Jim Fetzer - U.S. Iran War Engulfs Middle East / Patrick Henningsen & Lt Col Daniel Davis
Aired: 2026-03-05
Duration: 59:35


=== Worst Case Scenario (03:47) ===

[00:00:01]  We are, of course, going to give you an update on the American-Iranian war.
[00:00:04]  Obviously, that's dominating the headlines here.
[00:00:07]  But do you remember all these times we put up people in front of you that showed how the Ukraine side said that they're winning the war?
[00:00:14]  No matter how ridiculous it sounded, they kept going on to say, We're winning the war.
[00:00:18]  We're winning the war.
[00:00:19]  Well, as it turns out, we have a new entrance in that category of we're winning the war on day four of this war right here that is far, far from any kind of a decision, one way or the other.
[00:00:31]  Lots of destruction going on.
[00:00:33]  Here is just moments ago, President Trump from the Oval Office saying this.
[00:00:39]  What's the worst case scenario that you have planned for in Iran?
[00:00:44]  Well, I don't know if there's a worst case.
[00:00:46]  We have very much beaten militarily from the military standpoint.
[00:00:52]  They're still lobbying some missiles.
[00:00:54]  At some point, they won't even be able to do that because we're hitting all of their carriers.
[00:00:58]  We're hitting all of their missile stock.
[00:01:00]  You know, they built up all these missiles over the last few years.
[00:01:04]  They had a lot of them.
[00:01:04]  They've shot a lot of them and we're knocking out a lot.
[00:01:09]  I guess the worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who's as bad as the previous person, right?
[00:01:16]  That could happen.
[00:01:17]  We don't want that to happen.
[00:01:19]  It would probably be the worst.
[00:01:20]  You go through this and then in five years, you realize you put somebody in who is no better.
[00:01:27]  That is apparently the worst case scenario, according to President Trump.
[00:01:30]  But no worries because we basically already won.
[00:01:35]  And I mean, I'm almost don't even know what to say about that.
[00:01:39]  We have with us Patrick Henningsen, who's a journalist and geopolitical analyst, founder of the news analyst website, 21st CenturyWire.com and host of the Sunday Wire Show.
[00:01:50]  And yikes, what do you say to that?
[00:01:53]  I can't think of a worse scenario, Danny, in America that we might get a president in about 12 months ago and realize after a year that he's actually a lot worse than the previous guy.
[00:02:03]  But I suppose that's always a risk in our democracy.
[00:02:06]  Oh, touche on that one, man.
[00:02:09]  But I mean, but let's look at the first part here, though.
[00:02:13]  We've basically won.
[00:02:15]  They can throw a few more missiles out, but basically they're just one.
[00:02:18]  And Gary, put that video back up.
[00:02:19]  This is from today.
[00:02:21]  And I think probably about the time he was making these statements in the Oval Office.
[00:02:24]  This is Tel Aviv, folks.
[00:02:26]  This is not Gaza.
[00:02:27]  This is not Tehran.
[00:02:29]  This is Israel.
[00:02:31]  So it looks like it's more than just a couple of missiles.
[00:02:33]  And that is some profound amounts of damage.
[00:02:36]  And believe me, that's not the only one.
[00:02:37]  I think Gary's got some other ones from Jerusalem and another one from Tel Aviv and others from Tehran because they're all getting hammered.
[00:02:44]  But what does this tell you about the state of the war today, Patrick?
[00:02:48]  Well, there is a moratorium on reporting in Israel regarding any damage or military targets that have been hit in Israel proper.
[00:03:01]  And I think that moratorium also extends very much so to Fox News.
[00:03:07]  They're very careful what they show and they don't show in the U.S. media.
[00:03:12]  There's a little bit of a difference between certain networks.
[00:03:14]  But overall, you only find this type of footage on the internet.
[00:03:20]  What's incredible about this, Danny, what you're showing here is, and this is something that I understood having showed some of the old missiles that have been used in the past, the models anyway, is that you'll find in the different waves of missile attacks from the Iranians that once air defenses are depleted, once they've used older missiles and drones to deplete Israel's, quote,

=== U.S. Decision-Making Crisis (15:18) ===

[00:03:49]  Iron Dome and other integrated systems, then the second and third waves will be, they also have older rolling stock, but that are heavier, sort of, you know, upgraded variants of the Scud missile, but have huge explosive payload capabilities.
[00:04:07]  And those wouldn't be in the sort of hypersonic range per se, although technically they might be hypersonic just.
[00:04:14]  But that goes to show you the variety and the different types of product that Iran has in its missile arsenal are suited for different situations.
[00:04:27]  And I think if you think about the strategic depth that Iran has as an advantage, also on the depth of their missile program, they'll be able to deploy certain things for certain situations that the longer the conflict goes,
[00:04:44]  that is an advantage that's clearly on the side of the Iranians because they've been stockpiling for this war for a few decades, whereby Israel and the U.S. are really only stockpiling or arming for potentially for a conflict that can only last really two weeks, I think.
[00:05:00]  And I'm saying two weeks, Danny, because if we look at the so-called 12-day war, it really was, Israel was finished after two weeks.
[00:05:09]  They had to have the Americans come in to draw a line under it.
[00:05:13]  Otherwise, it would have been an existential issue for the Netanyahu government and for Israeli society.
[00:05:19]  So it was really an hour of desperation that day 12 for Israel.
[00:05:24]  Now, Iran has already said that they're not going to be giving any concessions or anything like that like they did before by having this symbolic exchange with the U.S. so both sides could go away sort of with a win, so to speak.
[00:05:37]  That's not going to happen this time.
[00:05:38]  So that gives the advantage to Iran in terms of the war of attrition.
[00:05:44]  I'm not saying that Iran's not going to incur tremendous losses and damage because they already have and they most likely will if this goes on for another week or two.
[00:05:54]  But proportionally, Danny, it's nothing near what the U.S. and Israel are going to incur in terms of damage, relatively speaking, much more on the U.S. and Israeli side.
[00:06:05]  Now, you were recently did some reporting on the ground in Tehran, right?
[00:06:09]  Not long before this war started.
[00:06:11]  And to what extent, now, obviously, I know that you can't go over there unless you have permission from the government so that maybe they're going to limit what you get access to.
[00:06:19]  I guess it's always a challenge, but it's best you could ascertain how serious are they that they're willing to pay this price and consciously so and not make a deal to say, because apparently by a lot of reports from Western press, President Trump, within like 72 hours or 30, I'm sorry, 36 hours, was making overtures to say, hey, can we get a ceasefire going on here?
[00:06:42]  And apparently it was rebuffed.
[00:06:43]  What can you tell us about the state of the Iranian mind?
[00:06:47]  Well, the state of the Iranian mind is they're under no illusions that even with nuclear talks, which I think Iran is quite canny politically at this point anyway.
[00:07:00]  They're always giving negotiations a talk.
[00:07:02]  They're not very different from the Russians in that respect.
[00:07:05]  They're a normative power.
[00:07:06]  They tend to do statecraft in a very pragmatic way.
[00:07:10]  And of course, they're going to give a full effort for any potential peace negotiations, but that doesn't preclude that they're going to be preparing militarily for an attack that would come imminently.
[00:07:22]  So I was very cognizant of the fact that from the moment I took the moment I entered Iranian airspace that the U.S. could attack at any moment and that my trip would be possibly lengthened there because of the closure of the airports.
[00:07:39]  So they're on alert even back then.
[00:07:42]  So three weeks ago, they're on high alert.
[00:07:44]  But this is the airport you came in and out of, right?
[00:07:46]  Isn't that it right here?
[00:07:48]  Is that Murhaba airport?
[00:07:51]  Yeah, I'm not sure if that's the main interpretable check if that's the main international airport or not.
[00:07:56]  But the main international airport is approximately an hour and a half outside of the city.
[00:08:03]  But there's two or three airports that are Tehran.
[00:08:11]  You said, Danny Meher.
[00:08:12]  Okay.
[00:08:13]  Mehan.
[00:08:16]  So suffice to say, Iran was prepared for the war, even though they're running parallel negotiations because they didn't believe the United States is credible because they had already been victim of a facade of negotiations that were used as cover for a sneak attack back in June.
[00:08:33]  And the U.S., as we know, have done that multiple times with different negotiations, whether it's with negotiations with Hamas, whether it's negotiations luring Soleimani to Baghdad for negotiations, or whether it's with Russia and Ukraine and other examples of this.
[00:08:52]  But on multiple occasions, the U.S.-Israeli tactic is to use the facade of negotiations as cover for a sneak attack.
[00:09:00]  It's very dirty tactics.
[00:09:02]  And I'm sad to say, you know, the U.S., the Trump administration, has merged with Israel in its methods, in its language, in its rhetoric, and with its dirty methods.
[00:09:12]  And the damage this does to the U.S. credibility as a credible, honest broker.
[00:09:18]  Not that anyone, many people anyway, who are smart were under any illusions that the U.S. is an honest broker, but at least the appearance of going through the motions at least gives some potential chance for an off-ramp in any particular situation.
[00:09:34]  But I think that's completely gone now with the United States after this.
[00:09:39]  I mean, they've really taken a turn here that I don't think they will be able to undo in terms constitutionally, domestically, but also internationally.
[00:09:49]  I think the U.S. is the Trump administration has taken the country and the government down a dark path, and it's been led down that path.
[00:09:58]  In fact, I would argue that it's been ordered down that path by a foreign entity, and that foreign entity is the state of Israel.
[00:10:10]  Because that's one of the things that President Trump also mentioned today.
[00:10:13]  Let me as a kind of a setup here.
[00:10:16]  A lot of people heard yesterday that the Secretary of State Rubio may have said, may have spilled the beans inadvertently when he's in the process of explaining why we took this action, actually showed that he wasn't because of what we wanted to do.
[00:10:30]  Watch this.
[00:10:31]  There absolutely was an imminent threat, and the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us.
[00:10:39]  And we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded.
[00:10:43]  If we waited for them to hit us first after they were attacked and by someone else, Israel attacked them, they hit us first, and we waited for them to hit us, we would suffer more casualties and more deaths.
[00:10:53]  We went proactively in a defensive way to prevent them from inflicting higher damage.
[00:10:57]  Had we not done so, there would have been hearings on Capitol Hill about how we knew that this was going to happen and we didn't act preemptively to prevent more casualties and more loss of life.
[00:11:07]  Okay, now, first of all, and I'm going to bring in a separate point here.
[00:11:10]  First of all, the question he was asked is because there was this claim that we had to take action because it was an imminent threat.
[00:11:15]  And so he was asked about that.
[00:11:16]  And he shot back like, you know, this incredulous question, like, well, of course there was an imminent threat because Israel was going to attack.
[00:11:23]  And if we didn't attack them, then we would get it.
[00:11:25]  I.e., the imminent threat, Patrick, was that we, our side, was going to attack Iran.
[00:11:31]  And then in the counterattack and the counter response from that, we were going to get hit.
[00:11:36]  Not that there was an imminent threat against us that if we don't take action, we're going to get hit.
[00:11:40]  No, it was that our ally was going to take action preemptively.
[00:11:43]  Let's look at that part first.
[00:11:44]  What do you make of that?
[00:11:45]  Well, he's admitting that, he's basically admitting that as a U.S. Secretary of State, it's quite extraordinary.
[00:11:51]  He's saying that the U.S. doesn't have any agency when it comes to having any influence over whether Israel is going to launch an unprovoked war of aggression that we all know was going to result in retaliation, even Rubio admits it, that he has zero influence.
[00:12:09]  So Israel can go by Rubio's standard there, which is no standard at all.
[00:12:16]  It's a lunatic sort of worldview that Rubio is postulating there, that Israel can go and start any war anywhere in the world against anybody, and the United States is obliged to allow them to do it, not just allow them to do it, but to join in in that unprovoked war for fear that if they don't, that they'll receive retaliation as a result of Israel's unprovoked war.
[00:12:44]  I mean, this is completely insane, but it shows you and it proves everything that we have said and many of our colleagues have said is that the United States foreign policy is under 100%, 100% control of a foreign government and specifically a foreign lobby operating within the confines of the United States territory, but doesn't register as a foreign agent.
[00:13:09]  And I'll extend that further.
[00:13:11]  The two so-called chief envoys of the Trump administration are not in the State Department.
[00:13:19]  They're just ad hoc associates of the president.
[00:13:23]  One is a property developer from Long Island that nobody ever heard of before 12 months ago.
[00:13:28]  And the other is his son-in-law, who was not on the ballot and is not officially in the cabinet.
[00:13:35]  And they're running Middle East foreign policy for the United States.
[00:13:38]  So if Israel determines U.S. decision-making and whether the U.S. will go to declare undeclared war against or around Congress, then those decisions are being made by two individuals that seem to be working on behalf of a foreign entity.
[00:13:58]  Let me just add a little bit of fuel to this fire here.
[00:14:01]  This just isn't, see, when did this come out?
[00:14:03]  This came out at 11,000, so three hours ago.
[00:14:06]  Apparently, there's a Senate hearing is up today, and Elbridge Colby is being interviewed.
[00:14:15]  He's one of the senior Department of War officials, and he was being interviewed and had an interaction with Senator Warren.
[00:14:22]  It went like this: Senator Warren, the Trump administration's national defense strategy.
[00:14:27]  No longer will the department be distracted by interventionism, endless wars, regime change, and nation building.
[00:14:34]  Colby, this is not nation building.
[00:14:36]  Warren, so this is not interventionism?
[00:14:39]  Colby, no.
[00:14:40]  Interventionism is more a responsibility to protect.
[00:14:43]  And he got cut off and she says, really?
[00:14:46]  We didn't do this to try and protect Israel?
[00:14:48]  Colby, well, that was one of the goals.
[00:14:51]  Oh, so this is interventionism.
[00:14:53]  So here, he's even trying to say that, no, we're not being nation building.
[00:14:57]  We're not doing interventionism.
[00:14:59]  And then he admits it under oath on the Senate floor.
[00:15:02]  So, I mean, it seems like, yeah, that's exactly what we're doing.
[00:15:04]  On the U.S. Senate right now, that was happening today.
[00:15:09]  They don't have any answers for that.
[00:15:10]  Marco Rubio is panicking, if you noticed in that press conference.
[00:15:14]  He was being very sort of, he was panicking, giving his flippant responses because he was, it's very clear what happened.
[00:15:21]  And he doesn't have a way to justify that legally as a supposed chief diplomat of the United States of America.
[00:15:29]  And I'll extend that even further.
[00:15:31]  If Trump did not even consult Congress about starting a war that could very easily, and I said on this show that it would be a regional war, that you would not be able to contain it.
[00:15:44]  Many have said the same thing.
[00:15:46]  We know it would be a regional war.
[00:15:47]  A regional war risks being a world war.
[00:15:49]  And you're not even consulting Congress, but your chief diplomats that are supposedly running this facade of nuclear negotiations that we all know was a complete farce, they have a direct line of communication with Benjamin Netanyahu.
[00:16:06]  So Benjamin Netanyahu is being consulted.
[00:16:10]  He's being consulted by the Trump administration, but the Congress is not.
[00:16:16]  And Netanyahu is informing Knesset committee members about their defense plans because their defense plans are intertwined and in partnership with the U.S. defense plans.
[00:16:28]  So we have a situation here, which is a constitutional crisis, whereby the Trump administration is communicating with the Israelis about U.S. operations, imminent operations that we all knew were going to come, and that those are being communicated to the Israeli government, but not to U.S. congressmen and senators.
[00:16:50]  So what's going on here?
[00:16:52]  So the Knesset has priority on U.S. operations for knowledge, information, consultation.
[00:16:59]  And the U.S. government, our Congress is cut out of the loop until after the fact.
[00:17:06]  So that to me is a this is a fundamental constitutional crisis.
[00:17:12]  And Steve Wickoff and Jared Kushner should register as foreign agents under Farah, quite frankly.
[00:17:18]  Yeah, I think we should.
[00:17:19]  And by the way, I've got another witness for the prosecution on your case here.
[00:17:23]  I'm going to show you in just a second.
[00:17:24]  I do want to point out that I think the last time we had you on before the war started, I remember you said if this war starts, there's going to be seven other countries involved.
[00:17:33]  Now, I remember, even that took me by surprise because I was like, whoa, I didn't think there would be seven.
[00:17:38]  And I think that's the exact number that has been attacked so far that is involved with all this.
[00:17:41]  So you definitely call that one out right now.
[00:17:44]  Getting back to the point at hand, you say that we apparently don't have agency and we are bypassing our own Congress in support of another country.
[00:17:51]  Well, President Trump, in that interview in the Oval Office here a little bit ago, was asked that very question.
[00:17:56]  Did Israel forced your hand to launch these strikes against Iran?
[00:18:00]  Did anyone pull the United States into this war?
[00:18:02]  No, I might have forced their hand.
[00:18:05]  You see, we were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first.
[00:18:13]  They were going to attack.
[00:18:14]  If we didn't do it, they were going to attack first.
[00:18:17]  I felt strongly about that.
[00:18:19]  And we have great negotiators, great people, people that do this very successfully and have done it all their lives very successfully.
[00:18:26]  And based on the way the negotiation was going, I think they were going to attack first.
[00:18:32]  And I didn't want that to happen.
[00:18:35]  So, if anything, I might have forced Israel's hand.
[00:18:38]  But Israel was ready, and we were ready.
[00:18:40]  And we've had a very, very powerful impact.
[00:18:45]  Okay, so I'm just going to just throw out the BS flag here and just flat out say that.
[00:18:50]  That is a known and intentional lie, what he just told, that these lunatics we were trying to negotiate and they wouldn't.
[00:18:57]  Now, you mentioned a minute ago about our negotiators, which is Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
[00:19:01]  We actually did a show with Doug McGregor this morning where we showed extensively what he said, and it validates virtually everything that you did.

=== Omani Foreign Minister's Negotiation Claims (06:28) ===

[00:19:08]  It's just egregious.
[00:19:09]  Recommend people go in and watch that if they want to get the details of that one.
[00:19:12]  But here is the Omani foreign minister.
[00:19:17]  This is important.
[00:19:18]  The day before this attack took place on the 27th, I believe it was, of February, CBS News had the Omani foreign minister on, who had been doing negotiations with the United States and with Iran, and he had an important breakthrough to announce.
[00:19:34]  So, key time, as you listen to what he said here, this radical, crazy person who was negotiating with the radical people that Trump just talked about here.
[00:19:44]  This is after however many months of negotiations, after they've already been snake-bit once because of what we did with the bypassing negotiations and pretending in 2025, all that is a background here.
[00:19:56]  This is on Friday.
[00:19:59]  This was made Friday afternoon.
[00:20:01]  And then this is in relation to what happened.
[00:20:04]  This is important.
[00:20:05]  Thursday night was the final meeting.
[00:20:07]  So, Witkoff had his third and final meeting with the Iranians with the help of the Omani foreign minister.
[00:20:14]  And whatever was decided at that time was known at 3:30 the next day.
[00:20:18]  Watch this.
[00:20:19]  Will Iran negotiate about its ballistic missiles?
[00:20:24]  I believe Iran is open to discuss everything.
[00:20:29]  Including its ballistic missiles, because they've said this has to be nuclear almost.
[00:20:32]  Everything.
[00:20:33]  But that has to take its proper context, a proper course, a proper framework.
[00:20:39]  Now, the priority number one is to get this nuclear issue resolved.
[00:20:44]  So he said, very matter of factly, that the Iranians had, at the 11th hour, had said, actually, we will talk about zero enrichment.
[00:20:53]  We will talk about getting rid of the stockpiles that we have.
[00:20:56]  We will go down to zero on that.
[00:20:59]  And we'll even put on the table missiles and the support to the proxies.
[00:21:03]  Everything was open to negotiation.
[00:21:05]  You had gotten a major breakthrough.
[00:21:07]  But we know from General Kane that the order to attack was given at 3.30 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, Ergo, the day after that offer had been listed.
[00:21:18]  So when you're now saying that we tried to negotiate and they wouldn't listen, that is now put to the lie by information put out by the White House themselves.
[00:21:27]  How do you see it?
[00:21:31]  People front-running your negotiations that are working for a foreign government, i.e. Israel, I'm talking about Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and anybody else, they're in a very powerful position there because if they receive information about the concessions that are being offered by the Iranians and they don't communicate that to the Trump administration,
[00:21:56]  because, well, we know the decision to attack was already made at Mar-a-Lago on December 29th when Netanyahu flew to meet Donald Trump.
[00:22:06]  So many people have intimated that that is indeed the likely scenario.
[00:22:12]  So even putting, but even putting that aside, if we're just going by the letter of what Trump has claimed there and the fact that he's claiming that they weren't negotiated, of course they were negotiated.
[00:22:22]  What Trump is doing is classic deflection.
[00:22:25]  The U.S. had no intention of negotiating.
[00:22:29]  They had no interest in the nuclear issue because anybody with half a brain who even read the U.S. intelligence assessment on Iran's nuclear program knows, including Tulsi Gabbard, who is conspicuously silent through all of this, knows that the Iranians weren't even pursuing a A nuclear weapon.
[00:22:49]  It was a non-issue.
[00:22:51]  But Iran has gone through the motions of negotiations in the hope that, and also to signal to the rest of the international community and to China and Russia and other potential allies, that they're willing to give diplomacy a chance, whereby the U.S. has proven multiple times now.
[00:23:08]  The record is 100% clear.
[00:23:11]  The U.S. are not agreement capable, but worse than not being agreement-capable, they use negotiations as a deception tactic in order to prepare for a sneak attack.
[00:23:25]  There is no debate that this is the method of the Trump administration and the Israeli government.
[00:23:31]  And the dangers of this type of approach to international affairs will always result in war.
[00:23:39]  It will always result in war.
[00:23:40]  That's exactly what we will get every single time.
[00:23:43]  And it's even worse to know with Rubio admitting that the U.S. has no agency when it comes to control of its military, that effectively it's being leased out or it's being not even rented out.
[00:23:58]  That would be generous if Israel was paying for the service, but it's not.
[00:24:01]  We're paying for the service of allowing our military to be used by a foreign country for their specific interests.
[00:24:09]  And there was no imminent attack on the United States or anything like that.
[00:24:14]  It would not have happened.
[00:24:15]  Iran has been very to for Trump to come out and just say that, oh, I knew they were going to attack us first when he's the one that attacked first.
[00:24:25]  I mean, this guy is not even capable of telling a lie in any credible fashion.
[00:24:31]  I mean, it's just so ridiculous, the level of double speak that we have with this.
[00:24:36]  I mean, and he says, I've sent my best negotiators.
[00:24:39]  They do this all their lives.
[00:24:41]  Steve Wickoff hasn't been doing diplomacy all his life.
[00:24:44]  He's not been doing any diplomacy at all.
[00:24:47]  He's not experienced.
[00:24:49]  Nobody in Trump's diplomatic corps or any have any real pedigree or any credibility.
[00:24:55]  If they did, we would have had a resolution in Ukraine like 10 months ago.
[00:25:00]  And they failed in Gaza.
[00:25:01]  They failed in Ukraine.
[00:25:03]  And this is beyond a failure here.
[00:25:06]  They're dragging the U.S. and the region and the world towards a world war because of this fake facade of this pantomime of negotiations that is just belligerent to the core.
[00:25:19]  I mean, I think we should be past the point of being nice about what we're witnessing here because this is criminality.
[00:25:27]  This is criminality.
[00:25:28]  I'm sorry to use this term, but this is criminal, what they're doing.
[00:25:32]  It's negligence, like, yeah, criminal negligence.

=== Apathetic Negotiations Lead to Crisis (05:54) ===

[00:25:36]  Maybe you can just make that phrase there.
[00:25:38]  This, it doesn't go back to, but it was highlighted, I think, in the aftermath of the Venezuela operation, which was violated the Constitution, violated international law, violated American law, et cetera, when we go in and stole the leader of another country and started stealing their oil.
[00:25:53]  Just blatant, right out in the open, hardly any, as you say, any declaration of anything else.
[00:25:59]  Now, I think you and I on this channel, and I definitely did, talked about how it violated our law.
[00:26:05]  It was unconstitutional, all those kinds of things.
[00:26:08]  Well, lots of other people, we weren't the only ones that were making that argument.
[00:26:11]  And then afterwards, sometimes we show a mashup of a lot of people.
[00:26:14]  In the aftermath of that, back in January, there was this whole long list of people saying, look, there is no international law.
[00:26:22]  There's the law of the jungle.
[00:26:24]  And we're the lion.
[00:26:25]  We can do whatever.
[00:26:26]  I mean, a bunch of people.
[00:26:27]  I mean, it wasn't just Stephen Miller.
[00:26:28]  It was a number of members of Congress.
[00:26:32]  It was other people who go on TV a lot, a lot of influencers, et cetera.
[00:26:36]  They're all just saying this.
[00:26:37]  And so if you think you're the king of the jungle and there is no law, then you literally can do anything you can get away with.
[00:26:44]  And that's what I think is happening here.
[00:26:45]  So we're just putting fig leaves on stuff if we even bother with a fig leaf.
[00:26:49]  Meanwhile, just doing whatever we want to do.
[00:26:51]  And for those, if you can, in their minds, suckers who will fall for that fig leaf that they're putting out there to try and keep quell down some of the anger.
[00:27:01]  Now, that's going to work up to this point because we're in day four.
[00:27:05]  So there's been, and there's plenty of video to show of things just getting hammered and blown up in Iran to give fiction to this.
[00:27:13]  But now then certain people are starting to ask some of the more uncomfortable questions and the problematic about, hey, it's not over yet.
[00:27:20]  You didn't knock them out in two or three days.
[00:27:22]  Now it's starting into four and it looks like it's going to go into five.
[00:27:25]  Israel's starting to take some hits.
[00:27:27]  And then they're saying, hey, I'm just doing a little math here.
[00:27:29]  Do we have enough ammunition to actually extend this thing out to the four or five weeks you mentioned yesterday?
[00:27:35]  Here's what he said.
[00:27:36]  And by the way, we have massive amounts of ammunition, but we have unlimited middle and upper ammunition, which is really what we're using in this war.
[00:27:47]  And we have really an unlimited supply.
[00:27:51]  We also have a lot of the very high-end stored in different countries throughout the world.
[00:27:55]  We're literally storing it there, which is actually something that I insisted on in my first term.
[00:28:02]  But we have a tremendous amount of munitions, ammunition at the upper level, middle and upper level, all of which is really powerful stuff.
[00:28:14]  For someone who is incredibly comfortable with fiction and just creating fantasy out of thin air just to cover something that they want to do, he's looking to make, he's looking to not get into trouble today.
[00:28:26]  But what is your understanding as a journalist and sources you may have?
[00:28:30]  How effective, how likely is it that we have an inexhaustible amount of these offensive and defensive missiles?
[00:28:38]  Well, first of all, just a point of a legal point.
[00:28:41]  The president has just divulged what is potentially classified information that the key strategic ammunition is being stored in other countries, okay, without naming those specific countries, but it wouldn't take anybody very long to find out which countries they were.
[00:28:59]  So he did that to boast to the press, but he should have kept his mouth shut.
[00:29:05]  But he did it because he said it's something that I recommended my first term.
[00:29:09]  So to big himself up, he had to partly divulge what is probably not totally classified, but somewhat classified strategic information that shows you how reckless and just bullshit this president is.
[00:29:27]  But look, if this goes longer than two weeks, okay, Iran will no doubt, let's think of how this is going to end and how it's going to be judged in terms of who's going to win.
[00:29:39]  You can try to kill your way to victory, which is the Israeli method.
[00:29:43]  It's to kill your way to victory.
[00:29:44]  But the U.S. has never had success killing its way to victory.
[00:29:48]  I don't think they've won or had succeeded in any wars where they've tried to do that for many decades, in fact, a whole string of failures in that respect.
[00:29:58]  So he's defaulting to that basic method.
[00:30:00]  Now, if it goes more than three weeks or something, Iran will incur huge losses, no doubt, from a human point of view, from a military point of view.
[00:30:10]  Their nuclear power plants at Bashir are under attack as we speak right now today.
[00:30:15]  So it's going to be devastating for Iran.
[00:30:17]  But proportionally, if before this conflict America was up here and Iran was down here in terms of public support, legitimacy around the world, and also relative losses.
[00:30:30]  And after three weeks, if it's like this, who is the winner after three weeks?
[00:30:36]  Relatively, Iran is the winner, will be perceived as the winner if they survive.
[00:30:41]  The United States will be perceived as the loser for starting a war, which A, they couldn't win, that they had no basis of waging in the first place, and B, waged it on behalf of a foreign government.
[00:30:54]  So it's going to be seen as a loss.
[00:30:55]  And for Israel as well, they could have avoided the damage that they're going to incur by not starting this war, but they chose a war of choice.
[00:31:03]  Same with the United States.
[00:31:04]  So relatively, Iran will come out ahead in the global public opinion, within the Arab world, within the Muslim world, within the BRICS world, and at the UN level probably as well.
[00:31:17]  And the U.S. will be, it's reinforced the U.S. image of being a complete enemy of international law and norms, a rogue state, and a warmongering administration.

=== Markets Reacting Slowly (06:18) ===

[00:31:30]  It's just reinforced all that.
[00:31:32]  And Israel just basically looking to use the United States to do all their heavy lifting for them in terms of establishing the Greater Israel Project or regional dominance.
[00:31:42]  That's how it's going to end up.
[00:31:43]  It doesn't matter what we're talking about now.
[00:31:45]  That's how it will end up.
[00:31:48]  And has Trump, in his infinite wisdom and all the great minds surrounding him, all the great geopolitical thinkers like Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorca and Marco Rubio, the great scholars of international relations, the eminent brain trusts there, have they thought ahead about this or do they care?
[00:32:07]  Or were they too busy putting options along on oil and gas?
[00:32:14]  Because there's evidence now coming out this week that there's a number of people in Trump's inner circle that have placed bets on some of these outcomes to do with this war.
[00:32:24]  And that's quite, quite unsavory.
[00:32:26]  And that would be the subject of a congressional inquiry, as well as the transcripts of Trump and Netanyahu's conversations.
[00:32:35]  That should be front and center in any impeachment hearings coming up.
[00:32:39]  All of these things can be parsed through if there's a political will to hold this administration to account for what is unfolding, increasingly unfolding and looking like a disaster for the country.
[00:32:52]  And there's a lot of illegalities and scandals that are baked into this that I don't think we're going to see the end of anytime soon.
[00:33:03]  When Trump talks like this, he can calm some people down.
[00:33:06]  He can calm some markets down.
[00:33:07]  But as I literally just checked here, the price of oil right now is at about 70.
[00:33:14]  Well, it was at 70.
[00:33:16]  It's at 77 earlier today.
[00:33:17]  It's about 74 now.
[00:33:19]  It's gone down a little bit, but it's up from what it was.
[00:33:22]  And you see, it's up at about 10% from what it was in the first, when the war started.
[00:33:26]  You can see that more mark there is basically when the war started.
[00:33:29]  With the Strait of Hormuz, at least with a soft close right now, and it hasn't gone permanent so far, but it definitely has been some closures done and some ships have been attacked, et cetera.
[00:33:41]  A lot of people are just kind of hovering in the area with weight anchor.
[00:33:46]  And the Dow was earlier today.
[00:33:47]  It was down 900.
[00:33:49]  So Trump's trying to calm all that because he loves that Dow mark and he doesn't want anything to go down with that.
[00:33:55]  But the question is going to be: if this drags on, and you can only give all these happy comments for so long, and if it keeps dragging on and it keeps being inconsequential, and especially if there are yet more American casualties that come later for a war that he chose, what are the risks, do you think, to the administration and what might he do with it?
[00:34:14]  Yeah, in terms of the oil, we'll see what the trading is like at the end of today, but I think that's going to gap up to 80.
[00:34:22]  And the price is already starting to move.
[00:34:25]  Reality hasn't sunk in yet, though.
[00:34:27]  The markets will react a little bit slower.
[00:34:30]  But the main thing here, and this also underpins the markets belief system, is that this idea of the U.S.-led supremacy or supremacy of the coalition of the willing and so forth, that basically has now come into question.
[00:34:45]  And so as this conflict continues to develop, you're going to see some of these things start to realize in the price.
[00:34:52]  I think you'll see $90 to $100 a barrel by close Friday, or at least calls for futures on $90 to $100 by the end of the week, if the intensity continues at the current rate.
[00:35:06]  And then by next week, all bets are off how this would look after week three, week three or week four, or up to week four.
[00:35:16]  So, I mean, we don't have any way to control that.
[00:35:19]  Trump will then convene all the heads of the oil companies to say, to try to do price fixing, basically, for the U.S. domestic market.
[00:35:27]  But the person who's the market that's going to take the hit on this is Europe, is Europe, because if the straits of Hormuz close, Qatar is the number one supplier of LNG to the southern market, the receiver conversion stations in southern Europe.
[00:35:44]  That's Qatari LNG.
[00:35:45]  U.S. has a monopoly on the northern conversion terminals, which is overpriced U.S. LNG coming after the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline.
[00:35:55]  So now that's going to be a bumper.
[00:35:57]  That's going to be a bumper market for the U.S. oil and gas industry.
[00:36:01]  They're going to benefit.
[00:36:02]  And again, if you were able to calculate this in advance, would you not bet on it, having foreknowledge?
[00:36:08]  And with the type of business-oriented and stock market-oriented people you have in the Trump administration, I would imagine they foresee, they foresaw all of this.
[00:36:17]  The reason I'm saying that, Danny, is because the people who are day traders saw this the last two weeks that I know.
[00:36:26]  But we've been talking about this for weeks now.
[00:36:29]  So if the people in my peer group who are day traders know this and see this, I'm sure Howard Luttnick has already given the call to all of his buddies in Wall Street and in the MAGA movement in the Trump administration.
[00:36:42]  And they've all placed their bets accordingly, including bets on polymarket and so forth.
[00:36:48]  So, I mean, that's just another side of this.
[00:36:52]  But that would mean inflation for us at home as Americans.
[00:36:56]  But the upper class, the political class would have, the congressional Senate class will have profited immensely off this war, whereas we will be saddled with inflation across the board.
[00:37:08]  And that's just the reality of it.
[00:37:10]  And if an investigation later shows that friends of Howard Lutnick or any of these other administration senior officials benefited from that, like they had foreknowledge, I think that needs to come up in any trials that would have to come up as a benefit.
[00:37:25]  But let me ask you another question related to that, though, because, you know, obviously for understandable reasons, everybody's focused on what's happening right there in the Middle East, et cetera.
[00:37:34]  But with already the oil ticking up in prices here and with a lot of these missiles now, everything flooding into the United States, President Trump also mentioned in his comments that we played earlier that if there was any issue of any interceptor missile shortage, no problem.

=== NATO's Nuclear Undercut (14:53) ===

[00:37:48]  We'll just pull them back from other people that we have around the world.
[00:37:52]  What is that going to do to the war in Ukraine and Russia?
[00:37:56]  Because now then Putin is going to start getting more cash.
[00:37:59]  And that's one thing we've been trying to knock him out because the global price of oil.
[00:38:03]  And then what is that going to do to the Ukraine side?
[00:38:05]  Because now then they're going to have a dearth of air defense missiles and other missiles, which they were already short of.
[00:38:11]  What do you think?
[00:38:12]  You know, if I was in charge of the Russian Ministry of Defense, I'd be making plans right now to move on Odessa, quite frankly, and in short order.
[00:38:22]  It's a perfect time to do it.
[00:38:24]  And maybe even encircle Kiev at this point.
[00:38:28]  So this is definitely going to be to Russia's advantage.
[00:38:31]  But the problem, the U.S. and the Trump administration, they painted themselves into an incredible corner here because they're having to not just defend Israel or defend these U.S. bases.
[00:38:43]  There's all sorts of other installations that also require defense.
[00:38:46]  I mean, look at the Iranians hit RAF Akatori in Cyprus.
[00:38:52]  They've already light attacks, mind you, but promises for follow-up attacks with bigger missiles.
[00:38:58]  So that's EU territory.
[00:39:00]  That's, quote, NATO territory, according to Mark Rute.
[00:39:04]  The Iranians have done it.
[00:39:06]  And guess what?
[00:39:07]  Have you heard NATO?
[00:39:08]  Are there any emergency meetings in Brussels about this on NATO?
[00:39:11]  No, nothing.
[00:39:12]  Nothing.
[00:39:13]  Why?
[00:39:13]  Because the U.S. is NATO.
[00:39:15]  And the United States started the war.
[00:39:18]  So the irony here is, and if the need for all of this missile defense for the UAE, for Bahrain, for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for U.S. facilities in even Oman, to Kuwait, to U.S. facilities in Iraq, in Syria, and so forth, in Jordan, the need for all of this defense for the U.S. perimeter.
[00:39:40]  And the whole sales pitch, the whole pretext for them being there in the first place is they promised all these Arab countries protection.
[00:39:49]  They said, you're going to host our military facilities here.
[00:39:53]  We're going to protect you.
[00:39:54]  But it was really only to protect Israel, not them.
[00:39:57]  They're drawing fire to those countries by being there.
[00:40:02]  So that changes the whole calculus of the U.S. position in the region.
[00:40:06]  And so what Trump has done is by being the poodle of Benjamin Netanyahu, by following him on a leash in the way that he has, he is sacrificing the entire U.S. footprint in the Middle East.
[00:40:22]  That is no exaggeration.
[00:40:24]  He's put all under risk.
[00:40:26]  So, right now, everybody is still worried about just stopping the missiles that are coming.
[00:40:31]  So, I don't think anybody's thinking about that at the moment.
[00:40:33]  But, how do you think that might manifest?
[00:40:36]  Because my thoughts were: I'm thinking the same way that you are because I'm putting myself in their position.
[00:40:40]  I'm like, wait, we have been over backwards to be deferential to everything that you've ever asked with the expectation that we're going to get something out of it.
[00:40:49]  But now, then if the only thing I'm getting out of it is missiles in the teeth, I'm not sure that's a good bet for me to keep giving you something while I receive missiles.
[00:40:56]  But how do you see that manifesting?
[00:40:58]  Because that would be decades-long change, of course.
[00:41:01]  How might that manifest over time?
[00:41:04]  I think they have to rethink their entire posturing around the Persian Gulf and throughout the Middle East.
[00:41:13]  I mean, everything, if you look at it, everything is to protect Israel.
[00:41:19]  So, the position of all U.S. naval, land, air assets, and so forth.
[00:41:23]  It's a division of labor.
[00:41:25]  Every single base provides a certain function and has certain equipment for certain things.
[00:41:32]  And Iran, in their intelligence, have identified a lot of these places and radar stations and so forth.
[00:41:39]  And don't think the Iranians don't know where all the intelligence hubs are as well.
[00:41:44]  Or if they've commandeered the building, the top floor of a building in Dubai, the CIA, or Mossad, don't think the Iranians don't have very good intelligence, especially in the Emirates.
[00:41:55]  They probably have incredible in Qatar and the Emirates.
[00:41:57]  I would say Iran knows where all the U.S. and Israeli agents are, probably.
[00:42:03]  They have an incredible intelligence network in that part of the world because they're only 100 miles away.
[00:42:08]  So it'd be naive to think otherwise.
[00:42:11]  So you have all these different targets painted on all these different countries in the region.
[00:42:16]  So, you know, this is going to transform the conversation no matter what happens or what the scorecard looks like on the U.S. media when they do their scorecard of all the military largesse that they've achieved throughout this.
[00:42:30]  The reality is it's going to be a very, very different attitude and a very different view of the U.S. position in the region.
[00:42:37]  They've been able to get away with this for a long time post-Iraq.
[00:42:41]  And ISIS provided some kind of a false pretext, if you will, for redeployment of U.S. assets in the region under the guise of fighting ISIS.
[00:42:52]  They redeployed in Iraq and Syria and so forth.
[00:42:56]  But now that that's become a facade, Trump basically, you know, hugging and flirting with the head of al-Qaeda in the White House Oval Office, Al-Jalani, put all that basically to bed.
[00:43:11]  Any idea that the U.S. was ever fighting al-Qaeda or ISIS.
[00:43:14]  So now we're down to real politic.
[00:43:17]  They're there for Israel and only for Israel.
[00:43:19]  They're not there to protect Arab oil either, quite frankly.
[00:43:23]  If they did, the U.S. would have front-ran a peaceful negotiations to de-escalate if the concern was the Arab countries and their oil.
[00:43:32]  It's not.
[00:43:33]  Easy.
[00:43:33]  It would have been an easy win.
[00:43:35]  But, you know, somebody who put a lot to that one and really exposed it, not just what President Trump said, but the vice president, JD Vance, also addressed this issue.
[00:43:45]  Here's the thing, Jesse.
[00:43:46]  We destroyed Iran's ability to build a nuclear weapon during President Trump's term.
[00:43:50]  We set them back substantially.
[00:43:52]  But I think the president was looking for the long haul.
[00:43:55]  He was looking for Iran to make a significant long-term commitment that they would never build a nuclear weapon, that they would not pursue the ability to be on the brink of a nuclear weapon.
[00:44:04]  And after months, really almost a year of painstaking diplomacy, what the president determined is he didn't want to just keep the president or excuse me, keep the country safe from an Iranian nuclear weapon for the first three, four years of his second term.
[00:44:20]  He wanted to make sure that Iran could never have a nuclear weapon, and that would require fundamentally a change in mindset from the Iranian regime.
[00:44:27]  So he saw that the Iranian regime was weakened.
[00:44:30]  He knew that they were committed to getting on that brink of a nuclear weapon.
[00:44:34]  And he decided to take action because he felt that was necessary in order to protect the nation's security.
[00:44:39]  Now, nobody in the Middle East believes a word of that.
[00:44:42]  They know that, especially all of the Arab regimes.
[00:44:44]  They know that there's no truth that Iran was getting ready to have a nuclear weapon and it was an imminent threat and all this kind of stuff.
[00:44:50]  And that there was, we tried negotiations, it didn't work, but we were looking for long-term.
[00:44:53]  No one believes any of that.
[00:44:54]  So on top of the things that you just described about the physical harm that has happened to our relationships, what are statements like this?
[00:45:02]  Do they, has this become so normal, they just kind of gloss over their eyes?
[00:45:05]  Or does this actually more undermine our position going forward?
[00:45:10]  These are just boilerplates.
[00:45:11]  The Trump administration runs on sound bites and mems and like AI slop on social media.
[00:45:17]  That's the basic communication strategy.
[00:45:19]  JD Vance, bless him, at 42 years old, has no experience with anything.
[00:45:25]  And what he's given you is a sub, it's not even good enough as an undergraduate level political science assessment of the situation.
[00:45:34]  No one believes that the United States, that this was about stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
[00:45:40]  In fact, the supreme leader who they brutally assassinated was the supreme leader who issued the fatwa prohibiting the development of nuclear weapons.
[00:45:52]  So the guy you killed, now you've opened the possibility that they will pursue nuclear weapons.
[00:45:57]  So, you know, it's completely the inverse of reality with these people.
[00:46:03]  They lie.
[00:46:04]  JD Vance is lying right through his teeth, or he just doesn't know any better because he's not that au fait with history and international relations and geopolitics.
[00:46:14]  Maybe it's just not his strong suit.
[00:46:16]  And maybe he believes what he has been told to say by whoever the speechwriter is from IPAC.
[00:46:22]  That's probably the bullet points he's reading there.
[00:46:25]  So they've killed Khomeini, and the Trump administration are the ones that destroyed the joint comprehensive Iran nuclear plan in his first term.
[00:46:34]  We would not even be here.
[00:46:35]  We would not be here if not for Trump 1.0, destroying it.
[00:46:39]  And when asked why he had to unilaterally withdraw from something that all of our European allies guaranteed, even Russia was there to guarantee.
[00:46:48]  He said it's a bad deal.
[00:46:50]  Is Obama's bad deal?
[00:46:52]  It would never have signed this deal, whatever.
[00:46:54]  He never gave specifics because it was a good deal.
[00:46:58]  It was a good deal.
[00:46:59]  And Iran wasn't developing a nuclear weapon anyway.
[00:47:02]  But with the JCPO in place, it was double insurance, double guarantee that they wouldn't develop a nuclear weapon.
[00:47:09]  And Trump did that intentionally at the orders of Benjamin and Yahoo's office in order to create the conditions for the war we are witnessing right now today.
[00:47:20]  That's why Trump did that in his first term.
[00:47:23]  That was one initial step towards the war that Israel wanted and it needed the United States to do the heavy lifting for.
[00:47:31]  And Trump has been the ultimate vessel for Israel to get what it wants.
[00:47:38]  And part of this additional regional fallout, Gary's been showing you a couple on there.
[00:47:43]  U.S. embassies in Pakistan, in Dubai, in Baghdad, and in Saudi Arabia that I know of.
[00:47:48]  I don't know if there's any more than that, but that's at least four in the region.
[00:47:51]  Our embassies themselves have come under attack, some from bomb throwers, some from Molotov cotton.
[00:47:57]  I don't know, I think some even from missiles, if I'm not mistaken.
[00:48:00]  But bottom line is there are people really angry all throughout the region against us right there, which continues to undercut us.
[00:48:06]  There was one other thing I'd like to have your opinion on that even will undercut our near-term objective inside of Iran.
[00:48:14]  If you even have a theoretical hope that you could cause the population to rise up against the regime and overthrow them to basically become boots on the ground for you, and people have been using that analogy here lately, the question is: when they find out, and Trump admitted this from the Oval Office yesterday when he was asked and just kind of dismissed it, that some of the very people that we would want to rise up and take control of a democratic-led government or whatever, some opposition figures,
[00:48:44]  we killed them in the strikes because we were so careless on what we were targeting.
[00:48:48]  We literally killed them.
[00:48:50]  He said the number one, two, and three guys, oops, sorry, we ended up killing them, but no big deal.
[00:48:54]  They'll just find some more.
[00:48:56]  What does that tell the opposition?
[00:48:58]  Are they going to trust us?
[00:49:00]  No, they shouldn't, but they're assuming that the strategy which Israel has of assassinating whole lines of government, whole lines of negotiators, that's the Israeli tactic, is to kill your way to some kind of a political settlement.
[00:49:19]  And is that U.S. policy?
[00:49:21]  Should that be United States policy?
[00:49:23]  Can the U.S. lead the world by enacting a policy like this?
[00:49:29]  And do you think it's going to work?
[00:49:31]  Do you think this is going to, what Trump has done is quite extraordinary.
[00:49:37]  Listen, you have a generation of people in Iran that were born after the revolution.
[00:49:43]  They probably heard from their parents and grandparents about the revolution.
[00:49:46]  They see, they've been to the exhibits, they watch the TV programs, they've read the books, but they didn't experience the American oppression or the American tyranny of the coup in 53 or during the U.S. fake monarch, the Shah, the puppet the U.S. installed after the 53 CIA coup.
[00:50:08]  These kids have never seen that.
[00:50:10]  So the U.S. potentially had this generation as possibly malleable to be pulled towards the Western side of the political geopolitical spectrum.
[00:50:22]  But now, the young generation in Iran, Trump has given them the opportunity to experience U.S. tyranny firsthand, the slaughtering of children, of girls in schools.
[00:50:34]  Those faces are all over the media right now.
[00:50:36]  The U.S. and Israel did that.
[00:50:38]  That's what he's given them.
[00:50:40]  That's what he's given them.
[00:50:41]  They've lost.
[00:50:42]  And they will be the next round of revolutionaries in Iran.
[00:50:46]  You know, as you're talking, I can't help but remember, and I almost pulled it up here, but it would take too long.
[00:50:52]  I remember it was either 2011 or 2013 when Barack Obama went to Israel and was talking about, you know, let's bring peace to the Middle East.
[00:51:03]  Let's bring peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
[00:51:05]  And it was filled with Israeli people.
[00:51:07]  And there were so many that were cheering on the possibility of reconciliation between the two parties and making things work.
[00:51:14]  And he was talking about, you know, a two-state solution, all of those kinds of things.
[00:51:20]  And, you know, obviously none of that got realized at the time.
[00:51:22]  And maybe you can argue that, you know, that was a facade too.
[00:51:25]  But a lot of people really believed in it, especially because he was old, based on, you know, hope and all this kind of thing.
[00:51:31]  And now then we have where we are on the screen right there with bodies of, I don't even know what it was, 100 and something children and teachers at a school and hundreds of thousands of people, probably in the millions, openly walking out in support of the government, in support of these people here, risking getting shot or blown up with missiles.
[00:51:52]  I mean, we're going in the exact opposite direction.
[00:51:54]  It's hard to see how far we've come since that time.
[00:51:59]  Can't hear you, Patrick.
[00:52:01]  And that's going to be the long-term takeaway, Daniel.
[00:52:05]  That's one of those takeaways.
[00:52:06]  One of the material results of what's happened this week is exactly this.
[00:52:12]  And it's the opposite effect of what we've been told that Iran was a house of cards and the regime is going to collapse.
[00:52:20]  And then there's, you know, and they've been murdering the lie that they've murdered 30,000 protesters in the street, completely fictional, totally made up, but yet repeated by Trump and Rubio and the entire U.S. media as fact when it's just as fake as Iraqi WMDs.
[00:52:36]  But that's the best they could do was to make up this massacre protest story.
[00:52:41]  That was the WMD.

=== Recovering Neocon's Awful Reality (05:13) ===

[00:52:42]  They didn't have anything else.
[00:52:44]  They didn't have any evidence of a nuclear program, of nuclear weapons, nothing.
[00:52:48]  All they had was the fake peaceful protesters, 50,000, 70,000, whatever the number was, it changed by the minute.
[00:52:57]  And that was used to buy the American public opinion to be sympathetic towards a military strike.
[00:53:04]  In other words, if Trump did that, they knew that if they had enough public opinion that somehow hated the supreme leader, that they wouldn't mind if he was assassinated and if this attack took place, at least in a limited fashion, that they'd have manufactured consent for this attack.
[00:53:21]  The problem is, they haven't manufactured enough consent for this to be any more than a couple of days of conflict.
[00:53:28]  Anything past this point right now, I'm afraid it's going to, I don't think it's going to be positive at all for Trump, for Washington, for America, nor for Israel.
[00:53:39]  You know, it's interesting, Patrick, in the few minutes that we have left.
[00:53:44]  You know, President Trump is surrounded by so many just awful people that are saying a lot of things that are enabling this, et cetera, all around his cabinet.
[00:53:56]  But I think it's fair to say that everything starts at the top.
[00:54:00]  And there were a lot of people, and I won't name all the names, but there's a lot of people that were very different before they started working for Trump.
[00:54:08]  And then what they have been doing since, and they have completely subsumed everything about themselves to just completely follow through with whatever President Trump is saying, no matter how incongruous it is with the truth, no matter how immoral it is, none of that.
[00:54:22]  With the enthusiasm, they'll be saying this stuff.
[00:54:25]  One of the key ones here that I want to show, just because it's a good example, is Secretary of State's Secretary of Defense/slash War Pete Heg Seth.
[00:54:35]  First of all, I'm going to show you: here's something that he said.
[00:54:37]  I think it was yesterday, you know, just showing you how full-throated he is and getting behind whatever it is Donald Trump says.
[00:54:43]  This is the generational turning point America has waited for since 1979 and since the rudderless wars of hubris, my generation, our generation, endured.
[00:54:52]  Don't listen to the noise.
[00:54:54]  Just stay focused.
[00:54:56]  Our commander-in-chief is steady at the wheel.
[00:54:59]  We will finish this on America first conditions of President Trump's choosing.
[00:55:06]  America first, President Trump's choosing.
[00:55:09]  And this is not those wars of the past, the little Pamsy, Whamsy, Pamsy stuff.
[00:55:13]  No, we're studs.
[00:55:14]  We're awful.
[00:55:15]  Or awesome.
[00:55:16]  Right.
[00:55:17]  About a year and a half before that, that same guy said this.
[00:55:24]  I've been a recovering neocon for six years now.
[00:55:27]  Like the foolishness with which we ricocheted around the world, intervening, think it was in our best interest when really we just overturned the table and created something worse in almost every single scenario has led to almost, I mean, the hubris of the Pentagon is that they want to now tell other countries how to do counterinsurgency based on what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[00:55:51]  Are you kidding me?
[00:55:53]  So you really have learned nothing.
[00:55:58]  I don't even know anything to add to that.
[00:56:01]  I think Pete should get another tattoo on, says recovering neocon.
[00:56:06]  Just get that off on the side of the shoulder blade.
[00:56:09]  That would be pretty cool, Agen-based.
[00:56:11]  That would be based, actually.
[00:56:13]  But a generational turning point, 1979.
[00:56:16]  What are you talking about?
[00:56:18]  How's the Iranian revolution in 1979 a generational turning point for the American people?
[00:56:24]  It was a news story in 1979.
[00:56:26]  And by the way, one that the Reagan administration used quite handily in order to curry major public support in the October surprise to take credit for the release of the hostages, by the way, just a footnote of the Carter Reagan campaign of the 1980 presidential election.
[00:56:44]  But it was a news story.
[00:56:45]  The U.S. was kicked out of its largest CIA station where they used the embassy as cover for a massive intelligence operation in Tehran.
[00:56:54]  That was their biggest station in Asia and one of the biggest outside of the United States.
[00:56:59]  And they lost it pretty much overnight and it turned into a hostage situation.
[00:57:03]  It was hugely embarrassing.
[00:57:05]  But whose fault is that?
[00:57:06]  Oh, is it the fault of the Iranian students that overthrew the U.S. puppet monarch?
[00:57:11]  Is it their fault?
[00:57:13]  Or is it the United States's fault for overthrowing the democratically elected government of Mohamed Mossadegh in 1953 in order to allow BP to steal Iran's oil and then install a puppet monarch that nobody had no legitimacy at all in Iran?
[00:57:30]  And now they're still trying to present the son of Pahlavi as the sort of quote democratic alternative, a new monarch as the democratic alternative for the regime in Iran.
[00:57:43]  It's a joke.
[00:57:44]  And I said this, Danny, and I know it's probably going to go over people's heads.
[00:57:47]  But if we had a presidential election in Tehran, either you or me would get more votes than Reza Pahlavi.

=== More Popular Than Pahlavi (01:38) ===

[00:57:56]  I swear to you.
[00:57:58]  Just give us a month to campaign.
[00:57:59]  We'll get more votes than Pahlavi.
[00:58:01]  That's how popular he is in Iran.
[00:58:04]  Yeah, and for obvious reasons.
[00:58:06]  And I think that's honestly one of the reasons why he's being pushed so much by Israel, especially, because they know he's this polarizing figure, divisive.
[00:58:13]  They want, even if they succeeded, they would want it to stay divided.
[00:58:17]  Nobody over there wants it to be unified, but I don't know.
[00:58:19]  I don't want to open up a whole nother can of worms here at the end.
[00:58:22]  But listen, really appreciate you coming on today and just showing us what's really going on because I think that's where we are on day three or day four now of this war.
[00:58:34]  And Trump doesn't have a map to get through.
[00:58:37]  But anyway, thanks so much for coming on today.
[00:58:40]  Really appreciate it.
[00:58:41]  And we appreciate you guys too.
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