4/7/26: Trump Journo Jail Threat Backfires, US Low On Interceptors, Tucker Turns On Trump

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. Donald Trump at his press conference yesterday said he is on the manhunt. Sagar and I are gonna help the brother out. Let's roll Trump here. As you probably know, we didn't talk about the first one for an hour, then somebody leaked something, which we'll hopefully find that leaker. We're looking very hard to find that leaker. And talked about there's somebody missing. They basically said that we have one and there's somebody missing. Well, they didn't know there was somebody missing until this leaker gave the information. So whoever it was, we think we'll be able to find it out because we're gonna go to the media company that released it and we're gonna say, National Security, give it up or go to jail. And we know who and you know who we're talking about because some things you can't do because when they did that, all of a sudden, the entire country of Iran knew that there was a pilot that was somewhere on their land that was fighting for his life. And it also made it much more difficult for the pilots and for the people going in to search for him. All of a sudden, they know that there's somebody out there, they see all these planes coming in. It became a much more difficult operation because a leaker leaked that we have one, we've rescued one, but there's another one out there that we're trying to get. So first of all, none of that makes sense, but let's just pretend for the sake of Trump's argument, because he is after all the president of the United States, that what he's saying is serious and makes some sense. Again, so suspend your disbelief, your normal disbelief of this guy. All right, so according to Trump, the people who reported first that there's a, one pilot's been rescued, but there's another pilot out there, that they put the entire operation at risk because it alerted the Iranians to the fact that they're alive and made it put then hundreds of American service members at risk, let's pretend that that's true and that Trump is serious about hunting down a leaker. As patriotic Americans, Sagar and I went on the hunt, did not take us long to find the leaker. We didn't, we found him. In fact, you found him. Almost immediately, who is he? His name is Amit Siegel. Oh. Put up this next element on the screen. Okay. An Israeli journalist flagged for me almost immediately. You're like, hey, guess what? His name's Amit. He's a very famous Israeli journalist. He's known for his direct proximity to Netanyahu's office. That's kind of how he, that's just in Israel, that's not an insult, it's a compliment. He's like the Barak Revit of Israel. Yeah, and he's, and people assume that unless otherwise explained his source on things is Netanyahu. And we've quoted him many times on the show. Yeah. As you said, specifically to give a view into the Israeli government. So he has a telegram channel. Yeah. And he was live tweeting, whatever you want to call it, on his telegram, English language telegram channel while Trump was doing his press conference. And he writes, so he writes Trump quote, Trump colon. We didn't talk about the first one we rescued and then someone leaked something about the navigator. We're going to find whoever leaked it, whoever it is. We'll manage to track them down through the network that published it. We'll ask for the leaker. We'll say it's national security and therefore it couldn't end up in prison. And then Siegel adds, as you may recall, this was first published here, which Israeli journalists had been reaching out saying, hey, it was Amit Siegel, by the way, that first published this. And so we're going around looking for evidence that he was the first one to publish it. And then he just tweeted it out himself. Like he just comes out and says, yeah, actually, it was me, I was the one who did this. So we go to the White House. Yeah. We can put up C3. He has the White House for comments. Say, hey, White House. Yeah. We're like, might have found you guys names Amit Siegel. And they say on background, an investigation is underway, such a funny. Yeah. An investigation is underway. Now, to be fair to Amit, here's what he says, after all of this broke, he says, Newsweek first post and New York Post have all pointed the finger at me. While appreciate the attention, I fear it's undeserved. I was not the first journalist to report that the pilot was missing. So then why'd you lie? Nor that he was injured. I suppose the accusations are a testament to my timely reporting. But the fact is the Guardian and two Israeli channels broke the story before I did. I imagine Israeli journalist and dangerous American pilot makes a better headline. And then he says, if you're looking for cutting edge news that doesn't breach national security, subscribe to my telegram. So he is now backtracking the initial claim he made on his telegram and says, actually it was the Guardian and two other Israeli channels that broke it. Nobody has been able to effectively say for sure who the first person broke it. What seems obvious is that it's not just the Israelis that broke it, that multiple like channels across the world. It is also a little bit absurd because let's put C4 up there on the screen. The Iranians are the people who actually were also quote, leaking it because they shot the plane down. And I mean, they were boasting about it obviously as they did to Jeremy in the immediate aftermath. They said in Iranian official sense. This is 309 AM. Right, 309. It was many hours before the Amit Segar stuff. 309 AM. So yeah, maybe it's Jeremy. Maybe it's Yopraski Jeremy for leaking it from, I guess, who would you go out from the Iranians? Tell us your Iranian source. They say that because the nature of the strike, the pilot could not evacuate, intense fire at the scene, no remains have yet been found. There are conflicting reports on whether any military personnel may have successfully evacuated before it went down. There's military helicopter activity reported in the area conducting on what appears to be a search mission. So this is interesting. So to give Trump some credit, what he's saying here, or what he's trying to say is that maybe the Iranians thought that they both died. And so there's some support for that in Jeremy's first tweet, which he sources to an Iranian official. The official said that because of the nature of the strike, the pilot could not evacuate before crashing. And so what Trump is saying is that they initially thought there was one pilot and he was killed. And so therefore, American and Israeli reporters who later said there were two and one had been found and the other was being looked for, put them at risk. Now, yes, Amit, I don't actually think was even the first, even though he claimed he was. And as soon as people understood that it was a F-15E, they know that there's two people in that. Anybody with access to Wikipedia knew there were two. And also the idea that Iran would be like, well, looks like we got him. Let's just move on about our day and wouldn't like hunt. That is also absurd. So the whole thing is absurd. However, it is just utterly comical that it does appear that the first leaking came through the Israeli media. Like we said, yeah, the Israeli media, as Amit acknowledged, appears to have been some of the first people to report it. Amit himself took credit for it. There's another is really journalist. Ariel Kahana. Right, so you wanna explain that? So there's another Israeli journalist who also, either took credit for it or seemed to be very, very early in his reporting of the story. They put up Ariel Kahana's Hebrew language telegram post here. This is that kind of famous image of the ejector seeds. And this is, but all Ariel Kahana reports in this, and you guys can try to translate this, or you can just go find and translate it. All he's basically saying there is that, there's been a downing. He doesn't really give away any information that wouldn't be also available on Wikipedia. But he also very clearly is citing Israeli sources. Yes. And so if you take Trump seriously, and you wanna know where the original leaks came from, they came from Israeli sources. But the Americans were leaking it as soon as they found the guy too. So the whole thing is ridiculous. However, look man, we don't make the rules. Yeah, look, we are not Israeli. Israeli law, I checked. It makes clear that a journalist must report his source if it's deemed a national security crisis. I oppose that law in my own country. However, I'm not Israeli. You have to respect Israeli law. How many times have we been told that? Is Trump just gonna completely memory hold this thing? Of course, this will be totally memory hold. You will never hear about it again. After it turns out that it was very like, again, we're not saying it was Amit Sehgal, but we are definitely saying that it was, it looks like Israeli media were some of the very first to report it. And so we encourage this leak investigation wherever it may lead us. And in fact, it may even lead us to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, which, oh, that was an entire memory hold part of this story is initially, Oh, this is so good. The Times of Israel reported, the Times of Israel reported that it appears that it came from the sources within the Israeli Ministry of Defense. That was tweeted out. Then they removed that from their story. Miranda DeVine, a New York Post reporter, is that right? She tweeted that. She was like, oh my God, I can't believe this. So then they immediately deleted that part of the story and they updated their story to say, we erroneously reported that this. Did we say, did we say in Israeli source? We erroneously reported that it was in Israel. After the Israeli Ministry of Defense was like, whoa, it wasn't us. So you take that and watch it well. So either. I don't know where that erroneous report came from. That would be interesting. Should they explain that? Yeah, they should. They should know who erroneously told you. So either the Times of Israel is saying that they completely made up a source and published something fake. Or they actually did have a source and are now lying because Trump is angry at them. I have a lot of respect for their integrity. So I think they did not fabricate a source. I think they had a real source and now they're like, oh, we didn't realize that we were gonna get in trouble for that. So never mind. All right, well, all right. Let's go to the interceptors, shall we? The US is reaching the limits of its physical military capacity as it enters into what, the seventh week or something of this US Israeli conflict with Iran. We can put up this Bloomberg article. US deploys bulk of stealthy long range missiles for Iran war to put this into some context here. We had two carrier groups that were in the region. One of them, because of what they said as a result of a laundry fire, but I think more accurately as a result of just being deployed for too long. This is the jailed forward was sent to, down to Venezuela to carry out the operation there against Maduro. And then they were told they're going home right after that. Instead, they steamed across the ocean, headed over close to Iran to take part in that, along with the Lincoln aircraft carrier group. At the same time, the US has been using an extraordinary amount of its resources to defend against Iranian attacks, particularly against Israel, but also against the rest of the Gulf countries. The Gulf countries upset saying that Israel gets greater priority and also they have access to the Dan, the Patriot, all these other things. US pulling assets out of Asia to bring them over to the region. The US also getting the carrier groups and others, and the bases are getting emptied out by Iranian attacks on the Gulf bases, which means that you then have to fly further. Spain, followed by Italy, now followed by the UK, have said, forget it, you're not using our territory to fly over, you're not using our bases to launch attacks on civilian infrastructure. That stretches the US thinner. The recognition that the claim of 100% air superiority turned out to be false also changes the equation, because now you can't use your more conventional bombing aircraft, you have to send in, you have to send in F-35s, an F-35 gets clipped, now that means you have to take a lot more care around what you can do, then you have to rely a lot more on Tomahawks. Only have so many Tomahawks, you know the, how many Tomahawks do we make a year? About a third, well, we ordered 57 as of last year, we've used 800 so far, so yeah, a little bit of a problem. Also update on that, we don't even have this in the story, I know only just happened yesterday, the Japanese press reported yesterday that they had a huge order of Tomahawk missiles, which by the way, they did because we asked them to, because we were like, hey, you need to buy some, they were like, okay, so they did, and we just went to them yesterday, and they're like, yeah, just so you know, that's not gonna be fulfilled, even though you've paid for it already, and we will be taking the Tomahawks, this very same missiles, which we wanted them to buy for some deterrence effect in China, and also against North Korea, just so we are, oh yeah, and we're keeping the money. You'll eventually get your missiles, maybe, ish. Yeah, exactly, I mean that's kind of a disaster. Same thing with the UAE, by the way, with many interceptors, South Korea is a similar problem. This is really bad. And a bunch of weapons that were intended for Ukraine, the US said actually, you know what, we're gonna go ahead and take those, and the Europeans are like, wait, didn't we pay for those? We're like, yeah, you know what? Right, you'll get it eventually. What is property and money really, you know, when you're a hegemon, well, we're just gonna go ahead and borrow these, and so one piece of evidence of like how stretched in things are, you can put up D2 here, C17s, just like a giant ant march, you know, up the Eastern seaboard over toward the theater there. Put up D3 as well. This looks at tungsten in particular. The headline, if you're just listening to this, is from foreign policy, America's war machine runs on tungsten, and it could run out. You could actually run that headline and put several other critical elements inside there, and it would also be accurate. We hollowed out our productive capacity over the course of the last 50 years. We focused on this kind of, you know, shock and awe strategic approach. We enriched our military industrial complex with this trillion dollar annual defense budget with basically no kind of checks and balance on it, like no quality control, no because it feeds itself. Things are going well in Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland, then things are going well for everybody who's gonna rock the boat. And so it was designed in a corrupt fashion, but also literally not designed for an extended war against a real country. It was designed for like 2003, three or four day bombing campaign of Baghdad, followed by sending in a bunch of troops and paying Halibut to supply it. Let me, did you put D1 yet up on the screen? Yeah, you can put D1 back up if you want. I wanna expand a little bit on some of these missiles, is that they're explicitly being taken away from the Indo-Pacific region. It's not just about a shortage, it's that you're burning through the vast majority of the stockpile. There were over 2,400 before the war. If they take all of them out, there'll be about 400 left. So do the math about what that means, almost 2,000 in a single one month period. Also to connect this to my great fear of what we talked about in our A block, when you start to run out of conventional weapons, what do you do, Ryan? You have to start thinking about unconventional weapons or ground troops, and that's exactly where things are going. We take the sole civilization will die tonight truth, and we combine that with what's left in the US military arsenal. Well, let's say you're in the same boat as Truman. I know you put yourself in this boat, but what was his calculus? His calculus was, well, 250,000 dead Americans, atomic bomb. Now it was a little bit more complicated than that, but in his mind, that's what he was thinking at the time, and he goes, okay, I'm going with the bomb. Well, this is gonna be very simple. So let's say that this power plant bombing, and it doesn't work, almost certainly just leads to horizontal escalation with Iran. They wipe out all these power plants, desalination plants, oil infrastructure all across the Gulf. We're in a full blown global depression, and now he has a choice of tactical nuclear weapon, not that there is such a thing, or he can use ground forces. Well, if the war is only gonna be even more unpopular, when America wakes up tomorrow, it's we're living in a whole new world, not just in terms of what we've wrought, but people will actually, at least I hope, finally start to pay attention to what the hell is going on here. And then you combine that with where the president is, he either has to order ground troops, or he has to order some sort of unconventional weapon, especially when the military is gonna start coming to you and say, listen, we can't keep up the sustained bombing campaign, or we're gonna rip everything dry, like all of these munitions. This isn't just, this is just the way that wars are not meant to be fought. They either have to be fought on the ground, have a diplomatic solution, or you need to bring this to an end immediately. So the brittleness of the US defense industrial base is right around, right around now is when we expected things to break. And the early days of the war, I quoted a expert named Seth Jones over at CSIS. As you know, CSIS is like this with the Pentagon. They're basically in the arm of the Pentagon, which is why you should listen, because they tell you the things that a Pentagon wants to say, but can't. And he said, neither Israel nor the US has the munitions for a months long war. Out loud, he said it on the very first day. When I put that out, I was ridiculed by the Zionists, by the pro-war lobby. Here we are, we're a month in. We're stripping interceptors, I mean, oh God, we already stripped the interceptors out of South Korea, that took two weeks. Now we're stripping all these missiles out of the entire Indo-Pacific. We've got these large C-17, refueling tankers, which we've had to bring back. The money have been struck. We had that US Navy, what was it, the E3 spy plane. That was taken out, there's only 14 in the whole world. It was bombed. Let's put D3 up there on the screen already. They're talking about a big tungsten shortage. This is from foreign policy. It could run out. The US operations are draining limited US stocks that show how reliant the war machine is on tungsten. And exactly that material, which is very low in supply for a lot of the munitions and piercing rounds that we want to use, very low. We don't have enough. A lot of it is in China, and they don't want to sell it to us, shocker, in order to fund this war, which is currently happening. And so what do you think is gonna happen? So as we start to dwindle, and this is the same playbook that we saw in the First World War. As I've said, if you look back, the amount of munition, artillery shells that they had budgeted for the whole war, they blew through in a month. So they were like, oh my God, what do we do? They were able to go total war, nationalize the economy, put everything into production. Obviously nobody really ran out of shells. But when you start to run low, you have to start thinking about how do we change the status quo? And right now there's only two options, unconventional weapons or ground troops. Both are a horrific disaster for the world, for us, I mean, for the economy, and in the middle, so many millions of people are going to be affected. And this is the danger, not even to think about the bigger picture about the Asia Pacific, our real allies. I mean, we talked earlier in the show, how crazy is it? The Trump is like, yeah, our only real allies are the Gulf and Israel. You're like, what? Australia, South Korea, Japan? I mean, look, people know I hate Europe, but come on. Like I'll take London over Tel Aviv. Like what are we doing here? ASML, like all these companies that come out of there. Again, sure, they're sclerotic, but it's not, what are we getting from Israel? Ways? All right, I'm good, all right? If I had to choose between the two of those things. Ways is pretty good. Yeah, it's fine. It's fine, yeah. But if I had to use Google Maps, I could suffer through it. And at the same time that we're getting exhausted, Israel's getting exhausted too, as we're told, the number of interceptors that Israel has left that are capable of taking on ballistic missiles is at a critically low point. And that's obvious. Like we don't have to be told that, though we are. It is obvious just from the math, the numbers that they had, the numbers that they've been using. And at the same time, the Iranians haven't deployed their many of their most sophisticated hypersonic missiles, which are capable of more precise targeting and of evading these very interceptors that they're running critically low on. And so Israel is relying very heavily on the US Navy and its interception capacity, as it is much more vulnerable to attack. And also, and this is why I just, like Israel's decision to want to continue going forward with this at this point is so maniacal and so suicidal because it is, I heard somebody describe it as an energy island because it is, this country that is isolated from all the other countries in the region, it's not connected in a lot of ways. It has its own kind of energy island grid. If a few different nodes of that are hit, it is plunged into darkness. Iran, you can plunge it into darkness. We still have enough munitions that we can do extraordinary kinetic damage to Iran. No doubt about it. But Iran has hundreds and hundreds of power plants. Israel has what, 10, eight, like not many. So if they're hit and if they can't protect them from getting hit, and if Iran decides to use its hypersonic ballistic missiles against a much depleted ballistic missile defense, they're gonna get through and hit Israeli power plants, which then kills, like it kills people. Well, you should tell people about this because you were just in Cuba. And tell them what you saw. What does it mean when you lose power? The most immediate thing, and so we might, for a range of different people, but the most immediate, obvious thing is patients who are in hospitals on ventilators die. They die or the nursing staff has to run to them with their iPhone camera on or their smartphone light on and hand pump, which is not what you want because you also wanna be able to check their vitals constantly and you wanna be able to give the right amount of oxygen. So you can keep them alive for a while, but like not forever. We also talked to mom whose kid is on an oxygen tank and she said in the hospital, the nurses are so good that they're not as worried that when the power goes out, but at home, they have to rush to like get the oxygen tank, get the mobile one, the one that's battery powered, make sure that if the battery's not charged up, you're screwed. Also the shut down, the immediate shutdown of power damages all of this equipment. I talked to a researcher at Cuba's Neuroscience Center who was saying that they're losing a bunch of data to corruption because you can't just, done, shut down. Like you just lose stuff. MRI machines crash because the cooled helium, that the cooled liquid helium that is essential to an MRI machine, MRI machine loses power. That helium becomes a gas. Ryan, do you wanna tell me where liquid helium comes from? Do you wanna tell me where 30 to 40% of the world's helium comes from? Cutter makes that from the fields that, we even bombed one of the fields that makes that helium. So, if you're a Cuba, you can't get it just because you're sanctioned and told that you're terrorists. But if you had money a month ago in the United States, you can buy new helium. Now, you might not be able to. If Trump goes through with what he threatens and the entire straight is mined, if Qatar's gas field is destroyed, there is a world where in a year, Europeans are waking up and there's no helium in your MRI. And that's also, it's for AI. It's a perishable good. It's for AI. It's very critical for semiconductor manufacturing. Right, so what I didn't know before I went to Cuba because it's not this kind of stuff I know, you cool helium to an extraordinarily low temperature and that interacts with the magnets in these semiconductor and MRI technology in ways that allows it to move very frictionless. And that lack of friction is essential to the advanced sophisticated technology and the economy that we have today. When that stuff warms up to anywhere, remotely approaching, think of a helium balloon, right? Like it becomes a gas, it seeps out, it's gone. You can't chase it. You have to produce it in cutter and then ship it around. If those facilities aren't fire, you can't. So if you need an MRI, get it now. And I would suggest you don't get cancer or anything else that's gonna require an MRI in the near to medium term future. And who knows all the other petrochemicals and all of these other things. We're gonna find out how physical our economy is. We think our economy is fantasy and imagination and we just press these buttons and things work. We're gonna find out that there are actually things underneath here that matter. Yeah, in our last AMA someone was like, how do I prepare for this? And I was like, honestly, just save your money. I was like, have cash. I was like, that's all I can really say because we'll be okay, we're a rich country. As in like we won't starve to death. A lot of other people will probably starve to that or may starve to death if things become the worst case scenario. For us, we won't, but things will become massively expensive and effectively unlivable. So yeah, that's the only advice that we can get. By the way, that's an extremely privileged piece of advice because most people, if they could be saving, they would be so. There you go. What a disaster. All right, let's move on. All right, turning now to Tucker Carlson, extraordinary new remarks in his latest episode, effectively calling Donald Trump the anti-Christ, blasting him for his Easter message. Let's take a listen. Who do you think you are? You're tweeting out the effort on Easter morning? You'll be living in hell. Just watch, praise be to Allah. So obviously you're mocking the religion of Iran. Okay, if you seek a religious war, that's a good idea. But by the way, no decent person mocks other people's religions. You may have a problem with the theology, presumably you do if it's not your religion, and you can explain what that is. But to mock other people's faith is to mock the idea of faith itself, and we should never mock that. Because at its core is the acknowledgement that we are not in charge of the universe. We did not build it. We won't be here at the end of it. We can destroy life. We cannot create it because we are not God. The message of all faith at the biggest picture level is the message in our Bible, which is you are not God. And only if you think you are, do you talk this way. But it's not just mockery of Islam. And no president should mock Islam. That's not your job. This is not a theocracy. We don't go to war with other theocracies to find out which theocracy is more effective. We are not a theocracy. And God willing, we never will be, because theocracy corrupt the religion. No, this is a mockery not just of Islam. It's a mockery of Christianity. To send out a tweet with the F word on Easter morning, promising the murder of civilians and then saying praise be to Allah without explaining any of it, you are mocking me and every other Christian because we're Christians. We can't support that. That is evil. That is an intentional desecration of beauty and truth, which is the definition of evil. So defending Islam didn't think I would see it in my lifetime, but the bigger thing that he's talking about there is the departure. First of all, major political implication here. This is the biggest shot Tucker's taken. I took a shot at Trump on Tucker's show and I will admit, it's not really just about Tucker, but they're Joe Kent as well. But there was this, like, oh, it's Israel's war and kind of the bad boyars. Like the Tsar has bad advisors, but like that's out the window now. Like it's very, this is Trump. It, we had to be honest about it, you know, and now it's just so obvious, I think, to everyone. But I think with the Easter message and now the departure of the open the straight and now this morning, civilization will die. This is, I mean, genuinely probably one of the most insane statements by a president at war ever in modern history. And when you open the door to nuclear weapons, like he is in that statement, it actually does. That is the time to start talking about good and evil and humanity and I'm a secular person, as people know, but like this is then the time, I think, to be talking in explicitly apocalyptic terms. And yeah, religion is gonna be a part of that. Ryan. Yeah, no, agree. I'm secular too. I really like avoid, you know, phrases like good and evil. Right, same. But you're right, like there's no other way to describe this sort of thing. And I am somebody who even though I'm secular, I have, I don't have the like Bill Maher, like hatred for religion. I didn't know I was a teenager, I don't know. Sure, that's a normal teen thing. But as you grow older, you see the beauty and the wisdom and he expresses it, I think, you know, quite well that like, that there is beauty and faith and it is rooted in faith and humanity ultimately that and it is in a kind of is Islamic submission or a sense that there's something greater than us and that we have to all love each other. And that part is, that part's terrific and essential to what it means to be a human. And Tucker, yes, just absolutely obliterating him on every level. Let's roll F2 as well. On inauguration day, the president did not take his oath of office with his hand on the Bible. His wife stood next to him holding it. I was about 15 feet away and saw it, but he did not put his hand on the Bible. And that should have been maybe a clue that we need to pause and think about what is this? Why wouldn't you put your hand on the Bible? If you don't believe in the Bible, you think it's just a book, there's no cost to you to put your hand on it, just kind of following the protocol, going along with the tradition, all presidents do it. Why aren't you doing it? And you're not doing it intentionally. You're choosing not to put your hand on the Bible when you take that oath. That suggests not that you don't believe it's real, because if you didn't believe it was real, why would you care? You put on the costume and take it off, doesn't matter. That suggests you know it is real and you're rejecting it intentionally. You know what you're doing and you're doing it anyway. That is immoral. That will never be moral. That can never be justified. That is always wrong. It can be expedient. We need to do this. It doesn't mean that's right. It's the most wrong thing. And we should always remember that what we do will be done to us. Live by the destruction of civilian infrastructure. Live by the killing of children, the bombing of elementary schools and colleges. And you will die and your children will die by those same things. That's just a fact. Yeah. And I was thinking about that a lot as he was, I watched this last night and listened to it a little bit again this morning. It is a very interesting observation actually, because his point is to me correct that if you actually are just a straight up atheist. Like you were I. Just put your, yeah. Yeah, I don't care. I'll put my hand on the book. It's a book. If that's what you believe. I have two Bibles in my house. Right, they're interesting. I have a Gita too. I've got a Quran. Interesting books. Right. There's something profound in that gap between his hand and the Bible, which I guess people are gonna now ocent and fact check as much as they possibly can. Have you noticed if they're... No, I haven't. All I've seen actually, by the way, breaking news, here's a response. President Trump is responding. Okay, all right. Tucker is a low IQ person that has absolutely no idea what's going on. He calls me all the time. I don't respond to his calls. I don't deal with him. I like dealing with smart people, not fools. Liar, he says he likes to be surrounded by losers. Yes, that's right. The best part too, is when Tucker does call him, it's usually to try to say, because as he said openly, I try to maintain an open mind so that I can try to talk to him about things like, hey, don't do this. Don't do this, yeah. Right, and in the latest time that he attempted to get some sort of, the latest time that he tried to make contact with Trump, he told me this explicitly on the air. So I'm not breaking any confidences that he was told even by the White House, don't bother coming, because he's being shown polls that a 95% of people support this war. Yeah, that's the reality of where we are. Look, I do think this is commendable and important from Tucker. And I do think at this point, any of us who were in any way supportive of Trump or were supportive of the Trump project or boosted for years, many of the people who work now in the Trump administration, like I alluded to earlier, it's over. This is a time of choosing. If you do not resign by the time of 8 p.m. and that's when the bombs are going to drop, you are in this, we will never forgive you. We never, look, Trump for me was already long ago over, but I do think for everybody else at this point, low level and all the way up, you all talked a big game about the Iraq war. If you stay for one second when we're going to destroy a civilization, call us a panicking, I don't care. You people have the power of God in your hands, as Tucker is saying, which alludes to what? To power to destroy great civilizations. Also, I was just looking this morning, apparently one of the only parallel to Trump's civilization, the civilization will die quote, is from, please forgive me, I'm not as read up on Greek history, but it is the Delphic Oracle said to Crossius of Lydia in the histories that if you cross the Halleyes, you will destroy a great empire. But the irony is that he thought that the great empire was Persia, so he attacked Cyrus the Great, aka Iran of that time, but what actually happened is his own kingdom was destroyed. Right, that's what Oracle was right. Right, so this isn't even talking about Jesus. Well, let's take it back to the Greek gods of what they were trying to tell us about this. That's the only comparison that we have here. So if you have complicity in that, it is so beyond over, you're done. We will never defend you, protect you. In fact, we should go to the greatest lengths possible, that if you did not do what you could stop this, when you had real power in your hands, you are now beyond complicit, and we will treat you the way that we should have dealt with George W. Bush, with Dick Cheney, with Paul Wolfowitz, and with every single other person. In fact, my lesson from all of this, Ryan, is we didn't do enough to punish the people who were complicit in the Iraq war. We should make it clear. Like, I'm about to dye my hair pink. We're going for truth and reconciliation, bitch. Like. That's exactly right. Yeah, and in 2009, when Obama came in, he had this famous quote where he said, we're looking forward, not backward. Yeah, right. And the left at the time, what little there was, absolutely freaked out, making the argument, you cannot allow that to be business as you do. Yes, yes. If you don't have some consequences for somebody, and the next two years, there were many opportunities for consequences, there's an entire movie about the Senate torture report. That was circulating. I remember that fine saying, yeah. And the Obama administration's intelligence apparatus, doing everything it could to suppress this report, and water it down, and make sure that there were no prosecutions. You didn't even have to go after Bush and Cheney and Wolfowitz, which I thought at the time you should, and I think you're right today, that we should have. You could go after some mid-level, even slightly higher CIA officials that engaged in torture and rendition. Even just that small amount of criminal accountability is a shot at the heart of that impunity, and would and could have reshaped how people think about what's allowable. I think you're right. You follow that up by bailing out the bankers and not prosecuting any of them as well. Instead, you went after Joe Judice for some mortgage fraud. That was the extent of the prosecutions. And it created this sense that the swamp was in control, and so you needed somebody who alone can fix it, and so he comes in, and he, instead of fixing it, absorbs the lesson that there are no laws, and there are no consequences, I can do whatever I want. See, this is why a lot of people attacked the hell out of us at the time, Ryan. This is why Russiagate was such a disaster. It resuscitated all of these Bush-era neocons, like Bill Crystal and Liz Cheney, and all of these other people who were elevated. It exonerated them. And in service of not actually looking at what really happened. In service of what really happened, exactly. It became Russiagated and not, oh, we screwed up generation of policy, and all of it. And that, I mean, I know, I'd tact it, set it so off into the time, but it is so deeply true. And then now you have those very same people whitewashed, famously now trying to control whether people are allowed to talk to the son biker. It's like, bitch, you had that in the Iraq War. And you're like, yeah, what are we doing here? You know, who do you think you're talking to? And so one of the guys that's been tightest with Trump and taken so many arrows for him was Alex Jones. Yes. He's now calling for the 25th Amendment, and so is Marjorie Taylor Greene. So is Marjorie Taylor Greene. Do you see any, is there any movement inside the administration? I don't see it. I mean, obviously not for the 25th Amendment, but like some high-profile recognition. You spoke earlier about JD Vance. I mean, wouldn't it be him? As I understand it, he would be the person who has to do it. He's gonna care more about his career. Sad to say, you know, I thought I knew somebody different, but the truth is that we didn't. Is that absolute power does corrupt absolutely. And I've read about it in a book. It is another thing to experience it on a deeply visceral and a personal level. Now is the time for action to literally save the world from the precipice of disaster. And the ironing. This is what people do movies about, and now you find yourself a central character. And it's not just about him. It's about all the other people who surround Donald Trump, who are inside of the White House. Do they have the courage, you know, to actually do something about, let's even put the 25th Amendment aside. Offer your resignation. Create a titanic political scandal. You have the courage to do something like that. And I think the answer right now is pretty clearly no. So we're in it now. And the iron is if all you care about cynically is your own personal advancement, showing courage in this moment is actually the way to advance your own individual interests. Anybody who stands up to this at this moment will be rewarded by the public. And by the global public, but particularly by the American public. As Tucker clearly knows, and we could have a whole conversation about electoral implications, all of that. But it feels crass in this moment of absolute desperation for the entire world. But if you are cynical in this moment, the play is courage. Not, well, you may be Mr. President, right, go ahead and do it. You're the greatest Mr. President ever. Which the problem though is ironically that might be the only way to do it. If you were in power, that's the story that they always tell themselves, is that, oh, well, we have to gas him up in order to get him to do what we want. But at this point, things are so dire. Like there's only one language, right? The joke, by the way, look, Joe can't, maybe he didn't change anything, but he created a problem, right? He created a problem. Create problems, resign, do something, all right? Because look, maybe you can't stop Trump and it probably is unstoppable. That's the truth. The way that the Constitution, the nuclear codes and all of that work, look, this fantasy, it's not gonna happen, all right? If he wants to do it, he's gonna do it. And I mean, look, I hate to say that, let me tell you. But at the very least, for whoever of us survive, you need to be able to put it down in the book. X and Y and Z did something whenever they could. Tucker's joined, he's done whatever he could. I did what I could, I guess, at a certain point. We're just YouTubers. We're looking for people who are in power for God's sake. And for them, outside of Kent, we've seen nothing, nothing. All right, very depressing show. I apologize, but I mean, when you set the tone from the beginning of Civilization Will Die, that's gonna be the least fun bro show we've ever done. I believe so, yeah. All right, well, Ryan and Emily will be on tomorrow, hopefully not for a very historic show. So you'll see them all then, and we'll continue to give you a special coverage as much as we can. And I guess Ryan and I are gonna go do the AMA. Every question's gonna be about the Civilization Will Die truth, so there you go. All right, we'll see you later. Thanks so much for watching. This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.