Glenn Beck and Jack Carr analyze a military operation in Iran as part of President Trump's strategy to dismantle the CRINK alliance, highlighting U.S. superiority over Chinese and Russian air defenses. They outline three potential outcomes ranging from a stable, non-hostile state to mere baseline stability, emphasizing decapitation and deterrence over nation-building to avoid past failures like Iraq. The discussion contrasts this precise approach with decades of failed diplomacy since the 1983 Beirut bombing while warning that domestic defunding of homeland security increases vulnerability to internal threats. Ultimately, the segment argues that shifting regional dynamics and targeted force are essential to ending proxy chaos without repeating historical mistakes. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, on today's podcast, there's a couple of things.
We had Jack Carr on.
He is fantastic talking about, you know, what he thinks about what's going on in Iran, what happened, what is possibly coming our way.
Really important.
Also, I talked about what does a win look like?
We have to define that.
But in the last hour, and you should listen to the whole expanded version if you want to get the whole thing, but we have a piece of it here in the edited podcast.
I spent the weekend wondering what I was going to say to you.
And the last thing I wanted to do was convince you that I was right.
Because I don't know.
I don't know how this ends.
But I know what my principles are.
And so how do you answer, is this America first?
Is this in our national interest?
Is this just?
And if we're doing this because of, you know, all of the people that are being enslaved or killed, why aren't we in Sudan?
I had to answer all those questions this weekend just so I know what I believed, and I shared those thoughts with you so you can figure out what you believe all on today's podcast, Berna launcher.
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You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck Program.
Jason, do you have any more charts to show us?
So I've got what it took in the Venezuela compound.
And it's really interesting when you think about what the kind of hardware that was used to harden Venezuela and Maduro versus later an upgraded version of that for Iran.
I want you to take a look at this.
Producer Matt, throw this up really quick.
So this is.
I think this goes to my point on a bigger vision.
What is Trump's bigger vision?
And that is crink.
China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, crink.
And when you understand his bigger vision of building a more peaceful, robust West and reducing the power of crink, this strike over the weekend really makes an impact.
And this is just one of the impacts.
Shown what happened in North Korea, then how they upgraded everything in Iran and how well that worked.
I think you meant Venezuela, not North Korea, but Venezuela.
Sorry, yeah, Venezuela.
So in Venezuela, they had multiple.
So we were just talking about this, the insiders and I were about this is one of those areas that was considered, Producer Matt, throw that back up really quick.
This is one of those areas that was supposed to be so hardened that it was basically untouchable.
Now, they did this, the Venezuelans, they hardened it.
It's a surgical strike.
It's not a shock and awe.
We're just taking out everything.
It's very specific.
Now, they did this, or the Venezuelans tried to repel something like this with Chinese, a serviced air missile system called the HQ-9 and the Russian S-300 system.
Now, they're specifically designed to thwart stealth technology.
That's the entire reason that you get them is because of that.
Well, that was proven ineffective.
So the Iranians, what they decided to do was, and I'll throw this back up again, was to harden this unhittable area with upgraded versions of what was in Venezuela.
So they got the HQ-9B from China.
They got the S-400 system from the Russians.
These were supposedly designed to go after stealth aircraft and to make their area the hardened of hard areas to where you cannot do anything about.
Well, now we have seen both models of that.
And this stuff is, it's being sold and used all over the world as completely ineffective, completely ineffective.
So now everybody all across the world is wondering what an actual guarantee of safety from nations like China and Russia.
What the heck does that even mean this morning?
Pretty much nothing.
I think that's why you are seeing the typical fence sitters, the people who are friends, but not friends, and they kind of play, India is one of them.
They kind of play the middle ground.
They play us off of Russia, et cetera, et cetera.
I think just militarily speaking, and there's a lot of other reasons for it, but just militarily speaking, we have, through Donald Trump and his use of the military and Pete Hegseth and the way he has put this together with our joint chiefs of staff, they have demonstrated the U.S. military has prowess over the rest of the world, unlike anything I think we have had, well, since World War II.
And I think we might have been, we are more ahead than we were in World War II from the rest of the world.
The only thing that put us way ahead was a nuclear weapon.
We had to use that twice, and that was just so deadly.
That's not what's putting us ahead, not some big, deadly weapon, although we may have one of those.
It's the way we're skirting around everyone else's technology that is making us a mofo.
And the world is figuring that out.
And that's got to be freaking the people in Russia and China out just for the sales.
Imagine being a rep that is going to these big defense seminars and these big conventions where people are selling national defense.
And imagine the U.S. booth and then the China and Russia booth that is selling all the stuff we've just defeated in two different places.
I mean, spectacularly defeated.
I don't think we need anything except just a little screen behind us showing what has happened in Venezuela and Iran.
Can you imagine trying to sell that stuff against us?
I mean, there's no guarantee of any of that, any of that.
I want to take you through this list.
Thank you, Jason.
I want to take you through this list of things that I went through this weekend.
You know, is this America first?
Is this a just war?
Is this part of a bigger strategy?
What do we have to look out for if things go well?
And what do we have to look out for if things go horribly?
And, you know, the things that even if it goes well, we saw what's going to happen.
We're going to have things like we had in Austin yesterday, a shooter who was just a crazy man, but, you know, he gave his life to Allah.
And enjoy those virgins, buddy.
Enjoy those virgins.
But he gave his life for Allah and killed three people yesterday in Austin, Texas.
Those people are here, and we have to have a conversation with that.
We also need to see, you know, what's happening with our own Congress.
You know, Congress has shut off the funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
That means TSA.
That means lines are going to get longer.
It means that scanning will go down.
There will be holes in the system because we're not paying the people.
And if they don't show up, they don't show up because they're having to work for free.
And I don't know if you've noticed this, but those aren't the rich people in our society.
The people who are working there are clearly being paid a livable wage, and that's about it.
And for them to work without income is asking an awful lot.
But what are you going to do?
The Democrats don't want to fund it.
The Democrats should, the first thing they should do when they return to town, I think on Wednesday, they're not even working today.
When they return to town, the first thing they should do is fund the Department of Homeland Security because agree or disagree with a war, this is going to make us very vulnerable.
And we need all hands on deck right now.
By the way, it also defunds the Coast Guard.
So don't worry, but nothing comes in on our beaches.
Nothing at all.
But let me take you through one thing of this long list of mine, and that is what does a win look like?
Because that's where you have to start.
You don't take any action unless you say, okay, well, what does it look like?
We do all this stuff before we even start planning it, before I ask any other questions, what does it look like in the end if we win?
I don't have a grandiose version of what it looks like if we win.
I mean, I guess I do in some ways.
It's stable and free and supports the West.
Okay, that would be nice.
If it would return to, you know, the Iran of 1975 and it was stable and Western and the intellectuals were there and it became a powerhouse.
That would be utopia.
Be great.
That's not, I'm not expecting that.
I'm not expecting that.
I would settle for a couple of things.
And I've got three different versions of what a win looks like.
Best, better, or yeah, best, better, best.
Right?
No, I don't remember.
How is that phrase?
It's, do you know what I'm talking about?
Good.
Greatest?
Maybe.
I don't remember.
Anyway, here's the greatest.
That it would be stable, it would free, and it would be Western, and they would be our allies, and they'd start to rebuild themselves.
We're not there rebuilding it.
And they unleash this pent-up intellectual power and they become the Persian people and the Iranian people that they've always been, you know, without the oppression.
Okay, that would be great.
But I will take a stable and more free, non-hostile.
But what each of these must include when I say, what does a win look like?
No nuclear program.
None.
Period.
We take all of the cascading, what do you call those things?
It's enriching uranium.
I just talked about it a minute ago.
We take and we get rid of those and we destroy them.
Okay.
So they don't have, they cannot enrich uranium.
We take away all of their ability to produce missiles and enrich uranium and make a bomb.
That is, if we can't get that in the end, then we've completely lost.
No nukes.
This is still in my the best version.
Stable, free, non-hostile, no nuke capability, no oil to China, no drones to Russia, and no terror proxies.
I would walk away going, wow, what a success.
It's stable.
It's free or free-ish.
Maybe not America, but in their own interpretation of that, it's standing on its own two feet.
No oil to China, no drones to Russia, no nukes, and no terror proxies.
That's an absolute slam dunk.
But I would take stable and more free, but still, I mean, an Islamic state, I guess, if we have to, but no nuclear program and reduced terror proxies.
But all of this also has to happen with something else.
And this was Donald Trump's bigger vision, I think.
is why, you know, when I was looking into is this a just war and looking at the just war theory, you have to have a plan of success and peace.
And part, so that's what has to happen in Iran.
But you also have to have a more united Middle East.
Donald Trump, you remember when he, you know, put his thing out with all the hotels and the golf courses and they're like, you're going to make a Trump resort out of Gaza?
That wasn't about that.
What that was, was to show the Middle East, look, you can either keep bombing, you can either keep fighting, you can either keep pouring money and lives down the drain, or we can show you how to make this very, very prosperous.
And we don't even really have to show you.
You've already done it.
You've done it in, you know, the UAE.
You've done it in Dubai.
You've done it in Saudi Arabia.
You know how to be prosperous.
And what happens?
When your country is prosperous, it's prosperous because it's stable.
If you make this a stable region, Egypt, UAE, Saudi Arabia, all of you, all of you can actually be wealthy and prosperous and your people can get out of this cycle of death.
Adding Iran to that and actually having this coalition actually hold together is a huge, huge win.
Okay.
You also will still have, you'll still have Qatar.
I don't care what anybody says.
Qatar is not our friend.
And soon, within, I predict within six to eight months, you're going to see some stuff come out about Qatar that will make that so clear.
Anybody who is trying to tell you now Qatar is good, you won't have to worry about them because it's going to be so clear to every American how bad Qatar actually is to us here in America.
But you'll have Qatar, Iraq.
Why Qatar Is Not Our Friend00:02:40
That's going to be real trouble.
But hopefully a win looks to me that you have now made this more united Middle East to where they're policing their own area.
We don't have to be the policemen.
It's not us.
And we're not nation building.
That's, to me, that's a win.
It doesn't have to be perfect, but it can't involve nukes.
We have to reduce the terror proxies and we also have to unite the Middle East enough to where they're taking care of and policing their own area so we don't have to.
Because I don't want to be there for more than a few weeks.
And I don't want any troops on the ground and I don't want a nation build.
That's not America first.
This would be America first, which goes to answer that second question.
Is this America first?
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Now back to the podcast.
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
I come to you today and I want you to hear me clearly.
I am not trying to sell you on anything.
I have been down this road so many times over the last 30 years and I have seen things that I absolutely believed were happening that were not.
I think we have been betrayed by our government over and over again.
And I believed too many people I shouldn't have.
I started this weekend with, why would I give my trust to Donald Trump?
Loving War vs. Fighting for Freedom00:15:18
Donald Trump is not the Donald Trump of 2016.
Donald Trump did not do this in 2016.
But Donald Trump ran and said, no more of these wars.
Okay, so I want to get into that here in a second.
But when I say Donald Trump is not the Donald Trump of 2016, Donald Trump came in and he just kind of, you know, he's got such a good gut on him.
He was like shooting from the gut and he's like, I want to do this and I'm going to do that.
What Donald Trump has done in the last year has been remarkably coordinated and consistent.
Now, you may not agree with it and that's fine.
You may not like it and that's fine.
But you should understand it before you make a judgment on it.
And I have, it's my job to try to figure out what the hell is happening and then tell you my opinion on it.
I'm not going to give you, well, I guess I will give you my opinion because I'm going to show you how I thought of this, but I don't want to give you my opinion so you follow my opinion.
That's not my goal.
My goal is to help you think this through because we all, you cannot just glob onto somebody else's opinion.
You're going to get lost.
If you do that, you're going to, if you do that and you do this about feelings or winning or my team versus their team, you're going to get lost and you cannot afford to get lost.
So let me start with principle number one.
Can you hate war and still fight one?
Yes, and in fact, I believe that is the only moral way to fight a war.
I despise war, but this must be done.
Okay?
There is a difference between loving war and accepting that sometimes you have to fight a war.
And I'm not saying this is one of those times.
I'm just explaining, can you hate war and fight one?
Yes, a surgeon does not have to love the knife or cutting people up, but he does it because he has to.
A nation doesn't love war.
If it does, it has already become something dark and evil.
But a nation that refuses to act when evil calcifies into permanence is not peaceful.
That makes you peaceful.
That makes you negligent.
So yes, being pro-peace and being willing to fight can coexist.
In fact, I believe they must.
And I saw that everywhere.
I thought you were pro-peace.
I thought you were against war.
I am.
I am.
Can we be adults and have an adult conversation?
The deeper question is not, are you for war?
The question is, what kind of peace are you trying to secure?
And there are places where you go, I'm going to accept that peace.
And maybe this for you is one of those places.
But you can't jump to conclusions.
Instead of just reacting, like I saw everybody on TV this weekend reacting.
Can we think like an adult for a second?
First, what is the objective?
This kind of goes into the just war theory.
And I spent a lot of time on the just war theory.
I want to know, is this just?
Is this right?
When do we have to step in?
And when do we not?
Why do we step in here and not in Sudan?
Okay.
First, is the objective conquest?
No.
Is it regime change?
Not sure.
Is it humiliation?
No.
Is the objective the removal of a destabilizing terror-sponsored nuclear-seeking command structure that has choked its own people and threatened an entire region?
Yes, I believe that's it, but not only that.
And that's really important.
If the aim is limited and strategic, disable the head of the system that fuels regional chaos, then it is categorically different from marching divisions into a country to rebuild that country in our image.
Iraq was nation building, okay?
This appears at this point to be decapitation and deterrence.
You'll notice that he has not dictated that this will not be an Islamic state.
Did you notice that?
This is not the same as Iraq.
I'm not saying it's better or that you have to agree with it.
I'm just please understand, I'm not trying to convince you of anything.
I'm just trying to help you think it through.
And I imagine there's going to be a lot of people that disagree with me.
And that's okay.
My job is to help you think it through, not agree with me.
Second thing, was peace attempted first?
This one matters enormously.
You can't just rush into war.
And in the past, we have rushed into military action without creating a regional structure capable of sustaining peace afterward.
Okay.
And maybe we haven't exhausted the road to peace.
So this one is different.
First of all, beginning at Jimmy Carter, we have exhausted peace.
I mean, 49 years of peace talks.
Okay.
And what's different, why I believe Donald Trump did not take this on the first time, is because he hadn't done the work.
He had done the Abraham Accords, but he had not done the rest of the work that is needed.
The Abraham Accords fundamentally altered the Middle East diplomacy.
It brought key Arab states into open normalization with Israel.
And for the first time, major Sunni powers publicly aligned around coexistence rather than we got to wipe Israel off the face of the map.
So they kind of joined the Western world and went, we can kind of coexist here.
Also, Hamas's military capacity severely degraded since October 7th attacks and also the war in Gaza that shifted the strategic balance in the region.
Also, several Arab nations and governments have become stakeholders in stability rather than chaos.
They're no longer standing on the sidelines.
They are now saying, we want peace.
That's not a small shift.
That is a tectonic shift.
Here's what we have done in the past.
We have gone in and said, we're going to bring peace.
Freedom's on the march.
And we're going to bring freedom to these people.
You cannot bring freedom to these people.
I thought we could in Afghanistan.
I even kind of thought we could in Iraq.
That's absolutely idiocy to think you can bring people freedom.
They must fight for it themselves.
They must want it themselves.
So if we were going into nation build, I'm absolutely dead set against it.
If you remove a destabilizing regime after regional powers are economically and politically invested in peace, the odds of a vacuum of chaos shrink dramatically.
They don't go away.
It still could become horrible in the end.
This doesn't guarantee success, but it changes the probability curve.
Third thing I asked myself.
Can you be anti-war and still use force effectively?
Yes, look at Donald Trump.
This one is key.
This is not, can you fight a war and be anti-war?
This is, can you be against war and fight it effectively?
Donald Trump is not pro-war.
I don't care what any of the other pundits say that are now turned on Donald Trump.
And I am not here to shovel garbage for, I'm not carrying any weight, any water for Donald Trump.
He's a big boy.
He can handle himself.
I'm here just to tell you how I think about things and what I have noticed.
During his first term, Donald Trump authorized the strike that killed Soleimani.
This is the guy that was the architect of the Iran regional proxy war.
This is the guy who was responsible for killing many U.S. soldiers.
When he did it, people said, got to set the whole Middle East on fire, but it didn't.
Then ISIS.
ISIS, Barack Obama tried to fight ISIS for two terms, couldn't fight it, couldn't fight it, couldn't fight it.
Hillary Clinton goes over.
She actually helps create it, make it more powerful.
I mean, it was horrible.
Remember, ISIS was burning Christians in cages and we did nothing about it.
Donald Trump, they were killing our soldiers and Donald Trump said, we got to do this.
And all the generals said, it's going to take us two years.
And he said, bullcrap, it's going to take us two years.
Is there anybody who has less than a two-year plan?
That's when he found Raisin Kane.
General Kane came in and said, I can get it done in four weeks.
And he explained the plan.
And Donald Trump said, you're either crazy or you're my guy.
And he convinced him he wasn't crazy.
And what happened?
We wiped ISIS out.
The control of ISIS collapsed almost overnight.
Okay.
Far, far, far faster than even the most optimistic people predicted possible.
Because Donald Trump started to surround himself with the people who knew what they were doing, weren't part of the system of bull crap, and were fighting to win, okay?
And that's when the message was sent by him.
It was clear.
Restraint does not mean weakness.
There is a pattern here.
He disdains prolonged occupation, paired with a willingness to use unrelenting, overwhelming, precise force with a great strategy.
That's not neocon nation building.
Okay.
That is completely different than what we did.
This is coercive leverage.
Fourth question.
The capability that we have.
Does that matter morally?
Yes, it does.
I don't believe in a fair fight when it comes to war.
I don't want a fair fight when it comes to war.
I want to be so overwhelmingly powerful that it takes the oxygen out of the lungs of our enemies all over the world and they go, oh my gosh, don't ever mess with them.
That's the way to fight war.
Now, one of the just war criteria is the probability of success.
If you launch a war that you cannot win, you are not moral.
You are reckless.
If this president had demonstrated that when he uses force, it's targeted, short-duration, strategically defined, followed by negotiation, then the moral calculus shifts.
A limited strike backed by regional diplomatic architecture is not the same species of action as open-ended occupation boots on the ground.
But isn't that how we all get into all these foreign wars?
I ask myself, all these forever wars.
You're listening to the best of Glenn Beck.
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Check out the full show podcast anywhere you download podcasts.
Jack Carr is with us.
Jack is a military operator himself, best-selling author of the Terminal List series.
You can also, he's also the executive producer of that series on TV.
If you've never watched it, you've never read the Terminalist, you need to.
But he is also the author of a book, a non-fiction book called Targeted Beirut.
And he came out with this, and this is really kind of the genesis of how all of the, how we got here.
And I wanted to talk to Jack about, you know, the operation that happened this weekend and is still going on.
Donald Trump just said the big wave is yet to come in war with Iran.
What he thinks about what's happening, you know, what the things that happened maybe this weekend that the average person might have missed.
And also ask him as a fiction writer, the most likely way this ends.
But first, let me talk to him about, you know, the setup.
Why is this happening?
You know, if you look at targeted Beirut, Jack.
Explain this situation in that context.
Well, Beirut really was, and our response to what happened in Beirut in 1983 was so pivotal to everything that was going to happen afterward, meaning we had an attack on our embassy in April of 1983, killed 63 people, 17 Americans.
And then that led to the October bombing of the barracks and headquarters building of our Marines there who were there as peacekeepers that killed 241 servicemen.
Now, it taught Iran a couple of things in particular.
It taught them, one, that terrorism works, and two, that it works even better through proxies.
Because in the aftermath of that event, the Reagan administration did a lot of tough talk, but then in early 1984, they left the region.
So that taught not just Iran, but and not just the region really, but the world that terrorism works.
So had we responded differently back then, the history moving forward from 1983 would have been vastly different because there is a direct line between that and September 11th, 2001.
But I was not surprised to wake up on Saturday morning to a host of text messages letting me know that military operations had started against Iran.
And my first thought was really one of sadness.
Well, it wasn't unexpected, of course, because the maximum pressure campaign against Iran was really never going to work because the three things that were non-negotiable, Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, the ballistic missile program, and their support of terrorist organizations through proxies, any acquiescence to any of those would make the regime look weak.
And they've really been in power since 1979 through coercion, fear, threat of violence, and actual violence on any protest.
And we saw that most recently here in January.
So it may be sad because diplomacy had failed.
Also, covert action had failed.
So any covert action we'd attempted over the last year or through in previous administrations over the past decades, that had failed also.
And now we're in a full-scale military engagement with Iran.
So, you know, I saw these people, and I would love it if, you know, if we could have all come to the negotiating table and worked something out.
But I saw people say, you've got to give negotiation a chance.
49 years, Jack.
Why Diplomacy Failed Iran00:09:57
Right.
And it's, you know, the exact definition of insanity.
Follow me.
Jimmy Carter said this can't stand.
They got to stop.
Ronald Reagan said they got to stop.
This can't stand.
H.W. Bush, they can't, it's got to stop.
We've got to get to the negotiating table.
Clinton said that.
W. Bush said that.
Obama said that.
Trump said that in the first term.
Biden said that.
I mean, at some point, you're like, this is insane.
We've tried giving them billions of dollars.
We've tried holding money back.
We've tried carrots and sticks, and nothing works.
It's just that this president is the first one to say, I'm not kicking the can down to the next president.
It's over.
Exactly.
So each of those administrations from both parties have had the same red line.
They've had the same policy of our foreign policy in regards to Iran.
The same one.
They just had different ways of dealing with it, and none of them effective.
Some of them actually helped Iran get either more powerful or gave them more options when it came to building up these different weapons programs to crushing any popular uprising or protests.
So I'm not surprised that we got to this point.
And we should have learned from al-Qaeda, when someone declares war on you, pay attention.
Al-Qaeda did it in 1996, 1998, attacked the USS Cole, of course.
And none of those things made us treat that terrorist organization as anything other than essentially a criminal enterprise.
And only after September 11, 2001, our hand was essentially forced to treat it as a military problem.
When people declare war on you and tell you that they want to destroy you, you probably don't want that person to have a nuclear weapon or to have options that can lead to your demise.
So, you know, you look at everything that has been going on, and everybody's trying to make it about they were close to a nuclear weapon.
I've heard that for 30 years.
I'll believe it when I see that.
I think this is, I think that this is much bigger than that.
This is about Trump redesigning the entire world and going after crink to take the I. You know, there is no I in team.
Well, the Axis team is crink, and he's taking the I out of that, which hurts oil for China, hurts money through the oil for Russia.
Also, you know, they've been, Iran's been giving them all the drones, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, it really starts to break crink apart.
And I think this is much, I think to look at this just as Iran, I think is, you'll never understand why we did this.
Do you believe that's true or am I wrong?
Oh, I think you're 100% sure.
And I've been up before dawn on shows in the last couple of days, just been going all day.
So I haven't been able to look or listen to or read your analysis.
So I was really excited to hear your analysis of what's been going on.
But you're absolutely right.
With China buying so much oil from Iran, getting around sanctions from the United States, from other allied countries.
And then there's this $400 billion investment that China has in Iran.
And part of that is technological, meaning they are sharing, well, selling the apparatus by which they control their populace in China to the Iranians.
And that's really been propping up this regime.
So without that in play, and it really allows us now, well, we'll see how this plays out, but to focus on the Pacific, on China, on Taiwan, on the semiconductors that are built in Taiwan, and then the Russian side as well.
So you're exactly right.
This is not just about Iran.
I would be surprised if we read something in the future where someone makes that argument down the line because right out of the gate here, I'm not seeing that.
This is definitely a reshuffling of the world order and really putting Russia and China on bringing them into this fold, realigning some of these alliances and allowing us to focus on Russia, China, and Iran, not just the Middle East, as we have for the previous 25 plus years.
Jack, we've talked to each other for years, and I've always loved talking to fiction writers because you can be honest.
You're not playing politics.
You have to come up with a scenario that in the end may be more believable than actual reality because fiction has got to make sense.
And so you look at things and you're like, what makes the most sense?
What is most likely to happen if this, this, and this happen?
Have you had time to noodle this on what is the most likely outcome of all of this?
I have.
And it's really, it comes down to COPE is not a course of action.
Hope is not a good strategy.
And what we're seeing right now, and I'm going to be very curious as to how this plays out in the weeks, months, and even years ahead, is that if this is a decapitation, a regime decapitation, if this is a regime alteration or the hope of a regime alteration that brings Iran into the U.S. camp and away from the China and Russia camp,
if we had or the Israelis had or some other entity had a primary, a secondary, a tertiary person that we've been back channeling with who has the support of the military, who can purge that military and intelligence apparatus of those loyal to the regime and bring then Iran into the U.S. camp.
I would think we've done that.
And I would think that we've learned from the past 20 years in Afghanistan and all our years in Iraq, because we have people in the administration who fought at the tactical level in those countries.
But once again, I don't know.
And like you, We've heard so much about regime change and weapons of mass destruction and all of these things.
So I'll be very curious to know what lessons they took from Iraq and Afghanistan and applied to this present problem set.
So is there someone waiting in the wings that is going to bring Iran into the U.S. camp or not?
Or are they just hoping that someone's going to step up?
I'm very curious as to that.
You know, we have defunded, the Democrats have defunded DHS.
That means TSA.
TSA, I think, ran out of money this weekend.
That means the Coast Guard.
And, you know, I can't imagine if I were in Congress, I don't care if I agreed with this war or disagreed with this war, I would be worried that we were going to be hit internally because we have so many people inside.
You know, we already saw the crazy guy, you know, wearing the, you know, owned by Allah t-shirt and the Iranian flag underneath, that shirt.
We saw shooters because of this action up in Canada over the weekend.
How likely is it?
What should we be preparing for here in the mainland?
Because honestly, Jack, I have to tell you, I could come up with a thousand scenarios that about 25 people could do that would put us on our knees within a week.
And I'm shocked that nobody has done them.
I know.
I know.
Why hasn't that happened?
And how likely is it to now happen because of stuff like this?
Well, it certainly takes the attention of people out there that are just looking for a reason to lash out.
So there's different categories here.
But the sleeper cells are the ones that we typically talk about.
And that's certainly possible, especially with the wide open borders of the previous years.
So we have that to think about, something that's really thought through that hits multiple targets at any given time across the United States.
Or you have that lone wolf type person that's radicalized online, like maybe like we saw with a Charlie Kirks or someone who wants to lash out.
And it's been made acceptable for them to do so because of the insane rhetoric that's floating around out there on these platforms that really democratized free speech, meaning you don't have to invest anything in what you say anymore.
You can just say it, or a bot can say it, or an algorithm can feed it to you.
So we're in a very dangerous time.
You have to invest nothing in order to destroy or degrade what was once an extremely proud country, the United States of America.
So I don't have a good answer on that front.
It just makes me sad for the future.
But these platforms are tools and any tool is a weapon.
So I would definitely say that we need to remain vigilant, but not just because of what's happening in Iran.
These things can happen at any given time for any reason.
So people really need to take responsibility for their own protection and that of their families.
Somebody said on TV, you know, they had enough material to make a dirty nuke and get it into the U.S. How difficult is that?
Not as difficult as one would think because it's really just a normal explosive that one can make with material on the open market, and that's just placed near whether it's nuclear debris, waste, whatever.
There's all sorts of ways to do it at all sorts of different scales.
But you probably kill more people in a bunch of other different ways.
That one just really uses the imagination of the public.