Thu Episode #2225: The Case for War In Iran Is Collapsing
David Knight analyzes the collapsing case for war in Iran, arguing that U.S. and Israeli strikes on the co-owned South Pars LNG facility aim to destroy global fertilizer production and ignite a "Petro war." He critiques the manufactured nuclear threat narrative used by figures like Tulsi Gabbard and Dan Bongino, linking the conflict to Christian Zionist agendas and real estate interests rather than genuine security needs. The discussion highlights impending food inflation, potential stagflation driving gold toward $10,000, and the strategic dismantling of Gulf energy infrastructure to facilitate regime change and economic chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
In a world of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
It's the David Knight Show.
As the clock strikes 13, it's Thursday, the 19th of March, year of our Lord, 2026.
Well, Israel and the U.S. attacked a liquid natural gas facility that was co-owned by Iran and Qatar, daring Iran to set the Middle East on fire.
And now that's what they are doing.
All of these oil refineries, storage areas, ports, natural gas, they're all highly flammable.
Is this the plan of Israel, the long-term plan, so they can take it all?
We're going to take a look at that.
Meanwhile, we had yesterday Rand Paul on fire himself in a confirmation hearing.
It's Mark Wayne Mullen, the guy that Trump wants to run ICE, is shown to be a thug, a bully, just like the rest of the people that Trump picks, especially the ones that he wants to run his standing armies, foreign and domestic.
He's another war peak.
And then the Federal Reserve did not raise interest rates.
They said we had zero jobs created.
Has stagflation already set in?
I think we're going to have inflation regardless of what the Fed does with interest rates.
I think the nations are going to let it run loose so they can monetize the debt.
We're going to talk about the impact on gold because a lot of people are looking at what happens to gold.
So that's what we've got on the agenda today.
We're going to try to get through this quickly.
Before we start, though, there was some CIA weather control files that have now been reduced.
Yeah, those documents, not the Epstein documents, but the ones that talked about chemtrails.
Yeah, this goes back to the Vietnam War.
This goes back to Lyndon Johnson.
And as we talked about many times, there was a general, I forget the guy's name.
I didn't look it up again.
I've talked about it many times, the guy who was given an award for altering the weather as part of the Vietnam War, given an award by LBJ.
And so they had a couple of projects, CIA projects.
One of them was Project Storm Fury.
The other one was Project Popeye.
Got a lot of projects coming from the deep state, the CIA.
And of course, you had the quote that's famous from LBJ, he who controls the weather will control the world.
Yeah, controlling history and controlling speech.
And these people are control freaks about everything.
And so there was a letter as part of the documents from Lyndon Johnson expressing support for the activities in 1962 speech.
When he was vice president, he remarked, made that quote, he controls the weather will control the world.
So Project Storm Fury was an experimental effort attempted to weaken hurricanes by seeding clouds with silver iodide.
Think about the fact that they've been working on this for, you know, 60-some odd years, right?
What do you think they're capable of doing now?
This has been an open secret.
And of course, they very much want to push back.
Oh, Chemtrell, this is the ultimate conspiracy theory, right?
They've always been working on ways that they can modify the weather.
Chemtrails frequently dismisses a conspiracy theory, but RFK Jr. has jumped in on it.
He says they're real, likely orchestrated by DARPA, caused by materials mixed into commercial jet fuel, other issues involved in that, of course.
Vaccine Safety and Government Deception00:06:03
Don't expect them to do anything about it, just like he's not going to do anything about the vaccines.
But, you know, what he's doing is he is embracing this and talking about it.
But when it comes to action, whether or not he can do anything is one issue.
Whether or not he will even try is another.
As a matter of fact, when we look at the vaccines, it's not just the COVID vaccine and the mRNA that RFK Jr. is really not stopping.
What needs to be done is we need to get rid of this 1986 Childhood Vaccine Immunity Act that's there.
And here's a good example.
This is reported by the Children's Health Defense.
They have stayed on target even while RFK Jr. is playing his own personal political games.
Routine vaccines paralyze their toddler.
This was a child, Travis, that was just about a month older than your son is right now.
And he was given routine vaccines.
And all of a sudden, he's not moving anymore, getting very irritated.
And so they start trying to figure out what's happening.
And after a short period of time, they had some physicians say, well, I think it's reaction to the vaccines, autoimmune reaction.
And so that was in 2013.
They fought the system for 11 years to try to get any compensation.
He's been paralyzed now.
He's in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, and has many other issues as well, autoimmune diseases and things like that.
And it has taken them 11 years to get approval for a payout.
And that's doesn't, you know, compensation is needed, but it doesn't restore him to what he was.
And as they pointed out, this whole system, this childhood vaccine system, is designed to make you quit.
That's exactly what they want.
They want to wear you out with the process of this and hold the vaccine companies that are harming children.
Just think about this.
You know, we talk about how outrageous it was that they would target school.
Sloppy work, you could say, right?
They would target a school and kill 160, 70 kids.
Trump did far more than that with his vaccine, probably his COVID vaccine that he's so proud of.
He killed far more children than that, and they're still dying with sudden death heart attacks, myocarditis, and long-term effects of that.
And so just imagine what these people do.
They don't care about you and I.
They don't care about children.
People like Trump will sexually abuse them.
He will put out programs that kill them, injure them for life, paralyze them, even to the extent that MAGA thinks that he's going to protect children from this psychological gaslighting, mutilation, and sterilization.
No, no, if the parents want to do it, that's fine.
It does not protect children.
It doesn't protect us.
None of this national security stuff is about our protection.
It's about what they're doing.
Look, the people who are involved who started this war, a bunch of real estate dealers.
What does that tell you about this whole war in Iran?
We're going to talk about that coming up.
I think it's a real estate deal, frankly.
Shortly after receiving the flu and pneumonia and DTP shot, he became fussy, suffered from fever, decreased energy levels.
He stopped crawling, playing.
He started throwing food.
Said, while many practicing physicians and specialists suggested that he may have a genetic predisposition, that his vaccinations exacerbated, retired physicians who were likely more at liberty to speak freely about vaccines told family members that vaccine poisoning was a likely cause.
And so this is where we are in our society.
This is the kind of criminality that we have.
And as I said, there was a very long article.
I didn't go into it and discuss it in detail on the program, but just to summarize it, it was done by a physician who was on during the COVID stuff.
He said he had 4,000 interviews on TV.
And I thought it's pretty amazing that he was out.
I never had heard of him before.
But he said that all this subtle science stuff and the intimidation that was there throughout, he said, we've never seen this before.
We always had people who were free to speak their mind and free to make a case for the appropriate treatment or what the cause of a disease was.
He said, that was all shut down.
Never seen anything like that before.
And you know why it was shut down?
Because of money.
That's the way it happens.
Everybody says, oh, Trump didn't do it.
It was the bad Democrat governors that did it.
Well, the Republican governors were just as bad, and they were doing this because they were funded.
And the hospitals that were killing people at the beginning of this, that's the real pandemic.
The ventilators, the Rendozovir, and things like that.
That's the real pandemic, folks.
And they were paid to kill people.
And that's the way we got into this situation.
When you get corporations, all they care about is money.
And they'll be more than happy to kill us for money, whether you're talking about big pharma, big hospital, or whether you're talking about the military industrial complex or big agriculture.
You know, big agriculture just wants to be able to produce stuff that looks like food.
They don't care if it's got poison in it or not.
So, yeah, bring on the glyphosate.
We can produce more of this stuff and put it on the shelves and make money.
We don't care if it hurts you.
This is the way these people operate.
Well, we're going to take a quick break.
And when we come back, we're going to take a look at the back and forth fight about what Joe Kent said.
Imminent Threats and Intelligence Assessments00:14:59
And the, is there an imminent threat?
Was there an imminent threat?
This is the big issue that's been going on.
For 30-some odd years, we had Benjamin Netanyahu telling us that there was an imminent threat.
And now, so that is still the issue that is being discussed.
We're going to take a quick break.
We'll be right back.
David Knight
Show.
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Well, I guess I'll get in trouble for this here on Rumble, but Dan Bongino fired back at Joe Kent's claim that there was no imminent threat to the U.S.
And you've also got Tulsi Gabbard, who has burned her last shred of credibility, if she ever had any left.
Here's what Tulsi Gabbard said.
So the assessment of the intelligence community is that Iran's nuclear enrichment program was obliterated by last summer's airstrikes.
Yes.
And the opening statement you submitted to the committee last night also stated, quote, there has been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability, end quote, correct?
That's right.
And that's the assessment of the intelligence community.
Yes.
The White House stated on March 1st of this year that this war was launched and was, quote, a military campaign to eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime, end quote.
That's a statement from the White House.
Quote, the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime.
Was it the assessment of the intelligence community that there was an imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime?
The intelligence community assessed that Iran maintained the intention to rebuild and to continue to grow their nuclear enrichment capability.
Was it the assessment of the intelligence community that there was a, quote, imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime?
Yes or no?
Senator, the only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president.
False.
This is the worldwide threats hearing where you present to Congress national intelligence, timely, objective, and independent of political considerations.
You've stated today that the intelligence community's nuclear enrichment program was obliterated and that, quote, there had been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability.
Was it the intelligence community's assessment that, nevertheless, despite this obliteration, there was a, quote, imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime?
Yes or no?
It is not the intelligence community's responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat.
That is up to the president.
This is the problem.
No, it is precisely your responsibility to determine what constitutes a threat to the United States.
This is the worldwide threats hearing, where, as you noted in your opening testimony, quote, you represent the IC's assessment of threats.
You are here to represent the IC's assessment of threats.
That's a quote from your own opening statement.
And so my question is, as you're here to present the IC's assessment of threats, was it the assessment of the intelligence community that, as the White House claimed on March 1st, there was a, quote, imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime?
Yes or no?
Once again, Senator, the intelligence community has despite the inputs that make up this annual threat assessment.
The nature of the imminent threat that the president has to make that determination based on a collection and volume intelligence that he is provided with.
You're here to be timely, objective, and independent of political considerations.
That's exactly what I'm doing.
No, you're evading a question because to provide a candid response to the committee would contradict a statement from the White House.
Yeah, nothing but yes men and yes women around this guy.
They're all afraid of him.
They want their career so badly.
Well, she just burned her career.
Burned it in front of everybody.
She has absolutely not a shred of credibility left whatsoever.
Yeah, if Trump says that we've obliterated their nuclear program, then we've obliterated it.
If Trump says no, we didn't, and now it's an imminent threat, it's an imminent threat.
It's whatever Trump says.
And it's pure politics.
All the president's men and women can't put Trumpty-Gumpty together again, right?
It was like forced gump.
You know, for 35 years, you had Bibi telling us that a nuclear bomb and nuclear threat was imminent.
He was lying then.
Trump is lying now.
And of course, Trump had this to say about previous presidents.
He thinks basically out of his own mouth, Trump thinks that Trump should be impeached.
Nancy Pelosi, the speaker.
Well, you know, when she first got in and was named Speaker, I met her, and I'm very impressed by her.
I think she's a very impressive person.
I like her a lot.
But I was surprised that she didn't do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush.
It was almost, it just seemed like she was going to really look to impeach Bush and get him out of office, which personally I think would have been a wonderful thing.
Impeaching him?
Absolutely.
For the war.
For the war.
Because of the conduct.
Well, he lied.
He got us into the war with lies.
And I mean, look at the trouble Bill Clinton got into with something that was totally unimportant.
And they tried to impeach him, which was nonsense.
And yet Bush got us into this horrible war with lies by lying, by saying they had weapons of mass destruction, by saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true.
Yeah, exactly what Trump is doing right now.
As a matter of fact, you know, it's not just Tulsa Gabbard.
It's also Dan Bongino, who was willing to lie for the president.
Oh, well, you know, we know that we have these Epstein documents, we need to release them.
And oh, there's nothing at all there.
We don't need to release it, said Dan Bongino.
Now he's saying, I don't know what point you thought this wasn't an imminent threat after you read a lot of the stuff that I read.
And so he says, the president, I promise you, has a bevy of material that if he told you right now, you would come to the imminent threat conclusion in a snap as Dan Bongino was pushing back against Joe Kent.
The imminent threat was probably a threat from Netanyahu to get money withheld from Trump.
Look, after Bongino lied about the Epstein documents, who would believe anything he has to say?
Now he says, well, you know, if you saw this stuff that I saw, there's no child trafficking, nothing happening with the Epstein people.
And now if you'd seen the documents that I saw, you would realize that Trump was telling us there really are weapons of mass destruction that we have to go after.
Well, Tucker wasted no time in terms of getting Joe Kent on.
And this is what they said.
I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.
Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.
Not to us.
Iran.
And they didn't have nuclear weapons to come after Israel either.
I think this is key.
I mean, this would be more challenging to explain had the Secretary of State, the President, and the Speaker of the House not come out and said that we conducted this attack at this time because the Israelis were about to do so.
So that takes away the argument that there was an imminent threat, as in Iran was planning to attack us immediately.
That just simply did not exist.
May I ask you to pause?
And so I've heard people say that, and this just happened, but history has a way of getting rewritten in real time.
And then you look back 10 or 15, 20, 25 years later, and no one seems to understand the things that you saw because they've been eliminated.
So I think it's important to stop and say, here's what we actually know.
So I'd like now, if we could, just to play one of the statements that you alluded to, and that's from Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State.
And this was shortly after this war commenced.
And he was explaining, as is his habit, in a thoughtful, precise way, why.
Here's Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.
And so the president made the very wise decision.
We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action.
We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.
And we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed.
And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that indeed.
Okay, so that is his almost contemporaneous explanation.
And it's not offhand.
He reasons it out.
He explains there's a logic chain there.
And he says, we knew not that Iran was going to attack.
He did not say that.
He said, we knew that Israel was going to attack Iran.
And in retaliation for those attacks by Israel against Iran, Iran might attack American forces.
So the imminent threat that the Secretary of State is describing is not from Iran.
It's from Israel.
Exactly.
And I think this speaks to the broader issue, who is in charge of our policy in the Middle East, who's in charge of when we decide to go to war or not.
In this case, with what the Secretary described and later on, the President, later on the Speaker of the House, and the way the events played out, the Israelis drove the decision to take this action, which we knew would set off a series of events, meaning the Iranians would retaliate.
Now, I think there's a potential there where we could have done several different things.
We could have simply said to the Israelis, no, you will not.
And if you do, then we will take something away from you.
I think that it's fine that we offer defense to Israel.
But when we're providing the means for their defense, we get to dictate the terms of when they go on the offensive.
Otherwise, they stand to lose that relationship.
And the Israelis felt emboldened that no matter what they did, no matter what situation they put us in, that they could go ahead and take this action.
And we would just have to react.
Yeah, a couple of hundred million dollars from Miriam Edelson and a lot of other Zionist billionaires speaks volumes.
Trump's not going to say, no, you will not do this.
And of course, people like Dan Bongino are not going to stay silent if somebody is pointing out what our real relationship with Israel is.
That of servant.
And so he's going to step up and start serving for them.
Bongino fired back against Kent's claim that Israel and the lobby were a major culprit.
He said, I read a lot more intelligence than he did.
Yeah, right.
He said, I had access to just about everything, including the Epstein stuff, which he told you lies about.
And you come to the conclusion that the Israelis did it.
There was no imminent threat here, really.
How could you come to the conclusion, he said, that the Israelis could do it?
Well, it's based on not just what Joe Kent knows, but as he pointed out, it was made easy for him because you had Marco Rubio explain it to everybody.
He said, here's what's going on.
If they say, we're going to attack and we don't really care what happens to you, and they say, well, we had to join in because they were going to do it.
We don't have any control over them.
They control us.
Bongino listed reasons that Iran posed a threat.
So they've got anti-ship ballistic missiles.
Yeah, is that a threat?
Israel's got them as well.
So is the U.S.
So do most countries.
They've got a drone program.
So do most countries now at this point.
And they have enriched nuclear material.
And they shout death to America.
Well, I've heard Netanyahu shout death to Iran for 30 some odd years.
And he's finally gotten it because he's finally gotten a puppet regime in Washington that will do whatever he demands.
Then you've got Rick Grinnell.
Rick Grinnell is an interesting character.
He was their ambassador to LGBT, but he's the guy that in Trump's first regime, he had the job of Tulsi Gabbard.
You got to wonder about this director of national intelligence position, because after being the DNI in Trump's first regime, Trump put him in charge of the Kennedy Center.
So he goes, it goes from being DNI to head of the Kennedy Center theater.
And I guess that's true because this is all just theater, isn't it?
All this national security stuff, all this stuff about, oh, we have threats that are imminent, and we got to do something about it.
It's all just theater.
And so he says, Rick Gurnell says, I don't have any patience for these people who don't like the policy and don't want to implement the policy.
He said, Joe Kent just needed to, quote, shut up and salute.
So if the president's going to tell us a lie about weapons of mass destruction, if he's going to tell us a lie about imminent threats, you need to shut up and salute and you need to lie along with him, just like Tulsi Gabbard did.
You know, that's what we're getting from our DNI people under the Trump administrations.
He said, problem is we've got a lot of people in Washington with big egos.
Who's got the biggest ego in Washington, you think?
That's right.
President Gump.
And so, yeah, he's got egonomics.
He's got egopolitics.
He doesn't do geopolitics.
He does ego politics.
He says, I don't mind that Joe Kent, I don't think that Joe Kent should be surprised at where the president of the United States is going.
Well, I would agree.
I mean, I sussed this guy out for what he was in 2020.
But what about the campaign promises that Trump had made?
Emergency Powers and False Flag Claims00:03:46
That shouldn't surprise anybody.
Well, Glenn Greenwal says a 9-11-like mass casualty attack could trigger permanent emergency measures.
And he points back to 9-11.
It's like, well, and he says, you know, we have this permanent hangover from 9-11, you know, Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, all the rest of this stuff.
And it's like, yeah, and you might also want to take a look at what Trump did with COVID, because as I said before, the pandemic McGuffin and the whole idea that they could lock us down for whenever they decide there's some kind of, they declare a phony emergency.
They don't have to, it doesn't have to be real.
They have the power to lock us down.
They've been putting these pieces in places for in place for a very long time.
And Dark Winter, which was a war game plan that was exactly what Trump did in 2020, they did that two months before 9-11.
Then they did a real attack of anthrax, but it was likely it was a false flag attack.
And it looks like it came from the CIA.
They were the only ones who had that kind of anthrax.
And of course, the FBI covered that up for the CIA.
That's their purpose.
The FBI is feds blocking investigations, especially when those investigations would show what the federal government is doing.
And so they continue to practice that for 20 years.
And then they rolled it out.
These things are all part of taking absolute totalitarian control over our society.
And everything that Trump does is an emergency.
Everything.
He declares it to be an emergency, whether it is or not.
And then that allows him to completely avoid following the law, the Constitution, anything.
And he dares people then to take him to court.
And that takes a very long time, as we saw with the tariffs.
That was an emergency, right?
And so President Trump and his COVID stuff would not be surprised to see a false flag attack.
I mean, quite frankly, the whole COVID thing was not necessarily a false flag attack, but it certainly was false, wasn't it?
And he presides over the emergency branch.
He's got ICE and the police surveillance state.
He wants militarized federal police.
And we're going to, after this, we're going to take a look at this back and forth of Mark Wayne Mullen because that's the real subtext there, folks.
The Trump is looking for people like Mark Wayne.
He's looking for people like War Pete.
These are people who will do whatever he says, who are spoiling for a fight.
They're brawlers.
They're thugs.
They're bullies.
And he wants people like that to run the military.
He wants people like that to run his federal police, the domestic standing army.
Greenwall laid out a sobering scenario.
He said a mass casualty attacks on U.S. soil could trigger sweeping emergency measures that once imposed become fixtures of life, just as the Patriot Act did after 9-11.
The conversation opened with Greenwald addressing a noticeable imbalance in what passes for acceptable criticism in public life.
He said, it's interesting that there's no criticism of our country that is banned or even discouraged.
But you can't criticize one particular foreign country, right?
As the old saying goes, I don't know who controls you.
You look at who you're not allowed to criticize.
So we have an occupied government, just as Kerry Pregene Baller said.
He said, if you can't criticize a foreign government, then that country is in charge.
What other conclusion should I draw from that?
Car Normalization and Political Criticism00:04:45
I can't really provide you with any other option.
And so he said, I feel like there was already an attack in the U.S., that Austin shooting, but we haven't heard much about it.
But it seemed pretty clearly linked to the Iran war.
Well, they're going to come up with something that is bigger.
So he said, Patriot Act was this radical extremist un-American law that we needed supposedly in the wake of 9-11.
They assured us, oh, don't worry, it'll be temporary.
Well, here we are, 2026.
It's part of the woodwork, and nobody even talks about it anymore.
That's how quickly these things get normalized.
Yeah, just like the pandemic measures that Trump did.
And whether or not the stuff gets put into, enshrined into law or regulations, it still gets enshrined into people's minds.
You still have this Overton window that has been moved.
The normalization of universal basic income, the normalization of being able to lock us all down, just like that.
And when you look at what is happening with cars, it's not just gasoline, it's the insurance, it's the mandated regulations on automobiles.
They've become unaffordable.
They're going to squeeze us out of cars if we don't push back.
There needs to be some move at the state level, just like people in Wyoming tried to do with the gun control laws.
They said, we're not going to allow any gun control here in Wyoming.
And of course, you have the Republican governor pushing back on that.
And he's now pushing back on, you also had the Republican legislature in Wyoming set up a gold reserve.
And the Republican governor is pushing back on that.
He doesn't want you to have guns.
He doesn't want you to have gold.
And you can bet that these people don't want us to have cars either.
Cars need to be something.
We need to do the opposite of what California has done.
California is trying to ban cars nationwide because they are such a large market.
They can do that.
We need to take the other direction.
We need to encourage automotive freedom and liberty and mobility.
And now, the David Knight Show, Elvis, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Beatles, and the sweet sounds of Motown.
Find them on the Oldies channel at APSRadio.com.
Well, we're back, I guess.
We've got a lot of computer problems right here that are crashing, but I'm going to try to play for you the back and forth that happened with Rand Paul, the confirmation hearing for Mark Wayne Mullen.
This is a guy who is a congressman, then a senator.
And Trump wants an angry guy to run ICE, as we have seen.
Border Votes and Welfare Magnet Concerns00:15:31
And Rand Paul was questioning why somebody who's got, as he puts it, anger issues should be put in charge of ICE and Border Patrol.
As if we don't know that's exactly what Trump wants.
He wants a civil war.
I entered the Senate the same year that Representative Gabby Giffords was shot.
I knew then that the state of political rhetoric was encouraging violence.
I think it's imperative now, more than ever, that the leaders in our country disavow violence and lead by example.
Through the years, I've personally been exposed multiple times to political violence.
I was in the right field batting cage when the crazed shooter unleashed nearly 200 shots at our congressional baseball practice.
I'll never forget Steve Scalise valiantly trying to drag his body away as the gunman continued.
Later that year, a Trump-hating felon attacked me from behind in my yard.
I was just straightening up from picking up a tree limb.
I was wearing noise cancellation headphones, never saw him coming, running pell-mell down the hill.
I was struck in the back.
The force of the blow sent us through the air nearly 10 feet down the hill until his shoulder impaled me as we hit the ground.
Six of my ribs were broken.
Three of the ribs were completely separated, such that for weeks, the ends of the ribs would grind upon each other.
My lung was damaged.
For weeks, I could inhale but not have the rib strength to exhale.
I developed two pneumonias.
The pain was such that I could only sit up in bed by tying a rope to the foot of the bed and pulling myself up.
But even then, the pain was that of a thousand knives.
Over the year of recovery, I began to cough up blood.
I underwent removal of part of my lung.
Complications led to an infection in the space between my lung and chest wall.
I spent a week in the hospital having the infection lavaged every six hours through a chest tube.
Recently, Senator Mullen, if you have time to listen, you were confronted by constituents that were angry because you voted against my amendment to stop all funding for refugee welfare programs.
Instead of explaining your vote to continue these welfare programs for refugees, you decided to transfer the blame.
You told the media that I was a freaking snake and that you completely understood why I had been assaulted.
I was shocked that you would justify and celebrate this violent assault that caused me so much pain and my family so much pain.
I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits to the proper use of force.
You might argue you were mad and upset about being confronted by your constituents.
But Senator Mullen, your constituents are justifiably upset with you.
By now, most of America knows that the Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota stole over $9 billion.
But instead of defending your vote, you took to continue the vote to continue these refugee welfare programs.
You chose to lash out at me.
You went on to brag that you'd already told me to my face that you completely understood and approved of the assault.
Well, that's a lie.
You got a chance today.
You can either continue to lie or you can correct the record.
You have never had the courage to look me in the eye and tell me that the assault was justified.
So today you'll have to clear the risk of me today.
Why you believe I deserve to be assaulted from behind, have six ribs broken and a damaged lung?
Tell me to my face why you think I deserved it.
And while you're at it, explain to the American public why they should trust a man with anger issues to set the proper example for ICE and Border Patrol agents.
Explain to the American public how a man who has no regrets about brawling in a Senate committee can set a proper example for over 250,000 men and women who work at the Department of Homeland Security.
Senator Peters, you're recognized for your opening comment.
Well, and I know we're still having some problems with the board.
It got out of sync there and ended the video early.
But as you can hear what he was saying, Mark Wayne Mullen was called on his votes.
Again, Rand Paul introduced something to stop the funding or to reduce the funding.
I don't know exactly what his bill said.
The funding that was part of the refugee program, which brought in the Somalis, they didn't walk across the border.
And it subsidized them to a lot of these other institutions.
And I had pointed out before that not only did they not even reduce this program, let alone stop it, but they nearly doubled it.
They went from $5 billion to Trump just put it in at $11 billion.
And he did this as all of this stuff is happening with the Somali fraud.
They nearly doubled it.
So we're going to give $11 billion to more people like the Somalis to come in.
I don't know if they're expecting Ukrainian mafia people to come in next or what the purpose of that was.
Mark Wayne Mullen voted to not only not reduce it, but to increase it.
And so his constituents were angry with him.
And then he basically attacked Rand Paul for introducing a bill to stop the welfare magnet.
He doesn't want to stop the welfare magnet.
He wants people to come here.
So they can have an excuse to have a totalitarian federal police force to bully people.
And so, again, the real solution is welfare magnet.
And he is against stopping any aspect of the welfare magnet.
And he attacked Rand.
And so this is, that was just the introduction to the hearing because Rand Paul is the chairman of the hearing.
And then it got to the point where they had their back and forth.
You offered no apology.
Sir.
And you offer no apology today.
And no regrets.
Haven't heard the word apologize.
Haven't heard the word regret.
Haven't heard I misspoke and it was heated and I made a mistake.
I haven't heard any of those words.
Sir, actually it wasn't heated and I'm not apologizing for pointing out your character.
Good.
So you're jolly well fine and you want the American public and the people up here to vote that may or may not vote for you to know that you supported the felonious violent attack on me from behind.
I did not say I supported it.
I said understood it.
There's a difference.
By stalling you, by calling you.
That means you really didn't approve of it.
Just completely understand it.
What do you think most people would interpret completely understand to be support for or a condemnation of the violence?
You know where to find me any place, anytime, cowboy.
Sir, this is a time.
This is a place.
If you want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults.
We can finish it here.
Okay, that's fine.
Perfect.
You want to do it now?
I'd love to do it right now.
Well, stand your butt up then.
You stand your butt up.
Oh, hold it.
Oh, stop it.
Say a solution of reporting.
Oh, no, sit down.
Sorry, Eric.
Yo, no, you're a United States Senator.
Actor.
Okay, sit down, please.
All right.
Can I respond?
Hold it.
Hold it.
If he got up too, he would have gone at it right there in the interview.
I would have probably jumped over the dais at that point.
You have to be called out.
If not, this guy continues to get away with this stuff.
And it's just, you know, it's silly.
It's stupid.
But every now and then you need to get punched in the face.
Well, go back to the 1800s and 1700s.
They used to have canines.
And duels.
And they used to have canines.
And there was a way that men used to settle their differences.
I ignored him four times prior to that.
And people say, yes, you're supposed to ignore it.
Well, you know, I'm not a very good Christian.
I try to be a good Christian.
And I know people say you're supposed to turn the other cheek.
I prefer the David method.
But we need to move from an almost.
By the way, I'm not afraid of biting.
I will bite.
Biting?
Well, I'll bite.
I'm in a fight.
I'm going to bite.
I'll do it.
He's going to fight dirty, just like Pete Hexa says he does.
It just is going to be a bite.
In hindsight, any regrets?
No, I really don't.
So no regrets.
In fact, even after your anger had cooled, you were still bragging that if he'd only been brave enough to stand up, you'd have jumped over the dais and taught him a lesson because that's how men should settle their differences.
Do you think fighting as a resolution for political differences is a good example for the men and women of ICE and Border Patrol?
That's exactly what Trump wants.
Half a dozen Victory Lap interviews where you pointed out that the union guy was just lucky, that fear kept him from standing up.
Dana Bash asked you if you have any regrets about bringing violence to a Senate committee, and you replied that you have no regrets.
Today you've said you have no regrets about being happy, being completely understanding why I was attacked from behind.
You had no regrets about, you know, instigating a brawl in a Senate committee hearing.
Are those still your opinions?
Mr. Chairman, you're going to have your opinion.
I'm going to have mine.
As the Secretary of Homeland Security, I'm going to bring mind and security to this country, and I'm going to stay laser focused on that.
Senator Peters.
Isn't that amazing?
That's the kind of character.
I don't mean that he's got character.
I mean, he's a kind of actor that Donald Trump wants.
Donald Trump wants people who are authoritarian because he wants a totalitarian society.
He wants somebody like Mark Wayne Mullen put in charge of an institution that shouldn't even exist going back to 911, right?
Going back to 9-11, it's part of the Patriot Act.
The Department of Homeland Security should not even exist.
And he wants to put a thug like Mark Wayne Mullen in as the person who's going to run that.
Absolutely inappropriate, but that's characterization of the entire Trump regime.
You have Ann Coulter said in an op-ed piece here, she said, how can any Republican vote to confirm Mark Wayne Mullen?
I don't understand.
And certainly, I don't think the Democrats are going to vote to confirm him.
A longtime immigration hawk, Coulter, later added, amazingly, DHS nominee Mark Wayne Mullen voted against cutting welfare for non-citizens.
Not years ago, that was his vote this month.
They still don't want to stop the welfare magnet.
And of course, as you've got people who are pushing for just these thuggish tactics of ICE on the street, it is the reality is not that they're getting the worst of the worst out there.
As a reason talks about this, they point out that 73% of the people that ICE has picked up don't have any criminal record.
As a matter of fact, do you remember the guy we used to play this clip a lot, Sheriff Moonpie?
So just chill out.
You know, drink your seven up, eat a moon pie, quit murdering people.
Yeah, well, that'd be good advice for ICE, wouldn't it?
ICE and Border Patrol.
Chill out, have a moon pie.
Stop murdering people.
Well, he has pushed back against Ron DeSantis and DeSantis in Florida.
And this guy is not a liberal at all.
As a matter of fact, he's an interesting sheriff in Polk County, Grady Judd.
And he will get out there saying, hey, somebody breaks into your house, please do us a favor and kill them.
He's a pretty conservative judge.
But he's not about rounding up all the people that are here that have not committed crimes.
He said, we don't have, he said, that's a couple of lifetimes worth of work to do that.
We need to focus on the people who are criminals, who are committing crimes.
And so there was a council of Florida law enforcement leaders appointed to advise on the state's hardline immigration policies.
But instead of calling for a pathway for citizenship for certain immigrants who entered the country illegally, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said that while he had no problems working with federal authorities to deport illegal immigrants with criminal records,
he was concerned about stories from constituents about longtime residents who had been brought to the U.S. illegally as children and who had no other criminal record but were detained while checking in at ICE field offices.
And this is happening because, again, Trump put out quotas for these people.
So they're going in for the long, the low-hanging fruit.
Somebody's going in trying to get their paperwork together.
Let's just pick them up when they have their appointment.
We don't have to try to find them on the streets.
He says, while Congress sits on their hands and does nothing about this, we're on the ground floor with this day in and day out.
We're looking in the eyes of these folks that, yes, came here inappropriately, but some came here inappropriately only to do better for themselves and their families.
And again, cut off the welfare.
But Mark Wayne Mullen doesn't want to cut off the welfare.
That's what I've said.
The problem is the welfare.
He doesn't want that.
He wants to have a reason to fight, just like Trump.
That's why Trump has picked somebody like him.
So Grady Judd held a press conference on Tuesday.
To clarify his position, he stressed that he fully supports the Trump administration and ICE, but he didn't back down from his position.
that immigrants who entered the country illegally but otherwise lived as law-abiding contributing members of society said should have a path to citizenship.
He's a very notably conservative judge and a longtime ally of Ron DeSantis, often appearing with the governor at press conferences to tout DeSantis' criminal justice policies.
In fact, he has been the subject of numerous critical reason stories over the years for his office's dubious human trafficking stings and his questionable statements such as claiming on Fox and Friends that marijuana is, quote, killing people every day across the U.S.
So he's a drug warrior and he's got some issues wrong and recently has called him out on that.
But still, this is a bridge too far even for somebody who's a drug warrior, even for somebody who is a conservative sheriff.
And the comments are awkward because DeSantis has positioned Florida as one of the Trump administration's strongest allies in its mass deportation campaign.
DeSantis has made cooperating with federal immigration authorities mandatory for county and local officials under threat of him, DeSantis, removing them from office.
For example, party attorney Florida Attorney General James Untermeyer recently sent a letter to the mayor of Tampa warning that DeSantis would, quote, remove the mayor from office unless the city rescinded a policy banning the Tampa Police Department from participating in broad immigration sweeps, such as construction site raids and traffic checkpoints.
Immigration Enforcement and Thuggish Behavior00:04:02
And so the city quickly rewrote its policy.
And I don't agree with that either.
I think we need to have a separation of powers, certainly in Washington and certainly between Washington and the states and even within the states.
I don't like this kind of thuggish behavior from Ron DeSantis.
This is another black mark against Ron DeSantis.
He got several things right.
He was early on in terms of identifying the issue with the CBDC and a solution for it.
And he's been there with some other issues like that, some pro-life issues.
But remember, he went to Israel to sign a censorship bill.
Don't talk about this foreign government.
So the guy is completely owned.
And then he has the same kind of attitude in terms of Donald Trump.
And so the reason is saying this sheriff, even though he's conservative, he's standing his ground on this.
And he's absolutely right.
If somebody's a criminal, absolutely deport them.
They shouldn't be released in the first place.
This is one of the things that we see.
Well, here's this guy.
He's got a long criminal record, and he's out on the streets.
Why is that?
See, we need to stop the welfare magnet.
And then we also need to fix our government court system.
It's the government that is letting these people loose.
They came in once, but when you look at somebody who has a long rap sheet, that means that our own government is releasing them repeatedly, right?
These catch and release programs.
You need to release them into another country is what you need to do.
But they're not doing that.
And so the problem, when you look at immigration, the problem really is one that needs to be reformed.
And rather than sending out a bunch of thuggish, thuggish cops that are going to pick fights with people, kill people on the streets.
Instead of that, why don't you keep the criminals locked up?
Why don't you get rid of the criminals, deport them out of the country?
That would be the rational thing to do, but they're not going to do that.
Judge said law enforcement should continue focusing on undocumented immigrants who commit crimes.
He said, otherwise, there's two lifetimes worth of work for law enforcement to deal with.
There's so many people that are here at this point in time.
Well, we're going to take a quick break and we will be right back.
Nitrogen Mines and Global Fertilizer Crisis00:15:15
Making sense.
Common again.
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Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles and the sweet sounds of Motown.
Find them on the Oldies channel at APSradio.com.
Well, it looks like the fertilizer is about to hit the fan.
And this is something else that is coming, not just oil, but also the basis for much of the fertilizer that we get worldwide happening right now at planting season time.
You've got people in the United States saying they're having a difficult time getting fertilizer.
And the fertilizer, the elements that they're getting from this to make nitrogen-based fertilizer, one half of all globally traded sulfur and one-third of all globally traded nitrogen fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
But it's worse than that because they're going after the facilities that actually produce the stuff that they then transit through the Strait of Hormuz.
To produce the chemicals needed to grow much of the plant's crops, natural gas is broken down to extract hydrogen, which is combined with nitrogen to make ammonia and then mixed with other elements, carbon dioxide, for example.
All told, nearly a third of global trade for nitrogen fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which almost half of the world's sulfur, essential in producing phosphate fertilizers, also travels through the corridor.
But it's worse than just not being able to get the stuff through.
Because we had yesterday, actually two days ago, we had Israel and its puppet, the Trump regime, attacked a large natural gas facility that is co-owned by Iran and Qatar, our ally, supposed ally.
What are they doing that for?
I mean, that is absolutely insane that you're going to attack something that is vital and essential for world production of fertilizer and something that is co-owned by one of our allies.
But that's what Israel is doing now.
Israel wants to burn the world down.
And there's a reason for that, I believe.
I believe that they want to take the entire Middle East.
And one of the ways that you do that is to destroy their economies.
That makes it very viable.
But it's going to destroy everybody's economies here.
Fertilizer producers in other countries will be forced to shut down if they're not able to get the liquefied natural gas that normally comes to them through the state of Hormuz.
But see, even if they were to open up the Strait of Hormuz, if Israel and Iran destroy all of these different facilities that produce the natural gas, if they destroy the facilities that are the oil refineries, the oil wells, the ports, and all the rest of this stuff, it doesn't matter if the strait is open.
If they destroy the means of production, we have a long wait before we could even get that back up again, even after all the hostilities stop.
In Virginia, a farmer named John Boyd recently admitted to NBC News that local dealers are telling him we can't get the fertilizer that we need at this time of year.
The Oklahoma Farm Bureau says we're really facing a worst case scenario.
The war in Iran has led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping route, not only for oil and gas, but also for fertilizers needed to produce the world's food.
And yet, Israel and the U.S. just bombed one of the facilities that produces the fertilizer.
That's how insane this is all becoming.
So we have, as the Trump administration said, glyphosate is essential.
And we're going to compel the production of glyphosate.
And we're going to give them legal immunity from the cancer that it causes.
So many people.
You know, your product is good when you have to have the government come in and mandate that people use it.
Yeah, and protect them from liability like they did the vaccine people.
And so glyphosate, this poison, is a defense emergency, right?
But fertilizer to grow food is not.
That's the logic of Donald Gump, this idiot who is running our country right now, running it like a king, like a dictator.
Fertilizer that would normally be traveling through the Strait of Hormuz is not going to be getting into the hands of farmers around the world in the middle of April.
And so it's going to lead to more Donald Gump supply chain disruptions.
It's not just not being able to ship it, but it's being able to make it.
The New American is writing about it as well.
Raising the risk of food inflation and worsening global hunger.
You think Trump cares about any of that?
So again, American farmers always going to be taking a beating from the guy they love, Donald Trump.
Whether it's the tariffs, now the fertilizer, and the diesel fuel that they need to run their tractors and trucks, all of this.
Trump is focused on making sure, of course, he'll look out for the big ag producers.
But little guys, you know, just like Hillary Clinton said, I can't be bothered, all of you undercapitalized small businesses.
If you can't handle this by printing money on Wall Street, we don't really care about you.
Core agricultural inputs, including urea, ammonia, sulfur, nitrogen, phosphates, have surged in price as the war disrupts shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
The timing is critical.
The spike comes during spring planting.
Business Insider notes that nearly half of global urea and sulfur shipments move through the strait.
About 20% of natural gas used for nitrogen fertilizers also transits the region, according to the Fertilizer Institute.
This creates a clear bottleneck.
And when transit slows, supply contracts very quickly and input costs rise.
And again, all of this stuff was written before Israel and the United States attacked the places that produce it.
This is just about transporting it.
Catherine Austin Fitz has already dubbed this economic effect COVID 2.0.
Again, when you have Trump 2.0, you're going to get COVID-2.0.
Everything is about destroying our global supply chain.
Everything the man has done, whether you're talking about these ridiculous tariffs that he put on, his tariff tantrums that he had.
She said she questioned Catherine Austin Fitz question whether the prolonged blockades really rooted in America's inability to solve it, implying a degree of intent.
She also stressed the timing of cuts to food assistance programs by the Trump administration, raising concerns about how such decisions intersect with a rapidly worsening global supply shock.
She said the federally domestic and international food assistance systems are unconstitutional.
Yet the reality is that millions have become dependent upon them.
And so now you pull that away from them.
If you want conflict and chaos for your great reset, global supply chains are being disrupted yet again.
Food systems are coming under pressure yet again.
Trump 2.0, just like he did the first time.
Prices for essentials are rising.
To conserve energy, some countries and firms are reintroducing remote work policies.
The situation may be used as an excuse to shut down and impose other forms of control, said Catherine Austin Fitz.
And she's absolutely right about that.
Well, let's take a look at the policies of President Gump, our low IQ president.
This is an op-ed piece from the Bulwark.
Said, you won't believe Trump's dumbest Iran mistake.
As a matter of fact, he's got a lot of them.
We could spend a lot of time on these things.
Even when you've got people like John Bolton, who loves war like Lindsey Graham, complaining about it.
Well, I think it's clearly critical to reopen the Strait.
And I'm still surprised that it wasn't a priority toward the beginning of the military operation.
You know, what we did in addition to taking out air defenses was go after Iran's retaliatory strike capabilities, its ballistic missiles, production facilities, that sort of thing.
This is exactly right.
But closing the strait was another of Iran's retaliatory capabilities.
And Trump and others, Secretary of Energy, have said publicly they really hadn't thought about the effect on oil prices.
They didn't think it would be that great.
All I can say is every time I raised regime change in the first term, one of the first things people who oppose that option would say was, but they'll close the Strait of Hormuz.
So, both politically and militarily, I think this should have been done earlier, among other things that should have been done differently.
But right now, I don't think there's any choice, and I don't think the regime wants to negotiate at all.
They see this as an existential threat.
They're proving to the world what we already knew that they could close the strait and that would cause economic trouble.
And the way to open the strait is just to continue to do what we're doing militarily until the conditions make it safe to go through.
So, again, you have the guy who has no moral or legal qualms about war.
He loves war everywhere, but he's looking at this and saying, well, this is stupid if we want to win this war.
And it is.
I guess President Gump should do a clip of him sitting there saying, you know, war is like a box of chocolates.
And it's not just that you don't know what you're going to get, but you never know what you're going to do next because that's the way the Trump regime is conducting this war.
They never know what they're going to do next.
They're just going to have to see what comes out of the box.
The Pandora's box, actually.
Well, as the bulwark points out, stupid moves, not just securing the Strait of Hormuz, but even when you look at minesweepers, he said, low-grade reports about Iran mining the Strait of Hormuz.
He says, I'm skeptical about this for two reasons.
First of all, these claims seem to come from some American officials.
And he said they're no longer a trustworthy source of information.
But secondly, it's not in Iran's interest to lay mines.
Not yet.
He said, because mines are a dead man's switch.
Iran is currently looking to strike side deals for passage with China.
They want to allow some, like China and others, to go through.
He said, by relying on drones and missiles to close the strait, Iran retains the flexibility to offer selective passage, which gives it both a bargaining chip and a wedge.
Once mines are deployed, that strategic avenue is cut off and the strait is closed semi-permanently.
For that reason, deploying mines is a strategic escalation, the economic equivalent of a tactical nuke.
I would expect Iran to hold that card in reserve.
But he said, still, he said, mining the Strait of Hormuz is the single biggest danger.
America faced heading into any conflict with Iran.
How did the commander-in-chief plan to deal with it?
Well, he said, six months ago, the Navy decommissioned its four Avenger-class minesweepers that had been stationed in Bahrain precisely to deal with Iranian mines in the Strait of Hormuz.
And that's six months ago.
And he said, it gets even dumber.
Those four final American minesweepers left the theater in mid-January while war planning for this current operation was already underway.
And of course, we can look at just the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the fact that they go to war with it 40% empty.
They had absolutely no idea, no strategic plans for any of this stuff.
Well, there was an interesting op-ed piece on Asia Times saying that Iran may be where the U.S.-led world order ends.
American hegemony is unraveling in real time as Iran strikes Gulf states and U.S. security guarantees prove to be hollow.
Yeah, the regime that Trump may be changing might be his own.
Our current strategy.
I'll take it and chime in, Mr. Chairman, if you'd like it all.
Our current strategy of nation building and regime change is a proven absolute failure.
We won't break the cycle of regime change.
We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, in Libya, in Egypt, and in Syria.
Regime change takes chaos.
You've seen how that works over the last 20 years.
That hasn't been too good.
But of course, everything Trump does is about chaos.
We're getting out of the nation-building business.
Yeah.
Except in Gaza and other places like that for Israel, right?
Well, this essay points out that really the purpose of a large part of the basis of American power has been to leverage these petro states, right?
The Gulf states, the petro dollar, among other things.
And how did that operate?
Well, it was Pax Americana, the fact that we could produce stability and keep peace and keep everything moving.
And yet everything that Donald Trump has done has been designed to throw monkey wrenches into that machinery that was set up to produce prosperity and peace, especially for the Gulf states.
And that's what this war has done.
And so their point is, is that, you know, just as the Gulf states were the key support for the petro dollar, it's also the key support for their American empire.
And I say their American empire because I don't want anything to do with it.
And I don't think most Americans want an empire.
I think we'd be happy to see it collapse except for the economic cost that's going to be imposed on us when the petro dollar does collapse.
The region possesses vast oil reserves and they're now in the process of destroying that because of the wishes of Israel.
Missile Strikes and Diplomatic Trust Issues00:15:24
The strategic bargain was that Gulf states would get security protection in a region that was marked by geopolitical rivalry.
The U.S. would secure both energy stability and financial influence.
And yet what is happening now?
Well, now the U.S. is attacking major petro production facilities along with Israel.
Even as Iran threatens you destroy anything that we've got here, we're going to set the whole place on fire.
And they've already proceeded to start doing that as of today.
One major concern relates to diplomatic trust.
Negotiations between the U.S. and Iran were ongoing in Oman when the first strike occurred.
Again, treachery, perfidy.
How can you trust Pax Americana when they operate like Israel?
The legitimacy of this operation has been widely debated.
Reportedly, it lacked formal authorization from the U.S. Congress, no approval from the UN Security Council.
And of course, this is even worse than Panetta, right?
Even Leon Panetta, in that exchange with Jeff Sessions, Jeff Sessions said, well, you're not going to put troops in Syria without talking to us, are you?
Well, we will consult with our allies.
We'll talk to NATO.
We'll talk to our UN people.
We'll let you know what we decide.
He goes, well, that's not the way the Constitution works.
You've got to get Congress's approval first.
Well, Senator, we'll let you know what we decide.
Trump is acting even without going to the UN or to NATO.
Not that he should, but he doesn't care what anybody thinks.
And then when he gets into trouble, he starts calling out like, help, Mr. Wizard.
I want to go home.
So he's calling for help.
And then when they say go pound sand, then he starts threatening them through NATO.
That's the way this president operates.
So he's even worse than Lion Leon Panetta.
So Iran's retaliatory actions have targeted infrastructure and strategic locations associated with Gulf states.
Meanwhile, we do whatever BB wants, whatever Miriam Adelson and the other Zionist billionaires have paid Trump hundreds of millions of dollars to do.
So for decades, American strategy in West Asia rested on three pillars, containing Iran, maintaining the petro-dollar system, and guaranteeing the security of Gulf partners.
Well, the foundation of this system is now crumbling.
The strike in Iran has raised serious questions about both the credibility and the sustainability of U.S. leadership in the region.
One major concern relates to the diplomatic trust and the betrayal of the perfidy of saying, because that's the perfidy is actually the legal term for what the U.S. and Israel did with these negotiations in Oman.
They had a very detailed, very thorough agreement that would have stopped any possible nuclear construction from the Iranian side.
But that's not what Israel wanted.
They wanted to set the whole region on fire.
If the U.S. can't shield these Gulf states from regional escalation, can it still serve as a reliable security guarantor?
These concerns have been developing gradually.
The Gulf sites have increasingly diversified their strategic relationships.
China's expanding economic presence in the region has created alternative partnerships that were previously limited.
China has also begun to play a diplomatic role.
A 2023 agreement restoring relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran was facilitated by Beijing.
Alternative diplomatic actors are emerging in a region that historically has been dominated by American mediation.
So Trump risks undermining the very system that once sustained American leadership and their empire, which again, I don't give two figs about that.
The post-war order commanded legitimacy because it appeared to promote stability, predictable rules, and economic growth.
Think about this.
Stability, economic growth, and predictable rules.
Trump has worked against all three of those things from the very beginning, globally, not just in the Gulf area, but globally he's worked against all of those things.
If the credibility of U.S. security guarantees continues to erode in regions that once anchored its influence, and again, we've had so many wars over oil, and that has been fundamental to our petro-dollar, and the petro-dollar is crumbling as part of this as well, the global order may gradually shift toward a multipolar structure.
History suggests that moments of strategic overreach like this can accelerate deeper transformations.
For the U.S., the challenge will be whether it can adapt its leadership to a changing world or risk witnessing the slow erosion and eventual passing of the very order that it once built.
That is truly what is happening right now.
As a matter of fact, as they focus on this, you hear all this talk from Lindsey Graham and others on we've got to seize Karg Island.
Longer than he has to, and I don't think it's going to be much longer.
No, we're not going to invade Iran.
There's no reason to.
We're going to destroy their ability to hurt us, have a nuclear weapon, bill missiles to hit America and terrorize the region.
Karg Island, 90% of their income comes from oil and gas revenue.
100% of that revenue generating capabilities on a single island.
Mr. President, take Karg Island.
This war is over.
Well, that's not true.
It's not 100% of their production there.
But as one person, Danny Sutrinowitz, said, would seizing Karg Island end the war?
He says, not even close.
He said, Iran's Karg Island, the terminal through which roughly 90% of its oil exports flow, could that bring the conflict to a swift end?
That is a dangerously simplistic idea, he said, because that's the kind of ideas that we get from Lindsey Graham.
Dangerously simplistic from Lindsey Graham, from Donald Trump.
He said it reflects a narrow economic reading of the war.
First of all, the operation itself would not even be easy.
Karg Island is defended, and even if seized, holding it would be an ongoing challenge.
And by the way, in case you haven't looked at the map, Karg Island is a long way from the Strait of Hormuz.
There's little reason to believe that Iran would end the war after losing such a strategic site.
On the contrary, the loss of territory would likely harden its resolve.
Tehran has historically absorbed significant blows without capitulating.
There's no indication that this case would be any different.
Third, the control of Karg would not neutralize Iran's most important lever, its ability to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz.
Even without direct control over key nodes, Iran retains asymmetric tools that can threaten maritime traffic and global energy flow.
So while Karg is central, this is not Iran's only option.
Alternative and more limited export routes exist, and they are less efficient and more vulnerable, but they are also sufficient to prevent total economic paralysis.
The idea that there's some kind of a silver bullet that is a solution to this conflict reflects a recurring misunderstanding of Iran as a system, a misunderstanding of its resilience.
Seizing Karg is far more likely to complicate the war, to intensify Iranian responses, and to push any resolution further out of reach.
And so when Lindsey Graham says, we're not going to invade Iran, we don't need to.
We just get rid of Karg Island.
Well, good luck with that.
Going to cost a lot of lives, and it's not going to be effective either.
Dangerous and simplistic, Lindsey Graham.
And it's amazing to look at these two chicken hawks, Lindsey Graham and Sean Hannity, talking about sending other people to their death.
For what?
For Israel.
That's exactly what this is all for.
It's not going to be an effective strategy whatsoever.
And we know that.
Let's take a look at Ben Shapiro and his op-ed piece a week ago.
It has not aged very well, Ben.
As a matter of fact, I'm going to contrast what Ben Shapiro says with what David Stockman says.
David Stockman was there when he had the Marine barracks was bombed.
The couple hundred Marines were killed.
Iran was behind that.
And he said that is something that is really, that along with the embassy takeover are the two events in the minds of Americans that everybody goes back to.
But when we look at what is really happening here, the U.S. has lost about a dozen of these MQ-9 Reaper drones in the Iran war.
Now, what's going on with that?
How are they shooting down that many of them?
That's about $360 million right there.
And these things should tell us something about Iran's military capability when they're able to take down these drones that operate at such a high level.
Each of these drones costs about $30 million.
So the U.S. has lost several manned aircraft as well, including three F-35, I'm sorry, F-15 fighter jets and one KC-135 refueling tanker, which there's a dispute over that.
Say that it crash-landed.
Others say that it was shot down.
As a matter of fact, I've seen one guy who was a former military guy said, when you look at this, he said, the two dangerous times when you have a plane or when you're landing and taking off.
But he said, typically it's shot down if it goes down mid-flight, as this one did.
So it's questions about that.
Would they lie to us about that?
Of course they would.
The investigators that died suddenly have suddenly received a very concerning piece of intel they said we wanted to share with our followers regarding the war with Iran.
Over the course of the last four years, this same source has given us intel that we've shared, and they've never been wrong.
What they're saying is America only has about a week of missiles left to defend allies in the Middle East.
And that is the key issue.
So everybody said from the very beginning, who's going to run out of missiles first?
Well, nobody knows how many the other side has to start with with any certainty.
However, what we do know is that with these systems, they had to anti-missile systems, they had to fire two or three missiles for every missile that the Iranians fired.
So unless we've got two or three times the amount of missiles that they had, and they're already talking about that, of course, they'll come back and say, no, we have virtually unlimited amounts of conventional bombs and other things like that.
But these very, very expensive anti-ballistic missile systems that we have, we don't have that many of them.
And so what it's looking like now is that, as many people said from the beginning, you had people like Scott Ritter, people like Colonel McGregor, who were saying that the Iranians were using their older missiles at the very beginning of the conflict, sending masses of them in to exhaust the supply of defending anti-missile systems that they had, at the same time attacking the radar sites that gave them early warning.
They said their most sophisticated stuff they were holding in reserve to use after all the defense systems were gone.
And when you look at the claims that Iran has hypersonic missiles, if they have hypersonic missiles, even though it's about a thousand miles between the center, geographical center of Iran and the geographical center of Israel, even though that's about a thousand miles, it only takes about four or five minutes for the missiles to get in from launch.
And I remember going back to the Cuban missile crisis.
I was in second grade in Florida, and everybody was talking about how little warning we would have.
So I went back and looked that up.
And to go from Cuba, which is like 90 miles away from Florida, into Florida with a missile at that time, 60 years ago, it would take about 10 minutes.
So think about that.
You know, 90 miles in about 10 minutes.
This is now compressed it to where you could go 1,000 miles in four or five minutes.
So there's no early warning with this.
And that's why, and the things are moving fast enough that there is no defense against them.
So we don't know, but it appears this is going to escalate.
And if you look at the number of missiles and the number of drone strikes, there was a huge amount at the very beginning on the first day of the war.
And then it tapered off very quickly.
But now it is starting to pick back up again.
So it doesn't look like all the hubris and bragging from Trump and Warpete doesn't look like that's true.
It doesn't look like they took out all of their missile sites.
And then, of course, one of the other things that this post had up from their sources said China is weighing an invasion of Taiwan by July of this year because of the very real distraction and depletion of U.S. military stockpiles of troops, resources for the Iran conflict.
And of course, they're watching what is happening in the Strait of Hormuz and saying, well, look at this.
The U.S. can't really operate here.
They don't know how they can, you know, they don't really have a good path for controlling that.
And we could do the same thing in the Strait of Taiwan.
They also say U.S. casualties have easily reached 500, with many injured and dead that have not yet been admitted by the Pentagon.
As a matter of fact, it's kind of interesting.
Somebody posted this report from Fox News and said, have we entered the hide the bodies stage yet of this war?
Military base when the remains of the six U.S. service members killed in the crash of that refueling aircraft are returned to their families.
Obviously, a very solemn moment.
John, this is, of course, the second time since launching the war with Iran that the president will attend the solemn military ritual known as the dignified transfer.
Yeah, we should point out that at the request of the families, the dignified transfer is going to remain private.
There will not be any cameras there.
So unlike we have seen in the past, we will not see scenes of the president welcoming the heroes back home.
Do you think that is at the request of the families?
Or you think the Pentagon is pushing that?
Military Quagmire and Armed Conflicts00:12:40
Well, let's take a look at what Ben Shapiro said a week ago, March the 12th.
He said, the three big lies about the Iran war.
This was a week ago, hasn't aged very well.
It's totally laughable, quite frankly.
Even then it was.
And so he's got three reasons here.
And I got to say, if this doesn't destroy the credibility of Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro, I don't know what will.
Certainly what they have done in terms they have revealed themselves just to be apologists and influencers and propagandists for Zionism.
They don't care about the truth, and they certainly don't care about America.
So lie number one, says Ben Shapiro, is that the war is a quagmire.
Oh, yeah.
We don't have to worry about it being a quagmire, do we?
Why would anybody think it's a quagmire?
Well, he said, this is absurd.
At the time of this writing, the conflict, this was a week ago, the conflict is less than two weeks old.
So how can we talk about it being a quagmire?
Do you think, Ben, it might have to do with the understanding that everybody has that Trump A didn't have any plans, hadn't even thought about the Strait of Hormuz.
These guys really hadn't thought it through.
How about maybe a quagmire is because they haven't defined what winning looks like?
And if you don't have an objective, then war just goes on and on and on.
And perhaps that is the objective for Israel's purposes.
And so it may also be a quagmire because all of their chest beating and braggadosio is shown to not be true.
And it might be a quagmire because now they are planning to try to have assaults with Marines on land, put boots on the ground and boots in the ground.
Going to get a lot of people killed.
Maybe that's what has everybody asking whether or not this is going to be another Vietnam.
The Iranian regime is Philistines.
If you put boots on the ground in Iran, it will be another Vietnam.
Are you afraid of that?
No, I'm not afraid of, I'm really not afraid of anything.
Yeah, you've got to love those Irish reporters.
They're not afraid to ask the pointed questions there.
So again, he says, somehow Iran is winning.
Well, really?
You know, when we look at what is going on with war, Pete, why would we think that Iran is winning?
Well, look at the explanations that we get from war people.
I've played this clip before.
You know, the Strait of Hormuz, he says, is not really closed.
Oh, really?
So I'll take it and chime in, Mr. Chairman, if you'd like at all.
I want to emphasize what the chairman said about that.
The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping.
It is open for transit should Iran not do that.
Now, there's a reason why we chose as one of our primary objectives to destroy the Navy.
We understood the ability to interdict shipping is something Iran has done for 40 years.
It's key terrain.
They've used it as leverage.
The world is seeing what they'll do to fight back in that context.
And so we've heard them talk about taking various measures, and we're planning for all of them.
So we have a plan for every option here.
We're working with our international plan for every option.
And that's not a strait we're going to allow to remain contested or with a lack of flow of commercial goods.
So we're aware of that.
We're laser-focused on our military objectives, but also want to make sure our partners across this government understand we're working with you to make sure that energy flows.
And that's an important part.
Except it's not.
And of course, the war is like a box of chocolates.
Pete never knows what he's going to get next, right?
And he said we had to make sure that we destroyed their Navy first.
They didn't have much of a navy to destroy.
Bottom line, Iraq didn't have a navy.
Afghanistan didn't have a navy.
They didn't need one to defeat the U.S.
And they don't need one either.
You know, the Navy is not really what is going to be closing the Strait of Hormuz.
And even if it was the Navy, the U.S. destroyed their own minesweeping abilities I just reported in January.
They had decided six months ago they're going to decommission their minesweepers and they removed them in January as they were planning what they might do with this.
So none of this makes any sense.
So that's why Ben Shapiro, everybody thinks that Iran is somehow winning with this.
And then he says, and then the third thing is that the oil shock will break the United States.
Well, Ben Shapiro is not old enough to remember the OPEC oil embargo.
But those of us who are, those of us who remember Vietnam, those of us who remember the oil embargo, know how much this looks like that.
And that's why we are looking at this.
He said, right now, critics are just spinning worst-case scenarios.
Well, what he's doing is he's spinning a best case scenario for Israel, not for us.
And when you go back and contrast what he had to say with what David Stockman had to say.
Now, David Stockman was in the Trump administration, and he was in the meetings when they were talking about what happened with the U.S. Marines in the Beirut barracks in September 1983.
He said that attack was on armed U.S. Marines that were there to fight.
He said it didn't flow from Iran's hatred of American freedoms way over here.
It was in retaliation for Washington's help to Saddam Hussein to slaughter their armed teenage conscripts way over there in their own backyard.
He said, Washington's utterly gratuitous 1980s alliance with the very one and same Saddam Hussein, who 20 years later was swinging from the end of an American rope.
And so we were there with armed troops to support Saddam Hussein and what he was doing.
And we're also supporting what was happening in the Iraq-Iran war and getting involved in the Lebanon war.
He said, so context and history make a difference.
The MA propagandists who always opened their Iran 47 years of war on America, a big lie, they cite the 1983 Marine Barracks bombing.
They have no clue about how or why or when it happened.
He said, as a member of the National Security Council, I saw it all up close and personal.
Needless to say, our viewing was also to the proverbial visit to the sausage factory.
That is, it was unappetizing in the extreme.
The errors that led to the stationing of Marines in Beirut and the tragic deaths of 181 soldiers in September 83 stemmed from the same old, same old.
The imperatives of empire and the utterly mistaken notion that America needed allies in the Middle East and had to engage in active policies of the region in the name of national security.
He said, even more visible today as we look back at it, he said, after all, 1983 marked the fading hours of the Soviet empire that was collapsing from the sheer dead weight of communism internally.
And so he said, here's the thing, in virtually all of the urgent National Security Council discussions which transpired on nearly a daily basis, it was never explained to us as to how America's security would be enhanced by getting in the middle of this new Israeli spat with Lebanon, which has now opened up yet again.
So he says, as the crisis heated up, needless to say, we began to wonder about why we were there at all.
So he took the trouble to get a series of private briefings from CIA analysts with regards to these matters.
We recall these briefings quite vividly because they showed that it was well understood in the bowels of national security apparatus even then that the Reagan administration was plunging into a veritable hornet's nest of historical, religious, political, and ethnic animosities that were almost beyond comprehension.
Alas, the predicates of empire simply overruled any influence of plain facts and common sense.
The predicate was that America needed to assist its ally, Israel, even as it attempted to stabilize the surrounding region, which was afire with essentially irrelevant conflict.
Stated differently, even the National Security Council of Ronald Reagan was blinded by the imperatives of empire.
Accordingly, in the aftermath of the barracks bombing, the National Security Council deliberations reached a low point of absurdity, which is a reminder of why a global empire should not be run from the banks of the Potomac.
And again, so I was just pointing out the stability and prosperity of the region was a key foundation of the American empire and of the petrodollar.
And we have now destroyed all of those things.
The U.S. is showing that it can't be trusted as a negotiator because we engaged in perfidy and treachery.
We don't care about peace.
We don't care about prosperity.
So that is where we are right now.
I've got a couple of comments before we take a break.
Guard Goldsmith, good to see you, Guard.
Liberty Conspiracy says, DeSantis was identified by Gitmo prisoners who were tortured there.
Yeah, that's another thing.
When he was a JAG, he visited the base and saw the torture, did nothing to report the war crimes.
Yeah, that's another big mark against him as well.
MAV 2022 says, now thugs are showing up at people's houses in Florida and questioning them about social media posts if they question Israel.
That's right.
I mean, just think about this.
As a governor, first of all, he's going to Sign a law that contradicts the plain reading of the First Amendment, right?
But then he goes to this foreign country to sign it.
That's just an amazing display.
It shows that he really doesn't care.
He's just like Donald Trump when it comes to that.
We need to have somebody that is not beholden to Israel, that is not a puppet of Israel.
Swamplover says, New York State has made it almost impossible to get ammunition.
No mail order, and you need a background check at the counter to buy locally.
That's something that goes back really, first saw that with the Obama administration.
They realized that they need to focus on ammunition even more so than on gun control.
And what they did was they started going after it from a supply standpoint, even.
They stopped momentarily, they got restarted, but they tried to stop the recycling of brass for ammunition from the military.
So when the military had spent brass, they could sell it to people who are making private ammunition, and they could make a lot more money with that.
Instead, what they did was they, and I remember it was up in New York, it's Fort Trump.
They crushed the brass and then sold it as scrap to China for a fraction of what they could have sold it as spent brass.
North American House Depot says, no cop nor anybody else under the age of 40 ever knew America as something approaching a free country.
That's right.
I agree.
Marky Mark, New Jersey said, Dave, the USMC troops, Marines are guarding the barracks, they were guarding the barracks in Lebanon in 1983, weren't allowed to have their guns loaded.
Had they been loaded, they could have stopped the truck and its bomb.
That's right.
That's the other part of the absurdity of this stuff.
They don't know how to fight a war and they don't really care about the lives of their soldiers.
And I think we're going to see that in a big way once Trump gets that the Marines and that amphibious disaster that is waiting to happen.
Once he gets that there, we're going to see it yet again.
We're going to take a quick break, folks.
be right back.
You're listening to The David Knight Show.
Gold Repricing and Inflation Expectations00:14:34
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Well, while we're talking about the economic consequences of all this stuff, the petro dollar being undermined even more so, and the oil region, key oil region being set on fire, let's take a look at what's going on with gold.
Why is Wyoming stashing gold inside this old newspaper building?
They're wrapping it in old newspapers.
Who knows?
Trump's occasional tough talk about slashing the U.S.'s monstrous $38.9 trillion debt bomb.
His administration has zero real political will to slam the brakes on Washington's out-of-control spending spree.
As a matter of fact, they can't even reduce the amount of money that they're giving to refugees coming here like the Smalleys.
They double that in the face of all this stuff.
So Wyoming Republicans are gearing up for the inevitable economic train wreck when the day comes that America can no longer just print its way out of paying the interest on that colossal tab.
That's one of the things that Frank Nicely was very big on here in Tennessee.
He said, we need to get a regional agreement here to stockpile gold for this very issue.
And he was working with Catherine Austin-Fitz and others to try to do that.
I don't know what the state of that is anymore here in Tennessee.
In January, Wyoming lawmakers shelled out $10 million to snap up 2,312 Troy ounces of gold bars now worth $11.6 million.
So far, it's been a good investment.
But as I said before, they've got pushback from this rhino, Mark Gordon, who's the Republican governor, the guy who doesn't like the 10th Amendment.
I talked about that yesterday.
They had put together some legislation saying we're going to nullify federal gun control that's in defiance of the Second Amendment, and we're going to do that by non-commandeering, which is perfectly fine, a way to nullify these issues.
And he doesn't like that.
No, no, you do what Washington says.
So he also doesn't like people making preparations for an out-of-control meltdown of the fiat dollar.
The move came after the legislature passed the Wyoming Gold Act, forcing the state's investment portfolio to load up on precious metals as a hedge against economic chaos, including skyrocketing federal debt, raging inflation, a weakening dollar, and other doomsday scenarios.
I can't put a timeline on it, said the lead sponsor, but there's going to be a sovereign debt crisis.
There is no will in Washington to rein in spending.
So the goal is sitting, the gold is sitting locked in a high security vault being run by a private firm inside a beige single-story building that once housed the Casper, Wyoming Star Tribune.
The vault is structured like an onion layer, they said, moored to bedrock and closely guarded.
According to the company chief executive that's there, he testified in support of the gold buying bill, which he said would help the state become a precious metals hub for the country.
While state lawmakers mused about the logistics of transporting precious metals to Wyoming via aircraft and armored vehicle, the state ultimately bought gold from a bank that had already had a stockpile in the reserve.
The storage fees there had been at $7,000 a year when the state purchased the gold, but cost fluctuates daily, depending on gold's value, according to the state treasurer's office.
And this is all being pushed back against by the governor, who doesn't like it at all.
Yeah, no gold and no preparation for a catastrophe.
You shouldn't own guns.
You shouldn't own gold, says the Republican governor.
But you know what the truth is about all this.
And so we just had the Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, say this is the time that we're going to skip changing the interest rates, not going to reduce the interest rates, even though, as he pointed out, we had zero private job creation.
The only jobs being created are bureaucracies that are going to be standing on our necks and keeping us from being able to do anything productive.
Zero job creation.
And he said in his report, he said, we have never had this before in our history.
Zero job creation.
You know, we look at the stagflation that happened when the OPEC oil embargo happened.
This Trump oil embargo that is there is going to be much more disruptive in terms of the quantity of oil that is disrupted in all this.
And when we look at what happened in the 1970s, the stagflation, well, it looks like the stag part of it is already here, already stagnant.
And the inflation is going to be following very quickly here.
How did gold perform back then?
As I pointed out the other day, from the time that they did the OPEC oil embargo to the time that it peaked in January 1980, it went up about eight and a half times.
We're talking about, what, $40,000 gold, if that were to gold, if that were to happen today.
Of course, past performance is no predictor of future performance.
But when we look at the factors that drove that, the things that created the stagflation look very similar.
As a matter of fact, even if you look at what it fell back to right after the peak of $800 an ounce, it fell back into the mid-$500 an ounce area.
So, I mean, it was still up by about a factor of five.
So, looking at it from today, that'd be $20,000 gold.
But again, who knows what's going to happen?
We do know that what they're doing is very reckless, and there is a great physical realignment, says one set of analysts.
This is from a bank that operates out of Belgium and France.
Their analysts who look at commodities are predicting gold at $10,000 and silver at $200, and the death of the paper market.
This is a chief strategy officer at BNP Paribas Fortis, which is, as I said before, a Belgium and French bank.
He said, While the paper markets are currently in a state of panic, the physical world is just waking up to what will be the largest bull market in history.
They said, the fundamental case for hard assets being bolstered by a stagflation environment where central banks may be forced to abandon price stability to prevent a broader economic collapse.
They said they are, quote, absolutely convinced that central banks eventually will all choose to let inflation run so they can manage massive global debt loads, particularly in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.
Again, this is called monetizing the debt.
You run up this tremendous debt, and then you have inflation so that you can pay back the dollar-denominated debt with dollars that are worth a lot less, or he could even say worth less dollars.
And that's the strategy of monetizing the debt.
That's why they always want to have, as a goal, 2% inflation.
Well, they may get a lot more than that.
So, they said they will prioritize growth and they will allow inflation to run well above the traditional 2% target.
Gold will go to $10,000, they think, in a couple of years' time.
And he said he wouldn't be surprised to see $200 or so on silver in that amount of time as well.
And then he talks about energy warfare, talking about South Pars and the $150 oil risk.
Well, South Pars is the name of that liquid natural gas facility that was struck a couple of days ago by Israel and also by the U.S. that is co-owned by our ally, Qatar.
And so he said the physical reset is taking place against a backdrop of direct military strikes on Iran's energy infrastructure, specifically the South Pars gas field.
And already we have seen, and so he's saying, well, we might get up to $150 oil risk.
It peaked briefly at $120 a week or so ago.
This morning, it had already gone up to $114,000 because not only did they strike this facility that produces a lot of natural gas and produces all the other things that come from it, the fertilizer and other stuff like that, but then Iran began striking all these other facilities as they promised they would.
And so oil is up at $114 per barrel this morning.
So gold prices remain stuck below 5,000 as the federal leaves, the Fed leaves rates unchanged, but still sees lower rates coming this year.
So they're going to have this choice.
Are they going to support jobs or are they going to support and try to fight inflation?
Well, I think that the bank in the one that we just talked about, this in France and Belgium, I think they got it right.
I think the central banks are going to choose to monetize these massive debts because we're not the only ones that have essentially bankrupted themselves with debt.
And so they're going to allow inflation to run.
Trump's war for Israel is going to create inflation regardless of what the Fed does with interest rates.
So they're not going to be able to fight by lowering interest rates.
They're not going to be able to fight the inflation that's going to be coming because of the oil embargo from Trump.
That is going to flood everything they could possibly try to do.
And so when we look at it, said commodity analyst at another group, CRU Group, this is a group that does what they describe as business intelligence.
They look at mining metals and also fertilizer.
They said that goals climb from roughly $2,000 an ounce a year ago to now around to a high around $5,600 in January.
Think about that.
We're looking at this and it's kind of settled out for the last month or so around the $5,000 an ounce basis, but it was $2,000 an ounce a year ago.
They said that it is doing some repricing within the existing monetary framework rather than a collapse of the monetary framework.
However, they explained the U.S. holds just over 8,100 tons of gold in official reserves.
And if you start to look at it in terms of what would they do if they were to try to back the dollar with gold, where would gold be?
Well, they wouldn't have to have gold if you look at M2 money supply.
If they were to back that with gold, that would imply $85,000 an ounce gold.
So that's not going to happen.
Meanwhile, even a 20% backing would take us to $17,000 gold.
Tying gold to just the nation's monetary base suggests a range between $8,000 and $20,000, depending on the level of coverage.
So these figures are not forecasts, but they highlight the scale mismatch between modern financial systems and gold reserves.
Gold's upside is that it is not constrained by mining supplies or by industrial demand, but by how much instability the system can tolerate before investors demand protection.
So how much of this kind of instability and chaos are people going to take from Trump before they all start looking for gold?
We're starting to get a hint of that right now.
So they point out global debt burdens, especially are expected to exceed 100% of GDP for many countries around the world.
So the inflation to monetize the debt.
And if not, they're not going to be able to even service this debt because it has gotten so high.
So it expects gold prices to continue rising in the near term with a peak around $6,000 an ounce, likely over the next year.
That doesn't seem to be too extraordinary, does it?
Because we've already hit 5,600 in January.
If it were to go from where it is right now to 6,000, that would be a 20% increase, which is still amazing for anything that you can invest in.
Again, One of the islands of stability in all this chaos and disruption that Trump is creating is gold and silver.
And if you go to davidknight.gold, that'll take you to Tony Arteman, helps you to do something about that, to have physical gold and physical silver.
We're going to take a quick break and we will be right back.
Telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
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Yeah, right here.
Mr. Secretary, you have said that the U.S. military has essentially aerial superiority, naval superiority over Iran, yet we're not escorting ships to the Strait of Hormuth.
Precision Strikes and Shaping Operations00:06:13
Why?
How did you not plan for this?
We planned for it.
recognize it um because i know about that We want to do it sequentially in a way that makes the most sense for what we want to achieve and ensure that we're sending the right signals to the world when we do so.
What we're up against, what we want to say to the world, how we want them to see and understand the conflict.
It's like this whole idea of the war widening.
That's what the press wants to make it look like, like it's widening and chaos.
No, we're actually closing in on grabbing hold of and controlling what objectives we want to achieve and how we want to achieve them.
It's called shaping operations and setting the conditions.
But when you shape the international lies and propaganda.
Foolish political leaders and foolish military leaders of the past will hang an exact deadline on it.
Or here's exactly when we'll do what we're going to do.
Or here's how long it's going to take us.
And then if you meet that, maybe you meet it.
But if you don't, you fail.
And if you're far beyond, we know exactly what we're shaping and why.
We're sending those signals working across the interagency.
The Strait of Hormuz is something we've paid attention to from the beginning.
And the American people can rest assured we will ensure that our interests are advanced, no doubt.
No, you dismissed that from the very beginning.
Trump thought he was going to have an instant victory.
And I also just trust me.
Yeah, we are the professionals here.
We're the experts.
We've got laser focus on all this stuff.
I've got plans.
I just can't tell you what they are.
We've got a timeframe here, but I just can't tell you what it is.
Well, let's tell you what's happening right now.
Israel just made the single most dangerous military decision of the entire war.
Nobody understands what they just triggered.
Israel and the United States struck South Pars, the largest gas field on the planet.
Here's what they either didn't know or didn't care about.
South Pars is jointly managed by Iran and Qatar.
They didn't just attack Iran.
They attacked the energy backbone of their own Gulf ally.
The Iranians just declared all major energy facilities across the entire GCC as direct and legitimate targets.
And they're acting on that as of this morning because of the time difference.
They did that overnight.
They have warned that strikes are coming in the coming hours.
Already evacuated workers from the Sam Ref refinery in Yanbu.
They're not waiting.
They know what's coming.
Iranian hackers have already hit Aramco's digital systems. posting images and issuing threats to paralyze their infrastructure.
Multiple explosions just heard in Riyadh, confirmed by Reuters, AFP, and AP.
Sirens are sounding in the Saudi capital.
So why is all this happening?
Well, because Qatar's LNG complex is the largest of its sort on earth.
It supplies 30% of the world's liquid natural gas.
If Iran hits it, Europe's heating and supply disappears overnight.
Not in months, but overnight.
And they have made a big move into gas in Europe because of all this environmental nonsense.
That's why the Nord Stream pipelines going into Germany were such a big deal.
And of course, the U.S. wanted those blown up.
In 2019, a single drone attack on Saudi Aramco's Abquake facility, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, knocked out 5.7 million barrels per day and sent oil up 15% in one session.
Iran now has 10 times the motivation and nothing left to lose.
They're showing precision strikes on Iranian targets.
That's what Pete Hekseth likes to talk about.
But what they're not showing you is that those strikes just gave Iran the justification to destroy every oil facility from Qatar to Saudi Arabia to the UAE.
So Israel and its puppet USA bomb a gas field that is jointly owned with their ally, Qatar.
Then Qatar, our ally, publicly condemns the U.S.
Then Iran formally declares Gulf facilities all to be legitimate targets.
Iramco starts evacuating refineries.
Explosions hit Riyadh.
If this was a strategic victory, then why is Iramco evacuating workers right now?
If Iran's military is degraded, why are six Gulf nations scrambling to protect their oil fields from an attack that they believe is imminent?
Crickets.
We don't hear anything from these people.
You don't evacuate the world's most valuable company unless you know what is coming.
And this is what is happening right now.
This is the way the Petro war is unfolding here.
This is no longer a war between the U.S. and Iran.
This is a war that is about to erase the Gulf's entire energy infrastructure.
The infrastructure that powers half of the planet.
And of course, what happens is when you look at these Gulf states, right, there's a lot of these monarchs and kings that have been created when the U.S. and the British went in and created these different countries so they could extract the oil.
They said, yeah, we're going to give you a huge cut of this.
So these guys have gotten fat and lazy.
They hire everything out, including their defense forces.
And their entire country is basically running off of the massive amounts of money that they have as oil fiefdoms.
Biblical Genesis and Divine Land Promises00:03:53
If that gets cut off, if they destroy these facilities and these people run out of money, what happens then?
It'll be total chaos and anarchy in all of these Gulf states.
And I am starting to believe that maybe this was really the plan of Israel, that the Iranian stuff was absolute nonsense, that really what they wanted was to burn down the Middle East, to create chaos and regime change in all of these countries, so they could then step in.
Do you remember the back and forth that Mike Huckabee had with Tucker Carlson?
You've appealed to Genesis.
Genesis 15 says it's Abram, it's pre-Abraham, it's Abram, receives from God the news that his descendants will inherit the land.
And you tell me as the theologian, if I'm getting this wrong, but from the Euphrates to the Nile.
I think that's right.
And that would include basically the entire Middle East.
That would be the Levant.
So that would be Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon.
It would also be big parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
I'm not sure it would go that far.
I mean, it would be a big piece of land.
But here's the point.
It would be a lot of places that are now countries that this particular area that we're talking about now, Israel, is a land that God gave through Abraham to a people that he chose.
It was a people, a place, and a purpose.
We can look at it that way.
Christian Zionism, I want to go back because that's where we started.
I'm not going to let you off on this because you have said three times that God gave this land to this people.
And so it is entirely fair for me with respect to ask, what land are you talking about?
Because I just read Genesis 15, as I have many times.
And that land, I think it says, from the Nile to the Euphrates, which is, once again, basically the entire Middle East.
So God gave that land to his people, the Jews, or he didn't.
You're saying he did.
What does that mean?
Does Israel have the right to that land?
Because you're appealing to Genesis.
You're saying that's the original deed.
It would be fine if they took it all.
Again, maybe that is the plan.
You know, as you heard Huckabee say, it's a people, a place, and a purpose.
And yet, Huckabee, who says that he's Christian, doesn't see the purpose of God's promise to Abraham, doesn't see the purpose as being Christ.
It is Christ through whom all nations will be blessed.
Obviously, not through Israel.
We're not being blessed through Israel at all.
They're plunging the world into chaos and war.
And of course, the people, here we get back to the ethnic racism of the master race, the chosen people.
That is not Christian either.
There is no Jew or Greek, male or female, bond or free, under Christ Jesus.
It's all based on your relationship with God.
Do you trust him?
Do you follow him?
It's not based on your pedigree.
That is the word.
And then the place.
What is the place?
Well, of course, the place is all of it, all of the Middle East that should be given to this racist state.
And so this is Huckabee denying Christ and worshiping Israel.
And that really is key.
And it shouldn't be just dismissed as Gerald Celenti does as a fairy tale.
It's not a fairy tale.
It is an abomination and a twisting of the word of God.
And that is very serious.
That is the most serious aspect of this.
But there's always consequences when you get your theology wrong.
Consequences for Humanity and Control00:03:47
And this consequence is going to be humongous for humanity and what we're looking at here.
But I think they're looking for the entire thing.
And one of the ways that they do it is by destroying everything as they did in Gaza and then making their plans as Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Trump the real estate guys.
You know, they're rubbing their hands on the sideline as well.
They're going to be able to participate in this great reset building.
And frankly, I think that's really what is behind all this stuff.
North American House Hippo.
He says, for those old enough to remember when Saddam Hussein set Kuwait's oil rigs on fire as the forces retreated.
Yeah, that's right.
Scorched earth policy is pretty easy to do in oil fuels, isn't it?
Star Barkley, thank you so much for the tip.
I appreciate that.
And I just want to let people know, I didn't get to, we went a little bit longer because we had some technical difficulties at the beginning of the show.
And I don't know how long we were dead on air, but I think we have made up for it plus a little bit more.
So we're going to go ahead and end it now.
But thank you, Star Barkley.
I really do appreciate that.
I want to let everybody know where we're on the gas gauge.
Right now we're at 50%.
So we really do appreciate all the support.
And let me just, before we go, let me just real quickly read out as a thank you the names of the people, first names and last name of those who have supported us on Zelle.
We have William R., Kenneth C., Susan L. Same names I keep seeing all the time.
Gregory N., Stacey A., Marilyn G., Brian P., Benjamin R., Michael P. Rose, Gregory C., Gregory I, Kelly Ann M, Daniel C., and Sally D. Thank you all so much for your support.
I really do appreciate it.
And as I said, we are at 50% of the gas gauge now.
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The Common Man.
They created Common Core to dumb down our children.
They created Common Past to track and control us.
Their Commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the Communist Future.
They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
But each of us has worth and dignity, created in the image of God.
That is what we have in common.
That is what they want to take away.
Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
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