Truth vs. NEW$ Inc, Part 1 (2 March 2025) with Don Grahn, Joachim Hagopian, and Brian Davidson
Don Grahn, Joachim Hagopian, and Brian Davidson dissect the U.S.-led war on Iran—sparked by a failed decapitation strike on Khamenei in February 2026—where Iran’s drone swarms overwhelmed U.S. defenses, crippling Bahrain’s Fifth Fleet and trapping ships in the Strait of Hormuz. With oil surging to $100/barrel and Gulf allies abandoned, they expose Israel’s "Greater Israel Project" and Trump’s war-mongering as a lobby-driven power grab, comparing it to Ukraine’s quagmire. Accusing China of feeding Iran real-time intel, they warn of economic collapse and 20,000+ U.S. casualties—all while dismissing Trump’s rhetoric as delusional. The war isn’t about Iran; it’s about control, and the U.S. is losing. [Automatically generated summary]
And welcome, folks, to Truth vs. News, Incorporated.
This is March the 2nd, 2026.
And this show is something else as we march into war, it looks like here.
And we have either Epic Fury or Epic Fail coming up and all kinds of things.
You're going to want to share this show for sure.
And you want to have people see our leader, Jim Fitzer.
He's just our man of the year, man of the hour.
He's written books and highlighted things and done better than anybody else can to bring your history that nobody else has.
And he's getting very honored by everybody, including us.
We also have Brian Davidson.
And we have a private investigator out of Texas.
He's very sharp on detail and really gets his man.
And we have Joaquin Magopian calling in from Bali and having a wonderful time.
And he's an awesome writer.
He writes about history in America like nobody else can from that foreign port.
So Jim, I guess we have to get into this awful war here, right?
Isn't that where we're starting?
Don, there is so much going on.
So much going on with regard to the war.
You're absolutely right.
Let's begin with Colonel McGregor observing.
This is in anticipation of the war.
No more negotiations, the Colonel was saying.
Comments on Iran.
He received a standard.
Do you see a black screen?
Party, but from the Democrats.
Yeah, we don't see anything here.
Lobby loans to Congress.
You can't see it.
No.
No.
Circumstances, I think war with Iran is unavoidable.
We hear it, though.
Wondering, well, why hasn't it already happened?
I thought it would have happened somewhat sooner, but I think we have to understand that there are a number of problems that we're dealing with.
First of all, you know, you've only got two carrier battle groups.
Normally for an operation of this size against a country the size of Iran, you would have several.
But the Navy is not in the best of condition right now.
Carrier screen in the next couple of weeks could be ready for action, but they've got problems.
They're not full strength.
So one wonders whether or not we're going to wait that long for them.
I don't know.
I doubt it.
I think the burden for this Is going to be carried largely by the U.S. Air Force.
Donna, you're telling me you can't see it?
The Israelis, particularly.
No picture here.
All right, let's try the fleet down in the Indian Ocean.
I'm not sure how effective or impactful that's going to be.
You know, one of the things that several of my friends have done, I have not sat down and gone through the process, but many other analysts have.
And when you look at the hundreds of miles that we have to fly, either from land bases or seabase, that is from aircraft carriers, to deliver bombs and munitions and missiles and rockets and so forth, you're in a position where you've got to probably refuel on your way to the target area and then refuel again on your way back because you're talking about hundreds of miles.
So aircraft that on a good day can fly around 300 miles are now going to be asked to travel 700 miles or even 800 miles to reach the target area.
And I'm not talking about necessarily penetrating the integrated air defenses in Iran, which this time I think will perform infinitely better than they did the last time, simply because the Russians and the Chinese have invested a great deal of expertise, time, and money in making them effective.
So, yes, I think we're going to see a war.
And the American people overwhelmingly, at least based on the polling data, are opposed to a war with Iran.
Depending upon which poll you want to look at, it's 70%, 75%, almost 80% have said no.
War Despite Polling Data00:02:15
No more wars in the Middle East, period.
No war anywhere as far as most Americans are concerned.
But Americans do not control Congress.
The Israel lobby does.
And so when we talk about democracy, I think we ought to take a step back and look at the reality.
It's not just the Israel lobby on this particular issue.
Obviously, it's decisive.
But many of the lobbies in Washington, D.C. spend a lot of money to sway votes in their favor.
In the case of the Israel lobby, they say, well, we only spent $3 plus million on lobbying.
Well, that's true, but that doesn't include, you know, basically over $100 million that is spent by the Zionist billionaires directly to get control of candidates.
How do you do that?
Well, you know, you put money into their campaigns, into their political action committees, and you make it clear that if they don't vote the way you want them to, they'll support their opponents.
Doesn't matter who the opponent is or what party he belongs to.
In other words, do business as we tell you, and we'll get along just fine.
And you'll get lots of money out of this.
And we'll throw other good news in your direction.
Because remember, these billionaires own most of the media.
They're leaders in the financial community.
They own Hollywood.
That's not it.
You know, they probably control most of the legal profession.
But the bottom line is they're in a position with the banks and the various corporations to put even more money in your pocket if you go along with them.
So I'm afraid, you know, at this point, it doesn't matter what the American people think or want.
Yeah, the colonel's got it exactly right.
Doesn't matter what the American people want.
It's got to do with what the Israeli lobby is willing to deal out.
And that is the bottom line.
Meanwhile, we have another report, really excellent, from Russ Winter.
Operation Epic F-Up00:14:08
Can you see it?
Can you see it?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Operation Epic F up.
The Isenathi Hubas, Big Brain Trump, and his Zog whisperers learn what a life's lesson.
This is simply excellent.
He's given us an inventory.
Zog Whisper crew and big brain wrongly calculated that the decapitation crisis martyred Ali Khomeini and top Iranian leadership would cause Iran to fold its tent.
Instead, it seems razors and hardline resistance has galvanized against Zog.
It's also glaringly obvious going into day three that Iran has been woefully underrated.
America Israel is being revealed as the emperor without clothes.
Operation Epic, F up.
Here, policy tents and they really didn't see it coming.
It's astonishing just how much racialized contempt for the enemy routinely leads to grab intelligence and strategic decision making.
Still overnight.
Military officials and U.S. ops centers track dozens and dozens of missiles that attack launched by Iran throughout the night.
Said another familiar with the situation.
Iran is in full retaliation.
The vast number of retaliatory attacks in the array of sites being targeted, including non-military and Arab nations across the Middle East, is concerning.
After so much of the regime's top leadership was killed, officials are worried about the command and control of those weapons.
Law Rosen inside the Pentagon, among some members, the Trump admin.
There was deepening concern Sunday, the Iran conflict could spread out of control.
Said people familiar with the situation.
The mood here is intense and paranoid.
Pentagon throws Big Brain under the bus.
Source Reuters.
Pentagon just threw Trump under the bus.
Tells Congress no sign Iran was going to attack us first, which is required, of course, an imminent threat to justify the attack.
Trump returns to the White House, refuses his question, but gives Caligula a like tour of statues in the garden.
Outrageous.
Trump ignores questions about the Iran war and dead American soldier talks about the garden instead.
Unbelievable statues, you'll see.
Come and look at them.
The man is a complete sociopath.
The aircraft carriers have been withdrawn to distance, rendering them only useful for tomahawk attacks.
Inventory of those is estimated at 500, which will be depleted soon enough.
Iran's new swarm, shielded missiles, seem to be massively overperforming.
U.S. allies wasting six or seven interceptors per missile.
Drones are unstoppable.
These can get the job done even without hypersonics.
The hypersonics and newly arrived SU-35s can be secured and used as deterrence to keep the carrier groups at bay or against special high-value targets.
Here's Iran's war strategy.
Blind, deplete, overwhelm.
Phase one, blind.
Take out radar and communication nodes with cheap swarms of drones and missiles.
Destroy the U.S. integrated sensor, radar, and command network.
Phase two, deplete.
Use these inexpensive, numerous drones, only $2,000,000 apiece, which have to be intercepted by vastly expensive missiles at a million to 10 apiece.
Third phrase, overwhelm.
Use your held-back systems, your hypersonic against the weakened defenses.
Take out carriers and other command centers and what's left of the enemy.
I think this is exactly how it's playing out.
Very impressive.
Meanwhile, we have the U.S. at the Security Council.
I mean, this is just insulting.
U.S. calls Iran retaliatory strikes unprovoked.
Can you believe this?
Listen, this is U.S. calls Iranian retaliatory strikes unprovoked.
And other notes.
The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran rages on.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed.
Iran has been hammering U.S. military bases in the region with missiles and drones, and oil prices are already beginning to rise as the IRGC cuts off the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for the attacks.
U.S. soldiers have already begun to die.
US Central Command reports that three American service members were killed in combat with five seriously wounded, and it should here be noted that seriously wounded can mean permanently brain damaged, comatose, or otherwise rendered severely handicapped for the rest of their lives.
Trump said during an interview with the Daily Mail that he now expects the war to last four weeks or so, and that he expects US casualties to continue.
I have said it before and I will say it again.
Every single American soldier who dies in this war was killed by Trump and Netanyahu.
The US and Israeli governments bear sole responsibility for their deaths.
At least 153 people were reportedly killed in a strike on an Iranian girls' school in the opening wave of attacks.
Most of the fatalities were girls between the ages of 7 and 12.
Turns out freeing Iranian women from the hijab just meant killing girls before they're old enough to start wearing one.
There have been viral claims on social media that it was a misfired Iranian missile which struck the school, and that the Iranian government has admitted to this, both of which were swiftly debunked.
We've seen this play before.
In October 2023, hospitalists saturating the information ecosystem with claims that Gaza's Alali Baptist hospital was hit by a misfired Palestinian rocket rather than by Israel.
Israel has now bombed that very same hospital eight separate times, which tells you all you need to know.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz used the word unprovoked to describe Iran's retaliatory strikes on US military bases in the region, which is just plain hilarious.
Waltz told the UN, indiscriminate and unprovoked attacks by the Iranian regime today against our regional partners, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, and others, reinforce exactly why such actions are necessary.
Only the United States could bomb a country, kill its leader, massacre its children, declare the intention to destroy its military and topple its government, and then call that country's retaliation against US military bases unprovoked.
Iran has reportedly rejected Trump administration offers to make a deal after the initial round of attacks.
Quincy Institute's Trida Parsi assesses that Iran believes it needs to impose severe costs on the United States before returning to the negotiating table, because they know if they make a deal now, they'll just be attacked again in a few months unless they establish clear deterrence.
Parsi writes, Iran understands that many in the American security establishment had been convinced that Iran's past restraint reflected weakness and an inability or unwillingness to face the U.S. in a direct war.
Tehran is now doing everything it can to demonstrate the opposite, despite the massive cost it itself will pay.
End quote.
Iran's foreign minister Abbas Aragji went on NBC News to discuss the war and was actually asked by co-anchor Laura Jarrett how Iran can justify striking U.S. military bases in the region.
Why is attacking U.S. military bases abroad justified? Jarrett asked after Aragji said that Iran will not seek long-range missiles capable of striking the United States.
Aragchi replied with a chuckle, because they are attacking us.
They are U.S. military installations, facilities, bases who are attacking us.
We are under attack.
Why don't you recognize this fact?
This is obvious.
This is a very simple fact, and I'm sure that people would understand that.
You think every American reporter is a complete idiot.
Meanwhile, here's a fifth wave at the time.
I'm going to say something that's going to piss off a lot of Christians over 50, but y'all need to hear this.
You don't need Iran entered a new and dangerous phase, intensifying attacks on U.S. military installations in the Middle Eastern region.
A fresh wave of strikes under what Tehran calls Operation True Promise 4 is now targeting American-linked assets across land and sea.
Iran's powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC, claimed major strikes in the fifth wave of Operation True Promise 4, hitting multiple American-linked targets across the region.
According to Iranian sources, four drones struck an ammunition-carrying vessel near the Jabel Ali anchorage in the Indian Ocean.
The attack quickly resulted in explosions, leaving the ship disabled, they claimed, without sharing any proof.
Iran also claimed it hit a U.S. military installation in the Abdullah Mubarak area in Kuwait with four ballistic missiles and 12 drones.
The IRGC said the American forces sustained extensive damage and casualties.
Iranian Qatar-380 missiles hit a fuel-carrying combat support vessel supplying U.S. naval forces in the Indian Ocean, according to the IRGC.
There is no independent confirmation of this alleged attack.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has issued its starkest warning yet, declaring that Iranian forces will keep the gates of hell open.
This signals that Tehran is preparing for a prolonged confrontation.
From the Gulf to the Indian Ocean.
Following Iranian state television's confirmation of Supreme Leader Ali Khomeini's death, the IRGC unleashed a chilling warning for Israel and the U.S.
It says the most ferocious offensive operation in history is coming.
Iran appears determined to widen the battle as it faces an existential war.
I think that's absolutely right.
Joachim, your thoughts, my friend.
You have to wonder, we just go by what's on public domain access to news.
But we figured it out a long time ago that if America goes ahead and attacks Iran again with Israel, yeah, they can do decapitation, but they cannot sustain a war.
They cannot.
They don't have the logistics.
And Iran has been very restrained up until a couple days ago.
They finally are finally taking care of business with taking out all the military posts that are along the Gulf states.
You know, I mean, we got hundreds of them and they're all sustaining severe damage.
Bahrain, which is the fifth naval fleet home, the port's gone.
You know, I mean, they had to take the two carriers away into the Indian Ocean because they were sitting ducks.
We were calling all of this a long time ago, a year ago, probably.
So, you know, you have to wonder, you have to really wonder if we could figure it all out and we don't have access to the intel and all this bullshit that they claim.
So I almost have to say, it's almost like it's all done on purpose.
You know, you have to be so insanely off and wrong in your judgment to end up with this outcome.
You know, we knew, I mean, they already proved, Iran already proved last June that those missiles are going to be relentless, wave after wave after wave.
They already proved it.
So, I mean, how can you think, oh, there's going to be a five-day war?
Just gonna go in there and kick ass and come home, you know?
You know yeah, I mean it's so ridiculous.
You know, it just baffles me that that anybody listens to them and thinks, oh yeah, that they're actually saying the truth.
I mean everything that comes out of Washington Dc and all the whores in the media.
You know, it's like just give it up, because Iran has developed a military technology and a weapons arsenal that is only second to two other countries in the world.
Why War Seems Impossible00:15:39
Okay.
And we know who they are.
Who those adversaries?
You know, you know, a lot of this strategy of going after Iran is to actually get to China and Russia.
We know that too.
So, yeah, it's just, I hate seeing this.
And, you know, the reports from Iran are that 200 Americans are dead, you know, and I'm inclined to believe that.
We're seeing even some of the videos coming out are showing the damage that's going on in the military outposts.
Yeah, my best guess is actually 500 already dead.
And how telling is, as Trump originally said, be a four-day war.
Now he said it'd be a four-week war.
And Hague says they're talking about even longer having troops on the ground in Iran, which is insane.
Brian, your thoughts.
Yeah.
Okay, so we're committed to going to war.
Great.
Let's go ahead and raise our fists and let's go ahead and stick our nose in the ring only to find out that the opponent is much stronger than we anticipated.
We're the great America, Team America World Police.
We go ahead and allow our lobbyists and our political machine to tell us what's unavoidable.
And therefore, we go ahead and take that hook line and sinker.
Who cares what the general public taxpayers and voters think?
What matters is what the lobbyists think.
So if you look at McGregor's segment, he helped us understand why it's politically unavoidable with the lobbying system, regardless of what the American people think.
And then he began to develop the idea of this is going to be much harder than it looks.
Distance refueling reloads fatigue and uncertainty, plus an aging fleet that isn't quite as effective, maybe as it's been advertised to the American people with all the war propaganda commercials that have taken on.
But the problem that everybody sees, and what was interesting about the articles is it sort of progressed from McGregor to Winters to Caitlin Johnston.
And what Winters was saying is: okay, McGregor's right, but let's go ahead and inspect what's already showing up in the arguments from McGregor's warnings.
And then we develop that even further with the Johnstone piece.
But the fundamental issue comes down to what happens when it doesn't go down nice and smooth and fast and easy.
And was that baked into the plan all along?
Maybe it is because there's so much money in war.
But regardless, you've got a situation where you're up against an opponent that isn't going to lay down and die.
You got to remember that the Iranians see this as a battle for survival.
And they tend to fight a lot harder than purchased proxy military units like what the American people are offering.
Look, I seriously doubt the American military man believes the rhetoric that he's fighting for the country's homeland, like Lindsey Graham says, that he's fighting, he's going to become a hero for all of freedom and all of the world, because there's just no evidence to support that any of those claims have any weight at all.
And the propaganda cannot overwhelm the fact that this is clearly an oligarch's war.
So you've got a problem.
When the uncertainty begins to strike, and we learn that Iran is fighting for their very survival, we're going to find that it might have been sold to us as a four-day war and then a four-week war, but this is Ukraine 2.0, and that's still not over.
So this is another disaster.
Yeah, absolutely.
You got to have Ryan.
Who knows how long it could actually play out?
Very, very disturbing.
Agree.
The very first casualty of war is the truth.
Yes.
Yes, Don.
How true.
Meanwhile, Trump urges Iranians to take control of their own government after U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury strikes on Iran.
Harry was speaking to the Party and was actually black.
You can't see it, Don.
You can't see it?
No.
No.
Okay.
Let me see here.
Let me see here.
All right.
Sorry about that.
Can you see him now?
Yeah, there we go.
Okay, well, here was Trump in the middle of the morning.
This is like 4 a.m., and it was also broadcast into Iran.
A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran.
Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people.
Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world.
For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted death to America and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops, and the innocent people in many, many countries.
Among the regime's very first acts was to back a violent takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, holding dozens of American hostages for 444 days.
In 1983, Iran's proxies carried out the Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American military personnel.
In 2000, they knew and were probably involved with the attack on the USS Cole.
Many died.
Iranian forces killed and maimed hundreds of American service members in Iraq.
The regime's proxies have continued to launch countless attacks against American forces stationed in the Middle East in recent years.
Notice how he begins with the retaking the Islamic Revolution of 79, retaking the embassy and all that after we had deposed their government in 1953.
The mainstream and Trump never talk about the fact that we struck the first blow.
Then we have Netyahu, joint action with the U.S.
We will fight together.
Israeli P.M. Netanyahu said Saturday Israel and the United States had begun a joint military campaign targeting Iran's leadership, describing the effort as a bid to eliminate what he called an existential threat.
In a televised address delivered hours after U.S.-led strike commenced under Operation Epic Fury, Netanyahu said the allies were acting to counter what he characterized as the dangers posed by Iran's ruling regime.
He thanked President Trump for what he described as historic leadership and accused Iran's leadership of decades of aggression.
This is a nation that has launched a war of aggression since 1775, and yet he's declaring they're responsible for wars of aggression.
Here's Larry Johnson, just wonderful, thoughtful stuff with Judge Napolitano.
Of judging freedom with our dear friend and regular colleague, Larry Johnson.
Larry, of course, welcome here.
Thank you for disturbing your Saturday afternoon.
It's afternoon here in the east coast of the United States.
We have much to discuss.
Before we get granular, let's look at the big picture.
What happened today?
What did the United States and Israel attempt to do?
The United States and Israel started a fight that they can't win, that they're going to lose.
And they don't have an easy out.
They'd convinced themselves that all they had to do was launch this massive strike because, you know, Trump foolishly, foolishly believes his own nonsense about it.
Oh, there's no better, bigger, more powerful military in the world than us.
With maybe Israel is a close second, but we are the best and we can do anything.
And so they fully intended to try a repeat of what happened on June 13th of 2025 to do a decapitation strike, take out the upper political military leadership.
Well, you know, they've been gesturing for now more than two months that they were going to do this.
The Iranians had no doubt that they were going to do it.
And the Iranians were taking preparations that if it did happen, and like, you know, if the Ayatollah Khomeini died, he'd already designated successors.
If Pazeskian died, he'd designated.
They'd all, you know, they all said, hey, if I go, you're in charge.
You know, they were planning for this.
So here's Israel.
They top it off.
And, you know, we saw from a recent article from Seymour Hirsch that I don't know if his source was U.S. intelligence or Israeli intelligence, but regardless, this source told Sai that, oh, yeah, we decimated the Iranian ballistic missile program last year.
They don't have anything.
So within an hour and a half of this surprise attack yesterday morning, it was yesterday morning in Iran, Saturday morning there, Iran was firing back.
But this time, what's different from now compared to what happened in June of 2025?
At that time, Iran confined itself to attacking only Israeli targets.
They focused primarily on economic and military targets.
This time is different, way different.
They're going after U.S. bases and installations throughout the Persian Gulf into Iraq.
And the United States is suffering significant material losses.
I don't know about human loss at this point.
Here's one of the dopiest questions I ever heard asked.
And I think the Iranian foreign minister agreed when an NBC correspondent, I don't know who it is, asked him, Chris, the NBC dope.
Why is attacking U.S. military bases abroad justified?
Because they are attacking us.
They are U.S. military installations, facilities, bases who are attacking us.
We are under attack.
Why don't you recognize this fact?
We are under the attack by U.S. forces in the region.
So we have every right to defend ourselves.
And how to defend ourselves?
We attacked the U.S. bases.
This is obvious.
This is a very simple fact.
And I'm sure that people would understand that.
We are not the one who attacked Americans.
We are only defending ourselves.
What are American troops and installations in the Middle East to the long-range offensive capabilities of the Iranian military?
Well, you know, what's happened right now, for example, they made a big point of attacking the Fifth Fleet facility in Bahrain.
It's a naval, it's a port.
That port is critical for providing service to, say, U.S. destroyers who, remember, these destroyers come equipped with 96 missile slots.
I think they got 50 up front and 46 astern.
And they're vertical launch systems.
So when they launch either Tomahawk cruise missiles or Aegis air defense missiles out of those tubes, the only way to replace them is to sail to a port.
Previously, they could sail into Bahrain and go there.
Not now.
Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz.
You've got several U.S. Navy ships that are now basically trapped inside the Persian Gulf, and Iran's got the airship anti-ship missiles to take those out.
I don't know if they have yet, but I think they will, number one.
So now this means the United States, when it's in a fight with the Abraham Lincoln carrier in the Arabian Sea, accompanied by, you know, last I checked, it was like three destroyers and maybe up to four.
Once they're run out of missiles, they got the nearest port is three, three and a half days away at Diego Garcia.
Wow.
So what we have right now is a situation that we cannot sustain an attack, a naval attack from the south with just the one aircraft carrier because there's no nearby port they can sail to to get reloaded.
So three days out, three days back, that's a week.
How?
It's just incredible what's going on here.
Absolutely incredible.
And I love that Larry Johnson is laying it out so clearly.
And, of course, the stories do continue here with Rand's response to Big Brain's Operation Einstein.
Look at this.
Look how many places have been destroyed.
Abu Dhabi, Bahrain.
Response was immediate and widespread.
Tactical defense against this seems mutant.
Gulf countries have paid billions to the U.S. for protection, but it appears the U.S. is prioritizing Israel's security instead.
It seems the focus is on American radar and their bases in Gulf countries.
Iran's Preemptive Strike00:15:06
Iran wants to blind the U.S. first.
They started this process last time with a strike on El Udad.
That is why Iran hit Gulf countries first and more heavily.
The strikes were on satellite and comm installations.
Once this is severely disrupted, Iran can strike Iran more easily and effectively.
This is a lesson learned from the 12-day war.
A U.S. official says the U.S. hasn't faced so many simultaneous strikes on its overseas bases before.
Wall Street Journal.
Footage of an Iranian ballistic missile slamming into the headquarters of the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet at Naval Support Activity.
Bahrain earlier today.
It's happening all over the place.
Footage from the U.S. Fifth Fleet facilities in Bahrain shows huge damage.
Joaquin, your thoughts, my friend.
Yeah, they learned from June that they need to go after all those military bases in the Gulf.
And that's exactly what they did.
They pretty much taken out so many of them, you know, where they don't have their radar systems.
They have not planned this.
The U.S. is completely, you know, not prepared for this war.
And, you know, the weird thing is, is we figured it out a long time ago that it's not probably going to go more than a week, you know, and the longer it goes, the more definite that Iran's going to win.
Duh, you know, we get it.
We're just, quote, lay people just trying to figure shit out.
And we got it figured out ahead of all these, quote experts.
You know, I mean, it's ridiculous.
Over and over, they're wrong.
You know, that's why I say I think the objective is to destroy America, the empire.
That's a big part of this whole production.
And we're seeing it in real time.
You know, it's like Israel is behind.
I believe Israel wants the U.S. destroyed.
Now, they're going to get destroyed in the process as well.
They're not going to be spared, of course.
But Iran figured it out that, you know, they went soft on all those U.S. military posts throughout the Gulf region last time because they didn't want to offend America.
They're so worried about pissing us off.
But no holds barred this time because they went for that and took a lot of them out.
I mean, so it's like they got their hands, you know, handcuffed behind their back.
America is a sitting duck.
The naval fleet is obsolete.
They're sitting ducks.
And Iran did their homework and they came prepared for the long run, but it probably will not become a long run because right now, America and Israel are getting their ass kicked.
They do not have the air defense systems operating.
The Iron Dome is non-existent now.
It's already what?
Wave after wave and after three days, they don't have any resistance now to all those missiles and thousands upon thousands of missiles and drones.
They've got a whole hypersonic arsenal in store ready, and they've been sparingly using them.
But they used their older ones in the beginning, like, you know, as predicted, and we know they would.
But as time goes on, they're going to be using more of the hypersonic.
I mean, the whole targeting of Israel and all the military U.S. posts in the Gulf, they're completely, completely defenseless now.
And Iran's going to have their way.
And basically, in this way, even though I'm an American, the aggressor has always been the U.S. government and the Israeli government.
They are the bad guys.
They are immorally attacking, unprovoked, a sovereign nation, a UN member, and they keep doing it.
They got their obsession, fixation on we got to do the one thing, though, that I brought up in one of my articles: China gave them in real time basically the surveillance mechanism to be able to see everything going on with America and Israel's military.
How could those missiles and airstrikes come in and take out the supreme leader?
I don't get that part.
That part I don't get.
They know the history of U.S. in Israel is to do decapitation strikes.
They were very successful in June, and every other time they've tried it, they've taken them out.
So why in the fuck was the Supreme Leader up there in his home with his family, and they got wiped out too, and not down in some deep underground base?
I don't get that part.
That part, China gave them this, and then they didn't use it, apparently.
Is there a traitor general in the Iran forces?
I ask.
I'm wondering about that point.
Joaquin, my understanding is they fed Iran false information about not attacking during the day and that they fooled the Iranians.
But apart from that, Iran has been handling itself beautifully.
In fact, they're not allowing photos and videos to come out of Tel Aviv.
The damage is so massive, so extensive.
Brian, your thoughts?
Well, to address the question Lakeen just posed, yeah, I'm sure there's always somebody waiting in the wings to take over for the Ayatollah, but that's not the point.
There are certainly probably people waiting in line and aligning themselves with the CIA and U.S. interests and Israeli interests in order to be the puppet, because there's a lot of money in being a puppet.
And Iran is not the richest country in the world anymore.
So I'm sure there's a lot of people with a lot of appetites to take down the Ayatollah, which is exactly what Israel wants, in my belief, ultimately to happen, to topple any resistance to the Greater Israel project and use America as the police force slash grunt slash bouncer and enforcer to help them get where they're going.
Apparently, that real estate is going to be worth quite a bit to Jared Kushner and to the Trump family if they can go ahead and acquire it and expand their borders on that level.
But that's not what this is about.
I want you to think about the Trump address there and what you saw.
What you really saw was we manufacture consensus by convincing the American people that it's only going to take four days.
Okay, great.
Now that we've crossed the threshold and we've actually attacked them, we're going to go ahead and move the goalposts a little bit more.
And that's going to make some people mad, but it's not going to really change the overall consensus because we're going to use inflammatory rhetoric that says that we've got total intelligence dominance against these bad people over in Iran.
We've got all this operational superiority and this is going to deter them from making a deal.
And the problem is that deterrence isn't a finality.
Iran is fighting for their very lives and the Ayatollah is going to fight for his own life.
So they're just going to have to keep changing this from a one-night operation to a four-day operation to a four-week operation and continue moving the goalposts.
Now, Netanyahu, of course, to manufacture consensus is going to frame it as some sort of removal of some existential threat to all things right and moral and to prevent nuclear wars and create all the conditions for regime change just so that they could install a puppet that's going to do what Israel wants them to do.
And so he's already calling on Persians, Kurds, and the rest to help them, help support the fracturing of this nasty regime.
And Iran obviously has interpreted this as confirmation that their very survival is at stake.
Now, Larry Johnson comes in, he runs his article, and he adds something very critical, something that actually affects us.
Think about Trump trying to manufacture the consensus.
But what Trump isn't saying and what Netanyahu isn't saying is that this is going to shut down the Straits of Hormuz.
This is going to make our entire Fifth Fleet completely vulnerable.
There's going to be reload delays.
There's going to be massive problems in shipping architecture.
There's going to be massive gas and fossil fuel increases and prices.
And think about it.
If Iran can't win militarily, it can still win economically.
And that's very much a type of warfare that they probably will conclude that needs to be fought.
So, you know, Iran fundamentally believes if they negotiate now, they're going to get attacked again later.
And so it's going to take a very hard frontline position of imposing very severe costs for continuing to fight and demonstrating the strength to try to deter Western forces from doing what has already politically been concluded.
And so, you know, now we're not in, will there be a strike territory anymore?
Now it's, can we contain the escalation?
And I got to tell you that I just don't believe that we can.
American people are past the shock phase.
The campaign may or may not even affect it since Trump's, it's Trump's second term.
We're not prepared for the energy market volatility.
We're not strong enough.
We're not prepared for the insurance and shipping shock waves that are going to cause anything that goes maritime to cause the premiums to go up and the shipping costs to go up.
We're not prepared for any of these escalation techniques that come out.
So the real question isn't, you know, can we strike Iran?
It's we already have.
The real question is whether both sides can contain something that's escalating in a way that makes it politically survivable for one or the other.
And, you know, I just don't think that that can happen.
I think that there's going to be winners and losers as there are in all wars.
So this is a really ugly situation.
And I don't think Trump's rhetoric of, Hey, we're going to get the bad guys, Team America, World Police.
It's going to get him any closer to his political goals or his legacy goals.
But I do think it's going to end up helping Israel get closer to their goals, which are the expansion of the Greater Industrial Project, Greater Israel Project.
Well, this morning, the price of oil got from 70 to 83 bucks a barrel.
I think it'll be 100 by tomorrow.
20% of oil goes through the Straits of Orbuz, which are now shot.
I reaffirm my prediction.
We're going to lose three to five to ten ships and 10 to 20,000 troops, and Israel is going to be decimated.
My prediction.
Meanwhile, Trump encourages Scott Radhert.
Very good.
Scott, very thoughtful.
Trump attacks Iran.
Epic Fury or Epic Fail.
Love this guy.
Elijah Menes.
He's just wonderful.
He's also here with the judge.
Our government engages in preemptive war.
Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Saturday, February 28th, 2026.
Welcome to this special edition of Judging Freedom with Who Else?
Our foremost military expert, Scott Ritter.
Scott, thank you very much for joining us on this momentous day on what here in the United States is a Saturday morning.
So can you give us, before we get granular, can you give us a big picture of what the United States and Israel did in the past 12 hours and what they're trying to accomplish?
Well, the United States and Israel have kicked off a joint coordinated attack against Iran, the goal of which is regime change.
There are subsets within this.
Donald Trump spelled them out in a presentation he made earlier this morning.
Sorry about that.
Let's get back.
No.
Destroying ballistic missiles, destroying nuclear sites, destroying X, Y, and Z.
But at the end of the day, this is a regime change operation.
Destroying the Iranian Regime00:04:56
This entire effort fails if the Iranian regime survives at the end of the day.
And it's a massive attack.
I think the initial aspects of it are supposed to go for four days.
So the United States has a four-day air campaign sustained.
I don't know what they expect at that point to take a pause and see if the Iranians surrender.
But the Iranians, I believe, aren't going to end at four days.
The Iranians will continue to turn on the heat.
This is an existential war for the very survival of the Iranian nation, which began with, and this is, your audience needs to listen very carefully to what I'm about to tell you.
Go ahead.
The United States and Israel tried to kill Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, Ayatollah.
He is the second most revered man in all of Shia Islam.
This is like trying to kill the Pope.
This is like trying to kill the Archbishop of Canterbury.
This is like trying to kill the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.
And the United States and Israel tried to kill him and are still trying to kill him.
They tried to assassinate the president of Iran.
If you think for a second the Iranian people, the Iranian nation, are going to walk away from this and say, that's all right.
You're very wrong.
The gates of hell have been opened.
And unless the United States has a competent battle plan to complete this mission, we're going to lose this war.
In fact, later on, we can get into it, but we've already lost this war because we failed to achieve our initial objectives.
And now we're going to have a cascading series of consequences that will result in us depleting our limited ammunition resources.
And we're going to run out of ammunition before we run out of targets.
And Iran isn't going to run out of ammunition.
You say that the Americans and the Israelis tried to assassinate.
Yeah, clearly he's not up to speed.
He doesn't realize that the assassination attempt was a success.
I've yet to hear any mainstream media observe that.
Reagan, Carter, and Ford signed executive orders against the assassination of leaders of foreign nations.
This is why when we took out Saddam Hussein just three weeks into the Iraq invasion, they were going to celebrate it on the Abraham Lincoln office, San Diego with a mission accomplish.
Somebody realized that if W went out there and said he'd done it, he would be admitting he'd violated the law.
Those executive orders, to my knowledge, have never been rescinded.
So taking out the supreme leader was an exact example of what he is not allowed to do by American law.
Joaquim, your thoughts here before we hit our break, let's talk about this one.
Yours.
Yeah, it's barbarism.
It's total lawlessness.
It's the jungle operating when it comes to American belligerence and aggression to basically kill anybody they want.
You know, there's no such thing as international law.
It's not enforced.
UN is impotent.
So, yeah, I mean, America, the belligerent, does what it wants.
So, you know, they have to be put down.
Sadly to say, the American government has to be put down because they're a danger to our entire world.
And that megalomaniacal senile fart in Washington, D.C. could blow up the entire world.
He is that unstable mentally and emotionally that he is a danger to our planet now.
And we must remove him and the government.
They're all traitors.
With the exception of the three.
Brian, your thoughts?
I'm okay deferring on this segment.
I feel like we're just sometimes just saying the same things over and over again.
I mean, I hate to say it, but why do I feel like this is Ukraine 2.0, like the same script different day?
There's nothing new here.
I mean, I get it that it's a new war and there's new things to talk about and new implications, but this is getting old.
Don, can you take that swarm defeat?
Yeah.
Take Us Out For the First Hour00:01:12
Don, take us out.
Take us out.
Don Gron, are you there, my friend?
Okay.
Go ahead.
Take us out for the first hour.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, we can hear you.
Yeah.
Okay.
Anyway, this has been a heck of a first hour.
And we love that technical glass of 26 while arching right into that way.
You can't hear me, but this war is not what we think it is because truth is the first casualty of war and it's all bunch of lives and garbage going back and forth.
So it's something else.
So come on back for a second hour here.
Boy, I tell you, this is heavy, heavier than we ever wanted it to be, but life goes on here in good free America where truth is supposed to stand tall.