There’s a Reason Black Voters in Detroit Don’t Like Abdul

 

I don’t know where you grew up, but I grew up six blocks north of the Detroit border and one block south of 8 Mile Road, on “the bad side.” It wasn’t bad when I was a kid, or at least not as bad, and as I got older, I spent more time in the city. I went to college downtown at Wayne State and lived for a time in the Cass Corridor, back when that was not a place you wanted to be (it’s quite different now). I saw firsthand why there is distrust and dislike between black Detroiters and Arabs in the city, and I’m kind of surprised no one has talked about it in regard to why Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is doing so horribly with black voters.

Back in college, you didn’t really want to be on the streets in the Cass Corridor at night for too long, and you had to keep your ears open for sounds that set off your senses. I spent a lot of time there, and lived on 3rd Street and Cass for a while, because it was cheap, and that’s where the people from the theater department lived, as it was right near where our classes were. (Yes, I was a theater major for a year, mostly because I was aimless; it was fun and easy, I was good at it and the girls were good-looking.)

There were liquor stores and bars all around that neighborhood; most are still there. The bars were full of regulars of all ethnicities, but largely Vietnam veterans, which was not great for meeting girls (it is a very large commuter college, something like 25,000 students, with very limited on-campus housing and very few people living off campus because it was dangerous).

The liquor stores, or as they’re called in Michigan “party stores,” were a sea of fluorescent lights and plexiglass.

One thing you learn about party stores in Detroit is most have an unwritten rule: if you can carry it to the counter, they will sell it to you. If you look lost, confused, guilty or scared, they won’t. But if you act like you’ve done it before, you can buy anything, even the alcohol behind the glass. Money is money.

But the tension between the people on each side of the plexiglass was palpable. As a white kid, I was in the distinct minority, though by no means alone. Arabs owned and worked in the stores, sitting inside the glass, and black people were the vast majority of the people shopping there, as the city is more than 75 percent black. And they did not like each other.

Not everyone; there were plenty of older black men who’d hang out in the stores and shoot the breeze with the older Arab owner of the store, as they’d likely been seeing each other the majority of their adult lives. But younger men, on both sides of the glass, did not have that history or the respect that goes with it.

I can’t tell you how many times I’d seen shouting matches through the glass over price, the amount of money handed over or the amount of change given back; claims that someone was ripping them off, or the other person was literally stealing. So many threats of “kicking your ass” and calling the police, and the police were called a lot.

 There was no trust – as the owners saw their customers as likely thieves, and the customers saw the owners as racists ripping them off and taking the money out of the city, back to Dearborn.

It was a weird dynamic that didn’t involve most customers – black, white or whatever. Many times there would be yelling while the normal transaction was taking place between them, and others you’d conduct your transaction while the argument happened around you.

But it was clear that these two groups did not like or trust each other. Which was right and which was wrong did not matter, and does not matter; the animosity is there, and it’s not being addressed.

Abdul can’t take the side of Detroiters; that would anger his Arab voter base and a large group of his donors by calling them racists. And he can’t come right out and side with the store owners, as that would just reinforce the racism black Detroiters experience when they walk into those stores to buy milk, a loaf of bread or a six-pack. He’s stuck.

Mike Rogers can win more of the black vote out of Detroit than usual for a Republican by a couple of simple steps. First, ask for it – too many don’t bother. Second, skillfully point out how Abdul is more interested in the well-being of people on the other side of the planet than the people on the other side of the plexiglass, and Rogers will put Michiganders and Detroiters first.

Abdul can’t do that; it would cost him votes.

Unlike Abdul, the fight through plexiglass is one-sided for Rogers. He’s not going to win the Arab/Muslim vote, no matter what. What he can do is use that to take a chunk of the black vote from Abdul, or at least hope many people will stay home, as they’re unhappy with their usual party’s offering.

This is a prime example of the Left’s identity politics coming back to bite them. It plays well in gerrymandered districts, but less so statewide, and even less so statewide when a member of one of the groups they pit against each other for local control is on the ballot.

Let’s hope Mike Rogers knows this and spends some time in the last two weeks of this election taking advantage of it. Call me, Mike, I’ll hook you up.

We Know What Tipped Off the Feds About Ilhan Omar's Alleged Immigration Fraud

 Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) had her D.C. home raided this week as part of an ongoing immigration fraud investigation. We’ve known the rumors for years; now the Justice Department seems to be acting on them. Federal agents searched her home and seized her phone, computer, and passport. Omar’s personal life is rife with discrepancies. 

We know she misfiled campaign finance reports and her taxes — it’s all fishy. Now, we’ve learned her staff may have altered her date of birth in 2018 to align the timelines for her naturalization process. This probe began under President Joe Biden, so it’s not a witch hunt. And later learned that a major break in the case came from text messages from Omar’s sister, whose phone was taken earlier this year (via NYT):

    Federal investigators have been reviewing family text messages as they aim to build a case implicating Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, of conspiring to commit immigration fraud, three people familiar with the matter said this week.

    The messages were obtained from a phone that officials seized earlier this year from one of Ms. Omar’s sisters, Sahra Noor, a health care executive and author, according to the three people.

    The messages contained information that investigators had used to get a federal judge to authorize homeland security agents to search Ms. Omar’s Washington-area residence on Monday, the three people said. Agents spent hours searching the home of the congresswoman and were seen walking away with several boxes of seized items.

    The people familiar with the seizure of Ms. Noor’s phone spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an open criminal investigation that is before a federal grand jury in Minnesota. Federal officials have issued subpoenas in recent days to Ms. Noor and several other people in Ms. Omar’s orbit.

    The investigation seeks to determine whether Ms. Omar and her relatives lied or omitted crucial information in immigration paperwork they filed since moving to the United States in the 1990s. They were admitted as refugees after fleeing Somalia’s civil war.

    Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, suggested last month that the investigation could ultimately result in Ms. Omar’s deportation.

    The Justice Department on Friday did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Ms. Noor’s phone. It was not clear when or where her phone was seized.

    Ms. Noor, who recently published a memoir about her upbringing and the family’s journey to the United States, did not respond this week to several requests for comment. In recent years she has split her time between the United States and Kenya, and she spoke at events in the Minneapolis area this month to promote her book.

Recommended
Obama's Comments on the Ilhan Omar Situation Are Absolutely Insane Joe Chalfant
Sen. Slotkin Wants Young Conservatives Scared Off From Trump Administration Jobs Scott McClallen

A Democrat judge also signed off on the warrant, and raiding members of Congress’s homes isn’t exactly something a judge wants his or her name affixed to. If they do this, it means the evidence is pretty damning. Federal agents were also sifting through Omar's trash looking for DNA evidence, suggesting this might go beyond immigration fraud. 

Drip. Drip. Drip. 

It's Not a Christian Theocracy People Should Be Worried About

 

Wall Street Apes (WSA) is a popular account on X with 1.4 million followers. Among other issues, the author frequently posts about threats to the United States and other Western nations from Islamic migration and uses interviews with Muslims (and ex-Muslims) themselves to bolster his arguments.

Earlier this week, WSA posted about a new 5,000-square-foot Islamic superstore in Richardson, Texas, called Modefa and included what looks to be a commercial produced for the store. Smiling Muslim men and women walk the viewer through various departments, highlighting the store's offerings, including "a huge selection of women's modest fashion," "a variety of beautiful hijabs," kufis and thobes for men, prayer rugs, and Islam-themed home decor. The store also boasts of a family lounge and a prayer room.

WSA warns that this is just another step in the "Islamification" of America. He is not alone; others post similar warnings, including scholars Raymond Ibrahim and Robert Spencer, who point to Islam's history of infiltration, domination, and, ultimately, conquest. One sees plenty of social media posts urging Americans to band together to prevent the construction of mosques, madrassas (Islamic schools), Islamic centers, mini-cities, and retail establishments like Modefa that seek to "normalize" Islam.

Christians far outnumber Muslims here in the United States. According to polls, somewhere between 62 percent and almost 70 percent of Americans identify as Christians. Counting only adults (people 18 and over), that's nearly 180 million people. (Counting children in Christian families would add millions more.) By contrast, Muslims represent no more than 1.6 percent of the entire population — somewhere between 4.5 million and 5.5 million people.

And yet we now have cities governed by Muslims: Dearborn and Hamtramck, Michigan, for example. The current mayor of Dearborn, Abdullah Hammoud, was videotaped at a mosque recently, saying, "If the Muslim community votes, if the Arab community votes, we will determine every single position in the whole city." My friend Margot Cleveland, who lives in Dearborn, has sued the Muslim-dominated city government, alleging that it preferentially promotes Islamic religious displays while being "hostile to Christians and Jews" by forbidding the display of their religious holiday symbols.

The Democratic Party candidate for U.S. Senate from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, is Muslim. Rashida Tlaib, the congressional representative from Michigan's 12th district, is Muslim. Ilhan Omar, the congressional representative for Minnesota's 5th district, is Muslim; the 5th district has one of the largest Muslim populations in the country. And of course, Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, is a Muslim.

Why is such a small population having such an outsized impact?

One reason is because so many Muslims want Islam to be central to every aspect of their lives, and they make their decisions accordingly. Whereas American Christians — despite their far larger numbers — have grown comfortable with the idea that Christianity need not be central to every aspect of their lives, and they make their decisions accordingly.

Additionally, too many Christians are cowed by inflammatory headlines or silenced by pervasive viewpoints that link Christianity with ignorance and violence.

A perfect example is former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who said last year that white men "of a certain religion" (Christianity) were responsible for "so much damage." Author Jer Swigart called white American evangelicals "the most dangerous people on the planet." Charles Matthews has written in the Washington Post, "White Christianity is in big trouble. And it's its own biggest threat." Christianity is often falsely linked to "white supremacy," as when former President Joe Biden bizarrely announced that "white supremacy is the single most dangerous terrorist threat in our homeland." (Biden's administration wasn't just concerned about evangelical Protestants; his FBI went after Catholics who attend the Latin Mass, calling them "radical traditionalist Catholics," or "rad-trads," and painting them as "potential domestic violent extremists.")

And then there are the secularists' accusations that, left to their own devices, American Christians would create a "theocracy."

That is nonsense on stilts. This country was founded in opposition to that very idea. The goal is not government-mandated religion but a culture dominated by Christians who live their values in their daily lives, so that government, with its inevitably oppressive force, can be limited and people can exercise ordered liberty.

By their silence, Christians have allowed the culture — our educational systems, our media, our entertainment industries — to be purged of Christianity and Christian values. The result is crime and societal chaos. That, in turn, produces demands for more and bigger government, despite the fact that government policies created — or exacerbated — the chaos in the first place. Coupled with certain distorted attitudes about multiculturalism popular with the Left, the result is government and popular culture that is openly hostile to the Christian majority but treats Muslims as an oppressed minority deserving of special protection.

Thus does Islam grow in strength, while Christianity recedes.

The irony, of course, is that once Muslims have enough voting power, they will vote for government officials, governmental structures, and public policies that impose Islam on everyone else. That is what their faith demands, as they are more than willing to say, and often do on social media and elsewhere.

If the trends we are seeing in European countries (England, Ireland, Germany, Sweden) take root here, those who oppose Christian-dominated culture and foment hysterical and baseless fears of a "Christian theocracy" will find themselves in an Islamic one.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Our willingness to pretend that secularism could preserve our way of life — and to allow Christianity to be forced to the sidelines — has created an opening for a tiny but passionate population that shows no such trepidation about their own culture and beliefs. The vacuum we have created will not be filled by banning Islamic stores and halal restaurants; we must instead redouble our efforts to strengthen Christianity in our personal lives, our families, and our communities, and to insist that Christian values are powerfully and positively represented in our educational institutions, media, businesses, and government. We have the numbers; we just need the commitment.

If Christianity is not the dominant cultural force in this country, something else will be.

Obama's Comments on the Ilhan Omar Situation Are Absolutely Insane

 Former President Barack Obama is lashing out against President Donald Trump for the decision to criminally investigate Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar over her immigration status.

"It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say," Obama said on social media. "But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota."

Seemingly lost on Obama when he released that statement was the litany of activities his administration took to target conservatives and the Trump campaign when he was in power.

While progressives attempt to pretend that the only scandal from the Obama era was his choice to wear a tan suit, in reality, the administration made the decision to turn the power of government against its political enemies. The IRS targeted conservative groups over their tax exempt status so ruthlessly that the agency eventually was forced to release an apology. People inside the Obama administration manufactured the false Russia collusion hoax and Steele Dossier, which led to an FBI official pleading guilty to inserting fake information into emails in order to gain a surveillance warrant against the Trump campaign.

“The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans,” Obama continued.

Meanwhile, Democrats are openly admitting that they intend to use their power to intimidate young conservatives against working for the Trump administration due to the potential legal repercussions.

NATO Has Become a One-Way Street

Our on-and-off relationship with our European allies and friends is in another low spot. There’s a lot of developments that have been going on that I don’t think they quite appreciate have created a loss of confidence in the United States about the reliability of our NATO allies.

And this transcends the earlier existential problem that all of our NATO allies, 32, had over 20 years promised but reified that and ratified it the last 15 years, they would spend 2% of GDP on defense. And as you remember, in 2016, after the election, and Donald Trump, remarked as he was going to enter office in 2017 that all but six of them had not met their requirements.

And after all this bullying, all this acrimony, now almost all of them, I think with one exception, have made the 2%. But now we’re into another series of crises.

The former head of German intelligence was just found out in his retirement, I think he’s 80, that he was a traitor, and that he had been selling or trafficking in secrets that involved German and NATO security to existential enemies like China and maybe Russia.

That creates a lack of confidence in the security that we have with the Germans.

And Britain, remember, we have a dual-use base, an RAF and a U.S. Air Force base in the United Kingdom, and the idea, of course, is forward deployment. So if we would get into a crisis with China, with Russia, over Ukraine, almost anywhere in the world, we would have maybe 11 of our $320 million B-1 bombers that have capability to carry nuclear weapons and huge payloads, but they would be based and safe in this air base that was patrolled by our allies, the British.

Now we learn that some terrorists had a dry run where they got very close to this base and were in the process of filming it and doing reconnaissance work.

And we learned two things from the British government, Prime Minister [Andy] Burnham. Number one, they were trained by or in the service to Iran, the greatest terrorist threat in the world.

And number two, they were let out on bail.

How can you say that—the most dangerous terrorists that we’ve seen in the U.K. that are actually scouting out ways to destroy an American bomber fleet is from Iran, or at least influenced by Iran or hired by Iran, but then let them out on bail?

And then we get to the recent argument from our allies that they want nothing to do with the Iran war.

They understand that the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s oil and the oil of the Gulf are critical to their oil needs, and they understand that the wealth of the Gulf States is essential for them to export commodities. And they understand the principle that Iran is a dangerous country.

And for 50 years, they have said in a course with us that it should not and will not be nuclear, although neither they nor the American presidents, seven of them, have done anything about it.

So we go and try to stop that threat. France then immediately says that this was not an approved U.N. war, and they cannot use French airspace to use American assets, not NATO assets, American assets, in, over their airspace. The U.K. says you cannot use the Diego Garcia base, which is critical in the Indian Ocean, for operations in the Middle East, long-distance operation.

Italy says you cannot use your dual-use base with us in Sicily to land aircraft to go after Iran. Spain says you’re not gonna use our base. You’re not even getting near our airspace.

Switzerland and Austria are neutral, but they’re pro-U.S., and if their push came to shove, they wouldn’t be able to avoid a European continental war, and they would seek protection from whom? Probably us. They said nobody gets near our airspace.

None of these European countries said we will help the U.S. Navy patrol the Strait of Hormuz to ensure that it’s open and global commerce is uninterrupted. Okay.

And of course, we have our Canadian friends who said last year we may or may not have met our 2%, but for the last 15 years, we won’t spend 2%.

But of course, we expect to be, under the nuclear umbrella of, as we have been, of the United States, and we expect if there was ever an existential threat to the North American continent, you would not distinguish Canadian from American interest, even though we’re not armed and not capable with 79 45-year-old jets, given your 4,000 or 5,000.

So I could go on, but you get the impression that it’s again a reminder that it’s a one-way street. Remember the argument that our European friends are using to us. They are saying, “You’re a NATO power, and you’re pledged to protect the North American, space.” Of course, we’ve never… Only once after 9/11, and that was sort of symbolic.

Some NATO planes helped us after 9/11 to make sure there were not terrorists in our skies. But generally, the threats that face Europe are not going to threaten the United States, and the threats that face the United States, we don’t count on NATO partners, volunteering to go to Taiwan or to protect us from a Chinese missile.

So it’s a one-way street. And so we have made the argument that in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, which are the backyards of Europe, it’s essential that Iran not get a nuclear weapon for their protection and ours, and we are willing to handle that problem. We’re not asking NATO, we’re not asking individual countries to bomb, Iran or to send weapons.

None of that. All we ask is, “Can we use our NATO assets, the use of our bases, and your airspace to cut the travel time, the distance, from our bases, to Iran, and we don’t have to come all the way from the United States?”

And they said, “No. You cannot do that.” And so we are saying, “Well, Ukraine is threatened by Russia, but Russia’s army does not threaten us.”

There’s no way in the world that the Russian army is ever going to run the United States. It is going to overrun Ukraine maybe, maybe the Baltic states, maybe some of the Scandinavian states, maybe the European states. But it’s not gonna ever endanger us.

We have a strategic problem with Russia, and we handle that on our own with our nuclear deterrent: submarines, land base, and bombers.

So let’s get this straight, Europe. You are saying to us that when we have a shared threat and it’s in your neighborhood, and it’s of interest to us that you will not help, but you’re not gonna go beyond that, but you will not even lend your airspace to help us.

And at the same time, you’re saying, as the NATO big guy in the alliance, that you expect us to guarantee your safety and to arm the Ukrainians to the teeth and to deter the Russians from invading further and closer into Europe, even though we know, according to your logic, they’re not threatening us at all.

Now, the truth of the matter is, if Ukraine is overrun and Russia goes into the Baltic states or Europe, we will probably come, as is our obligations under NATO. But the Europeans are making that harder and harder to sell to the American people because it’s a one-way street. When we need you to protect Europe, you better be there.

When you need us not to protect us from a nuclear weapon from Iran, not to join us in battle, just to let us use your airspace, you can’t even do that. And we had to be uncouth and crude and scream and yell to make you protect yourself with a meager 2% investment of GDP in defense. I know what you’re gonna say to us.

We have open borders. We’re overrun with immigrants. We made bad decisions about our green energy. We warred on fossil fuels. We have certain culture that has a 1.3 continental-wide fertility rate that’s unsustainable.

We have immigrant populations that do not want to assimilate. And we have a socialist paradigm that is not sustainable, so we can’t help you. You can’t help.

At least you could say, “This is not working. This is not working, and we want to make reforms in our economy, our energy, our immigration, so we can free up capital to fulfill our partnership, and we want it 50/50. When you need us, we’re there, and when we need you, you’re there.” And if it doesn’t happen that way, then the NATO paradigm is not sustainable.

It will not work for the Europeans to deny us just the use of the airspace to deal with a common threat and then expect us to risk our key cities in any potential nuclear standoff with Russia, because that’s what would happen. To protect the integrity of Europe, if we couldn’t do it with traditional forces, it would ultimately be a standoff to use American deterrence to protect Europe, and that would entail our danger to protect your continent.

And so, yes, we can be crude. Yes, we can yell and scream, but ultimately, this remains an asymmetrical and thus unsustainable relationship.

 

Why Gas Prices Stay High Even When America Drills Its Own Oil

 

person 1: “Could you explain, person 2, why the media and government doesn’t remove the smoke and mirrors from this issue, which is the gas prices? The internet tells me that no oil from the Strait of Hormuz comes to America, yet our petroleum prices skyrocketed when we attacked Iran.

“President Donald Trump declared America energy independent, yet the world market still controls our prices. Why can the Iranians pay 30 cents a liter for gasoline, a year prior to the attack on Iran, and the poor people of Venezuela pay nine cents a gallon for gasoline? What gives?”

I’m not sure about that, those prices.

I hope he’s right on that.

person 2: Well, there’s a multifaceted—And again, I’m just hearing this for the first time. But as a general rule Westerners in Europe and the former British Commonwealth, New Zealand, they are maddened by the Green New Deal type of Al Gore thinking.

So in their way of thinking, they tax gas, and they let it go to as high as possible. I’ve gone to Europe every summer, until I got ill, for 22 years, at least once or twice, sometimes three times, and it was about $8 or $9 a gallon, and that was deliberate. They did not subsidize. It’s just the opposite in the so-called Third World of Africa, Asia, not so much Africa, but Latin America, Venezuela, and places that have oil, but especially in the Arab countries and Iran.

When you have an autocratic government, the last thing you wanna do when you’re exporting oil is to have people paying a lot for gas,because that’ll make them furious. So what they do is they subsidize the price of gas. The government comes in, and they take barrels out of the national petroleum company, and they refine it at a market loss.

Not really a loss to them. The reader has a very good point because they control everything, the oil, the refinery, but they want the people to be happy.

Now, his other point is we produce around, I think we’re getting up to 14 million barrels, and we import four from Canada. That’s 18, and we’re in the 20-something, depending how many barrels we consume.

And if we wanted to, we could buy the Canadian oil, and we could stop all exports to Japan, all natural gas and oil, to the degree it goes to Europe, and just consume our own oil and control the price.

But we’re a free market economy, so you’d have to tell a Texas petroleum guy, a fracker that was spending a lot of money, and he’s right there in Texas, and you’ve got a big European, or Japanese oil tanker right on the harbor at Houston, and you’re gonna say, “You’re an American and that cost you about $40 or $45 to pump, so I want you to sell it to the U.S. government to be refined or private for no more than $55.”

And what would he say? He’s gonna say, “I don’t know what the price is gonna be. It’s gonna collapse when the war’s over, and I’m gonna lose a lot of money ’cause I’m gonna keep pumping, and it might get down to $45. So I gotta make the money where I can.”

So we allow that. And so what I’m getting at is all the private companies that produce oil in the United States at enormous amounts, and the more oil we import from Canada could be—It is basically valued at, right now I think it’s $88 a barrel. But their costs to produce it are probably around $40. So they’re making a huge profit. They could make a profit, and we could have $4—right now it’s $4.50 nationwide or something. They could make a profit, and they could sell the oil for a price and the refinery that it would be about $3 a gallon, $2.50 a gallon, but that’s not how we operate with anything, food or anything.

And you know, when you had plums and Japan was offering for, I remember, Fuyu apple pears like $80 for 20 pounds, and the price here was for 20 pounds was $20, and everybody was trying to get this new crop over to Japan so you could get $80. And that drove up the price here because there were fewer of this, at that time, a boutique exotic everybody wanted.

They don’t care that much now for Asian pears. We had about 10 acres of them. But I wish that the oil companies would give the consumer a break-

person 1: Yeah.

person 2: And take a little bit less profit. Trump is trying now to—He’s had it with [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy. He told Zelenskyy do not hit the diesel refineries, that make diesel fuel, because if you do, Russia supplies ships diesel fuel, refined diesel fuel to China, to Asia, and that keeps the world price down, and we don’t have enough refineries.

So, but they know that, and Russia’s making a killing, so Zelenskyy didn’t listen to him. He just kept hitting, and that is driving diesel prices up.

person 1: Yeah.

person 2: So Trump said today … I disagree with that, by the way, that he’s a terrible president, he wants him gone. Well, he’s right in the middle of a war, existential war, you know.

You don’t, you don’t quite say that. But I can see why he’s frustrated. And Zelenskyy wants it both ways. He said I want another $140 billion we’ve given them over the last four years, five years, but I’m not gonna listen to you. And Trump is saying you’re gonna lose me the midterms, along with Iran, so I don’t want you …

Just hold off until the midterm. Do not hit there. So he bought diesel fuel the other day from Putin.

person 1: Yeah.

person 2: And the other thing Zelenskyy doesn’t understand, the American Never Trump and Left don’t understand: Trump doesn’t have any particular empathy for Putin or Russia. No. He got out of the missile deal.

He destroyed the Wagner Group. He told the Germans not to do the Nord Stream pipeline. He taxed the oligarchs. But he does believe in Kissinger triangulation.

He wants to turn Russia with its 7,000 nuclear weapons, and its oil, against China and vice versa to get leverage. Yeah. And he can’t do that as long as the Ukraine war is on, because [Vladimir] Putin is the bad guy, and you can’t reward a guy that’s …

The other thing that people don’t realize very quickly about that war.

And I’ve tried. I said at the conference, “But everybody said Putin, it was a terrible mistake.” It was. And Putin has lost a million and a half casualties. Yes. And he’s incompetent. Yes. And he’s destroyed the economy. Yes.

But what they don’t say is he has 20% of Ukraine. And with Crimea, I think he’s got six or seven million people that speak Russian, and his birth rate is one point three.

So in a very sick way, the way he thinks, I’ve lost maybe a million people, but I’ve gained six [million] soon to be transferred into loyal Russian citizens. And that’s why that one of the reasons he did that is his birth rate is so low, and so he’s only got a 144 million people with this vast…

And at one time, Ukraine was 41 million people. Had he been able to take Kiev, he would have had 185 million Russians, plus the Ukrainian bred. That’s why he was trying to do that. Yeah. And I’m glad he stopped. I wish Ukraine… But I said to a Ukrainian person, the other day, an expert in the Ukrainian war, I should say.

I said, “My gosh, they’ve lost 10 million people. They had 31 million.” And he said, “Where did you get that figure?” I thought, “Well, I read it, and I prepped for the comment.” He goes, “It’s not ten million. It’s twelve to fourteen million.” I thought he was saying I was exaggerating.

person 1: Wow.

person 2: He said they’re below 30 million or 28 million.

The Problem With America’s Military Arsenal

 

We’re in the eighth month of an on-and-off war, as we all know, with Iran, and since 2022, we have been watching Ukraine and Russia fight, and we have been supplying Ukraine. And one of the problems with these multifront wars, and we have been conducting operations against Iran as well as helping Israel supply its forces against the Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah.

Part of the problem is that in Ukraine, in Iran, in the Middle East, we have now, because of the use, cut our inventories of Patriot missiles by about 25% or 30%. And remember, we export them all over the Western world, and our Hellfire and Tomahawk missile inventories are cut by 50%.

And the problem is even greater than the erosion of our safety net because if we would have a problem with Taiwan or elsewhere in the world, we would be in trouble.

But the Patriot missile costs about $4 million and $4 million-plus, per missile. The Hellfire is shot by a plane, about $150,000, $200,000. The Tomahawk is about $3 million to $4 million.

So what I’m getting at is our enemies, whether in Iran or the enemies that are trying to squeeze Israel or the Russians that we supply Ukraine to fight, they are using cheaper drones, and some of them are only $5,000 or $6,000.

So in a cost-benefit analysis, we’re spending 10, 20, 30 times more to knock them down. And I know that we’re gonna—we’re in an evolutionary spiral where we can update electronic warfare, jamming, lasers. That’s all coming.

But right now, we have kind of a problem, and our Reaper, our really premium Reaper drones and remnants of the Predator drones, we’ve lost about 25% of those.

Those are several million dollars.

This year, Ukraine will produce, when 2026 is over, a million drones. We’re really trying to ramp up production, and we’ll probably only do 50,000 at most. And we are galvanizing, but even next year, we don’t think we could make more than 300,000.

Look elsewhere what we have, though.

We have 11 of the best, biggest carriers in the world, but they cost $13 billion just to produce them, not even to maintain and run them. We have the wonderful B-2, the most stealthy bomber in the world with the biggest payload, but it’s $2 billion, and we only have about 20 of them.

The B-1 dates from the Reagan era. It’s a wonderful bomber, but it costs $315 million each, and we only have about 45. And when you get the slightest threat that Iranian agents may be sending drones into an RAF U.S. base in the UK, and we can’t defend it, we have to take all 11 and send them back home, or we might lose $3 billion of inventory.

The F-35 is a wonderful plane. They’re $90 million apiece. We only have 400 of them. The best plane in some ways, the interceptor F-22, is $140 million each, and we only have 195. How could you have more at that cost?

What I’m getting at is this is not how we won in Korea, but especially in World War II. The idea was we were not going to…

When we rearmed, and we started the war with number 19 in size of our army and almost virtually no air force to speak of except some B-17s and out-of-date fighters. We had a good Navy, but the idea was we were not going to try to match the Germans or the Japanese necessarily, in the quality of each particular plane.

We were not going to build a Panther or Tiger tank that was indomitable as far as the power of its gun, and the armor, but would be produced in very limited, at 5,000 or 6,000 Panthers to a little over 2,000 Tigers. We were going to do something different. We were gonna produce 50,000 Sherman tanks.

Pretty good tanks. 10 hours on the road, one hour maintenance. Not like the Tiger or Panther, one hour maintenance, one hour on the road. Easy to maintain. Very crew adaptable. If they were hit, you could drop out on the bottom through a trapdoor. Three out of five of destroyed Sherman crewmen escaped with their lives.

We created 300,000 aircraft. 300,000, DC-3s, bombers, fighters. 35,000. 35,000 B-17s, B-24s and B-29 heavy bombers. One an hour at the Willow Run plant run under the auspices of the Ford family. 9,000 warships, if you count smaller landing craft. 140 aircraft, not 11, 140 of fleet, light and escort.

And how did that happen? Well, we enlisted, kind of like Donald Trump is doing with our own war production renaissance, where he’s bringing in techies, like Elon Musk or the Anduril people or the AI people, but who are often of the opposite political persuasion.

But World War II, we brought in the GM CEO, William Knudsen.

We brought in the aluminum king, Henry Kaiser. We brought in Henry Ford, the car baron. And we said, basically, we’re in trouble, and we may not be able to have the craftsmanship right now of a Japanese Zero or a Bf 109, or we may not have a V-1 pretty soon. But we can outproduce these people with very good weapons so that when we’re on the battlefield, there’s five, six, 10 Sherman tanks for one or two of the German tanks.

And they’re gonna run, and they’re not gonna break down. And you can pull the engine, the transmission in a few hours, not two days. And we’re gonna produce a greater GDP than all the belligerents in the world. Our Navy is gonna have more ships than all the ships in the world. Both happened by 1945.

So in other words, we’re not gonna make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Now, does that have lessons? Because obviously we won World War II within four years. I think it does.

And I think we’re starting to see that a little bit in the Department of War today. There is an emphasis that while a Northrop, a General Dynamics, a Lockheed, a Raytheon with their huge budgets and their expensive, I guess what the word would be, exquisite platforms are necessary, they have to be complemented by quantity.

So we don’t use $4 million missiles to shoot down a $5,000 Yemeni drone whose sole intention is to exhaust our inventories until they’re down at 10%, and then they will really unload on us. So what we all need to do as American citizens is support this reform effort, and it’s going to be multidimensional.

We don’t want just the type of lobbyist or insider Washington relationships as far as procurement and the Pentagon from former employees, all of that stuff. We need to get everybody involved and say, “Each company, according to your station, think of ways where you can combat drones or missiles or rockets or shoot things down inexpensively and create a lot of these platforms and weapons,” because we are reaching a very critical and dangerous period that we have to get through.

We have the existential threats of China. We have the traditional threat of Russia in a land war with our NATO allies. We have Iran and its effort to get a bomb and this standoff we’re dealing with. We have the enemies that surrounded Israel that are our enemies in an unstable …

And one thing we need is not just a few platforms or a few weapon systems that can be easily taken out and then exhaust our inventories, but we need really good weapons, if sometimes the best here, but maybe not always the best in the world.

One thing is we have more of them than the enemy, and we do the swarming, not our enemies.

The Lie Behind the Gaza Genocide Accusations

 

We’re at the third anniversary week, just last week, of the Oct. 7, 2023 massacres. Remember what happened? About 4,000 terrorists from Gaza, Hamas terrorists, accompanied by 2,000 opportunistic Gazan civilians, swarmed into Israel in a pre-planned assault. They penetrated 17 miles. They would have gone a lot further had the IDF and armed civilians not beaten them back. They killed almost 1,000 of the terrorists and their accompaniment.

But the question I have is: Why is Gaza now in rubble? We hear about genocide, we hear about settler colonialism, we hear about apartheid, but why is Gaza in rubble? And I think I can answer that in two ways. What happened before Oct. 7, and what happened after.

Let’s go first to what happened after. The Israeli government on Oct. 8, and subsequently for the next 20 days, asked Hamas, such as it is, to do two things: turn over the 251 hostages and turn over the architects and those who participated in the murder. They waited 20 days before invading Gaza. In those 20 days, the Gazans sent about 8,500 rockets into Israel’s civilian centers. These were not aimed at military targets or even dual-use targets. They were aimed at civilian targets.

So for 20 days, while Israel waited for them to give back the hostages before they invaded, give back the architects of this terror, they refused both counts, and they sent about 8,500 rockets. They would altogether send 13,000 rockets, we forget that, at Israel. So that’s number one and two.

And next, they exposed civilians at the entries and exits into the tunnels below Gaza. There was almost 500 miles in this labyrinth, and to get in and out, you had to go through a hospital, a mosque, or a school, or in some cases private homes. The Hamas terrorists, the people responsible for killing everybody, were hiding in this labyrinth quite safe while they were exposing their own civilians to retaliation for the crimes that they had committed.

Can you imagine during the Blitz, for example, if British civil defense people who were manning the barricades and were afraid of bombing went down into the subway and they denied the use of the subway to British civilians? That would be unheard of. But that’s exactly what Hamas did.

So number three, there were about 2,000 to 3,000 civilians that either planned all along to go into Israel to be opportunistic killers, looters, thieves, and rapists. And they participated in the mutilation and the desecration and the hostage taking. We know that. We had about a couple of hundred people who were captured. We had their GoPro cameras. We had security cameras in the kibbutzes.

And by the way, of the 6,000 who participated, the Israeli government has taken out about 4,000. The next 2,000 must know that they are marked people, and they will not be here very long.

Another reason. Why, when they brought back hostages and corpses and they paraded them in the streets of Gaza, were they not only met by a mob that was cheering, but the mob actually tried to spit, hit, club those hostages who were alive and mutilate the bodies of those who were dead and brought back as trophies?

In other words, the civilians, think of this, the civilians of Gaza that we say were innocent had to be stopped from further atrocities by the people who created the atrocities, the Hamas terrorists.

Let’s ask another reason why Gaza is in rubble, and in the context of before Oct. 7.

In September 2005, all Israelis were out of Gaza. There was not one Jew, there was not one Israeli inside Gaza. American philanthropic organizations and donors bought key infrastructure, especially greenhouses, and the Israelis turned them over to the Gazans, who immediately looted them and destroyed them against their own self-interest. They were very lucrative businesses, and they could have been using them.

So my point is, there were no Jews in Gaza. This is 22 years ago, or 18 years ago by the time of the October massacres. So Gazans and Hamas terrorists wanted to kill Israelis even though no Israelis were in Gaza. And they had not been there for about 18 years on Oct. 7.

And the West, mainly the United States and Europe and the U.N., had given Gaza in that period from 2005 to the date of the massacres about $40 billion. Did they build a Dubai-like resort? Did Hamas have regular elections? Did they have a constitution that encouraged the equality of the sexes, that allowed religious freedom, that called for protection of individual civil liberties? No.

Did they take their 25 miles or so of pristine Mediterranean beaches and turn it into a Dubai? No. What did they do? First thing they did is they murdered any contestant to the election. They held the election in 2006. They got elected, and then they canceled the election. And then for the next 18 years, they killed anybody who questioned this Hamas theocratic terrorist clique that ruled Gaza.

Let me emphasize again, they diverted $40 billion and built a tunnel labyrinth for one reason, to protect the terrorists and to expose their own civilians to retaliation when they committed their next planned atrocity.

Think of the argument. They are essentially telling the world we expect the Israelis to be more humane about our own civilians than we are. Therefore, we are putting our entries and exits in places where civilians will be there, in schools, mosques, and hospitals, because we think the Israelis are so humanitarian they won’t bomb those places and we will be safe.

In other words, We don’t care if they get killed, but we want to save ourselves and we think the Israelis will treat our civilians better than we do who are exposing them.

Let me just sum up.

After Oct. 7, they had 20 days to come to an agreement and turn over the perpetrators and give back the hostages. They refused. Instead, they answered that with rockets aimed at Israeli civilians. When the Israelis went in there to get the perpetrators, they hid in tunnels, committed terrorist acts, sent thousands more rockets into Israel, deliberately at civilian areas, and put their civilians as human shields to ensure there would be civilian casualties even as the Israelis were dropping leaflets and texting individual apartment dwellers to get out and not be collateral damage.

Before Oct. 7, Israel had completely evacuated Gaza for 18 years. They had allowed an election. They were supplying, I should say, about 20% to 50% of the food, water, sewage treatment, chemicals, fuel, and power to Gaza.

Gaza had a border with Egypt. Did Egypt want to let Gazans in there, and did they want to help? No. They wanted nothing to do with them. Nothing to do with them.

They had an election, then they canceled all elections, and they tormented and terrorized their own people. And we are supposed to believe now that Israel created a genocide when the population of Gaza, when they left in 2005, was what? It’s about 1.3 million. And what was it on Oct. 7? About 2.4 million.

Nations or countries that want to commit genocide do not pull all of their military and civilians out of the area that is targeted and then see it increase by one million people in a mere 20 years.

The charge is absurd. The whole situation is absurd. And what’s most absurd, Westerners still parrot this word genocide, which applies to a lot of places in the world that they omit, but it surely doesn’t apply to what Israel did after Oct. 7.

Rubio’s Athens Speech Could Solve the West’s Identity Crisis

And there’s a famous classicist, E.R. Dodds, who wrote a book called “The Greeks and the Irrational”, and he has a chapter about it, as I recall. But in any case, they were saying, well, the real legacy is rationalism, Aristotelian rationalism, the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Academy, the Lyceum.

And I have a really good article, I thought it was really good, in the latest issue of The New Criterion about the —

person 1: It’s exceptional. I recommend everyone go find it. And if you can buy it as a single article if you need to.

person 2: It’s basically about the discovery of rationalism or how Greeks thought about things, and that they saw the world as not mysterious.

I thought maybe that had influenced one of the writers because he was saying that they, in the speech, they didn’t see everything as blank or incomprehensible, but they had a rational system—you know, physics, metaphysics, biology, mathematics. They could break down any natural phenomenon or inquiry into a field, and then they would know how to inductively reason to find the answer, and that was what marked the West off from other cultures. But yeah, I thought it was really good.

A lot of people in Europe didn’t like it, but basically, the speech was basically this: We in the West are in a period of ennui or indecision or directionlessness or we’re listless. And our culture is superb. It’s preeminent. And there’s nothing close in the world today. We’re either going to lose the world without the West or we’re going to save it with the West.

And he went through the trajectory from Greece to Rome to the church to medievalism to the Renaissance to the Enlightenment to the British empirical tradition, Scottish Enlightenment, to the United States’ Founders. And it was very good.

And he was trying to say, “Don’t tear down monuments. Don’t change names.” I don’t know if he said change names. I want to stop because [Donald] Trump has changed names. But Trump’s names are not because of somebody’s sin. That’s the difference.

In other words, Trump says we want to name things for America because geographically they’re in or near or proximate in America. And we want to reference them from our point of view, not Mexico’s or Canada’s. But what he meant was don’t destroy things.

There’s a word, damnatio memoriae. Don’t condemn memory and try to erase it. Be confident and accept that we do things very well in the West. And we have universities, and we have the rule of law, and we have constitutionality, and we have free-market capitalism. And right now, we’re in trouble. And we’re not defending ourselves, our fertility, our ideologies. They’re anti-Western. And our enemies and our people within our own borders are trying to overthrow the West. So that was a very controversial thing to say.

person 1: Victor, Donald Trump. What are my notes here? Yeah.

President Trump said Saturday, that’s yesterday, that it was, quote, “Time for Ukraine to get a new president,” end quote, warning Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to stop attacking Russian oil refineries as the two leaders clashed over a U.S. deal with Moscow. “It’s time for Ukraine to get a new president,” Trump told reporters outside the White House, et cetera.

Well, it’s probably been a long time since they needed to get a new president, but what are your thoughts on that, Victor?

person 2: Well, what is hurting, what’s causing this? We have 3.4% inflation. It’s lower than 5.1%, but it would be much, much lower. It would be as if we were back in the first term where the average inflation rate was 1.9.

And the reason is not just that we’re paying, you know, here in California, we paid yesterday $7 a gallon. But it’s diesel fuel, which is the fuel that runs the whole economy in the sense of trucking. Everything involving trucking is it’s essential to the whole country. And when you’re paying in California $8.50 a gallon and maybe nationwide $6, it’s an untenable situation.

So I understand why he was upset because Russia is one of the largest suppliers of—not so much oil, but they do, of course, but refined diesel fuel. And when you take out, when you know they’re making a fortune, and I understand why Zelenskyy’s doing it. He’s hitting the diesel refineries because the world is short diesel fuel, and the Chinese need it, the Europeans need it, and Russia is supplying it. And the United States wants the price down, and obviously, if the Russian refineries were at full capacity, the price of diesel fuel would go down.

That said, he’s in a war for his own survival, and the Russians almost every single day are hitting things. That said, we’ve given them $140 billion, and they won’t survive without U.S. continued aid.

So, Donald Trump, basically, when you put all of those conflicting, incompatible interests together. He is saying privately… I mean, you’ve been reading. Privately, he said hit anything else, but just for right now, do not hit the diesel refineries because it’s killing the United States—the Western economy. And Zelenskyy said, yes, but it’s also fueling the war machine that’s killing my people.

And then Trump obviously would have said, okay, but you wouldn’t be there if we hadn’t supplied you more than almost anybody. And then Zelenskyy would reply and say, but I’m fighting against a common enemy of the West, and it’s your interest that Putin’s expansionist policies have been stymied by the heroism of the Ukrainians, and back and forth.

And so I can see why there was concern, but I don’t think it’s wise to conduct foreign policy like that.

The other problem is that when we see our allies at war, I guess Ukraine is an ally, and there are periodic elections. We and the British don’t cancel elections. So we do two things. In a major existential war, we bring in a bipartisan war cabinet. That’s why Churchill brought in [Neville] Chamberlain, and he brought in people, [John] Bevan, from the Labour Party.

person 1: Clement Attlee, who was the Labour leader.

person 2: Churchill had no sympathy for him. He had sympathy for Chamberlain, the Conservative, but Bevan he liked.

And my point is that even, you know, [Franklin] Roosevelt brought in two or three cabinet members who were Republicans. And then we had an election when the war started in ’39. We had an election in ’40. We had an election in ’44, right at the height of the war. Churchill had an election in July and was thrown out of office when the Pacific War was still raging.

After the Oct. 7 massacres and the Gaza thing, the Biden administration put pressure, and they despise Netanyahu, to bring in all elements of the Israeli political system, and he brought in people who were former and future opponents of him in his war cabinet.

But not Zelenskyy.

 

Paxton Has Problems—but Texas Democrats Have Bigger Ones

 

person 1: Well, let’s turn to [President Donald] Trump. We know that he’s planning on barnstorming the country for some of the candidates and such. So I was wondering what you made of [Texas Attorney General] Ken Paxton, who said that that convention that he had in Dallas, Texas, dragged down his numbers. It’s dragged everybody’s numbers down.

Ken Paxton was his man. Who? I mean, they caught him on a mic—or he didn’t say it formally.

person 2: He denied that.

But he shouldn’t have told anybody that. Look, [Sen.] John Cornyn would have won that election, and he was a RINO. And he’s very embittered, like [Sen.] Thom Tillis is in [North] Carolina. And he voted with Trump about 85% of the time, right?

But on the key issues, like the SAVE Act and those, he wasn’t with Trump, so Trump got mad. Paxton had a, what’s the word, colorful record, personal and professional. And he was not, as Trump said, a charismatic guy. But Trump endorsed him with the idea that Texas is not going to vote for a vegetarian when they’re famous for beef.

They’re not going to vote for a green nut when they’re famous for oil. They’re not going to vote for “Jesus is nonbinary” when it’s an evangelical state. So, I think that Paxton will win, but he’s a very weak candidate, I’ll be candid with you. And he doesn’t come across well, and they haven’t been campaigning.

[State Rep. James] Talarico is slimy and unctuous and smooth. He’s oily, and he’s taking his, “I never said that. That was a moment of exuberance.” Then every time you catch him in his real self, somebody ambushes him and says, “Who’s your favorite drag dancer, trans drag dancer?”

“Oh, yeah.”

And he’s like, “Uh-oh, I just gave a name as if I know all of them.”

So, he’s running as something he’s not. And when he gets elected, if he were to do that, he would go back to his socialist, crazy roots, just like [Abdul] El-Sayed and everybody else.

person 1: Yeah, as the reverend at his church got caught on a mic saying—

person 2: You know what I’m most scared about right now?

person 1: What?

person 2: We just did some videos for “person 2: In a Few Words” about how the economy was booming. This was before The Wall Street Journal. I had so many comments on X and emails saying, “You’re just a sycophant. You know, come on, Victor, just admit that we’re in a depression. Don’t just give us this rah-rah. The economy’s horrible.”

Nobody believes that. I wrote an article today, I mentioned on our website, about the ’92 election. The economy was strong. Not as strong as now, but it wasn’t bad, like [Bill] Clinton and [Al] Gore said. But they won on that.

So, I’m afraid that because we have not been talking about the economy, we haven’t explained the affordability issue: that it was 20% under [President Joe] Biden, 5.1% a year, and the only way you can get rid of 20% inflation over his tenure would have been a recession. And we’re not going to do that. And it was 30% for vehicles, fuels and staples.

So, the only way you can get out of those high prices is to cut the annual rate of inflation, which Trump did the first year by half, and raise wages, purchasing power, which he did.

This year it’s complicated, but I’m afraid that with all this foreign investment and all this AI, and the end of the Iran conflict soon, and the crashing of oil prices, and this boom that we see, that it’s going to happen after they take the House. And they’re going to say, “See, you voted for us, and we got the price of oil down.”

And that’s something everybody should watch. If anybody votes and believes them that they have any ability or desire to lower prices, you’re sorely mistaken. These are Islamists and socialists. They have bigger fish to fry than us. They want to change the United States into a socialist Cuba.

person 1: Yeah. And we looked at some of those stories in Seattle and California, where our socialist states are destroying it, especially with the homeless and fraud.

person 2: If they were honest, they should say this: “If you elect us, we can do for the United States what we’ve done in California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, New York, and Minnesota. And we can make every city in the United States look exactly like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York if you’ll just vote for us.

“That’s our plan because these are blue states and blue cities, and it’s a wonderful place, so vote for us.”

That’s what they’re running on. We’re going to make California nationwide.

person 1: And you’ll applaud us when we get one crosswalk painted in seven months, just like Nithya Raman did.

person 2: We get Stonehenge.

And we get Stonehenge. I have a reader, Gary. I never give his last name, so I don’t want to embarrass him. But I had said on this program, “What do you do with Stonehenge?” Right? Not one foot of track, but 170 miles, 78 miles or something, from Bakersfield to Merced.

And he—I guess he Photoshopped it or he got it—and, well, why not have a Western pedestrian trail? Because he’s a landscaper guy, and he had these beautiful bridges over railroad tracks, like from Fresno to Bakersfield.

And I thought about it. I thought, “Wow, that’s a brilliant idea.” Then I was reminded of that little animal walk in LA, where they built a bridge so the wolves or somebody could not—

And it’s been taking millions of dollars. They can’t finish it. But if they would turn it loose to a guy like Gary, and he could just landscape the whole thing as a private enterprise guy, then you could walk from Bakersfield.

Of course, you’d have to put a police station every 5 miles because of California’s crime rate. And, you know, you’d have to say, “If you rob somebody, it’s not $950 or a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

person 1: Yeah. Well, let’s look at states that are doing things, or just take a moment. I don’t know if you have something to say about this, but [Gov.] Ron DeSantis in Florida has designated CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Antifa as terrorist organizations.

So, woo-hoo for Florida, I’d say.

person 2: He’s very good. And I don’t know who got the inspiration from whom, but Donald Trump announced that last month there were zero Muslim, Islamic people coming in as refugees. That’s how they come in.

Basically, the argument is, “We destroyed our country with Islamism, and I want to go to a Western country and destroy it so it looks like the destroyed country that I left. So I want to come to France or Britain, the United States, and wave my Palestinian flag or my Iraqi flag or my Syrian flag or my Iranian flag because I’m a refugee. But I don’t want to integrate. I don’t want to assimilate. I do not want to acculturate.”

And so, Donald Trump—they’re really angry at him. “This is so—this is terrible.” But he just said, “We don’t have to let anybody—”

And we’re not going to let in people—he didn’t say Muslim. He said people from these countries. They’re not going to come in.

And when you look at what they’re saying, why would you want somebody like [Rep.] Ilhan Omar to come in, whose father was a colonel in a genocidal army under Siad Barre?

Why would you want [Zohran] Mamdani, who was a settler colonialist in Uganda, where the community was 0.01%, and they own 60% of the GDP?

And he didn’t say much about that [Yoweri] Museveni, or whatever his name is, the president of Uganda, has been there for 40 years without a free election. God, can you imagine? He’s a dual citizen. He’s a citizen of Uganda right now.

Why doesn’t he say, “Well, I want to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, but because I have dual loyalties, I’m also a citizen of Uganda, I want to arrest the Ugandan delegation because they’re dictatorships.

“But then, on the other hand, my family has a two-acre estate with a view of Lake Victoria, so we have to get along to get along.”

Or why doesn’t Hasan Piker—you know, he said he hates the United—

“Gosh, I hate the United States. You guys deserve 9/11.”

Why don’t you just stay home? We don’t want you or any of your friends over here.

person 1: Yeah. Wearing—what was that? A maid’s dress? Hasan Piker was dressed up in a maid’s dress this week for his podcast.

person 2: Because he has an affectation for transvestism.

person 1: Yeah, cross-dressing.

person 2: Cross-dressing.

The Truth About Oct. 7 Massacre, 3 Years Later

 

This week marks the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 slaughter of Israelis, civilians, some people in the [Israel Defense Forces], and foreign residents. … Women, men, children, young adults, some of them attending a rock concert. 

Remember the facts. Without warning, over 4,000 terrorists from Hamas stormed in over the fence, I can’t call it a wall, it looks to me more like a fence, stormed in and waged a surprise attack against Israel. They were accompanied by 200 civilians that tagged along on the expectation that the terrorists would be killing, wounding, torturing, taking hostages, and the civilians could rape, mutilate, and steal, and bring loot, and all of that was accomplished. 

We also forget that there was another thousand terrorists who, in support of this invasion, had launched 4,300 rockets into civilian centers. In fact, that would be the first salvo, which in the next few days would account for a total of 13,000 rockets. Remember, 13,000 rockets all fired at Israeli civilian centers. They attacked 23 different little hamlets. Almost 1,200 died. They took 251 hostages. They got in 14 miles, 14 miles inside 1948 Israel. 

So, what are the facts about why did they do this?  

Well, we can ask that question because there had not been an Israeli inside Gaza since 2006, for almost, at the time of the assault, 17, 18 years. Israel was supplying the majority of the water, fuel, and power for Gaza even though they had left and turned it over to them.  

Gaza had staged one election, in the words of the great Muslim scholar Bernard Lewis, “One election, one time.” They had killed off many of the architects of the opposition. They had thrown Palestinian Authority activists off buildings. They had eliminated them. They never held another election. They tortured or killed internal dissidents. 

In this period in which Hamas had complete autonomy over Gaza, they received somewhere between $45 and $50 billion in aid, roughly from 2006 to the present day. Forty to 50 billion. That would have allowed this choice piece of Mediterranean real estate to build luxury hotels, to bring in European and Gulf advisers, and in other words, to create a Qatar or an Oman or a Dubai.  

They didn’t want to do that. They diverted about $1 billion to $2 billion and built the largest labyrinth of tunnels probably in the world, not subways, but I mean military tunnels, about 500 miles. It cost them 6,000 tons of cement, 2,000 tons of metal. The entries and the exits were placed under schools, mosques, and hospitals, forcing the Israelis to attack those exits and entries and then incur collateral damage. 

Remember one other thing: They were prepared to send more terrorists and more soldiers deeper into Israel if the IDF had not responded belatedly, though they did. They did respond and stop them. They confiscated over 10,000 weapons. Where those weapons came from, you can imagine, but most of them were from Iran or China. 

I want to leave you with a couple of questions. Number one, would there have been this cry of genocide, this hatred of Israel? It was always there, but would there have been an American action, all of the things about Iran, had they just not attacked on Oct. 7?  

What if Hamas had said the following: “We have a peace deal with Israel. We’re going to create our own nation here. We have twenty thousand workers inside Israel at competitive wages worldwide. We’re going to use that revenue and that expertise that they’re going to gain by working with Israelis to create a successful autonomous nation. We’re gonna show the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank that we can be preeminent in the Middle East.” 

They didn’t do that. Instead, they wanted to slaughter Jews, men, women, children, mutilate, behead, rape, torture, take hostages. 

I have another second question. What was Israel supposed to do after this had happened, given that they had an overwhelming military that could dominate almost any country? I shouldn’t say almost every country in the Middle East. With this enormous military power and this egregious assault on Israel, it was really one of the few assaults ever conducted inside 1948 Israel.  

What were they supposed to do? Were they supposed to say to the Hamas leadership that was gloating in the global media, “Would you please turn over the architects who planned this, the forty or fifty people?” They did. Did they say, “We would like all the perpetrators as well”? They did. Did they say, “We would like you to return all 251 hostages”? They did. Did they say, “We would like you to stop sending rockets, especially the rockets, all of them, intended to kill our own civilians”? They did. 

And what was the Hamas reaction? Jubilation. Jubilation. This was the high point of Iranian subsidies. They were getting billions of dollars from international relief organizations, and the Biden administration had refunded them through the U.N. They were getting weapons from China. They had help and solidarity from Hezbollah and the Houthis. They were at a crescendo of pride and arrogance. 

What did Israel do? They waited three weeks before invading. And what was the reaction to that patience and that demand that this could be resolved peaceably if they would turn over all the perpetrators and release the hostages? It was absolute hatred and contempt. 

I saw it when I walked across my home campus where I work. On Oct. 8, 9, and 10, I saw students yelling, “From the river to the sea.” They were not objecting to Israeli entrance in Gaza. They weren’t objecting, I should say they were celebrating that they thought Oct. 7 was the entree, the beginning, the alpha of a larger multipronged assault whose ultimate aim was to kill as many Jews as possible. 

So, why do people react that way given the circumstances? Why don’t they, the world, condemn these killers, these mutilators, these beheaders? And why do they keep saying that Israel is a genocidal enemy when they waited and waited and waited before going in? 

Well, Israel is not the Israel of the 1950s and ’60s, a small, poor nation that is a victim of repeated assaults. It’s a powerful 10-million-person, 10-and-a-half-million-person nation that has high tech, an overwhelmingly strong economy, an attraction of science and technology in the Middle East.  

In other words, in the words of DEI, they are a victimizer or oppressor just because of their, quote, “privilege.” 

DEI played a lot of it. In the world that’s gone mad, in Europe, the United States, Israel, Israelis were white and Palestinians were nonwhite and therefore victims. Doesn’t matter what the reality was. That was the binary. 

Antisemitism played a role. We have half of our people for some reason going to colleges where they’re all indoctrinated. We have immigration now where we’re letting in 5 million people from the Middle East in the first and second generations from what we can tell by Hasan Piker or Zohran Mamdani or Ilhan Omar or Abdul El-Sayed, is that they have very little affection for their host.  

They despise Israel, and they want Israel destroyed, and they work and act and fund to that purpose. 

Add it all up on this commemorative week of Oct. 7, and to sane and sober people, it makes no sense. But sane and sober people, unfortunately, in the West today are in a minority. 

Tucker Carlson Is Wrong About World War II

 

person 1: The interview Tucker Carlson had with Jacob Rees-Mogg, who’s a member of Parliament. I don’t know if he’s still a member of Parliament, but exceptionally smart man, articulate, and of course, Tucker got into World War II. Hitler, Hitler really didn’t want to go to war with England. He said it many times.

Rees-Mogg came back with, “Well, he signed that piece of paper and gave it to Neville Chamberlain, so what Hitler said most of the time was lie.” But I think most people that watched these clips would’ve been embarrassed for Tucker Carlson and his continued desire to push this rewriting of World War II history and other historical incidents in the 20th century.

person 2: Yeah, I watched a lot of it. It was painful to watch because I used to know Tucker and I liked him. I still like him, but obviously something’s happened to him. I don’t know if they meant it to be that way, but what it was really saying, Jack, was here is the American aristocrat, wealthy, privileged kid who grew up in conservatism and represents the right side of the right.

And here is the British aristocrat, very wealthy, who represents the right side. I don’t mean right as correct, but a strong Brexit guy, you know, an ultra-conservative. I’m sorry about the imprecise terminology. So he’s an ultra-conservative, and so is Tucker. Uh, Rees-Mogg is the heir, I think his father was the editor of The Times, and he inherited an estate, and his wife is very wealthy.

So, he’s probably worth $150 million in dollars. Tucker is the heir to the Miller Lux 19th-century land. At one time, it owned almost a million acres in the 19th century. Everywhere I go around here, you can see old Miller Lux ranches. On one side, and then, of course, I think it was his stepmother, but I may be imprecise, was the heir to the Swanson food fortune.

And he went to prep school in Europe, I think, for a while. So, they’re very similar in background. But when they actually talked, Jacob Rees-Mogg was very careful. He cited evidence. He didn’t try to interrupt. He didn’t chuckle and look at the camera. It was very professional, very kind of cold and sober, factual, never lost his temper, and Tucker was highly emotional, spewing out all sorts of misinformation that, what, 1,200 people at Eaton were killed in the war, and it was 200.

Just factually incorrect, and he had to be corrected by Rees-Mogg. As far as the main issues of the debate, once again, Tucker is completely wrong. He says that that Britain did not have to fight World War II, A, that if Hitler had been allowed to win and keep all of his ill-gotten gains from the Russian border all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, Britain would have been better off because after the fall of France in late June of 1940, Hitler made a deal.

And then Tucker said that it could have taken it rather than demonizing Oswald Mosley and the other fascists. He knows nothing about contemporary reports of that deal. What Hitler was saying was, you white Tories, you aristocrats in Britain are a lot like us. That’s not true. They weren’t. And then he’s saying, you can have your empire take a deep breath for a while, but you’re never going to intervene in the continent.

Now, they were already going into Poland and rounding up Jews and killing them. They already were doing, quote unquote, assisted suicide with their own multiple sclerosis, mentally retarded. They were already lining up dissidents and shooting them en masse.

There was only one country in the world that stood between that entire, every single major EU country today was either by June, July of 1940, either aligned with Hitler, maybe we could stretch it to August, September with Greece falling in Yugoslavia, but aligned with Hitler as an ally, neutral but pro-Hitler or occupied by Hitler.

The whole EU, all of the NATO countries, there was only one little country, little Britain and its crumbling empire that it couldn’t quite reach, which was under attack by Japan already before Pearl Harbor in the Dutch East Indies and soon to be in Singapore and soon in India and in Burma. And what did Britain do?

It said, we don’t trust you. We’ve tried to make a deal with you, Hitler, at Munich. You lied. You said that was the last territorial ambition you had, and you annexed, you destroyed Czechoslovakia. And no sooner did we sign that than within a year you invaded Poland. And Poland who lost, who disappeared for years, who had its borders chewed up by Soviet Russia in 1939 with you.

And then what Tucker didn’t say is, because he’s a big fan of Vladimir Putin apparently, is that Britain was attacked, bombed by the help of the Soviet Union from August 23rd of 1939 until June 22nd of 1941. There was no allies. The United States was not in the war. The Soviet Union was on the side of Germany de facto in a non-aggression [pact], supplying 20%, 30% of their food and fuel while they bombed, firebombed Coventry and began firebombing London, etc.

It was only Britain, and Britain was the only country … He makes fun of it because he said, “Well, you went to war when you weren’t invaded.” It’s worse than that, Tucker. Britain was the only country of the six major belligerents, Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, who went to war for the principle of upholding its word to Poland that it would protect it if Hitler started a war against it.

And it did. And it was the only country to fight on the first day of the war and the only country to fight on the last. It fought magnificently, given its resources.

Now, he made finally a couple of other crazy … He said that Oswald Mosley was the opposition. Oswald Mosley never had any elected office. He was a fascist and he was pro-Hitler and they dressed up as a black shirt or brown shirt, whatever you want to call him.

He had 5,000. He tried to beat up people in the street. And he said that Hitler, we know now that if he took over, the likely people who would have ruled Britain were him, Mosley, or maybe the Duke, the dethroned king, Edward, or maybe basically pro-Hitler’s David Lloyd George, the prime minister during World War I, was talking about coming back as an interim government.

It was only Winston Churchill who said, “No, do not trust these people. They say that we can have the empire and we can have our navy, but we’ll never have our navy or empire because they’ll have the entire continent, the entire world, and it will be just like Munich again. They will say, ‘You can’t do this, you can’t do this.’ And then we will be completely humiliated as a moral country while they slaughter people as they are doing already and we don’t say a word about it.”

And so, why did Hitler invade the Soviet Union? He said he was going to do it in “Mein Kampf,” but one of the reasons he did it was because Britain would not give in.

He tried everything. He couldn’t invade them by sea. He couldn’t bomb them into submission. He couldn’t beat them in North Africa. He did it because he thought he could take the Soviet Union. Think of that thinking. This huge Soviet Union will be easier to beat than little Britain. That’s what he really believed, that in 10 or 11 days, as Gen. [Franz] Halder said, “Well, after 11 days, one could fairly say the war in Russia is over,” and that that was going to then bully Britain into surrender.

And there wouldn’t be a Jew in Europe today or in the United States probably, because a lot of them came over here, had Hitler won. And Tucker knows that.

And then he says, “Well, they wouldn’t have had all these foreigners.” That didn’t come in 1946 or 1947. Look at the population in 1950. Look at when you had the Rivers of Blood speech, that was in the ’60s.

It started in the ’60s, but it was mostly the idea of Tony Blair. He was the one that really opened the floodgates. That was a postmodern … The empire was in big trouble financially after World War I. World War II didn’t destroy it. They were gonna have to give it up anyway. And they knew that. It hastened it.

FDR hastened it, but it was a dead letter anyway. And so almost everything he said in that interview was false. Once again, he has these little quips that are really… And then he starts chuckling and trying to make fun of this guy, Rees-Mogg, but he really knew history. He was actually educated with a seconds in history at Oxford.

And that used to be really hard to do. And so he knew his history, and he didn’t lose his temper, and he quietly corrected him. And I don’t know any fair-minded person that didn’t think that severely damaged Tucker’s reputation. He couldn’t laugh his way or fudge facts out of that. And one of the subtexts is, again, so if you listen to very carefully, a subtext is the Jews, the Jews, the Jews.

person 1Voic: Oh. You never heard back from him your request that he correct the record.

person 2: No, I haven’t.

I’m still waiting. He said that person 2 thinks the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima was glorious when I actually said it was a horrific act. But if anybody could come up with a better way of stopping a horrific invasion of Japan that would have cost Americans a million casualties, probably 5 to 6 million Japanese casualties and 15,000 dead every day we were fighting the Japanese.

The Japanese were killing in Asia and the Pacific. I’d be happy to hear it. And maybe they thought, “Well, we could have used the firebomb raid.” Yes, we could have. And the big greatest loss of life in a single day was not Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It was the March 9th or 10th bombing of Tokyo with napalm. And we would have bombed them.

Believe me. After World War II in Europe was over, we were gonna have bombers transferred. We had new B-29s on order, and Okinawa was going to be a deliverance of fiery death to all of Japan had that war continued.

person 1: The fact that Japan did not immediately surrender after Tokyo, it was evidence that they were going to fight to the last man.

person 2: They were very excited, if that’s the right word, because they hadn’t had a really good record when they first introduced in the Philippines campaign kamikazes. But Okinawa was only 900 miles away. And the Zero was a very light aircraft, and it had enormous, almost 2,000 miles of range. And it only had to go one way as a kamikaze.

It was like a cruise missile. So it didn’t have to have the whole tube.

person 1: So they sunk 30-something ships, didn’t they?

person 2: I think they hit 36, and they sunk 19. And they killed 5,000 sailors. And they pulled off a lot of the major carrier groups. They had to get out of there because there was nothing they could do with a Zero, with 50 Zeros and other Japanese planes coming at 350 miles an hour, two feet above the water, under the radar.

And then at the same time, Japanese Zeros diving from 30,000 feet right through fighter cover at full speed. And they’re not trying to shoot anybody down. They’re not trying to bomb. They have one goal, to crash. That’s a lot easier to do than drop a bomb and hit the target. And they were brilliant cruise missiles, and you couldn’t stop them.

And they had 7,000 to 8,000 of them waiting on Japan. They could have destroyed most of the Pacific fleet. And I don’t know why he doesn’t see that, or he does see it. But it’s so easy to say, “Well, I’m so moral. I hate all nuclear weapons. And person 2 thinks they’re glorious.” Just prove it. Prove it.

Prove it. Prove it. Prove it. Just give me a quote. Just say, “Here it is, Victor. You’re a liar. Here you said this. This was glorious.” He will never do that. He’ll never apologize for all the facts that he got wrong in the case of Jacob Rees-Mogg. He won’t. But he got corrected a lot. He could have got corrected a lot more, but Mogg was too polite to just end up saying “wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.”