Megyn Kelly on Venezuela, Ben Shapiro’s Treachery, and Mark Levin’s Mental Illness
Megyn Kelly on Venezuela, Ben Shapiro’s Treachery, and Mark Levin’s Mental Illness
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@MegynKelly
What happened a few days ago in Venezuela is not just a big surprise to people who are watching it.
It's not just a kind of exciting foreign policy story.
It is the effectively announcement by the U.S. government that our system is changing, that we are now explicitly an empire.
We're an empire.
So, of course, the argument has been made, and probably there's some truth to it.
The United States has been an empire for a long time, for at least the last 80 years, since 1945, when we emerged victorious from World War II, or maybe even 1918, when the British Empire effectively ended.
Maybe even 1898, when we got Puerto Rico, and then a few years later, Cuba from the Spanish Empire.
So you could argue that the United States, like all big prosperous countries, inevitably became an empire.
But the difference between the last 120 years and earlier this week is that we never before admitted it, and now we are.
So every time we've gone into foreign countries in Latin America, but not just Latin America, really around the world, there has been a pretext for that, usually about human rights or democracy.
We're not going to put up with this or that government treating its people this way, and we have to go in to stop the tyranny because we are a force for openness and freedom.
And there's been some truth in that, of course.
But behind that has been the calculation behind every big foreign policy move made by every big country.
How is this good for us?
Whether it's propping up the dollar or getting access to resources, there's always another reason that we're doing it.
And people who are paying close attention know that.
Of course, one of the reasons that American troops have been clustered around the Middle East for as long as they have been is not just the Israeli lobby.
It's because there's an awful lot of energy in the Middle East, oil and gas, and that's important to our country.
So of course, we have a stake in making sure it can be extracted and moved around the world, obviously.
But what makes what happened in Venezuela, taking the head of state out of the presidential palace with Delta Force and bringing him to New York and putting him on trial, what makes that so very different from, say, I don't know, Pikwan killing Mossadegh in 1953 in Iran or whatever, is that the U.S. government, the president of the United States, basically just said we're doing this because of the resources.
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserve in the world.
It's in our hemisphere.
It's going to China.
And how about no?
This is our hemisphere.
It's going to go to us.
He just said it out loud.
And there's something kind of thrilling about that.
There's something thrilling about the honesty there.
There's no fakery.
No.
We're the U.S. We're not going to put up with that.
This is our interest, and we're going to protect it.
That's what the president said.
And for the first time in a long time, there was pretty strong support from the right, from Trump voters, for foreign policy adventurism.
Keep in mind, a lot of them voted for the president on the basis of his pledge to not start new wars.
Well, here is effectively a new conflict, and they're supporting it.
Why?
Because the president justified it in terms of our national interest.
This is good for us.
We're not upholding international law.
We're doing it because we want the oil.
And again, there's something bracing and refreshing about someone finally telling the truth about why we're doing what we're doing.
And the president absolutely told the truth.
And that's great.
And you saw an uptick in national pride.
Understandably, the U.S. military is actually capable of more than DEI.
We can do complicated things.
And that is something to be proud of.
The U.S. government is finally acting in the interest of the United States, or says it is, and that's a massive improvement over yet another lecture about a hollow theory.
But there are pitfalls potentially, and it's worth also considering those, because this is a new era.
As has been noted, the United States has moved into the imperial phase of empire, leaving the republic, shifting to empire.
And that's a pretty familiar life cycle for civilizations.
And so we sort of roughly know what will happen.
The first thing that's going to happen is that the energy and the power will vest in the executive and not the legislative branch.
Congress will inevitably wither.
It already is.
They were not consulted before we took out the president of Venezuela.
They had no role in this whatsoever.
They have a constitutional authority here that was ignored, as it has been many times in the past.
When was the last time Congress did something of note?
It's been a long time.
And that, if you take three steps back, is probably not surprising.
That's the way these things go.
The power moves to the executive, to Caesar or the president or whatever you call him, to the national leader.
And that trend will accelerate over time for certain, not decelerate.
And that has all kinds of implications, one of which is national elections are now everything.
It's always mattered who the president is.
Now it matters more than ever because the president has the ability to act unilaterally in the way we just saw.
And that's a lesson that every aspiring president will internalize.
And so the next presidential election, 2028, means much more than any presidential election in our history because the power has expanded so dramatically in the office.
And once expanded, it never contracts voluntarily.
So that's the first implication.
The second implication is that now that we're telling the truth about why nations do what they do, a lot of the arguments that we have relied upon, in fact, that have been the basis of a lot of our foreign policy positions, are now moot.
So once you say out loud, we're grabbing Venezuela because we're annoyed they're selling what is our oil to the Chinese, our rival, once you just say that out loud, and again, it's good to be honest.
But once you are honest, it's kind of hard to make the case that, well, for example, Russia doesn't have an interest in what happens in eastern Ukraine.
It's hard to scold Putin for moving into Ukraine.
Here's a great power threatened on its border, and it takes action to protect itself.
And we've been calling that an unprovoked invasion.
The Biden administration called it that.
The State Department still calls it that.
And our policy is based on the idea that this is illegitimate.
And that's why we've been waging a proxy war against Russia for four years.
You can't really make that argument anymore.
How is it wrong for a great power like Russia to protect itself?
Well, under the rules that we're now operating under, it's not wrong.
But you can't point to some abstract principle and say it's absolutely wrong.
Why would it be wrong for China to retake Taiwan?
The U.S. government already acknowledges that Taiwan is part of China.
We have a so-called one China policy.
And yet simultaneously, we suggest we would defend Taiwan against Chinese aggression.
But wait a second, Taiwan is Han Chinese.
Same people, same language, tons of cultural similarities.
We want the microchips in Taiwan.
We hope it doesn't happen because it would give China greater leverage over the United States.
But as a matter of principle, can you really say it's wrong for China to reunify with Taiwan?
No, you can't say that anymore.
All you can say is we will try to prevent it if we can, but we can't appeal to any higher authority.
Now, some will say that higher authority was made up.
Well, it certainly was made up, but that principle was the basis of the entire fabled post-war order.
What was the post-war order?
It was based on one idea.
It is wrong for bigger countries to swallow up smaller countries just because they want to.
That's why we declared war against Germany when they went into Poland.
Though weirdly, we did not declare war against the Soviet Union when they did the same thing the same day.
But whatever.
The point is, big countries are not allowed to act in a predatory way towards smaller countries because that's wrong.
And there's always been, as noted, tons of fakery around that, of course, tons of pretending and pretense.
We're all wearing a veil to hide our true motives.
But that has still been the basis of the way countries deal with each other.
And that is no longer the case as of this week, because the world's great superpower, oldest superpower, the United States, just acted purely in its own interest and said so out loud.
So where does that leave all these international bodies?
The UN most famously, but all of them.
The World Health Organization.
How about NATO?
Do they have any authority at all?
Is there a reason to have them once we stop pretending?
Probably not.
They may not know that yet.
And of course, they're all very well funded and will live on into the future to some extent.
But basically, they're dead men walking.
They're over.
That's all over.
We now live in a world where countries will act in their own interest without apology to the extent they are capable of doing so through force or guile, through economic power or military power or trickery.
But nobody's going to have to pretend that we're doing this because we're upholding the rights of man.
So, again, that's great.
A lot of people are excited about it.
Not going to argue against it because it's already happened.
This is done.
This is the new world that we live in, for good or for bad.
So it is a waste of time and breath to complain about it.
Far better, far more constructive to think through what does this mean going forward?
What implications does this have for us?
And what are the potential traps in an arrangement like this, one that we've never lived in before?
And the first is very obvious, and that's getting over your skis.
That's getting stoned on hubris, which is always the pitfall for any man really in life, powerful or not.
Convincing yourself that you have more power than you actually have is the most basic trap in life.
That's how you wind up hurting yourself because you overextend.
And the problem with military success is it does inspire that.
This is not true just of the current president, but it's true of every president.
And all of a sudden, you can wind up in much deeper waters than expected.
And of course, in our government, there's an entire constellation of foreign lobbies around any president telling him, do this, do that, on behalf of other countries, trying to leverage the enormous power of the United States for their own ends.
And so you could very easily imagine soon the U.S. government doing what it did in Venezuela in other countries.
And maybe in some it will work, maybe in some it won't work.
But there are a couple of them where if it didn't work, you could get in very, very serious trouble.
In fact, you could wind up in nuclear war.
So it's worth remembering that even a great power is limited in its powers, can't do everything.
And things can go wrong very quickly in ways that you don't anticipate.
And that's why, above all, an empire needs serious men to run it.
It needs people who understand the stakes, who understand the burden that they are carrying, which is the future of the world, certainly the future of their own people, and who make wise decisions with the national interest ever present in mind.
What you don't want are flighty, emotionally incontinent, silly people on the payroll of foreign nations making the decisions in an empire, because that's how you get in trouble.
People like just throwing this out there, say Lindsey Graham, here he is in the aftermath of Venezuela.
Every time you see that guy, every time you see that guy on TV, it really just reminds you of like getting pulled over for DUI with your drunk girlfriend in the passenger seat screaming at the cop, you can't do this.
Lindsey Graham really is the drunk girlfriend, picking fights you'll never have to participate in.
We're going to kill you.
Settle down, son.
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That is not helpful in any way.
And it's that exact attitude and that lack of seriousness that can get you in trouble.
Once you strip away all the pretense, all the appeals to national sovereignty and human rights and international law, once again, you need serious, smart people making the decision.
You do not need harpies screaming about how my boyfriend's going to beat you up if you arrest him.
You don't need people like that.
You don't need people like Ted Cruz, Laura Loomer, buffoons, bloodthirsty buffoons hovering around trying to lure you into a new conflict.
You don't need people like Mark Levin who told the president that you should bomb Qatar.
Bomb Qatar?
Why would you do that?
Our strongest ally in the region?
Let's bomb them.
And to the president's great credit, to Donald Trump's great credit, he has, in the last several days, resisted a lot of that.
And we know that by how they handled the exit of Maduro in Venezuela.
So there are a lot of ways to do this.
The neocons had their candidate ready to go.
They awarded her the Nobel Prize recently, the abortion lady, the gay marriage lady, the Klaus Schwab acolyte who's going to move the embassy to Jerusalem or something.
They were all set to install this lady Machado in the presidency in Venezuela, and Donald Trump shut it down.
In fact, he mocked her at his first press conference announcing the capture of Maduro.
That is a good sign.
That is the best possible sign that someone has thought this through in a very serious way.
And I have to say, it looks like Marco Rubio and JD Vance played a huge role in that.
And a lot of people mock Marco Rubio for being a neocon, which he may or may not be.
But my impression was that his influence on this operation was real and that his preference was not to install the Nobel Prize lady, but instead to continue continuity of government.
So what does that mean?
Well, it's an imperfect solution.
It means taking Maduro's number two and letting her continue to run the country.
Now, why would you do that if you were operating under the previous framework, which was basically an emotional framework?
Well, we need to bring human rights to Venezuela.
We can't depose the dictator and put him on trial in New York and then put his number two in charge of the country.
That'd be bad.
We need to kill Saddam and then disband the Iraqi army.
So someone has learned a lesson from that.
And let's hope no one ever forgets the lesson, which is that tyranny is bad, chaos is worse.
And Donald Trump clearly learned that lesson because he arrived at an imperfect but wise solution.
Let's keep people in charge who can actually keep the country together.
Now, we'll see if Del C. Rodriguez can actually do that.
We don't know yet, but it's the intent of the administration to do that, to not turn Venezuela into a Libya or an Iraq in our hemisphere with the ensuing migrant crisis and just the disaster, the complete loss of the oil fields, the insurgency, the civil war, massive death toll.
I mean, just the pure disaster that U.S. foreign policy has created again and again and again with regime change.
That is not necessarily going to happen in Venezuela.
And that's a massive improvement.
And we should be grateful for that.
Whatever you think of grabbing Maduro, that is a really good thing and a really good sign because it suggests that the administration understands that resource extraction, national interest is a huge part of running an empire, but it's not the only part.
The main part is stability.
That's the most important part.
From stability flows prosperity and every other good thing, decency.
Nothing good can grow in chaos.
And they seem to understand at the height of the Roman Empire, the most famous empire in history.
There were very few wars.
It was called Pax Romana, the Roman peace.
The empire was powerful enough to establish peace, to establish order and tranquility.
And, you know, almost 2,000 years later, we're still talking about it because it was a rare and beautiful thing.
So ultimately, an empire exists.
Its first job is to preserve stability in the world or the portion of the world over which it rules.
And the Trump administration seems to understand that and seems to be moving in that direction.
And if so, that's a huge win.
So get rid of the dumb, shrill harpies.
Don't let them have any influence.
We can't bomb Qatar.
We're not going to threaten to murder the Ayatollah on Fox News.
That's not how an empire behaves.
We're going to make calculated, wise decisions about what's good for us and what's good for the part of the world that we rule over.
The second thing you do once you announce that you're an empire is think through where this is going to go in the next several years.
Like, what does the world look like five, 10 years from now?
Well, today, about an hour and a half ago, the president announced that he is hiking the Pentagon budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.
Just announced that.
Why?
Well, it's hard to know without asking him.
He'll explain.
But big picture, obviously, that's the kind of budget that a country that anticipates a global or regional war has for its military.
There's no other reason to do that.
That's not a peacekeeping budget.
That's a war budget, a big war budget.
So I think it's fair to expect, and all the signs suggest, that we're going to have a big war soon, a big war soon.
I think everyone expects that to happen.
Hope it doesn't happen.
But obviously we're moving in that direction toward a world war.
Sorry.
So how do you position yourself for that?
Well, you look at a map and you ask the most basic questions.
What areas do I want to control?
Where are the trade routes?
Who's got the resources?
Who do I share a language with?
Who do I share a common history with?
Who do I share a civilization with?
And you proceed on that basis and you try and shore up your team, the allies, against the other team, the Axis or whatever.
But you think soberly about how the world is going to cleave once this begins.
And if you were to do that for about, I don't know, 25 or 30 seconds, you would arrive at the most obvious conclusion of all, which is the United States has to have a relationship with Russia in order to survive anything like that.
And the reason is really simple.
Scale and resources.
Russia is the largest country in the world.
It has the most resources in the world.
That means energy, oil, and gas.
It means all kinds of minerals.
It means gold.
And in a world where the U.S. dollar is probably not going to be as powerful as it once was, it's already declining in value, massive incentive for other countries to get off the dollar to trade in energy in other currencies.
You need to think about gold.
And people are thinking about gold.
And by the way, if you are wondering whether volatility is coming up, look at silver prices.
Look at gold prices over the last year.
Investors understand this is a new time.
You need to be aligned with Russia.
And the number one thing you can't do, Donald Trump has said this many times over the years, is allow Russia and China to become a bloc.
Because if you do, then you are facing off against the majority of the world's population, the biggest population bloc in the world, the biggest land mass in the world, and the biggest economy in the world if you combine those two.
So you can't do that.
And it's pretty clear that the last administration intentionally drove Russia into an alliance with China, which they now have.
Just to be really clear, just to bottom line it, if Donald Trump wants to commit one act as president that will secure him a place in history forever as a hero, it would be to bring Russia back into alliance with the United States.
Oh, Russia's bad.
Right.
Kind of hard to say that after Venezuela.
And it's tiresome anyway.
No, Russia is not bad or good.
Russia is essential to the United States.
We cannot survive a global conflict if Russia and China are aligned against us.
Period.
And it couldn't be more simple, and it shouldn't be very hard at this point to make that deal.
There is no reason to pay any attention to the unelected leader of Ukraine.
Now, the obstacle in the way is not geostrategic.
There is no argument for continuing a proxy war, which is what it is.
United States versus Russia.
We've been at war for four years.
All of us are pretending we're not.
We are.
There's no reason to continue that on the basis of America's national interest.
That is not in our interest and it never has been in our interest.
And by the way, Russia is a Christian country, a remarkable country, a very serious country that we have a lot in common with, whether you like it or not.
Oh, he's bad.
Okay, stop.
We need Russia.
And the only reason we are not in alliance with Russia is because the foreign policy establishment in the United States, the weapons manufacturers, and particularly the neocons believe that they somehow own Russia or want to retake Russia or something, and Putin is in the way.
He kicked out the oligarchs.
That was gravely offensive to the American finance establishment and to the American foreign policy establishment and acted on his own country's behalf.
Whatever.
None of that even matters at this point.
Ignore these people.
He has to be our enemy.
No.
If Putin is our enemy, if Russia is our enemy, we cannot survive a global conflict.
Sorry.
And if you think we can, tell us how.
With the help of NATO, which, by the way, is now done.
NATO is done.
Once the United States takes Greenland, which is owned by a fellow NATO member, what will be the rationale for keeping NATO?
The whole illusion has shattered in the past four days.
None of this is real.
And now everyone admits it's not real.
So it's time to start thinking about the next step.
The third thing to remember is that a functioning empire benefits from the empire.
Rome, at its height, was a gleaming, clean, prosperous city.
Rome benefited.
In the end, of course, it was destroyed by its empire.
It was invaded by the people it had subdued.
And that is ultimately the fate of all empires, all of them.
London is filled with former colonial subjects.
That's what that is.
And that will happen to every empire.
But in the meantime, the point is to help the seat of empire.
And so if you can't fix Baltimore, you don't really have a shot of making Caracas functional.
And so as you administer this empire, you need to remember the point of this is your own country, making your own country more prosperous, but also stable and cleaner and better for its own citizens.
It can't just be, oh, Paul Singer gets rich, therefore it's a good thing.
No, no, no.
All Americans, not just Paul Singer, have to benefit from this.
And they can, and they absolutely can.
And the president, to his great credit, has made a huge effort to clean up American cities.
Washington, D.C., for example.
People mocked him for sending the National Guard in.
Washington is safer.
It's just a fact.
He did that.
The last guy didn't do that.
Trump did that.
Keep doing that.
Remember, an empire should be impressive.
Not just its satellites or its colonies, but the mother country should be impressive.
And ours can be.
It is, inherently.
But the point of this is to help us.
And the last thing to remember about being an empire is that it can corrupt you.
And this is the fate, ultimately, of all empires.
They are corrupted by the imperial project and they become coarser.
As Rome grew, as its territory grew, so did the number of people dying in Circus Maximus.
So that does happen over time, but fight back against it.
You want to retain the fundamental decency of your country even as you expand, as you take Greenland and take Venezuela or wherever else we're going.
You need to remember we are decent people and we're going to continue to live as though we are with dignity.
You are not going to become hardened by the violence that you sometimes commit on other populations.
And that is really difficult to maintain.
And you see this even in Washington.
You saw this, in fact, five years ago yesterday, when Ashley Babbitt was shot in the chest for doing nothing, an unarmed woman, an Air Force veteran, murdered by James Byrd in the Capitol building.
And nothing happened.
And the reason nothing happened, the reason the guy who shot Ashley Babbitt, who'd already been disciplined for leading a loaded handgun in the men's room, so he had a documented record of recklessness, there was no reason to kill her.
She posed no conceivable threat to him.
But the reason that nothing ever happened is because there were almost no members of Congress who thought it was a big deal.
Now, why is that?
Why would members of Congress, 535 members of Congress, are they uniquely hard-hearted?
Well, they are, actually.
And why is that?
Because they spend a huge portion of their day every single day talking and thinking about killing people in other countries.
And if you watch enough snuff videos of the U.S. military taking out this or that bad guy, after a while, it inerts you.
After a while, it's not such a big deal to kill somebody.
And you can make a case for that if there are foreigners who threaten you.
You can never make a case for the U.S. government casually killing Americans.
All of us should be offended by that every single time.
And we should push back against it.
Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm not a Houthi.
Don't treat me like one.
I'm not a Venezuelan.
Stop.
Americans have to remember that the point of this exercise is to secure the homeland and everything good about it.
And one of the very best things about the United States is the regard that Americans have for human life and for dogs.
There's a sweetness and a sentimentality to Americans that would be sad as hell if we lost.
Don't allow the killing that takes place overseas to make you think it's okay for the U.S. government to treat you that way.
But they naturally do.
And it's one of the reasons, and I hate even to say this, but I've just noticed it from living around it for so long, that some of the most authoritarian members of Congress, almost all of them actually, are career military officers, not enlisted, they're all officers, but they're career officers who spend an awful lot of time thinking about how to kill America's enemies or rivals, not even attacking that.
That was their job.
But that attitude seamlessly transfers to American citizens.
And our government is never allowed to have that attitude toward us.
Again, we're not Houthis.
We have rights because we're citizens.
You serve at our pleasure.
We own this government.
You may say you own Venezuela.
Okay.
You don't own me.
I own you because I'm the citizen and you're the servant.
That posture is essential and very hard to keep up during the empire phase of civilization.
Very, very hard.
Because, again, there are a lot fewer meaningful democratic structures in an empire.
Nobody cares about the Congress anymore.
It's all about the president.
And that's great when you have a great president.
And hopefully we always will, because once again, so much power has been vested in that office that at this point you kind of can't let AOC have it because you can't let any irresponsible person who like hates whites or believes in transgenderism or wants to destroy America.
People like that cannot be president, period, anymore.
Because there's so much power now in the presidency that they could do the kind of damage you don't even want to think about.
But you have to push back against an imperial government treating you like a subject.
And there is no issue on which this is clearer than free speech, which once again is the basis of our country.
It's not just some line in the Bill of Rights.
It's the whole reason the United States is exceptional.
And that's clearer than it's ever been because the country that gave us the concept of free speech, Great Britain, puts thousands of people in jail every single year for thought crimes.
And so it's not like this is a distant, they only do it in China or North Korea kind of problem.
This is happening in the country that gave birth to us, Great Britain.
It could very easily happen here.
And the only way that it won't is if American citizens draw a line in the sand and say, you will have a revolt if you take away my right to say what I think.
Period.
You will have a revolt on your hands.
And they should, because that is the only remaining power for most American citizens.
That's your inalienable, God-given right to say what you really think.
No matter how kooky your opinion is, no matter how offensive it may be to the people in charge, you have an absolute right.
Inaliable, it can't be taken from you because it wasn't granted to you by any temporal authority.
You have that.
If you give that up, you are a slave.
And not surprisingly at all, given the way these things roll, given this new era that we're in, all of a sudden, you are hearing calls, not just from the left, not even primarily from the left, to end the freedom of speech in the United States.
I mean that we need to control the platforms, all the social platforms.
We need to stack rank the authenticity of every person that expresses themselves online and take control over what they are saying based on that ranking.
So here's a foreigner coming to our country and saying with a straight face, you need to get rid of the First Amendment because people are using it to criticize my country, sitting on a TV set in New York City, lecturing a country that's not his own about how they're not allowed to criticize him and the government should punish them for doing it.
It's been a lot of noise in the news recently, but none of it matters if you can't hear it.
There's no shame in this.
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Cheeky doesn't begin to describe it, but he is a foreigner, right?
So, okay.
You could say, well, he just doesn't know what the rules are.
He's obviously got a lot of brass to say something like that, a lot of chutzpah to say something like that.
But who cares?
I mean, yes, he's a billionaire.
There are a lot of Israeli billionaires who've been calling in an Israeli prime minister for censorship in the United States, and it's offensive, and we should obviously stop giving him any money.
We shouldn't be paying for that.
But they're still not Americans.
Oh, but there are Americans saying that.
Here's one, actually happens, a career U.S. military officer called Jay Collins.
This man is the lieutenant governor of Florida, which is the most conservative state in the Union.
And if you ask Jay Collins, what are your politics?
You say, oh, of course, I'm straight MAGA Republican.
I'm a conservative.
I share your values.
This is real.
We check.
This is not AI.
Watch.
Here's Jay Collins of Florida.
unidentified
And here's a critical thing.
You have a right to free speech, but you don't have the right to harm other people with your words.
And you don't have the right to say things that have really negative, really horrible meanings.
When you want people to destroy Israel, that matters.
Oh, you don't have the right to say things that people in charge don't like.
You don't?
That's the whole point.
If you don't have that right, you are a slave.
And Jay Collins is your master.
Notice, by the way, he didn't say you can't attack America.
That's totally fine.
Jay Collins, military officer.
No, no, you can't attack Israel.
You can't call for the destruction of Israel.
Of course, you can call for the destruction of any foreign country you want.
It's a staple on Fox News.
Lindsey Graham does it every single day.
You just can't call for the destruction of Israel.
And that's a crime.
Of course, it's not a crime.
It may be an ugly opinion.
It may be an unsustainable argument.
You may be an idiot.
You have a God-given right to that opinion and a God-given right to express it.
And this is the only country on planet Earth where you still can.
And again, if they try and take that away, you need to have an insurrection against the government because you're done at that point.
An insurrection against the government if they try and take away your right to say what you think, your right to your own conscience.
Period.
That has to be it right there.
It's fine to attack America, but you can't attack Israel.
This is, by the way, part of the problem with administering an empire is that a lot of people, and Jay Collins, clearly one of them, might be good people, might be right about a lot of different things, but they come to identify so strongly with foreign countries that they forget about their own.
This was a huge problem during the British Empire.
There were tons of colonial military officers and administrators who spent their careers in India and kind of cared a lot more about what happened on the subcontinent they cared about in England because that's where they spent their lives.
Those are the problems they spent their career solving.
So they wound up identifying with foreign countries more than their own.
This is absolutely a feature of empire, hard to fight against, but it's essential that we do fight against it.
No, what matters is the United States.
That's who's paying for this.
That's in whose name these actions are being conducted.
The only justification for any of this is to serve American citizens, not the citizens of Israel or Sri Lanka or any other place, Venezuela, but America.
So you'd think this would all be very, very obvious, but somehow, I actually called around on this and was told, oh, it's not a real position, but there's a current administration official, like an actual official in the executive branch right now who's making this case. that Americans actually don't have, oh, they have a First Amendment, but it turns out that actually you can't say anything I don't like or else you go to jail.
This guy's name is Rabbi.
I don't think he actually has a congregation.
I don't know if he's, I don't know what it means to be a rabbi.
I don't think he actually runs a congregation.
Yehuda Kaplun.
Actually met him.
Seems like a nice guy.
But here are his views.
And you should keep in mind that the views you're about to hear are much, much more common than you may realize.
Here he is.
unidentified
The amount of hate speech that we've seen during this time, I mean, it's off the charts.
You look through social media.
You see it even on television.
The lines, they're not even blurred anymore.
They're gone.
How do you even begin to tackle such a phenomenon?
Well, I think we have to have an understanding that first of all, in this country, we believe very strongly in free speech.
It's the basis in our Constitution.
And we also believe in the freedom of religion.
You have to balance that.
You balance that in two ways.
Europe has hate speech laws, probably some of the best on the butts, but it's selectively enforced.
So if you selectively enforce a rule, it's not going to have any effect whatsoever.
And you can see how it's had no effect in Europe in monitoring and stopping the hate.
So this guy is something called the Anti-Semitism Czar.
It's an office set up by George W. Bush, like most insane, unjustifiable things, anti-Semitism czar at the State Department, focused on one specific kind of ethnic hate, not protecting all Americans.
There is no stop anti-white hate czar, of course, and there never will be because the same people who are upset about hate are promoting that kind of hate, but whatever.
It's one specific group protected somehow by the United States State Department.
But this is a guy who actually has a job in administration saying it's great.
European hate crimes laws are great.
Well, first of all, every single one of them is immoral.
And two, they're all contrary to the First Amendment.
You couldn't have laws like that here.
And three, when you actually look at those laws that Rabbi Yehuda Kaplun is saying are so great, they're used to suppress Christianity.
That's what they actually are, of course.
And creativity and freedom of thought and individual conscience and the humanity of the populations of European countries, all suppressed by this.
But Christianity is always number one.
So in Finland, for example, one of the lead opposition political leaders is now on trial.
Why?
Why is she on trial?
Because she tweeted a quote from Romans, the Epistle to the Romans by St. Paul.
You may have heard of it.
It's a significant book in the New Testament.
And in it, he describes basic Christian sexual ethics, you know, like one man, one woman against other forms of sexual expression.
That's Christianity.
And that was deemed a hate crime under the law, under those European hate crimes laws, hate speech laws that Rabbi Yehuda Kaplun is saying we should emulate, but maybe enforce a little tougher, more selectively.
This is what will destroy the country and divide the country and make people hate each other.
Whenever the U.S. government protects one group and allows others to be attacked, whenever the U.S. government promotes one group and suppresses another group, it's prima facie unfair, but it's also the most divisive thing you could ever do to any country.
If you treated your children differently, they wouldn't hate you.
They'd hate each other.
And every parent knows that.
So all of this stuff is corrosive to the United States at exactly the moment when national cohesion is going to be essential because there is a rocky road ahead.
That's very obvious.
And here you have an administration official calling for hate crimes laws.
So the answer has to be no.
And it has to be no now more than ever because once again, we're entering into a brand new phase with new rules.
And all of us are going to have to adapt to those rules.
We may support them.
We may not support them, but that's what we're doing.
But in the process, we cannot give up what it means to be American on the most basic level.
You don't need to be an economist to see what's happening.
The dollar is in trouble.
It's getting weaker.
It's sad, but we're not in charge of it.
So we have to respond appropriately in ways to protect our families.
When paper money dies, it's going to be replaced by programmable digital currency or gold.
Gold survives.
The same Americans who think they're protecting themselves with gold are the ones getting ripped off by big gold dealers.
After we left corporate media, we got offered tens of millions of dollars to promote gold companies.
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Someone who has watched this more carefully than almost anyone I know and whose instincts are admirable and wise is Megan Kelly.
And so I want to bring her in now to get her sense of what exactly Venezuela means.
Megan, thanks so much for doing this.
I have a million questions for you.
But first, you said right after Maduro got grabbed that you weren't exactly sure.
I, first of all, would prefer we use our military defensively and not offensively, which may be anachronistic, but I'm not really in the mindset at all, especially now with three kids who are two out of three in their teens, of being super bellicose in our language or our approach to the world.
And I don't really see this as necessary.
I don't see this one as necessary.
I understand what Trump is saying is the reason.
And I too appreciate the honesty.
I actually appreciate that we're not cloaking it in democracy like we wanted the oil.
He was really explicit.
And we didn't want them playing footsie with China and Iran and Cuba.
Okay, so at least he's being honest about it.
But I worry very much about unintended consequences.
And, you know, I realize it's not Libya, it's Venezuela, but okay, a couple things happen in Libya.
First of all, when we killed their leader, it's been chaos ever since.
And I see the same sort of power vacuum there potentially, even with this vice president left in place that happened in Libya.
I don't think we actually are going to run Venezuela because we don't want to and we don't want to have a long-term presence there.
So I do wonder what the power vacuum will be.
I'm not so sure this vice president is going to be able to rule there with the same iron fist as Maduro.
I don't know what's going to happen.
But I also think about what happened in Libya, Tucker, when we were even younger.
And that's when you and I were in college.
And for the years prior to that, Libya was doing some bad things in the world.
They bombed the nightclub in Berlin and some Americans got killed and Reagan then bombed them.
And we were sort of ratching up.
It wasn't an outright war with Libya, but we were escalating tensions here and there with them.
And the next thing we knew, we just sort of thought we had settled the matter because we are the big, bad United States.
And once we sort of bomb you, you're supposed to go away and realize it's going to get worse for you.
But what Libya actually did was they planted a bomb on Pan Am 103 and brought down that flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 259 people, most of whom were American, including 35 students from Syracuse University, where I was going to school as a freshman.
And every year I was there for four years, we had the memorial honoring those 35 18 and 19 year olds who had been studying abroad in London and had been killed over Scotland on their way home from their study abroad program because of these little sort of power battles that had happened that weren't supposed to mean anything.
We're supposed to be just sort of asserting our power and teaching somebody a lesson.
Did anybody anticipate that?
I don't think so.
Okay, you know, Venezuela is not Libya.
It's not full of a bunch of Middle Eastern potential terrorists, but it's not great.
Like they've got a bunch of gangs down there who have zero problem killing Americans.
Let's check in with Trenda Aragua.
Let's check in with Lake and Riley's family to find out whether they have any empathy for Americans.
Doesn't seem so.
And I don't know what faction of that group we're ticking off right now with our behavior and going in there and saying the oil is now ours.
We're going to sell it.
You know, we'll give you a piece of it, but we're taking it.
So I really do worry about unintended consequences and I object to empire.
I much prefer the way we started with the original George Washington, let's avoid foreign entanglements.
Let's not cozy up too much to any one country.
Let's enjoy the beautiful blessing of these two huge oceans on either side.
I don't want to have to take care of Venezuela.
I really don't.
I'm not particularly worried about them cozying up too much to China and Russia, neither of whom are in a position right now to attack us and don't, I don't think I have a reason to attack us at the moment.
So I don't like it.
I still support Trump, obviously, but I don't think this is something he ran on at all.
I think he actually ran on the opposite promise that we weren't going to be doing this stuff.
I don't think anybody who voted for him was thinking about this when we voted for him.
Everyone's rooting for him, everyone who's sane and independent-minded.
But this is a massive distraction from where his attentions should be, in my view, which, as you point out, are rightly Baltimore and other cities that are genuinely suffering.
And I think if we roll into these midterms, he gave a big speech before the Republicans in Congress yesterday about we need to win the midterms.
If we roll into these midterms and we have a year almost of Trump focusing on running Venezuela as the so-called affordability message is ubiquitous in the left-string press every day, it's not going to help.
He's going to lose control of the House.
I don't think the Republicans will lose the Senate, but we're going to have nonstop two years of investigations.
And look, Trump hasn't been doing a great job of getting his agenda pushed through as legislation the first year, because as it turns out, you really do need 60 senators now in order to enact legislation unless you get rid of the filibuster.
So think how we'll do when Republicans don't even control the House.
We will have absolutely no laws passed, which Tucker will only feed into what you're talking about, which is this idea of empire and the executive branch growing bigger and bigger.
He's already rendered Congress almost irrelevant.
They'll become even more so with the Democrats in control of the House because all they're going to do is snipping at his heels trying to investigate everything he does.
But they won't even be relevant in terms of potentially passing legislation because it'll be an absolute no-brainer.
Nothing will happen.
The executive branch will grow.
And okay, maybe I can get comfortable with Empire if I must.
If we're thinking about a JD Vance, but we are not going to have a Republican in the White House forever.
Never mind the right Republican in the White House forever.
We are going to wind up with a Gavin Newsom one of these days or an AOC.
And then what?
And by the way, even if we move on from Trump or a JD type president and stick with like Republican, who's going to run the empire?
Like what if we wind up with a Mitt Romney?
What do we do with Venezuela then?
What if the collapse happens then because we no longer have a strong hand on the tiller the way we might with Trump here?
What chaos will ensue?
I don't think we have an accurate feel for what we've unleashed.
I don't think I articulated it quite as well as you just did.
And of course, I'm totally opposed to empire too.
I'm kind of for an agrarian society with no electricity, you know, small communities.
I'm serious.
I mean it.
But we're not in charge.
And so this is a new system.
Clearly, we're moving toward it.
At some point, this president or some president is going to start ignoring the courts too.
And you're going to have just total power in the executive.
And there's a lot of evidence that the emerging America demographically wants that.
I mean, that's the case in most countries, and it will be the case here probably.
I'm not endorsing that at all.
I'm just sort of looking ahead generationally, and we're going to get something like that.
So given that, I feel like you need to make smart decisions, wise decisions with the future in mind always, especially now.
And there are all these ghouls who've somehow attached themselves like barnacles to the executive branch, like Mark Levin and Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz screeching about how, okay, that was a great success four days ago.
It's like he's got the taste of blood in his mouth and he's excited.
I mean, he's practically frothing.
It was disturbing.
And, you know, this is who for right now, Trump is surrounding himself with.
You know, you had Lindsey Graham on Air Force One with him.
You had Levin at the White House with his arm around Trump, almost trying to like manhandle him, like sort of assert power over Trump, like kind of pulling him in.
And, you know, Trump doesn't like that.
Even when you shake hands with Trump, he makes sure he's in command and he's in the dominant position.
But Mark Levin goes in there and almost tries to emasculate him, like with the arm around, like this is my guy, which is exactly the wrong messaging to allow and to send in Levin's case.
So it is disturbing, like how close, not just the neocon.
I think there are some normal neocons.
Like I would consider probably, you know, Britt Hume is probably Neoconnie, some of my pals over at National Review are neoclassical, but they're not frothing at the mouth crazy for blood neocons.
That's right.
I mean, what Lindsey Graham stands for is deeply disturbing to me.
And that stuff about the Ayatollah, like, you know, our president is going to come kill you.
Would you just stop?
Like you said, just, hey, as far as I know, Lindsey Graham doesn't have teenage children who are going to have to go fight his war.
He now wants against Iran, but I do.
And you have kids in their 20s.
And some of us actually have a real stake in making sure that does not happen.
We do not want that.
It's, again, unnecessary.
So it's really kind of getting crazy.
And I also think you're right about the alarming increase in military budget.
What is the reason for that?
Trump's speaking in a disturbing way about Greenland.
My hope is that all the talk about Greenland, because even yesterday, Caroline Levitt was saying military options are still on the table if that's what the president wants, explicitly about Greenland, that he's just asking for a 10 where he intends to settle for a six, which is, I'm going to scare you so that you actually will cut a better deal with me on your raw earth minerals and give me more access to your country if I need it for those and or military purposes.
But obviously, we can't go around invading Greenland.
We can't go around invading any countries.
We can't go invade Cuba.
He mentioned them.
We can't go invade Iran.
We cannot go invade Colombia or just kick the guy's ass, as Trump is saying, and not expect any negative consequences to us.
Like we are actually are rebuilding the economy.
Trump is rolling back regulations.
He's allowing modern business to thrive.
The tariffs, I think, have not worked out too poorly, and I think have a very good shot of working out even better.
Interest rates are coming down.
Inflation is coming down.
Why can't we just roll that agenda into a stronger economy than ever come midterms and maybe possibly win more seats in the House such that Trump and maybe, you know, God even knows, convince some senators to vote Republican when a vote comes up and actually enact an agenda that could stick and that could be popular and stop worrying about being policemen of the world, worrying about the bad.
Of course they're bad guys.
We know there are bad guys in Cuba.
We know the guy who runs Colombia is not great.
We know Maduro wasn't great.
Iran, obviously, we're not big fans of the Ayatollah and vice versa.
We're not the policemen of the world.
It was never intended to be this way.
And look, if that's what we're going to use the $1.5 trillion for, that's alarming too.
Even if it's not world war, if it's just that we can be the world cop or the world invader or like sort of the badass with swagger with the amazing military and now we want to use it, that's going to cause a host of unintended consequences that Trump's never going to be around to even see through.
You know, you and I are still going to be here.
Our kids are still going to be here.
Trump's grandkids are going to be here.
But it almost feels at times to me like Trump has discovered he's got this exciting, efficient tool called the U.S. military, and he's dying to try it out.
And unfortunately, when you're dying to try out the U.S. military as the commander in chief, you ultimately are not the one who will be dying, but others will, and they include Americans eventually.
And, you know, your point about free speech is absolutely spot on.
You know, you play, I was amazed to hear that the one soundbite by Jim Collins in Florida.
Incredible.
I actually wrote down what he said.
He said, you don't have the right to harm other people with your words.
I absolutely do.
And it's actually what makes us fundamentally American.
It's awesome.
I have every right to insult you, to speak hatefully about you.
And it's glorious.
It's what makes it wonderful to live here.
I mean, the First Amendment, of course, is there to protect hate speech.
Hate speech is not only constitutional, it's written right in there that you can say you can say the most hateful things possible.
Sorry, but I can.
And if you don't like it too, you're the one who needs to move, not me.
I don't need to move out of the United States of America.
That's my fundamental right to say things that offend.
And that's what's so upsetting about what is happening in Europe.
Not to mention in Israel too, because you mentioned the rabbi and the guy on CNBC.
I mean, Israel's been on the press quite a bit over the past year or two for cracking down on free speech rights in its country, the rights of journalists to report openly and honestly on what's happening over there.
And Europe is in a place where they're now arresting people for thought crimes, for actually just causing offense.
That's it.
Not to mention in England, arresting a woman for silently praying outside of an abortion clinic, literally not saying a word, just praying in her head.
And a cop saw her standing there and asked her what she was doing and she admitted the truth and she got arrested.
Our friend Lawrence Fox, he got arrested because he was over there saying he was thinking about tearing down the pesky traffic cameras that they put in various places in London to police the gas guzzling cars because they don't want these non-eco-friendly cars in London.
And he was thinking about tearing down the cameras.
He got arrested.
They raided his home.
So yeah, you need to be able to think what you want.
You need to be able to say what you want.
And all three of those examples that you showed of people saying it's time to crack down or you should control the internet.
You can't say things that hurt people or that are hateful are exactly the opposite of what we actually stand for in this country.
And we better be really loud about it or we're going to be following our friends in Germany and England down the drain.
I mean, there does seem to be a connection between war footing and a clampdown on civil liberties in the country that's on war footing, right?
So the presidents that clamp down on free speech most aggressively in our history, Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson during the First World War, FDR for his entire term, and Lyndon Johnson during Vietnam, who sent the FBI after his critics and CIA to do all kinds of things that are shocking.
So that's, I guess, my concern.
If like all of a sudden you become permanently at war, your own population in some ways becomes the government's enemy, I've noticed.
Like they didn't allow, and we didn't allow people who were criticizing the war a platform.
We mocked them and made fun of them because I think we thought it was our duty to defend the war.
And I see Fox News doing that right now.
There's not really a skeptical voice over there about what we're doing in Venezuela.
And I'm fine with the people who support the Venezuela move.
Then I've been having them on my show all week and giving the president his due to hear what are the detractors saying and what are the supporters saying?
And that's up for the audience to make up their mind.
If they disagree with me on my stance, that's fine.
It's great.
No more power to them.
But, you know, that's not the job when you're on Fox News.
And when I was there, I'll speak for myself.
It was very clear to me what the job was, which was to root for it, to defend it, period, and not to allow skeptics on to express, you know, why they thought it was a bad idea, but instead to mock them and to belittle them, which has an effect of shaming people out of the view, at least maybe not the code pinks of the world, but like normies, whether they're Republicans or Independents who would come on Fox, they understood that message is going to get you banned.
You're not going to get an invitation back because this is not a place to come for a full and fair discussion.
So yeah, we've already slipped into that in our past, our not so distant past.
And look what it got us.
You know, the Iraq war was not a good idea.
I wish I hadn't defended it.
I know you feel the same.
I wish I had let more dissenting voices on and really listened to them to see whether they had a good point.
And I think now more than ever, that's why independent channels like the ones that we're operating on currently are incredibly important because there is no agenda.
You know, people want to say you're bought and paid for.
You're not bought and paid by anybody.
You're totally independent.
As am I.
I don't take anybody's money other than like cozy earth, but they're not involved in this conflict.
So Mark Levin is in a special class, shall we say?
He's in the special class because I truly think he's not well.
I genuinely think he's unwell, which is when I stopped fighting with him.
Like over the, even though over the holiday break, he was incendiary in his rhetoric.
And I thought, you know, I went after him a little because he kept attacking me and others and like was calling Dave Smith a Nazi, a neo-Nazi, like crazy stuff.
And then I just realized, what am I doing?
Like he's truly, he's an insane person, you know?
And as my therapist ironically always says, stay away from crazy.
And he's not wrong.
He doesn't take the truly crazy ones, which bodes well for me.
But I genuinely think like he's not well.
And I really don't think the president should let Mark Levin within 10 feet of him.
Like he's not a well person.
But there is a very ardent, extremely pro-Israel, and indeed I will say Israel first crowd that is doing what you said right now.
And sure, Levin is one of them, but I'm just saying he's just such a nutcase.
How can we really factor him into this argument?
But I don't know whether the point is to cause losses for this president or stop his agenda.
I really think that the Israel firsters have no tolerance for anyone who will not defend Israel at every turn.
And that's why they can't stand you.
And that's why they now can't stand me.
Because even though I am an Israel supporter, you and I have discussed this before.
It's not that I defend everything they've done, but in the war with Hamas, my God, when I thought what Hamas did on 10-7 was absolutely barbaric and I have defended Israel's rights to defend itself.
And I've even argued that it doesn't need a proportionate response.
All the things.
I've been very defensive of anti-Semitism on college campuses, which I think has been very real over the past couple of years.
I've wanted the foreign exchange students, the non-Americans, ejected.
I have no problem with ejecting the Mahmoud Khalils of the world who said, nice university you have here, Columbia.
Either boycott Israel or the campus gets it.
Get out.
Get out of here.
Right.
I have no problem with any of that.
I've gotten notes from all, like all of these people, dear friends of mine over the past two years.
Thank you so much.
You make me and my family feel safer.
These are pro-Israel Jewish friends of mine in the media.
You make me and my family feel safer.
I love you.
My family loves you.
God bless you.
These same people have now turned on me and some are calling me an anti-Semite.
Why?
What did I say?
What did I do?
Did I step on a rake and say something super anti-Semitic without realizing it?
No, it's because I won't defriend you and I won't condemn and say that Candace Owens is hateful.
They want me really, really badly to condemn Candace Owens.
And I'm sorry to break it to them, but I am responsible for what I say, not for what anybody else says.
I am not Candace Owens' policeman.
And by the way, they're kidding themselves that if just one more voice will say something nasty about Candace, she could finally be controlled.
Like, how well has that worked so far?
But again, the instinct is just to stop her, stop her speech, stop it, make her stop it, make Tucker stop saying the things.
Well, I have no desire to and I have no power to.
And for that, I was called a coward by Ben Shapiro at the turning point event, Amfest in December, who, by the way, in my last exchange with him, literally said, our friendship, his and mine, is too important to both of us to make it depend on who else, whom else we are friends with and aren't friends with.
That is literally the last text I have from Ben Shapiro.
The next thing I knew, he was standing on the stage at Turning Point calling me a coward for this very thing.
So I am convinced now more than ever that there is a crew for whom everything revolves around Israel, that friendships don't matter.
Love relationships don't potentially matter.
The only thing that matters is whether you are standing up for Israel or not.
And on top of that, you can even stand up for Israel as I have.
You also must not just condemn, but defriend, defriend anyone who is raising questions about Israel.
It's important that that other person be excised from polite society, be ostracized, that you join us in our messaging to tell the world that they're terrible.
They're evil.
They should be out of polite society.
And no, no, no, we're not calling for cancellation.
No one's calling for cancellation or deplatforming.
But what's interesting is while the rest of us are having these debates, a bunch of different states, including the state of Florida, the most important state in a lot of ways, has codified anti-Semitism as a crime.
And they've defined not anti-anything, just anti-Semitism.
And they've defined it in a way that is so expansive that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.
The claim that someone is Israel first is a crime in the state of Florida.
DeSantis signed this.
And I'm just like, well, wait a second.
I mean, I don't think most people even know that that happened.
And plenty of states have done that.
And so I think we're going to wake up one morning with European hate crimes laws written in a way that is not fair at all, that doesn't affect justice and is basically just another form of identity politics at the point of a gun.
And I'll tell you the number one reason, apart from the free speech principles, I guess the number two reason we shouldn't be doing that, it will cause anti-Semitism.
Absolutely will cause in the same way that now, like, people don't understand Nick Fuentes.
You may be familiar with him.
They don't understand him, right?
Like, why?
Why are people flocking to Nick Fuentes?
You know what?
It's because a lot of young white men in particular have been told for years now that identity is everything.
It's everything.
It does matter.
What is your in-group?
And those are your compadres.
And you better get some alignment there because we're factioning now into groups.
And you better figure out which one is yours.
And so there are a lot of young white men who have accepted the messaging of the BLMers and the Woexters on the left and have understood now like, you know what?
I don't want to follow what Tucker Carlson is saying, that we don't judge people like that, even though we're on the right.
That I am accepting the messaging that's been taught to be by my teachers, K through 12, by my university professors for four years, by my grad school professors, by the media, by corporate America, all of them, which is identity does matter.
Your very goodness will be rated on whether you accept this premise.
And they've accepted it.
And now they're leaning into white identity politics and then being shamed because the leader of those happens to be Nick Fuentes.
So what the Jews who push those laws, and it is a lot of Jews down in Florida and a lot of Jewish people in New York too, they think that the answer to anti-Semitism, which is a problem to some extent, of course, is to get themselves recategorized as one of the protected DEI groups.
And of course it's not.
The answer is to demolish DEI.
The answer is to stop separating us by group.
And the more you start cracking down on people's thought crimes against Israel or even their anti-Semitism, truly, like this is America.
You're allowed to be a racist.
You're allowed to be a misogynist.
You're allowed to be an anti-Semite.
You're not allowed to like make hiring and firing decisions based on that, but that's not what we're arguing over here.
We're talking about what's in your head in your heart.
The more you try to criminalize that or ruin someone's life over those thoughts, the more you engender the very hatred you say you're objecting to.
And this is part, in part, the reason, Tucker, that I tweeted out that it's not Tucker Carlson and his views on Israel that are causing anti-Semites.
It is more Ben Shapiro's and the Barry Weiss's of the world.
And of course, the ADL then called me an anti-Semite because what happens is, you know, you see the cycle, right?
Like you get attacked.
I didn't attack Barry or Ben.
They attacked me.
Again, just because I wouldn't defrie people.
They attacked me.
I said to them, that behavior is going to cause anti-Semites.
Like you shouldn't do that because this is actually undermining the very thing you say you care about.
Then he swoops in the ADL to say, you're an anti-Semite for saying that to them.
You're not allowed to defend yourself against their attacks by saying, hey, you're the one who's bringing more hatred into this argument.
Most normal American Jewish people would never make Israel the stakes of a relationship.
I know so many Jewish dear friends of mine who are sick of talking about Israel.
Ben, Barry, Levin, they don't speak for the vast majority of American Jewish people who would never think of making your feelings about Benjamin Netanyahu the stakes of your friendship or love relationship.
So he decided to go after Jack Bisobeck, who is a great guy who is a dear friend of Charlie's and who has really stepped up to the plate in the wake of Charlie's murder.
He's been doing so much to help Turning Point stay afloat, taking his podcast out there.
He's been in close contact with all the Turning Point staff, with Erica.
Like this guy's been a real stand-up guy.
He's been a hero.
And not for nothing, but he's been great to me too.
And I really appreciate it because back in the day, he and I didn't get along, you know.
But you know how this business is.
Like, yes, you can get past that if you're a decent person.
And he and I totally got past that.
I really like him and respect him.
And he's been a leader on the faith front.
One of the things we lost after Charlie died was someone who could speak about the Bible, about God, about Christianity, about faith in the way that Charlie did that was inspirational, but also that unique ability to tie it to our conservative principles.
Like that was part of the deep loss in losing Charlie.
Like that he helped you realize that your conservative ideas actually are found that the foundation is in Christianity.
But on top of that, he could cite the chapter and verse of the Bible of Proverbs, all of it to prove it to you.
Well, Jack Pesobic can do this too.
And so I've really come to adore this guy.
Anyway, he interviewed me at the Turning Point event the night after you were there.
And he gave me actually on my tour a beautiful rosary at Charlie's memorial that we all went to.
He spoke and he held up that gorgeous rosary and it was very moving.
Then I complimented him.
He gave me a rosary that was identical, which I pray every day and I love.
And after that event at Turning Point, he posted a picture of that rosary.
And Mark Levin chose that picture of Jack Poseobic holding his rosary to attack calling him, I'm trying to remember the word.
It was like wacko or freak.
It was something extremely pejorative and diminishing.
And there's no accident that he chose that picture.
If you Google this guy, you can find 10,000 pictures of him on the internet.
It is not hard to find a suit and tie picture of Jack Poseobic or even Jack in a t-shirt if you want to make him look more casual.
He chose that picture.
And it's no accident, Tucker, because he held that up because I genuinely think Mark Levin thinks Catholics who pray the rosary are freaks, that we are kooks.
And that's one of the reasons why he thinks we're completely fair game to attack as woke Reich, which is what he's called me and you and others, anti-Semitic, because what you're anti-Semitic, because you're holding up a rosary.
Well, that's sick.
That's absolutely disgusting.
And if you take the religious discussion there, you want to go back and argue about Jesus and Jews' role around the time of Christ.
Okay, let's do that.
How's that going to end?
About the same as the discussion that people wanted to raise about black crime versus white crime ended.
Glenn Lowry stood up at the time saying that's not going to end well.
Stop doing that.
Stop talking about suggesting whites are committing all the crimes.
You know what they're going to do soon?
Is they're going to bring up some uncomfortable truths about blacks, which is eventually how that ended.
Like, just stop.
All right.
Because never in my life, in arguing with someone like a Mark Levin, would I bring up his faith beliefs and call him a kook for them?
That's just so hateful and disrespectful.
Never, never would I do such a thing.
But there's a reason he chose that photo with the rosary and tried to diminish Jack Pesobic.
And I would argue, Catholics and Christians who also pray the rosary.
Like there are tweets out there saying, oh, she's got a hell of a podcast in 2022.
He came on my podcast.
He asked to come on when he had a book out.
Sure, yeah, come on.
We had a nice exchange.
This is all, I think, pre-10.7, but we had a very nice exchange.
Never had a problem when we were at Fox with one another.
And then, as I point out, I didn't have a relationship with Mark texting and so on, but some of those others that we discussed had been sending me the love texts ever since 10-7 about how my standing up for American Jewish people made them feel safe and thank you and we love you and we're so grateful and blah, blah, blah.
That's not why I did it, but I appreciated the notes.
That was very sweet.
So when exactly did I become an anti-Semite?
Because he's called me that.
Was it this past July when you and I were both at Turning Point, the Student Action Summit, and Charlie and I had a two-minute exchange on Epstein?
And if he worked for a foreign agency, who would it have been?
And I said, it would make sense it was Masad.
Yeah, I was called an anti-Semite after that, as you and I discussed the last time I came on your evening show by some official Jewish group that said Charlie was an anti-Semite too.
Charlie Kirk.
Okay.
Was it then?
Was that the day I turned anti-Semitic?
I'm trying to track it in my head.
So then the next thing that happened was I went on with Piers Morrigan and I said, I don't believe the Hamas ministry of anything.
I don't believe their numbers and I believe their propagandists and I don't believe their photos they put out.
But I also said Israel needs to wrap up this war because they're losing support.
I got called anti-Semitic by a bunch of people.
A lot of pressure from American Jews who are active on Israel, which is the difference.
No, I'm not going to take it back.
I meant every word I said.
None of it makes me anti-Semitic.
And then came the Tucker's interviewed Nick and you must disavow him.
Now you really need to break up with Tucker.
As if my entire career rises or falls based on who my friends are and whose interview I decide to weigh in on.
Well, it's ridiculous.
So first of all, I had no problem with the fact that you interviewed Nick Fuentes and you did it your way.
And I happen to know, because I know you and I know some other things about that interview, that you did it with a pure heart.
It wasn't because you were in love with all of Nick Fuentes' messages at all, but I know you and I understood, this is what you don't have to confirm or deny, but I thought you were very much trying to reach him with your main message that you say all the time, which is in the conservative sphere on the right, we don't judge people by identity.
We don't, you didn't say it this way, but we don't, we're not big on the N-word and the other words that he's been calling people like Usha Vance or even thinking about people that way because that's what crazy leftists do with identity.
I have an open heart to he was manipulated by somebody.
I do.
So I'm fine with those questions and I'm sorry for people who don't want them asked.
And then it switched to Erica Kirk and Turning Point.
Erica became, Turning Point became the focus of Candace Owens.
And honestly, Tucker, from that point forward, I worked with Turning Point and Erica regularly to say, look, Candace has a right to ask the questions she wants to ask.
I'm very close with everybody there, as I know you are too.
And I talk with them at length often about what's the best way of handling this, right?
And I did not think it was a great idea to go out and try to combat each claim.
I really thought just let her do her thing.
You don't get to police her, but you also don't have to respond to every question she asks.
Like, that's just not, I wouldn't do it.
And I don't suggest you do it.
Sometimes they agreed with me.
Sometimes they didn't.
But for the whole time, I was in close contact with them.
And then ultimately, Erica was asking me if I would help forge a meeting with them, broker a piece of some sorts.
I told her, you know, maybe you could just email Candace and put it to bed.
You know, maybe that's the best way instead of like getting together.
I don't know, or doing some, she wanted to do a live stream initially.
She didn't want to do it that way.
Whatever.
I tried to be of service.
I spoke with Candace too and was honest with her.
And I've gotten to know her a lot better over the past six months.
And actually, I know her better now than ever.
And I've learned a lot about what's being done to Candace by some of the people we've been discussing.
She's never worked in television a day in her life, not one day.
She actually wasn't very experienced even in the press business, even in the newspaper business.
She quit the New York Times after a couple of years.
So she's got one thing going for her, which is she is not woke when it comes to blacks and Indians and like, I can't think of any other favorite groups, but she is woke when it comes to American Jewish people and somewhat when it comes to women.
So, okay, she's not as far left as some of the other woke radicals who dragged us through 2020 and its aftermath.
But she doesn't have any business running a news organization.
And people have pointed out that I sent out a tweet when she got the job saying she deserves her success.
Of course, I was being nice because we were friendly.
And also because I don't begrudge her her success or the money that she got paid for an organization that honestly wasn't worth $100 million.
Like the multiples didn't play out.
But God bless, if you can get somebody to pay you a shit ton of money for your company, go for it.
But no, she has no business running a TV news organization.
There's a lot more to TV news than just taking the free press and putting it on TV.
A lot more.
There's a reason they call it broadcast news.
There are two pieces to it.
The news is important, but so is the broadcast piece.
And the fact that she put herself at the helm of the Erica Kirk Town Hall proves to me she doesn't understand the broadcast piece.
Because I'm sorry, not to be mean, but Barry Weiss is not a strong broadcaster for many, many reasons.
And she should not be on camera and she should not be the face of CBS News.
And she really shouldn't steal the on-air opportunities of the talent who are filling those roles.
There's no better way, and I don't have to tell you this, to engender a loathing and resentment from the talent that works in your building than for you as an executive to start stealing their prime time opportunities.
It was a massive fail.
The ratings sucked.
And trust me, it wasn't because the public's not interested in Erica.
She didn't lead Erica to good places for Erica to shine.
She ambushed her with the guy who asked Charlie the last question before he was shot and killed.
She brought him back to face Erica Kirk to finish a question and to ask Erica to condemn Trump's violent rhetoric.
This is the guy who saw Erica's husband get assassinated by a leftist tranny furry-loving guy.
And now you want to make his widow condemn Trump, who just gave her husband the presidential medal of freedom, who's vice president, buried him, got him on Air Force 2.
How dare you?
How dare you do that, Barry Weiss?
And she had zero sensitivity about it.
She ambushed her.
And trust me when I tell you, there's no love loss between Erica Kirk and Barry Weiss.
So that's just my little window into what she's been doing.
But on top of that, Tucker, I've got more if you want it.
There's no saving evening news, and there's really no saving CBS evening news.
This guy, Tony Docopool, what has he done so far?
Nobody knows who the hell he is.
So far, he got the job because he had a contentious segment with Tana Hisi Coates, in which he was good.
Tanahisi Coates went to Israel for 10 days and came back and said he was an expert on it and wanted to write his thoughts.
Okay, you're not.
Be quiet.
Leave it to people who actually have done a little study on it.
You're going anywhere for 10 days.
I mean, I just got back from Montana for 10 days.
Doesn't make me an expert on Montana.
It's cold.
It's got bears.
People love to hunt.
Okay, like I'm not an expert.
Okay, but anyway, that was a good interview.
That's why he got the job because he stuck up for Israel.
He has an ex-wife who's living in Israel.
And of course, that's the agenda now of Barry Weiss and her boss, the Ellisons, at CBS and possibly at CNN if they wind up buying that too, although it's not looking good for them given the rejection of that bid today.
In any event, so that's why he got the job.
What has he done?
We pulled up a few segments that Tony Docopool has done while a corresponding because now he's claiming, I've always hated it.
I've gotten it.
Too much reliance on elites.
I'm going to be for the people.
He's trying to sound like a Fox News anchor.
Well, we pulled up a couple of big news events.
We pulled up the Border Patrol is whipping Haitian migrants at the border story.
Did Tony Docapool get it right even 24 hours into it after the Reuters photographer who took the pictures and said that's not what they show came out and said that's wrong?
No, he jumped right on the bandwagon, served it up to Jen Saki, who is his guest, to let her take a huge dump all over the Trump administration and the Border Patrol.
But that's the rescue.
That's the savior of CBS evening news.
Count me a skeptic, Tucker.
People aren't interested.
They're not interested in network news.
They're really not interested in evening network news, and they're really not interested in CBS evening network news.
Of course they did, but it's completely fruitless and it just shows they may be evil, but they're dumb.
What about Fox?
I mean, so you said at the outset that Fox played a huge role in selling the Iraq war, a huge role basically in every pointless conflict we've had for the last 30 years.
Well, I think they're going to be in a tough position as soon as Trump leaves.
Because Trump, as you know, is a ratings machine.
Everybody's interested in Trump.
You know, I remember when I was on Fox, Trump would come out and just do a random press story and just start talking about anything, whether he was a candidate or a president.
The ratings would go through the roof.
People just love him.
They love listening to him.
He's incredibly compelling.
He's entertaining.
He's smart.
He's very funny.
He's charming.
He's self-deprecating.
He's just like, unlike anything you've seen.
These pressers he's doing on Air Force One, where he's like, you know, rolling thunder, like who asked me, yeah, but Cuba, maybe them next.
Yeah, it could be.
You know, like, yeah, that guy needs to watch his ass in Columbia.
Highly entertaining.
No one ever does this.
You know, he got out there when he was talking to House Republicans yesterday and he was talking about the transgender issue.
And he was like, oh, you know, you get the guys come in and they lift the weights like this.
And you get the women.
He goes, Melanie hates when I do this.
She hates when I do this.
I'm going to do it.
You get the women and they're like, he's imitating the weak woman trying to live.
Anyway, my point is, you got to love him because he's funny and he's accessible.
So that benefits everyone, including Fox.
But when Trump is gone and we have anybody in his stead, I don't care how charming or interesting the next guy is, it's not going to be Donald Trump.
I think Fox News is in a lot of trouble, just like the rest of them.
And I also think this is going to hurt them.
The thing we discussed.
The Fox News of yesteryear, which just has a knee-jerk response to things like Israel, to things like war, is out of touch with today's young Republicans.
Today's under 50-year-old conservative men and women are over that bullshit.
They are.
They do not want war cheerleaders or Israel cheerleaders.
They have healthy skepticism of both.
And if Fox doesn't start understanding that and making room with its elbow for that kind of coverage to start not just occasionally being spouted on their network, but become a serious part of the network the way Roger did after Trump took over the Republican Party and started to sort of shove out the more establishment types or at least make room for the new MAGA types, they will fail.
So they will continue with the Murdoch's mission or even with the old Roger Ailes mission, which was very, very neocon-y at their own peril.
Why do they have, do you have any guess as to why that's the only issue they won't move on?
They're pretty flexible.
They're business people, of course, and they've moved all over the map on a lot of issues, but they've never wavered at all on the need for America to be involved in neocon wars.
And they do not have their finger on the pulse of the young people who voted Trump last time, who are critical in putting him over the line, and who have started to turn on that mindset and who do not see Israel, especially now, as totally aligned with American interests and values.
And let me just say one other thing on it.
I've been asking myself this question, Tucker, because you cover foreign policy a lot and always have.
It's not really my thing.
This is not like, I don't think people tune into the MK show because they really want to get the latest on foreign policy.
You know, I cover all domestic news, politics, law, culture, all that stuff, hard news.
I do think that even I, as I look back, I'm like, I'm pro-Israel.
I say I'm pro-Israel.
And I've been asking myself lately, like, how?
Like, why exactly am I pro-Israel?
And what I've come up with is, well, I was raised Catholic and, you know, you're kind of taught from a very young age that there's an alignment, Judeo-Christian values.
You hear that all the time.
You read the Old Testament, you know, like all of it.
And you're sort of thinking, okay, yes, I defend the Jews and I'm pro-Israel.
Then you get to Fox News and it's like, of course you are and the Republicans all are.
And you're like, okay, I accept that.
And you see like they're an important country in the Middle East and I believe what they say, which is they're in a rough neighborhood and people do want to attack them a lot.
So, you know, I understand this is a free democracy.
But then you get to the point where you realize, oh, wait a minute.
I've been in an organization for 14 years of my formative adult life and professional life where I wasn't even encouraged or allowed to question any of that.
You know, it was just spoon-fed and I swallowed it because I didn't really care.
It wasn't something I was ever really focused on.
So I was like, yeah, sure, okay, we love Israel.
And only now, Tucker, have I begun to say, like, wait a minute.
How much of the narrative that is in our news today has been spoon-fed to me by people who are super pro-Israel at all costs, who won't tell the truth about Israel, no matter what it is, and will cancel you if you don't befriend or defriend people who do.
And so this whole thing has made me reevaluate.
Like I'm just starting from square one, basically, on Israel right now.
And I'm actually day by day taking a much harder look at who are they?
What do they do?
How do I find real information on what happened in this war in Gaza that I will trust because I do know I'm being propagandized by both sides.
And how will I make up my own mind?
Even some of the narratives that we hear, like I'm not a fan of certainly radical Muslims.
And I'm not a big fan of Islam.
I'm going to be honest.
The tenets of it are political and I don't agree with them.
But I have dear friends who are Muslims.
And I do start to wonder like how much of the very negative messaging about all Muslims, and I've been a part of some of that negative messaging.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not wavering from my position that like it's not great to have an Islamist running New York City.
But how much of the narrative has come from people who are just ardently pro-Israel and need me to hate them?
I think lying is lying is what changes the calculations.
So right after 9-11, Britt Hume and Carl Cameron did an amazing week-long series on the dancing Israelis, the Israeli intel operatives who were arrested right across from ground zero, celebrating the falling of the building.
And then all these Israeli intel operatives were swept up in the United States.
They've been following the hijackers across the country.
It was a big story.
And Britt and Carl did this whole series on special report for a week.
And it was really interesting, super interesting and factual.
Fox News deleted it from the website, act like it never happened.
And I remember thinking, why would you, was it incorrect?
No, it was not incorrect.
It was correct.
That's why they took it off.
And then I watched Judge Napolitano, who was over at Fox Business, get fired.
And I know why he was fired for criticizing Israel.
And under the previous regime, they got the call, got to fire him, and they did.
And I remember thinking, that's not fair play.
If you disagree with his views in Israel, tell them.
Or if you think that Britt and Carl did something wrong in their series on the dancing Israelis, tell us what it was.
No, it was just eliminated.
It never happened.
It was shut it down.
And I don't think that's fair.
That's not, first of all, it's not journalism.
Second, it's just inherently dishonest.
And third, it suggests like, why are you doing that?
Like, what is there that you're trying to hide from public view?
And that's when my mind started to change a little bit.
You would know the board better than I would, but I do, I think it's mostly rooted in the fact that it was always fine with absolutely no downside to just be completely in the tank for Israel.
And I don't think they've moved out of that mindset.
And I think they're going to learn the hard way that they need to.
Because look, let's not, let's be straight about it.
The average age of the cable news viewer is somewhere between 68 and 72.
That's not the key advertising demo.
And that's not going to keep the lights on for very long.
They're going to have to find a way to appeal to younger viewers.
And unlike our business, where a download is a download, you know, we really, ironically, our business, which probably does appeal to more young people, doesn't depend on young versus old.
It literally is just like a click is a click, a download is a download.
Their business actually does depend on the key advertising demo of 25 to 54 year olds.
And that is only going to dwindle further if they are just knee-jerk defensive of Israel without giving any voice to its critics.
Those days have passed, and you can thank Israel for it.
I mean, they've just completed this two-year war and nobody would have begrudged them for fighting back after 10-7, but it went on too long.
It was too brutal.
It expanded into too many different countries.
And then ultimately, it dragged us in and exposed us in a way that, again, sort of like what we're watching in Venezuela, we still, we don't know what the long-term effects of the bombing of Iran will be.
Let's hope we've escaped unscathed, but we don't know.
So I just think it's too late.
Israel is too controversial.
Many, many people said to them, including Trump, months before the Iraq or the Israel-Gaza war wrapped up: stop.
It's got to wrap up now.
It's gone too far.
And Netanyahu was going to take it further even than he did.
Trump had to basically grab him in a headlock and say, stop.
Would you just take the win?
Just stop.
Like, we're declaring victory.
It's a ceasefire.
Take the W.
And he only did it because Trump basically threatened him that he had to.
But that whole thing has turned young people off.
They've seen, again, it feels like just a thirst for too much.
And even Israel's numbers acknowledge tens of thousands of Gazans have been killed.
And of course, that includes an untold number of civilians and women and children.
And I saw the dead Israelis at the bus stop.
I saw the dead children.
I saw the celebrations of the rape of the women.
I excused none of that by the disgusting Hamas terrorists.
But the answer was not then to respond with the deaths of civilians, which I know they say they try to prevent, but you know what?
You didn't.
You didn't in large enough numbers.
And you really turned a generation against you.
There isn't a single Democrat in America that's pro-Israel right now.
They've lost all the independents, over 70%.
And as I point out, the young people under 50 in the Republican Party, you can see it in the polls and you can see it anecdotally in your business and mine, have turned and are turning on Israel.
So Fox News continues as it has been at its own peril.