Megyn Kelly talks Iran and domestic terror attacks in the wake of the Texas and Michigan attacks, as well as the White House response to the attack in Austin, Texas, and the shooting at a Jewish synagogue in Michigan.
00:01:21.480There is so much happening in the world, as you know.
00:01:23.900It's been like drinking from the news fire hose.
00:01:26.820And if you were to check any news site, you would think the only thing going on in the world is the Iran war, because everybody's devoted to it right now.
00:01:35.020I mean, truly, it's amazing to me how news disappears when a big story comes, because every reporter in the world is obsessed with Iran.
00:01:42.260I wouldn't say we're obsessed with it, but we're very, very concerned about it.
00:01:45.140And this is part of the challenge, is figuring out what's real, what's propaganda, not just from their side, but from our own, and how the war is really going.
00:01:58.540Defense Secretary of War Pete Hegseth had another presser this morning with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dan Cain, and came out swinging.
00:02:09.080He, too, has a job of trying to spin us.
00:02:11.700I mean, that's part of his job, and he's good at it, because he comes from TV and Fox News.
00:02:16.800And so with him, too, I respect Pete and obviously advocated for him, but you've got to be somewhat skeptical as a reporter and a news consumer about the just sweepingly positive reports he gives, and also the sweepingly negative reports the president's critics drop online.
00:02:36.140It's been an effort, even for us, and we're in the news business, and my team and I have been working together for 20 years, some of us, and even we are struggling to figure out whom to believe and where to discount the reports.
00:02:50.440While all this happens, not surprisingly, already we are seeing an increase in domestic terror attacks here at home.
00:02:59.240There were two troubling incidents yesterday here in America.
00:03:03.180You know, one terrorist, previously convicted of attempting to provide material support to ISIS, might have wanted to have eyes on this guy, shot and killed the chair of Old Dominion University's military science department and wounded two others.
00:03:17.460He was ultimately taken down and killed by heroic students in the ROTC class.
00:03:21.820That terrorist was a naturalized citizen from Sierra Leone.
00:03:24.660And in Michigan, how's it going in Michigan, guys?
00:03:31.660A naturalized citizen from Lebanon rammed his car packed with explosives into the Temple Israel synagogue.
00:03:40.660All right, luckily, the only person killed in that attack was the attacker, and truly, it is a blessing.
00:03:45.400But that guy rams his truck in there full of explosives, starts shooting 30 of the teachers and others, or the firefighters too, I think it was.
00:03:55.400And the cops have been hospitalized due to smoke inhalation because he set the car on fire and then he also started to shoot up the room, the facility, but amazingly, no one else was killed.
00:04:07.460You know, we saw the terrorist attack down in Austin.
00:04:09.400We're going to see more and more of this because this is how radical Muslims who are over here in America will start, you know, their retaliation.
00:04:22.180They may not be able to defeat the U.S. military, but they can do this.
00:04:26.700They can grab a gun and go shoot up a bar in Austin or go to a temple.
00:04:32.080Meantime, in Iran, the U.S. is staying on offense.
00:04:34.360With the military saying today will be the heaviest day of attacks yet.
00:04:39.560President Trump pushing back on the narratives in the corporate media.
00:04:42.080He's posting on True Social this morning.
00:04:43.640If you read the failing New York Times, you would incorrectly think we are not winning.
00:04:48.040Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today.
00:04:51.100They've been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th president of the United States of America, am killing them.
00:04:58.440What a great honor it is to do so, unquote.
00:05:02.920Secretary of War Pete Hexeth, as I mentioned, taking to the mics and pushing back hard against a CNN report that hit late last night, claiming the U.S. underestimated Iran's capability to shut down oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
00:05:41.100It's a fundamentally unserious report.
00:05:44.060The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.
00:05:49.840That reference is to Paramount CEO David Ellison, whose company agreed to acquire CNN's parent company earlier this month, with the deal expected to be finalized later this year.
00:05:59.120Joining me now for a reaction to all of this and more is Sagar Anjeti.
00:06:02.300He's co-host of Breaking Points with our friend Crystal Ball.
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00:08:05.860I do not believe that that is true, Megan.
00:08:08.040And I think that you did a very important caveat near the top.
00:08:10.940It's not a personal call-out for anybody involved.
00:08:13.200You and I have been involved with this business to see many people take that Pentagon podium, and almost all of them lie directly to your face in a time of war.
00:08:21.140So let's just assess the facts as we actually know them.
00:08:24.300The latter one, where Secretary Haig said that Iranian leaders are hiding like rats in a ground, is literally categorically untrue.
00:08:31.620Actually, today was the Quds Day parade that happened in the streets of Tehran, where the entire Iranian top echelon actually took to the streets with a crowd of tens of thousands around them.
00:08:42.940The National Security Advisor, the foreign minister, all giving statements in the streets, being followed by the security guards with cameras that were in front of them, effectively saying,
00:08:52.080we are not afraid, as you could actually hear, Israeli and U.S. strikes that were happening in the background.
00:09:12.720Yesterday, I interviewed Professor Robert Pape.
00:09:15.360I highly recommend everybody go and engage with his work.
00:09:18.480He is the preeminent American scholar on air power, and he has consistently noted that air power alone is almost – not almost impossible, impossible to dislodge a regime, which is really what this war is about.
00:09:30.280Now, even in terms of reducing the enemy's ability to produce, let's assess that through history.
00:09:36.120We do know, of course, even with Allied bombing near air superiority over Germany, that German war production actually peaked in the year 1944.
00:09:45.040We also know that the Iranians have had 47 years, of course, as the president said at the top in his Truth Social post, to plan and to disperse their entire production facilities underground, many of which are inaccessible.
00:09:57.180So we may have hit 90 percent or 95 percent of what we know about, but of course there are unknown unknowns in war, as Donald Rumsfeld used to say to us at the height of the Iraq war.
00:10:09.220Bloomberg reported just this morning Iranian ballistic missile firing has actually remained constant through the war, especially when you match it.
00:10:17.040They're saying that their strikes are reducing – our strikes are actually reducing as well compared to the original first days of the war.
00:10:24.180And I really want people to – I want people to put in some historical context of what's happening here.
00:10:29.640A lot of the statements from Secretary Hegsteth and General Cain really remind me of General Westmoreland from MACV, or Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.
00:10:38.460What they would emphasize are these amazing numbers, the body count.
00:10:42.620We killed 292 Viet Cong yesterday, and we bombed X amount of hectakers, removing them from the enemy.
00:10:56.800It says strategically, it was a massive defeat.
00:10:59.320So do not get distracted, as many of us saw in the Iraq war with shock and awe.
00:11:04.640Well, shock and awe was a supposedly incredible military success, but strategically it was a nightmare because it led to a civil war, ethnic sectarian conflict, and some 7, 18 years of occupation in Iraq, not to mention Afghanistan.
00:11:19.080We easily defeated the Taliban, but it took 20 years, and of course they're back.
00:11:23.220So we need to actually assess the strategic picture from a high level and not fall for what the military always likes to do about numbers of targets that have all been hit.
00:11:33.040And also just take a look at some of the things that have happened to us.
00:11:36.240Let's take a look at our strategic picture, our domestic picture.
00:11:38.940And we're watching already seven Americans who have been killed in action, four just yesterday, who have been confirmed dead in this tanker crash that happened over Iraq, too, remain missing.
00:11:50.000A French soldier was tragically killed also yesterday.
00:11:53.600I mean, one of the first KIA that they've had, obviously, in quite a long time.
00:11:57.200Not to mention thousands of Iranian civilians, Lebanese civilians as well, civilians in Israel.
00:12:05.580There are soldiers in Kuwait, civilians all across the Gulf who've had debris, who have fallen on them.
00:12:12.080So this is a regional and global conflict now at this point.
00:12:15.760That we unleashed, that we chose to go over and unleash, which I want to return back to in a second because there was an interesting discussion between Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly.
00:12:25.020O'Reilly claimed to have information clearly from the White House, although he didn't source it that way, on why we got into this war.
00:14:34.820And with great respect to those individuals, that's incredibly magical thinking.
00:14:37.960And I think you're falling for some memes about photos of women in Tehran and not the reality of a country of 93 million people.
00:14:45.820Okay, one-third of the United States population.
00:14:48.880Let's remember and just think about how you might be able to transpose a picture, let's say, of Los Angeles and try and take that as representative of the entire nation.
00:14:58.380So let's just understand, first of all, that we're dealing with a highly complicated country.
00:15:02.260Now, also, let's take it back to the work of Professor Pape, and this is the scariness of it, is that initially it's very clear that the White House expected an enormous tactical and strategic success.
00:15:20.800Instead, what happened is they went for maximal retaliation with what they have in their arsenal, which is asymmetric warfare.
00:15:27.080They want to inflict maximum economic pain on the American and global economy.
00:15:31.520They also want to be able to strike to every U.S. ally.
00:15:34.760They want to use up a vast portion of U.S. interceptors and munitions.
00:15:38.940Hopefully, we can return to that because our defense readiness picture right now is a nightmare after only just 12 days of war, dramatically weakening us vis-a-vis China and our ability to project power across the globe.
00:15:50.360But really, this is the history of all wars.
00:15:53.280What happens is that you have an initial expectation of success.
00:15:58.640And so what happens is it morphs from an initial tactical encounter, let's say, between the U.S. military and the Iranian military to now, if we want to break the back, as Professor Pape said there, then we must engage in total war.
00:16:11.400And to engage in total war, that means we have to remove the capacity of the Iranian people to make war upon the United States on the Gulf and to close the Straits of Hormuz.
00:16:27.160And that is effectively what we are in an escalation trap of right now.
00:16:31.500And this is why we never succeeded in Vietnam because we tried to exactly copy this mistake.
00:16:37.180LBJ very often would think that dropping bombs, let's say the number of bombs in World War II, was equivalent to success.
00:16:45.600Obviously, that was not the case in that conflict.
00:16:49.480What would have needed would a literal occupation of the entire country, a commitment to staying there forever, to consistently engage in counterinsurgency, to build the nation, what we did in Germany and in Japan.
00:17:02.300You've mentioned, and I've talked about with Tucker, about unconditional surrender.
00:17:06.960Unconditional surrender, let's be very clear, requires dropping atomic bombs.
00:17:14.580Remember, the Soviet Union took 400,000 casualties in 1945 alone, advancing on Berlin.
00:17:22.320That's what unconditional surrender means.
00:17:23.900It means you break the back of the enemy and completely destroy their capacity, their will to fight, occupy them, and then rebuild and impose your martial will upon their soul.
00:17:37.120And unfortunately, that is the project that we are now engaged in in conjunction with the nation of Israel.
00:17:42.800Well, this is one of the things that many people who are skeptical about the war are worried about because now that we're in this fight and, you know, now what is Iran's goal with respect to Israel now?
00:18:10.160Like, it's already been reported that Trump understands this decision has to be made in tandem with them, even though this is a country of 9 million and we have 350 million and we have our own concerns here.
00:18:19.900Apparently, we're treating ourselves as equal partners in this thing as opposed to the senior partner.
00:18:24.380And what incentive does Israel have to stop this thing before there's complete annihilation of everyone at the top of the Iranian regime, which means tens of thousands?
00:18:34.860And if we stop before then, what does Israel do?
00:18:38.500I mean, what weapons do they unleash on Iran?
00:18:43.040Of course, Israel is a nuclear armed power.
00:18:45.180And by the way, they're much more likely to use their nuclear weapons, actually, than we are, considering the asymmetry exactly of what you just talked about.
00:18:51.440That's why they became a nuclear armed power.
00:18:53.380But this is where, let me make it very clear, is that Israel and the United States have completely divergent interests.
00:18:58.240Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech just yesterday where he bragged about how Israel is now becoming a, quote, global superpower.
00:19:06.780This is effectively his goal in getting the United States into this conflict.
00:19:11.740The United States and Israel have completely divergent interests in Iran.
00:19:15.840In Israel, what they want is total regional hegemony.
00:19:19.620They could care less what happens to Iran, whether they have the Ayatollah in charge, which is, you know, over a rump state, whether it's a thriving democracy, they could care less.
00:19:28.960What they want is a literal civil war rump state, which they can easily control, which is what happened in Syria.
00:19:35.120Now, not to mention the refugee crisis that came out of Syria, not any Syrian refugees that are in Israel, but there's a lot in Europe, aren't there, and in Turkey, and a lot of our NATO allies.
00:19:46.480For them, destroying the state and actually destroying the regime is the point because they want to eliminate Iran as a polity that is capable, not just under the Iranian regime, but ever from being able to pose a regional threat to their hegemony in the region.
00:20:01.780The United States has an immense interest in a stable Iran.
00:20:07.280Look at the Strait of Hormuz crisis that's happening right now.
00:20:10.400You don't want jihadists and groups to be able to control various different portions of the strait.
00:20:16.460Already, Donald Trump has the highest gas prices of his entire presidency as of this morning.
00:20:21.980Diesel is on its way to $5 a gallon, which, as we all found out under Biden, means massive food inflation for all of us,
00:20:30.180because anything that needs to be trucked across this country, that has the price of diesel baked into that good whenever it gets to a store that all of us are going to consume.
00:20:40.980So my husband wrote a book called The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel, and it was about the inventor of the diesel engine who lived in the late 1800s, early 1900s.
00:21:08.140The entire World Economic Society is based on the diesel engine, much more so than the gas engine that the rest of us use for our cars.
00:21:14.960And when Doug came on my show, my husband, to promote the book, we talked a little bit about how ubiquitous diesel gas and the diesel engine is and just how dependent the entire world economic system is on the diesel engine and diesel gasoline, which is currently skyrocketing.
00:21:30.720Here's just – we pulled this out just to – because no one can say it quite like Doug did.
00:21:35.060This is the guy whose engine power – it's the most important power source over the last 100 years in the world and continues to be our most important power source.
00:21:46.320When you consider a piece of fruit grown in a tropical region, all of the farm equipment used to grow that fruit is diesel-powered.
00:22:33.040But he, a month ago, diesel gas was at $3.65, $0.66 a gallon.
00:22:40.380And today, it's at $4.89, as you said, almost $5 a gallon, which means it's not only going to hurt people who drive cars with diesel engines.
00:22:50.420It's going to hurt the entire world economy for the reasons Doug just outlined.
00:22:56.740I'm going to have to buy his book because I became obsessed with the price of diesel during the Biden crisis because this is exactly what happened, especially after the war in Ukraine.
00:23:05.640But let me zoom out even more because it's not just about diesel and gas.
00:23:09.520So fertilizer is skyrocketing in price.
00:23:12.140A significant portion of it actually comes through the Straits of Hormuz.
00:23:16.300Already, our own farmers are reporting spot price increases of up to 70%.
00:23:21.600All of us know that's going to be passed on to us with food.
00:23:24.620What's actually even more tragic is that what that means is that while Americans and first world countries will just have to pay a lot for food, third world countries will actually go without.
00:23:34.640We could have a full-blown crop shortage if this war continues going on.
00:23:50.280So TSMC, semiconductors, what the entire global economy is currently running on with respect to AI.
00:23:56.360We've already seen all that helium begin to come down and offline.
00:24:00.720What that means for all of us is a chip shortage, which means what we saw in the COVID crisis where people were buying cars with no electronics in them.
00:24:09.940There were shortages of, let's say, phones, laptops, computers.
00:24:13.900I mean the ripple effect of this already almost two-week war is titanic to the global economy.
00:24:20.720Now, people may say, I'm being alarmist, and you're right, I am being alarmist because I currently expect what Robert Pape has laid out there is an escalation and continuation of hostilities.
00:24:32.000And let's take the word of the Secretary of Defense, of the President, and of the Israeli Prime Minister that this is going to, quote, four to five weeks.
00:24:39.200Four to five weeks of this much oil offline is going to be a literal nightmare for many of us.
00:24:44.480Now, we can mitigate some of that, which is what they're doing with the Jones Act and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but I'm setting the global context so that Americans and people who are listening to the show can say, what am I really getting out of this?
00:24:55.960And I think that's the most vital question for all of us.
00:24:59.380I've seen a lot of criticism of people like you and I who are skeptical of the war, and they're like, you never would have made it in World War II that was multi-year.
00:25:06.380And I'm like, well, we were attacked in that one, and we were declared war on by the Nazis.
00:25:12.700This is a little bit different because there was no congressional authorization.
00:25:16.340There's no real case that was even made by the president.
00:25:19.060We just decided to do it, I guess, on behest of the state of Israel.
00:25:26.300And I mean, just this morning, the White House press secretary is retweeting a poll from Mark Dubowitz, who's one of the preeminent regime change lobbyists here in Washington, where it literally says there's only 41 percent of all adult approval for the war.
00:25:41.700And I think like 27 percent approval whenever it comes to independent voters.
00:25:46.060I'm not bragging about that if I were the White House.
00:25:49.700And that is an unpopular war at the beginning.
00:25:54.220President Bush, H.W. Bush, had 90-something approval rating, and he lost the election.
00:25:59.560George W. Bush had titanic support for the war in Iraq, shamefully, I think, because many of us were duped by the mainstream media at the time.
00:26:08.120But even that, of course, became a quagmire and a nightmare.
00:26:37.040There's like tens of millions of people who live out there.
00:26:39.960So it's already a nightmare, and we're talking about today.
00:26:42.120And going into this conflict, before we launched this conflict, the rating of foreign policy with average Americans in terms of importance was like literally down at the bottom without any percentage points above three at the most.
00:26:55.180Everyone was saying the number one issue is my pocketbook.
00:27:09.460He was very proud that he had brought down gas prices, which are now starting to skyrocket again because of all of this, which, as we discussed, will jack up all the other prices too.
00:27:17.920It doesn't stop when oil goes up at gasoline.
00:27:20.940And meanwhile, when asked, like, do you care about foreign policy, like literally nobody said yes.
00:27:25.640It was like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin said, yes, I do, and drove that number up to like one percentage point.
00:27:31.300Even the caring about crime had fallen way down.
00:27:33.480It was the economy, the economy, the economy in terms of people's issues.
00:27:48.780He was pointing out that now for the first time, like in months, the graph has gone so far down in terms of what it looks like in terms of like whether the Republicans might lose the Senate.
00:27:58.800March 31st, there was a huge gap between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to like projections on the Senate and whether which party will win it in 2026.
00:28:08.480As of today, it's 53-48 Republicans over.
00:28:12.380That's only a five percentage point lead on whether the Republicans will hold on to the Senate saga.
00:28:19.240And it's directly correlated to the beginning of this war.
00:28:21.780So like the losses, the economic pain that's about to be foisted on the people, the unhappiness that's going to be foisted upon people who are already focused on the economy, not foreign policy.
00:28:30.440And now the potential loss of the U.S. Senate, think you want to see Republican approval ratings drop.
00:28:39.960Not to mention mortgage rates, housing that I'm 33 years old.
00:28:42.920That is the number one issue for my cohort.
00:28:45.060My ability to buy a house, to have children, to be able to raise them where I want to and not have to have both parents working like 90 hours a week in order to just stay strapped for cash to be able to afford whatever lifestyle, which is like a bare minimum compared to how it used to be.
00:29:01.860And by the way, mortgage rates ticked up already as a result of this war to 6.11%.
00:29:06.400So we're already watching the spiral for equality of life here at home.
00:29:11.300And look, let's take the president and state of the union.
00:29:19.580And then a week or so later, we're already launched into this foreign adventurism, which the White House really, I have to assume, believed that it would just be easy.
00:29:30.000This morning, Secretary Hegseth lambasted the media for that report about what they expected.
00:33:06.880This person who's dying in a Middle Eastern conflict who was born four to five years after this entire mess was unleashed on the globe.
00:33:16.060That's how bad our strategy and our leaders have failed us in this moment.
00:33:19.460So let's just zoom back to what the secretary is saying.
00:33:22.300He's basically lambasting the press for accurately reporting the widening of the conflict, the debts here of American service members, and not just releasing press releases, basically touting his target packages or number of strikes.
00:33:35.780We have learned too much that these so-called numbers and target packages and all of this that get purported as tactical successes often result in strategic failure.
00:33:46.760And just bringing it really back to America and its own interests, I also think, what is the number one national security interest of the United States?
00:33:55.860It's to deter a conflict with China, and it is to protect our allies in the Asia-Pacific.
00:34:00.740Why? 50% of GDP will be in the Asia-Pacific in just a four-year period.
00:34:05.660President Trump also sees his relationship with China as the preeminent relationship that he has to manage.
00:34:12.400We have actually fired so many munitions in just these two weeks with bad interceptors.
00:34:17.720These are the most – some of the more highly advanced interceptors that are able to shoot down incoming Iranian missiles that we actually already have had to pull them out of South Korea.
00:34:27.020Now, let me remind everybody what the GDP – or the bilateral trade relationship between the United States and South Korea is $240 billion.
00:34:34.800Do you know what it is with Israel? $50 billion.
00:34:36.920Israel is like number 50 or something down on the list.
00:34:40.580The entire GCC, I think, is more than all of Israel.
00:34:43.440GCC are the Gulf countries that we are also allegedly supposed to be protecting, many of whom are all saying we have been abandoned by the United States.
00:34:54.200They're totally re-questioning their security relationship, all of these bases, to hundreds of millions of dollars in damage has already been done.
00:35:01.940We are watching – you know, the press, I read the daily South Korean press, they are all asking questions.
00:35:07.700Is America still here for us in Japan, in Taiwan?
00:35:11.720There are op-eds and things flying around the Asia-Pacific looking at the amount of munitions that we are expending and saying,
00:35:18.120how are these people supposed to defend us?
00:35:20.480They don't even care about us right now, and they're wasting it on this useless conflict.
00:35:24.980Also, we are inflicting maximum damage on these economies.
00:35:29.980Japan gets 90% of all of its oil from the Middle East.
00:35:34.200They've already had to do a massive strategic petroleum reserve release.
00:35:38.080Their stock markets, we're nothing compared to them.
00:35:40.600At one point, they were down 14%, 15% just in a single week of trading as a result of this war.
00:36:56.120We don't have enough to combat the missiles and the drones that the Iranians are unleashing, not just on us, but on our military bases in the Gulf countries and on the Gulf countries themselves, our allies who we've agreed to protect.
00:37:10.000And some of them have come saying, did you give any thought to what would happen to us?
00:37:13.540Did you plan on how to protect us as we're seeing bombs rain down on Dubai, for example, which is taking a lot of incoming.
00:37:22.920Many of our other friends in the Middle East who are genuinely friends of ours and great trading partners who are now feeling exposed and like we didn't live up to our promises, not to mention all the problems you mentioned because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
00:37:36.160And Pete Hexeth says that we did plan on the closure or what would happen in the Strait of Hormuz.
00:37:40.340But if we did plan, then why is it closed?
00:37:57.200And there was also blowback on whether American parents want to see their sons and daughters on U.S. ships risking their lives to get oil through the Strait of Hormuz to send off to China.
00:38:18.020So the Iranians do have an effective veto over this.
00:38:20.320And there's a real question about how we ever can secure it.
00:38:22.860How can we – because they've got potentially mines set up in the Straits.
00:38:26.540They've also got missile launchers on the shores that are proving problematic for us.
00:38:33.100And there's a – I've heard credible military experts say without sending ground troops in to go stand along the shorelines of the Straits,
00:38:41.400we're not going to be able to secure this in a way that's going to satisfy commercial shippers.
00:44:28.760Yeah, I mean Dick Cheney said that about Iraq.
00:44:30.820Nobody in 2001, October of 2001, would have said we're withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021.
00:44:37.960You think LBJ wanted to be in Vietnam in 1968?
00:44:42.400That's the point of all of these examples is that you get into them, and they become open-ended even when you wanted it closed because you are no longer in a controlled system.
00:44:53.200We could control the diplomacy between these two nations, but we cannot control this now, especially with Iran in the classic situation of asymmetric warfare but with nothing to lose.
00:45:05.520They have nothing to lose except to fight to the death.
00:45:20.620Well, now I mean that's – part of the problem is the bombing of their fuel depots, their oil depots, which literally caused oil to be raining down on the faces of the Iranian people, their children, their babies in strollers, anybody who goes outside now after that happened.
00:45:36.580And that caused even the crazed lunatic Lindsey Graham to say to Israel, you might want to watch what you bomb.
00:45:43.880Actually, you might have gone too far.
00:45:45.660I mean when Lindsey Graham is telling you you've gone too far in your bombing campaign, something very, very wrong has happened.
00:45:51.140But you mentioned that this is a war of choice, which I agree with.
00:45:54.840This is not what the administration says.
00:45:56.480Of course, the administration says we had no choice.
00:46:00.500I believed that they were about to develop a nuke, that they almost had a nuke.
00:46:04.320And now we had an interesting conversation that I heard today between Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, in which O'Reilly seems to be shedding more light on that.
00:46:13.240We're going to play part of it for you now.
00:46:15.320Reached a period in time, in history, where the CIA, NSA, all of our intel, jive with the United Nations and said,
00:46:27.280look, we knocked out a lot of their nuclear capacity in June of last year, but they have satellites and are close to being able to put together 10 nuclear bombs.
00:46:44.020And I don't think the Trump administration is going to mind me saying this, even though it hasn't been made public, but I'm a reporter and I have the information.
00:46:52.660So Mossad went in and said, look, on this Saturday, the Ayatollah and 25 of the stugs are going to be in this place at this time.
00:48:54.820That is – there's no evidence for that from the IAEA.
00:48:57.680If that were true, the Trump administration would have said it.
00:48:59.980Remember, the only reason that they say that we're in this war is that Israel forced our hand,
00:49:04.580and that even whenever it comes to nuclear, they say that they were creating a ballistic missile shield for their potential nuclear capacity.
00:49:12.500There's been no DNI release, no CIA release, no even fake Colin Powell vial that can be held up, no yellow cake, no Judy Miller.
00:49:21.920So if there were even a remote case that that were true or as true as WMD in Iraq, they would have said it.
00:49:29.100They didn't say it because it's complete nonsense.
00:49:31.840That is completely manufactured consent afterwards that is being put out there to justify some of the feelings for the people that want to continue to be in this war.
00:49:41.020And if you don't believe Sagar, I'm going to play for you when we come back.
00:49:44.760Top Netanyahu advisor, Ophir Falk, who gave an interview to NBC's Richard Engel on the reasons we got into this war,
00:49:52.300and we will see what he says on whether there were 10 or 11 nuclear bombs that Iran was close to.
00:51:42.120Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a trained responder, anytime.
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00:51:50.840Back with me now is Sagar Anjeti, co-host of Breaking Points.
00:52:00.140So we were discussing Bill O'Reilly's statement that his reporting reflects that Iran was close to 10 nukes, that they went to Trump and said the Ayatollah and his thugs are having a meeting and there's an opportunity, and that after three months of negotiations with the Iranians, the foreign minister of Iran had said, we're not stopping the nuclear enrichment.
00:52:21.060So go F yourselves, and that's why Steve Witkoff communicated to Trump, like, they're just never going to make a deal, and Trump felt that he had no choice.
00:52:30.400Now, let's just stay on number one for a second here, that they were about to get 10 nuclear bombs.
00:52:36.200This is what top Netanyahu advisor over a flock just told Richard Engel.
00:56:20.160But – and they had the ballistic missiles.
00:56:21.900Again, back to the ballistic missiles.
00:56:23.880Even Israel has abandoned the nonsense about the nuclear bomb about to come from Iran, but we're still hearing this from our own administration and obviously the reporters to whom they are talking.
00:56:47.540Believe in Marco Rubio, the secretary of state with the most – I mean genuinely the most shocking and, in my opinion, important declaration by a U.S. secretary of state in modern history is that we had to do it because we had no ability to restrain our clients' trade.
00:57:01.840Either no ability to restrain or a capacity where we wanted to join them.
00:57:06.800Both of them are catastrophic decisions, not really sure what's even worse, but you could see very clearly that they are not even trying to sell that level of B.S. right now.
00:57:15.360And this actually highlights the problem of getting in bed with Israel in this conflict because, again, we have very divergent goals.
00:57:23.260They want to collapse Iran as a polity ever capable of making war upon them or restraining any of their regional ambitions, be it in Syria, be it in Lebanon, be it in the West Bank, be it in Gaza, be it in Egypt potentially.
00:57:39.400I wouldn't put that one off the table.
00:57:41.000Or with Turkey, which is a NATO ally, and let's not forget that the Israeli prime minister or the former Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, has already declared that Turkey is the next one and is now a so-called imminent threat.
00:57:53.400Let me play that, Shlager, because he keeps doubling down on this.
00:58:20.320Let me just ask you whether there's a risk of further confrontation with Turkey based on comments that you've said in the past.
00:58:27.740Well, we need to ensure that Erdogan doesn't create a new alliance of radical Islam Sunni version, meaning an axis between himself, Julani, Qatar, and Hamas.
00:58:47.700We've been facing for many decades the Shiite radical Islam, and I hope that Turkey doesn't choose to foment terror and Islamism in its power.
00:59:16.740Yeah, Turkey, by the way, is the country that we have an actual treaty obligation to defend in NATO, shall I remind everybody, and actually has had two ballistic missiles fired at them at our bases, which are in Turkey.
00:59:29.600We've had a relationship with Turkey for so long that, remember, the missiles that were stationed there were the precipitous conflict of the Cuban Missile Crisis back in 1962.
00:59:39.060That's how long our relationship with that nation, our military relationship, goes back.
00:59:43.540But again, it just highlights their regional ambitions.
00:59:46.420Also, his idea that he cares about Julani, the al-Qaeda leader in Syria, is ridiculous.
00:59:53.960Because he doesn't care that Israel wants to basically annex and control a significant part of his country and is effectively giving up any claim over the Golan Heights.
01:00:04.840They cannot have a powerful Islamic state like Turkey with a NATO alliance of the United States, which poses any regional threat to their hegemony.
01:00:14.180That's why Prime Minister Netanyahu brags about becoming a, quote, global superpower.
01:00:19.560And I don't even contest that at this point.
01:00:21.540You have effectively either controlled or, you know, co-opted the world's preeminent superpower for your own regional designs.
01:00:36.620Our aim is stability in the region, is actually balancing our alliances.
01:00:42.220This entire region, by the way, while, yes, it may be important, it's not nearly as important as the Asia Pacific.
01:00:48.160It is a giant magnet that sucks U.S. resources, attention, money from all of these other important problems, be it the Asia Pacific, be it the mortgage rates of my friends and their ability to buy houses, be it the gas price that all of us will have to find a diesel.
01:01:05.520And every time we go to the grocery store and to buy something that's been trucked from across the country.
01:01:11.500And that's the problem with this entire thing.
01:01:13.880It's been 20-something years now of my life of this magnet just sucking the life force out of this nation.
01:01:32.820But before we get there, let me just stay on the O'Reilly reporting for one second and what he was saying about the negotiations, about how, you know, they just came in and they were obstinate and Trump realized they were tapping us along.
01:01:44.500And, like, they just said, F you, that the Iranians said, F you, we're going to do what we want.
01:01:48.780I mean, I beg to differ because we watched this unfold.
01:01:52.980To me, you tell me, but to me, it seemed like we went in there with a list of demands that in no world were they ever going to agree to.
01:01:59.760And sure enough, they didn't, but they were discussing it with us and that we were in the midst of a negotiation, which they thought was in good faith when we then bombed them.
01:02:07.900And there's a real question about whether American credibility is intact or in tatters after that.
01:02:14.660Oh, it absolutely is because we were literally negotiating them with them twice before we ended up bombing them.
01:02:19.400They said, fool me once, you know, shame on you, but fool me twice.
01:02:22.220You know, at this point, why should they take any sort of negotiation or diplomatic action?
01:02:26.480Seriously, I can tell you unequivocally, I have sources that were involved in these negotiations, and I can tell you exactly what went down in those rooms.
01:02:34.380What happened is that while the United States was demanding, quote, no nuclear weapons, what we were actually demanding is no nuclear enrichment literally of any kind.
01:02:58.540What they don't like to emphasize is that we also told them that they have to give up their ballistic missile program, that they have to basically give away any defensive ability, that they have to stop Israel from wantonly attacking them at any time or place of their choosing.
01:03:13.240And they have to give up this nebulous term of, quote, supporting terror.
01:03:17.800There was never any definitional term that was given to them.
01:03:20.820Oh, you can't support Hezbollah anymore.
01:03:23.500Like they basically just said you have to stop supporting terrorism in the region.
01:03:27.220Remember, the JCPOA, the Iran deal, which is how most of you may know it.
01:03:31.740Now, there's a lot to criticize about the deal with sunset clauses, et cetera.
01:03:35.480It took like two and a half years to negotiate with some of the world's like preeminent nuclear experts actually writing down certain levels of enrichment, of enforcement.
01:03:43.700There was none of that that was involved in the Wyckoff-Kushner negotiations.
01:03:47.000And so the Iranians basically were presented with, first of all, ridiculous demands, but second, changing demands, changing terms from the presidents of the United States who would say one thing about nuclear weapons, but allegedly it's meaning another thing about nuclear enrichment, and then also being presented with effectively surrender.
01:04:06.060If you gave up your ballistic missile program, that is surrender.
01:05:29.880I can guarantee you civilian nuclear science programs in any small country in the world is going to explode within the next 10 years.
01:05:38.120And if you were an adversary of the United States, you should now pay attention to the fact that the so-called axis of evil, the only one left standing, is the one that sprinted to a nuke and always rejected any efforts by the United States to constrain them.
01:05:53.080This just hitting via the Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon is sending a marine expeditionary unit to the Middle East.
01:06:01.600They're moving this unit as Iran steps up its attacks on the Straits of Hormuz, according to two U.S. officials.
01:06:08.740Pete Hegseth has approved a request from CENTCOM, our military body that oversees the Middle East, for the expeditionary unit typically consisting of up to 2,500 Marines.
01:06:20.800So 2,500 Marines up to going to the Middle East, according to this report from the Wall Street Journal.
01:06:26.720The move comes, reports the Journal, as Iran's attacks on the strait have paralyzed traffic through the strategic waterway, disrupting the global economy, driving up gas prices, imposing a major military and political challenge for President Trump.
01:06:37.480A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment.
01:06:39.620Again, that's the Wall Street Journal, which suddenly is very friendly with the Trump administration.
01:06:44.300They've been sort of on the odds in terms of domestic policy.
01:06:46.580But when it comes to the neocon policies of yesteryear, they are lockstep together, Sagar.
01:07:01.440Because truly, we could run the soundbite.
01:07:03.540We haven't run it, but we have one queued up.
01:07:05.300It's got about 20 examples of President Trump when running saying, I don't want war.
01:07:09.640There won't be a war in the Middle East.
01:07:11.000If you vote for the other side, you're going to get war in the Middle East.
01:07:13.500The last thing we want is war with Iran.
01:07:15.880He's on camera so repeatedly saying it.
01:07:18.520And there's been a war within the Republican Party, you know, a civil war, a rhetorical war about the neocons versus the more isolationist wing.
01:07:27.740All the young Republicans are in the isolationist wing.
01:07:30.220I mean, if you want to bet on the future of the Republican Party and keeping people in it, you would side with the isolationists because there's not a person under the age of 40 who's a voting Republican who's in favor of this.
01:07:41.860They are the ones in that small minority that they keep showing when they show the people who are in support of this.
01:07:47.480Cora Maga reportedly supports this 90 percent, but the Republican Party, it's more like 77 percent, which is not great.
01:07:54.220That is actually not great for the Republican Party because the entire Democratic Party is against it and over 72 percent of independents are against it.
01:08:54.460I am the Uber mentioned and I am able to succeed here where no other president can.
01:08:59.720It would not put him all that different from many of the presidents who are lined up behind me, who believed many of the same things about themselves.
01:09:07.560That's why I've been I unfortunately had to bring out my George W. Bush book behind me very prominently.
01:09:12.720And there's a reason for that is that I'm just living, I guess, through the exact same playbook.
01:09:18.660You know, don't forget, Megan, George W. Bush in 2000 ran a campaign where he wanted to withdraw from the world.
01:10:20.440Messianic is the last thing we need in Iran, whether it's the promise of the return, which cannot be orchestrated by man, or in the head of any leader.
01:10:30.720Because the only thing that gets you through this life is humility when it comes to the Middle East, in particular the Middle East, which is a lesson Trump has learned.
01:10:41.440Trump was one of the first critics of the Iraq War.
01:10:43.720He saw that it was folly before virtually anybody else.
01:10:46.820He was very outspoken against it at a time when that was not popular for anybody who said that they were a Republican.
01:11:57.460And I also think it's a dramatic failure of the vice president and of a significant part of the higher echelon of the national security establishment who are currently in Washington who lied to my face.
01:12:11.220And I'm not just talking about one individual.
01:12:13.560People, whenever they went on camera and they said that war with Iran is not on our interests, I have been a part of the professional America First Movement, whatever you want to call it, which is kind of an elite network of not elite in the sense that we're better than anybody else.
01:12:26.140But, you know, people who work in professional politics in Washington.
01:12:29.520War with Iran was the number one thing we agreed that we weren't going to do.
01:12:33.100There was an entire staffing project that was built around this, around foreign adventurism, learning the lessons of the war in Iraq, of diplomacy.
01:12:40.880And now this administration and to have those same officials now be not just complicit but actively arguing for that in a way where they literally lied to our face some year ago.
01:12:57.300But the reports are today, just today in Politico, there's a report about J.D. Vance.
01:13:02.620The headline is Vance was skeptical voice in White House on Iran strikes that – hold on, I screen grabbed it.
01:13:09.360Vice President J.D. Vance was skeptical.
01:13:12.740He's long questioned U.S. intervention abroad.
01:13:14.820He's publicly defended Trump's Iran operation, but White House officials revealed that the vice president made his opposition known in the lead up, pulling the curtain open after months of speculation about Vance being far more tepid about military action than Trump.
01:13:29.840Vance is, quote, skeptical and is, quote, worried about success and, quote, just opposes the war on Iran.
01:13:35.560A senior Trump official said via text message the official was granted anonymity to speak about the VP's views.
01:13:40.760A second senior Trump official said, quote, his role is to provide the president and the administration, you know, all points of views of what could happen from many different angles.
01:13:49.820But once the decision has been made, he's fully on board.
01:13:53.200His well-documented skepticism of U.S. military engagement forged in his experiences serving in the Marines paired with his more subdued tone on Iran and so on.
01:14:28.300It's a lot of the people who work around the National Security Council.
01:14:31.620It's about the, you know, people in the Pentagon, on the joint staff, many of the appointees.
01:14:36.680I don't want to get too personal here because, you know, it's one of those where, you know, I don't even necessarily make sense.
01:14:42.420I'm just giving you my own report that many of the people who work for the president in a variety of different ways all agreed this was the one thing that we didn't want to do.
01:14:51.520We did not want to go to war with Iran.
01:15:46.960He's the most powerless man in Washington, but there are a lot of people in the Pentagon and others on the National Security Council, staffers, all the way from the low level up to the high, who I know for a fact were people who not that long ago were preaching against the neocons.
01:16:02.840And what did Stephen Miller said? Like, Kamala will send your sons to war.
01:16:07.200They sent all this stuff out in public.
01:16:08.860I mean, look, many of us believed it, not just because of what they said in public, but again, because of the professional network of people who really made it, you know, one of their missions to replace the so-called Bush neocon establishment and guide the country in a better foreign policy direction.
01:16:25.020That's why I've said it's a great professional disappointment because –
01:16:27.880And what they say, Sagar, what their president's defenders say in response to that is, but he's always been adamantly opposed to Iran getting a nuke, and he's made that clear over the years.
01:16:36.360That's also true, which is why, like, for example, yours truly, when we struck Iran's nuclear facilities last June, I actually did think that was a good idea.
01:16:45.200I did defend the president on that one.
01:16:46.600You know, it's like, okay, that – he has been clear on that.
01:16:49.640If we have, like, a clear sight and we know we can take them out, okay, then we used – it was a pinpoint.
01:16:56.040It was, you know, beautifully executed, and we were told that we, quote, obliterated the nuclear facilities, which people like the Washington Post and the New York Times were disputing in their reporting, saying that's not true.
01:17:40.480Megan, I can tell you why I opposed that strike, and it's because I knew that Israel was involved.
01:17:45.180And let me tell you two other countries where Israel struck their nuclear program and said that it was all done, and they would never have to do it again.
01:17:52.500Anyone want to tell me how those countries are doing today?
01:17:54.800What ended up happening to both of them?
01:17:56.400They got politically collapsed, destroyed, turned into civil war, either conquered, invaded, or messed with from the outside.
01:18:03.260I knew that this wasn't the beginning.
01:18:05.040Once you break the seal here on Midnight Hammer and you open the door for regime change with the Israelis and all of their BS around how we need to go to war with Iran – by the way, it was also clear during the 12-day war.
01:18:17.540While, yes, the US did Midnight Hammer, which was the alleged obliteration of the nuclear program, they were going for broke then too.
01:18:25.960Remember, they were broadcasting regime change messages.
01:18:28.940They were striking large parts of the security establishment.
01:18:32.480They would have killed the Ayatollah then, maybe if Trump had led them, but they definitely killed as many people as they possibly could.
01:18:38.740So they made it clear that regime change was their goal.
01:18:41.220I was almost certain that once the dam broke on that strike that we would get back to where we are, and that's exactly what happened, unfortunately.
01:18:48.520And so, you know, look, this gives me no pleasure to say I just – I've studied enough of Israel's military campaigns in history to know that when they do that, and especially when they get somebody like Trump, that they are going to go for broke for their own security interests.
01:19:02.960I don't even really begrudge them for acting that way.
01:19:05.920I just kind of wish that we had a security establishment, which we do the same.
01:19:19.520You've been trying to force this on every president for the past whatever decades, and they've all withstood you, and we will withstand you too.
01:19:34.460Anyway, Sagar, you've been amazing on this.
01:19:36.440I've really, really appreciated your coverage on your show, on Tucker, here, and I'm grateful to have you back on our show again to help our audience understand that there's more than one view on this.
01:20:23.820She had an interesting name, obviously, Crystal Ball.
01:20:26.360And she got like, I don't know if you – you might call it revenge porn today by her – I think it was ex-husband who leaked some – it was a PG photo of her, like in her college days.
01:23:22.580I mean, truly, only deranged leftists would even want to highlight that kind of a thing.
01:23:26.660And then there's James Tallarico, who is going to be the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, who continues to be a goldmine when it comes to weirdness.
01:23:36.180And sadly, he's leading in the polls versus either John Cornyn or Ken Paxton.
01:23:44.420Query whether those polls are accurate, but, like, he's up by a fair amount, which ought to scare us all.
01:23:50.040Here to discuss it all, Isabel Brown, host of The Isabel Brown Show on The Daily Wire, and first-time guest, Brianna Lyman, host of Countdown to Freedom and elections correspondent for The Federalist.
01:24:12.200I've never seen anything like it because he had, like, a year to say goodbye, and I think it's finally going to happen in May, which can't come soon enough.
01:24:18.840And here he was last night, John Lithgow, on his show, reading a poem for Colbert.
01:25:53.220No, and honestly, Megan, that's the part that I'm still scratching my head over, not just related to Stephen Colbert, but all of the late night hosts lately.
01:26:01.200There's this understanding in Hollywood that late night is the epitome of making it and having your own show.
01:26:07.140If people are watching it in the evening, clearly means that you are the funniest person on the face of the planet.
01:26:12.180I don't think that's true anymore, and a TikToker is getting infinitely more views than your average late night host and is infinitely funnier in modern American culture.
01:26:21.980So I really think this is more of a passing of the torch to whatever the next medium is going to be, the same way that independent and alternative media are outshining legacy news coverage of everything going on in the world.
01:26:33.160And I'm anxious to see what comes next because I think this will breed a new level of creativity and actual comedy coming back to American culture.
01:27:05.220And you see that in the poem because he sits back and he's basically saying, I don't know why Stephen Colbert is getting the axe.
01:27:11.980And it just goes to show you what kind of bubble all of the Hollywood apparatus lives in, that they don't understand that when people used to tune in for late night comedy like Johnny Carson, you wanted to step away from the everyday politics, the negativity.
01:27:24.760You don't get that anymore when you watch Kimmel, Colbert, the rest of them, because all it is, is shoving their political views down your throat with a few laugh soundtracks in the background.
01:27:34.040And people are tired of that, which is why the ratings are tanking.
01:27:53.720You know, is it somebody like a Stephen Colbert?
01:27:56.540I guarantee they don't know each other.
01:27:58.360This is just like an aderant fandom that is humiliating to John Lithgow, who is, of course, of the left.
01:28:06.460I remember he played Roger Ailes in that movie Bombshell and was so quick to come out and, like, shit all over Fox News.
01:28:15.360Roger Ailes is like, well, then why did you star in the movie?
01:28:17.640Because he had the chance to make him look terrible.
01:28:19.400That's what he enjoyed about it and had only negative things to say.
01:28:23.000It's like, wouldn't it be more interesting if you could find some complexity in this character and see that there really was a tug of war between this guy who gave his employees cancer treatments that he didn't have to pay for and this guy who did wind up sexually harassing other employees?
01:28:35.460Like, that would be a much more interesting man to play.
01:28:38.000But, no, he sees anybody on the right as a villain and a monster.
01:28:42.960Okay, monstrous numbers coming out of Texas when it comes to this James Tallarico.
01:28:47.000I mean, I feel like people like us normies look at this guy and his insanity and say there's no way this person is going to do well in Texas.
01:28:54.680And my pal Jesse Kelly assures me he's not going to.
01:30:25.180I know that might be insane for some of your viewers to hear.
01:30:27.740But they're not covering the more egregious things that James Tallarico is saying.
01:30:31.060Things like defining woman as a lens through which to defeat patriarchy or saying that Mary, the mother of God, is the reason that we should all be pro-abortion, as if we didn't have Jesus Christ come into the world through an unexpected pregnancy.
01:30:46.240These are the things that he's saying not just on the campaign trail but from the pulpit.
01:30:50.160And yet it's being twisted and manipulated by the media as this form of toxic empathy where it comes across that you're the person who really cares about the marginalized.
01:30:59.080You are the person who's doing everything they can to love and accept their neighbor.
01:31:03.680And in reality, it's actually so hateful for society that you're seeing the erasure of women.
01:31:08.940You're seeing advocacy for the slaughter of innocent children and a complete twisting of Christianity, the foundation upon which our country was built.
01:31:17.140I think this is a really scary moment for the left as they grapple with their options of who's going to be our face moving forward because that's not yet answered.
01:31:24.500Is it going to be someone like a Zoran Mamdani that's holding Muslim prayer services in the New York City mayor's mansion and Gracie Mansion?
01:31:32.480Or is it going to be this facade of Christianity that looks appealing to the average independent voter or someone who's on the fence but in reality is pushing this extreme leftism just right under the surface?
01:31:45.220If that's the answer, it's very scary.
01:31:48.360I actually think he is more radical than Jasmine Crockett.
01:31:51.360Like she was squad friendly, but she didn't engage in this kind of extreme rhetoric when it came to Christianity or, you know, peddling these far, far left progressive views under the guise of Christianity and God-fearing speak.
01:32:16.440Something that you love that's not family or friends.
01:32:22.500I love, I'm just saying this because it's on my mind, the trans children who showed up yesterday at the state capitol to advocate for their humanity.
01:32:33.180They shouldn't have to, but it was an inspiration to watch.
01:33:00.460Something that would actually resonate with the majority of Americans, and in particular, men, because Democrats have lost young men 18 to 29 in large swaths.
01:33:08.840So they have to work to get them back.
01:33:10.480But, no, he went to trans children and he said, they're fighting for their humanity.
01:33:14.660There is nothing humane about cleaving healthy breast tissue off a child.
01:33:19.140There is nothing humane about mutilating their body.
01:33:21.600And we have seen so many detransitioners come out and talk about that mental and physical impact of their choices that they made when they simply were not in the right frame of mind.
01:33:30.700And instead of getting them the psychiatric help that they need, he wants to double down on this.
01:33:35.100And to Isabel's point about Christianity, look, we have heard for years that Christianity is the greatest threat to democracy, right?
01:33:41.140White Christian men are going to tear this country down.
01:33:43.800But when James Tallarico wants to launder his radical progressivism through his very convoluted interpretation of the Bible, suddenly it's okay, it's cool.
01:33:52.820And actually, the media is salivating at how he's normalizing Christianity and bringing back Christianity in a way that's okay for the mainstream media because they get to decide what's okay and what's not.
01:34:03.820Yeah, because somehow now it reinforces all of their weird worldviews.
01:34:09.440I mean, this is why when I took a one-day excursion into the Episcopalian church, I walked right out of there as soon as she started the homily because it was a female priest talking all about how we need to trans our children and support the trans children.
01:34:21.640And I was out of there and went right back to my Catholic church, which doesn't engage in that nonsense.
01:34:26.740Now, we're not great on immigration, but we're very solid on the trans issue, and it's one of the many reasons I remained an observant Catholic.
01:34:34.540All right, not completely far afield from that soundbite is this piece that I mentioned in the intro from New York Magazine's The Cut.
01:34:42.620And it's a piece all about regretting being a parent.
01:34:46.020I mean, truly, only the left would sit around and say, you know, it would be a great thought piece on how many parents hate their children.
01:34:51.820And they actually managed to find people who hate their children.
01:34:55.460The one mother they highlight is leaving them.
01:34:58.460Like, she's actually going to peace out because she doesn't want to be with her children anymore, and she doesn't seem to feel particularly bad about it.
01:35:05.520It ends with, my husband and I are taking steps to separate, and he's willing to take on the role of a single parent, which makes me feel incredibly guilty.
01:35:38.860This is a 27-year-old North Carolina mother of a 1-year-old.
01:35:42.800And the more you listen to this woman, the more you think, she's doing the right thing.
01:35:46.900She should get the hell away from that child because all I can think, Isabel, is I feel bad for her baby.
01:35:51.840Maybe now he has a shot, if the father remarries, of finding a mom who actually loves him.
01:35:56.700That was exactly my first thought when I read this piece as well.
01:36:00.520And it hits me all over again hearing you read those words out loud, Megan, because I'm in the exact phase of life that this young mom is in.
01:36:06.240I'm 28, so I'm one year older than her, but my daughter will be one at the end of next month.
01:36:10.540And my last year has been so full of the most magical, purpose-giving moments that I could have ever asked for in my life.
01:36:18.420I am such a different person today than I was a year ago when I was anxiously awaiting the birth of my daughter in all of the best ways.
01:36:24.960But how they are presenting this through this article is asinine and completely disgusting.
01:36:30.180The brainwashing that they're willing to do to tell young women that motherhood will ruin their life.
01:36:34.600The way that they teased this article on X, New York Magazine actually tweeted out the three examples of the things you'll lose when you become a mom are disposable income, peace of mind, and a lazy weekend at home.
01:36:47.700Of course, they'll never tell you that your bank account will never love you back.
01:36:50.600Lazy weekends are always better when your baby is falling asleep on your chest and you're watching football as a family on the couch.
01:36:56.940And peace of mind, I mean, what a more beautiful way to highlight watching your daughter laugh for the first time, that you'll never get to feel otherwise.
01:37:04.840And now they paint you as a good person if you all out abandon your children.
01:37:08.600I really think this is the end result of decades-long programming against young women to try to convince us to never want to get married or have children in the first place.
01:37:17.740But now that they can't do that because we know it's an innate desire baked into us by God how women are created with this nurturing instinct.
01:37:24.700Now, even if we lost you and you ended up becoming a mom, we'll just convince you to leave that experience because it's so bad for you.
01:37:40.180It's the vast, vast majority of time now.
01:37:42.680It's like 98% fun and 2% work at this point.
01:37:46.040There's more work when they're little.
01:37:47.380But I will tell you this is about one of the things I miss most about when they were really little, like babies like yours, which is not in the New York magazine, the cut piece,
01:37:54.920is in the morning when you walk into their room and they're in their crib, you know, and they're babies, and like they've just woken up and they're so happy to see you.
01:38:09.880When they can finally start standing and they hold on to their little crib rails and they're looking at, they're so thrilled when you walk in there.
01:38:15.820It's like there isn't an amount of money that you can place on that.
01:38:19.480I can't quite understand somebody who would commission a whole piece on highlighting only the financial downsides.
01:38:28.020Brenna, I don't think that you're a mom yet, right?
01:38:31.360But when you look at this, does this pull you in any one direction?
01:38:35.780Do you think to yourself, oh, yeah, no, I better not have kids because look what's going to happen to me.
01:38:40.760No, if anything, I think of they missed out on writing about all the things that moms gain.
01:38:45.060You know, my mom talks all the time about all the things she gained by having me and my sisters.
01:38:48.580And I actually feel bad for this young woman because, remember, my generation has been taught that we should go out and pursue our career and nothing else, right?
01:38:56.620That marriage and motherhood are shackles that you have to break away from if you want to succeed.
01:39:01.480And we've been taught that women don't actually have any intrinsic value, but we have a lot of value.
01:39:05.960No other person can be a mother, right?
01:39:07.980No other person has that, you know, kindness and warmth.
01:39:10.820And we should embrace that and celebrate that.
01:39:12.940And I unfortunately think that this young mom probably bought that lie, hook, line, and sinker, that she has to be only a career woman and not a mother.
01:39:20.700And now it's impacting her offspring, which is just awful for this child.
01:39:24.060Now she sees him as an inconvenience that she has to deal with as opposed to an enhancement who will make her life better.
01:39:30.380And just like the folly of suggesting, oh, if I, there's a lot in here about how, oh, you know, if I didn't have kids, I could just go for a walk and no one would bother me.
01:39:39.260It might be an isolated life, but it would be a peaceful one.
01:39:42.900This one woman writes a different lady.
01:39:44.600If I could go back, I'd redo everything.
01:39:46.800My fantasy is an alternate universe where I graduated, I went straight to a doctorate program and lived alone.
01:39:52.760I mean, like she writes, I would go for walks whenever I wanted.
01:39:56.000I would go swimming at the end of the week.
01:40:18.880We're going to take a quick break and we will be back with the panel to finish this discussion and move on to the moron, Meghan Markle, who wants you to pay $2,000 to go listen to her in Australia because no one wants her in any place else in the world.
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