The End to U.S.-Iran War? Iran: Rational Actor or "Death Cult?" Plus: An Israel-First Admission
Trump announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, but is it meaningful and will it last? Plus: Glenn dismantles the propaganda and lies about Iran used to instigate the "12 Day War." Finally: State Department Spokeswoman Tammy Bruce blatantly states what many in the foreign policy establishment firmly believe: that the U.S. is "the greatest country on earth next to Israel." --------------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, on Saturday night, the U.S. bombed all three of Iran's major nuclear facilities.
That, it should go without saying, is an act of war.
That was what Israel was demanding the U.S. do, not just protect it from Iran's retaliation for the war that Israel started, which the U.S. was already doing, but they dispatched, they also demanded that Trump dispatch B-52s with 30,000-pound bombs known as bunker busters because Israel lacks the munitions to destroy Iran's underground and hardened facility at Fordo.
That is what Trump did, along with attack two other nuclear facilities with Tomahawk missiles shot from nuclear submarines.
Yesterday, early Sunday afternoon, I recorded a 30-minute live video or so providing some of my analysis of those events, which is also available on Rumble.
But since then, since yesterday, there have been major new events, including an Iranian attack in retaliation this afternoon on a U.S. military base in Qatar, which, according to President Trump and even sources close to the Iranian government, was an attack that the Iranians did,
but was coordinated in advance with the Qataris and the Americans to essentially allow Iran to claim to its people that it attacked back while ensuring there'd be no deaths from that attack, so as to avoid further, forcing Trump to escalate further.
In other words, it was the facade of a retaliatory attack, but really done to ensure there were no casualties.
Donald Trump now says that the military conflict between Iran and the U.S. is over and claims he is pressuring Israel to stop shortly as well.
Just moments before we went on air, President Trump announced that he had cemented a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, which will take effect in six hours and 12 hours later, will become permanent.
There's a little bit of uncertainty about this, as there typically is, given how fast it happened with some Iranian sources denying that.
We'll see shortly enough, and we'll also examine all of these events.
Then, Iran's behavior here is really worth studying.
The propaganda we have been fed basically since the U.S. overthrow of Iraq's government, Wasad Hussein, is that, no, it's Iran that is uniquely evil because they are ruled by a cult of religious fanatics who do not operate in accordance with reason or pragmatism like everybody else, so they can't be deterred.
Instead, they are an apocalyptic strain of Islam that seeks death and martyrdom as more important than preserving their own lives, that they actually want death, so deterrence doesn't work on them.
It is important to examine that demonization script against Iran that we've heard for so long and compare it to their actions and decisions, not just today, but over the past several years.
That's not a defense of Iran any more than it was a defense of Saddam Hussein to oppose the war in Iraq or to dispute that Iraq had a nuclear program or WMDs back then.
If you contested that, you were told, why are you siding with Saddam Hussein?
It's no more being pro-Iran to say that maybe this demonization script of Iran is not accurate, the one that we've been fed, but that's how it'll be depicted as well.
But it's vital to examine the narratives our government and media disseminate in order to determine if there is validity to them, especially so when that propaganda is disseminated to fuel war fever.
Finally, the events of the last couple of weeks have forced many people to finally be candid about their real loyalties and priorities, starting with Ted Cruz's confession that we reported to you last week, to Tucker Carlson, that he said he ran for Congress with the intention of being the leader defender of Israel in the Congress and that he has woken up every day since then to do so.
We have had many other similar remarks, admitting that Israel is the highest priority, on par with the United States, including yesterday by Trump's State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce that we're going to show you.
It's quite a remarkable statement.
And all these statements are deeply enlightening about U.S. foreign policy and the nature of U.S. politics.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
So there's a lot of news to cover today, a lot of very significant news in this war that Israel last week started 10 days ago or so with Iran when they attacked Iran using fighter jets and missiles and bombs of all kinds, as well as on-the-ground Assad operatives that they had deployed in Iran, blew up a lot of things, killed a bunch of people.
And the U.S. ultimately joined that war.
It really was a joint U.S.-Israeli action from the start.
But Donald Trump over the weekend made the U.S. a direct belligerent by dispatching multiple aircraft, including B-52s that are the aircraft that carry bunker busters from very far distances, and bombed the underground nuclear facility at Fordo.
There's been a lot of triumphalist claims about how this has obliterated the Iranian nuclear program.
There's no way we could actually know that.
There's been no damage assessment yet of these facilities, including at Fordo.
Nobody has any idea whether Iran knowing that this was coming, and certainly it was a very high possibility that it was.
It was openly discussed whether they removed heavily enriched uranium and centrifuges prior to these attacks.
But certainly it damaged or impeded these facilities.
And the killing of nuclear scientists that the Israelis did, the assassination of scientists Combined with it, I'm certain had a deleterious effect on Iran's ability to develop nuclear energy to say nothing of nuclear weapons.
How much it damaged it, how much impeded it, we actually don't know and won't know for a good while if we ever really know.
So, that was obviously the main news that we had planned to cover.
But then, Iran, as expected, as pretty much they were required to do, launched a retaliatory counter-strike today in response to the U.S. bombing against a U.S. military base, a gigantic military base in Doha, Qatar.
We often hear that Qatar is this enemy of the United States, that it's the menace of the Middle East, when in reality, it hosts the largest military base, the U.S. military base, that you have in the region.
If you go to Doha, as I've done, you will be amazed at how sprawling this military base is.
Everywhere you go, you see U.S. military officials.
It's a major, important base for the United States in the Middle East.
We, of course, have military bases in countless countries around the world, and you can question why we need to have that when China doesn't.
Most other countries don't.
But the U.S. does have a major one in Qatar, and there were only six missiles that the Iranians sent, which they said was a number they picked because that was how many bunker buster bombs the U.S. dropped on Fordo.
And so they said it was symmetrical.
But it was not just designed to do no damage and kill nobody.
It was actually coordinated with, or at least the Qataris and the Americans, had advanced notice that it was going to be done.
The base was evacuated.
The Iranians really needed to do something to show its people and the world, look, we don't just allow countries to attack us.
But they also wanted to prevent Donald Trump from being forced to go and be even more destructive in their country to escalate the war.
And this was how they did it.
After that happened, and President Trump, as we'll show you, kind of mocked the Iranians for what was a very weak and deliberately harmless, benign counter-strike and said that it was done in advance.
And he said, as far as we're concerned, the Americans, we don't need to counter-attack.
We did what we want to do.
There'll be no more war between the U.S. and the Iranians, assuming they do nothing else.
He then went and announced, he earlier today said, the Israelis, I'm encouraging the Israelis to end the war with Iran too.
And then just a little bit ago, maybe 30, 45 minutes ago, he went to True Social and posted this, quote, congratulations to everyone.
It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be a complete and total ceasefire in approximately six hours from now when Israel and Iran have wound down and completed their in-process final missions, meaning they're going to bomb each other in the next six hours.
That ceasefire will last 12 hours, he said, at which point the war will be considered ended.
Officially, Iran will start the ceasefire.
And upon the 12th hour, Israel will start the ceasefire.
And upon the 24th hour, an official end to the 12-day war will be saluted by the world.
In other words, Israel has 12 hours to keep bombing.
Iran only has six.
After six hours, the Iranian ceasefire begins.
Another six hours later, the Israelis begin.
And the Israelis have been issuing evacuation notices in Tehran during this time.
They obviously intend to use that 12-hour window before the ceasefire begins to be as destructive as possible.
We saw them do that in Gaza as well when President Trump fostered a ceasefire when other ceasefires happened.
The Israelis just keep bombing and killing right up to the last minute.
President Trump went on, quote, during each ceasefire, the other side will remain peaceful and respectful.
On the assumption that everything works as it should, which it will, I would like to congratulate both countries, Israel and Iran, on having the stamina, courage, and intelligence to end what should be called the 12-day war.
This is a war that could have gone on for years and destroyed the entire Middle East, but it didn't and never will.
God bless Israel.
God bless Iran.
God bless the Middle East.
God bless the United States of America.
And God bless the world.
So that's a very triumphalist statement.
He's obviously proud of the work he did to facilitate and end this conflict.
And this conflict wouldn't have started had President Trump not authorized the Israelis to do it, not plotted and planned with the Israelis to do it.
They launched an unprovoked attack on Iran, unprovoked in that Iran wasn't planning on attacking anybody, hadn't attacked anybody.
This is exactly like the Iraq War.
It wasn't even a preemptive war where we were preempting an attack.
They came up with a new term, preventative war, like we're trying to prevent them from sometime way in the future attacking us with weapons they don't yet have or that we claim they have, but it turns out we didn't is a brand new way of thinking about war that you don't have to wait for a country to attack you or imminently attack you or even threatening to attack you in a real way.
Just if you feel like it, you just go and start a war.
That war killed a lot of people in Iran, killed some people in Israel.
So there's death, a good amount of death in the wake.
But it is true that if all of this plays out as President Trump announced it would and envisions it will, he will have acted to ensure that this war, which had a very high potential for going up the escalation ladder, for involving other countries, for entailing far more destruction, ended relatively quickly as compared to wars, which is why he wants this war to be called the 12-day war.
I still think President Trump and the Israelis have a lot of blame for starting the war based on absolutely no basis, but it's also true that if everything goes as President Trump says it will go, he will have ensured that the war, which again is between two sworn enemies with a lot of weapons, will actually end in only 12 days.
And there's a lot of reasons why both sides would want an end to this war.
Over the last couple of days, we've seen that Iran was able to have its missiles land and detonate in Tel Aviv and other places in Israel, even though they were sending fewer and fewer missiles because clearly Israel's air defenses and Iron Dome was starting to become depleted.
And that was always the race in this war, who would determine who would win.
Would the Israelis run out of air defenses before the Iranians ran out of ballistic missiles, or vice versa.
And so the Israelis are spending a huge amount of money, they're suffering damage, they're having their citizens killed.
They still have an ongoing utterly just obscene destruction of Gaza, killing 100 or 150 or 200 Palestinians a day, including just massacring them at aid sites where they go to try and get some food, flour, and the like.
So there's benefits for the Israelis.
There's benefits for Iran, obviously, and having an end to this war.
And then President Trump, obviously, as well, gets to give himself credit and take credit and probably will get credit for maneuvering the war so that it didn't last nearly as long as it could have.
Now, there have been some doubts about whether the ceasefire is actually finalized here from CNN.
There's a headline, Iran has not received any ceasefire proposal, senior officials says.
And the text of this article is, quote, the official said Iran would continue to fight until it achieves lasting peace and that it would view remarks from Israel and the U.S. as a, quote, deception intended to justify attacks on Iran's interests.
Quote, at this very moment, the enemy is committing aggression against Iran, and Iran is on the verge of intensifying its retaliatory strikes with no ear to listen to the lies of its enemy, the official said.
Professor Said Mirandi, who's been on the show a couple of times now, he's an Iranian-American professor.
He has been close to the government in Iran.
He's in Tehran.
He, after President Trump announced this, took to acts and he said, quote, no ceasefire, fake news.
Zionists are in trouble.
So at least some Iranians were denying that there is in fact a ceasefire.
Just a couple of minutes before we went on the air, there was a conflicting report.
This one from Amlaj Media, which is a Persian language, Iran-based media outlet.
And they have this headline, exclusive, quote, conclusion to Iran-Israel war agreed after Iranian retaliation over U.S. bombings, quote, Iran and Israel are set to end their war, informed Iranian sources have told Amlaj Media.
Israel is expected to stop firing at 3.30 a.m.
Jerusalem time on June 23rd, with the anticipation that Iran will respond by also ceasing offensive military operations.
Soon after, the truce will transition to a, quote, conclusion of the conflict, a senior source in Tehran explained.
Confusion initially emerged over whether there was an agreement between the two sides, which has been denied by some Iranian sources.
The denial of the existence of an accord is likely tied to Tehran's principled stand that it will not only resume talks with Donald Trump once Israel, that it will only resume talks with Donald Trump once Israel has stopped firing, and that since Iran was not the party that initiated the conflict, will not be the ones to end it.
So there is some confusion.
I have to be honest.
Certainly, we've seen President Trump saying things before that were likely untrue, including his claim that President Xi of China had called him and they spoke because China was seeking to reach a deal on the trade war and the tariffs, and China vehemently denied it.
And Xi said, I haven't talked to Trump about this at all.
Who knows who's telling the truth?
But Donald Trump is, like any politician, is prone to disinformation, prone to lying.
Right up until the Israeli attack, he was saying, I hope to resolve this diplomatically when he knew he had already authorized the war with Israel and that those statements made to the public were false, that he hoped to resolve it diplomatically.
It was just a ruse to lure the Iranians into a sense of security, that no attack was coming, so that there'd be some element of surprise.
But at the very least, there is some basis for seeing this.
We'll know in six hours, one way or the other.
There's really no need to speculate.
I just wanted to give you what side they're saying about whether there's a ceasefire.
This is always very touch and go.
Anytime there's a ceasefire, if the Israelis go much further than they've gone, that could undermine it.
If the Iranians do, the same thing.
But Trump is insistent that this has happened, and we will see if it's true.
All right.
but that nobody was killed.
And after it was over, Trump went to TrueSocial and he gave his version of events, which was this, quote, Iran has officially responded to our obliteration of their nuclear facilities with a very weak response, which we expected and have very effectively countered.
There have been 14 missiles fired, 13 were knocked down, and one was, quote, set free because it was headed in a non-threatening direction.
I am pleased to report that no Americans were harmed and hardly any damage was done.
Most importantly, they've gotten it all out of their, quote, system, and there will hopefully be no further hate.
I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost and nobody to be injured.
Perhaps Iran can now proceed to peace and harmony in the region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
So it seems as though that very likely happened.
That's what happened last year when Israel made very provocative steps toward Iran, including blowing up their consulate in Syria, which any country would consider an act of war, assassinating guests that Iran had invited into their country, including for the inauguration of the new president.
And Iran felt compelled to respond and they shot a couple of hundred ballistic missiles, but used old and slow ones.
They barely did any damage.
Nobody was killed at the time we explained that it was clearly designed to be far less than what Iran was capable of doing.
And as we've seen over the last 10 days, Iran is capable of striking Israel.
They are capable of blowing things up in Israel.
They are capable of killing Israelis, and they've done so.
So that was Iran back then sort of having a symbolic retaliatory strike, not wanting to escalate Things further, and it seems like today that's what they did as well.
They needed to show their population, but also the world, that you can't just bomb Iran and have no retaliatory strike.
But they also wanted to make sure that whatever they did in retaliation didn't force the Americans fully more into the war than Trump already had them be on Saturday night.
Pretty restrained, balanced response from Iran, obviously very pragmatic, walking this fine line.
And according to Trump, at least, he was appreciative to the Iranians, believed the Iranians acted responsibly, and that's why he believes that the war can now be over.
But I do think there's still some important lessons to be learned from this.
As I said, I spoke about some of the key lessons in that live broadcast that I did yesterday.
But I want to just go over one thing in particular because if something like this repeats again, I think it's extremely important to understand the issues that were purposely distorted, the propaganda that rained down on people to get them to support this war, including people who have been saying for a long time they don't want any new Middle East wars.
And one of the most important is this issue of enrichment, enriching uranium.
So I just want to give this background because I think it's so crucial.
We are told that Iran is this fanatical regime desperate to get a nuclear weapon so they could wipe Israel off the map.
Obviously, if they used a nuclear weapon against Israel, there'd be no Iranian in Iran left.
There'd be no more Iran.
The Israelis have a massive second strike nuclear capability.
The Americans have a massive strike capability.
We have said under many presidents that if anyone attacks Israel with a nuclear weapon, we'll respond with our own.
So you'd have to be genuinely suicidal, willing to not just sacrifice your life, but every person in your country's life, the country itself, would just all instantly end.
And I would suggest that Iran has done nothing to suggest that they operate in accordance with that kind of irrational suicidal tendency.
The most important data point that demonstrates that's not who they are, and I think this has gotten so lost and it's extremely frustrating because of how critical it is, Iran voluntarily entered into an agreement that was painstakingly negotiated basically by the entire world,
by the U.S. under President Obama, by Russia and China, by most of Europe, including France and the UK, the other members of the Security Council.
All kinds of international organizations were involved in negotiating this deal, the purpose of which, from the Iranian perspective, was to reintegrate them back into the international community and lift sanctions so that their economy could grow.
And from the Western perspective, the purpose was to make sure that there was no way Iran could have a breakout and develop nuclear weapons.
And the reason why it worked, and everybody agrees it worked, the U.S. intelligence agrees it worked, European intelligence agrees it worked, the IAEA agrees it worked, it was working.
By working, I mean Iran was complying.
And the whole foundation of that was Iran was saying, we insist upon our right, which every country has, to develop nuclear energy.
So we're going to have reactors and centrifuges, and we're going to enrich uranium solely for nuclear energy, but we're not going to enrich uranium to the level where it's possible to get a bomb.
Prior to the Iran deal, every country in the world is a signatory to the Nonproliferation Treaty, which was negotiated and implemented from 1968 to 1970, and the purpose was to prevent countries that don't have nuclear weapons from obtaining them.
There's only four countries on the planet, four, that are not signatories to the NPT.
India, Pakistan, and Israel never signed.
North Korea signed and then withdrew.
So those four countries, North Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel, every other country in the world is a signatory to the NPT.
And under the NPT, there is no limitation on how much a country can enrich uranium, to what extent they can enrich uranium.
It's guaranteed that everyone who signs that agreement has the absolute right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
And a lot of people say, well, why would Iran need nuclear energy when they're swamped with oil reserves?
And the reason is because they don't want to use their oil to fuel their country.
They want to sell their oil on the market, and they want to energize their country with nuclear energy.
And so the key difference here, there's a very simple difference between having a nuclear energy program and a nuclear weapon program.
And it's about the extent to which you're enriching uranium.
In order to enrich uranium for a nuclear energy purpose, you have to enrich uranium, let's say up to 4%.
It's like 3.6%, 3.8%.
In order to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon, you have to enrich it first to 60%, and then 80%, 90%.
And then you can develop a nuclear weapon.
There's still a big question of how would you deliver it.
How do you fit it on a missile or a warhead?
But to just get the nuke to enough to test it and show the world that you have it, you need to enrich uranium at 90%.
As I said, under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which governed Iran prior to the Iran deal, there is no limit on how much you can enrich uranium.
Countries can enrich uranium up to 99% if they want and not be in violation.
The whole benefit of the Iran deal was that Iran not only agreed that they would not enrich uranium beyond 3.6 or 3.8%, but that there would be this massive inspection, monitoring, and surveillance scheme in place to ensure they kept their word.
Inspectors were all over these nuclear facilities.
Cameras were placed everywhere there.
We could listen to what was going on.
We had all kinds of different ways of Monitoring and surveilling what was taking place.
And that's how the world knew and was very confident that Iran not only wasn't but couldn't pursue a nuclear weapon because they allowed all kinds of inspections way beyond what the NPT required for other countries into their facilities because they didn't want the world to know they weren't seeking nuclear weapons.
They just want nuclear weapons for energy purposes.
That deal lasted from 2015 when Iran signed it with the U.S., Russia, and Europe and China.
The UN Security Council ratified it.
Up to 2018 when President Trump just fulfilled his campaign promise in 2016 to pull out of the deal.
President Trump ran on this campaign promise.
It wasn't that he claimed Iran was violating the deal.
He just claimed the deal wasn't good enough for the U.S., that Obama was a weak negotiator, Trump would get a better deal.
Trump wasn't claiming that Iran was violating it, and there was no basis for asserting that they were.
Nobody claimed that.
It was also a campaign tactic to get pro-Israel money on the side of Trump, to get American Jewish voters to vote for him, because from the beginning, Netanyahu and Israel hated this deal so much because they didn't want Iran integrated back into the world.
They wanted to keep Iran isolated and broken and sanctioned.
And credit to President Obama for being really the first president in a couple decades to at least partially defy what Netanyahu wanted by entering into this deal.
And in 2018, Trump made good on his promises to the Adelsons, to Israel, to neocons, and he pulled out of that deal.
And once Trump unilaterally tore up that deal, and he said, oh, I'm tearing it up because I want to negotiate a new one, but never got a new one done until the end of his, for the next two years when he left the White House.
And then for the next four years, President Biden didn't even try to get a new deal with Iran because Israel was so opposed to it.
So you had a deal in place that was working in preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons that Iran voluntarily entered into.
President Trump ripped up that deal, and once he ripped up that deal, there were no longer any requirement to have this massive surveillance system in place.
They had some inspection requirement under the NPT, but nowhere near as invasive and rigorous and comprehensive as the Iran deal permitted.
And once he tore up that deal, President Trump, what disappeared was any limitations on Iran's ability to enrich uranium.
They were allowed to enrich it now again to 50%, 60%, 80%, whatever they wanted.
That's what got us here.
Now, once Trump got into office again at the beginning of this year, in 2025, he renewed his desire to recreate an Iran deal.
And he prioritized it.
He had Steve Witkoff, his primary and most reliable negotiator and envoy to the Middle East, prioritize it.
They met with the Iranians many times.
President Trump continued to say over and over that he was very confident a diplomatic resolution could be reached that would prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon without the need for any kind of military conflict or war.
And yet that never happened.
We didn't get a diplomatic resolution.
We got war instead.
And here's why I believe strongly, and we're going to show you the evidence for it as well, that this happened.
I think this is such an important point.
The only way to get a deal with Iran would be to allow Iran to enrich uranium up to the level needed for nuclear energy, because Iran has always said it is an absolute red line for us.
We are never giving up our nuclear energy program.
We believe it's intrinsic to the right of every sovereign state.
Every country on the earth has that right.
There are countries that enrich uranium without having nuclear energy.
Brazil is an example.
Japan, Germany, others.
And we insist on the same right.
We're not going to give up the right that every other country in the world has.
So they were always going to insist on a nuclear energy program with reactors and centrifuges and minimal levels of enrichment.
And when Steve Witkoff began the process, he was asked publicly, do you envision Iran as part of this deal you're pursuing to have the ability to have civilian uranium enrichment, enriching up to the levels of nuclear energy?
And Steve Witkoff said, yeah, of course.
You couldn't get a deal without that.
Of course, Iran is going to be able to enrich uranium up to 3 or 4 percent.
And what President Trump needed to do was just get a somewhat better deal than Obama got, just throw a few things in there that weren't in the prior one so that he could claim he got a better deal than Obama.
He's a better negotiator than Obama.
But it was always going to have the same fundamentals.
Iran can enrich uranium up 3% to 4%, have a major inspection scheme to ensure they're doing it like before.
And in return, we're going to lift sanctions and allow Iran to integrate back into the economic community.
That was always the only blueprint for an Iran deal.
And we covered this at the time, but the people who actually wanted war with Iran, Netanyahu and Israel, the Tom Cottons, the Lindsey Grahams, devised this very devious strategy to try and manipulate President Trump, which was they pretended they also wanted a deal and agreed with Trump that the best thing to happen would be a diplomatic resolution.
Because of course, if they said, oh, President Trump is wrong, he would never listen to them again.
They would lose their influence with him.
So they have to say, oh yeah, President Trump is absolutely right.
We too agree there should be a diplomatic resolution.
But they put a definition of what a diplomatic resolution has to entail that made it certain that it would never happen because Iran could never agree to it, would never agree to it.
Namely, they said the only agreement that is acceptable is one that completely dismantles the entire Iranian nuclear program.
Not just any potential to get weapons, but also not allowing them to have any nuclear energy program.
No enriched uranium, no reactors, no centrifuges, nothing.
That's the only solution.
Of course, Iran was never going to agree to that.
And at some point during this process, that group, that faction, convinced Trump that having a deal with Iran that prevents nuclear weapons requires Iran to give up nuclear energy completely.
No, enriched uranium, nothing.
Even though Steve Whitcock began by saying, yeah, of course, you have to let Iran have a nuclear program in rich uranium for nuclear energy.
And that's why Trump, just 10 days before the war, go, said, I thought we were going to get a deal with Iran.
I was really optimistic, but something got into them.
They really changed because he was hearing back that they wouldn't sign the deal that he wanted, which was no more enriched uranium, no more reactors, no more ability to even have nuclear energy, which they were never going to agree to.
So to him, in his mind, he thought we were on a way to a deal, and then suddenly Iran changed its mind and stopped.
When in fact, the only thing that changed was that Trump never had a very detailed understanding of this enrichment question.
And the Lindsey Grahams and Tom Cottons and Mark Levins and Sean Hannity's and Netanyahu's of the world convinced Trump that all along what he was trying to obtain was that Iran would give up all enrichment, even for peaceful purposes.
That is the basis for what happened here.
That is why, number one, Trump ripped up the first Iran deal.
That's why we're here.
And then number two, the deal that at some point President Trump started demanding was a deal that Iran could never agree to, would never agree to, and that was known from the start.
Here from AP in April of 2025, this was a Trump-Netanyahu meeting, which the Trump-Netanyahu meeting was the day before in the White House.
Netanyahu-Trump meeting reveals unexpected gaps on key issues.
Quote, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington for a hastily organized White House visit, bringing a long list of concerns.
Iran's nuclear program, President Donald Trump's tariffs, the surging influence of rival Turkey in Syria, and the 18-month war in Gaza.
Netanyahu appeared to leave Monday's meeting largely empty-handed, a stark contrast with his triumphant visit two months ago.
During an hour-long Oval Office appearance, Trump appeared to slap down, contradict, or complicate each of Netanyahu's policy prerogatives.
With Netanyahu's strong encouragement, Trump in 2018 unilaterally withdrew the United States from the agreement between world powers and Iran over its nuclear program.
As it says, with Netanyahu's strong encouragement, Trump followed the Israeli course.
That deal, negotiated by the Obama administration, put curbs on Iran's nuclear program.
It was denigrated by Netanyahu because he said it did not go far enough to contain Iran or address Iran's support for regional militant groups.
Netanyahu has long maintained that military pressure was the best way to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Israel struck Iran last year in the country's first direct conflict ever, but it did not target Iran's nuclear facility, something Israel would likely need U.S. military assistance to do in order to strike targets buried deep underground.
Trump has suggested, including on Monday, that the U.S. could take military action if Iran doesn't agree to negotiate, but his announcement Monday that talks would take place between the U.S. and Iran this weekend flew in the face of Netanyahu's hawkish views.
So Trump at least created the appearance of telling Netanyahu we're not going to go get military conflict with Iran.
We can just get a deal about their nuclear program that will avert the need for that.
The Jerusalem Post, April 2025, one day after Trump-Netanyahu meetings, reported essentially the same thing, quote, a source familiar with the details of discussions told the Jerusalem Post, quote, Trump said Iran will not have nuclear weapons, military nuclear facilities, no, civilian nuclear, yes.
So that was what, according to the Jerusalem Post, Trump's position was.
They can enrich uranium, they can have nuclear reactors and nuclear facilities only for peaceful energy purposes, but not for nuclear weapons.
Steve Witkoff, just six days later, went on Fox News with Sean Hannity, who asked him about exactly that question.
Here's what Trump's negotiator Steve Witkoff said.
This is not a threat on my part now.
It is just a simple fact.
The president means what he says, which is they cannot have a bomb.
The conversation with the Iranians will be much about two critical points.
One, enrichment.
As you mentioned, they do not need to enrich past 3.67%.
In some circumstances, they're at 60%.
In other circumstances, 20%.
That cannot be.
And you do not need to run, as they claim, a civil nuclear program where you're enriching past 3.67%.
So this is going to be much about verification on the enrichment program, and then ultimately verification on weaponization.
That includes missiles, the type of missiles that they have stockpiled there, and it includes the trigger for a bomb.
And I think we're here to have, as the president indicated, and I take my direction from him every day that I go to work, we're here to see if we can solve this situation diplomatically and with dialogue.
So that was their position explicitly.
The Iranians can enrich up to 3.6%, which was the same exact same thing that the Iran deal that Trump ripped up already required that Iran was complying with.
When El Salvadoran President Bukhali, President Bukeley visited Donald Trump in the White House, he was asked about that as well.
And here's what Trump himself said.
You can't have nuclear weapons.
And I think they're tapping us along because we're so used to dealing with stupid people in this country.
And I had Iran perfect.
You had no attacks.
You would have never had October 7th in Israel, the attack by Hamas, because Iran was broke.
They were stone cold broke when I was president.
And I don't want to do that.
I want them to be a rich, great nation.
The only thing is one thing, simple.
It's really simple.
They can't have a nuclear weapon.
And they've got to go fast because they're fairly close to having one.
And they're not going to have one.
And if we have to do something very harsh, we'll do it.
And I'm not doing it for us.
I'm doing it for the world.
And these are radicalized people and they cannot have a nuclear weapon.
So you see there, he wasn't saying they can't have a nuclear energy program.
He was saying they can't have a nuclear weapon program.
Now a lot of people say well look Iran was enriching uranium well past 3.67%.
They were enriching uranium to 20% even 60% Why would they do that if they weren't trying to get a nuclear weapon?
And to me the answer is very obvious Once Trump they weren't doing that when the nuclear deal when the Iran deal was in place They weren't doing that at all They were abiding by the limit of 3.67% once the Iran deal was ripped up by Trump They no longer had any benefits of the agreement They weren't having sanctions lifted they were reinstated The deal was gone including the benefits to them and
then they were again back in the situation they were in prior to the Iran deal which is they could enrich uranium up to the level of whatever they wanted and there's two reasons I think they enriched uranium to 20 and 60 percent one is because they needed some leverage to get Trump to the table oh wow Trump Iran is enriching uranium at higher levels that gives a sense of urgency to getting a deal done and that was something that they needed to leverage to negotiate that away okay here's our centrifuges here's our enriched uranium at 20 to 60 percent we'll agree now to an inspection regime to put us
back at 3.67 percent which you're comfortable with but the other reason is also deterrence or israel and iran have been threatening to attack the to attack iran for many many years in the time of the iraq war the idea was we're going to go to iraq change the regime there and then go right to Tehran and do the same and having the ability to break out and get nuclear weapons was also a form of deterrence but there was no evidence as everyone agreed that Iran had decided to seek a nuclear weapon and had you just done a deal like the Obama
deal then all of this would have been solved without the need for a very dangerous war and a lot of people dead and a lot of destruction a lot of destruction in Israel that I'm sure the U.S. is going to pay for to rebuild and fix here from the Jerusalem Post same thing Trump seeks to cap Iran's uranium richment at 3.67% Witkoff says this is a significant statement as it considerably more lenient than the Israeli demand publicly voiced by the prime minister which calls for the quote Libyan model meaning
the complete physical dismantling of Iran's nuclear military nuclear facilities quote Iran should not have nuclear weapons this can be achieved through an agreement but only if it's a Libya styled agreement Netanyahu said that means going in blowing up the facilities dismantling all the equipment under American supervision and executed by the U.S. And then you had neocons like Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense Democracy saying this is just the Obama GCPOA.
Are we really going to just do this again?
We left the Iran deal in 2018 just to do it again.
So you had Israel and neocon groups in the U.S. harshly criticizing Trump saying you can't allow Iran any nuclear enrichment.
That was the Obama deal that you said wasn't good enough.
Here from the Hill, this is the kind of pressure they were implanting in the media.
Are Trump's nuclear talks just Obama-Iran deal 2.0?
And then here is Steve Witkoff.
Just shortly after he gave that interview on Fox News, quote, a deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal.
Any final arrangement must set a framework for peace, stability, and prosperity in the Middle East, meaning that Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program.
It is imperative for the world that we create a tough, fair deal that will endure, and that is what President Trump has asked me to do.
So at some point, Trump listened to the Israelis, to the neocons, and decided after first saying they could have a civilian peaceful nuclear energy program, decided that they can't.
Mark Arubio was on board with that same message.
Here's what he told, I think, Barry Weiss, but talking to the free press.
We do not want to see war.
This is not a president that campaigned on starting wars.
And as he said very clearly, Iran is not going to have a nuclear weapon, and he reserves every right to prevent that from happening, but he would prefer it not happen.
He would prefer that there not be need to resort to military force, either by us or anybody else.
He would prefer that it be something that we can negotiate.
The Iranians have shown a willingness to talk.
We're going to talk to them.
If there is a chance of peace, we're going to give peace and a peaceful resolution to this challenge.
Every opportunity to succeed.
Our priorities remain the same.
If Iran wants a civil nuclear program, they can have one just like many other countries in the world.
All right, I just have to play that again.
This is Marco Rubio saying what Steve Woodkoff said and what Steve Woodkoff told the Israeli press that Trump's belief was as well.
Every opportunity to succeed.
Our priorities remain the same.
If Iran wants a civil nuclear program, they can have one just like many other countries in the world have one, and that is they import enriched material.
Now, we're not going to negotiate this in the So Marco Rubio, his view changed to they could have a civil nuclear energy program for peaceful purposes, but they can't actually enrich the uranium themselves.
They have to rely on some third-party country like Saudi Arabia or whomever to enrich it for them and give it to them, which is, again, something that the Iranians were never going to do.
Now, here is Mark Levin, who's very close to Trump.
He met with Trump, had lunch with him in the White House just days before Trump gave the green light to the Israelis to attack Iran.
He went there specifically to say, you're being deceived by people who don't want war.
You're falling into the Obama deal.
And here was the kind of thing he was saying from the beginning.
It gives you the sense for what this faction wanted that Trump ultimately ended up listening to.
Mark Ovin on March 17th, quote, for the apologists of the Iranian terror regime, a nuclear warhead on an intercontinental missile has the capacity to kill millions of Americans.
To pretend otherwise is unconscionable and insane.
President Trump is 100% right.
Iran must never get a nuclear weapon.
I stand with him, period.
Which is exactly what we're told about Iraq.
Iraq, we don't know if Iraq has a nuclear weapon, but we can't wait to the smoking gun be in the form of a mushroom cloud over an American city.
Lindsey Graham in late March said, if Iran wants out of the oil business, attack an American military base, quote, President Wright is rightly opposed to Iran having a nuclear weapon because it would be a destabilizing event with global consequences and a direct threat to the United States.
It would lead to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and put Israel's very existence in jeopardy.
Iran has high enough enriched uranium to make six nuclear bombs.
There is no commercial purpose for enriching uranium to 60% and beyond.
When it comes to Iran's nuclear program, the Ayatoll lies and cheats.
He's hell-bent on obtaining a nuclear weapon, which is a complete lie and the exact opposite of what the entire intelligence community in the West affirmed.
He went on, quote, I hope and probably President Trump, through diplomacy, can deliver the end of the Iranian nuclear program.
So do you see what I mean?
He was saying, I agree with Trump, but they were casting this as it has to end the Iranian nuclear program, both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, not just nuclear weapons.
However, he said if that fails, the military option must be pursued with vigor, and Iran should understand that its oil refineries are very much in play, threatening Iran that if they don't agree to what we want, dismantling their nuclear energy program, we'll blow up all their oil refineries.
Tom Cotton, late April, same thing.
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.
Here's Mark Duboitz, the head of one of those pro-Israel, Israel-controlled think tanks, the foundation for the defense of democracy.
He said, it stands with President Trump and his top national security team.
Iran must dismantle its nuclear program.
No enrichment, no reprocessing on its soil.
That's bomb material, and that's what the fatal flaw was of Obama's deal.
So you see the sabotage they set up for this deal from the start, which is, oh yeah, we agree with you, President Trump.
We know Steve Witkoff said they can enrich.
Of course, that's the only way to get a deal, but we want a deal too, but they can't have any nuclear program at all.
They made war inevitable.
And once Trump got in his mind that denying Iran nuclear weapons means not letting them have any nuclear program at all, even though they had a nuclear program under the Iran deal that everybody agrees prevented them from enriching above 3.6%, it basically made war inevitable.
In early June, Trump said this, just to make clear how he got convinced.
Quote, the Otto Penn, meaning Joe Biden, should have stopped Iran a long time ago from enriching.
Under our potential agreement, we will not allow any enrichment of uranium.
So you see how it's the U.S. position that radically changed.
From in April, oh yeah, of course the Iranians need to have the right to enrich at 3.67% for nuclear, civilian nuclear energy, to early June, just before Israel started the war, to no enrichment of uranium at all, which was guaranteed to ensure a failure.
Then President Trump on Air Force One, June 7th, by this point he had already greenlit the Israeli attack on Iran.
This is what he said about what a deal should have been and why he was no longer optimistic about a deal being done.
We're obviously having technical difficulties.
I don't know if it's just with that video or if it's with me as well.
Are we going to do a little workaround?
Are we ready with the video or not yet?
He's very highly further.
What do you make of the Ayatollah saying that they have to enrich?
They have to be able to enrich.
No, they won't be enriching.
If they enrich, then we're going to have to do it the other way.
And I don't really want to do it the other way, but we're going to have it.
What's your latest?
There's not going to be enrichment.
And then he went on and said, I don't know what got into the Iranians.
The Iranians didn't change their view at all.
It was Trump that changed his view completely.
And that's because I don't think he understood very well the enrichment issue.
I'm not saying Trump's dumb, far from it.
I don't think he is remotely, but he's not someone who sits down and studies detailed documents about the difference between enrichment for peaceful purposes and enrichment for nuclear purposes.
Witkoff and everyone began based on the view that Iran should be able to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.
At some point, Trump changed that to the only way to prevent them from getting nukes is no enrichment, and that meant the deal could never have been signed.
Once Israel attacked Iran, and obviously by this point, Trump was preparing to attack Iran as well, he went to True Social, Trump did, and said this, quote, Iran should have signed the deal I told them to sign.
What a shame and a waste of human life.
Simply stated, Iran cannot have a nuclear energy.
We're having some technical difficulties here.
Okay.
Simply stated, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
I said it over and over again.
Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran.
So he was blaming the Iranians for not signing a deal that they were never going to sign in the first place and then told 15 million people in the middle of the night to evacuate Tehran because he wanted to create that psychological terror.
Now, once President Trump ordered the U.S. military attack on those three Iranian facilities, it seemed like he was pretty determined to make sure that the U.S. didn't get dragged in further, which I think we should all be thankful of, no matter what you think of the events leading up to that.
And I think I made pretty clear that I think it was President Trump and the Israelis who started this war and made it inevitable by choice.
It was so easy to have gotten a deal with Iran where they couldn't get nuclear weapons.
Obama already had one.
And it was so easy to just get something that would have let Trump say, oh, look, we got a better deal.
But it would have been basically the same thing.
But people sabotaged that.
They didn't want Trump doing that.
And so here's what Trump said when he went on to True Social the morning after this bombing, quote, the damage to the nuclear sites in Iran is said to be, quote, monumental.
The hits were hard and accurate.
Great skill was shown by our military.
Thank you.
Now, we've shown you before many times Tulsi Gabbard, when she went to the Senate, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and testified to the public and to the Senate, she said that Ayatollah Khomeini in 2003 Ordered all work toward a nuclear weapon to be stopped.
He didn't think it was in Iran's interest to try and get a nuclear weapon, probably because he knew that that would be likely to result in an attack on Iran.
And Tulsi Gabbard said that it's the consensus of the intelligence community that that has not changed.
That although they're enriching at higher levels, nothing suggests that that has changed.
That Ayatollah Khomeini has changed his mind, that Iran is now in the mindset of seeking a nuclear weapon.
They are not.
And that caused friction with Trump.
That's when Trump said, I don't care what Tulsi Gabbard said when asked about that.
And then she tried walking that back, accusing the fake news media of lying about what she said, even though we all heard it.
She played a broader clip, a longer clip, that didn't change the meaning of what she said at all, that Iran was not seeking a nuclear weapon.
They hadn't made the choice to get a nuclear weapon.
But what she can't walk back is an annual threat assessment of the U.S. intelligence community where they issue an unclassified document and then a classified one telling Americans of the world what threats they perceive from other countries.
This was issued in March of 2025, the same month she testified three months before Trump told the Israelis they can go and attack Iran with our support.
This is what this document said.
I read the whole thing today.
This is from the Iran section.
The heading was weapons of mass destruction.
And it said this, quote, we continue to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapons program.
This was not Telsey Gabbard saying it.
This was their written reason considered assessment.
We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khomeini has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program.
He suspended in 2003.
And it does say there's more pressure on him now.
People are starting to think maybe we should because of these Israeli threats.
But that he's the decision maker and he has not changed his mind.
He has not told Iran to start building a nuclear weapon.
This whole war was started on the basis of the claim that Iran was about to get a nuclear weapon.
Lindsey Graham said they're desperate to get a nuclear weapon.
And here's the Trump administration with his hand-picked DNI saying none of that is true.
Now, I want to show you a clip from Noam Chomsky when he was asked about Iran and the nuclear program back in 2010.
Although it was 15 years ago, it's amazing.
You can go and listen to a lecture from John Mearsheimer from 20 years ago or Stephen Walt from 25 years ago or Chomsky from 30 years ago.
It's amazing how relevant and applicable their analysis is.
And a lot of people have problems with Chomsky over the last few years because of what he said about COVID, when he was like 93 years old and actually vulnerable to it and forced in his house for two years.
Whatever you think of Chomsky, I just want you to listen to this with an open mind.
He went to Brown and he was asked about the dangers of Iran getting a nuclear weapon and this is what he said.
I definitely understand the idea of a country obtaining a nuclear weapon or developing one themselves out of a form of protection or to be on the same, I guess, international status as other countries who are considered superpowers or on the same level as a superpower because they themselves have nuclear weapons.
But what do you do when a country is openly trying to develop one or obtain one and also openly threatening to wipe out a country and claiming that a country shouldn't exist?
Now, one thing this does as well is it shows, this is 2010, how this claim was being asserted back then, oh, Iran is about to get a nuclear weapon, they're trying to get a nuclear weapon.
We've been hearing this for 40 years.
It's just like a side point here is that back in 2010, people were telling Chomsky, okay, you don't want to go to Iran, but it's a crazy regime.
They want to wipe our off the map, and they're trying to get nuclear weapons.
You see how long we've been hearing this from?
How long we've been hearing this for?
There are two really big issues that we're dealing with, and I didn't really think you address that, and I was curious what you had to say.
Well, what do you do about countries that already develop nuclear weapons outside the framework of the Nonproliferation Treaty and are daily violating resolutions of the Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency?
That's the much more serious problem.
But that's a different situation because those countries aren't openly threatening to wipe out another country.
Nor is Iran.
Just take a look at the statements.
The statement is that, you know, in the course of time, Israel should no longer exist.
Well, actually, I happen to agree with that, too.
In fact, so do a lot of people in Israel, the ones who think there should be a single democratic state.
That's not calling for wiping anyone out.
In fact, Iran has supported the international consensus on the two-state settlement.
Actually, there are two countries that are not only calling for some nation not to exist, but are destroying it, namely the U.S. and Israel.
That's their position with regard to the Palestinians.
And they're not just saying it.
Stress, they're not just saying it, they're doing it day by day.
That's the meaning of the policies that are going on right before our eyes in Gaza and the West Bank, which we are supporting and paying for.
So sure, you shouldn't call for the destruction of another nation, and you shouldn't implement that.
Actually, the official position of Israel, backed by the United States, they've slightly modified it, but back about 20 years ago, their official position, the coalition government, Labor Likud, was that there cannot be, I'm quoting it, an additional Palestinian state between Jordan and Israel.
In other words, they declared, and the U.S. supported that, that there already is a Palestinian state, namely Jordan.
I mean, the Palestinians object.
They say, no, wait a minute, that's not our state.
But who cares about them?
We say that's your state, and there can't be an additional one.
Well, that goes well beyond calling for the destruction of another country.
I mean, comparison with Saudi Arabia, Iran looks like a civil rights paradise.
But it's awful, you know, no doubt.
And there's a way to deal with it.
Like, for example, moving towards a nuclear weapons-free zone.
But among strategic analysts, including Israeli ones, there's no real question about why Iran is moving to nuclear weapons capability, which is not the same as having nuclear weapons.
It's just being at a point where you could have them.
Like most of the advanced industrial world is in that position.
Japan, Italy, all sorts of countries.
The reason is very simple.
Actually, it was described by one of Israel's leading military analysts, very hawkish, Martin von Kreiefeld, a couple of years ago.
After the invasion of Iraq, he wrote an article in which he said he doesn't know if Iran is developing nuclear weapons, and he hopes not, but he says if they're not developing nuclear weapons, they are crazy.
That was his word.
If they're not developing them, they're crazy.
The United States has just announced we're going to attack anybody we feel like and invade you if we can do it with impunity.
So you better have a deterrent.
I think two crucial points from there, and I mean the whole four-minute clip I think is extremely important, which is why we played it for you.
But I just want to highlight, kind of draw out and re-emphasize and build a little bit on, two points.
One is this idea that Iran goes around saying we want to wipe Israel off the map.
As Chomsky said, it doesn't mean we're going to nuke them out of existence.
But what's so amazing about it is we have watched over the last 19 months, 20 months, Israel not just talking about wiping places off the map, but actually exterminating them, wiping them out.
Entire parts of Gaza that were once built there are completely obliterated.
And people very high up in the Israeli government have been very honest and candid about what is clearly their policy, which is they want to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza, of all non-Jews.
The ones who remain will be put in this concentrated area, this concentration camp.
And it'll be just all taken over by the Jews.
They're going to wipe Gaza off the map and just integrate it into Israel.
And they're in the process of doing the same thing in the West Bank, where they intend to annex the West Bank, make it formerly part of Israel, drive as many Palestinians out so they can't be accused of an apartheid state.
And we're watching them do that with the United States' funding and arming and approval.
I think that's one of the key problems is that so many people in the West have so much difficulty applying the standards we're told to apply to these other countries in order to see how evil they are to ourselves and to ask what it is that we do.
The second point is that I think we have created a world where we've incentivized every country that doesn't have one to obtain a nuclear weapon.
The lesson we've taught the world, this is 2010, we taught it, look what we did to Gaddafi and then to Assad, is, look, if you have a nuclear weapon, we're not going to mess with you.
Trump had all those love letters with Kim Jong-un in North Korea.
Why?
Because they have nuclear weapons.
Pakistan and India that hate each other so much for so long for so many in-depth reasons had a very serious war.
But it didn't last very long.
And it escalated a little bit, but not much because both sides have nuclear weapons and they have to respect that in the other side.
So if I were Iran, and Chomsky was saying this in 2010, and he was quoting Israeli sources saying it too, I absolutely would have looked around me.
You have Afghanistan on one side, Iraq on the other, and the United States invaded both, bombed both, tried to overthrow the governments of both, completely destabilized both.
And the reason the Americans could do that was because they don't have nuclear weapons.
I would have looked around and said, wow, the only way we can be safe in the world is by having nuclear weapons.
Iran didn't do that.
What they actually ended up doing five years later is said, here's a deal that we're willing to sign, even though we don't have to, that lets you and your inspectors to just buzz around our entire nuclear program to make sure that we don't enrich beyond the amount that you're comfortable with us enriching at.
And that would have been the status quo had President Trump not, because of a campaign promise, because of Metanyahu's demand, ripped it up unilaterally, even though everyone agrees they were complying.
But that really is the world that we've created, where I agree, countries that are in strategically important areas with oil or other geostrategic importance that don't get nuclear weapons really aren't paying very close attention.
And that is the world that the Israelis and the Americans have created.
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Back in 2002 and 2003, when the U.S. was trying to convince Americans to support an invasion of Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein, we constantly kept hearing that Saddam Hussein was a unique evil.
He was the new Hitler, we were told.
Even the United States had armed him and backed him when it started a war with Iran.
We were partners with him in all sorts of ways, but suddenly he became the new Hitler, the unique evil, this grave monster, incomparable to any other evil on earth, and that's why it was so urgent we go and take him out.
And then once he was gone, that's exactly what started getting said about Iran.
I remember very well, probably don't even remember his name, but Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was the elected president of Iran, was supposedly the new Hitler.
He was elected to two terms, left power after his second term as the Constitution requires no one known, Hitler has never heard from again.
But oftentimes, there's a very specific theory that is offered about why Iran is this unique evil, that while every other country that has nuclear weapons, we're not really afraid that they would use it because they're rational.
They know if they use it, they would be destroyed, especially if they used it against another nuclear power like Israel or the United States, where no one does.
We're supposed to believe that Iran is different.
It operates to a completely different set of rules that other rational human actors operate under.
And it's because of their religious fanaticism.
Here's Glenn Beck, just 10 days ago or so, agitating for this war, offering this theory, laying out this theory about why Iran's fanaticism is uniquely insusceptible to rational discourse or pragmatic analysis or any form of normal deterrence.
Has Israel asked us to fight their war?
Answer, no.
Is this another Iraq?
Or is it something entirely different?
Well, let me tell you what makes this moment unlike anything else we have faced before.
First, this was not a call to war.
This was not a land invasion.
This is not a campaign to topple a regime and then sit around for 20 years trying to rebuild a culture that doesn't want what we have.
Even though Iran, the Iranian people are good people, the Persians are great people and they do want a life like ours.
I mean, that's an amazing comment.
I mean, one of the things that people, a lesson that they took, the wrong lesson they took from all of our regime change adventures was, look, Arabs are really primitive.
These Muslims are really just basically a thousand years behind.
They don't understand Jeffersonian democracy.
That's not for them.
And here's what he's saying.
It's like, look, Iran, they're Persian.
That's different.
They're actually civilized.
These people are actually elevated enough to want what we have.
I don't think he realizes what he was saying there.
Maybe he does, but listen to the rest.
But this was targeted.
This was surgical.
This was preemptive.
Not against an idea.
Not against a guess.
Against the very real, very stated intentions of a regime run by men who do not think like we think, okay?
They do not want what we want.
We choose life.
They literally choose death.
That is as clear as it is.
Do you choose life or do you choose death?
That is a culture of death.
So I want to start with the clerics of Iran, the Ayatollahs, the supreme leader, the mullahs, the puppet masters of the so-called Islamic Republic and their Sharia law.
I have said this for years and years and years.
If you don't understand this, you don't understand Iran.
These are Twelvers.
They are followers of a branch of Shiite Islam that believes not just in the return of the messianic figure called the Mahadi, but also that his return can and must be, in their words, hastened or accelerated.
And the only way to do that is to quote, using their words, wash the world in blood.
All right.
I'm going to stop it there.
Do you understand the irony of this?
That a big reason why the Israeli government has become way more fanatical, way more warmongering, way more aggressive, way less cognizant of ethical and humanitarian and legal limits is because it's been taken over by a group of religious fanatics who believe that God gave them that land, wants them to have that land, not just the modern state of Israel as the UN recognized in 1948 or even the 1967 borders, but all of Gaza, all of the West Bank from the river to the sea.
So ironic that if you chant from the river to the sea, it's supposed to be anti-Semitic.
The position of Likud and of these religious fanatics is that Israel from the river to the sea belongs to them.
And one of the major reasons why you have a big chunk of the American Congress that wants to send American money, American taxpayer dollars, American weapons, wants to fight wars on behalf of Israel, as we showed you in that Ted Cruz interview, and also with Doug Carlson, also in the Lee Fong interviews where he went up to members of Congress, mostly Republicans, said, why do you want to keep sending our money to Israel?
Why do you keep wanting to fight wars for Israel?
And they said, because I believe in an end times messianic religion, exactly what he accused Glenn Beck, accused the Iranians of having.
And they believe that the Messiah is returning.
They want to accelerate that.
And the way to do so is by strengthening Israel, consolidating all land under the control of the Jews so that Jesus will then come back as part of the rapture and send all non-believers to hell, including most Jews, and take up to heaven the people who are the believers.
It's a messianic end-time religion.
I'm not describing that for them.
I'm not guessing at that.
They say that themselves.
We showed you all those videos of that.
Here is Lindsey Graham with John Roberts on Fox News talking about why the Iranians are different than the rest of the world, including all the civilized people like us.
Yeah, I mean, I like Marjorie, but to be honest with you, she doesn't understand the threat, in my view.
If you don't understand that Iran, a religious theocracy, religious Nazis, would use a nuclear weapon to kill all the Jews, you don't listen to what they say.
They're a threat to us.
They're a threat to the state of Israel.
It is not in the world's interest to give this religious fanatic a nuclear weapon.
Somebody's got to deal with it.
Donald Trump is the right man to deal with this.
I think he's been very measured.
He had 60 days.
Steve Witkoff went over there three or four times.
They've tried very hard to get Iran to the table.
I appreciate reaching out and trying to do this diplomatically.
I appreciate Witkoff.
I appreciate President Trump trying.
Well, it's not working.
You can't have peace unless both people want peace.
And what the Iranians want is to kill all the Jews and kill us.
And the answer is no, we're not going to let them do that.
So the sun is setting on this regime.
Okay, so the Iranians want to kill all the Jews, and then he had to add.
So people didn't think, wait, we're fighting a war to protect Israel and us.
The Iranians want to kill all of us, all of Israel, even though both countries have massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons and would obliterate Iran in one second if they tried.
And so people understand deterrence.
People understand that if you have a nuclear weapon, the reason you don't use it, especially against other nuclear states, is because if you do, it's going to obliterate you.
And countries that have nuclear weapons have never used it against each other or anybody else since the end of World War II when only the U.S. had them for that reason.
So you need an explanation if you want to go to war with Iran or you want to gene up hatred against the Iranian government as to why they're different, why they don't operate by the same principles of survival and rational self-interest and deterrence as everybody else.
And so the argument is that they want to die.
They're happy to die.
They're eager to die.
They don't value life.
They value death.
Look at what we just witnessed Iran do.
When the Israelis last year blew up their consulate in Damascus, assassinating people on their soil, which was an act of war from any country, they shot some ballistic missiles that were old and slow, knowing most of them would get intercepted.
And I remember saying this at the time.
And a lot of people are like, oh, ha ha, you think they have more and they didn't use it?
Well, it turns out, of course, they did have greater capabilities because we watched them strike Israel almost every day in the last 12 days and do a fair amount of damage, including killing Israelis.
They chose not to do that in that situation.
Why?
If they're so suicidal, why didn't they jump at that opportunity to just massively bomb Israel in a way that would have maybe even provoked the Israelis to, or the Americans to blow up their whole country or even drop a nuclear bomb?
They were acting with restraint, with pragmatism.
And when we entered, the United States entered this war as a direct belligerent on Saturday night, the strategy of President Trump was we're going to do a one-day bombing and then we're going to count on the Iranians to be smart and rational and we're going to tell them, look, we're done bombing and we're not going to bomb you again unless you start killing our own people or really damaging our own people.
The whole premise was that Iran is not an apocalyptic regime, that they were operating according to fear and self-preservation, which is the basis of all deterrence.
Why don't we nuke Russia?
Because we know we're all going to die.
We have a fear of what would happen if we attack Russia, so we don't.
That's the same fear the Iranians have.
It's the same fear human beings have who want self-preservation.
They've proven over and over again that they operate according to restraint.
Way more restraint, by the way, than Israel exercises.
That's for sure.
And we saw that in the last 24 hours.
The Iranians basically negotiated their retaliation with the U.S. and said, look, we need to retaliate just for our domestic population alone.
Trump actually does understand.
It's one of the things he empathizes with other leaders, even ones that he's adverse to.
And he gets it.
He's like, yeah, I understand why you have to do something.
You can't do nothing.
So we'll let you drop a few missiles, shoot a few missiles at one of our bases.
We'll intercept them.
We'll evacuate it.
Nobody will die.
You'll get to say you counterattacked.
We get to say we don't have to attack you because you didn't kill any of our people.
And they agreed to.
And that's what the Iranians did, a very restrained, limited attack.
They could have massacred American troops in Iraq that are surrounded by Iran loyal militias and forces.
They could have attacked bases that were far less protected, but they didn't.
They operated in their rational self-interest.
Exactly what we're told not to think about them, which is why, even if they did get a nuclear weapon, which they weren't seeking, even if they did find a way to weaponize it and put it on a warhead, which they haven't done, the idea that they would be suicidal and just use it because they're this end times messianic hole, there's a lot of projection there.
A lot of the people who say that are the ones who actually that describes.
And they're not just saying it, they're actually doing it.
They've exterminated and are in the process of ethnically cleansing Gaza.
It's not Iran that has started countless wars in the last 40 years.
It's the United States along with Israel in many cases.
So again, I think it's so important that when you hear something from your own government, we all want to believe that our enemies are really the epitome of evil.
We're all very susceptible to leaving.
If we're going to start a war with another country, we're on the right.
We're in the right.
They're in the wrong.
We're the good guys.
They're the bad guys.
It's a tribalist instinct embedded in all of us.
That's what war propaganda targets and manipulates.
But you have the responsibility to constantly use your own rational thought to ask whether what you're seeing, whether the actions and evidence in front of you actually comports with and supports and substantiates what you're being told to believe.
And in the case of Iran as this wildly apocalyptic suicidal cult, the exact opposite has been true.
They have been the far more restrained and pragmatic party over the last two years.
And you can even argue over the last 10 when they voluntarily entered that deal that would have prevented them forever from getting a nuclear weapon had President Trump not ripped it up.
All right, one last segment.
You know, it's long been taboo in the United States to suggest that anybody has loyalty to Israel and that that shapes what they advocate in the United States, even though we've long had people who say it.
And everybody knows it's true.
If you grew up Jewish in the United States or anywhere in the world, there are Jews in Brazil, I know.
It's all the same.
You get taught from birth or pretty much from birth that Israel is a country, even though if it's not yours, even if you don't live there, that you owe loyalty and love to.
That it's extremely important to you as a Jew, no matter what your nationality is, to want to keep Israel Protected and strong.
And there's a lot of people who never reevaluate what they're indoctrinated with from childhood.
And one of the reasons why it's taboo to say it, one of the reasons why, in fact, the expanded hate speech codes governing anti-Semitism that President Trump is imposing on American campuses prevent you from saying it.
It's considered officially anti-Semitic to accuse any Jewish person of having more loyalty to Israel than to the United States, even if they say it.
Even if a Jewish person says, look, I am American, but at the end of the day, for religious reasons, for historical reasons, my first loyalty is to Israel.
Or as happened if a Republican member of Congress is asked if you had to choose between saving Israel or save the United States, which would you choose?
And he said, look in the Bible, you'll see my answer there, meaning I would choose Israel first because I believe that's what God wants me to do.
Even if a person who's Jewish says it explicitly, you still can't claim it because that would be considered anti-Semitism.
The problem is that over the last three weeks, two weeks, as we've been debating whether the U.S. should enter this war on behalf of Israel, jointly with Israel, we have had a lot of people making extremely candid statements that leave no doubt about their loyalties and priorities.
Senator Cruz, Ted Cruz, told Tucker Carlson, and I'm pretty much quoting verbatim, even though I don't quote in front of me because I've talked about it so much, I ran for Congress with the stated intention to be the leading defender of Israel and the Congress, and I've woken up every day in order to do that.
His stated intention was not to help the people of Texas or the United States.
He said his stated intention was to be the leading defender of this foreign country, and that he wakes up, quote, every day in order to do that.
Last night, President Trump's State Department spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, longtime Fox News personality, which is where President Trump got a lot of his cabinet from.
He watched Fox News all day.
There's a New York Times story out today claiming that one of the reasons he wanted to become involved in this war is because Fox News that he was watching after the Israelis attacked said it was a huge success.
It was an incredible operation.
And then Trump the next day said, I did this.
I approved it.
We joined it together and started talking about the war as if it was his and not even the Israelis anymore.
So he watches Fox News all the time.
That's how he knows Tammy Bruce, found Tammy Bruce.
She's one of those people who claim she used to be a liberal or a Democrat.
She talks all the time that she's a lesbian, so she's gay.
She used to be a Democrat.
Then she realized the left was so bad.
The liberals were so bad.
She didn't leave the left.
The left left her.
The Dave Rubenstick.
And that's how she became a Fox News personality.
I know she's like a standard conservative.
She was being interviewed by 24 News in Israel last night, and this is what she said.
The pride of being able to be here and do work that facilitates making things better for people and in the greatest country on earth, next to Israel.
It's an honor to be able to make a difference and to be able to speak in this regard with an administration that I love so much and that I feel genuinely represented by.
It's a real honor.
Now, I have heard my entire life, from the time I can remember, just being as young as any memories that I retain, being told that the United States is the greatest country on earth by far, that we should be so grateful to live in the United States, it's not only the greatest country on earth by far, it's the greatest country ever to exist in all of human history.
It's incredibly improbable that a person would be born into not just the greatest country on earth at the moment, but the greatest country ever to exist in all of human history, but that's what we're taught.
I don't know how many times I heard that.
I always thought that was a little strange.
Like, wow, that's like hitting the lottery.
Like, the probability of that is very small, but that's what we're taught to believe.
I have never once heard anyone, especially an official of the United States government, say that we're the greatest country on earth next to Israel.
And next to could mean alongside of, but typically in that formulation, next to means after.
Vanilla is my favorite flavor next to chocolate.
Meaning chocolate's the real thing, but vanilla is my second favorite.
And people were saying, oh, she was just being polite?
She was talking to Israeli media.
I want to know how those people who are defending that would react if Joe Biden's State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller or Jake Sullivan, were giving an interview to Qatari television and said, look, I'm so grateful to live in the United States because next to Qatar, it's the greatest country in the world.
The United States is the greatest country in the world next to Qatar.
You think people would like, yeah, that's just normal diplomatic politeness when you're talking to a foreign.
The only way that's acceptable is if you say that about Israel.
Cami Bruce issued a statement today because this viralized for an obvious reason.
She claimed, oh, anonymous people on the internet are taking it out of context.
Almost everybody I saw commenting on this was not anonymous, including myself.
The person who was the one who alerted the world to this clip was Ken Klippenstein, the independent journalist, who's not anonymous.
And she said, if you listen to the full interview, it makes clear that it was taken out of context.
Like what Tulsi Gabbard said about her Senate testimony, even though you go and listen to what she said, it doesn't change the meaning at all, even though she said it exactly the same way in that written report that I showed you.
So I went and looked at the full Tammy Bruce interview.
It's like 10 minutes long.
I swear to you, this is how it begins.
The reporter says, Ms. Bruce, I'm so honored to talk to you.
I've seen your social media over the years, and you are passionately devoted to Israel.
You really understand the importance of Israel.
I presume you're Jewish.
Are you Jewish?
You're Jewish, right?
And she said, actually, I'm not Jewish, unfortunately.
I'm Italian, she said.
I'm not Jewish, unfortunately.
I wish I were Jewish.
I mean, so, I'm so sad I'm not Jewish, but I wish I were.
And she's Italian, and then she went on to tell a story about how it was either after 9-11 or October 7th, she went to her jeweler and she ordered a custom-made Star of David that she intended to wear as a pendant around her neck, as a necklace.
And supposedly her jeweler said to her, Tammy, You should really think about this twice because it's dangerous to be Jewish in America now.
Nothing's more dangerous than being a Jew in America.
You walk on the street and you're Jewish.
Good chance you're going to be not just assaulted, but murdered.
Epidemic, as we've been told for two and a half years now.
And so this jeweler said to Tammy Bruce, I think you should be more careful.
Like if you wear that, people are going to think you're Jewish.
And that's very dangerous.
And Tammy Bruce said, that's exactly why I'm doing it.
I want people to think I'm Jewish.
That was the whole ethos of the interview.
And so when she got to the point where she said the United States is the greatest country on earth next to Israel, it's exactly what it sounded like.
Here is Stephen Goldstein, who's an operative and Democratic Party activist.
And the New York City mayoral race is taking place tonight.
And there's no question.
Oh, there you, let's put that Twitter bio on the screen just so people can see how he describes himself.
Stephen Goldstein, there you see the rainbow flag in his bio at the end, but he describes himself this way.
The first thing, passionate Zionist, sensible centrist liberal, civil rights lawyers with 200 laws passed, TV producer with 10 MEs, HarperCollins, Arthur, question mark, what might I become?
So he, this New York mayoral race is going to be won either by this Muslim candidate, Zaran Mamdani, who is of Indian descent, but was born in Uganda, and he's Muslim and a critic of Israel.
And anyone who's Muslim and a critic of Israel, no matter how, you know, law-abiding they are, no matter how well-spoken they are, no matter whatever, that automatically gets interpreted as some existential threat to Jewish people.
In London, Saadi Khan is the mayor.
He's Muslim, and he's depicted as, oh, Jews can't live in London because of Saudi Khan.
And Saadi Khan is just like a completely banal, technocrat, completely centrist labor figure.
But because he's Muslim and has criticized Israel in the past, I mean, he's going to put Jews in concentration camps.
Now, the problem for a lot of Democrats like this is that the only other option for Zohan Mandani to win, in practice, there's eight candidates, but the only two who have a chance are Mandani and Andrew Cuomo.
And as you might recall, Andrew Cuomo was forced to resign the governorship just four years ago in disgrace, in part because he lied about COVID at nursing homes, but more so because he had multiple women accusing him of sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexual assault.
His brother, Chris Cuomo, then got fired from CNN because he was plotting with him, his brother, as to how to discredit the women.
And he demanded they do things like get vaginal tests.
And feminists were disgusted.
And Bill Clinton, another honored member of the Democratic Party, also recently endorsed Andrew Cuomo.
Bill Critton has been credibly accused of sexual assault for sure, sexual harassment, and even rape.
These are the two Democratic Party heroes.
They ruined people's lives for years, Democrats did.
On this Me Too movement, believe women.
Any woman who said a guy was kind of creepy in the way he dated, they were destroyed.
Now the entire Democratic Party establishment is aligned behind Andrew Cuomo, the sex pass, the sexual harasser.
And here's Steve Goldstein saying what his dilemma is about that, because as a feminist, he, of course, hates Andrew Cuomo, but his priorities are clear.
This is what he said, quote, I wish the New York City mayoral primary had different candidates.
As a feminist who helped to pass several pro-women laws, I'm well aware of the issues with Andrew Cuomo.
Look at how gently he phrases that, the issues with Andrew Cuomo.
But Zoran Mandani is an existential threat to the Jewish people.
Cuomo over Mandani in what's now a two-person race.
He's gone around, I'm a liberal feminist, have this LGBT thing and this rainbow flag thing in my bio.
And as much of a feminist as I am, there's issues with Andrew Cuomo, meaning a history of chronic sexual harassment and trying to destroy the reputation of the woman, just like Bill Clinton did.
But he's saying, like, as much as I care about that, feminist issues and not having women harassed and assaulted, the much bigger issue for me is Israel, not having a Muslim mayor.
Can you imagine the derangement it takes to say that Zoran Mandani is an existential threat to the, what is he going to do as mayor of New York?
Is he going to give Iran a nuclear bomb?
Is he going to open concentration camps and put all the Jewish residents into those concentration camps?
Is he going to withdraw protection from synagogues or even maybe attack synagogues?
Like, this is derangement of the highest order.
But so many people have as their number one priority, loyalty to the state of Israel or the belief that everything has to be done to accommodate the unique victimhood of Jewish people that over the past three weeks, they've been forced to just admit it explicitly, including a very influential United States senator who run for president, Ted Cruz, President Trump's State Department spokesperson.
It's all over the place.
And I always think candor is healthy.
It's been clear this is the case for a long time.
And the reason there was a taboo on it is precisely because it's true, but it's damaging to say.
And people have now gotten to the point where they don't care anymore.
After what Israel did over the last 19, 20 months in Gaza, after the censorship that we've been subjected to on our college campuses by the U.S. government in the name of protecting Israel from criticism, deporting people who are in the country legally, who are very high-achieving students, productive student, law-abiding students, people with the green card whose wife is American.
After seeing them, the U.S. government try to deport them after running on a campaign of deporting illegal people into their country illegally.
These people enter legally because they criticize Israel.
People got to the point where they're like, wait a minute, why is everything about Israel?
And now obviously with this war, the same thing.
And these people are forced to come out and admit this.
And once they start admitting it, which they've now done, it's just going to break the dam.
And I think that statement by Ted Cruz, I ran for Congress with the stated intention to be the leading defender of Israel, a foreign country, in Congress, and I've woken up every day to do that, is going to be remembered as a very important moment precisely because it made it impossible to keep this off-limit, to banish it, to make it taboo.
And people in power are just coming out, not only and making it clear with their actions, but making it clear with their own words.
And I think that's an important disinfectant.
Sunlight is always a disinfectant.
And if that's the priority of many people, which it is, better to have them admit that openly than to pretend it's not true and to try and destroy and punish people who observe it.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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