Mike Waltz is Sacked In Cabinet Shuffle as War with Iran Looms; Minerals Deal Signed with Ukraine; Matt Walsh Tells Tucker Carlson Gay Adoption Is an Abomination
Glenn Greenwald takes a look at Mike Waltz sacking and how that relates to the foreign policy divisions within the MAGA movement. Glenn also takes a look at the minerals deal signed between the US and Ukraine. PLUS: Matt Walsh shares a deranged nad ignorant opinion about adoption by same-sex couples. ----- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every single Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
I want to thank Lee Fong for doing an excellent job, as always, in sending me for last night.
I was actually in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, testifying for five hours before the Brazilian Senate about the reporting we did all throughout last year about the corruption and incriminating behavior of Brazil's Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moura, so I couldn't make it back to Rio in time.
And so I was happy that Lee did a great job sitting in.
Tonight, President Trump fired his national security advisor earlier today, Mike Waltz, from his key position in the West Wing and instead relegated him to a largely ceremonious and meaningless position far removed from the West Wing in New York City, where he will be the U.S. ambassador
to the U.S.
There's no doubt.
That what we now call Signalgate contributed to this firing.
That was when Waltz accidentally added the vehement anti-Trump journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to his group to plan a bombing campaign on Yemen.
But there are also likely ideological and substantive factors driving this to motion.
All of this comes at a very critical time in American foreign policy.
The US is heavily bombing Yemen.
Trump is trying to facilitate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war.
And Israel and its supporters in the United States are pressuring the US to bomb and attack Iran.
Beyond that, Trump today announced that his long-sought-after minerals deal with Ukraine has been signed.
But will it, as Trump promised, create a new, a whole new security and military commitment for the United States to protect Ukraine?
And if that's what we're doing, why not just put them into NATO?
Then the conservative culture warrior Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire went on Tucker Carlson's show this week, and for whatever reasons, they decided to spend the first 10 minutes or more of their conversation.
The very first thing they talked about was talking about whether same-sex couples should be able to adopt children.
Walsh, and perhaps Carlson, though it wasn't totally clear, seemed to agree that adoption by same-sex couples is an abomination that must be banished.
Much of this is just rehashed right from a culture war debate that the country has already long ago resolved in favor of same-sex couples.
But one argument that Walsh made is worth some attention.
It concerned the millions of children worldwide and the tens of thousands in the U.S. who are lingering in orphanages, shelters, and foster care systems.
Either because their biological parents died or abandoned them or were simply unfit to raise them often for drug and alcohol issues or abuse issues or molestation or other reasons.
And Walsh actually said, when Carlson asked, that it's preferable to leave such kids where they are, in those shelters, orphanages, and foster care with no parents, no family, few chances of ever being adopted and expelled onto the street when they turn 18 with essentially no skills or support.
It's better to leave them there, he said, than it is to have them adopted by stable, loving, same-sex parents.
Walsh said, in fact, that it's far worse for kids to be in such homes where gay people lurk than to linger in foster cares or shelters, and that studies, which he did not name, prove his argument.
Now, I know there is some support for this view because when I noted it on social media earlier today, a lot of people rose up in support of Matt Walsh's view.
It is true that it's a marginal view.
All 50 states of the United States have abolished their ban on same-sex adoption.
But I do think that his argument, given the platform where he made it and the...
The adamancy and vehemence of his claims is worth examining.
Before we get to all of that, a few programming notes.
First of all, we are encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app.
If you do so, it works on your smart TV, your telephone, all kinds of devices.
Once you do, you can follow the shows you most like to watch here on Rumble.
And then if you activate notifications, which you hope you will, it means the minute any of the shows that you follow here begin broadcasting live on the platform, you'll be notified by text or email, however you want.
You just click on the link and begin watching.
It really helps the live viewing numbers of every program and therefore the free speech cause of Rumble as well.
As another reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble, on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms where if you rate, review, and follow,
It really does help spread the visibility of our show.
Finally, we are independent journalists doing independent media, and that means we do rely on the support of our viewers and members to produce the independent journalism that we do every night.
In order to do that, you can just join our Locals community where you get a whole variety of Benefits and access and all sorts of ways of viewing exclusive video content.
We put transcripts of every show that we produce here.
We put those professional transcripts there.
But most of all, it's the community on which we really do rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
Simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Thank you.
Earlier today, the embattled National Security Advisor of Donald Trump, Mike Waltz, has been fired or is about to be fired from his position as National Security Advisor, which is essentially the key position when it comes to foreign policy.
You're the one who's in the president's ear every day on foreign policy.
You're his top advisor when it comes to foreign policy.
You are in the West Wing right next to the Oval Office speaking to the president multiple times a day.
You obviously wield a great amount of influence.
They put a national security expert, someone they think is a national security expert, in that role whose advice and counsel they want to use essentially on a daily basis.
And although Waltz wasn't fired outright from the Trump administration, he was fired from his position as national security advisor and given a gigantic demotion.
Where he's moving from Washington to New York City, where he'll essentially occupy the very ceremonial position of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. This is a position that Nikki Haley, another neocon like Mike Waltz, held in the first Trump administration.
You really don't do anything in that position other than raise your hand when the State Department tells you to and veto what the State Department tells you to and approve what the State Department tells you to.
You've got a lot of parties in New York.
I mean, it's actually a nice, comfortable sort of gig, but it's not...
A very important one, to put that mildly.
And so maybe you can't technically call it a firing because Walt is still technically working for the Trump administration, but for all effects and purposes in terms of his influence, that has come to an end.
Here's the New York Times article on this from earlier today.
Quote, Trump moves Waltz to the UN and names Rubio his interim national security advisor.
Quote, most of Mr. Trump's advisors had already viewed Waltz as too hawkish.
To work for a president who campaigned as a skeptic of American intervention The official and others spoke on the condition of anonymity.
MR. RUBIO WILL NOW HOLD BOTH POSITIONS, SOMETHING THAT NO OTHER OFFICIALS HAVE DONE SIMULTANEOUSLY SINCE HENRY KISSINGER WAS SECRETARY OF STATE AND NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR UNDER BOTH THE NIXON AND FORD ADMINISTRATIONS.
ONE PERSON WITH KNOWLEDGE OF THE DISCUSSIONS SAID MR. RUBIO HAD INDICATED SOME TIME AGO THAT HE WOULD BE WILLING TO SERVE FOR ROUGHLY SIX MONTHS IF MR. WALT WAS BEING REPLACED AND MR. RUBIO WAS ASKED.
Now, just to be clear, this circulated in many media outlets.
Earlier today, it was presented as Mike Waltz was being fired as a National Security Advisor, or removed as a National Security Advisor, and he was that.
And then it was made official by Trump's own announcement on his social media platform, TrueSocial, where he said this, quote, Very important role.
I just added that very important, but you can kind of see the subtext there.
In the interim, Secretary of State Marco Rubio will serve as National Security Advisor while continuing his strong leadership at the State Department.
Together, we will continue to fight tirelessly to make America and the world safe again.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
When I was a lawyer, I used to write very aggressive and mean, insulting.
Condescending articles and then I loved at the end saying thank you for your attention to this matter and then just so many of my cordially Glenn Greenwald.
Trump has obviously become an admirer of that phraseology as well.
He's constantly now making these big bombastic statements threatening Iran.
He'll say Iran you better stop this immediately where you know what the consequences are for you.
We can destroy your country.
It'll be like thank you for your attention to this matter.
So anyway that's Trump drawing attention to this matter by announcing With very nice, generous language that Mike Waltz has been severely demoted.
Now, there's been a lot of speculation for a long time, at least since the couple of months since quote-unquote Signalgate was unveiled, that Waltz was in a lot of trouble with Trump.
And Trump made it clear internally that he was enraged by what had happened, but publicly he didn't want to feed the media some sort of victory.
You may recall that very early on, in fact, I think before Trump was even inaugurated, maybe slightly after, he fired the person he had chosen to be his national security advisor after that first victory for the first term, which is General Michael Flynn, because the FBI had basically invented allegations of wrongdoing by Mike Flynn.
Mike Flynn did nothing wrong, nothing wrong.
That was all part of the Russiagate hysteria, and Trump just knew into office, just didn't...
I think it was worth it to take on the shots of Mike Flynn.
So we kind of just fed Mike Flynn to the hounds, the cable news hounds and the Russiagate hounds in the Congress.
And by all accounts, Trump had really come to regret that.
Because obviously you feed the hounds and they just get more bloodthirsty.
They don't get satiated and take a nap.
They're like, oh, we can actually force him to fire who we want.
Let's keep doing that.
And Trump was determined not to give them That victory, and maybe moving him to UN ambassador as a way to conceal the fact that that's really happening, but everyone knows it's really happening.
And if you recall, Signalgate, and people have long forgotten it, and I sort of understand why, but by far the least of the sins was the one that was most focused on, which was adding Jeffrey Goldberg by accident to a signal group in which Trump's entire senior national security officials were specifically planning with coordinates and times and
aircraft what they were going to do when bombing Yemen.
They were about to start the bombing campaign.
There was a lot of information in there that, had you had that information, you could have easily thwarted the attack or made it much more difficult.
I think Trump was willing to write that off as kind of a mistake by somebody new in that position.
He doesn't like those mistakes, but I think he was willing to write that off.
But I think what really enraged him, and it's understandable, was that Mike Waltz basically turned himself into a laughingstock in the way he tried to explain how this could have happened.
Because the big question was, wait, why is Jeffrey Goldberg's phone number in your phone?
Like, are you talking to Jeffrey Goldberg?
Are you a source for Jeffrey Goldberg?
Why did you have his number in your phone?
In order to make a signal group, you hit create signal group, and then you add the people who you want to add.
And the only ones you can add are people who are already saved in your phone.
So the question was, how did Jeffrey Goldberg's number get in your phone?
Why was his contact in your phone?
And Mike Walts gave explanations that made Fox News hosts, who were otherwise sympathetic, like Laura Ingraham, just kind of scoff at.
That was when he was saying, I understand that sometimes numbers can just get sucked in.
To your phone, it's like, what?
How do numbers just get sucked into your phone?
Like, has that ever happened to you?
Like, you're just minding your own business and someone who you don't like or somebody who you would never talk to just suddenly appears, like, saved in your phone, their number and their contact?
I don't think that actually happens.
No one else thinks that either.
So, one of the things Trump hates is when someone turns themselves into a laughingstock.
He thinks that reflects very poorly on him.
He loses respect for the person.
But I think the much bigger thing is the question of why...
Why did Mike Waltz have Jeffrey Goldberg's name and number stored in his phone?
Jeffrey Goldberg is one of the most fanatical anti-Trump haters.
Under his leadership, The Atlantic became ground zero for all the worst frauds of Russiagate.
He had every Russiagater, Natasha Bertrand, Franklin Four, who did the fake story about Trump communicating with the Alpha Bank in Russia.
Just all of them.
It was nonstop Russiagate promotion.
And then in the campaigns, the 2020 campaign, it was Jeffrey Goldberg who claimed that Trump said people buried in Arlington's National Cemetery and gave their lives for their country are suckers and losers.
And then it was Jeffrey Goldberg right before the 2024 campaign when he said that Trump had been secretly admiring or expressing support for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
I mean, he's as fanatically anti-Trump as it gets.
You could see why Trump would be very angry if someone who he's trusting with all the nation's secrets has been serving as a source.
Now, not only did Mike Waltz invent some fairy tale, some science fiction about how Jeffrey Goldberg's name and phone number ended up in his phone, but he also denied that he even knew Jeffrey Goldberg.
He just denied it, even though, subsequently, we were able to discover, we being collective we, A photo of the two of them in a very small event in France standing on a stage together at an event that was so small it was impossible that they didn't cross paths.
They were right next to each other.
And beyond that, Jeffrey Goldberg is a very well-sourced person in Washington, especially among neocons and warmongers.
He is a neocon and warmonger.
And so Mike Waltz has always been in that camp in Congress.
That's exactly the kind of person you would expect Jeffrey Goldberg to be talking to.
Of course they knew each other.
And that's obviously how Jeffrey Goldberg's number ended up in his phone because Mike Waltz was a source for Jeffrey Goldberg.
Now, Jeffrey Goldberg did a media round and he was asked about Mike Waltz's claim that they had no relationship of any kind.
And Goldberg was put in an uncomfortable position because if Waltz had been his source, the number one rule as a journalist is you don't give up your sources.
You don't say, oh, this person was my source.
BUT HERE GOLDBERG WAS FACED WITH A CLEAR LIE BY MIKE WALTZ.
HE WAS SAYING, OH, I'VE NEVER TALKED TO JEFFREY GOLDBERG.
NOW HERE'S WHAT JEFFREY GOLDBERG SAID ABOUT THAT ON NBC NEWS.
I'LL MEET THE PRESS.
Well, this isn't the matrix.
Phone numbers don't just get sucked into other phones.
I don't know what he's talking about there.
You know, very frequently in journalism the most obvious explanation is the explanation.
My phone number was in his phone.
Because my phone number is in his phone.
He's telling everyone that he's never met me or spoken to me.
That's simply not true.
I understand why he's doing it.
But, you know, this has become a somewhat farcical situation.
There's no subterfuge here.
My number is in his phone.
He mistakenly added me to the group chat.
There we go.
No, look, you will not find anybody who distrusts and disbelieves Jeffrey Goldberg more than I do.
I've spent many years pointing out that he was and is one of the most pathological and malevolent liars in all of the media.
I've constantly talked about how he was the one who almost single-handedly convinced Americans that Saddam Hussein was involved in the planning of the 9 /11 attack, which Americans needed to believe to support the invasion of Iraq, because he was the one that told people that Saddam Hussein was in an alliance with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
He was a big advocate for the war in Iraq.
And his career only has thrived in advance since telling those lies, just like the people who told the Russian gay lies.
Got rewarded for that as well.
If you lie in media, you get rewarded as long as it's for the right cause.
So it's not like, oh, Jeffrey Goldberg said that, therefore you should believe it.
Absolutely not.
In fact, if anything, if he says something, your skepticism should be on red alert.
But in this case, it's so obvious and clear what happened.
Of course Mike Waltz and Jeffrey Goldberg knew each other.
Of course they talked to each other.
That's why Jeffrey Goldberg's number was in Mike Waltz's phone.
And so, again, it's not even so much that Mike Waltz did something embarrassing by adding Jeffrey Goldberg, an anti-Trump journalist, to a war planning group where they were actually planning an imminent bombing campaign that was starting the next day with the times and the places and the aircraft.
You know, it's a terrible, ridiculous, amateur, reckless mistake.
But it was how Waltz responded in the fallout, and it created the suspicion in Trump's mind that he was somebody who leaks to people like Jeffrey Goldberg.
I don't think Trump wanted to fire him quickly because that would be seen as a capitulation.
But clearly, you don't fire a national security adviser after 90 days.
Mike Waltz gave up a very safe seat in Congress, a senior seat in Congress, to go be Trump's national security adviser.
And although he still has a job, it's not the job I think he would have left Congress in order to take.
Now, I do think there's likely some sort of ideological component to this.
And I'm not just speculating here.
I think there's evidence for why that is.
The New York Times article that we read on the firing kind of hinted at it, that Mike Waltz has long been out of place, because unlike Marco Rubio, who is also a sort of long-term, pro-war, aligned with the neocons member of the Senate,
Rubio has skillfully and deftly transformed, at least his rhetoric, To align with what Trump believes and wants to hear.
I mean, Rubio is front and center arguing why the U.S. has no continuing interest in financing the war in Ukraine, how we have to end that war, whereas for the first two years when he was in the Senate, he was as vehement of a war supporter as you can get.
We have to support Ukraine to the end, give them all the weapons they need.
Even suggesting that Biden wasn't doing enough to help Ukraine, that it's vital that we defeat Russia and Putin, and then just overnight...
In order to adapt himself to the America First worldview, which he has never been a proponent of, he started singing the exact opposite tune, like a 180-degree rehearsal.
Now, whether that, as we saw in the first Trump turnoff frequently, is a smart, skillful, shrewd Washington operator saying the things he knows he needs to say to stay in Trump's good graces, but gaining more power as a result not to serve Trump's agenda but to subvert and undermine it, is something that we will see.
So there wasn't this perception about Marco Rubio.
He started becoming more team player.
Mike Waltz is just not very sophisticated.
I don't think he's very skillful.
And he had a hard time hiding what he really believed.
And so you have this large Trump national security team who are part of this more isolationist, nationalistic, non-interventionist wing of the Republican Party that Trump has aligned himself with.
And they were looking at Mike Waltz with a lot of...
Distrust and suspicion because they knew what his ideology was and that it was driving Trump to war in Iran or driving Trump to continue the war in Ukraine.
Mike Walts, too, was a full-throated supporter of the war in Ukraine all throughout the time that he was in Congress.
And there's a lot of reporting that the team around Trump has been divided when it comes to the extremely vital question.
I think there's a more important foreign policy question.
Certainly right now, and probably we won't have one for the next four years, let's hope not, then the possibility that the United States, with Israeli pressure, will go and bomb and attack Iran and then easily that could escalate because Iran has lots of retaliatory and escalatory options.
So there are a lot of people in Trump's world who are saying, this is madness, you have to reach a deal with Iran.
And then other people say, no, this is the opportunity to get Iran finally, to bomb them, even change the regime.
And Mike Waltz was clearly in the...
More hawkish, war-seeking camp.
Here from Axios, just as one example.
Trump's team's Iran divide.
Dialogue versus detonation to end the nuclear threat.
Quote, President Trump has vowed to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but inside his national security team, there's a divide over the best way to do it.
Officials are divided over which route is more likely to be successful, but they agree that without a deal, there will likely be a war.
One camp, unofficially led by Vice President J.D. Vance, believes a diplomatic solution is preferable and possible and that the U.S. should be ready to make compromises in order to make it happen.
Vance is highly involved in the Iran policy.
Discussions and other U.S. officials said this camp, the one trying to avoid war with Iran, also includes Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff, who represented the U.S. at the first round of Iran talks on Saturday, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
It also gets outside support from MAGA influencer and Trump whisperer Tucker Carlson.
Lots of effort to go around the term journalist.
And as well, Steve Bannon is a fanatical, outspoken opponent of war with Iran.
And you've had people like Charlie Kirk, who have been repeatedly outspoken, Donald Trump Jr. as well.
So there's a substantial camp that is insisting that Trump will ruin his presidency, will ruin his legacy if he drags the U.S. into another Middle East war, and Israel's urging.
This group, the ones trying to avoid a war, is concerned that striking Iran's nuclear
The other side, the other camp, includes National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
They're highly suspicious of Iran and extremely skeptical of the chances of a deal that significantly rolls back Iran's nuclear program.
Senators close to Trump, like Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, also hold that view.
This camp believes Iran is weaker than ever and therefore the U.S. should not compromise but instead insist Tehran fully dismantle its nuclear program and should either strike Iran directly or support an Israeli strike if they don't.
The chances that Iran is going to give up their nuclear program entirely is zero.
The chances of that are zero.
Iran has long made that clear.
That is a non-starter for them.
They will not do that under any circumstances.
They demand the right to use nuclear energy, to have nuclear reactors.
And they've long insisted they're not trying to get a nuclear weapon.
They had inspectors all around one of those facilities and surveillance every day, which they agreed to as part of the Iran deal that President Obama entered into with Iran, along with the Europeans and the Russians.
And which Trump insisted was too weak of a deal, and therefore he vowed in the 2016 campaign trail that he would immediately nullify the Iran deal, which the Israelis hated from the day it was signed.
And he did that.
He nullified the Iran deal.
All the inspectors went away.
And it made Iran more capable of developing a nuclear weapon because they weren't being watched anymore.
And it should be noted that Biden spent four years nominally as president, Biden, and that administration did not...
Renew the Iran deal with the Iranians.
They didn't try and institute a new deal.
They were very pro-Israel, that administration.
And so now Trump is in the position of either having to get another deal with them that he has to prove is much stronger than the one Obama got, since Trump went around saying forever that that was too weak, that that wasn't sufficient, and actually withdrew from that deal.
He has to get a deal that is enough to be able to say that that's much stronger than the one Obama got.
Not so strong that the Iranians won't accept it.
He has to try and find the sweet spot, which won't be easy.
And their first Iran deal was very delicately and laboriously negotiated.
And then they're pretty much stuck with the idea of bombing Iran if they can't get an agreement because Trump has long said we will go to war as a way to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, which will happen if he says there's no deal.
So that's the position that they're in, and that's the breakdown of the...
Of the debate.
And there's no question, in my mind, none, that Trump desperately wants a deal with Iran.
He does not want to have to participate in a war, get dragged into an Israeli war.
He campaigned on the promise of being the peacemaker of avoiding wars.
This is something he prides himself on, notwithstanding his bad decision to renew the Biden bombing campaign in the Houthis, to renew it and escalate it.
I do believe Trump cares about being perceived as the person who stopped wars and not started ones.
He was the one who negotiated with the Taliban to withdraw from Afghanistan.
He was prevented from doing so.
It was Biden who ended up doing so.
But that was Trump's initiative, to negotiate with the Taliban to finally be able to pull out of Afghanistan.
He clearly wants to end the war with Ukraine and Russia.
And I know he wants to avoid a war with Iran, the problem is that he has a lot of people pressuring him to go to war with Iran, leading with the Israelis.
Here's the New York Times on April 16th, which is the same day as that Axios article reporting on the internal divisions, where Mike Waltz is specifically.
Trump waived off Israeli strike after divisions emerged in his administration.
Quote, Israel had planned to strike Iranian nuclear sites as soon as next month, but was waived off by President Trump in recent weeks in favor of negotiating a deal with Tehran to limit its nuclear program.
According to administration officials and others briefed on the discussion, Mr. Trump made his decision after months of internal debate over whether to pursue diplomacy or support Israel in seeking to set back Iran's ability to build a bomb at a time when Iran has been weakened militarily and economically.
Israeli officials, remember, this is when Netanyahu visited Trump for the second time.
He purportedly came to talk about terrorists, but they spent all their time, according to everybody, on whether the U.S. should help Israel bomb Iran, change the regime, take out all the nuclear program.
I don't know.
ATTACK ITSELF.
FOR NOW, MR. TRUMP HAS CHOSEN DIPLOMACY OVER MILITARY ACTION.
Look how often the Israelis want to start wars, but make clear that the United States has to get dragged into those wars, has to protect them, has to help them bomb, has to put our own soldiers in the region, endangering them because Iran can easily strike and has done so before.
Small U.S. bases, unprotected, they're not sprawling.
Highly protected military bases like we had in the Gulf States or we had in Iraq.
These are small bases of 500 or 1,000 troops that are highly vulnerable.
And there have been strikes, not by Iran necessarily, but by groups aligned with Iran, strikes on those camps that have killed American soldiers.
And it's a tiny fraction of what Iran is capable of doing and would likely do if we bomb them.
So here's Israel saying, yeah, put your troops in harm's way.
Deploy your military to fight our war against Iran.
Endanger your oil regs and your military and economic assets and the lives of your citizens to fight this war that we want to fight because it's in our interest to change the regime in Iran, but we want to use you for it.
And clearly Trump doesn't want that.
And so if you have the person that you're supposed to be relying upon to give you this sage, dependable advice and counsel...
As your national security advisor, Mike Waltz, and he's clearly pushing you to war when you don't want to go to war, especially for someone like Trump that has to create tensions and resentment.
Like, look, this person, if Trump perceives that somebody wants war, remember those comments he made about Liz Cheney that the CNN tried to turn into a vow to assassinate her that she did too, where he was just basically saying, yeah, Liz Cheney loves war because it's never...
Her that has to go fighting them.
He said she's a war pig.
And let's see if she would change her mind if she's the one who has to face down machine guns and rifles and the like.
Point it at her face.
So Trump does have this kind of personal aversion to people who too blatantly want war.
Again, he's not a pacifist.
He's not a anti-war extremist.
As his Yemen bombing demonstrates, he bombed.
Heavily in Syria and Iraq in his first term, he withdraw from the Iran deal.
But if somebody seems too eager for war, he immediately starts disliking them.
We've seen that pattern over and over.
He got rid of John Bolton for that.
And there's no doubt that Mike Walz is that person.
And I guess you can have that person somewhere in your orbit just to hear their voice.
But when the person right next to the Oval Office is supposed to be there, kind of being the last word.
And they're completely on the opposite track as the one you want to go on.
That has to contribute to your willingness to get rid of the person.
Now, you could say replacing Mike Walz with Marco Rubio is sort of a wash, ideologically or in terms of military strategy.
Marco Rubio is also, according to all these reports, in the camp that wants to go to war with Iran that doesn't believe a deal can be done.
But Rubio is much slicker about it, much more cunning, much
sophisticated in how he talks about these things, to make it appear like he's aligned with Trump when he really may not be, and Waltz just doesn't have that capability.
Speaking of people who don't hide their obsession with having the U.S. perpetually involved in wars for other countries, Senator Tom Cotton said this on X two days ago, quote, President Trump said the only solution is Iran completely dismantling its program or we should do it for them.
And he's right.
A nuclear Iran is a direct threat, not just to our friends in the Middle East, but to every American.
And one of the things the Israelis are doing and people like Tom Cotton are doing is they're trying to pretend that they also think a deal should be done if it can be.
But they're setting the terms of the agreement purposely to be impossible, knowing that Iran would never accept it.
After Netanyahu left the White House, he went on television in Israel, and he said, like, yeah, we would love an agreement, an agreement that we would accept.
It's the Gaddafi deal, named after the now murdered and deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
In the 90s, Gaddafi was told, it was actually right after the, when the war on terror commenced, when they were invading Iraq, Gaddafi was told by the U.S. and by the West, look, if you don't want to be the next Saddam Hussein,
if you don't want us to invade your country and depose you, just...
Basically disarm.
Give up all your real weapons.
Let us inspect to make sure you have.
And then don't worry.
We will—you'll be part of us.
We will guarantee your security.
You won't suffer the fate of Afghanistan and Iraq where we invade you.
And Gaddafi said, okay, I think that's a good deal.
I'd rather have my country integrated into the world than isolated from it.
So he gave up all his weapons.
And then 10 years later, Obama and France and— The U.K., David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy convinced Obama to join that war.
They bombed Libya with the intent of regime change, even though they denied it, and Gaddafi ended up forced out of his palace and onto the street where he was anally raped to death by an angry crowd, an angry mob.
So the Israelis are telling the Iranians, yeah, you'll be fine.
Just follow the Gaddafi model.
And you think Tehran is looking at what happened to Gaddafi and being like, yeah, we'll take that.
We'd like to...
Be the next Gaddafi.
That sounds really good.
But that's what Netanyahu is doing, pretending for Trump's sake that he too would like an agreement, but setting it up an agreement as the only minimally acceptable agreement that he knows that the Iranians could never and would never accept and would force Trump into the war that they really want.
Here's Lindsey Graham in Tel Aviv, a place that he often is.
And when he's not there, he's talking about it.
Meeting it with Netanyahu at one of Israel's main military installations.
By the way, Israel has tons of nuclear weapons.
So we're not against nuclear weapons proliferating in the Middle East.
We just want to make sure Israel is the only one that keeps the military superiority and that Iran can't be on the same level of Israel so that Iran can't deter.
We have to make sure Israel can attack whoever it wants, whenever it wants, meaning they're the only ones with nuclear weapons.
So here's Lindsey Graham in Tel Aviv, you could say of Tel Aviv, speaking with Netanyahu in February.
The Trump administration is going to have to make a decision here very soon about the Iran nuclear program.
There are two paths to take.
A military path where we help Israel deliver a decisive blow against Iran's nuclear infrastructure
Do you see what he said?
Very, very clear.
Sitting with Netanyahu saying, look, one option is to just go to war with Iran, bomb Iran, bomb the crap out of their nuclear facilities, do it in partnership with our lovely close friends Israel.
And then he's about to say there's a second path which would avoid war.
That's diplomacy.
But Lindsey Graham was very clear.
Especially knowing that the Israelis were listening, saying, the path that I just laid out, the one where we just go to war with Iran, bomb Iran with the Israelis, that's the one I prefer, not this diplomacy crap.
And then he went on.
Just negotiate with Iran to try to get them to abandon their nuclear ambitions.
If that path is chosen, it needs to be limited in time.
We should put it on the clock, and we should define what success looks like.
So you see these people close to Trump and what they're putting in his ear.
And that is very dangerous.
I think Trump is resisting them for now.
All accounts, not just public accounts, but people I talk to who are close to the administration, all say the same thing unanimously, that Trump is genuinely determined to avoid a war with Iran.
But he will go to war with Iran if he can't get a deal that he can boast is much stronger than the one Obama got.
And like I said, there are...
A lot of MAGA voices, important influential MAGA voices inside the White House and outside who are being quite vocal and vociferous about their steadfast opposition to war with Iran.
One of them is Charlie Kirk, who in It's going unnoticed because so much of their news is happening, but the war drums are beating again in D.C. The warmongers worry this is their last chance to get the white whale they've been chasing for 30 years,
which is an all-out regime change war against Iran.
And Charlie Kirk is a thousand percent right.
That's the game.
The nuclear installations are the pretext.
Just like when Obama went to war in Libya.
The pretext was, oh, we're going to protect the people of Benghazi.
Remember that?
We're going to just do a no-fly zone over Benghazi to prevent Gaddafi from massacring the people of Benghazi.
But don't worry, it's not regime change.
And then very quickly it turned into a regime change operation.
Obviously, Iraq was admittedly sold as a regime change operation.
But this is what they really want, regime change.
That has been what they've been tasting for so long.
They want to install the Shavarons' utterly fell son.
And just, like, restore the glorious Pahlavi monarchy to the Persian state and let him be the puppet to Israel and the U.S. that his father was when we installed him after we overthrew their government.
That's the real dream.
Kirk went on, quote, a new Middle East war would be a catastrophic mistake.
Our military stockpiles are depleted from the three years of backing Ukraine.
And you could say Israel as well.
"Our effort to reshore manufacturing has only just begun and will take years to bear fruit.
War would worsen our already immense deficit and national debt.
Iran is larger than Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan combined.
A war would not be easy and could easily become a calamity."
Thanks to President Trump's restraint during his first term, America has a golden opportunity to pull away from Middle East quagmires for good.
We shouldn't throw that away again so that D.C. has has-beens can feel tough by sending young Americans to die yet again.
Just...
100% endorse that.
He's continued to say that.
Whatever else you think about Charlie Kirk, that is an important voice in trying to bring a stop to a war with Iran.
Tucker Carlson is an extremely important voice in that as well.
And so is Steve Bannon from the New Arab in mid-April last month.
Arrogant Netanyahu trying to pressure U.S. into Iran attacks, says Steve Bannon.
Speaking on his podcast, Steve Bannon said Netanyahu, quote, forced his way into meetings with Trump in a bid to win backing for a strike on Tehran's nuclear site.
Quote, Trump insider Steve Bannon has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of attempting to pressure the White House to approve a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facility.
Speaking on his podcast on Thursday, You see where this pressure is coming from.
From Tel Aviv, from Jerusalem, whatever you want to say is the Israeli capital.
The world's divided on that.
But this is a war for Israel.
That's exactly what this would be.
And its supporters in the U.S. Here was Tucker Carlson on April 7th.
Whatever you think of tariffs, it's clear that now is the worst possible time for the United States to participate in a military strike on Iran.
We can't afford it.
Thousands of Americans would die.
We'd lose the war that follows.
Nothing would be more destructive to our country.
And yet we're closer than ever thanks to unrelenting pressure from neocons.
This is suicidal.
Anyone advocating conflict with Iran is not an ally of the United States, but rather an enemy.
And then two days ago, Charlie Kirk noticed that there's been these smear campaigns in the media against anybody who's in the camp of trying to prevent war with Iran.
There's been smear campaigns against Peace Hagfest, a campaign to get fired, all of his closest allies, which has been successful.
There's obviously been a huge, coordinated, severe campaign against Tucker Carlson.
And there's a massive campaign out to delegitimize Steve Witkoff, who deserves credit for having facilitated the peace deal, the ceasefire deal that didn't hold up, but he did facilitate it.
It lasted about a month between Israel and Gaza.
He's also trying hard to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.
And he is vehemently in the camp of trying to avoid war with With Iran.
And there's been many articles placed trying to attack Steve Whitcoff on the Russian payroll or the Qatari payroll, all the standard smears they make.
And one of the groups behind that is called the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has been around Washington forever.
They're a hardcore neocon pro-Israel, pro-war group.
And...
The article that was planted, I think, in the New York Post about Steve Witkoff included this, quote, The last time Trump had a chance to meet directly with the Iranian government, Bolton pushed back hard.
Mark Dubowitz, head of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, and a highly influential figure during Trump's first term, It is hoping that, quote, the new generation of hawks in the administration could try to block a deal internally by framing it as humiliating and embarrassing to Trump personally.
So that's their strategy, saying, look, if you actually avoid a war with Iran, it's basically you're going to be humiliated trying to play on Trump's insecurities.
Like, you're going to look weak.
IT THEN GOES ON, QUOTE, "ANYBODY ENGAGING IN THESE KINDS OF TALKS WITH PUTIN, MEANING WITKOV, WOULD BENEFIT FROM HAVING EXPERIENCED RUSSIA, RUSSIA HANDS ON HIS OR HER TEAM AND MEETING WITH THEM AND BRINGING THEM ON TO THE KREMLIN." JOHN HARDY, DIRECTOR OF THE FOUNDATION OF DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACY'S
RUSSIA PROGRAM, SAID OF WITKOV'S MOVE, MEANING GOING TO
So there's this massive attack on.
On Whitcoff, and about that, Charlie Kirk said just two days ago, quote, And then Donald Trump Jr.,
a major voice in the Trump administration, And it's hard to dispute any of that.
That's clearly what is happening.
You had three.
Close allies and friends of Pete Hegseth at the top of the Pentagon, all of whom had this isolationist, anti-interventionist, avoiding war in the Middle East perspective, led by Dan Caldwell, who we talked about last week, all of whom got fired based on fabricated accusations that they were leakers,
and they manipulated and cajoled Hegseth to get rid of these people who were trying to stop a war with Iran as well.
And then you see all these attacks on Hegseth and Tucker Carlson.
And Steve Witkoff, J.D. Vance, the people leading this effort.
The wing that has dragged the U.S. into war and wants to drag the U.S. into more Middle East wars remains extremely potent, notwithstanding Trump's resistance to them.
I just want to end this segment by noting a significant event, which is that Donald Trump has long been pursuing a minerals deal with Ukraine, where basically the Ukrainians...
In exchange for having the U.S. have given it so much money to fight Russia and giving more arms in the future, would give the U.S. rights to a lot of their key earth minerals.
These vital minerals that are going to be crucial to things like electric cars and all kinds of other future technology that Ukraine has an abundance of.
And Trump has long been saying, wait, why are we supporting your country and arming you and paying for your war if we're not getting anything back?
We want those minerals.
Earlier today, Scott Bassett, the U.S. Treasury Department Secretary, or this is actually yesterday, he announced that a deal had been reached, and here's what he said.
Thanks to President Trump's tireless efforts to secure a lasting peace, I am glad to announce the signing of today's historic economic partnership agreement between the United States and Ukraine, establishing the United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund.
This partnership allows the United States to invest alongside Ukraine to unlock Ukraine's growth assets, mobilize American talent, capital, and governance standards that will improve Ukraine's investment climate and accelerate Ukraine's economic recovery.
The Development Finance Corporation will participate and help to establish this fund in collaboration with the government of Ukraine.
Today's agreement signals clearly to Russian leadership that the Trump administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term.
It's time for this cruel and senseless war to end.
The killing must stop and both the United States and the government of Ukraine look forward to quickly operationalizing this historic economic partnership for both the Ukraine
Now, I understand, let's call it from an America First perspective, why it's preferable, in Trump's mind, that we don't fund and finance and arm Ukraine.
And it's wars, if we're not getting anything returned, that it's preferable that we get something, too.
And these minerals are very valuable.
And we don't have the exact terms of the deal yet, but essentially they provide for the U.S. to have an ownership stake, a percentage stake in these minerals.
And they could be very valuable to the United States.
So I understand from a...
From that isolated question, is it preferable to finance Ukraine and get nothing in return, or is it preferable to finance Ukraine and get something in return?
I understand why Trump would want to get something in return.
The problem is, and you saw it in these remarks by Secretary Betsy, is that this is being presented as an agreement that will cause the United States to have a vital national interest to defend Ukraine.
And he is announcing it as a, look, Russian leaders, you better understand, we are not abandoning Ukraine.
Quite the contrary.
We're increasing our stake in Ukraine.
We're increasing our commitment to Ukraine.
Ukraine and the U.S. are now partners in this lucrative mineral extraction deal that requires us to protect Ukraine from any attempts by any country to want to attack and including Russia.
And so it's being used almost as leverage to tell the Russians, look, we are now the protectorate of Ukraine, so you better end this war.
And it seems to me like the entire argument, the MAGA argument, against committing to a war in Ukraine was that we don't want to have to be responsible for Ukraine's national security, that we don't want to have to be duty-bound to go protect Ukraine in its wars.
I mean, if we're going to give Ukraine a security guarantee from the United States, we should have just put Ukraine in NATO.
And now the United States is duty-bound to...
Protect NATO.
I guess you could say, well, they're paying us in exchange for this commitment, but nonetheless, we still now just concocted out of whole cloth a new commitment to yet another foreign country to have military assets deployed there to protect them, to give a security guarantee.
When Trump originally announced this at the White House, he presented it in the same way, basically as something that he said would I mean that it would be good for Ukraine because we now have an actual national interest in protecting Ukraine.
And here is the White House in its fact sheet announcing this deal that was earlier today.
Quote, fact sheet, President Donald J. Trump secures agreement to establish the United States Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund.
Quote, this partnership between the United States and Ukraine establishes a fund that will receive 50% of royalties, license fees, and other similar payments from natural resource projects in Ukraine.
The partnership will be controlled by a company with equal representation of three Ukrainian and three American board members who will work together through a collaborative process to make decisions for allocation of fund resources, such as investment and distribution.
Natural resource projects will include minerals, hydrocarbons, and related infrastructure development.
If the United States decides to acquire these resources for ourselves, we will be given first choice to either acquire them or designate the purchaser of our choice.
Economic security is national security, and this important safeguard prevents critical resources from falling into the wrong hands.
The United States now has skin in the game and is committed to Ukraine's long-term success.
Is that what Trump voters wanted?
A long-term security commitment given by the United States and its military to Ukraine to protect it from wars from its neighbors, including Russia?
Because that's what you're getting.
That's what you have.
Here's Trump speaking today about the It's also good for them because you'll have an American presence at the site,
Chris, and the American presence will kind of keep a lot of There it is right under his own mouth.
We're telling Russia you can't mess with Ukraine any longer because now we're going to protect Ukraine.
And he's saying it as kind of a deterrence, like, hey, everyone's going to know Ukraine is the United States' property.
They're our little pet state.
And so people are going to know you can't interfere or mess with Russia, with Ukraine.
But the Kremlin has made very clear that they consider Ukraine to be in their vital interest, in their backyard, the way the U.S. considers the Caribbean and Latin America to be in its backyard.
And no one else can be there messing around.
That's the Monroe Doctrine.
Only the United States can meddle on Latin America, nobody else.
And so Russia has demonstrated it's more than willing to risk war with NATO in order to achieve what it regards as existential aims in Ukraine.
And this idea that if the United States is in Ukraine, it means Putin's going to be like, oh my God, we have to stop the war right away.
The U.S. is here.
This is fantasy talk.
This is one of the main reasons Russia went to war in the first place.
As recently as 10 days ago, according to Reuters, quote, the Kremlin says U.S. position ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine gives satisfaction.
Quote, U.S. Envoy General Keith Kellogg said on Sunday that NATO alliance membership was off the table for Ukraine.
Trump has said, pass U.S. support for this.
What was it cause for the war?
"We have heard from Washington at various levels that Ukraine's membership in NATO is excluded," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
"Of course, this is something that causes us satisfaction and coincides with our position." Ukrainian membership of the U.S.-led alliance would threaten Russian interests, Peskov said.
"In fact, this is one of the root causes of the conflict."
Why would it be any more acceptable to the Russians to just have now an American presence permanently in Ukraine?
Would the Americans say, no, this is ours.
We will fight to protect what's ours.
This creates a long-term security guarantee for Ukraine, which is exactly what every Trump supporter, every MAGA supporter has said they wanted to avoid.
That's why they were against the war in Ukraine.
No, that's not our business.
We don't want to have to protect Ukraine.
Remember all this?
We're focusing on our own country.
We're going to use resources for our own country not to keep expanding our military and fight wars for other countries.
We're going to use these.
Weapons instead at home to improve our citizens' lives?
I understand the argument from Trump, like, hey, we got these mineral deals, but we'll see how these mineral deals plays out.
It's far from clear or certain what the value of it is.
And whatever the value is, in exchange, we're making a massive, potentially cataclysmic decision to commit the United States military and our national resources to protecting Ukraine.
I guess we're betting on the fact that that will scare the Russians away, but I don't think that anything Russia has done over the last three years suggests that they're afraid of anything when it comes to protecting their interests in Ukraine because they regard that as existential, but we'll see where this all leads.
you Thank you.
If you're struggling with insomnia, meaning you're tossing and turning all night and feeling edgy during the day, let me tell you about CBD from CBD Distillery.
Millions of people are turning to their CBD relief because it works.
In fact, over 90% of customers report better sleep with CDB, and it's not just sleep.
CBD Distillery offers targeted organic formulations for just about everything.
Sleep, stress, mood and focus, pain after exercise.
They even have CBD for pets.
And I have several dogs that are...
Quite hyperactive, to put that generously, and CBD really does relax them.
It's super organic, super natural.
It comes from the hemp plant, but it doesn't have any psychoactive ingredients that marijuana has.
In fact, it's all made with the highest quality clean ingredients.
There's no filters, just premium CBD.
I've talked before, but I also use it for myself when I play tennis, what they do.
Almost every day, I get this mild pain in my wrist just from the way you have to hit the ball and the racket.
And when I use the CBD stick, the kind of lotion to put on it, you feel the pain subsiding right away.
With over 2 million satisfied customers and a 100% money-back guarantee, CBD Distillery is the source of trust.
If you're struggling with sleep, stress, or other health concerns and haven't found relief, make the change, like millions are doing, to CBD from CBD Distillery.
And for a limited time, you can save 20% off your entire purchase.
Visit CBDistillery and use promo code GLEN.
That's CBDistillery.com.
Promo code GLEN, CBDistillery.com.
Specific product availability depends on individual state regulations.
Thank you.
All right, so this is a topic that we don't often cover on this show.
In fact, very rarely, but I feel compelled.
To do so, because I think it's an important topic, especially given the way it was just treated and the audience that it found.
And as I said throughout the show, it involves the conservative culture warrior and Daily Wire personality, Matt Walsh, who went on to Tucker Carlson's very well-watched podcast.
I've been on that show several times.
He's going to be on it again, I think, in May.
And I don't really know why.
I think probably because Tucker understands that Matt Walsh's primary focus is the culture war and social conservative issues, trying to control the lives, the private lives of other adult citizens.
And Walsh is somebody who believed, for example, you know, lots of people have debates about the extent of the trans agenda.
Like, well, what age can parents decide to have their kids take hormonal Treatments or surgeries?
Is 10 abuse if you socially transition?
Is 16 old enough if a doctor has prescribed it to deal with gender for you, enough to go on cross-gender hormones?
Those debates we have.
We have debates about whether trans women should be able to participate in sports because they were biologically born as men, if that's fair.
A lot of people debate that, but most people, I think, I certainly feel this way.
Don't have the slightest interest in whether adults, adult citizens, decide for themselves to live life as whatever they think they identify as.
Why would I care in the slightest if some adult decides that they want to have a mastectomy and live as a man, or some adult decides to have breast implants or penile removal or whatever because they want to live as a man?
In what way is that my business?
I have no interest in stopping that.
That's just not my concern.
That's live and let live.
That's what it means.
Just stay out of your neighbor's private life.
Especially when it's not hurting anyone else.
But Matt Walsh, he goes so far, he thinks that adults should be banned by the state from living their life as a trans person or seeking medical treatments if they believe are safe.
Matt Walsh wants to butt into that person's private life, that adult's private life.
And say, no, you have no right if you want to live your life as a trans person to do so.
We're going to stop you as a state.
So he's well on the far extreme of these issues.
And so I guess Tucker kind of had him there as a representative of this sort of social conservatism that Tucker himself shares a lot of but not all of.
But he was mostly sympathetic to what Matt Walsh was saying and did push back a couple of questions.
Not very much.
So I don't want to necessarily attribute any opinions to Tucker that he didn't express himself.
I'm really focused on Matt Walsh here.
Although I am interested in Tucker's views on this for sure.
But I guess that's why they decided to spend the first 10 minutes of their discussion on a very narrow, rarely discussed question, which is whether or not Same-sex couples should be permitted to adopt.
Now, as I said, this is—and by the way, this is not surrogacy.
Let's be very clear about that.
This is not the debate about surrogacy, where couples pay a woman because they can't conceive, either because the woman in a heterosexual relationship is infertile, or the man is impotent, or there's a gay couple that obviously can't reproduce,
so they pay a woman to be inseminated, and then she carries the baby, then— I think there are major ethical issues.
I have ethical qualms about that.
It's a free and open deal, theoretically, between adults involved in an economic transaction.
But with so much economic inequality, there's an obvious, very disturbing economic exploitation danger that a lot of poor women are going to be— Pay to do something you really don't want to do, which is often, of course,
very traumatic, usually traumatic, which is carry your own baby or carry a baby in your womb for nine months, give birth to it, have to hold it, and then give it up to someone because they paid you $20,000 or $50,000 and know that you're never going to see that child again.
I believe it's impossible to go through that and not be very psychologically harmed.
And yes, in theory, these women are adults and are doing it of their own volition, but There's a lot of economic exploitation going on.
There was recently a report about wealthy Europeans who need kidney transplants.
And so they fly to the poorest countries in Africa and pay Africans some fee, $20,000 or $50,000, some massive amount to Africans to give up their kidney.
So the European, the affluent European can take the kidney for themselves.
And this is the kind of really dystopian thing this can lead to.
And one more thing about surrogacy, which is that although a lot of the focus of surrogacy is on gay couples that pay women, the vast, vast majority, two out of every three, if not more, of couples who pay a woman to be a surrogate are straight couples,
not gay couples.
It's overwhelmingly done.
Something like 65%, 70% by straight couples.
And so you can have that debate.
Like I said, I have my own qualms about it.
I'm not ready to say I think it should be banned, but I definitely see the concerns about that.
This is a completely different topic.
Just put that out of your mind.
This is not the topic being discussed.
The topic being discussed is whether gay couples should be able to adopt children, children who already exist in the world, who perhaps don't have any parents because they both died and therefore they're orphans.
Or perhaps one parent died and the other abandoned them, so there's no family members to raise them.
Perhaps both parents or one parent is drowning in addiction or physical abuse and rage issues and beats them or just neglects them.
And so the state comes and says, yeah, no one in your biological family can raise you.
And they end up in places like orphanages or shelters or foster care.
Where they just don't have parents.
They just live their lives without family.
And most of these places are terrible, abusive, harmful.
Even with the best intentioned people, there just aren't resources sufficient to give kids in these places any semblance of a family.
They don't have parents.
They don't have family members.
They have nobody to stand over them when they're eight or five and say, you have to do your homework.
If you don't do your homework, you're going to get punished.
We're just giving them positive reinforcement about why education is important, why studying is important, why health is important.
They just don't have any of that.
Things children absolutely need, above all else, like a stable, loving set of adults who treat them as their children, raise them as their children.
So this is not a question of gay couples buying a baby.
This is a question of, and Tucker Carlson asked about this, and Matt Walsh answered in a, I think, In a remarkable and shocking way, a horrific and morally twisted way, about whether it's better to leave children lingering in orphanages and poorly managed shelters where they're there with 20 other kids and a staff of two.
Or foster care where they're just passed around every eight months to some different family.
And then they're just expelled the minute they hit 18, armed with nothing.
No skills, no education, no support.
And a lot of them end up on the street.
The boys end up selling drugs.
The girls end up in prostitution.
The girls end up in prostitution because they have no other thing.
It's really a dark and horrific existence.
These are kids who have no chance at life because for whatever reason they don't have parents who can or will raise them.
And they linger in these places.
It's not like they're all a big line for adoption.
So there's You know, a huge number of kids who, once they reach the age of three or four, have almost no chance to be adopted.
And so Tucker asked Matt Carlson, Tucker asked Matt Walsh, is it better to leave them in these horrific places than to at least have a stable, loving set of parents who are gay?
And here's how he answered.
Okay, so I'm not on X all that much, but I do read you.
And sometimes I read your tweets and I'm like...
Matt Walsh, ladies and gentlemen, spinning people up.
Here's one.
We've been saying for many years that gay adoption and surrogacy should be illegal.
Now everyone else seems to be catching on.
This is an abomination.
We've been saying for many years that gay adoption is an abomination?
I've never heard anybody say that.
Wow, we're just diving right in.
We're diving right in.
Gay adoption is an abomination.
Yeah, well, I think there I was referring to...
Social conservatives, because social conservatives still somehow get a bad rap, so-called social conservatives, even among other conservatives and other people on the right, it seems to me.
So when I say we, I mean like so-called social conservatives?
I've never heard them say that.
I've never heard anybody...
I think I agree with what you said, but I'm not...
I don't think I've ever heard a single person say that.
Everyone seems to be afraid to say that.
Yeah, most people are.
That's why I think...
But, you know, so-called social conservatism is...
That's why it's not popular, even on the right.
Now, as I said, this debate really doesn't exist.
Florida was the last state to have a ban on same-sex couples adopting back in 2014, 2013.
It was actually Matt Gaetz played a key role.
In having that repealed because his father was a very influential state senator, Republican state senator, and he convinced his father that this ban made no sense.
It was unchristian to not give kids an opportunity to have parents, have support, financial support, familiar support, emotional support.
And so Florida was the last state to abolish its ban on same-sex couples dubbing.
It was like in 2013, 2014, so years ago.
And now all 50 states allow same-sex adoption.
Almost every country in the democratic world does.
I think every country in the democratic world, actually.
So you did hear Tucker saying, I think I agree with you.
But here is where that it kind of escalated.
Can I ask you, is there anything more hated on the right than social conservatism?
I don't think so.
So you could say, like, I think we should drop an atomic bomb on a bunch of people and just, like, kill them all and their kids.
And people are like, well, that's a really good idea.
But if you're like, actually, we should, like, save some kids, then they hate you.
What is that?
Yeah.
Or we should...
We should...
Okay, let me just...
I just have to interject here because I just want to...
I need to emphasize what actually is going on here.
Tucker's saying and Matt Walsh's saying, we're here to save the kids.
We love the kids, the children, like the abstraction, the children.
And yet, if you ban same-sex adoption, which they're saying they want to do, you're going to have tens of thousands of kids, hundreds of thousands of kids who aren't being saved or being destroyed because they're going to just linger in orphanages, shelters, and foster care forever.
You're not saving those kids.
You're consigning them to a life of utter misery and deprivation permanently.
By depriving them of a family.
Even if you think this is a perfect family.
And I don't think that.
But even if you think, oh, it's ideal to have a mother and a father raising kids in a heterosexual marriage.
To say that it's preferable to put kids on that path.
And I'm somebody who has adopted kids.
I understand what shelters are.
What orphanages are.
We adopted our kids from orphanages.
I've seen.
I've done reporting on this.
I know the horrors that go on there, the damage to us.
Again, everyone who raises kids knows that the thing a kid needs most is a loving, stable family.
Parents who look over them, who care for them, who look over them, who unconditionally love them, protect them, put them on the right path.
And in the name of saving kids, they're actually destroying kids by saying, one of the paths you have to getting a family, the very improbable path to get a family we're going to take away from you because we want to save you by leaving you in.
All these hideous places.
We're not going to adopt you.
We're not going to raise you.
We have no interest in sacrificing to raise you.
We just want to abstractly love the children and say we're saving them even though they're destroying them.
Here's the rest of this.
We should look at the way that human society was structured for thousands of years and we should probably consider that they were right about a lot of that stuff.
Maybe not everything.
Maybe not everything, but there are just certain basic civilizational truths that we have moved away from in recent decades.
But I don't think there's any good reason to move away from them.
And so if human beings did something a certain way for literally millennia in every civilization that we know of, it's...
It's probably right.
I mean, there's probably a lot to be said for it.
Again, not in every case, but in most cases.
I mean, a lot of this is just such trite culture war stuff that has been real long ago.
Polygamy has been a huge part of human existence for millennial.
So has rape.
So has slavery.
So has cannibalism.
So has child sacrifice.
All these things are found in the Bible.
All these things are found everywhere.
So it's like, hey, they've done this for a thousand of years.
Why would we change that?
And of course, he's acknowledging, hey, maybe part of what we should be doing is getting rid of the stuff that is from the past that's actually bad, even though they did it for a thousand of years.
And once you acknowledge that, saying that this is the way it was done for a thousand of years is no longer an argument.
And I'm going to say on that, let me just show this last clip, because this is where it really gets sketchy.
A child being in foster care, Is far from an ideal scenario.
It's very, very sad.
A child going to two gay parents I think is worse.
I think it's easily worse, actually.
Why?
So that's the nub of his argument.
A child is in foster care or any analog or orphanages, shelters.
That's sad.
But it's better to leave them there without a family, without parents, without any hope for the future than it is to put them in a...
Home, and obviously anyone who adopts, you can investigate it to make sure you're stable, you're law-abiding, you have the financial resources to raise kids.
It's better to leave them.
Just leave them.
Who cares what happens to them?
I mean, I love the children, in quotes, but I don't love the actual kids, like the flesh and blood kids.
I don't care about them.
He said it's not even a close call.
It's better to leave them there than put them with gay couples.
He goes on.
Actually.
Why?
It's just more disordered.
It's more confusing for the child.
Again, neither scenario is good.
We don't like either thing.
But I don't see going to gay parents as an improvement over what they had before.
Do we know that it screws kids up, or we just sort of intuitively know it?
I think we intuitively know it, but also there's been plenty of studies done about the mental health effects of kids that grow up in these...
You know, single-sex, same-sex parent homes.
There's been a lot of studies done about it.
But honestly, I don't—you can look at the studies, people will fact-check, and they're there.
I just—I don't need studies for this.
It's the same thing with the trans topic, you know.
Okay, so he doesn't need studies.
But let me just say how idiotic that framing is.
Let's assume for the sake of argument.
That there are studies saying that it's better for kids from their mental health to grow up in an opposite sex couple than with a gay couple.
Let's pretend that there are those studies.
The question would have to be, to support this argument, is comparing those harms from growing up with gay parents to the harms that grow up from having no parents at all.
From only being around people who are employees of the orphanage that you live in or just being passed around?
Confusing and destabilizing?
What do you think happens in the foster care system where kids get passed around from one horrible set of parents to the next?
Sometimes they're well-intentioned, but they're being paid in the foster care system.
There's immense abuse, molestation, pedophilia, rape, and neglect.
How about the studies on what happens to kids in those places?
There are lots of studies on what happens to kids in those places, and the statistics are very grim for what happens when they're left there.
I don't actually care about these studies either, but since Matt Balch claimed that studies show that kids are better off with same-sex couples, opposite couples, and are severely harmed for their mental health association, here's the American Psychological Association.
This is 2012.
So before there was even gay marriage nationally recognized, the title of it was Lesbian and Gay Parenting, quote, On lesbian and gay parents and their children, the American Psychological Association and other health professionals and scientific organizations have concluded that there is no scientific evidence that parenting effectiveness is related to parental sexual orientation.
That is, lesbian and gay parents are as likely as heterosexual parents to provide supportive and healthy environments for their children.
This body of research has shown that the adjustment, development, and psychological well-being of children are unrelated to parental sexual orientation and that the children of lesbian and gay parents are as likely as those of heterosexual parents to flourish.
There is no reliable evidence that homosexual orientation per se impairs psychological functioning, although the social and other circumstances in which lesbian and gay men live, including exposure to widespread prejudice and discrimination, is itself a cause of acute distress.
Oh, here's another study, just to give you a sense, from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry from 1999.
So, by no means was there a taboo on saying anything different.
Quote, From the American Sociological Association,
September of 2020.
The title is School Outcomes of Children Raised by Same-Sex Parents, Evidence from Administrative Panel Data.
Quote, although widely used in policy debates, the literature on children's outcomes when raised by same-sex parents mostly relies on small selective samples or samples based on cross-sectional survey data.
This has led to a lack of statistical power and the inability to distinguish children born to same-sex parents from children of separated parents.
We address these issues by using unique administrative longitudinal data from the Netherlands, which was the first country to legalize same-sex marriage,
Quote, These data include 2,971 children with same-sex couples and over a million children with different sex parents followed from birth.
The results indicate that children raised by same-sex parents from birth perform better than children raised by different sex parents in both primary and secondary education.
And then finally, what we know from Cornell University Journal in 2015.
What does the scholarly research say about the well-being of children with gay or lesbian parents?
We identified 79 scholarly studies that met our criteria for adding to knowledge about the well-being of children in gay or lesbian parents.
Of these studies, 75 out of 79 concluded that children of gay or lesbian parents fared no worse than other children.
We identified four studies concluding that children of gay or lesbian parents face added disadvantages.
Since all four took their samples from children who endured family breakup, Note that terminology, LGB-headed households.
was off in the terminology used until quite recently when the tea was added.
Taking together, this research forms an overwhelming scholarly consensus based on over three decades of peer-reviewed research that having a gay or lesbian parent does not harm children, evaluating studies that find no differences resulting from having a gay parent.
Some critics of the LGB parentate
I mean, it's just weird to see that, even though that was common.
Some critics of the LGB parenting research object to the small non-random sampling methods known as, quote, "convenience sampling," that researchers in the field often use to gather their data.
Yet within the field, convenience sampling is not considered a methodological flaw, but simply a limitation to generalizability.
Within sociology and especially psychology, small qualitative and longitudinal studies are considered to have certain advantages over probability studies.
Such data can allow investigators to notice and analyze subtleties and texture in the child development over time that large statistical studies often miss.
It is important to note, moreover, that some of the research that finds no differences among children with same-sex parents do use large representative data, and then it goes into a bunch of those.
So, I could basically show you studies all night that reach that same conclusion.
The vast, vast majority of consensus of studies along this line, are children raised by gayer parents prejudiced or harmed as opposed to opposite experience?
All reach the same conclusion if the answer is no.
And in some cases, for a variety of reasons, children with same-sex couples fare better.
Now, again, it wouldn't be one thing if there was just this long, long line of straight couples eager to adopt children, wanting to adopt all children.
It doesn't matter what age.
They just all want to adopt children.
And so every child is going to be adopted.
And the question is, do you add gay couples to the line and let them be participating?
That's not the reality that we're facing.
The reality that we're facing is that there's a huge number of children in the United States and worldwide.
Who don't have parents, and once they reach a certain age, even four or five, and then as they go up, it becomes less and less probable, are extremely unlikely ever to find parents.
Which is why Matt Walsh has to take the position that he's taken, which is, otherwise, you could say, I want to ban same-sex couples, and then you say, what about all the kids in these places that don't have parents?
And most people will say, yeah, I mean, if that's the choice, like, even people who are— We'll say, yeah, that's a choice, leaving them in a foster care system or an orphanage.
Of course, it'd be better to put them with gay couples, even though the ideal is straight couples.
But that's not the reality.
He has to take the position in order to ban same-sex couples from adopting.
No, it's actually better to leave kids in these repulsive, loveless, family-less places than it is to have them raised by gay parents.
Group Children Uniting Nations that specializes in adoptions.
This is from April of 2025, so just about a week ago.
How many children are in foster care in 2025?
U.S. and global numbers explained.
Quote, U.S. nationwide total, as of early 2025, the most recent count confirms that 390,000 children are currently in foster care across the United States.
Almost half a million.
No parents, no adoption.
Just passed along every few months from one family to the next that gets paid by the state very little to not being their parents, just to keep custody of them.
It goes on.
Global foster care estimates.
Accurate worldwide statistics remain difficult due to non-uniform data collection.
However, UNICEF and IFCO have provided structured reporting covering the majority of the global child population.
Key figures.
2.7 million children.
2.7 million are in residential or alternative care worldwide.
120 children per every 100,000 are in foster or institutional care across 84% of the child population tracked.
Foster systems in low-income countries lie heavily on informal kinship care, which remains underreported.
it.
I want to ask anybody who is making this argument or who says they care about.
The children or they care about religion, Christianity, that's what's at stake.
One of the reasons there's so many kids in the United States and around the world who are with no parents in these underfunded, abusive institutions is because there's not nearly enough people in the world or in the United States willing to be selfless enough to go and take care of them,
to go and adopt them.
To say, you know what?
These aren't my biological children, but I'm nonetheless going to raise them as my own child.
I'm going to give them all the things that a child needs and form a parental bond with them, which every adopted kid or most adopted kids will tell you is what happens.
It's an incredibly benevolent and noble and I would say Christian thing to do.
And you actually see a lot of religious Christians, not enough, but a lot of religious Christians Who actually have a biological family, but nonetheless adopt out of a sense of following the kind of spirit of the Gospels to care for and nurture and connect yourself to the most downtrodden and the most deprived,
which is what Jesus spent his time doing, with prostitutes and addicts and just what were considered the lowest drugs of society.
That's where he preferred to minister.
And you have people like Amy Coney Barrett, who's Catholic, and Mike Johnson, who I believe is evangelical.
They both have a large Biological family of a lot of kids, but in the case of Amy Coney Barrett, went to Haiti and adopted two kids.
I don't know exactly where Mike Johnson's adopted kids are from, but they both did it out of the sense of religious obligation.
And I know when we decided to adopt, one of the main reasons was a kind of moral conclusion that if you're somebody who has the means and the economic stability, And you feel stable in your life and in a stable relationship.
It almost like feels immoral to just live a life of consumption, selfishness, when you know that there are these children that you're more than capable of taking care of whose lives are inevitably going to be destroyed because they don't have a loving,
stable home where parents, which every kid absolutely needs, no matter how nice and well-intentioned orphanage psychologists or social workers are, Foster parents are.
It doesn't give kids even nearly what they need.
And it was out of the sense of moral obligation.
Like, hey, we should be giving back to the society.
And one of the ways to do that is to give the child who doesn't have a home a home.
And I did a lot of reporting on this as well.
I did it in Brazil.
And one of the things I did was I profiled the same-sex couple who were economically limited, working class, really.
And they decided they wanted to adopt one child.
And then when they found the child they wanted to adopt, they learned that he had two older siblings.
And they were like, we can't just take one and split these siblings up.
So they ended up adopting all three, even though they only wanted one.
And they don't have a lot of money, but they give these kids an incredible home.
And as part of that article that I wrote profiling them, I also included a lot of statistics in this article there.
You see it as a same-sex couple set out to adopt a child.
They ended up with three.
We produced a video.
About their lives as well.
And as part of the article, I wrote this.
Quote, So a tiny percentage of parents who want to adopt,
Are willing to adopt a child six years or older, even though 85% of the kids needing adoption are six years or older.
In other words, there's a huge mismatch.
Every healthy baby up for adoption is born.
There is a long line.
Everybody wants to adopt healthy infants.
But for kids who reach a certain age, even four, they have a very low probability of getting adopted.
Five or six, it almost becomes, I wouldn't say impossible, but extremely unlikely.
So if you're opposed to same-sex couples adopting, you should know that what you're doing is you're consigning these kids to a life of misery.
And the reason for it is because a lot of people who say they love the kids, love children, care so much about the children, get performatively teary-eyed when talking about children, don't actually back up that profess concern.
And in fact, in the case of Matt Walsh, and I guess to some extent Dr. Carlson, they'll say, oh, we're here to save the kids, when in fact their view of the world will result in Basically, abusing children in the worst possible way you could possibly imagine.
The article went on, quote, declining to adopt.
BROTHERS, THIS IS THE SAME SUCCER COUPLE WHO FOUND GABRIEL AND THEN ADOPTED HIS TWO OLDER SIPLINGS, WOULD ALMOST CERTAINLY HAVE CONSIGNED THEM TO A LIFE OF HEINESS, DEPRIVATION OR WORSE.
CHILDREN IN SHELTERS WHO END UP NOT BEING ADOPTED, FACE GREAT HARDSHIPS EVEN IN THE BEST OF CIRCUMSTANCES.
BUT IN THE POOREST STATES OF BRAZIL, ITSELF A POOR COUNTRY, THEY HAVE ALMOST NO SOCIETAL SUPPORT.
UPON EXPULSION FROM THE SHELTER AT 18, BOYS COMMONLY END UP SELLING DRUGS AND LIVING ON THE STREETS WHILE GIRLS TURN TO PROSTITUTION.
The choice this couple unexpectedly faced adopts one or two or two children as intended while leaving their sibling or adopt the three siblings together despite uncertainty about how it worked is a common one in Brazil because most Brazilian children eligible for adoption were removed from their biological parents due to serious abuse or neglect or the death of their parents.
Siblings are often removed together.
As Schofield reported, 77% of children in shelters are with siblings, while 79% of adopted parents want to adopt only one child.
In sum, the overwhelming majority of couples begin the process wanting only to adopt a purely healthy infant with no siblings, yet the reality of the eligible children is radically different.
Adoption authorities have a strong preference to have siblings adopted together, and they apply a wide array of pressure tactics, from subtle to overt, to induce adopting couples to accept more than one child.
So those are the realities.
And if you want to say, oh, yeah, ban same-sex couples from adopting, you should know what you're actually endorsing.
Here from the National Library of Medicine in March of 2011, patterns of movement in foster care and optimal matching analysis.
And Matt Walsh is saying, oh, it's very confusing and destabilizing for kids to get adopted by a couple.
Better to keep them in the foster care system where they get passed around to 39 different families.
Probably the average number of placements is 8.3, the average number.
You get passed around eight different times to different families before you're 18. Do you think that creates a sense of confidence and security and stability and love and protection in a child?
On average, foster youth in the samples are estimated to move 1.3 times per year.
They move more than one time per year.
The National Library of Medicine in November of 2017, here's the mental health interventions for children in foster care, a systematic review.
Unlike the studies that said that children adopted by stable, loving gay couples, Do very well, as well as opposite sex couple children.
Children in foster care where Matt Walsh wants to leave them because he's too selfish to raise them himself, and so many other people are as well, those children, those are the ones without parents who don't get adopted, who "exhibit great mental health needs."
Between 50 and 80% of children in a foster care meet criteria for a mental health disorder.
23% meet criteria for more than one mental health disorder.
I will just add a personal note, when the adoption of our kids was finalized, there was kind of a party at the orphanage celebrating their adoption.
Of course, the other kids are happy in one way that when someone gets adopted, but you can see the incredible sadness in their eyes about the fact that they're remaining without parents.
I remember these kids' faces that day viscerally.
It's extremely sad.
Because you know that the path that these kids are on means they have no chance in life.
They can be incredibly smart, incredibly talented, incredibly good-hearted.
You cannot really survive as a child or get on the right path.
Extremely difficult.
Without a stable home, a loving home, and a set of parents who are devoted to your well-being.
And to listen to people say that those kids are better off where they are.
And they get expelled the day they turn 18 than to be raised in a household led by a same-sex couple?
That is not just fanaticism, but moral depravity of a kind that I honestly can't comprehend.
And having put that video on X earlier today, you know, it's anecdotal, but there were lots and lots of people saying Matt Walsh was right.
So I thought it was important to kind of dissect the realities morally and emotionally and psychologically of what these people are actually advocating for these children who they claim to love but actually want to destroy.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, a system update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after.
They first appear live on Rumble, on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
If we rate, review, and follow our program, it really helps spread the visibility of our show.
Finally, as independent journalists and as independent media, we really do rely on the support of our viewers and our members.
The way to do that is to become a member of our locals community, where if you join, you get access to a wide array.
We have a lot of original video exclusive segments and interviews that we don't have time to put here.
We put them there.
Sometimes if our show goes too long, we start streaming exclusively live for our local members.
We put transcripts of every program.
That we do every day.
The next day we put them on Locals Platform.
It is the place when we have original journalism, written journalism to publish.
We put it on our Locals Platform first.
And most of all, it's the community on which we really do rely to support the independent journalism that we're doing here every night.
All you have to do is click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page, and it will take you directly to that community.
For those who have been watching this show, we are, of course, very appreciative, and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m. Eastern live exclusively here on Rumble.
