Gas Prices Skyrocket, Trump Freaks Out & His Powerlessness Is Exposed: The True War Agenda Revealed

The wars in Iran and Ukraine are weakening, discrediting and impoverishing the United States. That’s not an accident. It’s the point of the exercise. Brandon J. Weichert is the publisher of The Weichert Brief on Substack, www.weichert.substack.com, and the Senior National Security Editor at 19FortyFive.com, a defense publication. He is the author of four bestselling books, most recently of “A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine.” He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon. Paid partnerships with: Defend: Enter code "Tucker" for 20% off your purchase at https://defendcellcam.com American Financing: NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. Average savings based on borrowers who save over $199.99. Call 800-685-5696 or visit http://www. AmericanFinancing.net/Tucker. Troomy Nootropics: Get 20% off with code TCN20 at Troomy.com/Tucker TCN: Get your copy of ‘10 Things To Learn' only on https://TuckerCarlsonBooks.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPact.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:30Tucker Carlson?

  We don't want to be cynical, but it does sometimes occur that maybe we're talking about the wrong things. We mean that when a big news event happens and everyone in the media is talking about one element of it, and we're usually part of that herd, embarrassingly, you have to ask yourself at a certain point, hmm, could it be that the thing that we're all talking about is not the most important thing? Could it be that we're talking about it or being led into that conversation on purpose? I mean, again, not to be a conspiracy nut or anything, but it's possible that happens. And here's an example, ongoing. And that's the Strait of Hormuz. We've done a bunch of different shows in the Strait of Hormuz. Strait of Hormuz is obviously inherently significant. It's the waterway, now famously

• 1:14Tucker Carlson?

  at the eastern end of the Persian Gulf, through which a lot of the world's energy flows. Iran has the longest shoreline along that strait. We're all geography experts now. And so now we all know that it's essential to keep that waterway open, and then it curves around on the Red Sea along the coast of a country called Yemen, which is controlled almost the entire country by a group called the Houthis. People are getting an ongoing education and all this. And why is that meaningful? It's meaningful because you can't get oil out of the richest oil-producing region in the world unless you have access through those waterways. Strait of Hormuz into the Red Sea. So the ongoing conversation, again, including conversation we participated in,

• 1:58Tucker Carlson?

  has been about how to open the Strait of Hormuz, how to get that oil through. But if you think about it, is that really the most important question that arises from the Iran War? So a waterway, of course, it is inherently important. On the other hand, that's a problem that you can fix really quickly. If you have a blocked waterway, if one country says you can't come through or we're going to blow up your tankers, well, you could reach an accommodation with that country, and you could fix that in about 10 minutes if all sides were willing to do it. What's harder to fix is the destruction of energy infrastructure, pipelines, wellheads, but more than anything else, refineries. So a refinery is the plant, the factory,

• 2:43Tucker Carlson?

  where crude oil pumped out of the ground is turned into products you can actually use. And people may not have an appreciation for how different crude oil is from the refined products made from it. So from crude oil, we get famously gasoline, jet fuel, aka kerosene. We get all the way down to asphalt. We get diesel fuel. And we also get a lot of the precursor elements for fertilizer. So none of those things come directly out of the ground. They are made from this commodity called crude oil. And they're made in things called refineries. So without refineries, you really can't run a society.

• 3:28Tucker Carlson?

  You cannot run a country on crude oil. There's very little you can do with crude oil, actually. You can't even put it in a diesel motor. And they'll, I mean, they'll run on vegetable oil, but you can't run crude oil. You have to refine it. So refineries are actually the most important link in the chain from drilling to turning on the lights in your house or getting on an airplane or eating food that's grown in the ground. And the problem with refineries is there aren't very many of them. So there are a lot of oil and gas wells. In fact, no one really knows the number. There are about 70,000 new oil and gas wells drilled every year globally. The US alone has almost a million active oil and gas wells.

• 4:11Tucker Carlson?

  But refineries, which are absolutely necessary, are a different question. So how many refineries are there globally? On planet Earth, right now, we know the answer because it's not a very big number. There are a total of 825 refineries on the planet for a population of 8.3 billion people. 825. So that's about one refinery for every 10 million people. One refinery for every New York City, plus 2 million. So when you destroy a refinery, that's a big problem because a big refinery is incredibly expensive, $25 billion, for example. Very expensive to build and time-consuming. It could take more than 10 years to build a big refinery.

• 4:55Tucker Carlson?

  So when you destroy one, you have an immediate and long-lasting effect in a way that closing a strait does not achieve. It's a big deal to destroy a refinery. And so with that in mind, you have to kind of wonder what's going on with refineries. All of a sudden, they're getting hit. By our count, and this may be off, we may be undercounting it, but we think, as of today, seven refineries in the Persian Gulf have been hit, destroyed, damaged, shut down for a while anyway, maybe some long-term, so far in this war, not even a year old. Seven refineries. So if you're wondering why diesel is 650 nationally and much more expensive than that in other parts of the world, it's because of that.

• 5:40Tucker Carlson?

  It's hits on refineries, and not just in the Persian Gulf, but in Russia, which makes about 7% of the world's diesel fuel, refines it. And so what is that? How exactly is that helping? Even if you're waging a war, would you go after the refinery? Would that be your first order of business? Well, it has been the first order of business in both of those conflicts. So we've got footage, no sound, but just so you can see it. This is from the very early days of the Iran War. This is in early March. And this is the product of an Israeli drone attack on a refinery in Iran. Amazing. So the war breaks out. We're told that this war is an effort

• 6:24Tucker Carlson?

  to stop the Iranian nuclear program because they're minutes away from nuking Miami. And that's what it's about. It's only about that nuclear program, which we're not going to accept. But if that's true, why do the Israelis, instead of hitting a nuclear facility or assassinating more nuclear physicists, they've done that in Iran, why do they hit a refinery? Hmm. No one has answered that question because almost nobody's asked. Why would the Ukrainian government be hitting Russian refineries right now? Which they are, all over Russia. Apparently, 60% of Russia's refinery capacity has been hit. And we're not exactly sure how much is taken offline permanently or for the short term, but 60% of their capacity

• 7:09Tucker Carlson?

  has been hit by the Ukrainians. Why refineries? So that's the first mystery. The second mystery is why is no one talking about this? Because the thing about hitting a refinery is that it releases massive, epic amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Now, for the last couple of years, people have not been talking about CO2 emissions. For the preceding 20 years, every child at every grade in American schools learned that CO2 is a poison and that it is increasing the temperature on the Earth and that Florida will soon be underwater and we are destroying the planet every time we emit CO2. All of a sudden, no one's talking about that.

• 7:54Tucker Carlson?

  And there's nothing that emits CO2 in greater volume than we can think of than blowing up energy infrastructure. The Biden administration's destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, the natural gas pipeline from east to west, from Russia to Europe, was the largest man-made emission, we think, of CO2 in human history. And yet, no one said a word. So for example, the Sierra Club, which is the best-funded environmental group, climate change organization in the United States. They've got like a $100 million budget. They didn't say a word about the Biden administration blowing up Nord Stream. Well, that's very, very curious, if you think about it. They also haven't said a word about the bombs

• 8:37Tucker Carlson?

  that the United States, under Biden and Trump, has sent to Israel, 2,000-pound bombs. So how much CO2 does a 2,000-pound bomb emit? Well, we know because academics in London figured it out. They did the math. About three metric tons. How much is that? Well, it's a lot. In fact, it's more than three times what the average gas-fired home water heater, we looked this up, emits every year in a residential home. Now, why the comparison? Between a single 2,000-pound bomb and Biden sent like 14,000 of them to Israel to eliminate Gaza, to commit genocide in Gaza, Trump's sending 40,000 of this bomb and lots of other bombs, but we're just picking the 2,000-pound bomb. Why compare it to home water heater?

• 9:22Tucker Carlson?

  Well, because the Sierra Club has issued endless press releases on home water heaters, gas-fired home water heaters, the ones that work well, that are efficient, and has also paid a team of lawyers to make sure you can't have one. And not just gas-fired water heaters, but gas ranges, wood stoves, basically any household appliance that you enjoy, that is effective, dryers, washing machines, all of these are threats to the earth, according to the Sierra Club, our largest climate group, because they emit CO2. But for some reason, the Sierra Club is, so far as we could tell, never mentioned the CO2 emissions from munitions,

• 10:06Tucker Carlson?

  from dropping bombs, or from blowing up refineries.

• 10:10Tucker Carlson?

  They never mentioned that. Now, why is that?

• 10:14Tucker Carlson?

  It makes you wonder if the environmental movement, the climate change movement, which really was kind of the dominant piety of a ruling class for two decades, we were very concerned, really concerned. If you ever had dinner with rich ladies in the past 20 years, with a private equity wife, you get stuck next to one at dinner, she would turn to you doe-eyed at some point and say, "I'm very concerned about climate. We're destroying this planet with our emissions." And she would get a little misty. They really meant it. But all of a sudden, there's not a word about the biggest CO2 emissions in our lifetimes, brought on by this war and the war in Ukraine. How strange.

• 10:58Tucker Carlson?

  Could it be that they never really considered carbon dioxide a poison? Because of course, it's not a poison. You breathe it, you exhale it all day long. It's not a poison, and they never really believed it was. Could it be that the real appeal of the climate movement

• 11:18Tucker Carlson?

  was its effects on the way people live? So if you think about it for a second, what were the climate people telling you you were gonna have to do? What were you gonna have to give up? How were you gonna have to change your life in order to save the planet, which you uniquely had destroyed? Not China, the world's largest emitter of carbon. No, they never mentioned that. But you, as an American, as a European, as a Westerner, what were you gonna have to give up? Well, for one thing, your mobility. You're gonna have to live in a 15-minute city. You couldn't go anywhere. You'd be locked down effectively, but for the good of the planet, assuming you care about the planet. You have to give up meat, of course. You might have to wear a sweater indoors in the wintertime because it's profligate to heat your home to 70, obviously.

• 12:02Tucker Carlson?

  That's not good for the environment. And you can't have working appliances. You can't have anything that actually gives you comfort at low expense, because that's a sin. So instead, you're gonna have to have, I don't know, a thermostat that can be controlled from Sierra Club HQ, or from your local state capitol, or at least your city council. You're gonna have to give up your autonomy and dial down your standard of living. That's what you're gonna have to do in order to save the earth. It's fascinating when you think about those effects, which are, by the way, wildly unpopular. Nobody wants to wear a sweater indoors in February. No one wants to be cold and hungry.

• 12:47Tucker Carlson?

  In fact, for all of human history, the two main goals on the mind of every person on the planet was, "Let's not be cold or hungry." So it's not like anyone wanted this. There's no groundswell of support for being cold and hungry. But you were gonna have to do that, and of course, the people in charge, and they said this a lot, wanted that. They wanted that. But what's interesting is, they're getting it anyway. So we're not talking about climate change, because famously Larry Fink, the single most powerful businessman in the world, the head of BlackRock, deeply embedded in the Ukraine war, profiting from the Ukraine war, of course,

• 13:26Tucker Carlson?

  dropped his demands for climate change. In other words, the idea was, "BlackRock's not gonna do business with you unless you sign onto the climate agenda." Well, he's dropped that. Why? Maybe because they're getting the same thing

• 13:42Tucker Carlson?

  from these wars. Because when you destroy refineries, what do you do? Well, you hike the price of diesel and gasoline and jet fuel, beyond what most people can pay. And the trajectory is in place now. 650 for a gallon of diesel? Which is the energy source that gets all of our goods from manufacturer to warehouse to home? Yeah. So you are going to, when you destroy the world's refining capacity, achieve the same effect you would if you were to enact Plan 2030, or whatever they were calling it, to avert climate change.

• 14:26Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly the same thing. And of course, if you adjust people's standard of living down enough, what do you get? Fewer people. Because either they starve to death, and we're facing that possibility very soon in countries around the world, particularly in Africa. And that will, needless to say, spark mass migration to the West. There are a billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa, and if they go hungry, you think they're gonna sit and starve to death? No.

• 14:55Tucker Carlson?

  They'll be in Los Angeles, obviously, and Frankfurt, and Lisbon. So there's that.

• 15:03Tucker Carlson?

  They starve, or they decide to have fewer kids. So one of the goals of the climate agenda was reducing global population. And they just said it. I mean, they just said it a lot, all the time. Bill Gates, hate to blame everything on Bill Gates, that poor autistic elderly man. Bill Gates being unique among rulers of the universe because he's sort of damaged enough to say the dark stuff out loud, because he clearly doesn't know the difference, doesn't know what he's not supposed to say, Bill Gates. But all of him has said this. "We need fewer people." Jeffrey Epstein, famously, maybe not so famously. We're gonna read it to you. Here's part of an exchange that Jeffrey Epstein had in the now-famous Epstein docs, the ones that have been released or not being hidden by the Trump administration.

• 15:49Tucker Carlson?

  And we're quoting, this was from 2016. And he's in an exchange with Jaska Bach, a cognitive scientist. And he says this about climate change. "Maybe climate change is a good way of dealing with overpopulation. The earth's forest fire, potentially a good thing for the species. Too many people, so many mass executions of the elderly and infirm make sense, is the fundamental fact that everyone dies at some time."

• 16:17Tucker Carlson?

  Now Jeffrey Epstein, and if you've read The Epstein Fellas, you know this, was basically illiterate, so it's not entirely clear what that meant. But he's applauding of mass death, of course.

• 16:30Tucker Carlson?

  And he's emailing this to a normie, someone who probably, we haven't checked, but probably still has a job and is walking among us. He's a cognitive, eminent cognitive scientist. And they're talking about fewer people. And by the way, at a certain level, way above the level where you and I live, the people who run countries think in terms of population. If you assess your life, you think in terms of your kids and your job and your wife, and how are things going? And am I making enough money to pay for everything? If you're running a country, if you're in charge of a civilization, if you're part of the class of people making big decisions about giant populations, you think in terms of what? Demographics. How many people live here? How many people do we need to live here? That's the very first question people who run countries

• 17:15Tucker Carlson?

  ask themselves and their advisors. Do we have the right number of people? So when you see big things happen in the world, if a completely pointless war breaks out in Eastern Europe, and they're telling you, "Oh, it's about these three oblasts in Eastern Ukraine no one's ever heard of, and we have to take a stand on principle because Churchill is at war with Hitler again." You can be absolutely dead-freaking certain that's not the cause of the war, and that's not the reason it's continued for almost five years. There's something else going on here. Something much more important than who controls three oblasts, whatever an oblast is, because nobody cares, actually.

• 17:55Tucker Carlson?

  And you gotta think, just watching, that maybe one of the reasons for that war is its effect. And its effect is to completely depopulate the largest country in Europe, which is Ukraine,

• 18:11Tucker Carlson?

  which has fewer than half the people it had when the war started,

• 18:16Tucker Carlson?

  and will never be Ukrainian again, ever. So a child could have known that going into this. If this war continues, and if it's a First World War-type standoff, meat grinder, the country with the smaller population is gonna lose a sizable chunk of its working-age population. You're gonna have to change the population. You think people didn't know that going in? You think NATO and the Biden administration, you think the Trump administration doesn't know that? You think the leadership of the EU doesn't know that? You think the British Prime Minister doesn't know that? Of course, they know that.

• 18:48Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, they're not geniuses, but they're not entirely stupid, and they think in big terms. That's the point.

• 18:54Tucker Carlson?

  So when the Western proxy, the Ukrainian military, tries to take out 60% of all of Russia's diesel production, it's probably not just about Russia, is it? It's about hiking the price of diesel globally, which it immediately did, of course.

• 19:15Tucker Carlson?

  And that has the effect of imposing the same restrictions they called for in the climate agenda, but which were broadly rejected by the population. It's like, "Yeah, I care about the earth, but I can't control my own thermostat? I can't have a wood stove? I don't have a functioning water heater? I don't think so. Like, I don't care that much."

• 19:41Tucker Carlson?

  And the same with the Iran war. "Iran can't have a nuclear weapon." Okay, yeah, that doesn't sound great. Iran, nuclear weapon, they seem bad. Certainly don't speak English. They seem pretty foreign. Some weird religion. I don't, yeah, they shouldn't have a nuclear weapon.

• 19:55Tucker Carlson?

  But at this point, how many Americans care if Iran has a nuclear weapon? I mean, probably don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon, or anyone to have a nuclear weapon, but really, as a justification for $6.50 a gallon diesel? They don't care. So what does that tell you? $6.50 diesel isn't an ancillary byproduct of this war. It's the whole point of the war. The point of a system is what it does. And that's how you know what's true. Because it doesn't matter what they tell you, the justification, "We're doing this for this reason." No. Watch what they do. Consider the result it produces.

• 20:39Tucker Carlson?

  If they keep doing it, and it keeps producing that same result, that result is the point of the exercise. You don't need to be a genius to understand that. So when people, dumb people like me, get up on camera and say, "Oh, my gosh, if this continues, we're gonna have famine in Africa and mass migration. All of Sub-Saharan Africa is gonna move to Europe and the United States and Canada." You think that hasn't occurred to them? If this continues, the standard of living in the United States is gonna plummet. People won't be able to afford essentials. They're gonna have to stop eating meat. You think they'd ever thought of that before?

• 21:21Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, at some point, all of us need to just like wake up and ground our understanding of reality in reality itself. Be like your dog. Your dog doesn't understand a word you say, and yet your dog has an amazing track record, most likely, of anticipating what you're going to do. How does that work? Because by not hearing what you say, the dog is restricted to watching what you do. And watching what people do is, over time, a far more reliable indicator of why they're doing it. Seek motive by understanding people's actions, not their words. Words mislead. Actions tell the truth.

• 22:05Tucker Carlson?

  And these actions, both in Ukraine and in Iran, both in Eastern Europe and the Persian Gulf, have the same effect, which is to lower the standard of living in the West, not in China, in the West. China has gone crazy with refineries, and none of them have been blown up. China is producing energy, liquefying coal, as the Germans did during the Second World War, because they don't have adequate oil reserves. So they have a massive gasification program with coal. They have big coal reserves, so they're taking the coal and turning it into liquid fuel, effectively diesel. So China is actually fine. We're not fine. Europe is shafted.

• 22:49Tucker Carlson?

  It was obvious when this started that was going to happen. They did it anyway. Why did they do it? Don't listen, like your dog, to what they say, assess what they do. They did it to destroy the standard of living in the United States and Europe, to make way for the Chinese empire. Obviously, "Oh, that's crazy." Is it crazy? Look at what they're doing. By destroying refineries, they are ensuring that the West will be a lot poorer than it is now. And that's not quickly fixable, and they know that. And by "they," who are we talking about? Well, whoever's making the decisions in the Ukraine war. And it's not Putin. Putin! The Russians are responding at this point.

• 23:34Tucker Carlson?

  They're responding to increased aggression from Ukraine. Ukraine's out of men. We don't know the numbers, because they're still secret, but hundreds and hundreds, likely over a million Ukrainians have been killed. And certainly, way over a million have been killed or wounded. So there is no Ukrainian fighting force left. But they're amping up the aggression? What is that? And who's making that decision? Well, watch the following clip, and you will know. So this is Donald Trump, this is just the other day, as diesel prices start to climb in the United States, and Trump, whatever his many faults, which we've cataloged pretty extensively, understands commodities prices, because they're not hard to understand.

• 24:18Tucker Carlson?

  A commodity is really simple. It's not, you know, there's nothing complex about diesel fuel. You wouldn't want to have to refine it. The process is complex, but diesel as a commodity is easy to understand. It's the liquid that goes inside trucks to keep the global economy going. And without it, the global economy grinds to a halt, literally grinds to a halt. So Trump gets that, and you can check diesel prices on your phone, and there's no question he does. So his fear from the very beginning of this whole conflict was commodities prices would go up, and he's been very focused on the price of Brent crude. Brent crude is one of many markers of global oil prices, named after a now-defunct oil field in the North Sea called the Brent Oil Field. But it's kind of the measure that people use.

• 25:01Tucker Carlson?

  It's like the S&P of energy markets. You know, it's just like a brand name, and people check it. And the Brent crude prices stayed, you know, it's gone over 100, but it's not at 300. So fossil fuel prices, or crude oil prices, have stayed pretty, I mean, relative to what's happened, they've stayed pretty reasonable. But it's the refined products that people actually use. Jet fuel, gasoline, diesel, and fertilizer. Those are the ones you gotta start worrying about, a lot, and diesel in particular. Because unlike jet fuel and fertilizer, they advertise the price of diesel at your local gas station, so you know what it is.

• 25:43Tucker Carlson?

  So Trump is watching this, and it's freaking him out, of course. Because he'll be judged, and he knows, no matter how many arches he builds, or Kennedy centers he names after himself, or whatever kind of sad insanity he attempts to make sure that he's remembered fondly, if the diesel price gets to $8, like, there's no chance. You know, you will always be remembered as a failure, period. And he knows that, because he's, despite appearances, not stupid on this level. So Trump clearly asked advisers, like, "What's going on with diesel?" And they say, "Well, it's really not the Middle East that's causing the spike, it's the Ukrainians smacking all these Russian diesel refineries." And it turns out Russia's one of the big producers, I think, number two in the world for diesel.

• 26:27Tucker Carlson?

  And so Trump gets so agitated that he says, he calls for Zelensky to stop hitting diesel refining. Watch this.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  Mr. Zelensky has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia. Let him go after targets, but not diesel fuel, because he's causing a shortage of diesel fuel. This isn't done by the Middle East, this is done by what's happening with Russia and Ukraine. So we spoke to Mr. Zelensky about it. There are plenty of other targets. Don't hit diesel fuel, because that's hurting, that's hurting the world. We don't want him to hit diesel fuel.

• 27:02Tucker Carlson?

  So that's pretty clear. So that's last Sunday. Trump says that, and that's actually a pretty good thing to say, a pretty smart thing to say. I mean, he's identified one of the main causes of the problem why diesel prices are going up, it's because the Ukrainians are hitting Russian refining. And he thinks, understandably, that he's in charge. Like, there would be no Ukraine, well, there wouldn't be a Ukrainian nation were it not for the support from the United States, and there certainly wouldn't be a Ukrainian war effort. It's not like the Ukrainian people want it. They are being held hostage by an unelected president who's eliminated civil liberties in the country, banned the biggest Christian denomination, put people in prison for criticizing him, he's a lunatic and a tyrant. And why is he continuing?

• 27:47Tucker Carlson?

  Well, the only reason he's continuing is because the Trump administration, through its intel agencies, is giving the Ukrainians targeting information. So when they hit a target in Russia, where did that information come from? From their intel agencies? No, from ours. So whatever they tell you, the Trump administration is allowing this war to continue. It's just a fact, okay? And so Trump feels, understandably, that he can shut it down, because this is only happening because he's allowing it to happen and aiding the Zelensky government. Now, God knows why he's doing that. That's a much deeper question that someone should get to the bottom of. I think we know. In any case, it makes sense that Trump would be like, "Okay, enough. Shut it down, you're hurting me, you're hurting America."

• 28:31Tucker Carlson?

  So that was last Sunday. Here's Trump on Friday, last Friday, just the other day, declaring mission accomplished. Watch this.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  We have the highest employment that we've ever had in history. All of these things are the lowest, we have the best poverty rate, the lowest poverty rate in the history of our country, and people are making more money today than they ever had. And we do have something that I'm very proud of. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. Now, for that, people are gonna have to pay some extra gas. I think most people, if they had a vote on lower gas prices or letting Iran have a nuclear weapon, I'd be willing to vote that it would be a massive landslide. People don't want to have Iran have a nuclear weapon, and you know what? They won't. And the war's gonna end soon, and when it ends, your gas prices are gonna drop to a

• 29:24Speaker 02

  level that they were before, maybe even lower.

• 29:27Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. Ignore this stuff about Iran having a nuclear weapon. I mean, that's obviously the ram, it's kind of sad ramblings of it all. Nobody cares, actually, at this point. Israel having a nuclear weapon, Israel's threatened to use nuclear weapons against various countries a lot, and there are no nuclear inspections in Israel. Inspectors have never been to Dimona. So if there's one country on the planet that's breaking international law on nuclear weapons, it's Israel, of course. They're a much greater threat than Iran's non-existent nuclear program, and honestly, at this point, nobody really cares, and Trump must know that, which is why he keeps repeating it.

• 30:08Tucker Carlson?

  But it's the first part of that statement that really feels almost poignant in retrospect. So here's Trump, just a couple days after, saying, "I'm gonna tell the Ukrainians to stop hitting Russian refineries, we're gonna get diesel prices down." And he's like, "Yeah, the economy's great." Because he feels like he's got it under control. He's working the levers of the global economy. And if diesel prices go really high, well, he's the President of the United States, he can bring them down. It's not a magic trick. Just rein in your proxy, and we're done.

• 30:39Tucker Carlson?

  Truly, the black pill here, the radicalizing fact, the moment where you're like, oh, man, I don't know how we fix this, is when you realize it doesn't matter what Trump says, because he's not in control. And of course, he's not in control. He didn't want to go into this war in the first place. And he was pushed by Benjamin Netanyahu into doing it. So, the president doesn't have the power to make independent decisions on certain topics, the big topics. He doesn't have sovereignty, any more than the US has sovereignty. It's all an illusion. But you would at least think that he could reign in Ukraine, which is not even a real country, the most corrupt country on earth. We could at least tell the midget dictator in charge of that country what to do, since we're the only reason he's

• 31:21Tucker Carlson?

  still alive. But the radicalizing fact, and this is just a fact, because we know what happened next, is that Trump can't tell him what to do. He just gives Trump the finger and does whatever he wants, because he doesn't work for Trump. He doesn't work for the United States, despite appearances. And, by the way, Trump has apparently no control over his own intel agencies. You think he could haul John Ratcliffe in and the heads of the other 16 intel agencies and say, if you give any targeting information to the Ukrainian military, I'm gonna bring you up on charges. Like, you work for me. You weren't elected. I was. That's our system. You have no inherent legitimacy. You're not the president. I am. And I will

• 32:06Tucker Carlson?

  have you brought up on felony charges, treason charges, if you're caught disobeying the commander in chief in wartime. It's like, super simple. And legal, by the way. But, he didn't do that. And because he didn't do that, and because he's not actually in charge of anything of substance, which may be why he's so focused on renaming the Kennedy Center, at least that's something he can do. Build some dumb arch at the end of Memorial Bridge, okay. Build his ballroom. But like, on questions of global power apportionment, he doesn't get a say. And we know he doesn't get a say, because this happens. Here's the BBC News report from like, two days later. Watch.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  With a wave of hundreds of drones and some missiles, a message delivered to Moscow with fire. This oil refinery, just 10 miles from the Kremlin, is the capital's biggest, supplying fuel for the city, and Ukraine says for the Russian military, too. Ukrainian officials say the aim is to bring Vladimir Putin's war home.

• 33:09Tucker Carlson?

  So, in other words, a week after Trump publicly tells Zelensky not to bomb Russian refineries, because it's spiking diesel prices here in the United States and globally, Zelensky bombs Russian refineries 10 miles from Moscow. And then the BBC, which describes this all in kind of pornographic, heavy breathing detail, "one-handed," as they used to say, "sending a message to Vladimir Putin." Like, the amount of war pornography, the amount of violence worship in the news coverage of these conflicts is repulsive. And the people engaging in it need psychiatric care immediately, because it's disgusting. People

• 33:53Tucker Carlson?

  are dying, and you're masturbating over it, which they are. It's disgusting. Beneath contempt. But in any case, they're telling us that the Ukrainians did this, because they're gonna tell the Russians that there's a cost to what you're doing. Well, of course, no sane person thinks that the Ukrainian military is going to push the Russian military into any kind of surrender, or even forced negotiated settlement. That's like, not gonna happen. And we know that, for a lot of reasons, but one is population. Russia's like, 100 million more people than Ukraine. This is nuts. And it's always been nuts. It's never going to

• 34:33Tucker Carlson?

  work. And so, what you're going to get is the total destruction of the Ukrainian nation, and, energy prices that are so high, that you get 15-minute cities and people eating bugs. And so, you have to ask yourself, is that the point? Was that always the point? I don't know. The purpose of a system is what it does. And this system is doing that. So, yes, that's the point. There can be no other. And if you want to know how totally powerless the President of the United States is, and we don't mean to pick on Trump, who at least had the right instinct on diesel, like, you're killing us here. Stop it. If you want to know how totally powerless he is, watch this CNN panel, as they celebrate

• 35:18Tucker Carlson?

  the Ukrainian government giving the finger to its patron, its supposed patron, the United States. Watch.

• 35:24Speaker 04

  Ukraine managed its largest drone attack that we've ever seen on Moscow, and it hit a major oil refinery after President Trump had demanded that Ukraine stop hitting Russian oil targets, because, of course, it's adding to the price hikes, particularly in diesel fuel in the United States. What do you make of this escalation? What does it tell you about capabilities and where we are in this war?

• 35:48Speaker 05

  I have a one-word response for the Ukrainians, which is, congratulations. They need to increase these strikes, and doing so is the only way they can put pressure on Vladimir Putin.

• 36:04Tucker Carlson?

  Okay, so, save that tape, because that tape tells you everything. Now, who is that guy talking? Well, that is a retired, four-star, American admiral. That was the head of NATO under Barack Obama. So, who's he speaking for, exactly? What else does he do? Who is that man? Well, that man is a partner at the Carlyle Group. That man was the former head of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. That man is the current chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation. That man is, in other words, the physical embodiment of the actual rulers of the United States and of the world. And

• 36:48Tucker Carlson?

  they're not political figures. They're not people who are elected by anybody, because that would be democracy, and we don't have that. The actual decisions are being made by people with commercial interests, in whatever conflict is ongoing, and with a much bigger picture of how this is all going to wind up in the end. The point of this exercise is to dethrone the United States as the ruler of the world, to diminish the United States, to impoverish the United States and Europe, which is kind of an innocent bystander here, but will be completely destroyed by this, and to make way for the new era, in which

• 37:29Tucker Carlson?

  we will not be in charge. And, of course, likely, China will be. So, these are the people who are making the decisions. And you know that, because that guy, the former head of NATO, the four-star admiral, the chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carlyle partner, is taking Ukraine's side, Zelensky's side, over the elected American president. So, Zelensky gives the finger to the President of the United States, and the former head of NATO, the four-star admiral, the guy who's like, dedicated his life to saving, helping, defending the United States, that guy's like, no, no, I'm with Zelensky. And he knows, because he ran NATO, that there's literally no chance.

• 38:14Tucker Carlson?

  There's no chance that this tactic, or strategy, will work. You could blow up every refinery in Russia. You could kill Putin. There's no chance that Russia is going to surrender to Ukraine, or anyone else. So, the best you can do is destroy Ukraine, and the nations that support Ukraine, which include the rest of the West. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the object of the exercise. It feels like a lot of people know this. It feels like a lot of people who are much smarter than I am, for example, which would be a lot

• 38:56Tucker Carlson?

  of people, have thought this through from the very beginning. And they know that there's no liberation here. They can call Zelensky Churchill all they want, but in the end, no one's gonna be liberated. No one's getting sovereignty and freedom. In fact, the direct effect of all of this is death for military-age men and women in the West, the legacy population in the West, not the people who just moved here from some foreign country. They're not signing up, of course. But the people whose ancestors were here 100 years ago, they're going to die. And the ones who survive will be much less free than they were when this

• 39:37Tucker Carlson?

  all started. Now, how do we know that? That sounds dark. It sounds like some Alex Jones rant. "New World Order, there's a plan!" Well, we've gotten to the point where they just like, say it on cable television. And so, the only question is, are you listening? This doesn't require any interpretation. You don't need a Rosetta Stone to know what they're saying. You're not hanging on every inflection or nuance here. They're just saying it. So, here's a guy called Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, and we should warn you before this begins, that the affect in this guy's voice, which we think it's fairly fake, is so overwhelming that you think you're watching a cartoon, but this is apparently real. This guy is a conservative political figure in the UK, and he's on television on the conservative

• 40:21Tucker Carlson?

  station in the UK, which is basically like, our own conservative station, not conservative at all. Violence-worshipping tool of whatever is coming next, whatever this new arrangement is going to be, that station and this guy are spirit carriers for that project, obviously. There's nothing conservative about it. They're not trying to conserve what we have. They're trying to usher in the new, new thing. And the one thing we know about the new, new thing, whatever it is, you're not gonna benefit from it. And we know that, because they're just telling you. So, here's Sir Rupert Jacob Rees-Mogg, or whatever we're calling him today. Watch.

• 40:58Speaker 06

  We may face a war. And if we face a war, we will need people who will join the armed services, and who will go out and do their duty. We may even face circumstances where people have to die, to save their country, as they did in the First and Second World Wars, and in many other wars before and since. That is something that makes a country survive. If people are not willing to do their duty, then the country will be taken over by another country, ultimately, one way or another. This is part of the reason that ancient Rome fell.

• 41:33Tucker Carlson?

  Remember, this is a Brit. So you think he would know that the last time Britain was invaded was almost exactly a thousand years ago. It was in fact, in 1066, by Scandinavians posing as French, coming over from Normandy. And they invaded the country and they completely changed it and they do what invading armies do, which they kind of enslaved the population and then, over time, people sort of forgot and they became the aristocracy. And you know the story if you're familiar at all with European history. But the point is, it was a thousand years ago that Britain was last invaded. So the last two wars, the big wars that Britain participated in, the First and Second World War, were not in response to an invasion of Britain. No one was trying to invade Britain. Those were both wars of choice. And what was their effect?

• 42:18Tucker Carlson?

  Well, their effect was to completely destroy the country, completely. In 1914, when the First World War began, when Britain joined the First World War, Britain ruled the world. And by 1945, when the Second War ended, Britain was a husk with rationing for the next 10 years. And the Prime Minister who led Britain through that war, the much-loved in the United States, Winston Churchill, was rejected by voters as a failure. They despised him. Because they knew, what our historians will not admit, which is he destroyed the empire and destroyed their country and it has never recovered. So the wars that that buffoon cites as necessary were in fact, the opposite of necessary. If you think war should be waged in defense of a nation for the benefit of the people who live there.

• 43:03Tucker Carlson?

  And throughout history, people have assumed that's the only reason you have a war. To help the people who live in your country because you're acting on their behalf and you're asking them, as the buffoon reminded us, to die for this effort. So if it doesn't help them, that's a lot to ask of anybody. Go die for something that helps me, something for which I'm not personally willing to die. And my children are not willing to die, but we would like you to go die for this thing that will not help your surviving relatives, at all. In fact, will wreck our country. And that's exactly what Britain did in those two wars. And there's kind of no counter-argument. I mean, they'll get huffy and call you names and you're, you're a hater if you say that, but what about that is not true? It is true. It is true and it's disgraceful.

• 43:46Tucker Carlson?

  And the people who defend it are disgraceful. So actually, if you point out something that is true and you take a position against killing people pointlessly, you are not the criminal. And of course, they try to invert that immediately. Well, you're the bad person, you have hate, you're hate. No, I'm against people dying needlessly. I'm against murdering the innocent. I'm not the bad person here, you are. And so it's very important to keep your kind of wits about you and not succumb to moral vertigo. And moral vertigo is, of course, their, their, you know, their only really effective weapon. You're like, wait, you're committing genocide? You're a hater, shut up! And you get censored, but the people committing genocide, I don't know, get to speak at the UN today.

• 44:31Tucker Carlson?

  So that's not kind of the way it works. No, the way it works is, if you call for the deaths of innocents, you're the bad guy. I'm not the bad guy for calling you out for that. So just remember that if you're watching at home. You are not the bad guy if you oppose sending your nation's young people to pointless death. You are the good guy. And you are facing off against the bad guys and you should put them on their back foot. There's no way that they should be allowed to continue to call for the pointless deaths of our people and hold the moral high ground. That's outrageous. What they're calling for is criminal and vile and disgusting and totally indefensible and they should be ashamed.

• 45:15Tucker Carlson?

  You should not be ashamed for opposing it. In any case, they're trying to shame the population of the UK, the legacy population of the UK, people who watch GB News, into dying for a war that has nothing to do with Britain. And of course, Britain is not even controlled by British people. It has no sovereignty. There are American troops on their soil. The whole thing's a joke. But what's the real agenda? Even Jacob Rees-Mogg, or whatever his name is, probably isn't eager to have a totally pointless war. There's a point to it. There's a reason they want to do this. So we want to play you a clip, and it's part of a colloquy between him and you would think his counterpart.

• 46:00Tucker Carlson?

  So the guy you just saw, Rees-Mogg, is what is known in the UK as a conservative. So he's on one side. Here's a guy called Paul Richards, who's on the completely opposite side. They have nothing in common, they agree on nothing. They're polar opposites, locked in this battle of ideas for control of a great democratic nation. Oh, but that's not true. Because as in the United States, both sides are aligned against the population on the questions that really matter. And the question that matters above all, because it touches on every other question, is the question of who gets killed. War. That matters. So don't let them distract you with all this other crap. What matters is who lives in your country and who gets killed. Okay, let's just start with the things that actually matter.

• 46:45Tucker Carlson?

  And that matters. And so on those questions, who lives in your country and who gets killed, in the UK, as in the US, both sides are in total agreement against the population, which wants none of this. They don't want to have a completely different country every generation because of immigration and they don't want to go fight wars for other nations or commercial interests or whatever. They don't want to die for no reason. They will die in defense of their nation, they don't want to die for any other reason and that's not bad. You're not an anti-Semite for thinking that. And up yours for suggesting otherwise. Anyway, here's this guy, Paul Richards, the liberal, if this were American television, facing off against the conservative.

• 47:27Tucker Carlson?

  Watch him just sort of say out loud what the point of all of this is. This amazing clip, watch.

• 47:33Speaker 07

  I think the British would rise to grain as if they had to. We would have to lock a few people up, by the way. Some of the pro-Russian voices, people are saying there isn't a threat, don't fight for your country, don't go to war for Burnham. We'd have to lock them up.

• 47:44Speaker 06

  Well, we suspended habeas corpus during the Napoleonic Wars.

• 47:47Speaker 07

  Well, and under the Defense of the Realm as well. So, you know, we would have to go to those measures and we would have to look at things like conscription as well.

• 47:54Tucker Carlson?

  It's quite a picture, okay. The very first thing we're gonna do, you can tell these are like, highly informed military tacticians, because they don't start with like, okay, the front in this war is here, you know, we need to cross the Dnipro River to do that. No, no, no. The first thing we need to do is imprison anyone who disagrees with us. And then we need to send everyone else's kids to go die, because those, those guys are not obviously participating in a physical sense in this war. They're not gonna go fight. You think Paul Richards is gonna go fight it? No. The first thing we need to do, the very first thing we need to do is lock up people who are opposed to this war. And then Jacob Rees-Mogg, or whatever his name is, who's posing as like an expert in

• 48:39Tucker Carlson?

  English history, clearly knows nothing about it, is like, yeah, we did that during the Napoleonic Wars. Uh, no buddy, you did that during World War II? When the very first thing the British government did was imprison the opposition party, called them Nazis, which they weren't, run by one of the great war heroes of the First World War, Oswald Mosley? Oh, he was a Nazi. Uh, no, he wasn't. If he was a Nazi, he'd be living in Britain, in Germany. He didn't want the war. And he has been slandered ever since. It's like, scary even to defend him. I'm not even defending the guy, I'm just saying, whatever his views in a free society, you cannot imprison people for their opinions.

• 49:24Tucker Carlson?

  And when you do, how are you better than the people you're fighting? So they just did this in their last big war. And not only did they imprison the opposition party, they sent their wives to prison too. Why? What did the wives do? Oh, they're married to the guys they didn't like? That's called blood guilt. That's kind of not what we do in Western civilization. In fact, that's the opposite of Western civilization. In the West, we judge people on the basis of what they do. We punish the guilty, we spare the innocent, we make every effort to spare the innocent. But they stopped doing that in Britain, in 1940, and just imprisoned the wives, including pregnant women. People died in prison. And they were there for the whole war, under Churchill, Mr. Freedom Fighter Guy.

• 50:06Tucker Carlson?

  So yeah, you just did this in your last big war and you can't wait to do it again. You can't wait to slander anybody who opposes this war as pro-Russian, just as you slandered anyone against the last big war as pro-Nazi. You're pro-Nazi! No, just against the war. How's that? I don't, I don't think it's, I don't think it's gonna help us. That's pro-Nazi, pro-Russia. But that's their, that's their first plan of action, is to put in prison people who disagree with them. Oh, okay. So going back to our plan for understanding reality, that's not a byproduct of the plan.

• 50:49Tucker Carlson?

  That is the point of the plan. The point of the war is to change not Iran or Russia or whatever they tell, no, it's to change us. It's to change our lives. It's to change the way power is apportioned in our society, to take it from the population, this arrangement we had called democracy. And in democracy, of course, you wouldn't go to war if the population overwhelmingly opposed it, because how would that be justified? Where would the authority for that come from? But we do, it's not even a question, people don't want it, who cares whether you want it or not? What do you have to do with this? Shut up. But now, clearly, the plan is to take it to the next stage, where it's like, well, we're just gonna send you off to go die. And by the way, anyone who tells you that conscription in the United States is totally

• 51:34Tucker Carlson?

  off the table is lying, because it's not off the table at all. Hard to believe it could happen. Honestly, it's hard to believe it could happen. And maybe it won't happen. But they've already put in place the, the mechanics to make it happen. But in Britain, they're just like, far gone. Britain is a failed society, run by people with no authority, no credibility and no legitimacy. And they're facing, in effect, a revolt of their own population, which is entirely justified. And their answer to it is not to improve the lives of the people they supposedly represent, the answer to it is to start a war that could end with nuclear annihilation, because they

• 52:13Tucker Carlson?

  just don't care, because they're nihilists, and use that war to end all civ liberties in their country. And if you think that couldn't happen here, if you think that's not part of what you're seeing now, as they blow up refineries around the world.

• 52:31Tucker Carlson?

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• 53:16Tucker Carlson?

  They start, most people pay about 10 bucks a month. And unlike big tech, defend protects your privacy. It's an American company. It will not sell your data. So real security is pretty simple. It means having total control over what's yours, no matter where you are. If you want to find out more, go to defend cellcam.com and enter the code Tucker for 20% off. Once again, that's defend cellcam.com promo code Tucker.

• 53:41Speaker 08

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• 54:42Speaker 09

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• 55:24Speaker 09

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• 55:36Tucker Carlson?

  Brandon Weickert is one of the most informed people we ever talked to on any topic related to war and statecraft. And he's informed because he pays attention to all the details. And so while the rest of us are doing whatever we do during the day, he's learning more about the facts, the actual facts as they unfold, which is not easy, by the way, if you're trying to track these wars on a factual basis, how many people have died? What's been blown up? You know, how many planes in the air at any given time? It's not that easy to do it because there's just a haze of lying around everything, but he has pierced that haze and consistently. And so we're really glad to have him join us again. Brandon, thanks a lot for doing this.

• 56:14Speaker 10

  Thank you as always for having me. It's always an honor to be with you.

• 56:18Tucker Carlson?

  So it feels to me like the attacks in Eastern Europe and the Gulf on refineries, on energy infrastructure is a huge and undersold part of the story. How, how bad have these attacks been? How widespread? Can you give us a picture of what you've seen?

• 56:35Speaker 10

  Well, anybody who's ever played Jenga, you're sort of pulling the pieces out one at a time and watching the, you know, the tower kind of lean and list. And eventually you pull the one out and then the whole thing comes down. The refineries are sort of the, the most important block here. And I thought that your monologue laid it out brilliantly. In fact, it's sort of already hit a lot of the points I had made. But, but the point here is, is that we can reopen the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Bab al-Mandeb eventually. We can take control of the Panama Canal Zone.

• 57:18Speaker 10

  We can, you know, reassert ourselves around Greenland, near the Greenland Iceland UK gap. We can do all of that and that's fairly straightforward. The refineries are not coming back once they're blown up and it's going to take years. Now in the United States, we have our own problems and I'm kind of want to start there because you already hit on Russia. The United States though, has a very significant set of issues with the refineries. First of all, we haven't built new refineries since the late 1970s. And one of the reasons we haven't built a new refinery is because of what you mentioned,

• 57:59Speaker 10

  which was sort of the eco condria, you know, the, the panic over global warming and climate change. So we created regulations and we created disincentives for investors to put money in these, these very important refineries. And so what we have is basically what we've had for about 40 plus years, well, really since the Ayatollahs took over in Iran. So pretty much that same timeframe that we've been at war with Iran, we've had the same refineries. Those refineries were designed to process the heavy sour crude.

• 58:39Speaker 10

  We hear very often from our, our leaders, so-called, they love to say we're since, you know, standing on an ocean of, of oil in North America and we are, we have a lot of, in many cases untapped, light, sweet crude. Our refineries though, don't process light, sweet crude. So we drill, baby drill, and then we export that stuff to the rest of the world, to refineries and people and countries that can refine that. We import a lot of our stuff and heavy sour crude.

• 59:19Speaker 10

  So from places like Mexico and wouldn't you know it, Canada, who we seem to have really aggravated lately. So we, we bring in a lot of stuff that we don't drill and we use our refineries to refine that. Somebody explained to me, I was, I co-host Mario Nothel's show and I, we had an oil expert and he said, it's sort of like, we have caviar for oil and we sell that on the market and then we bring in the quarter pounder with cheese from overseas and we have to process and use that here. So that's one of the biggest problems that we have.

• 59:59Speaker 10

  There's another issue, which is we pretty much max out our refining capacity. And we do that because we're a capitalist country and we like to have the short-term profit, you know? You, you max it out, you take the money, you make off that and you, you use that for profit. You mentioned China earlier. China, if you'll forgive me again, my glasses, China has basically, they are the world's largest, most advanced refining capacity. And they don't even use roughly, the percentage I can't find now, but they don't use a, I'm

• 1:00:41Speaker 10

  sorry, yes, 30% of their, of their refining is in the teapot refining, refining capability in Shandong province. That capability is heavily sanctioned because that, those teapot refineries use and process a lot of oil from Russia or from sanctioned countries that we don't like to do business with. But one of the things that China's done is on top of those capabilities, which are numerous, the Chinese have actually built out really new, advanced, sophisticated systems like the Yulong petrochemical complex, which deals a lot.

• 1:01:23Speaker 10

  They've really developed some interesting refining capabilities, new techniques for gasoline and diesel, even for plastics. But the key thing here is the Chinese have spare refining capacity. And that is because they want to have a buffer because they anticipated many years ago that there would be a national security crisis in which you could either have an oil shortage globally, or you could have sanctions being used and there would be a, you know, a lack of supply coming in. So the Chinese have excess, not only storage with their largest strategic petroleum reserve,

• 1:02:04Speaker 10

  which was numbered at 1.8, 1.6 billion barrels before the war began. They've gotten, gotten into a little bit of that, but basically they have a lot of reserve, but then they also have reserve capacity. And you rightly noted.

• 1:02:22Speaker 10

  Knocking out these Russian refineries, I think the percentage was forty-five percent of Russia's refining capacity has been taken offline as of this month. So the Russians are not, almost half of Russia's refining capacity is now offline. The United States is already at capacity. We talk a lot about, you know, the, the, um, the supply issue, but we're not talking about the refining issue. And China has a lot of excess refining capacity. So we're creating a situation, either purposely or just because stupidity. Um, the fact is we're creating a situation, Tucker, where China's gonna have a lot of cards.

• 1:03:06Speaker 10

  We've seen this play out, and I'll shut up after this, but we've seen this play out, um, with rare earth minerals, right? We always hear, oh, China has rare earth mineral dominance. Well, that's not exactly accurate. What they have is rare earth mineral processing dominance. It's the processing that makes the stuff work. They've got it. They've got about ninety percent of processing dominance. The whole world's supply chain relies on it. The Chinese have replicated that strategy for everything. In fact, Chinese doctrine, they talk frequently about controlling not just choke points in terms of, you know, straits, maritime straits and whatnot, but they really focus on controlling

• 1:03:48Speaker 10

  the geo-economic hubs of the twenty-first century. So things like rare earth mineral processing or the processing and refinement of crude oil, which the world needs, and they've got a lot of excess capacity. Tucker, I could foresee if we continue blowing up or allowing the destruction of all these refineries around the world, and we can't really build new ones that process the stuff we need here because of environmentalism or whatever, I could foresee that the Chinese say, hey, we've got a lot of excess capacity, you can deal with us.

• 1:04:27Speaker 10

  And you could have an entire new market arising for heavy or, or for crude oil refiner, refinement occurring over time in China, which then just gives Beijing even more leverage. And this whole war, notably the Iran war, but also the Ukraine war.

• 1:04:45Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:04:46Speaker 10

  What has it done? It has actually knocked down not only the United States, which is the key rival for China, it's also actually kind of knocked down their other rival, Russia, because Russia's having to fixate on Europe and fixate all their resources on opposing NATO. And in turn, Russia's had to pivot, and they're not natural allies with China, but now they're bosom buddies. The shotgun wedding has now become a true love story between Xi and Putin. And that is all because of these Western so-called elites, uh, like Larry Fink, like Admiral James Stavridis. I had a very interesting conversation with him once in twenty twelve about drugs in

• 1:05:30Speaker 10

  Afghanistan, and it was very, and very insightful into the psyche. Anyway, um.

• 1:05:35Tucker Carlson?

  Wait, can you pause right there? Because he is, Admiral Stavridis is, I, I think, one of the key players in all this. Again, he's the chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation. He is, was the former dean of the Fletcher School. He, I mean, talk about deep state, he is a Carlyle partner, and he was the head of NATO. So like, if there's someone who should be more famous than he is, and of course, he was commander of US forces in Afghanistan. Tell us about your conversation.

• 1:06:02Speaker 10

  Well, it was offline, and, and it was when he was commander, and I was at an event in Chicago, and it was the NATO conference in Chicago, and he gave a, you know, a briefing, off, off the record briefing, but, but it was all about the poppy, the issue of drugs in Afghanistan.

• 1:06:18Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:06:19Speaker 10

  It's just that, you know, we created that problem.

• 1:06:23Tucker Carlson?

  I know.

• 1:06:24Speaker 10

  As always, and, um, there seemed to be kind of, we were okay with that. It was, you know, I don't know, it just was a very interesting, it was, yeah, it was, and that's who you're dealing with, and, and that's not to, you know, I don't want to bash the guy, because I don't know him, because, you know, he wore the uniform, I have a lot of respect for that. Um, but the point here is, is that he, I believe, is part of a cadre, dare I say cabal, of people, government and private sector types, who have a certain worldview. And, um, I don't know if they would describe it as harming America, they probably have convinced themselves it's for the greater good or whatever, but their actions are clearly,

• 1:07:07Speaker 10

  and again, I say, you know, Stavridis sort of ran in the same circles as the Russiagate crew did. Um, and what's really astounding, Tucker, at, since we're on a sidebar here, is how the president has empowered the same cabal that tried to take him out in twenty sixteen. He is empowered, and every chance these guys and gals get to undermine him still, they take it, as that CNN clip highlighted. But my, my point here is, is that there, there's clearly a policy in place that is, um, negating our energy dominance, that is restricting our ability to process.

• 1:07:52Speaker 10

  And who benefits from this? It isn't the United States, it isn't Europe, it isn't Russia, it isn't our partners in the Middle East. It's one country, the People's Republic of China.

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• 1:09:11Speaker 00

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• 1:09:41Tucker Carlson?

  Tucker. All of it, from, from the day the Biden administration had the vice president at the time, Kamala Harris, announced at the Munich Security Conference that we're gonna push Ukraine into NATO. And that was the moment the war was assured, like, it was gonna happen at that point. They pushed this war, they wanted this war. From that, from that moment, I thought, everything that has happened since has diminished the United States and strengthened China. So you can't tell, and, and we're almost without, almost that exception.

• 1:10:12Speaker 10

  Right.

• 1:10:13Tucker Carlson?

  So, so it's like, it's not a conspiracy theory to note that and to say, once again, that the point of a system is what it does.

• 1:10:20Speaker 10

  Right.

• 1:10:21Tucker Carlson?

  It's obvious to me that knowingly or not, they're taking the West out of competition with China and making way for this new age and this new empire.

• 1:10:30Speaker 10

  And it is a new age, because I, you know, and, and to be fair, China, it's just interesting, because I talk a lot with people in China, you know, there's, there's a lot of investors I know, and there's a lot of people who are very pro, they're American, very pro-capitalist, very pro-open, you know, open markets and whatnot, and they are always telling me, you know, the hawks have got China wrong. And the one thing I could foresee is that the Chinese leaders, they don't really like America, they don't trust the United States, you know, the military side, the national security side, understandably, um, and I don't think we should trust their military

• 1:11:11Speaker 10

  side, but the, the Chinese leadership, it doesn't sound like their play is to actively seek to take over the American empire. It's more headache than it's worth, but they absolutely want to undermine our ability to threaten them in their backyard. And so they're taking advantage of all of these self-inflicted disasters that we're creating, even things like refineries. We don't, we don't, we haven't built a new refinery in forty years. The Chinese are looking at us going, you're stupid. We're gonna do what we need to do, and we'll just outpace you that way, so the whole world depends on us, and we'll reorient trade flows that way, and you can never be a threat to us again.

• 1:11:54Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, and I mean, there are a lot of participants in this. I mean, the Sierra Club says not a word about the carbon emissions from our bombing campaigns. It tells you they don't really care about carbon emissions. There's another agenda here, obviously.

• 1:12:04Speaker 10

  Well, and also the tech bros. I mean, look, I, I, I was in high school when I was a senior, I believe, when the, the movie, the Gore movie, the inconvenient, whatever.

• 1:12:19Tucker Carlson?

  Inconvenient truth.

• 1:12:21Speaker 10

  Yeah, I remember it was like 20 years ago, but I remember they made us, my, we made us watch the movie as a school, as seniors. They wanted us to watch it. And so I did. And I remember thinking, this is scary. And of course, none of it ever happened. All of the fear mongering. But you know what it did do? It was pushed, first of all, by a lot of fundraisers from Wall Street and Silicon Valley. And it was all about getting people to be so afraid of the weather, that they would then invest, or purchase, or, or promote these technologies

• 1:12:59Speaker 10

  that were all the brolegarchs technologies. And now the brolegarchs have a new set of technologies, a new set of clean energy, which is they have AI. And therefore, they need it. They need all the power they can get. So you don't hear that much anymore about fossil fuels causing pollution. You now have things like nuclear power being promoted, finally. You now have things like that, because we're now moving away from the fear of whatever to where we are now.

• 1:13:34Tucker Carlson?

  Right. But both have the same effect, which is the loss of sovereignty and freedom and choice for the average person and greater control for the group that runs the country, which is not, not the population, obviously.

• 1:13:46Speaker 10

  No.

• 1:13:47Tucker Carlson?

  So in the, in the specific case of the Ukraine war, and that kind of amazing week, last week, where Trump comes out and says, you gotta stop bombing Russian diesel refineries. Two days later, he's like, we won, you know, the economy's gonna get better, the war's almost over. And then three days after that, the Ukrainians just do it anyway. Who's making that decision?

• 1:14:11Speaker 10

  Um, well, I think it's the CIA. I think, I think, I think that it's very interesting to me that Mr. Trump doesn't pick up the phone and call John Ratcliffe and be like, WTF, what's going on? Because I'm the president, and I specifically publicly said, don't do X. And then your boy in Kyiv did X. Why? Why did he think he could do that? Because we know that this Ukraine war is being run out of Langley, partly at least. It's being run out of CIA. And so I don't know if, and, and again, this goes back to things like Russiagate, right? Like CIA is clearly doing whatever the hell it wants. You know, the

• 1:14:53Speaker 10

  CIA has its own policy. They don't give a dern about who the elected American president is. They're gonna do what they're gonna do all the time, period. So CIA policy is, they wanna go to war with Russia. As, as I told you before, I was at a, on a location consulting for the Air Force in, in the West Coast, and I had a two-star general tell me, Brandon, you don't understand, we're breaking the Russian army in the field for free. That's the mentality of those types of people. And so they're gonna push this. The president could literally say, don't bomb these refineries. And then their guy on the ground is gonna

• 1:15:35Speaker 10

  do it. Because the president is not running the agency. The agency is running the administration, clearly.

• 1:15:42Tucker Carlson?

  He doesn't seem to be making any major decisions. He doesn't seem to have the capacity to make them, the power to make them. And if you look at his social media posts, which are becoming increasingly deranged, literally deranged, what you see, if you calm down and assess it coolly, is frustration. A guy who can't actually do anything. And he's enraged by that. And so then he's posturing, I'm gonna destroy their civilization. Well, no, cuz you, you know, it's not up to you, actually.

• 1:16:13Speaker 10

  That's a very interesting take on, on that. That's interesting.

• 1:16:16Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I mean, there, he's not that crazy. He has not been that. I mean, I've spent a lot of time with him. He's, he doesn't talk, he's never talked like that in private, or in public.

• 1:16:26Speaker 10

  I am surprised that he talks like this, because I remember the first term, and, and he, I remember he would get allergic to the thought, you know, of, of, of a nuclear war, or, and it's like now he, you know, I, I have been told by certain people, that the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Kane, basically, it's like dealing with a toddler. He has to kind of jingle the keys in front of the, the toddler to keep him from bringing up the N-word, nuclear war. That in the last several meetings, Trump is fixated on the, you know, nuclear war. Why can't we use this bomb? What's the big deal? What, that's crazy town to me.

• 1:17:04Tucker Carlson?

  He should be removed from office immediately for talking that way. You can't threaten offensive nuclear war. You risk the life of every person on the planet. Like, you're not allowed to do that, and he should be removed immediately for talking like that.

• 1:17:17Speaker 10

  Well, this is a question for certain people in the cabinet. Why have they not had it?

• 1:17:23Tucker Carlson?

  Cause they're cowards. That's why. They're, cuz they're cowards. Look, I, I, I don't, I like craziness. I grew up around it. I'm not bothered by craziness at all. I tend to be a little crazy. I, I have a very wide strike zone on crazy. But if you threaten nuclear war, offensive nuclear war, against a country that doesn't have nuclear weapons, but against anybody, you are a criminal, and you are putting the life of every living thing at risk. And you're not allowed to do that. And so you're done. We're, you're done. And I, I, that's just the clearest possible thing. And he, they could take him out, and they should immediately take him out, the second he talks like that. And they won't, because they're cowards. It's just that simple. Like, what's the other explanation?

• 1:18:05Speaker 10

  No, I mean, they're cowards, but they're, they're also, they're all part of the grift machine, right? They're all getting, you know, so in a way, they're all sort of a problem. And Congress won't investigate. And unfortunately, it's probably gonna take the Democrats taking power, and they have their own problems, to, to, as you know, to really get to the bottom of, of what's going on. Because the bottom line here is, the president has unleashed the dogs of war. The dogs of war are now running wild, and nobody can rein them back in. And now we, we live in the nuclear age. So that means

• 1:18:45Speaker 10

  the dogs of war, you know, we, we could be seeing this happen, a nuclear bomb strike, you know, either, in either front of these wars. If they're willing to go after the refineries, if they're willing to go after the stuff that builds civil society in modern countries, Tucker, because of, you know, I don't even know why, I mean, the Ukraine war, I can't even remember anymore what we're fighting over. The same thing with the Iran war, nuclear weapons, you know, the president said a year ago that we blew up the nuclear weapons. So what are we still fighting for? So the point is, is if they're willing to do that, you know, target these, these facilities, target the infrastructure, it's only a matter

• 1:19:26Speaker 10

  of time before the powers that be, the real powers that be say, we're gonna, we're gonna take this to the next level, cuz we have to, quote, win. And, you know, I don't know what victory looks like, but it's not gonna be pretty. I can tell you that much. Look at the Russians. You know, the Russians are advancing on the eastern front. They, they are, they are decisively moving. It is, it is slow going, but there's clear forward momentum for the Russian armed forces. And I realize I'm gonna get a lot of hate mail for this. They have taken two of the four big fortress cities in that fortress belt in Ukraine. They are probably going to take the third one soon. They're doing a classic

• 1:20:07Speaker 10

  encirclement campaign. This is the Russian style of war. They encircle, they seal, they use heavy artillery, and they crush until there's nothing left. And then they walk over and do it again. This is, this is how they fight. This is the war of attrition. They are going to take those two remaining fortress cities, Tucker. But I am, you know, concerned that you will see, as that Russian force is advancing closer and closer to the final fortress city, I could foresee a European NATO country allowing their territory to be used to launch attacks on behalf of Ukraine against the, the, the invading, or, or advancing,

• 1:20:49Speaker 10

  however you wanna describe it, Russian army. And I had the chance recently to talk to a Russian officer on the Mario and Awful Show, and I asked this guy, so what happens if the forces on the front line start falling under attack from, from, you know, these, these NATO countries? And his response to me was, the Russian battlefield commanders have been given authorization to protect their forces. And they will protect their forces, which means if they're fired upon, and it is serious enough, from these NATO European countries, they will retaliate in kind at the, the place of origin. Which means suddenly now, you have an advancing Russian army in eastern Ukraine, potentially

• 1:21:33Speaker 10

  firing into, you know, these European countries, which you know, the Europeans are dying. I've never seen a group of people wanna be bombed so badly. The Europeans want to be bombed, so they can then declare Article Five, and they think, get America to come back to their rescue, and then they have their, their very big war. And that's my fear of where that's going.

• 1:21:54Tucker Carlson?

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• 1:23:19Tucker Carlson?

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• 1:24:15Speaker 00

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• 1:24:45Speaker 11

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• 1:25:15Tucker Carlson?

  And then the West destroys itself, which is the whole point.

• 1:25:18Speaker 10

  And we're already there.

• 1:25:18Tucker Carlson?

  This is a murder-suicide. Right, obviously. And I just

• 1:25:23Speaker 10

  It's a murder-suicide.

• 1:25:24Tucker Carlson?

  I just want to say it's happening against the will of the population. Nobody wants this. And you would think in purportedly democratic countries, that would matter. It doesn't. One mystery of this whole thing is why is Israel so aggressively backing Ukraine? Putin has gone out of his way for 25 years to get along with Israel, never been anti-Israel. He's had good relations with various governments in Israel, including the Netanyahu government. And yet, the Israeli government is very much pushing this war. Why?

• 1:25:53Speaker 10

  I think that there's, well, I think there's a lot of quiet money flow going on. I did a report many moons ago at the National Interest when I worked there. And I found that there was these oligarchs in Ukraine that were, they were also Jewish, and they were basically becoming dual citizens. And they were essentially taking the money, the foreign aid that the country was receiving, they were gaining access to it, and then they were stealing it. And then they were fleeing the country before the anti-corruption police could get them because they had, they had knowledge, foreign knowledge, these raids were going to happen. And where did a lot of them end up? They ended up in the, over the years, in Israel.

• 1:26:37Speaker 10

  And of course, since the, I think it's the rite of return, the Israelis will not send those people back to be prosecuted, even though they are likely guilty of corruption, because now they're part of their Israeli citizens. And Israel wants the tax revenue. They tax the money that was stolen. They get a lot of money. It's, it's, it's a tax scheme. So you have a lot of, a lot of wealth flowing in from wealthy Ukrainians who are also Jewish, and they're fleeing the war, they're fleeing the corruption police, and they're ending up in Israel with our money. And they're living large, I mean, as large as you can live in a, in a, you know, the war zone there now.

• 1:27:20Speaker 10

  But they're living there, and they're protected by the Israelis, partly because of Israeli tax policy. The Israelis want that tax revenue constantly coming in. Then you have also, I think there's a bit of a historical grievance. Russia, you know, pogroms against the Jews and all throughout the czar's reign. And I think that that has always, sort of Russia has been viewed by certain hardliners in Israel as sort of a threat, or certainly something to kind of get revenge upon. And I think that you've seen this, looking at the support of Ukraine, sort of in that

• 1:28:02Speaker 10

  historical, cultural reference of, hey, we want to avenge ourselves upon this, this Russian state for what they did to our grandparents and great-grandparents. And the pogroms were terrible. But I think that's part of it. Then you, and that, that gets us to the Pale of Settlement, which was the relocation of Jews from Crimea and some of these parts of Ukraine. Incidentally, there are certain people like Victoria Nuland and the Kagan family, who apparently they had relatives, and I think Tony Blinken had relatives that were affected by this over the, over the centuries. But also, Tucker, there's the issue of Russia's support of Iran.

• 1:28:45Speaker 10

  And this is another thing that's very important to understand because it is geopolitics. I believe the Israelis genuinely believe, and if I were living in Israel, I wouldn't want a strong Iran either. But I'm not an Israeli. I'm not, and I'm an American. So, but the Israelis are looking over their shoulder, saying, I don't want a strong Iran. And who's one of the number one or number two supporters of Iran? It's the Russians. And so they view, I think, the Israelis view covert support for Ukraine. And I realize they didn't always help with, with air defenses, because that's always something I hear. Yes, of course, because the Israelis are going to protect their interests first. But at the end of the day, if Israel can, can weaken Russia via Ukraine, I think the

• 1:29:30Speaker 10

  logic in Tel Aviv is that's less capabilities the Russians can give, or, or less aid the Russians can give the Iranians as we fight the Iranians. And I think that's all sort of what's going on there.

• 1:29:45Tucker Carlson?

  It makes sense, actually.

• 1:29:48Speaker 10

  It doesn't. There's no antisemitism involved in any of this.

• 1:29:53Tucker Carlson?

  Right. Well, there usually isn't. Right. You, I used to say, facts don't care about your feelings. That, that used to be the rule, but it's no longer valid.

• 1:30:03Speaker 10

  You know, you know, the people who say that are often the most emotional and irrational.

• 1:30:07Tucker Carlson?

  I've noticed. They don't mean it. Last, last question. How do you, since I, I know that you're so focused on the war in the Persian Gulf every day, and you're immersed in the details, how do you think it likely ends and when?

• 1:30:25Speaker 10

  I still think it's probably going to end in a nuclear explosion. That's, you know, they call me Black Pill Brandon for a reason, though, Tucker. So, you know, not to be, not to make light of this, but I, I am very concerned that we are edging toward, you know, Trump doesn't seem to have his hand on the wheel, as you rightly note. He's not in control. And I don't know if that's all because of Israel, you know, he is the President of the United States. He, he could, I mean, look, Obama said no to Israel in a big way. So the president really could tell them to F off on some of this stuff, but he doesn't.

• 1:31:10Speaker 10

  And so he is responsible for this, and he's in quite a sticky wicket. And the president's instinct on this is to double down, which is odd, because, you know, originally, his instinct was, it's not my fault. I didn't do it. I'm out of here. It's too expensive to maintain it. That was first-term Trump. Second-term Trump is, I'm going to keep doubling down because I'm the big man. Well, the only next thing he could potentially do would be to drop a B-6113 ground-penetrating nuclear device on Pickaxe Mountain. Now, it's not going to really do anything in terms of, like, what does it do? Okay, it knocks out Pickaxe Mountain.

• 1:31:52Speaker 10

  Pickaxe Mountain's not even finished being built yet, that facility there, by the way. So really, it's sort of like he gets his big finish. Now, an Israeli source of mine recently used the phrase, "A war in three acts." And that's stuck in my craw. Because if you think about it, that is what this is shaping up to be. The first act was the 12-day war. The second act is whatever you call the last six or seven months. And there's a kind of a pause going on as everybody kind of reorients themselves to the new normal. The third act, the finale, the final act, if we're talking in screenplay terms, the big finish would be a mushroom cloud over Pickaxe Mountain, dropped from a B-2. And then Trump gets to say, I'm the first president since Harry Truman. Drop it.

• 1:32:37Speaker 10

  I got my big bang. It was a movie finish, and I'm done. Problem with that is, once you do that, once you do that, Tucker, Russia and China and every other nuclear power gets a vote, and they're not going to be too pleased. And by the way, to be fair to Trump, it might not, and this, I talked to Anthony Aguilar last night, and he kind of put this possibility in my head. Trump might not do a B-6113. He might realize this is a bridge too far. But the Israelis, we just sold them $2.6 billion worth of bombs. Lots and lots of bombs, not nukes. They've got their own nukes, but a lot of bombs.

• 1:33:20Speaker 10

  Now, that's not going to be hitting their arsenals for many years. But the theory is it is possible in the month of October, Netanyahu's up for an election he's losing right now. Possibly Mr. Netanyahu needs his next war. He's going to take what he has in terms of weapons, and he's going to fire them or drop them over Iran to kickstart that war again. And then the stuff we sold them will be used to backfill those arsenals over the years. And at that point, remember what Marco Rubio, our venerable secretary. Somebody said to me, he's the greatest secretary of state. And I said, secretaries of state are supposed to be diplomats who end wars. This guy is like presiding over like 50 different wars.

• 1:34:04Speaker 10

  So anyway, Secretary of State Rubio, three or four days into the war, after the February 28th war, he was in Congress and he said, he said, we had to attack Iran when we did, how we did, because Israel was going to attack them regardless in a few days. And then we would have been hit by Iranian retaliation. So we had no choice. Well, I could foresee then, if that's the logic here, if that happened before, past his prologue, the Israelis might decide to kick off another round, the final third act of a three act war by launching a strike, airstrikes or something, maybe even nukes from a dolphin class submarine off the coast of Iran, which they've got six dolphin class submarines with nuclear tipped cruise missiles.

• 1:34:45Speaker 10

  The Israelis could kick off something that we get again sucked into.

• 1:34:52Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, it's been, you know, over 80 years since, you know, the one and only time nuclear weapons were deployed. And that seems like a threshold that once you cross it, the world is done. I mean, the voluntary offensive use of nuclear weapons? I mean, do you think that's been, is currently being discussed?

• 1:35:15Speaker 10

  Uh, yeah, yeah. And I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of these generals and admirals are constantly sort of, like I said, dangling the keys in front of the two year old because he starts talking about it and they're like, oh, no, Mr. President, let's, let's, you know, they're constantly trying. Somebody said, I can't remember now who in the last two days, they said that, sort of like they're just giving him enough information to keep him on the path they want him on. But this is a guy who, you know, is going to go his own path no matter what. Um, because I think there is, I know there's fear among the retired, uniformed officers that I know, and I know a lot of top people, retired generals in many cases.

• 1:35:59Speaker 10

  And whatever you think of them in terms of their politics or whatever, I think these people have a good read on what's going on inside the Pentagon. And they have intimated to me that they're, the uniformed military command is very frightened about what might happen with the N word being used so much.

• 1:36:18Tucker Carlson?

  Do you think they would carry out? I mean, I would pray that they would not as patriots and Christians, decent people, carry out an offensive use of nuclear weapons like, no one's resigned, I noticed.

• 1:36:31Speaker 10

  If it's, right, right? I mean, even Cole and Powell finally had enough with Bush. Um, but, um, well, if it'd be 61, particularly a B-6113. Now, I want to make it clear, and this is from General Randy Manor, former head of Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Talked to him last night about this. And he said, look, the B-60, there's no, no tactical nuclear weapon we have is going to be effective against pickaxe. That's why they built it there. They know our yields, they know the, I mean, these are very smart people. Who knew our enemies are smart? Um, they built this thing to survive the kind of attacks they figured we would subject the facility to. So one of the things that we have is a B-6113.

• 1:37:16Speaker 10

  It's a ground penetrating nuke. We have a B-6112, which I believe is an airburst nuke. And those are kept, I think in Enserlik. Uh, but the B-6113 is very convenient because we keep it in Whiteman Air Force Base and the B-2s are there and we can just load them up and fly them. And the thing is we can dial the yield. Okay, it's not like it's one yield, one strike. If we want a little teeny tiny explosion, we can literally dial back the yield on the explosive device. And then you'll have a relatively confined nuclear blast. Um, so in that specific instance, Tucker, uh, the president could give the order. And it's not like he's running through all the, you're not launching intercontinental ballistic missiles. They will give the order to the base commander.

• 1:38:01Speaker 10

  The base commander pulls a nuke out, they load it up onto the B-2. The B-2 takes off and 17, 16 hours later, it does its thing. And it's relatively straightforward in that way. Uh, and the argument would be is, hey, we can control it. Not a big deal. It's just a big bomb, basically. And I would remind your audience to, uh, Bridge, Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of war, undersecretary of war for defense or policy. He is writing the renewed or the new nuclear warfare doctrine, which explicitly lowers the threshold for the deployment of non-strategic nuclear weapons. And why are they doing that? Well, part of that, Tucker, is because we've blown through

• 1:38:46Speaker 10

  all of our conventional munitions or most of them. And we talked, you know, we, we talked about that before. So how do you make up for the gap? Because the defense industrial base isn't making it up. So we have a lot of tactical nukes lying around from the Cold War. We'll just, and some new ones that we're building. We'll just bring those to the fore and we'll use those systems now.

• 1:39:05Tucker Carlson?

  These people can't, and I know a lot of these people.

• 1:39:08Speaker 10

  I do too.

• 1:39:09Tucker Carlson?

  Very well.

• 1:39:10Speaker 10

  I do too.

• 1:39:11Tucker Carlson?

  But, you know, mass psychosis is an interesting thing. It's like you lose your capacity to hear yourself. So what they would be arguing is because we fear that someday Iran might have a nuclear weapon, we're going to nuke Iran.

• 1:39:26Speaker 00

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• 1:39:55Speaker 10

  I think they would say it's China, it's about signaling to China. I think it's actually dark.

• 1:39:59Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, signaling to the world that it's permitted to use nuclear weapons, something that's been verboten for 80 years. So it's like, once you lose your nuclear virginity, there's no getting it back. And you are on inexorably a road to a real nuclear exchange in which everybody dies. Like, obviously, this has been known, this is intuitive. Like, you don't need to have a grounding in history to know that. It's obvious. And so even the fact they're discussing it is, is grounds for imprisonment, as far as I'm concerned.

• 1:40:29Speaker 10

  Well, it's certainly grounds to get, uh, the institutions up and running again that are supposed to actually have oversight here. Uh, this is my bugaboo as somebody who used to work there many years ago. Uh, Congress is not around, apparently. Apparently we don't have a Congress because at the very least, we, we should be privately calling, having friendly senators and congressmen to Trump, calling him, being like, hey, man, you, you can't do this. You, you cannot do this. Uh, it's not okay. We don't even have that. Everybody's just like, yeah, we're going to do it, America. So this is where we're at right now. Um, and by the way, you mentioned the leadership, you know, and they, they have to know.

• 1:41:11Speaker 10

  Um, I don't think we have responsible men and women in power. I think this gets back to the Epstein class. You look at what these people were doing to get power and wealth. Um, they don't have moral clarity. They don't have personal judgment. Clearly, many of them are sociopathic people. So, you know, we used to have leaders who really did worry about what, you know, what the other side might do, that worried about the cost of people. I mean, we had, one of our greatest presidents was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who actually did not want to build bullets. He wanted to build butter and have more butter than guns

• 1:41:56Speaker 10

  because he recognized when you build weapons, that's a theft from the American people. It does not go into anything productive. It just goes into destructive means. And so we've had presidents, and of course Eisenhower saw war. And like very few other people did. But we've had presidents who had that capability. We don't have people today because we don't have a moral country. We have a, we have a pagan country. Uh, we have a post-Western country. And if people keep saying we're a Western civilization, I don't believe that. I don't think there's anything about us anymore, except maybe the language that's really Western. So that's why you have people in the West. And it's all the Western countries, by the way.

• 1:42:41Speaker 10

  It's the Europeans, it's the Brits, it's, it's the Americans. We're the ones acting like crazy people. The Russians are in Ukraine, but you know, Putin could have, could have nuked Ukraine. Putin could have flattened the Western side of Ukraine. Instead, he keeps bleeding Russians because he doesn't want to escalate beyond where it is. Okay, Xi Jinping, so I changed my assessment, uh, you know, at the, uh, right after the war began in Iran and I saw what was going on. For years I was convinced, yeah, probably they're right in the air force. 2027, he's going to try something with Taiwan. I don't believe that. I said back in June, I was writing about this. I actually think Xi Jinping watched the Russian experience in Ukraine.

• 1:43:25Speaker 10

  He watched the American experience in the Middle East. He goes, I don't want that. I can get Taiwan, um, you know, through peaceful means. I can reabsorb them through trade and economy on a 50 year cycle. I can do that. So he's, I don't think, I think the, and that just tells me something. The leaders of these countries that we're at war with tend to be apparently more restrained than the American and European leaders. And I don't say that because I'm happy about it. I'm very worried about this.

• 1:43:56Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, after watching, you know, the President of the United States threaten the use of nuclear weapons against a country that doesn't have nuclear weapons because he doesn't want to get, it's, it's all so crazy that you can imagine normal Taiwanese saying, I'm, why would we want to be aligned with that? You know, people, by the way, the, the powerful force in any conflict is the one who restores order and peace. It's not the person who postures.

• 1:44:22Speaker 10

  By the way.

• 1:44:23Tucker Carlson?

  That's dad. Dad comes home and stops the fighting. And so of course China doesn't need to invade Taiwan. It's also stupid.

• 1:44:33Speaker 10

  It's stupid. It's, it's stupid, but that's another thing is intellectually, I mean, look at our, look at, look at the American test scores. Look at, look at our educational system or lack thereof. Three generations at least have been poorly educated in this country. It's no surprise that we have idiots like from Idiocracy, the movie, running this country. It's, it's no surprise. And now we're talking, you know, potentially world ending or whatever events. And we have these people, we don't have John F. Kennedy secretly talking to Nikita Khrushchev through Gromyko. Uh, you know, we, we don't have the, the kinds of responsible stewards of national security policy that we used to have.

• 1:45:18Speaker 10

  We have a CIA that is apparently running rogue and running their own operations against, uh, you know, the Russians, even after the president publicly tells them, their boss, don't do it. So that's kind of where we're at now.

• 1:45:33Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I pray you're wrong, but I do think you're the single most informed commentator on all of this stuff.

• 1:45:38Speaker 10

  Oh, my gosh, thank you.

• 1:45:39Tucker Carlson?

  I worry that you're not.

• 1:45:40Speaker 10

  I have a lot of haters out there, if you can believe it.

• 1:45:42Tucker Carlson?

  You don't have much competition, I will say that. Brandon Waker, thank you very much for all of that. It was great to see you.

• 1:45:47Speaker 10

  Thank you, Tucker.

• 1:45:48Tucker Carlson?

  Thanks. Thanks for watching, we'll be back next Wednesday.