Mike Rains joins to dissect Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump’s 2024 bombing of three Iranian sites—$6B in oil trade risks if Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, targeting allies like Iraq and UAE. QAnon’s failed prophecies now pivot to justify strikes, despite its anti-Semitic ties and paradoxical Israel hostility. Trump’s transactional diplomacy, ignoring intel (e.g., Canada’s Trudeau-Carney warnings), fuels distrust; Iran’s asymmetrical resistance mirrors Afghanistan’s insurgency tactics. Military pressure may backfire, accelerating nuclear ambitions like WWII-era Japan’s defiance, while economic fallout splits even U.S. allies—Alberta gains, but global tensions escalate. No path to peace exists without dismantling mutual miscalculations. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello everyone, I'm Sauce and I'm Sandy and we are the hosts of Tinfoil Tales.
We have been observing the Australian freedom movement since its COVID era inception.
We share our observations and analysis of a movement that has swept the world looking at how it has affected Australia specifically.
So if you want to know about people yelling across lakes, why what flag you carry matters, and a super secret list of 28 names, find us in your podcast app.
and we're back with truth unrestricted the podcast that is what is it doing again I can't even remember my own tagline.
That's awesome.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm so distracted by everything else I'm talking about.
The purpose of this podcast is we are going to interpret the information, the language of the disinformation age.
That's what it is.
We are creating and interpreting the language of the disinformation age.
Wow, that's, I should write this stuff down in advance.
I'm your host, Spencer, and I have a special guest today.
Go ahead and introduce yourself.
Hello, I'm Mike Reins.
I'm one of the hosts of the Adventures in Hell World podcast, and I also run the Poker and Politics Twitter feed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know how you do that.
That's you are active.
I never able to get that quite that level of plugged in.
I don't know if it's healthy, though.
I'm worried about you.
No, I'm an internet addict.
I've been an internet addict since I was a teenager.
I grew up, I grew up with Prodigy in America Online and all that good stuff.
And one day, somehow for like a month or two, I had to use like long distance to call my modem.
And my mom got this like $500 phone bill and she was like absolutely out of her mind.
And I was like, I didn't know.
How could I have known?
And it was, yeah, it was very exciting.
But yeah, I've always been an internet addict.
I post way too much.
I fully acknowledge that.
Like people have emotional support dogs.
I have an emotional support phone.
Like I just need to be on my phone constantly looking at the world.
I have two kittens in my room and I tried to get them out, but they were there, two of them and they're siblings.
And every time I got one of them out, before I get the other one out, they ran back in.
So I might have to let them out if they want out.
But right now they're just running around my room.
So I have to find a way to not be distracted by that in addition to everything else.
So the reason why we are here today, why I invited you on here was to because last night a thing happened and everyone in the world is talking about it.
So I figured that I should too.
And I'm always better when I talk with someone about these things.
So I just picked you and you said yes.
And here we are.
That's pretty much the whole process.
I'm so glad that's what it took.
It was just me to agree to this.
And I was in.
Well, in this case, I mean, consent and people agreeing to things might come up in this discussion.
So of course, the thing that happened last night for us was the United States as a nation, under the careful guidance of one Donald Trump, bombed three facilities in Iran under a thing that they're calling Operation Midnight Hammer.
Yeah, so I just want to, I just, I feel like As a Canadian, I feel like how these things are named should at some point get discussed even a little bit, because this sort of started, I feel like this started with the CIA and MK Ultra.
The idea that these names shouldn't just be random things.
Like MK Ultra shouldn't have been that.
It should have been, you know, MK, you know, juice box or something, right?
It should have been some random thing, but they decided to go with something that sounded really, you know, masculine and crazy and like really big somehow.
And then it gradually progressed, right?
You had Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and then you had what was shock and awe when it went back to Iraq, right?
And in this situation, we have Midnight Storm, right?
Which, of course, has to have a cute connection.
Or no, not Midnight Storm, Midnight Hammer, sorry.
Midnight Hammer, this idea the planes come in and they're like a hammer.
They're going to smash things.
And you get this movie-like name for this operation.
What's your take on this, Mike?
I don't know that I know I feel like that big about Midnight Hammer.
What I care about is the fact that this had been something that QAnon had spent months telling us would never happen, that Trump was the peace president, that everything that was going up to this point was Kfabe for a deal to be reached.
People were pointing out that Trump talked big about doing stuff against Kim Jong-un and my button is bigger than yours and it works and blah, blah, blah.
And then the next thing you know, they're busy broing it out at their peace summit and everyone's happy and nothing happened.
Like in reality, nothing happened and all Kim Jong-un got was legitimacy on the international stage.
But QAnon pretends that North Korea was turned into a utopia, a paradise.
They imagine that something happened behind a curtain somewhere that greatly affected a thing and they get to go and pat themselves on the back for that.
Right.
QAnon believes that there are cue drops where Q says that the strings were cut, that North Korea was controlled by the CIA and Trump broke that control.
Now Kim Jong-un is the actual ruler of the country, not beholden to his Illuminati masters.
And that was the story there.
And the thing about that was while that was happening, while the whole Trump Kim issue was boiling over in the real world and Q was talking about it, Q is constantly making comments about how Iran was next.
And there's a bunch of cue drops about how Iran's government is going to be toppled, how the people of Iran are fighting for freedom and they're going to achieve it.
And this, now all those cue drops are being brought up and reposted basically like seven years after the fact to be like, look, see, Iran's government being toppled has always been part of the prophecy.
It's all working out the way they intended it to.
This is great.
And that's like the attempt to try to make the medicine go down about the fact that we're on the side of Israel.
And again, most of QAnon is fearlessly anti-Semitic and Israel is the big bad in the story.
So they're not happy about that.
They're very unhappy about that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I define QAnon as a system of continual reinterpretation of events around a fixed set of, you know, supposedly factual points.
And so therefore, it's more easily defined by defining those fixed points rather than by trying to explain all the other things that happen.
That's just swirl.
You know what I mean?
All of those things can be washed away and it wouldn't mean anything to the people who follow QAnon, right?
It's all about just Trump is right and good.
And, you know, on the underside of that, that they don't say usually really openly, but it's usually something about the Jews are bad.
And that's the gist of it.
There's probably a couple, you know, you could break those down on a couple more finer points, but that's, you know, it doesn't work without Trump.
And it's on some level, it also doesn't work unless you're also, you know, not liking Jews in some respect.
But yeah, this Operation Midnight Hammer, I mean, we have a lot of people immediately said, okay, we're at war with Iran now, right?
This is sort of the first thing that comes up.
Everyone just says, okay, we're at war with Iran now.
And of course now, this morning, we have on several of these news channels, we have the White House saying, no, we're not at war.
This was just an operation.
This was just a thing we did.
And that we still have diplomacy as an option or whatever.
And I think that just a little bit of talk about why we consider this to be more than just some of the other things that happen.
I mean, obviously the U.S. has in the past, in the past, you know, 60, 70 years, very, very often done things in a belligerent manner inside other foreign nations past the boundaries of their borders, right?
In almost every situation, this hasn't been troops in uniform.
This has been what CIA, CIA operations, intelligence operations, people who might be disowned by their own government, and they know it in advance, right?
CIA operatives who go into other nations to do things understand when they go there that anything they do won't be worn by their entire nation and they'll be prosecuted as individuals rather than as parts of administrations.
And so, and they take those risks on themselves.
But in this case, that's not what you have.
You have people in uniform flying planes that are supplied and flown from U.S. Air Force bases.
The planes themselves are property of the U.S. Air Force or whatever branch of the military it actually was.
I assume it was the Air Force.
And you have them flying into international airspace.
You have them dropping bombs on actual facilities owned by a government that's within a boundary.
You have them killing civilians.
I mean, I assume there were civilians inside this.
Maybe they were military people, but it doesn't really matter because if you didn't declare war, why are you, you know, why are you considering them to be okay to kill?
So in this way, this feels a lot more like a declaration of war, a de facto declaration of war, even if you're not speaking it into existence by a declaration of war formally in the Congress or what have you.
What's your thoughts on this, this supposed new gray area between war and not war in this case?
Well, I think the big thing about this is that the issue about this quote-unquote war or non-war is that our stated governmental position is that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
And the problem is, is that how does this not war achieve that goal?
Because we're hearing everything at this point.
We're hearing that all these nuclear locations that got hit were blown the smithereens.
There's nothing left.
Then we're hearing other commentary that the Ford Row location wasn't totally destroyed.
Then we're hearing stuff about how Iran is saying, oh, we got all our enriched uranium out of those areas anyways because we knew your guys were going to bomb them.
We still have the uranium hiding somewhere else.
And so this is the issue is like when we went in and killed bin Laden, and that was in Pakistan, the reason why the Pakistani's weren't mad at us afterwards is like, we did our job.
Bin Laden's dead.
We don't care about you guys anymore.
And if you're going to raise a stink about this, we're going to be like, yo, you harbored bin Laden for all this time.
You're kind of in the wrong here.
So then Pakistani just threw their hands, Pakistan threw their hands up and said, whatever.
We're nuts to all this.
The problem here is that I don't see how Trump or the Iranian government can argue, can have a negotiation in good faith.
They virulently distrust each other.
I mean, Trump tore up the agreement Obama made.
Iran's been talking about enriching the Iranian this whole time.
Like Trump's gone on the record is like having been told by reporters are saying to him, Mr. President, your intelligence community says Iran's not close to getting a bomb.
What do you say to that?
He's like, my intelligence community is wrong.
They're all idiots.
Iran's a couple hours away from a bomb.
We need to act now.
So on what planet is Trump and like the Ayatollah or whoever going to get into a room, start discussing stuff, and then come to an agreement and they're both okay with it.
And they both trust the other side to uphold their end of the agreement.
I mean, is Iran going to let us bring in weapons inspectors to run around Iran like Iraq did with the WMDs?
And I mean, Iran is obviously going to know how great that was.
We had Hans Blix running around their country saying, we can't find them.
And then W said, screw it.
They're there anyways.
Kill them all.
They're still there.
Yeah.
Even though we know we have no proof.
Even though we have no proof, even though Scom has given us 80% of what we want in the inspections, we're just still going to invade and topple him and kill him.
I mean, so I just don't see how these two sides actually get down to the negotiating table and hammer out an agreement that makes both sides happy because Iran is always going to be of the mindset that Trump's not believing them and that Trump's going to just do dumb stuff to quote unquote prevent them from getting a nuke.
And on the other side, Trump's just going to be laying in bed, tossing and turning, thinking to himself, Iran's going to try to get a nuke so I don't beat them up anymore.
And I need to beat them up so badly, they can never get a nuke.
So like this whole idea that, yeah, we just did this and there's no way we're going to get dragged into a regime change.
I don't see how it's possible you don't get dragged into regime change because you don't trust the current government.
The current government doesn't trust you.
And again, unless you're willing to say, yeah, if Iran gets a nuke in five, ten years, that's fine.
I kicked the kid down the road.
That's not your line.
Your line is Iran can't have a nuke.
And I don't know how that's an enforceable statement to make.
Yeah.
I also don't know how, you know, the line of we will always do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear nation is it's a temporary goal.
It cannot last forever.
Like what you could do, like, and what this did, undoubtedly is it pushed the timeline out.
And even the Iranian, the, the deal that the Obama administration made, John Kerry worked, I don't know however long he worked on making that deal.
Even that was only going to buy time, right?
It was only going to postpone something.
I think that it's going to be not possible to actually prevent long-term this.
And I think that, like, I think that personally, I also have a thought that the United States has a different version of long term than nations like Iran have of the term long term.
They're much more patient.
They feel that they inherit all the glory of Persia, basically, right?
Which means that their culture and their lives and their history stretch back thousands of years.
What's 10 years on that cycle, right?
If the Iranian people say, yeah, okay, we'll wait 20 years more to achieve this level of godlike power.
That's a different thing.
Whereas the United States, if the United States had to say, we have to wait 20 more years for a thing, this would seem like an interminable loss, right?
That's ridiculous.
How many more presidents do we have to go through before we get this thing that we're looking for?
So I think this just postpones something.
And I think that a reasonable strategy, I think, was probably found along the track that was placed by the Obama administration on this, to do this through diplomacy,
to help Iran still get everything that they would get from achieving nuclear power and postpone as long as possible this in the hope that you could come to a place where you have more reasonable relations with this nation that's going to be just as powerful as all the other nations of this type.
Iran is going to have, like, it has the resources to do a great many more things than even some of the other nations that are nuclear now.
Like it's going to have more capability than North Korea.
That's inevitable, I think.
They are, you know, they're going to have more ability.
I don't think that there's any way to stop that.
Even if you try to bomb them into the Stone Age, as is probably going to be a word, you know, a phrase used at some point here.
That's only going to delay them.
That's only ever going to delay them.
And in some ways, some people in Iran now are probably thinking, well, you know, our greatness was only delayed so far, only delayed thousands of years, right?
And they will carry that forward and then they'll have children and they'll tell their children about all the things until unless you can actually stop ideas from being transmitted across generations, you're never going to stop this idea.
So like where this has a timeline, this has a time horizon.
Bombing the facilities that are enriching uranium.
Okay, well, that also prevents, you know, that pushes the timeline out, but it also prevents a great many, as you mentioned, a great many diplomatic solutions.
And Trump is going to pretend like he can still get those somehow, but he's just sort of imagining them to be the case.
The Iranians are just as capable of lying to him as he is of lying to them.
They're not a stupid people.
They aren't some kind of, you know, as some racists will imagine, they're just savage people that we can just take advantage of.
Well, that's not going to be the case.
The Iranians, this is not going to come to fruition.
And it might take 10 years for the world to realize that.
But I think that this is a thing that prevents a great many ways in which we could move forward.
And it means that more and more often the only way to push out this time horizon of when they get become nuclear is to continue to do actions like this, military actions that actually bomb facilities that are doing this sort of thing, which also almost guarantees that once they do become a nuclear nation, they will be belligerent when they do so.
And that's the thing that we have to try to, that's the thing we're trying to avoid, a nuclear nation that's belligerent.
But I think this puts us closer to a path where it becomes inevitable.
What are your thoughts on this?
I think everything you're saying is accurate.
And what you pushing it out, the main problem with pushing it out that people have with diplomacy in America is that, in all honesty, what that would really entail is us bribing Iran not to make a bomb.
Us saying, hey, look, we're going to take care of you.
We're going to help your economy.
We'll reduce sanctions.
Just we would be giving into nuclear blackmail, which people hate to do, unless they're right-wingers whining about how Ukraine hasn't surrendered to Russia yet.
We better give up and let them win or else they're going to nuke us all.
And I mean, these, these, the same people that whine about how we're letting Ukraine drag us into World War III are the people who whined about Obama sending Iran back their money, which was theirs.
And we literally had like an international arbitration decision to have it discussed.
They were like, look, this is how much you owe Iran.
And we're like, fine.
And we paid it to them.
But that kind of diplomacy, that kind of diplomacy where we work with another nation that hates our cuts and we hate them, but we're trying to find a common good where it's like, if you don't build a nuke, you will get, here are the carrots you get for not building a nuclear bomb.
And the fact that Trump has gone right to the stick, immediately to the stick instead of the carrot, what carrot could he possibly offer them?
What possible benefits could Trump offer Iran that's going to make Iran say, yeah, you got a deal.
We're going to stop going for a nuclear bomb?
I don't see anything that is possible.
And this morning, we've already seen that the Iranian government has voted in favor of blocking the Strait of Hormutz, which if you don't know, it's basically this very small section.
It's a very small area of the in the Middle East.
It's a little river and it's where most of the oil in the Middle East gets out into the Pacific Ocean and then gets traded to the world.
And it's a choke point.
It's a choke point that everyone's known for forever that Iran could use to try to derail shipping from the Middle East and to do that kind of damage to the global economy.
And I've heard people on social media have said literally everything from enjoy your global depression and $12 gallon gas to them blocking the Strait of Hormuz will do nothing.
We won't even feel a tickle.
Go ahead, waste your time, Iran, you losers.
So how effective that will be, opinions differ.
And yes, and the map, yeah, that little, that little jut out where Africa goes way high and Asia is close to it.
Yeah, that area there.
That's the Strait of Hormuz.
And that's that very tiny little area.
And if Iran wants to just throw a bunch of mines in there or arm people on the coasts with artillery and rockets to shoot at ships, as someone pointed out, basically, and that's how you get out of the Persian Gulf and into the Pacific, is you have to go through the Strait of Hormuz.
Yeah, if you're going to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so people have said, once this happens, no company insuring these trade vessels are going to insure them.
They're going to be like, nope, we're not involved in that because all these ships are going to get sunk and we're going to be owing billions of dollars to all these companies.
So we're pulling your insurance.
So then the companies will stop shipping and it'll be this massive shutdown.
And how devastating would that shutdown be?
And how would you break a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz if it matters?
Because again, we're hearing everything from the doomers declaring it's the end of the end of modern civilization through a global depression to the non-doomers saying, ah, that oil shmoil, it ain't going to amount to a hill of beans.
So this is where we're at right now.
This is the latest escalation.
Donald Trump's plea for Iran to come to the negotiating table now is being ignored from all signs.
No one, because what does Iran get from surrendering now?
I mean, oh, we'll stop bombing them.
Great.
But how do they know?
How do they know we're going to hold up that end of the agreement?
Yeah.
He didn't hold up any other agreements ever.
Right.
Even with allies.
I mean, this is part of the thing.
Trade agreements with Canada and Britain and other nations have not been honored under this administration.
Why would anyone think that they would be honorable with nations whose interests they oppose?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're not a we don't argue in good faith.
That's what you just said is nobody knows what Trump wants in a trade deal.
All these companies are coming to him and saying, what do you want in a trade deal?
And he's just an angry idiot who gets mad at the concept of a trade deficit, which he doesn't understand.
Yeah.
Trade deficit in Trump's mind means I get a burger from McDonald's and I get the burger and they get two bucks.
And in their mind, in his mind, Trump, McDonald's has won this exchange because I was the one that gave money in exchange for a product.
And that's the way Trump sees everything.
Yeah, it's sort of like this capitalist's view of every transaction, right?
Like if I go to McDonald's and I pay $250 for a burger, but I find out that they could still make money by charging me $2 for a burger, I should demand that they make the burger cost only $2 rather than $250.
And so in that, you know, sort of, except that if everyone else, I mean, if the market is bearing this at $250 and with the extra profit, McDonald's gets to, I don't know, make better burgers next year than they did this year or something, right?
I mean, that's part of what companies do with more profits is they improve their, you know, supply chains and everything else, then that means the system's working.
And your only choice really is to choose to buy it at 250 or to not buy it at 250.
That's really your choice instead of just demanding insanely that they charge only $2.
But he looks at things like deficits as like, as though the nation, you know, this is part of the problem of having someone who is a businessman run the country as though it's a business.
If we have money going out that we use to spend for things and we have money coming in as revenue and the amount of revenue that we have coming in is less than the money we have going out for expenses, then our company is losing money.
That's true, except that that's not really how it works for trade and deficit spending and trade deficits and whatever.
If what you're making could be worth more than what you're bringing in, then you have added value to all of those things.
You have Canada that's supplying all these raw materials.
You have the U.S. that's turning those raw materials into real things that are worth more.
I mean, this is, you know, just trying to add them up like this is not working the same way that you think it should.
And of course, often what he does is he just takes only a specific number of columns to try to work this out.
So things like information.
information related things are in a separate column.
There's a massive trade deficit on the Canadian side for that stuff.
And of course, you know, if you just remove those columns, it makes it look like, you know, the U.S. is losing in this overall trade thing across this select set of sectors that he likes that are just physical stuff.
Whereas if you add the information related stuff in, it starts to go the other way.
But yeah, Trump is not understanding this stuff.
And that's why he eventually he's going to not like Mark Carney the same way he didn't like Trudeau, which is going to be also lead to bad relations between Canada and the U.S.
He came to not like Trudeau because every, you know, everyone outside Canada anyway tended to just like Trudeau.
He was liked by people, including Trump's own family members.
You take the picture of Trump's daughter looking at Trudeau and no one could deny the fact that, oh, yeah, she kind of gets a little glow there, right?
She likes this man.
He's attractive and confident and all the things that Trump wishes he was, right?
And so he gets jealous of this man.
But Carney is going to make him feel bad in a different way.
Carney's not got that glow of the, you know, an extremely attractive man.
He has that, I'm extremely smart vibe and everyone else treats me as though I'm one of the smartest people in the room.
And that's also the way Trump wants to feel.
And so Trump goes to the G7, spends not even quite a full day there, and then makes an excuse to leave again.
You know, he could have stayed the second day easily, except that he, you know, but everyone sort of who's there agrees that, you know, yeah, Trump feels stupid compared to Carney.
He does.
And that's not going to work.
That's going to work to a much worse relationship here, right?
But that's these personal factors that you have to factor in all the time with Trump.
And Iran doesn't have this sort of leader with this glowing, personable, you know, world-renowned reputation as we've had with the last two leaders anyway here in Canada.
So they're not going to have that specific problem.
But Iran also isn't going to react in the same way that everyone sort of is going to expect.
My prediction is they're not going to react in the same way everyone sort of expects.
A lot of people are expecting, okay, what's the first thing they're going to do?
What they do in the next week is going to determine everything they're going to do.
And I don't think that's the case.
I think what I said before is true.
They're a patient civilization.
Like across their baseline level of patience for these sorts of things across their entire society is just a different level than what it is here in the West, where we tend to want to have more immediate responses and reactions and shows of retaliatory force when we get these sort of slights to our level of safety and everything else.
So like 9-11 happens and the U.S. government has to have a response within a couple days.
They have to have whatever they're going to do on the table right away, whether it's right or wrong or whatever, they have to have it on the table and ready to go.
Troops got to be moving, right?
Whereas, uh, potentially a more uh, you know, cogent response would have been, we're gonna, you know, we feel there aren't any more immediate attacks.
We're gonna take a little bit of time and we're going to think harder about how we're going to handle this.
Uh, you know, that might have turned out a lot better than the way they did it, which was a war in Afghanistan that lasted 20 years and accomplished almost nothing because, again, Afghanistan and the culture there is extremely patient.
They just waited them out.
20 years is basically nothing to a culture like they have in Afghanistan that brags about being an empire killer, right?
You know, very powerful nations come here and have been coming here for thousands of years, have been throwing themselves around and then eventually just sort of going away and then we carry on, right?
So, Iran is going to have not the exact same reaction, but I think something similar where they're going to do some things, but that's not even going to be close to the entire list of things they're going to do here, right?
And Trump is, you know, they're basically just going to wait Trump out until they get a new administration and then, you know, have a new set of factors with which to deal with this.
I said a lot of stuff there.
Well, why don't you chime in?
That's the interesting question about how delayed would Iran's response be that is that's another one of these problems that we have is that this is always going to be now a slight that Iran is going to remember.
This is going to be the thing that we did.
But we can't say, oh, like, sorry about that.
And I mean, Lord knows, like, like Trump and the Republicans are going to be celebrating.
We beat your asses.
We did all kinds of damage to you.
We crushed you.
How you like them, apples, Iran?
And you couldn't prevent us.
Right.
You couldn't stop it.
And that's the one thing that's been really eye-opening with the Ukraine-Russia war and now Israel and now America and Iran is how paper tiger these people have been.
Like everyone's mindset was, well, Ukraine's going to give them a couple months and then it'll be over and that really sucks.
And Russia's going to do this thing to them.
And now we're like three years in and Russia has like 10% of Ukraine and they have anywhere from a half million to a million casualties.
And so many of their tanks and other war machines have been blown up and Russia's military has been exposed as being fraudulent.
And here, Israel just goes in and like steals Iran's lunch money.
They just beat them up and Iran really has no answers to it.
And Iran fired off some rockets and they did a little damage.
But if you're not in the QAnon world, and trust me, all the QAnon people who are crazy anti-Semites have all these posts about how Israel is in ruins, how they awoke a sleeping giant and Iran is now beating the crap out of them.
And none of that's true.
But Iran has really shown itself to be pretty toothless as a military power.
And for them, this blockading the straight of hormones, this escalation, the dream for Iran is to get America to be dumb enough to put boots on the ground because that's where they can win.
Yeah.
Insurgency, defense, trapping an American army inside of Iran and then slowly grinding it down through attrition.
That is what they want because that's a very, that's Afghanistan.
It's a winnable way to handle the war.
If we just sat there and potshot them with bombings, they've shown they've got no air force or air defense that can stop us.
We have cardee blanche to do whatever we want to them.
So how they can attack us militarily is obviously asymmetrical.
It would probably be involving terror attacks on military installations America has in the Middle East.
Yeah.
Maybe clandestine affairs, encouraging others to become belligerent with the United States.
Yeah.
Right.
They can't fight us militarily the way we can fight them.
We're too strong for them.
But we can definitely screw this up and put ourselves in a position where they can do something to us.
And just the idea that the idea that this is going to calm down, that this is going to stop, I don't ever see Iran agreeing to anything.
And that's the real problem is that I don't think there's going to be a peace accord struck anytime in the near future where everyone walks out of a room and shakes hands and says, yeah, we're good now.
We got this.
Look forward to a bright new future under this new piece of paper we signed.
Yeah, right.
Right, exactly.
Because neither side's going to trust the piece of paper.
And I don't even, and I don't even think that Iran really wants to sign a piece of paper at this point.
I think they're pretty cool with not signing a piece of paper and being like, look, we're going to be open about this.
We're mad.
And how we're going to handle this is like none of your business.
You'll find out when you find out how we're going to handle it.
Yeah.
And they won't mind if it takes 20 years.
Right.
That's the other thing.
They're not going to be that that's not going to be considered much of a loss for them if it takes 20 years to get back.
That's the that's the Afghanistan quote that the Americans have watches, we have time.
I mean, yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
And so it's just, I just think that we're in we're in a bad spot.
And I don't see how it becomes not a bad spot because there's no trust between these two sides.
And as a result, I really feel like we're going to get sucked into doing something.
I mean, Trump even talked about it before the bombing run where he's like, I know where Khomeini is.
I could kill Khomeini if I wanted to, but I'm such a nice guy.
I won't kill him.
And now, I mean, what would be Trump's reason for keeping Khomeini alive when Iran's blocking the Strait of Hornwoods?
That like they're, they're going to be doing stuff.
And I've seen people say, well, we don't want to do regime change because the next guy might be worse than the Ayatollah.
Well, it's like you're with the Ayatollah.
It ain't going to be great either.
I mean, all of this sucks.
There's basically the none of it's.
Yeah.
My great synopsis is all of this sucks.
There's really no good way out of here.
And anyone who's thinking, oh, yeah, we're going to just take over.
But they've moved into position to get the killing blow or the checkmate position or whatever.
That's not how this works.
This isn't a game of chess.
Yeah.
I think that just real quick, just for anyone who's, because this is going to be for some people listening.
I just have the map up here of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, Hormuz, however you want to pronounce it.
And just as a reminder of some parts of the geopolitical spectrum here that is going to be affected, like just as far as trade goes here.
So Iraq and Kuwait are going to be affected directly by the lack of port access through the Persian Gulf to markets in the rest of the world.
There's also Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Dubai that are going to be affected.
However, these nations, as long as my limited knowledge of international relations is correct, have friendlier relations with Saudi Arabia and could potentially strike deals to use Saudi Arabian pipelines to access ports in the Red Sea,
which isn't going to be as ideal, but it might keep these very small nations whose income relies entirely upon oil afloat long enough to do this.
These nations also, by the way, tend to have huge treasuries with no debt.
So they can also outlast the siege for potentially several years of this kind.
But make no mistake that blocking the Strait of Hormuz is a siege situation for all the market traffic that's got to go through there, which is almost entirely oil.
Goods can come in from other ways, but the oil has to go pretty much has to come out by boat.
Because also Iraq tends to not have very strong, friendly relations with the other nations around it that it could possibly build pipelines through, like something close with Syria, but you can't always rely on that because as soon as the regime change happens, you get a new nation that closes that pipeline down or just blows it up.
So you have to rely on the other nations around you being stable before you could rely on a pipeline or rail trains through there for your market, for your supplies to get out.
And they just can't do that.
So this is going to be absolutely devastating to Iraq, especially.
And if you devastate Iraq, they just kind of got on an even keel here.
You're going to increase the likelihood that they also turn to more extreme things happening there.
Whoever is in charge, I haven't even kept track really with Iraq, but I know that they're somewhat stable now.
They have a lot less going on than they had eight years ago or something, 10 years ago with ISIS that was going on in this region.
With less resources, you get a greater chance that ISIS could flare up again or any other things could happen.
This is going to just across the board increase instability.
And in that instability, you will get all kinds of other people that will take advantage of that instability that are not even related to Iran, right?
Saudi Arabia also uses these ports, but they can switch things up.
They have other ports on the Red Sea.
Jeddah is a major one where they can get their product to market.
It will be squeezed through a smaller number of holes, right?
But they'll survive.
But the other factor here is that anytime you interrupt the oil routes, the price is going to change globally.
People wonder, well, we don't buy from Iraq.
Why is our oil price changing when Iraq's supply gets interrupted?
It's because the people who were buying from Iraq now have to buy from other sources that compete with where you were buying it from.
And then your price goes up.
This commodity is a global commodity in this way.
It has something like just several months from when it's pulled out of the ground to when it's used typically.
So any supply, any wrinkle like this, any ripple like this changes all of the global markets change, right?
So for people who, you know, Alberta is going to be happy about this.
Typically, the attitude in Alberta is that, you know, they're not happy that people suffer.
in wars in the Middle East, but they are happy when the price of oil goes up because of it.
So they get this sort of conflicted sort of thing.
But they're going to start to, you know, as the price rises, it's going to get busier there.
And of course, in Canada, we currently have a situation where Alberta is looking to be very, very loud about leaving and how much they contribute and how much, how good their economy is because of all the oil they produce and all the rest.
This is going to become down, you know, down the chain effect to, you know, become more difficult to deal with a belligerent Alberta within Canada and all the divisions here.
I mean, that's just how it affects that.
The rest of the world is going to be affected by this in many different ways is kind of the point here, right?
There's no escaping that.
Even just blocking the Strait of Hormuz is going to change that.
And it's possible that Iran tries to block this and is unsuccessful or tries to block it and then changes their mind in a week.
You know, we don't really know what all they're going to do.
But if they block it and they successfully, you know, stop all boats from moving through here via the placement of mines, et cetera, this is going to be a major disruption all by itself without even factoring in any other military engagements of any kind.
What are your thoughts, Mike?
I just think that's what you're saying is the situation is that this is going to keep escalating and there's really no way to put this genie back in the bottle because, I mean, we obviously want this to be over because we want to just dunk on Iran and say we stop them from getting a nuke.
We win, game's over.
And my favorite guy for QAnon stuff like this is the guy War Clandestine.
He's like one of my favorite barometers for how QAnon works.
And basically his whole argument is that Iran's screwed.
They're isolated.
And we've got them by the throat.
So Iran needs to just accept that they're beaten and they need to quit now.
That's been the constant refrain from his posting.
And he is putting all the fault of the conflict and all the violence on Iran.
And if they would just stop being stupid and listen to reason and accept that they lost, we'd all be better for it.
And yeah, that's great.
But by the same token, like the same mentality is Ukraine needs to acknowledge they can't beat Russia.
They should give up.
It's this ridiculous might makes right.
We're stronger than you.
So we get to tell you what you're going to do.
And you have no choice but to accept it.
And he's doing it because this has to be how it works out for him because Trump has to be the peaceman.
He has to end wars and bring about peace and harmony and prosperity across the globe.
Right.
That's one of the central points of his sort of new religion, right?
Everything else has to, all the other points of reality have to bend in and deflect in order to make this one thing become true, right?
Yeah.
Right.
And that's, and that's really what it comes down to is just this idea that we we've uh, we've beaten you.
Now accept defeat, come to the negotiating table, we'll give you some scraps and then you can slink back to your corner and we won't hit you anymore.
But that's the problem.
Iran has no possible way of acknowledging that we're not going to hit them anymore.
Iran has no way to believe that they can trust Trump and this like uh, I remember some reports early on that were they were saying that the ayatollah is not responding to any communications because he's afraid that if you yeah right yeah, if he does do anything electronically or he does use a phone or anything, that it will give away his location and the Israelis and the Americans will just kill him.
So I mean when, when?
That is the mentality of one of the two sides of the negotiating, where it's like hey, if you guys see me, you'll probably kill me.
I don't.
It's really hard to imagine that we're going to be able to hash out a peace agreement.
Yeah yeah, uh.
And also uh, Iran probably is thinking no, we could, we could take at least a couple more hits before we give in.
And you know, this isn't even the start of the sort of hits we could take right uh uh, because they're, they look at the West as soft in this way, I think uh, you know, they'll look at the number of casualties and go what, like?
That's not, that's barely, you know, I don't think Iran is going to want this sort of eye-watering level of casualties that Russia sort of undergoes and, you know, belligerently keeps moving forward with.
But I don't think they look at this and go what like?
Oh, of course.
Yeah well, the planes came and they dropped the bombs and you know they're thinking, how many more do you really have?
Like there's no possible way you could really end our nation as a project with what you have there's.
You know you could bomb more cities.
This isn't going to cause us to just fold.
Uh yeah, the back.
You know the idea that the backbone of the Iranian people is broken by this is just complete fantasy.
Complete fantasy.
I mean this is uh, I mean this is Japan at the end of World War Ii, where they were gonna fight to the last man and the last bullet.
And yeah, Operation Ketchuko was to just make the allies land on the home islands and then slaughter them with literally every Japanese soldier and civilian fighting to their last breath, and I mean, I don't know that Iran has that level of fanaticism in them.
But that's the thing, when a nation is under attack, it's willing to endure a lot more hardship than you might think they'd be willing to endure.
Yeah, like no, everyone always imagines that the other side will break when we hit them.
It's.
It's very funny, because I was literally just reading a story about this where uh, the strategic bombing by the allies in World War Ii did have some effect, but it ended up being better later in the war, when we just started bombing Germany's oil reserves and their uh, trains and roads that got their oil to the front lines, and that was how we actually hampered them like terror bombing their cities really didn't do anything.
And the British military leaders were like well, terror bombing their cities will break their spirits and that was like the dumbest thing in the world because the Nazis did it to them in the Battle Of Britain.
Yeah, if it was gonna break spirits, why didn't it break your spirit when the blitz was on?
Yeah right exactly, it's like.
It's like, oh, you think the Germans are different than you.
It's an imagine that you are superior to your foe at some base level.
That will never be understood by anyone.
But that's, that's the stuff of daydreams, right.
When you fight in your daydreams, you're always the winner and you're never touched by the opponent.
Uh yeah, and that's ridiculous right, it's like British are made of sterner stuff than those crowds.
As soon as a few bombs them, then they'll be waving the white flag immediately.
And yeah and, and that was like and, and that was Pearl Harbor.
It was like, America has no stomach for war.
We'll give them a bloody lip and they'll beg for a peace accord and then, and then they'll make a deal to sell us diesel so we can go to war with Britain.
Yeah right right, and then, and then we literally harness the power of the sun and hit them with it twice to let them know we meant business.
I mean, so it's just, it's just, it's just so silly to think that, like that uh, that the Iranians are gonna cave on this.
Uh, I mean like really like, the only way this works and it's like the ultimate triple bank shot is that if we did get regime change and we somehow did get a secular, like neutral or Pro-western government in place, that we could then, uh like, remove all the sanctions from and then pile lots of money into, and they were cool with the occasional weapons inspection to make sure they weren't having a nuke,
and that's that's really it.
At the end of the day, the uh Theocratic Republic of Iran, uh is, is going to get a nuke one way or another at some point down the road, because they need one, because Israel and America will always be able to pull this shit on them if they don't have it, and so, if anything, this just increases their, their drive to get it done, regardless of anything else.
Yep exactly yeah, so I think that's a good note to end on.
Yeah, a happy, cheerful note.
Yeah yeah yeah, it's uh, it's great.
We, we just saved the world mike yep, all right well uh uh, Where can people find you?
You mentioned your hell world and your poker and politics.
Yep, that's it.
Those are the places you can find me.
I do have accounts on Blue Sky and other places like that, but I don't use them as much.
Twitter's where QAnon is, so that's where I am in order to monitor them.
It's like when QAnon got kicked off Twitter, I was like on Gab and Truth a lot and then reposting my stuff back on Twitter.
But I mean, maybe one day I'll fully do the immigration to blue sky, but we'll see.
We'll see how that all shakes out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, for anyone who's for any reason unfamiliar with your content and kind of what you do, you've been, you know, paying attention to QAnon right from sort of day one.
And it's sort of interesting to watch sometimes you use the actual Q drops and pull them on the people who, you know, feel that they're, you know, part of QAnon and following this movement and enthusiastically supporting it.
And you showing them, you know, yeah, yeah, but you're, you know, this, this thing that's your gospel is saying that you're wrong.
So where are you now, right?
That's always interesting to watch.
I mean, just to talk about that real quick and I'll shut up.
Basically, my Twitter account is my timestamp for this.
I joined in August of 2018.
Q had started posting in October of 2017.
I had been seeing people posting on Twitter and I've been hearing about QAnon.
And I've said this many times, but I immediately said to myself, this sounds like the Illuminati that I've been tracking for all these years, but Trump is the protagonist.
And then when I found the Q drops and I found the people that were actually talking about QAnon, I was like, this is exactly what I thought it was.
I mean, this is just, this is just the Illuminati, just the idea that a bunch of bad people secretly rule the world, but now it has a protagonist.
Now Donald Trump's the guy that's going to stop the bad people.
It's going to save us all.
And I, and I also, at this point, had seen a lot of people posting on Twitter and having Twitter accounts.
And I said to myself, I'm going to get on there.
I should be entertaining enough to get a small audience.
And boom, dream achieved.
So yeah, but you have to, I've heard people ask me.
They're like, why did you read the Q drops?
It's so stupid.
And you have to read the source material to know what to talk about it.
It's like if you're an atheist, you have to read the Bible or the Quran or whatever holy book it is you want to debate with a Muslim or a Christian or a Jewish person or whatever.
I mean, you have to know the source material to be able to talk about it.
And the Q drops are incredibly stupid.
They're incredibly poorly written.
It's obvious they are wrong.
So reading them is very helpful.
I think it was Will Summer.
I think it was Will Summer, but someone published a book, Trust the Plan with the Book.
And in that book, they had a QAnon person who got out of QAnon because they read my thread of all the failed prophecies of Q.
And so by reading the Q drops, I got one person out of QAnon.
So that's a win for me.
It's one more than I've got.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So yeah.
Okay.
Well, for anyone who's not joining us on YouTube, you're unable to see the very cute kitten I am holding.
This is the sort of latent pandering I will do to the cat-loving crowd on YouTube.
And with that, if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about anything they've heard in this podcast, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.