Donald Trump’s reckless strike on Iran’s leadership—killing the Ayatollah in 30 seconds—ignited a war he downplays as "easy," despite military warnings of prolonged conflict and depleted defenses. His refusal to negotiate, bypassing Congress under the War Powers Act, mirrors past blunders like Iraq, with Iran’s retaliation risking a regional conflagration involving Russia and China. Trump’s disdain for intelligence, purged military leadership, and reliance on Fox News over experts suggest a strategy of spectacle over victory, while domestic chaos—like the Austin shooting linked to Iran—exposits a fractured state. With no exit plan, the U.S. teeters on a quagmire, its democracy eroded by executive overreach and authoritarianism, as Trump gambles with global stability for personal validation. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, everybody, welcome to the Muck Craig Podcast.
I'm Jared Dave Sexton.
I'm here with my fellow mukboy, Nick Hausman.
How you doing, bud?
Careful.
Making sure people understand.
For the muckboys, what are you talking about?
That's what we do.
We follow in it.
But the importance of one letter, I suppose.
Yes.
I don't see the downside whatsoever in that nickname.
All right, I'll be a muckboy.
The good old muckboys.
Everybody, we have an incredible show for you today.
We have to cover the first two days of this ever-expanding and chaotic war.
Of course, for those of you who listened to our emergency podcast on Saturday, a ton of shit has went down and revealed itself, which is so, so much fun.
Before we do that, though, please head over to, I can't even remember, patreon.com slash muck craigpodcast.
Become a patron of the show, gain access to the weekender episodes on Fridays that you already listened to the preview of, and also support us.
We need your help right now.
In case you haven't been able to tell, the shit has hit the fan, and you're going to need people like us to sort of sort through this in a way regular media has not.
Everybody, since we recorded the emergency podcast on Saturday afternoon, a whole hell of a lot has happened.
It was reported that the Ayatollah Khomeini was killed within the first 30 seconds of the joint strike between the United States and Israel, as well as large swaths of Iranian leadership.
These people have already been replaced and have already told the United States of America that they are not going to negotiate and they are not going to surrender.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump, it's wonderful having this guy in charge at the moment, has been talking to every single media person that he possibly can.
And depending upon the moment that he's talking to them, his answers have changed, Nick.
He said that he has opened up negotiations with Iran, which is funny because they've said that they haven't.
He's went out and told people, oh, this is only going to take a couple of days.
He's told people it's only going to take a couple of weeks, maybe a month at the most.
He's went on Fox News and told them this is going to be just like Venezuela.
But if you listen to him, this is our beleaguered, exhausted, very, Nick, isn't it strange he somehow or another both looks dry and wet at the same time?
Yeah, rashy.
He's rashy.
He's rashy.
He's a specimen of health.
Here is the president of the United States of America.
And we will easily prevail.
We're already substantially ahead of our time projections, but whatever the time is, it's okay.
Whatever it takes, we will always, and we have right from the beginning, we projected four to five weeks, but we have capability to go far longer than that.
We'll do it.
Ever, somebody said today, they said, Oh, well, if the president wants to do it really quickly after that, he'll get bored.
I don't get bored.
There's nothing boring about this.
Do you agree with that, Pete?
I don't think there's anything, Mr. General, there's nothing boring about it.
Somebody actually said from the media, I think he'll get bored after about a week or two.
No, we don't get bored.
I never get bored.
If I got bored, I wouldn't be standing here right now.
I guarantee you that, to go through what I had to go through.
We also projected four weeks to terminate the military leadership.
And as you know, that was done in about an hour.
So we're ahead of schedule there.
Nick, we have to talk about the fact.
There's a ton to catch up on in terms of the development, what Iran is doing.
But let's just focus for just a second.
By the way, sometimes when that man speaks, I have to remind myself that he is the quote-unquote leader of the free world and that he's not somebody who wandered in front of a podium and just started rambling before security takes him off.
Can we just spend a couple of minutes talking about the emergingly clear fact that one of the most consequential possibilities military strikes in modern history, this man has not fucking thought about it more than we have in any way, shape, or form.
He has no idea what he's doing.
He has no goal for the future.
He went against everybody who told him not to do this.
And we basically have a president at this point who has shit for brains and is carrying out a campaign that could spiral out of control at any given moment and is spiraling out of control.
And God knows where it's going.
And I can't believe I'm talking about this.
Well, I mean, I think the biggest worry that I saw was that, you know, we have all this amazing technology to knock their missiles out of the sky.
But the numbers look to me like it's like 10 to 1 in terms of how much munitions you need to fire into the air before you hit one of their missiles.
And I think the Iranians know this.
And they've been kind of, you know, feeling out the last couple of years what kind of response they can get and what it looks like.
So what looked like wildly successful operations where Israel had protected itself completely from any missiles in an iron dome situation could very well have just been, well, let's kind of figure this out.
Let's map out what they can do.
And we might not have that many munitions left after another week or two of this to protect anybody around in the area from being able to knock these things down, which is probably one of the reasons why Iran decided to shoot some missiles out in all different directions in the beginning.
Well, let's just go ahead and call it what it is.
It feels like we're inching up on Fuhrer bunker territory.
You know, like a megalomaniacal asshole who knows absolutely nothing about what he's talking about and is sending people out to die and get destroyed.
This man, It's increasingly clear that all of these different interests, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, you name it, have basically rented the United States military.
They put Donald Trump in a position where, and we're hearing all kinds of reports that we knew that Israel was going to hit Iran and that we had to make a choice, which is join in on it or just go ahead and let them hit our military bases and then join in on it.
This person is obviously not a serious person.
He has no grasp on the severity of this thing.
I don't know if you saw the clip from that very press availability, Nick.
He was talking one second about Iran and the next he was talking about the curtains in the East ballroom.
Like this is this is a really, really sick, unwell man who is corrupt, who has been bribed by all of these countries.
And he has been put in charge of the United States military, the deadliest, most well-funded, largest, most powerful military in the history of the world.
There are different things to think about here.
I, for one, I would like to talk in a little bit about what we're seeing from military brass in terms of what they're leaking and where things are going.
I think that's a different story that we need to focus on.
But as of right now, Nick, the train is going faster than it can go.
We're heading up towards a turn and nobody is at the wheel.
And this guy has no fucking clue what's going on.
I mean, they released a picture of the skiff, quote unquote, and that's a really loose term for what they were planning this in at Mar-a-Lago, where they had some curtains up at some, you know, some area.
You know, there's no walls.
Anybody walking by could have heard what they were saying.
He was being feed by some or joining some party that was going on there right after he announced that they're going to go to war.
You know, no notion of like, maybe we should go back to the White House and control everything from the situation room there, whatever normal people would do.
And the other thing is, is about, you know, when Israel decides, okay, it's go time.
We have intelligence.
We can get them and we now get them.
Like the reason why we decided to go in on this with them is that it's probably because Trump wouldn't allow Israel to have sole credit for this, right?
Well, I think the Venezuelan thing, I think it has been undersold how much that quote unquote victory really got him hyped up for this, that he could do whatever he wanted, people would praise him, and that he would be able to show his might and abuse people and shove people around.
And I mean, everybody told him it wouldn't be like that with Iran.
And I think his brain simply works in like really, really shadowy, stupid, stupidly simplistic stereotypes.
Yeah.
No, he's got the little toy soldiers and he's making all the noises while they're fighting.
That's how he looks at all this.
It's what's fun.
That's why he said it's not boring, right?
In that, in that take.
We have capabilities that going a lot longer than a few weeks, which doesn't seem to be the case because of the munitions limitations.
Also, I think it's not boring to him because, yes, he likes to see these maps and he likes to hear the explosions and see these videos and stuff.
It's like he doesn't give a shit about human lives.
No, and why would he?
You know, this is one of the most self-absorbed human beings the United States has ever created.
And we know that he doesn't respect the military.
I mean, he's told us as much every time.
He sees them as a weapon that he gets to aim at people, and then they will either grovel or be destroyed, which, you know, it, Nick, it's very much like an asshole who is just like super excited about fireworks.
They light the fuse and then they watch the pop, you know, and that does it for them.
Like, this is what this guy gets off on.
And now that he has embraced militarism, that's like a new corner of his brain that has started going off.
And he thinks he can get away with whatever.
It's hubris.
And the hubris that he is displaying going against everything that generals have told him, everything intelligence has told him.
Like, and by the way, like, this is the guy who's tuning into Fox News and thinks that they're hard on him, right?
Like, he is living.
This is where it was always going to go as America corroded and as the empire was falling.
And meanwhile, what is the one thing that we have?
The one thing that America has as a military, because it was used as an organ to funnel all the money away from me and you and the people listening to this and our parents and our grandparents and then funnel it to the wealth class.
Meanwhile, they have all of this shit.
But now, Nick, you just brought it up.
Iran is sending missiles everywhere at this point.
I mean, the moment that they got hit, they were just like, fine, we're going to hit every U.S. base within missile range.
We're going to hit every other country in the Middle East, particularly those who have aligned against us and we have rivalries against them.
On top of that, they have actually absolutely figured out that Israel's iron dome is susceptible.
They figured that out going back to that 12-day war, they telegraphed all of those strikes and some of them still got through.
And then they figured out Israel only has a certain amount of anti-missile missiles and the United States only has a certain amount of them.
In fact, we only have a certain amount of ammunition.
They're talking about going around the world to our bases and getting that ammunition.
This is Iran is outmatched militarily, but they are running circles around the United States and Israel right now, which is a wild thing to look at.
I don't think that they can carry that on for forever, but they're certainly going to make this interesting.
That's all I can say.
And the fact that we do not have a president who has a working brain, like this thing has really, really bad potential.
Oh, I agree.
And I was doing a deep dive because, again, we keep getting conflicting reasons for why they're doing this.
First, it's their nuclear ambitions.
Let me ask you this, Jared.
Did you take it face value or did you believe when the Ayatollah had insisted for all of these years that they getting a nuclear weapon went against Islam, the teachings of Islam, and they had a fatwa against it?
Like they were never going to actually develop it.
Do you believe that?
I mean, I don't know.
I don't know how you can take any of these assholes seriously.
Most of them are just like in love with power.
So I don't know.
I don't know what was in his heart there.
I mean, because they're religious fundamentalists, right?
So it's like a lot of times you kind of, it would be hard to imagine someone using the Quran in that way as a completely and utterly blatant lie.
You know, because the argument could have been they just always used the threat of that to get negotiation tactics and to be able to try and get these changes, which didn't really work either.
But you can argue that they were always enriching to 50 or 60%, which is still way off what they need, to be able to use that as leverage.
Now, it's possible.
It might not be completely wrong.
And that might be flying in the face of everything else.
But the other part of this then would be like, how, you know, if it is regime change, right?
Now it's gone to regime change and they knocked out the leader.
If you're not knocking out the leader, then why else are you doing this other than to change the regime?
Boots in the ground, right?
We say this all the time.
There doesn't seem to be any other way to do that because again, it's like they just someone else rears up into that spot and then the hierarchy exists for a long time.
You have to kill, I don't know how many have to kill thousands upon thousands, like the government before you could do it.
You know the last time we had an incursion into Iran that was actually successful?
I looked it up.
Do you know when?
It was in the middle of World War II when Iran, you know, didn't really even have an army.
And the Russians were part of this, which is really kind of fascinating because we should probably have to talk about them as well.
But the Americans went through the Western side through Iraq, which I don't think that that would work so easily, even though we sort of have a friendly government-ish.
But there was a northern invasion you needed to have too through Armenia and Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.
I don't think the odds are very high that any of those countries would allow any kind of passage through their countries to get it to Iran.
Our embassy isn't safe in Baghdad.
Our embassies in Pakistan and Iraq have both been attacked.
Dozens of people have already died.
Like they've barely been able to defend them.
Going in through any of these places is wild.
And Nick, what we're talking about now, for those, I did a bourbon talk on Sunday night and I gave the explanation, the analogy.
It's like getting ready to be in a bar fight and you know that the guy across from you is going to whip your ass.
And so you just have to like try and turn the one-on-one bar fight into a riot, right?
To get everybody to fight because you are going to get your ass beat.
And for sports fans out there, I use this all the time, Nick.
Like back during the championship game when small school Butler played Duke and they had to muck the game up, right?
It was going to be a low-scoring affair and it was going to be ugly to watch, but that was their one chance to do it.
Iran's only real chance in this situation is to just throw as much shit at the wall as they possibly can to try and turn this into a regional war, which will then bleed the United States, it will bleed Israel, and then maybe some chaotic things will happen.
And then you brought up Russia.
The past day, Russians have been having a field day talking about World War III.
Vladimir Putin and all of his little cronies are now saying, guess what?
Our hands are no longer tied.
We are more than welcome to get into this fight.
And if Washington, D.C. wants a fight, we can do it.
So they're looking to try and draw them in and trying to, quite frankly, kill as many Americans as they can in order to make this not palatable.
American Lives at Stake00:10:15
And you do not change your regime, particularly an embedded, entrenched regime like the Iranian regime through airstrikes.
The idea, telling the citizens to rise up and take over their government, Donald Trump and them want to act like they care about the 30,000, 50,000 protesters who got murdered.
If you think that they would murder more of them than that if they just rose up to do it without any assistance, this is going to end up in a place where there are going to be conversations about whether or not boots need to be on the ground.
And quite frankly, Nick, this doesn't look like a rock to me.
This looks like Vietnam to me.
Like, that's the difference here.
Everybody keeps saying, oh, this is like Iraq.
This is like a rock.
Iran is so much bigger and so much stronger and so much more better organized in terms of regime politics and influence than Iraq ever was.
And on the other side, nobody really was aligned with Iraq.
When the Soviet Union fell apart, they were on their own.
That's why that happened immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Iran has China and has Russia, and they're not going to let them go down completely without a fight.
Right.
I think that's the other thing about Iran is calculating is that to make this into a regional war might not be their only ambition.
They might end up trying to get Russia to be involved.
Now, Russia is a little bit busy.
If we haven't noticed these days, is there some sort of crazy genius here where you suck Russia into the Middle East?
They kind of take their eye off the ball in Ukraine, who then can kind of end that conflict, whatever.
And then Russia also falls apart again, like it did in Afghanistan.
You're playing a game of risk, and this administration is eating the game pieces and choking on them.
I know, I know, but go bear with me because, and then China and the U.S. were sort of plotting this.
Like, let's just get Russia out of the picture and we'll just split up the U.S. and China are teaming up.
Like, I'm just trying to figure out if there is any possibility of this.
Like, like the movie version would be some weird thing like this, where like, you know, it would appear completely horrible and dire and incompetent, maybe even.
But what it turns out is that, yes, China and the United States have figured this whole thing out and they're going to cut the world in two.
You can have your hemisphere, I'll have our hemisphere, and we'll get rid of like this, this asshole Putin who's been bothering both of us.
No, no, that's not happening.
In fact, if you want to talk about the weird double cross, like four-dimensional chess that could be played right now, there's two countries that have everything to gain right now, which is Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Yeah.
Which is the idea that Israel and Saudi Arabia are using the United States to get rid of their rival Iran.
And Saudi Arabia and Israel are both very interested in sort of leveraging their alliance with the United States versus a potential alliance with the BRICS countries.
So, and on top of that, Nick, it's just so many of these things.
We keep having conversations.
And I'm an old teacher.
I like to look at like a semester and how you scaffold knowledge.
We learn one thing, then we learn the next, then we learn the next.
And you can look back at like week two.
You know, you get to like week 20 and you look back at week two and you realize you learned something there.
What have we talked about?
As the American order has flagged, we keep talking about flashpoints.
And notice how many of these things are border skirmishes, right?
Or regional feuds.
That's what a world war is.
A world war isn't just where two countries are like, we're going to fight everywhere.
It's where all of these little flashpoints start growing and growing and growing.
And right now, how many of these flashpoints have just gotten open?
Israel, I mean, my God, how many countries is Israel at war with?
I think they just hit Beirut yesterday, if I'm incorrect, if I'm not incorrect.
They've had like eight countries that they're at war with.
Iran is trying to bring all those people in basically to try and create a royal rumble.
God knows what will happen with it.
And again, that would be hard to control, even with the most intelligent and competent leadership that the United States of America has to offer, much less these dumb fucks who can barely eat dinner without killing themselves.
Yeah.
I mean, listen, it would be something if the State Department hadn't been completely decimated by this administration.
I just saw a guy on CNN who was a retired general who I think was in the UAE.
And he's like, yeah, the British, they're all being evacuated.
The government there is completely taking care of them.
We haven't heard squat from anybody in America.
Nobody seems to care and has any idea.
And probably because there's nobody on our beat.
There's nobody in charge of this part of the world.
So, and that's probably by design as well.
You know, they don't want to be able to have support for any of these things.
But again, those kind of positions, especially in the State Department, are basically the spies you have on the ground.
And that's how the intelligence you get.
And there seems to be a distinct lack of intelligence going on right now around what's going on.
Did you see that Trump seemed quite surprised?
He said he was surprised by Iran's reaction, how they were going to attack other countries in the neighboring area.
How is it possible that they would not have considered that?
And they wouldn't have been part of their plan.
Can I tell you I knew they were going to do that?
And you know why I knew that they were going to do that?
Because of three reasons.
Are you ready?
One.
Because of what all belligerents have done when attacked by the United States of America.
See Iraq, right?
Like immediately they attack their neighbors, including Israel.
The second is that this is what Iran did when they got attacked the last time, right?
Third, are you ready for this one?
Iran told them.
Iran told them.
I knew because Iran had put out a statement last week that said if the United States of America attacks us, it will immediately become a regional war.
I knew that.
I'm not the president of the United States of America, but I'm also not some old fuck who falls asleep in every briefing and doesn't give a shit.
Of course he's surprised.
I bet he's surprised when he looks in the mirror, Nick.
Like that, that's the level that this guy's operating on.
Of course, everyone who paid attention to this knew it was immediately going to become a regional war.
Yeah.
And then the whole thing about the legal argument about this is really crazy because now you get to really see, you know, these litmus tests that you want to do in Congress and like force people to have a vote and so you know where they stand, right?
Well, this is sort of like, let's hear where they stand.
Like this is going to put like Mark Wayne Mullen, these idiots who are trying to protect him with the War Powers Act.
We have to remember that the only way that the president has the ability to do what he's trying to do now is when we are under attack, when it's an emergency situation, of which it was simply not that.
And the fact that he, do you get this sense that he almost he almost turned the negotiations, this is part of one of his negotiation tactics, which is insane to me.
It'll cost us billions of dollars in American lives in this weird notion of just like extracting a couple more concessions in some sort of agreement that like he seems to be after and not regime change.
I mean, it's just more impeachment fuel.
Like this would finally be the thing where like the Democrats, if they win control of Congress, can say, you know, because even the first impeachment, so nebulous, it was like, oh, abuse of power or whatever.
Like, that's not really going to be sold that well.
At least here, now you can, you know, really sort of say it broke the law, killed people for it, impeachment.
Yeah, but you're still, you're still thinking in West Wing terms.
You're right that this is the reason, one of the reasons he should be impeached.
The Democrats are pissed that they couldn't approve it.
The Democrats are pissed that they couldn't get in Congress and take a vote.
Not one of them outside of like AOC and Mamdani has said that this was a bad idea.
There's a couple of other stragglers who would have given him the power if they would have went to Congress.
It's almost stupid that he didn't.
Right.
It's almost dumb as fuck that he didn't.
And by the way, they might still do it.
They might still go ahead and rubber stamp this thing because what are they more?
They all wanted to attack Iran.
Democratic leadership wanted to attack Iran.
Hell, Chuck Schumer was taunting Donald Trump before the attack saying, Taco Trump, he always backs down.
He's trying to get a deal with Iran.
Like they want to rubber stamp this thing.
And if they get the opportunity, they will.
No one's crying over the Aito being killed, right?
No, he's a piece of shit.
Right.
So it's like, and that's what I was talking about in the last one.
Like, what the best, the best case scenario in this whole thing, it's like, you know, like, like taking on a murderous dictator who is oppressing their people for decade upon decade is not a bad thing.
It would be nice to think that they had thought about all these things and how to actually then do the next step of this.
But yeah, I think your argument would have ended up being that taking him out and kind of then like getting back to his stalemate makes it much worse for people in Iran because of the hardliners.
Well, so here's the thing, Nick.
And listen, this is not just Donald Trump.
Like in the lead up to the Iraq war, every intelligence service was trying to educate George W. Bush and the neoconservatives of what would happen if they went into Iraq, of all of the religious sort of rivalries, all of the factions, all of the things that would suddenly come out into the open if Saddam Hussein was killed.
But American hubris was, no, we're going to do this.
We're going to be welcomed as liberators.
We'll figure it out.
It'll be fine.
In this case, Nick, this administration literally looked at Venezuela and they're like, well, we took Maduro and the vice president and played ball with us, right?
Like, we don't even need to occupy the country.
The vice president was just like, absolutely, whatever you want, bosses.
There's a difference between a slight dictatorship that has criminality to it and a religious fundamentalist revolutionary state because you kill Khomeini and he becomes a fucking martyr.
Venezuelan Liberation Missteps00:06:24
Like that, like that doesn't, it doesn't work that way.
And it's so simplistic and so obvious that they have no interest whatsoever in looking at the larger picture or understanding it because all the problem here, Nick, is that these are some of the dumbest motherfuckers that have ever existed.
And they have like the largest inflated ego about themselves.
It's, what's that called?
The Dunner effect or Dunner Kerger effect or whatever it is.
It's incredible.
They literally do not know what they're doing, but they are so self-assured about what it is that they're doing.
Right, right, right.
I mean, like, you know, listen, if you wanted to do this properly, right, then it would have to be a coalition like we had seen in the first Gulf War, 10 to 1, 10, 10 out of one, right?
And the whole world is with you behind you after you know.
Uh, well, actually, that was I'm talking about after Kuwait, but you're talking about the Persian Gulf, yeah, yeah, even after 9/11 when you had the whole world sort of behind you for a brief amount of time, which you know, everybody seems to when you get attacked, you have that, you know, you have that time, right?
Everyone kind of will get behind you and say, Hey, whatever we need, whatever you need, we'll help you with.
Um, yeah, but to go with this alone, basically, like you know, Israel and the United States against Iran, uh, you know, the list is gonna start to expand as well of where we want to start attacking, like who's next, yeah, Cuba, Cuba's next.
Well, but but Turkey could be next, like it might be in the same area in the same region while we're there, by the way.
Let's get Erdogan out of there, you know.
Um, all those things could be on the table, and you're talking about NATO ally Turkey, yeah, yeah.
And we're talking about you know how Russia has already had their eyes on other stuff as well after Ukraine.
No, Cuba's next.
If they go anywhere, it's Cuba, you think it's Cuba for us?
It's yeah, and it's just Nick, we're a pariah state at this point, we're a pariah, us and Israel were both pariah states that are just like out.
It's it's it's it's a lot like when you read about like serial killers who team up and serial criminals who go around robbing banks and doing shit.
And they just like they're just like pushing it to the limit.
That's where this is.
Serial killers, I've never heard of them teaming up.
That's not oh, yeah, every now and then they come across each other and they go out and they have a good time together.
That's that's where we are.
Okay, all right, man.
Bites dog.
Did you ever see that movie?
I certainly have.
I mean, it feels like a documentary of the modern, modern uh situation.
We might have to watch that for a uh for our show.
That's a tough one.
I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna make our audience uh watch that.
But there, there's there's so much uh to get into here, Nick, because there's so many signals that are coming out.
So, the Pentagon gave a briefing, and in it, the Pentagon briefers acknowledged, and you brought up 9/11.
You're right.
If there had been a 9-11 and maybe that had like sort of pushed this thing, maybe we could have like had a you know coalition of the willing.
They came out and said, Hey, the administration's telling people that they thought that maybe Iran was going to attack us, and that's why we attacked them.
They came out and said, Absolutely, that's not true.
Uh, there have also been so many leaks that have come from the officer class within our military that has said, We told Trump not to do this, we told Hegseth not to do this, and they did it anyway.
Intelligence sources have come out and said, Every briefing that we've given, we told Donald Trump not to do this, and this was going to happen.
Nick, it at the beginning of a military operation, it's usually not a good sign if every apparatus of government power and military strength and intelligence is coming out and leaking to the press.
That is usually what happens, I don't know, let's say years into an occupation of Afghanistan.
The fact that it's happening here at the very beginning, I think, is pretty telling about the state of power and balance within the United States government at this point.
Are you avoiding using the term war?
Oh, no, war, war, war, war.
We are at war.
Yes.
Because I mean, the military exercise, whatever you said, was, but this is war.
When you kill the head of another state, that is war.
When you kidnap the head of another state, it's war.
You know, and again, that is where I think I suspect where some of the people in the military are now realizing is that, yes, there's no, there isn't a plan to be able to do it like this.
And I think, I think what Trump thinks is he'll have some fun.
He'll launch the rockets.
They'll run out of munitions sooner than later.
And then they'll just stop and they'll pretend that there's negotiations for some sort of nuclear deal that they already had under Obama.
And then they'll declare victory on that.
I don't think that there's much more they're going to end up doing anyway from that.
I disagree.
You think that they would be, do you think that we could be eight months from now still stuck in a live hot war?
Possibly, yeah.
Did you live through the early 2000s?
I did.
Okay.
What I'm saying is, Nick, and I just want to construct a timeline.
Like, you know what I find interesting sometimes?
Alternate timelines where you look at a moment in history where things branch.
I just want to sort of create one of those right now.
It starts out with Donald Trump in 2016 being interviewed about John McCain.
And he says, I like the soldiers who didn't get captured.
Right.
Then he becomes president of the United States of America.
And what do we hear?
He goes to our LinkedIn and he goes to Normandy and he's just like, how stupid it is that these people died.
Right.
And he's constantly talking shit about the military over and over.
He gets elected again, Nick.
And what happens immediately?
Him and Hegseth drag every single officer from around the world to Virginia for a retreat so that Hegseth can call them fat and lazy and incompetent.
And then Donald Trump basically sleepwalks through his regular stump speech about how great he is.
We now arrive here to this Iranian conflict in which he was told not to do this.
He was told that this is a bad idea.
There's no reason to do it.
It's obvious that Saudi Arabia and Israel has rented the United States military.
We've already had four people die.
We've already lost three of our jets, which were they were taken down, Nick, by quote unquote friendly fire.
Three jets taken down by quote unquote friendly fire, right?
I'm sure they were all taken down by friendly fire.
Troops in Harm's Way00:05:04
So then we get to the point where if this thing doesn't cool down and that there's not a negotiation, if there's even the possibility of having to go into these places and putting troops in harm's way, Nick, that's an interesting situation about whether or not this military, which is already leaking, that they do not agree with any of this.
We've already seen sailors sabotaging ships to try and keep from the war.
All of a sudden, that starts bringing together a really weird picture of what we've talked about for a while, which is at what point do people with military persuasion and power say enough is enough?
And let's not forget who it is who's saying this, because a lot of the senior military brass has been forced out already, right?
The people who had been there with vast amounts of experience and who we should be relying on right now are gone.
DEI, woke, all that stuff.
Remember, they purged a whole bunch across.
So the fact that the people who are still left, because who are the people who are still left?
The people who are the believers or who are the six people, you know, who are willing to pledge fealty or whatever, right?
They're the ones who are trying to tell them, hey, this is not a good idea.
This won't work either, right?
And that's a problem because if they're willing to say that, then I don't have any confidence that this would work.
Even though I would say, let's just say you were on the side of like Israel and you wanted to see a more peaceful area there.
Having the Ayatollah gone and having a different kind of government in Iran would help that to some degree, right?
But I think we're skipping a lot of steps, right?
That's the only problem.
Because they say the same thing about Iraq, right?
And it's still, Iraq still does not have like a, you know, a representative government, right?
I think it's safe to say that they're kind of barely hanging on in some version of subsistence, but it's still, you know, really a lot of upheaval.
So, but like, there is this notion, like, yes, okay, if you were able to sort of get rid of that, that upper level of management in Iran, you could have something better in the region.
I don't think that's going to happen, though.
Right.
And we're talking about the leadership of our military.
Many of them served in Iraq, a war that they were lied to and they were used.
And many of their friends and compatriots were killed in.
And now they're being asked to make decisions on behalf of the most overtly corrupt president of the United States of America, who does not enjoy the military, does not respect the military, a secretary of state who does not respect the military.
I'm telling you that there are, I'm not saying it's for sure, but I'm saying there are elements that add up to a military style coup in all of this.
Right.
A soft coup, perhaps, right?
Like, you know, on the margins, people not doing stuff, or like, you know, sabotaging the bathrooms and all sorts of stuff like that could be happening.
And it's by the way, if you were old enough in the armed forces, you would realize why Afghanistan was an equally problematic incursion as well after 9-11.
So a lot of those things are factoring in for sure.
So I'd be interested to see how that's going to play out because the other background here is that to meet quotas, after not having a draft for all these years, they had to lower the standards, right?
Of admitting, see Hag Seth, Kama Pete.
You know, listen, he went to Ivy League school, so maybe he was worth admitting.
But they did lower the standards in a way that we don't necessarily have the same kind of fighting force that we would have expected to have, you know, 20 years ago.
And I, I, you know, I really don't know what's going to happen if we get to the point where boots have to be on the ground because we do not have the military necessary to take over Iran.
We simply don't.
I mean, if you think Syria was bad, like, I mean, Iran would be several times worse.
Why say Syria?
Why not look at Iraq?
Well, Syria was more of a giant mess.
It just so happened that the U.S. sort of blowback at Iraq was worse.
Syria, Syria was a fucking disaster.
Well, let's look at, I was looking at the numbers there.
I'm just kind of curious because how many boots in the ground would it even take to begin to this process?
And we might remember there was like 150,000.
You know, that was some of the numbers being thrown around in the Iraq in 03 and back.
Iran has over a million troops.
Yeah.
So, but when you also include all the support troops as well, all the logistics and everything like that, it was, yeah, it was half a million more.
And then you include the coalition, it was more.
You know, we don't have you.
So now you look at Iran, which is again three times larger, terrain equally or even more difficult to fight against.
It doesn't have an equal, easy access to as it is, and not a lot of friends that are going to let you use their countries to fly over.
So yeah, you're talking about millions.
And I don't even think we, I mean, it would be as many troops as we have total.
We wouldn't have any troops anywhere else.
It's an absolute disaster.
Quickly, Nick, I want to come back stateside.
We've been talking about foreign politics.
This weekend, there was a mass shooting in Austin, Texas.
Elections and Trust Crisis00:06:19
Very, very quickly, the right wing and the law enforcement have begun rumors and claimings that this was terrorism resulting from the attack on Iran.
There still has not been proof of that yet.
I think this is a good opportunity to talk about how we approach possible attacks in the United States of America because one of the main tools of a regime such as Iran that is in real trouble is to use sleeper cells and some really terroristic sort of tactics.
And I think this is our first sort of glimpse of what, not necessarily what we have coming, but how the reaction is going to look.
Well, you know, and you scared me the last episode because you talked about how, you know, we were relying on Kash Patel in charge of this kind of thing.
But they also, not only that, the guy in charge, I believe, of the domestic terrorism part of the FBI is this kid who's like 22 years old or 23 years old, has no experience doing this.
There's a picture that was floating around of him that's like laughable because he's trying to look, I don't know what he's trying to look like.
So that's that's the face of like who we're relying on to keep us safe.
Very, very, very concerning.
And what happened in Texas, I don't know about you.
I'm willing to say it was related to Iran.
You know, the guy.
I haven't seen any proof of it.
You haven't?
Well, you know, he was wearing an Iranian.
Do you know that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's been widely reported at this point.
It's been rumored.
I didn't see it.
Do you trust anything that this government tells you at this point?
Okay.
I mean, right, because they would lie about that.
Do you trust?
Do you trust anything on social media?
I don't know.
Whatever I saw made me trust it, but I guess you're going to be can be right.
I mean, that's my point.
Is I at this, it was bad enough what happened post 9-11, right?
Where we heard all these stories where you actually had people.
And for those who don't know, most of the stories about terror plots that were disbanded during that, you know, post-9-11 period, most of it was the FBI like entrapping people, most of them not mentally well, and then saying, hey, we caught a terrorist cell and we stopped this thing.
That was the vast majority of what happened.
So it was a lie as well.
Now, we're in the worst information environment that you could ever imagine.
I mean, you know, social media, one of the wildest things for me, Nick, has been trying to find out any sort of information on social media where it's incentivized to lie about things and use AI.
Like everything that you see, you have to verify and check multiple times.
And in a chaotic, kinetic environment, you can't.
Meanwhile, add in the possibility of, I don't know why this guy in Texas did what he did.
We're a country of mass shooters.
Maybe he was, you know, part of that.
But I do know that that environment suits authoritarians and fascists, which is they can say, hey, this thing happened over here.
This is a reason we have to crack down on people, which I think requires us to change the way that we absorb the news, the way we look at current events, and the way that we process things.
I think it requires more of us.
And we have to be very careful about if it's not this guy, a false flag of that for sure.
Don't forget when Zelensky got dressed down in the Oval Office by Trump, in that going on all that stuff, Zelensky had said something to the effect of, you know, we're in the middle of a war, so we can't safely have elections right now.
And Trump says, oh, you mean like in three and a half years from now, there's a war and we can just get rid of elections.
And then he kind of laughed.
And, you know, he makes light of these things.
And we always say, listen to him.
He's telling us what he's doing.
He's always trying to make it like a joke when there's, it's a very solemn subject he's talking about.
Myself about people being murdered and killed and war, and you know, but it certainly is of note now that as we're slowly approaching midterms, um, you know, and what I said about, you know, you know, I said, Well, are we still going to be mired in this thing, you know, in six months from now?
Well, it would be easy to do that and then be able to say, Okay, we have to have, we can't have elections right now.
Um, and that is has to be part of the background.
And it's what happens when you have someone like this, when enough, not enough people in the public believe a guy is a traitorous felon, right, who is simply doing a lot of this out of a motivation to protect himself from going to prison.
Um, this is what you get.
And then, Yahoo's the other example of that.
Yep, and they have elections in the fall as well.
And I, I, I look at all of this, Nick.
I'm shocked by how much of mainstream media, first of all, the number of closeted neocons.
Thomas Friedman came out and argued for this today.
I mean, it's incredible.
You couldn't script this shit who have come out in favor of a disastrous war.
Mainstream media has basically been calling this over since they found out that Khomeini died.
I don't see anything here.
I don't look at any of the facts on the ground.
I don't look at any geopolitical signals at this point that this thing is simply going to end tonight and Trump is going to be on an aircraft carrier in San Diego telling everybody mission accomplished.
I don't see that.
I don't know how you put it back in the box.
I really, truly don't.
And what you just said is exactly right.
As they create more chaos, whether or not it's terrorist cells or whether or not it's an ongoing war, using what the government propaganda gives them, they're going to use it to their advantage to destroy democracy and to take away rights and freedoms and protections.
Like that's just how authoritarians work.
That's not just an opinion.
That's what history shows us.
As long as this disaster goes on, the worse the danger grows around the world and the worse the danger grows in the homeland.
Make no mistake, this is not a democracy right now.
We're living not a republic.
This is not nothing.
This is somebody who is unilaterally just making decisions from the Oval Office.
And we have the Constitution is in tatters.
Yeah, it doesn't functioning in any way like what a republic should look like.
And we have senators who are like for the SAF Act for instance, they don't have to really bring it up too much, but like they're having trouble passing that, where they're getting the voter ID and all, and then marginalizing married women and all sorts of stuff like that.
They can't even get enough votes to get it going in the Senate, you know, for the Republican side.
And a couple of these assholes are like, just make it into an executive order.
What Keeps Us Independent00:01:41
Like you've been doing anything anyway.
Don't even worry about the, you know, the legislative process.
That is insane.
It should never come from anybody's mouth who's serving as a politician.
And yet here we are.
And I have no doubt that it's rooted in blackmail.
You know, that's what they're doing to everybody.
I don't buy the blackmail story.
I think that's an easy way to not confront the fact that these people are just doing what they want to do.
Like, the blackmail story helps you sleep better at night, but the disturbing truth of it is that there are authoritarians in this country who are acting on their free will.
Okay.
Well, if you want to get down that road, listen, we could talk about Epstein and 9-11.
One day we might have to have that conversation.
I'm exhausted by burgeoning World War III.
And on top of that, knowing that the country is run by corrupt criminal pedophiles.
I am this close to being one of the Roman soldiers in History of the Real Part 1 when one turns the other and when they're getting high.
And he goes, Do you care if it crumbles?
And he goes, what?
The Empire?
And he goes, fuck it.
No, I'm becoming the Joker.
Like, I really am.
And like I said, it's not just the Joker.
It's all of the Jokers rolled up into one.
Wow.
That's how I'm feeling.
All right, everybody.
That's going to do it for us.
We'll be back with the weekender episode on Friday.
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