Matt: Wednesday night, the president of the United States addressed the nation on the war in Iran. The White House called it an important update and analysts expected something new, a deal, an escalation, ground troops, an end date, something. But what they got was 19 minutes of the same talking points that Trump's been giving for the last 30 some odd days repackaged with a podium and a prime time slot. Take a listen. So we're both nearing completion and committing to two to three more weeks of the hardest strikes yet. Trita Parsi at the Quincy Institute, who's one of the sharpest foreign policy analysts working right now, said it plainly, quote, I did not detect anything new. It reveals that he really does not have a plan. And I agree. This was a repetition of everything that he has said in the past. CNN described it as, ⁓ a belated sales pitch for an increasingly unpopular war. And afterwards oil jumped back above $100 a barrel after the speech. Asian markets dropped across the board, the people who bet real money on what Trump's word meant heard nearing completion and bet on escalation instead. So the speech though, it's useful. It was useful to watch. ⁓ Not really though for what it tells us about Iran, but for what it tells us about the Trump administration and what the world thinks of the Trump administration in America right now. Because when you take it line by line, The contradictions pile up so fast that by minute 15, you're watching a man argue against himself. The nuclear justification contradicted by his own intelligence chief, his own counter-terrorism director, and himself in an interview published the same day. You have the diplomacy claim contradicted by the timeline. You have the regime change denial contradicted by his own words. ⁓ know, on video the day that he announced the beginning of the bombing campaign a month ago. And also the claim of 45,000 Iranians that have been killed by their own government. It uses a justification for a war against Iran, cited by the man who wants to bomb them back to the stone ages and destroy their electrical grid. So a lot of contradictions here, including that one, you can't mourn dead civilians and promise to create more of them in the same speech. How can you think that no one would catch that? So what I'm gonna do now is take a look through, play some of the clips of the speech. and look at all the claims in here, compare it to other claims we've seen or receipts that we have, see what holds water and what doesn't. So let's go through it from the top. Trump opens with Iran as the world's number one state sponsor of terror. He says 47 years of quote, death to America. He quotes and talks about the Marine barracks bombing, roadside bombs, proxies. It's kind of the foundation of his entire speech in the entire war that Iran is evil. Iran kills Americans. Iran must be stopped. The designation is, I guess, technically true. The State Department labeled Iran a state sponsor of terrorism in 1984, but If we're gonna have an honest conversation about who sponsors terror in the Middle East, the mirror is right there. You The United States has killed an estimated two million people in the Middle East since 2001. We invaded Iraq on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist and links to 9-11 that didn't exist. We handed the country to sectarian chaos that gave rise to ISIS. We turned Libya into a failed state with open slave markets, actual human beings being bought and sold. After... might I add, a regime change operation that had no plan for what came after. We backed Saudi Arabia's bombing campaign in Yemen for years. are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of civilians dead there. It's the worst humanitarian crisis on earth. We occupied Afghanistan for 20 years, spent trillions of dollars, and the Taliban is now back in charge with better armaments because we left it for them to use. By any objective body count, the United States government has caused more death and destruction in the Middle East than any other It's not even close and this is a point that Dave Smith has made a couple times and took him taking some heat I guess about it if you can call it heat most of the people who were commenting on it negatively towards Dave Smith didn't really have any thoughts behind it just just kind of was like support the military Dave bad But no if you look at it just like how are we gonna figure out the criteria of what terrorism is in? By my definition, it's starting a war of aggression and killing a lot of civilians. And if that's the case, that's the benchmark. United States has done it better than anybody else, I think, in the last 20 years since the war on terror. what's the comparison here? Something like two million dead in the Middle East from America. It's like not even close. And I'm not some lefty American hater either. It makes me sick to think about this stuff. We're talking about mostly non-combatants, like innocent people murdered. And like, if you think about, like, I'm forced to fund that. Americans are forced to fund that. If you live in America, that's being done in your name, like for no upside to us. The war on terror has been a catastrophic loss for America. It's been a moral loss. ⁓ Why would we do that? Why would we start wars of aggression against an innocent population? Someone was not connected. You can't say 9-11 and then go after Iraq. It wasn't about that. So no upside for us. We took a moral loss, we took a financial loss, eight trillion dollars, I don't know what it is, something like that that we spent on this God forsaken thing, a loss of stature, it's weakened us in the world. And it's given Americans at home, with no upside from these things, actually downside because we paid for it, our currency was debased because of it, inflated because of it, and we lost freedom at home too because of the rise of surveillance state among other things. So what's the comparison here? And then when you have Trump explaining that Iran has been the largest state sponsor of terror for the last 47 years, that doesn't make any sense either. Trump keeps starting the clock in 1979, which was the Islamic revolution and the hostage crisis and death to America. But he's thinking of it or he's framing it that way as if Iranian hostility towards the United States just appeared out of nowhere. Like it was inexplicable. Just like fanaticism that happened without any cause. Just like they hate us for our freedoms. Stupid. You know, George W. Bush era, stupid talking point. With no acknowledgement from Trump of 1953 when the CIA working with British intelligence overthrew Iran's democratically elected prime. minister for the crime of nationalizing Iran's oil industry, which had been controlled by the Anglo-Iranian oil company. I think it's what we call BP now. And the US and Britain overthrew him and replaced him with the Shah. And the Shah ruled for 26 years with the help of Savak, which is his secret police or which was the secret police. trained by the CIA who tortured, imprisoned, and killed political dissidents on a massive scale. So like what reasonable person would not see that and think, gee, I imagine the Iranian people don't have very high regard for America after that, you know? ⁓ And I'm not justifying, you know, a state nationalizing, ⁓ you know, ⁓ a private organization. And then of course, if you're a multinational organization, I can understand you want to take some steps if you're doing business in a country and it's sort of withholding, it's not holding up your property rights. I get that. But you can't then direct the CIA to go and overthrow the government. Like that doesn't work ⁓ if you want the Iranian people to like you. So. The 1979 revolution, the one that Trump cites as the beginning of Iranian aggression was a direct response to 26 years of a US-installed dictatorship that was brutal. That too, America didn't come from nowhere, from the ether, from the abyss, it came from us. And none of this excuses the Iranian regime. They're brutal. The massacre of protesters in January proved that beyond any doubt, like it did happen. But if you're gonna use history to justify a war, you don't get to the clock at the moment that's most convenient for your argument and pretend the previous 26 years didn't happen. And the 1,050 Americans allegedly killed by Iran over those 47 years, we should talk about that too. ⁓ Because this is the number that the Trump and the neocons and the Israeli firsters, keep citing. And also the same thing with the midwits on Twitter who respond to me ⁓ when I say like, hey, we shouldn't kill innocent people. They're like, well, they killed, you or I say they can't they can't hurt America, they can't US soil. And they say, well, what about the 1050 Americans that were killed by Iran? ⁓ I mean, we should break that down to check out any war.com if you don't. I'm a regular reader of anti war.com and supporter of anti war.com. It's just some of the best foreign policy from a liberty view. But David Stockman ⁓ wrote an article in antiwar.com, on antiwar.com I guess, the right preposition. David Stockman was Ronald Reagan's own budget director. He did the math on this. ⁓ How many attacks were on American soil? The answer is zero in 47 years. Over 90 % of the pre-9-11 deaths were in Lebanon. Including 241 Marines at the ⁓ Beirut barracks, which was a deployment That was so clearly a mistake that Reagan himself pulled them out. They shouldn't have been there in the first place They were only there supporting Israel expanding its borders its territory So those soldiers should never have been in harm's way at all We weren't fighting an enemy that had that posed any threat to the United States whatever at all We were supporting a regime in Israel who was trying to expand its borders That's empire building. The largest single block, which is 603 deaths, and all these are tragic by the way. Like no one wants to see American soldiers in harm's way. It's like part of the reason besides the non-aggression principle, which is fundamentally what I'm, the philosophy that I adhere to, try to live my life by the non-aggression principle, just describes when force is moral to use and it's defensive force. In defense, violence is, completely moral to use. attacks you, you absolutely have the moral upper hand to defend yourself. In fact, you need to defend yourself and your family and your country, right? If the US is attacked, someone invades our soil, then it is our responsibility, it's American military's responsibility, but it's our responsibility too, my responsibility too to repel that attack. I believe that wholeheartedly. But part of the reason why I'm so aghast at these wars of choice that have no American upsides, because I know what it'll do. the negative consequences are beyond financial. They're also putting American troops in harm's way. I don't wanna see Americans put in harm's way, potentially killed. Anyway, the largest single block, 603 deaths, happened in Iraq by Shiite militiamen fighting an American occupation in their own country. So again, these aren't Iranians, this is Americans in Iraq. We shouldn't have been there either. There's no weapons of mass destruction, we all know that. Everybody knows that. You can't invade another country and expect them to not defend themselves though. And then when they do defend themselves, call them terrorists and then pin it on a third country. You know ⁓ Iranian ⁓ IRGC or the Iranian soldiers they didn't kill Americans those deaths were attributed to Iran because some of their weapons may have originated there and there's some There's some some arguments against that as well, but again, these are Iraqis Killing Americans who are occupying their country It's a war of choice for no good reason since Iraq posed again Iraq Iran posed no threat to the United States So they weren't even Iranians that killed 603 Americans. It was Iraqis, but it sort of pinned on Iran because maybe some of the weapons were manufactured in Iran. But that's not, that's ridiculous to think that those deaths were caused by Iranians. They weren't, they were caused by Iraqis because we were there and we shouldn't have been there. So 603 numbers, complete bullshit. So then, so okay, so that's 603 deaths in Iraq and then the 241 in Beirut barracks. And then the other famous one is the Qobar Tower. I think it's how you explain it, or Qobar Towers. In 1996, truck bomb killed 19 American servicemen at a military housing complex in Dharan in Saudi Arabia. And this is what happened. The Saudis rounded up six Shiite militants and extracted confessions claiming Iranian backing. But here's the thing, American investigators were never given direct access to the suspects. The FBI was allowed to observe exactly once from behind one way glass with pre-submitted questions. There was no cross examination, no independent verification. The confessions came from Saudi prisoners in a Saudi prison in a country where the Sunni government has its own reasons to blame Shiite Iran for anything that goes wrong in their oil producing Eastern provinces. So we just don't know like those confessions could have been coerced, exaggerated, they could have contained some truth. They might have been truthful. We just won't know because none of those suspects ever faced American justice. So again, we don't know. And the 19 Americans who died, they were stationed in Saudi Arabia to enforce a no-fly zone over Iraq, which again is a mission that had nothing to do with defending the United States. So every single one of these deaths, they happened overseas. So again, Iran can't touch the United States, can't. ⁓ They happened in theaters the United States chose to enter largely for the benefit of other countries, namely country Israel. For wars, the United States chose to fight in countries, again, where American troops had no defensive reason to be there. We had no reason to be there whatsoever. There was no upside to being there and only downsides, cost and human lives. And it cost us both. So that's not the positioning of this, the framing of this. It's not Iran waging a 47 year war on America. That's America putting its people in someone else's fight for 47 years and blaming the other side when they shoot back. And by the way, it's like not even the Iranians that have been shooting back. So it's such a stretch to say 1000 American soldiers were killed by Iran. It's like such a ridiculous stretch. And when you're stretching that far, you're just, it's just propaganda. That's it. Okay, listen to this. In the next part of the speech, Trump says that the Iranian regime has killed 45,000 of its own people. And he says it in his own way, kind of like it breaks his heart. I'm not quite sure that a heart exists inside Trump's body. Maybe it does, I don't know. But he's not alone. The entire Israeli lobby does the same thing. The conservative, bought and paid for conservative influencers, they say the same thing. ⁓ And it's like, the care, like, can I take your care seriously after the destruction of Gaza? No, not really. But they use it like, this is the thing that justifies the whole war. I mean, they use nuclear too, which we'll get into. And then they use this. ⁓ They justify the whole war with it, like the bombs, the billions of dollars a day, the dead Americans, like the $4 gas. But you have to ask, it, number one, does it justify it? And like, do we believe those numbers? And even if we do, does it justify it? The Iranian regime is pretty brutal, that's for sure. What we know is in late December, 2025, protests broke out across Iran over economic grievances, was inflation, the collapsing currency. And as these protests spread, they became explicitly anti-government. And so the regime responded with overwhelming force. really was. You had security forces that opened fire on protesters in the streets from rooftops. The internet was shut down nationwide for days, families searched morgues for their dead. The footage from ⁓ is I think it's Karizakh morgue is how you pronounce it in Tehran. You see like hundreds of bodies in black bags lined up in in sheds or on the ground outside. It's extremely disturbing to look at. And just, you know, a brutal documentation of state violence. You're seeing like gunshot wounds to the head, all sorts of stuff. And this all happened. It's ugly. And if you believe that killing innocent people is wrong, which you should, then this was wrong and completely evil. ⁓ The ayatollah at the time before we killed him, Khamenei, eventually acknowledged that thousands had been killed. So that's what they admitted to. And he blamed Trump. He called every protester a rioter and a terrorist affiliated with the United States and Israel. Obviously, this is not completely true. I do think, in my opinion, it's in my opinion, it's a certainty that CIA and Mossad backed NGOs were there funding protesters like they did in Ukraine, like they do here. Mossad admitted as much last week. There's articles that came out ⁓ that I read about it last week. But of course, that's not all the protesters. And that doesn't make opening fire on them, okay. So we know the Iranian regime killed a lot of protesters, it's not in dispute. We've seen the footage. But 45,000, I mean Trump said 32,000 at the State of the Union a few weeks back. And now he's saying 45,000 with no new evidence cited. And I've looked around for this by the way. The only verified count that I can find is from HRANA. which does actual documentation work. And they're saying 7,000 confirmed, ⁓ so a lot of people. But then other organizations are like possibly maybe like the UN has said possibly 20,000. Where this started was the Time Magazine report. I think I saw this right at the beginning of the year. And you saw the Israel bot conservative influencers site. ⁓ 30,000 says the Time Magazine article. I mean, on its face, it looked like bullshit because they were talking about this over the course of a couple of days. And if you read the article, obviously they never did or don't care, they get paid, it doesn't matter to them. But if you read the article, Time Magazine admits that they don't verify the numbers at all. They didn't do any independent verification of the numbers, they just took a source. And of course that source is, they kept off the record. I'm not giving them too much... ⁓ issue about that. mean, you know, it's kind of a staple of, of, of doing reporting, but, but that number has no backing. And so on its face, like you always have to question it. And then those deaths occurred in like two days to kill 30,000 people in two days would take an immense amount of violence. Like it would be carpet bombing to do that. And you would see, you'd see dead people all over the streets. Like it would be hard to hide that we have satellites for God's sakes. So I don't think that that number is anywhere. Like that's not a reasonable number. If you just put a little bit of scrutiny, if there's evidence otherwise, I mean, I'm glad to change my mind here, but I think a number, our own CIA and security states is something like 6,000 people. So I think maybe 7,000. I mean, that's a shit ton of people and that's terrible and wrong, but it's not 45,000. Like that's a huge embellishment. And. You know, as I said, US and Israeli intelligence almost certainly had a hand in funding and encouraging those protesters as well. Like Trump himself told the protesters to, take over your institutions and said, help us on the way. It doesn't mean that the grievances weren't real and that a lot of the protesters were sincere. I'm sure they were. But the idea that this was purely organic in the US and Assad had nothing to do with it is naive. And either way, though, what's clear is the numbers embellishment was also clear is the Israeli first conservative influencers as Trump, they don't care about those people because in the same speech Trump says, we're going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong. And he threatens to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants. So you can't be both aghast at civilian deaths and talk about destroying civilian infrastructure. If you destroy a nation's electrical grid, it kills citizens. You have hospitals that lose power, have water treatment that stops, refrigeration for medicine and food disappears, ventilators shut off, incubators go dark. I mean, we know this because we're watching it happen in Cuba right now. We've got three nationwide blackouts in March alone because the US had stopped any oil from coming in for a month. And ⁓ that may have shifted now. seen the news lately, but Russia sent oil and I think it landed and they're gonna send another freighter with oil. So that might be stopping. But anyway, you can see exactly what happened. So you can't stand at a podium and mourn dead Iranian civilians and then in the same 19 minutes speech promise to bomb their country back to the stone age and destroy infrastructure that keeps them alive. Those two positions do not coexist in a person who actually values those lives. He's not citing the civilian deaths because he's horrified. He's citing them because they are useful to his propaganda. Next. This is the section of speech that Trump anchored hardest on. clearly it's because nuclear is the only justification that anyone remotely believes him on. His terrorism framing is completely falling apart, as I mentioned earlier here, but like I've been talking about for 30 days, so terrorism. The diplomacy claims get denied by Iran within hours. They were going to attack us was debunked by his own counterterrorism director, security apparatus, whatever, tons of people, his own administration. So the nuclear threat is all he really has left that sounds at least relatively reasonable, if you don't think about it very much, but relatively reasonable by certain people. And here's what he said. said, Obama's nuclear deal was a disaster. Iran wasn't abiding by it. They were at the doorstep of nuclear weapons. Trump said that he did what no other president would do, that he corrected their mistakes. And every piece of that is complete bullshit. The JCPOA, which is the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which is the Iran nuclear deal, was signed in 2015 by Iran, the US, the UK, France, Germany, Russia, China, and the EU. Under the deal, Iran dismantled large parts of its nuclear program, accepted the most intrusive international inspections regime ever negotiated, and reduced its enriched uranium stockpile by 98%. In exchange, they got sanctions relief. And it worked. The IAEA, which is the International Atomic Energy Agency, the body specifically created to monitor nuclear compliance, verified repeatedly that Iran was in full compliance over and over. Every 90-day review, every inspection cycle, full compliance. The arms control center confirmed it. Quote, up until May 2019, a full year after the United States withdrew from the deal, Trump did, the IAEA routinely verified that Iran was in full compliance. So a full year after Trump walked away from the deal, Iran was still holding up its end. Just reflecting on how many deals that the United States has walked out on with Iran. You know, whether it's the... ⁓ whether it's the JCPOA or it's the negotiations before last June's bombing campaign, or then the negotiations that got cut short by the United States bombing Iran again just in the past month. It's like, many times? No wonder their leaders say there's no reason to do a deal with the United States. They don't hold to their deals. They bomb us in the middle of them. So Trump withdrew from the deal in May 2018, not because Iran violated it, because Netanyahu gave a presentation called Iran Lied about Iran's past nuclear activities, not current violations by the way. And because John Bolton, war criminal, Trump's own national security advisor has been pushing for withdrawal since before he took the job. The leaders of France, Germany and the UK publicly expressed regret and concern and urged Trump to stay in, but he pulled out anyway. Iran's breakout time, so this is describing the time it would take to produce enough material for a nuclear weapon, under the JCPOA was more than a year. But after Trump withdrew and reimposed crushing sanctions, Iran began exceeding the deal's limits. Their breakout time dropped to three to four months. So by leaving that deal, Trump made them closer to a bomb, not further away. He created the crisis he's now bombing them to solve. You can see this from Iran's perspective, right? ⁓ back out on our deal, our contract, which we were upholding, our end of the bargain, and then apply sanctions again, well, we're gonna start working on our nuclear program again, get it to 60 % enriched. And then at the very least, it becomes a bargaining chip for them. You can see it. You don't have to like the regime to be able to put yourself in their shoes and say, wow, if I'm in their position, what would be reasonable for me to do? And Trump's own people know this, his DNI. Tulsi Gabbard told Congress under oath a couple of weeks ago that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. That's not their intention. Joe Kent confirmed it on Tucker and other interviews he did after he resigned. They're not on the verge. No U.S. intelligence assessment has ever concluded that Iran intended to use nuclear weapons offensively. The Arms Control Association, which is one of the most respected nonproliferation organizations in the world, said explicitly, there is no imminent threat. Iran is not close to weaponizing its nuclear material so as to justify another US attack. Trump said Wednesday night during this 19 minute speech that Iran was right at the doorstep of nuclear, his own intelligence chief, and everybody else said the opposite under oath. And then the kill shot on the same day as his prime time address, this Wednesday, two days ago, as I record this, Reuters published an interview with Trump and they asked him about Iran's enriched uranium stockpile. And this is the thing, this is what Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro and the rest of the Israel first lobby argued is the reason why we need ground troops because we have to go seize this. This is the thing that Hegseth and Rubio and every other hawk in the administration has cited as the core justification for this war. What about Iran's enriched uranium stockpile? Trump's answer? That's so far underground, I don't care about that. So the entire nuclear justification, the enriched uranium, the doorstep language, the reason Levin told you we need the 82nd airborne on the ground in Iran dismissed by the president himself in a single sentence on the same day He gave a primetime speech anchoring on it. Baffling how bad these guys are at this. How bad they are at propaganda. Last Saturday, Trump told you to watch Mark Levin's show. Levin went on Fox and argued for sending ground troops to seize the uranium. Trump promoted it. Can you imagine promoting that freak? Mark Levin is such a bad actor, such a lying bad actor. Can you imagine the President of the United States saying that anybody should go watch him? It's crazy land. Trump promoted it, the Pentagon is now preparing for weeks of ground operations, and the president the same week told Reuters he doesn't care about the uranium. So what are we doing? ⁓ go watch Mark Levin, he's gonna lay out the reason why we need to go into Iran, which, let's just summarize this so you don't have to listen to the freak. ⁓ they've got enriched uranium, we gotta go seize it. And the president says in the same week, he doesn't care about it, it's so far underground, it's not a threat. So what are we doing? If the nuclear threat is the justification and the president himself says he doesn't care about it, what exactly are American troops being asked to risk their lives for? Next. Trump claims that we tried diplomacy and they've got weapons that can hit the United States. Both of those claims are false. First, the we tried diplomacy thing. I've covered this a number of times. So basically five rounds of talks took place through Oman in 2025. The Omanis were mediating. By late February, a deal was described as within reach. Then the United States and Israel bombed Iran during the negotiations. Not after they failed during it. In the sticking point, from what they said, it was just bad diplomacy, but the sticking point from what the Trump administration said was enrichment. Iran was willing to negotiate limits, but the demand from the hawks, the neocons, and Israel firsters was zero enrichment. At the time, Tucker Carlson identified this publicly as a poison pill, a demand designed to be rejected because if Iran accepts limits, you get a deal, and a deal means no war. and no war means that people who wanted the conflict don't get what they want. The Oman mediator, who had been working on this for months, said a framework was within reach and then the bombs fell. So that's not a we tried diplomacy scenario. is a diplomacy was theater. We put in a poison pill so that it would never end well and then we bombed them during the middle of it. It's basically was an it was basically the only outcome was in is ensuring that ⁓ military option was what was going to happen. Then Trump talks about weapons that could hit the United States. And he implied that Iran has or is close to having the capability to strike the American homeland. The DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, his own intelligence apparatus concluded in 2025 that Iran was a decade away. from developing intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States basically. A decade. Iran's longest range demonstrated capability is the missile that hit Diego Garcia, which was 4,000 kilometers away. It's a long way. But the US mainland is over 10,000 kilometers from Iran. Iran can't hit America. And his intelligence community agrees with that assessment. And then Trump contradicts himself later in the speech. He says almost as an aside that Iran can't hurt the United States. So what is it? Which one is it? You're saying that they're very close to weapons that can hit US soil, but then you're saying they're they can't hurt us. You can't brag that the United States has bombed Iran. Iran's military options disintegrated them, obliterated them. And, you know, puff yourself up and try to puff up the American people saying how badass we are. And then in the same sentence, or the same speech I mean, say that they can't hit us. It's one or the other. Well, we all know what the other, we all know it's the other. It's that they can't hit us. They can't hurt us. Okay, so next is him talking about regime change. Trump was the one that said we were affecting regime change. He said it in the night that he announced the bombing campaign existed. This was February 28th, the first night of Operation Epic Fury. He says this isn't a regime change. He tells the Iranian people, when we're finished, take over your government. It'll be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations. Then March 7th, he demanded unconditional surrender. He discussed publicly having a role in selecting Iran's next leader. After US and Israeli strikes killed Khamenei, Iranian officials selected his son as his successor. That wasn't the plan. The plan was Washington picks someone friendly. Well, it didn't work out that way. And now like we never said regime change, he's claiming credit for it and denying he pursued it in the same sentence. both of these things again, We catch him in these contradictions all the time. I don't understand why his speech writers allow this. Maybe he's just going off the cuff. And then if you're a Trump speech writer, you gotta be like covering your eyes through the speech. It's gotta be hard to watch. He contradicts himself. Either you wanted regime change and got it, or you didn't want it and it happened accidentally. He's trying to have both because admitting the goal is regime change from the start means admitting that this was never about nuclear weapons and also kind of admitting you failed. where we know what's really more true. It's like causing chaos in Iran to ensure Israel's regional dominance is what they really want. They don't care. I think they'd rather chaos. I think it's better for them. By the way, Trump also said the new leadership is less radical and much more reasonable. So is that true? I the new Supreme Leader is the son of the old one, installed by the same clerical establishment operating the same system whose family we killed. not just his dad, but his immediate family. So if that's like positive regime change is the worst regime change in history. You spend a billion dollars a day, kill thousands of Iranians in airstrikes, you crater the global oil markets and the result is the dictator's son is running the same theocracy, mission accomplished. Next is his electrical grid threat. And then he added almost casually, we could hit their oil. He doesn't really go into the details there, but you know what he's implying there. We could hit their oil, meaning we could really, we could stop them from having any chance of coming back as a country in the next, I don't know, in decades, decades and decades. Because oil is really the way that they do it. That's the threat, more civilian threat. So the nearing completion war now has a two to three week deadline attached to an ultimatum. Make a deal or we destroy your electricity and your oil infrastructure. So that's winding down. That is the biggest escalation threat in the entire war. Like if you destroy, I mentioned this in the opening, but if you destroy a country's electrical grid, it's not a military operation, it's a humanitarian catastrophe. Right? Everything needs power, hospitals, clean water, removing sewage, food storage, medical equipment. then traffic systems, communication networks, all that stuff requires again, I just want to like juxtapose this with the threat, this threat with ⁓ the same speech where he's citing 45,000 Iranian civilians killed by their own government as a justification for war against them. You don't care about this. ⁓ You don't care about ⁓ Iranian civilians. If you you wouldn't. you wouldn't threaten their civilian targets. So again, there's not a serious case he's making. None of this mostly contradictory points hold up to scrutiny. This is a man who's running out of justification and justifications and escalating because he doesn't know how to stop it or he isn't allowed to stop it. So then after the speech, how did the world respond to the president's important update? Oil jumped back above $100 a barrel. I think it traded at 114 yesterday. What does that mean? That means that the people who trade oil for a living heard nearing completion and bet on more war. Brent crude gained over 3%, US crude over 2%. and they were right to bet that way. Two to three more weeks of extremely hard strikes is not an exit ramp, it's an on ramp. Gas is at $4.06 a gallon nationally on average, which is up 25 to 35 % depending on where you live. Trump blamed Iran for the gas prices, said it's entirely the result of the Iranian regime launching deranged terror attacks against commercial oil tankers. Say that, but we started the war. Iran responded by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz. We knew they would do this. ⁓ And now the gas prices that resulted from our decision to bomb them are their fault. What does Trump have in store for the solution to the Strait of Hormuz problem? We're weakened now, right? Like we have less influence there than we did before. He told other countries to just go take it. He said, grab it and cherish it. He told countries that can't get fueled, many of which refuse to get involved to buy oil from the United States or go and take the Strait yourself. So the pitch is United States breaks energy markets, global energy markets by starting a war nobody asked for. And now you guys should ⁓ either go and commit military to opening the straight yourself or buy our oil. Which, you know, that sounds like more of a protection racket than anything. What else happened? Asian markets cratered The Nikkei in Japan fell 2 plus percent. Same thing in Hong Kong, South Korea. The global economy heard the speech and panicked. You these are not people who listened to Trump and thought the war is ending. So for him to put that cap, hey, listen, we're almost done. We've done everything we need to do. We're almost done. Two or three more weeks of this and then it's over. If you were really, Dave Smith made a good point. If you were really trying to tell encouraging news, you thought that your switch was gonna give encouraging news to the market, you do in the morning before the market's open. You wouldn't do it at nine o'clock at night. He must have known that. This speech was filled with contradictions and people would look at two to three more weeks of war and at the same time threatening civilian targets as an escalation. He must have known that. So why put it at nine o'clock at night? And then there's NATO in an interview with The Telegraph published the same day. said he's considering pulling the United States out of NATO because allied nations wouldn't join the Iran war. Rubio backed him up, said that they'd have to re-examine the value of the alliance. So the president is threatening to dismantle the most significant military alliance in modern history because Europe wouldn't help him fight a war that most Americans don't even support. Now, should the US pull out of NATO? Yes, we should for sure. And to me, the reasons don't matter. I'm just pointing this out as hypocritical and ridiculous for him to say this or threaten this. But yes, we should get out of NATO. It's a huge waste of resources. It's basically military welfare for other countries. And it's largely responsible for tensions with Russia right now, basically a second Cold War. But using it to threaten other countries to take part in a war of aggression they didn't start, weren't consulted on, and don't agree with makes no sense. And the ceasefire, Trump said that morning, Wednesday morning, that Iran's president had requested a ceasefire. But Iran's foreign ministry spokesman called it false and baseless. It's the same pattern we've seen over and over. know, the phantom talks from a few weeks ago, Trump says negotiations are happening and Iran said they're not. Meanwhile, Israel keeps killing people that we're negotiating with or trying to, even yesterday. And in Tel Aviv, protesters held signs reading, repeating the Gaza playbook in Iran. Thank you. Thank you Israeli citizens for doing this. So you got protesters in Tel Aviv holding signs, begging their own government to stop. Iran says there's no negotiations. And the president's response to all this is two to three more weeks of the hardest strikes yet. So everybody outside the White House is looking at that and are like, We don't believe you. 19 minutes of the speech and in them the president of the United States contradicted his own intelligence chief, his own counterterrorism director, his own Reuters interview from the same day and his own words from the night that he started the war. The nuclear deal was working, he broke it. Iran complied for a full year after he walked away. He in turn, because of walking away, made them closer to a bomb, not further away and now he's bombing them to solve the problem that he created. D &I Tulsi said Iran wasn't building a weapon. Joe Cant when he resigned, no weapon, no imminent threat. And on the same day, on Wednesday, when Trump, know, same day of the prime time speech saying, you know, enriched uranium as a justification for the entire war, that same day told Reuters, that's so far underground, I don't care about that. He said, we tried diplomacy. The Oman mediator said a deal was within reach. We bombed during the negotiations. He said, Iran has weapons that can hit the United States, his own. DIA says they're a decade away. Then he admitted in the same speech that Iran can't hurt us. If Iran can't hurt us, this isn't defense, it's aggression. He said that we never pursued regime change. He told the Iranian people on February 28th to take over their government. He demanded unconditional surrender. He discussed picking their next leader. And the regime change he's now claiming credit for produced the dead dictator son running the same system. He cited... 45,000 dead Iranian civilians then promised to bomb them back to the stone ages and destroy their electrical grid you don't get to mourn the dead and Manufacture more of them in the same speech every major claim in this address falls apart against Other parts of the speech or older receipts sometimes receipts from the same day from his own people from his own intelligence from his own words So why give the goddamn speech? Because 66 % of Americans oppose the war because his approval rating is at a second term low, might be a historic low. Seen some contradictory evidence on that, but low, because gas is about $4 and climbing, because oil jumped above $100 a barrel, because markets are crashing, and because NATO allies are refusing to join, because even protesters in Tel Aviv are holding signs that say stop. He gave this speech because the war is failing the only test that matters to him, the political one. and the best he could do for 19 minutes was give us talking points that contradict each other. And also the way that he delivered it, it appeared to me like he knows everything he says is a contradiction or a lie. Like there was no enthusiasm. He sounded old and uninspired, tired. He must know that no one will believe him except Israel firsters, those conservative influencers. He must hate. the pattern he's in. Like, manufacture justification, shift it when it falls apart, escalate while claiming you're winding down, and never define what done looks like. Not really. He must hate it. This war wasn't started for American security. It wasn't started because Iran was a threat. It was started because a foreign government wanted it. A lobby paid for it and president who owed them delivered it. The receipts are all there. His own people keep telling us. The question is whether enough Americans are paying attention before the next escalation. Ground troops, the electrical grid, the oil fields becomes the new normal that nobody voted for.