Feb. 23, 2026 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
47:46
Armed Man Shot and Killed at Mar-a-Lago, Cartel Violence Rages Through Puerta Vallarta & the Threat of Regime Change in Iran
Joshua Lysak and Jack Pisovic dissect the Mar-a-Lago shooting—21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin’s violent breach tied to online radicalization fueled by baseless Epstein conspiracy theories—while Sheriff Mark Lamb links cartel escalation in Puerto Vallarta (from $500M to $13B under Biden) to Trump’s border policies and past U.S. arms trafficking like Fast and Furious. Meanwhile, the episode explores Trump’s 15% global tariffs, backed by bipartisan support, as a shift from Biden’s free-trade stance, and warns of Iran regime-change risks, citing Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Kaine’s caution amid potential strikes, contrasting with past failed interventions like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Economic protectionism and military restraint clash in a volatile geopolitical moment. [Automatically generated summary]
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This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth generation warfare.
A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.
This is Human Events with your host, Jack Pisovic.
Christ is King.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard today's edition of Human Events Daily.
We are here live.
Today is February 23rd, 2026, Ann O'Domini.
And as you can see, we are here live at Liberty University, where Joshua Lysak, who here joins me in studio.
We're in Dave Brad's studio, as you can tell.
We're going to be speaking later this evening in beautiful Lynchburg, Virginia.
Of course, even though we are here, we're doing Human Events Daily.
This show is our show.
It is not the university show.
And of course, these opinions are ours.
What have we seen, folks?
Unhumans activity continues.
Another day, another example of an attempted assassination of President Trump.
This individual, 21 years old, Austin Tucker Martin, shot dead on the scene while attempting to and actually having breached the perimeter of Mar-a-Lago with a gas can and a shotgun in some sort of attempt, it seems, to kill the president and burn down his home.
Joshua Lysak, we've got you for a couple of minutes today.
I wanted to get right into it.
Why do we keep seeing these types of activity?
One of the things that all of these scenarios have in common with the attempted assassination, first of candidate Trump and now President Trump, seems to be the combination of online radicalization and isolation.
We seem to see something like that with Thomas Matthew Crooks.
This was an individual, of course, that's the Butler Pennsylvania shooter.
And we saw that something similar with Ryan Wesley Ruth, the West Palm Beach attempted assassin there during the campaign.
And also with this particular character.
What all of them seem to have in common is an anti-Trump fervor that starts with and becomes fixated on a particular story or storyline.
With Ryan Wesley Ruth there, there seemed to be a lot of free Ukrainian Slava-Ukraini type of propaganda that he was consuming.
Of course, the potential for ties with the Azov Battalion and then with the Epstein list allegations, baseless as they are, have been making their rounds in all manner of conspiracy theory forums across the internet.
And it looks like this 21-year-old fellow from North Carolina got caught up in that and became radically anti-Trump, similar to Ryan Wesley Ruth, going down that path past the point of no return, being isolated from one another, family, friends, and so on and so forth, and believing that there's only one way out of this.
And we have heard that before, unfortunately, on the right in some circles, you can't vote your way out of this.
And we see this, and we see this, by the way, in a text message, the same way we saw text messages within, in the case of violence, with Tyler Robinson and so many others, where you see this phrase, I don't know if you've read up on the Epstein files, but evil is real and unmistakable.
The best people like you and I can do is use what little influence we have, tell other people about what you hear about the Epstein files and what the government is doing about it, raise awareness.
And so, Joshua, you and I were just talking, literally just talking about what drives individuals to acts of assassination, acts of political assassination.
And it really comes into this psychological, what you say is this belief in a false reality, whereby they feel that they have to take some kind of response, but that it's always been done in a self-defense or a defense of others kind of mentality.
What does that mean?
What we notice with recent domestic terrorism in the United States is that it follows the cultural Marxist oppressed versus oppressor frame, where there is this evil figure or their government or their regime,
and these poor little subjugated individuals who, in the case of the trans with Tyler Robinson, there was that interest group with the Epstein files and all of the storylines and false allegations that have been made against the president on that.
People have become hyper-fixated on it and we just have to do something is the belief that comes up here.
And it's those of us who are individuals and we're citizens and we're so oppressed and we can't do anything and our voices don't matter and we can't vote our way out of this.
This sort of demoralizing language that we often see will take root in an individual like Ryan Leslie Ruth, like Tyler Robinson, like this, this young fellow.
And then they go to the most extreme version, which is responding to speech with violence, ironically, with speech being violence and violence being speech.
It's getting it all mixed up, but it falls within the oppressor versus oppressed frame of cultural Marxism.
So in this case, he believes he's defending the people, defending against, and to be clear, what Jeffrey Epstein did was heinous, was disgusting, was despicable.
But again, if you're actually looking at these files, nowhere in them will you find a spot where Donald Trump is involved in these, you certainly do, by the way, find you know, find instances where Bill Clinton is involved in the pictures and involved in elements of the island and things like this.
And so the idea being there that this isn't just that he was reading the files, it more than likely he was reading a filtered version of the files where someone had actually taken some elements that responded to or were related to President Trump and then put him on top of there.
And then what do you do?
Just like NPR, as Joshua always says, you repeat over and over and over.
So that's the association that they built.
Joshua, I know you've got to run.
So I want to say thank you for joining us here, sitting down.
Josh and I will be speaking later at Liberty University.
We're taking our Tales of Regime Change series and we're turning it into a lecture here down at the great Liberty University at Lynchburg, Virginia.
Joshua, thank you so much for joining us.
My pleasure.
Thank you, Jack.
Congrats on the new book, by the way.
Go get it.
Unelected.
Joshua Data Republican.
Talk more about that later.
Nothing will stand in our way and our golden age has just begun.
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President Trump announced he is increasing global tariffs to 15%.
in his early 20s carrying what appeared to be a shotgun and a fuel can entered a restricted area around Trump's Palm Beach, Florida home early this morning before he was shot and killed by authorities.
They confronted a white male that was carrying a gas can and a shotgun.
He was ordered to drop those two pieces of equipment that he had with him at which time he put down the gas can raised the shotgun to a shooting position.
At that point in time, the deputy and the two Secret Service agents fired their weapons and neutralized the threat.
Iran is on a full court press trying to talk America out of an all-out war.
Cartel Violence and Border Security00:15:35
Thanks so much for having me.
Iran's foreign minister spoke with Face to Nations, Margaret Brennan.
But Iran also has one of the largest arsenals of ballistic missiles in the region.
Israeli intelligence sources we spoke with confirmed stockpiles are back to the same level seen before Israel and the U.S. launched attacks last June.
Explosions erupting across Puerto Vallarta tonight.
Black smoke seen rising over the resort city on Mexico's Pacific coast.
Mexico's military forces launching a daring operation to capture cartel leader Ruben N, known as El Mencho.
Multiple cars on fire in the streets.
Mexican officials say during their operation, military personnel were attacked.
We came in contact with masked men in the streets.
They had guns.
They were ducking behind cars.
We watched them pull a bus driver out of his bus, and starting it on fire.
All right, folks, Jack Posobiec, we're back live here.
Human events, daily, and we're in Lynchburg, Virginia, folks.
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All right, folks, I'm just going to say it, right?
When you talk about this situation, the attempted assassination again of President Trump, when you talk about Mar-a-Lago nearly being burned down over the weekend, we have a problem in conservative media, and I'm going to call out conservative media.
I'm going to do this because conservative media needs to start taking this stuff seriously.
They need to start taking the threats of violence against conservatives and against President Trump seriously.
They are killing people.
It has already happened.
We cannot allow this normalization of violence to say, oh, well, I guess it's another one.
And then you give it 24 minutes of a news cycle before you rush off to the other thing.
All right.
We're not going to be doing that around here.
We're certainly not.
No, we are going to talk about how violent our country is becoming and talk about the fact that you're looking imagine if you were a guest.
Imagine if you were a guest at Mar-a-Lago this weekend and suddenly, boom, boom, boom.
You hear shots fired in the middle of the night.
Just for what?
Just for associating yourself with President Trump?
Well, guess what?
That's reality.
That's real life now.
And you don't believe me?
Go ask Charlie Kirk about it.
Oh, right.
You can't.
You can't ask Charlie Kirk about it.
Or go ask the people at Butler about it.
You know, when we were doing the halftime show, there was a young girl came up to me and she said, thank you, Jack, for writing the bulletproof book.
And I said, I said, sure, you know, I'm happy to do it.
But why do you say thank you for writing it?
You know, usually people say, I liked your book.
They never say thank you for writing.
I said, why do you say thank you for writing it?
She said, because I was there that day.
So she was there that day.
Here's a young girl, Western Pennsylvania, just a patriot who loves her country.
She had to see a man gunned down in front of her, Corey Compatore, and she had to live through the president of the United States almost being killed.
And she herself was in the line of fire.
And that's 2024.
Then you have Charlie in 2025.
Now we have this going into 2026.
When are people going to start taking this stuff seriously?
You absolutely need to take it seriously.
And I'm honestly, I'm just getting fed up that conservative media barely even bats an eye anymore.
Now, one thing that we certainly have to take seriously, and I think something that we've been living a little bit in denial of for so long is the cartel violence on our border or directly south of our border and directly north of our border.
What did we see?
This Jalisco New Generation cartel where they take out the leader yesterday.
And this guy, it turns out the operation, which had some U.S. elements as well, targeting Intel related.
We don't know if any U.S. boots or special forces were involved, although perhaps not without precedent.
But we're now getting indications that the operation to take him out was because he was El Hecho or El Hencho was going to meet one of his mistresses and they caught him at the mistress's place or going into the mistress's place and they were able to, they were going in for arrest and they took him out.
And in response, the cartel starts taking over and laying siege to these tourist areas.
Why are they doing it in tourist areas?
Because they want the communications.
They want the videos.
This is psychological terrorism that you are looking at.
They want you to share the videos.
They want to show the tourists.
And they know there's Westerners, Americans, Canadians, and others, Europeans that come down there.
Puerto Vieta.
That's why they go down.
That's why they're doing this in these high visibility locations because they want it to be seen.
I want to bring on now Sheriff Mark Lamb, who's also running for Congress in Arizona.
He's been on the show for a minute.
This guy, he is a cartel expert.
Sheriff Lamb, are you surprised at all that the cartels are doing this?
No, Jack, I'm not surprised at all.
This is Matt.
We have been actually putting our boot in their throats for since President Trump came in, closed down the border.
That affected the amount of income they've had come from human trafficking.
Drug trafficking has been impacted.
We're actually seeing that.
It's proof positive in the amount of fentanyl poisonings, the huge reduction in fentanyl poisonings in this country.
So the cartels were already getting hit economically.
And now they lose one of their leaders, El Mencho, and now they lose it.
And you hit it right on the head when you said they want this to look chaotic.
They want to strike terror into the hearts of not only those tourists down there in those areas, but they also want to send a message to the world of their capabilities of violence against even their own government.
And you talk about these capabilities, and we've certainly seen the capabilities writ large.
I mean, you're talking about a force down there.
When we think cartel, we usually think gang violence, but these look like, to my eye, a military style attack.
Well, there's videos that show just how equipped these cartel, especially CJNG, these guys are not lightly equipped.
You're seeing the video right now.
They have vehicles that are armored vehicles.
They have grenades.
They have 50 cals.
They've got all the weaponry that a military would have.
I have been saying for years, we in law enforcement, we don't have enough equipment to be able to combat these types of groups, these armies that these cartels have created to protect their businesses.
They not only protect it from law enforcement, but they also protect it from the other cartels.
And what you're going to see now is the compression of power that we've been seeing since President Trump came into office and the moves that he's made to reduce this kind of flow into our country.
You're going to see that compression even greater now as CJNG, which has been one of the more powerful cartels, just lost their leader.
Well, and they lose their leader, but unfortunately, just like we saw with terrorism, you know, it's they are able, you take out one of these guys, and in many cases, you're able to get him replaced overnight to find someone else to take his place.
Because what we're really talking about here is a network and a network that needs to be disrupted and a network that needs to be destroyed, going after the money, going after the communications, going after the key nodes.
And of course, you know, we don't know everything that the administration is using against these individuals, but certainly taking out one of the individuals.
It looks like they had the opportunity because he was going to visit his mitras.
And it looked like they were able to find, as they say, find, fix, and finish this high-value target here.
So they did so.
But unfortunately, this type of violence is something that's been part and parcel because we've allowed for years, we've allowed and let the Mexicans just kind of sit and ride by over and over the Mexican government as these cartels grew in strength, grew in power right on our southern border, right across our southern border, and in many cases, crossing north of our southern border.
We're going to a quick break right now, but I want to get into how this violence is a real and serious threat to Americans, not just when you're out on tourism down in Mexico, but even when you're living in your own homes north of the border.
Right back, Jack Posobiec, Human Events Daily.
You know, they talk about influencers.
These are influencers.
And they're friends of mine, Jack Pesovic.
Where's Jack?
He's got a breakdown.
All right, folks, Jack Pesobic, we're back live here.
Lynchburg, Virginia, Human Events Daily, beautiful Lynchburg.
I love it.
No snow here today, by the way.
I know my folks back home in Philadelphia and all my family there definitely got walloped last night.
New York City getting it as well, Boston.
But down here in Lynchburg, not even a flurry.
Another spot where we didn't see any snow, at least in terms of the, at least in terms of the kind that falls from the sky, but the kind that comes across the border in trucks and in caravans, of course, is down there in Arizona.
Sheriff Mark Lamb, so when we talk about these cartels, we talk about the drug running, the narcotics that they have coming across.
The armaments, though, I want to get back into this because so many of these arms and people are looking at them saying, wait a minute, these look like American arms, AR-15s, and the like.
And doesn't this bring us all back to those operations that were being run, these highly controversial operations of Barack Obama and Eric Holder running guns south of the border to try to in it in some sort of scheme to entrap, you know, saying they were going to be able to track them.
It never made any real sense to me how you giving them guns is going to help us stop them.
It seems like it's just going to give them power.
And is that what we're seeing happen here?
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, Jack, because a lot of people forgot about Fast and Furious.
You know, look, the cartel does a really good job of finding a way to get guns across the border.
We didn't need the government to help them.
And if you don't know what Fast and Furious was, basically, like you just said, they said, hey, let's allow a bunch of these guns to go down and then we can kind of track them and where they're going into the cartels.
It was a dumb idea.
Eric Holder and Obama are not the sharpest tools in the shed.
And they're certainly not the most pro-American either.
And not cost the life of Agent Brian Terry, who was shot and killed down in the deserts of Arizona by one of those guns that was taken over the border by the Fast and Furious operation.
But they were actually, our government was giving these guns to the cartels.
And now we're going to be having to deal with these kind of issues for a long time until we actually, like you said, eradicate these cartels and finish them off.
They're going to continue to have somebody rise up.
El Mencho was one of those guys.
He rose up the ranks.
He was a part of one of the assassin crews for the drug cartels that he worked with.
And then he actually became part of the Los Mata Setas, which means those who were killing the Setas.
And if you know about the Setas, they were a lot of military, a lot of guys that decided they were going to protect the cartels.
Then they actually became one of their own cartels in and of themselves.
And then his group came along and they actually eradicated the SETAs to the point where they became part of CJNG.
So that's a little bit of the backstory on what you have.
And so this is a violent guy.
He's no stranger to violence.
And he ran his cartel with violence, which is why it's not surprising to see what they're doing in Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara.
And so, Sheriff, when we see this, and of course, you know, Cuadaljara is down in southern Mexico.
And the reason, though, that you, you know, look, you were a sheriff in Arizona.
The reason that you've had to get so smart on the cartels is because this type of violence, unfortunately, doesn't stay in Mexico, does it?
No, it does not.
In the beginning of last year, we had information coming out from Border Patrol that there were 60,000 drone incursions across the border in one month.
It is tens of thousands of drone incursions every month across the border.
They attack each other with weaponized drones.
At one point, the Rio Grande sector, RGV, they basically said, Hey, there's a green light from the cartels on border patrol agents using drones.
So not only do they have these RPGs, grenades, high, high automatic weapons, semi-automatic weapons, they also have these weaponized drones.
And they don't play by the same set of rules that we play by in the U.S. with law enforcement.
They're playing by a violent, win-it-all cost set of rules.
And this is a dangerous thing to deal with along the border.
This is why it's so important that we secure our border.
No, and this is key because the cartels have grown strong or did go strong prior to this administration because in the past, the border was completely open and they were able to use these operations not only to make money, and that's why the cartels are doing these things, it's to make money.
Of course, they can have this power down south, but also because you had people like Eric Holder.
And again, I just keep going back to this, who thought it was a good idea to give powerful American weapons to the cartels.
Cartels and Accountability00:02:44
And we were told, by the way, that this was a way that somehow we were going to use that to take down the cartels.
And I just, I think it's ridiculous.
I think it's one of the most idiotic and quite frankly criminal things that our government has done in a long time.
And these are the types of things that frustrate Americans because it's been government failures that have allowed these cartels to grow to the size.
And yet there's never any accountability.
Why was Eric Holder not held accountable?
We had an agent who lost their life.
They literally put the guns and weapons in the hands of these cartels.
Now we're the Mexican government, they had, I think, 27 of their people die in this little skirt and this little war they're having down there in Puerto Vallarta.
So look, they should hold somebody accountable.
That's what Americans want to see across this country, whether it's Epstein, whether it's Fast and Furious, whether it's Hillary Clinton's emails, whether it's all these different things.
We're sick and tired of no accountability.
Americans want accountability because this is the type of stuff we see that they cause.
No, and unfortunately, we can see this.
Look, it's ridiculous to me that we see this going on just south of our border, this type of chaos, this type of violence, this type of non-state actors who are able to control these areas.
I mean, people have to understand, this is where you go back to the 1960s.
I always use this example.
This is where JFK and Jackie O went down on their honeymoon, was down to Acapulco, was down to this area, right?
And so that's how safe it was just one generation ago.
And because of our mismanagement, because of our lack of governments, because of our willpower, whatever it is, the situation has gotten to this point.
Yep.
And we created this to a certain extent.
We haven't been held accountable.
Under the Biden years, four years of just basically not doing anything and letting these cartels gain immense power.
They went from making $500 million a year to $13 billion a year.
They've trafficked humans.
They've trafficked children.
They've raped women.
They've killed Americans more than any other army or anybody's been able to do with fentanyl and other drugs in this country.
And yet we haven't held them accountable to where they need to be held accountable.
So I hope that we continue to put our boot in their throat and crush them.
And Sheriff, please tell people about your campaign.
Where can they go to get more info on the campaign?
Running for Congress out here in Arizona to replace Andy Biggs, who's running for governor.
Please go to marklam.us, marklam.us.
All right.
Good luck and Godspeed the sheriff.
Thanks for joining us once again here on YouTube.
Tariffs and Trade Certainty00:15:30
be right back talking tariffs human events returns and Jack when is Jack Where is Jack?
Where is he?
Jack, I want to see you.
Great job, Jack.
Thank you.
What a job you do.
You know, we have an incredible thing.
We're always talking about the fake news and the bad, but we have guys, and these are the guys should be getting published.
All right, folks, Jack Prosopic.
We're back live, Lynchburg, Virginia.
Here, Real America's voice.
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All right, folks.
Obviously, tariffs back in the news.
Huge Supreme Court ruling on Friday.
And we saw the president's response to that.
Let's play it now.
Therefore, effective immediately, all national security tariffs under Section 232 and existing Section 301 tariffs, they're existing, they're there, remain in place, fully in place, and in full force and effect.
Today, I will sign an order to impose a 10% global tariff under Section 122, over and above our normal tariffs already being charged.
And we're also initiating several Section 301 and other investigations to protect our country from unfair trading practices of other countries and companies.
Well, so that was the president's response, throwing down he's not backing off of tariffs.
I want to get on here, the chief economist of American Compass, Oren Cass, to kind of walk us through some of what's happened here.
Oren, how are you?
I'm very well.
Great to see you.
Great to see you as well.
So walk us through the theory of the case.
Why did the Supreme Court rule the way they did on these specific tariffs?
And people need to understand this isn't all tariffs, but one specific subset of the tariff basket.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
There are a lot of very well-established tariff authorities.
You heard the president just mentioning some of them, Section 301, Section 232.
These are all processes you can go through.
You show that some other country is behaving unfairly.
Some particular product that's important to the U.S. is under threat.
And then you could impose tariffs.
And the president has done that going all the way back to his first term as well.
What the administration did this time around, though, was use a different statute called AIPA, which is an emergency statute and is basically designed to give the president very quick authority, a lot of flexibility to, as the statute says, regulate imports.
And so the question for the court case was: well, does regulate include tariffs or not?
And the White House's position was, yes, it does.
And that allowed them to move very quickly with a lot of the actions you saw over the last year.
Ultimately, the decision by the Supreme Court was: no, no, regulate means you can regulate, you can make rules about what imports can come in under what conditions, but it does not include the ability to actually impose a tariff, which is sort of a tax.
And obviously, the Constitution is very strict about who can tax when.
And so those very kind of short-term emergency tariffs that the president had been using over the last year negotiations now go away.
But all of those longer run permanent tariffs are still in effect.
And the administration is in the process of using those same authorities to put more tariffs in place, which will leave us pretty much where we were all along.
And so this is something that I know you've written about this.
I know others have written about this, that a lot of people pointed out from the very start, from the very jump, that the administration really can just move the tariffs over.
So even though the authority is different, the actual burden, the actual economic effect won't really be changed that much.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
What's going to change is really the White House's ability to sort of very quickly threaten to snap tariffs on, take tariffs off, move them up, move them down, which obviously the president was using very aggressively in this first year, especially as he was trying to cajole everybody to the table.
Frankly, I think we're better off in the long run moving to these stabler, more permanent authorities.
I think if we actually want to get to a new trading system, if we want to have certainty, if we want to have people investing in the U.S., it will actually be a very good thing that people know, okay, these are not emergency tariffs anymore.
These are actually established after investigations based on very clear authority, and they're likely to be here for the long run.
Well, and this really does, at the same time, move the U.S.
So, you know, you look at where we were coming from the Biden administration to Trump coming in.
And even without, and I'm sure he's going to look for other ways to get, you know, to get back another bite to the tariff apple, but even moving that into these permanent tariffs, as you say, this is a totally total sea change or regime change, I guess I should say, from the previous administration, previous efforts.
Because although you didn't see these worldwide tariffs under Biden, I will admit, actually, with one exception, because Biden even kept many of the China tariffs from Trump's first term in place.
And that's kind of a little mentioned fact because they were in fact working and because China was in fact guilty of the things that the American investigators had found.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And, you know, the tariffs on China are the ones that are the most clear-cut.
Obviously, we have the authority to do them.
China is trying to destroy our industrial capacity.
China is our national security adversary.
China does cheat every way possible under every rule of the trading system.
And so, you know, we can certainly continue to carry that on.
But I think, as you said, it's really important to say we've seen a much broader permanent shift now in how we're going to think about the global economy.
This idea that it's just free trade no matter what.
It's free trade no matter how other countries treat us.
It's free trade no matter what the results are is out the window.
And I don't think it's coming back.
We're moving to a model that says we would love to have strong trading relationships, but they have to be balanced.
They have to be good for the United States.
And I think what's so telling is, you know, all of these authorities for tariffs do exist, right?
It's really funny.
You go back, it's from this law from the 1930s.
It's a law passed in the 1960s.
It's a law passed in the 1970s.
Because in all of those periods, everybody understood free trade wasn't always going to work.
And you needed to have these kinds of authorities to confront countries that were not playing by the rules or relationships that were not working for us.
It's only very recently we got to this idea that you can't use tariffs under any circumstances.
And so it's really important to be moving back to a world that says, yes, we would like to have healthy trade, but we absolutely can and we will use tariffs if it helps us to get there.
And I think, by the way, the team is just putting up, as you and I have been speaking, the president has tweeted or truthed a tweet.
That's always a risk About this, where he's funny enough, he's actually just reinforcing exactly what you're saying.
As president, I do not have to go back to Congress to get approval of tariffs because it has already been gotten in many forms a long time ago, as you just delineated.
And they were already, they were also just reaffirmed by the, as he says, the ridiculous and poorly crafted Supreme Court lowercase Supreme Court decision president DJT.
So he's really just outlining exactly what you said.
These were, these are long-standing laws and authorities that Congress has delegated to the president when it comes to these tariff powers.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
Now, I do think there are two things ideally that Congress would still do.
You know, one is this idea of what's called the global tariff.
So he has reinstated the global tariff under what's called Section 122, which is only for a limited time.
So it's also sort of an emergency provision.
I think we should have a permanent long-term global tariff.
That is something you would want Congress to put in place.
It's also something I think they could put in place.
You know, there's actually legislation to do that.
It's actually, there's a conservative Democrat as the sponsor of it in the House of Representatives.
And so it would be great to see Congress move on that.
And then the other big one is permanent normal trade relations with China.
That's the big thing we did back in 2000 when we welcomed China to the WTO.
And it's, I think, really important that Congress take the step of revoking that, saying we do not have normal trade relations with China.
And again, there, there is bipartisan legislation on that.
It's a bipartisan recommendation of the China Select Committee.
And it was in the president's 2024 platform.
So that would be another great place to see actually a real push in Congress.
Let's actually put our money where our mouth is and do the thing we've all said we know we should do.
I'd personally love to do it.
It's something that, you know, even coming up as a China hand, you know, you go back and you look and you say, how did this ever make any sense?
Most favored nation, permanent normal status.
Orin Cass, where can people go to follow you, get your work?
We are at commonplace.org is our magazine.
Just published a great analysis of this on Friday.
So subscribe there.
And I am on X at Oren underscore CAS.
All right, take care, man.
Thanks for joining us.
Great to see you.
Thanks.
youtube right back at human events daily jack is a great guy He's written a fantastic book.
Everybody's talking about it.
Go get it.
And he's been my friend right from the beginning of this whole beautiful event.
And we're going to turn it around and make our country fight again.
Amen.
All right, folks, we're back.
Jack Pasobic live here, Lynchburg, Virginia, on Real America's Voice for Human Events Daily.
And we have breaking news that actually just dropped out of Axios right before we came to came live today that just kind of crossed my desk.
Where they're now reporting that Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Kaine has been advising President Trump and top officials that a military campaign against Iran could carry significant risks, in particular, the possibility of becoming entangled in a prolonged conflict.
Why does this matter?
If there's an ongoing debate at the top levels of the Trump administration on how to handle the Iran standoff and what the consequences of what each option would be.
At the moment, several of the voices in Trump's circle are urging caution, though some sources think Trump himself is leaning towards a strike.
After all, there's a question of what success would look like when it comes to military action and how risky it would be to try to achieve it.
On the other hand, meeting a nuclear deal could potentially mean walking back some of the president's previous red lines.
And of course, the envoys, Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, have been a huge pick point there.
Kane's position, they're saying, could be, look, we know President Trump, he loves General Kaine.
General Kaine is absolutely someone that he trusts going all the way back to his first term.
That's why he appointed him chairman of the Joint Chiefs and made sure that he got there to say, look, this was a situation where, you know, he has said that, you know, they're saying that according to reports, Kane is a reluctant warrior on Iran, even though he was all in on the Venezuela operation.
And he's been more cautious in his discussions on Iran.
Of course, obviously would support and execute any decision that the president makes, but also more steely-eyed, clear-eyed, and realistic.
And look, when you look at all of this, go back.
So Joshua and I, Joshua Isaac and I are going to be giving a talk tonight on really the thesis of our discussion going back to tales of regime change, which was the special that we did here on Human Events Daily during the Christmas break.
And why did we put that special together?
Well, we wanted to talk about how this line of thinking seems to go throughout the American media, particularly conservative media, particularly the conservative right, where we have these ideas that, oh, well, you know, we're just going to knock off the bad guys and the people are going to rise up and everything is going to be great.
And so what Joshua and I did is we went and looked at case studies and we went case by case by case.
We looked at Iraq, we looked at Afghanistan, we looked at Syria and we said, what went wrong in all of those situations?
Of course, Iraq knocked them off.
That leads to a massive sectarian civil war.
Afghanistan, of course, that ended with the Taliban retaking Kabul and retaking power in the country.
Syria, the Syrian civil war, which the United States played a role in fomenting, led to the rise of ISIS, which also spread to their extremists in Iraq across that border, all the way down to the Euphrates.
And then we even talked about Ukraine and how it was U.S. operations and U.S. involvement, particularly from the intelligence side, that led to the ouster of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych all the way back in 2013, 2014, the Maidan revolution, as it's called, a color revolution, which was held there, which led to the current crisis and the war in Ukraine.
And you can certainly point back and say, would the war in Ukraine have ever happened if the United States and members of the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, Victoria Newland, and others started their regime change operation color revolution in Ukraine all the way back then, right?
Potential Reprisals Against U.S.00:03:57
We do have to look at these things in totality, that when you knock off a world leader, a foreign leader, and you hear this in the Intel community all the time.
And again, you hear it in conservative media all the time.
Oh, we're just going to knock these guys off or we're just going to just going to take out some of the regime's infrastructure and everything is going to work.
Really?
Are you sure about that?
Can you point to an example of a time where it has worked properly?
So I just laid out a few.
And in fact, if we were going to do, we'd actually, when we were putting together the episodes, we said if we were going to do two more episodes, we'd either talk the other two on the list, the other countries we were looking at were going to be either Iran itself or Libya.
And in fact, we still may go in and do those because in Iran, the United States has been involved in multiple regime changes in Iran.
When you look at the Shah, when you look at Mossadegh, when you look at what was done there, the British MI6 as well has been involved in many times.
And it was in fact, it was in fact.
All right.
The imposition of the Shah, backed by the CIA and MI6, that led to so many Iranians being upset at the West, being upset at the United States, that led to them joining the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
That's why they were chanting death to America.
That's why they viewed America as the great Satan and the great evil.
The same way they referred to Israel as the little Satan and the little evil.
So you go back and you look at all this stuff.
And what I mean to say is this.
It's very simple.
When it comes to regime change operations and regime change wars, nobody can prove what is going to come next.
And ultimately, the outcome that you do get is probably not the desired effect.
It is not the desired effect at all.
And so if you have anybody sitting there and promising you that, oh, well, this group is going to take power and the people are just going to rise up and it's going to be great.
Go look at Libya, by the way.
Go look at Libya, where Gaddafi himself gets brutalized in the streets and sits there and gets attacked and gets raped over the coals, literally raked over coals and flayed out there in public.
And who takes over it?
You've got Al-Qaeda, you've got terrorists.
Benghazi takes place a year later.
It was complete mayhem on the Mediterranean.
So that's what we got.
And so it doesn't surprise me at all that General Kane is out there, Chairman Kane of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, telling the president, hey, Mr. President, just so you know, that if we really start to underpin the regime in Iran and if we get them into a regime collapse or regime change scenario, we have no idea what's going to come out.
And it could lead potentially to, by the way, even if the regime doesn't collapse, by the way, it could lead to reprisals against the U.S. and the U.S. getting sucked into a larger regional or perhaps worse war.
All right.
And let's not forget that Iran's two biggest allies are Russia and China.
So a Maduro-style operation or a Midnight Hammer-style operation.
We can remember that General Kane is the one who ran Operation Midnight Hammer.
He is an Air Force general that was predominantly air assets.
Now, we've also seen those air assets being forward-deployed now.
We talked to you last week about the importance, the map break on Diego Garcia, why Diego Garcia is so important for a long-range or sustained bombing runs when it comes to Iran as a staging location.
It's positioned southern, directly south of the Persian Gulf, where it can range into Iran and then come back for refueling.
And so we need to look at this again, clear eyes.
What do we want?
What comes next?
What is interest in the interest of the American people?
Belief in Trump's Lessons Learned00:01:18
And I believe that President Trump knows this.
And I believe that President Trump remembers, of course, the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Remember, it was Donald Trump himself in 2015 who stood on stage next to Jeb Bush and demanded that his family apologize for the lies of Iraq, that his family apologize and talk about, and he talked about this in Georgia when we were just down there on Thursday when I had the honor of spending the day with the president, where he talked about the troops, the boots on the ground coming home and the way that people were maimed, the way that people, American citizens,
our boys, were maimed, were hurt, were injured, and came back forever scarred.
And today he's, of course, meeting with the angel mom.
So he understands that the victims aren't just the people killed, but the families they leave behind, that everyone is victimized in these scenarios.
And so if you want to pop the Iranians, focus on the nuclear program, that's one thing.
But these long-term regime change wars are something that the president ran against in 2024 and something that I personally am more than willing to call out even here in 2026.
And we just heard, by the way, I broke the news earlier that Tucker Carlson is there at the White House today.
Is he meeting with the president?
I suppose we'll see.
Ladies and gentlemen, as always, you have my permission.