Best of the Program | Guests: Dr. Zuhdi Jasser & Khosro Isfahani | 3/26/26
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Hey, great podcast today for you.
We talked to somebody who has direct connections inside of Iran.
What is going on in the ground?
He broke some news, talked about vaguely, I questioned him on it.
He's like, yeah, probably not going to say that.
But somebody is training citizens in Iran for the uprising.
Interesting.
Also, we had a really great conversation that may not sway you one way or another, but good food for thought to make sure that you're not calcifying your thinking on anything.
Is there such a thing as Islamism and is it different than Islam?
Is a Muslim always a radical or have they been radicalized?
We had a great conversation with Dr. Azudi Jasser on this.
Also, a little bit of history about three posters that most people don't know the history of.
And you only know one of the posters, but it was the one that was never hung.
And it was the one that I think relates to what we're doing today, the kind of war that we're fighting today.
All of that.
That's a don't miss on today's podcast.
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We have been very outspoken about what is happening in Iran, who the bad guys are.
And this has been going on long before the war was there.
And we had the Crown Prince on with us.
And it was the first time that we had had a serious major cyber attack on our systems.
We have had them now four times.
Yesterday was another day where we were having a DDOS attack.
And we're having it again today.
If you are an insider, thank you for putting up with this.
It seems like the more we talk about radicalized Islam in the Middle East, especially with Iran in particular, somebody is trying to take our site down.
So we appreciate it.
That is the importance of this network's radio family.
They can't take us off of the radio, but we appreciate your patience with this.
We are being told that it is a major attack that would have to be at this level, some sort of a massive,
if not state-directed kind of DDOS attack.
So I guess it makes our next guest even more important.
Khosrow Isfahani is the National Union for Democracy in Iran Research Director.
He grew up, was raised in Tehran.
He lived there for 30 years.
He worked as a journalist and a frontline human rights defender until 2021.
This guy is braver than I think most of us put together.
He has infiltrated secret missile facilities.
He smuggled classified documents out, and he delivered aid quietly to the communities placed deliberately in harm's way over the years.
And I have been watching what he has to say.
He has sources on the ground in Iran.
Welcome.
How are you, Hosro?
Hi, Ghillen.
Thanks for having me.
And thank you very much for your kind words.
And more importantly, thank you for bringing light and attention to this very important story.
And obviously, the regime is not happy about what you're doing.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Well, I have to tell you, I think every American, everybody in the world should be concerned about what's happening to the Iranian and the Persian people.
They have been living under this dictatorship forever.
And you don't have to be pro-war or anti-war.
You just have to be, you have to have some compassion for what the people have been going through between the women, the children, homosexuals.
I mean, anybody that they don't happen to agree with, they slaughter.
And I wanted to talk to you because I'd like to get a feeling of what is the mood on the ground in Iran.
I mean, they came out in droves.
About 30,000 of them were slaughtered after that.
Now they're inside.
The president is saying stay inside, but will they come back out?
Is there an appetite for coming out on the streets and risking it all again?
Here's the thing.
People in Iran already are back out.
Right now, we are celebrating Nowruz, the Persian New Year.
The actual celebrations, the main one happened a couple of days ago on March 20th.
Before Nowruz itself, we have this fire festival in Iran.
Every year, people get together, make bonfires, jump over them, making good wishes for the next year, dancing, singing.
That's the usual.
This year, Crown Prince Rezaba Alavi, the leader of the opposition, issued a call asking people to celebrate this national moment, this national moment that we have held dear in our hearts,
despite the Islamic Republic trying to erase the Iranian history, Iranian culture, Iranian heritage.
He called on Iranians to not engage security forces, just Celebrate the occasion in your neighborhood.
And people listened as always.
They took to their streets in their neighborhoods.
They were singing, dancing, chanting against the supreme leader against the new supreme leader, Mini Mushtaba, and the whole regime against the IRGC in support of the Crown Prince, all of that.
There is a video that came out the same night.
A woman is addressing Prime Minister Netanyahu, saying, Bibi Jun, dear Bibi, we know that you won't let them touch us.
And this trust, this trust that people took to the streets celebrating was not in vain.
The regime actually had issued threats telling people that we are going to kill you if you come to the streets to celebrate.
And they dispatched forces, Basij militia was dispatched.
And each of them, each convoy of these militiamen that tried to approach the celebrations, they were taken out by Israeli drones.
The United States and Israel have finally stepped in, providing the Iranian people with a fighting chance against this Islamist occupation of Iran that has lasted for almost five decades.
We have been fighting this regime non-stop since its inception.
We have been on the streets.
March 1979, women took to the streets in Iran, opposing the imposition of the Sharia law.
We have been out every year, every day, fighting this regime.
So many people have died in Iran.
We have buried on the other side.
You don't have in REN, you don't have any weapons whatsoever.
And Americans are not going to put boots on the ground.
They're expecting the people to be the boots on the ground.
But again, you don't have any weapons.
So, how does the boots on the ground actually work?
What does it look like with the Iranians just coming out of their houses?
Because I mean, it could be really bad.
The IRGC is still, you know, somewhat in control.
Let me give the answer to you in three parts.
First part: when in January, Crown Prince Jaza Paul issued a call on people, and people took to the streets in millions.
They brought with themselves to the protests the actual flag of Iran with the lion and the sun.
Hundreds of flags flooded the streets of Iran.
Those flags don't grow on trees.
People have been preparing, and those flags are the lowest-hanging fruit on that preparation tree.
Much more has been done.
I cannot go into very much the details, but a lot of technologies have been deployed, and drones and all that we are seeing, these are just the start of it.
A lot more is ready to go.
The Iranian people are the boots on the ground.
But the next two parts of my answer: one, what the United States and Israel have achieved during this military campaign.
A lot of naysayers in the West, after three weeks, we are not even at four-week milestone.
The United States and Israel have dismantled the Islamic Republic leadership to a great extent.
A lot of targets are still there.
Ahmad Wahidi, Khali Baf, the parliament speaker, Ejei, the judiciary chief.
These are the actors that are holding the regime together.
Targeted killing of these individuals will lead to the collapse of the leadership of the Islamic Republic, which already is happening.
A lot of military bases, the commanders have deserted their posts.
That's one side.
But more importantly, the arms of oppression of the Islamic Republic has been targeted repeatedly by Israel and the United States.
So far, hundreds of Basij militiamen have been taken out in targeted drone strikes.
Many more have been injured and many, many more are not showing up for service.
They are scared and the regime cannot even pay them.
The situation that the regime is facing is dire and they cannot hold it together for long.
But back to your actual question.
Iranians have been preparing.
A couple of two weeks ago, I think, Crown Prince Rezafa Alevi finally publicly announced the existence of the Immortal Guard, Guardaja Dun.
A decentralized, self-organized group of people, multiple circles across the country that have been trained and are ready to go.
Iranians are the boots on the ground.
Trained by who?
I cannot go into details of that.
Too much is at stake and we are talking about a war zone.
Okay.
Well, that is good news.
I had not heard that before.
One of the things I have heard to try to discourage those who want Iran to be free is that the people are turning on the United States and Israel because of the bombing that,
you know, they're saying, now you're killing us.
And, you know, now they're turning on us.
Is there any truth to that?
In every society, you have outliers.
Before this whole military operation started, the Islamic Republic and a bunch of lunatic leftists organized a pro-Pali rally outside Tehran University.
They were able to get 20, 30 people outside Tehran University to chant in support of Hamas and Hezbollah and other terrorist groups.
And more importantly, we are dealing with a situation that internet has been caught.
Yes, some dissidents have received satellite internet and technological tools that is enabling them to circumvent the blockade.
But a lot of the noise that is coming out of the Islamic Republic is generated by the Islamic Republic.
Remember a couple of months ago, there was a story all over the news about white SIM cards, SIM cards that the regime removes all online limits for and give it to influencers to push its line.
There is also another piece of evidence of them doing the same thing.
When the regime's foreign minister was on air giving an interview using internet, he was questioned, why do you have internet while the whole nation is offline?
He responded, I'm the voice of the nation.
They are providing internet to these type of influencers to push an anti-U.S., anti-Israel narrative.
But what we hear from people in Iran is that with every missile hitting this regime, people are rejoicing.
When No Rooz was happening, traditionally people visit the graves of their loved ones.
When you kill tens of thousands of protesters in cold blood, hundreds of thousands are going to visit their graves, and they did.
There is a video of a mother, a mother at the grave of his son killed, and she's shouting, addressing the United States and Israel and telling them, God bless you.
You made our hearts happy after this darkness.
This is the mood that we are seeing coming out of the country.
Is there something that the people are waiting for?
Is there a signal they're waiting for?
Is it Donald Trump just coming out and saying now?
It's multiple elements.
One, the decapitation at the top needs to continue.
Multiple individuals are still in place.
They have been engaged, apparently, or who knows what's happening in negotiations.
Those individuals are actual terrorists.
And the United States have been saying that it doesn't negotiate with terrorists.
We need to stop talking with these people and also let our allies finish the job of taking them out.
That's one element.
And two, two weeks of targeted campaign taking out the Islamic Republic's arms of oppression would turn the tide, give the Iranians an actual chance in this uphill battle.
We have been fighting this for the past five decades.
I have been involved with it for 17 years.
We are unrelenting.
This is, you're saying that there's still a lot of targets left before that signal can be given.
Yes.
And that's my understanding from every military and security source that we talk with, that the military campaign is far from over.
And which war against a major terrorist sponsor like the Islamic Republic, a state that has killed so many people inside and outside the country, has occupied land beyond the borders of Iran.
Look at Lebanon.
Look at Syria.
Look at Yemen.
Look at Iraq.
How a war against such a regime can be over in three, four weeks.
The timeline is not too far from being over, but there is much more needed to be done for the call to arrive.
And President Trump has repeatedly told the Iranian people, stay home, stay safe while the bombs are falling.
When they stop, the call will arrive from the leader of the opposition, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.
And Iranians have shown that when that man speaks, they listen.
Osra, I appreciate it.
I pray that your people will be free.
This is probably it.
I mean, if the people don't in the end rise up, if we don't weaken them enough and give you the opportunity to rise up, it may unfortunately be another half century before you have this opportunity again.
So I pray this goes well.
Osro, thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
You bet.
You bet.
Osra Isfahani, National Union for Democracy in Iran.
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
Let me take you through just a couple of things that are happening here in America.
Cut four.
These are Muslim protesters in Philadelphia.
They are protesting our soldiers and our stance on Israel and Palestine.
I want you to listen to this.
Cut four, Philadelphia.
Until we have done everything in our power to bring the United States to its knees, let us not lose sight of the enemy.
For every U.S. military base that crumbles and for every U.S. soldier who returns home in the casket, we cheer.
Okay, stop.
Notice that's an American accent.
That's not a foreign accent.
It's an American accent.
We cheer for every soldier that comes back in a body bag.
And let's not forget the enemy.
The enemy, he says, there is the United States.
We will bring it to its knees.
Here in Philadelphia, again, this was posted by a great service out of the Middle East called Memory.
What they do is they take videotape from all over the world that is in Arabic and they translate it so people know exactly what's happening in their areas.
We thank memory TV.
This is from Philadelphia.
These are Islamist kids.
Listen to what they are singing and a little skit that they're doing.
Go ahead and play a little bit of this.
This is not Islam.
In this Philadelphia mosque, we will chop their heads off.
We will liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa.
That's Jerusalem.
We will subject them to torture.
Rebels, rebels, rebels.
They're talking about the great Satan and the little Satan.
That's in Philadelphia.
Here's a North Carolina scholar defending child marriage.
Listen to this.
Now, what's the age of marriage in the U.S.?
Every state has a different age.
There are some countries outside in the world.
Girls can marry at 12 years old.
Okay, what's the issue of this?
If in Africa, girls reach maturity much, much younger, even here in the U.S.
I know we have some students from our families, from our acquaintances, the girls grade five, and they reach maturity.
They reach puberty.
Very briefly, the worst enemies of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, in his own time, did not object on this and did not say to him, oh, look, he's marrying a young lady.
And in Islam, it's understood by consensus.
You can marry a child.
So you can marry a child.
You can marry a child.
That is a scholar at North Carolina State University.
What is happening to us?
We have been invaded.
And I laid this out on my special last week.
If you have not seen it, does it come out today?
Do we have the...
What part do we have coming out?
We'll have it by tomorrow.
We have bonus content coming out.
We have bonus content tomorrow.
You're going to see these full interviews.
Plus, you have the entire special.
You'll have about an hour to two hours more bonus material yesterday and a booklet that will help you understand this that you'll be able to share with your friends.
You'll be able to get it if you're at glenbeck.com slash torch.
Just join us, torch, that hopefully will all be out tomorrow so you can share this information.
But in our special, we have Dr. Zudi Jasser.
Zudi is a dear friend of mine.
I've known him for, I don't even know, 20 years, probably.
It wasn't, I think I was at CNN when I first met him.
He is a primary care physician.
He is, he used to be a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, physician to Congress and the Supreme Court justices.
He is also the founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and the Muslim Reform Movement.
Reason why I like him so much is this guy has paid and his family have paid such a heavy price because he's a Muslim, but he says there's a big difference between a Muslim and an Islamist.
And he is trying to reform Islam.
Imagine being that guy.
He is also now running for Congress.
I fully support him.
He is running for Arizona's fourth district.
It's a swing district.
You can find more about him at Z4AZ.
Z, the number 4AZ.com.
Zudi, thanks for coming on.
No, anytime, Glenn, it's great to be with you.
Thanks for talking about this.
It's the most important discussion in the 21st century.
So I'm going to push back hard on you because I really want to have an honest discussion about this.
You said in the special there is a difference, and I wasn't sure.
Honestly, at the beginning of the special, I wasn't sure that I fully agreed with that.
I thought I did, but I didn't fully agree with it.
I wasn't married to it until I heard some other things in the special, and then I think I'm there.
But I want to play pushback and devil's advocate, because in the special, you said there is a difference between Muslims and an Islamist.
One is political and one is religious, I guess.
Yes, you know, and this is a construct.
You know, as you know, as somebody who believes there's some deep need for reform in Islam, and we haven't gone through the anti-theocratic movement yet, you can't admit as a Muslim that you need reform unless you realize that the general consensus,
the leadership, the establishment of the faith has a cancer in it, and that is theocracy.
So you can call it political Islam, theocratic Islam, Sharia supremacism, all those things are the same thing.
And is it the predominant Islam?
Absolutely.
There's no doubt that normative Islam, as you played an audio earlier, most of the Imams, 95% of the Imams globally are problematic.
They are evil as far as their concept of humanity, of human rights.
Their values are incompatible with America, with the West, and no different than our founding fathers that fought against theocracy.
I, as a Muslim, have a moonshot.
I have a sense that this is where I think we can go.
I believe in liberty.
I believe in that first liberty.
But even after our founding fathers fought for a revolution, it took them 13 years until they had a legal document and that they agreed upon and recognized that first liberty as being religious liberty.
So as an American and as a Muslim, I say, you know what?
We have to recognize that there's a table.
We're not going to rename the religion.
The definitions, Islam is the faith.
Muslims are those who follow it.
The problem is the entire establishment, the leadership, the people that are making money from Islam, the Petro-Islamists of Saudi Arabia, of Iran, of Pakistan, the establishment that has dug their heels in the sand for the last thousand years.
But let's also not have an ahistorical approach to Islam like any other faith and say, listen, if the recipe was wrong, the first three, 400 years would not have been an era of enlightenment on the planet in which the Greek philosophers and so many philosophers are translated into Arabic and other languages while the West was still grappling with the Dark Ages if the recipe was wrong.
But it went from 4,000 schools of Sharia to essentially four.
And you had basically now for a thousand years.
This is why what's happening in Iran is so amazing.
If you don't separate Islamism from Muslims and a possibility of reform, who are the people in Iran, the people on the street that reject theocracy, are they in a vacuum?
Do they not have a faith?
Are we going to disenfranchise them from their relationship with God?
And I want to end this comment with what you and I, we've become such good friends.
And I can tell you that as you met my wife, you met my kids.
You know, my kids are God-fearing, moral, sentient human beings who have a strong relationship with morality.
They aren't morally inverted like all these satanic, cultish, death cult folks of the Islamists.
They would die for their fellow Americans regardless of their faith.
They believe in God and fast and pray.
And who are they praying to?
It must be a faith that has some type of moral compass.
And if we say that's not a faith and we don't even want to call it Islam, we recognize that we're a minority report within that faith.
But we also have to, we can't leave, you know, I recognize that the seats at the table are empty, that the most majority of Muslims are silent and we have given them a pass.
No, don't give them a pass.
Put fire under their feet.
Tell them that they're like the silent Nazis in Germany, you know, silent Germans under Nazi Germany.
Yes, tell them that.
Get them awakened, but don't deprive them and disenfranchise them of their relationship with God and the faith of Islam.
You know, that was something that we did in World War II.
You know, I said I was someplace speaking, and it just kind of came out of my mouth, and I thought, well, that's going to cause some problems.
But let me repeat it now to a bigger audience.
You know, when we went into Germany, you know, we knew who the enemy was.
And we knew who the Germans were that were good, because not all Germans were Nazis.
But the ones that were good were the ones that were like, the Nazis are over there.
Get those guys.
Help us, help us.
We knew because the good guys would self-identify and help.
The bad guys didn't.
And, you know, you get to a point to where this is going to get so bad if we can't have logical conversations, if we can't just be shouted down every time we try to have this conversation, it's going to get to the point, Zudi,
where everybody's just going to, everybody's just going to assume that every Muslim is bad.
And in the special that I saw, you know, one of the things that really convinced me or helped convince me was the number of Muslims that when the Muslim Brotherhood and others were taking over and buying all of the American mosques,
most people don't even know this happened.
Buying all of these mosques and taking them over, it was the American Muslim that were standing up, reaching out to our government and everybody else, going, help, help, help, help.
We're being taken over by really bad people.
And they were, and we didn't do anything.
And now what do you do?
If you're in that community, now how do you speak out?
Exactly.
And that we have to recognize that America really has the answer and that Europe, you can almost put a fork in it because their version of democracy is a racial version in which, for example,
one of the founding scholars of the concept of Islamism that understands it was Bassam Tibi, a German scholar.
He retired in America because he said, you know, I lived in Germany for 40 years and I never felt German because they didn't have a culture of absorbing folks of all different origins,
ethnic origins that could then become American or become German.
So he retired in America.
He said Americanism as that anti-theocratic religious liberty is the only way to create a strategy against political Islam, against these viral movements.
So let's look at the threat.
1.8 billion Muslims globally.
30 to 40 percent are died in the wool Islamists, which is five to six hundred million people.
So that's a massive movement.
So yes, people who say that Islam is a problem are right.
There's not that much daylight between them and me.
But the issue is, what is our strategy?
As a West, to save the West, we have to have a strategy of an offense.
And the head of the spear of that offense, I'm not alone.
The people of Iran are more on the offense than me because I've been protected by a country that has gone through this revolution.
And by the way, the woke, the bigotry of low expectations, all of that needs to go away because it's giving Muslims a pass in America so they do become more passive and sort of let The Iranians fight the battle against Islamism when in fact it's coming here to our shores.
So we have to fight it here in this laboratory that we can do it better than anywhere on the planet against theocracy.
You're streaming the best of Glenn Beck.
To hear more of this interview and others, download the full show podcasts wherever you get podcasts.
So let me take you back.
In the final days before World War II began, Britain did something that most governments never ever do.
They planned for fear.
They had just lived through World War I.
They knew what they were headed into.
They planned for bombs and guns, but they also knew they had to have a plan for what happens to a population when the ground beneath them is no longer stable,
when rumor outruns truth and anxiety is just spreading like a wildfire.
The British Ministry of Information prepared for a different kind of war, and they produced different kinds of weapons.
What they did is they prepared messages, in particular, three messages.
Each one was designed for a different psychological moment in the war that they believed were going to come to London and to the streets.
And so the first message was put on a poster and it was pretty severe.
Freedom is in peril.
Defend it with all your might.
That's what it said.
Freedom is in peril.
Defend it with all your might.
That's not a comfortable thing.
That is a joke.
Wake up.
It was designed.
Wake people up.
Take a population that might still be thinking in peacetime terms and force them to understand this is an existential fight.
This is not about politics.
This is about your very survival.
Wake them up.
And it aimed to create real clarity and urgency and cut through the denial that a lot of citizens, you know, were living in.
You know, they needed to feel the weight of the responsibility at a time where war perhaps was distant and not real.
The second poster was for the next phase of the war when the war became more obvious.
The second poster out of the three softened the tone, but really sharpened things.
That poster read, your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution will bring us victory.
That poster was released once the war had begun.
The war now, people were awake.
It had become real.
Fathers and sons were dying on distant battlefields.
The storm clouds were visible, growing darker every day.
And now the question was not do we act or not, how do we endure?
And families were stressed out.
You know, the story of what happened with the children over in England during the war is just amazing.
The children didn't understand what was happening.
The parents were struggling with the basics.
The British pound was not buying, you know, what it could.
Everything cost more and more, and the pound, you know, was worth less and less.
And the message was shaped to, meant to shape the behavior under that kind of pressure.
And it promoted something more difficult.
Courage under fire.
Hey, be happy.
Cheerfulness is in, it can be found in scarcity.
And there will be a resolution over time.
And it told people the emotional discipline is part of the war effort.
We're counting on you.
I mean, the message is so British and also from such a different era, it's kind of hard to relate to.
You know, hey, cheerfulness is really?
But it worked.
The posters were up everywhere.
Now, most people don't remember the posters, and certainly no one, even in England, remember the third poster being posted from the war.
It was printed in the millions, and it was kept in boxes.
Same look, same kind of message, but this one, this one they hoped they never had to use.
It was held back for a very specific moment, catastrophic failure.
You know, a time when Germany would use overwhelming force.
They would be landing on the shores.
They'd be destroying the streets of London, maybe killing the king, followed by, God forbid, German occupation.
That's what that poster was for.
It was for a people that, you know, their confidence was shattered.
They stopped trusting that there would be a brighter tomorrow, and everything about their society would begin to fray.
Then and only then, the final message, that third poster was supposed to be released and put up everywhere.
It wasn't meant to rally.
It was meant to hold the line inside the human mind.
So they print it.
They have it ready.
And then comes the blitz.
Night after night, London burns.
People are sleeping in tunnels.
Fires lit the sky.
Entire neighborhoods disappeared.
And the children of London were set out on trains to the rural areas of Great Britain to people they didn't know.
The families didn't know.
They just put the kids on the train and then they'd pull up to a station out, you know, someplace in Great Britain and they'd say, hey, who will take these kids?
So moms and moms could stay in the city and work and fathers would go overseas to fight and the kids would be safe.
At that time, there was even talk about sending the royal family off the island, perhaps to America, just to preserve the crown to fight for another day because they thought the Germans were coming.
The moment the government had planned for looked like it had arrived.
But something unexpected happened.
The people were already doing what that final poster was meant to instruct.
They were already steady.
They had already adapted.
They had already endured without being told.
And officials said, wait, wait, wait, wait.
If we put this message out, we put these posters up, it might feel like we're patronizing.
You know, it might sound like the government is lecturing people who have already carried a heavy enough load.
They don't need our help.
So the order came quietly down, do not distribute this poster.
Destroy these posters.
Most of them were all destroyed.
They were burned.
They were discarded or forgotten.
The message meant for the darkest hour never saw the light until decades later.
There was a small bookstore, Barter Books.
It had just bought a whole bunch of old books at some auction.
And in this box of books, tucked away was a copy, one copy of that poster nobody had ever seen before.
It was an original.
It was a survivor, a rare survivor.
The store didn't really know the story.
They just thought the design was beautiful and the words were so simple it kind of stuck with you.
So they framed it and they put it up on a wall.
And customers stopped and they looked and they asked.
And a message designed for national collapse began spreading in a time that didn't look anything like war.
I thought about this poster yesterday.
I was sharing with you a list of things you could do in your own life to grow the muscle called courage in small ways so it would be in shape when you need it.
And this poster came to mind.
Because we're not living in a time where we have falling bombs, on us at least.
But the worst case scenario that the British were worried about back in the day is happening today with us just in a different way.
Their worst case was occupation.
Enemy occupation.
A breakdown of society, of courage, most importantly, loss of hope.
I contend that's what we're living through right now.
And not occupation from one enemy, but dozens.
They're not marching in uniform.
They're entering through screens, through noise, through constant pressure.
Even the enemy that whispers doubt and fear in your mind while you're laying in bed at night trying to get to sleep.
It is occupying you.
The reason why we're having a hard time fighting this war is because you can't see it.
There's no battlefield.
It's in your head.
There's no single front line.
There's no air raid sirens.
There's, you know, no bombs going off.
This is why it's so hard to fight this one.
When you're physically under attack, your friends are dying.
The streets are on fire.
Buildings are being destroyed every day, day after day.
Everyone knows it.
And just like September 11th, it bonds people.
It knits them together in a shared struggle.
We don't even agree on the struggle.
We're fighting a war that is easily deniable.
A war where no leader has even clearly identified what we fight and who we fight.
Our families are being destroyed from outside and inside as we fight our own loved ones for some strange reason.
There are no bombs, but make no mistake, every day we are fighting.
Information that is overwhelming, lies and technology that's so well crafted now, you can literally no longer believe what you see or hear.
Narratives that divide.
Economic pressure that's just grinding you every day.
A generation growing up without any kind of clear foundation.
A culture that has defined and redefined and then defined and redefined reality over and over again until you don't even know what to trust.
You don't even know it's true or real.
And perhaps the worst of all, more and more of us surrender to the enemy of despair and apathy.
I make the case we are living in occupied territory right now.
But instead of land, it's a tension of thought, of inner life.
The battlefield isn't out there.
It's in each person every day deciding what do I believe, what do I fear, what do I focus on, what do I ignore?
It is literally the battlefield of our minds.
And that is the hardest kind of war to fight.
Because bombs unite people.
Confusion isolates them.
And that's why I thought of that poster yesterday.
I think that's why that final message matters more now than it did then.
It wasn't written for comfort.
It was written for discipline, to remind people.
You don't have to solve everything.
You don't have to absorb everything.
You don't have to react to everything.
But you have to remain steady.
You have to remain engaged in everyday life.
Don't give in to despair or anger.
Just live your life quietly.
And that's not surrender.
That's control.
Remember, you choose every day.
You choose deliberately.
Show up for your responsibilities.
Protect what's yours to protect.
Speak the truth.
Refuse to let chaos dictate your state of mind.
The bombs that were sent to destroy everything they knew and loved were real, obvious, and uniting, and the British lived it, which is why that message was never needed.
No one needed to tell them.
That box of books, where that third never-seen poster was tucked into, was sold, and coincidentally opened just a few months before 9-11, 2001.
When the owners found it, as I said, they had it framed and they hung it on the wall of that bookstore.
And it didn't take long before people started asking if they could buy a copy of it.
And the owners made a few prints here and there, but then they finally started to print copies of it en masse.
Right around the time of the financial crash of 2008.
That is when everybody saw it.
They couldn't print enough copies to keep up with the demand.
Most think now, I'm sure, oh, it's a cool image, you know, catchy slogan, some slick urban outfitters product department dreamed it up to make a buck.
But the reason that connects with people is because it feels like and is the opposite of that.
It's authentic.
It's real.
It's true.
But even those who do know that it's authentic probably think it's famous and been around forever.
But it hasn't.
Personally, I'd like to think it was preserved by chance and hidden away amongst the dusty books in some attic or basement, simply waiting for our time, this time, to let us know clearly and simply,
it's all going to work out.
We're going to make it.
Stop overthinking everything.
Stop frantically and fearfully trying to fix the whole world.