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Nov. 30, 2025 - Lionel Nation
39:22
America Is At War
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America hates complexity.
And the reason why is America never needed to master complexity.
We had it made pretty much.
We were always the top dog.
And when you're the top dog, you don't have to consider things like enemies.
You don't have to understand weird cultural differences.
In order to be an American up till now, you didn't have to worry about any of this stuff.
America had the luxury for the longest times of having very few actual enemies.
Other people had enemies.
World wars had enemies.
They were elsewhere.
And we jumped into the fray then, over there.
That's where it was.
Whether it was Vietnam or World War II or Europe or the Pacific, that's where it was.
And then there was, you know, the notion of the Cold War and communism.
And that's where that was.
It's a fascinating subject.
Something which I don't think people really understand or want to grasp because it's a very difficult concept.
And one of the reasons why it's a concept is because we have been very, very lucky.
And sometimes these issues get very complicated.
I did one this morning, a video.
It harkened back, reminded me to a BBC special 2004 called The Power of Nightmares.
And it was one of the most important things I ever saw because I did not understand the mindset.
If you don't understand the mindset, and I hope the president understands the mindset, if you don't understand the mindset, how people think you can't fight back in World War II, when people tried to grasp the notion of Hitler, they didn't understand it.
It just didn't make any sense.
Why is he doing this?
What is this?
He wants genocide?
I mean, we kind of knew about it.
What?
It doesn't make any sense.
And we still don't understand it.
One of the biggest problems that we're having and Mrs. L is having involving AI is to try to explain to somebody why would tech companies fight so hard against protecting children.
It's very difficult, if not impossible, to explain.
But that's what this is.
And that's where we are now.
It's this world.
And it is so complicated.
And it goes back to the Muslim Brotherhood and it goes back to a new sensibility right now, which is even more complicated because you have a new found sense of appreciation for the plight and the nobility of Islam vis-a-vis the Middle East and Palestine.
It's becoming even more complicated than ever.
And you must start off with the fact that there is nothing at all wrong with Islam.
None, nothing, nothing, nothing.
We're not talking about that.
There's nothing wrong about against German people during its time.
That's not it.
But when you listen for the most part, when you listen to people who are, how do I say this?
When you listen to people who are involved in kind of this shorthand cable news stuff, They love to speak in these generalities.
And they love to get it wrong.
They love generalities.
Look at what they're talking about, Zorhan Mamdani.
They keep telling he's a communist.
He's not a communist.
He might be a socialist, ideally, but that's not what he's about.
They're missing the point.
They feel that once they name somebody something, that the battle's over.
The war is over.
And everybody's happy because they've correctly named or identified the enemy.
And this is something which I think is very, very difficult and very, very strange, very hard for people to understand and to grasp.
We're at war right now.
And we are at war with an ideology and a kind of a group of people.
And remember, it is being fomented.
The folks, and I'll say this, the Soros is another's.
I will give you the Soros position because people so easily identify with him and say, okay, you know, so be it.
They love the, you know, the Soros thing, but the people who are responsible for this will use anything to subvert us and to hurt us now.
And what's happened?
We've already forgotten about the shooting.
We've already forgotten.
We've forgotten all about what's her name.
Anybody?
20-year-old?
Sarah Beckstrom.
Oh, yeah, yeah, man.
We've already forgotten.
I told you this yesterday.
It's not.
Look, it's not that we're bad people.
We're just busy.
We're busy.
But this is a different story.
This is a different kettle of fish.
This is something which I find so fascinating.
And this is what I want you to pay attention to and to think about.
Because what I want to do is I want to talk to you about a movement that has never gone away.
Most people really don't understand it.
They've never heard of it.
And I don't think anybody to this day understands it.
And when you talk about the Muslim Brotherhood, you have to understand it in the right context, not as a slogan, not as some kind of talk show punchline, but as a real machine with history and structure and ambition and perspective and ideology and an ideology that has been chasing the same prize and the same thing for nearly a century.
I cannot emphasize to the president, to others, we need more of this.
Instead of having these little Stephen Smith snippets and Kash Patel, we need almost to go out and re-educate.
I want you to think about something.
I want you to remember something.
I want you to imagine and go back to a particular time to get a mindset of something which is very interesting.
I want you to imagine, again, Egypt in the 1920s.
This is what I've been saying, and I'm going to say it again.
This is where this started from.
This is different.
You have to understand, to understand Nazism, you have to understand the etymology, the genesis of Hitler and what happened.
Why did it come about?
If you don't understand why it came about, you won't be able to address it.
Remember, these issues are not bad if they remain in sight to, if they don't metastasize.
But Egypt, the 1920s, the Ottoman Caliphate had just vanished, vanished.
And when you take away, look what happened to Russia before that led the way to Putin.
Remember, the Soviet Union collapsed.
It's gone.
When things disappear, we don't know what that is.
Imagine the United States gone.
European colonial powers carved up, kind of gerrymandered the old empire, and they planted flags and jurisdictions where a single religious and political order once held sway.
And Egypt is formally independent, you know, in practice, but still under British control.
Western ideas, secularism, modern habits, and all of that, that ideology kind of seeped into the elite.
Now, when a gap opens between rulers and the ruled, between westernized upper classes and traditional masses, you get this.
And into that gap walked a young school teacher.
Remember this one?
Named Hassan Albana.
And Albana looks at his society and decides it's no longer truly Islamic.
His answer is simple and enormous to re-Islamize everything.
Said Qutub, I watched this video I did.
He was tortured and killed by Nasser.
Ayman Zalwaha Wahiri, al-Zawahiri.
Remember that the red-headed dude, bin Laden's right-hand man?
That was a part of this.
This is all where it starts.
And start with the original individual Muslim then, when the family, and then look at the neighborhood, and then the state, and then the entire world.
He builds schools and charities and sports clubs and preaching circles.
This is so critical right now.
And he travels village to village, often sleeping in mosques.
And 10 years after founding the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, he has hundreds of thousands of followers and then millions and a clear political project.
They want to restore the caliphate, apply Sharia as state law, ultimately spread Islamic rule across the planet.
This is what this is about.
Now, on paper, that may sound kind of nutty.
It may sound weird.
It may sound purely religious, whatever it is.
Whether you agree with it, it doesn't matter because this is, hey there, you can close the door.
You can, this does not apply to our sensibilities because we don't know what this is like.
Per usual, this is un-American.
But listen closely to the methods.
You know, one man, one movement, one ideology, a disciplined cadre, a single party, a morality police, and a program that covers every corner of life.
And it's not an accident that the early brotherhood, the Muslim Brotherhood, and this thinking absorbed the style, the structure of totalitarian movements of its time.
Listen to what I'm saying.
This is the most interesting.
Fascism collapses.
Nazism is defeated.
Communism rises.
And the Brotherhood studies all of it and then dresses those tools in kind of like a pious language.
The Brotherhood, the Muslim Brotherhood, their second great architect, Saeed Kupt Qutub.
This is the fellow I talked about.
Go back and watch the video I did this morning.
He begins as a literary critic.
And this is the best.
He travels to the United States in the late 1940s and is disgusted by what he sees.
And what freaks him out more than anything, more than anything, what absolutely blows him away is our focus on lawns.
I know it sounds crazy.
How we spend so much time on lawn.
Well, of course, if you're from desert climb, you don't have much of a lawn.
He just looked at it as just incentive, kind of a little, a little right to an extent, but to ordinary Americans, it's a small, you know, that small town prosperity and innocent fun, you know, but to him, it's vulgarity and materialism and sexuality within restraint.
He hates us.
We are a part of this Western ideology that basically just took over and destroyed Egypt and the Caliphate.
This is a group of people we are, that we worship lawns and gadgets and gossip and sex and dances and music.
He couldn't get it.
So he returns to Egypt.
He's convinced that the West has completely wrapped spiritual, I don't know, vacuity or emptiness into, you know, neon and plastic.
And that Muslims who imitate that are not just mistaken, they are sick.
This ideology grows.
Listen to this.
Well, you say, where does all this come from?
Where is this?
You know how on TV, historically, we always looked at the Germans as these angry, screaming, yelling, Hitlerian, you know, all fa.
Nothing cultured about them.
This was that Frank Capra kind of a mentality.
But look how we look at Islam.
And you hear it all the time.
Oh, it's a savage religion that savages these funny.
And sometimes, to be fair, when some move in, especially with women's clothes, because we even, you'll hear people call them burqas.
It's really a, it's an abaya or a hijab.
It's not a burqa.
But anyway, we look at them like they're crazy.
And they look at us like we're crazy.
And they want to move.
This is, interestingly enough, this is where the neocon Trotskyite kind of spreading democracy were able to spread.
Let me just stop right now.
I hope you're able to handle like 50 different ideas that are all dissimilar and all similar simultaneous.
It gets complicated.
So this Qutub joins the Muslim Brotherhood and his ideas hardened because of Nasser, Nasser's prisons, and they torture him.
And he takes an old Quran concept of Jahiliyyah and the age of pre-Islamic ignorance and applies it to modern societies, including Muslim ones.
And it's this kind of a brutal diagnosis.
And the rulers who ally with the West or enforce secular laws are no longer true Muslims.
I mean, he is as hardcore and badass as you can.
And if you think he's gone away, you're out of your mind.
Remember, there are people who loved it.
9-11 was, oh my God, they loved it, the great Satan.
This isn't an exaggeration.
And they figure that we and others, we can be overthrown.
Offensive jihad becomes legitimate under God's law governing the earth.
And if you follow that logic to the end, you get a permanent holy war, and that becomes a moral duty.
And if you think I'm exaggerating, if you think I'm just, you know, this guy's on, you don't know.
We don't have anything like this.
Joy Reed thinks that Donald Trump is extreme.
Donald Trump is nothing.
He's light.
He's nice.
We don't even know what there's nobody in our group like this.
Nobody.
So the Saeed Qutub, he's executed in 1966, but his book, Milestones, spreads like a virus.
And it provides the ideological kind of a bridge or connection between the Muslim Brotherhood and the global jihadists who come later.
Al-Qaeda doesn't fall from the sky.
Its founders read Qutub.
This is where it's coming from.
They study in brotherhood circles.
They break off on a more violent path.
But this is Abdullah Azam, who is a Brotherhood man.
He organizes foreign fighters in Afghanistan, Afghanistan.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was once this kind of this polite young Egyptian.
I think he was a doctor.
I'm sure.
Anyway, influenced by the Brotherhood, he preaches wild stuff.
He passes through Nasser's torture chambers himself and then reappears as the hardline doctor at bin Laden's side, the one responsible for killing Anwar Sadat.
The names change, but as they say, the tree is the same.
The idea is the same.
And at the same time, another current moves through the Shia world.
In Iran, a radical cleric, another one named Nawab Safavi, he leads a group called the Fidayeen of Islam.
He attends a Muslim Brotherhood conference in Jerusalem in the early 1950s.
And he stands before Arab and Muslim delegates and the like, and he reframes the Palestinian question.
Now, sound familiar?
And it's no longer kind of a local national dispute.
It becomes an Islamic cause for the entire world or ummah, ummah, this territory.
And so Safavi's ideas and networks shape a younger cleric.
You might have heard of him, Ruhollah Khomeini, Khomeini.
You got to get the pronunciations, Khomeini, Khomeini, the Ayatollah.
He builds the Islamic Republic of Iran on a mix of Shia theology and an absolutely distinctly Muslim Brotherhood style.
That's his political program.
It's offensive revolution, Islamic State, global mission.
And by the 1980s, you have the Sunni Brotherhood of branches and Shia activists drawing on the same kind of a toolbox or toolkit or whatever you want to call it.
Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan, Gaza.
In each case, in each of these areas, the Muslim Brotherhood plays a long game.
Charity clinics, schools, welfare, that come first.
They fill the gaps that were left by these corrupt regimes.
In Cairo and in Cairo slums and Tunis neighborhoods, remember where the whole Arab Springs come from.
Remember in Tunisian and the vegetable monger who sets himself aflame.
Oh, it's all they're different, but they're the same.
Algerian towns and especially in Gaza, they become the only ones who care for the poor.
Food, medicine, school books all arrive with a message attached.
Islam is the solution.
And let me explain something to you.
I don't care whether you understand this, whether you agree with it.
I don't know what you want to call it.
Doesn't matter.
There is something which is really, really serious.
What is happening right now in the Middle East, as we say, with Israel and with Palestine and Gaza, is taking a lot of people who, many of them Jewish, who are branching off into areas such as anti-Zionism, anti-Israel, anti-Netanyahu, Jews.
And this feeling of this tremendous intellectual movement in support of Gaza, Palestinians, Islam.
That's what this is.
Now, you are going to hear to, you're going to hear very, very simple people who say, no, no, it's Islam.
That's it.
No.
They missed the point.
They missed the point.
That's like saying that communism is about Russia or Germany with Marx.
No, In Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood operating under occupation slowly rebrands itself as Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement.
You've got to understand that to a lot of people, Hamas is their hero, their salvation.
Terrorism to you is freedom finders to them.
And remember the story of Hamas, where it came from.
People were so upset about that, they said, well, that's anti-Semitic.
No, go back, do your own research, find out where Hamas came from.
Who paid for Hamas?
Where?
So the switch here was from social work to armed struggle is gradual, and then it became overt.
Jihad against Israel becomes both a political program and a sacred duty.
Children's television encourages hatred and martyrdom.
Sermons speak about Jews not just as enemies in a border dispute, but as a cosmic evil.
And you could say, well, that's understandable.
That's the Nakba.
Not necessarily.
Not necessarily.
That's not the, granted, that foments it.
Now, under European anti-Semitic myths, all of them repackaged inside Islamic rhetoric.
And by the way, it goes both ways.
Oh, then you've got brutality centered a lot of times towards these individuals, which just foment and stir the anger.
And the Jew becomes the eternal, the eternal conspirator, not just against the neighbor, but across the world.
And throughout this period, Muslim Brotherhood leaders insist that they have renounced violence as an organization.
They say this repeatedly.
But the dirty work they say belongs to splinter groups, not us.
It's splinter groups.
That's not our message.
Yet, the ideological foundation, the soil, so to speak, is shared.
The blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, remember him?
He issues a fatwa that helps justify the assassination of Egypt's Anwar Sadat after peace with Israel.
Muslim Brotherhood intellectuals praise Said Kupt, praise him as a martyr, and never disown his vision of a permanent jihad.
Uh-uh.
And the line between words and bullets and all this stuff, it stays blurred.
Look, then the story jumps forward to us, to now, to Gaza on every screen, and to something Western politicians barely understand.
While bombs are falling in Palestine, a different battle is happening in the minds and the feeds.
Young people in Europe and the United States, they're watching this right now.
They're watching images from Gaza and drawing emotional conclusions.
I mean, even Piers Morgan seems to understand.
And if Piers Morgan can understand, anybody can understand because Piers Morgan is a Cretan.
But these ideas skip over decades of history and complexity.
And they kind of like centralize into one very simple idea.
For many of them, the story looks very simple.
The Muslim in the Kafiyya, you know, is the oppressed.
And the Israeli soldier is the oppressor.
That's it.
And the West funds the oppressor.
And what you hear, and by the way, I don't think these people are ages.
I don't think Tucker or Charlie Kirk or your friend Candace Owens, I don't think they're ages for Qatar, as people say.
I think they really believe.
And there's a lot of evidence that certainly warrants what they're saying.
But that's not the way it's perceived.
See, it looks like the West is funding the oppressor.
Therefore, the West is guilty.
That's what we're looking at right now.
And you're going to start seeing stuff left and right.
And then you've got the seditious six over here.
You see how complicated this is?
You have four or five different bowls and plates all spinning, all intertwined, interconnected, feeding on the other.
And out of this moral math or calculus, whatever you're going to call it, comes a new wave of sympathy, not just for Palestinians as a people, but for Islamic causes in general.
And you see students marching with brotherhood slogans that they couldn't even translate.
And you see activists quoting Qutub like poetry without even knowing who he was.
Remember when, remember the Che pictures, the Che, you've seen the uh, the classic picture the the, the Che picture um, the one also of uh, Mumia Jamal you know that fella, by the way.
Thank you, Anita.
Or uh, Anna Barl Stealth.
Thank you for that.
Thank you for your kindness.
I missed that.
I'm so sorry.
The internet influencers repeating talking points that were drafted in Cairo cell blocks and Tehran seminaries.
I know people don't want to hear this.
The old machinery of the brotherhood is alive and well, and it meets with a new machinery of social media.
And suddenly, an ideology with roots in the 1920s feels like the cutting edge of resistance.
You see where we're going with this?
There's another twist.
Some of the voices joining this wave are Jewish, disgusted with Israeli policy, tired of being told that Zionism defines their identity.
They swing to the opposite pole.
They renounce Zionism.
They embrace Palestinian struggle.
And in the process, they drift close and closer to movements that don't simply criticize Israel, but reject its right to exist.
For a small but growing number, the Brotherhood and its relatives look less like a threat and more like authentic anti-imperialism dressed in some kind of a faith.
Do you follow this?
So we arrive at a strange moment.
The old Brotherhood project that many assume was fading finds new energy from Gaza outrage and campus activism and online radicalization.
And its themes match exactly the mood of a generation that feels betrayed by liberal promises at home and horrified by images it brought.
Do you find yourself not able to find a particular ideology that best reflects your thinking?
That's the way the world feels.
And the details are hazy.
The history is unknown.
This is so, if you love complex, this is it.
This is it.
And you will, you can tell by what people, most people, they don't know what this is about.
They don't know what to say.
They'll just, you could see from their reactions, they're saying, we believe in America and Christian.
Okay.
Do you understand this?
No.
Can you explain this?
No.
Do you know who these people are?
No.
But don't feel bad.
They said the same thing about Hitler.
People kept saying, women, why is it Hitler once?
Hitler can't be that bad.
And all these details are hazy.
See, to a lot of people, the history is unknown.
And the emotional pull is strong.
So which brings us back to the core question.
When you blend this history with what is happening now, what's happening today, what do you get?
Is this simply a wave of some kind of a conscience about Palestinian suffering that will fade?
Or is it the early stage of a much larger realignment, using AI language, in which a disciplined Islamist movement quietly recruits from a confused, angry Western audience, or I guess, focus group that thinks it's joining some kind of a human rights cause?
And remember, look at what human Americans don't understand this.
They'll just throw out the same phrases, America, we got to throw these people out there because they don't really understand it.
They just know what to say, but they don't know what to do.
And you got to ask yourself, are you watching right now a legitimate moral protest?
Or is this the soft kind of a front end of a serious project, a hard project that dreams of some kind of a single religious state?
A lot of these folks love enforced morality and permanent confrontation with the West.
That's what we're looking at right now.
Are we able to handle this?
Do you think President Trump can handle this?
You think Pam Bondi DiKash Patel, Stephen Miller?
You think Christy Noam?
You think Lutnick and Lutnik and Witkoff and Susie Wilde.
You think Jared Kushner understands this?
He understands the Israeli perspective, but you understand what we're talking about with these people.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not a charity.
It is not just a party.
It's a century-old operating system waiting for new hardware.
And right now, the hardware is coming online.
We are looking at something which you cannot believe.
This is bigger than anything you can imagine.
And Americans, for the most part, do not understand how this works.
Americans have no earthly idea of what this means.
So recognize something.
You can do one of two things.
One, oh, oh, look at Paulette, Paul Bartlett, thank you so much.
You're very kind, very kind, kind for that.
I appreciate that immensely.
You could do a couple of things here.
You can do a couple of things, which is very, very, very interesting.
What do we do?
How do we figure these things out?
I've got a couple of ideas.
And they involve a lot of reading and understanding what's going on.
And that could be very difficult.
You're going to have to take a country that has never understood any of these things.
I live in a city where people still don't understand communism, socialism, Marxism.
They don't know what it means.
They think they do.
That's kind of like a pejorative.
They think that Zorhan Mamdani is a Marxist or something.
No.
And they think that once they say it, that's enough.
That's all you got to worry about.
Just say it.
That's it.
Don't worry about figuring these things out.
Just say it.
President Trump has got to figure out.
He, I do not believe, and I love this man.
I don't think he has any earthly idea of what's happening.
And he has a lot of friends of his in the Israeli camp who said, don't worry, we'll take care of this.
Don't worry.
Ah, Muslim brother.
Don't worry about that.
Just, you know, help us.
Okay.
And if you don't know this, you haven't been paying attention.
And rather than sitting around like everybody else with their, listen, I understand.
If I hear genocide one more time, it's like, we know what your point is.
What do you think we should do about it?
What do you think we should do?
So remember, it is complicated.
It's this layer and this layer.
It's a tangled Gordian knot.
It is beyond anything you can imagine.
And it is focused right now upon you, what you're going to do.
It's not about coming up with a cute little pithy thing.
It's not about retweeting something.
It's not about always suggesting, just like the way we look at the way we handle the Epstein case.
Nothing.
Nothing ever happens.
I told you this the other day regarding Sarah Beckstrom, the fallen National Guard, nothing's going to happen.
Nothing.
She's already forgotten.
We have moved on.
America today, right now, is football and that other kind of nonsense.
That's what's happening.
It's a brand new world.
The rules just changed.
The bad guys you thought before, they're like herpes.
They just, there's a flare-up, but they never went away.
It never went away.
Never.
And this administration, I love them to death, don't have a clue as to what's going on.
Don't have a clue.
And they've got, and you've got also, whenever you see MBS, if we ever dropped or they dropped their control, Saudi Arabia would overrun that family.
They would make the Russian revolution look like a walk in the park.
I mean, this is wild stuff.
But America can't think anymore.
I will watch our cable news and watch a funny show because we're great.
We're the best.
Everybody loves us.
I mentioned to you the other day about sovereign AI.
This world is unrecognizable in the past five years.
Whatever you said before, forget it.
This world is different than the first Trump administration.
And we're now 300 and whatever today we are.
As we speak, the president is 312 days in office.
312 days.
So that's where we are.
So my friends, I'll be speaking more to you.
But as this picture says, stand behind the president, but the gloves are off.
We are at war.
That's not an expression.
That's just not a phrase.
We are at war.
This is as serious as it gets.
So my friends, I thank you for joining me.
You have a wonderful day.
Stay tuned.
Subscribe to Lionel Nation.
I'll be back later.
I've got so much to tell you because everything changed.
And my job is to reteach, to educate, to change your way of thinking so that you say, okay, I got it.
I'm applying old, dust off all of the PNAC, ISIS.
Remember, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh, Boko Haram, all of these names for these Alexa Brigade.
I mean, just, it's incredibly complicated.
But that's what we're going to see.
And the seditious six, they don't care where this is from.
They don't care who the people are, whether it's whatever it is.
They want to see Trump fall.
They want to see revolution in their own right because they get to rebuild it once the calamity and the horror has taken.
Anyway, I've said enough.
Thank you for spending your time with me.
We'll talk later.
Stay tuned.
I got a lot more.
And brave for impact, my friends, because we are at war.
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