Shaun Newman Podcast - #1020 - James Lindsay

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

James Lindsay is an American author, mathematician, and cultural critic best known for co-orchestrating the 2017–2018 Grievance Studies Affair, where he, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose submitted hoax papers to academic journals to expose perceived ideological biases in fields like gender studies and critical theory. He founded New Discourses a media platform and educational resource where it promotes open dialogue free from political correctness constraints, pursues objective truth amid subjective biases, and offers podcasts, articles, glossaries, and books critiquing postmodernism, Marxism, and identity politics.Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

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Today's guest is an American author who has his PhD in mathematics and hosts the new Discourses podcast. I'm talking about James Lindsay. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by James Lindsay. James, thanks for hopping on.

Yeah, good to see you again. Yeah, it's, it's, been a it's been a little stretch um and uh uh i don't know i've been uh interested to talk to you for for some time um and so i appreciate you you're doing this again hopping back on uh the world as you know it has become i don't know it has been a lot of noise it has been interesting to try and even follow people probably notice my ex account i i post my interviews i i don't even know what to comment on at this point because there's just like complete insanity and i pride myself in trying to bring on multiple sides to talk about multiple things. And right now I'm just

like, I don't know. So I thought I'd go to somebody who's on the inside of, you know, who has some level-headed thinking. And I thought we'd start with Charlie Kirk because I didn't realize James that you guys were good friends and I don't want to put words in your mouth. So I thought we'd just start there because Charlie Kirk gets killed. My condolences, not only to his family, but you. And then that insanity breaks out. And now like, I sit here and I'll put until that had happened. I knew who Charlie Kirk was like that much, right? I saw the odd video of them, but I never had him on the podcast. And if I'm being honest, he wasn't in my top five to have on the podcast. Not because I didn't like what he's doing. I just had other things. And now,

you know, months later, the world has very much changed. And the amount I see Charlie Kirk on my feed is like insane. Full stop. Your thoughts. And, and then I'll probably ask some questions along the way. Yeah, well, all that stuff you just brought up related, I think. So obviously the insanity online is a huge issue. Huge. It's very disorienting. I'll tell you as like basically somebody who has sort of built something of a career, part, like part of what I do, you know, people think that I can like kind of predict. trends. Sometimes I get myself in trouble because I predict them too far ahead of time. And the way I do that is like, it's like an old Chinese doctor reading the pulse of, of the, you know, social media. You start to see certain, you know, movements rising up. You see trends. You see fads and you see which ones kind of have roadblocks ahead of them. And then which ones have absolutely, you know, no roadblocks and

they're going to take off. And the thing is, is I say that because I'm good at navigating kind of the signal to noise problem on social media. And even for the last few months, I can't handle it. It is unbelievably noisy. It is unbelievably disorienting. It's confusing. People are not behaving in ways that I would have predicted. They're not behaving in ways that I can fully understand or figure out even how to engage with. So that I think is common. But I do think it's also related to the phenomenon of what Charlie Kirk was doing in the broad conservative movement, especially down here in the United States, what he represented more broadly, even up there in Canada, and what his death has meant.

There's a really popular meme. It shows like, you know, the Hoover Dam or whatever, and it says a bunch of retardation up above the dam. And then it shows like, you know, society down below the dam. And it says Charlie Kirk on the dam. Like he was holding back all this stupidity, all this confusion. And there, you know, you see this talked about a lot that Charlie Kirk was holding so much together and we never really appreciated it.

And I don't read the situation that way. It is true. You are correct. Charlie and I were pretty close personal friends as far as I know and understand. We spent a lot of time together individually one-on-one. We traveled a lot. We probably shared a stage at least dozens, maybe a hundred or more times. I don't know, a lot of times. So we spent a lot of time together as far as that goes. He's a very busy guy. So it's not like we were just hanging out all the time. But we did just hang out. Like not everybody just hung out with Charlie. It was he didn't have. a lot of spare time for just hangouts. And I was on that short list. So at any rate, I knew him. And that's not really relevant. I'm just kind of confirming what you're saying. But what I think is going on is that there are, or there is a mass scale operation that is meant to fracture the American conservative movement and maybe conservative movements around the world from within. And I particularly mean the sane ones, the ones that are actually conservative. I don't mean right wing in kind of the broader sense. I mean specifically people who identify as and feel and resonate with and work with

conservatism, which tends to be incremental. It tends to be cautious. It tends to be slow. It tends to value tradition and not making hasty assumptions. It tends to value one generation to the next, the unbroken linkage of what our societies represent. So in the Canadian context, a conservative would be the Canada of yesterday should strongly inform the Canada of today, should strongly inform the Canada of tomorrow. And it's like there's a link between the past generation, the present generation, and the generation yet to be. So that group of people has been very rapidly rising against this woke thing, which of course is much worse in Canada. The left is much worse in Canada than in the United States, but it's even bad in the United States to, I mean, very significant

degree. We're under a tremendous threat here in our own country, even with our first amendment and our second amendment and other amendments. And so we were getting successful. And that had to be stopped. And I don't see this radicalism on the right as a reaction to the left. I see it as a continuation of the left. And the linchpin, the way that this is working is by making the right go crazy on its own terms. So it's taking conservatives and turning them into radical right-wingers that are odious, frankly, odious. Nobody wants to be around them. They're causing problems everywhere they go.

They infiltrate. They besmirch everything they get involved in. They come out with radicalism that if they're presenting themselves as Catholics, makes the Catholic church look bad. If they're Baptist, it makes the Southern Baptist or whatever Baptist Convention look bad. If they're presenting as Republicans, they make the Republican Party look bad. Anti-Semitism, racism, racism, radicalism, anti-constitutionalism.

we could go down the list. Anti-liberalism, post-liberalism, they're very aggressive, a different breed. And what was going on was that my opinion is that they needed Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk had so much power, so much sway, so clear an ability to see things and communicate that if they recruited Charlie Kirk, they got his youth movement behind them. And if they scared Charlie Kirk off, then Charlie Kirk would turn the youth movement against them. So it was everything riding on Charlie Kirk. And then Charlie Kirk dies. Once Charlie Kirk dies, that neat. So you've heard the analogy boiling the frog, right? You turn the temperature up one degree at a time so the frog doesn't jump out of the water. Well, Charlie was the frog and they were trying to boil Charlie. And if they

turned the temperature up too quickly, the frog would die. Charlie would have caught onto them. He would have turned the youth movement against them. There were signs that he was sometimes catching onto what was going on and there were signs that they were winning at different times. They were pulling Charlie in and that confusion actually is being weaponized now. People are using his words at different times, his videos from different moments in his life to make all kinds of contradictory points, but usually ones that favor the radical agendas. And anyway, Charlie dies while they're trying to boil the frog. Well, now you don't have to, you don't have to raise the temperature slowly anymore. You just crank the gas. And so they turned the temperature up to full.

everything went absolutely crazy. Charlie Kirk himself becomes an object of propaganda. It becomes because he can no longer speak from his coffin, he becomes a character that has so much moral and emotional weight for people that they can put whatever words into his mouth. And he can't say anything about it. He can't say that doesn't represent how I thought. He can't say that doesn't represent how I think now because the world is different than it was six months ago. Things have been shown. Things have been seen. Things have been revealed. Things have happened. Major, major world events have happened. Charlie wasn't alive when Venezuela was taken. Charlie wasn't alive now that Cuba's falling. Charlie wasn't alive when the war against Iran started for whatever good or ill that was.

But these are the kinds of things that they want to put into Charlie's mouth. Charlie wasn't alive when Tucker Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes. Charlie wasn't alive when Tucker, when Tucker Carlson was defended by Kevin Roberts, a Heritage Foundation for hosting Nick Fuentes. And we could go down the list. There are a lot of things that if Charlie could pop back in, having seen all of this,

Charlie wasn't alive when they attacked his widow relentlessly for months. If he could pop back in, the mind that he would have today would not exactly agree with everything he believed in September 9th. or September 10th, 2025. And so it's very useful for them to put words in those mouths, but the reason they went so freaking crazy, the reason every bit of this propaganda has been turned up to 11,

where 11's the highest the knob goes, is because they don't have Charlie Kirk to scare off anymore, or to try to keep in their recruitment circle anymore. That's my read on this. But it's absolutely insane. And the stuff that they're saying, I mean, like, it's really weird. I get in trouble for this a lot. People don't understand. There's a very simple concept. It even has a name. It's called paltering. Poultering is when you lie by telling the truth. And you say, James, how can you lie by telling the truth? You can lie by telling the truth by putting out true statements that don't actually connect to one another and let people assume that they do connect. Or you lie by telling the truth by putting out a true statement.

without all of the truth present. So I'll give you two examples. The second example, you put out a true statement without telling what's really going on. It's all over social media this week that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Old Jerusalem is closed, even though it's Holy Week coming up for safety reasons or for whatever. It's closed for the, all you see in the news report is that it's closed for the first time ever, although I saw on the Daily Mail that it's because of some kind of revelation prophecy or some nonsense. No, what they're not telling you is the Western Wall is closed, Al-Aksha Mosque is closed,

and the reason that it's all closed is because a rocket landed, was destroyed in the air, so it didn't explode, but the fragments of the rocket landed in old Jerusalem. They landed literally in the courtyard and on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, so they can't guarantee that visitors will be safe. But all they say is, the truth that they tell is the church has been closed for Holy Week. Israel's government closed the church. And then people run with this emotional reaction. How dare they close our church?

How dare they prevent us from worshipping? The United States did that for COVID. Literally, Iran is shooting rockets at it. Pieces of rockets are landing on it. So that's one way you can lie with the truth. Another way is one of the oldest fallacies in the book, every lawyer has to learn this. It's still used in Latin, post hoc, ergo proctor hoc.

This is where you can take two pieces of information and create a lie, both pieces of information are true. Post hoc, ergo proctor hoc means after the fact, therefore because of the fact, and it is recognized as a fallacy. If something happens yesterday and then something else happens today, there's not necessarily any connection between them, but you could say, well, you know, a tree fell down yesterday and today my kid failed school or whatever. There's no necessary connection between these two things, but you could create that.

Well, a better example of that is, in fact, what they're saying about Charlie's death. This is the thing that is actually coming out of people's mouths like Joe Kent, Tucker Carlson, and so many people online right now, is that Charlie said that he did not want to see a war in Iran evolved during Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025. So that happened in June. And then now, in September, they killed him. So post hoc, Charlie dies. Ergo Proctorhawk, Charlie died because he didn't want there to be a war. So Charlie says he doesn't want there to be a war. Then Charlie is murdered.

Therefore, Charlie was murdered because he didn't want to have a war. That's the logic that they are allowing people to take and sometimes actually saying. But that is lying with truth. That is a deceptive technique. That in fact is a straight logical, the most classical logical fallacy. And so this kind of stuff is everywhere. now. And, you know, as somebody who knew Charlie pretty well, it's just so, I don't have words for how disgusting it is to watch in a sense, like I said, his corpse is being paraded around. People are

standing on his coffin knowing that his silence is permanent that he can't say anything about them. You even got some weird Scientologist claiming that Charlie was a Scientologist and secretly working in Scientology magic or whatever using techniques. Like, this is just out of control. So this lie by telling the truth, paltering, correct? Yeah. On this, on this side, I've seen this play out off of my own show. And the example I'll give is Daniel Smith, Premier Daniel Smith came on the show.

Forgive me the timeline, folks, but she talked about immigration and how she wanted to see the population of Alberta double by, and it was 2050. but what they did was they took the clip which is three minutes long or roughly and they trimmed it they just did it enough so what did it do? I want to double the population of Alberta to whatever

and so everybody lost their mind it was so I've seen that play out I'm always skeptical of when you clip any short thing and I don't get to see the full the whole thing. That's why I like podcasts because if I want to go listen to James

I go listen to James this is why I struggle with social media. I just, I just struggled full stop because I'll give you an example. We were talking about earlier this week, I had a Greek Orthodox priest on and he talked about some things with Israel and so obviously my phone is listening to everything that's going on. So now what am I being shown on all social media? If I go on, Israel is literally the devil. Like I can't put it any better than that And I'm like, I haven't changed anything I've done on my phone. It's just listening. The AI actually literally shows.

Right. And I'm like, all I'm doing is when I started this out, I'm trying to bring on multiple voices because that's how I make sense of the world. I don't make sense by AI telling me what the world's doing. But I find it interesting that now my echo chamber, because of one conversation is literally this bang, bang, bang, bang. Anyways. So I understand what you mean by paltry. I want to go back to something you said. Mm-hmm.

you said you were on stage roughly somewhere around 100 times with Charlie Kirk, correct? Yeah, that's right. And then you, but before you had, you said, I mean, we could count. It might only be like 40 or 50, but it was a lot. It was a lot. To me, I'm like, oh, I mean, unless he's jumping on a plane or you're jumping on a plane 10 seconds after, that's getting it. That's like a coworker. Like, you're actually getting to know this guy relatively well, I would say.

But you said, I know and understand us to have had a friendship. What did you mean by that? Do you look back on it now and just go like, I think we're friends or you're like, no, we're friends. I mean, I always believe that we were friends. And I just say that as kind of like a way to cover my ass because everything's so messy right now. I thought from my end at least for sure, like for two years, people would say, you know, well, you know, what do you do with your friends or whatever? And I'm like, well, I would make like a joke. It's like, well, I think my best friend in the world is Charlie Kirk.

And he lives in Arizona and I live in Tennessee. So it's like the point I was making was I don't see my actual friends. that often we're like we live apart we don't we don't get to just you know it's been a long day bro do you want to go grab something sure like that like my friends are scattered across the world they're not other than my wife who you know obviously is my best friend in the world there's nobody local that I have this like because I'm never here so it's hard to build and maintain a stable relationship with you know people it's hard to get together when you're when you're when you're an adult anyway like it's easy when you're a teenager but it gets hard

as you get older to get together with people. And so the reason is, though, that Charlie was so positive and so good with so many people. He lifted up everybody. Like, I see people have published their text messages with Charlie, which is pretty wild. And they're all like, you know, Charlie's all like, I'm so impressed with this. One of the things Charlie would do is like, you know, if you had a podcast and you did a good job and you were on Charlie's radar, he would text you if he caught it and say, like, you did a great job on Sean's podcast. like he would just do that, right? And so I'm not like second guessing whether or not we were friends.

I mean, I saw the way the guy would light up. I mean, people joked about the way he would light up like he was seeing his boyfriend. And no, that wasn't a thing, guys, when he would see me. Like, it was abnormal that Charlie would light up the way that he did when he saw me, according to the people that were around him, like literally for work 24-7. So I'm pretty sure we were friends. But he was so positive with everybody that, and everybody now's claiming friendship. I just don't want to overstate any case, right?

So all I meant by is I don't want to overstated case. That sucks. Just full stop on this side. It does suck. It does suck. You know what? I think we're friends. But now I got to call on the question everything because of how insane the world has become.

Because all these people out there are like, oh yeah, Charlie and I were friends. And then they show like these text messages where Charlie sent really nice things. I think one of the signs that Charlie and I were actually friends is that Charlie and I pretty routinely disagreed in text message. Like they're not all positive glowing, like nice things. it was like he would text me and just like, you're wrong. And it's like, no, I'm not. And we'd go back and forth. And, you know, occasionally he'd come out on top. Occasionally, I would come out on top. And occasionally it would remain ambiguous. Like literally, um, the last sets of texts that Charlie and I

had were something like he told me I was wrong about something. I said, no, I wasn't. And then some that didn't go anywhere. And then some time went by. And then I sent him a piece of evidence saying, I think I was right and he didn't reply and that's it. That's where it ended. And so and then, you know, it was like that was a week before he died. Well, from an outsider's view, James, because once again, I didn't know Charlie. I didn't exchange everything I said. I can tell you this. This is how well I knew Charlie. That when Charlie died, my wife was out and I was like, I wanted to call her when I saw the video. Somebody texted me the video. So the first thing I saw was Charlie's, the video. And so I see this.

I'm like, oh, that's bad. Like, he's not making it through that. And so, like, I just went outside and, like, my wife wasn't home. And I wanted to just call her and be like, I need to talk to you about something. And I was like, no, let her drive home safely. I can talk to her when she gets home. Like, she doesn't have to have this, like, honor. Little did I know that about 30 people texted my wife and were like, was James with Charlie?

And she's like, no, why? And Charlie's been shot. So they all told her, like lots of people texted my wife. More people texted my wife than texted me. Is your husband with Charlie? Is your husband with Charlie? Oh my God. So it was full expectation of lots of people who are even one step removed that I

possibly would have been with Charlie that day. Well, and I was going to say from an outsider, the amount of times, just to tag on to the text, the amount of times I was texted was a bit insane because I'm like, I've never interviewed this guy. Full stop, right? But one of the things that I would say are similar between you and Charlie is your life, not your lifestyle, but like you live on the road. You go speak at events all over.

That's how we met, right? Is you came to Canada, several times, Alberta specifically. And when I look at what Charlie was doing, not knowing the guy, what do you do? He traveled around and talked to the people. You travel around and talk to the people. There would be a mutual respect, I would think, because that is a, how many people choose that life? That is, that is, from my standpoint with three young kids, I'm like, that is a difficult thing you both were doing. Maybe it's the funnest thing in the world, but like you're constantly confronting people with new ideas.

They probably disagree with at times. And on and on, I watched the videos of Charlie and I'm like, man, that guy had a talent for confronting people who disagreed with him. over and over and over. Well, there are lots of people agreed. Sure. But overall, the videos that people watch aren't the videos where they're like,

you're the best, you're the greatest. It's the videos where people are like, you're an idiot, and this is why. And then he has to unravel what they just said and give him something coherent back.

That's what made him what he was, I think. I mean, there's probably other parts to it. But regardless, from an outsider, I look at it and I go, there probably was a mutual respect

between the two of you because you shared similar things. I mean, being on stage with a guy 50 times, that's almost unheard of. I would say. It's a lot. I mean, it was Charlie's doing. I didn't never, I invited him to something once. He invited me to stuff all the time. So, but that's not like I didn't want him there. It's just like, A, he's kind of a big deal and busy and be like I don't do put on that many things. And he put on things like literally every week. All the time. Yeah. Literally every week, multiple things every week, everywhere. Okay. Can we talk about the aftermath of Charlie? So he gets everything and then everybody goes after Erica. I know that, you know, Charlie, do you stand back and go like, man, maybe there's some truth in that? Are you like, this is a complete insanity? I think it's complete insanity. I will, you know, just like I was being careful with how I talked about, Charlie, I don't actually know Erica. I met Erica a couple of times. It was all very brief. Usually she had,

baby in tow. So like, you know, that's, you're at this huge conference. There's thousands of people around tons of things are happening all at the same time. And you've got an infant. So like, your hands are full, right? So it was just like nice to meet you, whatever. Talk to her for a couple of minutes. And, you know, she had things to do. I had things to do. So it wasn't like an ever really sat down and got to know her. So I just caveat saying that I don't actually know Erica. But I do know Charlie, and I know Charlie, I know how he thought about her. I know how much he liked her and loved her. It's just incredible.

So, like, a lot of these rumors that are flying around about any of that are, to me, insane. But the idea that, like, she's this kind of scheming character or was involved in any of this stuff that happened is so, it's not just insane. It's so far beyond the pale that it's just blatantly evil to me. So, you know, in the realm of, you know, things that are not totally impossible, like, I guess something could come out proving otherwise, but I would be as shocked as a person could be to find out that any truth is, that there's any truth to any of this. She's, in my opinion, being attacked. She's being used in the most malicious way I've ever seen ever for anybody at all, ever. And so I don't think there's any truth to any of it. I mean, it's probably this kind of thing where there's always these little like weird kernels of truth, but there's a different explanation.

So like Erica was seen at the whatever. She probably was at the whatever, but she was there for some totally normal reason. Charlie probably either totally approved of it or like helped set it up or something. So it's like it wasn't her being like shady. But the fact, again, you can lie by telling truths by not having the context there. Was Erica at the whatever? Probably. I don't know sometimes. But is she like, does this like imply some kind of, you know, a scheme or some kind of a, you know, involvement or selfish motives? Like, no. Like I personally would not necessarily have handled some of the public appearance stuff immediately after Charlie's death the way that she did. But my God. She's grieving her husband on a stage so large that his memorial service attracted not just a full stadium, but an overflow bigger than the contents of the stadium itself. I can't imagine going through that kind of grief as it is, but then to couple that with the incredible public spectacle of the whole thing.

And the fact that so many people that Charlie knew were famous, Charlie knew the president of the United States. I mean, he showed up and spoke at Charlie's Memorial and gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously. I mean, come on. So I can't imagine, like, I personally probably would not have, you know, done some of the things that were done in the public spectacle. I would have probably personally handled turning point operations different.

in the immediate aftermath, no shade to the guys. I'm just saying I probably would have done it differently. I don't know that I would have done it better and no shade to Erica. But that doesn't mean that she did anything wrong. I think she was doing the best that she could with the most horrible circumstance on the biggest stage in the world that you could possibly imagine. So like I'm willing to cut her tons of slack even if like I imagine. I say that I would have done things differently.

I don't know. I mean, I don't know what I would have done. If my wife was murdered like that and I would be out of my friggin' mind, like, who knows what I would have done? One final one on Charlie and Erica is the kids. There's the, I don't want to say rumor, the story of whatever you want to call it, that the kids were actors, like that they didn't exist or that they were, I don't know, like paid. I mean, I just told you. I saw, I mean, I saw them as infants. So, like, I wasn't exactly there. Like, when they were born, you know, I would, I don't want to do it.

I can't do it right now. I think if I were to dig through my texts with Charlie, I think I was on the very short list of some of the first people he told when his second child was born. I'm almost positive that he not only told me, but sent a picture, but I'd have to look through and see again. I saw the kids. I don't know what you're talking about. Like, they're actors. These people need to, I have bad words to say. Well, I feel bad for bringing up, but it's just sitting here.

These are the things that have come on. I'm like, I don't even know what to say about that, right? So when I get somebody of your stature, James, who knew Charlie, I go, well, I'll just ask all the stupid questions. Because then you can talk to them and people can go, they can either believe you or not, right? Like, I don't know, and they can move on with their life or not. Which brings me to... Dude, let me tell you this real quick before we get to that. Okay, so maybe this is where you're going.

This is the second time in second circumstance in my life, and they've happened overlapping at the same time, where I've had this experience, where the stuff people saying online is so off from what I know of reality that either literally I'm insane and have been completely duped by everything that I can possibly see with my own senses, make sense of with my own, you know, understanding of the world. Or they're just making stuff up. And I think they're just making stuff up. The first of these is all this stuff

you're talking about with Charlie. Like, I see the stuff people say. And I'm like, what the hell are they talking about? But the second of those is when I went to, I've been to Israel twice in the last four months or five months maybe now. Time is dragging on. I went in October. I went in January. And so when I went in October, I was having this weird experience where, you know, here I am driving around the country with people seeing different sites, going to different meetings and briefings and getting told like how this works, how that works. Here's Syria. Here's Lebanon. Here's this. Here's that. You know. And so seeing all this stuff. And I'm looking simultaneously like we're, you know, we're driving around. So in the back of a van like looking through my phone trying to catch up on my, you know, X experience. And I'm seeing all the propaganda about Israel while I'm, you know, in Israel. And by like the third or fourth day, I literally like, it was like looking into my phone was like looking into like a crazy person's mind. Like I'm here. None of the stuff they're talking about is happening. None of the stuff is real. I have a friend who lives in in Bet Shamesh, which is the roughly suburb of Jerusalem that's the most targeted in the war right now. And you know,

you see all this propaganda and they're like Israel's totally destroyed, Tel Aviv's on fire, whatever. this guy's like, I have to check my ex and or telegram to remember we're in a war. Like, everything's like totally normal, but the internet says that Israel's like on fire. That's the level of not real that I see when people talk about this stuff to do with Charlie. It's like it's so not real that you don't even know how to, it's so fake. You don't even know where to start. You can't even find that piece where you're like, okay, this is what they actually see and this is where they've gone wrong with it. it's just made up. It's so perplexing. And when I was in Israel, in October, I actually was talking to the guys about this that I was with. I was like, I can't process how wrong the propaganda is. It's the most surreal thing in the entire world. It's not like you're seeing a fun house mirror bad reflection. It's like they're just talking about a place that doesn't exist at all. And it's, you don't know what you can't even figure. This is I think part of why the Israelis are quote unquote, losing.

the PR war. Half the Israelis I talked to don't even know where to start. And it's the same stuff. All of us who knew Charlie, sometimes we're on the phone with each other, we're like, how do we, what do we even start with some of this crap? What I was going to bring up was you've mentioned the line, know them by how they circle the wagons. Oh yeah, that's not Israel. Sorry, but we'll know, no, no, no, it's fine. It's fine. No, no, no. No, I got, I got to two thoughts. One is, I've had a couple of my own surreal experiences that you talk about, right? I was in Ottawa and I and and certainly being there and then seeing the propaganda placed by our own media and trying to try it like kind of broke

my brain for a bit. I'm like yeah how I don't know how to put this in so what you're talking about being in Israel and seeing what they're talking about is you're I get that that that makes sense um to me uh at least. And anytime any big name talks about what's happening in, say, Alberta, I always kind of chuckle, because I'm like, if you're not here, I'm like, well, some of that's true. Some of that is definitely false, right? Dude, I think it's like all the weather reporter in a mud puddle on his knees so that it looks like the water's up to his waist. You know what I'm talking about.

There's a big storm. The weather guy goes out and the storm gets down, like lays down in a mud puddle. And he's like, the water's everywhere. walking around in Ottawa during the convoy, James, right? You can look this way and there's roughly, I don't know, is it 10,000 people? Give or take. I'm just, there's a lot of people. That's all I'm saying.

There's a lot of people. And then there's a news crew with no, they don't put anything on themselves. They're all, they had security. And I was trying to walk up to him just say hi. Probably looked intimidating or something. Security wouldn't let me let me get up there. I'm just curious who they are. He's like, oh, I was just curious who they are.

it's just a news station, you got to stay back. I'm like, okay. And they were pointed the opposite direction of the protest. And I'm like, well, why would you do that to show that nobody's there maybe? It's possible. I don't know, right? I mean, it's a strange thing to witness firsthand. So when you talk about, you know, what did an old journalist,

Byron Christopher, if you're listening out there, he's a, he's a beauty of a man. He always talked about, you know, it's how you frame it. So if you have a snake with a, I don't know, a gerbil in its mouth, you can frame it as the snake saving the gerbil. Or, you know, take it a different way. The snake is about to eat the gerbil, right? Like it's all on how you frame things. So to me, what you're talking about is, is something like that. Which brings to me what I've been watching, you know, I don't listen to anything, well, not anything. I don't listen to a ton of Candace or ones. But at the same time, at this realm, do you know, I know who Candace is? certainly. Tucker, there was a time where I listened to everything that had a time where I didn't.

Now I've, I'm like, I got to start following this game because I don't know where all this starts. So now I've been listening to everything, right? Just had Joe Kent on. And you're like, holy crap. Like this is, this is going, um, super sonic again where I just, I almost can't keep up to everything going on. You feel like COVID all over again. It does. With Joe Kent, Out of all the interview that stuck out to me was no imminent threat. And what do we talk about? We talk about nuclear weapons. We talk about all that.

I don't know. Maybe you took something different out of it. I was curious your thoughts on there's a whole bunch of things there. Circling the wagon. The fact that you have, forgive me, what is Joe Kent? He is the director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center. Former. Former.

Former. Sorry. Apollies. Your thoughts? All right. So those are two actually, they do overlap, but they're two distinct things. Know them by how they circle. Know them by how they circle their wagons is kind of a phrase that I've been using for a while.

Because I actually believe that a lot of these guys are working with each other. I don't think that this is just a bunch of random grifters saying similar stuff because they get clicks. I actually think there is a coordinated push. I don't know how many of the people involved are in the coordinated sector. It might only be a few, literally a handful. It might be a few dozen. It might be a few hundred. But I think there is a coordinated group or set of groups that are working together to push these narratives and to create these images for us of how the world is supposed to work.

And when they all start to defend one another, I feel like what they're doing is defining kind of what that group is. There's an old game. It was called Mafia originally. It came to be known as werewolves. It's a party game where the idea is that you have a bunch of people who are the peasants and you have a couple of people who are the werewolves. And the werewolves get to knock somebody off every single day or every single night, I should say, in the way the game is played. They get to kill somebody.

And then the peasants get to try to figure out who the werewolves are and they get to hang somebody at the end of each turn. So two people die each turn, one killed by the werewolves, one killed by the peasant. by the peasants, but everybody thinks everybody's peasants. Nobody knows who the werewolves are except the werewolves. So what happens is everybody's playing and, you know, the guy says it's nighttime, everybody covers their eyes or whatever, except the werewolves. The werewolves don't. So the werewolves don't get to communicate except through like pointing and gestures,

but they also, like they can't talk. They can't write things to each other, but they know who each other are. Right. And so they know they're working together. And what happens is that in this game, Unless you put in all kinds of weird rules to favor the peasants, the werewolves almost always win. So just the fact that people know that they're working, like the, the werewolves, the bad guys know who the bad guys are and the good guys don't know who the bad guys are. That alone gives the bad guys a strategic advantage that's overwhelming.

I'm talking over 90% of the time they win this game, which means they kill all the peasants before the peasants kill them or villagers or whatever. Okay. So this is what I think's going on. I think that there are groups of people. I think that it is coordinated. I am explicitly saying this is not a conspiracy. Theory, I believe there is a conspiracy, an active conspiracy. And when they all start defending each other, they're drawing the outlines for us.

We don't know who the werewolves are. But they're kind of saying they're circling around each other, the same way the people that actually in the werewolves game would circle around each other. The problem is, is we're not talking about, you know, a dozen people at a party with two werewolves. in the game, we're talking about millions of people in the game and maybe a hundred or more or a thousand even maybe werewolves. And so when they circle, what I'm saying is like, imagine there's like, we used to say this about the, you know, the global left or whatever. It's like we know the woke thing. There's some monster out there, but we don't know what it looks like. It's in the fog, but we can see a claw. We can see a tooth, but we don't know what

it really is. And it's like that. There's a conspiracy. We don't know who's involved for sure. We don't know who's a grifter. We don't know who's a collaborator. We don't know who's an active participant. But one thing that we do know is that they all circle up and defend each other, even when the things that they do are indefensible. So that's what that, that's the meaning of that phrase. Now, of course, they're circling very vigorously around some things that I think that Joe Kent has said that are pretty indefensible. And, you know, there's no, there's no imminent threat that he's saying, Israel dragged us into this war.

It's funny, even President Trump posted like on his truth social or whatever. Like, Joe Kent just not very long ago was saying there's an imminent threat. He's been saying for years that there's an imminent threat that we need to take out their nuclear capabilities. And we need to do this. We need to do that. And it's even up to a fairly recent time. I don't know exactly the timeline of when he was still saying that kind of thing. And then suddenly he flips.

And he suddenly flips it looks very much like from what the other reporting that seems confirmed is, is that he was under investigation by the FBI for being somebody who was leaking intelligence. In fact, classified information. So it looks like Joe Kent had already, and the claim is that he had already been shut out of intelligence circles in certain cases because they knew he was a leaker, which means the walls were closing in for Joe Kent, and he suddenly flips and does this kind of spectacular thing. It feels very much like when Kanye West had the walls closing in on because he marched into the bank and said that he wanted to have a meeting with Jamie Diamond,

and they told him to pound sand. And so then he flipped out and made this huge thing, and they debanked him. And then Candice Owens, by the way, was his PR agent at the time. And Candice Owens was like, go full Hitler, make it all about the Jews, say the Jews debanked you, and then Kanye West actually exploded and got bigger as a result of this. So it's like when you get in certain kinds of trouble,

blaming some nefarious conspiracy against you as a proactive step right before the hammer-fell. Falls is a pretty time honored technique to try to like skirt trouble. So I don't believe a damn word Joe Kent is saying actually. I don't I don't think I mean I know that with some of the stuff that he's saying there's this element of paltering. He's like when Charlie Kirk talked to me last, he looked me in the eye and said don't get us into a war with Iran. That was in June. And it's like, okay. That was during Operation Midnight Hammer, Joe. Charlie said that on camera. He said that to the entire listening audience of his entire show.

He put that out. He talked to President Trump privately himself directly saying he didn't want to go to war with Iran during Operation Midnight Hammer. And then when Operation Midnight Hammer started, Charlie Kirk was asked on camera, what do you think of this? And he didn't actually answer what he thought of it. His answer was actually that he didn't, it wasn't his, he didn't say this, but he said without saying that his, it wasn't his place to render an opinion. He said, I support President Trump. 100%. He's the man for the hour.

He didn't say whether he supported the strike or not last June. He didn't say. He just said he supports President Trump. He thinks President Trump's the man for the hour. And Charlie 100% always did support President Trump. In fact, sometimes it was like Charlie, like, I don't know that what President Trump just did there was like the best thing in the world. Like you could just let that one lie.

But he was always out defending and promoting President Trump and everything he did. So Joe Kent just kind of lets it hang. The last thing Charlie said was don't let, don't let us get into a war with Iran. Yeah, last June during Operation Midnight Hammer, things changed. I'm sorry, Joe. Like, you're lying. Like, you're lying. And then he dropped in, you know, he said this.

Three months later, he was murdered. And it's like, there's your post hoc aerial proctor hawk. It's like, come on, Joe. How can you trust somebody who does stuff like that? You can't, it doesn't, he might be telling you 100% true. things other times. It doesn't matter. You can't trust him. It's the same with Tucker Carlson. The guy is posing himself as a trusted voice against all of the, you know, the corrupt powers out there, the CIA's after you. They don't want you to know this. Israel did that. He's posing himself

as the trusted voice and you can go through any one of his episodes and prove 100 lies. You can't be a trusted voice and lie all the time. Like we're talking about demonstrable lies. It's like when he lied that he was detained at the luxury lounge, the Al-Fata lounge in Jerusalem or in Tel Aviv at the airport, outside of Tel Aviv at Bangorian Airport. There's this luxury lounge for the private jet people. I've actually been in that lounge. I did not fly private to Israel. You can pay 600 and something bucks and get to go through like you get treated like you did. You get taken over to there and processed over there instead of through the main airport.

So I've actually been through this lounge. It's a nice luxury lounge for like private jet pilot. And they like, you know, the video comes out. He's taking selfies with the guys that allegedly detained him. He made up this whole story. The dude is not trustworthy is the point. You don't get to be a trusted voice until lies. So if Joe Kent is willing to mislead us about stuff like whether he's talking

about Operation Midnight Hammer or he's talking about the current operation, Epic Fury, then he's not trusted. you can't trust anything else he's saying because he's willing to lie on something unbelievably important. And then like I said, you compare against his record from just months ago. President Trump sharing Joe Kent saying

exactly the opposite thing. You know, in the past, Joe Kent making a big deal about this repeatedly on his social media over the years. It just strikes very much so that what he's doing is, in my opinion, what he's trying to do is take advantage of the walls closing in around him, maybe save his ass, and certainly give

himself a new career option because the one that he was in is about to shut down completely. Curious your thoughts on this, because you, obviously knowing Charlie and the amount you travel and the different people you get to interact with. I was saying this off air a couple days ago. that when I first started this, I said in an hour interview, like we're doing, I get a pretty good feel if a guy's full of shit, pardon the French folks. But as I, you know, I crossed over the thousandth episode plateau and with that comes running into a lot of different guests. And, you know, I didn't get to interview Trump or anything like that craziness. But like, there's been some people come that are that are now pretty high profile. file, right? And what I'm learning is there's a lot of people you can't get to know in an hour

because they are pretty good at it. They're like fantastic. So when you talk about Joe Kent, I go, what did I know about Joe Kent before Tucker Carlson? I'll be honest to the audience, close to 0%, right? That's how close. Like I follow Canadian politics and I have a hard time keeping up, let alone what the United States is doing. Okay? And I try my best. So my curiosity is on, do you see the same thing with you get to travel all over the place? Talk to people all over the place. The thing that I give credit to is when you talk about how many times you're on stage with Charlie, I go, well, after a course of 10 times, let alone 50, let alone 100, you start

to learn who a person is. Like, it's hard to be on that much. But I will not throw it by that they can't be on for a lot longer than you think, because I'm learning that now over the course of the podcast. when you look at Tucker, when you look at Joe Kent, Candice Owens, all these people, do you see a similar thing where they can be on a lot longer? And you know, the Bible says you judge your tree by the fruit repairs, right?

So you have, that takes a long time to, to pay attention to. And that for most people is hard to do because you got really, you know, we're not talking about just one person. We're talking about plenty of different people circling the wagons and confirming that people are good or bad or, or anything else. Have you noticed a similar thing where it's harder to just spot a person after an hour conversation? Yeah, it can be political people and media people in particular, very difficult. I mean, it used to be 100 years ago that people didn't trust actors because

everybody knew that they were people that were paid to lie to you for money. And in fact, if you look at what an actor does, Brad Pitt, you know, pick your favorite actor. I'm not putting anybody on the spot here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is that person's job to convince you that they are literally a different person than they are. And let's say it's a character who's supposed to be lovable. The whole point is to make you fall in love with a person that doesn't actually exist that's embodied in their physical form. It's a really weird thing. And a good actor is very convincing on a lot of levels, the emotional level, every level.

And so what I find is that media people are very much harder to read. I find that political people are also very hard to read because it's their job to base. It literally is their job, at least in public, not necessarily the decisions that they make in their offices or the votes that they make on the floor of the parliament or the Congress or whatever else, State House. Not necessarily there. But their job as a politician is to make a lot of people. like them. It is their job to make people think that they're in their corner. And so these people, these are the two snakeiest industries in the universe, politics and media. And these people are the hardest to read. Okay. They're very, very hard to read. They're literally the profession itself

selects for people who are good at putting on this show. And then it is their job that they then practice to become better at putting on that show. I've talked to people who have sat down and had dinners with politicians, prominent politicians, and they made it their entire goal. I mean, we're talking one-on-one, hour and a half, two hours at dinner. And they may not, no interview, no microphone, no cameras, no crowd, nothing. Private, you know, quarters in the back of a restaurant, one-on-one, say, with a senator. And they made it their mission to try to find the guy inside the suit. and they couldn't do it. And it's no, it's no, um, it's no, um, it's no insult to the politician. It's not to say that the politician's fake. It is in the politician's interest professionally to hide who he really is

and to maintain the political, um, facade. If he can't trust the guy across the table from him, literally with his entire career and maybe his life, he can't have a break in the character. And so these people can be very, very, very, very, very, very, very, hard to tell what's going on. Some of them are not as good at it as others and they give, they give the game away. Others are very good at it. So yeah, I find that people that are in politics and media are much harder to read. I find that, um, you can only get so much of a sense. Even with Charlie, you know, the, you could only, like I think Charlie was a, was fundamentally a good man. I think he was fundamentally grounded in the Bible, the way that he said he was, the way that he acted.

Literally one of the things that Charlie would do every time I would see him, one of the first questions that he would ask me. And again, this is like probably over a hundred times. James, what are you been reading in the Bible lately? And I learned pretty quickly that I needed to have an answer. So I was like reading the Bible and trying to figure out what parts of the Bible meant because I knew I was going to see Charlie soon and Charlie was going to ask me. And I needed to be able to say, oh, well, you know, this part in First Thessalonians was It was really interesting. I was looking into it the other day. It came across my, you know, so I had to have something. So I think that that was all pretty real and genuine,

but he was into a lot of political stuff. He was into a lot of, you know, dealing with big donors. Lots of money involved is a huge money organization. You have to make people happy to do that. So you have to be able to wear, you know, a mask. This is why it was nice that we were able to do things, not just on stages, but backstage or at his house where, you know, it kind of, you know, it kind of comes down a little bit in private places. And the character I saw with Charlie was pretty consistent. You know, of course, he's doing a little bit of a show when he's on stage versus when he's in private.

But it's a pretty, it's a fairly consistent character. Same on camera when he was talking to his audience. But with like Tucker, the first thing my wife ever said when she saw Tucker on Fox News, maybe even CNN, God, years ago, was that guy's an actor. That's the first thing she said. That guy's an actor. So I don't know if he's believable. all. I don't think he's even close to believable now. But these people are very hard to read.

They're very, very hard to read. There's one other category of people who are extremely hard to read. And that's a kind of like social chameleon that we sometimes call, you know, there tend to be called things like sociopaths. And they're out there. I'm not saying that Tucker is a sociopath or that Candace is a sociopath. Personally, I will say, I think they both are. But that's, I'm not a diagnostician. But the fact is that those people, they're in. entire schick, whether it's clinical psychopathy or whether it's sociopathy or certain cluster B and sometimes A personality disorders. Their whole thing relies on making people think that they are one thing when they're a different thing. And they're very good at it. And it's very convincing for a lot of

people. Anybody who's ever run into a histrionic narcissist sexual subtype woman will understand exactly what I'm talking about. And if you don't know, watch yourself, boys, you're going to get yourself in a world of hurt. They're very appealing and it's a very bad idea. Luckily, my experience with that is secondhand, not firsthand, but holy crap. You can watch that wreck of life. And they're very, very good at concealing what they really are until you learn to see it. And so this is a, and again, media and politics literally select.

for those types of personalities. Those people rise within the ranks. Narcissists in general rise within the ranks of media and politics, and those are the kinds of characters that put on a show. So, yeah, it's hard. It's real hard. And my default at this point is the more media, the more politics, the less I trust somebody, even over the long haul,

until I really, really start to get to know their character. But I've even been tricked and betrayed by some of these people after knowing people I thought I knew well for years. So it can be very difficult. It's a very balanced answer, I would say. Because once again, don't know Tucker or Candace. I can't speak to anything. I find Tucker's guest in his conversation is very intriguing.

But right now, I say this. with a lot of people. If you go on to Tucker, what do you expect to hear? The war is bad. Full stop. He's going to have a guest on. And I'm not saying the war is bad or good. I've certainly had my list of guests come on and say both sides of it, right? And that's what I try to do. I try really hard. And I'm not, I'm not perfect. The only thing I think at one point that I stopped trying to bring on the opposite side was COVID, because I was seeing it firsthand and how I was saying it was getting in Canada. But at the start, if you go back, I had both sides on.

And people were upset because I'd have either side on. It was an interesting. As a dude who was a kid in the 80s, I think it's just hilarious. You know, I hear a lot of these Gen Z people who like literally weren't alive during 9-11. It's like, where were you during 9-11? Oh, that's not even a question. Like, that's not a real thing. I know where I was.

But I was a kid in the 80s. And it's like a lot of these younger guys are out there. They're like, there's no, like, why would we start a war with Iran? And it's like, bro, I, grew up literally me and my friends grew up singing the Beach Boys knockoff, bomb Iran. Like bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb. You know, Trump put out that video of it like back during Operation Midnight Hammer. And people thought like all these Gen Zs thought it was new.

And it's like, dude, that is a song from the 80s. We were singing that crap growing up. Like everybody who is Gen X or Boomer or older knows exactly why we would go with the operation is called Epic Fury against Iran. And anybody who was born in like 2004 has no freaking idea because they didn't grow up watching the hostages on TV, you know, and watching the conflict and the Iran-Contra situation. They didn't see any. They didn't see news story after news story of our servicemen and women or, you know, our diplomats or whoever else being murdered by the regime. They didn't know, like I'm a little too young even to know what Iran

was like before the Ayatollahs came in the 70s and in the 60s. But it was like up, it was like, where do you want to go on vacation this year, honey? Oh, Tehran sounds fantastic. And it was like this really hip Lebanon too. Those were really hip places to visit. And now everybody's like, holy shit, you went where if you go at all? You know, because it's like, it's different now. So everybody that's old enough kind of just implicitly gets it.

So there's this weird lack of communication possible. for people born in 2004. It's nothing wrong with being born in 2004, but you just don't know. You weren't there. So do you think they went, okay, Iran, sorry, Israel and the U.S. Do you believe they went in because of nuclear weapons?

Or do you think it's something more along the lines of oil and China? Or where do you fall on this, James? I mean, this is, I mean, I know we're cutting it on time, but this is a gig. This would have been the topic of an entire show. So this is not an easy topic. There are a lot of strategic objectives that we had. China is one of them. Oil is actually a complicated one. This is Iranian oil was getting largely as sanctioned by the whole world. So it was all getting processed illegally primarily through what we're called teapot refineries in China. China was playing a dangerous game there with its insurability by being willing to do this. And there was kind of this like general agreement to look the other way for big reasons. So this is actually going to change. the oil market tremendously, but having that oil under the control of the United States so that

China can't just kind of get it illegally and do what it wants is a major piece. Interrupting the Belt and Road Initiative, which requires both the maritime route and the land route through Iran and around Iran is another major strategic objective. Like disempowering China from being able to establish an economic corridor that controls 5.7 billion people's. economic futures is a major security issue for the United States. So there are those elements to the story. There's also the fact that like London, and I mean the city of London, controls all kinds of financial arrangements that have a lot to do with all of this. Lloyds of London insures every ship that goes through the Strait of Hormuz, for example. And now London is being, you know, kind of

put in its place. You know, they refuse to insure ships. Trump said American insurers will insure them, and they kind of got disempowered. There are other players on the take. Britain is on the table here. The Democrats are on the table. There are a lot of things Trump's dealing with all at once. But at the same time, yeah, I do think that they were either, I don't even just think they were close to a nuclear weapon. I don't think they had manufactured one. I would be shocked. Everybody keeps telling me, no, there's no way, there's no way. I would be shocked if they weren't given one, either by Russia or by China or by North Korea. I don't know that they had a nuclear weapon, but Trump was perfectly convinced and said, you know, and this is the limit of the

intelligence that the public is being given, that they had hundreds of kilograms of 60% enriched uranium, which there's literally no purpose on Earth for having 60% enriched uranium except to go to 90% or 95% so that you can make a weapon. And that they said that they had enough to make 11 weapons if they finished the centrifuges, which could have been a week worth of centrifuging away. So I totally buy this idea that they had these weapons, or we're on the cusp of having them. I'm still of the kind of crazy mind. I don't know that this is true. But if that they do have a nuclear weapon, I don't know that they're going to fire it outwardly.

I would totally not put it past the Iranian regime to nuke itself and blame Israel, given the political fallout that that would have. And that's what you're hearing tons of propaganda about, oh, Israel is going to nuke Iran. Israel, of course, is confused about this accusation. So they're going to nuke Iran. They're going to nuke Iran. But if Iran has a nuclear weapon, then they could nuke themselves and say it was Israel. And it would be very... Yeah, but they'd eventually get it.

proved out, but it would not get proved out in the first 48 hours. Going down that train of thought, though, is like going down the train of thought of Israel bombing itself and saying, yeah, of course. Right? Like, but this is actually part of the, like Israel, like Judaism loves and honors and protects life to a ridiculous degree. It is so central to their religious belief and to their cultural value. Anybody who goes there sees this and knows it absolutely clearly. Shia Islam is not that way. It's actually the other way. It's a doomsday cult. And so it's like literally the opposite. These people were willing to massacre tens of thousands of their civilians going into hospitals and killing people who were wounded and being treated because of the uprising in January. They were willing to mutilate nurses who treated the people who were injured in that, you know, that retaliation of the uprising. Like, this is, we're not talking about the same kind of people here. Like, Israel did brain surgery on, oh God, which one was it, Solomon, before they ended up, you know, later hitting him with a missile or whatever.

But he had cancer and they cured, they treated him in their own hospitals. So it's like the life-loving-loving versus death-loving perspectives are totally different. We're not talking about, and I'm not talking about the Iranian people. I'm talking about the revolutionary Shiites that are running about the government. I'm talking about the IRGC, yeah, the, what is it, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Yeah, the government. These people are crazy. And like I said, that's all like rabbit hole stuff.

I don't know if any of that's true. But do I think that they had enriched uranium or enriching or enrichable uranium? Yes, they bragged about it. I do think they had it. And I do think that they were willing to do things with it. And I do think that they wanted to have a nuclear weapon. And people say, well, Trump campaigned on no new wars. Go watch his campaign videos.

He also said that he was campaigning on Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. He said it almost as often. And so those two things become in conflict if Iran is close to having a nuclear weapon. A lot of people like to believe that Trump is lying all the time. But like, this is very rarely proved out. I mean, it's one thing to keep a secret here or there in order to accomplish. an objective, but it's another thing entirely for him to just come out and lie. And it's just not what he does. From a Canadian's perspective, because that's one of the reasons I like Trump

is the no new wars, right? Yeah, of course. And then you have Venezuela, too. You have his comments on Cuba, comments on Greenland. And I think most people are like, well, it's on our side of the world. You kind of get what he, is it a new war? I don't know. And right, I can hear people yelling at the radio and not yelling at the radio. But for some reason, we all go, I think that makes sense, right? But like, as a Canadian firsthand, you know, I just saw Pierre Polly of his on Rogan, right? Should have done that a year ago, full stop, right? Like, I mean, oh, yeah, great, we're going to go on Rogan now. Cheer me on. It's like, moron, in the middle of your election, you should have went on it. Regardless, right. Here's my Maple Leaf kettlebell. Right.

But I'm not sure if he can lift him. This is my personal thoughts, regardless. No, I like Pierre. In the middle, in the middle of an election. Donald Trump stuck his head in it and won it for the liberals. I mean, that's that's what happened up here in Canada. He did. He did. He totally hosed you guys. So like I look at it and I go, this brilliant man has done Venezuela, Canada, talks about Greenland, talks about Cuba, then goes to Iran and does all the things he does in Iran and continues to do. And I go, whether that was a brilliant thought out plan and he thought he'd be in and out, I don't know. But I worry that it is Iraq. Afghanistan, take your pick. No, we should be worried about that. I mean, that's fair. So this is the ultimate question. And again, this is like a whole show too.

Sure. The question is, is what they're calling it, the Don Roe doctrine after the Monroe doctrine, you know, for Donald. Yes. But is the Trump doctrine the same as the Bush doctrine? That's ultimately the question. So these wars, like if Afghanistan, the stuff, not necessarily whether or not we should have struck Iraq.

Okay. that's one question, but whether or not we should have, you know, tried to occupy and transform Iraq for years and years afterwards. That's the Bush doctrine, right? And the Bush doctrine, I think most of us agree when we say no new wars and we say forever wars, we're really talking about this Bush doctrine bull crap. And it's not to say it was only Bush because, like, you know, Vietnam was a quagmire and we can talk about other quagmires in the past. But we're talking about a very specific kind of thing, right? We're not talking about, as in Venezuela, a surgical strike on the head of the regime. We're not talking about bombing the nuclear sites during Operation

Midnight Fury or whatever, Midnight Hammer, sorry, I've mixed them up. And we don't know. Like, all these people are like, oh, my God, we're in another Forever War. And it's like, bro, we're on literally day 17 or something like that. Like 17 days. Like you're not in a Forever War, at least until you're stretching out over a year, like calm down. Let's see how this plays out. Trump has been very consistent. Now, I will say, you're absolutely right. I think he screwed Canada, and I was pretty pissed at him about that, and I still am. Like, maybe it's not shared by a lot of my American compatriots, but I really love your country, and I really wanted to be great and strong, and I wanted to be, like, an awesome partner with our country, and I've invested time coming to your

country and getting to know people and getting on the ground. And, you know, I really really, give a shit about Canada. And it really pissed me off when he did that. I like Pierre. I don't think he's the strongest candidate that could possibly be, but I generally like him. I think he would have been a great step in the right direction. I'm not worried about whether or not he was the be all that ended all. And it would have been a lot better if Trump hadn't, for whatever reason, you know, basically caused the Liberal Party hysterics. Maybe he's got a long-term plan. I don't understand, but holy crap, this is a disaster in my opinion. And I, I was pretty critical of him and I remained critical of him for that and you're not supposed to be critical of Trump.

So I'm not like just cheerleading the guy. But I forgot what my point was because I started talking about how much I like Canada. It happens. Just the Forever War, I think. Oh yeah, the Forever War. That's right. So like his doctrine has not been in any of these conflicts so far to go in and stay. Like he keeps saying the Iranians need to rebuild their country.

The Iranians need to create the opportunity to step in and basically overthrow the IRGC. The IRGC has crazy weapons still and they're crazy sadistic. So and the Iranian people have no weapons or very few. And so it's a matter, there's going to be a tipping point where that might or might not become possible. Trump's already tried to declare the war over a few times and like be out. no signaling coming from the guy that he wants this to be a long-term, forever war, Bush doctrine, regime change, whatever language we want to use engagement. Now, if he does persist, I doubt Iran even has the capability to drag us into that unless Russia and China can

assist them in doing so. But if it does persist, you know, we're going to have to start asking questions. At some point, I'm not saying this is Israel's war that they dragged the United States into. has been very clear that this is an American interest as well, and it matches his goals and promises. But Israel has its own interests in the region. At some point, the United States can actually step out and let Israel fight it if Israel wants to continue fighting it or if it needs to continue fighting it. And that's totally fine, too. Most of what I saw in Israel is the opposite, again, of what we hear over here in the Western Hemisphere, most of what I hear there is that they feel like the United States actually puts golden handcuffs on the operative.

they want to conduct. They have operations that they feel like they need to conduct for their own security. And President Trump or President Biden before him have just flatly said, no, you can't do that. And it has been, I mean, like there's a border dispute with Lebanon that has to do with Hezbollah that's like that. There's some things, of course, Judea Samaria that are like that. Samaria in particular is pretty fraught. and the Israelis wish to have the handcuffs taken off and basically just be able to take control of their own territory and they can't. So I think at some point if the United States decides it wants out,

Israel is going to feel freed up to do whatever it wants. And like there's no reason for us to panic yet. I like how Trump calls these people that like, from like within 36 hours of the war, they're like a forever war. And it's like 36 hours, bro. It's a holy crap. What are you talking about?

More people have died in car accidents. and in the war since the war started. What are you talking about? Like calm down. You're being a panicking. Trump's totally right. And so I don't think that Trump has signaled anything that suggests that he wants us to be this dragged out 10 year or two year even or one year even engagement. He keeps signaling that he wants the war to be over. Then Iran fires a rocket at something and blows it up. And he's like, well, no, we're not going to do that. The straight of where Moses seems to be the only thing he particularly cares about anymore, securing the shipping for U.S. ships, Israeli ships, because those are the only two that Israel's, sorry, that Iran said

don't have safe passages, U.S. and Israel ships right now. Securing that straight, which is an incredibly important shipping straight for the entire world, for oil prices all around the entire world, is a priority that he has. But beyond that, it's like he doesn't seem to have other interests in the region anymore. It's like, so I just don't see the signals that we're going Bush doctrine on this thing. And all I hear is Neo-Con, Forever War. I just hear these vague terms. Like, do you think Trump with his so-called Donro doctrine is, or whatever, because Donro would mean Monroe, which would mean Western Hemisphere, so it doesn't really apply? But this piece through strength thing, do you think that Donald Trump is actually executing Bush doctrine? Are you just saying

that crap to make people mad online to do? tap into the resentment for the quagmires that occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan became. And I think that it's propaganda. They're like, give the man a chance to do what he's doing, criticize him for what he's actually doing. But why don't you listen to what he's saying instead of just, you know, Joe Kent's letter is like he was duped by Israel. He's a, he's a, people are saying that Trump is the puppet of a foreign country? Are you out of your mind? like they started accusing that the golden beeper that gave him as a gift is probably a bomb and that's how they like just shut up let the guy do some stuff give him some breathing room criticize him for things that he's actually doing that he's actually done wrong and if you want me to come up to canada and bitch about him and what he did with your liberal party i would be more than happy to because it still bugs the hell out of me um but like you know breathe a little we're not even we're not even three weeks into this conflict yet three.

weeks and forever have a big gap between them. If we're here in a couple months still having this conversation or a few months, well, maybe there's a conversation to be had them, but like calm down. James, appreciate you hopping on and doing this. It's always, sorry, I took that over. That's a complicated topic. No, no. Well, I'm the guy who asked the question right at the end of our time frame. Regardless, thanks for hopping on. And well, we'll wait and see what the next couple months bring and maybe we'll just bring you right back on to talk about it again. Yeah, that would be fantastic. And plus the next couple months, by the way, bring summer and no more cold eventually for you guys. It's already, we had our last snowstorm, I think, this week. And so

I think we're out of the, we're out of the woods. You guys can freeze your, what is it, Tokus's off or whatever for some more time. That's not so bad. James, we'll talk again soon. Thank you. See you, Tom.