A shooting at a border patrol station in Texas. Where is that coming from? Why are Democrats talking again about defunding ICE? Plus, the latest on this awful Texas flood, President Trump issuing new threats of trade barriers, and Tucker Carlson interviews the President of Iran.
00:00:19.000But first, the Daily Wire has officially joined forces with EveryLife to bring real tangible help to families in central Texas who are suffering devastating losses from historic flooding.
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00:00:53.000So a terrible story out of Texas yesterday.
00:00:57.000Aside from the obviously terrible story of the Texas flooding, which we'll get to in just a moment, there was a story in which a 27-year-old man with a rifle and tactical gear, according to CNN, was killed on Monday morning after exchanging fire with law enforcement officers at a Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas.
00:01:12.000A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said that the man, quote, opened fire at the entrance of the U.S. Border Patrol sector annex and that Border Patrol agents and local police helped to neutralize the shooter.
00:01:51.000With that said, the suspect's vehicle was spray-painted with the phrase cordis die, which appears in a Call of Duty video game.
00:01:56.000According to local law enforcement, apparently that Call of Duty reference is to some sort of anarchic globalist group that is on the left wing of the political spectrum.
00:02:06.000And that's, of course, why you would show up at a Border Patrol station.
00:02:08.000Now, the parents of the man said that this person had a mental deficiency.
00:02:13.000That, of course, is not a gigantic shock because in a wide variety of cases of this sort, the person who does the shooting has some sort of mental problem.
00:02:22.000With that said, we have seen a massive spike in the number of attacks on ICE agents over the course of the last six months.
00:02:29.000Since President Trump took office and decided we were actually going to enforce our border, ICE has come under significant fire.
00:02:35.000Tom Holman himself said attacks on ICE are up something like 700%.
00:02:43.000Look, you're the typical protesters that go from protesters to criminals.
00:02:48.000The attack on ICE offers, you've covered it many times, is up nearly 700%.
00:02:52.000Now, we were talking 500% a couple weeks ago, so it continues.
00:02:56.000The Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks, he added that obviously left-wing anti-ICE red rick is having something to do with the uptick in violence.
00:03:05.000We've seen our assaults go up dramatically.
00:03:12.000We've got Border Patrol agents on the river right now in the Guadalupe assisting with rescue efforts.
00:03:17.000These agents are outstanding Americans.
00:03:20.000They're just trying to enforce the law.
00:03:22.000But all of the rhetoric and the false information that's being put out by the left is just increasing violence against our agents, and it's just unacceptable.
00:03:30.000Now, again, the left has been claiming for a very long time that if you use rhetoric that is too colorful, if you say things that are borderline, this can lead to quote-unquote stochastic terrorism.
00:03:41.000This is an act of stochastic terrorism that essentially what you're doing is creating a permission structure for terrorism.
00:03:46.000And as I've said before, unless you are actually excusing or inciting violence, you are not responsible for that violence.
00:03:52.000With that said, when you raise the temperature, what that means is that there will be people who bubble over.
00:03:57.000That doesn't mean that Bernie Sanders is responsible for the congressional baseball shooter, for example.
00:04:02.000What it does mean is that when you keep saying over and over and over that Republicans are going to kill your kids when they take away Medicare or some such nonsense, if you say that sort of thing and then somebody goes and shoots a bunch of Republican congresspeople who are playing baseball, you at the very least should consider whether the kinds of language that you used were well calibrated.
00:04:21.000The sorts of language that are currently being used with regard to ICE, with regard to border patrol by the left are extraordinary, extraordinary.
00:04:29.000And they set up a permission structure that causes people who are unhinged to then take it to the next step in the same way that if you keep saying that President Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler, at some point someone might take you seriously and go and try to kill Hitler.
00:04:42.000Well, this is the same sort of thing with Border Patrol agents.
00:04:44.000Here is just a few examples of members of the high-ranking left going after ICE and Border Patrol in language that is completely unhinged.
00:04:54.000Donald Trump's modern-day Gescapo is scooping folks up off the streets.
00:04:59.000They're in unmarked vans wearing masks, being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons.
00:05:04.000No chance to mount a defense, not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye.
00:05:08.000I don't know of any police department that routinely wears masks.
00:05:15.000We know that there are other groups that routinely wear masks.
00:05:19.000It's felt like we're part of a grand experiment.
00:05:23.000How far will the public tolerate the federal government intervening and seizing power from a governor?
00:05:30.000The combination of these Gestapo-like tactics with the fact that these are nonviolent, non-criminal immigrants doing things the right way.
00:05:41.000I mean, in that last facility, I was not safe from the officers in that facility.
00:05:49.000But when the nation, when these political factions divided the nation between slaveholders and slave catchers, when they made everybody, with the fugitive slave law, all of us had to, if someone escaped, all of us had to return that particular piece of property to these folks.
00:06:06.000With ICE running around LA, forcing people to make choices, will they protect their friends, their neighbors, their family members?
00:06:14.000You know, my dad served in the Second World War.
00:06:18.000He fought the Nazis in Northern Africa.
00:06:21.000He fought the Nazis on the Italian peninsula.
00:06:24.000And I think he's looking down right now and he's happy that I'm fighting today's Nazis.
00:06:30.000Okay, so as you can see, those are a lot of prominent Democratic figures.
00:06:33.000I mean, there you're talking about Tim Molls, former vice presidential candidate, current governor of Minnesota, Mayor Michelle Wu of Boston, Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, Representative Dan Goldman of New York, AOC of New York, Eddie Gloud, who's over on MSNBC, and a representative Stephen Lynch.
00:06:46.000Okay, that sort of language is going to have some sort of consequence.
00:06:49.000Again, it doesn't mean they're responsible for a person trying to shoot Border Patrol agents if you keep increasing the temperature and if you keep excusing violence on the other end, which is the other thing that Democrats have been doing for quite a long while here, ranging from the sort of violence we saw during the BLM riots of 2020 to the excusing of the alleged murderous actions of Luigi Mangion on the streets of New York.
00:07:11.000When you do that sort of stuff over and over and over, you're obviously going to lead to an uptick in violence.
00:07:36.000You don't get to simply call the people who are enforcing the law Nazis and Gestapo and then act all surprised when people attack the supposed Nazis and Gestapo in our midst.
00:07:47.000There's a point made by Caroline Levitt over at the White House yesterday.
00:07:52.000Does the White House expect Democrats to tone down their rhetoric in light of what we've saw today in the county, Texas?
00:07:58.000We certainly call on Democrats to tone down their rhetoric against ICE and Border Patrol agents, who, again, are everyday men and women.
00:08:06.000I would encourage AOC and other Democrats to actually meet with the United States Border Patrol.
00:08:11.000These are honorable Americans who are just simply trying to do their job to enforce the law.
00:08:16.000They go home to their families every night, just like we all do, and they deserve respect and dignity for trying to enforce our nation's immigration laws and to remove public safety threats from our communities.
00:08:27.000All righty, coming up, an ice raid in LA, and LA's mayor is doing the performative work Democrats love to do.
00:08:33.000First, you know, there's a lot of great stuff the administration is doing, ranging from actually enforcing the border to an excellent foreign policy, which we'll get to a little bit later on in the show.
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00:10:40.000Okay, so all this culminated yesterday with a face-off between members of ICE and Board of Patrol agents and Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles.
00:10:49.000So yesterday, federal agents accompanied by members of the National Guard, according to Fox News, conducted an immigration raid in Los Angeles.
00:10:56.000They did this in an area near MacArthur Park, which has a large immigrant population.
00:11:02.000That part of the city is heavily Hispanic.
00:11:04.000There's a lot of MS-13 in that particular part of the city.
00:11:07.000MacArthur Park, for anybody who used to live in Los Angeles, is not exactly the kind of place that you go to hang out with your kids like a normal weekday.
00:11:15.000It may look that way because all the federal agents have shown up at this point, but very often you're looking at open-air crime, drug trade, gang members hanging out.
00:11:24.000It's not a safe place, MacArthur Park.
00:11:25.000This has been known in LA for a very, very long time.
00:11:27.000In any case, U.S. Border Patrol agents were seen on horseback in the park.
00:11:30.000Law enforcement military-looking vehicles were stationed in the area.
00:11:35.000Nobody was actually arrested, but the minute that the cops showed up, everybody sort of ran away.
00:11:39.000At that point, Mayor Karen Bass appeared at the scene and demanded to speak with the ICE leadership, saying they needed to leave right now.
00:11:45.000They need to leave because this is unacceptable.
00:11:48.000And she showed up to yell at the border patrol agents.
00:11:51.000The border patrol chief, Gregory Bovino, told Fox News he got on the phone with Karen Bass and she demanded the raid be stopped.
00:11:58.000And he said, I don't work for Karen Bass.
00:11:59.000Better get used to us now because this is going to be very normal soon.
00:12:02.000We'll go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.
00:12:04.000And then she said, well, this is awful because minutes before there were more than 20 kids playing and then the military comes through.
00:12:11.000Okay, so first of all, I'd just like to point out that the military were not going to shoot the kids.
00:12:18.000This very bizarre notion that exists on the left that anytime kids see a member of law enforcement, that that's some sort of traumatic event.
00:12:24.000I just got to tell you, my kids see law enforcement all the time, all the time, really, because my kids go to a Jewish school, which means they're constantly surrounded by law enforcement.
00:12:34.000The idea that if law enforcement or ICE shows up, that immediately some kid has been deeply traumatized, the military is coming through.
00:13:11.000As far as what happened to the criminals, the drug dealers, the violent individuals, well, I mean, what happened is that you declared yourself a sanctuary city and said you wouldn't work with ICE.
00:13:18.000It turns out that cities that are working with ICE are generally, when they arrest people, turning them over to ICE after checking their immigration status.
00:13:26.000But that's something that Los Angeles does not do.
00:13:30.000Protesters then quickly began showing up in the area.
00:13:32.000There are reports of a tire on a federal vehicle being slashed.
00:13:37.000Of course, Governor Gavin Newsom called the events at MacArthur Park a, quote, message from the polluted heart of President Donald Trump.
00:13:43.000He said, I want folks to know that we have your back.
00:13:45.000We'll continue to come back and do what we can to protect our diverse communities, to protect the spirit that defines the best of the city and our state, and to push back against this cruelty being perpetuated by the president of the United States.
00:13:58.000Okay, well, again, if you obstruct federal law enforcement, you should not be surprised when they do not ask for your permission or help when they go to a place like MacArthur Park to find MS-13 members.
00:14:10.000But this is all part and parcel of the Democratic attempt to turn immigration enforcement into the actual crime.
00:14:20.000Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader who hopes to be Speaker after the 2026 midterm elections, he was asked about defunding ICE, and he wouldn't rule it out.
00:14:28.000I mean, this is where Democrats have now gone.
00:14:30.000By the way, immigration policy remains the most popular plank in President Trump's agenda right now.
00:14:37.000Now, some Democrats, amid the criticisms of ICE right now due to these ICE raids, have started calling for defunding ICE.
00:14:43.000Do you think that's effective going into the midterms and do you support those calls?
00:14:47.000Well, I definitely think that we need aggressive oversight as it relates to the overly aggressive behavior that we've seen from ICE, from the Department of Homeland Security.
00:14:58.000It's not what the American people actually, in my view, voted for.
00:15:23.000And for those that say 3,000 a day is too much, I want to remind them, do the math.
00:15:28.000We'd have to arrest 7,000 every single day for the remainder of this administration just to catch once Biden releasing the nation.
00:15:36.000Meanwhile, in other news that is being, again, promoted by a left-wing media, and it's just not true, with regards to the Texas flooding, the left media refuses to move away from the lie that the National Weather Service was somehow cut or underfunded to the extent that this caused the death of all of these people, particularly children in Texas from these flash floods.
00:15:58.000CNN's Juliet Kayem, she knows better, but she's still out there suggesting that she doesn't know if there's a direct line between these NWS cuts and flooding.
00:16:07.000But you should not make the suggestion unless you have the data.
00:16:11.000These sorts of unsubstantiated allegations are not good.
00:16:30.000I don't know if there's a direct line between the National Weather Service and cuts and what happened, but this is what government's for.
00:16:39.000It's to help people and prepare them for the damage and the devastation.
00:16:45.000Again, just perpetuating the narrative, despite there being no evidence, this is the stock and trade of the left-wing media at this point.
00:16:50.000Amisha Elsendor, who's a Washington correspondent for NBC News, she used one of my favorite tactics here, which is you accuse the Trump administration of something, and it's not true.
00:16:59.000And the Trump administration pushes back.
00:17:05.000The White House is also pointing to meteorologists that we've seen in Texas saying that there were staffing concerns, but that there were no staffing issues that led to ample warnings not giving out in the way that they were.
00:17:18.000We at NBC News have also talked to some people, meteorologists and others, who say that the National Weather Service had the staffing that it needed.
00:17:25.000Even though, again, that there were concerns about staffing.
00:17:27.000We've also, of course, I'm sure Julian's going to tell us about the lawmakers that are now wanting this issue to be more investigated.
00:17:34.000But the White House here taking a really defensive posture on the idea that anything that President Trump did hurt the people in Texas.
00:17:41.000And the White House press secretary also saying that the president wants to give Texas any of the resources it needs in this moment.
00:17:48.000So how dare they take a defensive posture when you accuse them of something totally false?
00:18:17.000The San Antonio office was operating with 11 forecasters.
00:18:21.000And as Brian said, the union themselves said that there was adequate staffing.
00:18:26.000So I think those words speak for themselves and the numbers speak for themselves.
00:18:30.000This was a once-in-a-century flash flood, a tragic natural disaster, and the administration is doing all that we can on the ground to help these families.
00:18:38.000So again, is that defensive or is that just her telling the truth?
00:18:41.000Meanwhile, no story in America can be complete without some sort of nonsense racial angle added to it.
00:18:47.000A former Houston city official, appointee, mayoral appointee, has been raging apparently over the coverage of this girls' camp, Camp Mystic, which she says is only being covered because it's largely white.
00:19:02.000As though if a bunch of black kids got washed away by a flash flood, that wouldn't be a story.
00:19:06.000Okay, so I'm old enough to remember when a lot of that sort of stuff happened during Hurricane Katrina.
00:19:11.000And actually, it was a much bigger story because of the race of the people who were being disproportionately killed in Hurricane Katrina, because then the president of the United States was accused of being a racist.
00:19:21.000So this is just false on the merits, but it also shows how race talk can just warp your brain.
00:19:27.000I know I'm probably going to get canceled for this, but Camp Mystic is a whites-only girls Christian camp.
00:19:49.000You ain't getting in, you ain't going, period.
00:19:52.000And I think that context needs to be said in this matter.
00:19:58.000It's not to say that we don't want the girls to be found, whatever girls that are missing or whatever right now, but you best believe, especially in today's political climate, if this were a group of Hispanic girls, especially with them being in East Texas, it should be most likely Hispanic.
00:20:17.000If this were a group of Hispanic girls out there, this would not be getting this type of coverage that they're getting.
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00:22:41.000It has created these echo chambers where you believe that you can say things that are completely specious and truly ugly, and that real people do not exist in the real world who will be upset about that.
00:23:03.000Now, again, that doesn't mean that you're responsible for terrible things happening if you say something terrible.
00:23:08.000What it does mean is that being responsible about the language that you use and the ways in which you approach issue, that should actually be a prerequisite to being taken seriously in the world.
00:23:20.000It's on the audience to determine who to take seriously and who not to take seriously at this point.
00:23:25.000Okay, meanwhile, President Trump has unleashed the tariff talk again.
00:23:28.000He has sent a series of tariff letters to a bunch of countries on Monday, pairing new rates with an explicit warning that even those could change at any time.
00:23:49.000The idea is going to be that this is sort of a final push, final chance for them to get something done before those higher tariffs kick in.
00:23:56.000Those tariff rates are similar to what the White House announced on the April 2nd Liberation Day before swiftly pausing the implementation for 90 days.
00:24:02.000He then posted similar letters to Myanmar, 40% tariff, Laos, 40% tariff, Thailand, 36% tariff, Cambodia, 36% tariff, Serbia, 35, Bangladesh, 35, Indonesia, 32, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 30, South Africa, 30%, Kazakhstan, 25, Malaysia, and Tunisia, 25.
00:24:19.000Many of those rates were slightly lower than April or unchanged.
00:24:23.000Cambodia's rate dropped 13 percentage points from the original target.
00:24:27.000According to the letter, quote, if you wish to open your heretofore closed trading markets to the United States, eliminate your tariff and non-tariff policies and trade barriers, we will perhaps consider an adjustment to this letter.
00:24:37.000That's what the letters to the South Korean and Japanese leaders say.
00:24:41.000Later, President Trump told reporters at the White House the August 1st deadline was firm, but now 100% firm, saying that he would be open to listening to offers.
00:24:51.000He said, if for any reason you decide to raise your tariffs, whatever the number you choose to raise them by will be added onto the 25% charge that we will drop on you.
00:24:59.000This, of course, caused a drop off in the S ⁇ P 500 because people got a little bit freaked out by all the tariff talk.
00:25:05.000Although, honestly, I think it's all baked into the cake at this point.
00:25:07.000People understand that Trump is going to threaten things.
00:25:11.000Secretary Scott Bessant, he said, listen, we're going to announce a bunch of deals over the course of the next 48 hours.
00:25:16.000And this is what is keep, as always, it is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant that is keeping the markets on an even keel here.
00:25:22.000If it were Howard Luttnick talking, the markets would be going nuts right now.
00:25:26.000We are going to have several announcements in the next 48 hours.
00:25:30.000And Joe, I think what President Trump is concerned about is the quality of the deals, not the quantity.
00:25:38.000My mailbox was full last night with a lot of new offers, a lot of new proposals.
00:25:44.000So it's going to be a busy couple of days.
00:25:48.000So I'm going to once again point out that what we are talking about here in terms of the tariffs that we are going to charge on Japan or South Korea, supposedly because how they've been going after American goods, these rates are nonsense.
00:25:59.000I'm just going to point That out right off the top.
00:26:01.000I checked with my friends and sponsors over at Perplexity.
00:26:04.000What were the average effective tariff rates charged on American goods by Japan and South Korea as of January 1st, 2025?
00:26:10.000Before any of this started, Japan, effective average tariff rate, approximately 1%.
00:26:16.000This figure represents the ad valorem equivalent tariff rate across all industries as calculated by the World Bank and UNCTAD databases.
00:26:23.000Most U.S. goods, especially industrial and manufactured products, face very low tariffs in Japan due to existing trade agreements.
00:26:28.000Notably, tariffs on U.S. autos and auto parts are 0%.
00:26:31.000Agricultural tariffs have been reduced to trade equivalent to the TPP agreement.
00:26:36.000South Korea ranged somewhere between 0.19% and 2.87%.
00:26:41.000According to trade data from the Korea Customs Service and analysis by the Korea Economic Institute, the effective weighted average tariff on U.S. imports in 2024 was within this range.
00:26:50.000The vast majority of American goods, about 95%, entered South Korea tariff-free under the Koreas FTA, with most remaining tariffs affecting a narrow range of agricultural products subject to quotas.
00:27:01.000Okay, so you might ask, what about non-tariff trade barriers, like subsidies to various products and goods in these particular areas?
00:27:09.000Well, it turns out those are also pretty low.
00:27:12.000According to, again, our sponsors over perplexity, the average non-tariff barrier rate for Japan against American goods is about 1%.
00:27:20.000For automobiles, non-tariff barriers are notably higher with advalorem equivalents estimated at somewhere between 8% and 11%.
00:27:26.000And those stem from regulatory requirements, non-recognition of U.S. safety standards, and distribution challenges.
00:27:31.000Agricultural products, non-tariff trade barriers for vegetables are about 3%.
00:27:36.000Rice faces really, really high tariffs, about 400%, but U.S. rice often enters under duty-free quotas.
00:27:42.000So the NCB impact is less pronounced for quota imports.
00:27:45.000And again, the reason Japan is trying to protect its domestic rice industry is because that is a key food staple in Japan.
00:27:51.000So it's almost a security issue for them in Japan.
00:27:54.000In South Korea, the non-tariff barrier rate, well, there are significant non-tariff barriers in South Korea that include regulatory and emissions standards, approval processes, distribution requirements.
00:28:07.000For agriculture, there are certain standards that American products supposedly do not meet.
00:28:12.000Generally, again, according to our sponsors over at Perplexity, NTBs can add the equivalent of 3% to 10% to the cost of U.S. exports.
00:28:19.000So if you're talking about total, they are nowhere near the 25% that President Trump has been talking about.
00:28:25.000With all that said, this is why I expect that Secretary Besson is going to come up with some sort of win-win for President Trump or Trump is going to get to declare some sort of trade victory.
00:28:33.000But we are going to avoid these gigantic tariffs that he is set to drop on a wide variety of countries, including Japan and South Korea.
00:28:39.000As a general area of policy, we should not be dropping gigantic tariffs, particularly on countries that we are trying to ally against China.
00:29:19.000The reason being, whenever there's this level of speculation without any sort of supporting evidence, it's not a shock to me when all that sort of falls apart.
00:29:27.000Michael Tracy, a journalist with whom I frequently disagree on a wide variety of issues.
00:29:31.000Michael Tracy has a thread on X where he explains, he said, the key Epstein victim who made the most sensational claims of being trafficked to powerful third-party individuals, Virginia Giufre, was not even called by prosecutors as a witness in the 2021 Ghislaine Maxwell criminal trial because her credibility was in such tatters.
00:29:48.000The whole mythology around this case is largely based on the claims of one mentally unstable serial fabulist, Giufrey, who eventually had to admit in a civil settlement she had falsely accused Alan Tershowitz of depraved sexual crimes for nearly a decade.
00:29:59.000Nonetheless, she was able to eventually extract a few million pounds from Prince Andrew, the only other third-party individual she actually sued, despite naming a huge array of prominent individuals over the year with zero credible evidence, and despite having the dogged assistance of some of the most high-powered attorneys in the world.
00:30:13.000Prince Andrew, as Michael Tracy points out, was in the throes of a PR disaster after his infamous 2019 BBC interview.
00:30:20.000So opting for a settlement with royal family funds rather than standing trial in the United States was probably the sensible course of action from his perspective.
00:30:27.000This was the sole third-party settlement Giufre ever successfully reached, despite claiming she was trafficked to an extraordinary cross-section of prominent individuals, including George Mitchell, Bill Richardson, Marvin Minsky, etc.
00:30:38.000None of the women who testified in the Maxwell criminal trial claimed they were trafficked to third parties.
00:30:41.000Jiufre, clearly in the grips of a worsening psychological crisis, died earlier this year.
00:30:46.000Unfortunately, but doesn't change the fact that so many of her wild, extravagant claims turned out to be totally baseless, despite serving as the evidentiary foundation for this blinkered Epstein mythology, which continues to persist despite an increasingly tenuous connection to any observable reality, having been egged on recently, playing to the fevered imaginations of right-wing social media.
00:31:04.000The entire Epstein saga, says Michael Tracy, has long since turned into an enormous cash cow, with even J.P. Morgan settling for $290 million simply because Epstein was a former client.
00:31:13.000The feeding frenzy litigation has been endless from every angle and is still ongoing.
00:31:17.000We're supposed to believe that not one of these rich and powerful American men, to whom everyone assumes Epstein must have trafficked scores of children, could have been successfully sued at any point in the past 10 plus years and coerced into a generous settlement, particularly in the context of Me Too Mania, from which this affair gained such outsized cultural notoriety.
00:31:32.000Epstein himself was clearly a dirtbag and openly confessed to a pathological obsession with procuring teenage girls for himself.
00:31:37.000But the grander web of creepy conspiratorial intrigue that's enveloped this case and turned it into a weird, tantalizing, unfalsifiable mythology that won't go away is just an extension of the unhinged fabulism pioneered by the original accuser.
00:31:48.000That seems to me the most obvious answer to what the hell was going on here.
00:31:56.000But at a certain point, if the FBI and the DOJ not run by Democrats, first of all, we should point out Democrats running the FBI and the DOJ would have had a pretty large incentive, would they not, to have dumped an Epstein file on, say, Donald J. Trump?
00:32:15.000I mean, we know for a fact that in 2016, the intelligence community coordinated to set up an entire op surrounding Donald Trump's supposed collusion with Russia.
00:32:24.000Do you think that under the auspices of Joseph R. Biden and the rest of the Biden administration, if they had one single iota of evidence, for example, that Jeffrey Epstein had been trafficking underage girls to Donald Trump, that that wouldn't have been on the front page of every single newspaper in the world the next day, like the day after Joe Biden was elected.
00:32:56.000The burden of proof in a civil trial is much lower than the burden of proof in a criminal trial.
00:33:00.000All you have to do is win by preponderance of the evidence.
00:33:02.000And when you're talking about young girls, now young women or middle-aged women suing powerful older men, the possibility of a settlement is very high.
00:33:11.000So why weren't there any of those things?
00:33:13.000A lot of that was studiously avoided during all of the Epstein talk, which again was spicy and interesting and fascinating because conspiracies are usually spicy and interesting and fascinating.
00:33:23.000And of course, Epstein's death was suspicious.
00:33:29.000The memes were funny of Hillary Clinton sneaking into jail at night to get Bill Clinton off scot free because he was trafficking in girls.
00:33:36.000And Jeffrey Epstein was a weirdo with pictures of Bill Clinton in a dress, aside from being a sick sexual deviant who should have been arrested and executed a long time ago for his crimes against children.
00:33:50.000Well, it demonstrates that once a conspiracy theory gets going, it becomes utterly unfalsifiable, utterly unfalsifiable.
00:33:55.000And no matter how much evidence is provided, and even if the people you trust are put in charge, it's still even more unfalsifiable.
00:34:03.000So listen, it's justifiable for people like J.D. Vance, who was the vice presidential candidate at the time before the election, to call for the release of an Epstein list because, frankly, people thought there was an Epstein list.
00:34:14.000However, the evidence suggested there really was not an Epstein list if you were watching this case with any sort of eagle eye.
00:34:21.000This is J.D. Vance before the election.
00:34:23.000Everybody in politics has a vice that's much worse than alcoholism is the way that I put it.
00:34:37.000Okay, so the problem is that when you feed this, when you feed this, when you feed this, at a certain point, it's going to blow back on you when it turns out that you open Al Capone's vault, like Geraldo Rivera, and there's nothing there, which is actually what seems to have happened right here.
00:34:51.000The person who's receiving the most blowback on this, of course, is Attorney General Pam Bondi, because Attorney General Bondi back in February had suggested that the Epstein list was sitting on her desk.
00:34:59.000Don't say this sort of stuff if you don't got the goods.
00:35:01.000If you don't got the goods, don't say it.
00:35:04.000Again, this goes to our social media-driven age where you are likely to score points and garner loyalty for making commitments that you can't actually cash in.
00:35:13.000The DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients.
00:35:47.000The internet tried to spin it into a conspiracy theory anyway, because that's what happens.
00:35:50.000Caroline Levitt was forced into the uncomfortable position yesterday at the White House of trying to retcon those comments from Pambandi.
00:35:58.000According to the report, this systematic review revealed no incriminating client list.
00:36:05.000So what happened to the Epstein client list that the Attorney General said she had on her desk?
00:36:11.000Well, I think if you go back and look at what the Attorney General said in that interview, which was on your network on Fox News, John Roberts said, DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients.
00:36:46.000When everybody engages in outsized speculation, the outsized evidence better stack up at a certain point.
00:36:51.000And if it doesn't, if your expectations of a gigantic conspiracy don't come true and you have no counter evidence, none except for your speculation, I'm sorry, but that's on you.
00:37:08.000If you want to provide me the actual, not just your speculation, not just your sort of suggestions, not your wild, outlandish theories, speciously based on nothing, right?
00:37:22.000But I'm sorry, when you put Cash Patel and Dan Bongino in charge of the FBI, and we put Pam Bondi in charge of the DOJ, and then it turns out that there's nothing there, I don't know what more you expect.
00:37:37.000You're seeing people online suggesting now that Cash Patel is being blackmailed by his girlfriend because his girlfriend works for PragerU.
00:37:45.000I mean, like, give, and Prager and Dennis Prager is Jewish.
00:37:48.000Of course, you can always go down the next conspiratorial rabbit hole.
00:37:51.000That's the beauty of conspiratorial rabbit holes.
00:37:53.000When one of them gets to both, you just dive right into the next conspiratorial rabbit hole and they all tie together in a gigantic bowl of spaghetti that is a global unifying world theory that in the end is about some sort of conspiratorial elite controlling your life.
00:38:05.000Or maybe, or maybe fact and evidence should be necessary when you make outsized allegations.
00:38:14.000Again, this doesn't mean that conspiracies never take place.
00:38:17.000There was a conspiracy with regard to, for example, covering up the possibility of Wuhan lab leak.
00:38:22.000That was a real thing that happened where Anthony Fauci and members of the health establishment attempted to legitimately silence people who made the case that COVID was leaked from a Chinese lab.
00:38:31.000Those things happened, but here's the thing.
00:38:35.000Before that, you could speculate maybe that was true.
00:38:38.000And if you kept an open mind, you say, okay, if there's new evidence, I'll change my mind on that stuff.
00:38:41.000Then when the evidence emerged, then you could say, hey, look, evidence.
00:38:46.000This is why I've been asked before, are there any conspiracy theories that I believe?
00:38:50.000And, you know, the question is to whether I believe a conspiracy.
00:38:53.000There are conspiracy theories that could be plausible, but I don't believe in any conspiracy theory unless there's Actual evidence that makes it not a conspiracy theory anymore, just a conspiracy.
00:39:03.000That's when you should believe in things, is when there's evidence of them that is at least plausible in nature.
00:39:08.000But as you can see, the conspiratorialists are very, very upset with the Trump administration.
00:39:12.000Now they believe the conspiracy goes even deeper.
00:39:14.000So, Alex Jones, who has yet to find a conspiracy he doesn't believe in, is about to go throw up, which frankly might be good for his weight loss program.
00:39:55.000In fact, he's been called by some a prophet.
00:39:58.000Tucker Carlson literally called him a prophet on his program.
00:40:01.000So actually, this is a person whose own lawyer made the case in a custody hearing with his ex-wife that he was a performance artist.
00:40:08.000This wasn't even the Sandy Hook trial where he tried to make the same case.
00:40:10.000His lawyers claim that this man of integrity is, in fact, a performance artist.
00:40:16.000Quote, he's playing a character and is nothing like his online persona.
00:40:19.000Attorney Randall Wilhite reportedly insisted in a Texas courtroom at a pre-trial hearing ahead of the right-wing Radio Jocks custody battle with ex-wife Kelly Jones.
00:40:28.000Judging Jones by his Infowars performances would be like judging Jack Nicholson by his depiction of the Joker on Batman.
00:41:05.000On a moral and intellectual level, it is not so fine because it turns out that people who consistently traffic in conspiracy, it turns out that people who consistently traffic in trash, people who spend your time, your few brief breaths on this planet, filling your mind with stupidity, playing a WWE character.
00:41:25.000Listen, if you want to watch Alice Jones in the same way that you watch WWE, because you know that the WWE is people who are fake jumping on each other and you find it dramatic and interesting, you know, more power to you.
00:41:37.000But if you're watching WWE and you think it's real, that makes you the stupid person.
00:41:46.000It just makes you in the end, you're responsible for the information that enters your brain and your independent judgment of that information.
00:41:53.000But if people are consistently being inauthentic, if people openly acknowledge that what they're saying to you publicly and what they say privately are two different things on the same matters, well, then maybe you ought to take what they say with a grain of salt rather than suggesting that, for example, Donald Trump is lying to you about Jeffrey Epstein or Dan Bongino, with whom I am friends, is lying to you about Jeffrey Epstein, or Cash Patel, the head of the FBI, is lying to you about Jeffrey Epstein.
00:42:15.000Because those are your only two choices here.
00:42:17.000Either Alex Jones, as is usual, blew a conspiracy theory out of proportion, and so did the rest of the internet, or Dan Bongino and Cash Patel and Donald Trump are all lying to you.
00:42:28.000President Trump, for his part, says, quote, the FBI, under the direction of Director Cash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, is back to the basics, locking up criminals, cleaning up America's streets.
00:42:36.000We have the greatest law enforcement professionals in the world, but politics and corrupt leadership often prevented them from doing their job.
00:42:46.000So that's President Trump defending the people that he selected for these jobs.
00:42:49.000And again, I'm just going to point out for the thousandth time here, Dan Bongino and Cash Patel were both suspicious of the Epstein list stuff.
00:43:07.000You may not come to that same conclusion, but now you should be forced to provide your evidence before you call people like Cash Patel and Dan Bongino.
00:43:14.000And by the way, the president of the United States, liars on this matter.
00:43:20.000Now, once the conspiracy is essentially exploded by people like Cash Patel and Dan Bongino and President Trump and Pam Bondi and all the rest, once that happens, why do people double down?
00:43:31.000And the question has to be answered by looking at the mentality of people who do the doubling down.
00:43:36.000Again, you can believe this stuff or speculate about this stuff, but once the evidence comes out, that's a different class of people who've decided to double, triple, quadruple down and look for a way to somehow weasel their way out of having to provide any evidence.
00:43:49.000And that worldview basically says that there is always an elite that is controlling the events in your life.
00:43:54.000And those elite are able to get away with literally anything.
00:43:58.000They have almost godlike powers over your life.
00:44:01.000And once those elites are unmasked, then suddenly the world will become a better place.
00:44:07.000And so every time it turns out that a conspiracy theory is untrue, it undermines your case, unless you make the case that actually the elites got away with it again, in which case you are strengthening your case.
00:44:18.000Actually, a conspiracy debunked in many cases for these folks actually strengthens their broader great conspiracy theory, which is that there is a group of small elites who are running every aspect of your life and they get away with everything.
00:44:28.000And when they get away with this one, it actually makes you more passionate about the fact that they got away with it, as opposed to maybe taking a look at your core theory, which is, no, maybe there isn't this like small group of elite who's controlling every aspect of your life.
00:44:39.000Again, this doesn't mean that every conspiracy is untrue.
00:44:42.000There are conspiracies that exist and we don't even argue on them.
00:44:45.000Alex Jones and I may agree that there was a conspiracy to silence the Wuhan Lab League theory.
00:44:49.000The question is, why double down on theories that are already debunked?
00:44:52.000Why double down on theories that are widely derided as dumb?
00:44:55.000Why double down on theories that have no evidence to them?
00:44:57.000And the answer is, those are precisely the theories you must double down on.
00:45:01.000You must, because if there is a group of unanswerable, unpunishable elites, it excuses all of your day-to-day life.
00:45:18.000Meanwhile, to the great disappointment of so many, President Trump lives in the world of reality.
00:45:22.000Again, my common refrain with President Trump, he lives in the world of reality.
00:45:25.000So remember all that talk by a wide variety of people inside and outside the administration About how Ukraine needed to be abandoned.
00:45:32.000In fact, there were members of the administration, high-ranking members of the administration, who said they didn't care what happened to Ukraine.
00:45:37.000And then there were realists, actual foreign policy realists, you know, people who believe in American interests abroad, who said, you know, what would be bad is Vladimir Putin taking the rest of Ukraine and ingesting it and then being on the borders of Hungary and being on the borders of Poland.
00:46:37.000You can hear the wails, the gnashing of teeth from the people who called the president of Ukraine rat-faced and sweaty for the great crime of saying he didn't want to be invaded by Vladimir Putin.
00:46:49.000Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said, quote, at President Trump's direction, the Department of Defense is sending additional defensive weapons to Ukraine to ensure the Ukrainians can defend themselves while we work to secure a lasting peace and ensure the killing stops.
00:47:01.000President Trump even told Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in a telephone call on Friday, according to the Wall Street Journal, he was not responsible for the halt in weapons shipments to Kyiv.
00:47:09.000He said he had directed a review of Pentagon munition stockpiles after the U.S. struck Iran's nuclear sites last month, but had not ordered the department to freeze the arms deliveries.
00:47:18.000So, you know, that does actually raise the question as to who in the Defense Department was telling the deliveries to stop.
00:47:23.000That ought to be investigated because that should not happen unless the president of the United States gives a sign-off, which apparently he did not.
00:47:30.000The call with Zelensky came shortly after Trump publicly said he was very disappointed and did not make any progress on a Ukraine peace deal in a separate call Thursday with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
00:47:39.000He said, I'm disappointed, frankly, President Putin hasn't stopped.
00:47:44.000And in reality, it is not in America's interest for Russia to be treated as an ally of the United States while they invade a sovereign country, Ukraine, try to kill its leadership and take over the entirety of the country, which borders on multiple NATO countries.
00:47:58.000This is perfectly obvious to President Trump.
00:48:00.000It's the reason why he is now doing the thing that people like me have been suggesting that he do, which is, sure, of course, look for an off-ramp.
00:48:08.000But if no off-ramp is available, because Vladimir Putin is not providing an off-ramp, you have to acknowledge reality.
00:48:13.000It turns out that Vladimir Putin's interests are not the United States' interests.
00:48:19.000And meanwhile, speaking of which, it turns out that there are also countries all over the world, many countries all over the world that do not share America's interests, that have their own independent interests.
00:48:28.000And those interests are very often at odds with the interests of the United States of America.
00:48:32.000I know this comes as a shock to many, but it shouldn't because China, for example, has its own interests.
00:48:37.000Those interests are adversarial to those of the United States.
00:48:42.000Those interests include being a regional power.
00:48:45.000In fact, not just being a regional power, being a global power, even if they don't have the capacity to do that.
00:48:50.000Another country that has its own interests is Iran, which brings us to the much ballyhooed interview between Tucker Carlson and the president of Iran.
00:48:59.000So the president of Iran is a man named Masoud Pezeshkian.
00:49:02.000You haven't heard of him because frankly, the president of Iran is pretty much irrelevant.
00:49:07.000The only people who can run in the election are already pre-selected by the Ayatollahs because Iran, of course, is a Shia Islamic theocracy.
00:49:15.000A radical Islamic theocracy that has spread its terror tentacles all over the Middle East is responsible for the deaths of thousands and thousands of people ranging from countries like Iraq and Syria to Lebanon to the Gaza Strip to Yemen.
00:49:28.000They've got their tentacles all over the globe in terms of sleeper terror cells all over the globe, according to every single major intelligence agency in the West.
00:49:36.000Well, Tucker Carlson obtains an interview with President Pazeshkian, and Tucker explained that the reason he was doing this interview was not to get to the absolute truth.
00:49:47.000He was not interested in getting to the absolute truth.
00:49:48.000And this is the part that's sort of fascinating, not what Pazeshkian had to say, because of course he repeated a bunch of lies, easily demunkable lies that we will explain in a moment.
00:49:58.000What is fascinating about this interview is Tucker Carlson's approach to the interview.
00:50:02.000So Tucker has a particular approach to certain figures.
00:50:05.000So we'll begin by showing you how he treated Ted Cruz.
00:50:10.000This is how you would treat an adversarial interview.
00:50:12.000Okay, so he treated Ted Cruz as an adversary because Ted Cruz was an advocate of the president of the United States striking the Iranian nuclear facilities, which, by the way, again, Tucker was directly at odds with the president of the United States over it.
00:50:25.000He made a series of horrifyingly bad predictions.
00:50:27.000Those predictions were predicated in a series of lies that he has told himself and his audience about the way that the world works, particularly in the Middle East.
00:50:44.000This, again, is, I think, two weeks ago, asking him about the population of Iran, as though this was the most relevant issue with regard to Iran.
00:50:52.000How many people live in Iran, by the way?
00:51:38.000You're the one who knows anything about the country.
00:51:40.000No, you don't know anything about the country.
00:51:41.000You're the one who claims they're not trying to murder Donald Trump.
00:51:44.000You're the not saying that, who can't figure out a saying you need to kill General Suleimani, and you just said it was bad they're trying to murder Trump.
00:51:52.000So again, this is what an adversarial interview looks like from Tucker Carlson, right?
00:51:56.000Badgering people, asking them for very specific, Sometimes red herring statistics on matters.
00:52:03.000By the way, the answer to whether the Ayatollahs ought to run the country does not lie in whether half the country is Persian or 75% of the country is Persian.
00:52:11.000The answer is about 48%, by the way, but it doesn't really matter very much.
00:52:14.000The reason being, it can turn out that an Islamic theocracy is not in the best interests of the United States.
00:52:19.000If the Ayatollahs were to fall, whatever comes next is likely to be better than the current regime.
00:52:23.000Okay, but put that aside, it is the way he's approaching the interview.
00:52:26.000And again, this was the constant, this was the constant theme of the interview with Senator Cruz, was him badgering Senator Cruz, being incredibly adversarial.
00:52:33.000So bottom line is when Tucker wants to grill people, he absolutely knows how to do it, but he saves his ire for Senator Cruz.
00:52:40.000He does not save his ire for some of the worst leaders on planet Earth who hate America and literally chant about it.
00:52:46.000So for example, another clip from that Cruz interview.
00:52:48.000Here he was asking Senator Cruz about his biblical beliefs with regard to Israel.
00:53:37.000I mean, frankly, I think Tucker's a wildly talented guy and very intelligent.
00:53:40.000With all of that said, if you cannot discern his worldview from the way he approaches these things, I don't know what to tell you.
00:53:47.000So he leads off before the interview is even released.
00:53:50.000He explains why he's interviewing and he says, we were not intending to get to truth, so I didn't ask him any tough questions effectively.
00:53:58.000And there are all kinds of questions that I didn't ask the president of Iran, particularly questions to which I knew I could not get an honest answer, such as, was your nuclear program totally disabled by the bombing campaign by the U.S. government a week and a half ago?
00:54:11.000There's no chance he's going to answer that question honestly.
00:54:45.000The promise of America is you asking absolutely unskeptical questions to the dictator of Iran, who has his people shouting death to America and recently tried to attack an American airbase in Qatar and is responsible for the death of thousands of Americans in Iraq and service people in Lebanon and the deaths of tens of thousands of people around the region.
00:55:02.000You need absolutely unskeptical questions of the president of that country in order so that you can make up your mind, apparently.
00:56:23.000Because it turns out that actually you don't need that level of uranium enrichment for civilian nuclear purposes.
00:56:29.000According to the Institute for Science and International Security, in front of the inspector's eyes, Iran is undertaking the near-final step of breaking out, converting its 20% stock of enriched uranium into 60% enriched uranium at a greatly expanded rate.
00:56:43.000There is no, no actual civilian use for 60% enriched uranium.
00:56:59.000By the way, it was Caroline Levitt, the White House press secretary.
00:57:03.000Tucker, by allowing these lies to go unchallenged, and he won't challenge them on his show, I would imagine, by allowing these lies to go unchallenged, Tucker is directly at odds with the White House.
00:57:12.000Here's Caroline Levitt, June 19th, saying that Iran has everything it needs to achieve a nuke.
00:57:16.000All they need is a decision from the Supreme Leader.
00:57:19.000When the president said a few weeks away, did he mean obtaining enough enriched uranium to start building a weapon?
00:57:27.000Or did he mean Iran is a few weeks away from completing the production of a weapon?
00:57:40.000Iran has all that it needs to achieve a nuclear weapon.
00:57:44.000All they need is a decision from the Supreme Leader to do that.
00:57:47.000And it would take a couple of weeks to complete the production of that weapon, which would, of course, pose an existential threat, not just to Israel, but to the United States and to the entire world.
00:57:57.000And that is something that the entire world, including countries like Russia, is in agreement with, that Iran should not and cannot obtain a nuclear weapon.
00:58:05.000And that's why the president believes that, and he has believed that again, not just his political career, but frankly, his entire life.
00:58:12.000Okay, so you may have noticed that that would make a good follow-up question that was not asked.
00:58:18.000Well, then, Mazoud Pazeshkian suggested that actually the diplomacy was going amazing.
00:58:23.000Israel just destroyed the diplomacy with its preemptive strike on the nuclear facilities.
00:58:28.000And we were going to have the next Round of the talks very soon.
00:58:35.000But in the middle of it, suddenly Israel torpedoed the negotiating table.
00:58:43.000We were sitting at the negotiating table when it happened.
00:58:46.000And by doing this, they totally ruined and destroyed diplomacy.
00:58:52.000Well, that's weird because the Trump administration said over and over and over, actually, that Iran was basically jacking around the United States, that he gave them 60 days to negotiate, and then they didn't actually negotiate in good faith.
00:59:05.000They kept saying over and over and over they would not give up their nuclear facilities, period.
00:59:08.000Steve Woodkoff, who was very much biased toward a deal, was unable to make any sort of deal.
00:59:12.000You can ask members of the administration this.
00:59:15.000Zero follow-up questions on this particular matter.
00:59:18.000Well, how about the Iranians claiming that the IAEA had full access?
00:59:22.000So Tucker asked about the IAEA, and here was the response.
00:59:27.000There have been news reports that you believe your government believes that the IAEA was spying on the government of Iran and passing information to Israel.
00:59:40.000And if so, do you have evidence that that's true that the world could see?
00:59:47.000I would like to tell you that we were, yes, somehow pessimistic about the activities of the IAEA because somehow we realized that Israel could get information from the inspections which were carried out by the IAEA, but it never prevented the IAEA from carrying out their activities inside Iran.
01:00:11.000And they had full access to supervise and to have surveillance over our nuclear facilities.
01:00:17.000Okay, so first of all, this blows up a couple of Tucker's already existing narratives.
01:00:21.000One is that there was no ongoing nuclear program and that Israel basically sold the lie to the United States to get the B-2 bombers to fly over Fordo.
01:00:28.000Well, that is the president of Iran acknowledging, according to him, that the IAEA had full access, was leaking the intel to the Israelis who were then giving it to the Americans.
01:00:36.000So actually, the intel came from on the ground in Iran, according to the Iranians.
01:00:39.000But put that aside, he's lying when he says the IAEA had full access.
01:00:44.000Here is a piece, March 9th, 2020, from the IAEA.
01:00:48.000Quote, the agency has identified a number of questions related to possible undeclared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities at three locations that have not been declared by Iran, says IAEA Director General, Rafael Mariano-Grossi, calling on Iran to cooperate immediately and fully with the IAEA and provide prompt access to locations, which it has refused to let agency inspectors visit.
01:01:09.000Just June 12, 2025, 19 of the 35 countries on the board of the IAEA backed a motion declaring Iran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in 20 years.
01:01:21.000So that doesn't sound very like, that would be a great point to, you know, maybe ask a follow-up, like a little bit of pushback.
01:01:26.000Now, my favorite, I think, here is once Tucker asks about death to America.
01:01:32.000And the president of Iran says, no, by death to America, it's just like when when, it's just like when Julius Malema in South Africa says killed the boar.
01:01:41.000It's just a figure of speech, death to America.
01:01:45.000When they say death to the United States, it doesn't mean death to, they don't mean death to the people of the United States or even to the officials of the United States.
01:01:59.000They mean death to crimes, death to killing and carnage, death to supporting, killing others, death to insecurity and instability.
01:02:12.000This is, have you ever heard that Iranian killing an American?
01:02:20.000Or a terrorist that was Iranian and he carried out a terrorist attack against the Americans?
01:02:28.000No, it was your president who confessed that the Americans created the ISIS in our region and they were responsible for this wrong image that is portrayed of religion or the Muslims in the world.
01:02:57.000Iranian-backed militias Hezbollah in Lebanon murdered hundreds of American Marines.
01:03:05.000Iranian-backed militias in Iraq killed thousands of people, including over a thousand Americans in Iraq.
01:03:12.000Iranian militias all around the region have threatened Americans, including, again, Iran directly firing a missile.
01:03:18.000I understand that they pre-coordinated it with the United States so the United States did not blow them away, but they did in fact fire a missile at a U.S. base two weeks ago in Qatar.
01:03:26.000I remember because Tucker Carlson was almost crying about it on air, saying it was a tragedy for his friends in Qatar, his allies in Qatar.
01:03:34.000He doesn't know what an ally is when it comes to Israel, but apparently Qatar is a deep and abiding ally.
01:03:38.000By the way, again, this puts Tucker in his failure to ask any basic follow-ups at odds with the President of the United States here as President Trump, June 22nd.
01:03:47.000For 40 years, Iran has been saying death to America, death to Israel.
01:03:53.000They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs with roadside bombs.
01:04:00.000We lost over a thousand people, and hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East and around the world have died as a direct result of their hate, in particular.
01:04:11.000So that might have made a good follow-up question.
01:04:14.000Tucker also provided a forum for the president of Iran to suggest that there was no actual fatwa on Donald Trump, that they've not been trying to kill Trump at all, actually.
01:04:21.000Of course, he sort of has to say that now that he suggested openly in his interview with Senator Cruz, that if people had attempted to kill Trump at the behest of the Iranian government, we'd have to nuke Iran.
01:04:33.000Here is Tucker Carlson with the Iranian president.
01:04:36.000To the best of my knowledge, they have not issued decrees or fatwas against any individual, against Donald Trump.
01:04:47.000And first off, it has nothing to do with the Iranian government or to His Eminence, the Supreme Leader of Iran.
01:04:56.000What they actually meant by the fatwa was In condemnation of an insult to a religion or religious personalities.
01:05:07.000And they were actually saying that this is deplorable, this is unacceptable.
01:05:12.000So it was not directed towards the U.S. president or any other individual.
01:05:20.000Well, I mean, that's kind of weird because actually, here's a video of the IRGC commander in 2023 saying that, God willing, they'll be able to kill President Trump.
01:06:13.000Notice the difference in approach between how he approached Senator Cruz and how he approaches an absolute fabulous serial liar on behalf of an enemy regime of the United States that declares death to America with the greatest, with the greatest of care.
01:06:32.000He did the exact same thing with Vladimir Putin.
01:06:34.000And when Tucker Carlson interviewed Vladimir Putin, everything that he did with regard to Vladimir Putin was designed to allow Vladimir Putin to basically tell lies unhindered.
01:06:45.000Here, for example, was Tucker Carlson with Vladimir Putin again.
01:06:51.000As soon as the political leadership decided to use the U.S. dollar as a tool of political struggle, a blow was dealt to this American power.
01:07:01.000I would not like to use any strong language, but it is a stupid thing to do and a grave mistake.
01:07:08.000Again, I would like to point out at this point that after Tucker's absolutely sycophantic interview with Vladimir Putin, and again, I don't blame Tucker for letting Putin talk for a very long time.
01:07:17.000At the time, if you go back and listen to what I said, you know what?
01:07:31.000And I think that's because he has a view of the United States that is rooted in the idea that America has essentially perverted herself since World War II.
01:07:39.000That is something that he has suggested openly multiple times on his pro.
01:07:42.000Whatever the rationale, what he is doing is very clear.
01:07:46.000I mean, right after that interview with Vladimir Putin, he did another interview, this one, I believe, in Dubai, in which he was asked why he didn't ask Vladimir Putin about tossing people out of third story windows.
01:07:56.000And he said, well, listen, every leader kills people.
01:09:21.000And none of that says to me, if you're being super generous with those people, but extremely aggressive with, say, Senator Ted Cruz, I'd love to see how that stacks up as America first.
01:09:34.000And I'd love to see him explain to President Trump why it is that he is allowing the president of Iran, without any sort of pushback at all, to make claims like death to America is essentially an empty chant that just means we don't like bad things, or that they're not trying to kill President Trump, which is not true, or they're not trying to develop nuclear weapons, which is not true.
01:09:56.000I'm not telling you not to listen to Tucker or enjoy his programming or recognize that he's a super talented guy, which obviously he is.
01:10:01.000What I am telling you is you ought to take it with a grain of salt.
01:10:04.000You ought to actually look at the things that are being told to you and wonder what are the motivations of the people who are telling them to you?