In this episode, we remember the brave young men and women who answered the call to serve their country, and the families who lost their lives in Afghanistan. We also pay our respects to those who died in Afghanistan, and remember those who were honorably discharged from the Marine Corps.
00:00:26.080We're getting access to all the documents necessary, why decisions were made, why they weren't made, why certain force protection measures were ignored.
00:00:34.000Again, there's never been accountability for this.
00:00:36.820It's something that Joe Biden allowed to happen that never should have happened.
00:00:40.300Anybody, any objective observer knows that's not how you leave a country.
00:00:43.980And certainly these families know better than anyone else.
00:01:25.200I don't say, here, have them under the auto pen.
00:01:27.420The United States Marine Corps Sergeant Joani Rosario Picardo was part of the Marines' female engagement team.
00:01:34.660She was a native of Lawrence, Massachusetts, a 2014 graduate of Lawrence High School and attended Bridgewater State University.
00:01:42.080She was full of light, armed with valor and bravery, but at the young age of 18 decided to raise her hand to serve our country as a member of the United States Marine Corps.
00:01:52.860Corporal Humberto Sanchez, United States Marine Corps, was a native of Logansport, Indiana, 2017 graduate of Logansport High School.
00:02:02.760He bravely answered the call to serve his nation.
00:02:05.860He was honored to be putting on the Marine uniform and serve his country.
00:02:10.680Staff Sergeant Ryan Noss, U.S. Army, motivated young man who loved his country from Knoxville, Tennessee.
00:02:17.880He joined the Army shortly after graduating high school.
00:02:21.000He was part of the 8th PSYOPs group and was looking forward to moving to D.C. upon his return home.
00:02:28.200Staff Sergeant Darren Taylor Hoover, United States Marine Corps, known as Taylor, former high school football player from Midville, Utah.
00:02:39.320He spent his entire adult life as a Marine for the last 11 years.
00:02:43.220His father said his son did what he loved, was leading his men, and was with them to the end.
00:02:48.800He loved the United States and proved it by his service.
00:02:52.800Sergeant Nicole Gee, United States Marine Corps.
00:02:56.020She was a Marine's Marine, loved helping people, and she did it until the end.
00:03:02.220She's a native of Sacramento, California.
00:03:06.360Lance Corporal Dylan Morala, United States Marine Corps, from Rancho Cucamonga, graduate of Los Osos High School,
00:03:15.180had only been in Afghanistan two weeks, planned to study engineering in college after his military service.
00:03:21.600His mom said he was kind, loving, and giving to every single person.
00:06:12.240But I think it's a good time for reassessment.
00:06:15.620I believe I heard General Milley actually speaking and criticizing the president last week on a different topic.
00:06:24.140But the question goes, what have we learned from Abbey Gate?
00:06:29.460What have we really learned and what lessons do we take away from the disastrous adventure in Afghanistan and the disastrous adventure in Iraq?
00:06:44.740These two wars of nation building and wars of choice because the Afghan situation with the Taliban and what we do with the Taliban was really solved or could have been totally solved in the first, I don't know, 100 days or six months.
00:07:03.840And the reason I ask this is you see the same proponents of this failed strategy just nonstop on television and never held accountable.
00:07:15.020I would actually propose that 26 August be set aside as a day of commemoration for the wars of the 21st century, particularly the young generation that volunteered to fight.
00:07:29.000Remember, all of these were volunteers.
00:07:30.400Unlike World War II and World War I, where there were principally draftees, these were volunteers and Vietnam, I might add.
00:07:40.780These were volunteers, people that volunteered to defend their country or what they thought at the time was defending their country.
00:07:48.480And, of course, they were sent all over Hell's Half Acre to these wars of choice that now we know because of the manipulation of information and really, quite frankly, internal propaganda that these were unnecessary and people were lied to over and over again.
00:08:04.740Afghanistan being only slightly worse than Iraq, you know, 20 years after our adventure in Afghanistan started, the Washington Post did a series called The Afghan Papers.
00:08:15.980And it was every bit as damning as the Pentagon Papers.
00:08:20.960Now, it got very little play because the progressive left is now the biggest proponent of the deep state.
00:08:29.520So unlike in previous eras where there was a fight against the deep state, there was no fight until the MAGA movement came along with the twin goals of deconstructing the administrative state,
00:08:44.400but taking on and destroying the deep state.
00:08:47.560And my question today, and Pete Hegseth just laid out, they're doing an investigation.
00:08:51.520Sean Parnell, who is a friend of the show and a guy we think so highly of, Sean Parnell runs comms over at the Pentagon.
00:08:59.960And Sean has got an amazing book about his time as a junior officer in those wars and really kind of rose to prominence because of that.
00:09:09.340Sean is doing an investigation, and Pete said it would come out sometime in 2026, so they're taking their time to do it.
00:09:19.020It seems a little long, but if that's what it takes, that's what it takes.
00:09:22.080But we have to hold these people accountable.
00:09:23.620I don't know what we're waiting on General Milley for because I think he can be held accountable very, very quickly.
00:09:29.980But the people that – in the Biden regime – and you see him on TV all the time.
00:09:34.960You see Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken in this crowd.
00:09:38.100It's like – and Susan Rice plus the architects of the Iraq war.
00:09:42.500I mean you see Nicole Wallace and Dana Perino, these people either on Fox or MSNBC, they're on all the time.
00:09:52.360They were the mouthpieces for what was clearly we were lied to about Iraq to get into that war, the wars of the phoniness of the weapons of mass destruction and the real reasons we were there and lost so many lives and blood and treasure.
00:10:08.600And I don't know, Brown University says that it's approximately $9 trillion, those wars cost us, of wasted capital, and that's just a fraction of the wasted lives.
00:10:31.240Tage Gill is, what, 16 combat tours, and I don't know, half of those are as a SEAL and half as a contractor because we went to a different model to make sure that, you know, we couldn't afford the health care.
00:10:52.760It's a good day to think about this, to think about Afghanistan, to think about everything you recall.
00:10:56.920Remember, for those of you who have been with the show for years, remember we did it live over those couple of days.
00:11:03.780In fact, you know, Rob Sigg and I talked to Parker and Rob.
00:11:07.640We went live on a Sunday night, had a live special on a Sunday evening in the middle of this thing because of the disaster that was building up on this retreat.
00:11:20.380It was just a mad scramble, disgracefully, out of Afghanistan.
00:11:26.920And it's obviously so central to what's happening going forward.
00:11:32.360Going forward, and we're going to talk about that today, these different wars in Ukraine, the wars in the Middle East, this potential war they're trying to drive us to in Persia that we're not going to take debate on.
00:11:43.180We got off the hook last time when President Trump had total obliteration, the total obliteration campaign that ended their nuclear enrichment program.
00:11:53.500But we always have to be on watch here, and quite frankly, this goes to the NDAA and the budget and the deficits.
00:12:00.140You have now the National Defense Authorization Act that's going to lock us into over a trillion dollar defense bill.
00:12:06.260And my question is, it doesn't coincide whatsoever with President Trump's stated strategy of hemispheric defense.
00:12:13.940And I would love to see the White House and the National Security Council come out.
00:12:18.640Basically, you're supposed to do this report every year.
00:12:20.640It'll be out, I think, in November or December.
00:12:22.600But I'd like to see it for this budget cycle as we run up to the end of the fiscal year, and particularly the must-approve NDAA.
00:12:31.640Which I ask, why do we have to approve that?
00:12:39.920But those authorizations, you're supposed to authorize, I think, most of these departments at least every five or ten years.
00:12:46.800I don't believe the EPA has been authorized since its inception.
00:12:52.300I don't think the Justice Department has been reauthorized for, I don't know, 40 or 50 years.
00:12:59.580If we're going to play by the rules, and I believe we should play by the rules, and I think we should go through authorizations, reauthorizations to these departments.
00:13:05.940But I think we need to get back to that, because then you can start asking basic questions about what in the hell are we doing?
00:13:19.060And the NDAA that they're talking about, this must-pass NDAA, which is just an authorization bill.
00:13:23.860You still do the appropriation, you still have that.
00:13:25.760But they do this to lock it in, because then they say, well, look, the number's a trillion dollars.
00:13:29.440You guys spend the trillion dollars, and they've got it kind of out in big sections.
00:13:32.640But the NDAA does not tie back to the strategy that President Trump, I think, has been pretty articulate laying out, which is a hemispheric defense.
00:13:42.320That to come back and have a hemispheric defense, it's not that you're retreating from the world, but you're taking a smarter view of it.
00:13:50.280That we don't need to be engaged all over the planet, and particularly on the Eurasian landmass.
00:13:55.640We can actually do this much smarter in expeditionary forces.
00:13:59.560Well, Steve, what's an expeditionary force?
00:14:17.780Total obliteration, according to our commander-in-chief.
00:14:20.380Also, you have 4,000 Marines right now and sailors heading towards, been attached to South Com to head to basically the Caribbean in an amphibious marine expeditionary force to do direct interdiction with the cartels.
00:14:45.880Minstrel Boy from Blackhawk Down will take us out this morning.
00:14:50.080We'll be back in the warm in just a moment.
00:14:59.900This July, there is a global summit of BRICS nations in Rio de Janeiro.
00:15:04.820The block of emerging superpowers, including China, Russia, India, and Persia, are meeting with the goal of displacing the United States dollar as the global currency.
00:15:18.760As BRICS nations push forward with their plans, global demand for U.S. dollars will decrease, bringing down the value of the dollar in your savings.
00:15:27.000While this transition won't not happen overnight, but trust me, it's going to start in Rio.
00:15:32.880The Rio reset in July marks a pivotal moment when BRICS objectives move decisively from a theoretical possibility towards inevitable reality.
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00:18:08.000With all due respect, how is allowing 600,000 students from the communist country of China putting America first?
00:18:16.500Well, the president's point of view is that what would happen if you didn't have those 600,000 students is that you'd empty them from the top.
00:18:26.340All the students would go up to better schools.
00:18:28.700And the bottom 15 percent of universities and colleges would go out of business in America.
00:18:34.200So his view is he's taking a rational economic view, which is classic Donald Trump looking at higher education and saying, until we modify that.
00:18:44.640That just helps Harvard and UCLA and UCAL Berkeley.
00:18:48.580And I mean, you're all helping those schools.
00:20:35.980The reason is that they've been putting their money into social programs for decades and decades and decades as the same people that came up with the wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan
00:20:47.660essentially underwrote the European elites to get political pressure off them from having to make those tough decisions between guns and butter.
00:20:59.340However, this is why this NDA right now, I'll get more into this later this week, and we shouldn't pass it.
00:22:07.100Because Scott's a safe pair of hands and will look you in the eye and into the camera and tell you what's going on and not try to spin you.
00:22:17.020And do we agree with 1,000% what's happening at Treasury?
00:22:48.040The New York Times has an amazing article of investigative reporting of how, wait for it, the Chinese Communist Party has infiltrated into New York City and has a major role in local elections in New York City.
00:23:41.160The H-1B visa program is a total scam.
00:23:44.680The H-1B visa is to take the job of those 13 young people that died in defense of their country at Abbey Gate in Kabul, Afghanistan on the 26th of August of 2021.
00:24:01.800It was to take their job when they got home.
00:24:24.880You want to take care of your affordability issues in your cities with your homes and have family formation happening earlier because kids can buy homes.
00:24:37.400And get a partner and get married and have a couple of three kids.
00:28:04.160They're going to sit there and go, no, but I can get people cheaper and I can get them to work 100 hours a week and live 10 to a condo in Silicon Valley.
00:28:42.040It just cannot keep up with that demand.
00:28:43.920I don't know about you, but I don't like the idea of being without power, even for a day.
00:28:48.600That's why I got the Grid Doctor 3300 from my Patriot Supply.
00:28:53.440It's a powerful solar generator that runs refrigerators, AC units, medical devices, power tools, anything you need to write out a blackout.
00:29:02.340And right now, for their Christmas in July event, they're including over $1,000 in free survival gear with your generator.
00:29:10.400Including emergency food supply, water filtration, survival tools, and more.
00:33:45.580And their casualty rates, they could care less.
00:33:48.580And now we know from sources, right, that, and President Trump has been implying this the entire time, is 1.7 million Ukrainians dead and wounded.
00:34:01.980You notice you don't see a lot of, remember back in the beginning when MSNBC and CNN were at the front line and they were giving you footage and they were giving you war, you know, they were being war correspondents.
00:34:12.280They thought everyone was Edward R. Murrow, right?
00:34:27.880And that's why this thing's totally sorted.
00:34:29.740Zelensky's going to go, I don't know, to the Gulf Emirates or UAE or somewhere and hide out.
00:34:34.480Now, the way we can avoid this is not to be sucked into any more of them.
00:34:40.040And this audience had a heroic effort during the first part of this Persian war.
00:34:45.600And that was we went absolutely nuts and you worked the phones and you let people know, no, we're not going to get sucked in here to a regime change war.
00:34:53.380We've already done that in Iraq, already did that in Afghanistan.
00:34:59.040And President Trump came up with a solution, an expeditionary force of submarines with Tomahawk missiles and, of course, the amazing strategic bombing we have to, and I quote him, total obliteration of their nuclear enhancement program, of which, as I said on the show over and over again, there was no urgency to it.
00:35:23.420But that was a total and complete lie of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, a bald-faced lie to keep him in power.
00:35:32.100But we stopped the regime change as much as they wanted.
00:35:36.100Of course, now Netanyahu's giving an interview saying, hey, there's guys over there saying we want a regime to change war.
00:38:20.320When you say under pressure, they've got – they're plateful.
00:38:23.600I mean, the interesting thing I find when you look at Israel and study it today is the IDF.
00:38:28.800I mean, the actual people that have to fight these wars are – there's a huge schism between the politicians, the politicians in Netanyahu's government and the IDF about exactly what the plan is in the first order of business, which is let's get this thing sorted in Gaza, right?
00:38:47.700And particularly taking on the dead-enders, I don't know, the 20,000 Hamas Muslim Brotherhood combatants that are still dug in there.
00:38:55.960And also – and then post that, how do you occupy it or what do you do with it?
00:39:02.120Today, there's going to be another set of huge demonstrations in Israel as the country is kind of torn apart about its direction.
00:39:09.300How can they possibly be considering another front when they're still – you know, you're still – they're still dealing with Hezbollah.
00:39:19.140They're still working on the northern front.
00:39:21.660But this thing in Gaza is so overwhelming that even the IDF, which kind of has this legendary reputation, has been at this for, what, two years with no solution, sir?
00:39:43.500Faced with all of these challenges and clear divisions in Israel about what to do with Gaza, why would they want another front?
00:39:50.180Well, if someone else is paying for that war, then that's a very different question.
00:39:55.600And this is what the Israelis have been seeking to do, to try to make sure that they drag the U.S. into that war.
00:40:00.240Moreover, I think we should also be clear, precisely because this is so divisive inside of Israel right now, the question of Gaza,
00:40:08.020Iran is actually a political benefit for Netanyahu.
00:40:12.880There was quite strong support for his war with Iran inside of Israeli society, even amongst those who are dead set against Netanyahu.
00:40:21.420So he didn't get necessarily a longstanding bump in the polls because of it, but he did get a reprieve in the sense that the population, by and large, were in support of it.
00:40:31.620So precisely because Gaza has become such an infested problem for them domestically, shifting towards Iran actually makes political sense for Netanyahu.
00:41:11.280I'm trying to negotiate, but we've got to take care of this because it's a ticking time bomb inside the country.
00:41:16.680What's the opposition to Netanyahu's say right now?
00:41:19.660There's a variety of voices, but what you hear from the Israeli military is that there are no military objectives in Gaza at this point.
00:41:27.560This is just a slaughter that is taking place while completely destroying Israel's standing internationally.
00:41:33.340There are no major military objectives to be gained.
00:41:37.020Rather, this is something that Netanyahu wants to keep going because once the war ends, he's going to be facing tremendous amount of political problems at home, including a potential prison sentence.
00:41:48.880If he manages to create some other form of a forever war with Iran in the midst of all of this, then perhaps he doesn't need Gaza because he has another war that will keep him in office.
00:41:58.220So you hear this from a lot of different areas inside of Israeli society.
00:42:02.080It's not as if that is a highly contended argument.
00:42:06.260It's the question is, how do you get out of this situation in which Netanyahu manages to just stay in power by continuing these wars?
00:42:17.820You do have a couple of brigades, at least, of Hamas fighters that have not been eradicated.
00:42:23.200When you say – I mean, Gaza City is an objective, right?
00:42:26.440And it's not like in Ukraine where it's a moving front.
00:42:30.540But isn't it like Fallujah that you're down to the dead-enders right now and, you know, that's what made Fallujah so awful?
00:42:38.900At some point in time, if you want to take care of it, somebody's got to go in and somebody's got to go door to door and kick in that door.
00:42:46.400But isn't that one of the rubs of it, that they've got to go in and get the Muslim Brotherhood fighters out?
00:42:53.000Well, the bottom line is after two years of doing all of this and destroying all of Gaza, they have not managed to do this if they actually still exist.
00:43:01.160And we frankly don't know quite yet whether that is the case or not.
00:43:04.140But to just continuing in this manner doesn't look as if it is aimed at targeting Hamas.
00:43:09.340It looks increasingly – and they're saying it publicly – it looks like an annexation of Gaza, which is a completely different proposition.
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00:46:23.080Trita, what's going to be the trigger?
00:46:24.320If you say this is going to happen sometime this fall, what is going to be the trigger and is going to be done for political reasons, domestic political reasons?
00:46:32.480What do you believe the trigger event will be that we should be on the outlook for, sir?
00:46:38.280I don't think it necessarily will be a trigger.
00:46:40.380It will be whether the Israelis reach readiness to do this, meaning that they have replenished their stockpile of interceptors.
00:46:48.980There's a political opening in Washington for them to push this through.
00:46:53.860For instance, there may be a snapback decision at the UN.
00:46:57.260The Europeans may trigger this next week, which would snap back all of the previous UN sanctions on Iran.
00:47:02.640That could potentially be a political lubricant, but I would say that that is a secondary factor.
00:47:07.360The most important thing is that the Israelis are ready themselves for the second round.
00:47:11.540I think one thing to keep in mind that is very important is the second round is not likely to be similar to the first round.
00:47:18.500In the first round, the Israelis took the Iranians by surprise.
00:47:21.360They did a spectacular intelligence job inside of Iran and had plenty of people inside of it.
00:47:28.320They may be able to pull that off again.
00:47:30.460But more importantly, the Iranians were playing the long game.
00:47:33.120They thought it was going to be a long war.
00:47:34.880Instead, Trump essentially ended it after 12 days.
00:47:37.640For the second war, I think the Iranians are going to try to strike at Israel as hard and as fast as possible
00:47:44.020to dispel them of the notion that Iran can be turned into a Syria or a Lebanon,
00:47:50.100that this mowing the grass strategy simply will not work.
00:47:53.020That means that the pressure on the United States to get into that war is going to be much, much greater than it was last time around that year.
00:48:01.200This is my anger about this first one.
00:48:04.540First off, the sense of urgency was totally and completely made up.
00:49:36.400Brandon, we've had you on about Ukraine, but you wrote a brilliant book, The Shadow War, about this, I guess, the animosity that the Iranians, the Persians have had with the United States.
00:49:48.300Do you agree with Trita that we're going to be heading towards another potential conflict that could be a regime change type of conflict?
00:49:58.500Well, we're definitely, yeah, we're definitely headed toward a conflict.
00:50:01.060And Trita, that was an excellent article you wrote.
00:50:03.480I 100 percent agree with what he's saying about the timeline.
00:50:07.620I don't know from our end if we would want to do a regime change, but I do think the risk is very high that we're going to get pulled into whatever the Israelis are getting ready to initiate.
00:50:18.440The point about the stockpiles is very key here, though.
00:50:21.280As you know, I was on with your show last time.
00:50:23.440We were speaking about depleted stockpiles.
00:50:25.540We have not restored our own stockpiles.
00:50:28.620And so I don't know if it will be September-ish if the conflict could begin, because I'm not convinced Israel has been able to replenish their own supplies, because we haven't been able to replenish our supplies, especially now with Ukraine still going on and this thing with Venezuela popping off soon.
00:50:46.720So I'm not convinced yet September, but definitely toward December, I would say Trita is absolutely on the money.
00:50:53.300I just want to remind audiences, though, we should not support any regime change war in the Middle East.
00:51:00.120In fact, we should be trying to get out of the Middle East as fast as possible and worry about our own hemisphere.
00:51:06.320The problem is, though, we do need to remember the Iranian regime is not our friend.
00:51:10.720And so we're in a bit of a bind here, because you've got the Zionists on one side trying to do this mowing the grass strategy, which is not going to work.
00:51:18.440And then you've also got Islamists on the other, which we can't rely on as able partners, which is why I argue we hand off the region to the Arabs and the Israelis and let them figure it out and get us out of there and stop giving the aid that we're giving to everybody, because we don't have any more aid to give.
00:51:35.280So that's my that's my view on this. Can you guys hang on for a second?
00:51:41.060We're going to take a we're going to take a short commercial break at the top of the hour.
00:51:44.360And I think President Trump, I believe the cabinet meal started a little late so we can get into this.
00:51:48.420No, Brandon, the the number of the question is we have to make sure that we can make a compelling argument that we can't get it.
00:51:57.120This is a regime change, which the last one was. This was on that Friday morning when Fox News is sitting there and they're glazing President Trump and they're glazing Netanyahu.
00:52:08.000And you got Lindsey Graham, you got Tom Cotton. It's the greatest military strike in human history.
00:52:13.420And the Persians are going to collapse in the next six hours. No, no.
00:52:18.360They want to suck us in. It's a comment, not just the Israelis, the Israelis, the Netanyahu part.
00:52:24.980I'm not so sure the people oppose Netanyahu want to get into a big regime change war with the Persians.
00:52:30.220But the Netanyahu, for political reasons, keep himself politically alive. Definitely.
00:52:34.820But don't blame it all on him. He's got these guys here in the United States.
00:52:39.740They're every bit as bad or maybe even worse because they will look you in the eyes of an American citizen and they will lie to you.
00:52:46.500But you get into a regime change war in Persia, you're going to be there for 30 years.
00:52:53.300Short break. Back in the warm-in moment.
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