Curt Mills warns Trump’s 2024 victory risks being undermined by neoconservatives—like those sabotaging Mark Hegseth’s Defense Secretary confirmation—who smear his allies (e.g., Steve Wyckoff) as pro-Iranian despite their pro-Israel records. With Netanyahu’s war-dependent survival and U.S. arms fueling Israeli annexation, Mills argues Trump must avoid Middle East wars to focus on domestic crises like 200,000 annual fentanyl deaths. Carlson highlights Trump’s purge of neocon holdouts (Pompeo, Hook) and generational shifts—younger Republicans rejecting endless conflicts—as key to redirecting U.S. priorities from Ukraine to American survival. The episode frames media censorship and establishment smear campaigns as obstacles to Trump’s peace agenda, urging resistance to prevent another costly war. [Automatically generated summary]
So it's amazing to me that over 20 years after the Iraq War, its architects and supporters are still not fully in control of America's foreign policy, but certainly influential in it.
And it's shocking to me that two months after Trump's landslide victory, a race in which he ran against the neocons, the neocons are still brazen enough to try and influence and sabotage his nominations.
We are days but less than a week before Tulsi Gabbard's hearings.
Where are we in the below-the-radar war between permanent Washington's national security establishment, the neocons, and the incoming Trump administration?
Yeah, I mean, I think the available evidence is that he is, like, circa 10 years ago was a pretty conventional Republican, and he has changed his life in more ways than one, and so he is a question mark.
But the early evidence is the people that he has chosen to surround himself are stark departures from...
It's got a pretty abysmal record of winning wars, a pretty great record of spending money.
It desperately needs reform.
And you're saying that based on the personnel choices you think he's making, he's now the defense secretary, by the way, as we're right now, that he is sincerely on board with Trump's foreign policy.
So, yeah, these are the guys that were hunting down IRGC, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps people in the forever wars that Trump and Vance ran on reforming and ending, etc., etc.
And so, you know, they're very much in the Vance mold of, we went there.
Not really sure what the point was, and we want to roll back from that somewhat.
I think you might have heard this message from Mr. Trump at least once or twice in the last 10 years.
So these, I don't know, Damien, I know Caldwell, who I think of as a man of genuine integrity, high intelligence, and principle committed to his country.
I think he's proven that.
I honestly think he's like a wonderful person.
But he's being attacked by people who never served with a long, unbroken track record of destroying America as somehow anti-American?
You know, if anyone sues this publication, it will take years and years and years and hope that some club member at Mar-a-Lago hands this to President Trump and tries to trick him and thinks that Mr. Trump is a stupid man.
I mean, I'm not familiar and I don't know any of the people over there personally, but the big story that's going around on both Domino and I believe Caldwell is from Jewish Insider.
And again, no one really wants to be...
You know, attacked by something called Jewish Insider.
It doesn't sound very fun.
And so they are running headlines against people, and they are attacking them.
And what they do is they don't say anything that is per se inaccurate, but they totally strip the context for everything.
This is somebody who wants to pull back, I would say, moderately from the Middle East, which I think at this point is basically bipartisan outside of the radicals within Washington, D.C. and the Beltway.
Or to even state that it's not, in fact, our war, as the President of the United States just did on his inauguration day, emphasizing from behind the Resolute Desk that it's their war, not our war.
So I read something from a guy called David Wormser, who was one of the architects of Iraq.
We're not from this country, not really concerned with this country at all.
And also, I think it's fair to say, you know, someone who should hang his head in shame, given a lifetime of destruction that he's helped bring to our country, but describe these policies as anti-American.
So I have to say, it takes a lot of balls for someone who has no interest in the United States to accuse someone whose whole orientation is helping the United States of being anti-American.
But I've noticed this a lot.
If you raise the question, like, what are we getting out of this?
You know, the endless war cycle, we're getting bankruptcy, obviously, but, like, is this good for us?
They'll accuse you, you know, the Constantine Kizzen, also not an American, will accuse, that wing, will accuse you of being somehow woke, and you're, like, left-wing for asking these questions.
So, I mean, I think that they're hoping that Americans don't do the reading.
They're hoping that Americans read X posts.
They're hoping that Americans watch.
Random cable news hosts that they're zoned out and let's say they have a positive view of certain aspects of America's role in the Middle East and they start tar and feathering people on the internet and that there's no pushback on it.
I guess the only reason I have noticed this is because it's so over the top.
rather than look I think a lot of these positions are legitimate I disagree with them you know a ton of these people are smart people I know almost all of them yeah and they could make like a straightforward case for their position like here's why we should affect regime change in Iran or here's what we should kill Putin I mean maybe there's a case to be made for that but they never make the case they attack anyone who stands in their way in the most brutal and dishonest ways they have no limits at all in their behavior at all and I just find that repugnant I'm
You know, just personally, I don't know a ton about his views.
I don't sense that...
We probably don't agree on foreign policy in some ways, but he was tasked by Trump, as you know, to go over and effect some kind of ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and he did.
And I doubt he's anti-Israel.
In fact, I know he's not, whatever that means.
And he is being attacked as somehow an agent of the Islamic Republic of Qatar and, like, anti-Israel Steve Wyckoff.
I think the Wyckoff thing surprised both sides, though, I would note.
Why?
I think, so obviously you knew him before, within recent years.
Okay, so I think in general, the open source intelligence to use a...
Lame term, but I would say is that the Hawks...
People who want to, say, go all the way on Iran did not expect Wyckoff to be so pragmatic.
And then additionally, the realist and restraint camp also did not expect it.
All the reporting from, say, Israeli media, say, Haaretz or Sides of Israel, that Wyckoff went in there and sort of with both the incoming Trump administration and the remnants of the Biden administration, forced Prime Minister Netanyahu into some sort of deal. forced Prime Minister Netanyahu into some sort of deal.
A deal that he had turned down six months ago in May of 2024, basically identical deal.
That threw most everybody in the loop for a loop.
And that has set off, as far as I can infer, a climate of hysteria within Israel itself, at least among the—I'm not sure, sir, Netanyahu himself, but at least within the factions of his cabinet itself.
I mean, this was lost in the absolute cacophony of 2024. Really?
But yes, if you read...
I read the Israeli press daily.
And there were members of Netanyahu's...
So these are members of Prime Minister Netanyahu, people who are not in his party, who are more hard-lined than him, and they were saying, Trump's really talking about this endless war stuff.
This might be a problem.
And this was back in October and September and August, and no one was paying attention because it was brat summer and other things were going on.
But this was coming.
And the fact that they got it done not even before, not even during the transition itself, also surprised people.
They have disagreed since at least 2020 over the election, but they probably disagreed beforehand over strikes in Iran.
The last time you and I spoke publicly was over the Soleimani strike in January of 2020. And since then, reporting in the last five years has come out that the two of them disagreed over that.
Trump felt that the Israelis didn't do their part, etc., etc., etc.
So for years, for at least half a decade, the well has been poisoned between Trump and Netanyahu.
Doesn't mean the relationship is done, but there's been an atmosphere of mistrust.
I mean, I think the key thing to understand for your listeners, anyone who's not turning this off because we're getting into the depths of Israeli politics here, but Netanyahu's situation is unstable.
Yes.
A supermajority of Israelis want him out.
They want him to resign.
He does not want to resign, because if he resigns, he may go to prison.
And also, he's been a power achiever for 30 years, and I've noticed that people who do that often don't like to quit.
I think it's really significant that he's not a professional foreign policy figure.
He hasn't spent a career at the State Department or doing bilaterals for his career.
You know, he's just a smart, tough, competent person who was charged with a task by the president, and he got it done.
And maybe we need more of that.
I mean, you know, there are certain parts of statecraft that, you know, probably it's helpful to have experience in statecraft, but some of it's just pretty straightforward.
It's the same thing with all of academia, which is people's theses are increasingly more Baroque and nobody actually knows large things.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or at least know it in a way that is applicable in power in real life.
And I mean, maybe things are changing now, but like also a lot of the foreign policy establishment, it's different now in the second term, but wouldn't work with the first Trump term, wouldn't work with their team.
Well, we know the country hasn't been served because look at the country.
And so I think, you know, we can say of all players, they didn't serve the country.
That would include the media.
And there have been times when I didn't serve the country, like when I advocated for the Iraq War.
I mean, we're all culpable to some extent, but it's just remarkable to me that people are continuing it.
So now, instead of telling us that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, or that Osama bin Laden attacked us for our freedoms, or whatever the lie of the day was, the new idea is that Iran is, quote, the head of the snake.
How many Americans have been killed by Iranian proxies in the United States over the last 20 years, do you think?
But the Iran war would be still, like, the worst and, like, not something that we should pursue.
And look, foreign policy experts at this point will chime in on this conversation being like, oh, well, that's just so unrealistic.
That's not actually what we want.
This is actually just ridiculous externality.
But I think it is worth noting that we have done wars.
toppling governments throughout the region over the last 25 years.
So number one, it's happened very recently.
Number two, it is kind of the explicit goal of the hardliners.
And the hardliners keep moving the over to window in their direction.
And so while this is perhaps not 100% certain, but hardly, There is a hard drive towards doing this and picking off Pentagon deputies and allowing leaders like Trump and Vance to be surrounded by hawks and no dissenting voices whatsoever.
And I have to say the amount of calculated deception on the right.
So all of a sudden Barry Weiss, who's a leftist, becomes a conservative because she's against trannyism or something. - Every normal person is against that.
It's pretty obvious that the whole purpose of her organization, the Free Press, and her career in journalism is to kind of soften up the right for war with Iran and to attack anybody.
And she's got this whole constellation of people, you know, Neil Ferguson and all these kind of people who add weight to the project, but who really are all kind of paid.
To flack for war with Iran and attack anyone who's not with the program.
I felt the sting of this, so I didn't really understand how this worked, but then someone with thoroughly moderate foreign policy views, I don't really want war with anybody, I'm not against anybody, and all of a sudden you're like, wow, people are calling you anti-American.
You said the problem with voting Republican is you're more likely to wind up with a...
War with Iran.
And I agree with you, I'd much rather have a war with Iran than a war with Russia, but kind of don't want either one.
And it's just interesting how the groundwork, I just know because I've been in conservative media my whole life, all of a sudden all these new people and you're like, oh, Barry Weiss, are you really conservative?
Well, not at all.
Then what are you doing here?
Oh, you're trying to convince me that I'm not allowed to oppose a war with Iran.
Or I'm going to be written out of the conservative movement or something.
But by the 90s and 2000s, if you believed in some crime enforcement in New York, you also had to believe towards the march towards regime change in Iraq.
unidentified
And so, again, don't want to sound like— I'm skipping that part of the buffet line.
But I think it is the essential pitch of this new generation of neoconservatism, which of course does not call itself that.
But it is moderation on the social issues.
Let's turn down the volume.
And at the same time, over here in column space over here, a little Little news item about what's going on in the Red Sea and why the U.S. needs to care.
And it's a drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip.
And it can go on for months and years and years and years.
And all of a sudden, we super care about the Houthis in Yemen.
We super care about Iran.
And we have to underwrite a war in Israel until every single member of Hamas is dead.
And it's just not clear that the U.S. national interest is there, to put it lightly.
And so you ask questions like, well, is this in our interest?
Well, you hate so-and-so.
I don't hate anybody, and I certainly don't hate that country.
I like it a lot, actually.
But there's no room for it.
They're preventing discussion.
And a lot of these people have the gall to describe themselves as warriors for free speech, when, of course, free speech is the last thing they want, and they've gone out of their way to prevent any kind of open conversation.
About the most important topics in our collective life.
I mean, I started the very first day of the Weekly Standard, August 1st, 1995. 30 years ago, and I thought Bill Kristol, I still would say, was a great boss, you know?
Interesting, fun to talk to, funny as hell.
Obviously, I think he's taken a really dark turn, and his life has been kind of a disaster, and I feel bad for him.
But one thing I'll say about Bill Kristol circa, you know, 2000, is that he would make an actual case for his views.
He would say, we have to go in and take out Saddam.
For the following eight reasons, and you would write...
unidentified
You would say this is in 95, 96, 97. I mean, I was there for all of that.
So, I mean, if the president wants to send troops to the U.S. border, and the president wants to rebuild the American economy, and the president wants to focus on China.
And the president wants the moral credibility to end the Russia-Ukraine war at some point.
Expanding the war in the Middle East, even with prolonged arms sales, corrodes his political capital.
We have the reserve currency, and we can keep writing debt until it causes an inflation crisis, which a lot of people thought would happen earlier and did not.
And even our inflation crisis in the 2020s was mild by global standards.
So accordingly, we've got plenty of room for the big enchilada, which is an Iran war.
Just for the record, I try to suspend judgment because I know a lot about what countries do.
And...
I do think, this is one thing I'll say in support of Israel, I do think that it is, you know, it isn't fair to just single out Israel and say they're doing naughty stuff.
Like, lots of people are doing naughty stuff.
That's just a fact.
My only, you know, the only point where I would feel like I want to say something is if the United States gets sucked into it.
Now we're talking about our interests, my country, where my family's from, and I think it's fair to speak up then.
You would say there was an election in Iran right afterwards.
A lot of people disagree with our perspective, will disagree with this term, but the more moderate candidate, people think there are no moderates within the regime, but the less hardcore candidate won.
This is the first time this has happened since Trump left the Iran deal.
and this person, it is not clear how much power he has within the system.
The supreme leader is old.
It's not clear how old.
And there will be a succession crisis to succeed the supreme leader should he die.
So it is this weird situation where every time Iran is in a crisis, and they're a crisis right now, they're in an electricity crisis by all reporting.
Again, don't know if we can trust all the reporting, but they can't keep the lights on in Tehran fully.
And what will they do?
And so every time Iran is at a decision point, there is a fracas between what I will call the moderates and the hardliners within their government.
The hardliners want to go for the bomb.
They think, we can't trust anybody.
We need to get the bomb.
They also recently signed a defense pact, just short of mutual defense pact, but a security arrangement with the Russians.
So, they seem to have a bunker mentality right now.
If U.S. intelligence or Israeli intelligence or Western intelligence assesses that they are going for the bomb in a real way, so they can either be true or false, but if they assess it, then there will be severe pressure on the new administration to do airstrikes on Iranian nuclear.
It was five years ago this month that people started to drop dead in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
Five years since the beginning of COVID. And yet, for some reason, we still don't know answers to the most basic questions.
And one man knows those answers.
His name is Dr. Tony Fauci.
And now, a documentary filmmaker called Jenner First is out with a new film explaining exactly what happened.
The film was called Thank You, Dr. Fauci.
We'll see it exclusively here on TCN. Look, all I'm saying is it's important to maybe dial back a little bit on the moral outrage and assess the world as it is, assess what you can do, you know, create a hierarchy of priorities.
Like, we don't want other countries to get nuclear weapons.
I think that's...
I'm with the neocons 100% on that.
But, you know, in a complicated world that we don't actually control, what can we do?
What are the limits of our power?
Given a lot of other factors, like our domestic, our economy, the needs of our people, like, you can't do everything.
Yeah, no, I mean, so I think Trump should complete the work of his first term, which is he revoked the JCPOA, the Obama-Iran deal, and he should do a Trump-Iran deal.
It's counter to our interests, I guess, is what I would say.
If you were Trump, and you say to Steve Wyckoff, hey, Steve Wyckoff, go get a ceasefire in place, and he comes back like 20 minutes later with a ceasefire, wouldn't you say, okay?
So, they, remember Obama on the debate stage in 2008, and he was just howled down for this, whatever you think of Barack Obama, said, we should meet with the Iranian leaders face-to-face.
And Trump did similar.
I mean, was North Korea policy more stable from 2017 to 2021 or 2021 to 2025?
I don't think after 25 years of this nonsense, killing dictators and watching their countries become more chaotic and more dangerous to the United States and the world.
We have any obligation to listen to people who chirp like that.
Well, I'm 55, so this is driving me completely insane.
I thought, after we discovered that the pretext of the war was a lie, that those people would, I don't know, don ashes in sackcloth and go sit on a pillar for 10 years.
And I'm, because I've spent my life in the media, I'm very kind of fixated on their enablers, their agents in the American news media.
And one of them who's working, has been working for years on their behalf, on behalf of permanent Washington, the foreign policy establishment, every bad idea.
Is Jennifer Griffin at Fox, the Pentagon reporter, who is now, you know, basically texting, Domino, is that the?
Yeah, is, you know, running around on behalf of, you know, her sources at the Pentagon, doing their bidding, trying to torpedo these guys because permanent staff doesn't want to be challenged on anything.
And, okay, you know, there's a role for that kind of behavior.
It's called lobbying.
But it's a little crazy that, like, a supposed news reporter would be acting like that.
I'm not guessing.
This is a fact.
She's doing that right now and has been doing that kind of thing for as long as I've been paying attention, like, a couple decades.
Yeah, I don't know her personally, but what I will say is the role of most Pentagon reporters has always struck me since I've done this as extremely hierarchical.
Where we have civilian command of the armed forces, and the entire federal government works for the population of the country, its voters, its citizens, its constituents, shareholders, no?
There's no sense of that whatsoever in Washington, at all.
I mean, you didn't see criticisms or skepticism of the military from the right until the very last few years, including from the new president, including from organs of conservative media.
I think it started with Mark Milley, but also the sort of...
You know, I just refer you back to the pivot point in American politics in my lifetime, which was the 2016 debate in Greenville, South Carolina, where Donald Trump, home of the highest percentage of military veterans of any state, famously, and Donald Trump came out against the Iraq War and all the dumbos at the channel I work for and in Washington are like, oh, he's lost it now!
He'll never get the nomination!
He's offended all the veterans!
And of course, all the guys whose lives were destroyed fighting these wars, not on behalf of the United States, not to...
To the benefit of the United States.
They were filled with many emotions, frustration, shame, rage, sadness, and they immediately knew what he was talking about.
And no one in D.C. knew what he was talking about.
That was the moment when I was just, you know, whatever his flaws, I was for Trump because here was a guy telling a real truth, a hard truth that no one wanted him to tell and was rewarded for it.
And I just felt like that's consistent with my principles and beliefs, which is you ought to tell the truth and a healthy country rewards people who tell the truth, not people who lie.
And actually, the people that are driving the opposition to these selections in the Pentagon agree with President Trump's critics in spirit and in practice.
It's very important to use as scary words as possible.
Ayatollah, the Mullahs, the Islamic Republic emphasize, you know, and again, like...
Basically, the Bin Laden, who's dead, runs a country, even though he's a different ethnicity and a different religion, and so it doesn't really matter.
You're stupid, and we need to do this again.
And, like, they won't say an invasion, but, again, some of the people pushing this stuff didn't say an invasion in 1996. They soft.
I mean, it's a little harder here, too, because on the question of Russia, it's been surprisingly effective for them to just dismiss all criticism as sponsored by Putin.
Like, you don't think it's a good idea to prop up...
With the Qatar argument specifically, I mean, I think it's an unusual place.
It was supposed to be the Eighth Emirate, so it is separate from the UAE. It is the most conservative of those emirates, I would say, at least in terms of the government.
They have a perspective.
They spend money on media.
They spend money on press junkets.
They have an influence operation.
No question.
But the idea that this small, jetting, LNG-dependent peninsula controls U.S. foreign policy, hook, line, and sinker, top to bottom, if you think that...
I mean, I do think it's worth having an honest, I've never seen one, there never has been one, but an honest conversation about foreign influence on American policy.
I think that's a totally legitimate topic.
And, you know, we've kind of done a lot of lying and pretending, for example, that Russia has, like, undue influence over American foreign policy.
It's absurd.
But why not have that conversation?
Are there foreign countries that exert influence on American policy?
Whose interests supersede those of American citizens in the minds of policymakers?
There may be some of those.
How would we rank Qatar in terms of its influence?
Maybe not in the top three.
So, just having lived in D.C., this whole conversation is so infuriatingly false and just silly.
Are they running intel operations against us?
Qatar surveillance in Washington?
A lot of Qatar agents running around the Willard Hotel?
Because, you know, so you were there for the inauguration, I observed a week ago.
And, you know, I've always observed that is usually...
When I meet someone from a red state, Oklahoma or Alabama, it's often their first time in Washington, D.C. It's very like a Roman province visiting Rome for the first time.
Versus, I would say, Blue State America actually has a lot more familiarity with D.C. Back and forth, airport access, etc.
So when they hear...
The argument going on in the Capitol, there's actually a de facto trust there that might be not as much there on the Democratic side.
There's actually a more jaundiced cynicism on the Democratic side, so it's less effective.
They assume that the, despite it all, despite all the failures that you've announced, that you've reported on fairly tirelessly, they assume that the people in D.C. know what they're doing, and I'm not sure that's the greatest default assumption.
I mean, look, respectfully to the new president, I mean, Donald Trump, again, is the only U.S. president who was not a general or a former statewide official or federal official to get the presidency.
And with all due respect to the new president.
A healthy country doesn't elect something like that.
That level of outsider could only exist within a polity that was deeply sick.
And the fact that the Capitol doesn't imbibe that lesson, I think they're imbibing it a little bit more, but it's like, I mean, it's still bizarre.
Ten years on, I mean, Trump, June 2015, so June this year, Ten years of Trump, you know, longer than Obama at this point, the Trump era, in spirit, in length, it's like, well, maybe there's something wrong with this country.
But it's very upsetting, not only to leaders of some foreign countries, and this is not just the Middle East.
We didn't even talk about Russia-Ukraine, but that perspective is obviously very, very relevant for extricating the United States out of the Russia-Ukraine war, and almost every European...
The capital is unhappy with that.
And, you know, you can have a conversation with a nice Danish person and you might agree on immigration or trade or wine.
But you mentioned, like, hey, I'm not really sure the United States should be underwriting a quagmire in Ukraine.
The Western Europeans, not the Eastern Europeans or Central Europeans, but the Western Europeans have decided to kill themselves.
And it's almost like if someone's standing on a bridge or in a window of a skyscraper and you're trying to talk them back in, it's hard.
And who knows why that happens?
I think there's a supernatural element at work, it's my personal view, but whatever you think the cause is, that's what it is.
You destroy, you blow up Nord Stream, destroy the German economy, and you're not allowed to say anything about it in Germany?
I don't know that we can help you at that point.
You know what I mean?
Like, if you're that intent on self-harm, that...
Anxious to destroy your own civilization, make it impossible for your children to live there, then you're killing yourself.
You can't help someone who doesn't want to help himself.
Like, go ahead and jump then, kind of.
That's how I feel.
But just from an American perspective, like, all of this has been bad for us.
There's no way to pretend otherwise except to launch into some airy moral lecture about dictatorships and Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain or something.
And I think there's just a bet that a lot of the voters that made the decisions in the 90s and 2000s are dumb and don't care about their kids' future and will vote for the exact same thing.
don't yeah sorry and will exert pressure on the new administration to do the same thing and uh i i think i think there's a there's a bet the the president is a desperate cynical man who will do whatever it takes uh when he's pressured um and i think uh the early evidence is that it's untrue i mean i don't i mean The evidence is that Trump is less cynical than even his supporters thought he was.
The disagreement with Pompeo is potentially quite new.
And so, by all available information, Pompeo was in the mix for Secretary of Defense, most likely, in the days after the election.
So much so that his son, Donald Trump Jr., Intervened in a sort of online campaign, and other allies within that milieu stopped both Pompeo and the former UN ambassador and South Carolinian governor, Nikki Haley, from getting administration posts.
Patriotic Americans rallied, as they did in Boston in the 18th century, to act on behalf of their nation at some personal risk, but they did it anyway.
One of Pompeo's former deputies, Brian Hook, who ran something called the Iran Study Group and had various other portfolios and titles at the State Department.
He's actually someone Pompeo inherited from Rex Tillerson, his predecessor.
He kept him on.
Brian Hook, at various points throughout the transition in the last 100 days, was reported to be running the State Department's transition at some point.
Then was rumored, again, Rumors, it's rumored, I don't post about it, I don't tweet it out, I don't write about it, but it was rumored to have been fired.
Very unclear.
Trump, in the days leading up to him taking the Oval Office oath, issued, essentially, an enormous denunciation, a fatwa against Mr. Hook.
Extraordinary.
To say, not only is this guy not in the mix, I hate him.
And he said that.
So that occurred.
And then additionally, both Hook and Pompeo's security detail...
So the key thing here is that there is an allegation, a belief, many in the intelligence community believes this, that there were serious, credible plans by the Iranians to assassinate members of the Trump high command, as it were. credible plans by the Iranians to assassinate members of the So Trump, Hook, John Bolton, etc., etc., in revenge principally for the Soleimani assassination.
I think the key thing here is, the critique on Trump always was, he fired Bolton, but he didn't really understand why.
So, he just, he soured on the guy, but he didn't change any, like, policy.
He didn't learn.
This is the sort of pedantic way of looking at the president.
But with the Hook and Pompeo removal from his inner circle, there is, I think, very credible evidence that Trump's personal grudges are now blending quite heavily with policy.
He doesn't trust the Iran hawk old guard.
A lot of the Iran hawk old guard think tanks struck out in getting transition officials and officials in this government.
And again, circled around this very unlikely Pentagon, helmed by a guy who has changed his life, it appears, in pretty severe ways over the last five years, both ideologically and morally, is this very new Pentagon that is now being targeted.
By all the usual suspects.
And it is the biggest story in American politics that people aren't talking about.
You're very restrained and business-like and precise as a reporter should be, as an editor should be, but the story that you're telling, I think, I don't want to put words in your mouth, is a...
You've got a lot of problems in your personal and public life, but you can bomb around Eastern Europe and get treated like an emperor and feel like you're doing something.
You're Jim Risch or Mike Rounds or some U.S. senator nobody's ever heard of, even in his home state.
But when you travel to Romania to tour a NATO base, people are like, oh, you know, Senator Risch is here!
Well, he's on, I think, more than one board, but he's certainly running around, including with people I know, saying, I'm really kind of a business guy.
Look, so the Pompeo thing is supremely interesting because You know, I think it's somebody who probably would have positioned himself to run in a major way had Trump lost.
I think it's somebody who's not going to quit being president.
And I don't want to say he's part of the cynical bet crowd, but he's making a bet that the Trump thing will pass and I will be able to steamroll people like Vance.
And even Rubio in the future, because I'm more vicious.
And in the meantime, you know, maybe make some money, influence the debate, etc., etc.
And he's very impressive if you don't know.
I mean, if you don't come in with huge foreign policy convictions, as I think you and I do, he can be very persuasive.
I mean, like, I mean, so I think this was very interesting about some of these Pentagon picks, not to keep linking it back, but also the vice president.
A lot of these people, my generation, the millennials, fought in these wars.
But, you know, if you look at the conversation online, if you look at the sentiments of younger conservatives, younger Republicans, the anti-war stuff is big and it's not going anywhere.
And I think that also drives a sense of a timetable.
Which is, you know, we've got these older people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.
So we can't afford it anymore and our allies pivot to China and sell even more defense technology to China.
Yeah.
I do think they're, okay, so the backbone of support for these wars has been evangelicals.
Let's just be blunt about it.
It's everyone, you know, beats up on the neocons or whatever, these fervid intellectuals in Washington.
But really, the foot soldiers of this have been Fox News viewers who are not ideological.
They're not intellectuals.
They're not, they're just normal American patriotic, heavily evangelical people.
And the truth is, I think a lot of them are beginning to recognize that their religion does not support this at all.
It's really clear.
Genesis 6. Why do we have the flood?
Why does God kill everything on earth?
All the people except Noah and his family.
All the animals except the ones in the ark.
Why does he do that?
He spells it right out.
Because they're committing violence.
That's why.
So it's like the idea that...
I mean, the Iraq War breaks out and all these preachers are like, no, no, no, really, we have to fight Islam and kill all these people and that's what God wants.
And there's no mention of any specific secular government in the New Testament.
Sorry, guys.
And I think a lot of Christians are beginning to realize this.
It doesn't, because you're a Christian doesn't mean you have a specific political agenda at all, I don't think.
But if your political agenda is like violence, that's prohibited.
Sorry.
And I just, it could not be clear.
It's on every freaking page.
So I don't know the deception involved in this was just like mind-boggling that these preachers could get up on Fox News and tell you that like, yeah, killing people is what Jesus wants.
No, that's not true.
And I just feel among people I know a growing recognition of that.
And I think it's a huge problem for the war lobby, which has used these people as its supporters.
And you see it in the Congress.
You know, I'm an evangelical and I'm for another war with somebody.
Yeah, I think they're hoping the country's old, tired, zoned out, can't oppose it, and they're hoping that these initiatives can be achieved piecemeal.
You know, start by bombing Iran here, etc., etc., maybe the government will collapse, etc., etc., etc.
You were nice enough to come, and we're in a hotel room in some city, but I thought I was going to be more depressed by the end, but actually I feel really heartened by what you said.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking.
With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
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It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
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