On today's show, Stephen and Tim discuss the latest in the ongoing saga between Israel and Iran regarding nuclear weapons, and whether or not they have been lying to the world for decades about their supposed nuclear weapons capabilities. Plus, Tim and Stephen debate whether the U.S. should go to war with Iran.
00:00:07.000He basically made the argument that Netanyahu's been saying this, or essentially Israel has been saying this for the better part of 30 years, maybe 25 years, is what he used, but I think it's probably 30, 35 years that he was saying.
00:00:20.000And he said, was he wrong or was he lying?
00:00:26.000And he said, it's more likely that he was lying the entire time.
00:00:29.000And the implication that Dave is saying is that we have been lied to this entire time, that Iran really never has been close to a bomb.
00:00:35.000But every time Israel wants us to go over there and try to take this threat, perceived threat out for them, they just say the magic words for us, which is they're going to have a bomb and you guys better go and take these guys out.
00:00:48.000And many, many, many people have made the point.
00:00:50.000Like, listen, what do you, what do you like?
00:00:57.000Maybe this is homework you'll never see that was assigned to him.
00:01:00.000Go out there and put all of those claims on a timeline.
00:01:05.000And then go out there and put all of the strikes, all of the scientists killed, all of the centrifuges that magically spun too fast and blew up, all of the fires, all of the intelligence taken away, all of the cyber warfare that has occurred on that same timeline and see if you can maybe make sense that maybe it wasn't just lying.
00:01:28.000Maybe it was steps taken along the way to make sure that the bomb stayed just out of reach for Iran.
00:01:36.000And when I say bomb, I mean the material to be able to make a bomb.
00:01:39.000I know there's a little bit of a lag there and you'll probably focus only on that.
00:01:43.000Maybe some personal accountability here is in order for you, Dave Smith.
00:01:48.000Because you're making it sound like that's the only possibility that Netanyahu is just this lying warmonger who's going to drag America into yet another war.
00:01:59.000And you're not even giving any kind of credence to the possibility that the actions of the United States and Israel over those 30 years have kept the world from having a nuclear-armed Iran.
00:02:14.000Certainly you wouldn't have advocated for this.
00:02:17.000Under your assumptions, we could just say that Israel is lying every single time and hope for the best with Iran.
00:02:23.000And to make it very clear, nobody on the show, including yourself, including Stephen, and including me, has said that Israel should preoccupy some sort of special veneration in our hearts.
00:03:01.000But I just don't understand when you look at it.
00:03:04.000They'll make this argument over and over and over.
00:03:06.000But then when someone brings up the United Nations body that you are putting all of your eggs into to say Iraq did not have WMDs said that they found uranium enriched at over 83% in 2023.
00:03:22.000No one can explain to me what they were going to do with 83% enriched uranium unless they plan to.
00:04:30.000Like Ian Carroll and Candace Owens and the other people that are kind of calling out stuff in Israel are not Nazis for calling out bad acts by Israel.
00:04:38.000When they try to loop all of these things together and form some kind of a conspiracy, it starts to like the Jews being behind 9-11.
00:06:23.000On the other side of it, though, just because you say that you're okay with Israel taking stuff into their own hands and going in and striking Iran when they feel threatened by these guys that say death to America, death, and they have been lobbying rockets and funding terrorist cells, seven different syndicates or networks of terrorism around them for decades?
00:06:43.000Like, in what world are you living in where Iran is just this neutral, benevolent actor sitting over there to be trusted?
00:06:52.000I don't think that that's even remotely possible.
00:06:56.000You can be in the middle and say, Israel, get your act together.
00:06:59.000You don't know what the F you're doing, according to Donald Trump, which I don't usually use profanity, but I think that was a very good use of the F words.
00:07:06.000Probably one of the best kind of encapsulations of this entire conflict that I've heard.
00:07:11.000And you can also say, hey, you know what?
00:08:41.000They should be able to rebuild and do a good job.
00:08:43.000They're never going to have nuclear, but other than that, they should do a great job.
00:08:50.000I like the, there is a bit of ambiguity here because he is talking about making Iran great again.
00:08:55.000He put out a post saying, or truth, saying that I think that he did kind of call for regime change or pretty clearly, kind of said he would support it, but he supported it from this perspective, that the people of Iran should rise up and demand better from their leadership, not that the United States or Israel should go in and overthrow the Ayatollah.
00:09:14.000And I don't want to prescribe him playing 8D chess or something, but the moment in which he issued that statement turns out to have been very strategic because Iran was at its lowest point.
00:11:00.000Anything we can do to hamstring China, I would appreciate.
00:11:02.000But at the same time, you don't want to try to bring the Iranians back to the table and say, well, you can't send oil to your biggest partner.
00:11:09.000So it's a little bit of a fine line he has to walk right now.
00:11:14.000And I mean, look, this is part of, I don't know, Trump's negotiating tactic.
00:11:18.000I don't think he wants somebody to completely lose either, right?
00:11:22.000If you have somebody who's just completely dominated, you're pushing for regime change, you're not letting them rebuild their economy, you're continuing with harsh sanctions on these guys that are above and beyond, then potentially you could drive them into the hands of people that you don't want them to be in business with, right?
00:11:36.000So that was one of the fears with Russia is that if you do too much to them to sanction them, that they'll just align more with China.
00:11:42.000And that's an alliance that we really don't want to get off the ground because naturally it should never happen to the degree of like military cooperation.
00:11:48.000It probably won't naturally happen on its own.
00:11:51.000China may see them as a weak neighbor that they can just take from, but you don't want these guys kind of teaming up.
00:11:57.000And so that's the same thing with Iran.
00:11:58.000We don't want to drive them into the end, into the hands of somebody else.
00:12:02.000And so I think it's fine to look at it and say, maybe that's the play here.
00:12:06.000Maybe the play here is to kind of like, hey, we've got everybody neutral corners.
00:12:10.000We've taken out what we said we wanted to take out.
00:12:15.000Now, why don't you get back to the business of rebuilding your country and making it great for the people that are there instead of worrying so much about Israel and the United States?
00:12:25.000I mean, unfortunately for the Iranian people, I don't think the mullahs and the ID are ever going to be great for the people.
00:12:30.000But you see a lot of the Iranian activists who I have a lot of respect for over the past couple of years, especially since the anti-hijab protests.
00:12:37.000But they're pissed at Trump right now.
00:12:39.000They wanted him to push and push and push, but that would require us actually going to war.
00:12:51.000So get back in the streets, Iran, if that's what you want.
00:12:54.000If that's what you want, go make it happen.
00:12:56.000We don't have the capital or the resources with our important theaters elsewhere Right now, but on the term of resources, oil prices just went down 4% upon that announcement.
00:13:45.000I literally watched this happen because I'm like, ooh, okay, so they're threatening this.
00:13:48.000Everybody thought that this was one of the problems that we could run into is that they could just block this strait, maybe give China access to it and just block everybody else.
00:13:56.000And maybe that leads to an armed conflict.
00:14:42.000It's like, if all of these things that people are saying online are actually going to happen and World War III is coming and oil prices are going to go through the roof and Iran is going to rain holy hellfire down on everybody, don't you think the stock market would have reacted?
00:14:58.000Don't you think that the futures traders and oil would have been reacting?
00:15:00.000These guys make money at every single opportunity that there possibly is.
00:15:04.000When you look where people put their money, they didn't put their money on that stuff.
00:15:08.000Anything else that we need to catch up on?
00:15:09.000Do we have the Tucker clip or any of that stuff?
00:15:11.000So there was a Tucker clip, and then you said there was a clip from people in Qatar at the base.
00:15:42.000Look, I don't know if this is true or not.
00:15:44.000Explosions have been heard over Doha Qatar.
00:15:46.000After Iran launched a missile attack on the U.S. Russian officials told Axios that Iran had fired six missiles toward at least one U.S. base in that Gulf country.
00:15:55.000That base exists to protect Israel, by the way.
00:15:58.000I know we're constantly, Bray Weiss is constantly attacking Qatar.
00:16:13.000And Josh, you can correct me if I'm wrong.
00:16:15.000I got hurt in Afghanistan and that base guarantees the survival of the state of Qatar as long as it's there.
00:16:22.000They benefit more from that base than anybody.
00:16:24.000So the fact that he's saying they don't need the base there, if he's saying that at all with any sense of sincerity, he can shove it up his ass because that is so far from the truth.
00:17:09.000No, I actually don't know which one's closer, but I do know that the 173rd Infantry Regiment is there, and we have quite a few nuclear troops, right?
00:19:14.000I argue you should criticize the president all the time, especially if you don't like what he's doing, but don't turn around and go like, yep, I knew it.
00:19:38.000That we could pull up, it's really funny.
00:19:40.000Okay, so while we're doing that, why don't we take some of your chats?
00:19:43.000I'm curious what you guys have to say about today's show and the Israel shilling that we've done and also the anti-Semitic crap that we said, too.
00:19:51.000I'm not sure how we're capable of both at the same time, but I know that you will criticize it.
00:20:40.000I think, in fact, we don't have as much definitive information about that as I would like for us to have as to where the enriched uranium has been taken to.
00:20:48.000And I think that's what the IAEA said as well.
00:20:50.000They were very unsure where some of that material had gone to.
00:20:54.000That probably is one of the reasons that they took out as much of their nuclear sites as possible.
00:20:59.000I don't know what intelligence they had on where this stuff was, but that is definitely a concern that is out there.
00:21:05.000Could definitely be a reason why Iran's so willing to stop.
00:22:08.000You need to then assemble a nuclear weapon.
00:22:10.000That's what a one or two-year process potentially for them to be able to do.
00:22:14.000And then you have to have a mechanism to get said weapon from where you are to where they are, unless you want to nuke yourself, which most people don't.
00:22:21.000So that is a process that took North Korea how long, 10 or 12 years after they had the bomb?
00:22:26.000After the first test, I believe, in the mid-90s, or when they started enriching in the mid-90s, they didn't test until 2006.
00:22:36.000And then they didn't really deliver another, like a credible delivery system that could at least reach ICBM levels until 2017 or something.
00:22:44.000And so everybody could be right theoretically that they don't have the capability of making a bomb, but they're making the material for the bomb, right?
00:22:56.000And there's only one reason that you do that.
00:22:57.000And again, I'm not going to go with the negotiation thing because if that was the negotiation thing right now, that they had to stop enriching uranium.
00:23:03.000And that's the black, the poison pill that they put in these negotiations that they couldn't enrich anymore.
00:23:38.000And then also read the IAEA's full statement.
00:23:40.000Dave Smith and those guys will actually cherry-pick the IAEA statement.
00:23:43.000And I don't know if it's out of maliciousness or if it's just ignorance, but you can see that the IAEA report has major concerns.
00:23:51.000They understand the 2003 fatwa that was issued by the Ayatollah saying that they would not be seeking nuclear weapons because that is haram.
00:23:59.000But then you can also see the 60% and now 83.7% enrichment that has zero specific use outside of creating a bomb.
00:24:09.000There's so many things here that don't line up.
00:24:11.000So if you're out there saying that Iran is not trying to develop a bomb, you're probably, if you had to put odds on it on the polymarket side of things, you're probably in the minority there.
00:24:26.000What's the best response to those who point at pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal as one of the current catalysts or catalysts of the current conflict?
00:24:39.000Well, do you have any thoughts on the JCPOA?
00:24:44.000So when Obama signed that, there was a lot of caveats on what could be inspected.
00:24:48.000They could inspect military installations, but they could only be at predetermined dates and times and things like that.
00:24:54.000And the moment that this ran out, it did nothing to set their program back.
00:24:58.000So theoretically, the day that that deal ended, they could be right back on the path to enriching and right back on the path to a weapon from the same point at which they started the negotiations.
00:25:08.000So you were just kicking the can down the road a little bit farther without actually dealing with the problem.
00:25:13.000Yeah, and again, I hate to go back to Dave Smith.
00:25:15.000Dave's going to be able to get away from him.
00:25:15.000We gave him $400 million of cash to just pay to Paris.
00:25:32.000But making that point, like blaming Trump for leaving this, and that's one of the reasons why we are where we are today.
00:25:41.000I think that's kind of lazy, unfortunately.
00:25:44.000I think there was a before that, before that time, they wanted to make the bomb.
00:25:49.000And now saying, well, they're just enriching to this point to be able to use it in negotiations.
00:25:53.000And they wouldn't have been able to do that otherwise.
00:25:55.000Well, it's like the IAEA, even in their report, said, we're very concerned about these other materials that we have found that we have no idea where they came from because they didn't come from the places that we're inspecting.
00:26:15.000So, acting like this agreement was going to be the savior of everything and Iran was just going to play ball like they should have the entire time and be honest with us and allow inspectors to go wherever they needed to go, whenever they needed to go there, is just not being honest.
00:26:28.000Question, and I think a lot of people that are upset with how things have developed need to answer this.
00:26:33.000If this was all done under a false pretext that there was nuclear weapons or the potential for nuclear weapons in the future, and that was all fake and it was just to help Israel and, you know, whatever, why would Trump all of a sudden be okay with taking out their nuclear facilities and now we can have a ceasefire and everyone can stay where they are?
00:26:56.000He would be taking out the false flag, essentially.
00:26:58.000He would be removing the thing that they would use as a false flag, not a false flag, you know, and they could attack, obviously, and say it was somebody else, but the impetus for going to war.
00:27:07.000Basically, Trump took that card off of the table and said, now what?
00:28:51.000And I'm not going to say his name again, but this is directed at everybody out there who is making this argument.
00:28:58.000And maybe Piers Morgan as well in a very kind of friendly way.
00:29:02.000Like, you ought to be blaming more than just Israel.
00:29:07.000If everything you're saying is true, if I grant every single thing that you have said, every nasty, terrible, and I don't mean nasty like you're wrong, I just mean like terrible, disgusting, horrible thing.
00:29:17.000If everything you've said about Israel and the war that they are waging in Gaza is true, then you need to be blaming them and a handful of other people as well.
00:29:29.000Because it is entirely avoidable if a gate is opened into Egypt and a humanitarian zone is put up.
00:29:40.000Not talking about letting people just flood your country.
00:29:43.000You have refused to accept one person.
00:31:11.000The human shield people are probably the bad guys in this situation.
00:31:13.000And the other guys, maybe not the good guys, maybe doing some bad stuff too, but certainly Egypt and Jordan and neighbors that could take people in that are saying, hell no.
00:31:23.000Maybe they ought to get some blame too.
00:31:29.000Next chat from Rage Against the Goons.
00:31:33.000Do you think individuals like Tucker and Candace are reacting this way for clicks, or are they simply revealing their true lack of trust in Trump to make the right decisions?
00:32:46.000Because you don't go to the center of Moscow, to a subway station that was constructed under the Stalinist regime to impress foreign journalists.
00:33:39.000But these are all things you could Google and find out in a couple of seconds or speak to someone from Russia for two seconds that's not just a white girl that got put up on TikTok because she's a white girl.
00:34:19.000I have a hard time with Tucker lately because I think he can make the point without doing it the way he does.
00:34:25.000So, for example, we know, we know, we know without a doubt that Russia is selling arms, or I'm sorry, that Ukraine is selling arms to Mexico, I believe was what it was, that it ended up in the hands of the cartel.
00:34:38.000We know, we know, we know, without providing any evidence that we know.
00:34:49.000Because you've said that, and you've had people on that have some theories about that, potentially, but they don't have any evidence of that.
00:34:56.000And that's typically where we have to go with these things.
00:34:59.000And so saying that I know that this will end up in thousands of deaths, this is what the Pentagon says.
00:35:04.000This is absolutely what the war game says.
00:35:08.000Like, you can say, hey, I'm worried that this may end up leading to thousands of deaths if this happens and escalates, but hopefully it does not.
00:35:15.000In the past, it seems like it has not, but maybe now is the time where the Iranian regime reaches out and touches us and it hurts in a different way.
00:35:24.000And that's not what Tucker has been saying.
00:35:26.000Tucker has been increasingly definitive.
00:35:29.000Now, I also, I honestly am not 100% on this, but I'm really, really close to being 100% that I think he does absolutely love his country.
00:35:40.000The reason I say I'm not 100% is not because I think there's some like sliver of actually he doesn't love his country.
00:35:46.000I'm just saying he says some stuff sometimes that makes it seem to me like he does not love his country, like the Moscow thing, like saying they're better than us.
00:37:55.000The problem is when you went to the grocery store and you went to the subway station, you went to the grocery store and I can't remember what the stat was, but that was actually like the average Russian's income couldn't afford the basket of groceries that he had.
00:38:07.000And then saying how nice this was and obviously the propaganda piece at the railway station or the subway.
00:38:51.000When Ukraine is being attacked, in the very first stages of this war, we say, Russia, bad, and you absolutely have to get them out.
00:38:58.000Get Ukraine all the support that they Need after it becomes increasingly clear that there is not going to be a negotiated settlement based on reality.
00:39:05.000We're saying, guys, we've put too much money into this to continue funding this thing, knowing that there really isn't going to be an end.
00:39:11.000There's no clear way out of this thing, and so we should probably stop sending our money over there, and Europe should probably start picking up their fair share of this tab.
00:40:27.000With the show of force blowing these sites up, do you think this makes China question their intentions with Taiwan while Trump is in office?
00:40:35.000Lane was on TV last night talking about this.
00:40:40.000Maybe to a minute degree, but I think all of that I think China's decision, Xi Jinping's decision to move or not move on Taiwan is predicated largely on domestic factors and where he sees his own mortality.
00:40:56.000I think it's less likely to happen under Trump if he thinks that he can wait it out a couple years.
00:41:02.000But if the point came where he thought, well, Trump is actually going to make it so it will be impossible for us to do in the future, I think he would move on it then.
00:41:09.000I think domestic factors are motivating him more.
00:41:13.000But that being said, I guess I'll take back my previous statement a little bit.
00:41:17.000He would think twice about it and hold off.
00:41:20.000He would be more likely to hold off under Donald Trump, but I don't think it would, we could say definitively that it would stop him from doing that.
00:41:27.000No, but I mean, it doesn't hurt our case.
00:41:30.000Showing a force is not the worst thing in the world to be able to do and to be like, hey, these guys showed up there unannounced, took it out.
00:42:30.000But the Japanese had very specific goals that we were getting in the way of, and they thought there was an apex point of their power that they could achieve those goals, and they took a shot, even though they knew that it wasn't a good shot.
00:43:30.000While Israel launching an attack on the heels of a ceasefire was a dick move, was this the best thing to happen for Trump's national image as he proved he prioritizes America first?
00:43:40.000Yeah, look, I mean, Trump took a situation that wasn't necessarily great and turned it into something that I think is very iconic.
00:43:46.000You know, Stephen was almost kind of joking when he said that this is up there with all these other kind of famous presidential lines, you know, tear down this wall and nothing to fear but fear itself or famous lines, you know, in history.
00:44:00.000I mean, you may not like what he said, and a bunch of people in Israel are probably pissed off at him and, you know, frustrated with this, but that's good.
00:44:06.000You know, like that's actually kind of a good thing for them to get a little bit of a dose of reality.
00:44:11.000Like we are the reason that you exist as a nation, as a country right now.
00:44:17.000And I'm not removing the hand of God from any of that.
00:44:20.000And I'm also not placing any special like super privileges on Israel as a nation right now, as the nation of Israel in the Bible.
00:44:27.000So I know we can have that conversation.
00:44:29.000That's something maybe we'll do for a Friday episode at some point.
00:44:32.000But I think he took a very bad situation and turned it into a very good situation.
00:44:36.000And it looks like the peace is holding, or at least the ceasefire is holding right now.
00:44:41.000And both sides have kind of gotten things out of their system.
00:44:43.000Now, understand too, that there was an initial, it seemed like there was a, okay, we're going to have a ceasefire here in six hours.
00:44:50.000I'm going to bomb the hell out of you for the next four.
00:45:00.000I mean, you talk, unfortunately, a lot in World War I happened after they basically had said, hey, this war is going to be over at this time.
00:45:07.000And so there were a bunch of commanders that basically said, okay, well, they're going to freeze the lines where they are.
00:45:11.000So let's go ahead and try to get a little bit more territory right before a ceasefire.
00:45:16.000So it's not uncommon for those things to happen.
00:45:19.000But what is uncommon and what people did not expect is for Donald Trump, the president of the United States, not on a hot mic somewhere in B-roll land, not somebody with a recorder on that he didn't know about, but directly to the press as he was walking to Marine One saying that they don't know what the F they're doing.
00:45:38.000That's a moment that'll go down in history, and hopefully, hopefully, we won't have to talk about Israel for a very, very long time.