Nick Houseman and Jared Yates Sexton dissect the dire Strait of Hormuz crisis, where European allies reject reopening the waterway while 5,000 Marines face unfavorable terrain. They argue the American liberal order has collapsed as nations pivot to BRICS currencies, raising fears China will exploit US distraction in the Middle East to seize Taiwan. The discussion scrutinizes Tucker Carlson's alleged back-channel talks with Iranian officials, dismissing CIA asset theories as political maneuvers against his critiques of Trump and Israel. Ultimately, the hosts suggest these escalating tensions reveal a deepening authoritarian shift where crises thin democratic discourse and constitutional rights face unprecedented erosion. [Automatically generated summary]
Maybe it's because we were recording this earlier in the day.
Oh, that's very interesting.
Well, energy levels up, I think.
Yeah, maybe.
Maybe that's very, very possible.
I'm fresh off of eating a little food myself.
And so I've got energy stored ready to go.
We're ready to rip ass on this thing.
We're going to get after it.
Okay.
Interesting choice of phrase, but okay, let's do it.
Let's rip some ass.
Right, everybody.
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Nick, we start.
I'm shocked.
I'm shocked and surprised.
I heard last week the president of the United States of America tell me that the war with Iran was pretty much done, pretty much all over.
And here we are barreling into the next week of belligerence.
Things ain't ain't great, Nick.
The American economy and world economies are sort of teetering on the edge and the brink of the razor.
Donald Trump, listen, if there's one thing I can say about that man, he is, he's an alliance maker, Nick.
He likes to do things by consensus.
He likes to bring in other countries, get everybody on the same page.
He doesn't act unilaterally.
Shockingly enough, he asked Europe to team up with the United States to now help him reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
And from everything I can tell, Europe has basically responded with one voice to say, no.
No.
That's a nice way of saying it.
I think fuck you.
I think fuck you is up there.
So weird how watching Europe start to navigate this on their own, as well.
Rumors are that about 5,000 Marines are being prepared for the possibility of going into the Strait of Hormuz.
This to me feels like another one of those chapters, a moment where the United States of America looks behind it and sees that nobody is following save for Israel.
Nick, how do you take this news?
Because this seems pretty big.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny.
See, my first instinct was to think that the way the Europeans are responding sounds exactly like Trump's campaigning, where he's like, no more wars, no more of this foreign stuff.
We're not going to America first, whatever.
Well, these are the guys who are saying, yeah, we're not interested in the wars.
And by the way, they're a little bit busy right now because they've been still doing things by supporting Ukraine in the midst of a war with Russia.
So if you broke it, you bought it.
That's what they're saying to him.
And they're absolutely right.
If Trump had wanted to build a coalition, which would have been far better than anything they're trying to do now.
And we've seen like, you know, the only like, if you want to call it success in the Middle East in terms of military actions has been when it was seven on one and they went in in 93.
So, you know, the idea that he would say, oh, now you got to help and help us out here.
Or even Ukraine, now you got to help us with drones and how to attack those.
It's like, it's, you know, it's just another layer upon layer of just how ineffective and how incompetent this administration was.
And the fear that we always had from Trump 1.0 of what was going to happen when foreign entanglements start to happen, right?
didn't happen in the first time, but somehow.
But this is what the big fear was.
I think might have been my biggest fear in 2016, 2017 that didn't come to fruition until now.
You know, as a political analyst, I, for one, after studying history, I've always thought that if you spend years demeaning your allies and betraying them in order to enrich yourself and enrich your relationship with a natural adversary like Russia, I always thought that that would end up working out when it came to alliance building.
It's really wild to just like shit on all of these people for years and basically tell them that they're on their own in terms of protecting themselves and something like NATO doesn't matter.
In fact, not only does NATO not matter, but you're going to hold them hostage and ransom to make them pay for more of their defense and overturning the American military liberal order all in a couple of years.
I don't know how that didn't work, Nick.
I don't know how insulting these people and flipping them off and telling them to go to hell, how that didn't end up working.
So what happens now?
The Strait of Hormuz remains closed because Iran basically has a complete natural advantage.
And Nick, I cannot believe that every couple of days now, we talked about this at the beginning of it.
The leaks that have come out of this operation are incredible.
And for people who are trying to like learn how to analyze stuff, have you noticed that every couple of days, the New York Times or the Washington Post will run an article that's like how the Trump administration got this wrong, right?
And then they have a whole giant story from all kinds of sources that say they just didn't think about this.
They simply didn't consider the Strait of Hormuz.
They didn't get oil prepared for this thing.
So they have walked into the quagmire of all quagmires.
And on top of that, it has provided more than enough awareness that the American liberal order has collapsed.
What are the European countries going to do, Nick?
They're now negotiating with Iran one-on-one.
That's not supposed to happen.
You're not supposed to have American allies negotiating with the belligerent on the other side of the war with America.
So they're all making deals with Iran.
And guess what Iran has realized, Nick?
There's an advantage to never reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
In fact, they can punish America by never opening this up.
And they can start charging countries to use this.
And guess what, Nick?
Here's the wildest thing in all of it.
They can determine what currency is used.
So all of a sudden, the American dollar, which was the basis of the world economy and the petrol market, that goes away.
And guess who Iran's with?
China and BRICS.
So they have literally created the mechanism by which the economic American world order could possibly be destroyed in the long run.
I don't know about you.
It seems bad.
Jared, you sound like you spent some time thinking about this.
It's a fucking mess.
It's a fucking mess, Nick.
But you know, the problem is when they realize what you just laid out, which would have taken all of an hour to look up.
They knew it before this thing even started.
So this is why the only way to combat that, at least the way you look at it in their mindset, is boots on the ground.
They'd have to take over Iran completely, dismantle the entire infrastructure and just become a satellite of the United States.
It's really, right?
Like the only way they could control that.
Nick, and here's the thing.
I'm going to lay something out for people.
Are you ready for this?
I'm going to give, I'm going to, I'll just give people a little bit of a preview of this.
So let's say that these Marines go in to secure the Strait of Hormuz, right?
Number one, they would be island hopping.
How's that turned out in the past?
For American Marines.
How's that go?
Are you referring to Iwo Jima, perhaps?
I kind of am.
One more thing, Nick.
The topography of Iran, the Strait of Hormuz area, it's pretty flat and like a bowl.
Guess what's around it?
Fucking hills and mountains and terrible terrain.
I'm no military expert, but usually you favor who has the high ground, do you not?
Why don't you ask the Houthis?
Why don't you ask the Houthis who the America had to settle with because they beat their ass?
Yeah.
This is a terrible.
terrible situation.
Why do you hate America, Jared?
Because I'm looking at this problem.
And if, and, and it all looks, Nick, it looks like they're going to send Marines.
It looks like they're going to send the Marines in.
So I might have to have my son come on the show, who you know, because we had this incredible talk the other day about like, how do you attack this area of the world?
Because, you know, Persia, when that was Persia and the Persian Empire, you know, people had a hard time with that one.
They really couldn't get, you know, through.
And he had a really, you know, fact.
I mean, I think it's Alexander the Great was the one guy who could kind of figure out how to do this a long time ago, which, you know, one more.
There's one more.
And if I'm not incorrect on this, there was one other time and that's during the World War II period in which the joint forces of the British and the Soviets did it.
And if anybody pays attention, the Soviet plus the British forces together is a pretty substantial force.
Right.
And by the way, Soviets ain't walking through that door, by the way.
No, Rick Petino and the Soviets are not walking through that door.
If you look at it in 42, because this came up in our conversation, they had machine guns.
And as far as we could tell, the Iranian army then, or Persian army, whatever who was there at that point did not have nearly any kind of technological advance enough to fight that.
That would have been an unfair fight.
So yes, it's a real problem.
I mean, we've already heard people in the administration talking about, and it's not leaks, Jared.
You know, you're talking about how like whistleblowers or whatever.
They're telling us in public to the press they don't know what they're doing.
They don't even, I'm not sure they realize the Strait of Hormuz is the entire coast is Iran across the northern coast of that.
It didn't sound like they understood that part.
And so, you know, and Hegseth is talking, hey, what's the big deal?
Just try it.
See what happens.
Send your SIF through.
I don't think anything's going to happen.
That's their plan.
And the only way you're going to stop this is, yes, is to try and throw.
But like 5,000 Marines, that doesn't sound good.
If they said 100,000 Marines, okay, maybe now I can understand what they're trying to do here.
5,000 Marines, to my mind, with what you're describing in terms of the terrain is a duck shoot.
Listen, and here's the thing for someone like me, I'm not a military analyst, but in order to understand modern geopolitics, particularly this problem, I have to get up to speed on them.
So I'll tell you what my read is, Nick, from what I've been paying attention to.
What America keeps saying and Israel keeps saying is that they're taking down the weapon systems in Iran and soon they'll own the skies.
That's what they've said.
Iran understands that this is one chapter into the next.
The next chapter isn't necessarily shooting rockets into Tel Aviv, even though Tel Aviv doesn't have interceptors anymore and American bases have all been decimated and basically every embassy has been, you know, given up at this point.
The next chapter is getting ready for this giant fucking mess that we're talking about now.
It's moving into that.
And guess what?
It's not like bombing and these runs.
It's not like that's going to get rid of their military, which is like a million strong.
It's not going to get rid of their advantages.
It's not going to end the scourge of modern drone warfare.
Like that, there is a huge disconnect.
And watching it is strange, Nick.
And I don't know if you, I don't know if you have this.
Like you're a coach.
I'm an old teacher.
And part of being a good teacher or a good coach is understanding where the disconnect happens from an individual to the teaching, right?
And the information that's coming across.
What aren't they understanding?
How do we make them understand?
Watching what the Trump administration is saying, along with the military intelligence and the disconnect.
It seems as if they're in meetings with the military and the military is telling them what's going on and it's going completely above their heads.
They have no idea what's going on.
And so as a result, Nick, what are they doing?
They're acting out of hubris.
And I'll tell you what happens when you mix hubris with military expeditions.
You get a lot of people who die.
And that's what I'm looking at at this point is the developing tragedy that anybody with like half a brain can see coming if this thing allows to keep going down this path.
Jared, do you know how many people have already died?
U.S. forces have already died in this country?
I think officially we're at 16 or 17.
Yeah.
And that's not including all the wounded too.
Yeah, we don't even know how many people are wounded.
Yeah.
It's frightening that we'd have that many casualties this early into a conflict where we haven't put boots on the ground.
Airstrikes only.
Yeah.
And it's like, even if it's an accident, it doesn't matter.
They never would have been there had they not declared this war, which is, you know, even more tragic.
So A, that's a big problem.
B, what I like about what Iran is doing is they recognize, okay, we're going to fight a war against economics infrastructure, right?
That's basically what they know they do.
That's how important they are to the world in terms of their oil production.
So what is, you know, if that's the case, right?
And they want to be able to weaken and cripple the entire global economy.
And then you hear Trump say stuff like, oh, we can just take out their oil in a second with no any problems.
Now, is that true?
I mean, they can take out all their oil production in like five minutes.
They can take out some of it, sure.
Well, I would argue they could probably take it all out.
Yeah, but yeah, that doesn't help anybody.
Yeah.
Because remember, when we went into Iraq and then we were to take over, we didn't attack the oil fields.
What did they do?
They actually tried to blow them up or like light them on fire so that we would, you know, because they knew it was over at that point.
But I think Iran understands that if they want to attack and destroy the oil infrastructure in Iran, and then they hope eventually they're going to take it over, it will destroy the economy anyway.
Like that's what the dumbness is when you hear Trump say this shit like he's a blustering Clint Eastwood character in an 80s movie.
New World Order Bullshit00:03:02
Nick, but even to, I'm so glad that we're getting into the nuts and bolts of this.
The only option if you're to bypass Iranian oil is Russian oil.
And let me check something here.
Let me check the depth charts and the relationships.
So let me get this straight.
In order to bypass Iran, you need to work with the country that is allied with Iran and giving information and strategic help to Iran.
So last time I checked, that means there's no fucking path to success here.
None.
It's almost like the New World Orders is bullshit.
It was complete and utter horseshit.
And Iran, they're exactly right.
It's the thing where the American capitalist global empire, they've now said we're going to start targeting corporations in the Middle East.
Well, there's a lot of them because America went in and placed them everywhere.
So there's plenty of time to do that.
And Nick, you want to talk about other indicators and signals?
We heard for a while, like some insiders, they would say it like Davos or they would say, you know, some sort of like little conversation.
They'd be like, the American stock market really doesn't make much sense, right?
It's really doesn't, it seems almost like it's not working correctly and something's wrong with it.
That's that's been completely blown up.
Everyone at this point is like, we have no idea why it's doing what it's doing right now.
The only thing that we know is it's not working.
And I use the analogy of a car all the time.
When your car starts making like a little bit of a noise or you feel a little bit of something when you're steering it and you're like, man, I think I'm going to have to deal with that at some point.
It's not making a noise.
It's not feeling a little bit different.
You've lost your tires at this point and you're trying to get on the off-ramp in order to go get help.
And guess what?
You got a hell of a long steer to take.
But, but what stupid fool would not know the tires are gone off of the while you're trying to drive the car?
Like, that's the worst.
The person who hasn't driven his own car his entire life.
Right.
Yeah.
This is a bumpy.
This is weird, right?
It's like, yeah, I actually want to liken it to it.
Reminds me a little bit of never in the show Madman.
I don't know if you watch that show.
Sure.
Love it.
But at some point, a young exec finds out.
It's spoiler alert.
I'm sorry.
It's 20 years ago, right?
But, you know, he finds out that one of the partners is not who he says he is.
He's got a whole other identity.
And so he's like, I'm going to tell everybody unless you make me a partner.
And they fucking laugh at him.
And what you realize, it's like, nobody cares about who you say you are, what secrets you might have.
I mean, this even extends to something like Epstein, too.
Like, nobody gives a shit about any of this stuff.
And it's like he pinned his entire hopes on this whole thing of exposing all stuff.
And it feels like that's what Trump and these guys are.
We're just going to, you know, lob some missiles and they're just going to melt and they're going to say sorry.
And we're going to take over the whole thing.
And what they're going to realize is that nobody like Russia doesn't care if you're attacking Iran.
The Coming Shift Today00:15:36
Iran doesn't care if you're attacking them.
They're all going to be able to benefit from each other when money is involved.
And then it doesn't matter.
Well, and let's move beyond Iran and Russia.
Nick, the most powerful people in the world, the wealthiest people in the world, are they only in America?
No.
Do they only work with America?
No.
They don't care about any of this.
This is great power bullshit that just serves their bottom line.
That's it.
Yeah.
And guess what?
That's bad for us.
It's bad for you and me and the people listening and the people who are going to be affected.
They can get on a ship tomorrow or a ship.
They can get on a helicopter tomorrow and go to one of their bunkers in New Zealand.
They're fine.
Meanwhile, over in Taiwan.
Meanwhile, over in Taiwan.
Okay.
Okay.
So maybe, maybe people haven't heard this.
That this is always one of the more fun things about living in this new, like, weird environment.
For people who don't know, in the middle of all of this, Taiwan looked up a couple of days ago and they're like, oh, that's strange.
There's 26 military planes that are circling Taiwan and the borders, as well as seven naval crafts, which means that China has bumped up the number of sort of sorties that they're doing and missions that they're doing.
Taiwan suddenly looked up and said, Hey, I don't know that we're being invaded, but something is definitely up right now.
Well, but there is a context to that as well.
Is if you live in Taiwan, apparently it's a daily thing where they're buzzing the tower with their F-16s all the time.
So they didn't do this for like a couple of weeks.
That's what was so strange about it.
And then they ramped it back up and now they ramped it even beyond what is normal, right?
So that definitely got to have people on edge.
And again, we said this before.
It's like, you know, if America is tied up in other things and they have their eye off the ball, is that going to empower China to then finally once and for all do this?
What's weird is China already assumes that Taiwan's part of their country.
It's like the baseline default setting.
And that's just, it's just weird to hear their official proclamations about Taiwan because it's like they already, it's already like theirs.
And it's just a question of, we'll just flip a switch and then we're just going to take it over.
And that's how scary it could be for anyone living there.
I don't know.
I don't know.
It certainly seems like it would be an opportune time if China wanted to do it where they wouldn't push back.
We've been saying for a while now: like, what are the strategic reasons not to do it?
And by the way, it's not just like getting Taiwan back, it's also cornering the market on like, you know, conductor chips, semiconductor chips, which is, you know, what Taiwan is offering and what China necessarily wants, besides, you know, the land.
But Nick, that's the question here.
Is this one of these feints where China is sort of like seeing what America will do while it's busy over here?
And guess what the answer is?
Not much.
Not much.
And for the record, Nick, do you think for a second that if China invaded Taiwan, do you think that Donald Trump would step up for Taiwan's defense?
You know, that's an interesting question.
The amount of money involved in all these things, you know what I mean, corrupt or otherwise, could it's interesting.
I wonder if he would look at that too.
But like, I don't think we have, I think the answer is we don't have enough military presence to be able to handle that either way, right?
I think that's the answer.
Don't know.
Don't know.
And it would help if you knew.
Yeah.
That's the whole thing.
So why do you do something like this?
It's a lot like a pump fake in basketball.
Is the person going to jump and try and block the shot?
Oh, they're not going to.
I guess I can take the shot or I can drive, right?
There's options that you go through.
So is this, and this is the real issue at the heart of it.
I don't know if China is getting ready to go.
I don't know.
I can't tell you for sure whether or not it's going to happen now or next year or whatever.
But here's what I do know, Nick.
I know that every time that something like this happens, I look around and I'm like, oh, that's right.
The American order has crumbled and they know it.
And we don't know it yet.
You and I know it.
And the people who pay attention know it.
The Trump administration doesn't know it.
They're assholes around them don't know it.
But what is obvious is that the point of a power shift is here.
And we're already living in the world that is sort of that liminal state between the American order and what comes next.
We are watching with each of these feints, we are watching another opportunity for us to be plunged into that world.
That's it.
Like this liminal state that we're in, we're not going to live in this for the rest of our lives.
Something is going to shift in some way, shape, or form.
And guess what?
Going and doing a dumb fucking thing like declaring war on Iran is going to get you to that after place faster.
If I were China, I would certainly take advantage.
I might have to, I might wait a little bit longer because, again, is this excursion, I ask you to call it, limited to the Strait of Hormuz or are they going to use it as like a bulkhead and then make an invasion in there?
And as soon as that happens, then China should be like, oh, great.
There's because there's no way they'd have enough troops to be able to handle that in two different regions of the world.
But I've also been saying this for a long time is that I think that the meetings have already been had.
I think that Trump and China and Russia have already divided up the world and they're not going to get in the way.
I mean, I think there's probably less of a meeting and more of an understanding.
I think Donald Trump is much more of a looks around and realized like, oh, I'm in a new place.
How did I get here?
You know, you ever have one of those days where you're like, man, I don't know where the day went.
You know, and you're like, what is it that I did today?
Someone says, what'd you do today?
And you're like, oh, man, what did I do today?
That is Donald Trump's permanent state.
You know what I look at?
I think he's like the guy who just got into prison and he's going to try and slug the biggest guy there, like Haley, to do that the first day, right?
And then while he's in the middle of that, like someone else shivs him in the back.
Like that's the whole point here nick, is that it it would be hard enough to navigate this mess with competent leadership like it would take for for a competent president and a competent administration right now to navigate this.
It would be tough like it'd be really.
You know those computer games where it's like turn based and you're you're, like you're you're fighting World War Ii or your civilization or whatever it is.
You could understand, You could take like all of America's best, like military leaders and minds, and put them into that game in this situation.
It would still be hard.
Really, really hard.
Meanwhile, these are people who are lucky not to choke on their pins.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Jared, you know that movie Limitless where the guy has an unlimited brainpower?
It's the opposite of limitless.
Yeah.
But I'm convinced I would be a lot closer to that path of that guy had a game like you described not existed in my life.
So I'm having, you know, a little trauma now having to hear.
But you know what I mean?
Like you could take this scenario and put in like Abraham Lincoln and Mike and you could put it like just put in all of them and it would still be a challenge to navigate the fall of American Empire.
It's because it is a growing problem that gets worse and worse.
But it comes down to this.
What is the old axiom?
It's never interrupt your opponent when they're hurting themselves.
So is this a case where you're just like, go ahead, do what you need to do.
We'll help Iran and they will absolutely bleed you for a very long time.
They'll allow this process to go through.
And, you know, if China plays it the right way, Nick, they might not even need to invade Taiwan.
Like they, they, they might just like end up the victor in all of this and the shift will change.
The currency and fiat will change and then we'll go from there.
Don't even know.
It's a lot like an apprentice episode where the guy starts doing badly and you're just like, just shut up.
Don't say anything.
He'll continue to screw himself the whole time.
And that's really what it was.
The irony, even though fucking Trump is the guy who hosted this show, doesn't even know his own show.
He doesn't know that he's a guy in that he's the I always forget the term you use for the wrestling, at least the foil.
The heel?
The heel.
He's the heel.
He doesn't know.
Yeah.
Man, it's such a fucking mess.
And again, it's like the Velociraptors trying to fence.
Like, why not faint towards an invasion of Taiwan and see what America does?
And I bet they didn't do shit.
I bet they didn't do anything because there's not much to do.
Right.
Yeah.
And there goes my theory about how Trump's just going to declare victory and then pull out completely.
It looks like, yes, they've gotten themselves into this now where, you know, they're going to have, you know, can they secure the straight of Hormuz?
I don't know.
And the way it looks, I mean, the way this has progressed in the timetables, I wouldn't be shocked if we have boots on the ground by this coming weekend.
Like, I really wouldn't.
And then meanwhile, Europe, we talked about it.
Europe is now negotiating individually with Iran.
They're having like small little discussions where the Europeans might share weapons with one another.
So there might be, you know, like France and Germany, maybe England, maybe they'll form a little pact, but they're withdrawing within themselves.
They're not going to invade countries.
They're not going to try and overthrow people.
They're just going to like hold steady and get ready for possible war with Russia.
But NATO itself, this is an opportunity for them to prove to Trump how important they are, right?
And say, well, we're not going to help you.
So you're going to realize this.
Now, that's not great humanitarian-wise.
And, you know, the other thing is, again, it's like, shit, if, if Iran crumbled or whatever and was taken over in some sort of democratic thing, that should be a good thing, right?
Like you have these hawks, I'm sure, who are clinging with their dying hands to this notion that like, you know, they're going to clear this all out.
I mean, Israel has widened the war as well.
It's a Lebanon, and who knows how far they're going to go.
And there has the thinking on that side has to be, this is our once and for all chance to like clear out this whole thing, install like, I mean, puppets, but like democratically or the sheen of democratic run, at least they'll be more friendly to the West.
I don't know.
Is that good?
Could that be good?
Could we ever have a good outcome from something like that?
No, it's not going to work.
It's not going to work.
It's not going to work.
And with Israel, like we've talked about, Israel is at war with like seven, eight countries right now.
Maybe, maybe nine, if you now count Iran.
Like, what are they going to do?
The one thing that they, well, they've got two things, Nick.
One is that they had big brother United States of America, which I don't know if you ever ran across these people when you were younger.
You ever meet like, there was this little asshole kid that I went to elementary school with, absolute shit kid.
And he wanted to fight all the time.
He was little.
And he walked around with these two bigger guys.
And if you fought him, the two bigger guys got involved.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Like that's what Israel had on its side.
It had America.
Well, now all of a sudden, America is in the middle of a developing and worsening quagmire.
Okay.
So what's number two?
Nuclear weaponry?
Yeah.
So what?
Israel's just going to be like, guess what, Iran?
We're finally going to drop this or we're finally going to go over here and we're going to drop this here.
We're going to drop this there.
I'm not going to rule it out because Benjamin Netanyahu is a fucking monster if he's alive for the record.
But I don't know.
I don't know where that off-ramp is.
I don't know what the end game is.
It reminds me a lot about watching Breaking Bad, Nick.
Like, where's this end?
You know what I mean?
You're just compounding the problem over and over and over again.
Well, let's interrupt our regular schedule of programming to talk about this notion that did you see the Scott Besson interview that he got interrupted in the middle of and it comes back.
Here's the problem.
Besson sounds shaken normally.
So it's hard to know if he was more shaken up after he had that intervention or in the middle of an interview.
People think that that was him finding out that Netanyahu was killed.
I'm not sure that would, you know, I mean, it's kind of a, that's too bad, but there's a, is it AI?
Was that Netanyahu thing to the camera?
AI?
I don't know.
We're back.
We're back to that show where you're asking me if Epstein's still alive.
I don't fucking know.
I'm a fucking peasant, man.
I'm a serf.
I'm just, I'm, I'm paying attention to the cycles of the moon.
Is God mad at us?
Is that why we're losing battles?
I don't fucking know.
Maybe Netanyahu's dead.
Maybe he's not.
That video was weird.
That video is weird.
AI vibe.
Sure, for sure.
So yeah, a lot of interesting things, strange stuff.
And then it makes you wonder what would happen.
They're target number one now, those guys, Trump and Nanyahu.
And it's like, it makes you wonder how that would play out.
I wouldn't shed a tear.
That's how that would play out.
I wouldn't lose a moment of sleep.
Right.
Oh, I hear you.
Ding dong, the witch is dead.
And I'm waiting for that sign.
Hey, here's a hypothetical before we move on.
It's not the weekender, but I'm glad we've opened this up.
What do you think would happen if Iran carried out a terrorist attack on the United States of America that got Donald Trump and maybe a couple of members of his administration?
How would people react to that?
Like, would they be like, oh, my God, you got our president?
We now have to exact revenge?
Would they rally around like the Vance administration?
I don't think so.
Well, there would be a lot of cheering in the streets, I think, anyway.
It's a weird bittersweet thing.
I mean, obviously the cheering would come from sort of natural causes, but yeah, listen, I think that that would galvanize some, enough of the country.
We would have an Afghanistan style attack on Iran.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
All right, we got to move on from speculation.
It's not the weekender, Nick.
Come on.
Sorry.
Come on.
The FCC is saying that it is going to investigate network news for its Iran coverage while Donald Trump over the weekend.
This is great.
Says that outlets like the Wall Street Journal and others who are talking about developments in the war are guilty of treason, saying, quote, they should be brought up on charges for treason.
And last time I checked, Nick, that means that the journalist reporting on the war should be murdered.
So this is a new development.
It is?
It's a development of an ongoing story.
And this is straight out of the late night wars with Kimmel and all those guys, too, where they were trying to take away licenses.
And then, you know, basically to censor the news, right?
Because they're not coming out of any, like, if you were going to even pretend to do this.
And by the way, like SEC commissioner Ana Gomez, who is, I guess, not equal to Brendan Carr, but like she's on the commission was like, this is going nowhere.
There's no way illegally you could do this, but they could muck it up in the short term, right?
And they could cause enough interference where, you know, obviously we've already seen.
Is it clear to you now that CBS is so it's completely neutered at this point?
Oh, CBS is completely bought and sold as a propaganda arm completely.
And they've already been signaling, by the way, that when CNN is bought by Ellison, that they're going to do the same thing without even having to do anything with the FCC.
Tucker Carlson CIA Asset00:13:40
Like that's the scary part.
That's the thing that they're probably trying to distract us with this when really it's like when they when these things are bought and they controlled.
So but it's it's the same thing we've talked about.
And if you were going to do this, though, you would have needed to have provided evidence for whatever lies that they say that they're telling.
They don't have anything.
They just don't like the coverage.
And so they're just going to scream this way.
And I don't know, 100 million people in the country are going to believe it.
Well, I will say that this for me is a signal of something where this can go.
Most of the time, you and I talk about like, oh, Trump is saying this about the free press.
It's showing his fascistic instincts, right?
It tells us what he would do if he was capable of doing it.
Now, all of a sudden, we're in a war.
And so let's say that we put 5,000 Marines on the Strait of Hormuz.
And let's say that it's an absolute bloodbath, which leads to more troops and it turns into a giant, gigantic clash.
Guess what?
I've got bad news for everybody.
The president enjoys certain emergency powers.
So if all of a sudden this is to escalate to the point where it gets out of control and Donald Trump has absolutely no support whatsoever, yeah, we could see like things that we never even imagined.
We could see the restriction of constitutional rights and protections, the likes of which like it would set your hair on fire.
And guess what?
They've got competent people behind them that would look back into times in American history where this has happened where, I don't know, Japanese Americans were interred or people were being rounded up and shipped off, specifically if they were communist or if they were critical of the government.
I could see if this thing goes down the very, very bad path, if we end up in the very bad place, I could see these emergency powers being used because they want to use them, period.
And so if they found the opportunity to do it and circumstances were conducive, they would absolutely do it.
So why wouldn't they?
Absolutely.
And by the way, a lot of those legally are short-term solutions that the government has given granted power to the executive.
But that's the worry is that like, okay, they do it for the 100 days, 120 days, but then they're like, yeah, this is kind of nice.
In that interim, we're going to make sure that this is permanent.
And that the only one who's going to tell us that we're going to stop this is us.
And that's how easy, that's how easy it is to do it to have a democracy crumble in one easy year, right?
Or a year and a half, whatever it's going to be.
You know, you can do the how to disable a Democratic Republicans in 120 days.
Like that's basically what they've done and or 300, 400 days.
It's it's it's frightening.
And yeah, there doesn't seem to be anybody out there who can, you know. get it one step ahead of the game and sort of stop them from doing any of this.
Yeah.
And by the way, just a reminder that cable news and corporate media, they're actually doing a really awful job of covering this war.
Like most people have no idea what the hell is going on.
And they've relied on, you know, state propaganda in order to put together their quote unquote understanding.
It is, again, the thing that we saw going back to Trump one where he's hanging out with Kim Jong-un.
And he's like, man, Fox News is not as nice to me as North Korea's media.
What does he want?
He wants a media that is completely engaged in fealty.
And in the midst of all of this, if those emergency powers open up to him, and it's really, I mean, again, it's a hop, skip, and a jump away from getting to that point because American, there's a precedent for American presidents enjoying those types of powers and cracking down on constitutional rights and protections.
It's a hop, a skip, and a jump, and he will absolutely do it if he gets the opportunity.
Yeah, scary.
Well, other good news, friend of the show, Tucker Carlson, who has been a vociferous critic of this war for a variety of reasons, which I'll get into in just a second.
He came out this weekend with a really interesting little message regarding his current status.
So the other day I found out that the CIA is preparing some kind of criminal referral against me, a crime report, the Department of Justice on the basis of a supposed crime I committed.
What's that crime?
Well, talking to people in Iran before the war, they read my texts.
So the crime under consideration apparently would be the Foreign Agent Act or something like that, acting as an agent of a foreign power.
And I don't expect this to go anywhere.
I'm not too worried about an actual criminal case against me for a bunch of reasons.
One, I'm not an agent of a foreign power.
Unlike a lot of people commenting on U.S. politics and global affairs, I have only one loyalty and that's the United States and have never acted against it.
Its interests are the only interests I care about because I'm from here and I have a lot of kids.
So that's not a concern.
I've also never taken money from anybody.
Don't need it.
Don't want it.
And that's provable.
And moreover, it's my job to talk to everybody all the time and try and figure out what's happening around.
So, Nick, I've got a lot of thoughts on this, but what do you make of friend of the pod, Tucker Carlson, possibly being charged as a foreign agent by the Department of Justice after an investigation by the CIA?
You know, it sounded familiar to me.
I thought, gosh, have I heard him say something like this before?
And guess what, Jared?
He's done this before.
And I was wondering, like, is it a ratings?
Like, has he gotten a little bit out in the weeds here?
No one's paying attention to him.
Oh, wait, let's get back in the news again.
You know, do I believe that he might have some buddies over at the FBI or NSA or whatever who might say, hey, just by the way, and if you don't remember, it was, I don't know, five, six years ago where he said, the NSA is tapping my phone for a similar thing.
And I think he was just caught up in a monitoring thing, which, by the way, if you're wondering out there, they're listening to everything.
Everything you write, everything you text is out there.
And you're most likely so small and so whatever, it's not, you know, it doesn't really bubble up to anything, but Tucker Carlson will.
So I think this is just more of this fluff bullshit thing that, you know, that, you know, listen, of course, anyone, you talk to somebody in Iran, that's not illegal.
And I know I'm sure that was probably just him getting some information about what's going on.
But is there any other way you can picture that?
Is that the conversation would have been such that Farah would have been invoked or could be invoked?
So, Nick, I'm going to give you two answers.
Two answers for the price of one.
Are you ready?
One is serious political analyst, and the second is Jared Yates Sexton.
Are you ready?
Are you ready for these two answers?
First things first.
I think there is a very real possibility that Tucker has been tipped off to the possibility that the DOJ is investigating him.
And here's the reason why.
Mommy and Daddy are fighting.
Tucker Carlson, in order to pursue his particular audience and his particular base and his own particular product, he had to break from Donald Trump when it came to Epstein, Israel, and Iran, right?
He has one foot in the Groyper, fascistic sort of far right, right?
So as a result, he had to critique Donald Trump while continuing to talk to Donald Trump and advising him.
In fact, Tucker went to the White House multiple times in order to tell Donald Trump not to do this.
Nick, weirdly enough, he was gifted one of those pairs of Florsheim shoes during one of his meetings with Donald Trump.
Eventually, he had to critique this stuff while critiquing Donald Trump.
Trump then declared that he is no longer MAGA, which is an incredible thing for the high pope of MAGA to say that someone is not MAGA.
And that has created a rift between him and Donald Trump.
And so it could be the administration using the DOJ and the CIA to go after.
And by the way, Tucker, Tucker has been an unofficial foreign agent of Russia, Hungary, and who even knows, right?
So that's the serious political analysis.
Are you ready?
You ready for what Jared Yates Sexton has to say about it?
Yeah, can you put Mr. Sexton on the phone, please?
Yes.
So here's the thing.
For people who are listening and for people who are watching on YouTube, I'll give you some visual cues, but for people listening to the podcast, I will modulate my voice in order to give my further meaning of this.
Are you ready?
Very nice of you.
Tucker Carlson is absolutely not an agent of the CIA.
He has never been a member of the CIA.
And it would not be an inter-agency squabble between different members of the CIA who are trying to do this or trying to do that.
And meanwhile, there's never a civil war within intelligence agencies in which the left hand and the right hand is doing separate things.
That's never happened.
And he would never be tipped off that the CIA was doing something like this by somebody who is one of his associates in the CIA.
And you would never see these kinds of maneuvers happening while he helms one of the most popular far-right and influential shows in the world.
And it is deeply, deeply pushing against the MAGA consensus and setting up the new neo-Nazi sort of order that will take over after MAGA.
That would never happen, Nick.
By the way, now you got me picturing like this deep, you know, he's an asset and he's deep undercover or whatever.
He's like having these deep discussions with in Hungary.
And then out of that, he goes, oh, yeah.
And by the way, can he come on the show?
That would be, and that's what he would do, right?
That's what he did.
That's what he did with Orban.
That's what he did.
Putin looked him in the eye and like, you didn't get accepted into the CIA, did you, Tucker?
Because that was KGB on CIA violence.
Wow.
Yes.
That's a fascinating thing.
Because it's like, yeah, and by the way, it's a problem like Kushner in a different way where Kushner is doing his high-level talks to represent the government.
Oh, and by the way, let's do this deal where I'm going to make a couple billion dollars as well on top of that.
It'd be great.
Kushner is absolutely a civilian.
Wow.
Yeah.
He just, he's like stalling, Nick.
Just finds himself in these rooms.
It's so strange how it happens.
Yeah well, he must have been talking to some pretty high up people in Iran, wouldn't you say?
I mean, there's no, I have to assume he was talking to Iranian civilians nick yeah, and so at that point, the back channel, I don't know, it's interesting.
Um, isn't it weird that Tucker has spent most of his time uh, forwarding the agenda of bricks, countries like Russia and the emerging international authoritarian order that wants to take over for the fallen American order?
Isn't that weird, I?
I have to assume he was talking to uh, Iranian civilians in this case, sure?
I mean, you can throw on top of that how he crucified Ted Cruz over Israel sure, to give you some insight into how he feels about them compared to like, how he might feel about Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, it's interesting.
By the way all uh, one of the great things, and by great I, it's obvious that war is tragic and none of this should happen, and it's an illegal, corrupt war, and the things are happening now.
So people are terrible.
But one of the great things that happens with war nick, is it really brings things into clarity.
Ted Cruise, saying we shouldn't say Christ is king, because that's Anti-semitic, is a wild thing to see from a guy who has been touted as an evangelical savior in waiting.
It's also, of course, what we saw from Huckabee when he was talking to Tucker Carlson, how people are voting, the way that they're showing up and all of this like the crisis of war it.
It makes that veneer that we're always talking about that much thinner.
We're just asking questions, Jared.
We're just asking questions allegedly.
I I can't even, Nick I can't even imagine Tucker Carlson having been a CIA asset and I can't even imagine what it would mean for the trajectory of right-wing politics and corporate right-wing news if he were a CIA asset.
I can't even imagine what that would mean for things.
Thank god he has never been an asset of the CIA.
They got a cue, the maniacal laughter I.
I do it pretty well, but I don't want to.
I'm not, would they?
I mean, that's the funniest thing about it Nick, is it's like you're not going to take a CIA, an alleged CIA asset, and put him in jail like you're just not, especially when he has the largest media platform.
That was Tucker Carlson shooting a shot across the bow of the administration saying, stop investigating me.
That's that's what that is makes sense.
Deep politics are wild, aren't they like, when you really move away from just like oh, the midterms are looking like a banger and all of a sudden you're like no, this is where the bread's actually buttered, sure that that's.
By the way, money power, all that stuff is yeah that's, that's the big calling, but like this other stuff i'm sure is uh, is a uh intoxicating, intoxicating brew for a lot of people as well.
Well it's, it is, and actually it's.
It's very alluring, because when you start knowing about the moves within the moves we know this you, how many, how many books have we taken down that has, like you know, skull and duggery?
It's it's it's, it's alluring right, but when you actually start to see how this stuff works, you start to realize That, like, oh my God, like the Matrix didn't go far enough.
Right.
Well, by the way, like, lost in like three days of the condor was, you know, in the very beginning, he's reading books and he's finding in these novels, you know, coded information and stuff like that.
Like, that's probably true.
Rabbit Holes Never End00:01:00
Oh, yeah, no, no, for sure.
Well, no, and then you look at, Nick, it never ends.
It's like there are all these stories about how like American literature was seeded by the CIA in order to, you know, push down dissent.
Like, there's all kinds of shit like that.
It never ends.
But the bigger problem is that, like, there's so many doors to open and look at that eventually, like, we talk about.
You look around, you're like, I don't have a fucking clue what's actually going on, but I have the beginnings of an idea, which is more than most people have.
Yeah.
Do yourself a favor, look up CIA and Jackson Pollock.
It's a great time, everybody.
All right.
That's going to do it for this.
We went down enough rabbit holes for a Tuesday episode.
Absolutely.
Enough of them.
All right.
We will be back with the Week Under Edition on Friday.
You know, head over to patreon.com/slash MikeBreakpodcast, listen to that entire episode and support the show.
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