00:04:21.180This military conflict has very little to do with Israel.
00:04:25.440The reason President Trump decided to attack Iran is because Iran has been waging war with America for 47 years,
00:04:32.700and they've killed nearly 1,000 Americans, and they're the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world.
00:04:38.360And so the people trying to say, I don't want another war for Israel.
00:04:43.780I don't want my children to die for the Jews.
00:04:47.600That is not honest, because we're doing this because the regime in Iran is killing Americans.
00:04:57.460And to be clear, if they had the capacity, if they had nuclear weapons, they would kill many, many more Americans.
00:05:05.560If they could, they would kill you and me right now, Ben.
00:05:08.620If they could, every listener of this podcast, they would kill.
00:05:11.900If they had a nuclear weapon, I believe there is a real possibility they would detonate it in the skies of Tel Aviv or New York or Los Angeles.
00:05:19.580And I'm not interested in seeing a day where hundreds of thousands of Americans are murdered by an Ayatollah chanting death to America.
00:05:34.540And I think we need to be very, very clear about that.
00:05:37.040I also think one of the other things that I think is really frustrating is just seeing how many people act as if somehow Donald Trump was hoodwinked by Israel for us to get involved in this war.
00:06:37.940When I said there's like four or five working theories, Democrats are on jail at a wall saying, does any of this fit with Americans?
00:06:43.420I also think it's very interesting. And final thing to you.
00:06:46.760I don't think the American people are buying this.
00:06:49.700And part of it's because I think Democrats have just said some of those orlandish and crazy things on every issue trying to hurt Donald Trump.
00:06:56.740Now it's becoming a little bit more of white noise.
00:06:59.080And that's I'm thankful for that, to be honest with you.
00:07:03.440And look, some of the reaction of the voters will depend on how this plays out.
00:07:08.040But if this military conflict lasts many months or years, if we're sitting here a year from now and still mired in a military conflict, if we've got a massive troop presence on the ground, if we have hundreds of thousands of American soldiers being killed, this war will be very unpopular.
00:14:41.620Number one, during this war, the Iranian national television is playing Tucker Carlson's show in Iran.
00:14:49.700They view that as such valuable propaganda.
00:14:52.320They want the Iranian people to hear Tucker.
00:14:54.260Number two, the Muslim Brotherhood—by the way, Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, and they are terrorists—are tweeting out Tucker Carlson's show.
00:15:04.160The Muslim Brotherhood is saying, this is our spokesman. Man, this guy is good.
00:15:08.660I cannot recall another major political figure on left or right who has said, if you surrender to America, American soldiers will rape your women.
00:15:18.300That's what Tucker Carlson just said. That is grotesque.
00:15:21.560And by the way, any soldier who sees Tucker Carlson ought to say, how dare you say that, American soldiers?
00:15:47.840That's the sort of thing the Ayatollah would say.
00:15:49.900And you've got to ask yourself, look, some of you may think back to when Tucker was on Fox News and he was actually said a lot of things you and I love that made a lot of sense.
00:17:34.440Well, it goes back to a previous Democrat president, Bill Clinton.
00:17:39.760Bill Clinton sent a State Department employee named Wendy Sherman to negotiate a nuclear agreement with Kim Jong-il, who was the father of the current dictator Kim Jong-un.
00:17:54.220And the deal they cut is that Bill Clinton agreed to send billions of dollars to North Korea, and in exchange for that money, North Korea would promise not to develop nuclear weapons.
00:18:33.060Literally, there are 8 billion people on planet Earth, Ben. There is one out of 8 billion who has screwed this up previously, has negotiated a deal to send billions of dollars to a foreign dictator, and it's resulted in that dictator using the billions of dollars to develop nuclear weapons.
00:18:48.620That would be Wendy Sherman. That's who Obama brought in and said, hey, can you do the same for us?
00:18:52.940now we live with the failures of the clinton administration and wendy sherman with north
00:18:58.700korea and and kim jong-un is a dictator he's megalomaniacal he's dangerous as hell he is
00:19:05.800he is testing icbms he is targeted explicitly target u.s citizens including austin texas
00:19:11.820he is a city that he has said he's targeted before however our best protection is kim jong-un
00:19:18.520knows if he ever used a nuclear weapon the result would be massive overwhelming retaliation and his
00:19:24.620regime would lose power that day. It would be the end of his life if he did that. As dangerous as
00:19:31.600Kim Jong-un is at least there's some possibility of rational self-deterrence. Here's what makes
00:19:38.880Iran orders of magnitude more dangerous. When you're dealing with religious extremism, when
00:19:44.500you're dealing with theocratic zealots who are in a death cult, who glorify death and suicide,
00:19:52.840rational deterrence doesn't work the same way. So for example, if the Ayatollah
00:19:57.000detonated a nuclear weapon, say in Tel Aviv or in New York or Los Angeles, and let me be clear,
00:20:03.780I believe if the Ayatollah could do so, he would have done so already. The response would be
00:20:09.100overwhelming and devastating, but the problem is when you celebrate death and suicide,
00:20:15.120that normal cost-benefit analysis does not apply. And so, yes, they've named a new Ayatollah. The
00:20:21.240Ayatollah is what? The son of the old Ayatollah. Okay, great. That is not acceptable because
00:20:27.940President Trump has rightly made the decision we're not going to allow U.S. national security
00:20:33.020to be vulnerable to religious zealots who are funding terrorism,
00:20:39.400who are the number one funders of terrorism worldwide and have been for 47 years.
00:20:47.600So Ayatollah number one, Skippy Jr., is not going to get to take over either
00:20:52.640because allowing Iran to wage war and to murder Americans is not consistent with U.S. national security.
00:21:00.520As before, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation on this topic, you can go back and download the podcast from early this week to hear the entire thing.
00:21:09.800Canadian women are looking for more, more to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world around them.
00:21:16.120And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.
00:23:09.760They don't care about the people whose lives they're ruining.
00:23:12.280They don't care about the people who can't pay their rent or can't feed their kids, and they don't care about leaving us exposed to a massive terrorist attack, and that seems harsh.
00:23:22.340I don't like saying they don't care about it because – but give me an alternative explanation, and I think the media plays a huge part in it because they believe there is zero cost, so they're appeasing their radical base.
00:23:35.940So look, the CNN tweet that I read just a minute ago describing the two ISIS-inspired terrorists as just two Pennsylvania teenagers that could have had a normal day enjoying the warm weather.
00:23:49.860Like that was so ridiculous. They deleted that tweet. But I also want to play what Abby Phillips, who you know, you've been on her show with her, what she said about this because it shows just the mindset of CNN. Here, give a listen to how she described.
00:24:07.840Two Republicans say Muslims don't belong here after an attempted terror attack against New York's Mayor Zoran Mamdani.
00:24:16.000And the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, says nothing really to condemn those comments.
00:24:23.320And it did backfire, as you described it, because she had to come out and then apologize on this one or retract it.
00:24:32.000And this is how her retraction, by the way, the next night. Take a listen.
00:24:35.840This morning I issued a correction first thing in the morning on X for a mistake that I made in last night's show, but I also wanted to do so on air as well.
00:24:45.540I incorrectly said that the bombs that were thrown by ISIS-inspired suspects in New York over the weekend were directed at Mayor Mamdani.
00:24:52.880They were not. I failed to catch and correct that mistake in real time, and I take full responsibility for that.
00:24:59.120And while we do make mistakes, it is important to acknowledge and correct those errors when they happen.
00:25:03.920Senator, I appreciate when there's a correction, but there was a lot of people online that were actually frustrated with a correction because what Abby was doing was acting like she didn't correct somebody that said something on her show in real time.
00:25:18.640And there was a lot of people going like, you're the one that said it.
00:25:23.340You're the one that has to correct your own information you put out there that was incorrect.
00:25:28.040It wasn't a guest on your show that you failed to correct what they said.
00:25:32.140Yeah, and Ben, I don't care about her. She's a leftist quack. What I do care about is the failure of supposedly journalistic outlets to actually do journalism. They are propagandists. The mistake she made was not random. It was just not, oops, I said green, I meant red.
00:25:54.080it is consistently skewing in a way that number one she's not identifying that the terrorists in
00:26:01.480question were radical islamic terrorists number two she's claiming the target or what she claimed
00:26:07.580the target was mandami the target was not mandami in fact there was a protest against mandami and
00:26:13.760the radical islamic terrorist tried to throw the bombs at the protesters who were opposing mandami
00:26:18.160and and and if you look at her whole story it wasn't even on the terror attack it was on and
00:26:24.800and republicans criticized muslims and oddly enough there's not outrage that republicans
00:26:29.380criticize muslims it reminds me of so there's a classic tweet that norm mcdonald the great
00:26:34.440snl comedian said yeah uh and and and his tweet he said what terrifies me is if isis were to
00:26:42.700detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million americans imagine the backlash against peaceful
00:26:50.840muslims like that was norm mcdonald's tweet years ago and that was cnn like isis terrorists try to
00:26:58.720kill a lot of americans can you believe how upset people are with muslims like like cover the damn
00:27:05.140news cover the facts by the way you look at mandami's statement after that terror attack
00:27:08.880he didn't identify the two criminals. He didn't mention they were radical Islamic terrorists. He
00:27:13.400didn't mention they were affiliated with ISIS. Instead, he blamed the guy who was protesting
00:27:18.640against him, who was intended to be the target of the bombs. When the media is this wildly
00:27:28.440dishonest, it has real consequences. And so, yes, those are two instances on this terror attack
00:27:35.480where cnn had to correct themselves because they were so absurd but but i ask you i mean you
00:27:41.720mentioned before i have not seen a single one of my democrat colleagues asked by any reporter
00:27:46.480how can you justify not funding the department of homeland security when we've had four terror
00:27:53.660attacks from radical islamic terrorists in 10 days and we have radical clerics calling for more
00:28:03.120Every journalist out there knows that's the question you should ask senators on the way to the airport as they're walking out of their office, as they're at the airport waiting.
00:28:13.020If you have terrorist attacks and you've voted to not fund the Department of Homeland Security, there should be, and traditionally there would have been, hell to pay on that one.
00:28:22.220I also go back to the part you're talking about with this whole cleansing of, oh, let's not act like this is Muslim extremists.
00:28:28.240i i put out a list of of just like the history in the past that we've dealt with with with radical
00:28:34.000muslims the shoe bomber muslim orlando attack muslim the beltway snipers muslim the fort hood
00:28:39.500shooter muslim the underwear bomber muslim the westminster attack muslim the 05 bali bombings
00:28:44.380muslim the murder of lee ben and ben ben let me let me jump in look you were right but i want to
00:28:50.680draw a distinction because there are more than a billion muslims across the globe and there are
00:28:56.900hundreds of millions of Muslims who are in fact peaceful. And in fact, if you look at different
00:29:01.400regions of the world, if you look at a country like India, India has millions and millions of
00:29:07.460Muslims and it has very little problem with radical Islamic terrorism. It's not something
00:29:11.400that plagues India, even though it has a huge population. There is a distinction between being
00:29:17.880Muslim and being an Islamist. An Islamist is a particular ideology. There's a great book called
00:29:25.740The Looming Tower. It was written by a journalist, a Texas journalist called Lawrence Wright,
00:29:29.920that traces the history of Islamism. And Islamism is a political ideology that says we will use
00:29:36.640force, we will use violence, we will use terrorism to forcibly attack the infidels and to force them
00:29:43.860to either convert to Islam or to die. And Islamists, they have killed vast numbers of Muslims. By the
00:29:52.480way, the Islamists target their fellow Muslims with great frequency. They target Christians,
00:29:57.340they target Jews. Islamism, which is where we get radical Islamic terrorism, that's where on 9-11
00:30:03.920Osama bin Laden was an Islamist. That is a particular ideology, and one of the real problems
00:30:10.660is leftists refuse to acknowledge it. In fact, I'll tell you, during the Obama administration,
00:30:15.640I chaired a hearing on the purge of radical Islamic terrorism from the Department of Homeland
00:30:23.740Security. And the Obama White House sent an email to DHS instructing it to purge. And by the way,
00:30:30.920purge was the word used by the Obama White House political operative. Purge from the DHS records,
00:30:38.100any reference to jihad, any reference to Muslim Brotherhood, any reference to radical Islamic
00:30:44.920terrorism and DHS under Obama either deleted or modified over 800 different records. And then
00:30:51.660when you'd have another radical Islamic terror attack, they'd be like, we have no idea where
00:30:55.520this came from. That same ideology is playing out in CNN's coverage. Like, gosh, we can't figure
00:31:02.960out what's going on here. And by the way, it played on in their open borders when they allowed
00:31:08.280people to come in who are coming from countries that are filled with terrorists, filled with
00:31:16.100jihadists. They didn't do vetting, to be clear. Look, you look at the Afghan immigrants that Joe
00:31:22.420Biden brought into this country. They did a terrible job vetting it. We saw one of those
00:31:26.700Afghan immigrants murder one National Guardsman and severely wound another in D.C. If you cannot
00:31:34.260acknowledge what it is you're fighting, if you can't even say the words, and sadly, CNN
00:31:38.740has a really hard time saying the words radical Islamic terrorism, then you know what? You don't
00:31:43.460hold anyone to account for doing nothing to stop it and doing nothing to keep Americans safe.
00:31:47.720As always, thank you for listening to Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you.
00:31:52.940Don't forget to download my podcast and you can listen to my podcast every other day you're not
00:31:56.840listening to Verdict or each day when you listen to Verdict afterwards. I'd love to have you as a
00:32:01.180listener to again the ben ferguson podcast and we will see you back here on monday morning