The Iran War Is Not an ‘Endless War’

 

person 1: I get really tired of the Left and some of the Right because they keep saying “forever war,” “miasma,” Vietnam, Afghanistan. Take a deep breath. Eight and a half months, right? Twenty-two people have been killed [in the Iran war]. That’s tragic. But in those eight months, we would have lost—we’d lost about 250 people killed by accidents, one a day.

So, in terms of historical blood and treasure cost, it’s been amazing that you could pretty much destroy the economy, the military, and the nuclear industry of Iran. And it’s about ready—if you would arm the opposition, it could just implode in the next two years. And they’re not going to get a weapon with that economy and with the United States able to do whatever it wants to it.

But they keep saying that this is an endless war, and it’s destroyed—I mean, I don’t understand it. Gas got up to well over what it is now under Joe Biden, and we had 5.1% average inflation. It’s only about 3% now, a little higher.

As I said last time, the Fed projections for the fourth quarter are that it’s going to be about 2.5% for the year and maybe 3.5% for the last quarter.

So, it’s just mind-boggling.

persion 2: Yes, that the Democrats can argue that the economy is not going well for individuals. I see that.

persion 1: I can see that.

persion 2: Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

persion 1: But it’s gas. It’s just based on gasoline. If you look at the unemployment rate, it’s 4.2%. The poverty rate is the lowest in history. The per capita family income is the highest in history.

We have an enormous amount of foreign investment. We’re leading the entire world in digital media, AI, software, and space. All that is helping the economy with new investments. Elon Musk is building these huge new buildings.

GDP is good.

Inflation, with all the problems with energy, is still a little bit over 3%. I remind myself that I took a loan out from the Production Credit Association in 1981 for 16%—or 16%—and I bought a used car for 19%. We thought we had gone to heaven when we mortgaged some of the land, and the Federal Land Bank gave us an interest rate of 9.5%.

So, I think everybody’s just got to get real.

persion 2: Yeah, exactly. Well, I just thought it was interesting. There was a debate between Sen. Cory Booker and his opponent in New Jersey, Justin Murphy.

persion 1: Yeah, he never debates, though, does he, Cory?

persion 2: No.

persion 1: He just screams and yells, “I’m Spartacus.”

persion 2: Yes, but Justin Murphy, on the Iran war, said [President Donald] Trump needs to put—so I’m paraphrasing, and I might not be using the exact same words—but he said Trump needs to put his cowboy boots on and get in there and finish that war and get it done fast, you know?

persion 1: And Cory Booker just thought, oh, we don’t say that in America anymore, that we want to win wars.

persion 2: Yeah. What I was reading said he looked a little shocked. So …

persion 1: There’s one thing that should be pointed out. How did this all start? I mean, just ask yourself how it all starts. How did we get a war with Russia to begin with?

It started in 2008, as I said, when George W. Bush was mired in Iraq and his popularity was low, and the last thing he wanted to do was save Ossetia and Georgia. And Putin saw that he was weak and compromised, so he took it.

And then there was Barack Obama, and Obama did the apology tour. He cut defense. He demonized Russia after he tried to have a reset. Remember, he said, “There’s a red line, and if I see WMD moving around, that’s a red line in the Middle East.” And then they moved it around, and he didn’t do anything.

So, Vladimir Putin sized him up very quickly. He’s arrogant, he’s loud and he’s weak, so he invaded Crimea and the Donbas.

OK. And he was angry because they felt the Obama administration and the Kagan couple had been writing and influencing. And there was a conversation between our NATO representative. Basically, it was kind of conspiratorial: “We’re going to do this.” And we were interfering in the elections in Ukraine. And the Biden family was interfering a lot with Hunter.

So, they looked at that as weakness, and then we skedaddled out of Afghanistan—the greatest humiliating retreat I’ve ever seen, worse than the 75 copters off the embassy in Vietnam.

And then Biden was asked, “What would you do if Putin is going to invade? He’s massing troops in Belarus.” And he said, “It depends on whether it’s a minor invasion.” Well, he added all that up, and so he said, “I’m just going to try to take Kyiv.”

That failed, and then he tried to expand his Donbas area further west.

What I’m getting at is that there’s only one president he didn’t do that to, and that was Donald Trump, because he’d seen Soleimani, Baghdadi, ISIS, and the Wagner Group, right? And he thought he was too volatile.

So, now it’s very ironic for the Left to say that he’s appeasing Putin when Putin’s aggressions over four presidencies did not include only one presidency: Donald Trump’s.

persion 2: I wondered if you had anything to say about the [Rep.] Ilhan Omar investigation. It looks like they are getting evidence that she was involved in the fraud in Minnesota, selling fake wine, and that she was channeling government money to her relatives and pretending that—

persion 1: Are you saying the walls are closing in, as the Left said?

persion 2: Yeah, the walls are closing in, and the DNA with her married spouse—brother.

persion 1: I don’t know. They were reporting leaks from the investigation that the DNA now confirms that she married her brother.

That was a rumor yesterday. I don’t know if it does or not. We can’t talk about rumors, but if she is found to have married her brother, and she did change—or it is found that when she applied for citizenship, she was 18, as an adult, and she lied about that and then later changed her birthday officially because she didn’t want to come in through her father, once her father has been exposed as a possible war criminal, a genocidal colonel in Siad Barre’s genocidal regime.

And she’s basically saying two things: “I was not 18, so I was just a child. My father sponsored me as his daughter, and I came in through him. And I can’t be punished for his sins.” You know what I’m saying? “And I wasn’t able to make these decisions.”

If she lied about that, she knew well, and she should have been adjudicated on her own merits at 18. That’s one thing.

The second is, did she or did she not get her brother over to the United States through a green card by marrying him? And she’s denied that—and she hasn’t denied it. She said anybody who just said what I said is a racist, horrible person, da, da, da, da, da.

But again, it’s not about—you can say, “Well, Trump is just targeting her.” That’s like saying Biden targeted her not to investigate her because this was all known, and they wouldn’t let anybody—I mean, they had an investigation. They whitewashed her.

So, everybody should just ask themselves: Did she marry her brother or not? Was her father a colonel in a genocidal army and did not tell us that when she came into the country?

In other words, if she was 17, as she lies, apparently, and attached herself to him, maybe we shouldn’t have let any of them in. But if she was 18, as she later changed her—she later said she was 18, but she later changed it to say that she was 17—then she’s responsible for all the mistakes and lies concerning her own request.

She’s a very nasty person. I mean, there are so many things they can investigate. I’ve never heard that a congressperson can say, “I’m worth $30 million” …

persion 2: One day. And then the next day, not.

persion 1: …and the next year, what, $200,000?

And then they show that the winery had empty barrels, and investors were buying nonexistent inventory. They show the winery, and it’s closed, and her husband seems to be as shady as she is.

And then they had this really strange thing where all she’s been talking about is white privilege and white supremacy for 10 years. And you say to her, “White supremacy, white supremacy.” Then you just married a white guy, you know?

And AOC was saying, “White supremacy, white supremacy. White people are the biggest danger in the United States.” And she just dumped her white boyfriend after, what, eight years.

So, it’s really strange how they separate that. I don’t quite understand. You can’t say, on the one hand, that the country is full of—collectively accuse white people of being racist and likely terrorists—and then go marry a white person. You know what I’m saying?

persion 2: Isn’t she married to another white person now?

persion 1: Who?

persion 2: Isn’t her—

persion 1: Yeah, that’s who. Ilhan Omar married her campaign aide. And she’s under investigation because, when they were dating, she was filtering contracts to him as her campaign helper.

persion 2: Money to him?

I just have one question. Forgive my ignorance, but when they say they might be able to prove the DNA, is somebody lurking around the guy who was supposed to be her brother or her husband, maybe trying to get his DNA or something? I mean, how are they—

persion 1: They requested her sister’s, and they went into her garbage and stuff to find—they can find hers. But I suppose somebody went to Britain, where he’s back and tried to get his DNA.

And that will show it.

But again, it’s just she either did it or she didn’t. And it doesn’t matter whether Trump focused on her or Biden did not focus on her and gave her a pass.

But essentially, she’s the one who has most manipulated the DEI thing.

Remember what DEI is, everybody. DEI is an indemnity policy. It’s an insurance policy. You take it out and say you’re a victim, and then you’re free to do whatever you want.

And then when people catch you, you know, you’re racist.

So, Karen Bass goes to, what, Ghana or Uganda during the Palisades fires, and people say, “You were just derelict.”

“Oh, you’re a racist.”

The assistant mayor phones in a bomb threat. Bomb threat under house arrest. He’s not even there. You’re racist for saying that.

The water and power woman gets this huge, inflated salary as an incompetent, has hydrants that don’t work and leaves the reservoir drained for months. And people complain, and [the response is], “You’re racist and attacking a Latina.”

The fire woman is completely incompetent, doesn’t get the hydrants fixed and is not proactively doing—“You’re homophobic.”

And so, that’s how it works. Everybody has to have some claim on an indemnity policy, and that just empowers people to do stupid things.

Like somebody says, “Victor, I like those—I see you’re wearing kind of ceremonial [items]. Every once in a while, you wear Viking horns, and you kind of have a little Viking sword when you display it, and you’re very proud of your Swedish heritage. And you know how Swedes were poorly treated.”

They were. They were, in some way. They were called dummies and square heads. And I’m kind of exaggerating, as you can see. But we feel bad about it, so you’re not a drunk, you’re not a square head, and we’re going to give you preference in hiring, retention, dorms, graduation—you name it.

Well, then all of a sudden, I’d say, “Hmm, I’m going 70 miles an hour in a 55-mph zone.” And when the cop pulls me over and rolls down the window, I’m going, “I’m not going to do that.”

And that’s what happens. You think your entire spectrum of behavior is protected. And if it’s 30% of the country, you can see what’s going on.

France’s Left Learns Rioters Don’t Check Voting Records

 

person 1: two things I came across today, and I don’t know if it’s apocryphal, one of these made-up sayings, but I’d never seen it before. But Charles de Gaulle, in 1959, talking about Muslims in France, compared it to a salad dressing, the oil and vinegar, and you could take it and shake it up, and it’s mixed, but eventually, the oil and vinegar separate. And that was his view of what France would become: an unassimilable Muslim population. Not that he did anything about it.

person 2: Yeah, he was actually—he allowed a million Muslims from Algeria to come into the country.

person 1: Right.

person 2: And after the collapse of the Pied-noirs in Algeria. And he didn’t even have a—at least Spain had a coastal enclave so that they could monitor immigration, although the current prime minister is destroying it. But he just pulled everybody out and then brought a million people with him.

person 1: Yeah.

person 2: And that gave a signal. It’s a very strange—I think everybody that’s listening is as confused as I am.

It’s a very, very strange mindset that somebody comes to the United States from a place where there’s no security, there’s no freedom, and there’s no prosperity, and suddenly this host gives them lavish health, educational, food, and housing subsidies, and almost immediately they—and I’m generalizing, I understand, but it seems like it’s the majority now—they enlist in the Left, and they start lecturing the Indigenous population about everything that’s wrong with your country.

It’s the worst country, said [Rep.] Ilhan Omar. I hate—God knows I hate the United States, says Hasan Piker. [New York City Mayor] Zohran Mamdani, you know, giving us lectures about everything that’s wrong with our immigration laws.

You’d think they’d have a little humility and gratitude, like most of the traditional immigrants. I hope—we have 53, 55 million that weren’t born in the United States. I hope the majority, and I think they are—I know so many wonderful immigrants.

But it’s very hard for people to come from a particular region en masse and then create a ghetto or an enclave and claim it as their little toll inside America and say to America: We want your economic prosperity. We are going to have freedom for ourselves as protected by your Constitution, and we, of course, have security, so we won’t have tribal warfare. The next village or town won’t kill us, or a dictator won’t. But that said, we’re not gonna assimilate. We’re just going to expand, expand, and make our little home country inside America, recreate it.

person 1: Yeah.

person 2: And it’s—

person 1: And not only enjoy these expensive benefits, but then … [commit] fraud. Engage in these hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud, all these various autism daycare centers. … Birth—we’re gonna talk about birth tourism later.

Yeah. I mean, the immigrant communities of Somalia and others are, they’re just unfathomable, what they’re doing here and their contempt for America.

person 2: I know it. And I was listening to the woman running in Colorado and Upstate New York. One is from Ethiopia, and I think one is—I don’t know where she’s from. But they can’t finish a sentence without “white, white, white,” or, like Mamdani, “I’m gonna go after white neighborhoods.”

So, when I was collating all these things, I asked myself, I guess they have statistics that show that the host white population and their resentment is committing all these crimes. But when I looked at the fraud, and I looked at hate crimes, and I looked at interracial crimes, it turns out that the so-called Indigenous white population is overrepresented as victims, underrepresented as victimizers, underrepresented as crime perpetrators, overrepresented as victims of crime, with one exception.

In the black community, most black violent crime is committed against other blacks. But in interracial crime, it’s committed overwhelmingly against whites, about 7 to 1, depending on the—

And so, what I’m getting at is there’s this hatred of the Indigenous population, if I can use that term, or what they call “white, white, white,” that they’re so obsessed with, but they don’t produce data that show that this particular targeted population is doing all these bad things to them, other than the Left.

I mean, the Left is giving them the proverbial caricature of a Karen, a very, very wealthy, liberal, affluent woman who feels terrible about the plight of the world and votes a strict left-wing ticket no matter what. And I guess she’s white and she’s exempted, but there’s a racial element of hatred, and I don’t quite get it.

And the hatred, that’s why there’s no assimilation. And I think it’s the wages, Jack, of—it’s almost like all of these things we’ve just been putting fuel on. We’ve been making a big bonfire—wood, fuel, gasoline—and it got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger with the DEI, the separate graduations, the separate dorms, the hyphenated names, the cultural appropriation.

And we just—it was just insidious. We just said: OK, that’s kind of silly. Safe spaces, yeah, we understand. OK, if you’re blonde, you can’t have cornrows. We get that.

And then it just exploded. The match, it just exploded now, and it’s exploding in Europe. It’s exploding, as we see in this election cycle.

And I’m not exempting the socialists. The socialists are the people who are the puppet masters in Europe. And I think here too. Big money, big money—the Soroses and the Singhams and all those people.

person 1: Yeah. We’ll get into that in a second, but just to pick up on your Karen, lefty Karen line of an American, but I’m sure the one outside of pure fires, videos of fires of the Limoges town hall, etc., there’s that one video going around of the woman, the shopkeeper—

Attractive middle-aged woman who is saying, “Please, no, stop. But I’m one of, you know, I supported you.”

And she thought, as you’ve talked about many times, the lefties think that they are immune by voting to let this madness into the country, by voting Left. Somehow they’ll be exempt. Somehow they bought insurance.

But it’s come to bite them in the hiney,

person 2: It reminds me of Danton or St. Just or some of the early revolutionaries trying to reason with the Jacobins. But I’m one of you. But I agree with you. No, put your head down. We’re chopping it off.

These revolutions get more—they always eat their own as they get more and more radicalized until they’re so incoherent they blow up, and we’re getting to that point where they’re gonna blow up.

I think this is gonna affect the midterms, I really do, because I think if the word gets out, and you can see it on—I know today I went on the internet and looked at some of the coverage. You can really see that CBS, ABC, AP, CNN—they don’t want to cover this. And to the extent they do cover it, they talk about students not having enough books.

Did you see the looting of the Louis Vuitton store, the handbags that were all coming out? I think somebody had a little meme that said, these are—France didn’t give their students tote bags, so they were forced to go into Louis Vuitton and get bags for their books.

person 1: And now they’re being sold on some of these secondhand online luxury item resellers.

person 2: There’s also a racial element and a religious element. There was a—I can’t verify it, so I hesitate because it hasn’t been—but it’s all over social media about Marseille and other places where they’re targeting non-Muslim stores and shops, especially Jewish shops, like Kristallnacht in Germany, but not Muslim shops.

So, if you were to identify your shop or store as Islamic, you would not be touched.

person 1: Yeah, there is a video that—not here. This is one of our sisters, and then they go off. They’re not—because it’s owned by a Muslim woman.

person 2: If that’s true, it’s sort of like Germany and Kristallnacht, where they just targeted shops that were Jewish. We’re going really backward.

I do blame also, I’ll be very candid, everybody, I do blame certain—not just the people on the left, but certain people on the right that traffic in all of this antisemitic, Jewish, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew.

And if you’re not careful, you’re gonna unleash the animal spirits that are always suppressed, the anti-Semitic violence that occurs if you keep trying to target Jews, Jews, Jews.

Because it’s not like you’re in America in 1950 and you’re targeting Jews, Jews, Jews in the antisemitic tropes. It’s not like “Gentleman’s Agreement” or something like that, the Hollywood film that dealt with it.

We have a large population, minority population, maybe 5 to 7 million, who hate Israel and they hate Jews, and they’re from the Middle East, and they’re pro-Hezbollah and pro-Hamas.

So, when you say the Jews did it and Israel’s evil, it’s not just crazy Americans who are going to get incited. You’re inciting a group of people who are much more serious than you are. And they really do hate Israel, and they hate the West.

When you saw at Limoges the cupola fall, or you saw that—I’ve seen it in Marseille, that very famous statue of Marianne, I think, Marianne. She’s the symbol of the revolution or the republic, excuse me, the French Republic.

And you see the Duomo in Italy, where there’s fire, you know, not very far from that famous Gothic cathedral. You can see that they really do hate this civilization, Western civilization.

And you ask yourself, all of these iconic buildings, it’s like all these Europeans are living in an ancient treasure house, and they’re kind of like museum guards, but they haven’t created—maybe high-speed rail or the Chunnel or something—but what have they created?

They can’t defend themselves. Their economy is shot. Their gas is $9 a gallon, and they have these welfare programs that are not sustainable. Their higher education is not competitive in a global sense.

And the Russians despise—the Russians hate them with a passion because they lecture the Russians, and the Russians think they’re weak.

And the only thing really, to tell you, that’s stopping Russia from going into Europe are two things, three things.

What’s left of the Ukrainian army is down to 28 million people, or 27 million. Thirteen million have left, but they’re fighting heroically.

And France and Britain, for now, they have about, together, about 300 or 400 nuclear weapons, and the United States.

Take those three things away, and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin would just walk through that continent.

And some of the Scandinavians, the Finns and the Swedes, they have very sophisticated arms. But other than that, it’s—

And that really characterizes why they’re so paranoid about Putin and the United States, [Russian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, all of these melodramas.

They all have a central text that they have destroyed their economies, they’re ashamed of their culture, they have this rioting in their streets, they have this unsustainable immigration, open borders problem, and they can’t deal with it.

Because to deal with it would refute their entire postwar, postmodern leftist dogma, and they’re just paralyzed.

person 1: Yeah.

person 2: And that’s what—and if you don’t believe me, go play what Jack just mentioned. I’ve watched it twice, [French President Emmanuel] Macron’s speech, and it’s on the one hand, on the other hand; yes, but; of course, maybe.

And it’s just gibberish. It’s gibberish. He thinks that because he’s kind of good-looking, like [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom, and he has his hand gestures, like Gavin, or vice versa, that we’re gonna be convinced?

person 1: Yeah.

person 2: Or like [Canadian Prime Minister] Carney—they remind me of, like, the Three Stooges: Carney, Gavin, and Macron. They’re all a lot. You think about it, they all think they’re technocrats.

They’re all empty suits. They all have that sort of, I’m dignified in my really nice, natty suit, but I’m also hip.

And they’re completely incompetent, and they have the Midas touch. Everything they touch turns to dross.

Ukraine Is Becoming Another Verdun

 

The war in Ukraine has gone on for four years—4.7 years. Feb. 24 of next year, it’ll be five years. It’s longer than World War I. It’s longer than the American Civil War. It’s longer than the U.S. Pacific War. There are about 2.5 million combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties.

I mean by that, of course, dead, wounded, missing, and captured. Russia does not have the economy or the military to absorb all of Ukraine. And Ukraine, with one-fifth the population of Russia, one-tenth the [gross domestic product], and one-twentieth of the area, cannot force Vladimir Putin out of either Crimea or the occupied Donbas territory.

And that means the only way that this Verdun or this Somme can be solved is for one side or the other to win, and it doesn’t seem like either can, or for a new power to join one of the two sides, or for them to agree to a ceasefire.

There’s another issue. In World War II, Winston Churchill held an election right after the German surrender, but right at the height of the Pacific War, and he was voted out of office. FDR had an election in 1944, right during some of the worst of the island-hopping and Pacific campaigns.

So, I’d like to make two initial points. I think it would behoove Mr. [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and Ukraine in general, because they’re very angry that Donald Trump said they need a new president. I don’t think that was the right articulation, but what I think he meant was that Israel has an election coming up. It’s basically in a state of war.

It has a mixed or wartime cabinet. It would help Zelenskyy to restore habeas corpus, a free press and opposition parties, and have an election. And then we’ll see to what degree new people or new ideas in a campaign agree with Zelenskyy, sort of agree or reject him, or maybe the other participants will have a new idea.

The second thing is everybody just says, “[Vladimir] Putin’s awful.” I agree. “Ukraine should win.” I agree. But they never tell us how they’re going to achieve that after four and a half years. They criticize everything that Donald Trump has said, but there’s one constant. If you want to call all of his ideas crazy, whatever you want to do, there’s one common theme.

He doesn’t like all these people killing each other for no apparent purpose. There’s no change, really, in the momentum of the battlefield, and none of his critics and I’ve read a lot of them this week—say, “Donald Trump is wrong. This is what we must do to help Ukraine win the war and restore its territory.”

Nobody will take that leap. What’s the latest melodrama? The latest melodrama is that Donald Trump is less than three weeks from the election. Diesel is higher than gas. Diesel is the blood that makes the American economy flow. It’s up to way over $4.22. The average gas price is averaging about $5 to $5.50.

Here in California, it’s almost $8 in some places. So, obviously, he wants calm in the Strait. He wants to resolve the Iran war. He wants more refineries, and he wants Russia to start selling diesel and refined fuel on the world market. Even though it’s a small percentage, it’s psychological, and the world went crazy.

He was blasted as Putin’s puppet. The Europeans said he sold them out. The Canadians say he’s on Putin’s side. Zelenskyy said he was disappointed. But let me just remind everybody: We have given $140 billion to Ukraine. We are the ultimate guarantor of the safety of all the European countries that are talking about more aggressive action.

They should take more aggressive action, and maybe they should. But if they get in a jam with Russia, who are they going to call? Us.

More importantly, what has Europe been doing in the last four and a half years? It’s the greatest purchaser of Russian natural gas.

In other words, they are criticizing Trump for trying to put more diesel fuel on the global market from Russia, which will help Russia at a time when it’s attacking Ukraine, unfortunately. But they’re saying to Ukraine, “Do not hit refineries,” and the world is angry.

But Mr. Zelenskyy and the Europeans are not talking about the greatest source of Russian income right now: Europe’s massive purchases of natural gas.

So, you’ve got to stop. You don’t move—you’ve got to move it. Let me keep going.

Europe says that Russia is an existential threat. OK, it may be. It’s got 6,000 nuclear weapons. But right now, it is an existential threat to Ukraine and to Europe. We believe that the Iranian regime is more unhinged than Putin and not subject to the same degree of deterrence as China or Russia. It was on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon and had been supplying the Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah, which are the primary sources of tension in the entire Middle East.

So, we were trying to tell the Europeans, “OK, we’re going to give $140 billion to help you stop Putin. But all we want in return, in our effort to denuclearize Iran, is just your airspace. Can we land at a base or two so we can save transportation costs and probably save lives?”

And what happened?

The U.K. said, “No. In fact, there was an Iranian-inspired terrorist threat here against your bombers. We caught the guys, but guess what? They’re out on bail. We can’t protect you.”

So, we went home. Italy can’t let us land at that base in Sicily that’s a dual-use NATO base. Spain said, “Don’t use our NATO base, and don’t fly in our airspace.”

France said, “Do not use any French airspace.” I could go on. Diego Garcia—the U.K. said, “Don’t use it.”

So, just stop a minute and take a breath. What are they saying to us? They are saying, basically, “We are going to be beneficiaries of a denuclearized Iran, but we don’t want to participate.”

Fine, we didn’t ask you. “But we want to thwart your efforts to denuclearize by not allowing you to use NATO bases for the common good.

“But at the same time, we want you to intervene with us to help save Ukraine and all of NATO because Ukraine is an existential threat to us, and we don’t think Iran is an existential threat to you.”

And so, that’s the problem.

And the ultimate cause of all of these problems, I’ll be blunt, is that European GDP is flat.

European unemployment is skyrocketing. European borders are destroyed. European unassimilated and unintegrated Islamic minorities are gaining traction, and they make up 16% to 30% of the population. They’re voting, and they have control over the destiny of Europe. Europe is still basically disarmed. It’s trying to rearm, but very slowly.

Europe has a socialist economy like Canada, which has a very low fertility rate and very low GDP. Europe has 100 million more people than we do. It’s a $10 trillion smaller economy.

Europe, especially the U.K. and Germany, shut down coal, natural gas and nuclear plants and invested in very costly wind and solar, and they’re uncompetitive.

So, you add a Europe in crisis that is weakening, with its notions of grandeur from the past, when it had enormous military, political and economic power and influence and leverage, and they don’t match.

So, they are telling us all these things that we have to do, what we can’t do, and how awful we are, and we say, “If that’s true, you must be very, very powerful, but you’re not.

“You’re not. You’re like Canada.”

And so, what’s the result? We all want Ukraine to win. We all don’t trust Putin. But until—it’s easy to give criticism, but somebody should stand up and say, “I have a plan to stop Putin, and this is what we’re going to do: A, B, C, D, E, F.”

What have we heard? Crickets.

Why the French Riots May Be Coming to a Street Near You, and How You Can Stop It

 

person 1: France is ablaze yet again. Let’s talk about the riots. Now, a few things. The riots are not only in France, Belgium, and Italy, and now Albania also. And they’re being called student riots.

person 2: Yeah. They’re being called, outside of France, French riots

person 1: French, yeah. I’m sure many people who watch this show, listen, have seen the videos of the Limoges town hall, about 150 years old, burned this weekend.

Donald Trump has weighed in. He’s urged France to close its borders. He has called France ungovernable and the riots apocalyptic. The police have said in these cities they’re outmanned. So hundreds of thousands of protesters—they shouldn’t be called protesters—criminals taking to the streets of all the major cities.

And then we’re gonna talk about a particular case. But Victor, your thoughts?

person 2: Well, it is kind of Orwellian, isn’t it? That you bring in millions of people, many of them illegally, you allow, and then 45% of your budget is social welfare, and you’re up to 125% [gross domestic product] in debt, and you’re giving people cradle-to-grave social support.

The unemployment rate of new immigrants is almost 50%. And with all that, life is heaven in France compared to Somalia, the Sudan, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. And then you start to riot in league with students who are, I guess, upset about shoddy conditions in their high schools and all of that.

And then you get socialists fanning it on and there’s allegations there’s Chinese money involved. So you’re destroying this place, and you’re a guest in this country, even maybe you’re second generation, some of them. But compared to where you came from, it’s still heaven. And your attitude toward your hosts that welcomed you in is not magnanimity, it’s contempt.

And so, the host is getting very angry.

They are deliberately targeting iconic buildings. They went after a 19th-century government building that was a historical monument in one French city. There was a really disturbing scene in Milan where they were very close to the Duomo, that historic Christian church, and there were flames and everything.

And when you’re at 16%, 10%, 30% in Sweden maybe, then you start to see things. And one of the things you start to see is that these NATO countries will not support the United States and not even allow us to use their airspace because we are at war with a Muslim nation, and that resonates.

And even though they say, “We are the avatars of democracy and we support democracy,” and then there’s this little democracy in the Middle East, and they never miss an occasion to damn Israel and they’re boycotting produce and goods that are supposedly outside the 1947 or ’48 borders, and they’re siding with these radical Palestinians.

Remember, Europeans, you and the U.N. and the Bush administration said, “Hamas, we’re going to get all the Jews out of Gaza, and you can have an election.” And they had an election. There were no Jews since 2005. And what did they do? They threw all their opponents off high-rises and killed them, the Palestinian Authority rivals.

And then, for nearly 18 years, they didn’t build anything. For $40 billion in foreign aid from the U.N. and Europe, the United States, they built 350 miles of tunnels, and then they hid there while their civilians were used as shields, and then they slaughtered 1,200 Jews. That’s their experiment with democracy.

And you side with that over a free society in Israel. And so that’s their problem.

And it doesn’t do them any good, Jack, because they’re so paranoid about these unassimilated un-integrated populations that they turn on their protector, the United States. The only reason they said you can’t land here was Iran told them that we’re going to go after you.

And they did. They did do it at the RAF base in U.K. And so, they’re so scared of their own population that are Muslim and they get to go, “Well, if we help the United States, the Muslims, they may be mad at us, and they may riot.”

Well, they’re going to riot anyway. What good did that do to offend the United States and say, “You can’t use our airspace.You can’t land in Sicily. You can’t land in Spain. Now, Muslim populations, see what we did for you?”

And they said, “No. No. No. That’s not on our agenda, just, you know, helping Iran out. We’re going to take over the country because you don’t want it or you can’t defend it or you don’t deserve it, and we’re taking it over.”

And that’s their attitude. They don’t get it.

You know, our friend Bruce Thornton in 2007. He wrote a book called “Rise and Fall: The Slow-Motion Suicide of Europe.” And Roger Kimball published it at Encounter. It was a great book. It predated Douglas Murray’s book of nearly the same title by 15 years.

And he said in the book, as Mark Steyn did in his, “If demography continues as it does, if immigration continues as it does, as politics continue as it does, within 20 years, Europe will be unrecognizable.” And it pretty much was a prescient—a prediction.

person 1: Yeah. Well, here’s a case, Victor, of why should Europe be saved when Europeans are acting in this fashion?

So this is the micro version, Thomas Hobbes. It’s an ancedote, but I think it’s an important one. So here’s a—

person 2: Bellum omnia, bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of everybody against everybody.

person 1: Yeah. Well, here’s one everybody who’s a dirtbag. This is from The Mirror, London. “Rapist who killed police officer at World Cup fan zone gets one year in prison.”

So here’s the story. Bear with me, folks.

“Convicted rapist who punched and killed a police officer at a World Cup fan zone has been jailed for just one year. Father-of-two Christian Zedig, 32, was off duty and had gone to watch the match between Norway and Ivory Coast on a giant screen on June 30 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“When a fight broke out, he intervened and in the ensuing chaos was struck in the throat. When police arrived, they found Christian with life-threatening injuries as the blow had ruptured his artery. He died on July 3 at the hospital. Nkumba Ludovic Tshiembe surrendered to police and was remanded in custody but initially denied wrongdoing.

“He pled guilty eventually at an assault trial this week. At the end of the trial, he was sentenced to just one year in prison, and he was also ordered to pay some damages to the wife and the daughter of the slain police officer.”

Now get this: Tshiembe was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2017 for attempted murder after stabbing a man in the heart at a nightclub.

Before that, he had been convicted of rape. So this is who lives and breathes and destroys on the streets of Europe, and justice does not come to them ready for.

person 2: Did you see that interview with the editor-in-chief of The Economist with, I think her name is Alice Weidel? She’s the head of the AfD in Germany, Alternative for Deutschland.

And they were talking about this issue, what you’re talking about. And she was trying to get scare quotes that Ms. Weidel had said or her co-chair, I think his name was Chrupalla or something had said. And it was, “You say that these people who commit crimes are not wanted in Germany?”

“Yes.” “And you say if they are citizens, we can denaturalize them, or if they’re illegal, we can send them back?”

“Yes, of course. Why would we do that? Why wouldn’t we? They were guests. We gave them opportunities, and they broke the law. If they broke the law in coming here, they’ll have to go home. If they broke the law once they were citizens, they’re no longer citizens. We can denaturalize them. We can’t afford this.”

But she was just very calm, and you should have seen the interviewer. She was astounded. How can any European say this? But what I’m getting at is that stories like that, they’re not forgotten. They’re all memory-banked in the collective memory of 450 million Europeans, and it’s getting to a breaking point.

I think it’s kind of getting here in the United States. You know, there was a story about the New York Fashion Institute where two girls wanted to get some drug, I think cocaine, and they called up somebody, and he came with the intent of basically killing them and had pure fentanyl. Did you read about that?

And he gave them fentanyl, and one of the girls went immediately into a coma. She died. Both of them died. And she was completely naked, and he sexually assaulted her.

And there was another story in Boston where a—I think the person was in law enforcement, and he was in law enforcement barracks, and they found a naked girl walking across the street, and he had enticed her to come in and physically assaulted and raped her.

But the point is that that person had a long, like this person, and this is in the United States, had a long criminal record. And the other one, even though he was 19, I think he had a record. And we’ve had a lot of these sensational cases in California recently of sexual assault, pedophilia, fentanyl by illegal immigrants, and they all have prior records.

And so, you have to ask yourself, this is a Western disease, and we’re affluent in leisure at the end of history. We solved all the problems. We have our iPhones, our iPads. We got our Teslas. We got everything we want. And now we’re at the point where we can afford to feel magnanimous. Now, maybe the poor can’t, maybe the middle class can’t because they’re on the front lines of what we create, because we create chaos through our ideas, and then we retreat back to Menlo Park or Presidio Heights or Malibu, and then we’re safe.

We have our security, we have our money, and we have our nice ZIP codes, and we have private schools for our kids. But the theories that we advance about revolving door criminality, no bail, and decriminalizing theft, letting murderers out, that will fall on people that unfortunately we don’t really care about.

And that’s true in Europe and the United States. It’s the same thing. The only good thing about this horrific thing that’s happening is that we still have almost three weeks to look at what’s going on in Europe. And we should say what is going on in Europe is about a year and a half of what’s going on here.

And we’ve already seen some of it on the campuses of Columbia, at Stanford, trashing the president’s office in Philadelphia, chasing Jews into a library at Harvard, roughing up somebody and then getting an award at graduation, even though you roughed him up. And George Floyd, you know, 14,000 arrests, 35 people killed, $2 billion in damages, arson, da, da, da.

And you should vote against that. And there’s another thing to remember, and I’ll shut up. These people always, during the time—how do they get elected? Well, they get elected by saying things that they didn’t say before they ran for office. And they won’t say after they’re elected, whether it’s James Talarico here or Abdul El-Sayed or Millet Quiros.

Why is it that—take a guy like Paxton. He’s got a long record that he is ashamed of. He should be so—in some cases. Does he ever say, “I didn’t say that”? No. He just lives with it, and it’s authentic. Does Trump ever say, “Well, I kind of spoke out of turn, and I really didn’t mean that about Zelenskyy, that we need a new president”?

No. Whatever he is, he is. But why is it that all of these candidates, Talarico, El-Sayed, and people who were elected, Zohran Mamdani, why do they all, in Europe and in here, they cleanse, they purify, they excise their entire social media full of quotations? So Hasan Piker, he’s the only one that says—well, no, I take that back.

He’s now contextualizing his things that we deserve Sept. 11, and I hate the United States. He said that was rhetorical. Why is El-Sayed trying to get angry when you say he said, “Hurt people, hurt people,” after people tried to kill Jews in a synagogue?

Or why does he say, “That’s irrelevant, don’t bring that up.I was just talking on a hot mic when I said that my constituents might be happy or basically happy to hear the news of the death of the Iranian terrorist leader, supreme leader.”

Or why does Talarico say, “You know, I didn’t really mean that people with white skin are spreading a white skin virus. I didn’t mean that.”

Or why does Mamdani say, “Well, I really didn’t mean I want to go after whiter neighborhoods.” Or why does his housing head, I think Cea Weaver, why— Now she, “I really didn’t mean that when I said homeownership is a form of white supremacy.”

But my point is the Left always has to hide what they are, because if they told you what they are, nobody would ever want them.

And that’s what we should remember when we go into this election. What you’re seeing in Europe is what you’re going to get here, but they’re not going to tell you that.

If you hate beef and you hate fossil fuels, you’ll be like Talarico and put a cowboy hat on and be pictured in a Ram truck with a cowboy hat and eating a hamburger for a while, and then it will vanish when you’re in power.

So this unrest in Europe should be very didactic. It should really give us a glimpse of the future here if we continue down this path.

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.