantly as a result of last year's attacks, they are making things up about what the Iranians are doing.
And when they say that the regime is tottering, it's not.
Yes, there are a lot of Iranian people who despise the regime and hated Khamenei and are glad that he's dead.
But also, the regime and the theocracy have a lot of people who supported them.
It's a country of over 92 million people.
And so they have their equivalent in the rural areas, conservative areas, and so the MAGA equivalent in Iran that really has seen what the United States is doing now as just one more example of the United States carrying out violent attacks inside of the Middle East and directed against Iran.
All very serious stuff because he's going to package all of this up for two audiences.
The first is his aggrievement audience, the people who want a permission structure to deny the outcome of elections that they lost.
And then the second is, as I point out in the piece, the courts, because the courts are most deferential, like to presidents, when it comes to foreign policy and national security.
Like that's a real thing.
And we have seen a lot of damage be done.
Look at the migrants who are shipped to the Gulag in El Salvador.
Until that unraveled, there was a lot of damage done to those people.
So I don't think this is going to be a smooth process.
I'm optimistic that in the end we will fight this back and we will win in court as we did in the aftermath of 2020.
But everybody needs to keep in mind that there were moments of touch and go in 2020 and there were moments of touch and go in the post-election of 2020.
And ultimately when Donald Trump didn't prevail in court, he incited a violent mob to storm the Capitol to try to overturn a free and fair election.
So I'm optimistic, but I'm also realistic and we need Nicole.
We need to make sure that all of their institutions and all of our leaders have their finds steeled.
Like they are not driven to pessimism.
They're not driven to hopelessness, but they're also not blinded to what is in front of them and the challenges we're going to face.
It's Tuesday, the 3rd of March, Year of a Lore, 2026.
It's game day in Texas, this all-important Texas primary, and we're going to have a lot of coverage throughout the day on Real America's Voices and special coverage tonight.
Grant Stingfield and I will be co-hosting the Texas coverage, Grant, from his Dallas, from the Dallas studio, and I will be north of Dallas.
So a lot going on as people go to the polls.
They remember those early voting numbers, they don't look great, but a big part of the war imposse, a big part of the MAGA base just refuses.
They do not do early voting here.
They don't trust it.
So we'll be monitoring the turnout throughout the day.
Also, the war in Iran expands not just to the Gulf, to capital markets and to Asia.
We're going to have reports on Japan and Korea, all of it, and how this war is expanding, particularly the logistics chain.
Capital markets, which was very calm, I thought relatively calm yesterday because of the Revolutionary Guard saying they closed the straits of Hormuz and Qatar announcing I think they can't ship, they're not going to be able to ship at least gas for a while.
Equity markets throughout the world hit.
Gold, people are rushing to the dollar.
The dollar is getting stronger as they're looking at that as a safe haven also.
So there's a lot going on today.
We're going to break it all down to you and give you a range of perspectives because, you know, the war imposse wants to weigh and measure this itself as it should.
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Talk to Philip Patrick and the team, particularly today when the geopolitical risks, can we put the Financial Times headline up, front page of the Financial Times?
Did you ever think you'd see the day where, because it has taken people back that spent a lot of time there, that you actually saw the Sunnis and the Shiites?
I mean, they went at it in the Iraq-Iran war, but I would argue that wasn't about religion.
That was about hardcore geopolitics and just two nations living next to each other for thousands of years that hated each other.
And of course, what, a third of Iraq, the Vatican of Shiite, I think is in Najaf, right?
Which is, you know, in Iraq.
But this is different.
I mean, did you ever think you'd see the day where the Persians are unloading on the Saudis and the Saudis reportedly are asking the United States for permission to actually go, you know, go it alone and start doing their own sorties, sir?
Well, I think, Steve, all of us that have worked in the area always hoped we would not see that day, right?
You've taken the lid off of 1,500 years of animosity.
So there is a lot of potential here for this to add fuel to the fire.
I understand that in Bahrain, which is run by a Sunni monarchy, but is roughly 75, 80% Shia, the Saudis have now sent troops into Bahrain to help them quell the unrest in the Shia population there.
There's one bridge into Bahrain, which is an island nation, and it is from Saudi Arabia.
And the primary reason it exists is so the Saudis can do this when they need to.
They did it about, what, a little over a decade ago.
So they've already sent forces in to back up the Bahrainis.
I don't know that they're directly engaged yet, but that's kind of the loud signal when they thump the table and say, okay, enough of this nonsense.
I know he's an analyst, but he did that merger when he ran CIA, merging the analysts with the guys like you, the operatives, the House of Lords and the House of Commons together.
And I guess the House of Commons end up, he wanted the House of Commons to run things, not the operators.
They're, I don't want to say fanning the flames, but they look like they're all down for an expanded war.
So President Trump is obviously controlling this right now.
But these are the type of things in the law of unintended consequences, which is what war is all about.
This could metastasize.
And one of the reasons is that you've got guys now for these Gulf Emirates in these states.
And of course, MBZ is a guy that likes to get it on too.
But this could really start to, particularly as people are pushed and they're pushed by Western advisors that have worked for them or been consultants of them for years and not even associated currently with the Trump administration or the U.S. government, sir.
Yeah, well, Steve, look, I think it's crystal clear.
There are a bunch of people here.
I mean, a bunch of people outside of Iran who want us to lose, however you define that.
They want this thing to get ugly and bad and for us to take losses.
And they are cheering for the enemy.
I mean, note that the People's Forum, which is the so-called revolutionary incubator in the heart of Manhattan, and it's all funded by this guy, Neville Roy Singham, who's a CCP asset and operates out of Shanghai.
I mean, from moment one, these guys and Code Pink and all of these folks have been out in the streets in fully funded foreign-connected efforts to undermine our war effort.
They are 100% on the other side.
There are major players here that want us to lose.
You've had your hand on the pulse here, particularly the logistics chain and weapon systems and actual what you have to deliver, because they are going through the military under Kane and President Trump is going through a pretty methodical takedown of degradation first and leading to destruction.
But some of our best allies, like the Koreans and the Japanese, are noticing, hey, you're putting a call on folks to ship FADS, Patriots, et cetera, into the region.
And they're sitting there going, well, hang on for a second.
The main thing is Captain Finnell says the Chinese Communist Party is right here.
Maybe we shouldn't do that.
Your thoughts on all of first of all, what's happening in region, and then let's expand it out.
Well, in region, as you point out, the U.S. military has with the Israelis, well, primarily the Israelis, as we're finding out, with U.S. support, we have degraded a lot of capabilities.
Obviously, we assassinated many of their leaders.
We got the Ayatollah.
To me, that's mission accomplished.
We can come home, but this thing's continuing.
That gets us into the bad.
The bad is clearly we are depleting our stockpiles in the CENTCOM AOR a lot faster than even what was originally warned by General Kane last week.
But if you go back and look at Jack, and he knows the president very well.
I mean, quite frankly, he was a guy we offered A very senior job to he really wanted him more than Mattis to be secretary of defense or national security advisor.
But for, I think, his wife's illness, he couldn't do it in the first term.
He's a guy the president really thinks the world of, and he's obviously got a real neocon and been in the region forever.
But when he talks, you talk about degradation.
What Finnell and Kane are talking about is a systematic stripping that he says they can never come back from this, that they'll be essentially militarily fairly sophisticated, but in the stone age when you finish with them.
And that President Trump seems like with Raising Kane, they're going up the escalatory ladder to field strip this so they can never rebuild it.
But just to be clear, the objective was regime change.
The regime is holding on.
And we're finding out now with these missile strikes, they've been able to expand and do even more complex strikes on targets, not just in Israel or against the U.S. in the region, but they're expanding it now to an entirely regional war that's now even roping in the French and the British, as we're finding out.
So this really could be a world, you know, quote-unquote, world war because of all the powers involved.
So to me, we have degraded the regime.
Absolutely.
We've scored some key victories, like I said, with killing the Ayatollah.
But the command and control structure, while it may be degraded, is decentralized and hardened enough where they are still able to not only continue fighting, but we are seeing them expand.
Tel Aviv, my understanding is was pounded for eight hours last night.
Eight hours they were pounded by increasingly sophisticated and lethal missiles fired by these Iranian units.
So to me, we haven't gotten the kill shot in.
The Iranians are still fighting and they're upping the ante every single day.
So this is why we are having to pull on those stockpiles now.
We're draining CENTCOM's stockpiles, I think, faster than even was anticipated.
And now we're pivoting and going to the Asians and saying, we need our stuff back.
And as I noted to you before we started, the South Korean press is running this quote from a South Korean political leader saying that we feel betrayed by the Americans.
And now the Japanese are getting skittish because they're worried after South Korea gives over those systems, it's not going to be enough.
And the Americans are going to come knocking at Japan next saying, hey, give us your stuff.
So clearly the plan is to drain the CENTCOM AOR and then pivot and pull whatever we can from Indo-Paycom, which, as you know, then leaves a gigantic gaping hole for the Chinese in Taiwan or the South China Sea or the East China Sea to really have some real victories over us because we don't have the stuff anymore to shoot.
Then What I think happened was just like the 12-day war, only it happened in a shorter timeframe.
So, what happened was I think we did a lot of EM interference, and I think we did a lot of suppression of enemy air defenses, and we were in their sort of electromagnetic, you know, OODA loop there.
And we really stymied the Iranians again, but they adapted.
And this is the whole thing with the Iranians, and you have to give them credit, is they have been preparing for basically 47 years for something like this.
So, they have had the time to harden and to disaggregate their capabilities enough so they are survivable for round two, three, four, and five.
And you're seeing that now.
And they've now, I think, adapted to the environment and they are now getting more operationally complex.
And these guys have thousands and thousands of sophisticated long-range missiles buried deep inside missile cities.
Because I've talked to people too who said they are getting pounded, but I just want to make sure that we're talking to some of the same people in some cases too.
But I'm not even talking about the videos that I'm seeing on Twitter.
I'm talking about people that I know in the region or who are part of the year in the region and have a lot of ties that is not being reported officially, obviously, because the Israelis won't let that out.
But there are people who are living in Tel Aviv, who are who are sharing things that they probably shouldn't be about what's going on in the streets and whatnot.
And it is very brutal.
And I don't think Netanyahu even believed it would be this bad, but here we are.
I mean, President Trump, this was one of the reasons for the big move beforehand was that Tel Aviv was Tel Aviv was hit and hit very hard in those last couple of days before they brought the 12-day war to an end.
Also, explain to people the OODA loop.
What is the OODA loop?
Why is it so important militarily to get inside that, sir?
So, what we found in modern warfare, this was a theory created.
It's an acronym created by John Boyd, who was an Air Force general, real visionary.
Then he went on and had a long career in business.
And he came up with this theory called the OODA loop, observe, orient, decide act.
And for him, it started, he started observing this phenomenon when he was in combat flying jet planes.
And I don't remember which war he was in, but he was flying jet planes and he realized warfare happens very quickly today.
And you have to be able to observe quickly, orient your plane, decide to attack, and then attack without any hesitation.
And you've got to do it faster than the other guy.
And so he took that idea and he applied it to thinking and to thinking about leadership and things like that and systems management and things like that.
And he applied it for the military.
Then he applied it in the private sector.
But in today's world, speed kills.
And you've got to not only be fast with the OODA loop, your own OODA loop, you have to be able to be so fast that you can disrupt the OODA loop of the other guy.
And that's what you're seeing in modern warfare today.
You're seeing us, you know, we got the Iranians in the first day.
We got them very stymied.
But the longer the war has gone on, as I warned you on day one, the Iranians are adaptive and they are starting to adapt.
Now, ultimately, my hope is that we can break them in the long run.
But right now, they're not broken.
They're damaged, but they are not broken and they are starting to adapt and hit back hard.
By the way, to show that the Graybeards in our group, the Sam Fattises and the Captain Finels, that I'm actually older.
I remember getting the John Boyd briefing in the Pentagon, I think in 1981, 82, where he had that.
I don't know, Sam, you've seen it.
The briefing was like this thick because he was kind of a madman, but he was absolutely brilliant.
It was really maneuver warfare, the OODA loop.
I mean, he changed so much thinking in the Pentagon and the way we fight.
Sam, the intelligence here is all important, right?
Your assessment of how do you think, and I realize you have limited access to data, the classified, et cetera, with keeping this non-classified.
Your assessment of how we're doing both on strategic intelligence, operational intelligence, how do you think we're doing?
Because I believe some of the responses have caught people by surprise, particularly the way the Persians went after the Gulf states during Ramadan and how the Gulf states aren't shy about hitting back and hitting back quickly and asking the United States, hey, we need to come off the chain here because we may do something on our own.
Well, Steve, I think, you know, intelligence is only as good as, I mean, you got to have good intelligence, but you also have to have people that are willing to listen to the intelligence.
I think the reality is that we are way too dependent upon intelligence that's been provided to us from the Israelis.
And look, I don't fault the Israelis for pursuing their own national interests because that's what every country is supposed to do.
But I think they, my personal opinion is they've put a spin on this that we were going to swack these guys, hit them real hard, bomb them for a while, and then somehow magically the regime would topple and everything would be great.
And as you know, I'm very skeptical of that from the outset, skeptical of it.
And so now we're into the realm of the Iranians decided to think for themselves.
The enemy gets a vote and they have improvised and adapted.
So as Brandon was saying, you know, we've only got X number of interceptors.
So you fire the ones that are your missiles that are most easily intercepted first and burn up our defensive capability.
And then you actually shift into shots.
Also, they are the kill shots.
And they are also now expanding the war.
They have had the audacity to decide that they get to choose where this is fought and how it's fought.
So increasingly, they're hitting energy facilities all throughout the region, obviously with the intent of taking oil and natural gas from the region completely off the market, which at least temporarily they seem to have succeeded in doing, just because people are cautious.
They'll continue to do that.
The Greeks just arrested a guy in Athens airport.
He had been down in Crete surveilling Suda Bay, the NATO base there.
And then he was back in Athens, and I think they were afraid he was going to skip town.
And they grabbed him.
In retrospect, it appears he was getting ready to meet additional assets coming in.
All of these guys are working for the Iranians, surveilling our base in Crete, obviously preparatory to attacks.
And in fact, we've caught the Iranians doing that times in the past.
No, I think this is one of the worst planned operations I've seen now.
I think the president, they may have been telling him, yes, we're planning for a contingency for five weeks.
But remember, there was a lot of off-ramps built into that five-week plan.
Jack Posobiec was on the first day this war started talking about they had these planned pauses.
We haven't had any pause yet.
You know, we are very much in a very high-tempo conflict.
And I think that the president and Netanyahu really believed, and I think the president was following Netanyahu's lead on this, that, hey, if you kill, if you whack Khomeini, the whole regime will fall like a house of cards, because that's what the Israelis think.
The Israelis have this assassination mindset.
They're crazy about assassinations.
And when it works, it works.
But when it doesn't, you now have a situation where you've kicked over the hornet's nest and all the hornets are coming after you and your friends.
And it turns out you don't have enough stuff to whack them down.
And so I think that, you know, I'm hopeful the Americans will adapt like the Iranians have done in the next iteration.
But right now, I think this is a very badly planned operation.
And I think that the president should declare victory now and come home and say, hey, I took care of the problem.
It's over.
Because if this goes on longer, the Iranians have an asymmetrical power.
They have unconventional capabilities that are global.
A Saudi official told me in 2018 that Iran was a paper tiger with steel claws.
Those steel claws today, Steve, are extended and they're slashing hard at our people and our friends in the region.
And our friends are getting angry at us because they think we started this thing.
It was put down immediately, but that even General Rayson Kane was saying, hey, Steve, they had to fire Fred Kocher because he had the balls to go out and say, hey, my boss is warning the president and the president's not listening.
So Kocher got hosed.
And I'm talking to people at the Pentagon saying that was not Kocher acting alone, that Dan Kane asked him to do that for him.
So there's a lot of problems from the uniform military side, and they're afraid to say it publicly or to the president.
So they're doing this leak thing that Colin Powell used to do during the Iraq war.
And, you know, this is where we are right now.
The uniform military leadership is not on board with this.
Not as it's going on, not as it's executed, I should say.
If you still have the big wave to come, because we've been, you know, Rubio said this.
I think Pete Hegseth has said it.
The president has definitely said it.
A big wave.
If you do have this big wave that comes in the next 24 or 48 hours and you begin to see the uprising of the Persian people, because one thing we haven't seen is a mass uprising against the regime in the streets.
Now, part of that is 30,000 of them or 20,000 of them were killed four weeks ago.
I'm sure a lot of their leaders are that, but also people took that as an example that, hey, these guys are going to play hardball.
Now they're backs to the wall.
Because I think the regime and regime elements understand that the forces are raided against them.
The Americans, the Israelis, now Saudi Arabia, UAE, they want them graveyard dead.
So they're kind of backed into a corner.
But do you think that part of it is to come in with this massive wave and see if you get the uprising that President Trump has warned over and over again?
Hey, guys, it's your mission to overthrow these guys at the end.
Because President Trump, from the very first time he said it, now comes your hour of liberation, right?
I do believe people thought that the Khomeini taking out the Ayatollah might have had a bigger impact.
But do you see anything in the streets, given the fact that you used to live there?
Do you see anything in the streets of Tehran that would lead you to believe there's going to be a popular uprising right now, that the Persian people are going to take this in their hands and overthrow this Islamic Republic overlords?
Dave, I'm going to echo Brandon's sentiment and say up front, I hope I am wrong.
But no, I don't see any indication that is happening.
And I have never thought that that was a realistic prospect.
As I said to you the other day, if there is any prospect for regime change, it'll come from some guys at senior levels effectively staging a coup and saying we're not riding this thing to the ground.
But there's no guarantee at all that that's going to happen either.
I think a number of guests have said over the last few days, we ought to stop talking about regime change, make this about degrading capabilities and taking things off the table and be prepared to at some point effectively declare victory and go home.
If we're going to ride this idea of regime change, I think it's going to get even uglier.
I went down to talk to Wright for Bucks right outside of Philadelphia.
These guys are like the commandos of the MAGA movement in Pennsylvania.
They are the frontline troops, the really hardcore folks.
From the second I walked in, you know, God's honest truth.
Everybody had been watching your show.
Everybody heard you give them a shout out and they were all over me about how fantastic that was.
It was a shot in the arm.
They asked me to say thank you to you.
They were really receptive.
Look, I spoke, and then to show you how motivated these people are, I then spent another three hours after I spoke standing there talking to people individually outside of the ballroom as they came up one after another, just hungry for information.
You'll talk to someone with the East Texas accent about all the company has to offer, the best mobile company out there.
Sam Fettis, I just want to say, if you give us a minute on your expertise here, because when you come on, particularly something like this morning, people I know from the region and people that is a huge expatriate, expat community of Persians, particularly in Los Angeles.
I knew a lot of these folks when I lived there, New York City, all throughout the country.
You know, they always say Sam Fattis is 100%, 1,000% correct.
What's your background?
You know this region.
This is not something you just read in a couple of books and you've never been a pundit.
And obviously those operation, in other words, human source operations and covert action.
And in addition to a variety of other targets, a huge percentage of that was against the Iranians.
So I ran from a variety of countries and in a variety of countries, operated against the Iranians, the IRGC, MOIS, their Intel Service, et cetera, for many years and worked with a lot of really great, very brave Iranian patriots.
I mean, guys who were out of the country, who would go back inside Tehran into the heart of the beast on our behalf to get us intelligence and do the things we needed done.
And I'm, you know, thank God never lost a source to the Iranians, brought them all home safe, but a lot of other guys lost many.
A lot of people paid very heavily to get us what we needed.
And so you understand and you have, you know, how hard the Revolutionary Guard is, the Mulas, this whole aspect, this whole apparatus.
They're not Johnny Kumalega.
It's an ancient civilization.
And quite frankly, the bureaucratic nature of the administration of the civilization has been passed down in an unbroken chain generation after generation.
It's one of the reasons they're so hard to negotiate with, right?
As President Trump found out.
But you understand they're not just bad, the folks that run the Islamic Republic are not just bad ombres.
Well, look, Wright for Bucks has been literally on the forefront of the fight, the MAGA fight in Pennsylvania now for years.
And these guys are relentless.
There are a whole bunch of groups like that in Pennsylvania.
I mean, you know, people up in Erie come to mind who went into a blue, you know, dark blue city that had been Democratic forever and, you know, who are out there.
And they're not just, you know, this is not just a white rural Pennsylvania phenomenon.
I mean, you're talking about blacks, Hispanics.
I mean, good Lord, Hazleton, which is three quarters Dominican right now.
Precincts up there went 75% for Trump in the last election.
And the MAGA movement, I was down there every other day in the run-up to the election.
So you have incredible energy in this movement.
Now, if If the GOP understood that and accepted that and rode that and really fielded MAGA candidates, I think we would sweep the field.
If there's a disconnect, you get down to that level in Pennsylvania.
You still got way too many establishment rhino types being fielded.
And then folks wondering, well, why aren't the MAGA voters showing up for them?
Well, because you're dismissing them, or you expect them to show up, but you don't actually listen to them.