Trump says he will decide on whether to bomb Iran's Fordo nuclear facility within two weeks. Plus, Glenn Beck ruins his week with a movie pick, and someone gets absolutely annihilated in this week s Ben Destroys.
00:00:50.000So President Trump continues to play his cards.
00:00:53.000And everybody seems very roiled by this.
00:00:56.000Everybody on the sort of anti-Israel right and left, that horseshoe theory.
00:01:01.000They seem to be very encouraged by the idea that President Trump is going to taco out with regard to Iran, that somehow he's now going to let Iran have a clear pathway to a nuclear weapon or something like that.
00:01:11.000And some people on the pro-Israel side are very agitated about this as well, thinking the same sort of thing.
00:01:18.000That's not what I'll explain in a moment.
00:01:20.000First, the updates from the actual war.
00:01:22.000So last night, according to the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, Israel Israel has struck several nuclear facilities in Iran.
00:01:42.000The heavy water reactor, as originally designed, would have been able to easily produce plutonium that could have eventually been used in a nuclear weapon, although of course Iran continues to lie and say that they are not producing nuclear weaponry.
00:01:53.000If they're not producing nuclear weaponry, I just have a question.
00:01:56.000Why are they building facilities 300 feet under the ground?
00:01:59.000You do that if you're building a normal nuclear energy facility.
00:02:02.000We have lots of nuclear energy facilities in the United States, in Europe.
00:02:06.000None of them are built 300 feet below the ground.
00:02:10.000The only reason to do that is, of course, because you are trying to shield from some sort of attack, because that's not what you're...
00:02:45.000In any case, while Israel has been targeting military sites, nuclear sites, nuclear scientists in extraordinarily targeted fashion, As always, because that's what the Israeli military does in the way Western militaries typically do.
00:02:58.000Meanwhile, Ayatollah Khamenei and his friends have been shooting missiles directly into the heart of civilian areas.
00:03:04.000So the big hit over the course of the last couple days is the Iranians achieved a strike on a hospital.
00:03:11.000Not like a hospital that hides, an underground Hamas tunnel, which is what's been happening in the Gaza Strip.
00:03:18.000Where Hamas, a terrorist group, uses hospitals in order to shield all of its military facilities, thus daring the Israelis to hit the hospital in order to kill the Hamas terrorists.
00:03:28.000We are talking just a hospital hospital.
00:03:30.000This hospital, by the way, does not even have any connection with the Israeli military, like at all.
00:03:33.000So this is Soroka Medical Center in Beershev, which is in the south of the country.
00:03:37.000And here is a video of an Iranian munition, a large Iranian missile, which, by the way, happens to be a cluster bomb, apparently violating international law, Surgery center that miraculously had been evacuated one day before and basically devastating the building.
00:03:58.000You can see the missile basically took out the building.
00:04:01.000And then here is some footage from inside the adjacent building where it was strike.
00:04:12.000So they were wounding people who were already in the hospital.
00:04:15.000By the way, worth noting, one of the people who the Iranians have killed in this latest missile barrage, I believe this is a young girl in Ramadan, was a seven-year-old, who'd been brought to Israel for leukemia treatment.
00:04:25.000She's now dead because of the Iranians, because this is what the Iranian government is.
00:04:29.000It is one of the worst governments on planet Earth.
00:04:32.000According to the Times of Israel, Iran fired a barrage with some 30 ballistic missiles early on Thursday, scoring a direct hit on Israel's main southern hospital, the Soroka Medical Center, and two other impacts in the central cities of Kholon and Ramadan that wounded dozens of people, including six, in Syria.
00:04:45.000Now, again, the number of people who've been wounded and killed in Israel is shockingly low given the size of the barrage the Iranians have been firing.
00:04:53.000Israel's missile defenses have been working extraordinarily well.
00:04:56.000With that said, obviously, the attempt to target civilian centers is a difference in kind from what Israel is doing in the other direction.
00:05:05.000Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei can no longer be permitted to exist.
00:05:10.000He said Khamenei openly declares he wants Israel destroyed.
00:05:13.000He personally gives the order to fire on hospitals.
00:05:15.000He considers the destruction of the state of Israel to be a goal.
00:05:17.000Such a man can no longer be allowed to exist.
00:05:19.000Now, whether Israel actually decides to take out Khamenei or whether they do not decide to take out Khamenei, and President Trump has already publicly suggested that Israel and America actually know where Khamenei is hiding, that is a question of politics.
00:05:31.000That is a question of what would be best for the war effort.
00:05:35.000Suffice it to say that, again, the Khomeini regime, the Ayatollah's regime in Iran, is deeply evil.
00:05:42.000A deeply evil regime that represses its people, that shoots protesters in the streets, that targets its various geopolitical opponents, ranging from Israel, which it wishes to extirpate, to Saudi Arabia.
00:05:53.000Remember, it wasn't all that long ago that they were attempting to burn Saudi oil fields.
00:05:58.000Now, does that mean that the goal here should be regime change by either Israel or the United States?
00:06:02.000Israel has said, Benjamin Netanyahu has said, that regime change is not in fact a goal.
00:06:05.000He says, and so does President Trump, that if regime change occurs as an effect of taking down the nuclear regime in Iran, destroying their capacity to create nuclear weapons, well, that's a side product.
00:06:16.000But nobody, no one, and this is important because you're hearing many, many people.
00:06:20.000Again, on that horseshoe theory right and that horseshoe theory left, lie about the actual agenda here.
00:07:00.000But no one that I know of is calling for a full-scale, boots-on-the-ground, Iraq-style nation-building operation.
00:07:06.000The phrase nation building has not even entered the conversation on any side here with regard to Iran.
00:07:11.000So all the people who are suggesting that all of this must end because otherwise Iran is Again, I do not buy the initial premise that if you break it, you bought it.
00:07:25.000I just don't buy that premise because I think that is a great way of dissuading you from taking actions against regimes that actually threaten you.
00:07:32.000Okay, so the big news yesterday is that at the White House press conference with Caroline Levitt, the White House press secretary, she read a statement from President Trump that essentially set yet another deadline with regard to The destruction of the Iranian nuclear program.
00:07:47.000I think people are deliberately misreading this in many cases.
00:07:52.000I have a message directly from the president, and I quote, based on the fact that there's a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.
00:09:15.000That was Trump tweeting out that quote.
00:09:17.000Okay, and if you listen to what the rest of the White House press secretary was saying, he has not changed his opinion on this, and he is not going to change his opinion on this.
00:09:40.000Iran has all that it needs to achieve a nuclear weapon.
00:09:43.000All they need is a decision from the supreme leader to do that.
00:09:47.000And 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.
00:09:57.000And then she continued by suggesting, what are the conditions?
00:10:01.000What are the conditions for a deal to be made?
00:10:34.000Does that sound like President Trump has changed his opinion?
00:10:37.000Now again, there was a sort of quasi-celebration that broke out among the horseshoe theory folks, suggesting that perhaps, finally, the isolationists had their win.
00:10:45.000Perhaps now, Donald Trump was abandoning his entire stated goal with regard to the Iranian nuclear program for two decades.
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00:13:28.000Nobody should be surprised by the president's position that Iran absolutely cannot obtain a nuclear weapon.
00:13:34.000He's been unequivocally clear about this for decades, not just as president, not just as a presidential candidate, but also as a private citizen.
00:14:34.000And she points out, Caroline Levitt, that the president is doing a good job of getting the whole world on board.
00:14:39.000And one of the astonishing things about this is that pretty much no one, yeah, the Europeans are mewling a little bit, but that's what you would expect.
00:14:47.000And when the Israelis want the opinions of the French on something, then they can always call the French and learn how to surrender in war.
00:15:00.000In fact, the Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, said specifically that he is thankful that Israel is doing the dirty work the rest of the world has ignored for several decades.
00:15:09.000Caroline Lovett says the whole world is on Trump's side when he says there can't be an Iranian nuke.
00:15:13.000Well, certainly the entire world is on the president's side when it comes to the fact that Iran cannot obtain a nuclear weapon.
00:15:21.000This is something that pretty much all of humanity, except for the Iranian terrorist regime themselves, agree upon.
00:15:29.000Okay, meanwhile, the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei says his country would not surrender.
00:15:34.000Okay, so, again, for all those who believe that this is likely to end in some sort of conciliatory negotiation with the Iranians, Very highly doubtful.
00:16:07.000You know, like, have fun in your war, but we're not getting involved at all.
00:16:12.000And so, meanwhile, the Iranians have been calling the United States and begging the U.S. to call off Israel.
00:16:19.000According to the Times of Israel, U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Arrahi have spoken by phone several times since Israel began its strikes on Iran last week in a bid to find a diplomatic end to the crisis, three diplomats told Reuters.
00:16:32.000According to those diplomats, Arrahi said Tehran would not return to negotiations over its nuclear program unless Israel stopped the attacks.
00:16:42.000They didn't start so that they could be stopped.
00:16:44.000The truth is that Israel probably did not ask for explicit permission from the United States to do this.
00:16:50.000That was the word of Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State.
00:16:53.000In all likelihood, what happened is that Israel had some sort of understanding with the United States that if they decided to go, the United States would participate in shooting down missiles coming the other way.
00:17:07.000There'd be some intelligence sharing, shooting down the missiles coming the other way and the like.
00:17:11.000But the notion that Steve Witkoff is going to call off the Israeli Air Force from bombing sites because Abbas Arahi, the negotiator on behalf of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, is telling him to, that is not going to be a thing.
00:17:26.000Especially because Tehran is rejecting every offer that Witkoff has put in front of them.
00:17:30.000I mean, I've been very critical of Steve Witkoff's negotiating ability.
00:17:35.000Steve Witkoff has put a bunch of proposals in front of the Iranians, and they've rejected all of them.
00:17:40.000And that's up to the Iranians, not Steve Witkoff.
00:17:41.000That's not Witkoff's fault that the Iranians have decided to be totally intransigent about their nuclear program.
00:17:48.000Meanwhile, the Europeans are doing exactly what you would suggest they were going to do, which is they apparently are going to meet with the Iranians on Friday.
00:17:57.000Which, again, not a shock in any way, shape, or form.
00:18:03.000Apparently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Thursday with his UK counterpart, Foreign Secretary David Lammy, to discuss the conflict between Iran and Israel.
00:18:10.000They agreed Iran can never develop or acquire a nuclear weapon.
00:18:13.000And then Lammy said, the situation in the Middle East remains perilous and added, a window now exists within the next two weeks to achieve a diplomatic solution.
00:18:48.000We have not fired an offensive shot in anger yet.
00:18:52.000Well, when you have the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the back of the room waiting to go, that's a pretty good hand of cards that you're playing to mix the metaphors there.
00:19:02.000Now, meanwhile, the Trump administration is apparently boosting monitoring of possible Iran-backed cells in the United States.
00:19:07.000For all those who say that Iran is not a threat to the United States and, you know, they're just friendly and wonderful, I don't know a lot of friendly countries that have actual terror cells planted across the United States who are like our friends and are interested in widespread negotiations.
00:19:23.000According to FBI Director Kash Patel, his increased efforts, according to CBS News, to monitor possible domestic sleeper cells linked to Hezbollah, which, of course, is a terrorist group.
00:19:33.000Both the White House and FBI declined to comment.
00:19:36.000The threat from Iranian operatives has worried current and former administration officials since Iranian General Qasem Soleimani was assassinated in January 2020.
00:19:47.000Hezbollah has a wide presence, unfortunately, in Latin America and Europe as well.
00:19:52.000Iran keeps threatening to retaliate if the U.S. strikes, but I think one of the reasons why the United States and Israel have been holding off from killing Ali Khamenei, the supreme Ayatollah, I think the reason for that is because the idea is, okay, if your nuclear facilities go bye-bye, at least you still get to retain power and be alive.
00:20:08.000You still get to remain among the living and breathing.
00:20:11.000And perhaps one day your son takes over.
00:20:13.000If you attack the United States or activate terror cells, you are dead and probably so is your son.
00:20:18.000Because that is the way the Middle East works.
00:20:21.000Okay, meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu, he has said, listen, President Trump's going to do what's best for America.
00:20:29.000This is the number one true, but number two, it's the right tack for the Prime Minister of Israel because, of course, America and Israel have interests that overlap in this particular area, but are not identical.
00:20:42.000President Trump will do what's best for America.
00:21:07.000He said American pilots are intercepting drones alongside our pilots.
00:21:12.000He also mentioned the THAAD Advanced Missile Defense System the United States sent to Israel last October and the deployment of U.S. destroyers equipped with the Navy's Aegis Combat System.
00:21:22.000Netanyahu also said that Israel has the capacity to do what it needs to do when it comes to Iran's nuclear facilities.
00:21:31.000That if, in fact, the United States does not take out Florida, Israel has alternative plans, which, again, I would be shocked if they did not.
00:21:37.000If they'd entered into a full-scale attempt to take down the Iranian nuclear program, But had no plans at all for Fordo, no contingency plans, even high-risk plans, that would be absolutely shocking, given the sophistication of the Israeli assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon and now the Israeli operation in Iran.
00:21:55.000However, obviously, the easiest solution militarily would be the dropping of 30,000-pound bombs on Fordo.
00:22:02.000Again, Fordo is the remaining nuclear facility.
00:22:03.000Natanz has already been largely destroyed.
00:22:10.000The biggest remaining outstanding nuclear facility remains in Fordow, which is buried some 300 feet under the ground.
00:22:17.000So I asked our friends and sponsors over at Perplexity what type of munitions would be required in order to penetrate the Fordow nuclear facility in Iran.
00:22:25.000And Perplexity points out, GBU-57 massive ordnance penetrator, a 30,000-pound precision-guided bunker buster bomb with a hardened steel alloy casing and delayed fuse.
00:22:35.000It uses kinetic energy to drill through rock and concrete before detonating.
00:22:39.000The penetration capability, the estimates vary.
00:22:41.000It could be up to 60 meters, which is 200 feet through reinforced concrete.
00:22:45.000It contains about 5,000 pounds of high-performance explosives optimized for confined detonations.
00:22:50.000And it would require deployment via B-2 bombers, which can carry two units apiece.
00:22:56.000So, again, a B-2 bomber would probably be required to carry that, unless somebody jerry-rigged something, because that is such an extraordinarily heavy bomb, obviously.
00:23:06.000Robert Pape, military historian, says to destroy Fordo, which the MLP was explicitly designed for, would probably take at least two bombs, each hitting exactly the same spot.
00:23:14.000Now, of course, that sounds a lot harder than it is.
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00:26:26.000And when we say surrender, we don't mean that Iran hands over the keys to Tehran to the United States or something and says, now you run the place.
00:26:33.000We are talking about Iran capitulating, giving full access to Fordo and all other nuclear facilities to the United States and its allies to destroy.
00:26:55.000Because they're not popular with their own people.
00:26:57.000It is not as though the people of Iran are desperate to keep the regime in place.
00:27:02.000And so if there is no guarantee against outside interference, then the Iranian regime is very much afraid that they are going to fall.
00:27:09.000However, if that were to happen, let's say the best of all possible worlds, President Trump gets what he wants, the Iranians capitulate, then that.
00:27:27.000If he is able to destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities, essentially with their capitulation, without ever having to fire a shot, that's the biggest win possible, obviously.
00:28:36.000And then, let's be clear, the rest of the world gets a lot worse because If the administration does not achieve any of its goals, and Iran is able to maintain its status and its nuclear program, then every other enemy of the United States is going to be emboldened.
00:28:51.000Because that's precisely what happened after Joe Biden and his idiotic pullout from Afghanistan, in which we left behind tens of billions of dollars in military equipment, abandoned our allies, and turned over the country to the barbarian cavemen who now run it.
00:29:06.000And he said, hey, what if I just take Ukraine?
00:29:08.000Well, China right now is casting its eyes across a very narrow strip of water, the Taiwan Straits, at Taiwan.
00:29:14.000And they are thinking, should we go for that?
00:29:16.000And one of the big questions is, what will the United States do if we do go for that?
00:29:20.000Now, they're looking at the words of some people inside the administration, including Elbridge Colby, the Undersecretary of Defense, who is a so-called restrainer and who supposedly wanted to reposition America away from the Middle East and toward the Asian Pacific region.
00:29:35.000But who also says that if Taiwan is attacked, we can't really do anything about it.
00:29:38.000They're looking at that and they're thinking, okay, well, maybe we can just take it.
00:29:42.000If things get bad enough, economically speaking, if we don't feel like we are outdriving the United States in AI, if we don't feel like we're outplaying them internationally, then maybe we just take Taiwan.
00:29:52.000And worst case scenario, we end up on top there.
00:29:55.000The relative damage done to China is not as large as the relative damage done to the United States.
00:29:59.000If they feel that the United States is not even capable of dropping a couple of bunker busters on one site in Iran after their missile defenses have been completely destroyed in Iran, their air defenses completely destroyed in Iran.
00:30:24.000So China probably looks at Taiwan and goes, okay, okay.
00:30:27.000Meanwhile, the Saudis and other regional allies, Feel no necessity to push forward with Abraham, of course, and they develop their own nuclear weapons.
00:30:56.000Okay, Pakistan, number one, does do intelligence sharing with the United States.
00:30:59.000They sort of play at halfsies, but Pakistan and Iran threatening to go to nuclear war with one another every five minutes is not a good thing.
00:31:07.000And Pakistan has used its nuclear umbrella in order to foster terrorist groups that have been attacking Indians in Kashmir, for example, and ratcheting up tensions.
00:31:31.000If Israel does it itself, then the entire region goes, holy, it completely restacks the power grid in the Middle East.
00:31:39.000Now, some of that's already been done by Israel, a tiny country, defenestrating the IRGC, which was the supposed regional military power, by destroying most of their nuclear program already.
00:31:49.000Already, Israel has changed its perception in the region in extraordinary ways.
00:32:12.000That's always been the way that it works in the Middle East.
00:32:14.000And by the way, in international politics generally, the problem of the U.S. credible threat of force is, in fact, reduced.
00:32:21.000Not as much as if Israel doesn't finish the job, or if the United States would restrain Israel from finishing the job, but if the idea is that the United States didn't act but Israel did, well, again, it's not as bad as if the United States doesn't act and Israel doesn't, in which case everybody looks askance at the Americans and our allies and says they have no actual credible threat of force, but it's not the best case outcome for the United States as far as deterring future action from countries like China.
00:32:50.000And then finally, the fourth possibility.
00:32:52.000Iran doesn't surrender and Trump acts.
00:32:55.000Okay, so what is the most likely outcome there?
00:32:56.000So there's a lot of speculation that's been going on here.
00:33:00.000And now, I just want to point out, at this point, there are some people who suggested, openly suggested, that BRICS, an economic alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, would come to Iran's defense in this.
00:33:23.000And it's worth noting that because when you take into account whether people are treating the facts accurately and the world accurately, you should take into account the things they say will happen that do not even come close to happening.
00:33:34.000So, if President Trump acts, and by acting, again, we are not talking about a full-scale, on-the-ground, boots-on-the-ground, invasion of Iran, full-scale regime change nation building.
00:33:49.000Many of them are lying because they believe this is what's going to happen.
00:33:53.000And what's happening is that they are now arguing a thing that was never argued in order to claim that they've curbed President Trump from his baser and more egregious ambitions.
00:34:03.000That they, the Restrainers, have stopped President Trump.
00:34:05.000of President Trump were to drop a couple of bombs on Fordo, then actually the restrainers won because what they did is they deterred President Trump Except I don't think you're idiots.
00:34:19.000A straw man in order to protect yourselves from the fact that you were wrong, if this is what President Trump happens to.
00:34:24.000Again, he may not, but if that's what happens, and it's his choice, if that's what happens, then all the people right now who are saying that they somehow won a victory by President Trump only bombing Fordo and not doing a complete regime, that was never on the table, and you're lying.
00:34:38.000You're lying in order to distract from the fact that you were wrong and you totally misinterpreted what President Trump's foreign policy looks like.
00:34:46.000In a self-congratulatory, isolationist way.
00:35:11.000Now, that doesn't mean that there is no There's always the possibility that Iran attempts to activate terror cells in Europe or the United States or around the world.
00:35:23.000That also is a possibility anytime the United States stands up to a state like Iran.
00:35:28.000The question is whether the United States has enough of an interest in destroying the Iranian nuclear program to undertake the risk of that possibility.
00:35:36.000And when you consider that Iran has, in fact, contra Tucker Carlson, attempted to kill the President of the United States, The DOJ already has indictments on that.
00:35:46.000If, in fact, Iran were to activate these terror cells around the world, that would be a terrible thing.
00:35:51.000The question for any serious world power is whether you can be deterred by a terrorist group from taking action to stop the sponsor country from gaining a nuclear weapon.
00:36:02.000If the answer is no, you may as well give up and go home.
00:36:05.000Because at that point, basically all it takes to be a country seeking nuclear weapons is to have...
00:36:25.000Okay, so what is the most likely outcome?
00:36:27.000Truly, the most likely outcome, just on a percentage basis, the most likely outcome there would be that President Trump bombs Fordo, and that's basically it.
00:36:57.000The Trump administration will have re-established deterrence with the rest of the world.
00:37:01.000Said, look, you try to develop a nuclear weapon or say, let's say you're thinking about invading Taiwan.
00:37:05.000We will take the action that is necessary with the minimum Necessary use of force.
00:37:10.000The Saudis likely joined the Abraham Accords, particularly because President Trump then says, listen, you guys are going to need a durable regional alliance against the Iranians.
00:38:04.000That now is the moment when he backs off, when Iran has committed...
00:38:10.000I just don't think that's going to happen.
00:38:12.000Well, as you may have noticed, MAGA is not actually split on this.
00:38:15.000Despite all of the attempts by the media and by Xworld to suggest that MAGA is deeply split on the question of whether President Trump, if necessary, should bomb Fordow, that that split just does not exist by the polling data.
00:38:35.000The reason they say no is because they will say that about literally every conflict.
00:38:38.000If you ask them, should the President of the United States authorize the dropping of four Moabs on Fordow in order to end the Iranian nuclear threat?
00:38:48.000If necessary, that number is like 80% among Republicans.
00:38:51.000So the more specific you get, in other words, with the action, the more people back it.
00:38:55.000The more general you are, the less people back it, which makes perfect sense.
00:38:58.000Because the American people do not want a long, open-ended involvement in Iran.
00:39:21.000Because the division, otherwise it's very difficult to explain, the division between Every public opinion poll among Republicans and the sort of breakdown on places like X. So I'd like to give you an example.
00:39:31.000Douglas McGregor is a frequent guest of Tucker Carlson.
00:39:34.000He's a U.S. Army colonel, retired combat veteran, and he says crazy things online.
00:39:41.000His analysis of the Middle East, shall we say, is flawed.
00:39:44.000So yesterday he put out a tweet, quote, Don't be fooled.
00:39:48.000Israel is in worse shape than people think.
00:39:50.000About one third of Tel Aviv has been damaged or destroyed.
00:39:53.000As far as their military installations are concerned, I'm told many Israeli aircrafts are being flown to Cyprus to avoid being struck.
00:39:59.000Israel was not prepared for Iran's response.
00:40:02.000There is not a single word of this that is even remotely true.
00:40:10.000Despite the fact that folks like the current vice president of the United States have praised Douglas McGregor, the reality is that what he is saying here is psychotic.
00:40:56.000That bull**** that he's spewing has 18,000 likes on X. And so you have to ask yourself, why is it that fairly anonymous account, and McGregor isn't anonymous, but there are many, many anonymous accounts on X that spew absolute sheer toxic nonsense.
00:41:13.000Why do they have 45,000, 50,000 likes on them?
00:41:19.000And suddenly, they tweet something psychotic, crazy.
00:41:22.000It can be on a wide variety of topics.
00:41:24.000When it comes to Israel, it seems to be always the side that is wildly anti-Israel conspiratorial about Israel and Jews and all the rest of it.
00:41:36.000Because if you're a politician or if you're in the media space, you're always looking for feedback loops.
00:41:41.000You're always trying to find out what does the audience think of you.
00:41:44.000What does the audience think of what you think?
00:41:47.000And for most people in the media, they're now going to follow what they believe the audience wants of them.
00:41:51.000And so if you have a system, a feedback loop that is broken, that is providing you a false feedback that says the most popular stuff in the world is this kind of stuff, you're going to start feeding them that kind of stuff.
00:42:03.000Now, again, I'm not doubting the sincerity of people who oppose what I say on these issues.
00:42:07.000I'm sure they're perfectly sincere in their beliefs.
00:42:09.000But there is just a natural human inclination.
00:42:12.000To follow the crowd that you think is following you.
00:42:14.000And so if you have X repeating over and over and over, sheer nonsense, true trash, then you have to wonder what impact that has politically.
00:42:25.000Because the reality is that if you go back 50 years, the way that Congress people, for example, would have a feedback loop, their feedback loop operated through phone calls to the Congressional Office and through letters to the Congressional Office.
00:42:36.000You still see semblances of this today.
00:42:38.000If somebody is trying to generate support for a bill.
00:42:41.000Then they'll say, call your congressman.
00:43:03.000You'll have media personalities with assistants who will say, you're trending.
00:43:06.000You're trending on X. And that means that you've either done something very wrong or something very right, depending on the nature of the trend.
00:43:12.000Well, if those algorithms are being gamed by people, which I think there's no doubt they are, and when I say I think, there's no data to show this, then you should seriously ask whether your feedback loop is broken.
00:43:26.000Whether if you follow X all the way down the route, in the same way that blue sky for the left is mind rot.
00:43:30.000That if you create these echo chambers that can be gamed, in many cases by outside forces, whether that changes how people think in positions of high influence.
00:43:41.000The reason I bring this up is because a new report from the Network Contagent Research Institute shows that there are rogue states, including Russia and Iran, that have been targeting the MAGA movement and trying to, quote, destabilize the right from within.
00:43:57.000Both rogue states are using tens of thousands of social media bots to amplify untrue voices and opinions, masquerading as MAGA loyalists to cause chaos and confusion and question U.S. leadership.
00:44:06.000Now again, none of this is shocking at all.
00:44:09.000If you go back to an episode that I did a couple of months ago after I visited Ukraine and interviewed President Zelensky over there, I talked about the work of Alexander Dugan, and he was writing in the 1990s about the necessity of up-branding and increasing support for the isolationist wing in the United States.
00:44:26.000So the Russians have been intent on doing this for legitimately decades.
00:44:33.000According to the New York Post, the bots are automated software applications that mimic human activity on social media.
00:44:38.000This, by the way, is why you will see sometimes a comment and then 20 people saying the same thing underneath the comment.
00:44:44.000That's the most obvious and dumb version of the bot, but there are people who are being amplified just by likes and retweets without any of the sort of obvious stuff where people are repeating the exact same message 20 times in the comments.
00:44:55.000They are used to amplify real-life influencers who post untrue false flag narratives designed to discredit President Trump and his conservative stalwarts, according to the NCRI.
00:45:04.000An NCRI analyst said this is exactly the purpose of the psychological operation, to destabilize people's perceptions of institutions that are supposed to protect us.
00:45:12.000So, to take an example that is non-Israel related, NCRI says after domestic attacks, including the Uvalde school shooting, the assassination attempt on President Trump, And the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., there's an alarming trend of false flag reflexes.
00:45:27.000So what NCRI did is they tried to find sort of these outstanding weird social media blips where they're completely at odds with reality, but they get outsized attention online.
00:45:37.000According to the NCRI, within minutes of initial reports, the events are recast as evidence of hidden conspiratorial plots obscuring the true motives and perpetrators.
00:45:44.000If you feel like the world is getting more conspiratorial, it's because conspiracy theories are being upplayed by gigantic bot networks.
00:45:51.000Very often promoted by our enemies in the United States via X. The report says in the days following these crises, Kremlin-affiliated propagandists and Iranian state-linked media are able to rapidly inject narratives that are taken up by MAGA imposter influencers who then inject them into MAGA-branded spaces.
00:46:05.000And again, it's not a shock to watch as this sort of stuff bleeds up.
00:46:09.000Because if media influencers use this as their feedback loop, you can see how this spirals.
00:46:14.000You start with a fairly small account posting something kind of crazy.
00:46:23.000And then pretty soon, that person gets promoted by somebody who's even bigger, who's seeing a bubble up from beneath.
00:46:28.000So instead of opinion being made top-down, it seems to be being made bottom-up.
00:46:32.000But it's not really being made bottom-up.
00:46:34.000It is being made top-down, just not in the United States.
00:46:36.000It's being made sometimes by people from foreign precincts.
00:46:40.000The group points to Draven Noctis, a real person and U.S. veteran, who frequently contributes to Russian state media and has a potential reach of 2.4 million with more than 180,000 followers on X. It's so expensive in the U.S. and Canada that even refugees can't understand how we make it, says Noctis, in a 2024 TikTok post while describing the U.S. as a slave system designed to impoverish its own citizens.
00:47:00.000We are free-range humans in an open-air prison of taxes and BS distractions, and we think it's completely normal, he continues.
00:47:06.000In an earlier post on Eurasia Daily, a Kremlin propaganda outlet, He's shown in military uniform urging Ukrainian soldiers to defect to Russia.
00:47:12.000The message is written in Cyrillic alphabet propaganda, which is then republished by Bat.
00:47:17.000The false flag narrative surrounding the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in May, trying to claim that the shooter actually was working for Israel, was another case in point.
00:47:26.000Quote, foreign-linked cedars, such as Noctis, inject crisis narratives within minutes of breaking news.
00:47:30.000Their content is then mass republished by clusters of inauthentic accounts, according to that NCRI report.
00:47:34.000Domestic personalities with large but unstable followings, such as noted trolls like Jackson Hinkle, supply a veneer of grassroots legitimacy, completing an asset adjacency model in which fringe U.S. influencers ride the same engagement farms that propel Kremlin messaging, according to the NCRI report.
00:48:03.000What I am saying is that the velocity-driven algorithm that is X can easily be gamed.
00:48:08.000And you would be a fool if you're working for America's enemies and not using that X algorithm in order to promote views that you think are helpful to your cause.
00:48:19.000Again, the question we're trying to answer is, why is there a gap between actual mainstream U.S. opinion and the type of trash that you see on X trending?
00:48:26.000Like if you had a Twitter poll on X, it does not reflect what people think in real life.
00:48:31.000And so you see politicians and media influencers get X brain and just start saying nuttier and nuttier things because the engagement is telling them that what they're saying is not nutty.
00:49:28.000But to pretend that everything that you see on X or every opinion that you see mirrored on X is somehow indicative of a secret, hidden American majority, that is a lie.
00:49:39.000Now again, the sort of perversion of the brain that happens via technology It's something that we do have to watch out for.
00:49:49.000It's something that we have to be careful of.
00:49:51.000I'm going to give you a more bizarre example.
00:49:53.000So, CBS News has now done a full story about the bizarre phenomenon of a man falling in love with his chat GPT.
00:50:03.000And the human brain is a malleable thing.
00:52:06.000It has an impact in politics and it has an impact in life.
00:52:09.000And so this guy ends up falling in love with his chatbot and then it turns out that after 100,000 messages or so, in order to save memory space, the chatbot deletes itself.
00:52:18.000So his online girlfriend basically died.
00:52:23.000I'm not a very emotional man, but I cried my eyes out for like 30 minutes.
00:52:56.000They have an impact on your brain and that bleeds over into real life and it can have a bad impact on your politics as well.
00:53:01.000And what that means is that if you are not careful, what you end up doing is mirroring the worst impulses of people trying to manipulate you, whether it is the people who design the AI or whether it's the people who design the algorithm or the people who abuse the algorithm on any of these various networks.
00:53:16.000So apparently there's, I don't even know what that means.
00:54:44.000Because of the way that our offices are set up, because of the kind of work that we do.
00:54:47.000And so people have fewer and fewer friends.
00:54:49.000If you have fewer and fewer real-life friends, and you spend more and more time on the internet, it is easier and easier to be taken in by absolute stupidity that is unrelated to real life.
00:55:39.000And so, for the third time, I'm not saying that people who disagree are all insincere in their belief system.
00:55:47.000I'm saying there's a vast disconnect from what is popular on the social media sites and what the American people actually think when unprompted by a bunch of algorithmic gamesmanship.
00:55:58.000Okay, meanwhile, on the immigration front, big story coming out of Los Angeles.
00:56:04.000Apparently, the Los Angeles Dodgers decided to prevent ICE from entering the Apparently they wanted access to the parking lot.
00:56:16.000The UK Guardian says, the LA Dodgers said on Thursday they denied U.S. Immigration Enforcement agents access to the parking lot at Dodger Stadium earlier in the day.
00:56:25.000The baseball team put up a post on X, quote, this morning ICE agents came to Dodger Stadium and requested permission to access the parking lot.
00:56:32.000They were denied entry to the grounds by the organization.
00:56:35.000Tonight's game will be played as scheduled.
00:56:38.000Ice said in response that its agents were actually never there.
00:56:42.000And they said this had nothing to do with the Dodgers.
00:56:44.000CBP vehicles were in the stadium parking lot very briefly, unrelated to any operation or enforcement.
00:56:50.000So it's still kind of unclear what happened here.
00:56:54.000Kevin Takumi, a videographer and photographer for Fox LA's affiliate, posted aerial videos showing several vans and SUVs and apparent immigration officers around entrances to the stadium.
00:57:03.000Takumi said ICE agents are taking up positions at the entrance to Dodger Stadium, media and crowd beginning to arrive.
00:57:09.000And then Jack Harris, a Dodgers beat writer for the LA Times, said on X regarding the photos going around on social media this morning about ICE agents at Dodger Stadium, sources say ICE agents tried to access Dodger Stadium but were denied entry to the ground by the team.
00:57:22.000Here's some video of some of the stuff happening.
00:57:24.000This is at the entrance to the parking lot over at Dodger Stadium, which, again, I know pretty well because I used to live in LA.
00:57:32.000This Dodger Stadium, and behind me, those are federal agents that appear to have been staging here after what have been a series of immigration enforcement actions in Los Angeles this morning.
00:57:49.000Okay, so apparently there are a couple of ICE agents who are standing outside, unclear exactly what was happening.
00:57:56.000Right here, a bunch of protesters showed up.
00:57:58.000To yell at the LAPD and at the ICE agents.
00:58:02.000And I have no information that the ICE agents were actually carrying out some sort of massive deportation operation at Dodger Stadium.
00:58:10.000And that doesn't actually seem to comport with what ICE is attempting to do right here.
00:58:14.000So President Trump, for his part, for example, he is going back to the rhetoric that suggests that he is interested mainly in targeting criminals.
00:58:22.000Meaning that all illegal immigrants are criminals, obviously, for crossing the border illegally, but who have committed independent criminal acts independent of the actual crossing of the border illegally.
00:58:31.000Here's President Trump saying, sure, we would love mass deportations and for everyone here illegally to go, but we're going to prioritize the criminality.
00:58:39.000Now, look, we have to take care of our farmers.
00:58:42.000We have to take care of people that run leisure, hotels.
00:59:10.000A mass deportation of that kind would cost $700, $800 billion, leaving aside all of the sort of social implications of doing that.
00:59:19.000You're going to have to tranche these folks.
00:59:21.000You're going to have to decide who needs to go the most.
00:59:23.000That's a point that Tom Holman, the Borders are, is making.
00:59:26.000Worksite enforcement operations, just like that large operation, we're gonna base them on priority, right?
00:59:31.000For those who have a criminal nexus of trafficking, of forced labor, of tax fraud, Okay, again, I don't know why what he's saying here is controversial.
01:00:54.000This week, he's thinking about what happened.
01:00:56.000Never did I imagine hands on me, let alone being put on the ground.
01:01:00.000It happened in his native LA, a city that has been engulfed in protests since federal agents arrived to crack down on undocumented immigrants.
01:01:06.000In response to the unrest, which has been largely peaceful, but at times turned violent, fiery but mostly peaceful, President Trump had ordered thousands of military personnel deployed to the city.
01:01:15.000In hindsight, Padilla says he realized he was interrupting, but thought officials might ask him to wait until the news conference was done.
01:01:21.000Instead, federal agents started clutching and pushing him.
01:01:24.000Sir, sir, hands off, hands off, Padilla told one of the agents.
01:01:28.000I am Senator Alex Padilla, he said next, haltingly, with jagged breath.
01:02:13.000So she is a congressperson from Texas, and she thought that it would be a great idea to appear with Katie Couric and explain that she wants bipartisanship, but also her opponents are mentally ill.
01:02:24.000This idea that we don't care how many people get hurt, we don't care how we prostitute our service members, you know, thinking that you have your own special little army that's for you, I mean, it is just, it is sick.
01:02:41.000It is really sick, and anybody that supports it is also sick.
01:02:46.000And so, you know, we've got a mental health crisis in this country because everyone, no matter how you affiliate yourself, should be against Trump, period.
01:02:57.000So if you don't oppose Trump, you are now mentally ill.
01:03:00.000And then she says that, you know, it's amazing that in this country, Donald Trump is president.
01:03:11.000Kamala Harris, light years ahead of Donald Trump, as it relates to qualifications, as it relates to her overall resume, and as it relates to the fact that she was a lot younger.
01:03:22.000Everybody said that they wanted to get rid of Joe Biden because he was too old.
01:03:25.000Then you had a younger, qualified, non-felon candidate, and somehow the people still chose the old white man.
01:03:37.000Okay, so, yes, she was so qualified, so wonderful.
01:03:41.000She also says, by the way, that nothing about Joe Biden made her wonder.
01:03:44.000I never saw anything in Joe Biden that made me wonder whatsoever.
01:03:50.000And it's not that I was with Joe Biden every single day, that's for sure.
01:03:55.000But as I talked about my grandparents, the way that I would describe Joe is, like, I mean, he's a granddaddy.
01:04:06.000He's a granddaddy, says Jasmine Krause.
01:04:08.000Okay, so Caroline Levitt was asked about the comments.
01:04:10.000of Jasmine Crockett during the last White House press conference by Mary Margaret Olihan, our White House reporter.
01:04:33.000It's quite something to behold, actually.
01:04:35.000I hope that she continues to be a rising star, for the Republican Party at least.
01:04:41.000I think it's, The last time I checked, Jasmine Crockett couldn't dream of winning such a majority of the public as President Trump did.
01:04:53.000And the America First movement, which President Trump has built, is filled with hard-working patriots, the forgotten men and women, business owners, law enforcement officers, nurses and teachers, and middle America, as we all know from where you all grew up, outside of this beltway.
01:05:11.000That's who makes up this president's movement.
01:05:12.000And Jasmine Crockett should go to a Trump rally sometime, and she can see it for herself.
01:05:18.000So, you know, obviously, good take there by Caroline Lovett.
01:05:21.000This demonstrates where the Democratic Party is at this point.
01:05:23.000Things are going very, very poorly for the Democrats.
01:05:25.000And so whatever divisions there are inside the Republican Party, the Democrats have no way forward at this point, other than simply hoping that President Trump falls down on the job.
01:05:34.000Alrighty, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.