Ep. 1937 - Bizzare Stunt: Libs Fly To Cuba To Cry About Trump
Michael Knowles critiques Lindsey Graham's risky Karg Island proposal and exposes Code Pink's hypocrisy for flying first-class to Cuba while ignoring local poverty. He condemns their fossil fuel reliance, contrasts this with AOC's valid anti-gambling stance, and defends Trump's Columbus statue installation as a necessary counter to erasing pre-1776 American history. Ultimately, the episode highlights the contradictions of modern liberalism versus conservative preservation of national heritage. [Automatically generated summary]
Hassan Piker and Code Pink fly to Cuba to gawk at poor people and assail America in the most hypocritical left-wing stunt of the year so far.
Then Lindsey Graham calls on American servicemen to storm Karg Island like it's Iwo Jima in the latest escalation of the Iran war.
And a clearer sign of the apocalypse even than the war, AOC says something about policy that I totally 100% agree with.
I agree with her more than I agree with many Republicans.
I'm Michael Knowles.
us The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show, President.
Trump was asked if he has a plan on the Iran war as oil floats just below $100 a barrel as the conflict could spiral out of control as Lindsey Graham talks about getting thousands and thousands of American service members killed.
Trump was asked if he has a plan.
He says maybe he does, maybe he doesn't.
We'll get to the meaning of that answer first, though.
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Cuban Tourism Scams Exposed00:15:22
You could not make up the left-wing humanitarian trip that just launched to Cuba.
Why is there a humanitarian trip to Cuba?
Cubans have been suffering for 60 years because of the communist revolution.
However, after President Trump cut off the Maduro regime in Venezuela, cut off the support that the Cuban communist regime has been getting, after Russia basically turns its back on Cuba.
Russia has other problems right now.
After President Trump and Marco Rubio start talking about the United States reacquiring Cuba, don't forget, Cuba has been in the possession of the United States three times in the last 120, 130 years.
After all of that, these radical leftists want to go down, not to buoy the spirits of the Cuban people, but to prop up the Cuban regime against the United States.
So you get this group, Code Pink, best known for its anti-war activism.
They fill up an airplane and they fly down to Cuba.
Here is one of the leaders of Code Pink explaining.
So we're on the plane now getting ready to go to Havana, Cuba.
We have this entire charter flight full of people and as important full of medicines.
And we're so excited to be with the Cuban people and show our support, show our solidarity, and to say that this cruel, inhumane, barbaric policy of the Trump administration has to go.
It has to go.
So specifically what they're flying down there for is to get oil to Cuba.
And this is very funny because left-wing activists have spent the last 25 years telling us that we need to stop burning oil.
It's very important that we stop burning oil.
We Americans, Cuban communists should definitely burn oil.
So they went from stop burning oil.
Global warming is going to kill us all.
We need to end fossil fuels to get as much oil to Cuba as possible to prop up the communist regime.
That's not even the silliest part of that video.
I don't know if you were paying attention while watching.
Maybe if you're driving, you didn't see it.
That lady is sitting in a nice, big, comfy first-class seat.
Says, oh, yes, we have a private flight.
We got this nice charter.
Sitting here in my nice, cushy, cozy, first-class seat.
And we're going to go down to Cuba for the people.
So worth noting here.
People are very confused.
They say, I thought Code Pink was the anti-war group.
Yeah, it was.
Now it's the more oil for Cuba group.
Okay, yeah, I thought Code Pink was focused on Middle Eastern conflicts.
Now it's focused on the Caribbean.
Yeah, right.
The apparent objectives of these left-wing organizations do not really matter.
The point is always the same.
The point is just to weaken the United States, to weaken the West, to weaken our civilization and its allies vis-à-vis our enemies.
That's what it's about.
Greta Thunberg used to campaign against oil.
Then she campaigned for Gaza, which has nothing to do with the environment.
And now she's campaigning for oil.
That doesn't make sense.
It does make sense if you realize that the nominal issue that they talk about is not really the issue they care about.
The real issue is just weakening our civilization.
So Code Pink is a Chinese op.
Code Pink is not a grassroots organization.
It's not even all that ideological.
They'll switch their ideology.
They'll switch their focus depending on the needs of their backers, which is China.
Code Pink gets 25% of its funding from a guy named Neville Roy Singham.
He is an associate of the Chinese Communist Party, allegedly.
And who knows how much more funding they're getting from China?
And it makes sense.
They're going to buoy a regime that is more closely allied to China, certainly than the United States, and to weaken the United States, which is China's chief geopolitical adversary.
So Code Pink goes on and they take their marching orders from Beijing and they're happy to do so because they get their nice cushy first-class seats and they're going to go visit a nice Caribbean island.
They're not the only group of leftists that went down.
Hassan Piker, who's a left-wing streamer who's frequently called for political violence against conservatives in America, he also went down.
And here is Hassan bragging about the glories and the charity of this trip.
Kneecap's going to Cuba.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, I know.
I've been working hard, boys.
You expect the CNN person to go with you?
CNN is going with us already.
Yeah, we have a boy boy's going.
Idida thing is going.
We have a major, dude, more people will be revealed in the upcoming days.
I've been working on this for, I've been, no, it's not Dhoni, unfortunately.
I forgot to literally invite Dhoni.
It was such a mistake on my part.
It's another CNN reporter that'll be on board.
But I've been working for the last two months on like organizing this major, this major flotilla trip.
Like shout out to Progressive International.
They've been doing all the logistics, obviously, but I've been trying to get as many people as possible to come.
The goal there is to just like show Americans like what the regular experiences for regular Cuban folks actually look like on the island, because there's obviously somewhat of a communication blackout.
Okay.
First thought.
How is this guy one of the most popular broadcasters on the young left?
This guy cannot complete an English sentence in a way that is grammatically appropriate.
The way he speaks is unbearable.
And I don't, I don't obviously watch a lot of his content.
We do progressive photo.
I'm not usually that crude about it, but how does this guy have an audience?
I don't know.
But in as much as I could interpret some meaning from that garble of sound, that cacophony that entered into his microphone, he was working with very elite liberals, with very elite leftists, to go down and help prop up the Cuban government.
So he says, we got CNN coming with us.
We're speaking to lots of other new left broadcasters and we're going to go show people what it's really like in Cuba because there's a communication blackout.
Why is there a communication blackout in Cuba?
Might it have something to do with the fact that the Cuban government is extremely secretive because it's a totalitarian state?
Might that have something to do with it?
Might the communication blackout have something to do with the electrical blackouts that we have across the island?
Might it have something to do with the fact that this is an unaccountable government that has been imiserating its people for decades.
He says, so we're going to go down and tell the truth.
You're going to go down and show the truth about what it's like for ordinary Cubans in this trip that is obviously organized with the Cuban government.
You don't get to go in with a major film crew with charter flights.
You don't get to go into Cuba unless you have the permission of the government.
And when you have the permission of the government, guess what?
You're probably not seeing what it's like for the ordinary Cuban.
This is a personal issue for me because I have been to Cuba and I have spoken to ordinary Cubans and I have not collaborated with the Cuban government as Hassan Piker did.
So in any case, he starts broadcasting and it's too good to be true.
You couldn't have scripted it because as he's broadcasting from Cuba to show how great the island is, how wonderful everything is there for the Cuban people, he can't even get enough internet.
The government is backing this guy in this little stunt, and they can't even muster enough Internet to keep a live stream going.
Just looks like TV static from the late 90s.
There's just nothing's coming out there.
Okay.
Well, where was that guy broadcasting from?
Was he broadcasting from the middle of the street?
I don't know.
Is it clearly he doesn't have Starlink?
No, no.
Hassan Piker was broadcasting from a five-star hotel.
Cubans can't get electricity, can't get fuel, can't get food, can't do much of anything, certainly don't have many political rights.
Hassan Piker flies down in his $1,300 Cartier sunglasses on his nice flight to Cuba and stays at a five-star hotel.
But you don't, guys, you don't understand.
It's not hypocritical for Hassan to go fly down to Cuba to make poverty porn on his sunny Caribbean vacation and stay at a five-star hotel.
Here's why.
I was saying, tourism is the lifeline for the Cuban economy as it stands currently.
The government has very limited resources and the American government makes it illegal for Americans to stay wherever they want when they're in Cuba.
They have to stay in what they've declared as five-star hotels, right?
I'm telling you all this because like even the five-star hotels are not like, you know, they're, it's not like it's what the American government has declared five-star hotels.
But regardless, in comparison to the situation on the island, it's prosperity, pretty much.
And experiencing that dichotomy is like definitely f ⁇ ed me up.
Definitely.
Like, if I were to ever, if I, I mean, not ever, but like, I, I hope to come back.
And when I do, I'll probably not abide by the American restrictions.
Yeah, yeah, as he sips his.
Nice tiny little espresso.
Just guys, you don't understand.
You don't understand.
I'm dripping in my Cartier glasses sipping my little espresso.
You don't understand.
I had to stay in the five-star hotel.
The American government made me so.
The thing about this is, Hassan Piker has all sorts of ridiculous interpretations of politics based on real facts on the ground that just become jumbled in that soupy pudding mess of a head that he has.
In this case though, he's just wrong.
I don't know if he's ignorant, I don't know if he's lying to you, but what he's saying is not true.
It's the opposite of true.
Hasan Piker says that the U.s government mandates that Americans traveling to Cuba stay at one of the five-star hotels.
Actually, the American government prohibits it.
What Has On Piker is doing is illegal, and I hope he's prosecuted by the United States.
What the U.s government actually says not only can you look up the law, but I have personally visited Cuba myself, and I know this from personal experience what the government actually says is the the one place you're not allowed to stay is at the five-star hotels, because the five-star hotels are owned by the government of Cuba and the United States is legally prohibited from supporting the Cuban regime.
That's the reality.
This guy says, look, I wish I could, I didn't have to stay at the five-star hotel, but I just have to.
The government made me no no no, you just.
Maybe you're illiterate, maybe you're just blithely ignorant, I don't know.
But it's actually the opposite and I hope, I hope you're prosecuted for it.
But the reality is you can go right now.
If you go to Cuba for humanitarian purposes, for journalistic purposes for however you can get to Cuba, it's not really that hard you could go to Airbnb right now and you can rent a Casa particular that's what they call it and it's where you're renting an apartment or a room from a Cuban family.
It's much, much cheaper than the five-star hotels.
It's much better because you're actually supporting the real Cubans there.
Not only does staying at the five-star hotels not support real Cubans.
Real Cubans aren't allowed to go in.
When I was in Cuba I was in Cuba now, almost 10 years ago I was hanging.
I went down with Jeremy and this is early days at dwent down with Jeremy and our buddy Jonathan.
So we go.
I'm running a mile a minute, i'm smoking cigars, I want to see everything.
I'm talking to people, even though my Spanish is pretty weak, to say the least.
But at one point i'm talking to Uh, one of the Cubans that I had befriended, and Jeremy went to take a nap.
I said oh, I want to go into.
Let's go get a drink or something.
I want to hear about Cuba.
So we walk into the hotel and this guy starts tussling with the guard at the hotel.
I said, oh, what was that about?
He said, oh well, the hotels.
They're not for Cubans.
Cubans aren't allowed to go into the hotels.
Only tourists are allowed to go into the hotels.
So why is that?
He's like, well, the hotels, you know they.
They have swimming pools.
I said, what do you mean?
They have swimming pools.
He goes, yeah Cubans, we're not really allowed to go into the swimming pools.
We're not really allowed to go into the nice restaurants, we're not.
That's just a way for the regime to make money from the tourists.
I said, where are you allowed to go?
The beach.
The beach is free.
We're allowed to go there, but no there's, this stuff's not for us.
And this whole conversation started because I said, you know man, I tell you how's pretty fun.
And he says to me in Spanish, he says, yeah, it's fun for some people.
It's fun for people like Hassan Piker who go down, they stay at the hotels that are not for the Cubans.
They're only for the tourists.
He talks in another clip about how it's so nice, you know, how the Cubans don't have electricity because they don't care.
You know, they just, they've got that island attitude is what he called it.
They've got that.
I heard, I heard this when I was in Cuba from the white liberals who went down there who can't bring themselves to acknowledge that the Cuban people are truly oppressed.
And so they have to make up these excuses.
Oh, the Cubans, they're secretly rich.
Oh, they love not having air conditioning.
You know, it's really nice on those 120 degree days, not 120 degrees, but it feels like 120 degrees down there, you know, 100 degree days.
It's really nice not having air conditioning.
No, it's really cool that they're not allowed to go use any of the nice facilities because the government stops them.
It's really nice.
I'm driving around Cuba.
We got stopped by these cops who were shaking down the taxi driver multiple times because he saw three gringos in the car that looked like money bags.
And I don't even feel so bad for the crooked cops.
The crooked cops are wearing uniforms that are 30 years old because the whole place is just this fetid cesspool of poverty and corruption.
The average income in Cuba is $180 to $200 per year, per year.
Not per month.
That would be bad enough.
$180 to $200 per year.
That is even compared to countries in the region.
I'm not comparing that to the United States or to China.
Well, it depends on where in China or to Europe or something like that.
Compared to other Latin American countries, Caribbean countries, that is a fraction of an order of magnitude compared to those other countries in the region.
And the cherry on top of this absolutely corrupt, hypocritical Sunday, there was a blackout throughout Havana.
The only place that had electricity, as far as I could see, was the hotel that Code Pink and Hassan Piker were staying at.
The Cuban government cuts off the power to the hospitals, to the local residents, to, and they, they just, because there's a generator at that hotel, the only place that you can see electricity is for Hassan Piker.
Tallow Masks and Blackouts00:02:53
And he says, isn't this great?
Isn't this just great?
You could, thank you, please.
All these people, please go to Cuba more often.
Give us more videos of this.
Pretty soon, you're going to have riots in the streets of Havana clamoring for El Comandante Marco Rubio to take over.
Okay, I want to get to AOC saying something I agree with.
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Go to cowguys.com and grab free tallow bomb with your order.
Folks, the Mayflower team in the office can't help themselves.
Hold on.
Wait, hold on.
I'm like Trump right now hearing about RBG.
What is this?
What are you telling me?
There go.
Wow.
That's crazy.
So I've had a number of birthday parties.
I was traveling and there was one in DC and there was one here and then another one.
The Mayflower team says, folks, they're going to keep the party rolling 10% off still with code B-Day.
It's extended 72 hours.
That's it.
All right.
If I'm allowed to get three birthday parties, you're allowed to get three extra days.
Fair enough.
So you have to be 21 years old or older to order some exclusion supply, terms and conditions.
Okay.
Right before I move on from Cuba, Taylor Lorenz, she's this left-wing journalist.
She says, if you're traveling to Cuba or any impoverished community or just generally, you should be wearing a mask.
We're six years into an ongoing pandemic and airborne disease is real, no matter how many leftists want to scream and stomp their feet and shout RFK talking points.
Oh boy, let this be the campaign ad for the midterms.
Taylor Lorenz, I guess, always wears a mask years after Cuba's done, or sorry, after COVID's done.
She wears the mask.
And so you have Greta Thunberg now protesting for fossil fuels, wants more fossil fuels.
Gambling Laws and Masks00:04:16
You get that flipped up, flopped there.
You get Hassan Piker.
You get Code Pink flying down first class to Cuba, stealing electricity from the Cuban people, talking about how happy they are not to have electricity, staying at the regime-supported hotels where the Cuban people get none of the money whatsoever in violation of U.S. law.
And then you get Taylor Lorenz saying, no, no, no.
Guys, the real problem with what you're doing is you're not even wearing a mask.
It's like every left-wing neurosis, every left-wing vice and neurosis is just being thrown into a blender in this Cuba smoothie.
I love it.
I have something very nice to say about a leftist, though.
AOC has just said something very, very sensible.
She posted it over the weekend.
She says, this is sad.
I know as a politician, these companies are going to spend a billion dollars against me for saying it, but with a little shrug emoji, what are these companies?
She says, pervasive gambling is not good for society.
It turns life into a casino, traps people in addiction and debt, surges domestic violence, and fosters manipulation.
She's talking about these companies like Polymarket or whatever, all these companies that allow you to bet on everything.
I 100% agree with her.
This is going to separate the conservatives from the libertarians.
This is one of those.
And the conservatives are going to agree with some leftists like AOC, though AOC is really out of step with her party on this.
And the libertarians are going to agree with the left-wing liberals here.
But hear it now.
I know it's hard to hear.
Let all who have ears to hear, let them hear.
AOC is right.
This is sad.
This is sad that AOC is right, but she's right.
Pervasive gambling is bad.
We should not be betting on everything.
The rise of sports betting, online betting, it's not good.
Turning everything into an asset to be gambled upon.
It's not good.
And I know the reaction from the libertarians are going to say, well, who are you to come in here with your nanny state religious dogmatism and say that I'm not allowed to gamble?
It's downright un-American.
Hear me, hear me.
Gambling has been broadly illegal for all of American history.
All of it.
It's still illegal in most ways today.
In most ways, in most circumstances, gambling is still illegal in the United States today.
But basically all gambling was basically always illegal, with some exceptions.
Even the lotto, the lottery, you know, the state lotteries only came around in the 1960s, and they only really started to spread a little bit in the 70s and then the 80s and 90s.
That's when the lottery came around.
Not the 1780s, not the 1880s, the 1980s.
Before that, before the state lotteries, you know who used to run those games?
They did exist in the shadows in the corners of society.
You know who used to run them?
The mob.
That's who.
In New York, I can show you the spot.
It's now a very nice store where they used to run the numbers game in New York in the Bronx.
And then the state came in and they said, oh, the mafia has a pretty good racket going here.
You know what?
We're going to take it over.
Even then, though, I think it was Mississippi.
I forgot it was Mississippi or Missouri.
I think it's Mississippi, though, only got its state lottery in 2019.
I remember there was a very active debate over a state lottery in Alabama just six, seven years ago.
The norm in America is to outlaw gambling.
That's why you have Indian casinos, because the Indians have territory that they can do what they want on.
So they sell you cheap cigarettes and gambling, but it's not good.
And the real libertarians, totally disconnected from the moral order, they're going to tell you, what are you talking about?
People can do whatever economic transactions they want.
They'll run up GDP.
It'll increase economic activity.
Yeah, sure.
I guess this is why certain measures of economic activity are deceptive.
Because if you legalize prostitution, sure, I guess you are increasing the economic activity in an area.
You're increasing commerce, but you're not actually helping the country with gambling.
You're not really helping the country.
Defending Columbus Statues00:07:13
AOC is right here.
Look, we're conservatives.
We want to be prudent.
We're not radical ideologues in many ways.
My understanding of conservatism is that it is actually the anti-ideology.
It's opposed to these abstract bullet points that you put on the back of a napkin.
It's much more about prudence.
It's much more practical.
It's much more about lived traditions in real political communities.
So I'm not saying we need to outlaw gambling entirely.
But likewise, I'm not going to make some crazy abstract statement to say that we have some natural right given to us by God to play craps or whatever, to gamble on some sports game.
The VMA here is the virtuous idea, which is maybe some moderate forms of betting are to be permitted, but the whole thing shouldn't be encouraged.
AOC, totally right.
That's probably the first time I've ever said that.
But there's some real common ground here, and I think conservatives should get with the smart libs on this issue and rein it in.
Gambling, totally pervasive, unregulated gambling is very, very bad.
Okay.
Speaking of Washington, D.C., great news coming out of the White House.
President Trump teased this some months ago.
Now it's happened.
President Trump has installed a statue of Christopher Columbus at the White House.
This is on the front side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
That's where the executive office of the president works on the White House grounds.
On the other side of the EEOB is a statue to commemorate the Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the earliest battles of the Revolutionary War, a battle that my ancestor Simon Knowles actually fought at.
Let's just look at the Columbus statue for a second.
Why?
Why Columbus?
I'll tell you why.
Because a lot of people haven't seen the reporting on this story.
You can see it on a little plaque at the bottom of it.
This is not exactly an original statue.
This is a statue that was originally erected and dedicated in 1984 by President Reagan.
Then stood, not at the White House, but it stood for decades until it was destroyed in 2020 during that wave of statue toppling where the left was trying to take down all of the supposedly evil men in our country's history.
And President Trump made a great point back then.
He said, you know, they're tearing down statues of Columbus.
They're tearing down statues of the people they say were slavers, Confederates, all the bad people.
He said, But where is this going to end?
It's going to end with them tearing down statues of George Washington.
That's what it's really about.
Because many, if not most of the criticisms you can make of all these other men, you could make of men like Washington and Jefferson, too.
He said, We're not going to do that.
We're not going to tear down our history.
So they tore down the statue of Columbus in 2020.
Trump has it rebuilt and installed at the White House.
I love this.
It even says on the plaque, it says, destroyed 2020, resurrected 2025.
And now it's actually standing at the White House in 2026.
The chief complaint you're going to hear from the reasonable libs, you know, the ones who are the kind of moderate.
They're not going out there with Antifa, but they're just the reasonable libs.
They're the debunkers.
They're the really fashionable types.
They're going to say, it's ridiculous that Columbus, of all people, that Columbus has a statue at the White House.
Don't you know?
Columbus never even stepped foot in North America.
He was looking for a pathway to the Indies.
He got lost.
He was using dead reckoning.
He was using the stars and he navigated the Atlantic Ocean and he opened the new world for the old world.
But no, no, you know, he just did this guy.
He was kind of bumbling, got lost.
He was always terrible.
It led to the encomienda system, all of these terrible systems of colonialism in Latin America.
Just kind of true, but he actually fought against that and was out-flanked politically, whatever.
And you know, the only reason we even celebrate Christopher Columbus is because there was a lynching in the late 19th century and the Italian Americans wanted to feel good about themselves.
So they instituted Columbus Day and Franklin Roosevelt some decades later made it a national celebration.
That's what they'll tell you.
The really sophisticated libs will tell you that.
It's all kind of fake.
Columbus really has nothing to do with America.
This is silly.
We should just get rid of this.
Here's your response.
Where is the White House?
Where is the White House?
The White House is in Washington, D.C., right?
What does D.C. stand for?
D.C., check my notes here, stands for District of Columbia.
Why is it called Columbia?
Because Columbia, from our nation's earliest days, Columbia has been a poetic name for the country which was discovered because of Christopher Columbus.
That's why there are all these towns, Columbus, Columbia, all throughout the country.
Because we know, and we have always known that we owe our place here to that great hero, that brave hero, that profoundly Christian hero.
That's another reason they hate him, Christopher Columbus.
Such that Davis Ingle, who's a White House spokesman, just said, with regard to the statue, in this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero, and President Trump will ensure he's honored as such for generations to come.
Even here, the wink at that line from the Sopranos, very famous scene where Tony Soprano's kid is reading that dumb pseudo-history of people's history of the United States.
And he says, you know, Columbus was terrible.
He was a genocide or whatever.
And Tony says, in this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero and a story.
And the White House just even winking at that.
This is the key.
We have to defend Columbus, even if all you want to do is defend the founding generation.
Just as a tactical matter, even if all you want to do is defend George Washington, 1776, you believe, like the guy in Parks and Wreck, that everything before 1776 was a mistake.
You have to go back further.
Tactically, sometimes the best defense is a good offense.
You have to go back further.
Defend not only George Washington, but defend all of the statues.
Defend Thomas Jefferson, even though he owns slaves.
Defend Robert E. Lee, even though he led the Confederate troops.
Go back further in time.
Defend Jamestown and the Mayflower.
Go back even further.
You have to defend Columbus.
This is the unbroken story of America.
What the left is cynically doing, but it was pretty effective for a while, is they're going for the weakest points.
The conservatives, they're not going to defend Robert E. Lee.
He fought for the Confederacy.
Oh, they're not going to defend Columbus.
He was just some random Italian anyway.
Who cares?
They go for the weak points to chop up the narrative of our history because their real goal is George Washington.
Their real goal is your country.
They want to get rid of your country and your way of life.
Grand Strategy for War00:15:23
This stuff really matters.
A lot of the eggheads and the materialists don't get how much statues matter.
Statues tell us who we revere.
Monuments tell us who we revere.
And by telling us who and what we revere, they tell us what we are.
Cult and culture come from the same root word.
And President Trump's focus on reestablishing, resurrecting his word, the American culture is of inestimable value.
Really good stuff.
And I hope to see a lot more of it.
And in fact, I know we will see a lot more of it.
President Trump already announced that he's going to have a national statue garden of American heroes.
He recognized the importance.
The lives start tearing down statues.
He says we're going to have a garden with hundreds of statues to the great men who built our country.
Brilliant, brilliant stuff.
Okay, speaking of national policy and also speaking of sailing across the world, Lindsey Graham says we have to take Iran's Karg Island the same way we took Iwo Jima.
That should throw up some red flags.
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Just when you were hoping the Iran war would scale back, dial down, finish up, Lindsey Graham compares it to World War II.
Obliterated.
And they're running out of money.
So here's what I tell President Trump.
Keep it up for a few more weeks.
Take Carg Island where all of the resources they have to produce oil.
Control that island.
Let this regime down a vine.
Is this going to, though, take Carg Island?
Is it going to involve U.S. troops on the ground?
Let me just read you something from the Atlantic does an assessment on that.
They say U.S. troops may well take Carg Island.
We believe in their ability to do so, but only to endure ballistic missile strikes, drone attacks, petrochemical smoke, all without a reliable means of obtaining logistical support.
The result could be a grinding war of attrition.
They talk about how far away they would be from resupply.
Sort of tired of all this armchair quarterback.
And this has been an amazing military operation.
God bless the fallen.
But it's a difference when we talk about troops on the ground.
I trust the Marines, not that guy.
I trust D.O.D. We got two Marine expeditionary units sailing to this island.
We did Iwo Jima.
We can do this.
The Marines, my money is always on the Marines.
I don't know if you take the island or you blockade the island, but I know this.
The day we control that island, this regime, this terrorist regime, has been weakened.
It will die in a vine.
And here's what I want to do.
I want to get with Chris.
I want to sprint the peace.
As the war winds down, I want peace to ramp up.
The reason we don't have Saudi Arabia and Israel making peace is October the 7th, 2023, Iran through Hamas attacked Israel, stopping normalization.
I want to take up and complete what Biden started.
As soon as we get Iran defanged so they can never do another October 7th, I want to start up peace talks between Saudi and Israel this year.
I want a peace deal between Saudi and Israel normalizing, ending the Arab-Israeli conflict.
It's been going on for 2,000 years this year, and you can't do it with a lethal Iran.
So we're weeks away from this Iranian regime not having the capability to stop peace.
Okay, very quickly, though.
Hello, Shan Rev. Hold on, hold on.
I know we're going to conquer Iran.
We're going to have peace in the Middle East.
It's going to be like Iwo Jima.
We're going to have a new world order.
I know, I know all that.
But like, are you sure?
Because these other experts are saying this is going to lead to a grinding war of attrition.
And what is Lindsey Graham's response to the grinding war of attrition?
He says, no, it's going to be just like Iwo Jima.
Iwo Jima, over 6,000 U.S. soldiers were killed at Iwo Jima.
What's the number?
The exact number is 6,200, sorry, 6,821, almost 7,000 U.S. troops were killed taking Iwo Jima.
More than 19,000 troops, additionally, were injured.
You had 25,000 casualties?
You say, no, look, we took Iwo Jima.
We can take this one.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
That's supposed to make me feel better that this is going to be like Iwo Jima?
I am not an isolationist.
I am not a pacifist.
I am not one of these people who is making an ideological argument against war in Iran.
I agree with a little bit of what Lindsey Graham is saying there.
It would be great if we could overthrow the Iranian regime.
It would be great.
They are the impediment to peace in the Middle East.
They would allow us to focus on other threats, be they China or be they in the Western Hemisphere.
I agree with all of that.
But we have to bring our ideological conceptions down to reality here.
You're talking about a military operation that executed brilliantly by the U.S. military, nevertheless, is the least popular war at launch that we have ever had in American history.
World War II, you want to talk Iwo Jima, World War II had 97% support.
This war has less support than Barack Obama's bungled intervention into Libya.
You believe as a practical political matter, take the morality out of it for a second.
Even take the grand strategy advertising, just as a practical domestic matter, you're telling me that Americans are going to accept 25,000 U.S. casualties to take an island that they, until last week, had never heard of in a war that most of them did not support at launch?
Seriously?
And they point to these polls.
They say, well, actually, you know, the MAGA Republican base overwhelmingly supports the strikes on Iran.
Yeah, that's true.
Though the MAGA Republican base, as defined in these polls, is a subset of the Trump voters.
So it's a relatively small number, actually, of the broader MAGA coalition.
It's one way in which the wording of these polls can be very, very misleading.
But regardless, yeah, they support airstrikes without any boots on the ground in an operation that wraps up very quickly.
Now we're talking 25,000 U.S. casualties with a ground invasion of this island?
Not going to work.
Domestically, that's not going to work.
I'd love for the Iranian regime to fall in a way that did not make the problem worse.
I'm off.
I see the grand strategy, guys.
You don't need to convince me.
But if the best you got is Lindsey Graham going on the Sunday shows saying this is going to be the next Iwo Jima, ain't going to work.
We need to bar Lindsey Graham from doing these shows.
The people who sell this war are Marco Rubio and Donald Trump.
Okay.
And they just weighed in, by the way, on what the plan is.
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My favorite comment on Friday is from Fake Duke 7, who says, a Waffle House worker would have caught the chair.
Oh, this is from the Bachelorette who got the Bachelorette show canceled because, well, she's not a Bachelorette, first of all.
She's a divorcee, but she was filmed throwing a chair or a stool at her ex-boyfriend in front of her kid.
And you're absolutely right.
Part of the job application at Waffle House, you need to know how to catch the chairs flying.
It's one of the treats.
You go to Waffle House, you get dinner in a show.
A lot of, it's like UFC meets Denny's.
It's very nice.
Okay.
What is the plan on Iran here at the White House, Secretary of State and the president?
Well, you know, I may have a plan or I may not, but how would I ever say that to a reporter?
If I said that to a reporter, Marco would say, please, sir, let's bring you over to the helicopter immediately, right?
I can't tell you that.
Okay, so this is being reported by Trump's enemies on the right, as well as obviously the whole left, as proof that Trump doesn't have a plan.
You see it on Twitter.
You see it in the news headlines.
Trump, I may have a plan.
I may not have a plan.
Well, that's not really what he says.
You can see him here.
He's kind of joking around.
He says, look, I may have a plan.
I might not have a plan, but I surely wouldn't tell you.
This is just an extension of the joke he told with the Japanese prime minister the other day in the Oval Office when the Japanese reporter said, why didn't you tell us about the strike on Iran before it happened?
Said, why don't I tell, hey, why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor?
I think you guys know a lot about surprises, don't you?
He said, it would be crazy.
The deep point beyond that joke is, I'm not going to telegraph to you what I'm doing.
One of the great advantages I have is that the Iranian regime doesn't know what I'm doing.
This is not new for Trump.
This has been his foreign policy tactic for 10 years now.
So, of course, he comes and goes, yeah, Rubio, Marco over here.
If I started telling you my plan, he'd drag me away to the helicopter.
So there are, as I've said from the beginning, a billion ways this could go south.
There are irresponsible, reckless voices who are coming out demanding all sorts of U.S. involvement that really could lead us into a grinding war of attrition.
This could cause a global recession, at least.
There are, I am so clear-eyed about how badly this could go.
As I told you, had I been on the NSC, I would have made the arguments against it based on public information.
However, guys, what are we in?
We're in week three now of this war.
Trump told us it would be five weeks.
I'm not panicking yet.
I know I'm looking at oil prices.
I'm looking at some hits.
If you have any brokerage accounts, maybe you're seeing some hits.
I'm not freaking out yet.
I freak out on week six.
Not even.
I'll start to be concerned on week six.
But until the end of week five, I believe Trump has a plan.
Contrary to the headlines, but I think in accord with the statement he just gave to the reporters.
Okay.
Now let's turn to someone who definitely does not have a plan.
Oh, actually, before that, here, Trump gave a little more detail on TrueSocial.
He said, we are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great military efforts in the Middle East with respect to the terrorist regime of Iran.
So what are the objectives?
Completely degrading Iranian missile capacity.
Two, destroying Iran's defense industrial base, never allowing Iran to get even close to a nuclear weapon, protecting at the highest level our Middle Eastern allies, who have taken some hits, by the way.
And he lists Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, and others.
The Hormuz Strait will have to be guarded and policed as necessary by the nations who use it.
The U.S. does not use it.
He says maybe we'll help out, but the nations who use it need to police it.
But those are our five, five and a half, if you include the Strait of Hormuz objectives here.
Notice, none of those objectives says regime change.
The real hardcore neocons say we need regime change, install the son of the Shah, raise a Pahlavi.
This is our chance.
We're going to remake the Middle East.
Trump does not say that.
I guess regime change could be great, but Trump is a politician who loves the practical, who loves the real.
He understands that politics is the art of the second best.
The fact that he's telling us here that none of his objectives includes regime change tells us he does not want this to be a transformative war.
He does not want this to be a 10-year war, and he does not think they're going to unseat the Islamic government.
Worth pointing out, the CIA intervenes and fortifies the regime of the Shah in 1953.
In 1979, the Islamic Revolution happens.
The Islamic regime, for all of its unpopularity, has maintained power almost twice as long as the CIA-backed regime from the 50s.
They have some roots in Iran.
Strum says we're going to beat them up.
We're going to weaken them.
And we're not going to have to deal with them again.
One last point, though, that little extra objective he threw in at the end, says the Strait of Hormuz will be opened and it'll be guarded by the people who use it.
This is the key here.
If at the end of this conflict, you got rid of Ayatollah Khomeini and the new guy who's in charge is named Ayatollah Khomeini.
The Islamic government is still there.
Iran still keeps its regime.
And they now know that if they close the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. will back off.
We will be in a worse position than we were the first time before we even went in.
You cannot allow them to succeed at that tactic.
You have to punish them for closing the strait.
You have to make it clear that they can't close the strait again.
That's the key here.
Even if you oppose war in Iran, the die is cast.
That is what needs to be achieved.
I love Trump slips it in there.
Maybe not just coincidentally.
That little bit at the end about the Strait of Hormuz, in many ways, that is now the most important objective to secure.
Okay, so much more I want to get to.
We have a new Democrat candidate for president.
We have Afro-Man, you know, Colt 45 at two zigzags.
Afro-Man is now the man of the hour, a major patriotic figure because of his fight against an Ohio police department.
The largest Lego set ever is of a Catholic Church.
I want to get to all of it.
We'll have to get to it tomorrow because today is Music Monday.
The rest of the show continues now.
You do not want to miss it.
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