Maine Journalist Almost Got Murdered by a Crazy Person and It's All on Camera

 

Maine Wire reporter Joe Sokol was taping a segment outside a methadone clinic when he was nearly run down by a crazed motorist who was unhappy about what Sokol said was an invasion of privacy. Sokol said the driver might have been under the influence, as the driver’s speech seemed mumbled and slurred. Sokol was well within his rights: he was not on the clinic’s property but across the street. 

The driver drove off, made a U-turn in the nearby parking lot, and then gunned it toward Sokol, who got out of the way. Sokol recorded the driver’s tags as he sped away. Sokol was reporting on the clinic, which has received $25 million in taxpayer funds. This isn’t the first time Maine Wire reporters have been assaulted or accosted while doing their job. Sokol was shoved by an anti-Trump protester in July. (via Maine Wire):

A Maine Wire reporter was involved in a potentially dangerous confrontation with a driver Thursday morning while reporting outside a Bangor methadone clinic.

Reporter Joe Sokol was conducting reporting from public property near Bangor Comprehensive Treatment Center, also known as Discovery House BR Inc., at 689 Odlin Road when a driver confronted him and attempted to interfere with his work.

Maine Wire Editor-in-Chief Steve Robinson said the driver recognized Sokol as a reporter and confronted him in an apparent effort to interfere with his reporting.

“The bedlamite identified Sokol as a journalist and expressed a clear intent to stop him from conducting routine journalism from public property,” Robinson said in a statement.

Robinson alleged that the driver then attempted to strike Sokol with a vehicle, characterizing the incident as an attempted killing.

Sokol was able to move out of the vehicle’s path and was not injured.

Robinson said Sokol also recorded the vehicle’s license plate immediately after the encounter, allowing police to identify the driver.

“Sokol’s quick-thinking and training immediately allowed him to preserve the license plate,” Robinson said. “He is unharmed and safe.”

The Maine Wire identified the vehicle as a blue Jeep Compass bearing Maine registration 841-LZD.

[…]

Sokol had been reporting on Bangor Comprehensive Treatment Center, an active medication-assisted-treatment facility that provides methadone treatment. The Maine Wire said the facility has received roughly $25 million in taxpayer funding.

The incident comes amid a series of confrontations involving Maine Wire reporters this year. In January, reporter Jon Fetherston was physically confronted while covering a Lewiston City Council meeting, and in July he was shoved, spat on and struck in the head with a skateboard while livestreaming an anti-ICE protest in Biddeford; a man was later charged with assault in connection with that incident.

It Isn't Racist to Not Want to Die

 Facts don’t have to be warm and friendly to keep you alive.

One of science's biggest challenges is separating an experiment from its surroundings. When measuring the energy of a chemical reaction, one has to completely isolate the experiment from its surroundings. Doing so might only require running the reaction in a thick container of Styrofoam so that no energy comes into or goes out of the reaction chamber. A very expensive accelerator (CERN) in Europe had electrical noise, and they couldn’t understand why. For a prize of a bottle of champagne, they challenged their scientists to find a solution. A fellow looked at a local train schedule and determined that a train that ran near the facility perfectly accounted for the timing of the unwanted noise.

With our Flydubai plane, we have a perfectly isolated “community”. The numbers keep changing, but apparently there were around 180 people on the plane. Most were Israelis, which no doubt includes Jews, Arab Muslims and Arab Christians. Few Emiratis visit Israel, but we’ll assume that cabin crew and security included some UAE citizens. There were the two ostensibly white Christian backup pilots who landed the plane. All of the people listed above wanted to live. Each expected to arrive in Tel Aviv and continue with his or her life. And then there was the Omani Muslim pilot. As President Trump mentioned, we still don’t know if he was a terrorist or a “whack job”. If he was a terrorist, and that’s where I would place my bet, then we have the case of one guy who wanted to die and take with him 179 other people who wanted to live. And this is the problem of Islam in the West.

An interesting clause in the Abraham Accords is that any pilots flying between Israel and other countries must come from states that recognize both Israel and the Arab country source/destination. By those rules, the Omani pilot should have been disqualified from being in the right seat of the 737 Max. Why was he there? This question will have to be answered by UAE officials as part of their investigation. The reason why that stipulation is in the agreement is obvious: an Iraqi-born pilot or similar might have a hankering to kill 200 Jews and get his 72 virgins. The US does not need 150 million jihadi Muslims to kiss the country goodbye. Rather, a relatively small number of determined terrorists with Muslim Brotherhood financing and backing could cause complete mayhem and destruction of people, property, and economic well-being. Nineteen hijackers killed 3,000 Americans, shut down the stock market for days, ended flights into and out of the US for weeks, and completely changed our lives (TSA, etc.).

One can ignore this reality. That’s what Jews in southern Israel did. They gave Gazans jobs and took sick Gazans to Israeli hospitals. They were murdered like everybody else. Some think that by being nice and showing one’s good side, he will convince Muslims to like them and not kill them. Wrong! And in light of this reality, the West might want to take into consideration a smidgen of “racism” so as not to commit communal suicide.

In our desire to rewrite history, many like to shame or point a finger at the United States of the 1940s when it sent Japanese and other Axis-born immigrants to camps to move them away from the coasts and to keep an eye on them. This program sounds downright racist and bigoted, but if one was alive at the time, he would be the one breaking down doors to get his recently arrived Japanese neighbors onto a train to Montana. Racism is doing something evil to another for no real reason. No blacks in our restaurant! That’s bigotry and hatred. But if there are Muslims who wish to kill Westerners, then Western leaders have every right and even an obligation to protect their citizens. We see in Europe that their leaders don’t care about putting a couple hundred or even thousands of illegal African/Muslim immigrants in a small town, and if women get attacked, so be it. One may be accused of hysteria, but as several Israeli leaders said, they would rather be loathed and alive rather than dead and celebrated.

Islam is not a religion as much as a political movement with religious trappings. One cannot separate the “let’s kill all of the infidels” and violent jihad aspect of Islam from the prayers in mosques and fasting during Ramadan. Muslims in the UAE and, say, Malaysia somehow don’t seem to have the violent streak of those in Gaza and Tehran. Still, it was not that long ago (a decade) when the UAE was financing Hamas, and at this time, Malaysia has no relations with Israel. Claims of Islamophobia and racism are used in order to prevent non-Muslims from protecting themselves from people who, for ideological reasons, want to kill them.

The Indian-born pilot did not have any interest in killing the 179 souls under his command. The Air France pilot of the plane hijacked to Uganda refused to leave with the remaining non-Jewish passengers as he told the hijackers that he was responsible for his Jewish passengers and would not leave without them. He was rescued along with the others when Yoni Netanyahu led forces into Uganda to free those still held hostage.

In England, one sees violence and actual terror performed by recent Islamic arrivals, second- and third-generation Muslims as well as converts to Islam. The West doesn’t understand what kind of time bomb it has willingly and cluelessly brought into its midst. Just as nobody from circa 1990 United States thought much of 19 Muslims taking flight lessons at various US flight schools, today’s leaders aren’t thinking much of thousands and thousands of young, military-aged Muslim men coming to their shores. I don’t know what happened near the RAF base with the vans and five guys who were arrested. Was it a terror plot? Were they Muslims? Why were they released to house arrest? For all of the information at our fingertips, we don’t know everything. Let’s say that the Omani pilot says that Iran sent him, but the Saudis are terrified of renewed fighting. They won’t let Israel know the truth and will claim that the pilot was a kook and nothing more.

It’s not racist to not want to die. It’s not Islamophobic to note, as a Kuwaiti editor once did: not all Muslims are terrorists, while all terrorists seem to be Muslims. I asked a rabbi once about how one should look at and treat Muslims in Israel. He told me a story of a friend whose car broke down near an Arab town in the “West Bank”. As he sat there, he saw locals approaching and figured that the road would soon be named in memoriam after him. The guys approached and asked if they could help. The rabbi concluded that it’s not such a simple equation. I know of Arab Muslim doctors who have thrown themselves into saving Jewish Israeli patients. That said, one does not have to bury his head in the sand or go DEI and ignore the facts that A) some percentage of Muslims are into violent jihad against “infidels” and B) the remaining Muslim community is not doing anything about them. When some fake ultraorthodox Jews marched with Iran, Belgian Jewish schools threw their kids out of their institutions. Get out and stay out.

The West is either at a crossroads or lost. Europe doesn’t have the moral fortitude to recognize its destruction and right the ship. The US has the time and leadership to change things. But change must come now.

Gavin Newsom Adds Woke and Islamic Holidays to the California Calendar

 The bill updated the list of California holidays to include Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, allowing for school closures and work exemptions for state employees. While the legislation recognizes the new holidays on the California calendar, state employee observers are required to use holiday credits to use them, and courts and other offices will remain open. Students are to be issued excused absences when requested.


Additional legislation of a similar vein signed by Newsom added “Native American Day” to the docket of paid holidays. The additional costs of payroll expenses and lost productivity are expected to cost California taxpayers up to $20 million annually. Newsom hopes that the added holiday will “challenge misconceptions about California Indians and address what it describes as an incomplete understanding of Native American societies in the teaching of California history,” according to the California Post.

The new addition raises the number of California state holidays to 12, nearly 5 percent of the weekdays in a given year.

Democrats Are Coming After You and It Won’t End Well

 When someone shows you who they are, believe them. When someone tells you they’re coming after you, believe them and prepare accordingly. Democrats have been showing us who they are for decades – monsters willing to do absolutely anything to obtain power and abuse the ever-loving hell out of it once they do have it, so they never let it go again. They’re telling everyone their plan, how they will bury their talons so deep into power if they get it again that the options for prying it loose are limited and as awful as they are.

What will these people do to get back in power? Anything, literally.

Democrats have always been infested with violent radicals, but they’ve been able to win elections without surrendering to them. As their policies have failed in cities and states across the country, that ability to win has faded as people noticed. Then Obamacare failed, as designed but much sooner than planned, and fewer and fewer people were willing to trust the people who designed the failed system to “fix” it again.

Democrats could no longer attract enough voters to win elections in places they hadn’t drawn the lines or absolutely dominated, so they had to embrace the fringe.

Honestly, I thought former President Joe Biden might have stood up to these lunatics when he got into the race in 2020. Everyone else in their field was on the “America is fundamentally racist and awful” and “Israel is the root of all evil” train; I figured there was a lane on the left for someone to stand up and tell those crackpots off. If anyone could pull it off, I figured it would be the cranky old man. But Biden was even more spineless than I’d imagined – rather than stand up to the left and for the country, he joined them and tried to out-crazy them all.

That’s when I knew there was nothing redeeming left in the Democrat Party, that not a single candidate in a large field even bothered to stand up for the greatness of the United States, even the old guy with the resume long enough to do it without any personal electoral consequences. None of them dared try a different path; it was all obedience to the anti-American left, period.

Since then, it’s only gotten worse, and they’ve only gotten less popular. In fact, polls indicate that the only thing less popular than Republicans is Democrats. If they manage to win either or both chambers of Congress next month, it won’t be because they’ve won people to their side; it will be a result of anger taken out on Republicans over the discontent of the moment.

Democrats won’t admit that, and they won’t let that give them a second’s pause over what they’ll try to do with any power they might get. The Nazis didn’t win anywhere close to a majority in 1932 (only 37 percent), but that didn’t hinder their goosestepping over the rights of everyone else, and Democrats will be no different.

Some of their politicians are laying out the pathway Democrats will try to take – the Democrats Rep. Jamie Raskin (MD-8)/ Rep. Ro Khanna (CA-17) sleaze – say they will spend their time and our money investigating everything to financially punish anyone who served in the Trump administration. Others – the intellectual “hub” of the left – are less polished or interested in appearing less fascist.

Podcast host and Botox disaster, Jennifer Welch, wants to “restructure” the Supreme Court. She demonstrates a puppy’s understanding of the concept of a co-equal branch of government and wants to impeach all the conservative Justices because they exist in a way that displeases her.

MS NOW’s Simone Sanders Townsend wants Republicans to be afraid of what Democrats will do with whatever power they get because, as she puts it, “I'm of the belief that some people probably need to go to jail. And that should not be a radical concept. That's not retribution, that's doing what the hell needs to be done,” like a good little Nazi.

Rachel Maddow agrees, saying Trump administration “people who are committing those things now should know that they are not in a permanent position of power, and when other people take power, which is going to happen in a few weeks, they are going to have to preserve their documents and answer for what they did and pay for their crimes...”

“Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime,” comrade.

If they’re saying these things in public, what do you think they’re planning for you in private? They are, after all, of the political philosophy that is responsible for the deaths of more than 100 million human beings for reasons ranging from incompetence to malice, from starvation to “reeducation” camps. If you don’t think it can happen here, you didn’t notice how it has happened everywhere it has.

Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed people to do incredible evil and brutality. That’s the story of the 20th century; they intend to make it the story of the 21st, if we don’t beat them.

Vote like your life depends on it, because it probably does.

Why Ireland Is So Hostile to Israel

 

person 1: So, I was one-quarter Irish and one-quarter Welsh and one-half Swedish and—  

person 2: I think that’s 100% there.  

person 1: Yeah. But I know I have Mongol blood in there somewhere.  

person 2: Sorry. Well, let’s do a 23andMe test someday. My great-grandfather was the grand marshal of the New York St. Patrick’s Day Parade, so that kind of makes me Irish royalty. 

But I have no tolerance for Irish antisemitism, and we’ve got it by the boatload.  

person 1: Brendan O’Neill, did you see him, his little video? Brendan O’Neill. You know, he writes for Spiked.  

person 2: Yeah. I have him in my newsletter this week.  

person 1: Yeah, it was really good. He said he, he was good. 

And then, the other British, you know, our friend that was on the cruises.  

person 2: What? Douglas Murray?  

person 1: Yes. Douglas wrote or did a very good interview about Ireland, and it was full of passion. And he was really angry about it, given their moralistic lectures to everybody about—  

person 2: And their history …  

person 1: And their history as an oppressed people. 

And I was really shocked by it. And they wouldn’t even shake the hands of the Israeli athletes after a soccer match. And it’s gonna hurt the—wearing armbands. It’s gonna hurt the Israeli economy. It’s in a wartime footing to begin with, and then if all these countries boycott it in various ways.

If you say you’re boycotting products that were produced by settlement, many industries—it doesn’t really … They’re just gonna boycott anything Israeli. And what I don’t understand is they—there’s a lot of new videos coming out on October 7th.  

So, there’s 1,200 people that went in there that were killed and slaughtered by 5,000 Hamas, but there was also 2,000 civilians that came onward. There were people to rape, people to kill, people to mutilate. 

They had planned it. The 20,000 workers were in on it. Many of them, they were giving surveillance to Hamas. They were hiding weapons in advance. And they committed atrocities. And then nobody … The Irish don’t, the Spanish don’t, the Germans don’t. They don’t. The American Left doesn’t. They never say, “What would you do?” 

All they say is, “Well, this was earned,” or, “This was inevitable.” But there hadn’t been a Jewish person or an Israeli person in Gaza since 2006. But the U.N. had poured in $20-plus billion, most of it from Americans and Europeans. And remember the greenhouses, Jack, where that American philanthropist gave $50 million worth of very lucrative high-tech greenhouses to ship winter vegetables to a very—in a very profitable fashion? 

And what did they do as soon as they got it? They looted it, destroyed it. They’d rather have nothing than have Jewish fingerprints on it. And then they had an election, as they always in one election, one time. And they’re—and so, for the next, what, 18 years, they had their country. It was autonomous. They were short, of course, fuel, power, water. 

I don’t know, 10%, 20% of those necessities were provided by the hated Israelis, and they left them alone. In fact, they kind of favored them. And the wall is very impressive. I’ve seen it in Israel. It’s not a wall of iron at all, the Gaza wall. 20,000 day laborers getting three times the wage, so when somebody does that to you, then what do you do? 

They never tell us. I guess they mean kind of put your little hands up like a little puppy and say, “Please, please, UN, I confess to all my sins. Will you give me absolution because I deserved this massacre?” Would that have worked?  

And then remember, everybody, that the architect of this mini-genocide was Mr. Yahya Sinwar. He’s the one you saw hiding from that drone that took him out. But what you don’t see is nearly 20 years ago, he was a terrorist murderer who was in an Israeli prison for murder, and he got dizzy, Jack. He had a headache, and he had a cancer—a non-cancerous but would’ve been fatal meningioma brain tumor. 

And so, according to Nicholas Kristof, who says the Israelis use dogs and then they defy the laws of biology and zoology and make them perform stunts never been seen before to rape, excuse me, rape Palestinian prisoners. They did something even worse, Jack. They took Mr. Sinwar in and they stripped him of his clothes and they put a humiliating gown on him. 

Then they put him in a sterile white room, almost like a prison, and then they operated, and they cut open his head. Can you imagine that? And they removed—Yes, they did remove the brain tumor, and yes, it did save his life, but it was so traumatic to have Jews do that to you. And he therefore was angry at them, so he organized October 7th. 

Isn’t that a terrible thing to do, is to take a Hamas torturer and operate and take his brain tumor and save his life?  

person 2: Yes. It’s a high point of gratitude, from what we’ve seen. You know, there’s something about the Irish, if I may speak broadly. A few maybe disconnected points, Victor. 

I mean, we know the Irish immigrants, here in the Civil War, they were some of the bravest soldiers.

person 1: Yes, they were. 

person 2: And after the Civil War, you know, when [Gen. George] Custer was wiped out, most of the names killed with him were, were Irish. 

person 1: The 7th Cavalry was mostly an Irish cavalry.  

person 2: Yeah, the “Gary Owen,” which used to be the theme song of our show. But there’s a great sense of victimhood. We talk about victimhood all the time, and the Irish have it … The Irish. A lot of Irish live and dwell and thrill to victimhood status. They have right to be PO’d at England, what England did to Ireland in the 1700s and 1800s. 

But it’s very deeply instilled in many Irish and Irish Americans.  

And also, Victor, two other things. The Irish left is, is really left. One of their patron saints is Che Guevara, for example. Also, the IRA trained with the Palestinians. So, there’s this, there’s a significant connection between the— 

person 1: That was in the Tom Clancy novel, remember? 

person 2: Yeah, yeah.  

person 1: Yeah.  

person 2: Well …  

person 1: And remember that the Irish prime minister in World War. Eamon de—  

person 2: Valera?  

person 1: Yes. In World War II, not only knew of submarines from the Germans that were off the Irish coast, but he had been warned by Winston Churchill, “If you allow them to land, even though you’re a neutral country, we’re going to consider you a belligerent.” 

person 2: Uh-huh.  

person 1: “And you better have an air force to stop what we’re going to do to you.” So, they had to threaten them. And of course, when Hitler died, he sent condolences to the Nazi Party.  

person 2: I think he went in person.  

person 1: Yeah, I think he did.  

person 2: He went to the German embassy to sign the condolence book. 

person 1: He did. He did. 

He did. So they were pro-Nazi, and we have the Spanish prime minister who was very—probably the most anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish leader in Europe. And we know the history of [Francisco] Franco, who would have joined the Nazis except the price that he demanded from Hitler, a joint invasion by land and sea of Gibraltar to get it, and most of French Vichy Morocco. 

Hitler said it was an eight-hour argument, and I’d rather have my tooth pulled than deal with Franco again. And then we have, of course, the present-day Italians that are very anti-Israel, and we know what [Benito] Mussolini—I think [Benjamin] Netanyahu mentioned that in his speech. So it’s very strange for these people to lecture on morality. 

person 2: Yeah.  

person 1: I did a debate, Jack. It was one of—I’ve had three occasions on Piers Morgan recently. One was with a fanatic professor from the Middle East who was, I thought, just spouted lies. The second one was from a Chinese communist who was parading around as a disinterested professor in Australia who told us that Mao Zedong did not commit any mass murderers. 

I got so angry. It was right after—not too far off my operation, but the first one, my heart rate went up. I have my Apple Watch, 135. The second one was only 125, and then yesterday I did, or maybe it was Monday, I debated a democratic socialist professor who gave me the standard Marxist exegesis that United States was hopeless, its economy was destroyed, socialists were taking over, Europe was going to be socialist. 

And then every time I tried to politely keep calm and said, “Could I just say something? Lowest poverty rate in history last month. Highest per capita family income at $87,000 in history. Your socialist communist China is $10 trillion smaller than our economy despite four times the population. Your socialist EU with 100 million more people is also $10 trillion smaller than our economy. 

And third quarter Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta revised 5% growth they think, economic growth. Record numbers of orders for computers, heavy durable goods, et cetera. Record foreign investment. Unemployment 4.1. 140,000—  

person 2: Just something the other day, Victor, about this, maybe you mentioned the steel factory, yes, in Iowa. Monster investment, $15 billion. 

person 1: So, I was trying to tell him, and what was the socialist … Everybody should, I think, pay attention to this because it shows you what will happen if they take control. The first thing he said is they do three things, and this fits Saeed too. First, it’s ad hominem. 

“What do you do? You’re ignorant. You don’t have any credentials.” OK. I’m a … Second thing, they’re arrogant. “I’m a Ph.D., and I have a university position. I’m an economist.” Second thing.  

Third, they’re vulgar. “You have your head up Trump’s blank blank.” And Piers was just watching us, and I said to him, I said, “Is this serious? Is this a joke? What is going on here?” I couldn’t say a word without him interrupting, and I’m not gonna go on that show. I try to just— 

person 2:  Were you asking Piers that live while this—?  

person 1: Yes, while he was yelling and screaming while I was—he screamed for five minutes, and then it was my turn, and halfway through, he interrupted and he said, “You’re just making up all this data.” 

And I said, “You can find it. It’s out there. It’s in the public domain. You don’t believe we had 140,000 jobs? You don’t think the poverty … “

“You’re lying. It’s all doctored. They … Your GDP is all wrong.”  

Wow. And then he started, you know, “You have no credentials. You’re not educated. I’m a professor.” 

“Get, get … You have your head up blank blank,” very vulgar. Yeah. And Piers, that’s what he does. He invites people on. It’s kind of like a politicized version of Jerry Springer, you know what I mean?  

person 2: Yeah, yeah. 

person 1: And he never tells you, he never tells your … Megan’s a wonderful person that books for me, and he never tells her what I’m going to do. 

He said he was going to … This was the first time after the book was published, so I thought we were gonna discuss the book. But it had nothing to do with the book. He just mentioned it one time, and then it was lucha libre, and he got …  

So, when you go on there, I’m not an extremist, but he thinks that if you get a Chinese communist apologist or an American professor living in the UAE who hates Israel, or you get a commie socialist person who will scream and yell, then I’m supposed to what? 

Refute? You can’t talk to them because they’re complete ideologues. No. So it’s not… You think you go on there for the benefit of our listeners and us who are on the conservative side to try to get out in the public domain that these people are completely bogus, erroneous. But because it’s bloodsport for these TV shows— 

I don’t want them to be on any one side. I would just like them to say, “Please do not interrupt the other speaker. Please no ad hominem attacks. Please get your facts straight about your own credentials versus the other person’s.” 

person 2: If the guy’s being a jerk, turn off his microphone. 

person 1: Yeah. 

Is Iran’s Regime About to Crack?

 

Sometimes when you’re in the middle of revolutionary times, it’s sort of like being in the eye of the hurricane. You can’t really detect or fathom what’s going on, even though the changes are tumultuous. That’s what’s happening in the world today. 

The world is radically changing, and we don’t even feel it, or we don’t appreciate what’s happening. All we’re hearing in this midterm cycle are three things: affordability, affordability, affordability. And we’ve talked on earlier occasions that affordability is a result, the worry over affordability, of a 21% inflation just a year and a half ago after the Biden administration finished its four-year tenure, and a 30% inflation rise in things that matter: cars, insurance, fuel, power, health care, housing. 

So, we don’t really hear much. We hear the Iran war, the Iran war, the Iran war, the Iran war, and we hear, thirdly, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. But take a deep breath before the midterms and look at the world as it is now versus what it was, say, five years ago. Russia has been fighting since Feb. 28, 2022. 

Its invasion, even if it does annex some of the Ukrainian territory, has been a colossal disaster. Its economy is in shambles. It’s under drone attacks. Its oil and natural gas have been embargoed. It has suffered 1.5 million dead and wounded. Its political leadership is in disarray. 

It’s lost its proxies in Venezuela, in Syria, and Iran.  

China’s not much better. It just fired its entire top echelon of its military. Its economy is stagnant. Its fertility is 1.0. It’s a shrinking, aging population. About 400,000 Chinese have been completely shut out of the 1.4 billion population who is supposedly in a capitalist, proto-capitalist, quasi-capitalist revolution, but they’re not feeling it. 

In other words, China has enormous problems. When you look elsewhere, as I said so often before, Latin America is not in a pink tide. Don’t listen to the old words of John Kerry that the Monroe Doctrine is dead. It is not flipping toward the left. Maybe Brazil and maybe Cuba, and there are those governments on their last legs, and maybe a few countries like Nicaragua and one or two in the Caribbean. 

Otherwise, you have about 28, 27 of the 32 Latin-speaking countries, Spanish-speaking countries, and some in the Caribbean have completely flipped through free and fair elections with the aid and help of the United States. [The U.S. Agency for International Development], that was propping up left-wing movements, is over with. 

The Chinese controlling the exits and entry of the Panama Canal is over with. [Nicolás] Maduro sending drugs and millions of people northward who were criminals is over with. And people in Latin America see the American economy, and they want to be a part of it. That is a completely radical change in the status quo.

People have been screaming about Greenland, Greenland, Greenland. 

Yes, it’s unfortunate that Donald Trump is hyperbolic. Yes, he says things that are crazy on Truth Social. That’s the art of the deal. But the aim of the United States, as it was during World War II vis-à-vis Greenland, was to preserve this continental-size North American island, so to speak, in Western hands with it to be defensible and protected from hostile powers who want to use it as a base in the North Atlantic or to infringe on Western claims to the Arctic Circle and Arctic Ocean. 

And that can’t be handled alone by the 50,000 people of Greenland nor tiny little Denmark. World War II proved that when the Nazis overran Denmark, noble as it was, in three days and Greenland was lost and the United States stepped in, put bases there, protected it from the Axis incursions. After the war was over, it handed it back over to Denmark, and it protected it from the Russians for Denmark. 

All Trump was trying to say is, with new missiles and new technologies, the shortest route to the United States is over the Arctic from our hostile powers in China and Russia, and we’re not going to leave Greenland ripe to be picked by these powers. And so, now we have a new agreement, and the Danes have been wonderful. 

Trump has been wonderful. The Greenlanders have been wonderful. Everybody says, let the Americans build bases and protect NATO’s interest and the Western Alliance’s interest in Greenland. The Greenlanders will see prosperity from these bases. Denmark will retain sovereignty. It’ll still have Greenland on its coat of arms. 

It’ll still brag that it has this huge continental colony, so to speak. Fine. All we need to do is make sure that this is a Western entity, and it serves Western interest, and that’s happened. The same thing is going on in the Middle East very quickly. We are one country away from flipping the entire Middle East. 

This is not the world in which the Soviets were running Egypt or Saddam Hussein was in Iraq, or there was a crazy lunatic Russian Assad dynasty in Syria. It’s just Iran. The Gulf States have divorced themselves from al-Qaeda and ISIS. No more subsidies. They wanna become wealthy and prosperous and secure. 

And they’re talking more with Israel than they are with other Muslim countries. They see Israel as not an existential threat, but the enemy of their enemy, which is Iran. 

And so, Iran, with 93 million people and a history of civilization, high technology, high learning, has been hijacked for 50 years by a terrorist theocratic regime that has done all it can to hurt the interest of Europe and the United States and the world economy at large, and was seeking a nuclear weapon to deter any retaliation against it. 

And now, after about 200 days, that regime’s military, industrial, and nuclear complex is in shambles. Its economy is broke. Its currency is worthless. And we have accomplished that for about $40 billion. That’s about the size of the current here-in-California fraud that was perpetrated on us state and you federal taxpayers by crooked politicians and shysters who were hijacking programs for the poor, the homeless, hospices, and various welfare entities, and they stole $40 billion. 

That’s what we’ve spent so far to free Iran and change the Middle East without putting one ground soldier there. We tragically lost 19 soldiers in seven months. That’s unheard of in military operations of this scale and ambition. In other words, every single day on average, one person tragically dies by accident in the U.S. military. 

From the time we first hit Iran to the present day when I’m speaking now, the number of people, American soldiers who have died in Iran are a fraction of the daily accident rate. In other words, 11 times greater have been the accidents each day of people being killed in the military cumulative over this 210-day period, 11 times more than have been lost in combat against Iran. 

That is unimaginable. 

And we’re right at the point where if we continue this anaconda strangulation of this wicked regime without putting ground troops in, without upping the military tempo unless they retaliate with the Strait of Hormuz opening up and oil prices now starting slowly to recede, this regime will crack. 

And if it should crack, it will be the most calamitous, major, significant change in world political affairs since the fall of the Berlin Wall.  

All of these things are happening as I speak around the world, and it’s all a result of a suddenly dynamic U.S. economy, a suddenly changed position of the U.S. that is not only going to advance American interests, but also collective Western interests. And its subtext is we are going to stop the influence of China and Russia, communist governments in Latin America, in the Western Hemisphere, and in Asia and Africa, and we are going to preserve Western civilization and the United States’ preeminence. 

Why? Because we feel that if the world is consensual, we’re not nation builders. We don’t want to go in and change people’s hearts and minds. We are just saying, “Don’t tread on us. There’s no better friend and no worse enemy.” But when you threaten us, if people threaten us, our allies, our interests, we are in Jacksonian fashion gonna strike back, and we have.

And the world is far better off for it. 

California’s Political Future & the UN’s Hypocrisy

 

person 2: So, lots on the agenda, but I understand you were at a political event last night with Steve Hilton. I don’t know if you had a few things to say about that first, and then—

person 1: Yeah, I was asked. He was in Fresno, and I was asked to introduce him and then have a Q&A with him.

Well, he’s the best-qualified Republican nominee in the last 20 years. He’s a polymath. He had his own tech company. He ran restaurants in London. He was the political adviser to the British prime minister, David Cameron. He had “The Next Revolution” for seven years as a Fox host, so he’s done it all, and he’s mastered California issues.

So, I asked him a series of questions on what do you do with high-speed rail? If you cancel it, what do you do with this Stonehenge infrastructure? What do you do with the Left stopping the California water project completion? What do you do with the decrepit … What do you do with California?

He had a lot of good answers. There were a lot of people there, but it’s going to be very difficult.

Xavier Becerra‘s attitude is two things. One, we, the Democrats, outnumber the Republicans in registration almost 3-to-1. And the Hispanic vote is 45% of the population. I don’t know how many actually are registered and vote according to that demographic. Maybe not as high turnout as other groups, but they are angry at [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and they tend to be very left-wing, most of them. And they’re turned off by [President] Donald Trump.

So, Becerra’s strategy is threefold. I’m going to stay in my basement, and I’m not going to campaign. I think there’s going to be a debate tonight, Friday night. I’m not going to campaign. Stay in my basement.

No. 2, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Trump is at 39%. He’s endorsed Hilton. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.

And three, I don’t want to say a word about the multibillion-dollar fraud in California. I was attorney general at one time when there was a lot of fraud that was starting. I was the head of [the Department of Health and Human Services] when the federal government’s funds were being misused. My chief of staff and [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff have dipped into campaign funds in an improper way. I don’t want to talk about any of that.

So, I’m not going to discuss anything about my allegations of corruption or incompetence. I’m not going to debate Steve Hilton’s issues. I’m going to rely on the fact that, as [Los Angeles Mayor] Karen Bass just said, the election is over because he’s a Republican. All people are going to do, she said, is look at the name and, after “D,” check it off.

And that was a very cynical thing to say. She said that he’s already through. It’s not even close.

She may be right, but if he loses, and after Spencer Pratt loses, and the billionaire tax passes, there’s going to be a lot more people leaving the state.

And what’s happening in this state is the population is staying steady because the upper-middle class and the wealthy classes are leaving, but people are coming here because of our rich social welfare cost. And people who have come here, 27% of the California population was not born in the United States, and about 40% either were not born in the United States or their parents were not born in California.

And they have birth rates much higher than the indigenous population, and they have, on average, greater social welfare needs. And 50% of all California residents are on Medi-Cal, and 40% of all births are on Medi-Cal.

So, you can see what’s happening. The people who have the higher incomes are leaving because they’re taxed to death. The people who have the lower incomes, and who are recent immigrants or whose parents were, are demanding more social welfare services and think that the original population should pay for it.

And they’re going to run out of victimizers because they see themselves as victims of a system. I don’t know why a person would come from India or China or Latin America and come here and then have all these grievances against the existing California establishment, but they do.

And it’s just not going to work. It’s a medieval state with very wealthy people and very poor people. The middle class and the upper-middle class are leaving.

person 2: All right, so let’s go ahead and turn to the U.N. What did you think of all of that walkout on [Israeli Prime Minister] Bibi Netanyahu and how he handled it?

person 1: Well, it was very funny that the Iranian government just slaughtered 30,000 to 40,000 of their own people and continues to kill them. And not as many people walked out when the Iranians spoke as when Netanyahu spoke.

There were a lot of Europeans who walked out, and he addressed that with Britain and France. It was really amazing.

You know, he said, “You call us settler colonialism. Our language is unchanged. Our people are unchanged since the third millennium BC.”

And who are talking? The French, who were the great colonizers of the Middle East, along with the British. We inherited a British colony that had taken over and was not indigenous to the Middle East.

He had a good point.

He talked about [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani trying to arrest him. You know, he said, “Why doesn’t he arrest other people?” But he won’t ever touch people from China or Iran.

Well, it basically was a diatribe, and I don’t mean that in a negative sense, against hypocrisy.

And [Argentine President Javier] Milei and a lot of this, what was interesting, a lot of people from South America, a lot of presidents with this new conservative wave that Trump gets no credit for.

But as I said earlier, of the 32 nations in South and Central America and the Caribbean, there were only about seven or eight pro-American democracies, and now there are only, I think, five that are anti-American and socialist-communist. They’re all conservative.

The Paraguay president, who was newly inaugurated, lambasted the walkout. So did Milei. He gave a great talk. He said that the U.N. was parasitical.

Something just creepy, just to finish, looking at that delegation and reading about it. You have 170 nations. The majority now are not democratic. They come over to this rich, bustling city. They cannot be prosecuted for any crimes. They’re on budgets, and then they talk about democracy, and they vote usually to condemn the United States, the host, or Israel.

But they never vote in their own home country. So, they act like they’re defenders of democracy, and then they trot back and their dictator pats them on the head because they walked out during Israel’s or Donald Trump’s talk.

But I’m getting really tired of it. I think most Americans are. It’s okay just to vent, but we could just take it out of here, and it doesn’t really contribute that much to New York.

New York’s not going to sink or swim depending on whether the U.N. is there. I think it would be a lot better for it just to move to a neutral location. Why don’t you put it in, I don’t know, the Mariana Islands or Tahiti or something, a neutral place?

person 2: Or Iceland.

person 1: Iceland.

No, they would never do that. What they want in New York is left-wing media exposure and then nice restaurants and big expense accounts.

And a lot of them are, I don’t know how to use proper language, pretty degenerate people, so they indulge in drugs, alcohol, sex, and it’s all legal. I mean, you can’t prosecute them.

They all get parking … That famous picture they have of all of their cars with hundreds of parking tickets on them. They’re just immune.

And they’re mostly from the Third World, so they hate the United States.

person 2: It’s all hush-hush.

person 1: It’s just a circus.

Netanyahu was really good, and he addressed all the charges. I would have reminded him that genocide is impossible. They say he commits genocide against the Arab people, and the Arab people inside Israel are now 20% of the population. When Israel was formed, they were, I think, 12%.

You don’t have genocide. Hitler, if you say Hitler committed genocide, he did. What if you said Hitler committed genocide, but the Jewish population doubled in the Third Reich? You see what I mean? He wiped out Jews.

Tucker Carlson had a big rant about all this, and he went on Israeli TV and said that Israel was not a democracy because certain people don’t vote.

And I wanted to say to him, “Who doesn’t vote?”

In Israel, every citizen, Arab, Christian, or otherwise, over 18 can vote.

Do people in the West Bank and Gaza vote? No, they’re not citizens.

Do they vote for the Palestinian Authority? Yes. That has semi-autonomy.

And do they vote in Gaza? They did one time. One time they voted for Hamas.

But, Tucker, there are about 30 million illegal aliens in the United States, and they’re here, some of them for a long time. Are you saying we’re not a democracy because they don’t vote? They’re not citizens.

We have a greater percentage of the population inside our borders that are not citizens, about 16%, 17%, or 15%, than does Israel.

But he counts the West Bank and Gaza as Israeli citizens who are denied the right to vote. That’s absurd.

And the more and more he talks, it’s really strange because it’s almost … I was listening to a rant, and it’s all conspiracy theories.

And it’s basically the more he says he doesn’t do anything, the more that’s an indication that he has said or done that.

That’s what’s strange.

Medicare for All Is an Awful Idea

 We hear it every two years – some Democrat promising to solve all your problems by pushing “Medicare for All!” It’s the cure for what ails you, they insist: your health insurance. But there is a lot about the healthcare industry, including insurance, that they don’t tell you. I will.

This year’s model of promising Utopia is Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. He has joined the Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) chorus insisting “free” healthcare is just a vote away. We’ve heard this song before, and we’ve seen it around the world, too. It never ends up well for the people who fall for it.

Abdul was unambiguous about his intentions, pledging to get rid of private health insurance completely for his government takeover. But what works well in Democrat primaries doesn’t necessarily sell all that well to normal people, and most people like their health coverage. They may not like the price, which is the fault of Obamacare and the regulations put in place when Democrats “fixed” healthcare just 16 years ago, but the care they receive largely pleases them. Most people aren’t Luigi Mangione, ready to murder because they don’t like the insurance they have. (Ironically, Luigi comes from one of the wealthiest families in Maryland and, undoubtedly, had either great coverage or could have paid cash, but progressive politics had him choosing murder.)

But even people happy with their coverage can’t escape the media coverage of “evil insurance companies,” which is where you get “voters are unhappy about their healthcare” from. “Insurance companies are evil, even though I like mine” is the concept

Now, Abdul is saying you can keep your insurance, if you want, in his version of Medicare for All. But the concept of “for All” is pretty clear – it means everyone is in it. Otherwise, we currently have Medicare, and we currently have private healthcare, which leads you to wonder what it is Abdul is really proposing.

He’s lying, of course; he has no desire for private healthcare to continue to exist – his wife won’t even take it or Medicare or Medicaid, preferring to serve rich patients who have the cash for her services.

Medicare for All and private healthcare can’t co-exist. If government-provided entitlement programs are opened to everyone, companies would be insane to provide private coverage while carrying the added tax burden needed to pay for the program. If people were tagged with premium support that allowed them to either choose Medicare or private insurance – like a school voucher program, most people would take their voucher to the private sector, as outcomes and satisfaction for serious illnesses are much higher in the private sector.

That means that will NEVER be an option.

Republicans once proposed something similar, allowing seniors to choose between traditional Medicare and private insurance with the premium support they would get in Medicare, in the late 90s. Democrats screamed bloody murder – looping a clip of Newt Gingrich acknowledging how Medicare would “wither on the vine” if seniors were given the option to get out of it. The context was a lie, which the Clintons gleefully cheered on by saying Republicans wanted to kill Medicare, and a chance for meaningful reform was dead.

How’d that work out again?

Once you get rid of private insurance by making it illegal, it’s not coming back. As the saying goes, you can vote your way into socialism; you can’t vote your way out of it. No one will invest the billions needed to recreate the insurance infrastructure we have now once it is wiped out because it could easily be wiped out again.

Abdul is following the Obama playbook of “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. And if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” lie, knowing full well they were going to make millions of plans illegal through regulation, robbing what ended up being five million Americans of their doctors and plans. They knew what they were doing; they didn’t care. The lie was useful; the means justified by the end.

Abdul is no different. Democrats don’t have new ideas; they have new schemes to con people into buying into them. Will they work this time? I sure hope not. But Republicans need to actually and actively message against it and point out how Democrats are promising to fix again a system they “fixed” before, a system they set up and broke in the first place.