AVOID IRAN

“We have stated that our strategic goal, you'll hear Secretary Hegseth rattle these off in his morning briefings that he gives to the media. It's to destroy the Iranian Navy, to destroy the IRGC, to destroy their ballistic missile capability, to destroy all their enrichment. So we have a checklist of things that we want to bomb, essentially, to take off the battlefield. That's about as far as we've gone with stating what our strategic goal is.”

“The question for Trump is, how can the gives that we give be portrayed as superior to what Obama and Co. gave away in the JCPOA? I mean, if it was up to Trump, he would be the president, the first one, to deal with this problem in a permanent way, completely eliminate the program, have a new regime in that's more friendly to the United States. But none of those things seem likely right now.”

“What is clear, Michael, in every single poll that we have had described to us in our reporting is that the war has damaged Trump's numbers universally. And again, it doesn't mean he won't come back from it, maybe, depending on how this ends. But the longer it goes, Republicans who have been generally in lockstep with Trump, because they've really been afraid of incurring his wrath, are going to face a choice about how closely to align with him in the fall.”

“I truly believe, like I said in the letter, that the way that the president was influenced by the media, but then also by Israeli government officials, and the way that decision-making was took place in a compartmentalized environment. Compartmentalized in the sense that the president didn't have a bunch of, didn't have much in terms of people giving him alternative viewpoints, that our country was in a bad spot, and the most effective thing that I could do was resign, resign publicly.”

“The other frustration for Trump is he's facing real constraints. Despite all the bravado that you hear from the president and from Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, we have unlimited weapons, etc. They don't have unlimited weapons and they're very, very constrained when it comes to long-range strike weapons. What that means is if they do do what Trump has threatened, which is blow up every bridge and power plant inside Iran, they don't really have the long-range arsenal to do that.”

“So I wanna discuss three basic standards when it comes to political speech in The United States. First, there is the illegal. There actually is illegal political speech in The United States. If you say, I want to go kill the president of The United States, that's illegal. It's incitement. Then there is typical inflammatory rhetoric. This would be stuff like fight, fight, fight. And then there is the permission structure for violence we have been talking about a lot over the course of the last couple of years. That's the stuff that's truly dangerous. This is the conspiracism, the justification of violence.”

“So Trump had said, my red line is no nuclear weapons. Diatola said, great. I don't want nuclear weapons either. Let's talk. So they moved the red line by saying, enrichment. Iran can have no enrichment. Enrichment equals a nuclear weapon, which is just fundamentally not true.”

“Karim Khan put out a request an arrest warrant for Israel's leaders in 2024. That was Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Galant, the defense minister at that time. That was shortly after he had learned he had been accused of sexual assault, and then he went on leave in May 2025. Well, now a witness statement says, the Qatari government promised to look after mister Khan if he moved against prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

“Meanwhile, according to Bloomberg, Iran is rapidly running out of places to store their crude oil. That is because of the blockade that we have put on Iranian ships. The Islamic Republic has enough unused storage capacity to last another twelve to twenty two days. At that point, they have to stop pumping. So right now, they're keeping up the pumping. But because they can't get it out, they're filling up legitimately, like, old storage facilities that are incapable of even holding the oil.”

“And so Iran survives this eight-year, extraordinary experience, twice as long as the First World War. And it sets a mark upon the Iranian population that we shouldn't forget to this day, because the baby boomers are veterans of that experience. And the clerics get a lot of support from them.”

“The only proof of there being an investigation is someone in the government leaking to the media saying that Kent's under investigation for being a leaker. So they had to leak that I'm a leaker. Right, exactly. That's why, like, I mean, I take it seriously. The FBI has ruined innocent people's lives, like General Flynn with an accusation before. So I take it seriously.”

“The government gave Iranians a direct monthly cash payment last month amounting to 10,000,000 Iranian rials, which sounds like a lot of money. You know how much 10,000,000 Iranian rials is? 7 American dollars. 7.”

“He was open with Pam Bondi, now the former Attorney General, back in September, that she wasn't moving fast enough to prosecute certain people. In that case, it was James Comey. He has been talking to allies about how prosecutions can move quicker. You are seeing Todd Blanch now work with— This is the acting Attorney General. These are people who the president believes are going to do what he wants.”

“The rest of the space is actually negative on using the product in terms of the unit economics. So the more you use the product, the more you lose the money.”

“California is actively attempting to undermine all of that, which is the reason why Gavin Newsom, despite his sort of quasi Marxist leanings on economics, has been opposing a referendum that would force a wealth tax onto the ballot. Well, it turns out it made the ballot. The California Tax Foundation visiting fellow, Jared Walczak, estimates in a new paper, reported departures already total 777,000,000,000. By his estimate, the wealth tax exodus could total $1,230,000,000,000, reduce annual state revenue by $3,530,000,000 to $4,490,000,000.”

“California is actively attempting to undermine all of that, which is the reason why Gavin Newsom, despite his sort of quasi Marxist leanings on economics, has been opposing a referendum that would force a wealth tax onto the ballot. Well, it turns out it made the ballot. The proposed ballot measure would impose a supposedly one time 5% tax on individuals with more than $1,000,000,000 in wealth. The California Tax Foundation visiting fellow, Jared Walczak, estimates in a new paper, reported departures already total 777,000,000,000.”

“Karim Khan put out a request an arrest warrant for Israel's leaders in 2024. That was Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Galant, the defense minister at that time. That was shortly after he had learned he had been accused of sexual assault, and then he went on leave in May 2025. Well, now a witness statement says, the Qatari government promised to look after mister Khan if he moved against prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

“The dollar has already been weakened so much because of our deficit spending. We can deficit spend because we're the world's reserve currency holder. And a lot of that strength comes from the petrodollar, that any money that gets bought from the GCC or any oil that gets bought from the GCC, you got to sell the transaction in dollars.”

“I don't know, because the Iranian opposition is not really evident. We saw in 2009, they came in the streets and they were sort of beaten back into submission, and then reportedly thousands of Iranians protesting were killed by the regime in recent months. But I couldn't name the opposition leader. I couldn't tell you the liberation front.”

“So you're getting a lot of mixed messages, a lot of silence. And so we're in this very uncertain moment. Trump has extended this ceasefire seemingly indefinitely, but at the same time, they've kept enormous military force in the Middle East and are poised to attack if this thing falls apart.”

“The Islamic regime is putting out propaganda showing women and children with guns. That, by the way, is not a sign of strength. When you have to show your women and your kids with guns, that means you are down to the very end. This is like the last days in Berlin in the Nazi regime. They've got a real problem on their hands when they're relegated to using human shields like women and children and just stuffing guns into the hands of nine year olds.”

“And it's very frustrating to Trump because he doesn't feel he can negotiate properly with the Iranians. It's not clear that the Iranian negotiators are empowered to negotiate. It's very unclear the extent to which they're able to communicate in real time with the Ayatollah, who we don't have a clear idea of his health, his well-being. It seems pretty clear that he's in a bad way and that the negotiators are not able to get quick responsiveness from him.”

“So I wanna discuss three basic standards when it comes to political speech in The United States. First, there's the illegal. There actually is illegal political speech in The United States. If you say, I want to go kill the president of The United States, that's illegal. It's incitement. Then there is typical inflammatory rhetoric. This would be stuff like fight, fight, fight. And then there is the permission structure for violence we have been talking about a lot over the course of the last couple of years. That's the stuff that's truly dangerous.”

“So then after 2002, when George W. Bush names Iran to the Axis of Evil, reportedly to their surprise, you start to continue this set of grievances. So I try to remind people, whenever we think of what's happening now, if we don't understand that journey to this point, we don't understand the attitudes that are going to drive decisions people make.”

“Representative Rosa DeLauro, you might remember her from her Halloween hair. She she's along with a gigantic purple strip down the middle of her hair for for no reason that anyone can discern and some of the ugliest glasses you've ever seen. She was questioning Lee Zeldin, and she was questioning him about the fact that the EPA has said that it cannot regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act, which, again, is black letter law. The way she approaches this issue is she says, it's because Lee Zeldin is a liar and a bad man that he is not using the EPA to do something illegal.”

“They oppressed the people tremendously, particularly through SAVAK, the secret police. So when the Iranian Revolution erupts in 1978, we may be surprised. The Iranian people are not surprised. And when they suddenly say, death to America, most Americans will say, what's your problem? Why are you angry at us?”

“The US plans include targeting all of Iran's civilian electric power generation plants, probably simultaneously. That's exactly the red line that Iran has previously said would cause it to retaliate by targeting desalination plants.”

“Unless we restrain the Israelis and tell them, like, you're done, and if you continue to attack and you continue to do things without telling us and asking us, without asking us first, we're paying for it, you're going to ask us first. Then, we are going to negate our other part of the deal, and our part of the deal says that we defend Israel.”

“Jimmy Kimmel has spent years at this point calling the president a pedophile. He has he has imputed Epstein involvement to him. Again, that is the thing in the actual shooter's manifesto. It's actually in the manifesto. I don't have to speculate because he released a manifesto.”

“The Islamic regime is putting out propaganda showing women and children with guns. That, by the way, is not a sign of strength. When you have to show your women and your kids with guns, that means you are down to the very end. This is like the last days in Berlin in the Nazi regime. And it's literally women in burkas and small children behind behind machine guns.”

“He went over to the 6th Street Bridge. It is completely dark. The reason it is completely dark is because Karen Bass, the mayor, allowed criminals to steal all of the copper wiring from all of the lights. And her solution to this is not to police crime. It is to launch a program to install, wait for it, 60,000 solar powered street lights.”

“But getting Jimmy Kimmel for saying what he said on Thursday is like getting Al Capone for tax evasion. You're hitting him with the wrong charge. Jimmy Kimmel has spent years at this point calling the president a pedophile. He has he has imputed Epstein involvement to him. Again, that is the thing in the actual shooter's manifesto.”

“Back in 1981, somebody tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan, and it was a few days before the Oscars. And Johnny Carson, who was then the dominant late night host, was hosting the Oscars. Here's Johnny Carson, who by the way was Democrat in 1981. I'm sure that all of you here and most of you watching tonight understand why we delayed this program for twenty four hours. Because of the incredible events of yesterday, that old adage the show must go on seemed relatively unimportant.”

“He went over to the 6th Street Bridge. It is completely dark. The reason it is completely dark is because Karen Bass, the mayor, allowed criminals to steal all of the copper wiring from all of the lights. And her solution to this is not to police crime. It is to launch a program to install, wait for it, 60,000 solar powered street lights.”

“There's foreign connections we need to look into. That I can't get into because that's gonna... That's all tied up inside of classified channels, essentially. But there was more work we needed to do. And now I'm not saying, like, you know how an investigation works. You chase down 99 leads, and 100 leads, and 99 of them are BS. And you get one good one.”

“It's actually a $25 billion round of cash is sort of up front... the rest is in kind. So it seems from looking at this... it's a bit like a procurement round.”

“Back in 1981, somebody tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan, and it was a few days before the Oscars. And Johnny Carson, who was then the dominant late night host, was hosting the Oscars. And I just wanna show you what Johnny Carson said after an attempted assassination against Ronald Reagan. Does anyone think any any late night comic today would say the same if the president was wounded? The answer is obviously no. There this used to be a country where people actually, you know, held some basic standards in common.”

“What Donald Trump is focused on in this term, what he has been focused on, is making himself a capital G great figure of history. The amount of time he's spending on domestic politics pales in comparison to him taking really bold aggressive moves in foreign policy and also putting his physical imprint on the world, on Washington DC, designing monuments to himself, renaming institutions, ensuring that he achieved some level of immortality.”

“In terms of the Krog Island, that makes me nervous because I have heard so many people like Lindsey Graham and others that are not military people, that are not in the Pentagon, that are not reading intelligence every day, talk about it very flippantly. Like, oh, we'll just take that island. We'll just take their oil. I want to tell you guys, like, it's not 2003 anymore. You can't just put guys there and they'll occupy it. Like, there's ballistics, there's drones. They would be sitting ducks in that area.”

“We have a tendency in America to view things in very short periods. Our year in Iraq, or in my case, five years in Iraq. Yeah. But we tend to come in and say, we are going to fight the war to end all wars, at least in our minds. But it really starts in 1953, when the US and British intelligence services overthrew the constitutionally-elected prime minister and put back into power the peacock regime of the Shah.”