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March 14, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
01:32:25
Dragon Teeth
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Hello, everyone.
It is Wednesday, March 8th, 2023.
And if you hear Billy Joel at the start of the hour, you know who's guest hosting.
I'm Julie Hartman.
I am the co-host of the Dennis and Julie podcast with our friend...
I'm Dennis Prager, and I am also the host of my own three times weekly show called Timeless with Julie Hartman.
Just a quick word about Dennis and Julie.
We just celebrated our one-year anniversary.
Episode number 52 just launched, though now that I'm thinking about it, actually episode 53. Would mark one year.
So maybe I'm a bit premature here with bragging about the one-year mark, but hey, on Monday, it will be our one-year mark of Dennis and Julie.
It is one of the greatest honors of my life to do that show with Dennis, and it is a great honor to be guest hosting for you today.
Dennis is in Palm Beach at a PragerU gala, and he is heading to Tampa Bay, Florida, today.
So he's crossing the state over to the east side to meet with some members of the Tampa Bay radio station there.
So if you're in the area, be sure to listen in or even go in and see our dear friend Dennis.
There's a lot of news today that I am going to cover.
Certainly these January 6 tapes that Tucker Carlson has released is big news.
Also the kidnapping of four Americans in Mexico on Friday, two of whom tragically have been found dead.
But to start off this show, I'd like to talk to you about arguably the most consequential topic of our time, and that is our relations with China, which in the past few months and in the past few days, as I'm about to tell which in the past few months and in the past few days, as I'm about On Monday, President Xi Jinping of China bluntly rebuked the United States.
Again, this was on Monday.
And this marks a pretty blunt, harsh rebuke of the United States.
It's no secret that our relations with China have been hostile, but this is sort of kicking it up a step.
And then on Tuesday, Xi Jinping's foreign minister, King Gang, excuse me, said that unless the United States changes course with its policy towards China, quote, there will surely be conflict and confrontation.
Given that just last month, the Pentagon said that China officially has more intercontinental ballistic missile launchers than the United States, also given that China is developing killer satellites in outer space, which have the capability to shoot down other satellites,
of course, including ours, and also given the fact that by 2035, people don't know this, but it's true, China and Russia are planning to administer a joint Chinese-Russian permanently manned Moonbase.
These comments by Xi Jinping have a lot of relevance to us now, and we need to take them seriously, especially because it appears that China is trying to see how we react to their words and actions, to see if we are indeed strong enough to react appropriately.
I suspect that That is what the balloon incident of last month was about.
If you think about it, it's a pretty absurd thing for China to send a blimp, even though it wasn't a blimp, it was sort of like a blimp.
It certainly looked like one over the United States for quote-unquote surveillance, even though they have satellites which have the even stronger capabilities than a balloon would have as far as surveillance.
It's a pretty absurd thing for them to do.
But again, I think they were trying to poke the bear a bit.
it.
They were trying to see what we were going to do about it.
And we proved that we reacted too late.
We let the balloon traverse down and across the United States, and we only shot it down once it had reached the Atlantic Ocean over the coast of South Carolina.
So what is causing Xi Jinping to step up his rhetoric with regard to the United States Why is he saying that we are supposedly implementing all-round containment, encirclement, and suppression?
First, the United States announced just a few weeks ago that we are going to be sending between 100 and 200 more troops.
To Taiwan to help train the Taiwanese military there.
This is stepping it up from 30 American troops.
That's right, 30, not 30,000, not 3,000, not 300, just 30 that were stationed in Taiwan.
And so we're going to be sending, again, between 100 and 200 more.
Additionally, the Philippines president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., has announced that he is going to be giving the United States more access to military bases in the Philippines.
And we are allowing Taiwan's president to visit the United States later this year.
She is going to meet with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and, of course, the former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan last year.
Do those seem like very provocative moves to you?
Just stepping up modestly, our troop presence, and allowing the Taiwanese president to come here and using some military bases in neighboring islands?
Is that really provocative?
Or is that really containment?
Now, China would also argue that we shot down the spy balloon, as I mentioned, which they say is highly provocative.
Also, Washington rejected a 12-point Beijing paper, which called for talks to end fighting in Ukraine.
And we have seen in recent weeks U.S.-based companies like Apple try to move some of their supply chains out of China.
But again...
Do those actions constitute the kind of response or the kind of charge that Xi Jinping is leveling at us?
It seems, if anything, we've been pretty soft and cowardly with regard to China.
With all that China does to us, and I'm going to provide some more specifics in a moment, we have been remarkably amicable and helpful towards them.
In fact...
ICE just released data that shows that we, the United States, award the highest number of Chinese students with higher education visas than any country in the world.
In 2020, we awarded over 382,000 visas to Chinese students.
This is close to twice the number of the second-place country, India, which had about 207,000 visas, and over five times as many as the third-place country.
So again, are we really that bad, Xi Jinping?
We should be more hostile towards China.
We should step up the ante.
But again, we have been quite soft.
Why don't we look, though, at what China has done to us and see if Xi Jinping is engaging in a little bit of a Saul Alinsky trick here.
Saul Alinsky, of course, is a hero on the left.
He wrote a book called Rules for Radicals.
Obama has called him a personal hero.
Hillary Clinton wrote her thesis at Wellesley College on Saul Alinsky.
And in his book Rules for Radicals, he said, quote, Again, it seems that is exactly what Xi Jinping is doing.
He is accusing the United States of being aggressive and of suppressing the country.
But really, that is what China is doing to us, not to mention many other countries around the world.
First, China is providing heavy military aid to Russia to overthrow the sovereign country of Ukraine.
Additionally, China has helped Russia by buying Russian oil and other China conducted 71 air drills over Taiwan in January to do aerial reconnaissance of the area should they invade.
Last October, Xi Jinping said, quote, He's saying this with regard to reunifying Taiwan with the motherland of China.
It must be achieved, he proclaimed again, and he said that he would be willing to use force if necessary.
Just this past weekend, on Sunday, Beijing announced that it plans to boost its military spending by 7.2% this year.
They are going to bring the total military expenditures to $224 billion.
Xi said that he is wanting to build the PLA, that's the People's Liberation Army, the Army of China, into, quote, a world-class military by 2049, the centennial of the CCP. We're good to go.
Additionally, here in the United States, there have been reports by the FBI that China is opening clandestine police stations, including one in New York City, to surveil citizens.
And just as icing on the cake, they had an assassination attempt on a U.S. House of Representatives candidate for New York's 10th Congressional District who criticized the CCP. Again, all of this seems reversed.
What she's accusing us of...
He is doing.
We will be back more on China in the next segment.
I'm Julie Hartman.
The Dennis Prager Show.
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Welcome back to the Dennis Prager Show.
Julie Hartman here.
We've been discussing what I view as the most consequential topic of our time and that is our relationship with China.
I'm specifically discussing this in the wake of several comments, rebukes made by Chinese officials this week, including by President Xi Jinping, who said that the United States is engaging in, quote, containment, encirclement, and suppression against China.
And the foreign minister said something arguably even more scary on Tuesday when he said that unless the United States change its course, there will, quote, surely be conflict and confrontation.
So as I explained in the last segment, our policies and behavior towards China has been anything but confrontational.
In fact, it has been quite soft and cowardly.
Biggest things that we did was just send 100 to 200 more troops to Taiwan.
When I reported on that last week on my show, Timeless, someone wrote in to me and said, I think you got that number wrong.
And I said, no, I didn't.
It's 100 to 200. So hardly anything to write home to mom about.
But nevertheless, China is accusing us of aggression.
And I was providing some examples of the many ways that China is the aggressor in the United States and towards other foreign powers.
But back to what I was discussing.
I was mentioning that in 2022, the Justice Department found and charged several Chinese Communist Party affiliates for planning to violently attack a U.S. House of Representatives candidate for New York's 10th congressional district named Jian Yang.
He is a Chinese-American, and during his campaign, he spoke out very harshly against the CCP and against communism.
And again, these Chinese affiliates tried to target him and assassinate him, and luckily it was uncovered.
But just yet another example of China's aggression.
Russian.
I also mentioned that they have opened several overseas police stations around the world, including one in New York City.
Chinese officials have said that this is necessary to provide quote unquote vital services for Chinese citizens living in the United States.
But isn't that what an embassy does?
Why do we need a police station to do that?
Seems that they are just trying to surveil us even further.
Though they clearly have no trouble doing that because another way that they spy on us is through TikTok.
Which has 80 million users in the United States.
TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, is a CCP-backed, Beijing-based company.
It tracks user data like browsing history, your location, messages, social and financial data.
And actually, Joe Rogan recently did a report on the terms of service.
And one of the things that TikTok does is they track your file names and your keyboard patterns, which means that they know exactly what you write.
The content that you have on your computer.
Also, perhaps the biggest example of Chinese aggression here in the United States is the fentanyl crisis.
Fentanyl is the number one cause of death in the United States for people aged 18 to 45. It is 50 times stronger than heroin, 100 times stronger than morphine.
It kills 175 people a day.
And by the way, that's actually some believe that that is a modest estimate.
But even if that is true, that is equivalent to a 757 airplane crashing every two days and a 9-11 like event happening every three weeks.
So where does this fentanyl come from?
It is made and manufactured in China.
It is then sold to drug cartels in Mexico, and it is being funneled across our borders in the United States.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, 5 million illegal aliens have entered the United States through our southern border since President Obama.
And many of them, not all of them, but many of them are dangerous and have been carrying fentanyl-laced products.
But again, what we all need to realize is that the fentanyl crisis comes from China.
It is a eerily brilliant, a sick, but eerily brilliant move by China to commit an act of warfare against us.
Maybe they're not landing planes in our territory or sending in battalions and troops, but they are committing an act of warfare by leading to or causing this grave overdose problem that we have in the United States.
Additionally, China is one of the biggest robbers of our intellectual property.
They steal our patents, they take our movies and our music, and they plagiarize it and they show it in China without getting any rights or permission from the people who made it.
And additionally, they are trying to exercise their dominion even further by industrializing nations around the world.
I report on this a lot on my show, Timeless.
In the country of Colombia, they are building a train line through the capital city of Bogota.
Additionally, Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, just met with Chinese officials where China has agreed to bring more development to Hungary.
They're building a train line through Budapest.
And Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, recently in January met with Xi Jinping where they agreed to bring Huawei cellular towers to Saudi Arabia, Huawei, of course, is the Chinese tech company that distributes cell phones and has cell towers and uses those to spy on users.
And also China is bringing hydrogen energy development to Saudi Arabia.
China is also buying terminals at ports around the world, including in places like Like the UAE, Israel, Spain, and Sri Lanka.
So China is the one who is being aggressive, who is arguably pursuing a policy of containment and suppression, who is acting out against the United States.
And nevertheless, they are boldly accusing us of doing it because they know that we are soft and that we are weak and we will not react appropriately.
To those who may disagree with me, I would like to remind you of a statement that our President Joe Biden made back in 2019, where he dismissed the threat posed by China.
Let's listen.
China is going to eat our lunch?
Come on, man.
They can't even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the West.
They can't figure out how they're going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system.
I mean, you know, they're not bad folks, folks.
But guess what?
They're not competition for us.
It's amazing how many lies and stupid statements our president can say in just a 30-second clip.
And how about that ending?
They're not bad folks, folks.
Really?
China?
Who massacres the Uyghurs, who is doing organ harvesting of its population, who enacts forced abortions on women, who for 40 years enacted the one-child policy.
I mean, they're not bad folks, folks.
China knows that they have control over our president.
This is not...
Widely advertised, and China actually has tried to suppress this, but actually a Chinese official named Di Dongjiang back in 2020 said something publicly where he said that the CCP, quote, had people at the top of America's core inner circle and that with the election of Joe Biden, it is easier for China to, quote, manipulate the United States.
Right.
But we're the ones being the aggressors, China.
We'll be back with more news.
I'm Julie Hartman.
The Dennis Prager Show.
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Julie Hartman here.
It is the first hour of the Dennis Prager Show.
We are talking about China, as our former president would say.
Oh, you've got to love his pronunciations.
Remember when he said, Yunkin?
Sounds Chinese, Yunkin.
Whether you love him or hate him, you've got to admit he's pretty funny.
Let's continue with this subject.
I'm going to take a call, by the way.
Forgive me for not publicizing this sooner.
The call-in number is 1-8-Prager-776.
You can call in on this subject or any other subject.
I will be moving on to other news shortly.
But quickly, let's go to Mike in Detroit, Michigan.
Hi, Mike.
Thanks for calling.
Yeah, you're exactly right about it.
You know, you're looking at the Biden family.
This is a dysfunctional family.
Within the dysfunctional family of the Democratic Party, and President Trump, to his great credit, exposed these people for who they are.
You know, this is a criminally corrupt, politically corrupt, personally corrupt, you know, please don't mutilate our children, you know, treasonous and seditious organization, and they're completely compromised, you know, and if you could just, you're aware of this, I don't think a lot of people are.
But if you look at the bottleneck of the South China Sea as far as world trade goes, also there's a cable system, you know, just a critical communication system on the bottom of the ocean there.
And, you know, using North Korea as their corrupt surrogate, you know, to take all the heat.
You know, they're building all these islands right on top of it.
Every move they make is Sun Tzu's art of war, I swear to God.
And, you know, Sun Tzu did say, You know, the greatest victory is a victory without any bloodshed, but also an even greater victory is a victory where you achieve your goals and you win your war before the enemy even knows you're at war with them.
And I would say that when it comes to this COVID-19, you know, biological warfare agent, it fell out of the window of the Wuhan lab and landed in 135 countries.
I don't know.
You know, I don't know who or what can be trusted when it comes to this enemy that we have here.
Thank you for your call, Mike.
And I really appreciate that you just mentioned COVID because talk about aggression.
On behalf of the CCP, not only the fact that COVID originated in China, but that the CCP lied about it and tried to cover it up, that it leaked from the Wuhan lab virology.
Before we move on, I want to quickly highlight Mike's point that he made.
It is so important that the Biden family is compromised by foreigners.
I talk to people on the left about this.
You know, I grew up in Los Angeles.
I went to liberal schools, elementary school, high school, college.
I have many acquaintances on the left.
And when I bring these examples up to them, they have no idea what I'm talking about.
They think that I am just reading QAnon conspiracy theories.
What I'm about to tell you, I want to arm you with these facts because we all need to know them.
We need to know them cold and we need to tell people about them because our president is compromised by our foreign adversaries.
First, we know that Hunter Biden, President Biden's son, was getting a $1 million paycheck each year to serve on the board of a Ukrainian company, Burisma.
The mayor of Moscow's wife...
Transferred $3.5 million to Hunter Biden.
By the way, I just want to make a quick correction.
This is not during the time that the husband of this woman was mayor.
He was ex-mayor at the time, but still, the ex-mayor of Moscow's wife gave Hunter Biden a $3.5 million wire transfer.
This is while...
Joe Biden, as vice president, oversaw the country's policies towards Ukraine.
And then bringing it back here to our discussion of China, Hunter Biden had a meeting with a Chinese energy tycoon with ties to the CCP. And later that night, this individual sent Hunter a three- Now, Hunter Biden denied that he got this three-carat diamond from this Chinese energy tycoon, but later, of course, it came out thanks to the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Also, there have been emails that have come out between Hunter Biden and one of Hunter Biden's business partners and Yi Zhenming, who is a CCP-connected owner of the Chinese Energy Company, or excuse me, I don't have the name of that Chinese Energy Company, of a Chinese Energy Company.
And Hunter Biden and his business partner said that...
Biden wanted $10 million a year for introductions alone.
Okay, so that is proving that they are compromised.
And also in that email, Hunter Biden's partner said that 10% of the money should go to, quote-unquote, the big guy.
Who do we think, quote-unquote, the big guy is?
It is our president, Joe Biden, who says China is going to eat our lunch?
Come on, man.
Well, they've eaten our lunch, and that's thanks to you.
We'll be back.
I'm Julie Hartman.
Julie Hartman here in for Dennis Prager, who is in Florida at a PragerU gala.
He is also speaking tonight in Tampa Bay at the radio station there.
You heard on the intro Dennis talking about PragerU, and I would like to tell you that March is fundraising month for PragerU.
If you would like to support PragerU, you can go to PragerU.com or call 833-PRAGERU. That's PragerU.com or call 833-PRAGERU. A quick note about PragerU.
Just for the record, no one told me to say this, let alone even asked me to say it.
PragerU changed my life.
PragerU is the reason why I am in this chair, and PragerU is the reason why I am conservative.
And I would even go so far as to say that PragerU is one of the greatest reasons why I am a happy, clear-thinking, functional person.
And I know that sounds like very high praise, and some may think that it is exaggerating, that I'm exaggerating, excuse me, but I'm not.
I discovered PragerU in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter riots.
I was looking around at my country, not recognizing it.
I thought, if this is the left, this is not who I am.
And I decided to Google, what do conservatives think about police?
And there popped up a PragerU video.
I believe it was by Heather McDonald, and it was called, Are the Police Racist?
They upended my understanding of everything, not just the police.
From there, I went on and watched So many of their other five-minute videos.
I bet you in that one night I watched all of them.
I went down a rabbit hole and it was just so clear to me that these were intelligent, wise people.
And now that I know them personally, I can just tell you how true that is.
Any dollar that you give to PragerU, I am telling you, is worth your while.
They are doing such great work there.
I have never met a person at PragerU who isn't extraordinarily good.
And again, I know it sounds like I'm exaggerating, but I'm not.
So please do consider donating to PragerU, PragerU.com, or by calling 833-PRAGERU. And they will match your donation, Sean is telling me.
Great, that's on right now.
So if you donate, they'll match your donation.
On to another big news story today.
Yesterday, voters in Oklahoma rejected a bid to legalize recreational marijuana.
62% of the state voted no to State Question 820, which would allow citizens above the age of 21 to purchase and consume recreational marijuana.
And also...
It would make those convicted of low-level weed offenses able to have their records expunged.
But Oklahoma is joining Arkansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota in rejecting legislation that would legalize weed.
Since 2012, 21 states have legalized recreational marijuana.
Teen mental health problems have been on the rise in the same period.
And let me tell you, that is not a coincidence.
As someone who just graduated from college, I can tell you how prevalent weed consumption is.
I have personally witnessed several people ruin their lives or come close to ruining their lives because they suffered from such a great weed addiction.
My first show ever on my show Timeless with Julie Hartman, I talked about this subject because I believe it is so important.
The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry reports that in 2019, the use of weed in teens reached its highest rate in 30 years.
That is not surprising.
Additionally, another 2019 meta-analysis in the JAMA Psychiatry Journal observed that cannabis consumption in adolescents is associated with major increased risk of developing major depression in young adulthood and suicidality, especially suicide.
The CDC has recently come out and said that 3 in 10 users of recreational marijuana suffer from cannabis use disorder, which is just sort of a vague way of saying that they suffer from addiction.
I was told all throughout my childhood by adults and by fellow peers that it is impossible to become addicted to weed.
And this is a libel that has hurt so many people and that it continues to be peddled.
And the reason for this is that there is no known overdose amount for marijuana.
So people think that if there's no known overdose amount that it's impossible for you to get addicted.
Now, I'm not really sure how that logic follows, but I'm just telling you the argument that people use.
What we don't know, however, is that over the past 60 years, the average THC concentration in marijuana products, and THC is the active ingredient in marijuana, has increased exponentially.
The weed that our parents and maybe even our grandparents used to smoke back in the 20th century is not the weed that adolescents and teens and adults are smoking today.
To give you some statistics, the average THC concentration in marijuana products in the 1960s was just 2%.
In the 1990s, it was 5%.
And then ready for this one?
Now, joints have an average THC concentration of between 20% and 30%.
Edibles can go between 40% and 80%.
And dab pens or weed pens can go up to 90%.
That is astoundingly high.
And we are seeing...
People suffer from something called marijuana-induced psychosis, where people become extremely paranoid, not even just while they're high, but also when they come down from the high, when they are quote-unquote sober, there are still residual effects of the weed.
When you are more paranoid, you may be more prone to engage in violent behavior towards yourself or towards others.
It is really wreaking a lot of havoc on young people, and again, I have personally witnessed this myself.
We will talk about this more throughout the show, but I believe one of the biggest reasons that adolescents are turning to weed is, of course, because we've been sold lies about it, not being addictive.
But also it's because we are spiritually suffocated.
We are emotionally and intellectually suffocated.
I think we so desperately need emotional, spiritual, and intellectual enrichment.
And instead of doing the work to find that, we're turning to products that alter our consciousness.
More on that in the next segment.
I'm Julie Hartman.
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Final segment of the first hour of the Dennis Prager Show.
I am Julie Hartman, co-host of the Dennis and Julie podcast and host of the three times weekly show, Timeless with Julie Hartman.
I was just telling you that voters in Oklahoma yesterday rejected a bid to legalize recreational marijuana for adults 21 and older.
Joining Arkansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota in But 21 states across our union have legalized recreational marijuana, and teen mental health problems have been on the rise, with many becoming addicted to weed and suffering from marijuana-induced psychosis.
I have personally witnessed people suffer from this and almost ruin their lives as a result.
result, I cannot stress to you what a problem and ever increasing problem it is among people my age.
I was arguing that one of the reasons why I believe my generation turns to weed is that we are spiritually suffocated.
We are emotionally and intellectually suffocated as well.
Many of us believe that religion is antiquated, that believing in God is something of the past, that only rednecks, cowboys, white supremacists believe in God, and that there is nothing greater.
About our universe.
They have a materialist, secular, scientific worldview that we are just a product of science and our existence here on Earth for this very short time, again, is nothing but just an expression of materialism.
That is spiritually suffocating to walk around life thinking that your life doesn't have any greater meaning, that your existence doesn't have something eternal attached to it.
Additionally, we have lost love for our country.
We have told that we should be ashamed of our history, ashamed of our culture, that expressing patriotism, love, and gratitude for this country is something to be ashamed of, that you are a white supremacist and a bigot if you do that.
People need to feel proud of their lives.
They need to feel proud of themselves, of their behavior.
They need to feel proud of their families.
People need to feel proud of the places where they work, of the places where they go to school.
And we often forget how important it is to feel proud of your country.
That, alongside religion, has been taken away from us.
We in my generation, we think that living our lives through Instagram is the proper way to do it.
We scroll and scroll and scroll because we really don't know what else to do.
And we allow that to eat away our time.
And it's sort of an escape for us.
If we scroll, then we don't have to face the hard questions in life.
Am I living the life that I want to live?
Am I doing enough?
Am I fulfilling my duty to other people?
And weed is another way alongside scrolling to escape that.
In my show, Timeless, I try to be an example of a young person who is not spiritually, emotionally, or intellectually suffocated.
Please consider watching the show and please stay tuned for the next hour.
We'll be talking about the January 6th tapes.
I'm Julie Hartman.
Welcome back to The Dennis Prager Show.
I'm Julie Hartman, co-host of the Dennis and Julie podcast.
We are celebrating our one-year anniversary this Monday with the drop of the new episode.
And I also host the three times weekly show, Timeless with Julie Hartman.
You can call in to this program at 1-8-Prager-776.
You can talk to me about anything, but right now we are going to turn our attention to these new January 6th.
Now, since the January 6th event, which occurred two years ago, there have been dozens of people imprisoned for trespassing that day.
Many of them are political prisoners.
They have been put in there on trumped-up charges.
They have been treated terribly.
Dennis has actually interviewed one of them named John Mellis, who says that he has been beaten by correctional officers, that he has been in solitary confinement.
It's horrible to hear what they have gone through.
I am not saying that some people on that day do not deserve to have appropriate and adequate punishment or consequences, but the key is that it must be appropriate and adequate and in accordance with the law.
And many of those who have been imprisoned, again, are political prisoners.
40,000 hours of surveillance.
Footage of that day was withheld from the public, and accordingly it was not shown during court cases where these people were charged and then sent to prison.
Why is that?
Why would you withhold 40,000 hours of footage from that awful day from the public?
Well, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, when he got the gavel back in January a few weeks ago, he released or handed over those 40,000 hours of surveillance to Tucker Carlson, who last night and the night before released his team's findings.
And before I give you a summary of the big revelations here, I'd like to first tell you two macro things pertaining to this subject that I've been thinking about.
I will be honest with you that many people in my life have encouraged me not to report on this story.
They've said to me, Julie, you have a long career ahead of you.
People get really worked up about January 6th.
Don't talk about it.
Just move on.
Talk about all the other news.
And similarly, I talk to people who aren't necessarily in the broadcast business who say that they have been encouraged not to talk about it themselves because it may personally or professionally harm them.
And I was thinking that Dennis and I, you know, we talk a lot about the difference between good people and not good people.
But we don't really talk so much about the difference between good people and great people.
And I think that you, what really makes that difference is that you have to go all the way.
Morally, if you will.
You can't just go 80%.
You have to go 100%.
I was interviewing Kyle Serafin, who is a former FBI agent.
He is now indefinitely suspended from the Bureau.
He is a whistleblower.
He recently made public an internal memo within the FBI that has called Catholics violent extremists for their...
Anyway, he is a moral giant.
He has sacrificed his career.
He has sacrificed his safety.
He has sacrificed or put in jeopardy his reputation to talk about the political corruption within the FBI. I interviewed him on my show, Timeless.
I forget if I mentioned that.
But one of the things that he said to me during the interview, I said to him, it seems like there are a lot more whistleblowers coming out from the FBI, from the CIA, from these federal agencies.
And he responded to me and he said, yes, there are, but some of them won't go all the way.
They won't fully talk about the extent of the corruption because they're afraid.
And again, it made me think about speaking the truth.
I know a lot of courageous...
People on the right who are willing to talk about the crusade against police in this country, how awful it is, the corruption of Black Lives Matter, how ill-advised the COVID lockdowns were.
But when it comes to January 6th or when it comes to acknowledging that there were improprieties in the 2020 election or when it comes to acknowledging that there have been some Would it be better for my career in my personal life if I didn't talk about January 6?
Yes.
Would it be better for yours if you didn't?
Yes.
But this is our country.
This is the truth, and we need to uphold it.
And number two, the second big macro thing that I'd like to discuss, and then very quickly I'll turn over to these specifics.
Two things can be true at once about January 6th.
January 6th was an awful day.
The people should have never trespassed and entered the Capitol.
And the thugs who are trying to countenance interference with a constitutionally required function, again, should be adequately and appropriately punished.
However, it is also true that the media has lied to us about the event, that they have exploited it for their own political gain.
Kamala Harris has compared it to Pearl Harbor and 9-11.
President Biden, when there were riots in Brazil where pro-Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil's federal buildings, he likened that event to January 6th, even though violent riots have convulsed around Brazil in recent years many times.
Most of them have actually been left-wing riots.
One of the biggest ones was in 2017 when left-wing rioters stormed We can recognize how awful it was, and we can also recognize that the media has lied.
So let's go on.
I'm going to summarize for you some of the revelations that Tucker Carlson has exposed.
Please call in, 1-8 Prager-776.
If you disagree with me, if you'd like to challenge me, if you'd like to talk about this subject, I will take your call first.
The first big revelation pertains to Brian Sicknick, who is a Capitol Police officer, actually a Trump voter, who died on January 7th.
The original report in the weeks after January 6th said that he was hit over the head with a fire extinguisher that caused him to have severe head damage that culminated in his dying the next day.
This was pushed by the New York Times.
Anderson Cooper said this several times on his CNN program.
And it came out very quickly that he died the next day of a stroke.
The New York Times quietly retracted the story and corrected it, that he did not die due to this blow to the head via a fire extinguisher, that he died of a stroke.
But nevertheless, the media and the left continued to propagate this narrative that he was hit over the head with a fire extinguisher.
And his body actually lied in state, where our President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden and our Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, But the videotape that Tucker Carlson has released shows that after the time that he was allegedly hit in the head with a fire extinguisher,
he is walking around the Capitol, appearing to be very lively, able-bodied.
He looks like he's moving his hand, trying to usher people out.
He's talking to fellow officers.
And also, according to the video, he's wearing a helmet.
Which raises some questions about if he really did sustain a head injury as a result of a fire extinguisher because the helmet would protect him.
And certainly in the video he doesn't look like he sustained a head injury.
Of course it is tragic that he died the next day of a stroke, but the facts matter here.
It doesn't seem, according to this new video, to have anything to do with January 6th.
So that is the first revelation pertaining to Brian Sicknick.
The second one, arguably the biggest revelation of all, It pertains to the QAnon shaman.
That is his nickname.
He was that guy who has been the face of January 6th.
He looks like a hoodlum.
He was not wearing a shirt.
He had paint all over him.
He was wearing this horned hat.
He is a Navy vet from Arizona, Jacob Chansley.
He was sentenced to four years in prison after the January 6th event.
The video is stunning.
We don't know how Mr. Chansley got inside the Capitol.
The video, at least the ones that...
Tucker has showed right now does not show that.
However, once he was inside, we see him talking to and being escorted by nine different Capitol police officers.
In fact, one of these police officers, or actually two of them, opens the door of the Senate for him, where he walks in, and they're walking beside him, chatting with him.
They look like they're...
They have a great rapport.
It certainly does not look at all like the police officers are trying to detain him.
And this QAnon shaman stands up, gives a prayer, and thanks the police for letting him in.
Again, none of this was talked about, let alone revealed, in the past two years.
More on the January 6th tapes.
I'm Julie Hartman.
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Funny Dennis should talk about that in the intro.
I just did the first hour on that subject.
What a coincidence.
I'm Julie Hartman.
This is the second hour of The Dennis Prager Show.
We are talking about the January 6th tapes that Tucker Carlson and his team have combed through, which expose some revelations that we were not informed on prior to Tucker going through these hours and hours.
Again, it was a horrible day.
They should have never entered the Capitol.
People should be appropriately and adequately punished.
But also, if we look at this guy, Jacob Chansley, who was sentenced to four years in prison, we see on these tapes that he was escorted around the Capitol by Capitol police officers.
There is this case that is really relevant here pertaining to Jacob Chansley.
It's called Brady v.
Maryland.
It was handed down in 1963. It concerns criminal cases.
So it pertains to evidence in criminal cases.
Thus, it would concern Mr. Chansley.
It says that the prosecution or the police, if they have exculpatory evidence or information, i.e.
evidence that may show that the person who they are suing or trying to charge with a crime is not guilty, they have to turn over that evidence to the defense if it might go to the question of guilt or innocence or if it may affect the individual's punishment.
Now this case was handed down.
Because this guy Brady was being charged for a crime and the prosecution did have evidence that might show that he might not have been guilty and it wasn't handed over.
So the Supreme Court made it very clear that you have to hand over all of the relevant evidence.
Now, this clip of Mr. Chansley...
Being escorted around and inside the Capitol by nine Capitol Police officers, that was not shown during his court case at all.
The prosecution did not hand that over to the defense.
So according to this case, it doesn't matter if the oversight is intentional or inadvertent.
If you do not hand over all of the evidence, the conviction of the individual is supposed to get vacated and overturned and the person is entitled to a new trial.
So this seems clearly, at least in my judgment, to be a Brady-type evidence or a Brady-type violation that would mean that Mr. Chansley should be released from prison and given a Now, look, that doesn't mean that he wouldn't or shouldn't be charged with other things.
We don't know, for instance, how he got into the Capitol.
The video doesn't show that.
But the fact that he was inside being escorted by police and that didn't get shown or talked about at all during his court case, really?
Is this the place where our country has come to?
And if you are an honest person, no matter what you think about that day, no matter what you think politically, we should all be able to recognize that that is not upholding justice.
this On to other important things that were revealed during these January 6 files or 40,000 hours of footage that Tucker Carlson has exposed.
I talked to you about Brian Sicknick.
We just talked about Jacob Chansley.
Another thing is that the January 6th committee played footage of Josh Hawley, who is a U.S. senator from Missouri, running out of the Capitol as the people stormed the Capitol on January 6th.
And they were doing it to embarrass Senator Hawley, to make him look like a coward in the face of these rioters.
And actually, during the committee, when they played this clip, everyone in the room laughed aloud.
And it turns out that they were just editing one part of the clip, again, to embarrass Mr. Hawley, to show it to the January 6th committee members.
And according to Tucker's review of the footage, it shows a lot of other senators and congresspeople running out of the Capitol, as probably anyone would on that day when, you know, a mob is coming in.
And the police are telling them that they have to leave.
But instead, the January 6th committee just edits out that one small portion to humiliate.
Additionally, the January 6th committee accused Barry Lodermilk, who is a Republican representative in the House from Georgia, of leading a reconnaissance mission through the Capitol the day before January 6th.
They said that he was taking photos and videos in order to pass it along to the people who stormed the Capitol the next day.
But again, according to Tucker's review of footage, and you can look this all up, Yeah.
Representative from Georgia was actually just giving a tour to some of his constituents from Georgia who happened to be in Washington, D.C. that day.
You see him with his constituents.
They're talking.
They're taking selfies.
They're taking photos of the Capitol.
And actually, he didn't even walk through most of the route that the January 6 stormers took on that day.
He actually walked through a congressional office building down the street.
And that charge that...
that this representative was leading a reconnaissance mission through the Capitol actually made it to the final January 6th report.
It says that protesters took a tour of the Capitol in which this representative, Lodermilk, took pictures of hallways and staircases as reconnaissance.
Yet another lie that they peddled to try to make those on the right look bad.
They didn't need to make those on the right look bad.
There was already enough.
You know, evidence that that was a really awful day and many on the right did behave poorly.
But what is their motive for coming up with more and more of these lies, for saying that this representative was doing a reconnaissance mission?
Again, they're trying to exaggerate this.
They're trying to exploit it for their own political gain.
Finally, what I'll tell you, again, this is a summary of the January 6th tapes, is that Tucker found that GMA producer, GMA is Good Morning America show on ABC, morning show.
GMA hired a producer, James Goldstein, to comb through January 6 footage and to dramatize it.
And he actually dubbed in audio that made the video louder.
He dubbed in yells just to make it seem all the more awful.
You don't need to add in audio or sound effects.
It was awful.
So it seems a little bit questionable that those on the left were so fervent to push even more of these lies.
Again, we have to get to the truth here.
I remember during the Black Lives Matter riots, someone said to me, you know, Julie, I agree with you that maybe the defund the police movement is going too far, but I would rather be too sympathetic to the cause or the movement of Black Lives Matter, just in case there really is grave wrongdoing within our policing system.
I'd rather be too sympathetic than not sympathetic enough.
I remembered that, and my response to her was, why is that the option?
Why is it either you're in the Black Lives Matter camp or you're in the camp that opposes Black Lives Matter?
Why is it a binary option like that?
Why can't we just get it right?
Why can't we just get to the truth?
Which is that Derek Chauvin behaved horribly on that day, but also Black Lives Matter is a corrupt group that is trying to exploit Black death for their own personal gain.
Why can't we say that?
As the truth.
And the same thing with January 6th.
Why do we have to either be totally saying that it was an insurrection or denying that it was bad?
Let's get to the truth.
More on this when we're back.
Julie Hartman here, guest hosting the Dennis Prager Show.
I gave a summary of Tucker Carlson's revelations amid new footage that he has obtained from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
This is 40,000 hours of footage that was not shown to the public, that was not shown in court cases, but was handed over to Tucker Carlson, and he has now combed through it and made it public.
I encourage people to call in, 1-8-Prager-776-TUCKER. I'm not a liberal or a Democrat,
but I want to know, why is it so hard for conservatives to admit that January 6th was an insurrection and it was mainly caused by Trump's lies about the 2020 election?
Why is it so hard to just admit that to start with?
Okay, let me go through each of those.
First, with calling it an insurrection.
I think where the trouble comes is, first of all, most people on that day, though they should not have entered the Capitol, did not really have any idea of what was going on inside.
It was chaos.
People were running in.
They were, you know, wreaking havoc.
But mostly in that video, a lot of people, certainly within the rotunda, were peaceful and just coming in for the chaos of it.
They never should have been there.
I've said that many times.
They trespassed.
But to call that an insurrection.
I think is a bit exaggerating.
It was a riot.
Now, there were certain people who were insurrectionists.
There were certain people who were coming in who were trying to countenance interference with a constitutionally required function.
I would call those people insurrectionists, but to say the whole event is an insurrection, I'm not sure if it fits the definition because most of the people there were not trying to overthrow the government or countenance that interference.
They were trying to take advantage of the chaos.
Additionally, if we're going to call I would have no problem calling January 6th an insurrection if the definition of insurrection remains the same across all different levels of entering government buildings.
So that's my answer for you with the first one.
There were certain insurrectionists, but I don't think the whole thing was an insurrection.
It was a riot.
And what was your second one?
I said with regard to this January 6 issue that two things can be true at once.
We can acknowledge that it was an awful day and that people should be punished, but that also that the media has exploited it and tried to use it for their own political gain.
The same can be said of the 2020 election.
There were severe, severe...
I mean, if you look at Mark Zuckerberg giving $400 million to privatize election procedures, this happened in many states across our union, in Wisconsin, in Pennsylvania, in Georgia.
This allowed left-wing groups, one called the CTCL, Center for Tech and Civic Life, to have left-wingers change absentee voting instructions, have access to a number of...
Cure absentee ballots.
Also, there were other many examples of improprieties in Wisconsin.
195 voters had their ID requirements accidentally waived.
There was this kerfuffle at the State Farm Arena in Georgia where vote counters were told to go home, and then Democrat vote counters on video are pulling out ballots and running them through the machines without any oversight.
So there were many improprieties in 2020 that Trump talked about and exposed, and he was not lying about those.
There's mountains.
Read Molly Hemingway's book, Rigged.
But also, another truth can again be true at once, that Donald Trump exaggerated and he talked about things that also weren't true.
And his counsel, Rudy Giuliani, was very upsetting.
They had mountains and mountains of evidence that they could have talked about.
And instead, they talked about, you know, the over bloated dead voter rolls, which certainly was a problem, but it wasn't a problem nearly to the extent that they were talking about it.
It was such an odd strategy for them to focus on things that either happened to a lesser extent that they were talking about or didn't happen at all, when, again, there was a lot that they could have talked about and exposed that was really bad about that election.
So I'd like to give you time to respond.
Rudy Giuliani is on tape saying about election fraud.
We don't really have any evidence.
We have theories.
Yes.
Rudy, you're a lawyer.
Trump is the type who never admits he's wrong.
Frank, forgive me.
I don't mean to interrupt you, but we're almost done with this segment.
I'm so sorry.
You're right about Rudy Giuliani.
I think he was a very bad counsel for Trump, and he has not behaved honorably.
But that doesn't mean that some of the improprieties in 2020 were not true.
More on this when we're back.
I'm Julie Hartman.
The Dennis Prager Show.
Hey friends, it's Julie Hartman guest hosting for Dennis's It is the second hour of the program.
We're talking about the January 6th tapes.
You know, maybe it was a little bit naive of me to think that I could only do this for one segment.
Once you get on January 6th, you just kind of keep going and going and going, but it's okay.
I welcome discussion.
I know that we talk about it a lot.
It's reported on a lot, but it's not always talked about well and reported on truthfully, and I hope to do both of those things well here.
Just quickly before I go to the next call, and I would like to hopefully get on to some news, the third hour, the next hour of this show, I am going to talk about Iraq.
March 20th, in just about two weeks, marks 20 years since the United States invasion of Iraq.
So I'm going to talk about the background of that invasion, why we invaded in the first place, and the events leading up, even before 9-11, that made that invasion possible, going back to the Iran-Iraq War, the first...
I'm really going to try to make it as simple and understandable as possible.
And it's a riveting history.
So please stick in with me.
I know we're doing a lot of politics and news, but whenever I host, I always have to do a history hour.
This one will be on Iraq.
I'm very much looking forward to it.
But back to January 6th.
I'd like to take another call.
I'd like to thank Frank, the last segment, for calling.
I thought that was a great discussion.
I'm sorry we had to cut it short.
Now on to Tony in Phoenix, Arizona.
Hi, Tony.
Hey, Julie.
I'm here.
Hi, Tony.
How are you?
Listen, I kind of disagree with you.
I was watching the January 6th events as they unfolded that day.
I had listened to it on KFYI radio in Phoenix, Arizona, live with the whole thing of, you know, Trump was running behind schedule and all that kind of thing.
And then as they were getting closer to when he was, because he was 45 minutes behind schedule that day.
And as he...
So what they did is they went to the House where they were starting to vote on whether or not we should look into the elections and all that kind of stuff.
And they had asked, I can't remember who it was, from Arizona, do you have a petition, how many people, da-da-da-da, was it signed by legislators, yada-yada, all that kind of stuff.
And then there was that rumble in the background and it's like, oh my gosh, something's going on.
There's looks like there's some kind of commotion coming on.
Oh, wait a minute.
Here's the president now.
We'll come back later.
So at any rate, Trump was 45 minutes behind schedule.
Had he been on schedule that day, he would have said in the speech at the 45-minute moment, it would have been, so let's all now go down to the Capitol, blah, blah, blah, and peacefully protest.
Well, that was exactly, if he had started on time, that was exactly when the commotion began.
Tony, forgive me for interrupting you.
I hate doing this to callers, but just for the sake of time, I just want to clarify.
So what specifically do you disagree with me about?
Well, partly what I disagree with is that the people didn't have any right to be there.
I mean, it's the people's house.
I mean, what, was it a tourism day or something?
There was plenty of video streaming that day from people's phones all over the internet, and they're showing the police at the doors going, come on in, this is your house, get out of the end of the hall, make a left, you know, I mean, that kind of a thing.
The thing that I want to say, though, is that I believe the whole thing was a Democrat hoax.
To begin with, and my proof on it would be, aside from all the denials of extra help for the National Guard and more police and all that kind of stuff that Pelosi turned down, is that you might agree with me or not, but nothing happens quickly in Washington, D.C. They form a committee, and then it takes six months for them to figure out what the seating arrangements are going to be at the first meeting.
I'm so sorry, Tony.
Oh, sorry.
Just quickly, sorry.
It's really important.
Okay.
Please.
The next day, the whole Capitol is surrounded with fencing that's all numbered and lettered with gates and passageways.
That got ordered, that had to be ordered, what, six months ago?
Six months prior?
Because it's not like they can go down to discount fencing and have it...
Tony, I have to stop you here.
Again, I really apologize.
I wish I could talk to you for longer.
It is just that we're going to have to go to commercial.
So, a few things.
I believe they had a right to be outside of the Capitol.
peacefully and patriotically, that's Trump's quote, protesting what they saw as improprieties in the 2020 election.
They certainly had a right to be outside of the Capitol.
I do not believe that they had a right to go inside the Capitol.
That's trespassing into a federal building.
Now, you brought up that the police officers were welcoming them in.
If the police officers opened the door and welcomed them in, then you know what?
You're right.
They did have a right to go in and be there because that is the people that are in charge of that facility welcoming the public in.
So if that is the case, I agree.
Unfortunately, we don't know how they got in.
We see clips of some people breaking in.
That is clear violation and trespassing.
But then we also see some of these Tucker Carlson clips where the QAnon shaman, which is what he's called, is being escorted and walked around the Capitol by nine Capitol police officers.
Depends on the person, how they were getting into the Capitol.
Those who broke in were trespassing.
Those who were welcomed in were not.
And then as far as you're saying that January 6th is a Democrat hoax, I think that that is, with all due respect, untrue.
And I don't think that calling it that helps us in any way.
January 6th was not...
Yes, you are right that Nancy Pelosi rejected extra security that President Trump offered.
You may be right that there were some federal agents and government plants there at the event.
In fact, Democrats have testified before the January 6th committee that federal agents were there.
But to say the whole thing was a Democrat hoax, well, that's just not fair.
It's just not.
What I would love to agree with you, yes, but it's just not true.
These were mostly right-wingers, overwhelmingly right-wingers, supporters of Donald Trump who thought the election was stolen, who were trying to go into the Capitol.
Some of them were trying to countenance interference of the constitutionally required function.
Most of them were just succumbing to the chaos.
But overall, it was not a Democrat hoax.
It was aided and abetted in part by the Democrats, but mostly it was a right-wing thing.
We will wrap up on this January 6th issue in the next segment.
Final segment of the second hour of the Dennis Prager Show, which has turned into January 6th Tapes Hour.
I appreciate Frank and Tony for calling, and again, I'm sorry I had to cut you off.
I want to get to the truth of this.
It is comforting to pursue the truth, and no matter what gets revealed in this, If it's the truth, it needs to be talked about.
And I'm not afraid to criticize my side, and I'm certainly not afraid to criticize the other side.
Now, I'm getting a lot of calls here with what Tony just said, that January 6th was a Democrat hoax.
I think that that is going a bit too far.
It is certainly true that the Democrats may have aided and abetted this.
Maybe the Capitol Police officers who opened the doors were Democrats.
Certainly Nancy Pelosi rejected security.
January 6th committee members or people who they have interviewed testified that they're...
There were federal plants there.
But say the overall, just painting it with one broad brush to say the whole thing was a Democrat hoax, well, again, I don't think that helps our side.
We need to show that we can talk about this with nuance.
I hope I've done that for you this hour.
And again, thank you all very much for calling in.
I wish I could take the many calls on this board.
Before we go to break, I'd like to remind you that March is fundraising month for PragerU.
We are in a battle for America, and PragerU is a mighty weapon in that battle, I should know.
PragerU single-handedly made me a conservative.
I was a lib, believe it or not, for most of my life, and they changed my life by...
Waking me up.
So we need to support Dennis and PragerU and the terrific team they have there.
Please go to PragerU.com to donate or call 833-PRAGERU. That's again PragerU.com or you can call 833-PRAGERU. We don't have much time in this segment, but I'd like to quickly acknowledge this horrible event that happened this past weekend on Friday.
When four U.S. citizens from South Carolina, one woman and three men, were kidnapped in Mexico after crossing the border in Texas, apparently the woman was going into Mexico to seek medical treatment to get a procedure.
Right when they crossed the border, some gunmen hopped out of their car, surrounded the Americans' white minivan, opened fire, kidnapped the four Americans.
Two of them have been found dead.
The other two, thankfully, have been returned to the United States where they are safely with their families.
The FBI says that the Mexican kidnappers may have mistaked the Americans for Haitian drug dealers.
There is a bill that Reps Dan Crenshaw and Michael Waltz, both Republicans, have proposed.
It's a joint resolution to give the president authority to use the U.S. military against drug cartels in Mexico.
We did this successfully in the 1990s in a raid in Colombia that eliminated the two biggest drug cartels.
I hope that this tragic event will make Congress pass that proposed bill by those Republicans.
We should do to the drug cartels what we did to ISIS. Bomb them, drone them.
They are thugs.
They have killed our own.
They kill our own every day by sending fentanyl and drugs across our borders.
Next hour, Iraq history.
We'll be back.
Oh, I love it.
Ooh, she's watching me.
So Sean is playing this.
By the way, hello.
Welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
I'm Julie Hartman, your guest host today.
Dennis is currently in route with his wife Sue to Tampa Bay, Florida to speak there.
I know that because I just spoke with both of them a few minutes ago.
They are listening to the show, which is a great honor.
Sean is playing this music because today on my episode of Timeless that airs, I interview Carl Magnus Palm, who is a biographer of the Swedish band ABBA. One of the things that I was talking about in previous segments was weed addiction.
By the way, I am going to relate this to ABBA. Sean's looking at me like, how are you going to do this right now?
Many adolescents and teens and even adults are addicted to weed.
Oklahoma just rejected a bid to legalize weed.
And one of the things I said is that people my age rely on it as a crutch because we are emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually suffocated.
We don't have good influences that enrich us, so we think that we have to turn to a substance or to scrolling on Instagram to get fun in life.
And one of the things that I really want to do in my show, Timeless, in addition to giving you a fact-rich analysis of the news, Let's talk about non-political stuff sometimes, because that's one of the biggest problems in our country.
That we don't know how to talk to each other about things that don't have to do with politics.
My graduation at Harvard, one speaker after the other, all they would talk about is politics.
As a nation, we have become spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually suffocated, and that is causing a lot of our malaise.
So anyway, please check out that interview.
That's why Sean played Abba coming in.
Total 180. This hour, third hour of the show, I am going to be talking about Iraq.
In just about two weeks, on March 20th, it will mark 20 years since the United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003. It's amazing to look and see how much the country has transformed since then and how much it's transformed since the 1980s,
or I should say 1970s is more accurate, when Iraq was sort of at its height as far as domination and stature in the Middle East.
Saddam Hussein, who is the brutal dictator of Iraq that we, the United States, overthrew in our invasion of 2008. He was executed in 2006. Saddam in 1980 thought that Iraq was so powerful and that Iran was so weak that he could invade Iran and capture its territory and make it a Sunni state.
Well, not only did he fail, but 40 years later, Iraq...
is actually right now an Iranian client state.
The exact opposite happened, where now Iraq is primarily run by Shias instead of Sunnis and controlled by Iran instead of Iraq controlling it.
Additionally, Saddam in 1980 thought that he and his country were so powerful that not only could they invade and take Iran, but then in 1990, he thought that they could invade and take Kuwait.
And now we see that Iraq was actually the one that was invaded and taken by American forces.
And in the wake of our invasion, the country was taken over by al-Qaeda and ISIS.
So it's just fascinating, again, to see the way that the tables have turned with regard to this Arab country.
So what I'm going to talk about today, when I say the history of Iraq, that seems like a very broad thing, I'm going to talk about the circumstances that led up to the 2003 American invasion.
Again, it's very important to me, I said this last hour and I want to reiterate it, it's very important to me to make these complex subjects as simple and understandable to you as possible.
So if I am ever not clear, then I will not have been doing my job.
But this is very important to understand in order to grasp where Iraq is today.
Again, it's an Iranian client state.
It's very poor.
It's ravaged by corruption.
And the seeds of the destruction that Iraq has today really go back to 1980.
By the way, quickly, I encourage Iraqis, Iraqi Americans, Kuwaitis, Saudis, also Americans or people who don't have any tie to this, please call in.
I did a History Hour on the show on Iran.
And I couldn't believe the amount of Iranian Americans that called in, and I learned so much from them.
And I want to hear from Iraqis specifically, because I am talking about your country.
So please call in 1-8 Prager-776.
Let's go back to 1980, which is really the start of this story.
In 1979...
Iran was overtaken by Ayatollah Khomeini.
So Iran was mostly a secular state that was run by the Shah, who the United States, we propped up in Iran.
But in 1979, there was an Islamic revolution where the Western Shah was ousted for the very, very radical, religious Ayatollah Khomeini, who wanted...
To make Iran into an Islamist fundamentalist state, and he has successfully done so.
But in 1979, again with Iran having this revolution, Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, which is right next door to Iran, said, you know what?
Iran just went through this revolution.
They're looking to be kind of weak.
Why don't we, Iraq, invade Iran and retake the territory?
I say retake because historically many countries in the Middle East believe that other countries were once under their territories because this is thousands of years of history.
During the Ottoman Empire, they were all under the Ottomans.
So there are a lot of historical land disputes.
Hussein of Iraq wanted to take Iran after its revolution in 1980. Iran is a Shia state,
and Iraq actually was a primarily Shia state, even though Saddam Hussein was a Sunni leader.
Sunni and Shia are different sects of Islam.
And what Saddam wanted to do, he was afraid that the Shias in Iran would try to foment uprising among the Shias in Iraq against the Sunni leader Saddam Hussein he was afraid that the Shias in Iran would try to foment
So Saddam Hussein wanted to invade Iran so that he could capture the territory and make it all into a Sunni state to curb Shias both in Iran and Iraq from overthrowing his rule.
So Saddam did so in 1980. Iraqi forces came into Iran, and Saddam thought that he would quickly invade and take Iran, but he was wrong.
There was a bitter war for eight years that lasted until 1988. And basically, when the war was done in 1988 between Iran and Iraq, things went back to as they were.
There was no concessions of territory.
There were no borders redrawn.
It basically was eight years of wasted war.
That made Iraq very weak because they lost a lot of troops.
They lost a lot of money.
And so in the late 1980s, Saddam Hussein of Iraq found himself in a lot of debt, needing to rebuild his country after the war.
So what he did is that he went to OPEC, which is the group of Middle Eastern countries that form a coalition to set oil prices because the rest of the world gets a lot of their oil from Middle Eastern countries that export it to them.
Saddam went to OPEC and he said, look.
I am in debt here.
I lost this war.
I kept Iran out of your hair for eight years while I was fighting them.
Iran didn't go send any Shia militants into your countries to foment uprisings among your Shia populations.
Again, I kept them busy, but now I, Saddam Hussein, and Iraq, we are in debt, so we want you, OPEC, to agree to raise oil prices.
So that we, Iraq, can pay off our debt from the Iran-Iraq war.
OPEC said no.
Many members of OPEC did not like Saddam Hussein.
They did not like Iraq.
And they didn't want to rock the boat.
They thought that oil prices were stable and good and they were benefiting from them.
And they didn't want to shake anything up.
So they said no to Saddam.
His next move we'll talk about more in the next segment.
He decides to invade Kuwait, which brings us closer to the situation that we are in today.
We're going to be talking about the first Gulf War when Saddam invades Kuwait in 1990 under George Bush, the father, and the consequences of that event.
I'm Julie Hartman.
This is The Dennis Prager Show.
We are talking about Iraqi history.
Please call in, especially if you're Iraqi.
1-8-PRAGER-776.
The Dennis Prager Show.
It's Julie Hartman on the Dennis Prager Show.
This is Hour 3, and we are talking about a recent history of Iraq.
March 20th marks 20 years since the United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003. And I'm discussing some of the events, even prior to 9-11, that led up to our 2003 invasion and makes the American hostility towards Saddam Hussein in Iraq more under...
And similarly, Iraqi disdain for some Americans and Western countries more understandable.
And so one of the things that I was talking about last segment is that Saddam Hussein, who was the brutal dictator of Iraq, invaded Iran in 1980 because he thought that he could take the territory of Iran, make it into a Sunni-led country.
He is Sunni.
Most of Iraq is Shia.
Most of Iran is Shia.
Saddam was afraid that the Shias of Iran and Iraq would unite against him.
So he invaded to try to make the two countries Sunni.
He also wanted Iranian oil.
He failed at taking the country of Iran.
After eight years of war from 1980 to 1988, Saddam Hussein and Iraq withdrew their forces from Iran.
And now to the next part of the story where Saddam Hussein asks OPEC, which is the group of Middle Eastern countries that set oil prices to raise oil prices to help Saddam pay off some of his war debt.
OPEC says no.
And in 1990, Saddam Hussein then invades the neighboring country of Kuwait.
And this is known as the First Gulf War.
He did this to get Kuwaiti oil so that he could pay off the debt for the war.
And so that he could also go back to OPEC and have a better bargaining seat to ask them to raise prices of oil.
And also, again...
Kuwait actually had a mostly Sunni population and Saddam Hussein, as a Sunni leader of a mostly Shia country, wanted to invade Kuwait and sort of get more Sunnis under his rule.
He also argued that Kuwait was a part of Iraq under the Ottoman Empire, not unlike how Vladimir Putin argues that Ukraine was a part of Russia during the Soviet Union.
So Saddam invades Kuwait.
Very famously, our former President George Herbert Walker Bush, this is Bush the father, number 41, he creates a coalition of American troops, our NATO allies, as well as Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt.
And he gets permission from the United Nations Security Council to come in on behalf of Kuwait and push Saddam and Iraqi forces out of Kuwait and back into Iraq.
Bush the father successfully did so.
Within just about a year, the country of Kuwait was liberated from Saddam Hussein, and Saddam and the Iraqis were pushed back to their country.
President Bush, the father, is hailed as a hero for the way that he navigated the first Gulf War.
I would like to complicate our understanding of that event by first posing the question, why did we get into it in the first place?
Bush seemed to be friendly with the head of Kuwait, and perhaps that was part of the reason.
But if you think about it, in the 1970s, OPEC, that group of nations which set oil prices, OPEC imposed two embargoes on the United States in the 1970s.
Kuwait was involved in that.
Kuwait didn't do anything to stop those two embargoes, which were a disaster in our country for a time.
Under Jimmy Carter's presidency, most famously there were these long gas lines.
People couldn't get gas in their cars.
I'm sure many of you remember it.
Kuwait did not come to aid us in our time of need.
So why did we militarily intervene to aid them in their time of need?
Now, certainly we could have and perhaps should have provided them with arms and weapons, but I'm not sure if we were obligated to do a full-scale invasion to help the Kuwaitis.
We didn't have a defense treaty with them, for instance.
So it seems, although we helped the Kuwaitis, there were some unforeseen consequences for us invading on their behalf to push Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
Gave Osama bin Laden some reasons to hate the United States.
Now, of course, I am not trying to say that Osama bin Laden is in the right here.
I'm not trying to justify anything that he and his terrorist organization, al-Qaeda, did.
That is certainly not what I'm trying to say.
But still, bear with me here.
Osama bin Laden, he's the head of Al-Qaeda, which executed the terrorist attack on 9-11, which killed 3,000 Americans.
Osama bin Laden in the 1990s grew in his hatred for America, and a large reason for that was because of our invasion in Kuwait.
Saddam Hussein had three points that he said really bothered him about the United States going up to the terrorist attack on 9-11.
The first one was he resented the United States' embargo on Iraq during and after the first Gulf War.
When we helped Kuwait get liberated, when we helped push the Iraqis back to their country, we imposed an embargo.
The UN also imposed an embargo on Iraq, preventing us from selling food, medicine to Iraqis, also preventing us from buying oil and other products.
And Saddam Hussein, as a Islamic fundamentalist...
Who wanted to create a caliphate of Middle Eastern Islamic Muslim countries said that that embargo on Iraq was harming Iraqi civilians and Iraqi children.
And he resented the United States for that embargo on Iraq, which started during that first Gulf War, the invasion to liberate Kuwait.
A second thing that Osama bin Laden said that he detested about the United States is that we had forces in Saudi Arabia, U.S. troops in the holy lands of Mecca and Medina, which are the two most holy sites in Islam.
And again, that was an outcome of the first Gulf War.
Because when we went in to liberate Kuwait, we also stationed troops in Saudi Arabia.
And after...
Kuwait was liberated.
President Bush, the father, or President Clinton, did not withdraw those American forces from Saudi Arabia.
They stayed in Saudi Arabia.
And Osama bin Laden said, we don't want Americans or Westerners in our holy lands.
This is an affront to our culture.
This is an affront to our religion.
We don't want them in Mecca and Medina.
So that was a second of Osama bin Laden's three complaints.
The third, of course, was the United States' support of Israel.
Those were the three complaints that Osama bin Laden had of the United States leading up to 9-11.
In the first two, the embargo on Iraq and the U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia are directly tied to the United States' decision to invade Kuwait and liberate them from Iraqi forces.
Now, all of this, the terrorist attack of 9-11 and the aftermath comes back to Iraq and makes its decision to invade Kuwait, haunt them.
We are going to discuss that in the next segment.
I hope you are enjoying the summary of the modern history of Iraq leading up to the 2003 invasion.
I'm Julie Hartman.
As well as the daily show prep.
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