June 19, 2025 - The Truth Central - Dr. Jerome Corsi
33:08
Tucker vs. Cruz: Who Was Right About Dealing with Iran?
The recent interview-turned-debate between Senator Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson on the latter's show over potential U.S. intervention in the Iran-Israel War and thoughts on a potential regime change strategy has gone viral, yet brought up interesting points on both sides of the argument. Still, some of Carlson's tactics during the conversation were questionable at best. Dr. Jerome Corsi breaks down the discussion, who was right and the realities with Iran's government and threat level to both the Middle East and the U.S. on Corsi Nation.Visit The Corsi Nation website: https://www.corsination.comIf you like what we are doing, please support our Sponsors:MyVitalC https://www.thetruthcentral.com/myvitalc-ess60-in-organic-olive-oil/Swiss America: https://www.swissamerica.com/offer/CorsiRMP.phpGet Dr. Corsi's new book, The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Final Analysis: Forensic Analysis of the JFK Autopsy X-Rays Proves Two Headshots from the Right Front and One from the Rear, here: https://www.amazon.com/Assassination-President-John-Kennedy-Headshots/dp/B0CXLN1PX1/ref=sr_1_1?crid=20W8UDU55IGJJ&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ymVX8y9V--_ztRoswluApKEN-WlqxoqrowcQP34CE3HdXRudvQJnTLmYKMMfv0gMYwaTTk_Ne3ssid8YroEAFg.e8i1TLonh9QRzDTIJSmDqJHrmMTVKBhCL7iTARroSzQ&dib_tag=se&keywords=jerome+r.+corsi+%2B+jfk&qid=1710126183&sprefix=%2Caps%2C275&sr=8-1Join Dr. Jerome Corsi on Substack: https://jeromecorsiphd.substack.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/corsi-nation--5810661/support.
you you This is Jerome Corsi, and thank you for joining us today.
It's Thursday.
It's June 19th, 2025.
Thank you for joining us on CorsiNation.com.
We're back to our flagship accountant.
You can get me on X at CorsiJerome1.
And you can also follow us on Substack at JeromeCorsiPhD.Substack.com.
Okay, now let's start out with Israel.
What's going on in Israel right now is a little bit of a stalemate, a little bit of wait and see.
President Trump yesterday said that We might enter into an airstrike against Iran with Israel.
Now, the back story on this is the following.
There's speculation that Israel thinks that Iran might have two nukes.
And the two nukes they might have could be launched in, say, a barrage.
So Iran launches all the missiles they've got.
1,800 missiles at one time, or 2,000 or 3,000 missiles at one time, whatever they've got, and two of them have nuclear warheads.
Well, there's a 70% chance that one of those two warheads would get through and detonate over Tel Aviv, and that could destroy the modern Jewish state as we know it.
That would be kind of the big last play of Iran to win the war and to destroy the Jewish state.
So Israel and the United States can't not take that risk, which would mean that Now, this whole guessing game is leading to a bit of a pause.
Now, yesterday, Israel hit a number of the nuclear installations.
There's a big issue about Iran hitting a hospital.
And again, Netanyahu's saying that Iran's going to pay a heavy price for that.
So the war is really teetering on a couple decisions.
One is, is Israel going to kill Ayatollah Khomeini?
One idea is that if Khomeini were gone, the war might end.
that Israel would throw Iran into chaos politically.
And as a result of that, Of course, there's another argument that says if Israel killed Ayatollah Khomeini, it now looks like the war is about regime change rather than stopping the nuclear program.
I don't think it really makes a lot of difference one way or the other.
First of all, Israel can kill Ayatollah Khomeini, and it can probably kill all the mullahs, and it is about regime change.
Because if the regime lasts and the mullahs remain in power, these clerics will have ruled Iran since 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini came back from France and his Islamic Revolution, which Jimmy Carter initially welcomed, of course, until we had American hostages from the embassy in Iran, in Tehran.
Well, then it wasn't so much fun for Carter, and Carter ultimately lost his presidency over his inability to do anything effective in Iran.
All right, now, the whole issue of what we're going to do in this war is hinging on this question of whether or not Iran has a couple of nukes.
One way or the other, I think the massive strikes are going to continue, and it looks to me like Israel now has air superiority.
It's just the only thing the Iranians can do is launch whatever missiles they have left, hope a few get through.
If they're conventional weapons, there'll be some damage done, but it won't be ultimately fatal to the state of Israel.
And the United States is definitely standing behind Israel.
We are going to, I think, intervene if it seems necessary, meaning I do not believe that we or Israel will allow a nuclear weapon to be exploded over Tel Aviv.
And if that were imminently the way intelligence was telling both Netanyahu and President Trump that the risk was imminent, I think we'd have a massive strike against Iran to try to neutralize that possibility.
Now, again, This is going to play out in the next few hours.
In the meantime, Iran is begging for negotiations.
But negotiations to Iran mean stopping the war and letting them continue to enrich uranium.
Well, I just don't think that's going to happen either.
I think the point of this war is that the Western nations, the United States and Israel, are saying Iran has reached a dangerous point.
It's been going on.
I've been writing about this since my first book on Iran, which was in 2006, called Atomic Iran.
I was warning everybody back then that this was going to happen.
The day I was worried about is happening now.
We're right now in the middle of this Iranian war, which I've foreseen 20 years ago.
Okay, 2006.
So the war is going to end, I think, successfully for the United States and Israel because Iran does not have the military or the force or the money any longer, and we've bombed their oil infrastructure.
So Iran is effectively out of being able to earn any money, and they're going to run out of money very quickly.
People are probably starving already.
I doubt if they have effective access to the money in the banks.
And so therefore, Iran is going into chaos.
And Israel maintains military superiority.
The next issue is whether Israel is going to put boots on the ground to go after these.
Nuclear installations embedded inside mountain ranges, or whether we're going to give them bunker buster bombs, what we're going to do to get rid of those.
That's going to be probably the endgame here, is getting rid of those deeply embedded, buried inside mountains and concrete reinforced nuclear facilities that Iran has built.
But one way or the other, I think the war is not going to end until the United States and Israel are convinced.
That Iran cannot make a nuclear weapon.
Finally, we've got controversy over this.
We're going to review it in a minute with Tucker Carlson.
But the point is that if President Trump does decide to use military force, the United States is very good at using military force now immediately and winning the war.
Where we make the mistake is when we stick around and try to nation build.
We cannot have a prolonged, you know, We can't make ourselves permanently there like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Neither one of those turned out well.
You're not going to fundamentally stabilize these regions by occupying them.
So an occupation, a prolonged occupation by the United States would be extremely ill-advised in Iran.
President Trump has to realize this.
We can do effective, immediate Now, military action, solve the problem militarily, and whatever regime shows up in Iran is okay because they don't have any possibility of building a nuclear weapon anytime near soon.
Better if we had regime change, but not necessary.
That's kind of the universal consensus right now.
But I think we're going to get both an end to the nuclear program and regime change.
Because I think these mullahs are going to ultimately be hunted down by the Iranian people who are sick and tired of being repressed by these evil demons.
They hate Jews.
They want to destroy Israel.
They've repressed the people of Iran.
Now the women are all wearing these black burqas.
And, you know, this was not the Iran of the 1950s, which was a thriving cosmopolitan place.
Today, it's a dismal, Muslim, whatever you want to call it, totalitarian state.
And it's religiously imposed, so there's absolutely no dissent or any ability.
If you're not Islam and you're not following the Ayatollahs, you're probably dead.
And it's not the way to live.
So the Iranian people have tried.
To be an uprising.
But the United States government never supported them.
Certainly Barack Obama was going in Cairo when he first took office saying he had experienced Islam on three continents.
And America was not a Christian nation.
That was Barack Obama.
I wrote a book about him called The Abomination.
And he was an abomination, all right.
And I think people are finally realizing how much damage Barack Obama did to the United States.
So Chris, let's review a little bit of this.
Tucker Carlson controversy.
I'd like to see some of the clips and we'll comment on it.
Yes, apparently the two of them had at it in what was likely supposed to be, at least from Cruz's point of view, a friendly interview.
Yeah, Senator Tank Cruz.
I think he went in thinking he was going to be treated very cordially by Tucker Carlson because, you know, Tucker's been a star lately among all the Producers here and for the mega audience, since he left Fox, Tucker's built himself quite a little empire.
And then Ted Cruz comes in and Tucker basically attacks him.
Now, the basis of it, I guess, was that Ted Cruz is in favor of the war being successful and Tucker Carlson seems to want no war.
He wants war to stop.
That's smart.
And you just said a few moments ago, Dr. Corsi, that we're not very good when it comes to regime change.
Yes, World War II was fine.
We did a good job there.
More or less.
I think we became the Nazis.
We brought Operation Paperclip and everything else.
We brought them all here.
Well, look what else happened.
We have the trade imbalances that we still have today for some.
Right.
Ungodly reason.
But we'll get into that at another time.
We're talking about the idea of regime change in Iran, which, by the way, it didn't quite work out so well for us in Iraq.
Didn't quite work out so well for us or the Soviets, by the way, in Afghanistan.
No.
And probably anybody else that tries to go in there.
So Cruz brings up some points.
Excuse me.
Cruz brings up some points about what he wants to discuss and the idea with regime change.
But Tucker...
This is not a Rachel Meadow interview with a liberal.
This is a real journalist asking questions of someone, no matter whose side they're on.
How many people live in Iran, by the way?
I don't know the population.
At all?
No, I don't know the population.
You don't know the population of the country you seek to topple?
How many people live in Iran?
92 million.
Okay.
How could you not know that?
I don't sit around memorizing population tables.
Okay, so stop right here.
I mean, Tucker starts out with this, and it's, first of all, a setup question.
I mean, you know, it's unlikely that Ted Cruz is going to know how many people lived in Iran.
It really isn't relevant to the issue he wants to discuss, which is, you know, whether or not this regime needs to be destroyed.
The risk of the nuclear war, you know, if they do have a nuclear weapon or capability or are close to it.
So Tucker's, it's kind of like a, you know, a gotcha beginning to the interview.
And Tucker's whole attitude is to discredit Ted Cruz.
Ted Cruz is a very accomplished lawyer, very brilliant at Harvard Law, and he is quite good as a lawyer.
And he's right.
I mean, the population of Iran was 91 million or 92 million or 85 million.
It's really not relevant to the issue of the danger of Iran as a political regime that's aiming to destroy Israel.
May I ask one question of you, though, Dr. Corsi?
Yep, sure.
Just out of curiosity, possibly, at least an estimate, somewhere in the $10 million to $10 million ballpark might be smart, because if you think about it, just like Iraq, just like Afghanistan, we would be facing, while nation-building, a myriad of insurgencies.
That somewhat depends on the population.
He's not supposed to know everything.
If Tucker's got an objection like that, he ought to raise the objection and not take an effort to undermine the credibility of Ted Cruz with whom he's supposed to be aligned one way or another.
Ted Cruz has done a lot of good things in Congress.
Ted Cruz is generally on the side of MAGA.
You go back to 2015, Ted Cruz ran hard to be president.
A Republican National Convention, when Trump was the first time nominated as a Republican nominee for president in Cleveland, Ohio, the National Convention, Ted Cruz on stage would not endorse Trump.
Well, that about ruined Ted Cruz's political career.
I think Ted Cruz has gotten smarter since then, a little more politically savvy, a little bit more mature.
But this whole intent by Tucker to embarrass him is, you know, Racial bad all journalism.
That's beneath Tucker.
So let's play a little bit more.
Because you're calling for the overthrow of the government.
Why is it relevant whether it's 90 million or 80 million or 100 million?
But why is that relevant?
Well, because if you don't know anything about the country, Okay, what's the ethnic mix of Iran?
They are Persians and predominantly Shia.
Okay.
No, you don't know anything about Iran.
Okay, I am not the Tucker Carlson expert on Iran.
You're a senator who's calling for the overthrow of the government and you don't know anything about the country.
No, you don't know anything about the country.
You're the one who claims they're not trying to murder Donald Trump.
No, I'm not saying that.
You're the one who can't figure out if it was a good idea to kill General Soleimani and you said it was bad.
You don't believe they're trying to murder Trump.
Yes, I do.
Because you're not calling for military strikes against them in retaliation.
Okay, we are carrying out military strikes today.
You said Israel was.
Right, with our help.
I said we.
Israel is leading them, but we're supporting them.
Well, you're breaking news here because the U.S. government last night denied, the National Security Council spokesman Alex Pfeiffer denied on behalf of Trump that we were acting on Israel's behalf in any offensive capacity at all.
We're not bombing them.
Israel's bombing them.
Okay, hold on right here.
Okay, so again, this whole antagonistic, Tucker Carlson seems to have lost the ability here to judge right and wrong, or to understand.
you know when he got attacked by that demon i'm sure that demon seems to have taken away his sense of judgment or something i mean you know this is ted cruz he might object to ted cruz he might want to question policy but they attempt to discredit ted cruz because he doesn't know the ethnic percentages in you know iran which would take really a
But someone who's interested in political analysis, these are interesting statistics and questions.
You know, Iran is not the size of the United States, obviously.
It doesn't have 100 million people, obviously.
But again, it's a major state player because of the pandemic These are the relevant issues, not whether or not Ted Cruz knows how many people live in Iran.
Chris?
That's fair enough.
And if Tucker Carlson was more upfront with this question and says, this is a point I'm trying to make.
And I want to discuss the idea that the population and ethnic mix should play a part in this whole thing.
What do you know about that?
That would make it a more fair and less loaded question.
Tucker Carlson doesn't care about the ethnic population.
It doesn't matter.
He knows that's a question that Cruz is unlikely to know.
And he wants to embarrass Cruz to make Cruz look bad.
and say undermine Cruz's position, undermine Cruz's position that we need to be supporting Israel on Iran.
Tucker evidently doesn't like regime change, doesn't like war, and so therefore he's not going at this in an intellectually honest way.
I mean, you know, so you want to argue a question about baseball, and, you know, you don't know the size of the bases was changed this year, so how many more inches were added to the bases in order to How many seconds are there in the pitch clock?
I mean, you may not know the precise answer to that, but it doesn't mean you don't understand baseball.
No, but a lot of these guys, and Ted Cruz usually has this stuff in his head, or at least ballpark figures or ballpark ideas.
But I do understand that these two are pretty much adversarial at this point.
And that's a good thing, though, by the way.
Cruz is bringing across some very good points about why we should be aiding Israel.
Whereas Tucker Carlson brings across points, and again, he should be asking questions rather than initiating his opinion, I suppose, but it is his show.
But he's bringing across good points as to why regime change may not work.
Well, Tucker Carlson actually called up President Trump and apologized.
That's fair.
And I think he should have.
I think he should apologize.
This is not journalism.
This is Democratic-style gotcha politics, and I'm sick of it.
It's a cheap trick.
It's a cheap trick.
He didn't have to do it this way.
It's beneath Tucker to do this.
Tucker's a better journalist than this, and if he wants to behave like this, somebody could do this to him pretty easily, too.
When he goes to Russia to interview Putin, I want to know the exact number of square miles in the Russian territory.
I want to know the history of Russia.
I want to know, you know, give me the history of the Kremlin.
You know, what was what I wanted to explain, you know, the post-war.
I mean, I can ask Tucker a dozen questions he doesn't know the answer to, and it doesn't mean that those are relevant questions.
It just means I'm trying to embarrass Tucker.
On the other hand, when I coach people as far as when they do interviews with people like a Tucker or maybe coaching people who do interviews even on a local level, I check out the interviewer, the program, what they do, and prep my job.
the subject of the interview, if you will, for some of these potential gotcha questions.
Perhaps the staff should have been a little bit...
You couldn't prepare for a PhD thesis on Iran.
You could still get stumped by something you don't know.
Fair.
That's fine.
Let's play a little bit on both sides here.
I'm not both sides on this one.
I think Tucker made a fool of himself.
Fair enough.
I think it was a cheap shot.
Just a little bit more.
And I see an unending string of foreign policy disasters that have impoverished and hurt.
An unending string.
An unending string.
That's kind of loaded.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria.
And our inability to stop the Houthis, by the way, in Yemen, which exposes us as weak, and I grieve over that.
So these are failures.
You helped preside over some of them as a member of the Senate.
What foreign policy failures have I presided over?
Well, we were unable to beat Russia in the war that you supported against Russia.
You've been spending the last three years telling us that Vladimir Putin is evil and we're going to beat him with other people's children, and a million of those kids are now dead.
Okay, I mean, you know, again, Tucker is, if he's got objections to these policies, there's other ways to raise the objections.
Fair.
Okay, and the idea, first of all, I'm making the point, and I think it's an obvious point, that the prolonged occupation of these Muslim countries does not serve us.
When we go over, we have an immediate, you know, we're going to replace Saddam Hussein.
Okay, well, we accomplished that fairly quickly in the Second Iraqi War.
It took us a while to find him, but, you know, we didn't need to stay there for all the period of time we stayed there.
It only, you know, propelled, And, you know, it's a strain on our resources.
They're distant and difficult to manage.
And they're inherently chaotic right now.
More war is only going to further destabilize the Middle East.
It's one of the reasons I've been cautious about the war we're currently engaged in with Israel and Iraq.
It's more destabilization.
Unfortunately, there's no alternative when the mullahs are a week away from having nuclear weapons that are going to drop on Tel Aviv.
But the point is that Donald Trump's long-term strategy is to be very, very reluctant to go to war and be very encouraging that we can establish peace through prosperity.
The Abraham Accords, that's his endgame, and I support that endgame.
But we're not going to get to it until Hamas is out of Gaza and Tehran, this regime, is no longer in control to be able to produce nuclear weapons again down the road.
We just repeat the same old mistakes.
And this regime is inherently destabilizing when other countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE are on a path to prosperity.
And that's the only path that's going to get the Middle East out of its chaos.
Chris?
Again, that's true.
There are so many variables to what's going on in the Middle East now.
I do understand both men's points of view on this one.
The fact is, though, and if you want to go back into journalistic integrity, Tucker Carlson did not have to load the questions as he did.
While he brought up some good points, the question.
You don't have to yell at each other over these things.
This could have been a more civil discussion, probably could have been a more newsworthy discussion as well, whereas the two men would probably break off disagreeing, but the viewer would get perspectives from both sides of this whole thing.
And I do agree that there are some good points on both sides here.
Well, I mean, you're more, Exactly.
What you come away with this is that he's trying to make a fool of Ted Cruz, and Ted Cruz is not taking it kindly.
And he shouldn't.
He shouldn't.
The point of the interview is, They really aren't relevant.
And from a legal point of view, if this were a court, a trucker would be ruled out of order because these are not relevant points.
They're relevant.
They're not at the center of the argument.
The argument is about whether or not it's productive to have a prolonged attempt at regime change, or even if regime change is your goal.
That's a legitimate question and should be debated.
In the case of Iran, I think a regime change, if it could be achieved, would be desirable.
Because I don't see this regime as being productive for peace in any way, shape, or form.
It hasn't been since 1979.
They funded terrorism all through the region, and now that we can destroy them economically and reduce their power, as well as take away the nuclear capability, regime change might get Iran to be a reasonable citizen of the Middle East, and we could get on with the prosperity that needs to occur.
Radical Islam has got to go through a reformation, and it's not going to go through a reformation with the mullahs in power in Iran.
These are fundamental issues.
And the Marxism has combined with radical Islam.
Ayatollah Khomeini was involved in that from the very beginning.
And it's a revolutionary movement.
They want to destroy capitalist society and reduce everybody to the 14th century where they can have their religious totalitarianism.
That everybody wears burqas and everybody is going to the mosque all the time and crying and nobody works.
The brutality towards women is incredible.
These are not...
It needs a reformation.
Period.
And I think, you know, at and I'd rather see productive discourse on that and it makes me what I come away with is a little bit concerned about Well, he does want to keep an audience and get rolling here.
But the other X factor, the whole thing that I believe Tucker Carlson does miss with this interview.
And again, I understand the idea that the regime change, our history of that has not worked out very well.
But we could have learned the lessons from that over the years and would be now more prepared.
Secondly, as you pointed out in your Atomic Iran book, let's face it.
Iran is a threat.
It's a true threat.
One could argue Afghanistan maybe somewhat.
One could argue Iraq wasn't generally a threat, but Iran is definitely a threat to both peace in the Middle East and, yes, our nation, our national security.
Well, as we're going through all this, we're about to find out there's increasing evidence that 9-11, we've been lied to about 9-11.
I said, why did, you know, the building, why did building number six fall down?
You can see it falling down and was not hit by an airplane.
Questions about whether it was a missile or an airplane that hit the Pentagon.
I've raised questions about this from the very beginning and have gotten slapped down over it over the years, even at World Net Daily.
They didn't want me pursuing the fact that there was evidence in the rubble of the World Trade Center that there had been a controlled demolition, which certainly looked like.
Now, aren't we allowed to ask that question?
Aren't we allowed to explore that question?
So we've been lied to about everything from Russiagate, Through the assassination of Jack Kennedy.
So again, you know, our whole, the entire 20th century was a matter of war after war after war and intelligence lie after lie after lie.
As I said earlier, you know, we became Nazi Germany because we brought over all these Nazis to the United States after the war.
And so therefore, there's many, many issues here and it's not an easier, simple situation to sort it out.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, that's all we, you know.
Again, the discussion could have been a bit more civil and a bit more informative, and let's show many, if you will.
And I don't blame Cruz for firing back at him.
No, I don't either.
And look, the whole thing comes down to the following point, is that we're at a pivotal point in history right now, and we're dealing with end-days kinds of events.
Okay, these are clearly end-day events.
And, you know, the number of Christians that are getting murdered, etc.
And, you know, the point is, we're at a tipping point where we're going to go into a new millennium of peace or we're going to go into chaos and nuclear war.
And so far, the demons of the Democratic Party have been very happy to go into nuclear war.
Chris, put back up on the 800 number for Swiss America.
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I've got rush time today, so I've got to move on.
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Gold today is still trading strongly over $3,000 an ounce.
$3,367 an ounce.
And silver is almost at $37 an ounce.
It was $32 an ounce when we started talking about this.
Now, the points I'm making here in terms of the economy is that people have got to realize that we're in a very, very difficult period of time.
And while the stock market is still, Dow Jones Industrial Average is still trading over 40,000 points, it could easily start trading under 40,000 points.
Okay, so...
And the Federal Reserve is not lowering interest rates.
Powell is not helping Trump.
Not when we have a $37 trillion deficit and we've got to pay the interest on that.
And a little bit lower interest rates would make it quite a bit less expensive to pay the interest on the debt.
We shouldn't have interest on the federal debt.
We should be able just to print our money.
Jack Kennedy realized that.
And the Treasury could print the money.
If the money is fiat and it's not backed by gold, why are we paying the Federal Reserve, a private bank, interest to give us our money?
It makes no sense at all.
Especially not as this modern monetary theory, which says all money is fiat today, which mostly it is.
And so therefore we just print more money to pay off the debt.
If that's the case, why do we need the Federal Reserve?
There's a lot of things here that are being questioned.
Complete confusion and uncertainty.
I encourage you to read what I've written in the book The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy.
We're living in an era of anarchy, but a lot of corrective measures are being taken by Donald Trump.
They're not going to work all at once.
But if we continue fighting, in the end, we will win.
Because, in the end, God always wins.
We're on God's side.
We're going to win, despite the battles that we may have to fight to get to the victory.
God is going to win this, and God's in charge.
God is king and dominion.
You know, Jesus is our savior.
The fundamental bedrock of our existence here is not material, it's spiritual.
You're not going to fix this world to be perfect, no matter what you do.
The biblical remedy for these kinds of times is 2 Chronicles 7.14.
I encourage everybody to get down on our knees, as I do every day, asking God to forgive us for letting the world get to this point.
We should never have taken God out of our schools going back to the 1940s.
We should never have had Roe v.
Wade, which allowed for the slaughter of so many innocent babies.
These are horrible things.
We've got an outrageous child.
Sex, slavery.
We've got things that are just unconscionably evil.
And we need to address them, expose them, and eliminate the demons and send Satan back to hell where he belongs.
