Democrats Do a 180 on Age of Consent Laws

 Jack person 2: , let’s conclude with a couple of crime [stories]. I think crime was just mentioned before, and I have a bevy of things here, but I just want to mention a few and get your take on this. We brought it up in prior podcasts, the Democrat Party being the party that almost loves crime and criminals. 

In Colorado, four Colorado Democrats blocked a Senate bill which would have required jail time for child rapists. They’ve—I’ll mention their names, these Democrats—Adrienne Benavidez, Nick Hinrichsen, Katie Wallace, and Mike Weissman. Do humans do this? They do there. In New York, I’m holding today’s New York Post for those who can or are watching this on YouTube. 

Albany, that’s the capital of New York, there’s a bill being put forward there that would parole—this is David Berkowitz, by the way, the Son of Sam. He’s in prison. And under this law, anyone that’s 55 or older who has served 15 years would have immediate recourse to a parole hearing and hearings every two years. 

And there’s also some legislation about letting people out after a certain age period. And I thought I had—I have like 10 other criminality—oh, the last criminality one is in California. It’s in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Unified School District has come to a settlement with the teachers union. 

Let me see. If a union teacher sexually abuses a student in Los Angeles, they have unlimited job security. They just get sent to a new school. This is an agreement that LA’s education officials have. I mean, this is sick. 

 person 1: The subtext is that the epidemic is not what you would think, a bunch of bald, obese white guys chasing beautiful 16-year-old girls around the desk. 

It’s sophisticated, supposedly sexually experienced teachers, feminine, female, that are having sex with boys to fulfill that old 1950s jock-type idea that it’s not really sexual. It’s initiation—harassment.  

You know, the idea being, if you said in my high school class to a bunch of guys, the hot Mrs. Smith, who’s 28, is going to have sex with you at 15 or 16, they would say, “Oh, yeah,” you know. But that’s what one of my—I bring that up because that’s what they’re going back to. You know what I mean? That attitude that maybe these women are mentors or groomers or something. 

And it’s really sexist because if it was an older male, unattractive, trying to coerce a woman, they wouldn’t do that. But maybe they would under this statute.  

I don’t know whether it’s epidemic or it’s just in the news all the time of these young women in their 20s who are teachers that are having sexual relations with young men. And where does it come from? 

I think it’s part of—it started with the idea that pederasty that was in the gay world of, you know, Harvey Milk was accused allegedly of having a live-in person who was under the age of 18. I don’t know if that’s true, but I think people in Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon wanted to rename the—didn’t they want to rename the USS Harvey Milk, a logistic ship? 

person 2: Yes.  

person 1: I don’t know if they did for that reason. 

But there are a lot of people, I think there’s a person in the California Legislature, gay guy, who wants to water that down because they feel there’s a long romantic literary tradition in the West, partly in the public schools, which are the private schools in Britain and in Europe. Tea and Sympathy, right? Yeah. 

But also same-sex grooming. 

person 2: Gay.  

person 1: Yeah, what the Greeks called the erastes, the active older man, and the eromenos. And that tradition that was imbued with philosophical seriousness, supposedly—that was the idea. And it’s kind of scary. 

What I’m getting at is the—

person 2: I think it’s one of the pluses, by the way, .  

On the flag, I think that’s—that man-boy love is now one of these plus, plus, pluses. Yeah. 

person 1: Well, you know what? What’s so funny is that in the ’70s and ’80s, it was the Democratic Party that really—it was not the libertarian Republicans as much. They were moralistic, much more moralistic. I should say moral, not moralistic, but they were not driving these laws about the age of consent. 

It was the Democrats—remember that it was the children, it was Hillary. We have to save the children. And they were really going after any sexual activity under the age of 18 in most states. And now it’s just they’ve come 180 degrees. It’s now, well, who are you to say that the person isn’t old enough to give an age of consent? 

You know? And I think it comes from the idea they feel that it’s oppressing the gay community somehow, that they can’t date young boys. Because that’s the people who are the most advocate of the pederasty, which is a Greek word. It just means pais, the word for boy, and then eras—erao, the verb, and erastes, the noun, loving a boy. 

Pedophilia is a little different. That is termed with under the age, I think, of 12, pedophilia. But—or that’s love for a child, and over the age of 12, given the etymology, it’s sexual acts with a child. But in our world, we call pedophilia, I think, the worst crime because a person’s not even at puberty yet. That was the distinction. 

But it’s funny how the Democrat—this new Jacobin party—they want to destroy all of these norms that they used to say were so important, you know? Remember about abortion? I think that abortion should be—here’s Bill Clinton—I think that abortion should be, you know, legal and rare, he said that. Now it’s legal and common.  

person 2: Safe, legal, and rare. Yeah. Right. 

You know, this stuff with the teachers, with moving the teachers around or just moving them to another school—this is the same group of people that various states, the Left, extended the laws in order to go after priests. And I’m not defending priests here who were engaged in—but to say, oh, the Catholic Diocese was bad because the priest did this, and he abused this boy here, and they moved him to another parish, and that’s bad. 

Now, it doesn’t matter if it happened 50 years ago, we have to go after them. Meanwhile, if you’re a teacher, it’s OK to move you around if you—well, they’re not done yet—molested a kid. 

person 1: They may feel that liberation theologists in the church have certain dispensations because they’re trying to groom people in national liberation theology and things happen. Who knows what they’re capable of? 

They’re a very fluid mindset, the Left, and whatever is necessary or whatever is convenient. They don’t believe in absolutes or norms or unchanging human nature. And so they come up with all these—I mean, I never, if we had this discussion 10 years ago, 15, we wouldn’t even know what a transgendered person was. 

It was some clinical description called a transsexual that affected 0.0001 of the population. Christine Jorgensen from the 1960s who changed hers. And all of a sudden, it became 30% of the kids at Ivy League schools were saying they would like to transition. 

So as I keep saying, every bad idea starts in the faculty lounge. And from the faculty lounge to the American popular culture is about two years. 

Iran Is Losing This War, and the Global Balance of Power Is Shifting

 

Gerrymandering, or the protocol where states allot congressional seats by population, is in the news recently, and some states do it transparently politically, depending on the makeup of their state legislatures. Others go through the operation, sometimes genuine, sometimes not so much, of having a nonpartisan body redistrict. 

It’s very important because it’s based on the census, as well as within the state. The number of seats that the state is granted by the U.S. Census is then further determined by how you draw the lines for congressional districts. And as you know, birds of a feather flock together, so you can do it regionally in a way that would favor one or the other party. 

Now we’re in a gerrymandering war where some of the states are trying to redistrict and improve either the Democratic or Republican turnout. Here in California, 40% of the state voted a little bit over, maybe 41%, for Donald Trump. And if this new redistricting protocol goes into effect, which it will by November, it’s likely that even though we have 53 congressional seats, we may only have seven or eight Republicans in the House. 

We could go down, in other words, not getting 40%. We never get that. We get about 17% to 20%. We could go down to eight or 9% of the state’s House of Representatives members would be Republicans, even though 40% of the state shows that it’s Republican by their voting in national elections.

But this is what’s interesting. 

Now that we’re in this war, the Democrats, I don’t quite think, have known what is going to go on. There were some recent studies by various pollsters about what would happen if all of the states decided to engage in redistricting, gerrymandering, based on the relative control of the state legislatures. And it came up with a very surprising result.

And that is, if the Republican red states or purple states that have Republican majorities decided to redistrict and Democrats did the same, an all-out war, there would be about 262 Republicans and only 173 Democratic seats. 

And that’s not the end of it. We have had a massive population transfer of somewhere between 1 and 3 million people a year recently go from blue states and blue cities to red states and red cities. And that alone, according to many people, within just four years, is going to radically change the census allotment of congressional representatives. 

Forget about redistricting. It’s the whole number that each state is granted, and that will have an effect on the Electoral College, which has a formula that your senators and representatives determine your electors that will select the next president. And in that calculus, people are suggesting they may lose, they being blue states, anywhere from 10 to 15 [seats]. 

Some quite outlier polls say they could lose 20 seats, and that’s not the end of it.

A third factor people are not taking into consideration is the Supreme Court just outlawed racial gerrymandering. It’s a question of whether that will be enacted in time for the November elections. It seems like it can. 

Maybe not for the June primaries, but that will affect Democrat seats as well as the census and as well as just normal gerrymandering. But if you don’t have these special seats that are carved out to ensure black people are the only two candidates, the Democrats could lose another 10 to 15 seats. 

If you add it all up, you’re talking about a permanent switch of 40 to 50 seats in the House of Representatives, and it doesn’t end there.

If you look at the longer-term demographics, whether you use number of births per 100,000 population, or you look at by family, what is the fertility rate of the average state—is it 2.1, which is necessary for the replacement population—it turns out that with very few exceptions, the red states are usually reproducing about 1.6 to 1.9 in a few cases, and the Democrats are about 1.5 down to almost below [one].

So, long term, people in blue states, for a variety of reasons, we don’t have time to get into them, I think you know what they are. There’s less emphasis on traditional religion, on traditional nuclear families, etc. They tend to be more urban than some of the rural states in the West, Midwest, and South. But in any case, the long-term prognosis for the Democratic Party is not good. 

It could lose 50 to 60 permanent seats, and then you would have a sort of California-type one-party rule nationwide, except it might have implications for the Senate as well. What am I getting at?

It seems to me that the Democrats have lost confidence in their agenda. 

In other words, they don’t believe that you, the voter, really do want an open border, or you want 53 million foreign-born without audits that ensure acculturation, integration, assimilation. And the same is true of critical race theory or critical legal theory or the emphasis and fixations on transgenderism or the Green New Deal. 

It seems it would have been disastrous had we enacted the full agenda of the Left, given what the status of oil is, and we’re the largest producer of oil and gas in the history of civilization right now. 

You put it all together, and that message of the Democrats is not appealing.

And so, of course, in the short term, their strategy has been: We’re not Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a fascist, and we’re going to go demonstrate against Tesla and ICE and “No Kings,” and we’re going to try to put him in jail and impeach him on third time—all of that. 

But long term, it suggests that they have two choices. They either have to change their culture and go back to more traditional lifestyles to improve their demographics and to go back to the assimilationist model, as I think the Republicans have—I don’t see that happening—or they would have to lower taxes and cut back entitlements in these blue states to retain their high earners and their upper-middle-class people, who are, for the most part, leaving. They’re not going to do that. 

As the historian Livy said about Rome’s problems in the Late Republic, the medicine for them is worse than the disease. They don’t want a society where a man and woman are married fairly early with two to three children. They really don’t want a society that is racially blind, and they don’t like the idea that a lot of red people stay in their states. 

They welcome them to leave. And the result of all that is when they look at these long-term prognoses I just went over, they get very angry. And so what is the reaction? Is it to change the agenda to win you over the vote?

No. It’s to change the system. 

And so, if you want to know why they want to get rid of the Electoral College, or why they want the census to count residents that could be here, in many cases are here illegally, maybe 30 million, if you want to know why they want to pack the Supreme Court, if you want to know why they want the National Voters Compact to de facto get rid of the Electoral College, if you want to know why they want to pack the Supreme Court, it is that their message right now does not appeal to 51%, and the demography on which a democracy and a constitutional republic are based is not in their favor. 

So, their only alternative is to find radical changes in the system of governance to allow their unpopular agenda to be, what, de facto popular.

Gerrymandering, or the protocol where states allot congressional seats by population, is in the news recently, and some states do it transparently politically, depending on the makeup of their state legislatures. Others go through the operation, sometimes genuine, sometimes not so much, of having a nonpartisan body redistrict. 

It’s very important because it’s based on the census, as well as within the state. The number of seats that the state is granted by the U.S. Census is then further determined by how you draw the lines for congressional districts. And as you know, birds of a feather flock together, so you can do it regionally in a way that would favor one or the other party. 

Now we’re in a gerrymandering war where some of the states are trying to redistrict and improve either the Democratic or Republican turnout. Here in California, 40% of the state voted a little bit over, maybe 41%, for Donald Trump. And if this new redistricting protocol goes into effect, which it will by November, it’s likely that even though we have 53 congressional seats, we may only have seven or eight Republicans in the House. 

We could go down, in other words, not getting 40%. We never get that. We get about 17% to 20%. We could go down to eight or 9% of the state’s House of Representatives members would be Republicans, even though 40% of the state shows that it’s Republican by their voting in national elections.

But this is what’s interesting. 

Now that we’re in this war, the Democrats, I don’t quite think, have known what is going to go on. There were some recent studies by various pollsters about what would happen if all of the states decided to engage in redistricting, gerrymandering, based on the relative control of the state legislatures. And it came up with a very surprising result.

And that is, if the Republican red states or purple states that have Republican majorities decided to redistrict and Democrats did the same, an all-out war, there would be about 262 Republicans and only 173 Democratic seats. 

And that’s not the end of it. We have had a massive population transfer of somewhere between 1 and 3 million people a year recently go from blue states and blue cities to red states and red cities. And that alone, according to many people, within just four years, is going to radically change the census allotment of congressional representatives. 

Forget about redistricting. It’s the whole number that each state is granted, and that will have an effect on the Electoral College, which has a formula that your senators and representatives determine your electors that will select the next president. And in that calculus, people are suggesting they may lose, they being blue states, anywhere from 10 to 15 [seats]. 

Some quite outlier polls say they could lose 20 seats, and that’s not the end of it.

A third factor people are not taking into consideration is the Supreme Court just outlawed racial gerrymandering. It’s a question of whether that will be enacted in time for the November elections. It seems like it can. 

Maybe not for the June primaries, but that will affect Democrat seats as well as the census and as well as just normal gerrymandering. But if you don’t have these special seats that are carved out to ensure black people are the only two candidates, the Democrats could lose another 10 to 15 seats. 

If you add it all up, you’re talking about a permanent switch of 40 to 50 seats in the House of Representatives, and it doesn’t end there.

If you look at the longer-term demographics, whether you use number of births per 100,000 population, or you look at by family, what is the fertility rate of the average state—is it 2.1, which is necessary for the replacement population—it turns out that with very few exceptions, the red states are usually reproducing about 1.6 to 1.9 in a few cases, and the Democrats are about 1.5 down to almost below [one].

So, long term, people in blue states, for a variety of reasons, we don’t have time to get into them, I think you know what they are. There’s less emphasis on traditional religion, on traditional nuclear families, etc. They tend to be more urban than some of the rural states in the West, Midwest, and South. But in any case, the long-term prognosis for the Democratic Party is not good. 

It could lose 50 to 60 permanent seats, and then you would have a sort of California-type one-party rule nationwide, except it might have implications for the Senate as well. What am I getting at?

It seems to me that the Democrats have lost confidence in their agenda. 

In other words, they don’t believe that you, the voter, really do want an open border, or you want 53 million foreign-born without audits that ensure acculturation, integration, assimilation. And the same is true of critical race theory or critical legal theory or the emphasis and fixations on transgenderism or the Green New Deal. 

It seems it would have been disastrous had we enacted the full agenda of the Left, given what the status of oil is, and we’re the largest producer of oil and gas in the history of civilization right now. 

You put it all together, and that message of the Democrats is not appealing.

And so, of course, in the short term, their strategy has been: We’re not Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a fascist, and we’re going to go demonstrate against Tesla and ICE and “No Kings,” and we’re going to try to put him in jail and impeach him on third time—all of that. 

But long term, it suggests that they have two choices. They either have to change their culture and go back to more traditional lifestyles to improve their demographics and to go back to the assimilationist model, as I think the Republicans have—I don’t see that happening—or they would have to lower taxes and cut back entitlements in these blue states to retain their high earners and their upper-middle-class people, who are, for the most part, leaving. They’re not going to do that. 

As the historian Livy said about Rome’s problems in the Late Republic, the medicine for them is worse than the disease. They don’t want a society where a man and woman are married fairly early with two to three children. They really don’t want a society that is racially blind, and they don’t like the idea that a lot of red people stay in their states. 

They welcome them to leave. And the result of all that is when they look at these long-term prognoses I just went over, they get very angry. And so what is the reaction? Is it to change the agenda to win you over the vote?

No. It’s to change the system. 

And so, if you want to know why they want to get rid of the Electoral College, or why they want the census to count residents that could be here, in many cases are here illegally, maybe 30 million, if you want to know why they want to pack the Supreme Court, if you want to know why they want the National Voters Compact to de facto get rid of the Electoral College, if you want to know why they want to pack the Supreme Court, it is that their message right now does not appeal to 51%, and the demography on which a democracy and a constitutional republic are based is not in their favor. 

So, their only alternative is to find radical changes in the system of governance to allow their unpopular agenda to be, what, de facto popular.

corruption in Maine

 

Jack person 2: So, let’s start off with corruption in Maine. And here’s this—Steve Robinson posted this on X the other day. “Maine Democrats are actively recruiting voters who have never lived in Maine and never paid taxes in Maine.

“Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who previously tried to disenfranchise Maine voters by removing Donald Trump from the ballot, has publicly admitted that noncitizens are registered to vote in Maine. She’s refusing to give Harmeet Dhillon [from the Justice Department] Maine’s voter files so that the Department of Justice can prevent noncitizens from raiding our elections.

“And Bellows has partnered with the Community Organizing Alliance. This is a, quote-unquote, ‘migrant-run ACORN-style group created by the alleged Medicaid fraudsters at Gateway Community Services.’” Etc., etc.

You know, Maine was once a bastion of republicanism. It has important elections coming up, Victor, and we’re gonna talk about that separately with [Graham] Platner. But this is that infamous woman who tried to keep Donald Trump off the ballot. And she is a pure ideologue and in a position of power.

Your thoughts?

Victor Davis person 1: Well, I think there’s two issues here. One is Platner and the worry about him. The rumors are, and these are alleged rumors, but I think Mark Halperin mentioned them, that his long social media history, which is pretty crazy. Women need to wear Kevlar pants if they don’t want to be raped. White people, rural people are stupid and lazy. He’s a communist.

person 2: All cops are bastards.

person 1: All cops are … Yeah. And I don’t know how you can be on 100% disability for post-traumatic stress syndrome and then say you’re going to run for Senate because you’re disabled. But he’s doing that. And of course, no one has called him on it.

The other thing is if you have a candidate like that and you’re going to nominate him over, she’s not very moderate, the governor, but that he was going to win. And then once he’s in the general—Susan Collins, I know that a lot of the true-blue conservatives like us, Jack, get irritated with her, but she has to operate in the confines of Maine.

And I would say, I haven’t looked at her voting record, but I imagine—don’t you think it’s 75% or 80% with the administration?

person 2: Yeah.

person 1: On key votes, the SAVE Act and things like that, she disappoints, but she gets elected. And she’s smart. There’s no comparison between the two.

So, the point I’m making is that he is out of the ordinary. He also represents this new strain of elite, very wealthy—here in California, Tom Steyer is really off the scale, hard-Left, but a billionaire. We saw [Zohran] Mamdani. His two parents are billionaires. I mean, they’re not multimillionaires, but they’re very affluent. They’re from a very exclusive family in Uganda.

And then we go to Platner. He went to Hotchkiss School. He’s the son of a famous architect. His father was a lawyer. His mother is a restaurateur. So, he’s among the elite, and yet he keeps yelling and screaming about billionaires and millionaires. His parents are millionaires, no doubt. He grew up as a millionaire.

So, there’s a problem with him. And when you’re a Democrat and your heart says, I love this guy, but your brain says, he’s not gonna be electable under normal circumstances, then you opt for the change the system. And the change the system is what they always do.

James Carville outlined it. He said, when the Democrats come in, no more filibuster. No more Electoral College with a national voting compact solution to that. Four more Democratic senators under the Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico entrance. And pack the court. What does that show? He doesn’t have confidence in the Democratic message appealing to 51%.

They don’t have confidence that this guy can win. So, when they do that, they either open the border or they try to say that felons can vote or they try to change the system, and that’s what they’re doing, whether it’s off the radar or transparently in Maine because they have a problem.

And as I said, Mark Halperin reviewed his problems, and apparently, allegedly, there’s a lot more to come, Jack, about him. His record.

And it’s very ironic, well, not ironic. I should apologize for that. But the Democratic Party made such a fuss about Elon Musk’s Nazi salute. It wasn’t a Nazi salute. He saluted like we’ve seen everybody do that. Cory Booker, I think Elizabeth Warren. They all do it.

And they’ve said nothing about this Totenkopf death head, Third Panzer Division [tattoo] and also used as the Einsatzgruppen people at the death camps, and he knew. People have said, that were in his cohort, he knew what it was. He bragged about it.

He’s changed his story twice. He said, well, you know, I didn’t really know what it was until I ran for Congress, I mean, for Senate. And they told me what it was. And then he’s also said, well, you know, I was brainwashed. I imbued or absorbed this toxic Marine culture. And that made me do it.

So, he can’t tell the truth. And he thinks he’s going to win. Put it this way. 30 years ago, if you were a Democrat and you wore a Nazi tattoo for 20 years and people knew about it, that would exclude you from being nominated.

Today in the Democratic Party, the fact that he had a Nazi tattoo and he removed it will mean, A, the grandees will explain it away, or wink, nod, it will be something that will be of value because of the rising antisemitism.

It sends a message. It sends a message, and he’s reiterated again and again and again about Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, genocide, Israel, Israel, Israel, cut off—so that sends a message to the new Democratic Jacobin Party. And it’s not the Democratic Party anyway. It’s a Jacobin Party, a French revolutionary party. And they have institutionalized antisemitism. So, when a candidate sends those signals and we think they’re disqualifying, we’re in a time warp. That was 20, 30 years ago.

It’s not now.

person 2: Victor, I want to—we have to talk about Tucker Carlson now. Here’s a headline: “Tucker praises Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner.” Quote, “I certainly appreciate his foreign policy views, and I appreciate how different they are from everybody else in his party. I haven’t met him yet, and I plan to meet him.”

person 1: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. How is he different than anybody else? He’s representative of the Democratic party, isn’t he?

person 2: Other than [John] Fetterman, I guess so, yeah.

person 1: I mean, everything he’s right with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and the older guard that has flipped like Nancy Pelosi and Schumer. They’re for that stuff now. He basically wants open borders, doesn’t care about illegal immigration, critical race theory, DEI, transgender, all of that stuff. He can’t get elected if he wasn’t.

He’s a green guy, no fossil [fuels]—all of that stuff. And the whole He-Man, white working guy, all in the tough talk, and often laced with profanities, all of that is just superficial pablum for this mythical white working class that’ll vote for him because he’s tough.

It’s kind of insulting to the white working class because the people that I see in my neighborhood that are white working class, are pretty well-informed.

person 2: Yeah.

person 1: But I don’t know what Tucker-

person 2: Oh, you said F, I’m going to vote for you.

person 1: Yeah. I don’t know what Tucker means, but if he says that he would prefer Graham Platner, and I guess he does, because he didn’t say at the same time, he’s an interesting person. I want to interview him. But of course, I’ll also interview Susan Collins because her record, even though I don’t embrace it all, has been more representative of my entire life in the conservative movement. He didn’t say that.

So, I assume that he likes Graham Platner not because his views are at odds—I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt—with the new hard-Left Democratic Party, unless Tucker’s gone the whole Bill Kristol route. I don’t know if he has or not. Or Max Boot route. I don’t think he has.

But he must like him because Graham Platner has been outspoken in his hatred of Israel, Gaza, genocide, all this stuff. And that, it seems to me, that that’s—and he’s had people on—he has appeared with people who have endorsed, and correct me if I’m wrong, I think he’s appeared with or he’s talked with people who have been classified as pro-neo-Nazi. Really, you know, there’s kind of the Darryl Cooper, I don’t know how you’d [say it], revisionist.

So, is that why Tucker is attracted to this new face in the Democratic Party? Because if you look at the totality of what he said, it’s no different than “the squad” or AOC. It really isn’t.

person 2: Yeah.

person 1: And I thought Tucker’s criticism of Donald Trump was, I am a principled conservative, and I voted for Donald Trump and campaigned for him and frequented Air Force One and Campaign One. And I was at Mar-a-Lago, habitué a lot. And I did this because I agreed with 90% of his platform. I thought that’s the reason why.

And I still haven’t been enlightened by anybody. Candace. Any of them. Why, if you disagree with him on a particular issue, like you classify the 60-day, and it hasn’t been 60 days of kinetic activity, it’s been 40 days, maybe less, against Iran. You want to classify that as a forever or endless war, that he campaigned against. Okay, that’s a legitimate opinion.

But why would you take one particular issue and then say, well, I thought it over and I don’t like that wall that’s growing on the border. I don’t like the idea there’s no illegal immigration. I don’t like the idea we’re deporting 500,000 criminals. I don’t like the deregulation, the tax cuts. They’re all an abomination.

No. It’s just you crossed me on one issue and I’m done with you. Unless they can cite others, you know, that you don’t like Trump’s language or you feel that his impulsiveness or when he wasn’t respectful of the dead, with Rob Reiner’s passing, or he uses the F-word on his—something like that. But you have to come forward with something that would nullify your whole life’s conservatism.

person 2: It’s interesting because one of the criticisms from Tucker was—recent criticisms—was that Trump was the Antichrist. And then he was interviewed by The New York Times this past weekend who—and he denied saying it. And they showed the video he clearly—yeah.

person 1: I saw that. And he said he didn’t know what the Antichrist was, so how could he say that? And that would suggest that somebody always says things he knows.

person 2: Yeah.

person 1: Tucker gave an interview with the mayor of Bethlehem, who flat out said that Christians have been fleeing his city because of Jewish pressure, when in fact one of the destinations they go is to Israel, and they’re fleeing Muslim intolerance.

So, you don’t need to know everything to say something. He did say that. The Antichrist—you know, he said he didn’t know what the Antichrist was. And as I remember in the Bible, I’m just doing this—it’s in John, I think. It’s in Revelations, too. The Greek word for it is pseudochristos. The pseudo just means false. The false Christ.

And I have a feeling, isn’t he referred to in Acts or Letters as the person who, as the end of days come, he’s gonna be popular and work miracles?

person 2: Yes. Right.

person 1: But he’s not satan or Lucifer. He’s some type of—he’s not referred to very much in the Bible. He’s some person who’s going to emulate Christ and try to deliberately fool people. And then rob them of eternity through his sin. And they’re following his sin as deluded people.

And so if he meant that, I don’t believe he doesn’t—he’s very religious, so when he says, I don’t know what the Antichrist is, when he’s talking about Trump as the Antichrist, and he said that Trump had used foul language on Easter, and that Trump was a very magnetic person, you get the impression he did know.

Because he was trying to, I think, say that Donald Trump led us, in what I thought was a moral crusade, but it was a pseudo-crusade. Maybe that’s what he meant. I think he did. I just don’t believe that someone that aware and well-read and familiar with Christian exegesis does not know what the antichrist is

Iran Is Losing This War, and the Global Balance of Power Is Shifting

 

We’re approaching 60 days of the so-called Iran war, and we’re still getting these loud voices that Donald Trump has failed, that the war’s not going well.

It’s completely nonempirical. It’s antithetical to the evidence. 

Here we are at 60 days, and Iran is losing about $500 million in input per day. It’s running out of storage space in a week or two for its daily output of oil, at which point they either have to stop pumping or they’re going to have—if they don’t stop pumping—their wells will collapse. 

They either have to stop pumping, or they have to build, as fast as they can, storage facilities, which will be known to us and we can take out. 

So, they’re at the brink economically. They have no military ability. The course of the war, how it ends, is entirely in the hands of the United States. It depends on whether you want an unconditional surrender and you want to pay an extra price—maybe another month or two—with economic strangulation, or you want to use air power to take out bridges, and you can do that. 

What I’m getting at is it’s not a military problem like Afghanistan and Helmand Province, or the Marines having to go into Fallujah in Iraq. It’s entirely a political problem. It’s not a military problem. The military problem has been solved. It’s just a question of how much political price does President Donald Trump—or risk, I should say—want to take to get an unconditional surrender and the removal of the regime. 

He doesn’t need to do that. That was not one of his prewar agendas. The prewar agenda was to neutralize the nuclear proliferation of Iran, the missile and drone force, to attrite its military so it was not capable of conducting war, to stop the subsidies to its terrorist proxies, and to make sure it no longer attacked Americans and our allies as it has for 47 years. These have mostly been met—not quite, but mostly. 

So, what are the ripples strategically? Well, just recently, OPEC has announced—I should say the United Arab Emirates and perhaps Oman as well—that they don’t want to be in OPECopens in a new tab. Remember about OPEC: It was formed in 1973, and the whole purpose was to drive up the price of oil, and they did that by not pumping what they could pump. 

So, right now, they have each individual country has a quota, and that’s only about 70% or 80% of what they could pump if they were not in the cartel. That is what the United States is pumping right now—maximum. Russia will probably be pumping at maximum very soon. Venezuela will be pumping at maximum very soon. 

But what you’re talking about is 2 million barrels, maybe, from the UAE alone. Maybe if Saudi Arabia gets out, they can pump another 20%. What I’m getting at is the long-range strategic value of the Straits of Hormuz are going to decline because all of these countries, once they see one person getting out and taking advantage of these high prices, they will swarm to get out. 

But once they get out and pump more oil—and they’re immediately capable of pumping more oil—the price will drop, and the Straits of Hormuz will not be so important. And that will not be good for Iran if it has oil wells at all in two or three weeks. 

The other thing to remember is China. Everybody talks about, “Well, China, China, China.”

China hasn’t come out well. It had threatened to go into Taiwan all of the Biden administration. Year after year, it issued videos of bombing Japan, threatening to take out Taiwan, lecturing people: “Don’t tell us that we can’t take it.” 

Pundits saying that they were emboldened by the Russians. I never understood that—Russia is in a Stalingrad-like quagmire. But once they looked at this type of war—an air war in a gulf—and they were thinking, we have to transmit, what, 300,000 troops or so across 110 miles of open sea. And from what we can see from the Americans, the Israelis, these Western powers have enormous ability to flood the zone with drones, with missiles, sophisticated air defenses, submarine drones, surface drones. It could be a nightmare. 

And that’s not talking about the Taiwanese ability to defend themselves as well. So, in a cost-benefit analysis, I think the message is the United States can pretty much do what it wants militarily, and China will be somewhat deterred. 

Remember that it has lost its hold in Venezuela and in Iran. It was basically, along with Russia, controlling the Maduro regime, buying their sanctioned oil for a discount, selling them arms, trying to spread their influence in Latin America—the Panama Canal was a good example. 

And the same was true of Iran. They were buying sanctioned oil at a discount and then flooding Iran with sophisticated weapons and hoping Iran would use those weapons to hamper or neuter Israel and attack United States installations, as they did in Syria and Iraq. And then China wanted Iran—which they did—to supply Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. 

That’s going to be over with. Iran is broke. The people will not stand for—or the government won’t be so stupid when they’re impoverished—to start giving, what, $50-$60 million a month to Arab terrorists just so they can cause havoc when the people are starving. 

And they’ve lost probably a half a trillion dollars of a 50-year investment in their military, industrial, and nuclear industries. 

So, China’s on the losing end. Russia had lost the Assad regime. They were kicked out of the Middle East. They have a temporary little blip because the price of oil is going up. But as I said, with the breakup of OPEC and the increased production in Venezuela and the United States, as soon as this thing calms down, the price of oil is going to crash, and Russia will be a big loser in this. 

More importantly, they saw, again, a demonstration of U.S. air power, and maybe by extension, they correlated it with NATO proficiency. So I think they will try to get out of the war and get as much territory as they can along the existing battlefield today—maybe call it a DMZ. But they’re running out of people and money. They’ve lost a million and a half soldiers. 

And so, this war probably reminded them that they don’t have very many strategic options elsewhere, and they can’t develop them as long as they’re tied down in Ukraine. 

Europe was a big, big, big loser. They had forged a relationship with Donald Trump. They had agreed for a 2% and had met that 2% investment of GDP in defense, but they were talking about 5%. NATO had called Trump “Daddy,” and then all of a sudden Trump assumed they were normal allies. 

So, when he went in there, he didn’t want to disclose what he was going to do because he felt the U.S. Left and the Congress, or the Europeans would tell—and they would have revealed any type of surprise. 

But more importantly, he felt that the Spanish, the Italians, the British, the French—all of them—would just say, “No comment,” or “This is a United States effort. We support our NATO ally,” and then call him up and say “Donald, were not going to talk about it but use our airspace, use out NATO bases you pay for most of them. And this is what were gonna do but were gonna do it under the radar.”

No. Instead, they pandered to their Islamic constituencies, their left-wing constituencies. In Spain, even in Italy with Meloni, they said: No bombers in Sicily. No planes in Spain. Can’t fly over France. Can’t use Diego Garcia unless it’s for defensive purposes. 

What is a defensive strike? What does that mean? We’ll let you have a missile battery if somebody tries to destroy our base—we’ll allow you to defend our base—but don’t take off anywhere and attack anybody. 

It was absolutely ridiculous. Europe came off really badly—really badly. 

And then they made it worse when they said they were going to patrol the strait and then they realized the Strait might be kinetic, and they would have to use some force if we were to turn it over to them and they don’t have that force. So, it’s all talk, talk, talk, and it’s based on envy and anger at the United States. 

And it’s a very dangerous game they’re playing because at some point the United States says: We love you. Europe’s a great place. You’ve got problems—just settle them yourself. Maybe we’ll have a coalition of the willing, just like you did in Serbia. 

You went into Serbia—that wasn’t a NATO country. Kosovo—you weren’t protecting a NATO country. You went into Libya—those people weren’t in NATO. But you freelance all the time—in Chad, in the Falklands you people—and we always help you. And then when we want to freelance, you’re reluctant. 

So, go ahead, do what you want, but count us out. 

And finally, the American Left kept saying the war was lost—the war was lost—the war was lost. Donald Trump blew it. 

Don’t count him out. We have six months before the midterms. The price of oil could crash. A lot of the things Donald Trump put into practice—with the big, beautiful bill, deregulation, tax cuts, enormous amount of foreign investment—all of that has plenty of time to kick in in August or July and have a stronger economy than we do now, with cheap oil. 

More importantly, he can say that in his regime, his realm, his tenure, he neutralized the threat from Venezuela. It’s not spreading communism throughout South America—Latin America, and he neutralized the Middle East in a way that all seven prior presidents had dreamed and had never done.

The Iran War: Collapse, Chaos, and What Comes Next

 

We’re in the eighth week of the Iran waropens in a new tab, and things are starting to heat up even though there’s not kinetic action. What do I mean by heating up? The Iranian government has ceased to exist. We don’t know, and the Iranians don’t know who holds power. 

There is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. There is the theocracy, there is the elected people in Parliament, and there is a regular military. And those four groups operate in schizophrenic fashion.

Sometimes they freelance and appear very hard line and give press releases that they’re not going to negotiate and anybody who negotiates is a sellout and blah, blah, blah, because they are afraid each faction of being called by the other too pro-Western or not hard enough on the United States. 

By the same token, sometimes they give off signals that they would like to negotiate because that is predicated on popular resistance. When you get rumors, which are increasing, that the people are getting more and more restive, some of them are being armed, then people think, well, given the crimes that we have committed, should this revolution next time around succeed, we’re all going to have a collective noose around our neck. 

So, the bottom line, we can’t figure out who’s saying what. We were supposed to negotiate this weekend, and Donald Trump was going to send Mr. [Jared] Kushner and [Steve] Witkoff over all the way to Pakistan. I think all of us are a little bit dubious, given Pakistan’s long history that’s checkered with the United States, and it’s an Islamic country, a very impoverished country. 

But Donald Trump has very good relations with the foreign minister, the head of defense and the president. But nonetheless, he canceled that because he couldn’t get any negotiation that offered any chance of success from this motley group. 

So, what are we gonna do now in week eight? We’ve got a little over six months from the midterms. The war, even though it’s been spectacularly successful militarily, people want it over, even though Wall Street has adjusted. 

And we’re at record highs now with stocks, which suggests a lot of brilliant people think not only is the war gonna be over very soon, but it’s gonna be especially beneficial to the West in general and to the United States in particular, and especially since we’re making enormous profit selling oil to anybody who can get ahold of it. 

That said, what do we do at this point? There is a blockade. Time is on our side. The Iranian’s strategy has been delay, negotiate, delay, lie, backpedal, go forward, confuse, delay, delay, delay. Why are they trying to do it? They’re hoping that public opinion in the United States on the side of the Left, as we’ve said before, when you have Sen. [Chris] Murphy saying it’s awesome when he digests propaganda from the Iranian Ministry of Information and says that boats have broken the blockade, he likes that. 

They pick up on that, they absorb it, and that gives them confidence to keep delaying. They feel that they can last for six months. They cannot last for six months. The blockade is working, the de-banking is working. Their oil wells are reaching a critical point in a week or so, where they either have to shut down with irreparable damage or they have to find some cast-off tankers or somebody to store this oil that’s coming out of the ground, or maybe just to dig holes and pump it in. 

But they are desperate. They’re losing $400 million to $500 million in economic input, and it’s starting to hurt all four of these cliques that claim they represent the government.

So, what are we supposed to do about it? I would suggest that Donald Trump does not differentiate these PT boats, whether they’re laying mines or boarding ships. 

Whatever they are doing, they should not be in the Strait of Hormuz. We should have an ultimatum that says any boat, for any reason, that’s a military craft that leaves an Iranian port should be considered an enemy engaged in hostile action. Whether it’s boarding tankers or it’s laying mines, and they will be destroyed. 

That’s all they have. That’s the only military arm that matters now. We’re not gonna go in there on the ground and fight their army. Their air defenses are shot. Their navy otherwise is destroyed, as is their Air Force. Just finish the job and say nobody gets in any ship that’s a military craft and gets into the Gulf. 

And then at some point, in two weeks, I would give a week or two, and if these demands are not made—that they surrender their enriched uranium, they surrender their ballistic missile fleet, and they cut off the subsidies to their terrorist proxies—then the United States says these are the targets that are going to be hit. 

And then we’re gonna go home. We don’t have to say we’re gonna go home, but we should just go home. And those targets would be a series of bridges, transportation hubs, media and television stations. And if you want bridges that have dual use for the military. They don’t have to be done all at once. 

They just say, if you’re not gonna negotiate and you insist on retaining the possibility or the chance or the real viability of a nuclear weapons program, and you’re still going to build drones and ballistic missiles and attack your neighbors and disrupt the oil supply of the Gulf and attack Israel and kill Americans, then this is what’s going to happen. 

We are going to systematically start to hit things to accelerate the economic blockade, and I think very quickly they will concede. If they do not concede, we should systematically go down the list of targets. And then when we reach a point in which our military feels that we’ve so crippled the military-industrial complex and the nuclear complex of Iran, that we can go home, we can leave a carrier on rotating duty near the Gulf—the Persian Gulf—and go home and concentrate on the economy.

And I think Iran will look at themselves and they’ll see that we have no economy, we’re flat broke, we’ve lost 50-year investments, probably a half a trillion dollars of military infrastructure and weapons of arsenal. And the people will take care of the rest—the Iranian people