In this episode of the CharlieKirkShow, we discuss the latest terror attack in New York City, Iran's oil embargo, and the growing problem of homegrown terrorists in the United States and around the world. Today's episode is sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:00:56.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:43.000Yeah, I guess most people are too young to remember, including me.
00:01:48.000Yeah, in the 70s after the Yom Kippur War, a lot of the Middle East did an oil embargo of the West.
00:01:53.000And it's interesting because sometimes people speculate that's, there's that famous what the heck happened in 1972 or so is that chart where everything starts going bad in the early 70s and one of the arguments is it was the oil embargo.
00:02:08.000It suddenly made energy more expensive.
00:02:10.000Well, about 20 of the global supply has been disrupted for about nine, ten days now, more than double the previous record set during the Suez crisis of 1956.
00:02:57.000But we want to start with the lead today of New York.
00:03:02.000In New York, it was a very disruptive, discouraging, dangerous moment that happened where self-radicalized ISIS, they call them protesters, these are terrorists, used explosives called Mother of Satan inside bombs thrown at Gracie Mansion.
00:03:20.000So Gracie Mansion is, of course, where Mayor Mamdani and his Islamist loving wife live.
00:03:27.000And there were anti-Muslim protests saying they didn't want the, they wanted to stop the Islamification, the Muslim takeover of New York City.
00:03:35.000These two terrorist suspects in the Gracie Square terror incident, Amir Balat, who's 18, and Ibrahim Kayumi, 19, are both U.S. citizens.
00:03:48.000Balat's parents are Turkish immigrants who were naturalized as U.S. citizens in 2017.
00:03:54.000Kayumi's parents are Afghan immigrants.
00:03:56.000His mother was naturalized in 2009 and his father in 2004.
00:04:06.000So it underlies a bigger problem, which is, yeah, you can stop third world immigration, but guess what?
00:04:14.000Their kids could be radicalized by ISIS videos on the internet.
00:04:17.000There's going to be people online who are going to point out, like, this is a homegrown, this isn't an immigration problem.
00:04:21.000It's a homegrown terrorism problem because they're U.S. citizens.
00:04:25.000Yeah, and that's, I mean, there seems to be indication that these two young terrorists, budding terrorists, were potentially radicalized abroad as well.
00:04:38.000Trips to Turkey, trips to Saudi Arabia, which another funny instance here, trips to Melbourne, Australia, another known terrorist training ground.
00:04:56.000If you talk to people in the Middle East, they'll say a lot of the most radical people are in the West.
00:05:03.000There are a lot more radical Muslims in London or in Birmingham, I think, than there are in Dubai.
00:05:09.000Yeah, well, it's interesting because When you put a bunch of Muslims in a Western context, they instantly are infected with leftist ideology, which says that they're part of a systemically oppressive culture, and therefore they end up reacting even more stridently against the West because they just feel different.
00:05:29.000They feel like they're oppressed, living in their own skin in the Western context, and then they get radicalized even more so.
00:05:35.000So, let's go through some of the details here.
00:05:38.000There's a substance known as TATP, which is enormously quote-unquote volatile.
00:05:46.000It's become the ISIS explosive substance of choice.
00:05:52.000Fox News has learned of a disturbing development involving the type of explosive used in the attempted attack and just how dangerous it is.
00:06:00.000Let's bring in retired NYPD Inspector Paul Morrow, who has more information on this device that was found.
00:06:07.000So, it was a homemade device, Paul, but not necessarily a cheesy one, in other words.
00:06:17.000And I have to tell you, having done about 15 years' work worth of this kind of work, counter-terrorism work, this is a bit of a game changer.
00:06:25.000First of all, let me start by saying New York City got extremely lucky yesterday.
00:06:30.000TATP is enormously volatile, it is not very stable, it's extremely powerful.
00:06:37.000And those bombs, those IEDs, are filled with nuts and bolts and very destructive elements.
00:06:44.000And basically, when they go off, they're like dozens and dozens of bullets flying in every direction.
00:06:49.000This is a protester, a leftist protester, who was there saying, All immigrants are welcome.
00:08:53.000This was a vile protest rooted in white supremacy entitled Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City.
00:09:00.000I'm the first Muslim mayor of our city.
00:09:03.000Anti-Muslim bigotry is nothing new to me, nor is it anything new for the one million or so Muslim New Yorkers who know this city as our home.
00:09:25.000So we got to go through some of these headlines because this is, I think, one of the most symbolically important moments that I've seen recently of the situation that we find ourselves in.
00:09:38.000Of course, we have a conflict in Iran, but we are getting to the point as a country where you don't have to love what's going on in Iran.
00:09:46.000You don't have to have supported that effort.
00:09:48.000We're getting to the point where you can't actually conduct war with a Muslim country because you're going to have too many Islamists in the country that are going to try and bomb you.
00:11:14.000We have to, I mean, we have the meme here.
00:11:17.000This is the famous Norm McDonald tweet.
00:11:22.000What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans, imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims.
00:11:31.000And it was pointed out today, like younger people probably we basically live through this alternate universe where we're told that 9-11 happened and it caused, you know, probably caused a surge of Islamophobia.
00:12:09.000And on top of that, they massively increased the Muslim population of the United States by bringing them in as immigrants throughout the entire war on terrorism period, as refugees, as that whole spiel where, you know, they were allies in the Mideast, so we had to bring them here.
00:12:26.000Those Afghan immigrants who came here about 15 years ago, they were probably here because, oh, they wanted to get out of the Islamic radicalism of Afghanistan.
00:13:14.000It just takes a couple internet videos and an ideology and a feeling that they live in an oppressive system egged on by leftists like the guy who had the bomb chucked over his head that completely vindicates their victimization.
00:13:27.000Yeah, another way we've become vulnerable, remember, for example, throughout the Biden administration, they repurposed the FBI and DHS to say the chief terror threat is white dudes who go to Latin Mass.
00:13:40.000And so they wouldn't investigate this sort of thing.
00:13:42.000Just like they wouldn't want to police the border so anyone could come in over the border with Chinese espionage.
00:13:48.000They shut down their China espionage probe because too many of the people they were investigating were Chinese.
00:13:53.000And it felt kind of racist to do that.
00:13:56.000And that's the decision we've made over and over and over again, that we intentionally lobotomized ourselves.
00:14:03.000We've intentionally made ourselves stupid to not notice the obvious, to not observe the obvious, to not think the obvious.
00:14:11.000And I think a lot of us might think, oh, well, we'll just avoid saying something because it's impolite, but everyone knows it.
00:14:17.000But for a lot of people, if you are not saying the obvious thing, they will stop thinking the obvious thing.
00:14:23.000In this case, the obvious thing being Islam as a religion has way more violent radicals than any other major religion.
00:14:30.000And when you welcome them into the West in huge numbers, this results in terrorist attacks that kill a lot of people.
00:14:38.000But even if they aren't killing a huge amount, they just totally distort life.
00:14:42.000Think about all of the public events where you have all of this security theater that you used to not need.
00:14:48.000Think about all these events where, oh, you have all these bollards and these vehicles everywhere to make sure that some vehicle can't drive in and kill a bunch of people.
00:14:55.000And then you go to a country that doesn't have this level of migration and they don't have those things because they don't need those things.
00:15:01.000Well, and that's the sectarian violence that has ravaged the old world has now come to the new world by immigration.
00:16:08.000Oh, but I guess they're not foreigners because they have a piece of paper.
00:16:10.000The million, the million, two million dollar house says it all: that you can welcome people into your country and basically give them everything, and they will still resent you.
00:17:59.000Well, so both of the sides, you know, the leftist side specifically was already very rowdy and violent prior to the situation with the bomb there.
00:18:10.000But, you know, Bo and I were right next to each other.
00:18:13.000And we were, what, I would say a couple yards away, a couple feet away even from the incident happening.
00:18:20.000Yeah, you can see some of the footage there of them burning flags.
00:18:24.000They actually beat up another journalist after that flag burning happened.
00:18:30.000They chased him out, you know, saying that he was a Zionist, yelling at him.
00:18:35.000They ended up punching him, kicking him down on the ground.
00:18:37.000Yeah, that's that footage right there.
00:18:40.000It was a very hostile environment, to say the least.
00:18:44.000And it seemed like these people wanted nothing but trouble.
00:18:48.000And that's, you know, what ended up happening later with the Muslim who committed an act of terrorism.
00:18:55.000And thank God that that bomb did not go off.
00:20:28.000So, so there was anti-Muslim protesters on one side, and then there were, I guess, pro Muslim protesters.
00:20:38.000I mean, did it seem like the pro-Muslim or the counter-protesters, however you want to describe them, were they, was it mostly Muslims, or was it mostly sort of just like kind of leftist Antifa types?
00:20:52.000It was definitely like the Antifa types.
00:20:54.000It was definitely some white New Yorkers, I would probably say.
00:20:59.000A lot of that, you know, New Yorkers are very, they go hard in the paint.
00:21:03.000A lot of them are very aggressive when it comes to, you know, their beliefs.
00:21:08.000And it seemed like, you know, and Bo, correct me if I'm wrong, but this was on par with Minneapolis Antifa when we really went in there and we saw, I mean, right as we got out of our Uber to show up to this event, there was a kid with a freedom shirt getting berated.
00:22:25.000They, as soon as something went down, if you saw someone getting attacked, they stepped in and they tried to stop it.
00:22:34.000They were actually getting very angry at multiple times and were chasing people down, using profanities and, you know, trying to get them arrested.
00:23:42.000Was it skewing younger, skewing older?
00:23:45.000Definitely younger, definitely on the younger side for this one.
00:23:48.000I know that some of them have, some of them were probably in their like later 20s, but a lot of them seem to be around that, you know, teenage to mid-20s range, about the age of Bow and I.
00:24:39.000Or were they just kind of, I mean, as far as I could tell, they were just in front of the Gracie Mansion saying, stop the Islamification of New York.
00:25:04.000But during this event, no, I think that they were being very peaceful.
00:25:08.000And the people that were supporting Jake Lang, all they were doing was saying freedom and just supporting American values.
00:25:18.000What happened with a goat the night before?
00:25:21.000If you can use PG language just in case.
00:25:24.000Yeah, he was pretending to have relations with a goat the night before.
00:25:33.000He pulled up in a U-Haul, opened the door.
00:25:36.000You know, he had an American flag and he was basically mocking the Muslims, which, you know, some may say it's funny, some may say it's crude.
00:25:47.000But that seems to be a lot of the stuff that the leftists the next day at the protests where the attempted bombing occurred, they were actually yelling at, you know, they were calling him names that I probably shouldn't say on the show.
00:27:31.000Imagine being a young woman just finding out that you're pregnant, not knowing where to go or what to do, not even knowing exactly what is going on in your body.
00:27:39.000While the whole world tells her it's just a clump of cells, you and I, we both know the truth.
00:27:47.000And once she has an ultrasound that you provide and she sees the truth of the baby growing inside of her, you help her choose life.
00:27:55.000When you join us in providing ultrasounds with pre-born and she sees her baby and hears her baby's heartbeat, you will double the likelihood that she will choose life.
00:28:05.000And 100% of what you give goes to providing ultrasounds, 100% pre-born separately fundraises for administrative costs.
00:28:55.000It looks like our wonderful governor here in the state of Arizona has vetoed a bill that would have added a Turning Point USA license plate to a list of about 100 other license plates that Arizona drivers could opt into willingly.
00:29:14.000Okay, so the way it works is they're specialty license plates.
00:29:17.000You opt in to pay an additional $17, and then you get a special license plate that pays homage to the, in this case, yes, Charlie and Turning Point there for Charlie, it says.
00:29:30.000And it's got the Turning Point logo and a picture of Charlie, actually, with this picture right behind us with his hand and fist raised the air.
00:29:39.000And so Governor Hobbs decided not to allow this license plate.
00:29:45.000Again, that would have been added to about 100 other causes that Arizona drivers could support.
00:29:50.000Yeah, there's a Choose Life license plate.
00:30:04.000And by the way, so when you do this, it's a voluntary.
00:30:08.000This is not like taxpayer dollars are getting siphoned off the general fund and sent to Turning Point.
00:30:13.000It's a voluntary $17 contribution that would go to Turning Point.
00:30:18.000Just like when you do the other ones, there's a small fee that gets sent to whatever cause you're celebrating.
00:30:27.000But instead of allowing Turning Point to be one of those 100-plus groups that you could do that in the state of Arizona for an organization that's based here in Arizona, Charlie decided to make Arizona his home.
00:30:40.000He worked his butt off for this state.
00:31:18.000I find this obviously highly offensive that a son of Arizona, yeah, he came from Chicago, but this was the home he chose.
00:31:28.000A son of Arizona who was murdered in cold blood, taken down by political violence, an assassination, the most public and tragic in a generation or more.
00:31:41.000And she has the gall to stop the legislature, stop the people of Arizona from honoring him and his legacy.
00:31:50.000I can't wait till Andy Biggs is our governor and we get to do it.
00:31:54.000I mean, it's just truly grotesque because if they had passed one to honor, like you know, if there was some odious, like, borderline criminal person who got killed in Arizona and became a left-wing cause celeb and they passed that license plate, she would sign it in a heartbeat.
00:32:10.000But because we had a person on the right who was grotesquely murdered by someone on the left for his advocacy, and someone just wanted to make a license plate that you could voluntarily pay for the right to use, and she vetoes it.
00:32:25.000And the obvious answer is because she despises Charlie, and deep down, I suspect she's kind of glad he got shot.
00:33:51.000I'm not a New York Times subscriber, and I can't get the whole article to load right now in my paywall bypasser.
00:33:56.000But it was basically that James Tallarico is one of the few openly Christian politicians in the United States who acts like a Christian.
00:34:06.000And by acting like a Christian, he reveals a profound contrast with so many members of the MAGA Christian movement that has dominated political life for 10 years.
00:34:14.000And he goes off on a bit where he does this whole thing on, okay, you know, there's Christian orthodoxy, which is, you know, right, right beliefs, but we don't put enough emphasis on, I believe he called it orthocardia.
00:34:25.000I don't even know if that's a real word, but it basically means right heart.
00:34:29.000And so he says that James Tallarico has the right heart, that he has, he has the fruits of the spirit, actually, is what he says.
00:34:35.000That you see Tallarico and he's so obviously kind and loving and Christian.
00:34:40.000And he basically just, I don't think he literally says it, but the clear message is James Tallarico is the best Christian in American politics right now.
00:34:48.000And that's really galling to me because, okay, if he was just a left-wing social Democrat, like if he said, oh, I disagree with my party on a lot of things, but like I have to be on the left for, you know, you've seen the reasons, I would be extremely disappointed, but I'd vaguely get it.
00:35:04.000But there's something really unsettling with Tallarico.
00:35:09.000And the fact that he dresses up, dresses it up in Christianity is what makes him more sinister, not less sinister, that he goes to the Bible and says, actually, the Bible, the text of the Bible says that we need abortion and we can't restrict it.
00:35:23.000The text of the Bible is why I believe it's good for us to mutilate children because of some fad.
00:35:30.000The text of the Bible is why I think, I believe, what did he say?
00:36:14.000And yeah, that's definitely not what he's saying.
00:36:16.000And it says a lot that there's a type of Christian out there, David French, who thinks that that's the most Christian guy we have in politics right now.
00:38:19.000One is the domestic political risk that it poses to the Trump 2024 coalition going forward in terms of political capital to get things done on the Hill, but also in terms of the midterms and ultimately 2028.
00:38:33.000The second area of concern is geopolitical.
00:38:35.000In other words, how likely are we able to achieve an objective that would be favorable to American interest and would be perceived as favorable to American interest going forward?
00:38:46.000And then third is whether or not this is a use of our military that is constitutional, that is clearly legal and lawful, and that won't put our men and women at undue risk of harm for an unachievable objective.
00:39:04.000So from the domestic political side, I just think it fractures the Trump 2024 base.
00:39:11.000More and more people are not identifying as MAGA.
00:39:14.000That's why you can get, I think Richard Barris calls People's Pundit, calls it purification through subtraction.
00:39:20.000So Trump may look at it and say, oh, I have 90% support, but it's of a shrinking base.
00:39:25.000That's not a good situation to be in politically in terms of domestic political capital to get things done on the hill, but also in terms of the midterms.
00:39:33.000And there was a big part of his base that was anti-war.
00:39:36.000There was another part of his base that's libertarian, that leans non-intervention.
00:39:40.000Since 2015, he's campaigned very effectively as the peace president, the anti-war candidate.
00:39:46.000This undermines and sabotages that entire public perception and thereby impairs his coalition from an electoral perspective and political capital.
00:39:55.000In other words, the degree to which he is seen as unpopular on the Hill limits his ability to get things done legislatively.
00:40:02.000But then you go to the geopolitics of it, and it's for all the reasons and the military side of it that Charlie identified last year, that you dig into this.
00:40:11.000It's unlikely that we could attain a peaceful, free Iranian society and government through bombing them into such an agreement.
00:40:22.000And so, as he pointed out, that the Shia are built on a culture of suffering.
00:40:28.000Charlie was very good at developing strategic empathy.
00:40:32.000And people sometimes confuse that with sympathy.
00:40:34.000You don't sympathize with the Iranian regime.
00:40:37.000You can strategically empathize with it so that you understand it.
00:40:41.000And if you understand the culture and the people and the people in power, but also the people that could contest or challenge that power, then you have a sense of how probable or likely a sequence of events are using military or martial means.
00:40:54.000And what Charlie identified is that they have the means to militarily resist in ways that we cannot completely suppress, that they're unlikely to change their regime because the part of the Shia Islam, I mean, Charlie loved to study religions around the world and understand what motivated people around the world.
00:41:11.000But the Shia Islam religion is built on martyrdom.
00:41:16.000That's why the Ayatollah was happy to be martyred at the beginning of this conflict.
00:41:21.000And he's now been replaced by his son, his son who is more.
00:41:25.000This is one of the points Charlie made, that you got to look at who is likely to replace the existing regime.
00:41:30.000And there you look at who is likely to replace him.
00:41:32.000Well, it's more hardliners, people that are more likely to acquire nuclear weapons rather than less.
00:41:38.000More likely to be anti-U.S. and anti-Israel than less.
00:41:41.000The new Ayatollah, new Ayatollah just had the Americans and the Israelis kill his father, kill his mother, kill his wife, kill his son, and kill his niece, one-year-old niece.
00:41:54.000So what's the likelihood he's going to be really pro-American?
00:41:58.000He's known as more of a hardliner, et cetera.
00:42:01.000So then you have the, so that's, you know, scenario number one is that it's unlikely to achieve a peaceful, free, democratic, pro-Israel, pro-U.S. regime.
00:42:10.000So why are we risking American resources?
00:42:12.000Why are we risking American men and women?
00:42:14.000Why are we risking Trump's domestic political coalition and his political capital?
00:42:18.000Yeah, and I guess I feel like there's a lot of disagreement over how much, how much it is splitting the coalition, because you can produce polls that say support for the war among GOP voters is very high.
00:42:30.000But I think a thing people are missing is that this matters the most with that sort of that marginal, maybe that last 10% of the Trump coalition that got him to where he was, yeah, where he was winning all the swing states, where he was winning the popular vote.
00:42:44.000It was the people where that, oh, peace president, no new war, that stuff appealed to them a lot more.
00:42:50.000And I think that a lot of when people disagree with this, they're missing that that's the group that, and they're also the most marginal.
00:42:57.000They were least likely to respond to polls.
00:43:22.000Are you seeing people gathering in the square and the quad?
00:43:26.000What kind of activities are you seeing this manifest in?
00:43:31.000I'm mostly seeing things through online platforms, people on Instagram or Twitter just, you know, really going in at President Trump and being upset that gas prices might go up and forever war.
00:43:48.000Like people really, really do not want boots on the ground in this circumstance.
00:43:52.000Are you seeing that even from people that you know voted for Trump in 2024, or is it more, is it still mostly from people you know would be left-wing regardless?
00:44:03.000I think the idea of starting a new foreign war is really, even for Trump voters, really deterring people from wanting to align with the administration and their actions.
00:44:15.000So even amongst Trump voters, and then the other gal that was on said the same thing at her university.
00:44:21.000So the youth vote came plus 13% in our direction, which is a huge swing, historic swing.
00:44:29.000And this seems to indicate that we are in jeopardy, if not already before that, with some of the Epstein stuff, the Midnight Hammer stuff, of alienating those new additions to the coalition already.
00:44:44.000I mean, you guys would be on top of it more than others.
00:44:46.000I remember watching that, the live, that the young generation, the new MAGA part of the coalition, a lot of them were African-American male voters, Hispanic voters, and young people, disproportionately millennials and Zoomers that joined the Trump coalition in 2024 that weren't part of it before, that boosted us from being minus four to plus one in the national vote, that allowed for the sweep of the swing states, that allowed for some coattails in the House and the Senate to have the House in the Senate.
00:45:14.000Young voters do not support this conflict.
00:45:17.000They don't want us involved in foreign conflicts, period.
00:45:19.000So the sooner the president can bring us home, the better.
00:45:22.000And then the other vote is the historic anti-war vote, disproportionately in rural and working class areas in the industrial and rural Midwest and amongst Hispanic voters in the Southwest, which were bleeding out badly, as we saw from the Texas primary results.
00:45:45.000I think Blake and I were talking earlier this morning.
00:45:48.000The longer this drags on, the more fraught it becomes, the more there is an oil supply shock, then it's going to become even more painful, right?
00:46:07.000I think Matt Walsh was the one who said it, that if we bombed Iran and we achieved our missional objective there, and yet we lost the presidency or the midterms, it wouldn't be worth it to him.
00:46:21.000Okay, this is a series of impossible decisions.
00:46:24.000What needs to happen and how quickly, Robert Barnes, for this to come out as good as it possibly could be?
00:46:33.000Yeah, I think the first part is, you know, declare victory and leave.
00:46:36.000The president did that with the Hooties when we didn't quite achieve the original objective, but he realized that it was unlikely to be achieved.
00:46:46.000Vice President Vance has been giving the president an off-ramp all the way through.
00:46:50.000Say, look, the real focus of this was always about nuclear weapons, not about regime change, not about dictating to Iran its next supreme leader, not about any of the things that other people like Lindsey Graham want to drag the president into doing.
00:47:05.000One thing I would recommend is just have Lindsey Graham off the air, him running around saying, let's do something.
00:47:10.000Robert, I keep saying the exact same thing.
00:47:12.000If you follow me on X, I've just been like, get this guy away from the freaking microphone for the love.
00:47:53.000Declare victory and go home and get out as quickly as you can.
00:47:57.000Because the longer this drags on, as you know, the more political risk develops in the U.S. and the more geopolitical risk comes about in the Middle East.
00:48:07.000You know, if they start hitting desalination plants, if they start keep the straits of Hormuz closed, not only does oil and gas, natural gas prices spike, but also you could have a drought in a food crisis throughout the Gulf states because they depend, many of them, for the Straits of Hormuz to get access to their food.
00:48:25.000So people forget, you know, that it's all desert there in the Gulf states.
00:48:29.000So that's why they rely on desalination plants, including Israel does.
00:48:32.000I think it's in Israel's best interest that we get out of this quicker rather than later.
00:48:36.000Because who knows, if Iran really thinks they're under existential threat, we don't want to know what they might do.
00:49:59.000He said he wants to be involved in the selection of the next leader, somebody that will be friendly with America.
00:50:05.000And he also said that, you know, essentially he believes he needs to finish the job because he doesn't trust future presidents to, you know, that they will do the right thing in the future.
00:50:18.000He said, I don't want to be fighting them and come back in five years or in 10 years.
00:50:52.000I think it'll be tricky to re-enter negotiations, but try to.
00:50:55.000I think otherwise, I just look as a risk-reward ratio.
00:50:58.000What's the probability you get that reward of a peaceful, free, democratic Iran governed by someone other than the supreme leader that is not driven by Shia Islamic beliefs structure versus what risk do you have to incur to try to get that reward?
00:51:15.000I think the chance of that reward is low.
00:51:18.000The director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, reported that it was not likely to occur that military means could achieve regime change that can really only happen with a complete cultural shift amongst the Iranian population, in particular Shia Islamic population.
00:51:34.000And so that's part one is how do you assess the probability of obtaining that objective?
00:51:41.000You're basically, as Matt Walsh pointed out, even if he could obtain that reward, is it worth sacrificing the entire Trump OG MAGA 2024 coalition?
00:51:51.000Is it worth sacrificing the populist conservative realignment back to America's constitutional republic and religious roots?
00:52:02.000Is it worth risking all of his domestic policy agenda?
00:52:05.000Is it worth risking being impeached in 2027 with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate?
00:52:10.000My own view is I don't assess the reward probability is high, and I assess the risk probability is very high.
00:52:16.000And so I think the risk-reward weigh out that ratio.
00:52:19.000I think it's in the best interest of the president.
00:52:21.000Maybe down the road you can pursue that, but now is it the time given the risk that's accruing and the reward seems distant.
00:52:28.000And I think if he shifts back to a domestic agenda, 1776 law center, we did a nationwide survey, you know, get rid of all this immunity for big pharma and these big ag and big companies and government actors when they violate people's civil rights and civil liberties.
00:52:42.000You know, impose tariffs, but take away the individual income tax on 95% of American households.
00:52:48.000That was popular even with some Democrats.
00:52:50.000There's all these popular populist policies he can pursue and enforce in an act if he's not distracted or detoured by a foreign war.
00:52:58.000So I think when you weigh the risk-reward ratio, I think it favors the president finding an exit ramp as quickly and expeditiously as he can so he can shift back to the domestic agenda that can restore the coalition and at least mitigate the harm that's coming in the midterms.
00:53:44.000And for those under 16, direct messages are turned off.
00:53:48.000Only their friends can comment on their videos.
00:53:50.000And that kind of approach matters because feeling confident and comfortable about these platforms your teenagers are on shouldn't mean digging through a bunch of menus and trying to set everything up yourself and worrying that you got it wrong.
00:54:02.000TikTok is taking a proactive approach.
00:54:05.000Their protections are built in from the moment those teenagers join so that safety and peace of mind for parents is there right from the start.
00:54:13.000All of this is to say, when safety comes first, discovery and creativity can follow without fear.
00:54:19.000Learn more by going to tick tock.com/slash guardiansguide.
00:54:40.000Yeah, so just a month after the FBI raided Fulton County, or in Atlanta area in Georgia, to look at the 2020 ballots there, they did something a little different.
00:54:50.000They did a grand jury subpoena secretly to get about tens of terabytes, a large amount, about 40 terabytes of data from Maricopa County.
00:55:01.000Now, they didn't do it to Maricopa County.
00:55:05.000It was secretly done so that Maricopa County wouldn't know, but the Senate is confirming today that they did, in fact, turn over election data from many elections going back to at least 2020 and through 2024.
00:55:19.000This is the second major metropolitan area where there's always been questions about voting integrity, now to be targeted by the FBI.
00:55:31.000Volton County, very high-profile search warrant and a raid.
00:55:35.000This one, more surreptitious, behind-the-scenes grand jury subpoena going to a third party that had custody of the Maricopa County election data.
00:55:44.000So this was 2024, not 2020, or even 2022.
00:55:48.000I think they go all the way back to 2020.
00:56:09.000Was there something that triggered the grand jury in the first place?
00:56:12.000So a few weeks ago, or actually a couple, few months ago, Congressman Abe Hamaday wrote a very important letter saying, hey, congressional monitors that were sent from the House Administration Committee back in 2024 went and visited a warehouse and they saw some unusual commingling or what they thought was unusual commingling of unused ballots, blank ballots, and filled out ballots, ballots that people had voted with.
00:56:36.000These are all paper because Arizona's a predominantly paper voting state.
00:56:41.000That report got flagged by multiple people.
00:56:44.000The FBI looked at it, thought it was unusual, and that began a look at Maricopa County.
00:56:49.000And now, because of the nature of data that the Arizona Senate had, they get a large swath that goes back many years, at least to 2020.
00:57:01.000And I think what you know, if you go back and you look at the clips, is that Maricopa County's had lots of problems with trust and competence for a long time.
00:57:11.000In the early 2000s, it was the Democrats who were complaining about it.
00:57:15.000Then starting in 2020, President Trump and Abe Homeday and Kerry Lake and others raised concerns.
00:57:20.000But there's been basically a decade or two of concern about Maricopa County vote counting, vote procedures, and the FBI now is diving in.
00:57:29.000And the important thing here to understand is while state law and state legislatures set the rules for election, that's what the Constitution allows for, if a state or a county or a election locality doesn't follow the state law in the administration of a federal election, it can become a federal crime.
00:57:48.000And as we saw in the Fulton County search warrant affidavit, that is the predicate, at least for Georgia, that the FBI is using to do the criminal investigation there.
00:57:57.000So you have said that this is the second kind of shoe to drop, but there's more that we should expect to be coming down the pike.
00:58:06.000I think that's right, based on what I've heard from my sources, both in the Justice Department, the FBI, and in the election community.
00:58:16.000There are some other states where there have always been questions about ballots and counting and rule changes.
00:58:23.000And I think as comprehensive as you've seen Harmeet Dylan go after the dirty voter rolls and try to force the cleanup of those dirty voter rolls, I think they're up to 28 states that have some sort of compelled action from the Justice Department.
00:58:38.000I think the FBI is doing something similar, taking a look at some places where there's enough evidence to suggest that maybe the state laws weren't being followed or there was chaos or incompetence or maybe some nefarious behavior.
00:58:56.000I could make some guesses, but I think at the end of the day, Maricopa is round two, but I do think there'll be a round three, four, and five somewhere else in the country before this is all done.
00:59:06.000I mean, I hate to make you speculate here, but I bet Blake could pick three other cities if I had to.
00:59:38.000Those are three really good guesses based on what we, yeah.
00:59:41.000And let's remember there's a couple other little pieces here that aren't well known by everyday Americans.
00:59:47.000But in Michigan, the FBI received evidence from the Michigan State Police in late 2020 that they had found this voter mill, what they basically called a ballot mill up in Muskegon, I believe it was.
01:00:01.000And the Michigan State Police believed it was one of seven locations around the country where these things were going on.
01:00:07.000And they believe they found fake registration data and fake voter ballot requests there.
01:00:14.000Unfortunately, the Chris Ray FBI doesn't appear to have very aggressively investigated that.
01:00:19.000But I think that the Michigan makes a lot of sense because the FBI has some prior documentation that came in from Michigan State Police.
01:00:26.000Kash Patel recently found that data, and I know his team are looking at that right now.
01:00:31.000So, John, am I right to presume that sometimes you may not get actual evidence of outright voter fraud, but they're moving in on sort of process crimes, right?
01:00:45.000They're finding what they can charge these local officials with.
01:00:48.000Yeah, I think, and again, I don't think they're there to, hey, we have a name, let's hang a charge on it.
01:00:53.000That's what the Democrats did to Donald Trump.
01:00:55.000I think what they're looking at is, hey, enough people provided visual or paper evidence that the rules weren't followed in these state.
01:01:03.000And it turns out that that's a federal crime.
01:01:05.000And if it was intentional, meaning if someone intentionally didn't follow the rules, they knew that what they were doing was wrong and they just simply didn't follow it, that people can be prosecuted under, I think it's section 152 of the federal statutes.
01:01:17.000And so that's what the FBI agent in the affidavit described.
01:01:21.000And so you see places where, listen, in Wisconsin, we all know that after the fact, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that one of the changes they made for COVID voting wasn't lawful.
01:01:32.000Well, that's a pretty significant decision that was made by people, the Wisconsin Election Commission and others.
01:02:57.000And that is focused on the classified records case, but it was a counterintelligence case that was opened up.
01:03:03.000But there is another one that's opened up in that same timeframe, maybe a little bit earlier, as Crossfire Hurricane is coming to an end.
01:03:12.000And before the classified documents case began, they basically targeted the president a fourth time.
01:03:20.000So there will be four counterintelligence investigations in which the FBI treated President Trump as a national security threat nearly the entire time of his political career.
01:03:30.000We're going to lay all those out in the next 24, 48 hours.
01:03:33.000You said this could be the most troubling.
01:03:38.000I think because part of the predicate or part of the rationale for what constituted the national security threat was what words you used to talk about Hunter Biden in Ukraine.
01:03:51.000Speech may have been a delimiter for determining whether you were treated as a national security threat.
01:03:56.000And I think that investigation falls in that timeframe, but we're also seeing the origins of a disinformation board and then that massive amount of censorship that we saw, some of it in Europe paid by the United States who then come back and censor Americans, some of it outright occurring on U.S. soil.
01:04:13.000Charlie and I and many others were targeted in that censorship realm as well.
01:04:18.000I think that the fact that it went beyond censorship and maybe treated someone just because of what they said about Hunter Biden or COVID or whatever, that they could be deemed a national security threat worthy of being investigated by the FBI is a very concerning thing.
01:04:34.000And I think that that's where this fourth operation likely lands.
01:05:58.000So this is the thing that's going to get really frustrating over the months to come because there's a lot of people who are going to see the conflict with Iran as an excuse to maximally doomer.
01:06:11.000They want to pout, either because they find it emotionally satisfying to complain and pout or because they see it as a chance to win some sort of internal struggle within the right.
01:06:22.000So they'll either think, oh, we can turf out the MAGA people because Trump's poll numbers will go in, or we can turf out the more interventionist people because we think this war will go bad.
01:06:32.000And it's going to be very important to keep fighting for this cause because a lot of good stuff is happening, stuff that's not always in the headlines.
01:06:40.000And as an example, something we were celebrating over the weekend, this is great because it was reported by various outlets as a negative thing, where international student visas went down much more than expected, worse than we thought, because America's colleges have gotten hooked on foreign students, bringing in Infinity Indians, Infinity Chinese, Infinity Arabians.
01:07:08.000One is at a lot of state schools, they'll pay full-freight tuition, so this can fill in holes in their budget.
01:07:14.000A lot of grad students they bring in because these schools, to save money, pay their grad students in STEM subjects, are generally paid.
01:07:21.000They're not paying tuition, and they don't want to pay them too much.
01:07:24.000So, someone who's coming to the U.S. from abroad will work for a lot less money, both because they're from a poor country and because they can use this to get a green card into the United States.
01:07:34.000And that's effectively a form of compensation an American can't get.
01:07:38.000So, we've gotten totally hooked on foreign students.
01:07:41.000It's hollowing out America, especially in skilled fields.
01:07:44.000We've gotten totally hooked on, oh, we need foreign computer programmers, we need foreign physicists, foreign everything.
01:07:51.000And Americans are losing the ability to do these things.
01:07:53.000And then we become more hooked than ever.
01:07:55.000Anyway, visa issuances for foreign students went down 36% last year in the Trump administration.
01:08:01.000According to Chronicle of Higher Education's analysis of the Department of State data, this is what's interesting.
01:08:07.000So, this is 97,000, 100,000 fewer student visas were awarded.
01:08:13.000Technically, that's a 17% overall decrease in international student enrollments, which is big, actually.
01:08:20.000One year, just from a, they're just doing this kind of behind the scenes.
01:08:25.000No laws have changed, many different regulations have been.
01:08:27.000On EFI Institute, where I'm looking right now, it says economic implications for colleges are significant.
01:09:47.000Because you're making room for actual American-born talent to take those spots, especially when it comes to STEM.
01:09:55.000So a lot of people don't understand the psychology of this.
01:09:58.000Say you're like a white kid from Tulsa and you want to go get a STEM degree somewhere and you apply and you go into the introductory course because they do these, they do sort of like, you know, come get to know your faculty if you're thinking about this major or whatever.
01:10:14.000And you go in, you got this white kid from Tulsa who goes in and guess what it is?
01:10:56.000Endlessly has happened where we have Chinese scientists in sensitive areas or again, those Chinese graduate students.
01:11:01.000We do so much defense work at universities with professors who are elites in whatever their field is.
01:11:07.000And they'll have Chinese graduate students and they'll say, oh, we're keeping them away from the most sensitive stuff, but they're not away enough.
01:11:16.000Well, there's a new report, by the way.
01:11:17.000The DOJ just showed that over 30,000 visits during the Biden administration from Chinese, Russian, and Iranian officials to sensitive laboratories doing research in the United States.
01:11:28.000Not a problem that China has, for example, that they we've gotten so hooked, it's functionally impossible for us to do work that we think America should be able to do without an endless inflow of people from abroad.
01:11:43.000Some of those people are necessary, but not as many as we've gotten used to and not to the extent where it's worth hollowing out native-born Americans' ability to do key work.
01:11:57.000We're going to keep doing it because we can't let people use this conflict in Iran or anything else to blackpill us out of keeping this administration going.
01:12:08.000Because it's doing important stuff that no other administration would do that is helping America in the long term.