Listen to Press Go Quiet as Rubio Reveals Real Reason for Iran Attack
Dave Rubin’s Rubin Report (March 3, 2026) dissects Trump’s Iran strike as a calculated move to dismantle its missile program (10 ships sunk), navy, and nuclear ambitions while contrasting it with past U.S. interventions—criticizing critics like Tucker Carlson for misrepresenting Israel’s role and Megan McCain for ignoring Iran’s terror funding and repression. With China offering only "moral backing," the conflict reshapes regional alliances, as evidenced by a downed U.S. F-15 in Kuwait with surviving pilots, signaling local support for U.S. action over Iranian aggression. Rubin ties Trump’s strategy to historical failures—Obama’s $400M cash transfer and 2016 nuclear deal—and frames the strike as both a deterrent against China-Taiwan escalation and a chance to accelerate Iran’s internal collapse, warning that Democratic control could reverse these gains. [Automatically generated summary]
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And might I also offer you our official news feed, which we just launched a couple weeks ago.
This is my staff that is writing this stuff.
So this is coming right out of this room.
These are what I think are the most important stories to just get you caught up on everything.
DaveRubin.com/slash read.
We try to bring it to you exactly the way I do this show as honestly and clearly as possible and get through the noise.
And if you just have a couple minutes on any given day to just read a few things or send a couple links, I think we're doing a really nice job there and I do hope you'll check it out.
I think it's fairly obvious what the theme of today's program will be.
There is a war a brewing in the Middle East and there's a lot of fighting about it.
I do want to preface the show today with two things.
One, I said this yesterday, but I want to reiterate it because I think it's going to be a through line over the next couple of weeks, which is after the last 10 years of all of the craziness that Donald Trump has been through since he came down that golden escalator, I think he deserves our trust.
I don't know that he's going to do everything right.
Nobody does everything right, but I think he has been directionally right about virtually everything, usually before everybody else.
And it seems to me right now, when I see a certain set of people abandoning him, some of the influencer class, and we'll get to that in a little bit, it's like this guy deserves our trust.
He has been right about everything.
So now, 10 years later, you're going to abandon him.
You're going to say he doesn't know what he's doing or whatever.
Like that, that just seems crazy.
And I also want to say one other thing, which is connected to why we are doing that daveerubin.com slash read site is that, you know, information, especially in wartime when you're seeing so many videos fly every which way in social media.
And now that online media exists and there's a zillion people that can put on a jacket and sit at a desk and talk to you about what's going on, it seems to me that the misinformation war and the AI war is getting ramped up really, really quickly.
There are so many fake videos out there right now of bombs going this way and rockets going this way and a drone strike here and everything else.
And there are quite literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of accounts on X and TikTok and everywhere else that are designed to break brains.
They tell you things are happening when they're not happening.
They lie about what happened first and then what happened next.
So I just think this is literally what my last thought was in bed last night as I was going to sleep.
Like it is more important than ever that I try my best to give you everything as honestly as possible and hopefully with a little humor every now and again when applicable.
So let's dive right in.
Here is Donald Trump yesterday on the objectives of this war.
First, we're destroying Iran's missile capabilities and you see that happening on an hourly basis and their capacity to produce brand new ones and pretty good ones they make.
Second, we're annihilating their navy.
We've knocked out already 10 ships.
They're at the bottom of the sea.
Third, we're ensuring that the world's number one sponsor of terror can never obtain a nuclear weapon.
Finally, we're ensuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund, and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.
Now, we've shown you videos in the last week or so of Trump talking about 40 years of what he would have done to Iran.
We know it's not debatable.
Iran is the number one state sponsor of terror.
I mean, even think about what's happening right this moment.
Iran has attacked at least nine other nations right now in the Middle East.
So even if you don't like, let's say you really, you're just a standard garden variety progressive and you hate America, the big Satan, and you hate Israel, the little Satan.
How does it make sense?
And you want to defend the Ayatollah who keeps women in beekeeper costumes and everything else.
How does it make sense if Iran is such the good guy in all of this that they're being attacked and their response, yes, they are attacking Israel and it's quite a heavy attack.
We'll show you some video on that in a second.
But their response is also to attack about nine other largely Arab Muslim nations.
Doesn't that seem a little strange?
What are they doing?
Now, as what Trump laid out there, well, we're going to get rid of their missiles.
That means they won't be able to randomly attack, I don't know, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait.
The list goes on.
We've already, as he said, basically gotten rid of their navy.
That'll open up the Straits of Hormuz, which is extremely important in terms of international trade.
No more terrorism.
We're going to stop their terrorist networks, and we're going to stop them from getting nukes.
Okay, this seems pretty straightforward.
And then remember, this is all to the backdrop of this is very different than deposing a guy like Saddam Hussein.
You depose a guy like Saddam Hussein.
Saddam Hussein was one of the people of Iraq.
Khomeini, the Mullahs, are ruling over a people that they've been oppressing.
It is a completely different thing, the Persian people, to the mullahs of Iran.
So that is why that is why literally for over a decade, there have been these uprises against the mullahs, and they've been waiting.
The people of Iran have been waiting for our help.
I am sympathetic, as I said yesterday, to those people who say America should just do nothing and we should just be an island and we should never help anyone.
Like I'm sympathetic to that in a sort of philosophical sense, like we have problems here and we should always focus here.
But if we don't do anything in the world, if America has just decided we will not be a moral force for good, well, then someone else will step in and it will be China and I assure you they will be much worse.
Okay, so it's not just that I think you have to trust Trump here, but one of the things that I've talked about in the year plus of this administration is that he has great people around him.
That's why that was one of the things I was worried about years ago when he was running again.
Could he build a team of hyper-competent people?
And he clearly, clearly has.
And you know who I think is at the top of that, that Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.
Here he is explaining a little bit more granularly what our objectives are.
Look, again, I'm not going to always do this for the weeks that this goes on.
I'm not going to always have to qualify everything, but you can have your positions on what America's role in the world should be.
But there you have JD laying out.
Look what they are doing right now.
If they are the good guys, why are they attacking every other nation in the region right now?
And they are attacking, they're attacking bases, by the way, that even countries that we know will do jack poop in the name of defending themselves, like the UK and France, their bases are getting hit in some of these countries too.
But let's imagine that for in two weeks right now, this thing goes pretty well.
We really take out, we've basically taken out the leadership, we take out the military, the people start rising, maybe the Shah's son is able to come back.
That's going to take a little bit of time.
But let's say we really weaken this regime so that their military can't export this sort of terror anymore.
All the nine countries that just got hit, you think they're going to be pissed or are they going to be happy?
They're obviously going to be happy.
Their threat was not pesky little Israel.
It was Iran.
And Iran will be largely, it already has been largely decapitated.
Now, interestingly, on the domestic side of this, one of the things that people have been talking about from, at least on the internet side of things, is that there seems to be a disconnect in some sense.
Well, it's a perceived disconnect.
That's what I would say between Trump and JD, meaning that Trump, it's very clear, it's like he does not want Iran to get a bomb.
He's laying out what's going on here.
And JD has been kind of quiet on that.
And a lot of people think he's a little more in this Tucker isolationist version of it.
But he is the vice president.
And I have no, I just have simply no doubt he is going to back Trump to the ends of this.
That is going to become a problem for Tucker, not for Donald Trump.
Here's JD talking about what some of America's capacities are.
Well, what it means, Jesse, is we have a lot of capacity here.
I think there's a lot of chatter about what our objectives is, what our goal is.
I mean, I think the president's been extremely clear about our objectives, and it's that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, but there's also been a lot of conversation about what are our capabilities.
And look, I know this stuff.
Obviously, I'm not going to reveal classified information here on air, but the president of the United States knows what we're able to do.
He knows that we have much greater capacity to inflict damage on the Iranian nuclear program, but also on various missiles that threaten our troops.
As you've seen, they've been launching those at our troops for much of the past three days.
So I think the president has made it very clear that the United States has a lot of optionality here.
And, you know, we could go for a little bit longer.
We could go for a lot longer.
But I think the president just wants to make it clear to the Iranians and to the world that he is not going to rest until he accomplishes that all-important objective of ensuring that Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.
So I think that video is extremely important because I get it.
I get it on the on that Tucker Sliver side of things.
There are all these people that think JD is the great hope, right?
That he's the one, that Trump is for war and JD is against it.
But what you are going to see is that JD is completely in line with Trump.
Trump doesn't like war.
That's obvious.
What brings Trump, what seemingly brings Trump more joy than anything else?
It's when he talks about all the wars he's wrapped up.
His entire go back to those Donahue videos and those Oprah videos that I'm always playing from the 80s where he's talking about these ridiculous wars we get into and what he was saying about what we did in Iraq and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and everything else.
Trump likes ending wars, but you don't end wars by saying, and this is sort of the weakness of the libertarian mind.
You don't end a war or you don't end a potential war by saying, well, I don't like war.
War is not good.
I don't like war because you know what?
Sort of like the Hobbits, they might bring war to you.
Like, you can just sit in the shire all day long with your comb on your hairy foot saying, I don't like war.
And the guy with the beard can come and take the bong hits or whatever he was doing.
Am I getting any of this right?
And just not want war.
But then there's a big guy with a chain-link thing and a sauron and a spear maybe or something, and he's coming to get you.
So you got to take him out.
You got to take him out.
That's peace through strength.
All of that said, I am sympathetic once again to people that don't want this to be an endless war.
So to me, this is the war to say no more conventional wars.
Like we actually might be getting there in the course of human history that conventional warfare could be coming to a close, but it would only come to a close.
Not that bad things won't happen, but conventional warfare could end if the number one exporter of all of the terror was taken out.
And that seems to me what we're doing right now.
Now, the question is: you know, you don't want mission creep.
You don't want this thing that seems like to go quickly to go forever.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who was on Hannity last night and he talked about that.
In fact, I hear the people are saying we're going to have an endless war here.
You're not going to have an endless war because we've been, and Iran, this terror regime in Iran, is the weakest point that it's been here since it hijacked Iran from the brave Iranian people 47 years ago.
So this is going to be a quick and decisive action.
And we're going to create the conditions first for the Iranian people to get control of their destiny.
You know, I think it's worth noting how it's very obvious to me that Trump and Netanyahu, who have coordinated on this on the highest level.
I mean, it's so obvious in that this happened.
We sort of all knew something was going to happen.
But now that these armies, like we have basically the two most efficient lethal armies in the world completely in coordination working together, right?
We've got American bases and American ships.
We've got the Israeli Air Force.
Like these things are working together.
And Trump put on Truth Social yesterday, everyone should watch Bibi on Hannity last night.
So in some sense, he was saying, listen to the guy.
And what was Bibi's message there?
We're going to do this as quickly as possible.
He went on to talk about how then the people of Iran will have to step up.
But that's one thing at a time, right?
The Pavlavi can't just wander in today.
Like we have to do some of the work still, some of the work.
The left love's saying, we're doing the work.
Actually, our military is literally doing the work here.
And then maybe the people can take their country back.
So we took out their military leadership in about an hour.
And then this just broke literally about 10 minutes before we went live this morning.
Israel just struck the Supreme Council gathering where Iranians were gathering to choose a new supreme leader.
And I believe we have breaking image of that supreme leader in his last gasping moments.
Look, you try to get a new Star Wars reference in there.
Do your own show, okay?
Here's a bit more from Trump.
The United States munition stockpiles have, at the medium and upper medium grade, never been higher or better.
As stated to me today, we have a virtually unlimited supply of these weapons.
Wars can be fought forever and very successfully using just these supplies, which are better than other countries' finest arms.
At the highest end, we have a good supply, but are not where we want to be.
Much additional high-grade weaponry is stored for us in outlying countries.
Sleepy Joe Biden spent all of his time and our country's money giving everything to P.T. Barnum Zelensky of Ukraine, hundreds of billions of dollars worth.
And while he gave so much of the super high end away for free, he didn't bother to replace it.
Fortunately, I rebuilt the military in my first term and continue to do so.
Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump.
So the reason I'm reading that post right there is because, as I said at the top, there is so much misinformation flying.
I hate that word misinformation because they usually mean something true.
But in the case of the fog of war, I'm telling you, the amount of AI slop videos I'm seeing, but they're getting better.
And you can't tell, is that a real rocket hitting this place?
Or is that a real tanker that's been destroyed or anything else?
But the other version of the misinformation is you're seeing all of these accounts and they usually are somehow on X now where you can see where they're from.
If you're willing to click through, you start seeing that they're from Pakistan or they're from strange parts in Asia, and they are all putting up the America's running out of munitions and they're running out of bombs and all this stuff.
And it's just complete nonsense.
Here's a little bit more from Breaking 911: CENTCOM: U.S. forces have destroyed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps command and control facilities, Iranian air defense capabilities, missile and drone launch sites, and military airfields during sustained operations.
We will continue to take decisive action against imminent threats posed by the Iranian regime.
So, look, we're, what are we?
We're about 72, a little bit more, hours into this thing.
We've taken out the military leadership.
We've taken out Khomeini.
Iran is acting in some sense like a wounded animal.
What would a wounded animal in the end when it's in the corner and it's wounded and it's been attacked?
It would lash out in any way possible.
That's why they're attacking all of their neighbors.
Again, at least nine countries have been attacked by Iran.
And they also realize Israel is not going anywhere.
So there is a new Middle East on the horizon, but you have to have a little faith in America.
As I said, I think Donald Trump deserves our trust.
So you have to have a little trust in Donald Trump.
You have to have a little faith in America.
And dare I say, you have to have a little imagination right now.
Like maybe we're getting to a different world.
Maybe the post-World War II era and the map there is coming to a close and there's something new that is much better being born.
Did I smoke weed this morning and I'm just feeling it or what?
No, I didn't smoke weed this morning.
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Okay, so let's continue with a little bit of what I see as the chasm between the extremely clear messaging by the administration.
Again, you can like what they're doing or not, but I think it's been as clear and clean as possible, as opposed to, for those of you that are of a certain age, you might remember Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky affair, blobbing rockets all over the place to distract people, or Barack Obama with his kinetic military action to get rid of Gaddafi, and now Libya is a failed state, or virtually every president post-World War II that has had all of these military adventures and never fully explained any of it.
We have Trump and Rubio, really just and JD, out there saying, this is what we're doing.
Like, he knows what he's doing and able to communicate effectively what this administration is doing, just like Hegg said yesterday, like that the communication part cannot be forgotten.
You got to remember, we got a media, we have a leftist media that's going to lie about everything they're doing.
And now they're getting hit on the right in some ways.
And it's like, well, you have good people out there that can communicate this properly.
And that's probably the best force field against it.
Now, I do want to address Tucker for just a second because I would say he is now the leader on the right against Donald Trump.
And I do think this is a bit of a sidebar, but I do think there is an issue because Tucker's son works in JD Vance's office.
And he is now at complete odds with the president and vice president.
And the vice president's son is quite, or sorry, and Tucker's son is quite literally in the vice president's office.
But we'll just put that there for now.
Tucker, at this point, and I think you guys know my feelings on this.
You've been watching the show for the last year.
I don't take any pleasure in this.
I don't like talking, you know, a lot of the influencer class or whatever the high hell we are.
Everybody likes getting into all these fights.
And it's always good to get into a fight, right?
It's why it's good for rappers to be fighting with rappers.
Why do they do rap wars?
Because everybody gets more attention.
Everybody gets more clicks and thus everyone gets more money.
I have literally no interest in it.
I have no interest in it.
I really don't.
And I'll just leave that there.
However, Tucker has become the number one, outside of Candace, but she's so freaking loony at this point, it's not even worth addressing.
But Tucker has become the number one liar-in-chief in the country.
I keep saying this on Twitter, but it's like literally everything he says is a lie.
And I mean that literally.
I don't mean that facetiously.
If he says something, you can assume that the opposite is true.
So after we've just laid out Trump very clearly laying out why we are doing this, and after yesterday talking about Trump's 40-year history of saying that Iran is the bad guy and that they killed our Marines and all of the stuff and took our hostages, and by the way, also paid for Hamas to do October 7th, which killed 47 Americans, and they're threatening their neighbors, and they want a nuke, and they have an apocalyptic regime, and everything else that Marco said, here's just a moment of Tucker yesterday.
He is a liar and a propagandist at the highest possible level.
But you have to decide what you believe.
Do you believe Donald Trump when he's telling you the video?
You just heard what Donald Trump's saying, why we're doing this.
You just heard Marco Rubio say why we are doing this.
Israel wants hegemony over the Middle East.
What is he talking about?
They have a tiny little country they would like not to be destroyed.
That's it.
I think if the mullahs for the past 40 years had not constantly said we'd like to take out the little Satan and then the big Satan, they would be pretty quiet right now.
But they have decided to export terror, right?
And they've done this all over the world.
Every single thing he says is a lie.
But let me illustrate it perfectly.
Watch this from Bricks News.
This is regarding the same show that we just showed you of Tucker.
Tucker Carlson says that Saudi Arabia and Qatar caught and arrested Israeli Mossad agents planning bombings in those countries.
That was what Tucker said on his show.
Well, moments later from open source intel, Qatar, Qatar, a country that Tucker loves, Qatar's foreign ministry denies Tucker Carlson's claims, saying there is no evidence of Mossad cells operating in his country.
So you must understand, he went on his show yesterday and either was given information that was wrong or he just lied.
Now, my position is that he just lied.
He wants you to hate Israel and he can hate Israel and that's well within his rights.
So he made up a story that Mossad agents were there.
Now even the Qatari government, Qatar, a place where Tucker said he's going to buy a house, they're saying that that story is not true.
So I would say for anyone that watches, if you have a friend that watches Tucker's show, you might be curious to tune in, I suppose, tune into Tucker today.
I don't know if he does a daily show at this point or whatever he's doing, but will he correct himself?
I correct myself on this show all the time, usually for sort of minor, minor infractions.
And I feel it's incumbent upon me to do that.
He made up a complete lie in the midst of a war that we are leading in.
We'll see what he does.
Now, the other one that's been a massive disappointment, Tucker, I think, has largely lost his mind.
The other one that's been a massive disappointment, obviously, is Megan Kelly.
This is someone who had had a great relationship for years, who has seemingly gone off the deep end when it comes to all this.
And I think in the case of Megan, while I think Tucker actually has nefarious motives, I think Megan just saw clicks.
So when the Candace thing was happening, she wouldn't take a side and eventually sided with Candace because she saw a lot of clicks.
When the Nick Fuentes thing was happening, she wouldn't take a side and eventually sided with Fuentes because she saw clicks.
Here you have Trump laying out exactly what was going to do, which is completely ideologically consistent with everything he ran on for the last 10 years.
Remember him running on Iran's not going to get a bomb?
We just played you the video yesterday.
They asked Kamala and Joe Biden, what are you going to do to stop Iran?
What would you do?
And they say, don't.
And Trump's like, I'm going to bomb the shit out of them.
Trump is being completely ideologically consistent to the implication that Trump doesn't know what he's doing.
Marco Rubio has no idea.
And now JD, who's in on it too.
They all have, and Pete Hegset, they all have no idea what they're doing.
But Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro, my God, the Daily Wire over at Nashville.
They must be running a bunker with war plans over there.
It's so dim-witted, but I see what you're doing, Megan.
You think that the Groyper thing, you think that the Tucker thing, you think that that's a future.
And you know what?
Maybe you'll be right.
Maybe you will be right.
There will be some sort of neo-Nazi movement in the United States.
Perhaps you will be right on that, but you will be ethically and morally and philosophically wrong.
And to watch you go down this path, you know that that is just not true.
Mark LeBin, Mark LeBin convinced Trump to do it.
It's just incredible.
Absolutely incredible.
I thought this was interesting from the Inner Circle report.
Listen to this quote from Trump, which is basically a smack in the face to both Tucker and Megan.
I think that MAGA is Trump.
MAGA's not the other two, Trump said, referring to Kelly and Carlson.
MAGA wants to see our country thrive and be safe, and MAGA loves what I'm doing, every aspect of it.
This is a detour that we have to take in order to keep our country safe and keep other countries safe.
Frankly, isn't that interesting?
So he is talking about that he's doing this to keep our country safe.
They don't want the number one chief exporter of terrorism who has an apocalyptic leadership, or at least had until a couple of days ago, now they're all gone, to be able to export that nonsense.
Here's a little bit more on Trump on why he's doing this.
I guess he got some sort of card handed to him from Mark Levin.
Again, that's Trump being completely ideologically consistent for the past 40 years.
You know, he also addresses that they've killed tens of thousands of their own people.
Now, it's interesting because Megan basically implied, like, I don't like that they're killing all of their own people, but it's not our job to do anything.
Now, that, in some sense, that is right.
Like, what it's not our responsibility to do anything for anyone.
But as I've brought up several times, it's like, okay, so if we just, if the United States decides not to be a force for good in the world, the world will go to hell quickly, quickly.
So us putting our resources behind helping people doesn't mean it's always going to work.
But does Donald Trump not deserve our, does he not deserve our trust right now that he's going to do things differently?
Venezuela, it's going to cause World War III.
Well, we got Maduro in two hours and now we have access to their oil.
And by the way, the oil markets aren't spiking like crazy right now.
And is that partly because we also have access to Venezuelan oil?
China right now is kind of quiet.
I just, we just, maybe we can pull it up, but I just saw it literally at 1059 before we started that China has issued a statement saying they're not going to get involved militarily, just offer moral backing to Iran.
Because suddenly China is like, holy cow, this Trump guy, he's nuts.
And they've got this little Israel place in the Middle East and they're going to clean up this whole thing.
And our worldwide ambitions might be getting a little bit trickier.
And also to the idea that Israel wants hegemony over the Middle East and that they just want to blow everything up.
Do you think they want this?
Here is a series of videos of the hits that Israel is taking while they are trying to clean up the Middle East.
So the question is, what would you do?
What would you want America to do?
Let's say Toronto, in Canada, Toronto threw one rocket over into Michigan, right?
What would you want America to do?
They've been dealing with rocket after rocket after rocket to the backdrop of 1,500 of their men and women and children being slaughtered on October 7th and being taken hostage.
And then they've had rockets coming at them from Hezbollah and the Houthis and all of these places.
And it seems to me we're getting to the end of this, but the end of it is only if Iran is taken out.
And Iran, by the way, as Rubio pointed out earlier, Iran is hampered right now because of the Trump administration.
Imagine if they had more access to weapons, kept building ballistic missiles and got their hands on nukes while they're saying that's the little Satan and that's the big Satan.
How much more dangerous this would be.
But I just think you just, all of us should just think about it from our own lives.
If you had a rocket that was hitting your town, wherever you live right now, what would you want your government to do?
I think it's worth thinking about.
And now the interesting part, of course, as I've pointed out several times, can we get the amount of numbers?
I think it's nine countries, but it might actually be more that Iran has now attacked.
They are now, well, here's Laura Ingram on what's going on in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. Embassy, which has now been hit by Iranian drones.
Breaking news, a source telling Fox's Jennifer Griffin that the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia was hit by two drones.
A third is apparently en route and could strike at any moment.
And the embassy is now issuing a shelter-in-place for citizens in Saudi Arabia as the U.S. government has put all citizens in the region on high alert and urged those in 14 different countries in the region to leave immediately.
So again, as if this was Israel's war, it's just about Israel.
Why is Iran attacking Saudi Arabia?
It's nine countries.
We're going to get the full list that I'll read off to you real quick.
Connor, I think, just pulled up one of the points I was making about China.
Yeah.
This is from News Algebra on X. China, we are not providing military support to Iran.
We only offer moral backing.
Moral backing ain't worth much.
Got to tell you that.
It isn't.
Missiles help.
Other weapons help.
Moral backing, not much.
So this has much more to do.
I'm telling you over the next couple of weeks, guys, you're going to find out.
This has way more to do with stopping Chinese encroachment, maybe giving a warning, like the American military is back so China don't make a move on Taiwan.
Like there's just much bigger things happening than Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin walking into the Oval Office and telling Donald Trump what to do, you Botox bitch.
Nine countries.
They've attacked nine countries.
Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Cyprus.
And also, you can argue that in some sense they've attacked the UK and France because they have bases in those countries that have been hit.
This is one of the most extraordinary videos you will ever see.
This is absolutely wild.
A video, this is video of a US F-15 airplane which crashed in Kuwait, got shot down in Kuwait.
The pilots survived.
Just watch this.
unidentified
incredible you're fine really you need something to help you no problem you're safe you're safe You're safe.
I mean, it's the most extraordinary thing you could possibly imagine.
They were accidentally shot down by the Kuwaitis.
Okay, so there are going to be accidents.
War is messy, FAGO war, all of that stuff.
But how, this is what I'm talking about.
There could be a new Middle East on the horizon.
Do you think the Kuwaitis right now are running around thinking that the Americans and the Israelis are bad?
I don't think so.
I think they're going, man, Iran is shooting rockets into our territory.
Those are the bad guys.
So there are new, this is all to the backdrop.
Like if this thing gets done cleanly, the Abraham Accords that we already have are going to be much, much bigger.
Now, this is a bit of a side, but sort of strange, I guess, in a cosmic sense.
Listen to this from Asian News International.
An earthquake of magnitude 4.3 strikes Garash in Iran, reports Al Jazeera.
More details awaited.
So there's just a lot going on in the Middle East.
But from an earthquake, how do I do this?
From an earthquake in Iran to a woman who, when she farts, it's like an earthquake at that studio in New York City.
Whoopee go burn over on The View.
I really love this clip.
So for those of you that I used to watch The View, I mean, right now I show you these clips and we joke about them and everything else.
But 20 years ago, I used to watch The View because one of the things that they were doing sort of pre-internet, they brought those women together.
Barbara Walters had this great idea of we're going to take these different women with different views and we're going to debate these things and everything else.
And there was a, she was a girl at the time.
She was a young girl by the name of Elizabeth Hasselbeck.
And she was on when Rosie was on about what years, what years was Elizabeth Hasselbeck on The View?
It's a long time ago already.
And she was the conservative and she was a real conservative, not like Alyssa Farah getting her cookie or everything else.
And they brought her back, I don't know if it was just for a one-time thing or anything else yesterday, but she just did such a spectacular job talking about what's happening in Iran and watch the rest of the women of The View, who I think are supposed to be for women, regardless of what country they're in, watch them start fumbling.
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Secretary of War Pete Hegset has said that this is now the time for the Iranian people to stand and do what they need to do.
And when you look at what women looked like and were treated like, we have a before and after, before this regime and after.
This is before and here is after.
And right now, these women have hope.
47 million women have hope.
Women, people who are gay are not being thrown off buildings.
Women will not be mutilated and murdered.
And I think there's such hope and it takes strength to find peace.
And America should be first at that always.
Well, you know, here's the thing, though.
I remember, and I hope you're right.
I hope for the sake of the Iranian people and for the sake of the world, for America's sake, I hope you're right.
She's a real conservative, and it would be a real, it would actually be a conservative view that women should live freely and shouldn't have to be in those beekeeper costumes.
And it was very effective what you did right there, Elizabeth.
Perhaps that was from people watching online shows to show, to juxtapose those images.
What were women like in 1978, Iran, and what are they dealing with now?
And you guys should be cheering.
You don't have to cheer.
You don't have to cheer the idea of war and you don't have to cheer the idea of everything, of military adventures and all these things.
But it would be the easiest thing for all of you to be relentlessly defending that women and other minorities would be free.
You, whoopie, and the other one who's obviously off Ozempic.
And the other one, it's like, ladies, you guys wouldn't want to live like that.
So how about you defend, you defend the women who are stuck in this horrible position.
So good work, Hasselbeck.
I hope you come back to the show.
That would be wonderful.
Sarah Haynes, who's the other one that's kind of saying there, and I'm glad I got her name right.
My mom always tells me she's pretty good, so stop making fun of her.
So this one's for you, mom.
Here's Sarah Haynes reminding the most racist woman on television, Sonny Hostin, that every single other president in our lifetime has struck the Middle East without congressional approval.
I don't want to get into the whole sort of constitutional version of this right now, but the president does have broad authority, at least for 90 days to do military actions.
And as she pointed out, every president has done it.
Now, would I like Congress to be more functional and be able to vote on things properly?
That would be nice.
Also, Sonny Hostin saying, we didn't go to the UN, like the UN.
Yes, let's go to the Legion of Doom and ask, give me one of the guys, give me a couple Legion of Doom bad guys.
We got Berserko and give me a couple Legion of Doom guys.
Who do we got?
We got, give me some bad guys from the DC universe.
Bizarro, let's ask Black Mantis.
Gorilla Grod, who's the guy, not Green Lantern, but the bad Green Lantern.
He had a purple ring, I think.
Like, are we going to ask those guys if we should save the world or not?
Completely, completely ridiculous.
So that's what's happening over on The View Elizabeth.
I hope you make a comeback.
Let's jump over to the televised institution known as MS Now, where again, this whole idea that Trump doesn't know what he's doing, that there was no threat, that Iran was just a great bunch of people doing wonderful things.
Here's a guy with very low T. His name is Colorado Representative Jason Crowe, on with Joe Scarborough.
So here is Trump's envoy who was dealing with the negotiations literally about five days ago with the Iranians, Steve Witkoff, telling Fox News what the Iranians told him.
In that first meeting, both the Iranian negotiators said to us directly, with no shame, that they controlled 460 kilograms of 60%, and they're aware that that could make 11 nuclear bombs.
And that was the beginning of their negotiating stance.
So that's, they were proud of it.
They were proud that they had evaded all sorts of oversight protocols to get to a place where they could deliver 11 nuclear bombs.
Okay, so that's Witkoff, who, again, you don't have to take, you could say he's a liar, but there he is laying out what he says he was told.
I'm guessing some of this was on the record and they probably have recordings of some of this stuff and everything else.
So you can, so is what it is, right?
But I would also harken back to what Rubio said at the top, which is they're weaker now.
You know, there's this weird thing.
It's like, you know, you have a country that's kind of weak, but doing bad stuff.
And what do you do?
Do you wait till they're stronger to then fight them?
Or do you do something when they are somewhat weak?
That is seemingly what we are doing now.
Now, much of what's happened with Iran falls in the lap of Barack Obama, because Barack Obama, when the Iranian people were rising up about, it's a little more than 10 years ago now, he did absolutely nothing.
He did nothing.
Barack Obama, Mr. Peace and Progressive Values and everything else, he let those people die when they tried to rise up against the MOLAs over a decade ago.
But not only did he do that, he shipped hundreds of millions of dollars to the Iranians that then we know they used for terror and a whole bunch of other bad stuff.
I'm Jake Tapper in Ohio, Battleground State, where we're covering the presidential contest.
But let's turn to our world lead today.
Continued outrage and controversy over that $400 million cash transfer to Iran by the Obama administration on the same day four American prisoners were released by Iran.
The White House denies that the money was a ransom payment.
Footage aired on Iranian television, however, purports to show the money arriving in Tehran, and that is raising renewed questions about whether this was a quid pro quo.
That's what they wanted to literally impeach Trump on, even though we know that Joe Biden was doing a quid pro quo with Ukraine, but that's a whole other side deal.
But okay, we're giving tons of cash to the Iranian institutions, to the Iranian regime.
What do you think they are going to do with it?
Well, here's Barack Obama after he was very excited to give them another 56 billion.
It is true that if Iran lives up to its commitments, it will gain access to roughly $56 billion of its own money.
But the notion that this will be a game changer, with all this money funneled into Iran's pernicious activities, misses the reality of Iran's current situation.
Iran's leaders have raised the expectations of their people that sanctions relief will improve their lives.
Even a repressive regime like Iran's cannot completely ignore those expectations.
And that's why our best analysts expect the bulk of this revenue to go into spending that improves the economy and benefits the lives of the Iranian people.
I mean, we know they're going to trot out all of the people who get everything wrong, most of whom who have a version of Trump derangement syndrome, to lie about what's going on in Iran.
Here is former Obama CIA director, John Brennan, a man who probably should be in jail.
Okay, so all right, you can see what he's trying to do.
Well, basically, they were bad.
The Mulu was bad.
Ayatollah was bad.
But, you know, there's a big country and people have all sorts of opinions.
Well, that actually is true.
Although in that country, you could get killed for having a bad, the wrong opinion.
But why would they trot out John Brennan?
Do we have the New York Post?
Do you remember John Brennan?
Yeah, he's one of the 51 spies who lie, the intelligence experts who falsely discredited Hunter Biden's laptop.
And there he is.
There is his face right next to my favorite James Clapper, who when he was under oath asking if America spies on its own citizens, he said, scratching the top of his head, not wittingly, which is quite literally an episode of Seinfeld, which is that when you're lying, you touch your face.
And the higher up on your face that you touch, the bigger the lie is.
So what do we do in the face of people that are going to lie?
Whether it is John Brennan on the left or it is Tucker Carlson on the right, whether it is the army of Pakistani bots that are out there, whether it is the AI slop that's going to be thrown in our faces as we're in an information war to the backdrop of a conventional war.
You just have to not participate in the lies and you have to call them out when you see them.
And many psychological commentators, Jung was a good example of that, made a very straightforward case that you can't have a totalitarian state unless every single person is willing to lie about everything all the time.
And you can think about that as top-down because the leaders lie too.
And they also enforce punishments if you don't lie.
But then you can also think about it.
The totalitarian spirit is replicated at every level of the society.
And so in a truly totalitarian state, husbands lie to their wives and parents lie to their children.
And the totalitarian state is actually the grip of the lie.
And so, and people will certainly go along with that.
I mean, we're seeing that emerge here with cancel culture.
Is it possible some of my predictions will be wrong or whatever else?
Absolutely.
But I think you, if you're watching the show, you know what I think.
And you know that I'm bringing this to you as truthfully as I possibly can.
There are a lot of people that are not doing that.
And right now we are in a precarious position in this world.
And again, this is all to the backdrop of the real game in some sense, which is the midterm elections.
Because if we lose the midterm elections, then we get the Democrats again.
And then it will be much, much worse.
So do not participate in a lie.
By the way, I thought it might be a nice way to end the show by reading on the back cover here of Don't Burn This Book, New York Times bestseller, by the way, although that whole list is made up.
Allow me to read this.
Dave Rubin is one of the bravest, smartest people I know, as well as a tremendous television presence.