Luigi Mangione, 26, was arrested and charged with the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was shot to death on the streets of New York City last week. Mangione has been charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, but he claims he acted alone.
00:00:00.000Folks, the alleged of the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan last week has now been arrested.
00:00:06.000He was arrested yesterday in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
00:00:09.000This apparently happened because somebody at a local McDonald's saw him and his picture had been plastered across the news and they recognized him.
00:01:19.000We know that he had upon him a 262 word handwritten document.
00:01:25.000So presumably written at the last minute in which he said that United Health Care's market capitalization, even though it has grown American life expectancy, has not.
00:01:32.000This is according to the UK Daily Mail.
00:01:33.000He condemned companies that, quote, continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.
00:01:41.000Mangione then reportedly also added that he acted alone and that the entire effort was self-funded, saying, quote, to save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly I wasn't working with anyone.
00:01:51.000I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.
00:01:54.000We'll get into that particular argument that it, quote-unquote, had to be done in a moment because one of the things about evil is that it tends to masquerade as good.
00:02:03.000Nothing in the American healthcare system changed because the United Healthcare CEO was shot.
00:02:08.000And in fact, one of the sort of outlying symptoms of evil is to use broad-based rationalizations about systemic problems in order to justify individual acts of evil, like murdering a father and CEO of a legal company.
00:02:22.000That even if you don't like how the company runs, and I know a lot of doctors who don't like how United Healthcare runs, they think United Healthcare rips off customers and fights them at every turn.
00:02:32.000Whatever you think about UnitedHealthcare is irrelevant to the question of whether Brian Thompson should have been shot to death on the streets of New York.
00:02:41.000According to the Wall Street Journal, a review of his reading diet suggested that at some point his ideas about activism had crossed into an interest in violence.
00:02:48.000His circumstances were hard to reconcile with his standing, says the Wall Street Journal, less than a decade ago when he was a fresh-faced valedictorian at the nearly $38,000-a-year Gilman School in Baltimore, which he attended from the sixth grade until he graduated in 2016. Again, this is a very upper-class person from a very upper-class family.
00:03:05.000He ended up going to the University of Pennsylvania.
00:03:09.000Where he would major in computer science and earn a master's degree.
00:03:12.000So this person has a very high IQ, intelligent person.
00:03:16.000A particular person from that class named Luigi Mangione, according to the Wall Street Journal, was inducted into an academic honor society reserved for top students in electrical and computer engineering.
00:03:24.000According to the Wall Street Journal, he appeared to enjoy Greek life, posting photos on Instagram of him and his Phi Kappa Psi fraternity brothers, often on a couch outside their house.
00:03:32.000In Maryland, the family is a well-known clan.
00:03:35.000They founded something called Lorian Healthcare, which is a senior care company with services including nursing and assisted living in 1977. And they also developed something called Turf Valley Resort, which is a spa and conference center, In Maryland and suburban Baltimore's Hayfields Country Club.
00:03:49.000One of his cousins is a Republican member of the state House of Delegates.
00:03:52.000So again, very rich family, very wealthy family.
00:03:55.000It appears, and you can examine his sort of political record all you want, and again, if you view his old Twitter account, for example, what you will see is a sort of bizarrely heterodox, sometimes center-right Twitter account.
00:04:08.000But what is very clear is that in recent months, he underwent some sort of serious health crisis, which was probably exacerbated by psychedelic use.
00:04:18.000According to the Wall Street Journal, in recent months there were hints he'd become estranged from friends and family, according to interviews as well as his social media accounts, which might also shed light on his own health.
00:04:26.000So the banner photo of Mangione's X account features an X-ray of a person's back.
00:04:34.000This appears to be like an L4, L5 surgery.
00:04:37.000A spinal fusion surgery, which has a very low rate of success.
00:04:41.000It usually leaves people, or very often, at the very least, leaves people with significant pain for life.
00:04:47.000So this person must have had a massive back injury.
00:04:49.000According to his friends, he did that while surfing.
00:04:52.000His Goodreads profile showed that he had been reading books about back pain and apparently he suffered from chronic back pain that, quote, affected all parts of his life, including his ability to have a romantic life or enjoy sports such as surfing, according to a person named Josiah Ryan, who is spokesman for the founder of a Hawaii co-housing complex where Mangione lived a couple of years ago in 2022. About six months ago, he says, Mangione stopped replying to texts and sort of disappeared.
00:05:14.000So Mangione told a person named RJ Martin and others at this co-living facility in Hawaii, a place called Surf Break, that he was returning to the mainland to have back surgery.
00:05:23.000In late 2022, Ryan said that Mangione sent friends at Surf Break photos of his spinal x-ray and injured back.
00:05:28.000He did move back to Hawaii, but he stayed not at surf break and then stayed in touch by text with his friend R.J. Martin.
00:05:34.000And then he dropped off the radar about six months ago.
00:05:36.000According to a friend of R.J. Martin's, he just stopped replying to R.J.'s text.
00:05:40.000Part of the cognitive dissonance for R.J. is there was no indication from anyone, anyone at all, that this sort of thing might be in his future.
00:05:46.000Now, again, it's not a giant mystery because Mangione was posting about anxiety and mental health.
00:05:52.000He shared a quote by an Indian philosopher that read, quote, Again, you can start to see the radicalism creeping into his social media accounts.
00:06:03.000The law enforcement community is still trying to figure out exactly what happened in New York.
00:06:08.000He stayed at a hostel on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
00:06:11.000And then, of course, Thompson, Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was intercepted by the alleged shooter Wednesday morning as he was walking to the Hilton Hotel for the UnitedHealthcare Annual Investor Conference.
00:06:21.000But apparently, according to social media posts, a lot of his friends were reaching out to the shooter asking where the hell he was.
00:06:26.000Quote, Hey man, I need you to call me.
00:06:28.000I don't know if you are okay or just in a super isolated place, but I haven't heard from you in months.
00:06:33.000This particular friend said, you made commitments to me for my wedding, and if you can't honor them, I need to know so I can plan accordingly.
00:06:38.000And then on October 30th, another person posted to his ex-account, hey, are you okay?
00:06:43.000Apparently, your family is looking for you.
00:06:46.000Now, according to the UK Daily Mail, he suddenly went radio silent while he was recovering from this back surgery, and he sought alternative forms of pain management, including psychedelics and magic mushrooms.
00:06:56.000There are a lot of podcasts and people out there who recommend use of, shall we say, untested, unverified, uncontrolled studied drugs.
00:07:07.000And there are a lot of young people who are listening to these people and then taking these psychedelics.
00:07:11.000And it turns out that they are not harmless.
00:07:14.000One of the amazing things about sort of our constant information environment is that many of the same people who will suggest correctly that the overuse of pharmaceuticals can mess with your brain will then pump themselves full of psychedelic drugs that are completely untested that you don't know the effects of and that can in fact cause serious mental issues.
00:07:35.000On X, for example, Mangione had created a titled Psych full of tweets about psilocybin.
00:07:42.000In January 25th of this year, he added to his Goodreads a book called Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, an Identification Guide, and quote, Mushrooms of Hawaii, an Identification Guide, which sort of suggests that he's walking around Hawaii, picking up mushrooms, identifying them, and then ingesting them, which is not going to be good for your mental health, folks.
00:08:00.000Emergency physician Dr. Kashif Perzada wrote on X, the picture looks like a lumbar spinal fusion surgery.
00:08:04.000This would be his spinal fusion surgery that we talked about a moment ago.
00:08:07.000And again, there are lots of books on his goodreads.com about pain management.
00:08:15.000A staffer at Barstool Sports who said that high school friends of the alleged shooter claimed that he went crazy after being injured, quote, spoke with a source that had a lot of friends that went to high school with Luigi Mangione.
00:08:24.000What keeps coming up is a back surgery that changed everything for him, and he went, quote, absolutely crazy.
00:08:29.000His contact with family stopped about a year ago.
00:08:31.000Recently, the family reached out to his friends from high school asking if they even had information on him.
00:08:36.000Some of the books that were on his Goodreads list included, quote, Back in Control, a spinal surgeon's roadmap out of chronic pain.
00:08:42.000Another is, quote, Crooked, outwitting the back pain industry and getting on the road to recovery.
00:08:46.000Some friends, according to, again, this is the Daily Mail, now say that Mangione seems to have become radicalized after being laid off from a job at Trucar last year and then, of course, undergoing bad surgery.
00:08:56.000So that keeps coming up over and over and over.
00:08:58.000And again, there are indicators of just how radicalized he had become.
00:09:16.000It's a window into his mind, and it's a window into how people who have, quote-unquote, social concerns can start channeling those into acts of individual evil, just as Ted Kaczynski did, the Unabomber.
00:09:26.000Quote, clearly written by a mathematics prodigy, reads like a series of lemmas on the question of 21st century quality of life.
00:09:32.000It is easy to quickly and thoughtlessly write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic.
00:09:36.000Again, this would be the alleged shooter who is writing this about the Unabomber.
00:09:39.000In order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies.
00:09:42.000But it's simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.
00:09:46.000He was a violent individual, rightfully imprisoned, who maimed innocent people.
00:09:49.000While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a craty Luddite, however, they're more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.
00:09:56.000A take I found online that I think is interesting.
00:09:59.000Had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere, and at the end of the day, he's probably right.
00:10:04.000Oil barons haven't listened to any environmentalists, but they feared him.
00:10:07.000When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive.
00:10:11.000You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it's not terrorism, it's war and revolution.
00:10:16.000Fossil fuel companies actively suppress anything that stands in their way, and within a generation or two, it will begin costing human lives by greater and greater magnitudes until the Earth is just a flaming ball orbiting third from the sun.
00:10:38.000These companies don't care about you or your kids or your grandkids.
00:10:41.000They have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck, so why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive?
00:10:46.000We're animals just like everything else on this planet except we've forgotten the law of the jungle and bend over for our overlords when any other animal would recognize the threat and fight to the death for their survival.
00:10:54.000Violence never solved anything is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.
00:10:58.000And that is a quote that he is quoting, a take that he's quoting, about the Unabomber's manifesto.
00:11:03.000We'll get to more of this in a moment.
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00:13:07.000So you can see the extreme political radicalism here that suggests, again, That violence is justified because the system is unworkable, because the system is unfixable, and because grievances are justified.
00:13:20.000Now, the family of the alleged shooter did put out a statement saying, quote, The statement also says the family only knows the facts of the case that had been released in the news.
00:13:34.000We're devastated by the news, the short statement says.
00:13:38.000Obviously, windows into the mind of people who have had serious health problems, who are messing around with psychedelics.
00:13:48.000And I've said this before about alleged shooters and alleged criminals right and left.
00:13:54.000Mental illness, psychedelic use, all of these things play a role.
00:14:00.000But the generalized willingness by many members of the media and in the political class to justify this sort of stuff is a symptom of something deeper and sicker going on in our society.
00:14:14.000So, for example, when this alleged shooter was still at large, according to the UK Metro, some of America's highest profile amateur sleuths are flat out refusing to help identify the killer.
00:14:27.000TikTok sleuth, that Danish guy, told 2 million followers in a video, quote, I don't have to encourage violence.
00:14:31.000I also don't have to condone violence by any means, but I also don't have to help.
00:14:35.000Savannah Sparks, who has been reportedly tapped by police to help train officers on how to track suspects online, told NBC whether she's working on the case, absolutely the F not.
00:14:45.000Michael McCorder, better known as a person named Tizzy Ent on TikTok, explained in a video, quote, I've yet to see anyone online posting, we've got to find this guy, we've got to get him off the street.
00:14:52.000I have, however, seen people making an argument, doing the hear-me-out thing, talking about how attractive the killer is, people calling him Robin Hood, people quite literally making fan art.
00:15:00.000I don't think it's that difficult to figure out why.
00:15:01.000I don't think there's a single person in this country who hasn't themselves or had someone very, very near and dear to them suffer from the absolutely abysmal thing that has privatized healthcare in this country.
00:15:10.000Now, the thing about that that, of course, is amazing is that nationalized healthcare in places like the UK are full-scale disastrous.
00:15:15.000And the same people who presumably were cheering on the alleged shooter in this case are in favor of a healthcare system that ends with lower life expectancy and actual government rationing of care, many of them.
00:15:27.000But there is something deeper, a sickness that is going on in our political class, best exemplified by the absolute nutjob, Taylor Lorenz, who used to work for the Washington Post, As well as for Box.
00:15:41.000She appeared on Piers Morgan yesterday.
00:15:44.000And I have to say that Piers, his show is entertaining largely because it has become the Jerry Springer of politics.
00:15:50.000But he had on Taylor Lorenz, and she said that she felt actual joy when the UnitedHealthcare CEO was murdered on the street.
00:15:58.000I do believe in the sanctity of life, and I think that's why I felt, along with so many other Americans, joy, unfortunately, you know, because it feels like...
00:16:26.000So are the tens of thousands of Americans, innocent Americans, who died because greedy health insurance executives like this one push policies of denying care to the most vulnerable people.
00:16:42.000Okay, again, this is the case that is being made by the political and media chatter in class.
00:16:46.000Not all of them, but a large number of them.
00:16:50.000By the way, it is not designed at solving the actual healthcare problems in the country.
00:16:53.000It turns out that healthcare in the United States is a giant cluster F. Everyone knows this.
00:16:57.000It is a mix of massive government subsidization, massive government regulation, and then private healthcare companies who are attempting to navigate all of that.
00:17:06.000And one of the big questions that you should always ask in a quasi-market system is why companies are choosing UnitedHealthcare.
00:17:12.000And the answer is because UnitedHealthcare is cheaper for the companies.
00:17:16.000And why aren't companies getting better healthcare for their employees?
00:17:19.000Because it turns out that there aren't a lot of other companies that are significantly better than UnitedHealthcare.
00:17:34.000And it turns out that large parts of that are because of the bizarre subsidization of particular parts of the healthcare industry and the bizarre regulation of other parts of the healthcare industry.
00:17:44.000The American health insurance system is basically a Frankensteinian monster crafted by the conjunction of politics and business.
00:17:54.000And it ends up wasting an enormous amount of money on administrative overhead, It ends up with ugly negotiations between patients and insurance companies over what sort of doctors they can get.
00:18:05.000The history of the American healthcare system is really complex.
00:18:08.000It is also really difficult to untangle because it also has disparate results in a wide variety of areas.
00:18:14.000So, for example, if you have cancer, you would prefer to be in the United States.
00:18:18.000If you have a broken leg, you might prefer to be in a nationalized healthcare system depending on how the care is getting rationed.
00:18:25.000Emergency care in nationalized healthcare systems sometimes is quite good because, again, basic care happens with alacrity.
00:18:32.000But if you have any sort of complex problem, you're not going to want to be there.
00:18:35.000You're going to want to be in the United States, which is why you see people from foreign countries like Canada and the UK traveling to the United States if they have cancer.
00:18:41.000A lot of this is really complicated, and that's sort of the point.
00:18:45.000There's a piece by Alicia Finley talking about how Obamacare helped exacerbate all of these problems.
00:18:50.000Quote, Obamacare's perverse effects are fueling public rage against insurers and support for a single-payer system that would eliminate them.
00:18:57.000Mr. Obama, Barack Obama, who pushed Obamacare, of course, and Peter Orszag, the law's chief architect, must be smiling.
00:19:03.000Orjag, who is now CEO of the financial services firm Lazard, has dined out on advising health insurance on mergers he said were spurred by the law's regulations.
00:19:11.000The U.S. is spending $2 trillion more on health care than it was back in 2010, but Americans are not any healthier.
00:19:18.000Now, again, one problem is that having insurance doesn't change people's behavior.
00:19:24.000Medicaid beneficiaries, for example, rush to the emergency room for non-emergencies because they are covered by Medicaid.
00:19:29.000They don't have deductibles or co-pays.
00:19:32.000Also, the Medicaid reimbursement rates are significantly lower than UnitedHealthcare, for example, so there are a lot of doctors who will not accept Medicaid.
00:19:41.000And then Obamacare expanded eligibility because states have tried to hold down Medicaid costs by reducing reimbursement.
00:19:47.000Patients with exchange plans are not faring much better.
00:19:50.000Affordable Care Act plan networks include, on average, only 40% of local physicians and 21% of those employed by hospitals.
00:19:57.000Insurers are narrowing coverage to keep down costs.
00:19:59.000Because they sort of have to in many cases.
00:20:02.000They're also hiking deductibles, which this year averaged $5,241 for a typical plan.
00:20:08.000It turns out there are not a lot of easy solves for a complex system.
00:20:14.000There's nothing new about the United States people cheering murderous criminals.
00:20:18.000This has happened for a very long time in the United States.
00:20:20.000There are full movies about this sort of stuff, right?
00:20:22.000Bonnie and Clyde, famously with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, is a movie about the glorification of actual murderous criminals.
00:20:29.000John Dillinger, who robbed some 24 banks with his gang, He was widely proclaimed a folk hero in the 1930s by one segment of the population.
00:20:38.000According to the Sunday Times, for example, his gang robbed more than a dozen banks between May 1933 and July 1934, stealing over 300 grand.
00:20:45.000He also destroyed thousands of mortgage records during the robberies, which made him very popular with poor people who were seeking to escape the payments that they owed to the banks.
00:20:54.000So back in the 1930s, obviously, there's a lot of frustration and anger at the banking system because of the Great Depression.
00:21:00.000And so there was a sort of justification that went on of, for example, robbing banks or shooting bank managers.
00:21:05.000And as you can see in the alleged shooter in this case is justification of Ted Kaczynski.
00:21:10.000You can easily see the logic of this extending out to pretty much every aspect of free market enterprise in the United States.
00:21:45.000In a democracy, in a republic, the way that you change policy is by electing politicians.
00:21:50.000And then those politicians work with each other and with regulators and at the state level and at the local level in order to change the policy.
00:21:58.000Once you say that the system is so broken that the only resort is revolutionary violence and not even useful revolutionary violence in the sense that you're overthrowing the system, at least if you're going to make the case for revolution, you have to make the case for overthrowing the entire system.
00:22:11.000But that's not what these people are doing.
00:22:12.000It's just nihilistic violence lashing out at a system that these people believe is targeting them in some way.
00:22:28.000There's a whole class of demagogues in political office and in the media who spend their days saying that all problems are easily solved except that there is an intractable coterie who want to keep people in misery for their own profit.
00:22:45.000And there's just a bunch of people who don't care, for example, if you are being denied alone.
00:22:51.000There are a bunch of people who don't care if you're having a tough time with the healthcare system.
00:23:06.000That actually doesn't get the job done.
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00:25:24.000This is a strategy, a political strategy that was termed by the philosopher Alistair MacIntyre, emotivism.
00:25:30.000The idea that you, instead of making an argument about the policy the person is promoting, you actually just say that the person has bad motivations.
00:25:40.000Not just wrong, but motivated by a sociopathic evil.
00:25:44.000So the only way that you kill somebody like Brian Thompson is by suggesting that he is motivated not by a desire to keep the company working and operative in a very difficult regulatory environment with a bizarre system of subsidies and administrative details and all the rest of that.
00:26:01.000And you can disagree with his decisions, think they're wrong, but that's the actual...
00:26:05.000Instead, what you do is you say he's evil and he's just trying to maximize profit.
00:26:08.000Once you start saying the evil profiteers are trying to harm Americans, like that's their goal.
00:26:14.000Their goal is to harm Americans, and I'm telling you this is on both sides of the aisle.
00:26:18.000It is on the left predominantly, but there is a swath of people on the right who are also doing this routine.
00:26:24.000Now, I will say that there are elites who have lent credibility to this particular argument through their malfeasance.
00:26:31.000I think COVID had a lot to do with this.
00:26:33.000You had people like Anthony Fauci who were giving the platonic lies to the American public.
00:26:38.000Lying for their own purposes, in many cases, quashing their political opposition.
00:26:42.000But the generalized argument that is made too much in politics, and it does boil the pot, it leads to an increasing temperature that justifies violence, is this language that disagreements on policy are not because of a pragmatic inability to come to a conclusion or starting from different first principles or using...
00:27:05.000Logical deductions that end up with different conclusions.
00:27:08.000No, the actual reason that, for example, the healthcare system is a mess is because Brian Thompson is an evil person who is trying to kill grandma.
00:27:17.000Or the reason that the oil companies are attempting to pump more oil is not because there is high demand for carbon-based fossil fuels because it's still the most effective form of energy production on the planet.
00:27:28.000It's because they want to destroy the earth and don't care about destroying the earth.
00:27:33.000Or, the reason the bank denied your loan is not because the bank looked at your loan, assessed the risk, and found that it wasn't worth the price.
00:27:41.000It's because the bank manager is actually Mr. Potter and is trying to deny your bank loan because he himself is evil.
00:27:49.000Now, this sort of stuff does get politicians where they want to go very often.
00:27:52.000Because the easiest form of politics is to label your political opponents Motivated, not by mistake, but motivated by actual sociopathic Darth Vader style evil.
00:28:03.000People just want to do bad things to you.
00:28:06.000But this does lead to higher levels of violence across the board.
00:28:09.000And one of the things that's sort of amazing in the right-left breakdown is depending on who is doing the justifying, using the exact same logic, you'll see one side or the other justify it.
00:28:21.000When Bernie Sanders back in 2020 says that our system creates huge profits by deliberately killing people, which is not the way the healthcare system works.
00:28:29.000If that were true, life expectancy in the United States would have declined over the course of, say, the last 50 years, rather than radically increasing over the course of the last 50 years.
00:28:37.000The regulatory environment in the United States, as we've discussed, for healthcare is a complete mess.
00:28:41.000But Bernie says he could just cut that Gordian knot by suggesting the reason that healthcare isn't better is because we need to nationalize it, and anyone who doesn't want to nationalize it wants grandma to be murdered.
00:28:53.000The function of our current system, however, is simply to make huge profits for the drug companies and the insurance companies who made $100 billion in profit last year while people die because they don't get to a doctor on time.
00:29:13.000Again, the basic notion that Bernie Sanders is spewing there, this Marxist notion, that profit is inherently some sort of grave evil.
00:29:19.000And if you just got rid of the $100 billion in profit, then magically healthcare would get better.
00:30:09.000Daniel Penny was protecting people on a subway.
00:30:12.000From the predations of a mentally ill, deeply schizophrenic drug abuser who is threatening them physically according to witness testimony on the subway train.
00:30:20.000This trial never should have happened.
00:30:22.000It should not have happened in the first place.
00:30:26.000Okay, and I want to get into the acquittal in a moment, but what's really fascinating is the reaction to the acquittal.
00:30:32.000So, for example, on the left, you're seeing the exact same arguments that are being made about the quote-unquote racial systems of the United States as you see being made about the healthcare system of the United States.
00:30:44.000Famously, of the Black Lives Matter movement, he says, we need vigilantism.
00:30:49.000He's basically making the Unabomber argument here.
00:30:51.000He's making the alleged shooter argument here.
00:30:53.000The racial system of the United States, the justice system, is so broken that perhaps people should be assassinated.
00:30:59.000Now, you hear that, a lot of my listeners, many of the people in the comments a couple of days ago, and they will say, well, that's evil, what he said.
00:36:51.000By the way, Adam Coleman, a columnist for the New York Post, he points out, quote, When I see a father tell the world at the end of a tragic game that we need to do something, my question is, where was he all this time?
00:37:02.000Where was Andre Zachary when his son was arrested over 40 times, including multiple violent offenses?
00:37:07.000Where was he when Neely was struggling to mourn his mother's loss?
00:37:09.000Where was his father when Neely was abandoned in the foster care system with no one to advocate for him?
00:37:13.000Why is America being held responsible for Zachary's fatherhood issues?
00:37:18.000The reality of his background is horrifying.
00:37:21.000Neely apparently suffered as a child growing up in an abusive household.
00:37:24.000He testified at trial after his mother's boyfriend murdered her and stuffed her into a suitcase to dispose of the body.
00:37:29.000And then he was running around New York, bouncing from homeless shelter to homeless shelter while abusing drugs and schizophrenically threatening people on subways, and Dad was nowhere to be found.
00:37:49.000There will not be mass riots in the aftermath of this trial, nor should there be, because the American people are tired of, for example, the justification of criminality on the basis that America is, quote-unquote, racially corrupt.
00:38:01.000Well, if you're tired of that, then I have news for you.
00:38:05.000Applying that exact same argument to other contexts where it does not apply is not helpful in any way, shape, or form.
00:38:11.000In just a second, we'll get to all the updates from Syria.
00:38:13.000First, if you're still searching for the perfect holiday gift, look no further.
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00:38:51.000Meanwhile, chaos has continued over in Syria, where a rebel insurgency that was largely made possible by the destruction of Iran's entire swath of control, ranging all the way from Iran to the coast of the Mediterranean, as we talked about yesterday.
00:39:06.000According to the Washington Post, a U.S.-backed Syrian peace process begun after civil war broke out in 2011 was moribund.
00:39:12.000Lines dividing the country into spheres of influence among world and regional powers hadn't changed significantly for years.
00:39:17.000But the sudden offensive launched by Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rebel group leading to the collapse of Bashar Assad's government has left governments around the world scrambling to figure out what to do about it, none more so than the Biden administration.
00:39:28.000Senior U.S. diplomats have rushed to the region, fanning out for discussions in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq.
00:39:34.000Egypt and Saudi Arabia are also involved in talks about an effort to maintain stability in Syria and attempt to foster some sort of political transition.
00:39:42.000The United Nations Security Council held a closed door meeting Monday afternoon with the UN Special Envoy for Syria and the head of UN Peacekeeping Forces in charge of monitoring a ceasefire between Israel and Syria since the 1973 civil war.
00:39:52.000It is amazing, by the way, that the number one concern of the UN Security Council at this point is Israel deploying to the other side of Mount Hermon in Syria in order to create a buffer zone so Al-Qaeda and ISIS don't set up there.
00:40:03.000And the UN Security Council is like, this is the big deal.
00:40:06.000Not Turkish-backed Islamist forces taking over the entire country.
00:40:08.000Israel setting up a buffer zone to prevent the invasion of the Golan Heights.
00:40:12.000Yeah, that's really where you should be putting your focus.
00:40:16.000The reality is that Israel is currently doing everybody's dirty work by taking out pretty much every dangerous piece of weaponry in Syria.
00:40:24.000So Israel has knocked out the Syrian Navy now.
00:40:26.000They completely destroyed it, sent it to the bottom of the Mediterranean.
00:40:30.000They are doing that because they do not want that in the control of Islamist fundamentalists.
00:40:36.000Israel has been taking out chemical weapons depots throughout Syria so they don't fall into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists who are backed again by the Turkish government, which again is a NATO member, which is insane.
00:40:45.000If the Biden administration had any stones at all, they'd be applying pressure to the Turks to moderate their friends over in Syria.
00:40:54.000Instead, apparently, there is a piece of news breaking that suggests that the Biden administration is releasing more money to, wait for it, wait for it, Iran.
00:41:02.000According to the Washington Free Beacon, the Biden and Harris administration waived sanctions on Iran three days after the November election, providing Tehran access of upward to $10 billion in one's frozen funds.
00:41:15.000I mean, how sick and pathetic is this administration?
00:41:17.000They're trying to bail Iran out of its own failures.
00:41:20.000The reality is the fall of the Assad regime is most damaging to Iran, which spent billions of dollars trying to not only uphold Bashar Assad, but to set up proxy groups across the Middle East by using Syria as a thoroughfare for weaponry.
00:41:33.000As the Wall Street Journal points out, Iran spent decades and billions of dollars building a network of militias and governments, allowing it to exercise political and military influence across the Middle East.
00:41:40.000In a matter of weeks, the pillars of that alliance came crashing down.
00:41:43.000Assad's removal is the climax so far in a cascade of events catalyzed by Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7th of last year, which resulted in the most fundamental change in Iran's security landscape since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. While toppling Saddam Hussein ended up helping Iran, this time Tehran is at a massive disadvantage.
00:42:02.000According to Ali Valles, director of the International Crisis Group's Iran Project, the Islamic Republic thought Hamas' October 7th attack was a turning point in history.
00:42:09.000That's true, but in the entirely opposite direction to what it hoped for.
00:42:12.000The dominoes for the Western Front have fallen one after another.
00:42:15.000And again, there are forces in Syria that would be much better for the West than, for example, HTS, which is this Islamist terror group that sort of broke away from ISIS and al-Qaeda and ended up fighting both ISIS and al-Qaeda.
00:42:27.000That doesn't make them good, by the way, because terror groups fight one another all the time.
00:42:31.000As I mentioned before, there are the Kurds, who are up in the northeast of the country, and who have provided safety and security to members of a variety of religions, including Christians.
00:42:40.000That is not going to be the case, probably, for HDS, which is a tragedy of enormous and horrifying proportions.
00:42:45.000And then there are the Druze in the South.
00:42:46.000Yesterday, correction, I suggested they were Sunni Muslims.
00:42:49.000They're not, in fact, Sunni Muslims, of course.
00:42:50.000They're their own ethnic group, and their religion is sort of a mash-up of some elements of Islam, even some elements of Hinduism or Greek philosophy, so I just want to correct the record on that.
00:43:01.000The whole thing is a mess, obviously, and containment is likely to be the proper strategy here.
00:43:06.000In other words, let the pot continue to boil so long as it doesn't bother anyone else.
00:43:10.000That is precisely why Israel went to the other side of the Mount Hermon range and set up a buffer zone.
00:43:20.000So Netanyahu, Bibi Netanyahu has suggested that it's only a temporary hold.
00:43:23.000We'll find out how temporary it is because again, security, security holds are temporary until they're not.
00:43:28.000Meaning that if Al-Qaeda continues to be on the other side of the mountain range, if ISIS continues to be there, then Israel ain't going to abandon it because that would be incredibly stupid of them.
00:43:36.000And then there's the question as to what happens next.
00:43:39.000So again, Israel has been doing heavy lifting.
00:43:41.000In Syria, according to the Times of Israel, there were some 250 Israeli strikes against Syrian military targets after the fall of Assad.
00:43:50.000Israeli planes bombed at least three major Syrian army air bases, housing dozens of helicopters and jets.
00:43:55.000They basically took out all of the MiGs, so the Syrians had these really old MiGs that were, you know, crap.
00:44:01.000But Israel took them out because they don't want Islamists in charge of those.
00:44:06.000The 50-year-old regime, of course, had some weaponry, including chemical weaponry, and Israel has been steadily taking out all of those military targets over the course of the last few days.
00:44:16.000By the way, the rest of the world should be thanking Israel for that in the same way they should have thanked Israel for taking out the Osirak reactor in Iraq, and in the same way they should have thanked Israel in 2007 for taking out the Damascus-sponsored nuclear reactor that Bashar Assad was building.
00:45:01.000She has the right priorities, and he just nominated her to serve as assistant attorney general for civil rights within the Department of Justice, which is amazing.
00:45:07.000The Department of Civil Rights in the Department of Justice, the civil rights branch, has very often been militarized by the left to go after, for example, police departments.
00:45:19.000Trump has praised Dylan for having stood up consistently to protect people's civil liberties and for representing Christians who are prevented from praying together.
00:45:31.000She, at one point, ran for head of the RNC, an effort that I supported.
00:45:34.000I think that Harmeet, I can't speak highly enough of Harmeet.
00:45:36.000She's a fantastic, fantastic representative inside the Trump administration on behalf of Freedom.
00:45:43.000She said that it has always been her dream to be able to serve the United States, and she's excited to be part of an incredible team of lawyers being led by Pam Bondi, who is the new Attorney General nominee from President Trump.
00:46:27.000Quote, It was a pleasure to have dinner the other night with Governor Justin Trudeau of the great state of Canada.
00:46:32.000I look forward to seeing the governor again soon.
00:46:34.000So we may continue our in-depth talk on tariffs and trades, the results of which will truly be spectacular for all.
00:46:42.000Remember, he had suggested that if you guys are so dependent on the American economy and you don't give us what we want with regard to trade, then we'll tariff you.
00:46:50.000And if you don't like that, then maybe we'll just annex you and Canada will become the 51st state.
00:46:53.000So that is a reference to that specific comment by President Trump calling him Governor Justin Trudeau of the great state of Canada.
00:47:08.000Meanwhile, in other good news, Pete Hegseth looks like he is going to continue to sail toward the actual Department of Defense slots.
00:47:15.000There were some questions last week about whether he was going to be able to get enough Senate votes.
00:47:19.000One of the votes in question was Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who had questions about some of the allegations that were being made about Pete Hegseth with regard to sexual impropriety or alcohol.
00:47:28.000As I said, these are all anonymous allegations.
00:47:30.000And those anonymous allegations, aside from a police report, which is really sketchy at best, from California.
00:47:36.000That should not be enough to sink Hegseth's nomination.
00:47:39.000So now, Joni Ernst has released a statement, quote, As I support Pete through this process, I look forward to a fair hearing based on truth, not anonymous sources.
00:48:05.000With Joni on board, it looks very much as though Pete Hegseth is your next Secretary of Defense, which is wonderful.
00:48:11.000Hegseth has been stalwart throughout this process.
00:48:14.000Pete has been excellent throughout this process.
00:48:15.000Again, I highly recommend that people go back and watch the interview I did with Pete just a few months ago, where he talks about what he would do were he Secretary of Defense, which apparently he now will be.
00:48:25.000Pete is saying that he looks forward to getting his FBI background check back.
00:48:29.000You know, there have been questions about, is there going to be an FBI background check?
00:48:35.000Sean, you know what I look forward to?
00:48:36.000I look forward to the FBI background check.
00:48:39.000I look forward to the actual under oath conversations with senators as we go through the process because, again, this is what the left does, Sean.
00:48:50.000They take something and then they add anonymous sources and contortions and flat-out lies and then they try to try you in the media before you can even get into the doors with senators.