Oct. 8, 2025 - Timcast IRL - Tim Pool
02:10:24
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Welcome to Timcast IRL. | ||
| I am Matt Gates, thrilled to be guest hosting here with some of the smartest people I know in Washington in the media and commentating on all of the interesting things going on in the news. | ||
| We are, what, a week into this shutdown, and like many one-week olds, the shutdown is getting crankier by the moment. | ||
| And so we will analyze who is winning that and how we're likely to get out of it and if we even really care and is it going to affect people? | ||
| There's differing opinions on that subject and how we actually would address this shutdown as a mechanism to fight some of the challenging concentrations of power that are frequently discussed on this platform. | ||
| Also, it is October 7th. | ||
| We will talk about this day in history, what it means from a foreign policy standpoint, from the U.S.-Israel relationship standpoint. | ||
| And a lot of folks are talking about these things in the wake of Candace Owens releasing text messages showcasing a real disagreement between Charlie Kirk and some folks who are trying to push him more in the direction of supporting a robust U.S.-Israel relationship. | ||
| Turning Point USA has responded to that. | ||
| We will get into all of it, and we'll just take a trip around the world and see what the United States is up to in places like Somalia and Venezuela and Ukraine. | ||
| It'll be terrific. | ||
| Before we have that discussion, a few words from our sponsors. | ||
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| I wear them on the show periodically. | ||
| It's starting to get a little cool again, so we'll probably start wearing them. | ||
| Smart people right now, they're locking in their winter gear because this is the best time to prep for coming. | ||
| I've been told that many times. | ||
| Before we get started, my friends, we got a great sponsor. | ||
| It's Bearskin. | ||
| You know we love Bearskin. | ||
| These are great and amazing hoodies. | ||
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| Smart people right now, they're locking in their winter gear because this is the best time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I guess there's no audio on preparation. | |
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unidentified
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But only if you get your hoodie early, the hoodie is built like tank 340 GSM microphone. | |
| All right. | ||
| Well, let's start with introductions. | ||
| I was so flattered with how you said you were with some of the smartest minds around here in D.C., Mr. Gates. | ||
| So it's a pleasure to have you hosting today. | ||
| My name is Alad Eliyahu. | ||
| I'm the White House correspondent here at Timcast. | ||
| I've also been covering a lot of immigration stories. | ||
| Let's go around the circle. | ||
| What about you? | ||
| Yeah, I'm Dave DeCamp. | ||
| I'm the news editor for anti-war.com, where I cover the news. | ||
| And I appreciate Mr. Gates having me on here. | ||
| I'm a regular now on his show, The Matt Gates Show, which is cool. | ||
| And I'm very happy to be here. | ||
| Kurt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative magazine. | ||
| Likewise, a guest on Mr. Gates' new show, the New Underground, as I've termed it. | ||
| And excited to be here in this new capacity, or at least this temporary capacity. | ||
| Hello, everybody. | ||
| My name is Phil Labonte. | ||
| I'm the lead singer of the Heavy Metal Band, All That Remains. | ||
| I'm an anti-communist and a counter-revolutionary. | ||
| Let's get into it. | ||
| Phil, as a counter-revolutionary, what are you rooting for in this shutdown? | ||
| Well, I mean, we need to know where the counter-revolutionary force is here. | ||
| I mean, I like the fact that the government's shut down because the government can't do bad things generally. | ||
| But if you really take an honest look at it, look, if the government's shut down, that doesn't mean that the military is not doing stuff. | ||
| That doesn't mean that you're going to stop paying taxes or there's going to be like a two or three week break. | ||
| So really, it's theater. | ||
| So I think the American people that rely on the government for stuff kind of are the losers. | ||
| You know, like you were mentioning before the show, people that are waiting on the VA to decide on what their payment is for disability or what have you. | ||
| People that are going to be waiting in line for TSA when they're down to just one lane or whatever, the air traffic controllers. | ||
| For the most part, it's the American people that lose. | ||
| I would like to say that the Democrats lose because they're the ones that kind of initiated it unnecessarily. | ||
| But it is legitimate to say that the tax breaks that were connected to the ACA and stuff, like if they don't get renewed or whatever, that's going to be a significant increase for people that are actually paying their own insurance. | ||
| So I kind of feel like the American people are the losers, really. | ||
| I don't even know if the American people know what this is about yet. | ||
| It has a sort of festival energy to it. | ||
| People are mad about the deportations. | ||
| People are mad about the tariffs. | ||
| People are mad about executive power. | ||
| There's the Obamacare rug pull, which, by the way, so rich. | ||
| The Democrats are blaming congressional Republicans for a cliff in credits that they set up. | ||
| Like, it's not like Republicans picked this day in history and said, this will be the day that the Obamacare credits end. | ||
| It was designed this way by the Democrats. | ||
| And yet, I do not see a single poll that suggests the American people are not blaming the Republicans for this in some way. | ||
| And I am completely flummoxed by it. | ||
| I don't understand why. | ||
| Kurt Mills, can you explain why Republicans are losing the messaging war on a shutdown objectively caused by the Democrats over external policy demands? | ||
| Not really, because no one's really paying attention to this thing, but I will attempt to. | ||
| I think in general, the historical record since this shutdowns started, so government shutdowns, if memory serves, began starting in the late 70s and through the mid-80s. | ||
| But the very famous one that caught everyone's attention was the Gingrich Clinton first shutdown in the mid-90s. | ||
| There's a second one that kind of presaged Gingrich's exodus from politics or exodus from the House in the late 90s. | ||
| And I looked into this a few years ago, and there's very little correlation. | ||
| People think like the government, you know, whoever is accused of causing the problem will lose the White House or lose the Congress afterwards. | ||
| It's not clear at all, like literally. | ||
| And so I think that also sort of makes this not super important. | ||
| I think if you had to put a finger on why the Republicans are getting blamed with the Democrats, it's because there's an impression of Republican power right now because the Democrats are invisible. | ||
| And so the sort of eyes glazed just scrolling through whatever is that Trump is the president. | ||
| He sort of rules everything. | ||
| Congress is, I guess, a co-equal branch of government. | ||
| But the reality is that, you know, heavy lies the crown. | ||
| And so Trump is blamed for something going on in Washington, D.C. underneath his reign. | ||
| But we all know that you have to get 60 votes to pass a Mother's Day resolution in the United States Senate if you're not under the reconciliation rules. | ||
| And so now Trump is being blamed for having not done something, keeping the government open, that he cannot do without the Democrats. | ||
| And it seems as though this is more of a spasm reaction where they just need to fight on something. | ||
| Like who's in charge of the Democratic Party right now? | ||
| I would argue probably Gavin Newsom, because at least he is a guy utilizing his power in California to redraw congressional districts, to seize power, to deprive Republicans of the majority they want. | ||
| And the congressional Republicans or Democrats all look like they're just extras in the movie and they want to play a role. | ||
| And so they've brought this shutdown upon the country. | ||
| Trump must be frustrated with it. | ||
| How do you think the White House ultimately responds to people that work for the executive branch of government missing a paycheck, missing two paychecks? | ||
| I think there is a lot of good that can be done with the OMB Rust vote, clean out some of the dead wood, get rid of some commissions and councils and agencies. | ||
| But at the same time, we can't look like we're enjoying it too much. | ||
| Well, I think that's why the Republicans are getting blamed, though. | ||
| People, frankly, they've been able to create villains like vote, like Miller. | ||
| The Republicans are using this crisis as a pretext to do all the scary things they want to do. | ||
| Which we should, but we just shouldn't talk about it so much. | ||
| Well, the White House has leaned into it. | ||
| I mean, I mean, like, Trump bragged for the first time overtly that of votes, Project 2025 associations, sort of a gleeful thing. | ||
| I haven't seen him use that word basically since he claimed that he was a good idea. | ||
| It struck me as it was pre-like the shutdown gaining the certainty of feeling. | ||
| But you're still a bit of a house nerd. | ||
| People are just really paying attention to the top lines here. | ||
| Oh, I would run such a more dramatic shutdown. | ||
| I told you off camera that this is what's going on here is that you're not in the house. | ||
| And so it would be much more interesting if you were. | ||
| Well, and one of the pressure points people put on me when I deprived the speaker of the necessary votes and then when I removed the speaker is, now we're not getting to the important business. | ||
| To which I was like, what, Biden's agenda? | ||
| Like, what, what? | ||
| We can't rush to go and like give Joe Biden the next version of the CHIPS Act or his next military supplemental. | ||
| That was Ukraine. | ||
| That was when Ukraine was the big agenda. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so I didn't really mind. | ||
| Like, if we just sat around and played tiddlywings and didn't have a speaker and, you know, did not advance demise, I was kind of okay with that. | ||
| Not in a nihilistic way, but I just didn't feel, I didn't feel pressure. | ||
| Whereas here, Trump will want to get stuff done that people will tell him will be somewhat impaired. | ||
| And then stuff is just going to start to happen that's annoying. | ||
| When you have to wait four hours to get through TSA, it's going to suck. | ||
| When you just see like a third of the flights canceled because a bunch of the air traffic controllers called in sick because they weren't getting paid, that's going to suck. | ||
| And I wonder how people react to it. | ||
| Well, I mean, I'll tell you, you know, it's tough to even be aware that there's a shutdown, you know, from what I do because I focus all on U.S. foreign policy. | ||
| And I keep forgetting that there's a shutdown because we keep bombing places and shipping weapons to Israel. | ||
| Like that, that hasn't stopped. | ||
| So it is kind of the worst elements of the government that continue, you know, and it's things like you mentioned that actually get shut down. | ||
| I do think, you know? | ||
| Yeah, you mentioned something. | ||
| I think we shouldn't have to pay federal withholding during this period. | ||
| You know? | ||
| So a few things. | ||
| We're only like seven days into the shutdown, so I don't think until people really start feeling the pain, will it matter? | ||
| And I think the important conversation we need to have right now is too about is why are the Democrats holding out? | ||
| And the current incentive structure surrounding the Democrats is that they need to posture and show that they are fighting back against Trump to their base because Schumer and Jeffries need to demonstrate to their base so they cover their leftward flank from people attacking them. | ||
| So I think that's the real issue at hand here. | ||
| Well, the Democrat spasm, that they just have to show how long until that burns off. | ||
| They need to be able to go back to their constituents and say, we are fighting the fascism that is Trump. | ||
| Trump is trying to do mass deportations, and we are trying to hold him up in the House. | ||
| That is going to work more and more. | ||
| Fascism wasn't my letter carrier who delivered the mail, but now Ethel isn't getting paid. | ||
| And I think that's kind of unfair. | ||
| And the face of fascism isn't some airman who is stuck at Ramsdine Air Force Base with a family wondering if they're going to be able to provide for it. | ||
| Man, what you're talking about is honestly like that's tangible reality stuff. | ||
| And what he's talking about is just like the base of the Democrats that don't need any contact with reality. | ||
| They just want people to tell them, hey, I'm fighting Donald Trump, which is a terrible way to do politics, but it is the way that the premise that Kurt and David laid out, which is no one actually cares yet. | ||
| No one's paying attention. | ||
| It's only seven days. | ||
| How long? | ||
| What is the point at which the things I'm saying about angst around shutdowns actually becomes part of the body politic? | ||
| Or three months? | ||
| No, I don't think it's that long. | ||
| I think once a couple pay periods, I don't think it'll be two, three months. | ||
| I think a couple pay periods, maybe, maybe this, I guess this Friday is when people are supposed to get paid. | ||
| When the people that are reliant on the government for their whatever, their pay or whatever funding they get, when those people don't get paid and then they're complaining to their friends at work, like when people that hear, oh, my neighbor or the guy in the cubicle next to me or what have you, he can't make his mortgage payment because the government shut down. | ||
| That kind of stuff is when it comes to. | ||
| The median checking account balance in the country is like $2,800. | ||
| That's why. | ||
| You missed two paychecks. | ||
| A family is in crisis. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| And once word gets around that there are people suffering. | ||
| At that point, will the Republicans at least be able to say that they didn't cause this? | ||
| How bad do you think the shutdown was in 1819? | ||
| I think it was one of the three points during Donald Trump's presidency where his approval rating wasn't durably at 42%. | ||
| If you look at three times during Trump's presidency where he dipped a little before that very durable 42%, it was Charlottesville, Helsinki, and when he got out of that shutdown, because a lot of people felt like if there was going to be the pain of this shutdown, there should be the payoff of the wall money that he sought and ultimately got out. | ||
| How long was that? | ||
| That was 35 days. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, that was 35 days. | |
| No, but that was painful. | ||
| Halloween, I guess, would be the answer, right? | ||
| If it goes past Halloween, they're getting pretty bad. | ||
| Okay, so let me posit this other theory, Phil. | ||
| I believe the elites have insulated themselves from the pain of shutdowns. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| There's no real part of life for the American elite that is going to change about a shutdown. | ||
| And so, in a way, it's quite corruptly something where the elites, by virtue of this performance politics, are causing the problem, but life kind of goes on in the clouds. | ||
| You agree? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that the people that are being hurt are obviously people that live paycheck to paycheck. | ||
| And like you said, that's the vast majority of I don't know about the vast majority of Americans, but that's probably the majority of Americans. | ||
| And so, you know, the elites there, look, if you own assets, right? | ||
| You own a couple hundred thousand dollars in stock and you got a portfolio and stuff, like it's like, all right, well, if I need to pay for something, I can sell stock. | ||
| And it's like, it sucks because they don't want to, but it's not like I can't do this. | ||
| Money gives you options. | ||
| So the people that have, you know, a million dollars tucked away for retirement or whatever, they don't worry about this. | ||
| The stock market didn't take any days off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The futures markets didn't take any days off. | ||
| Like nobody's CDs stopped paying if they had accumulated wealth. | ||
| No one's home stopped appreciating in value, right? | ||
| So the boomers did just fine in the shutdown. | ||
| So Mark Mitchell is this pollster for Erasmus, and he comes on my program. | ||
| He posits this theory that actually Trump needs the shutdown to reconstitute his base of the under-39 crowd. | ||
| If you look at at the time of the election, the age group that made the most meaningful contribution to the Trump coalition as a distinct force in American politics, it was the 18 to 39 crowd. | ||
| And largely, the reason they voted for Trump was because they believed they had lived in a system that had screwed them over for most of their adult life. | ||
| And they believe Trump would do more violence to that system than Kamala Harris. | ||
| So do you think they're happy about this then? | ||
| Well, the pollster was saying since the election, that cohort has degraded to some extent. | ||
| And they have degraded because they have seen Trump assume power and become the system. | ||
| And not everything was taken down to its studs in the first week or in the first year. | ||
| And there is some discontent with that. | ||
| And so what happened in the administration that swelled approval rating among that constituency the most was the Doge stuff. | ||
| Like when people every day got another dopamine hit of like, these are the USAID workers walking out of the building. | ||
| Here's everybody from the Department of Education taking their protractors and chalkboard erasers home. | ||
| Like there was a sense that like, yeah, we're actually making a fundamental difference here. | ||
| Does Trump need the shutdown in some sense to get back that cohort? | ||
| And what else would get them back? | ||
| I don't think 18 to 39 year olds who voted for the president in large numbers in the past election are particularly interested enough in politics to know about the shutdown. | ||
| I feel like it just hasn't hit the average everyday Americans yet in a tangible way. | ||
| Like I said, most Americans probably don't even know that the shutdown is happening. | ||
| If you're not tapped into politics, you likely don't know that the shutdown's happening. | ||
| I am relatively tapped into politics. | ||
| Again, I focus on foreign policy. | ||
| But still, I pay attention to what's going on in D.C. | ||
| And it keeps kind of going out of my mind that there's even a shutdown. | ||
| It seems like business as usual as far as Washington, D.C. is still going. | ||
| From my angle, yeah. | ||
| And, you know, I've never been personally affected by a government shutdown, but I'm not an elite. | ||
| I'm someone if I didn't make two paychecks, I'd be in trouble. | ||
| But, you know, I'm just saying, like, I have the instinct, maybe because I am in that 18 to 39 range, that when I hear a shutdown, I go, aha, you know, take that feds or something. | ||
| That's like my instinct. | ||
| But the points you make are valid, that it's not like the, you know, the people really running the show who are being affected by this. | ||
| I think you're a little bit more tapped in because you're a former member of the House. | ||
| Oh, you hear shutdown and your alarms are going off. | ||
| But to most people, they're like a government shutdown. | ||
| I'm disappointed they didn't do it with Panash. | ||
| No, I mean, I think there is something, I mean, there's nothing about this shutdown. | ||
| I think we've entered a new, and there's nothing about this Congress. | ||
| This is the most boring Congress I can remember in my lifetime. | ||
| We have a lot of people. | ||
| People asked about whether or not Mike Johnson should be replaced as House Speaker. | ||
| And I said, Mike Johnson will give President Trump anything he wants. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Just like he gave the last president anything he wanted. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And that's kind of what we've gotten from Mike. | ||
| It's just like, yeah, like he's not, I know you know him. | ||
| He's just not much of an entity, at least for public consumption. | ||
| You know, I mean, all the other speakers were characteristic, so to speak. | ||
| I mean, even your good friend Kevin McCarthy is a character. | ||
| I mean, like, he clearly is a character nonetheless. | ||
| I mean, it's just like there isn't any drama. | ||
| And then, like, even the leading Democrats aren't in leadership or aren't in the Congress, right? | ||
| Newsom, Whitmer, you know, AOC's not heavily involved in the shutdown politics. | ||
| Is the leader of the Democrats? | ||
| Like you said, it's like AOC and Bernie. | ||
| Schumer and Jeffries. | ||
| No, AOC and Bernie. | ||
| I mean, Jeffries is getting super beat up this year because of all this Mamdani stuff. | ||
| And then Schumer is worried about a primary from AOC. | ||
| Well, they're both trying to demonstrate. | ||
| They're trying to demonstrate that their ability to fight back against Trump to try to cover that left word. | ||
| It's my political understanding. | ||
| Then who is the leader? | ||
| Answer your own question. | ||
| Who's the leader? | ||
| Who's the leader of that church? | ||
| Ostensibly a Schumer. | ||
| I mean, like, I mean, that is probably the person with the most power to stop this shutdown on the Democratic side. | ||
| And he's on borrowed time, frankly. | ||
| He'll be on the right. | ||
| The most powerful Democrat in the country is Newsom. | ||
| Dude, if you're old, white, and male in the Democratic Party, your days are numbered. | ||
| And more hawkish than average. | ||
| So I agree with you about Newsom, but what does that say? | ||
| Because I also agree with Matt about his, about, you know, like, if you're old, white, and male. | ||
| Not that Newsom's particularly old, but he's a white guy. | ||
| And when you take a look at a picture of his family, everybody's blonde, blue-eyed, and stuff. | ||
| And that just, you know, the Democrats are allergic to that now. | ||
| What does that say to his ability to actually win a primary? | ||
| I think there's a lot of sort of self-flagellation and hatred on the Democratic side. | ||
| I've heard a lot of like, we're not going to make that mistake of nominating a woman again. | ||
| And we're not going to make the mistake of nominating a minority again. | ||
| And so I think that's not why they lost. | ||
| But I think a lot of Democrats, because they are so plugged in on identity politics, believe that identity politics are super real. | ||
| And accordingly, this could redound to Newsom's benefit. | ||
| I think they see Trump. | ||
| They're like, maybe it'll work with any white people. | ||
| I feel like Trump. | ||
| It worked with Biden for us. | ||
| I mean, I think there's like, I mean, I think it's, it's, it would be. | ||
| So we're very far out. | ||
| I mean, if we were having this conversation in October of 2021, I think DeSantis might have been traded higher in the markets than Trump, and that would have been really dumb. | ||
| And so, but right now, it seems Newsom's a very soft frontrunner. | ||
|
unidentified
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And maybe in the way that Mr. Pete has been around, Mayor Pete? | |
| I feel like he's getting the same problem that we can't find seven black people who want to vote for him. | ||
| He's just going to say that. | ||
| The Democratic Party, if you're trying to build your coalition out of like yuppies, transsexuals, and like the, you know, the pit bull adopting lesbians, there's not enough of them that vote in the yeah, but it's a faction, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like the left, the left toys. | ||
| Or the left doesn't. | ||
| The left toys are going to lose their mind if Buddha is the nominee. | ||
| Newsom is a little bit like Biden, where it's like, you know, he's not really one of our guys, but he's not ideologically committed to the center in this way. | ||
| And I feel like they're not going to revolt on it. | ||
| I mean, California is the great liberal progressive project. | ||
| It's being governed very mediocrely. | ||
| But, you know, he doesn't rankle them in the same way. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Matt, I wanted to follow up with something you hit on because Speaker Johnson's obviously one of the most important politicians in Washington, D.C. Were you in effect saying that he's sort of a rubber stamp on the mega agenda? | ||
| Is that a good thing? | ||
| And what do you think? | ||
| Yeah, what do you do as speaker? | ||
| Yeah, what are the differences between Donald Trump, Trump, and Mike Johnson on policy? | ||
| Take all the time you need. | ||
| Well, he just does whatever he tells him to. | ||
| Right, right, exactly. | ||
| So my point is that the House is there to simply facilitate the actions of the administration. | ||
| And I think most people in the House would say, at this point, we're fine with that. | ||
| We haven't been well-led by really anyone. | ||
| And we have no unifying principle. | ||
| And one of the frustrating things for me about being in that meeting of 200-plus House Republicans is there was no thing that really united us. | ||
| There were like seven different political parties in the room. | ||
| We were barely a coalition. | ||
| And I think that that doesn't lend to a speaker having the authority to go and say, we're going to do welfare reform. | ||
| We're going to do spending reform, agency reform, sunset, different centralization. | ||
| The weakest Congress has been in American history. | ||
| It's astonishing. | ||
| I mean, it's just like, I mean, We've been struggling to cover Congress of the magazine before the shutdown. | ||
| It's like, what the hell is going on? | ||
| Like, and it's just not very much. | ||
| No, does it make you miss George Santos at all? | ||
| I always feel easily given it. | ||
| It feels like hilarious. | ||
| It goes without saying. | ||
| So, yeah, no, George Santos is back in his camp. | ||
| I can confirm after speaking to his lawyer today that George Santos has been returned from solitary confinement to his more amenable camp. | ||
| He had been in solitary confinement because the FBI was investigating a plot to assassinate George Santos in prison reflected in a series of letters. | ||
| Was it the Iranian? | ||
| What did the Iranians do? | ||
| I know Representative Green said she was lobbying for a pardon for Santos. | ||
| Do you think Santos deserves a pardon? | ||
| I think that George Santos probably will not serve his entire term. | ||
| I think whether it's a commutation or a pardon or some other feature of the justice system, I don't know that George Santos being locked up for seven years was a just result for misusing credit cards on OnlyFans and Hermes. | ||
| And by the way, you know what he spent the Hermes money on partially? | ||
| He bought gifts from members of the steering committee because they tell you when you get to Congress that your fate rests on whether the steering committee will put you on your committees of preference. | ||
| And so for me, I was like, how do I get on the Armed Services Committee? | ||
| And they said, you have to have $150,000 to us in the next 10 days. | ||
| And so I went and did it. | ||
| But for Santos, he was like, I know exactly how to win him over. | ||
| And he bought everybody like an Hermes pocket square. | ||
| And then apparently, that's against a whole lot of really good laws. | ||
| I think it's worth mentioning, too, that the district that he used to represent has been blue ever since. | ||
| And, you know, it was blue before. | ||
| George was the only one that won it. | ||
| He flipped an important seat on Long Island. | ||
| And, you know, once they kicked him out of Congress, they had to deal with an even slimmer majority, which is part and parcel why Congress is so weak right now. | ||
| And Mike Johnson can't do much. | ||
| Do you think that if we had like a 220, like, you know, what is there, like a three-seat? | ||
| 230 or 240? | ||
| I don't think it would be fundamentally different. | ||
| I mean, think we have 222 now. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Are we counting Massey as a Republican or not? | ||
| Because I don't know. | ||
| Often he supports Massey is a Republican. | ||
| Or he's going to go on government principles. | ||
| He's going to get a mega agenda often in Congress and voting with Democrats. | ||
| Well, on what core thing? | ||
| I mean, I guess he had some constitutional questions about the wall that I didn't have. | ||
| But on issues like opposing foreign entanglements and spending reductions, I've been aligned with Massey. | ||
| I think he's pissed the president off enough to get him to endorse his opponent. | ||
| I forgot exactly what bill it was, maybe the previous continuing resolution where he voted against and was holding up. | ||
| They're not going to be able to get rid of Massey, though. | ||
| That's the only thing he got. | ||
| Massey is the only interesting thing that's going on in the Congress. | ||
| I don't know if holding up the mega agenda is interesting, but I'm not very happy about it. | ||
| Like imaginable for more wars overseas. | ||
| Massey should be the heart of the party. | ||
| Well, I think the president's agenda is I think if Thomas Massey ran on a national platform on that platform in a national race, he would lose badly. | ||
| He's not running for president. | ||
| He's not for the House seat. | ||
| But I know I'm saying his positive. | ||
| Why wouldn't he run for Senate? | ||
| That's my question. | ||
| My question to Thomas Massey was: if they're going to spend $20 million against you, why even run for the House again? | ||
| Why not just run for Senate in Kentucky? | ||
| There's no runoff in Kentucky. | ||
| It's first past the post. | ||
| It's McConnell's old seat. | ||
| It's an already fragmented field. | ||
| Thomas Massey could get into a race like that, cobble up enough libertarian, kind of Jeff Yass money and could be a force and could be in the United States Senate. | ||
| And that could be an easier path. | ||
| That could be an easier path than what you describe as a very voting against him, though. | ||
| In his seat, I mean, they haven't really recruited anybody credible. | ||
| We support parts of the mega agenda that include things like mass deportations, having these flip-floppy libertarian-type Republicans in the party is what holds us back. | ||
| And they're essentially a Trojan horse for the left in our party. | ||
| Oh, totally. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Rand Paul, when Rand Paul questions. | ||
| Disavowed. | ||
| And when Thomas Massey tries to hold up the continuing resolutions in Congress, and then when libertarians go and rally at their anti-war rallies with communists, I think there's questions to be had about how much they're truly helping Republicans or just, you know, a Trojan police. | ||
| Massey is against some of the dumbest things in public policy in the last seven years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| COVID stuff, the Iran War. | ||
| You know, I don't agree with him on everything, but like this, this man is so much more interesting. | ||
| He's pretty much the only Congress that I like. | ||
| Him and Marjorie Taylor Greene. | ||
| I would be like the only ones that I agenda. | ||
| You can say the mega agenda all the time. | ||
| Trump changes his mind all the time. | ||
| Speaker Johnson and Thomas Massey have two very different jobs, right? | ||
| Speaker Johnson is trying to get all the Republicans in a caucus on the same page so they could continue to pass legislation that's broadly popular with the Republicans. | ||
| Thomas Massey just needs to play to his base and it's a completely different organization that he has to run. | ||
| You know where I used to fight with him was on the antitrust stuff. | ||
| I mean, fight in good nature. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But on the Judiciary Committee, when I would try to have the back of like the Gail Slater type policy around concentrated corporate power, you know, when I had views that were at times, maybe I was the Democrat. | ||
| I had views aligned with people like Jerry Nadler on the question of antitrust enforcement. | ||
| And Massey was like very reliably with the corporate right against that kind of bull moose energy of our movement. | ||
| He doesn't like the government. | ||
| No, but like it shows that there's nuance to these things. | ||
| Yeah, but I don't think you can paint someone's like pro-MAGA, anti-MAGA. | ||
| Well, the president does. | ||
| And so I think he has the mantle to say so. | ||
| The issue with being in government and being an anti-government guy, it's like it's self-defeating. | ||
| It's like you're elected to effective not get much done. | ||
| Massey spoke at TAX, the American Conservative magazine that I'm the executive director of. | ||
| He spoke at one of our events. | ||
| This is before I was involved in the magazine formally in November of 2016. | ||
| And I distinctly remember this. | ||
| And he was the, I'm not even sure this video is online, but he was the keynote speaker of it. | ||
| And, you know, he talked about how that, you know, of the candidates in the 2016 primary field, that Trump was his second favorite, that he waited a little bit to endorse him because Mr. Trump was very mean to Rand Paul, his good friend, during that race. | ||
| And ideologically, although they hadn't gotten the Rand Paul presidency, Massey was pretty happy with what the result was. | ||
| Compare that with the Mark Levins of the party, the Ted Cruz of the party, even outright never Trumpers who are, quote, on the MAGA agenda on the president's agenda. | ||
| This is MAGA MUSAC. | ||
| It means nothing. | ||
| It's just Pablom. | ||
| Massey actually was there in the grassroots at the beginning 10 years ago. | ||
| Yeah, Rand was his guy, but Trump was his second choice. | ||
| And I think we should defer to someone like that over people who just say they are for this stuff. | ||
| But it's basically MAGA and drag. | ||
| It's fascinating that you have to go back almost a decade. | ||
| We could go off. | ||
| What the president says and thinks right now on the Republican. | ||
| Even things that people in the cabinet are. | ||
| Trump's endorsing his opponent. | ||
| Trump said that he is not MAGA. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| But he actually said, I believe he said it along the lines of him being antithetical to the MAGA agenda. | ||
| And to answer your question from earlier, what is the top issue for the Republicans in the MAGA agenda? | ||
| It's mass deportations. | ||
| And libertarian obstructionists get in the way of achieving that goal. | ||
| And having Republican does Massey take a stance against having on the immigration issue. | ||
| I would say this with some granularity. | ||
| There was one issue that Massey did not like in the House position on the immigration debate. | ||
| He did not like the E-Verify stuff. | ||
| He felt like E-Verify was a step to a government surveillance, control over data thing. | ||
| And so we always had to deal with Massey on that question. | ||
| But he was also initially not too thrilled about using the military money for the wall. | ||
| But I think ultimately— And he's also targeted because of AIPAC and his stance on Israel. | ||
| That's one of the big reasons why there's all this money behind it. | ||
| And I know you're pretty pro-Israel, so that might be one of your problems with him. | ||
| I think Israel's great, but I think based on our conversation and what we've said so far, I think him being antithetical to the MAGA agenda is the bigger issue at hand. | ||
| But I just mean a few of the people. | ||
| The way he's targeted, like with the money. | ||
| With the money on Israel. | ||
| It's not about the MAGA agenda. | ||
| It's about Israel. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I mean. | ||
| That's who he's. | ||
| Okay, so he's weak on the border and immigration policy. | ||
| We haven't established that. | ||
| There's just two things that he had issues with. | ||
| He hasn't made any kind of stink about all of the mass deportation stuff. | ||
| Like you don't see him getting out in front of Congress or getting out in front of the press saying, you know, Donald Trump needs to stop sending the National Guard to Chicago. | ||
| He needs to stop sending the National Guard to the United States. | ||
| Rand Paul suggested that we shouldn't use the military message. | ||
| Rand Paul's different guards. | ||
| Rand Paul is a libertarian. | ||
| Rand Paul is a different person. | ||
| Let me finish. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| But I'm talking. | ||
| I know that you hate libertarians, but the fact of the matter is, if you're talking about one person, stay on the one topic. | ||
| Massey has not said anything about having a problem with using the National Guard to defend ICE while they're trying to carry out their lawful duties. | ||
| He hasn't said anything that I'm aware of about the mass deportations that we've done so far. | ||
| So the idea that he's an obstructionist to probably the most important issue in the quote-unquote MAGA agenda is just that's just ridiculous. | ||
| He's not. | ||
| Also, we just talked for 20 minutes about how irrelevant Congress is. | ||
| Congress isn't blocking the administration from mass deportations. | ||
| the administration's inertia is that i mean that's i mean like if they wanted to i don't know that much is being blocked then i would What is being blocked by the Congress? | ||
| Like, nothing. | ||
| Well, I guess the continuing resolution. | ||
| Yes, okay, yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I mean, I just wanted to run through a couple of examples because I wanted to give specific things. | ||
| So he voted against funding for the border wall and ICE spending, H.R. 3401. | ||
| And then recently in 2023, he was opposed to the Secure the Border Act as well. | ||
| So I'm saying flimsy, weak, obstructionist, libertarian types when it comes to the people. | ||
| We call him flimsy and weak when it comes to standing up in the party. | ||
| Do you care about mass departments? | ||
| I think libertarians have a different agenda. | ||
| Illah just hates libertarians. | ||
| He thinks that they're leftists. | ||
| I don't blame him for that. | ||
| Listen, I agree. | ||
| I stopped calling myself a libertarian. | ||
| Doesn't mean that I'm not sympathetic to a lot of their policies, but I don't call myself a libertarian. | ||
| I think I trust the president on this one. | ||
| I think there's more of a libertarian streak in MAGA. | ||
| At least there was at the beginning because we were like outcasts. | ||
| you supported trump over candidacies like rubio or jeb you there was something like a little off about you and that it we were kind of the the i think he ate rand paul's constituency i think a ram ram ram paul was was what was super hot in 2014 2015 i think uh rand got somewhat unlucky by the rise of isis um i mean if you talk to rand reporters uh sorry rand flax rand operatives they would say basically their problem was that you know quietly maybe rand isn't uh presidential charisma | ||
| And then also Jihad John, the ISIS better guy who got very famous at the time that Rand Paul was on the list of Time magazine. | ||
| But Trump was echoing all of this stuff. | ||
| He just did it in this sort of more nuanced way versus, you know, Rand was obviously associated with his father's pretty down the line. | ||
| Trump was a far better communicator than Rand about Rand. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Trump was far too bad. | ||
| Donald Trump is Donald Trump. | ||
| Trump is far taller than Rand Paul. | ||
| And as a short guy, I know that matters, especially when you're running for president. | ||
| Okay, so I do want to get into – We've got a lot of topics, right? | ||
| I do want to get into what has got the internet going crazy today, and it's these Charlie Kirk text messages. | ||
| Can we get this Candace Owens clip of her going through the texts that originally were questioned as to authenticity but were later authenticated? | ||
| It's going to come through the speaker. | ||
| Volume's down on it. | ||
| No, look on the screen. | ||
| Twitter video. | ||
| In the video. | ||
| I promise. | ||
|
unidentified
|
See, yeah. | |
| There you go. | ||
| So Charlie writes in this group chat, just lost another huge Jewish donor, $2 million a year because we won't cancel Tucker. | ||
| I'm thinking of inviting Candace. | ||
| Somebody writes, oh. | ||
| Charlie writes, Jewish donors play into all of the stereotypes. | ||
| I cannot and will not be bullied like this, leaving me no choice but to leave the pro-Israel cause. | ||
| And somebody writes, donor writes, please do not invite Candace. | ||
| That might feel good short term, but it's not good long term, in my opinion. | ||
| Like all groups, you're going to get a wide variety of opinions. | ||
| That nasty free will thing that God bestowed on us makes life frustrating at times after the dust settles a bit, maybe. | ||
| So again, this is 48 hours before Charlie Kirk was assassinated. | ||
| He was very clear and he was very explicit, and he did not back down in that Hamptons meeting, which they're all lying about, nor in this text thread. | ||
| I'm not going to reveal the names of the other seven. | ||
| Actually, you know what? | ||
| I disagree with myself four seconds ago. | ||
| Let's just throw in Josh Hammer for funsies. | ||
| He's on this chat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So after that hit the interwebs, you had a lot of people questioning whether or not that was legit. | ||
| Andrew Colvett, the person who, other than Charlie Kirk's family, I believe Andrew Colvett probably loved Charlie Kirk more than any other person on the planet Earth, was constantly at his side, his business partner, his co-operative on almost every project. | ||
| Here's Andrew Colvett addressing those text messages. | ||
| Some of the things that have been going around on public, namely about a text, a group text chain that has been made known and released by Candace Owens. | ||
| And I just want to address it head on because, you know, that was a text grab, a screen grab that I had shared with people. | ||
| So it is authentic. | ||
| And I want to go into it because I actually am really excited that the truth is out there. | ||
| I first want to say the reason I didn't share that screen grab publicly is because it was a private exchange and I felt like it didn't necessarily comport with things that were already public. | ||
| I wanted to not betray my friend's trust in that way. | ||
| But I did share it with some people in government because it happened really quick. | ||
| It took 33 hours for authorities to get their suspect. | ||
| And in those first moments, we wanted no stone unturned. | ||
| We wanted to leave nothing unturned. | ||
| So I shared it with a few people. | ||
| Don't know where it went from there, apparently, but here we are. | ||
| So one of the reasons, Blake, that I'm glad to have this now public, it was not mine to share publicly, but one of the criticisms we've received is that we don't care. | ||
| We're not investigating every lead. | ||
| We're not looking under every stone. | ||
| And that somehow we're just like, you know, sweeping things under the rug. | ||
| And when I say that we want justice for Charlie more than anybody else, I really mean it. | ||
| And no stone unturned. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if you want to chime in on that part alone, but I have more to say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so it has been so frustrating to have people blow up about this. | |
| And we've stated, I've certainly stated publicly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The reason I haven't waited on things is I am an eyewitness to events and they've said anything. | |
| That's a thousand. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So the lead there to me is Andrew Colvett, who's there in the moments following Charlie Kirk's death, feels the need to share this message with someone in government with some responsibility to investigate the murder of Charlie. | ||
| What does that tell us? | ||
| Well, I want to ask you something about this because I saw that you had Max Blumenthal on your show recently to talk about his reporting about this. | ||
| And in that text, he talks about the pressure for having Tucker and Candace there. | ||
| And it seemed like in that interview, you suggested that there might have been some pressure about having you speak at turning point events. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Well, first of all, in the moments where Charlie was having those discussions, he was reflecting the very same thing to me. | ||
| He was feeling this dual pressure. | ||
| He had been pro-Israel and had defended Israel's right to exist publicly and forcefully. | ||
| And yet at the same time, he was willing to platform someone like Tucker Carlson, who is a hero, and platform someone like me who I've taken controversial positions on foreign policy matters. | ||
| And there were people who were contributing to this experience for young people who didn't feel like the voices that you would get from a Tucker Carlson or a Mac Gates or a Candace Owens. | ||
| Not that we're a homogenized group, but that those viewpoints would not be helpful for young people to hear. | ||
| Charlie resisted that. | ||
| But I'm telling you, this was a guy who this pained him because I have a different viewpoint on this than Kurt does. | ||
| Kurt said on my program recently, he wants a divorce from the Israel first crowd on the right, that he doesn't believe that these things, if I'm paraphrasing you incorrectly, you can say, I actually want a movement on the right that can exist with people who want to listen to Mark Levin and hold his views, but then also those who don't want to go to war over the Middle East anymore. | ||
| And I actually think that was what Charlie worked so hard to try to curate, keeping these things together. | ||
| And there is a part of me who Charlie was my friend, care deeply for him, you know, that you see this play out publicly. | ||
| And it's not what Charlie would have wanted. | ||
| He would not have wanted his death to be something that like, yeah, that like accelerated the divorce. | ||
| He really was trying to like stay together for the kids, or at least the midterms. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the whole thing is really interesting. | ||
| Like, I remember I watched you on Matt's show when you talked about you wanted a beautiful divorce basically from the Israeli military, right? | ||
| I mean, I think the term is now getting perhaps more than I anticipated. | ||
| But yeah, I think that U.S. foreign policy should be beautifully divorced from Israeli foreign policy. | ||
| But do you think the right in America can exist with the pro-Israel contingent and the contingent that reads the American conservative and questions the depth of this relationship? | ||
| I mean, again, this is like a shell, right? | ||
| So like Netanyahu, who's the prime minister, and this question of what Israel would be without Netanyahu's prime minister, and this question of what Israel is becoming. | ||
| But in the current time, functionally, what I'm offer is this, which is Israel is going to prosecute this forever war. | ||
| It is now heightened from sort of back channeling in Washington, D.C., New York City, and other places to try to get the U.S. involved in Israel's wars. | ||
| That's been going on since the 80s and 90s to outright, this is the whole thing. | ||
| And I remember talking to somebody, this is like a month or two ago, and this is somebody who does not have my foreign policy priors. | ||
| But they were like, you know, the thing that you do raise, Kurt, that I think is fair. | ||
| And this is a person who is, you know, this person is Jewish. | ||
| This person is probably supportive of Israel's campaign against Hamas. | ||
| This person said, though, the thing about the Israel crowd, though, is they ask for everything. | ||
| It is the whole political capital of the administration right now. | ||
| It's not just part of it. | ||
| And so I'm far more skeptical of ability of the Mark Levins and the people who want something more like a divorce to exist within the same movement or the same party. | ||
| Because the reality is, what does President Trump spent a lot of time on? | ||
| Israel-Gaza. | ||
| I think you need a tough measure here, which is cutting U.S. military support for Israel, cutting U.S. diplomatic support for Israel as long as the war goes on, and a red line on really caring about Iran, and then we can talk. | ||
| There are certainly similarities between the Israeli project and the American project, but for now, for the foreseeable future, I don't see a way in which these two societies can really coexist in a way that U.S. can pursue its interests first. | ||
| Can I follow up on something that you said? | ||
| Just one point on the end here. | ||
| You said, like, put off the Iran issue. | ||
| How do you think the United States should react to Iran's perceived nuclear ambitions? | ||
| I mean, at this point, we're so deep in this game. | ||
| But, like, I think the reality is we have an offer on table. | ||
| The offer on the table from the Iranians in April of this year with, you know, in Oman and Muscat with Witcost team, was 3.76% enrichment, which is nowhere near nuclear bomb grade. | ||
| And the U.S. could have accepted that. | ||
| Above-ground inspections were also rumored. | ||
| These are not U.N. inspections. | ||
| These are American inspectors that you can put in the biggest, tough-ass, non-political— Send Mark Levin. | ||
| They can send Mark Zubows. | ||
| They can send Mark Levin. | ||
| They can send Josh Hammer. | ||
| They can go to Iran themselves and take a look around. | ||
| That's a pretty good deal. | ||
| It's a better deal than JCPOA. | ||
| It's a better deal than the Obama deal. | ||
| And I think Trump and the U.S. should take it. | ||
| I think that deal could still be procured. | ||
| And I think that's much better than the track we're on. | ||
| Is that to say that you don't think the United States should allow Iran to ultimately acquire nuclear weapons? | ||
| I think it's a false question because there's just a deal on offer to avoid that. | ||
| Yeah, that would be like the other scenario wouldn't be just letting Iran have a nuclear weapon. | ||
| We're making it way more likely. | ||
| Not dealing with Tehran diplomatically could make them conclude that we have to lunge for some sort of rudimentary bomb. | ||
| We have made every policy choice to make nuclear proliferation more likely. | ||
| So if what we're really talking about is nuclear proliferation, it's the Hawks who are agnostic about whether or not they get the bomb. | ||
| And another thing about that deal, I just want to mention, so apparently the deal that was on the table that they were discussing would have been some sort of consortium for the nuclear enrichment for that 3.6%. | ||
| There wouldn't be any Iranian only. | ||
| It would even have this absurd, basically Israeli invented neoconservative pretext of zero enrichment. | ||
| There was even a sort of hole in the Death Star, if you will, to have zero Iranian-only enrichment. | ||
| It would have been shared with Saudi. | ||
| And possibly. | ||
| The fact that we didn't even explore that further. | ||
| But that was on the agenda for the talks on June 15th. | ||
| You remember there's supposed to be talks between the U.S. and Irish. | ||
| I've heard mixed things about whether or not that could have actually happened. | ||
| But then what happened on June 13th? | ||
| The Israelis bombed them as well. | ||
| The Israelis started bombing them. | ||
| And what did President Trump say on Truth Social when the Israeli jets were in the air? | ||
| He said, oh, I'm committed to a diplomatic solution with the Iranians or something along those lines. | ||
| And according to the reporting, he sent that out when the Israeli jets were in the air, when they were attacking Iran. | ||
| So, you know, this relationship, it's made us complicit in, you know, going back on our word, just destroying our diplomatic credibility like that. | ||
| And I think it just shows how toxic is that. | ||
| Do you think our diplomatic credibility is even judged by our relationship with Iran? | ||
| I mean, I think, I mean, in the region, like, you know, what we, the things that we say and do. | ||
| They all hate Iran in the region. | ||
| Although those Sunni countries around there, they view Iran as a participant in this mischief to some degree. | ||
| They hate Israel too, though. | ||
| Well, I didn't say that. | ||
| I didn't say they didn't. | ||
| But like, you know, I don't know that I buy into the fact that like our chastity in our negotiations is like what all of American diplomatic credibility rests. | ||
| Israel's a useful foil for other countries domestically. | ||
| They can say, well, you know, blame Iran. | ||
| One big difference about these negotiations between when Obama did it is that the Saudis wanted the Iran deal. | ||
| So do they? | ||
| They did not want the Iran deal back under Obama. | ||
| Muslim world was united for the United States. | ||
| So they believe that a deal can be done with Iran. | ||
| The critique that I would often hear in Congress is there's no deal that can be done with them. | ||
| Any deal you do, they will cheat. | ||
| Let us give you the long parade of horribles as to the times when they've deviated from their otherwise stated agreements. | ||
| What is the answer to the argument that the Iranians simply can never be trusted? | ||
| I think that's made up. | ||
| I mean, I think the Obama deal was basically working. | ||
| Trump wanted to have a better deal, so that was what he cited. | ||
| I mean, if you go back to April of 2018, that's when he flushed out McMaster. | ||
| He flushed out Rex Tillerson, and he installed Pompeo in Bolton. | ||
| And I think it's pretty clear that he wanted to leave the Iran deal because Obama signed it. | ||
| And meanwhile, the guys who wrote the policy on it wanted no deal. | ||
| His rationale for leaving the deal was super personalistic and different than Bolton and Pompeo's. | ||
| Trump said he would meet with the Ayatollah. | ||
| This is the guy who wanted to bring the Taliban, I know, not Iran, wanted to bring the Taliban to Camp David. | ||
| His justification was basically he didn't personally negotiate this deal with Iran. | ||
| Now, putting aside whether or not that's a great thing for the president of the United States to do, that's what he did. | ||
| But I think Veil of Ignorance, he wants a deal. | ||
| And I think if you didn't have Israeli subterfuge and neoconservatives within the Republican Party making all of these moves, we would already have a deal. | ||
| Do you think there is any deal that can be done with Iran that would please the more pro-Israel components of the political right? | ||
| So there's a few different things that I feel like we need to talk about to include in the part of the conversation. | ||
| So I feel like with Obama's deal, if I'm not mistaken, there was ultimately a timeline which down the line they were able to achieve a nuclear bomb. | ||
| There was sunset provisions that the deal had to be renegotiated in 10 to 15 years. | ||
| But that would still be the same. | ||
| It would have had the non-proliferation treaty. | ||
| They still would have been a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty. | ||
| Yeah, and I guess there's also the issue of Iranian proxies in the region, which is responsible of the deaths. | ||
| But before we get to the proxies, just on this question of denuclearization, because I think the proxy question is a total. | ||
| No, because if we don't, okay, so the consequences of not having an Iran nuclear deal, though, is significant sanctions on Iran. | ||
| And then if we have those significant sanctions on Iran, they're not in a position to support their proxies as much. | ||
| So that's why this gets tangled up in all of that. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Yeah, would you accept the argument that I actually care about the Iranian proxies considerably less than the Iranian nuclear program? | ||
| And that I might be willing to trade Iranian proxy capability for knowing that there would not be a nuclear Iran. | ||
| Tough question. | ||
| Just as an American. | ||
| Because as an American, I know that these Iranian proxies have the death of more American service members on their hands than any bomb that they'd ultimately acquire. | ||
| I think a tough thing that needs to be done. | ||
| That's how they use it. | ||
| Nuclear bomb? | ||
| I mean, the Iranian nuclear bomb that doesn't exist hasn't killed any American service members, but their proxy groups have already are responsible for the deaths of hundreds, depending on how you count it. | ||
| I think a big question here, too, is how much of a threat is Iran really? | ||
| You are in Congress. | ||
| I'm sure you have more access to information regarding the threat from them. | ||
| When they say things like death to America, and I mean the fact that the Iranian revolution was based on anti-Americanism, how serious should we take their threats? | ||
| Are they just posturing to try to get popularity within their country? | ||
| Or do they mean it when they say these stuff, this stuff, and attack our troops in the Middle East? | ||
| Some people say we shouldn't have them in there to begin with, but. | ||
| I don't even take it all that seriously when people scream in my face. | ||
| I certainly don't take it that seriously when they scream at me across several oceans. | ||
| So an Islamist Islamist screams death to America, and you're not taking that threat seriously? | ||
| We just welcome you. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| You know what I took seriously? | ||
| You know what I took seriously? | ||
| Their intercontinental ballistic missile program. | ||
| And when they abandoned it in 2013, I took them considerably less seriously. | ||
| Like, I actually take the North Koreans a lot more seriously because they have a delivery mechanism. | ||
| They have a re-entry vehicle. | ||
| Even if Iran had a ballistic missile that could shoot at us, they don't have a re-entry vehicle to get a warhead back into the atmosphere. | ||
| And so, like, when I look at their kind of chance and their naughty talk toward us, it just means less to me. | ||
| What about a guy who joined Al-Qaeda after 9-11 to go fight Americans in Iraq and then went over to Syria to found Al-Qaeda in Syria, and then he becomes the president, and we welcome him to New York City. | ||
| Like, do you have a problem with that? | ||
| That's just so Syria, by the way. | ||
| I mean, Syria is the country. | ||
| I don't think my Neil Connery is going to go there. | ||
| Like, I don't know. | ||
| No, no, I'm just saying. | ||
| Are you suggesting that I support the president of Syria? | ||
| No, I'm just saying that the talking points about death to America, their proxies being a threat to us, like it's just clearly being used to push an agenda when, on the other hand, in Syria, we've literally not thinking this is the same. | ||
| We literally just rolled out the red carpet for the leader of al-Qaeda in Syria. | ||
| Do you think I'm a big fan of that? | ||
| No, I'm just saying. | ||
| I'm just saying that the talking points. | ||
| Because remember Israel's bombing Syria still, even though this new guy in office. | ||
| Yeah, even though they helped the regime change and celebrated it, and Netanyahu took credit. | ||
| So I don't know what your angle is. | ||
| No, I'm just saying that the reason why they wanted to oust Assad was because Assad was an ally of Iran. | ||
| There was the weapons pipeline to Hezbollah, and they would prefer an al-Qaeda guy in there over an ally of Iran. | ||
| I mean, that's clearly true. | ||
| I mean, that's just good old-fashioned Shia Sunni politics, right? | ||
| I mean, the Saudis are thrilled with this guy in Syria because they view him as more closely aligned to Saudi than all the Gulf countries. | ||
| This is very normative. | ||
| Do you think that Iran shouldn't be able to acquire nuclear weapons? | ||
| Or do you think the president should have gone into that nuclear deal with whatever percentage of the country? | ||
| I don't know how we think we're going to stop any of these Gulf countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. | ||
| Especially security guarantees. | ||
| That's what it's been. | ||
| I kind of think that in our lifetime, Saudi's going to have a nuclear weapon. | ||
| The UAE will have a nuclear weapon. | ||
| Qatar will have a nuclear weapon. | ||
| Iran will have a nuclear weapon. | ||
| I think the era of proliferation in the Middle East is upon us. | ||
| I don't celebrate that. | ||
| I'm not cheering for it. | ||
| But when you look at the democratization of talent around this space, you're not going to be able to keep that amount of money away from that amount of desire to have the deterrent that a nuclear weapon affords. | ||
| The Israelis cooked up the proliferation issue in the 90s. | ||
| You don't think all those countries acquire nuclear weapons? | ||
| I think if we can get a durable deal with the Iranians, that they won't proliferate. | ||
| I think if Netanyahu is allowed to toss over a country again, then Istanbul is going to panic, Saudi's going to panic, Egypt's going to panic, and I think then you will see a launch of the bomb. | ||
| The Saudi sign that defense deal with Pakistan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is the heavy nuclear game. | ||
| We've already seen the results of it. | ||
| So if we actually care about nuclear non-proliferation, it is incumbent upon us to do a reasonable deal with Iran. | ||
| If we're saying F it, then I mean, what do you guys think? | ||
|
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I'm not saying F it. | |
| No, wait, you're like, yeah. | ||
| I mean, if the idea is F it, everybody gets nuclear weapons, maybe. | ||
| I mean, what about Ukraine getting a nuclear weapon? | ||
| We wouldn't have to do it. | ||
| No, you're terrifying. | ||
| I'm like, Ukraine should have a nuclear weapon. | ||
| Okay, you seem more terrified about Ukraine having a nuclear weapon than you did potentially Iran getting a nuclear weapon. | ||
| A lot of times missing from the conversation, too, is the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons and dude. | ||
| No, but no, seriously, then we would not need to send weapons to Ukraine, and they would have a credible deterrent if they had a nuclear weapon, right? | ||
| So what's the logic? | ||
| There are Republicans in Congress who hold that view. | ||
| There are Republicans in Congress who do believe Lindsey Grant's not going to be able to do that. | ||
| We should create a strategic force for Ukraine that includes a nuclear component. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think we should. | ||
| Well, I don't think we should do this with any of these countries. | ||
| I don't think any of us have conversation over. | ||
| Matt seems to be saying that he believes nuclear proliferation is inevitable. | ||
| For rich countries, not Ukraine. | ||
| But yeah, but it's not that. | ||
| But I don't think the argument is the countries that like you know had World Cup if they had the ball if you don't have World Cup bribe money. | ||
| I don't know that it's like guaranteed that you'd get a nuclear weapon. | ||
| But if you knew, you're probably gonna have some. | ||
| I mean, they have real military capabilities, right? | ||
| I mean, they were and they had a nuclear program 40 years ago. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| We got them to abandon it. | ||
| But I think it is a false question, you know, because there is a deal on the table where we could enter with Iran and that they're not going to get a nuclear weapon. | ||
| Yeah, I think the voice is a conversation having the deal. | ||
| I think the president is more informed than you guys are on the specific nuclear deal, and I think he's getting a bad deal. | ||
| I think, I mean, you guys may think otherwise, but you acknowledge he wants a deal. | ||
| Trump wants an Iran deal. | ||
| Yes, he wants a deal. | ||
| And what would be the core features of that deal? | ||
| That's a question that Trump could strike with Iran that you could support. | ||
| I don't think they should be able to achieve the nuclear weapons. | ||
| So you have to take ultimate achievement of that off the table. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a term. | ||
| Ultimate achievement. | ||
| And the supporting of proxy group needs to be a key aspect of this as well. | ||
| It's not a nuclear deal. | ||
| It's not a nuclear deal. | ||
| Is that what I'm saying? | ||
| So is every Shia who launches a weapon or sets off a roadside bomb being funded by Iran? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But every Shia group that gets weapons from Iran, Iran sends them off. | ||
| As the Houthis, wait, you know, the Houthis. | ||
| No, I know they're backed by Iran. | ||
| Has been not only backed by the, like, they're warming up. | ||
| They're going to continue to get moved, though. | ||
| This is not a nuclear deal. | ||
| It's just like until the Houthis make their missile suicide on television, we don't have a deal. | ||
| Until women don't have to wear a burqa. | ||
| They're not wearing them in Tehran anymore. | ||
| Like they're not, like, since the new president in June, if you talk to anyone who goes in and out of Iran, they're basically not wearing them. | ||
| I mean, Iran is a more secular country in a lot of ways than Saudi. | ||
| I mean, I think it's even close. | ||
| What about ballistic missiles? | ||
| Would you want them to have to limit their missile program? | ||
| Yeah, I don't think. | ||
| Would you accept the deal without that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, then it's not going to happen. | ||
| And they just told out the U.S. and Israel. | ||
| We will accept total surrender. | ||
| It wouldn't be total surrender because, guess what? | ||
| We're not doing regime change, and they're lucky that's not happening. | ||
| Look at the Doro treatment that he's about to get right now. | ||
| I think they should know that they're on thin ice. | ||
| I think they're aware. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| There is a religious gerontocracy atop their society. | ||
| And they, in order to maintain some level of power, have to have some stability for their regime. | ||
| I'm not justifying that, but asking them to throw over all of their cars, to use the president's term, is a non-starter. | ||
| They'd rather go to war. | ||
| And so basically, the hardline position is setting up a deal so bad that we're going to go to war. | ||
| And I think the war is way too risky. | ||
| I think it's not going to happen nationally pretty soon. | ||
| And I think we should avoid it. | ||
| What was that, Dave? | ||
| I think another war is probably coming pretty soon. | ||
| You know who one of the biggest forces was against extended involvement in that war? | ||
| Charlie Kirk. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You know, I mean, and I say that not as an observer of it, but as a participant, because Charlie was the tip of the spear in this effort to showcase to the White House what would happen to the right if we were in some extended war with Iran. | ||
| Charlie believed that so much of what he had built in getting disaffected young men to show up, register to vote, vote for Donald Trump, would be thrown asunder if we went into some multi-year war as we had been in the 90s and early aughts. | ||
| And he was so specific about it, he would coordinate when Steve Bannon would go to the White House, when Tucker Carlson would go, when he would go, when I would call, when other people would call. | ||
| Charlie was such an effective operator that if he knew that he or I would be on television at a particular time discussing this issue and wanting our views to be understood by the president, he would do everything he could to get the people on Air Force One or in the Oval Office to flip it to RAV or One American News to absorb those messages, sometimes delivered by the two of you on my program. | ||
| And I wonder what's going to happen without Charlie to hold that view and to express that view in what I think are probably pretty likely coming hostilities. | ||
| Do you think hostilities are coming? | ||
| No, I think Israel mogged the country's Iran and their proxies sufficiently. | ||
| I think actually on the anniversary of October 7th, obviously we're talking now, but like the two years since then, obviously two years ago was one of the most terrific days in Israel's modern history, a bunch of war crimes. | ||
| I think it was like 800 civilians and 900 not civilians in Israel were murdered by Hamas. | ||
| But since then, how effective Israel was at taking out the Hezbollah? | ||
| And then, I mean, in their exchange with Iran, I feel like Israel's gotten the better of that with the toppling of Al-Assad Assad in Syria, who was an ally, some would say, a proxy of the Iranian regime. | ||
| The Houthis have been hampered down. | ||
| Yeah, they preferred the Al-Qaeda guy over Assad. | ||
| So hold on. | ||
| This is important, though. | ||
| This is important. | ||
| So if you're wrong, if you're wrong, though, if the hostilities re-emerge in, say, the next 90 to 120 days, will you support them? | ||
| Or are you opposing them? | ||
| Well, because you just said they got mogged. | ||
| So there's no crisis. | ||
| There's no crisis anymore. | ||
| So why did the Israeli government? | ||
| Well, I think a lot of people from your foreign policy persuasion like to fear-monger around things that happen around these situations that don't pan out. | ||
| So, for example, a lot of people said during this exchange that it was going to be World War III was breaking out now, that they were exchanging. | ||
| There's going to be boots on the ground, but none of that actually came to. | ||
| Without Charlie Kirk, it might have. | ||
| Yeah, and war was ultimately. | ||
| Yeah, they cut it short. | ||
| Israel did not win that war. | ||
| You don't think Iran was got the better of that exchange? | ||
| They weren't hitting anything. | ||
| They got the better. | ||
| They killed more people. | ||
| Your impression is that. | ||
| Did you hear what I said? | ||
| I said they killed more people, but they were striking Israel to the last minute. | ||
| I mean, and they did some serious damage. | ||
| Israel has been hit by that before. | ||
|
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You think that's better if that's not. | |
| I think that they were running on interceptors. | ||
| I think the ceasefire at the end of the day was brokered on Israel's behalf, not on Iran's. | ||
| I just think with the amount of enemies of the state of Israel and proxies of the Iranian regime that Israel was able to kill since October 7th is something that they should be really proud of. | ||
| I didn't relax. | ||
| You don't need to freak out over there. | ||
| I want to take this full circle, though. | ||
| It seemed as though some people after Charlie Kirk's death are we don't know what Charlie Kirk thought, but they seem to try to imply that he was progressing or growing in a certain direction with his narratives towards Israel. | ||
| As I understand, you used to be relatively more pro-Israel than you are now. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit more about how you grew into that position as somebody who was very pro-Israel and what the situation was like in Congress for somebody who was, and then now on the outside who is, I don't want to call you, I don't know if you'd say anti or just less supportive. | ||
| Yeah, I question the depth and the degree of the relationship now, and I have migrated on the issue. | ||
| And by the way, I think a lot of young Americans have. | ||
| I think Charlie Kirk's migration on the issue, my own migration on the issue, tracks where a lot of Americans are. | ||
| And for me, initially, I resented the fact that there was no appreciation for nuance. | ||
| Like if you asked any questions about any decision of the Israeli government in any place regarding settlements, regarding Gaza, regarding whatever, you were like, you had deviated from the script. | ||
| And I just, in any policy area, I had resentment over that. | ||
| And then I saw the way the APAC worked. | ||
| And that was weird for like a country lawyer like me. | ||
| I remember my first APAC reception and like your fundraiser tells you you have to go and your chief of staff tells you you have to go. | ||
| Your committee chairman all tell you you have to go. | ||
| And you get there and you wear this name badge. | ||
| And I remember there's a QR code on it. | ||
| And what you were supposed to do was go talk to donors. | ||
| And then if they liked you, they scanned your QR code to make a donation like on the spot. | ||
| And so this, can you just imagine how demoralizing that is to be told that your job for the next several hours to go chat people up, hoping they would scan you like a can of tomato soup on the way out of the meeting? | ||
| I mean, it's like literally purchasing. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And so I saw that and I was like, wow, that is so freaking weird. | ||
| And then, you know, I was in Israel. | ||
| I went multiple times and I did not like the fact that I found someone in my room rooting around in my stuff that should not have been there at the King David Hotel when I came back to my room when no one was expecting me to be back in my room. | ||
| Presumably Israeli launches. | ||
| Well, I don't know who it was. | ||
| I just thought, like, this is weird. | ||
| All of these things combined are odd. | ||
| And then the policy outgrowth seems to be an obsession about the Middle East that has not served my generation well. | ||
| I just don't think we're good at it. | ||
| And that is not a criticism even of Israel. | ||
| Like, we've been talking about Syria. | ||
| We had battles in Syria where forces funded by the Pentagon were fighting forces funded by the CIA. | ||
| If you just wait long enough in Syria, whoever you're giving money to becomes the enemy and whoever you're fighting becomes your friend. | ||
| And I think that increasingly Israel views the world this way. | ||
| There used to be like two dominant capital markets in the world, New York and London. | ||
| And Israel felt like they were very comfortable under that dynamic. | ||
| And now we live in this world where the most important capital markets are in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi and Dubai and Doha. | ||
| And I don't love that. | ||
| I didn't cause that to happen. | ||
| But I believe Netanyahu is trying to externalize his conflict. | ||
| I believe he has serious domestic problems. | ||
| And the way around those problems is to just sort of send the Middle East awash and chaos and regime change and maybe some war migrants moving around. | ||
| And if all of that happens, then there will be a reversion to the mean. | ||
| London and New York will run things again, and we won't have to deal with the pesky emergence of these Arab markets. | ||
| If I could follow up with you, it seems as though there is a growing anti-Israel sentiment, definitely on the left. | ||
| Also on the right. | ||
| What do you think is fueling this anti-Israel sentiment? | ||
| I think that with young people, it's more driven by age than anything else, more than by politics, more than anything. | ||
| So what is it about young people that is really causing this change? | ||
| And I think that whenever you tell young people there's certain things you can't say or can't talk about or can't do, there is like a natural resistance. | ||
| Like this is our ideological curfew that we're being given by the boomers that we're not allowed to question the U.S.-Israel relationship. | ||
| And there's natural reaction to that. | ||
| Like even the whole BDS thing, all we'd heard on the right is, oh, BDS is anti-Semitism. | ||
| We have to be against BDS. | ||
| BDS is the worst thing in the world. | ||
| And then Mike Huckabee gets mad at the interior minister in Israel because he's not approving visas for touring Zionist Christians. | ||
| And Huckabee says, my response to this is to tell people in the United States to cancel their trips, to stop sending money to these groups. | ||
| And I may respond by punishing the Israelis by not approving their visas to the United States, which sounded a whole lot like boycott the trip, divest your donation and sanction with visas. | ||
| And so we went from saying this was anti-Semitism to watching Mike Huckabee become the leader of the BDS movement. | ||
| I mean, the left-wing view in the world is that the big villains of the current conflicts are the Russians and the Israelis. | ||
| But I will say this for the Russians. | ||
| They're not asking anybody else to pay for it. | ||
| They're not asking anybody else to have diplomatic cover for it. | ||
| They're not asking anybody else to handle the refugee problem that will happen as a result of their actions. | ||
| Israel is. | ||
| Israel is asking for endless U.S. financial and military support. | ||
| It's asking for unending diplomatic cover. | ||
| I mean, cover the United Nations. | ||
| The U.S. is Israel's Batman, effectively, what is supposed to be a global forum for reducing conflict. | ||
| Additionally, for any of Israel's major objectives, which basically undeclared regime change in Iran, they need the United States. | ||
| They stated that openly. | ||
| And additionally, if they're not going to just murder everybody in Gaza, which I think they still could, most of the real plans are a U.S. redevelopment plan in Gaza or basically a U.S. ethnic cleansing by moving all of these people on boats to places like Libya or Madagascar. | ||
| The Israeli Navy is nothing to really write home about. | ||
| It would have to be the U.S. Navy. | ||
| And when you're talking about subverting the MAGA agenda, quote unquote, and talking about how mass deportations aren't happening, relatively because of Thomas Massey, I think we are far less likely to do mass deportations in the United States because we are spending all of our time doing mass deportations in Gaza. | ||
| That's odd given the biggest supporters of the president whose agenda is for our Zionists, of course. | ||
| I did want to have a biggest supporters of the president who pushed the agenda for Zionist. | ||
| Who pushes the other than Joe Biden? | ||
| Part of the MAGA agenda that people voted for was to get out of the Middle East. | ||
| No one is more America first than Zionists. | ||
| I mean, it's quite the claim. | ||
| Donald Trump went to South Carolina and called George W. Bush a war criminal over these wars in Iraq. | ||
| He was like, he was more Rand Paul than Rand Paul. | ||
| He would call Rand Paul and say, I'm more libertarian than you are. | ||
| Do you think like the sort of like laid-off glass factory worker in Toledo who voted for Obama Biden twice in 2008 and 2012, but then pushed the button for Mr. Trump in 2016 was like, ah, I am just excited to get a real Zionist in there. | ||
| No, I said some of his biggest donors. | ||
| You said his biggest donors and supporters. | ||
| I'll let you amend the record, but you did not say some of it. | ||
| You said his biggest. | ||
| You said the vanguard of the MAGA support. | ||
| I will say that because of the Trump campaign is different. | ||
| I'll just say that. | ||
| Well, Elon was the biggest funder of the campaign. | ||
| It wasn't the Edel Census time? | ||
| I think Elon's work in Pennsylvania actually got a lot more attention. | ||
| Zionist money isn't big enough. | ||
| But I'm just saying it is against the MAGA agenda when it comes to the grassroots, like the people that came out and voted for Trump, especially the young people. | ||
| They want nothing to do with these wars in the Middle East. | ||
| But the problem is that wanting to get out of the Middle East and also be this supportive of Israel just doesn't compute. | ||
| You know, talking about Syria in 2019 when Trump said he was going to stay, because he was initially going to leave, but then he decided to say, everybody remembers he said, I'm going to stay and secure the oil. | ||
| That's one thing I always appreciate about Trump is, you know, he says things like that. | ||
| But another thing he said was that he was staying there because Israel asked him to. | ||
| So this is something that, you know, Israel and Jordan. | ||
| And why do we give military aid to Jordan? | ||
| Why do we give military aid to Egypt? | ||
| It's like you're never going to get out of that region if you're like – Well, why not? | ||
| Why can't we just be honest with all of our friends? | ||
| I don't believe that we have to shun Israel in order to achieve some sort of foreign policy balance. | ||
| I think we just have to say, okay, Prime Minister Netanyahu, you have to go home and face the music with your own domestic politics without starting war with your neighbors. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I don't think Israel needs to be BDS'. | ||
| And I think we are entering the zone in which Israeli security is more precarious because of what they're doing. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think, look, I got to be like a squish on this, but I think there was basically an era of Israeli politics where a two-state solution was super possible. | ||
| And Netanyahu's entire political career has basically, I mean, he let his opponent get murdered in order to become Israeli prime minister, basically on the issue of two-state solutions. | ||
| He just said recently he visited a settlement and he said, I kept my promise. | ||
| Remember, I was here 20 years ago. | ||
| I said I would never allow a Palestinian state. | ||
| Well, here we are. | ||
| Yeah, so I think it's much more open about it. | ||
| I think the heightening of contradictions on that is actually what could actually be the most could usher into the mise of Israel. | ||
| And if Israel doesn't exist in 80 years, it'll be remembered that Netanyahu, not anybody else, was the greatest enemy of the Israeli people. | ||
| I want to talk a little bit more about the domestic situation, re-Israel, and how Americans feel about Israel writ large. | ||
| I definitely agree that there is a growing segment of the right that is anti-Israel. | ||
| But I think a bigger concern for Israelis should be the growing dissent within the Democrat Party and the far left. | ||
| And why is that? | ||
| I mean, I think you guys could agree to that, right? | ||
| Israel is increasingly more. | ||
| I think among the far leftists, Israel is less popular. | ||
| And why is that? | ||
| I think the reason for that is because Israel is right-wing-coated, and they believe that Israel is a settler, colonialist society. | ||
| And because of that reason, Israel is irredeemable. | ||
| What if it's just whiteness? | ||
| It is. | ||
| What if it's just that? | ||
| I think it's also just seeing pictures and videos of children ripped apart by bombs every day. | ||
| You can say that it's not a good idea. | ||
| I mean, this is just something we haven't addressed yet. | ||
| So we'll address it after. | ||
| So among the left, Israel is white and right-wing-coated, and they believe that they are a white settler colonialist state in the vein of how America was set up. | ||
| So I feel like for many far-leftists and socialists, it's a self-loathing of their Americanism that helps evolve into anti-Israelism. | ||
| In our country, the socialist left is the biggest constituency for anti-Israel people. | ||
| And I feel like isolationist types should keep in mind that who they're allying with in this case are oftentimes people who are anti-white, pro-immigration, hate ICE, are usually Antifa, and are far-left agitators. | ||
| And I think they're making causes. | ||
| So I've seen that. | ||
| Pardon me, one more sentence. | ||
| I've seen this manifest in how the libertarians are willing to have rallies with literal communists in the vein of being anti-war. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I have no common cause with communists. | ||
| I think it's bad to have common cause with communists. | ||
| I'm an ardent anti-communist, as Phil would say. | ||
| So I think we really need to take that piece in mind when we see people on the right willing to work with these people on the left who literally hate their guts. | ||
| If it's something wrong and something evil, then we should oppose it no matter who opposes it. | ||
| I mean, again, what we've seen over the past two years is like mass murder live streamed, and you can justify it and argue for it. | ||
| But at the end of the day, it's a foreign country. | ||
| It's not in our interest to support this far back. | ||
|
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Americans in America hate Israel, not because of the recent war in Gaza. | |
| You do way too much. | ||
| If you don't align with what I want, then you're aligning with the bad guys. | ||
| You do that with libertarians. | ||
| You're doing that right now with the situation in Gaza. | ||
| And that is nothing off the list. | ||
| That's not how normal people think further than Thomas Massey. | ||
| That's not how normal people think. | ||
| He's not. | ||
| Okay, look, who else is in Congress? | ||
| Thomas Massey is a one-of-one as far as he goes in Congress. | ||
| You allied with people on like, you know, you consider the far left in Congress on certain issues. | ||
| Yeah, well, like the stock trading issue is a classic case that's presenting right now. | ||
| I don't believe members of Congress should trade stock. | ||
| It turns out that the communists, in some cases, are unbought communists. | ||
| They sincerely are communists, and no one is paying them to hold those positions. | ||
| And just like I resent people that hold positions for money, they resent that. | ||
| And so I am actually willing to work with the communists to ban congressional stock trading. | ||
| Do you know who opposes that? | ||
| President Trump, of course. | ||
| I mean, he attacked Hawley. | ||
| I think there was one particular version of the bill. | ||
| President Trump has come out in favor of upset heading. | ||
| But he has come out in favor of congressional stock trading bans on a number of occasions, including recently. | ||
| And your stuff, like, again, we covered this a lot at anti-war.com, the bills you would introduce to pull out a certain conflict, Somalia, Syria, and the people that would align with you. | ||
| You would have some Republicans, but also some progressive Democrats. | ||
| So I don't think there's anything wrong with working. | ||
| I don't know why you can't work with people when you agree and not work with them when you disagree. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's exactly what we should do. | ||
| The idea that, oh, look, if you don't agree with me about this particular topic, then you're just against the entire agenda. | ||
| I totally reject that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, obviously, American voters in some levels are basically a principle, are prisoners of the first past-the-post system, that we have this ridiculous two-party system. | ||
| I don't think we should do anything to strengthen that system. | ||
| It's already enough of a bind as it is. | ||
| Yeah, my politics are antithetical to the left. | ||
| I'm an anti-leftist, and I don't think you should. | ||
| What is the left? | ||
| Communists, literal communists rallying a lot of people. | ||
| One of the libertarians are anti-war rallys. | ||
| I'm giving you a specific example. | ||
| Give me a example of a libertarian party. | ||
| The Libertarian Party is not communist. | ||
|
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That is the most absurd, ridiculous thing that you say. | |
| Angela Merkel held a rally for liberal. | ||
| Not Angela McClellan. | ||
| Well, no libertarian Angela Merkel. | ||
| She was like the spokesperson for the Libertarian. | ||
| Yeah, I went to that rally. | ||
| I was talking about communists with a congressperson. | ||
| This is a problem. | ||
| No, hold on, hold on. | ||
| Angela Maharaj. | ||
| Let Angela McCartney, who used to be the LP's chair. | ||
| Go ahead, make your point. | ||
| Is having anti-war rallies with communist groups. | ||
| You will never find me rallying alongside any communists. | ||
| I'm staunchly an anti-communist. | ||
| And I don't think you should. | ||
| Broken Clock is right. | ||
| So you're citing a third party, the nation's largest third party, Libertarian Party. | ||
| So there's that. | ||
| But doing an alleged event with literal communists. | ||
| I would like, well, I'd like to see. | ||
| I'm pretty sure they were. | ||
| They were at the rally, right? | ||
| Were they a liberal communist? | ||
| I was there. | ||
| There was some communist groups there. | ||
| Liberal communists. | ||
|
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All right, fine. | |
| All right, just making sure. | ||
| So what's an example in mainstream politics where, quote, small L libertarians are aligning with literal communists. | ||
| Like I have never seen Thomas Matthews. | ||
| Well, the Libertarian Party, right? | ||
| I mean, I guess you're right. | ||
| Is Thomas Matthew Party? | ||
| No, he's not. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| No. | ||
| He's like a cardinal. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I listen to their events. | ||
| I mean, I think I demonstrated my point. | ||
| Don't accept the Libertarian Party Convention. | ||
| Does that make him a literal communist? | ||
| No. | ||
| Does that make you vague? | ||
| I think the president spoke at a lot of... | ||
| Let me make a point. | ||
| Let me make a point. | ||
| Because I work on a single-issue project, anti-war.com. | ||
| We run stuff. | ||
| My boss always says, my boss, Eric Garris, who founded the site, he's always proud of some of the examples. | ||
| Like when the site first started, Pat Buchanan was a columnist, and so was Daniel Ellsberg. | ||
| And they hated each other. | ||
| But we were publishing both of them. | ||
| And so from my experience, working with people kind of all over the political spectrum on one issue, I mean, I think it's good for the country because you'll have people on the left who think like libertarian or people on the right are just monsters. | ||
| And obviously you get that vice versa. | ||
| You get to know each other. | ||
| You get to understand that like your political opponents aren't necessarily evil. | ||
| And then it changes people's mind and it can bring people closer to our ideas. | ||
| So I think there's a lot of positives to this. | ||
| And optically having a rally and people with the hammer and sickle there, that doesn't look good. | ||
| But single issue stuff in general, I think, is a net positive thing. | ||
| Especially when it's something as evil as what Donald is happening again as the party's standard bearer, this is not a doctrinaire Republican. | ||
| He's never been his entire life. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, so the idea that we're going to start dividing, like, I don't think even he wants that. | ||
| No, I mean, look, Donald Trump is a pragmatist if nothing else, right? | ||
| He's not ideological. | ||
| He will change his opinion if the results on the ground are not proving what he thought, whether it be tariffs, whatever the situation is, if it's not getting Donald Trump positive, if it's not getting actual positive results for the American people, right? | ||
| Now, maybe he misinterprets data or whatever, but if in his estimation it's not producing good results for the American people, he will change his policy. | ||
| There is nothing that Donald Trump wants more than to go down in history as a positive, good president, and you don't do that by making the American people miserable. | ||
| You can hate Donald Trump. | ||
| The left is always going to hate him. | ||
| That's perfectly, that is absolutely obvious, right? | ||
| That is self-evident. | ||
| But the idea that Donald Trump is trying to hurt America or trying to do things that are bad for America or that he won't change a policy if it's not proving to do what he thought, that's ridiculous. | ||
| He's not an ideological guy. | ||
| He's never been an ideological guy. | ||
| That's why he went to the Republican Party to run in the first place. | ||
| He saw, I think Trump saw the Republican Party as just an acquisition target, like an asset that had been put into such atrophy, like with the likes of Mitt Romney and John McCain, that he was like, I can just do a hostile takeover of this asset and I can improve its value. | ||
| Very, very business approach. | ||
| Serge, you have the Parscale article that I want to talk about. | ||
| I want to continue the points you were making about the domestic reshaping of perspectives on U.S.-Israel policy. | ||
| And there was this article we had where I guess Israel had filed a FARA form that they were spending $4.1 million to target American Christians. | ||
| Oh, there it is. | ||
| Yeah, that's Dave. | ||
| That's Dave's piece. | ||
| Dave, why don't you tell us about? | ||
| Yeah, so this is something that the Israeli foreign ministry itself is actually funding this. | ||
| And the budget is up to $4.1 million. | ||
| And they're calling it the largest Christian church geo-fencing campaign in U.S. history. | ||
| Essentially, what it is, is targeted digital ads targeting American Christians. | ||
| They're going to geo-fence Protestant churches. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they're going to plow message into those churches. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And specifically pro-Israel anti-Palestinian message, according to the documents. | ||
| And so this is a targeted propaganda campaign at American Christians. | ||
| They also have this plan to create an October 7th mobile experience, like a trailer that's going to be designed by some Hollywood people. | ||
| I don't know exactly what that's going to be, but this is a big information campaign because of what we are seeing, the growing skepticism among American Christians and evangelicals are historically a very strong base for Israel. | ||
| But not everybody is like a Christian Zionist in the sense that they believe they have a theological reason to support Israel, like Mike Huckabee. | ||
| So this, I think, really shows the desperation. | ||
| So this is a foreign country specifically targeting American Christians. | ||
| Do you have a problem with that, Phil? | ||
| You're okay with it? | ||
| $4.1 million just doesn't seem like that much money. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, when it comes to the grand scheme of things, like the whole U.S., it doesn't seem like a lot of money. | ||
| I mean, if they're going after Protestants, they're going after churches that are like in between Buffalo Wild Wings and like the shoe spot. | ||
| So I don't really care a whole lot, to be honest with you. | ||
| But those are just the FARA filings. | ||
| Yeah, that's just the FARA. | ||
| These are so overt, they had to register. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's an important point because Israel, the way AIPAC is set up, there's a lot of lobbying that goes on that is not reported like this. | ||
| But what I think it shows, you know, it's not so much the scale, the number, although I do think, you know, they're going to spend 3.25 million over five months on this. | ||
| Like, that's a pretty big budget. | ||
| I don't think that they're going to get traction posts. | ||
| I don't think it's going to work. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think they're going to have traction. | ||
| I really don't think that spending money on ads is going to help Israel because the internet has already done such a such a thing. | ||
| But they're betting we're wrong. | ||
| I mean, I mean, obviously. | ||
| Israel's falling victim to grifter influencers is what I'm seeing in this story. | ||
|
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I honestly think they would be very finally Israel has been victimized. | |
| I think this shows that there is some desperation here and they see that they're losing. | ||
| They would be better off not doing this messaging, in my opinion, at all. | ||
| I mean, like, to merge threads, I mean, that guy, the number of times that he had to deny that they had anything to do with Charlie Crook's death fed into the narrative that they did. | ||
| I'm not asserting that, but it struck everybody as very suspicious. | ||
| Wasn't it weird that they are failure if nothing? | ||
| They waved around? | ||
| Yeah, Netanyahu had this letter from Kirk that he waved around constantly in the moments after his death and then hasn't released the whole thing. | ||
| And what I've heard is there's a great deal more context in that letter. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| I thought he put out the whole thing. | ||
| I do think that the idea of... | ||
| It was just excerpts that he put out? | ||
| Yeah, no, I'd heard some suggest that there was more information. | ||
| Well, it is strange. | ||
| I mean, that's why this conversation is important, because Netanyahu immediately tried to make him basically a martyr for the pro-Israel cause. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So this conversation definitely needs to happen. | ||
| He was a warrior for the West, a warrior against Muslims. | ||
| He said all these things. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But I agree with you guys that Netanyahu did that, but the idea that the Israelis had something to do with his murder. | ||
| No, I'm not arguing. | ||
| No, I argue. | ||
| I'm not saying that you are, but there's a lot of people that are saying that on the internet. | ||
| I think they're fascinating. | ||
| They failed PR. | ||
| Why do you think they should be fast? | ||
| What's your basis to disprove that? | ||
| Well, I think that, well, I mean, Tyler's dad turned him in. | ||
| The kid's dad turned him in. | ||
| Like, the gun was his father's. | ||
| If there's new information or information that I don't have an idea. | ||
| I'm not suggesting there's any evidence that Israel had any involvement, but I just think that to make any determinations about the evidence seems misguided. | ||
| I wouldn't make any determination about anyone's culpability or not culpability until I full story. | ||
| I do think it's interesting that Andrew Colvett, one of the people closest to Charlie Kirk in the world, felt like one of the things he needed to share with authorities in the moments after Charlie Kirk's death was this rather raucous exchange about money being withheld and Charlie saying he's leaving the pro-Israel. | ||
| I mean, look, I don't have any insider information. | ||
| So if there is something that comes out that says that Israel was involved, then hey, I'm wrong, right? | ||
| No big deal. | ||
| But as of right now, I don't see anything or I haven't seen anything. | ||
| It speaks to the civilization, the society they put together that so many people suspect them. | ||
| I mean, they are. | ||
| I mean, this is this. | ||
| I feel like the people that are most vocal about that are kind of knee-jerk anti-Israel anyways, though. | ||
| Like, they're going to be like— But, I mean, Israel—I mean, this is in the Ronan Bergman book, Rise and Kill First. | ||
| I mean, Israel has killed through assassination more people through assassination than any Western country since World War II. | ||
| Yeah, but who are they killing? | ||
| Enemies of Israel, presumably. | ||
| And was Charlie Kirk an enemy of Israel? | ||
| Well, the conspiracy theory asserts that he was becoming one. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, that's the new. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I think anti-Israel opportunists are using this as an opportunity to just try to imply that David Ivan is obviously responsible. | ||
| I think Candace Owens is playing into this because it's an opportunistic way for her to be anti-Israel. | ||
| There's also a very influential Arab comedian called Basim Yusuf, who he's playing the comedian card where it's like, oh, I'm just some clown, although he's spreading misinformation about Israel being responsible for the people. | ||
| There's a lot of evidence that Tyler was the person who murdered Netanyahu. | ||
| If you've got people like Nick Fuentes that are saying, no, I don't think so. | ||
| I mean, and that guy's the first person to, you know, hatchet Israel. | ||
| You know, I don't think... | ||
| I'm not relying on Nick... | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm not relying on Nick... | |
| I'm not sure if the facts on anyways. | ||
| And like I said, if evidence comes out that connects Israel to it, then fine. | ||
| I don't have a dog in that fight. | ||
| But as of right now, I don't think that there is evidence. | ||
| I understand people. | ||
| You know what's weird to me? | ||
| No one else was killed. | ||
| If Tyler was some person that had some great grievance with conservatives or free speech or these events, you would think you would have an assault technique that would tragically have been more like the Mandalay Bay shooting where Charlie Kirk was more important than any of the other guys around him. | ||
| As long as he took out him, that was his ultimate goal. | ||
| No, that very well may be true. | ||
| That may well be true, but I mean, one shot from that distance. | ||
| It's not a difficult shot to make, all things considered, as I understand. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Right, Phil, you shoot more guns. | ||
| That is not a crazy shot. | ||
| That's not a hard shot. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| As I understand. | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whew. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Hard shot. | ||
| Because I'll take your word for it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I don't. | ||
| So, so, but, but on the paid influencer thing, is it your view that that could work? | ||
| No. | ||
| And I think 3.1 million is kind of chunk change, as you mentioned earlier. | ||
| And I don't think Israel is unique in doing this. | ||
| This is just the globalized information game that we're all a part of. | ||
| Like, there is a part of me that looked at the criticism of what they were doing and just saying, look, information is so globalized now. | ||
| There's so many powerful forces trying to plow information into various cleavages of the American electorate and the faith community. | ||
| Far registrations are fairly few and far between, at least in this kind of media blanket. | ||
| But only because people break the law. | ||
| And then additionally, I mean, this is what Benjamin Yahoo is spending his time on. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, although they're visiting Donald Trump, he's at the front. | |
| I mean, like, what other. | ||
| I didn't see Erdogan meet with a bunch of Turkish influencers when he was in New York that long ago. | ||
| Well, Hassan Piker, I don't know if he's a proud Turk. | ||
| Did they meet with Erdogan? | ||
| No, no, I'm making a joke. | ||
| I don't think he's. | ||
| Well, I mean, the joke's not that good because, like, if it was a truly analogous situation, I mean, he would have flown to West Hollywood and make sure Hassan Piker was on message for big Turkey, right? | ||
| But that's what Netanyahu actually did. | ||
| And also, the Oracle, the TikTok thing. | ||
| I mean, Netanyahu said it, did you see that clip when he was speaking to influencers in New York? | ||
| And he said, what's the most important thing happening right now? | ||
| When he was asked about this, you know, losing evangelical Christians kind of losing their support for Israel. | ||
| And he said social media is the tool of battle that we have to use. | ||
| And what's the most important thing happening right now? | ||
| The TikTok purchase. | ||
| And who's buying that? | ||
| The company with the main stakes is going to be Oracle. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Larry Ellison, you know, super pro-Israel, huge. | ||
| Is there a person on the planet Earth who donates more money to the IDF than Larry Ellison? | ||
| I think they say that's like, they say he's the largest private donor to the IDF. | ||
| I think that's based on like a fundraiser from a few people. | ||
| The IDF itself, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| The friend. | ||
| Now he owns TikTok. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| He doesn't give money to Israel. | ||
| He's just giving it to the guys. | ||
| That's probably bigger than any of this is the TikTok. | ||
| So are you betting that when we're back here in 120 days, like resolving our core disagreement about whether or not hostilities are going to increase or decrease, you actually think that peace will be. | ||
| Oh, by the way, I hope you're right. | ||
| I think there are a lot more dramatic ramp-ups in other parts of the world that we should be more concerned about. | ||
| But I think for one reason or another, no, not Sudan. | ||
| How about Venezuela? | ||
| We're going to try to do regime change in Venezuela, but for some reason, we're always a lot more focused on Israel. | ||
| We'll say this to some of the viewers. | ||
| If you have any dreams of getting into the influencer game or becoming a journalist, I will say this. | ||
| Any story on Israel will get a lot of attention, no matter how insignificant. | ||
| If you want some eyes on your scoop, no matter how small Israel does anything, you could bitch and moan about Israel. | ||
| You could praise Israel. | ||
| We love to give Israel a ton of attention. | ||
| So if you're trying to get into the game and get eyes and clicks on your stuff, talk about Israel. | ||
| That's why I guess there's so many powerful people in media who criticize Israel. | ||
| The Congress. | ||
| Why do you meet with Israel? | ||
| It is a new thing. | ||
| I guess that's why media is controlled by Israel critics right now. | ||
| Oh, and CBS. | ||
| I do want to talk about Venezuela, though, because you raised that point. | ||
| It is something we want to address. | ||
| And the good thing about the Israel discussion is we've made a series of pretty binary predictions and we'll be able to revisit them and the internet will remember them forever. | ||
| Venezuela, you have been critical of the administration's approach. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Where to begin? | ||
| I'll go for the easy one. | ||
| I am concerned that members of the administration are just pretty openly lying about this. | ||
| And I think that has clear echoes of the Iraq War run-up, where they were just fabricating intelligence left and right. | ||
| The big one to obviously flag is that Venezuela is not involved in fentanyl in a major way. | ||
| So the argument that we are targeting narco-terrorists, transporting fentanyl, and thus they should be murdered. | ||
| But fentanyl gets into the cocaine that Venezuela allows to be transported. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Without the cocaine that they're sending, people probably wouldn't take as much fentanyl because they cut the cocaine with fentanyl. | ||
| It's possible some fentanyl is getting through Venezuela, but most of the fentanyl, I mean, the villains of the fentanyl trade are China and Mexico. | ||
| And even if you look at the numbers with cocaine, most of the cocaine out of Colombia doesn't go through Venezuela. | ||
| So what do you think are the administration's goals in Venezuela? | ||
| Oh, I mean, I think that they are moving towards soft regime change. | ||
| I think this is what Secretary Rubio has long wanted. | ||
| I think he's changed and contorted his ideology a lot of different ways the last 10 years, but something that is a clear hallmark of it is pretty extreme hawkishness on Venezuela. | ||
| And I think they think they can knock it over pretty easily. | ||
| I think, you know, I wouldn't make up a story, but I have a very different experience with President Trump and Senator Rubio at the time over Venezuela. | ||
| Remember when John Bolton was running around with like 5,000 people? | ||
| And the Guaido guy, yeah. | ||
| And, yeah, there was this notion that Juan Guaido, someone you would probably call a communist, was going to be like— Wasn't he the rightful—who we recognize as the rightful government? | ||
| Yeah, but he was like a— I think the real communist. | ||
| I like the full government. | ||
| I mean, that's what the government stance was. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| The Maduro is the worst communist, I guess, between the two. | ||
| Yeah, they were both probably communists. | ||
| But either way, you had Senator Rick Scott, who I have a very high view of on many issues, trying to convince President Trump that we needed kinetic military action in Venezuela. | ||
| I believe it. | ||
| And Rick Scott laid out a compelling case for that foreign policy viewpoint. | ||
| He had done all his homework, laid it out. | ||
| And before I could even get in the conversation, Marco Rubio took the other side. | ||
| And those guys get along really well. | ||
| And Marco said, if you get into some war in Venezuela, it is a jungle conflict. | ||
| There's going to be a guerrilla feature to this. | ||
| We will be bogged down there forever. | ||
| Rubio had specific information about where different naval assets were and explained that getting them in position to launch this was impractical. | ||
| Yeah, but like Rubio was taking the anti-intervention side as it relates to Venezuela. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| Well, I don't think he's a cartoon character. | ||
| I mean, I mean, none of these people are. | ||
| But I mean, I think the proponents of the evidence is that he's supportive of a pretty hardline tact on Latin America and on Venezuela, that he's been fighting this shadow war with Rick Cornell about it, that Rick Rornell is losing as of now, and that we are ramping up, and a lot of this is being driven by the State Department, but also the War Defense Department. | ||
| Matt, if I could ask you, since you're a Florida JIT, there's a ton of people in the cabinet who are Floridian. | ||
| And as I understand, there's a large Venezuelan expat population throughout Miami or Florida largely that help influence the politics when it comes to this a lot. | ||
| Could you speak to how that could influence, I don't know, Susie Wiles or Marco Rubio or Pam Bondi? | ||
| I think that constituency has a lot of influence. | ||
| Totally, it definitely says. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's a fair question. | ||
| There are hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan voters in Florida who are swing voters. | ||
| And there were political figures like Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar saying that if the Trump administration would always take a maximalist view against the Maduro regime, that would be the best path to secure the support of those voters. | ||
| And the reason that mattered at the time was because Florida was a swing state. | ||
| Now, like, Florida is Arkansas. | ||
| We are not going to elect a Democrat statewide in our state for the foreseeable future. | ||
| And so this highly important political group in Florida that received all this attention probably gets less of that now just as a result. | ||
| I mean, that's why the embargo is still in place on Cuba, right? | ||
| Because of the Cuban Americans there. | ||
| They all want a hard line on Cuba, the sanctions to stay on. | ||
| Marco principally among them. | ||
| This is an issue Marco and I have discussed frequently. | ||
| We have different views on the subject. | ||
| I think that if sanctions worked, Cuba would be the Garden of Eden. | ||
| But I have the view that if something has failed for half a century, maybe try something different. | ||
| And I don't think we're any closer to the Cuban people being free. | ||
| I have a great connection to the Cuban people, but I don't believe the sanctions have weakened the regime more than the people who are trying to survive there. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| That key group of hardcore Cuban voters has been very politically powerful. | ||
| It's where Jeb Bush got a lot of his initial momentum when he ran statewide. | ||
| And it just is different when you're not a swing state. | ||
| Also, generationally, these third-generation Cubans are probably less tied to embargo politics because they don't think they're going back. | ||
| The first and second generation actually thought they were going to go back and get their plantations back. | ||
| By the third generation, no one's eager to make that happen. | ||
| And so that animates how people think about it. | ||
| Well, I've seen Kurt battle with Venezuelans on X. | ||
| Yeah, I did not know that they were. | ||
| They have a presence. | ||
| And I mean, maybe you know his name. | ||
| He's a congressman, Carlos Jimenez. | ||
| Jimenez. | ||
| Jimenez. | ||
| When they bombed the first boat off Venezuela, he's like tweeting in Spanish, celebrating it. | ||
| And I mean, these are foreigners agitating for a war in a foreign country. | ||
| I just feel, and I'm like, I'm like a dove's dove, but I just feel like we have way more. | ||
| I think it's a bad bunny speaking Spanish. | ||
| You don't care about it. | ||
| Carlos Jimenez? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I don't know if you can't do it. | ||
| No one should speak Spanish. | ||
| Do you have an English? | ||
| I think it was just in Spanish. | ||
|
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A lot of them do like duality spoken Spanish. | |
| No, I'm just saying it's like this is a constituency of people from this country who want our government to intervene there. | ||
| It's high conviction expats, basically. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, I mean, like, it's people who have. | ||
| And I think that's really what's driving this. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I mean, it's a lot of our foreign policy. | ||
| I think there's other aspects that we need to touch on, too. | ||
| There's also the oil markets that play into this. | ||
| If we were able to install a friendly regime there, we would be able to compete harder. | ||
| We can't deal with the current regime. | ||
| I mean, basically, we don't have any. | ||
| The administration has been sabotaging any of the deals. | ||
| Weren't these the same communists that nationalized their industry? | ||
| He can't use that oil industry anyways because they kicked out all the companies. | ||
| He's a communist, a narco-terrorist. | ||
| What is he? | ||
| A communist narco-terrorist. | ||
| But Chevron, what's interesting is that Trump recently left. | ||
| No, what do you mean? | ||
| They traffic drugs, and they're communists over there. | ||
| Am I mislabeling them? | ||
| I think there is drug running in Venezuela, and I think at a certain point, if you're an isolated, impoverished regime, you are looking the other way. | ||
| And fast as if your society and your administration are involved in it. | ||
| But the idea that Maduro sits down like Joseph Stalin and there's lines of cocaine everywhere, and like, you know, this is the fentanyl that's. | ||
| That's the president of Colombia, actually. | ||
| Okay, I mean, I mean, like, it's just, it's, it's, it's, it's a child's view of the universe. | ||
| So another point. | ||
| Well, no, no, no. | ||
| You, you don't, because I've studied Venezuela a good bit. | ||
| I don't have a child's view of it. | ||
| And I think that Maduro, in many ways, has to answer to the conglomerate of narcos that control portions of his economy. | ||
| I'm sorry, I was setting up a straw man. | ||
| But my basic, yeah, I think he's in a tough neighborhood and he's involved in it. | ||
| But the idea that there's not going to be drug running in that part of the world, regardless of who there is. | ||
| I'll tell you where there isn't any. | ||
| El Salvador. | ||
| I mean, there are two models right now for Latin America. | ||
| There's the Maduro model, which I think is far too permissive of that type of malign activity. | ||
| And then there's the Bukele model. | ||
| And the two are really at war for the soul of a lot of these Latin American voters as elections are getting ready in Argentina. | ||
| Well, if we're speaking about the Latin American voters, though, I do, and we're talking about future Republican consolidating gains with Hispanic voters. | ||
| I think if the administration spends its time killing basically Venezuelan fishermen on boats, I think that's actually going to return. | ||
| They're drug runners. | ||
| That's what they say. | ||
| Do you think anyone cares? | ||
| They're not fishermen. | ||
| That's what they say. | ||
| Why are you calling them fishermen? | ||
| I think there are people that are paid $1,000 to move drugs. | ||
| Okay, but those aren't fishermen are people who go out and see in boats and they take their rods in and then they reel in. | ||
| I don't know what to do. | ||
| I think there's something. | ||
| I think people think traffic should have shown that it will lie about the issue. | ||
| Second of all, they haven't proved anything about who these people are. | ||
| I wouldn't be surprised if they had ties the drugs, ties being like their gophers to move this stuff. | ||
| But they're not hardened criminals. | ||
| And if they are, the administration will produce the evidence, but they haven't. | ||
| We have to produce evidence of the current. | ||
| I think I'm against the drone. | ||
| You can't just blow people out. | ||
| I'm against the drone strike. | ||
| I think it's a lot of people. | ||
| It seems as though they're carrying payloads of drugs. | ||
| I mean, those seem. | ||
| That's not how we handle drug trafficking. | ||
| Like, are we going to start with drug trafficking? | ||
| After 9-11, we moved towards a broad dragon of terrorism. | ||
| And I don't think it served the American people well. | ||
| If we had treated it as a police action, Osama bin Laden would have been brought to justice, and we wouldn't have had all these. | ||
| We're merging the drugs. | ||
| What served the American people well is loads of fentanyl being shipped into our country. | ||
| That's really what we're getting. | ||
| It's not Venezuela. | ||
| Not Venezuela. | ||
| I don't even care if it has to be fentanyl. | ||
| I think we should bomb the meth labs in Mexico. | ||
| Now we're talking gates. | ||
| No, I mean, look, and I am widely viewed as a dove, but I think we have actual interests here. | ||
| I think we have an achievable interest. | ||
| The interest in the Gulf of America is deterrence. | ||
| Look, if you blow a few of these things up and you get that rolling on social media, I think people might think twice about traversing. | ||
| To your point, Colin Rugg was just tweeted a little while ago that the Sinaloa cartel is threatening to target American citizens at popular tourist spots like Cabo in response to lab raids and seizures, according to Breitbart. | ||
| A banner was recently erected addressing FBI Director Cash Patel. | ||
| The banner first surfaced on Sunday in Baja, California, where gunmen left two banners allegedly signed by Los Chapos Chapitos, I think. | ||
| Breitbart reported. | ||
| The banners claim that starting on Sunday, they will be targeting U.S. citizens in Mexico in response to recent lab raids and weapon seizures. | ||
| The banners were quickly taken down by authorities. | ||
| Look, if that happens, then I do think that I don't even believe that. | ||
| They own the resorts. | ||
| Why would the Sinaloa? | ||
| That seems to be something that somebody would say about the Sinaloa cartel as a false flag because they are the ones who own the resorts in Cabo. | ||
| Why would they do that to their own tourism industry? | ||
| I just think it's, I'm not, you think this would work? | ||
| I mean, you think we could just do the other drug problem drugs will work? | ||
| There's going to be always going to be this big market. | ||
| Like, the issue is that there's a big market for drugs in the U.S. Americans love drugs. | ||
| And that's a serious problem. | ||
| And I come from a place that was plagued by that. | ||
| But it's not something we could just bomb away. | ||
| I think it could make things worse. | ||
| I mean, it could really destabilize. | ||
| People are going to want drugs more because they see a Venezuelan government. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I mean, when it comes to the stabilization, I mean, you know, one reason why we're targeting Venezuela right now is because we can. | ||
| Because, you know, they're under all these sanctions. | ||
| They don't have any real allies. | ||
| We're able to do this. | ||
| No, they do have allies in the Caribbean that they provide cheap energy to. | ||
| I mean, that's why they're getting screwed off at times in the votes in OAS because they were subsidizing a lot of the people. | ||
| But they don't have anybody not going to come to the defense. | ||
| Sure, but I'm not going to be able to do that. | ||
| So if we start bombing Mexico. | ||
| Suriname might. | ||
| But if we start bombing Mexico against the will of the Mexican government, I mean, what is that going to do? | ||
| The Mexican government, to me, is a construct. | ||
| It's like saying the Afghan government. | ||
| Then the Mexican government is but a feature of the narco-traffickers. | ||
| It is a captive narco-state. | ||
| Wasn't it Nieto that took $100 million bribe from Sinaloa? | ||
| So what do you have to believe? | ||
| All the people who came after Nieto either weren't offered the bribe or didn't take it? | ||
| Like, of course they did. | ||
| So at that point, you're not really dealing with a sovereign country in Mexico, in my view. | ||
| And I wasn't going to Cabo anyway. | ||
| Do you think we should go to war with Mexico? | ||
| I would rather go to war with Mexico than Russia or something that will divide. | ||
| Iran. | ||
| I think this will divide. | ||
| I'm down to bomb the cartels in Mexico. | ||
| You haven't found anyone you're not down to bomb. | ||
| Can we stop some of the bombings in other places first? | ||
| Like, this is one thing I thought was interesting. | ||
| Steve Bannon posed an interesting question to Mr. Mills here when he was on, and he said, well, this is the hemispheric defense. | ||
| This is America first, bringing it home. | ||
| Well, we got to bring it home first. | ||
| We're still across the globe involved in all these wars. | ||
| Let's just start one war before we can wind another one down. | ||
| We couldn't get the Afghanistan war wound down until we started up the Ukraine one. | ||
| We didn't even start on China. | ||
| I mean, we didn't even touch on China. | ||
| All of the American bases in the Pacific, our troops in Korea. | ||
| As far as I can tell, super important is real problem. | ||
| No, I feel like China's a bigger issue, and I feel like more of the Hawks in government are reorienting. | ||
| I think Venice is a very important thing. | ||
| I think they're starting to be more of an important issue than Israel. | ||
| We've always realized that there's a moment, and they always try to froth up non-armed services committee members for big defense budgets. | ||
| So they have this idea at Republican Retreat, which I hated going to because I felt like we were always in a state of retreat. | ||
| But they bring us out there and they say we're going to do a war game with the U.S. and Taiwan. | ||
| And so, like, you know, the war game starts out. | ||
| And as the war game goes on, they're like, now 13 people from your district have died. | ||
| Now, like, this many U.S. cities have been annihilated. | ||
| It's like, don't you see we need more money for the defense budget to stop these things from happening? | ||
| I was like, you all had me just give China Taiwan. | ||
| Like, wait, why is it easier to defend Taiwan than just to find the smart people there that make computer chips and move them to the deserts of Arizona? | ||
| Wait, is that your position that if China were to invade Taiwan, that we should let them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| It is a home game for China. | ||
| Anyone who tells you anything other has not seen what happens. | ||
| How do we, we can't even get our aircraft carriers into the fight. | ||
| Let me explain something to you. | ||
| China can hit a moving target with a hypersonic weapon, and America cannot. | ||
| Do you think China could take over Taiwan now if they wanted to? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then I think they're already having that. | ||
| One thing they've shown is: you remember when Nancy Pelosi went there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they did these big drills. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One thing they showed that I think a lot of people didn't factor in is they could just put a blockade on Taiwan in like a minute, a second. | ||
| And then we could blockade China. | ||
| But I think this is the end of American. | ||
| How do we blockade China with the air defenses that they have with our military? | ||
| We do a naval blockade. | ||
| If you guys want to pull up, we could pull up a map and their hypersonic weapon systems will take out all of those. | ||
| I know, but okay, if they sink ships in all of these straits, then they won't be able to pass their ships through. | ||
| They're just as susceptible as we can. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| No one knows. | ||
| Our strategy now is to get so many ships blown up that we clock the straits. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Blockade China. | ||
| I think maintaining strategic ambiguity in Taiwan is smart, basically. | ||
| I mean, it's the normie position. | ||
| I think that's all the thing we should do. | ||
| Trump's going to do, too. | ||
| We don't know that Xi's going to invade. | ||
| I'm not convinced he's going to invade. | ||
| But I think we make it way, way, way more likely that he invades if we are bogged down in all these. | ||
| Why don't we just de-risk? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to make sure we get super chats. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I don't even know what that means. | ||
| I don't even know how to do it. | ||
| I do the super chats are on the screen. | ||
| Why don't you do it, Serge? | ||
| He'll take care of it. | ||
| Let me just mention one thing quick because we didn't get to all the topics. | ||
| I just want to say. | ||
| We have another hour, homie. | ||
| Oh, yeah, we're doing the membership. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, folks that stick around for an extra hour will get into other parts of the world, the wars that are not being talked about, and it'll be good stuff. | ||
| Genocide of Christians somewhere in Africa. | ||
| Super chats. | ||
| Phil, you got us or Serge? | ||
| Serge, I think, everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you look right at the screen, you can just read the name of the persons right here, which in this case is Bruh. | |
| Matt, if you were the Attorney General, would you have reopened the investigation of the USS Liberty? | ||
| I don't think that's something that would have required a lot of coordination with the Defense Department. | ||
| This guy's a Zionist show. | ||
| There's a very investigation. | ||
| By the way, I would have started with Fauci before I would have gotten to the U.S. APAC funded real. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, here we go. | |
| Here we go. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Another super chat. | ||
| Massey is a liar. | ||
| He runs as a MAGA Republican. | ||
| He's a pure libertarian. | ||
| If he was honest, he'd run in the Libertarian Party. | ||
| I loathe all liars. | ||
| If he wanted to lose, he would run in the Liberty. | ||
| Tax check. | ||
|
unidentified
|
True. | |
| Instead, he's running under the veneer of MAGA when he's a libertarian. | ||
| You're ridiculous. | ||
| My. | ||
| All right, here we go. | ||
| DJW, my contribution, whether you're pro or anti-Israel, beware of the rumor Dems and Antifa have a campaign to use this to divide us before the midterms. | ||
| Decide what is more important. | ||
| Be smart about this. | ||
| And this is sort of my point: that I actually want the pro-Israel people in our church. | ||
| Maybe not the pulpit, but certainly in the congregation. | ||
| Others have a different view. | ||
| And what you said, too, about Charlie Kirk trying to help continue to bridge that divide. | ||
| I think you were really spot on with that, and he played an important role in bridging like a Gen Z Republican divide for Israel. | ||
| But he was struggling through it. | ||
| As you saw in those texts, it was really hard. | ||
| A lot would defend Israel to the last American soldier. | ||
| I don't know if any American soldiers that fought wars for Israel. | ||
| Brian Mast did. | ||
| What was Brian Masta? | ||
| He wasn't an American, like fighting for an American army in Israel, which I think was the effect of the question. | ||
| Yeah, he joined the IDF. | ||
| Brave guy. | ||
| And he also served in America. | ||
| Interruptcast IRL. | ||
| Ouch. | ||
| Is it usually better than this? | ||
| Are we worse than usual? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's just the headphones being off. | |
| The headphones are on. | ||
| You can hear somebody speaking or setting up speeches. | ||
| I don't know what they're talking about, but that wasn't. | ||
| No, they're right. | ||
| We were yapping back and forth. | ||
| It's been a yap fest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This one. | |
| Remedy Shane Jr. | ||
| That's my guy. | ||
| Why now support regime change if the right does it? | ||
| Do you think it's a charge of hypocrisy that our supports for regime change are linked to who's in power? | ||
| Who's in power? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't support regime change in Venezuela. | ||
| I'm very against it. | ||
| I mean, what is the regime? | ||
| I mean, you know, I don't even view it as like that meaningful an end state because what do we think is emerging next in Venezuela? | ||
| Like the next Thomas Jefferson? | ||
| Well, who was the guy? | ||
| You mentioned him again earlier? | ||
| So that was an anti-regime change. | ||
| Juan Guaideau. | ||
| That's who I'm in charge. | ||
| Oh, terrific. | ||
| No, he's off the scene. | ||
| He's in my head. | ||
| He's looking at the different players now. | ||
| Still a ton. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I guess we'll read some more. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Just FYI, Matt, letter carriers and United States Postal Service workers still get paid as their budget is self-funded. | ||
| I just know I'm still getting paid. | ||
| We're glad you're getting paid. | ||
| I have to say, my knowledge of the Postal Service funding regime is diminished. | ||
| Can we get opinions on the Monroe Doctrine in relation to Venezuela and Venezuelans' oil exports to America's adversaries? | ||
| The Monroe doctrine is good, and we shouldn't be isolationists, not in the world stage or in the Western hemisphere. | ||
| Isn't there something weird about our opposition to the war in Ukraine and then the way that that's impacted Venezuela policy? | ||
| Because we had to do all these sanctions on Russia, which then meant that Biden had to sort of loosen up the secondary sources of Venezuela to get more onto the global markets to reduce price. | ||
| So at the end of the day, if we're just picking which dictator gets to sell oil, is there any moral clarity to it at all? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I would say just lift the sanctions and buy, you know, trade the oil. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I mean, I'm pro-Monroe Doctrine, but I think it's. | ||
| I just looked it up. | ||
| I just did a Google AI. | ||
| What does the Monroe doctrine actually say? | ||
| It says European powers should not interfere or colonize with the newly independent nations of the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| 1823, happy 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine. | ||
| All those who didn't celebrate it two years ago. | ||
| Let's make it more maximal. | ||
| We'll say no powers should interfere or colonize with the fully independent nations of the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| Yeah, there's ways of doing that. | ||
| And what I would do is bring in whoever rules Venezuela more into the fold instead of making it accessible for Russian, Chinese, and Iranian money. | ||
| I think Maduro wants to do a deal, and there's a way to do that without murdering him and a bunch of people in Venezuela. | ||
| They've been accepting deportation flights. | ||
| That's something that I believe Rick Grinnell got. | ||
| People in the administration have been going out of their way to isolate the Venezuelans. | ||
| And I don't, you have personal experience with Rubio, but all the available reporting is that Rubio's State Department and Rubio's guys are driving the hard line on stuff like not trading oil with Venezuela. | ||
| He also, in 2019, when they back Guaido and everything, Rubio tweeted out a picture of Gaddafi the moment that he was being brutally killed as a threat to Maduro. | ||
| And I think Maduro is – You remember that? | ||
| You Florida jets, they have an affinity to this guy who owns the next policy. | ||
| I said this to Bannon this weekend. | ||
| I think you should think of him as a Latino Gaddafi. | ||
| And what did Gaddafi say? | ||
| You break it, you buy it, and you're going to have all these refugees coming across the Med to the United States. | ||
| And we already have seen elements. | ||
| It's probably getting me in trouble with more Venezuelan people on the internet. | ||
| But we've already seen elements of refugee crises out of Venezuela into Colombia. | ||
| Doesn't like a third of Venezuela live in Colombia right now? | ||
| Well, the migration is approaching a million. | ||
| The crisis was exacerbated by the sanctions. | ||
| And there was all these warnings. | ||
| The Department of Homeland Security was writing up these reports saying basically, if you put these sanctions on, there's going to be even more migrants from Venezuela. | ||
| They did it anyway. | ||
| This was John Bolton and Elliot Abrams leading, who's Elliot Abrams is a neocon. | ||
| You know, these were the guys leading this policy in the first administration, and it created a migrant crisis. | ||
| And, you know, a similar thing would happen here. | ||
| What's the right answer in Venezuela? | ||
| Just a deal with Maduro? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Make a deal with Maduro. | ||
| What are the features of that deal? | ||
| Uh... | ||
| Oil trading, perhaps controls on Chinese money going in there would be something I would drive a hard bargain for. | ||
| I mean, we've kind of talked around this. | ||
| I do think that while I'm a non-interventionist on this stuff, I do think within the MAGA fold, China and Latin America will be more divisive among people who are intellectually honest than Iran or Russia because, yeah, people could see how Venezuela. | ||
| But Venezuela's gone kinetic. | ||
| What about China's, I mean, is likely to accelerate to that acuity. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Like, what is the big China question dividing us? | ||
| If you think obviously with Venezuela, it's the bombing of these guys in the Gulf. | ||
| You mean, I think, first of all, I think it means we're in a fascinating situation with China policy. | ||
| Trump moved the Republican Party and the United States significantly more hawkish on China. | ||
| But there's every piece of evidence that China, sorry, that Trump now is probably a dove relatively within his own administration. | ||
| I mean, there was Bloomberg reports. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I mean, look at China. | |
| Yeah, he wanted to. | ||
| Look at what he said in the 2016 election. | ||
| He said, I know China. | ||
| They got a place in my building. | ||
| I can work with these guys. | ||
| He paid the deal to the inauguration. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| He did. | ||
| I mean, but people forget that nobody would name China as a huge major threat. | ||
| But like, I mean, like, they would do it in this very elliptical way. | ||
| Like, Trump blamed China for stealing a generation's worth of jobs. | ||
| Trump blamed all this stuff. | ||
| Trump argued, sorry, not well stated, Trump took the call from the time when he's president during the first presidential transition. | ||
| So there were all these elements of hawkishness to Trump's rise to power that were way more China hawkish. | ||
| But again, within the continuum at this point, Trump has not committed troops to Taiwan if they're invaded. | ||
| Biden did. | ||
| And Trump wants to do a deal with the Chinese. | ||
| And it's very clear that major parts of his administration do not want to do that. | ||
| Well, Trump wants that deal just on trade, principally, right? | ||
| He likes Xi. | ||
| And I think he doesn't want a war. | ||
| And I think he, yeah, and I think he's afraid of a wider economic war of China. | ||
| I think he's actually. | ||
| Isn't that smart? | ||
| I'm fairly sympathetic to it. | ||
| I mean, I think China is different than any country in the world. | ||
| It is an actual peer competitor of the United States. | ||
| And so I approach it a little bit differently. | ||
| Like I just said, I think we should maintain strategic ambiguity with Taiwan. | ||
| Don't see why we have to get into the academics, very similar to the Iran debate. | ||
| There is a deal on offer. | ||
| I think it would work. | ||
| And I think if we are going to care about the preferences of the governments in places like Caracas, then one of the bargains we should drive is like, hey, maybe less Chinese cash and less Chinese people. | ||
| And I think that's the way to do it besides sanctions and bombing. | ||
| Like, I think that's just going to make them driving China out of South America is, I think, is like a cogent goal that can be done non-kinetically. | ||
| I think a lot of those Latin American countries just play us off of China and realize that they can get cash a I think we're going to do it. | ||
| I think they're more likely to do it if we start invading them again. | ||
| Like, I mean, like, I mean, it's the same thing with the Middle East. | ||
| It's like, it just will cause panic. | ||
| If Venezuela can be topped over, why not Chile? | ||
| Why not Peru? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think Venezuela is unique in Latin America. | |
| It's a distream example, but the administration is warring with Brazil in pretty extreme circumstances. | ||
| Trump put out a positive statement about Lula recently. | ||
| Well, he met him again, so he liked him. | ||
| But I mean, like, you can imagine. | ||
| I mean, again, that's the whole thing about contact, though. | ||
| They want to prevent Trump from ever meeting Maduro, right? | ||
| Because he's going to like him, right? | ||
| It's the same thing with Iran. | ||
| They want to prevent him from ever meeting Iraqi Rivers. | ||
| Right after the inauguration, Rick Grinnell went over to Venezuela, shook Maduro's hand, and came home with some Americans who were in jail there. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I mean, you know, I think it goes to show that there's a deal there. | ||
| We didn't trade anything for him either. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you know the president more than anybody on this table combined and then some. | ||
| I mean, fundamentally, my root of a lot of his foreign policy is that he's underratedly not a disagreeable personality. | ||
| Now, I mean, famously, this guy who fired people on television, he's famously very combative on True Social. | ||
| But I mean, he'll have Rupert Murdoch in his skybox and then the next day sue him. | ||
| He's sort of like impersonal about that. | ||
| And so like, I mean, even with the Ukraine situation, I think the basic story, absent all of the intellectual discussion around it, is that Zelensky repaired his relationship with him. | ||
| And then Trump kind of digs the European hawks on a personal level. | ||
| He likes Ruta. | ||
| He likes Kirstarmer, which nobody had in the bigger card a year ago. | ||
| He likes Macron. | ||
| He's very amused by him very famously. | ||
| And he also likes Putin. | ||
| So where are we? | ||
| We're at status quo. | ||
| We're at Stalemate. | ||
| Let's do some more super chats. | ||
| Oh, yeah, sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How do we do that? | |
| One second, guys. | ||
| So if people would rumble to scroll through these things here. | ||
| The thing that's driving people away from being Zionists is everyone from the president to the mayors are having to talk about Israel 24-7. | ||
| The less you talk, the more we care. | ||
| You find that theory? | ||
| I think people are certainly tired of hearing about it. | ||
| I think that's one of the big things on the right among the younger people. | ||
| Like the default was to be pro-Israel because it's like, oh, the leftists are on the other side. | ||
| I'm pro-Israel. | ||
| But it's just come, it's just too much now. | ||
| There's just, you know, if you're on, like, just being on X, like there are times where people will just randomly make comment. | ||
| Like, you'll be talking about something, and then they'll just be like, well, but Israel. | ||
| And it's just like, why? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Like, this has nothing to do with what we're talking about. | ||
| It's just, it is exhausting. | ||
| It is incredibly exhausting. | ||
| Because to me, Israel's like, there are people that think that Israel is the most important thing. | ||
| I think it's one of the most important issues. | ||
| Yeah, I completely. | ||
| Especially for my line of work, because it's like, we see what we're supporting over there. | ||
| We got to stop. | ||
| I completely disagree. | ||
| But the point is, there are people that are like, this is the most important thing because Israel controls the United States. | ||
| And I understand that Israel has way outsized influence compared to how many Israelis there are and how big of a country Israel is. | ||
| But at the same time, I think that China, I think that actually Venezuela, those are actually more important topics that we should be talking about. | ||
| And I think Israel is way down the list. | ||
| Take that super chat. | ||
| Let Israel gave us $20. | ||
| Let Israel take care of Israel. | ||
| Let Israel take care of Israel. | ||
| Bill Duncan on you. | ||
| Well, yeah, we should let them take care of themselves. | ||
| Agreed, I'd be very happy. | ||
| I think they're the ones driving that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So is the insinuation. | ||
| Oh, Serge? | ||
| Can't read that one. | ||
| All right, I see. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I just go straight, Ron Burgundy. | ||
| I just read. | ||
| They could say anything by the end. | ||
| Yeah, that's why I scrolled. | ||
| There we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's see. | |
| Let's go. | ||
| Thanks for saving me on that one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's go to like this is a good one here. | |
| Matt, Oregon governor marched with Antifa. | ||
| Arrest question mark. | ||
| I mean, when you look at the way Todd Blanche and the Justice Department have unlocked these authorities to go after Antifa, like what people, the Trump administration were saying to me is, we're even using Biden authorities, which is, I guess, like the worst thing you can do to people. | ||
| Is that good? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| They ran against it, right? | ||
| I mean, like, why do the exact same thing as your opponent? | ||
| I mean, like, is that good? | ||
| What's going to happen when the left takes power? | ||
| It's going to be really bad. | ||
| It's going to be a really bad base case. | ||
| Or you'll have a magnanimous left-wing president who will make the Republicans look like ghouls. | ||
| Like, either one is not good. | ||
| It'll either be horrible or it will be politically horrible. | ||
| Yeah, but there hasn't been. | ||
| I guess I don't doomcast about it because I don't think you've seen the Trump administration. | ||
| Not in the same way. | ||
| While there's like bluster at times that comes off the internet, I think they've been rather judicial. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Agreed. | |
| I mean, the risk, though, would be increasing the impression that you are doing it and then that being politically mobilizing, right? | ||
| worst of both worlds to create the impression and then to not actually do it because we're not doing mass deportations in this country They're not happening. | ||
| You don't count the self-deportation as a mass deportation? | ||
| I think we're still below the Obama second term numbers. | ||
| I mean, people can quit. | ||
| So many people are agreeing. | ||
| By the way, talk to anybody who is trying to hire someone to hang drywall and see what they're doing. | ||
| We're not deporting 10 million people. | ||
| And I'm not even making the case for it. | ||
| But we're not doing it. | ||
| I understand you well. | ||
| But what we are doing is being cruel to immigrants online with memes. | ||
| And so I can't imagine just losing Latino voters. | ||
| No, they listen. | ||
| We'll see a bunch of those Latino voters want to see those illegal immigrants go home or super or super illegal immigrants themselves. | ||
| Democratic voters go out more. | ||
| I'm just saying, like, it will look really dumb if the Republicans cosplayed as authoritarians for four years and then get kicked out of Washington because people thought that was the impression. | ||
| Serge, are we going to go to our special hour? | ||
| Yeah, I think we'll just do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can't Fiero Rumble's back in here. | |
| Can I do that? | ||
| I'll get a last rumble chat in to you, Gates. | ||
| I wanted to ask, since you're, again, a Florida JIT, there's a governor race happening in Florida. | ||
| Do you have a preferred candidate among the Republicans? | ||
| I don't even know if the field's set. | ||
| The big question is whether or not Casey DeSantis is going to run for governor. | ||
| I think if she did, she'd be a very compelling candidate to a number of Floridians who look at her. | ||
| Byron Donalds is a dynamic candidate. | ||
| Jay Collins, the lieutenant governor, talking about running. | ||
| So we'll see. | ||
| You don't have a favorite? | ||
| You don't think. | ||
| I like to let these things play out a little bit. | ||
| Still have that political bone in you. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| It's taking Casey DeSantis so long to determine. | ||
| She doesn't need to. | ||
| If you're Casey DeSantis, you have universal name ID. | ||
| You have the best image rating. | ||
| Byron Donalds has been running for governor for months and can't seem to get above the mid-20s in any ballot test. | ||
| I think that she looks at it and says, why do I have to be in now? | ||
| There's a general rule that I like to follow, which is you typically want to be a candidate for the least amount of time as is absolutely necessary to win the election. | ||
| Maybe she's making that calculus. | ||
| Thanks for giving that tidbit. | ||
| Let's do the outros. | ||
| Starty. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| I'm Matt Gates. | ||
| I host the Matt Gates show on World American News. | ||
| I was in Congress for a while and do what we can to advocate for reasonable policies still as a private citizen. | ||
| Matt Gates, it's been insightful. | ||
| Thanks for coming on and engaging with all my questions and headaches I was giving you. | ||
| My name is Alada Liyahu. | ||
| I'm a White House correspondent here at Timcast. | ||
| I also cover a lot of immigration news and deportations and arrests. | ||
| You can find the videos of my coverage on Twitter and Instagram at a lot of Liyahu. | ||
| Thanks for tuning in, guys. | ||
| Yeah, my name is Dave DeCamp. | ||
| I write for anti-war.com, and I also do a daily podcast and YouTube show called Anti-War News, where I cover U.S. foreign policy from our anti-war, non-interventionist perspective. | ||
| And if you're watching on YouTube, go subscribe to Anti-War News, or we're also on Rumble, Odyssey, and then wherever you listen to podcasts. | ||
| I'm Kurt Mills. | ||
| I'm the executive director of the American Conservative magazine, a magazine founded here or founded in Washington, D.C. in 2002 against the Iraq War by conservatives and friends. | ||
| We're trying to, in large measure, prevent a recruitscence of such wars through our activist journalism. | ||
| If you want to check us out, try www.theamericanconservative.com to follow my own personal commentary at C-U-R-T M-I-O-L-S on X. Thank you. | ||
| Don't forget, tomorrow morning, Tate will be back doing the morning show. | ||
| I am Phil That Remains on Twix, and the band is all that remains. | ||
| You can check us out on Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, YouTube, and Deezer. | ||
| You can check us out this next spring at the Louder Than Life Fest. | ||
| We'll be putting together a whole tour. | ||
| There will be more shows to be announced. | ||
| Don't forget, the left lane is for crime, and we will see you guys in the after show. | ||
| In the after-show, we're going to continue our foreign policy discussion with these great experts. | ||
| We're going to go deeper into Russia-Ukraine and what we think are some of the origins of that conflict. | ||
| There is a battle raging in Africa you don't even know about that we're going to get into, and we'll get perspectives on a way too early assessment of the 2028 Republican field, all in the after-show. | ||
| I know what is on everyone's mind right now, while they've joined the extended chat. | ||
| They want to know more about the U.S. war in Somalia. | ||
| That is what is on everybody's mind. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| Everyone deserves to come out of this far more appreciative of what's happening around the globe. | ||
| Dave, we've just been covering this at anti-war news. | ||
| Maybe that is the article I want to pull up. | ||
| What, at anti-war? | ||
| Did we have one? | ||
| Three days ago is the anniversary of Operation Gothic Serpent, right? | ||
| The Mogadishu, the Black Hawk Lost. | ||
| Yeah, Black Hawk Down. | ||
| Google anti-war.com, 81 airstrikes in Somalia. | ||
| Tell us what's going on, Dave. | ||
| Yeah, so since Trump came in, this Trump administration really ramped up the U.S. air war in Somalia, which very few people are aware of is even happening. | ||
| And the reason why is because there's no media coverage. | ||
| A lot of times, I'm literally the only person on an American news site that's covering U.S. airstrikes in Somalia. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| So right now we're up to 81 airstrikes in Somalia, and that's the most that the U.S. has ever launched. | ||
| Explain to people who we're shooting at. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the question. | ||
| Well, those are actually our allies. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Those are, yeah, U.S.-backed fighters in Puntland. | ||
| They seem lovely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's in Puntland. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's a really interesting thing to be doing that. | |
| Yeah, last time we did stuff like that. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Yeah, we don't know anything about Puntland is secured. | ||
| Yeah, don't worry. | ||
| Puntland's good. | ||
| Fear not. | ||
| So we're bombing al-Shabaab, who we've been bombing since 2007. | ||
| How many al-Shabaab are there? | ||
| I believe the estimate's 25,000 to 30,000. | ||
| They are sizable. | ||
| They control a good amount of territory in central and southern Somalia, and we've been fighting them since 2007. | ||
| What are we hoping to win against al-Shabaab? | ||
| Well, that's the question. | ||
| I mean, and also, so this story is about an airstrike in Puntland, where we're bombing an ISIS affiliate that popped up in 2015. | ||
| So after almost 10 years of bombing al-Shabaab, another group popped up that we had to start bombing too. | ||
| It's very similar to Afghanistan, where we were fighting the Taliban, and then you saw ISIS-K pop up. | ||
| And this war, in a lot of ways, is kind of like a mini Afghanistan, where they're fighting against the Sunni Muslim insurgency, propping up a government that relies on foreign funding to really exist. | ||
| And it seems like it's only a matter of time before this, at some point we decide either going to negotiate some kind of deal or just pull out and watch Mogadishu fall. | ||
| They've been back on the counteroffensive. | ||
| They just lost a lot of territory to al-Shabaab over the past few years. | ||
| And now they're launching this counteroffensive against al-Shabaab. | ||
| And that's why we've seen a big increase in the airstrike. |
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