In this episode of "Best Of Hannity," Sean talks with Senator Tom Cotton about what war with Iran would look like and what would force us to make such drastic actions. As a veteran, Senator Cotton has a unique perspective of what it takes to put America's brave men and women in harm's way and just why that might be so necessary.The Sean Hannity Show is on weekdays from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on iHeartRadio and Hannity.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The backwoods of Louisiana is now home to a new breed of millionaires.
My family.
Pretty scary, huh?
Idea of happiness is killing things.
Forty years ago, my father, Phil Robertson, invented a revolutionary kind of duck call that changed the duck in the industry.
Our way of life forever.
Looky here.
Look at here.
Good time to come our way.
As CEO, I've turned my dad's one man operation into a booming family enterprise.
Willie, he took the whole thing way further than I ever would.
Send me a check every month.
My brother Jace designs the duck calls.
Come on!
Manages the assembly team.
Somebody's gonna get killed for around this mess.
Uncle Cy, heads up operations.
Come and get it!
And my mom, Miss K. Always cooking up new ways to expand the brand.
Welcome, Judah.
I gotta say though, money didn't change some things.
I don't like me from the gochet show.
Makes me nervous.
Happy, happy, happy.
We still managed to stay true to ourselves.
Amen.
So smooth.
I die.
i don't need I am not ashamed of the gospel.
Because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.
First for the Jew, then to the Gentile.
For in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed.
A righteousness that is by faith.
From first to last, just as it is written, the righteous will live by faith.
I am not ashamed.
I am not ashamed.
I am unashamed.
What about you?
All right, that's the trailer for what is called the Unashamed Podcast of the Robertson clan.
And uh by the way, Phil Robertson, it's Patriarch is with us now along with his sons Alan and Jace of Duck Dynasty fame.
He has a brand new book out, The Theft of America's Soul.
It is a fascinating read, and it's on Amazon.com, Hannity.com, bookstores everywhere.
And we're actually doing something very brave and courageous.
We're allowing all these three guys uh to interview me, kinda sort of for their podcast.
Uh guys, welcome to the studio.
So what are you guys here for today?
Our brand new podcast is called Unashamed with Phil Robertson.
It's Jace, it's me, it's dad.
It's uh it's Where's Willie?
How did Willie get out of coming to We don't we don't let Willie get anywhere near serious discussions?
You know you've been around it before, right?
Oh, yeah, no, I've been around him before.
He thinks he's the boss, and it's the great patriarchal of the family that did it all.
Well, Willie does is he waits and he sees if it's successful, and then if it is, he comes in and takes credit for it.
Is that is that what happened with the whole duck dynasty?
Well, yeah, come in and started the business, and Willie took over, and now it's such a big deal, right?
Follow the money, Sean, follow the money.
It's Uncle Si, why isn't he up in New York?
You couldn't handle it?
Si's famous line is, he said, "Boys, let me just explain this.
He said, I've acted like an idiot my entire life.
He said, but I never thought I'd find a bunch of fools like A and E to pay me to do it.
That's true.
Uh, but he's got a great sense of humor.
He does.
He does.
I had the pleasure of interviewing you guys, so I'm but listen, I'm gonna you guys control this interview, because otherwise I'm gonna just take over.
Well, look, I know this is what you do.
So look, so the first thing I thought of is we call this unashamed because it's been obvious from the family's sake that we stand up for what we believe in no matter what.
I mean, obviously we had a huge dust up with AE over it and other things that have happened.
And by the way, Sean, you were one of the first guys that called us to to check on us and to help us, and we appreciate that.
Because there were others, I mean, but but not many, but people that said, I know what you guys are about to go through, you know.
Well, the the one thing uh everybody selectively hears what they want to hear.
Um and I was raised a Catholic, but I did go to eight twelve years of Catholic school.
In high school it was a seminary, I had to study, we went to mass every day, we studied Latin.
You know, this was serious.
You had to say you would consider uh the calling in the church, except three weeks in they said everybody but Hannity because we don't want you.
And uh by the way, and that is a true story.
No lie behind that.
I was pretty incorrigible.
I was 17, 18 years old, 10 to bar till 4 30 in the morning.
Right.
Um, you know, when I was 17.
And it was just a different life um that I had, but uh I do have a conscience.
I believe that's a living God within all of us that uh I know pretty darn well what I'm doing wrong and what I'm doing right.
Right.
And my conscience convicts me, tells me to knock it off.
I mean uh by the way, yeah, you're telling me to knock it off.
Go ahead.
No, but the the people you are sparring with every day.
You just said the magic word.
Their conscience has been seared over as with a hot iron.
You you see what I'm saying?
Because when the lies come out and you say, Wait a minute, how could you lie like the the conscience?
It's just seared over.
You see what I'm saying?
Plenty of texts say that.
Many, you know, there's a reason why one of the big ten uh in the Bible, if we're gonna go there is thou shalt not bear false witness.
Because it's so damaging.
That's right.
See Jesus said is the father of lies and the father of murder.
And I'm looking at both of them, the ones you're dealing with are champions of both, and it's a it's a it's a tough battle you're in.
That's why we've talked to you about spiritual matters, because we want to make sure that God has given you his spirit born of water and you must be born again of water and the spirit.
So when you look at that, you say, Hmm, we're trying to make sure you've got the power to withstand the onslaught you are currently participating in.
But you see what I'm saying, Charlie?
You can deal with anything, you can work out anything, but when you have lies, you can't work that out.
That's the only thing I punish my kids for.
I'm like, I don't care what you did, let's hear it.
You know, I had I have my daughter's phone.
I picked it up.
I was like, is there anything in this phone before I check it?
I checked my kids' phones.
And uh I'm like, is there anything in here?
She's like, nope.
I got in there.
She's thinking all this stuff has been deleted because it's you know, yeah, I found it.
And I'm like, Well, what what happened to this?
I'm not gonna find anything here.
And that's what I was trying to explain to her.
No matter what you do, we can work through it.
When you lie, when we can't discover the truth, any progress ends right there.
That's where you are with what the current struggle you're in.
Spiritual warfare.
The evil one works in those, he works in them.
So we're warriors.
You say, how come they are in locked step and their mind is just straight, and nothing seem how many of them have you seen that you changed their mind?
You're none.
That's Phil.
That went down a two-plus year narrative full of lying, full of abuse of power, corruption, and they did it willingly.
Listen, I've always thought for myself, um, I tell a story that I was a local radio host in Atlanta when the Richard Jewell thing happened and the Olympic bombing, and I was on the air at the time when the Atlanta Journal Constitution came out with the headline that he fits the profile of the lone bomber because he lives with his mother.
And I'm on here.
I remember it.
That was the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
I'm on the air dumbest thing I've ever heard.
That doesn't mean he it fits.
He was with his mother probably because it make enough money.
That's right.
So I didn't know it at the time.
Richard Jewell was listening to my radio show.
And I was the only one in the media that said, I'm not I'm not rushing to conclusion here, and it's not guilt by accusation in America.
And it ended up he gave me one of his first interviews when it was all said and done.
He died 44.
I th I'm sure the press killed him.
Yeah.
And he did not like it.
But then, you know, the media's been wrong on George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin.
I was right.
I actually took time to go down there and talk to the people.
Yep.
Uh When the Duke Lacrosse came case came up, I went out to Long Island and Garden City and I met with the parents and kids.
I I did my own research.
Right.
Uh UVA or Baltimore, Maryland, or Ferguson, Missouri, or the Cambridge Police, or believing that Donald Trump absolutely could win this election.
Right.
Or going back, I think I was the only voice vetting Obama and you know, Frank Marshall Davis and Olinski and Black Liberation Theology and Acorn and Community Organizing.
And oh, and he sat in the pews of the church of GD America for 20 plus years, and he started his political career in the home of two unrepentant domestic terrorists that bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol and New York City police headquarters, and 9-11, 2001 quoted in the New York Times as saying, We wish we did more.
That's where he started as so you know the answer to your question is I don't think Phil, I don't think about what I do.
Yeah, I just do it.
Yeah.
You know, uh uh have people said to Hannity, you're probably gonna have a pre-dawn raid coming pretty soon.
You know, when I'm taking on, you know, pretty powerful people, um and the intelligence community, only only a few, the ninety-nine percent are good honorable Americans that protect us.
Same with the FBI, just a few.
The ninety-nine percent do their job and obey the laws and would never abuse power.
But for me, um it's not like I have a choice, it just is you know, I'm I I I do what I do, you do what you do, and I know it's the right thing because I'm driven to do it, whether I want to or not, I'm gonna I'm stuck doing it.
Listen how serious this is.
This is how you can recognize the spirit of God, every spirit that acknowledges acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.
But every spirit who does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.
He's the spirit of the Antichrist, which you've heard is coming.
Now watch this.
You dear children are from God and have overcome them because the one who is in you, God spirit, is greater than the one who is in the world.
They're from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them.
We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us.
But whoever is not from God, listen to this, does not listen to us.
That explains why you say it's just like they're in lockstep, coordinated evil from the evil one himself, and you say what we're telling you is you said we say, Sean, make sure you got the power within you to withstand it.
We're just saying do this, it will help greatly.
The one in you is stronger than the one in them.
You all watch the Passion of the Christ.
Oh, yeah.
I cannot watch that movie.
It's tough.
Can it not take me down?
Yeah, that's right.
That movie touches me deeply.
I believe all Phil, I believe you wanted to chunk me in the back of with the in the swamp with the alligators, and I said, I'll do it, but I'm not doing it there.
Trust me when I tell you I want to dunk you anywhere.
Okay, get a bucket.
Now you can dunk me right here.
I don't hear some water fly it all over my head.
Well, Sean, you're uh you're a good American.
You really are uh the reason we connected with you uh immediately.
I want to tell you one thing.
Sure.
You know how you know there's a God.
Okay.
I argue with atheists on this radio program.
And I say, so you don't believe in God, okay?
You believe in the big bang theory.
I said, Well, you what you believe then is that all of this energy existed.
You're not giving me a source of the energy, just existed.
And then it collides together and creates perfection.
You know, detail the moon, the sun, the stars, the planet, gravity, all right.
DNA 700 miles an hour as I speak.
The planet.
Right.
And and it's doing like this, tour turning like this at a thousand miles an hour.
Universe within universes within universes.
That just happened.
No way.
No way.
And it's Going around and around and around, right?
You say you talk about precise.
We're just the right distance from the sun.
Mercury's too close.
Venus is too close.
We're just right.
Mars is too perfect.
Perfect.
Perfect.
The only ones that's not perfect is us.
That didn't work.
But by the way, you know, but you can be considered viewed as 100% flawlessly perfect.
Once you believe Jesus died, was buried and raised from the dead.
And look already believe it.
I know it.
Now you've got to enact that.
You've got to die to sin.
You, the old U. Well, you know, it's kind of talked about your old life.
You are just as bad as me.
Just to be very blessed.
Maybe worse.
Maybe worse.
I'm admitting my incorrigibility.
You said looked at Mo Greybeard said, I need to be baptized, but honey, why do you think you're in divinity school?
She said, Sean, because Al told me this that you took.
So, Sean, technically they're right.
I said, Well, technically, if we're right.
His woman and all three of the people that love him, the Robinson clan.
If we're all technically right, move.
All right, well, look, we need to go.
Sean, you're a busy man.
Thank you so much for being a part of the podcast.
Uh, don't get kicked out of hotels, Jace.
Next time, I'll try.
You know, you're up in New York City.
Facial profile.
We'll have more.
We'll have more on this podcast about our friend Sean Hannity.
Oh boy, that's dangerous.
Thank you all for having me.
It all be a woman's choice.
I'm not about to be in the male kill a woman with doing her body.
She has a right to make us see herself.
To regulate his head.
Some kids are not unwanted.
So you kill him now, I'd kill him later.
You you bring him in the world.
I don't want it on love.
So you kill him now, I'll kill him later.
The economy added more than a quarter million jobs, better than economists expected.
Unemployment is at its lowest level in almost 50 years.
Wages grew faster than prices did.
Do you give President Trump the credit?
I give our workers and our businesses the credit, Jake.
When you're out there across the country, you see people working harder and harder every day.
And this has meant that we are our businesses are strong and we're selling American goods.
That being said, a lot of people aren't sharing in this prosperity because of the cost, the cost of college, the cost of health care, uh, the fact that the president had promised that he would bring down the prices of their prescription drugs, and that just hasn't happened.
Unemployment is the lowest it's been since I was nine months old.
You're really not gonna give President Trump any credit for that in terms of his tax cuts or deregulation or anything he's done.
Uh you know what I'm thinking about?
I'm thinking about when we were in that downturn and President Obama came into office, and he had to deal with that with the Congress uh to try to one right the financial industry and then two, uh get us on the road to recovery.
And I remember that the Republicans were giving him grief uh when he took any credit for that.
So I think that we have had policies in place, starting with President Obama, that have aided that recovery.
Are you concerned that impeachment talk may actually help the president's re-election?
I'm concerned that if we don't impeach this president, he will get re-elected.
If we don't impeach him, he will say he has been vindicated.
You have said that you think that the House Judiciary Committee should open impeachment proceedings.
I think they should begin the process.
I do think they should begin the process.
Of course she thinks they should begin the process.
And the only one speaking the truth and all that was Al Green.
He got this Alabama Democratic state representative Uh you know, going after Donald Trump Jr., you know, using the R word, which I guess now you're not allowed to use it, and then saying he's the best defense for having an abortion.
It doesn't get but Al Green's saying something that's true.
Well, we better impeach him because otherwise he's gonna get re-elected.
An acknowledgment that yeah, he's gonna get re-elected.
You know, but this is all part of the media madness in this country.
I look, I think, as I said yesterday, it's worse than it was on election night 2016 and these the mass psychosis that then followed.
And the and the hatred and the rage is you know, they all fought Mueller, which is now officially dead.
There's no mo the no more Muller talk that is of any significance or meaning whatsoever.
All it is now is noise.
And uh Gerald Nadler trying to put on a show and moving towards some type of contempt effort against the attorney general because he wants to change a rule that's been established for two hundred and six years.
He would he they they're afraid to, I guess, interview Barr by themselves.
They want their lawyers to do it.
Well, that has not happened in the two hundred and six year history of the House Judiciary Committee of which he is now the chairman.
Not once.
Uh so Barr is saying, Well, I'm I'm glad of of course Congress has the right to oversight, but oversight by the people that were elected that are accountable to their to their constituents.
Not not strangers because we're too weak to do the job.
It doesn't work that way.
You know, unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, what, to cover for you?
800 nine four one Sean Tulfrey uh telephone number.
We're joined by Kayleigh McInney, National Press Secretary for Trump twenty twenty, and Jeff Floyd has a new book coming out called The Swamp Wars, Donald Trump and the New American Populism and the Old Versus the Old Order.
Well, that's not you know, I think a lot of the hatred of Trump, Jeff and welcome back both of you, is it's all rooted in the fact that he's not them.
He's never going to be them.
If he cured cancer, gave every American five million dollars, co-opted even the new Green Deal agenda, dropped another hundred and fifty billion dollars on the tarmac of the mullahs in Iran, they'd still hate him.
Yeah, they would, Sean.
And you know, I I think one of the things that really drives this is that he could have been one of them had he chosen to be so.
I mean, this is a guy who who went to an Ivy League school there at the University of Pennsylvania and he's made himself into a billionaire.
How easy would it have been for Donald Trump to be one of them?
He not only doesn't want to be one of them, I mean he just rejects them out of hand, and they hate him for it.
They just cannot abide him.
Well, I mean, you were one of the few of us that saw it coming.
I I'm beginning now to think Cayley McIntyre that it you know, it was so bad post twenty sixteen.
Remember, the exit poll showed that Donald Trump didn't win a state.
And it just like two thousand and four, it showed John Kerry was going to be the next president.
And I don't think this president in particular polls very well just uh just by virtue of the fact I don't think I I think a lot of people like we're not you you don't ask me your nosy questions who I'm voting for.
It's none of your business.
And frankly, if anyone asked me, I I probably would have said Hillary.
I never get asked.
I've never been interviewed after I vote.
But uh the point of it is is their reaction from that day forward, once the night started to roll in and Donald Trump became clear he's the next president of the United States, there's this collective meltdown because nobody saw it coming, number one, and now the Mueller report, it seems that in spite of everything we have pointed out for the last two years, they weren't paying attention and they believed their own lies about Russia collusion, and now they can't handle the results of that investigation.
Exactly, and they can't handle the thought of the president winning reelection and them once again never seeing it com coming.
You know, you point out a key fact here.
I talked to a polster and they said, Look, double digits, when I went out and and polled the hidden Trump voter, tried to find that voter that told the pollster they were voting Clinton, but really voted Trump.
He found them to a double digit tune.
That's why every exit poll was wrong.
You know, see Jeff and I were both on CNN set that night.
I remember the Hillary folks rejoicing with all the exit polls, showed Trump uh losing and virtually every state like you noted, but how'd that work out for them?
Jeff and I uh By the way, when when did they stop going to you guys for commentary and when did the depression begin to set in?
Yep, exactly.
No, I was on every single solitary network.
I don't work election nights.
I don't waste my time for the five seconds they'll put me on on Fox.
Uh so I stay home and you know, I'm I'm looking up Cuyahoga County and Hamilton County and you know, Southwest Florida, the panhandle and Broward and Palm Beach counties to see if there's any cheating going on, and uh that's how I like to spend my election nights.
Uh one of the Yeah.
The Saturday before the uh before Halloween in twenty sixteen, I put my then ninety-seven year old mom in the car to go out in the countryside and get pumpkins.
And I noticed there were Trump signs everywhere, hundreds of 'em.
I started counting.
There was one Hillary sign.
I get to CNN on the following Monday.
I tell that story on the air.
And they're all looking at me like I'm alone.
And they're saying, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, up holding data, up holding data.
I mean, I I tried to tell them that there was something going on here.
This is coming.
It's, you know, I I'm just not seeing it there for in the middle of Pennsylvania.
And they just, you know, wouldn't wouldn't believe it.
Well, I listen, I there was a funny thing, because Joe Biden, I know he went to uh uh you gave a union speech and he acknowledges that if he can't win Pennsylvania, he's not gonna win.
Here's the problem.
The economy in Pennsylvania is so strong right now that they're actually going inside of prisons, asking the prisoners, when are you getting out because we want to hire you?
Um that's a that's a big problem.
We now have one point seven million more jobs available than we have people on unemployment.
I mean I drive around this area, all I see are not all, but I certainly see more and more plenty of plenty of now hiring sons.
They're all over the place.
Sure, exactly.
And I think that's the point.
I think you know, uh how do you win in that economy with that economy so strong, yeah, you know, that anybody that wants a job is working.
That's why we have record low unemployment, a fifty-year record low unemployment numbers in the country.
Now, what they can't figure out is well, it happened when Reagan was president.
Now it's happening again when when Trump is president, it's the same policies that they put in place.
Eliminating the bureaucracy, cutting back needless and burdensome regulation and lowering taxes and incentivizing investment.
It's not that hard, Kaylee.
It's exactly right.
Free market policies work.
We have the hottest economy on record, save maybe 1980, which was probably right there, right there with us.
So you're exactly right.
In Pennsylvania, you point out lowest unemployment rate on record.
And I can tell you this, the Democrats aren't going to win by going around and putting forth these policies like Joe Biden saying China's not a threat when meanwhile, you know, President Trump rightfully points out we lost 60,000 factories when China entered the WTO.
It's an extraordinary number that even the Washington Post tax checkers who we know are always off base rate it as true.
Uh you're not going to win going around underestimating the threats we face from China against the hottest economy on record brought about by free market policies.
As we continue with Jeff Lord and Kayleigh McEnaney, so now we've got an issue that everybody pretty much in the media.
There's a very small group of us that saw an entirely different set of facts emerging the last two years, and that is oh, a rigged investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server, uh real obstruction of justice.
Then we saw a dirty Russian dossier bought and paid for by Clinton with funneled money to fusion GPS through a law firm hiring a guy that we're gonna break a big story tonight with our friend John Solomon uh about how everybody knew what Christopher Steele's agenda was, and they still used his dirty dossier, which the New York Times is even suggesting could be Russian disinformation from the get-go.
Uh how does Mueller justify not going into that issue?
But that became then the basis of these four Pfizer warrant applications.
The original in October of 2016 to spy on the Trump campaign.
Now we've got Stefan Halper spying on the Trump campaign, and now we've got the uh added component of some, you know, uh uh hot spy coming on to George Papadopoulos flirting with him uh in an attempt.
How many spies were there?
How many attempts to spy on the Trump campaign were there, and who ordered it, and why wasn't any of that looked into by Mueller?
I mean, that that's absolutely right.
And Sean, the thing that I think is is so notable here is all these people that you have had on your show for the last two years have very patiently and relentlessly spent time unraveling the facts.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media has gone out of its way to ignore the facts and and and bet the ranch on some collusion fantasy that just simply never happened.
I mean, it is the most massive piece of uh journalism malpractice That I think we've ever seen in American history.
That is a big story in and of itself right there.
Oh, I think it is too.
And it's you know, do they care about the truth?
No.
Now, has anybody in the media apologized?
No, they just doubled down on stupid, and I think if it was bad their reaction of the 2016 election results, it's even worse to that the Mueller report that they put so much faith, hope, and trust in didn't come out the way they wanted, Cayley.
And I just think at the at the end of the day, they're never gonna change.
There's never any hope for them.
They are agenda driven at the highest level possible.
That's exactly right, and they commit journalistic malpractice regularly.
Look, you know, you've reported on these huge scandals that have happened.
This investigation started on a fraudulent document funded by Democrats.
There's not been a single prosecution, by the way, but last week you have the New York Times finally confirming, hey, there were human sources on Papadopolis more than what we knew.
How many networks picked up that coverage?
How many newspapers ran with that coverage?
None because they have an agenda, they're not going to change, and they're going to derelict their duty to report the facts and be journalists.
don't deserve that title that they hold.
You know, you just watch CNN fake news.
You know, there's Wolfie Blitzer asking, will they throw the U.S. attorney in jail?
You know, they're they're talking now such insanity that they'll send the sergeant of arms to capture the attorney general and bring him in in handcuffs before Congress, as if that's gonna happen.
I mean, this is how insane.
Then you've got NBC, this guy, um, what's his name?
The guy before Rachel Maddow.
I don't somebody Hayes, I don't know this guy's name.
Chris Hayes.
So he actually has a theory about a conspiracy where millions of millions of business owners were secretly plotting to damage Obama's economy, and then now they're secretly plotting together to benefit the Trump economy.
And he's making these statements.
I mean, ha how do you how do you advance something that nuts?
Not for nothing.
Do you call them conspiracy TV?
I I mean, it is it is just uh uh stunning to watch.
I thought to myself, the real invisible headline here is Hannity was right, but we don't want to say it.
Yeah, no, I d listen, yeah, I'm sure that the hell will freeze over first.
Jeff Floyd, thanks for being with us.
Candley McAdaney, thank you.
When we come back, the president has granted clemency a full pardon for former Army first lieutenant Michael B. Henna of Oklahoma.
He'll join us in his first interview, and he had been sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for quote unpremeditated murder in a combat zone.
President did a huge did the right thing when you get to the details of this case.
We went in war with Iran.
Yes.
That didn't take you a second.
Two strikes, the first strike and the last strike.
What are the conditions or the circumstances that would justify going to war with Iran?
Well, if Iran struck out militarily against the United States or against our allies in the region, then I would certainly expect a devastating response against Iran.
As somebody who fought in two fronts in the Middle East, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan, do you think it would be a good idea to go to war with Iran?
No, I I don't advocate military action against Iran.
I simply get delivering the message that if Iran were to attack the United States, uh, it would be a grave miscalculation on their part, and there would be a theorious response.
Um, we don't want to govern Iran.
We don't want to rule 80 million Iranians.
We want 80 million Iranians to be able to govern themselves.
Where are you on regime change?
What I want is to have an outlaw regime change its behavior to rejoin the civilized world and stop supporting terrorism and trying to overthrow the governments of so many of its neighbors.
Ultimately it's up to the Iranian people and their leaders to decide how they're going to govern their country.
But with men like those in charge of Iran, I I think we're gonna see what we've seen for the last 40 years, which is a revolutionary theological movement that's hijacked the powers of a nation state.
I wonder if that means on any level to you that war is inevitable.
War is never inevitable.
War is always the product of human choices.
All right, that was Senator Tom Cotton of uh Arkansas, and in an interview I to it took me by surprise.
I'm gonna get into this issue of the US winning a war against Iran and two strikes.
Um, for those of you that don't know, uh Senator Cotton is uh uh combat tour vet and served as a platoon leader for the Army's third infantry uh regiment at Arlington.
Uh he actually has a new book out that pays homage to these soldiers who have gone before all of us and did what they did and and served their country.
Um many of them losing their lives in the course of that duty an honor um in service for other people and um anyway it's called the soldier a soldier's tour at Arlington National Cemetery.
Pretty inspiring portrait of Arlington.
If you haven't been there you need to go and Arlington Cemetery's old guard but also chronicling his personal journey and time as a platoon leader in the unit.
Senator how are you?
Welcome to the program.
Hey Sean it's great to be on the program and thank you very much for your interest in sacred duty you know it's a great honor to be able to serve at the old guard uh in two thousand seven and two thousand eight between my overseas tours and it was a great honor to spend the last year back at the cemetery with the soldiers of the old guard and to tell their story in sacred duty.
Well this is important an important part of your history is that for over sixteen months in 07 and 08 you know between combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan you served as the platoon leader of this old guard the Army's third infantry regiment at Arlington.
These soldiers have been embodied.
They embody the ideals of honor and sacrifice.
So between that time, what did you actually do there?
Sean, I was a platoon leader with the old guard whose primary mission is military honor funerals in Arlington National Cemetery.
We performed 20 to 30 funerals a day for veterans of World War II in Korea and Vietnam, and unfortunately active duty burials for those who had just been killed a few days earlier in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You know, we can do up to 100 funerals in a week.
I probably did 400 to 500 funerals in my time at Arlington.
But the distinguishing hallmark of the old guard is their pursuit of persecution.
perfection in everything they do their ethos of excellence because even though we might have performed 20 30 funerals a day we knew for for that fallen hero and for that family at the grave site that was the only funeral they were ever going to see that was a once in a lifetime moment and it was a lifetime in a making and we owed it to our uh comrades in arms to pay tribute to them we also knew that it helped create the next generation of guardians for this nation.
Whenever young men and women see the way our nation honors our warfallen know that they will be treated in the exact same way if heaven forbid uh they join the military when they grow up and they have to go downrange to fight and they lose their lives.
I think it's a really important message that we send to the next generation of American that we've that we started at the very beginning of this country back in the Revolutionary War and we carry forward to today that there's no one we honor more than our warriors and especially those who have laid down their life in defense of our nation.
What is the reaction is it every time the same when taps are played or 21 gun salute I don't know if that's included in every funeral but I know my father's built buried in a military gravesite as well he fought in World War II.
Tap taps is played at every military honor funerals.
The big guns are fired at certain funerals for uh senior officers or for senior civilians inside the Department of Defense.
But uh you know it it's a mournful tune and many families lose their composure um obviously the the raw the ra and newer that the um death was the harder it is on the family but of course that kind of thing sticks with you it stays on your mind after the funeral if you've seen a young widow receive the flag from you sobbing at the loss of her husband and what it means to raise the two small children next to her without their death dad for the rest of their lives.
Did you speak those words on behalf of a grateful nation did you do that?
We did it's called Condolences Sean and it's part of the test that all officers and NCOs have to undergo um before they can be certified to perform a funeral in the cemetery.
It's something that you don't forget.
When you bend down on a knee and you take that flag and you put it in, Tell tell us the whole process the whole process, if you don't mind, walking through, because this is after they fold the flag that was draped over the casket and it's folded with the honor that it deserves and then take it from there.
Yeah.
So uh so once the the family is next to the graveside, once everything is in position, I as officer in charge at the head of the grave would step away, the chaplain would step in.
The chaplain was the main link to the family, the chaplain would know about the soldier uh whom we were honoring, uh whether he had just passed away in Iraq in the conditions of his death uh downrange, or if he was a World War II veteran, the chaplain perform a short service um and then step out, at which point I would step back into the head of the casket.
That was the cue for the casket team which had been holding the flag taut to begin to fold the flag.
That is a precise uh maneuver.
They have exactly one minute 55 seconds uh to fold it into a crisp triangle and present it to me while the U.S. Army band plays usually either America the beautiful or Army Blue.
And then once it's presented to me, the casket team marches off and I I turn and and walk to the next of Kien.
I take a knee and I present the flag to the next of Pien, and then I recite the condolences on behalf of the President and the Army and a Grateful Nation, and then I stand and I salute um and then I return to the head of the casket while the funeral control.
Say the whole thing that you cited the fan you saw you take a knee, you present the flag, you have white gloves on.
I know I remember that part, and what are the exact words you say?
Yeah, so you t you go over, you you do have your dress uniform on and the white gloves on.
Um you take that knee and you present the flag and then you recite the condolences.
Now the condolences have changed just a little bit uh since the time I was there.
Um what they and that was done to harmonize them across all four services.
Um and today the condolences are on behalf of the President of the United States, the United States Army, and a grateful nation.
Please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved ones' honorable and faithful service.
And when the next of Ken takes the flag, you stand uh and you salute.
Uh one final salute to the flag that had adorned their loved ones' remains.
Unbelievable.
You know, we don't honor those brave men.
We don't think, I mean, we don't wake up every morning and say, Oh, I'm so free, you know.
And you take we take it for granted.
I mean, like a lot of blessings of life.
And then you think of all the people that have died in all the wars this country has had to endure.
And America, as I often say, is the country, there's never been a country that has accumulated more power, abused it less, and we're not a perfect country, but also used it to advance the human condition more than the United States of America.
It's just a fact.
But let me ask you let me ask you this question.
Um go ahead.
No, I was gonna say that's an absolute fact, Sean, and it's those young men and women, whether that are like they're at Arlington National Cemetery or with fame divisions like the 101st Airborne Division where I serve that have done that good on behalf of our nation.
And as you say, probably most of us in civilian life probably don't think enough each day about those Americans who laid down their life and the fact sacrifices their family made.
But as I write in sacred duty, that's part of the reason why we have a unit like the old guard of Arlington to every single day in the cemetery, whether it's at a military honor funeral or guarding the tomb of the unknown soldier for the eighty-second consecutive year to express our gratitude, our reverence, and and even our love as a nation for those fallen heroes and their families.
We we don't have the freedoms without these guys.
We don't have this country without them.
And again, you don't wake up every morning when you think of how profound it is, you know, no greater love have man for another than to lay down their life, and all these people have.
Um it's it strikes you, and you realize that the lives we enjoy are because of so many sacrificing.
But let me uh ask you why I have you on the phone.
I want to, and by the way, it's a great book.
It's uh coming out May 14th, uh Sacred Duty, a soldiers' tour at Arlington National Cemetery.
Um you uh I have studied this Iranian situation a lot over the years.
You know, I can remember when the Shah was removed and out of France comes the Ayatollah and the theocracy emerges, and I was very angry when Obama dropped a hundred and fifty billion dollars in cash and other currency on the tarmac in Iran for the mullahs that chant death to America and death to Israel, etcetera.
Um they've been saber rattling the last week or so.
You in an interview, I believe it was on PBS, said that you believe the US could win the war against Iran in two strikes.
And I wanted to ask you about it because I think we're all pretty confident that they, as evil as they are, they have uh intelligently moved a lot of their nuclear sites all around the country, deeply embedded into the ground, and which would make taking those sites out alone a monumental military task.
Well, Sean, to be exact, what I said on PBS is that we would uh resolve the dispute in one strike, because I said that if there were a military conflict with Iran, there would only be two strikes the first strike and the last strike.
What I mean by that is that we don't seek war with Iran.
We're not taking military action just for the hell of it.
But if Iran were to attack us, attack one of our ships in the Persian Gulf, attack our troops in Iraq, um, or attack the personnel, the thousands and thousands of citizens, in addition to diplomats and soldiers that we have living in the reason in the region, by taking the first strike against us, they would be guaranteeing that we take the last strike against them.
They might start a battle, we would be the ones ending the battle, and we would end it in time time and a manner of our choosing.
We lost 58,000 troops in Vietnam.
I think uh Grand Total Iraq and Afghanistan, somewhere between seven and eight thousand and and so many more permanently injured, losing limbs, etc.
And I've met many of the the families, gold star families, families that have you know injuries that are forever life-changing.
Um I don't like how we politicize war anymore.
I don't like the idea that we don't fight them to win them.
Uh it seems we're all gung-ho when we start, then it gets through seen through the prism of politics, and we're not winning it.
Um then it raises a question.
When Harry Truman hit Hiroshima, Nagasaki, it was over.
Did innocent people die?
Yeah.
We did not start that war either.
My father served four years in the Pacific.
Do we have to reconsider how war is fought and only get engaged?
We can't have guys in Iraq going door to door anymore, and they don't even have up armored Humvees for crying out loud.
No.
So Sean, it's not in our interest, nor should we desire to try to govern 80 million Iranians.
I would much rather 80 million Iranians be able to govern themselves in basic stability and peace and not be a threat to the United States and a threat to the security of a vital region as well.
That's why uh when I say that there would be two strikes, the first strike and the last strike, we would not precipitate, and we have not taken any actions to precipitate the increased tensions you see in in the Persian Gulf region right now.
The administration is responding prudently to very serious and credible threats against the United States, our personnel and our interests in the region.
I hope by virtue of the actions we've taken, deploying an additional carrier strike group and more bombers and patriot missile systems, that we have sent the signal to Iran that they need to stand down from some of the threatening actions they're taking.
I've got a make no mistake.
We'll be I just want the next generation of weaponry to be I want our worst wars to be fought in Tampa.
That's it.
In other words, that uh seriously, I want the next generation of weapons.
We can't go to door to door anymore.
We can't do it.
There's too many kids sacrificing, then it gets politicized, then you have to ask, well, why did we even begin it?
And that infuriates me because it shows a uh a lack of respect for what we're asking these kids to do.
If we're gonna fight a war, you better fight and you better win it and you better win it fast.
That's how we have to fight it.
I I think yeah, I think what the uh the Department of Defense is trying to do, what Chairman Joe Dunford is trying to do is provide the options to the president should Iran Iran strike the United States and our personnel are our interests.
I gotta I gotta run those center.
I'm not trying to cut you off here, but I got we're just up on the on the clock.
Uh listen, we really appreciate your time.
Um and uh thanks for all you do, and the book is out May uh fifth, May 14th, uh Sacred Duty, a soldier's tour at Arlington National Cemetery.
There is a new book out that I've been reading and I am fascinated by.
And very rarely do I say, wow, when you hear somebody that's got a little bit of intellectual honesty, probably doesn't agree with a lot of maybe my policies or where I stand, but...
but see something that is so obvious to see, and they have a willingness to speak out.
Now there have been a few people, for example, with this deep state gate, the abuse of power, corruption, using the powerful tools of intelligence against the American people, rigging an investigation into one presidential candidate, and the evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible that that candidate should have been put in jail.
Um then, of course, we're gonna we're gonna get a Pfizer warrant application using a phony Russian dossier that the New York Times is now finally saying, Oh, that was probably Russian disinformation.
Great, because we had four Pfizer warrants that were used against the Trump campaign, uh one before the election to get a backdoor into all things candidate Trump.
And then finally used to bludgeon the president as we've now had, you know, for two and a half plus years, and it hasn't stopped.
Um just to give you a sense before we get to uh Brett Easton, Ellis who's with us, he's uh written a brand new book that's called White.
He's gonna explain it in a second.
Uh he talks about those that just can't handle some simple basic fundamental truth.
Listen.
So right now we have Hillary's about a 75 or an 80% favorite.
We have different versions of the forecast.
The poll has Hillary Clinton up by double digits nationally, 12 points, 50 to 38 in four-way race.
Clinton leading in Florida, Clinton leading in North Carolina, Clinton leading in Ohio, Clinton leading in Nevada.
I could go on and on and on.
Uh I continue to believe Mr. Trump.
Trump will not be present.
I love you.
Come on, come on, buddy.
We have a major projection right now.
Donald Trump will take Ohio project.
Donald Trump will carry the state of Florida.
Huge win for Donald Trump.
Donald Trump while we project will be in Kentucky in Indiana with its eleven electoral votes, West, Virginia, from Tennessee, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, North Dakota, with its three electoral votes, and South Dakota,
Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, the state of Montana, North Carolina, Georgia, Iowa, Utah, Wisconsin, Arizona, Kansas with its six electoral votes, Nebraska with its five electoral votes, and Wyoming with its three electoral votes.
Sorry to keep you waiting, complicated business.
A lot of people have laughed at me over the years.
Now they're not laughing so much, I'll tell you.
No, they still can't face reality, which is the premise behind this brand new book.
Now it's written by uh Brett Easton Ellis.
He's an author screenwriter.
Uh it's called White, and uh he talks about the nanny state crying about the 2016 elections.
I you don't agree with much of my politics.
I'm assuming we're having re reading this book.
Well, I'm I'm not uh I'm not partisan, you know.
I'm in the middle of the aisle, and I always have been, and I didn't really pay attention to politics until this last election, where the mainstream news media that I trusted for all my life, whether it was the New York Times or CNN, I mean I'm saying that now with a smile on my face,
um, began uh to offer me this shifting reality that I didn't think was true about uh the campaign and about the election, and I started to pay closer attention to what was going on, and uh became seriously annoyed.
Listening to that roundup that you just played is hilarious, but also deeply deeply annoying.
And I think the same thing can happen when you find find those videos of election night on YouTube, much the same way that I think finding videos about people believing in the Mueller report for the last two years are also quite hilarious and are gonna be played for generations to come on YouTube.
Uh you know, the media comes up with a narrative that they want to believe in, and I've never really had seen that before.
I hadn't seen the media actually play out like a fantasy that they had.
And it was um extremely disturbing to me.
You know what's scary, and and you talk about it and you say it actually you're you're very creative in your writing in terms of your writing style, which I like, you do have a Uh a great flair for writing.
And you use a lot of expletives, which I always appreciate having been from New York.
Um but you're right, you know, the childlike disbelief that had manifested itself immediately after the election is embarrassing, and the post of what am I gonna tell my daughter and you know, people that and then on the other side you would meet other people that would sit and quietly whisper to you, I'm voting for Trump, but don't tell anybody.
Uh yeah, that I and I described this in the book.
Um I look, I live with a uh my partner is far left, a socialist democrat or uh, I don't know, democratic socialist, whatever you want to call it.
So I'm I'm in their shoes.
I I I get it.
I I hear it all the time.
I don't agree with it necessarily at all, but um I understand the other side to a degree.
But I also did not understand this inability to get over the election.
And it started to drive me crazy at a certain point.
Okay, two months, three months maybe, four months, but when we hit the fifth month and uh my partner was talking about Russian conspiracy theories, and we're talking about in the spring of twenty seventeen, I started to lose it.
And I started to say, come on, you've got to get out of this.
You really don't believe that, you know, Russians uh helped win this election, and also that Russians had something to do with the Democrats losing a thousand legislative seats, whenever, you know, two years before or whatever.
Um but he um you know there there was this belief that because Hillary lost the election, there had to be some kind of other reason that a country was just not, you know, ready for her, or didn't want her.
And so that that inability, that childish inability to accept an election that was won legally and fairly began to become something ominous to me.
And it played itself out through 2017, and then it started to play itself out through 2018.
And the final chapter of my book is about the summer of twenty eighteen, where everything I felt imploded for the left, and how were they going to get themselves back together?
And um and that and that really is what the book is about.
It's about kind of my progression from being someone who, okay, well, you know, the people spoke, they wanted Donald Trump uh uh to be president, and yet there was this faction of a lot of people I knew who just couldn't accept it and started to create narratives and fantasies about why he won and would were having meltdowns.
I have seen Trump derangement syndrome in action constantly in LA and in in California and amo among a lot of my friends.
Not all of them.
Okay, some of them accepted it, but it i it got to the point where I felt I had to write about it, and I was and I began talking about it on my podcast, the Brad East and Ellis Podcast on Patreon, and um and that's a lot uh and that's where a lot of white uh comes from from my podcast.
You know, I watched though uh I then a lot of the anecdote in the book are pretty amazing.
Let me ask you, as you were watching this phony Russia Trump Trump Russia conspiracy, it was it was like ninety-nine percent of the media.
And like usual, I go off of my own direction and I do my own thing, and and fair fairly early on I started developing sources that it was total BS.
You even talked about an incident involving the P tape with I didn't know there was supposed to be 14-year-old Russian prostitutes until I read your book, uh, but it didn't exist.
And you talk about turning on some of these, you know, networks, MBC, CNN.
It was pretty much everybody, and everybody was looking at me like I had lost my mind, but I have a pretty good track record uh being right, starting with Richard Jewell, Dra Vaughn and Zimmerman, Ferguson, UVA, Duke Lacrosse, Baltimore, Maryland, vetting Obama, Trump can win, you know, that they don't have, and I I just think that there uh for example, th it wasn't hard to tell that Obama was gonna win just by looking at the crowd sizes.
And but you know, I didn't go into a meltdown or a depression the moment this this guy won that I thought wasn't capable of doing a good job.
Well, you know, the same thing happened with this Russian hoax that began forming itself immediately after the election that my partner grabbed onto because he couldn't believe Trump won.
And so then I thought, okay, this is gonna go away.
This is gonna go away in uh uh in a while because was there really, really any proof?
And as we moved through 2017, I remember talking to two journalists that I uh knew back from the day when I was living in New York, and uh they were now situated in Washington, DC.
And apropos of nothing, we just uh began talking on uh Facebook, and they both told me, uh apropos of neither one of them knowing each other, uh, when I asked them, what's going on with this Russian conspiracy theory, both of them, again, situated in DC told me it's utter BS.
It's not true.
Everyone knows it's not true, but they have nothing else.
There's nothing else to go on.
So you have this Russian conspiracy that sells papers that gets clicks, and it's the only way that they can survive is to keep this Russian conspiracy thing going.
And then I remember asking them, well, what's going to happen when it it's found out to be not true?
And they both said there's going to be a dire reckoning.
There's going to be a dire reckoning about people trusting the media who sold this for two years.
And uh it's a good thing.
Where is the reckoning?
Because now all they're doing is pushing for Congress to do what Mueller didn't do.
We've now had four separate collusions on Russia.
We had the nine-month FBI investigation, even struck and page said, No, it didn't happen.
They also said that the investigation in the Hillary was rigged.
It's clear she violated the law.
And then we had, of course, the House Intel Committee, the Bipartisan Senate Committee.
Now the Mueller report can't can't be any more clear about Russia collusion, but they want another investigation, so they'll use a a hyperpartisan Congress that believes in the Green New Deal that elimin eliminate oil, gas, the combustion engine, cows, and planes, and everything is free, and uh that that Congress will finally do the job that Mueller wouldn't do and the FBI wouldn't do and and other people wouldn't do.
Well, I assumed that when the Mueller report finally came out and there was a bar report and all that stuff, that people would finally just realize we've got to move on.
We have to move on.
Muller was our God.
We we we place all of our faith in him in order to whatever he was going to do to Trump.
And then ultimately what happened, there was kind of this depression for about a week, this kind of silence for a week, and then the people who wanted to believe in the Muller report, like my partner, said, Well, he's lying.
It's not true.
He's a stooge.
The whole thing is.
When you tell him you're on the air with me, if he knows who I am, he's gonna he's gonna go nuts.
Yeah, but he also knows that I I believe in talking to everybody.
Look, I've for this book I've sat down with a profile for the New York Times, for the Washington Post, I also talked to Breitbart, and I'm talking to you.
I mean, my look, my partner's okay because uh Bernie Sanders was on Fox just about a week ago.
And I think you just have to, you know, get rid of that and talk to both sides of the aisle.
I hate this notion that people can only talk about.
I agree with you.
I think it's stupid.
And I and it it drives me crazy.
Stay right there.
So yeah, maybe I don't agree with a lot of what what what you say or maybe what Fox represents, but I still believe that uh invite me on.
I'm gonna come on and talk.
Brett, uh I've been right the whole time.
They were wrong the whole time.
So I I don't have much more to say, except you're the fact that you agree more politically with that side is what we're gonna talk about on the other side of this break.
Uh Brett Easton Ellis, he wrote the book it's called White, and it's gonna be a bestseller.
It's a very interesting read.
I'm telling you, you can't put you can't put it down once you start.
Talks about how the left is melted down in the country.
And as we continue, Brett Easton Ellis is with us.
She's an author screenwriter, his brand new book is out, White, where he literally takes on the nanny state, everybody on the left, their complete meltdown over Donald Trump uh and his election and buying into these conspiracy theories.
You know, you talked about there's gonna be a reckoning.
I don't see the reckoning.
Right.
Well, I see is they just right, and I think those those reporters that I talked to in the summer of 2017 were thinking that was going to happen, but there's been no sanity about this.
There's been no sanity about any of this.
This has all been delusional.
And you know, i and and I think it's this delusion, this childlike delusion about the reality of things that has kind of upset me the most.
I mean, I I don't want to actually um you know believe that you know certain things are true or certain things are not.
I mean, I like to think that there's a kind of logic to the world, and also that you're an adult.
You accept things.
Okay, so it didn't work out your way.
You move on.
You find a candidate that can get Trump out of office in 2020, but you don't lose your collective mind.
You don't have this meltdown.
You don't act like children for three years, and you don't believe in fantasies.
And in many ways, that's what propelled me to put White together.
Again, as I said, Sean, I am uh you know, I'm nonpartisan.
I'm really not on either side of the aisle, but for some reason, uh the the last three years of being around people who had actual Trump derangement syndrome and were completely believing in these narratives and these are the people who are.
Well, let me just tell you one thing we may share.
I I'm more critical of Republicans for being weak, visionless, spineless.
They make promises, they don't keep them.
The thing I love the most about Donald Trump is he's courageous, he keeps his word, his promises, he fights hard for everything he said he was gonna do.
How rare is that he's an individual.
He's an individual.
He's a disruptor.
He's an individual and admire him for that.
I'd urge everybody, we're gonna put it up on our website, Hannity.com.
Brett Easton Ellis is called White, and it is a takedown of how the uh media and the left wing in this country have just lost their minds uh since the Trump election and these conspiracy theories that followed.
