Episode 5211: Two Terror Attacks Unfold Domestically As War Continues Across The Middle East
Stephen K. Bannon and Natalie G. Winters dissect domestic terror attacks, including a Detroit synagogue ramming by an armed suspect and a Virginia shooting by former Army National Guard member Mohamed Baylor Jello, who pled guilty to ISIS support in 2016. They analyze an Iranian cyberattack on Striker disrupting Maryland hospitals and debate Khamenei's vow to close the Strait of Hormuz amidst Chinese oil transits. The discussion links these crises to potential Thucydides traps with China and refugee waves, while addressing Senator John Cornyn's pressure regarding the Save America Act's voter ID measures. Ultimately, the episode highlights a convergence of internal instability and escalating geopolitical tensions. [Automatically generated summary]
That we hadn't had a really big cyber attack from Iran yet, despite U.S. officials warning about that.
Now, that's changed pretty dramatically in the last day.
This medical device company, Striker, makes all kinds of hospital equipment used across the United States, from oxygen masks to cots that ambulances use to wheel patients on to IV machines.
And an Iranian pro-Iran group that we believe, according to my sources, is strongly linked to the Iranian government, has conducted a cyber attack that has disrupted almost all of their computer systems at this company.
So we have the FBI and other federal agencies scrambling to determine the impact of this, but also hospitals across the country asking the company, should we unplug your equipment?
Is it safe?
And right now, they are assuring people that yes, it is safe, it is okay, and they're trying to mitigate the damage, but we still don't really know the broader fallout wolf.
I obtained a message that the Maryland Emergency Medical Services Agency sent to hospitals in Maryland yesterday saying we think that the machine that is used to transmit data from ambulances to hospitals is down, so we need to do that manually.
If you're an ambulance provider, you need to get on the radio and say, this is what's happening.
So this is a real world impact that U.S. officials had warned about, and we're still getting a real understanding of the broader fallout wolf.
Police say a suspect is dead after ramming a car into a synagogue that also has a school.
The county sheriff says the suspect was armed with a rifle, explosives in the vehicle as well, according to emergency responders who searched the back of the car.
And before we begin, I want to send our love to the Michigan Jewish community and all of the people in Detroit, Detroit area following the attack, on the Jewish synagogue early today, and I've been briefed, fully briefed.
And it's a terrible thing, but it goes on.
We're going to be right down to the bottom of it.
It's absolutely incredible that things like this happen.
The latest retaliation from Iran, you know, it's been this wave of attacks on tankers and energy supplies to the region.
All these images of tankers on fire, stunning as they are, we continue to see that.
And the new Supreme Leader in that message that you said, which I'm holding here, it's quite extensive, purportedly from him, vowing to keep the Strait of Hormuz, that vital shipping lane, closed.
There are major questions today after the new Supreme Leader released this statement that is purportedly from him because obviously we haven't seen him, as you said, Boris.
Iranian state media actually read Muqtabah Khamenei's alleged words aloud.
So they read the entire statement here.
I'm just going through, I guess it depends on what font size you have, but one, two, three, four, five and a half pages.
He calls, talks about the blood of martyrs.
He talks about keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed and also, interestingly, thanks the fighters of the resistance front in other countries.
A very clear reference to other militias that have now begun fighting on Iran's behalf.
Now, Khamenei himself was reportedly injured in the strike that killed his father and other family members, and he details in here which family members he says died.
But he also mentions in here that according to this, purportedly from him, I had the honor of visiting his body after his martyrdom, referring to his father.
But then it oddly says, I heard that his uninjured hand was clenched in a fist.
Just sort of an odd thing, whether that's a translation or whether he didn't see it himself.
Two of the victims were members of the university's ROTC program.
The shooter is also deceased.
Our colleague Kendallanian is reporting that the suspect is a U.S. citizen and a forming Army service member who pled guilty in October of 2016 to attempting to provide material support to ISIS.
He served 10 years in prison.
My colleague Kendallanian is joining us now to tell us what he has learned about this.
Nicole, we're just learning these details, but a federal official familiar with the matter has identified Mohamed Baylor Jello as the shooter in this Old Dominion incident, which killed one and injured two others, and the gunman himself also killed in this incident.
And as you said, he pled guilty in 2016 to essentially engaging in an ISIS-sponsored terrorism plot.
He engaged with undercover FBI agents and confidential human sources after becoming radicalized.
He was born in Sierra Leone.
He served in the U.S. Army National Guard.
So he lived in the United States for a long time.
But then he said he became radicalized through online propaganda, got entangled with ISIS folks, and then got caught up in this FBI sting.
And he was sentenced, Nicole, to 11 years in prison in 2017.
There's no parole in the federal system, but it looks like he served most of that sentence.
You get a discount for good behavior.
But he was released, according to federal prison records, in December 2024.
After that, we don't know what happened to him, and we don't know to what extent the FBI was keeping tabs on him, but they clearly were not today, because today they're now saying he carried out this horrific attack at Old Dominion University on a day of violence in the United States.
And it really does underscore the threat picture right now in the United States amid an uptick in ISIS activity, clearly, and the response to people by people sympathetic to Iran as the United States goes to war with Iran.
And it also underscores the difficult posture that the FBI finds itself in with hundreds of experienced counterterrorism agents having left in the last year and not been replaced.
And all of us who follow the FBI have been wondering whether there would be an impact to that.
And now we're seeing what looks clearly like a gap, something that should have been caught that was not.
I'm sure there's a lot more than online people radicalizing him.
Also, the situation, there's going to be a press conference at six.
We will cover it in the second part of our show.
But when you're now, what, four hours into this and we haven't released the name of the individual, if it was a Trump supporter and they were wearing a MA ball cap, you would have had it up in 10 minutes, the name up in 10 minutes, and an entire social media.
Once again, FBI, et cetera, always treats people like idiots, always suppressing this information.
And the one in Detroit, obviously driving a truckload of explosives, looked like they're trying to do much, much more damage.
But we got to get to the bottom of this is certainly this conflict is expanding.
We had a lot to cover there.
Scott Besson, just with the Wall Street Journal, gave an interview.
He said the straits are open or not, at least not mined.
I shouldn't say they're open because Chinese flagged vessels are getting out.
Okay, note to CENTCOM and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Pete Overt, Department of War.
Why are we allowing Chinese-flagged vessels to transit through the Straits of Hormuz?
If American and others related to our side of the football can't, why are we allowing them to take oil out to the Chinese Communist Party?
We should cut the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese Communist Party is not our friend.
They're an existential threat.
There are a lot of people making the thing, well, this is so amazing because this is strategically going after the Chinese Communist Party.
No, that was not what this was about.
And don't fool yourself.
However, it has major benefits to those of us that want to keep the main thing, the main thing, as Captain James Finnell tells us, that both Venezuela and the Mulas and the Ayatollah have always been close to the Chinese Communist Party.
They kind of have the same outlook on humanity.
Let's say that.
Plus the deal they had, they took it in Chinese currency.
So it was a way, this was the central lead off to breaking the dollar as the prime reserve currency.
It was their starter.
They're going to do a 40-year deal or 20-year deal, an output deal that's going to be taken in the Chinese currency, and they would take the currency risk to hedge that out.
Why are we allowing, I understand 11 million barrels, I think has been reported, 11 million barrels of oil under Chinese flagships or these gray ships heading to China has exited.
If the Ayatollah is saying not a drop of oil, if the new Ayatollah is threatening us, putting drones out there, sinking other ships, making it so the United States Navy is saying, hey, they can't even begin to escort until the end of March.
So, obviously, there's a problem, and our quote-unquote allies in UAE and Qatar and Saudi Arabia are saying, Hey, we need your help here.
And the Ayatollah says over and over again, not one drop of oil is going to leave the Straits of Hermuz.
Okay, I got it, but then why are we allowing Chinese oil designated to our greatest enemy to exit?
Just quarantine it, block it, turn it around, say, Hey, head back, or seize it and take it.
They're an ally of the Moolah's.
If we're in a war, if we're shooting, if we have young men and women in harm's way, then you got to start.
And if Russia is providing them targeting information, which I understand they are, although Putin is telling Steve Witkoff and others, we're not doing it.
Well, the intelligence service ought to get to the bottom of it.
And if Russia's doing it, then there ought to be, we ought to have issues with Russia.
If the Chinese, we know the Chinese are allies of the Mulas in the Ayatollah, hence they're sending out oil with Chinese flagships.
Not one should go.
I'm glad Scott's mentioning that.
Hey, it doesn't look like it's mine because they're letting out their ally ships.
They're just not letting out our ships.
If it gets to be, why don't we turn a five-inch 54 or hit them with a surface-to-surface missile or get one of those fast-attack submarines?
And let's put a couple of shots in their hull and let's sink that outside the Straits of Hermuz.
You're either at war or you're not at war.
And I think it's quite confusing why we're allowing the Chinese Communist Party, the biggest sponsor, and basically the entity that still funds the cash.
Two things we ought to do this afternoon.
If we're going to be at war, let's seize all the financial assets in the pirate cove of Dubai, influencer capital, former influencer capital of the known world.
Let's seize their assets.
Hell you did it to Russia.
Let's seize their assets here.
Freeze them.
At least freeze them so they can't get access to them.
So they can't get around the sanctions by going to the pirate cove of the UAE.
Oh, that's right.
Another ally.
Lindsay, after five bourbon in branches is saying, hey, we'll give you a defense contract in perpetuity, but you got to stop double-dealing this.
That's him saying it.
Not the war room.
You got to stop double dealing this.
You got to stand up.
Let's just find out who's on our side of the football and who's not.
Since it looks like we might be there for a couple more days, all Chinese oil should be stopped, seized, or sent to the bottom of the Gulf of Oman.
How about that?
And seize their assets.
Let's see how tough they are if they ain't got the money to continue this.
Okay, we're going to have Philip Patrick is going to join us later.
The Tina Peters team is going to join us later.
Breaking news on Tina Peters.
They're going to join us later.
There is supposed to be a press conference on this, at least the attack in Detroit.
Maybe it's going to be both that's scheduled for 6 p.m. Eastern daylight time.
We're going to cover that.
Of course, we're hearing now may be delayed.
Benny Ray Harmony was in the East Wing for this event about women's history.
We're going to go to her momentarily, but I've got Ryan Matthew Niehaus with us right now.
First off, sir, you're a political strategist.
Your thoughts so far of our war in Iran and where do we stand?
And what do you think?
Where do you think the political temperature is?
Because I keep seeing influencers paid by a certain government that continue to send out tweets saying 99.99% of the American people support these strikes.
Yeah, I can tell you, as someone who lives in a little town far outside of D.C., I commute a ways to get in when I come into town.
There's a lot of people who don't understand what we're doing right now.
I think, you know, your comments earlier before we joined the segment of we got to decide if we're in the war or we're not, right?
What are we going to do?
Are we going to start sinking Chinese oil tankers down to the bottom of the ocean or not?
Are we going to allow the straits to be mined or not?
I think we need to decide if we're actually in this or not, because it's causing, one, a lot of confusion for the average American who doesn't truly understand what our objectives are.
I think the administration can really improve in that respect.
And then, two, you know, if American lives are going to be put on the line, you know, there's moms and dads who are going to lose sons and daughters, and they got to understand what it's for and why it's worthwhile.
And our soldiers who have signed up for this conflict, you want them to be motivated and believe in what they're sacrificing their lives for.
And without a true articulation of what that good is and what its objective is and why it's in the interest of the average American, I don't think this is going to bode well for the Republican Party if it continues for much longer.
We know today that there was a terrorist, an ISIS, so he's not, don't believe he's Shiite, but he's he got 11 years in prison for other nefarious activities, other crimes before he got out in three.
We still don't understand that.
So we know it's spreading.
That just wasn't a random event.
I'm sure we haven't heard the details about this until this press conference because I'm sure this is somehow tied to at least, I don't know, sleep ourselves are just people, they're people running right into the sound of the guns.
Caroline Levitt was very adamant today.
She came out and said that ABC has got to retract the story about California about maybe there's been enough terrorists go through the cartels and maybe they're working together and they may be targeting California.
She said that's not right lie.
It's got to be retracted.
We now know also item, Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
Looks like some guys walked off out of Fort Campbell, the home of the 101st airborne that they walked out with a couple of drones.
My whole point is that this gets more complicated every day, not less complicated.
And now we're in it.
And I think everybody was bitching and moaning about how you got in.
Boom, boom.
I got that.
And there's so many questions about that and a time and place for that debate.
But we're in it now.
And we have young men and women in harm's way.
We've got to figure out how we're going to win this thing.
We can't take a Korea or Vietnam or a global war on terror.
We can't let the valor of our arms and the heroism of our troops and the magnificence of our military be squandered.
And so that's why when I hear Scott Besson, I heard the other day 11 million barrels had gone through the Straits of Hormuz on Chinese flagships because they're letting them through.
And then, you know, today, Scott confirms it that he was making the case, hey, the thing's not mine because the Chinese flags are getting through.
So the opposition here is targeting people on our side of the football.
Well, look, they get cash to do this from two sources.
They get cash from getting around the sanctions, which are pretty stiff.
They get around the sanctions because they have the ability to get cash in and out of Dubai, which, as I told you the other day, is like Tortuga for Captain Morgan and the pirates down in the Caribbean that gave the middle finger to the Royal Navy.
Well, that's what the banks in Dubai are.
Your great ally there in UAE.
And hey, MBZ is as good as you got.
He's the best there and punches way above his weight.
But look.
You still got the assets flowing in there and you're getting the cash from the Chinese Communist Party because they're paying for the oil.
So, hey, if we're putting pilots in jeopardy flying over targets, if we've got sailors out there and they're worried about these missiles coming out, you have it now the Navy can't give a cheery eye eye to the commander-in-chief, say, yes, I'll get some combatants on these tankers like tonight to transit into the Straits of Hormuz.
That's got to take place at the end of March because the Navy needs some time to get ready for it.
I tell people, it ain't the tanker wars of the 80s.
It's much more complicated today.
If we're putting young men and women, which are really the treasure of our country, in harm's way in this thing, then you got to pull out all stops, cut their cash off.
And if it upsets the Chinese Communist Party, tell them to go screw themselves.
You know, maybe we'll figured out how you buy it from Texas.
Anyway, Ryan, as we're fighting this, we're fighting on another political front, and that's the Save America Act.
Tell me about your, because now Cornyn, Thun, ever since Matt Bull and Caroline Wren and the Paxson campaign and Paxson doing a sacrificial, hey, I'll drop out if Cornyn does this and you pass it.
Now they're all running around.
They're all, you know, Cornyn is like having Karl Rove write op-eds for him.
He's all for this, the filibuster, get rid of it, and standing filibuster.
You're getting so much smoke in the fog of political war here.
Walk me through the Save America Act.
One, how important is it?
And how are we going to really force these deadbeats?
And the sense, let's face it, they're just a group of most of them.
You got a handful of good ones.
You got Schmidt and Hawley and a couple, Mike Lee, you got a couple of good ones, but most of them like Cornyn are just going to double deal you all the time.
I mean, first off, Steve, what a brilliant move by Paxton, putting Cornyn in a pretzel like that.
I've loved seeing one of the biggest rhinos in the United States Senate squirm for the last couple of days trying to get the endorsement of President Trump, who he's, you know, for years now worked against with gun control bills and other immigration type deals that are just antithetical to the MAGA voting base what we want.
But the Save Act is one of the most important bills in the United States Congress right now.
I worked for Senator Mike Lee at the time of his introduction.
I was his legislative director.
The Save America Act has taken some evolution since, but to explain it plainly, it creates voter and election security at a time when in 2020, the nation was wondering and questioning how secure actually is this presidential election?
It would require citizenship verification.
It would require voter ID verification, which is just a very common sense policy proposal.
In fact, I believe some of the most recent polls say that nearly nine in 10 Americans think that there should be common sense voter verification in elections.
So I think it's of the utmost importance as we head into our midterms that the country know that their elections are secure and that only Americans are determining the outcome of American elections.
They're using the excuse that it's too complicated, that Mike Lee hasn't done a good enough job of focus on this, that they don't really have an idea of how they're going to add amendments.
It's going to be complicated.
Everybody's got to be there.
Everybody's got to be there to do their job.
What about these structural issues that they say is just too complicated?
My point is, and Thun keeps saying, I don't have the votes, I don't have the votes.
Hey, dude, you're the leader.
Go find the votes.
The reason you're the leader is supposed to be able to find votes.
Go find the votes.
Go force people to vote for this.
And then you figure out how it's going to be done.
Because there couldn't be anything better for us in a tough climate, and it's quite tough to force the Democrats, like Trump did at the State of the Union, force the Democrats to stand up and, for two or three weeks around the clock, have to defend why they're comfortable with illegal alien invaders voting in our elections, sir.
Look, I have no apologies for any complications that the Senate might face.
They signed up for one of the hardest jobs in the world to be a United States Senator.
So when somebody complains about the complications of process or procedure or the navigating the debate and trying to find the votes, like grow up.
That's what you signed up for as a United States Senator.
You signed up to navigate complex issues and find complex solutions.
The problem with this, and I laid it out in a tweet last night that I think garnered a little bit of attention, is that the process that Senator Lee and other great individuals in DC, like Rachel Bovard, who you guys know has been on your show, is the talking filibuster.
And the talking filibuster goes back to one of the earliest iterations of the rules and how the Senate operates.
It allows for unlimited debate until the individuals are exhausted in the Senate, essentially.
And then the vote proceeds at 51, which is a simple majority.
But senators oftentimes prefer to proceed through what I like to call failure theater.
I think failure theater should be a term that every American understands because senators implement restrictions and obstacles on their own accord to make it so that they can have cover votes or bypass the process that is a little bit more complicated, might take a little bit more work, but actually results in the outcomes that the voters are looking for.
And in this case, you know, they're self-imposing this 60-vote threshold on themselves.
They could pass this bill at 51.
All it takes is a little bit of strength to sit on the floor and let everyone exhaust themselves until the previous until the question is called and the vote proceeds at 51.
And we have the majority.
The question is, do you have the votes, right?
But Thune, like the job of someone who served as the whip leader in the Senate and then someone who is the leader is to find the votes and to deliver the votes.
We should be cutting deals intra-party, not with Democrats.
And it's just frankly embarrassing that we're going to spend weeks cutting political ads for consultants instead of delivering wins for Americans.
We have dedicated analytical and tactical support.
We are aiding in this investigation throughout the entire time.
We will continue to work alongside of our partners and those in the community to find answers.
The FBI continues to ask for the public's help in providing any information that could lead us in resolving this investigation, and we remind the public that any detail, no matter how small, could be useful.
A collection of those small details may help paint a complete picture.
We ask that the public submit their tips to www.fbi.gov slash ODU shooting.
Do you have any questions for me or for my partners here?
I can tell you that we have confirmed reports that prior to him conducting this act of terrorism, he shouted stated al-Akbar, and he was formerly a subject of an FBI investigation in materials supporting terrorism.
So I don't have any of that information right now.
That's because this is an ongoing investigation.
After we learned of his name, we confirmed that he was formerly a subject of a material support to terrorism investigation and obviously was sentenced for that.
But I don't have any information indicating that he was known or an ongoing problem.
unidentified
Do you have any more specifics on how he was subdued?
So we obviously are going to dig in, and this is why we need the public support to where he may have been before this, who he may have been in contact with, if he had any other supporters, anybody providing him information.
So we have to track every single lead down.
And that is exactly what the FBI will do.
Every single lead, we're going to track down the veracity of the information and make sure that we have a full investigation with as much information, again, to ensure that there isn't anyone else that he may have been receiving support from as well.
Natalie, I'm bringing in before you play the clip of what you got you here for, but another amazingly informative FBI.
Of course, they say he wanted to have a Fort Hood, Fort Hood 2009, with the radical Muslim major, who I think killed 13 here, the ROTC.
I don't know.
Maybe it was just random.
I know the FBI wouldn't have a guy under watch that got an 11-year sentence for material support for terrorist organizations here in the United States and serve three, and he's out on parole or out.
And so this will be another one.
Well, we should have done it, but maybe we didn't do it.
Well, I think this is a playbook we've seen anytime there's an event.
What was the first question?
How are you sure this is an act of terrorism?
Well, he said Ali Akbar.
I think that's pretty cut and dry, but thank you to the legacy media for clarifying that.
They, of course, never asking the real questions, which Americans, not just in that state at that university, but I think across the country care about, which is the direct linkage of attacks like this to what's going on in the Middle East, right?
I think the reason why Americans dislike these forever wars, obviously we're not there at that moniker yet, but it's not just because they're forever.
It's the second, third, and fourth order effects, whether you see it in the form of refugee waves or like this, right?
Homegrown, whatever you want to call it, whatever label you want to slap on it.
Terrorists, why like refugee type style individuals with links to known terrorist groups are still allowed to be in this country?
And it seems like our refugee admissions processes prioritize those that have connections to countries with deep ties to terrorist organizations is beyond me.
It's almost like they're trying to intentionally embed sleeper cells here.
I think if you were to reverse engineer an ideal immigration policy favored by ISIS or al-Qaeda, it probably would be what we saw under Joe Biden.
But this is like all of I think the left's horrible nightmarish policies.
But I guess to them it's their, you know, what dream coming together and seeing what is it, conflict in the Middle East where we can't even really be sure of who's actually in this country because we have no known record.
And of the available records that we have of people who came into this country, it's hundreds of people who are on the known terrorist list.
It's hundreds of people from the Middle East.
And it's, you know, diversity visa lottery programs and chain migration systems that I think actually incentivize people with ties to terrorist organizations, probably in the name of diversity, coming into this country.
Alarming signs of population movement are already emerging, particularly in Lebanon and across the border into Syria.
In Lebanon, the evacuation orders have seen over 90,000 people displaced.
As this morning, the numbers is projected to be highest.
Many people have already been forced from their homes, adding pressures to a region that is experiencing one of the largest displacement crises globally.
Prior to the escalation, more than 19 million people across the Middle East were internally displaced due to conflict, violence, and disasters.
The largest number are remains in Sudan, Syria, and in Yemen, with significant displaced populations, also in Iraq and Libya.
Any further escalation, of course, risks triggering a new wave of displacement and humanitarian needs across multiple countries.
IOM has joined other UN agencies in declaring emergency scale-up to enable coordination and rapid response.
Ultimately, de-escalation is essential, protecting civilians, including migrants and displaced people, and ensuring respect of international humanitarian law must remain a priority to prevent further human suffering.
Okay, Natalie, explain what I just heard because it sounds massive and it sounds like it's very, very much important of what's going on, yet nobody's writing about it, except nobody's talking about it, ma'am.
One, triggering a new wave of humanitarian crises in the UN speak, that's not a good sign for the American people.
But more importantly, there was a phrase, and that was the idea of this emergency scale-up, which you're seeing happening right now at the hands of the International Organization for Migration that's hosted in the UN.
Of course, the UNHCR, the kind of refugee apparatus, too, is also interested in deploying assets into the region and around the region.
But what's really interesting, that guy who was speaking was speaking about Lebanon.
In the first week of the crisis alone, there were 700,000 people displaced just in that one country where there was more readily available data.
The UN has also been flagging that there's been a lot of movement of people back or newly into Afghanistan, which I think when you talk about where exactly these people can flee, at least in the interim, before they set their sights on the West, either through Turkey or who knows what kind of NGO subsidized program, it's very concerning, I think, to see people compiling there.
But there's just new numbers coming out of the UN today showing that since the start of the conflict, there's around 3.2 million people who have been displaced in Iran, particularly in Tehran, coming from there, fleeing the city.
It's unclear where exactly they're going.
I also think it's important to kind of link this to the press conference that you just played.
The DHS was circulating an internal memo where they were talking about several fatwas that have been declared against the United States.
They describe it as a critical incident note.
I'll read the actual quote saying Iranian religious leaders issue fatwas calling on Muslims to avenge Supreme Leaders' death.
They call the U.S. and Israel the most wicked enemies of humanity and that it urges followers worldwide to take revenge.
If I were the DHS, I wouldn't have had the story be a leak from some employee.
I think this should have been posted front and center and made a big deal.
But look, Steve, I think that the point here is, right, when you talk about these second and third order effects of what we're doing in the region, I think the American people can best understand it through impending refugee waves, which don't even take my word for it.
People who are monitoring the flows of people are saying that this could be the largest refugee wave in modern history, right?
Iran has a population of 90 million people, and you're spilling over into the broader region as a whole.
Thank God we have President Trump, who has not signaled that they're going to be soft on refugee admissions.
But I think this is not a conflict that's going to subside in the next few weeks.
This is going to be long-term population movement and probably damage to the West.
So that's the number that Joe Biden would have wanted to admit to the country.
No, that's the number of people in the region right now who are currently displaced or refugees.
I guess internally displaced people is the new term for refugee.
Maybe it's too loaded of a term now.
But those are people they are saying, you know, can't live in their place of birth or residence for whatever reason.
But I do think the trend of people returning to Afghanistan is something that's quite interesting.
And I will say, for all the reporting that the UN is doing on this, there's been abysmal to zero coverage, of course, from legacy media talking about the impacts of people movement, which I think is quite interesting.
I want to hold you through the break because I want your take on Secretary of Treasury Scott Besson's comments about Chinese CCP flagships getting through the Straits of Hormuz.
Secretary Besson was saying, hey, I'm not so sure this thing is mined because we are seeing Chinese flagships getting through, carrying oil to the Chinese Communist Party.
Short commercial break, back in the war room in a moment.
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Birch Gold, Philip Patrick, supposed to join us in the second hour.
We are going to go to the press conference up in Detroit.
So we'll go there.
We just, you saw the press conference down in ODU.
That was not particularly enlightening.
Hopefully, Detroit will be better.
I understand now there's a bunch of first responders that have somehow gotten ill, and we'll find out what that's about at Detroit.
So this thing's kind of a mess.
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But talk to Philip Patrick and the team, and he'll be on in the next hour talk about capital markets and what's happening in the economic war here.
Speaking of the economic war, Natalie G. Winters, you cut your teeth and are an expert on the Chinese Communist Party and all of their unrestricted warfare against us.
Please tell me, why are we allowing Chinese flagships to exit the Straits of Hormuz when the Ayatollah, maybe a guy now with one leg, is sitting there raining at the United States and our allies to say not one drop of oil will exit, ma'am?
Well, Steve, I think it's kind of the same answer.
Why haven't we meaningfully taken on the Chinese Communist Party in ways that actually matter here in Washington, D.C.?
I'd also flag, I think, in addition to watching and tracking oil prices, all that kind of stuff, that the rare earth question, I think, is something that's very relevant, not just to the defense industrial base questions that you're seeing be debated quite heavily now.
I don't necessarily know if the answer to that is to quadruple the resources to the defense primes that sort of put us in this shortage problem to begin with.
I was reading the South China Morning Post and a lot of kind of more, you know, Chinese state media to get a sense of what they thought about the new Ayatollah.
And they seem to think that he will actually be more favorable to the Chinese Communist Party, not by orders of magnitude, but younger, more open, more likely to sort of collaborate.
But I think that the lens through which I view this, taking the specifics out of it, I think your commentary on, you know, on the best at the Navy, get their involvement, I think, is quite enlightened.
But I think looking at this through the lens of the Thucydides trap idea, whereby, you know, this kind of regional or smaller scale conflict can kind of get kicked up to the level of an actual global power struggle, right?
Something like you're seeing go down in the Straits of Hormuz, like you were talking about, right?
Dubai or these other Gulf nations having to sort of pick a side, I think is a very interesting and frankly, I think, more relevant to the kind of geopolitical world order as we know it question, as opposed to just myopically looking at the Middle East as a region, right?
Because the United States sort of looks like they're the system disruptor, whereas China's coming in stabilizing, calling for, you know, de-escalation, but it kind of fuses the Middle East into the, I think, purview of U.S.-China competition.
And I think barreling towards, you know, the forthcoming summit, I think this adds a layer of complexity that I think it's a kind of reductive view to take it as, oh, the PRC, CCP leaders are going to be really intimidated by America's show of force in the region.
Perhaps that's why they stopped their air incursions over Taiwan.
Or is it because they're planning something bigger?
Again, we don't know.
I don't have the Intel reports, but I think you have to factor in, like I was saying, not just the kind of oil question, but the rare earth shortages, right?
Some of the reasons why we're so behind on producing, whether it's, you know, the Thad batteries, missiles, take your pick, is because we just don't have not necessarily the raw materials, but the refinement capabilities, which of course are really bottlenecked in China.
And I think that's the real question.
And I think when you talk about, you know, the leveraging of American military might, whether it's in the Straits of Hormuz to ensure the flow of oil, I think you also have to compound that with the question of American military might in other regions where you have a significant effect, not just, I think, in the U.S. dollar, but confidence in the American-led world order, right?
When you're seeing these Thad batteries be pulled from South Korea, our European allies not necessarily backing us as they've been courting and being courted by the Chinese.
You're seeing a lot of our Asian allies, I think, fret a little bit by seeing America perhaps go back to its kind of not hawkish, but just say a deja vu sense of returning and restoring all of our capabilities to the Middle East.
So I think that what Besson is saying is good.
I think we should use power to advance American interests.
But I think that to just focus on the Straits of Hormuz, I think, sort of is a small point in a much bigger picture that, like I said, risks.
I mean, perhaps it's already underway, but really, I think, kind of reifying in a kinetic action way, what you see with the Thucydides trap of some smaller conflict sparking a bigger global power struggle.
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