Ezra Levant examines Iran’s April 15th barrage—cruise missiles, drones, and ballistic strikes—against Israel and Western allies, with 99% intercepted but seven breaching defenses, sparking debates over Iran’s calculated "spectacle" while denying warnings. Ben Weingarten warns of Biden’s alleged coordination with Tehran to pressure Israel, citing sanctions waivers, Schumer’s calls for Netanyahu’s ouster, and fears of Iranian proxy cells exploiting U.S. vulnerabilities, like the 2019 D.C. assassination plot. Levant ties this to broader concerns: foreign interference in Canada, Trudeau’s climate-tax priorities over security, and medical assistance in dying controversies, framing Western decline as a strategic failure against rising threats. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I want to talk about the very short war that broke out between Iran and Yemen and Lebanese Hezbollah versus Israel, America, UK, France, and Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
I think you could almost call that a world war, but it was over in hours.
I'll take you through it.
But first I'd like to invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
Just go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe, eight bucks a month.
Not only do you get the video content, but you help keep Rebel News alive because, you know, we don't take a dime from Trudeau and it shows.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, it looked like World War III there for a minute, but the Israel-Iran battle lasted just a day.
It's April 15th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious thug.
Israel-Iran Tensions Escalate00:02:50
What a strange war we had over the weekend.
I thought it was going to be World War III for a bit.
As you know, the Islamic Republic of Iran backs the terrorist group called Hamas that runs the Gaza Strip.
It also backs the terrorist group Hezbollah, which runs much of Lebanon.
It also backs the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is a worldwide terrorist group.
Recently, Israel took out some IRGC leaders in an attack in Syria.
It took out some senior generals.
Donald Trump did that too, if you might recall.
It seems that everybody knew when Iran's retaliatory strike would be.
And that sort of happened with Donald Trump.
Actually, I won't go down that road now.
But after that strike that killed the terrorist generals, the al-Quds force generals, Israel and America announced that they thought, seemed like they knew, an attack from Iran to Israel, not through Iran's proxies, but from Iran itself, would happen at a particular time.
In fact, Israel announced public restrictions on gatherings.
They had a whole checklist of do's and don'ts.
Looked terrifying, frankly.
Looked like they were shutting the whole country down.
Airspace over the whole country and neighboring countries was shut down too.
And indeed, the war came on schedule.
Iran launched cruise missiles and slower drones, which actually needed hours to arrive.
And the much faster ballistic missiles.
Those were very fast.
All of them were launched about the same time.
It was a challenging defense operation, but apparently the vast majority of them were shot down with various degrees of help from other countries in the region, including Jordan, Saudi Arabia, France, the UK, and the U.S., including some Navy ships of the U.S.
Attacks onto Israel came from Yemen, Lebanon, but mainly from Iran directly, which has been a change.
Now, as I mentioned, Israel claims that as many as 99% of these attacks were shot down.
Still, the ones that got through were terrifying.
Here's an image of how big one of the ballistic missiles was.
Imagine if that detonated on a house or anything.
Here's a CNN story that I thought was unusual, but it was my thinking too.
Iran's attack seemed planned to minimize casualties while maximizing spectacle.
Recent Immigrants and Street Violence00:06:55
It's a little bit out there for CNN.
Here's another one.
Iran says it gave warning before attacking Israel.
Now, the U.S. says that's not true, but those are mainstream news sources saying that.
Here, let me read a little bit from an extended Twitter post by Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister, who was actually in Canada just last week.
He said, some points regarding the overnight Iranian missile attack on Israel.
Number one, contrary to what pundits are saying, this wasn't designed merely as bells and whistles with no damage.
When you shoot 350 flying objects, time to hit Israel at the same moment, when you use three fundamentally different weapon types, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, you're looking to penetrate Israel's defenses and kill Israelis.
Number two, U.S. administration is telling us this is a victory.
You've already won by thwarting the missiles.
No need for any further action.
No, it's not a victory.
Yes, it's a remarkable success of Israel's air defense systems, but it's not a victory.
When a bully tries to hit you 350 times and only succeeds seven times, you've not won.
You don't win wars just by intercepting your enemy's hits, nor do you deter it.
Your enemy will just try harder with more and better weapons and methods next time.
How do you deter?
By exacting a deeply painful price.
He goes on at some length, but these are serious people who are saying this.
The war looks like a made-for-TV stitch-up, like that old movie with Dustin Hoffman called Wag the Dog.
Do you remember that?
In a way, everyone gets a PR win here.
Iran can look tough to its own people and its supporters.
Israel can get a military victory, a dramatic ratio of striking down those weapon systems.
It can feel great about it.
Biden can get the upper hand on Israel and try to stop it from finishing off Iran or to finish off Hamas in the southern Gaza Strip.
How about here in Canada?
That's where we live.
That's what we care about.
Look at this from Toronto.
Watch this video.
Israel has bombed multiple countries.
That was the moment the pro-Hamas thugs on the street heard about the Iranian attack.
The Twitter says this is Toronto, where a mob is cheering for Iran.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has just sent tens of drones towards Israel.
They were cheering Iran on our streets.
Look at this from Calgary.
Today, during the anti-Israel rally in Calgary, a protester was seen giving a Nazi salute while holding an image of the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini.
This comes a day after Iran attacked Israel.
We have literal terrorist supporters on our streets cheering Iran.
The mayor of Calgary, Jody Gondek, her office was right behind this guy.
I don't know if you could tell, but that guy giving the Siegheil Hitler salute was standing in front of Calgary City Hall.
There were police everywhere.
They didn't lift a finger.
They didn't care.
The mayor probably saw it with her own eyes from her window.
But remember, Jodi Gondek is the Calgary mayor who refused to attend a Jewish Hanukkah menorah lighting ceremony because she said it was too political.
And she's done the math.
There's about 8,000 Jews in Calgary and about 100,000 Muslims in Calgary.
And there was no way she was going to go to a Jewish event and risk all those votes.
That guy with the Siegheil was her people.
This is going on everywhere, by the way, all across the West.
I shouldn't say everywhere.
There's no protests in favor of terrorism in places like Dubai.
But these people on our own streets, many of whom were brought in just in recent years, they really want to kill us.
And by us, of course, I mean you.
They're dressing up for it.
They're practicing for it.
There's also a sour online anti-Israel right-wing community.
Jackson Hinkle is an example of that.
He's been on Twitter literally cheering for Iran and China.
He calls himself America First, but it's not America First to be cheering for the Iranian dictatorship against America.
How do you square that circle?
I think the number one thing we have to do is to fix immigration for housing reasons, for social services reasons, for traffic reasons, for inflation reasons.
Yeah, yeah.
But also, I hate to say it, but I've noticed that most of the people calling for terrorism in our streets are recent immigrants who were clearly not vetted for extremism.
Israel has its problems, but don't think we don't have them too.
Stay with us.
Up next, Ben Weingarten on the American point of view.
Well, of course, as we say quite often on the show, foreign policy is interesting and it's an expression of our principles.
But what really counts is the effect here at home in Canada, and of course in the United States.
What does this say to foreign-directed, foreign-financed radicals within our own countries?
What about the fact that Canada, for example, refuses to criminalize the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a terrorist group, and that the government of Iran has 700 agents in our streets, as you saw, cheering in support of Iran?
You saw that shocking image from Calgary, someone holding up a picture of the religious leader of Iran and giving a Nazi-style Sigh Hail Sieghail salute.
Joining us now to talk both about the foreign and domestic implications is our old friend Ben Weingarten.
He's a senior contributor at the Federalist.
Ben, great to see you again.
Thanks for having me, Azra.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you for taking the time with us.
Let's start first about what's really going on over there.
Israel's Credit Crisis00:14:52
I am worried that the massive rocket attack and its 90% plus success rate in being shot down gave the feeling of a great conflict that Israel can take credit for and that the Allies can take credit for.
But now Israel no longer has, quote, permission from the United States or the G7 countries to go any further with Iran or frankly to go further with Hamas.
That's what I'm worried really happened.
What do you think?
Well, I think your intuitions are right.
And if the reporting is true and the reporting is consistent with everything we've seen about the Iran-first policy that the Obama-Biden administration and now the Biden-Harris administration has been executing for the last 11 plus years with the blissful interruption of the Trump administration,
it's consistent with the idea that the U.S. essentially coordinated with Iran about how it was going to attack, which is asinine on its face, by the way, that America is coordinating the world's leading state sponsor of jihad in an unprecedented assault, aerial invasion, territorial invasion of our purported closest ally in the region.
And then also coordinated with Israel, Sunni Arab nations, and others in the response to provide defense and capture most, though not all of the drones and ballistic missiles launched at Israel to try to be able to claim some victory while also trying to appease the Iranians and then to end the whole thing right there.
And that somehow that constitutes a win and Israel should take the win and just accept now as normal the fact that they can incur 300 plus ballistic missiles and drones being launched at a New Jersey-sized country.
When, by the way, Hezbollah itself, let's note, did not really respond and engage, but they have hundreds of thousands of missiles and other projectiles that they can launch at Israel at any time when we know that Iran has flooded masses of munitions into Judea and Samaria to threaten Israel from that direction.
And then you have Iran and all of its other proxies as well.
And of course, this aggression, this overt aggression, overwhelming aggression really began with Iran-sponsored Hamas in Gaza.
And so what do I think ultimately part of this is?
This is in part about the Biden administration trying to further box Israel.
And what they will say to Israel is, look, you had all of the world community behind you and trying to defend you here.
You had the Sunni Arab powers.
Look, the Jordanians stepped up.
The Saudis stepped up to defend you.
All of this normalization and peace can be yours if you'll just end the war in Gaza, let Hamas survive, regroup, and then form part of a quote-unquote Palestinian Authority, Fatah, which is Hamas light-led government, to lead a newly established Palestinian Arab terror state.
And don't you dare think about seriously hitting Iran in a way that would destabilize, let alone topple the regime, despite the fact that it just engaged in unprecedented assault against you, despite the fact that it's been dashing towards a nuclear weapon and it's been enriched with tens of billions of dollars and emboldened by the fact that the U.S. administration will do nothing to deter, let alone punish them.
But all of this can be yours if you'll just stand down, essentially.
And that would be absolute suicide for Israel.
But the Biden administration is just as cynical and political as would be necessary to think about it that way and to manage things that way.
You know, that was my thought because I thought, oh my God, the war is coming.
And then my first, I mean, first of all, I've never seen a war telegraphed by the warmongers to the would-be victims so clearly.
Like they had it down to the hour.
I was reading news from Israel from Washington.
The attack is expected to start in 48 hours, in 24 hours.
Like real attacks, I think of the one of the most devastating wars against Israel was the Yom Kippur war on the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur when Israel was invaded in a sneak attack.
The October 7th Hamas attack was a sneak attack.
Almost never do you have to the hour the plans of the hostile enemy.
It seemed weird when it came.
I was scared of how huge it was.
And then I was elated by the massive success of striking it down.
But then it was over.
And this all seems so weird.
And my mind started thinking of conspiracy theories.
And I thought, no way, there's no way that Joe Biden engineered this and he was in communication with both sides.
But I see reports.
actual reports that this happened.
What is the latest?
Is it confirmed that Biden was in touch with both sides here?
I've seen hints to that effect in the Jerusalem Post and elsewhere.
We've also seen it in Turkish media.
There's been in American media reports that through Switzerland, essentially, the U.S. was communicating with Iran.
And all I can say is that this is just perfectly consistent with what we've long known, which is that the Biden administration and the Obama-Biden administration before it, and this should all be viewed as one consistent, continuous Iran-first policy, they have served as partners and protectors of the malocracy in Iran.
Iran, there's a notion that, well, Iran just had to save face after the mastermind, one of the masterminds by October 7th was taken out, likely by Israel, although Israel hasn't confirmed or denied it to date.
But this notion that, well, they just had to save face.
And so now, you know, we can just accept a complete shift of the Overton window and normalization of the idea that Iran can directly attack Israel.
But if Israelis don't die as a consequence, it's not really that serious and we can all just move on and shift it under the rug.
And you have the Biden administration saying, we're ironclad for Israel's security and defense, but at the same time, we're going to distance ourselves from however Israel might respond to this.
But also, Israel, you better take this win.
And, you know, don't look over here, but there's lots of talk in the U.S. about conditioning our weapons support on your conduct.
You put it all together and it's just very consistent with everything that we know that this administration, like the Obama-Biden administration before it, was always back channeling with Iran, was always bending backwards for Iran.
And let's note a couple of the first acts after October 7th that the Biden administration engaged in, beyond the fact that it re-upped the $10 billion sanctions waiver to Iran.
So you still have billions of dollars flowing into the coffers of this malocracy to underwrite its jihadism in the Middle East and all over the world.
What were the two significant, one rhetorical and one action steps that the Biden administration took?
It sought to de-link Iran from Hamas's attack, despite the fact that there is zero chance of October 7th if Iran isn't significantly involved with it, whether it's funding, whether it's training, whether it's logistics, whether it's intelligence and coordination with other proxies.
But set that aside, what was number two?
It was as Israel was planning to strike Hezbollah in the first week after, and Hezbollah is the far more formidable adversary that could destroy Israel with how big its arsenal is and how serious and sophisticated it is as a jihadist force in Lebanon.
The Biden administration told Israel, stand down, do not strike Hezbollah, do not escalate this war right after October 7th.
And the disastrous aspect is that every effort to quote unquote not escalate and to feed the Iranian crocodile ends up dramatically increasing the chance of a catastrophic Middle Eastern war.
And that's why at the end of the day, what's in the national interest of the U.S., what's in the interest of the West, ought to be letting Israel do what it has to do, where it has to do it, to neutralize, if not eliminate the existential threats facing it, because those threats are our threats ultimately at the end of the day.
And for the West to reduce its footprint in the Middle East is going to require Israel and the Sunni Arab states to serve as a bulwark against Iran and all of its nefarious tentacles.
We had that under President Trump with the Abraham Accords and burgeoning peace through strength and an Iran that was on the ropes.
The Biden administration has done the exact opposite.
And what is the result?
Chaos, carnage, and bloodshed, dead Americans, dead Israelis, dead citizens of other countries as well.
hundreds of attacks on our troops and our facilities in the region.
And the Biden administration says we can't escalate this.
Every act of quote-unquote de-escalation that the Biden administration imposes only leads to escalation from all of the worst actors in the world and that live in that region.
I just want to emphasize again, as an American, Iran has American blood on its hands dating back to the Islamic Revolution and the hostage crisis in the 80s in the attacks on U.S. troops and other personnel in Lebanon, in the 90s with the Khobar Tower bombings in Saudi Arabia, and in the 2000s with the IEDs that blew off people's legs and killed people and ruined lives in Afghanistan and Iraq as well.
And that continues to this day.
So there is American blood and the blood of our other friends in the West that's on Iran's hands.
And so it's not just Israel's fight, but Israel is the one that can end it.
Israel can decisively act.
The U.S. will not.
It's very clear.
It's abundantly clear.
The U.S. has no desire to do anything related to Iran, not even to end the unenforced oil sanctions that have flown tens of billions of dollars into their coffers.
So Israel has to act in its interest, and it will redound to our interest as well.
But it is shackled, no doubt, and feels the pressure, particularly from an America that is effectively partnered with Iran and that is at the very same time, by the way, trying to topple the government in Israel.
Yeah, I mean, it wasn't a few weeks ago where Chuck Schumer, who's Jewish, by the way, basically said Israel must have a coup.
I mean, he said this out loud that Israel has to replace Netanyahu.
The audacity of that.
And it's absolutely shocking.
You know, one of the strangest things in the last six months has been all these U.S. naval assets in the region, in the Mediterranean, in the Red Sea, et cetera.
And they're constantly being attacked by Iranian proxies in Yemen, this backwater, dirt-poor, backwards colony of Iran.
And they're shooting these drones and they're like at U.S. warships.
They're also hijacking or attacking merchant freighters going through the Panama Canal.
And the American response, put aside Israel.
America doesn't do anything.
America doesn't flatten the Houthi extremists in Yemen.
It just sort of tries to shoot down the drones and say, oh, that's nothing.
We're like Goliath and these are Liliputians or something.
Gulliver.
And I don't understand this new American approach of you can attack us and we won't do anything.
It's so weird.
And that's weird for America.
And now America is imposing that on Israel.
Oh, you have to roll with it.
You didn't have mass casualties, so you just have to accept it.
That's how it goes.
I'm worried, Ben, that America would actually shoot down Israeli jets that tried to attack Iran.
I actually believe that.
I know that sounds crazy, but they more or less said that.
Well, it's worth saying a couple of things.
First of all, look, they talk about building this port into Gaza and they say, well, no, U.S. boots on the ground there, but that's already a prelude to intervention on the ground.
We know that Samantha Power was a senior official in the Obama administration, a senior official in the Biden administration.
It's long been her dream to have boots on the ground.
And of course, that's against Israel.
We've seen the Biden administration issue an executive order to sanction anyone up to and including political leaders.
And that would mean up to and including the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, and there were threats to use this executive order against the quote-unquote right-wingers in the war cabinet and in the government to sanction those who would dare basically oppose U.S. policy on a quote-unquote two-state solution and what the world will look like in Judea and Samaria after the Biden administration is done imposing its will on Israel.
And we know dating back to the Obama administration that the Obama administration was leaking out and was first of all, of course, surveilling, but also leaking out intelligence on Israel when it came to its war efforts and undermining those war efforts, precisely because they don't want Israel to do what needs to be done ultimately to defend itself as it determines it against Iran.
So to your point, would the U.S. actually intercept an incursion from Israeli war plans?
I pray to God that we're never in a situation like that.
However, will they take other measures to no doubt threaten, pressure, punish Israel?
Absolutely.
And we've already seen myriad reports about the idea of conditioning weapons sales.
You know, you have the soft power quote-unquote attack of claiming that Israel is trying to create a famine, that Israel may have engaged in war crimes.
And then the Department of Defense says no.
But it's very clear that the administration is doing everything it possibly can politically feasibly, given where the American people are.
And the American people are still overwhelmingly pro-Israel, even if the progressive wing of the Democrat Party that's ascendant is not.
And even if those at high levels of the Biden administration are not, but they will push as far as is deemed politically possible to pressure Israel to stand down and not defend itself.
And it's all in service.
You talk about the weirdness and the notion that the U.S. doesn't strike back against far weaker foes, that there really is no freedom of navigation in the seas anymore.
Political Pressure on Israel00:12:03
And that, of course, impacts everyone from a commercial perspective.
But this is all in service of an Iran-first policy again, a policy which says, and this is insanity and ludicrous, but there are true believers in this.
And then there are others who have other objectives, but believe in making Iran the dominant hegemonic power in the Middle East.
And that somehow, with the world's leading state sponsor of Jihad as the strong course, that's going to lead to some kind of solution that fits America's national interest.
Utterly absurd on its face, disastrous.
We've seen the disaster, the culmination of these policies, 11 plus years of these policies, Season.
It's October 7th.
It's April 13th.
It's the hundreds of attacks on the U.S. and our allies as well.
It's no freedom of navigation.
But you have true believers in this.
You have people, of course, yes, who are trying to curry favor with a marginal voter in Dearborn and elsewhere.
But I think that that underplays the significance of what's going on.
There is an ideological as well as a political drive.
And then there's also greed associated with this, which is this notion that, sort of like with communist China, if you come to some kind of accord with Iran about nuclear weapons, but really it's also about legitimizing the nuclear program, appeasing the MOLAs, and also opening up Iran for natural gas deals and other kinds of commerce, that somehow everyone's going to get rich and this is going to lead to peace.
And it's utterly suicidal from the West perspective.
And again, it's going to be left to Israel and probably Israel alone to clean up the massive mistakes that the West has engaged in.
You know, America and Canada have different perspectives for a couple of obvious reasons.
America has the mightiest army in the world.
There were no Canadians involved in shooting down those missiles.
We don't have the people.
We don't have the equipment.
And we absolutely don't have the political leadership.
Canada also does not give any foreign aid to Israel.
And Canada, in the laughable decision, put an arms embargo on Israel, laughable only in that Israel really doesn't buy anything from Canada, certainly nothing important.
So I think there's a special level of audacity for Justin Trudeau to tell Israel what to do in defending itself.
It's obviously a little bit different with the United States because the United States sells a lot of important military equipment to Israel and it gives foreign aid to Israel.
But I think that although those things are beneficial to Israel, they may actually be a trap because they give Biden a sort of veto over Israel's maneuvers.
Israel can say to Justin Trudeau, go back to wearing your fancy socks and blackface, you child, and what's Canada going to do?
But as long as Israel takes money from the United States and is reliant on them for military equipment, which maybe is inevitable, it's this risk of being dominated by anti-Israel politicians from America.
I don't know how to square that circle.
Maybe the only thing to do is to wait seven months and hope that Donald Trump wins the election in November.
And the question is: does Israel have seven months with the threats that are looming and with adversaries knowing and led by Iran knowing that the getting is never going to be as good as it is now, potentially if a Biden administration is jettisoned and it's replaced with the Trump administration.
And that, I think, wins in part the timeline and the acceleration of these jihadist attacks, because you're never going to pocket greater concessions and potentially have it better than Joe Biden, at least, you know, potentially for the next four years plus.
So you're going to accelerate and escalate as much as possible to gain, to pocket as many benefits, as many concessions as you possibly can, if not engage in the ultimate genocidal acts that you claim you want to undertake with respect to Israel.
But to your broader point about aid and the leverage it provides, it's my view that this was exactly why the Biden administration, the Obama administration, negotiated that memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Israel.
It was to box Israel.
Yes, we're going to support the Iran nuclear deal, but we're going to shut you up and try to claim that we're pro-Israel by continuing to provide nearly $4 billion of military support every single year.
It was to not just pay Israel off, but try and box Israel through the leverage of aid.
And Israelis increasingly understand that that's untenable, that you can't be dependent on the U.S., at least with a Democrat administration in power.
And so there's been a lot of reportage recently suggesting that Israel is trying to dramatically ramp up its own munitions production on short it domestically.
But obviously that takes time and it's very hard, especially when you're in the middle of a war effort where your economy is hampered by that war effort, where literally you have men and women, substantial parts of the population often fighting, or tens of thousands of people in the north who have been refugees for months because the Biden administration won't let Israel take the war to Hezbollah.
But I think the broader point is it's untenable for any country to be dependent on other countries for its survival.
And to the extent you can avoid it, you do so.
Other actors, of course, are going to try to probably exploit, I bet, the wedge that clearly exists between the Democrat Party and Israel at the very least.
And this is a lesson that should have been learned during the Obama years.
I'm not sure that it was.
I think Israelis are still to some extent, in my discussions with them and observations, in somewhat of a state of shock about where America is, where the Democrats are.
But at the end of the day, their survival is going to rest on themselves.
The U.S. can't be counted on with respect to Israel.
And of course, that sends a message to the rest of the entire world.
And then to throw one more monkey wrench in all of this, this is obviously an election year.
I mentioned the Dearborn voters here.
There's also oil prices.
And so you can imagine the pressure that the Biden administration and others around the world, because there are national elections happening in numerous countries, major countries across the world this year, that they're going to do everything they can to try and keep a lid on any kind of activity that would make oil prices spike through the roof.
So add that to the pressure on top of for Benjamin Nanyahu, the internal pressure of many in the war cabinet who were ambitious, those on the left who would love his head on a platter, and probably some on the right who will try to exploit the situation as well.
And it's unthinkable pressure on any Israeli leader, but trying to deal with the forces of the U.S. that's not really an ally here and actually partnered with your worst adversary, the rest of the Western world that's essentially aligned, the Muslim world itself, which would be aligned with Israel, were the U.S. aligned probably in some parts, the Sunni Arab countries against Iran, which poses a threat to them.
You have all of these forces surrounding you, and it's an untenable situation.
And that's why, from my vantage point, it would be in the U.S. interest and also Israel's interest to strike back in a disproportionate way, not a proportionate way, a disproportionate way to dramatically escalate to de-escalate.
That counterintuitive sort of way of thinking, though, comes up against the hard practical realities that Israel is dealing with right now.
And one of them, obviously, to your point, is the leverage of the weapons.
I know you've got to run in about a minute, but let me put one last question to you.
I see today major bridges in the United States being blocked by pro-Hamas supporters.
I see Chicago's enormous airport, one of the most important airports in America, blocked.
In many cases, the people blocking it look easily removed, but the police response sort of cements it in place, it seems to me.
And I can't help but think of how porous the southern border is.
Basically, anyone walks in.
There's no vetting.
And many of the people are not Latin American.
They're from Africa.
They're from the Middle East.
I'm worried about a black swan event, that perhaps a whole Hezbollah or Hamas crew has come into America undetected, and it's going to have some shocking attack on a soft target within the country.
I'm not trying to be paranoid, but how could you not think about that?
It's the easiest path to hurt the great Satan.
And it can be, you know, it's not a direct attack from Iran.
It can be plausibly denied.
Jeff, any quick thoughts on that before you go?
That's the entire Iranian strategy is you have all of these tentacles that are your proxies.
And then to the extent you incur costs, it's the tentacles that might be struck, but it's a game of whack-a-mole that doesn't deal with the head of the snake or the head of the octopus to extend the analogy.
To your point, we have poorest borders.
There have been myriad prosecutions of Hezbollah agents in this country.
There are fatwas out on the heads of numerous leaders from the Trump administration.
There was a Iran-backed Hezbollah-driven plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador on U.S. soil in Washington, D.C., not long ago.
I would be utterly shocked if there weren't myriad Hezbollah cells and cells of other jihadist groups that are currently operating in America.
And the only question you'd have to ask is, do they even need to be activated and operate when you have the progressive left and the anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-Western forces that are ascendant, that have disproportionate sway over the Democrat Party and thus over our leaders, including in the Oval Office today.
But to your point, does this serve as something of a check on U.S. policy, the notion that these jihadists might operate on our soil?
I think you'd be foolish not to think that that's how these leaders, at least our current leaders, operate.
And it's clearly, it clearly impacts European leaders that they're afraid of their hostile populations internally engaging in jihadist attacks to the extent they don't cow and submit to the likes of the Iranians and others.
So it's absolutely a serious, serious threat.
We're in an election year, and you can imagine all manner of nefarious potential activities taking place and what the knock-on consequences will be.
So we are in a very perilous and volatile time right now.
And you have to pray that those with the resolve and those with the foresight to see it and act decisively are able to do so because all of the malignant forces are ascendant right now.
And the Judeo-Christian West is sadly in a terrible position.
Well, as W.B. Yates wrote over 100 years ago, the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Ben, I'm glad that you're one of the good guys and you are full of passionate intensity.
Keep up the great work that's been Weingarten with the Federalists.
Nice of you to join us today.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
There you have it.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
Here's a question about medical assistance in dying in my monologue on the subject.
No Room for Real Problems00:01:03
Lucas Chudley says, always money for immigrants, natives, and foreign aid, never any money for Canadians.
That was such a shocking story of someone who imagine spending four days on a stretcher in an emergency room and then being told, yeah, we'll kill you.
Sorry for the hassle.
We'll just kill you.
Unbelievable.
On foreign interference, someone whose nickname is User RW says, unfortunately, Trudeau is focused on climate, increased taxes, trans schooling, increased immigration, censorship in Ukraine.
There is no room during his boredom to deal with real problems.
That's a reference to Trudeau saying he finds being prime minister boring.
You know, some people say that Trudeau is just naive and that he's maybe not paying enough attention or that he's bored.
I don't want to give him that much credit.
I think he's absolutely in cahoots with the Chinese influence.
He's the recipient of the checks.
His brother personally took delivery of an enormous check to the Trudeau Foundation.