The Eric Metaxas Show - #64 - Rod Martin

Episode Date: February 25, 2026

Today On The Eric Metaxas Show, Rod Martin breaks down why he thinks Tucker Carlson’s Mike Huckabee interview signals a major shift on Israel and Gaza. He also explains his view of Iran’s long war against the United States, why Hamas and Hezbollah matter, and how cartel power and corruption threaten American security. And he connects the dots on China, supply chains, and why foreign policy decisions hit your life at home.⏱️ TIMESTAMPS0:00 Intro0:35 Rod Martin Joins6:59 China, Trade, And Supply Chains24:59 Tucker Vs Huckabee On Israel41:02 Can Cartels Buy US Officials?- - -TODAY'S SPONSORS:⭐️ BlockTrust IRA: https://www.metaxascrypto.com/✡️ Help Save Lives in Israel TODAY: https://www.savinglifeisrael.org/Legal Help Center - Get Free Legal Help Today: https://www.legalhelpcenter.com/MyPillow — Save BIG with code ERIC: https://www.mypillow.com/ten Boom Coffee— Save 10% with code ERIC: https://tenboom.coffee/- - -LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/@ericmetaxas#EricMetaxas #TheEricMetaxasShow #News #Politics

This episode is brought to you by Total Wine and More, where you'll always find something you'll love. Like if you're in your local Total Wine and ask for a recommendation on a bourbon, you're going to end up loving it. Honestly, the prices make it easy to say yes to grabbing a little extra, like your go-to bottle of Cabernet. And if you're not sure what to grab, the team can point you in the right direction. Shop Total Wine and More in store or online and get everything you need at the lowest prices. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. B-21. Folks, welcome to the program. This is the Eric Metaxis show. Today I'm going to be playing the role of Eric Metaxis. And I have as my guest, Rod D. I believe that's an initial. Rod D. Martin, he's the founding CEO of Martin Capital and the daily brief father behind the Rod Martin Report. If you don't know who Rod Martin is, that's why I do this program to introduce you to people whom you must know. Rod Martin, welcome back. be here. Thank you. I just love reading your stuff. You bring such an interesting perspective.

I don't know, you know, this is, I guess the only way to explain it is God creates each of us as he creates us with a certain viewpoint and abilities, whatever. But you seem to talk about everything that's going on in the world and you interpret it. You help us interpret it, see what's going on. So today, I really want to talk to you about anything that you're talking about. about. So I know we want to cover the Mexican cartel wars and we want to cover the conversation between Tucker Carlson and Ambassador Mike Huckabee. So. And just briefly, I would like to say, because I think it's important that your watchers understand. The president actually had a really interesting day at the Supreme Court last week. This trade ruling is not as it's being

presented by a lot of people. Yes, it strikes down the tariffs that were initiated under the authority of the AEPA statute. That's true. But the real question, and it's the ideological question for our libertarian friends, is a tariff attacks. Because if a tariff is a tax, Congress has exclusive taxing authority. That's well established. The Supreme Court didn't go there. In fact, It went the opposite way, nine to zero, against that idea. They absolutely stuck by the idea that the president has all kinds of tariff authority, whether it's delegated by Congress or it's inherent. There's a little fuzzy area.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but having finished my book on the American Revolution, titled Revolution, that's what when we were dealing, when the whole thing explodes with the Stamp Act in 1765, wasn't this the issue? In other words, the, the, the assemblies here in the colonies are saying, hey, great Britain, Parliament, you do not have the right. You know, you want to do tariffs or you want to do that kind of stuff, but this other kind of stuff, we have the right. So Congress has the right on this, but not this. The assemblies and the colonies, we have the right to tax ourselves, but you and parliament, don't have that right. So that distinction that was just made, which still holds 250 years later,

it's the same idea roughly, or am I missing part of it? I'm not clear. You're exactly in the ballpark. This is, and you know, you know, because you just wrote the book. You know, at a macro level, the issue at hand is taxation without representation, but more specifically, less to do with the taxation itself. That's the flashpoint. But just, just the idea that we don't lose our rights as Englishmen under the English Bill of Rights promulgated in consequence of the glorious revolution a hundred years earlier, just because we moved across an ocean. We have the right to form our own local parliaments in Boston and Williamsburg and Philadelphia, and they are sovereign in conjunction with the king. So we share a king,

but we get to make our own laws. And the British completely rejected that, at least under Lord North's ministry, which is how you get the war. And of course, we settled that once and for all. And I do mean once and for all, because that is exactly how the British proceeded to deal with Canada, Australia,

New Zealand, South Africa, etc. They recognized that they had local parliaments that had the right to make those laws, but they all shared a king. So we actually won the argument and not just the revolution. Here, yes, we have a very clear, absolute dictum in the Constitution. Congress has the right to tax.

But a tariff is a regulation of international trade. It's a foreign policy power, and the founding fathers were clear as mud on how that gets divvied up between Congress and the president, but they clearly recognized that power as overlapping. So what the Supreme Court did here is really quite fascinating. They have upheld a long line of cases kind of implicitly that say that a tariff, while still requiring congressional assent, at least at the foundational level, is actually a power shared with the president.

And it's perfectly legitimate, for instance, in the various other trade acts that we've since 1930 for Congress to delegate power to the president to determine whether a country needs to have a tariff on it and how much that is up to a certain limit, et cetera. So anyway, the president's power, especially under Section 338, is just extraordinary to continue exactly what he's been doing. He just has to shove it into some different boxes. And it's a remarkable ruling, and everybody is just glossing over it

either, you know, Trump, rah, ra, or TDS. It's actually much more fascinating than that, and it has much broader implications than just these tariffs. Well, what fascinates me, and I'm, you know, I'm late to this game, but it's only in the last decade or so that I've really seen how some people, you know, usually on the neocon rhino right, they make an idol of what they call free trade. or the free market.

They don't ever understand that all of this stuff has limits, just like free speech has limits. I can't yell fire in a crowded theater. Well, similarly, when it gets the free trade or free markets, I can make a ton of money dealing with satanic, murdering Chinese communists who are, they're killing Uyghur Muslims and other people for their organs. And I go, you know what, I want to get in on that.

I want to make some money off a slave. labor. That's where we in America say, no, we, you know, we don't want to make money dealing with Nazi Germany. We don't want to make, we actually have standards and we have the right to uphold those standards. But there are people that act like, nah, you know what, the free market will just lead to American-style government all over the world, including in China. So we'll give them most favorite nation status. And pretty soon, it'll be a billion Benjamin Franklin's over there, you know, or John Adams or George Washington. Well, it didn't work out that way.

So this is a serious issue where the president has to think about this, has to think about the power that we have of opening up our market to China or to anybody. But it seems like there are people that are uncomfortable because this brings up the issue of morality, I think. Yes, yes. But it also impinges heavily on the moral worldview of our libertarian friends, you know, many of whom aren't where I'm about to describe. You can think of this as sort of a hyper-libertarianism. Perhaps a better view would be anarcho-capitalism, which has had quite an interesting time lately.

The ANCAPs would tell you that nation states really don't matter. I mean, they just kind of hand-wave them away, that we're really just all individuals and, you know, whatever's good for individuals around the world is what we ought to do. and that means, you know, the lowest prices are the best. But there's more to all of this than just prices. And there are actual nation states. And the nation states actually have governments that have their own interests that are frequently at odds with the interests of their people and sometimes actually hostile to the people of the United States. So we have this Constitution.

I know that's a crazy thought. It actually says that we're to provide for the common defense. that suggests that there might be somebody to defend against, and not all of our tools are kinetic. We don't actually bomb everybody we disagree with. We're about to bomb Iran, and that's good, but we're not going to bomb China over a trade dispute. We're not even going to bomb them over the Uyghurs. Maybe we should, but we're not going to, and I would contend that we shouldn't, but what we can do is we can make their life much, much harder than it. would be otherwise by not giving the money to continue the torture. We can refuse Russia the money

necessary to fight its war in Ukraine. We can do things with the disproportionate power of the American consumer market. We are 26% of the world's economy. We're only 4% of the world's population. We can use that as a tool to move things toward peace and prosperity, but part of that is the rebalancing Donald Trump has been attempting, which is to make industrial jobs profitable in the United States so that middle class people who didn't get a gender studies degree can actually make a living and support their families. And our crucial defense supply chains are not dependent on our hostile, potentially actively hostile enemies like China. So, So anyway, the Supreme Court upheld all of that. They just struck down the AEPA tariffs,

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Crusade financial revolution that's finally giving forgotten Americans access to the greatest crypto wealth opportunity in history. For a limited time, they're offering my viewers up to $2,500 in bonus crypto when you open an account. Crypto created 80,000 new millionaires last year under Trump's phenomenal economic leadership. Why not you next? This brings up so much. I want to go back a little bit. And again, because I've just finished writing this book on The Revolution, this is so fresh in my mind. When we talk about Make America Great Again or America First or America's interests, ladies and gentlemen, we have to think about what that means.

We have an obligation to think about what that means, not to be sloppy or shallow, but to really understand exactly what that means, what our values are. do we have values? The anarcho-capitalists, the hyper-libertarian crowd, they think values are for suckers. It's about profit, it's about free trade, whatever that means. So we have an obligation to say, okay,

if I can make money or maybe I can get sneakers a dollar cheaper if they're made with slave labor, do I care? I think in America we have an obligation. to care. And we have an obligation to think about that and to think about what are the limits of the market. How does that work? If I can get sneakers cheaper that are made with slave labor or maybe I don't even know

whether they're made with slave labor, but I don't care to look into it. That really is the policy of some people. They don't want to know. And in writing the book on The Revolution, I realized George Washington got this. This is why he is like a demi-god. He understood that if we acquit ourselves in a certain way in this war, God will bless us. If we do whatever it takes as the British we're doing to win, God will not bless us. John Adams references this innumerable times, as does his beloved Abigail.

Many others talk about this, that we're in. a sacred cause. And so it's not just that we want to win, but it's how we win. And we believe, and this is the trick, folks, here's the little trick. You have to decide, do I believe in the God of the Bible or don't I? If I do, he will bless those who live for him, who care about whether someone is enslaved or tortured or if you actually care about that and you behave differently, God will bless you. Now, if you don't believe in God, then all those ideas are for suckers, and let's just make the most money we can. And to me, this is central to who we were in our founding, in our birth, into becoming a nation. And here we are again dealing with the same questions.

What are our ultimate values? If it is simply dollars and cents, I would say, and I know you, Rod Martin would say, we won't make as many dollars and cents if we only care about dollars and cents. We have to care about other things at the same time. Now, that's exactly right. And that's Ronald Reagan's position exactly what I term moral realism. You have the Kissinger Nixon realism, which I would not say is immoral. It just focused on what is possible. And how can we reshape things so that things go a little more in our direction? with a lot less emphasis on the moral outcome of the Cold War, even though they very much believed in the same outcome that Reagan did.

Reagan was much more morally focused there, but didn't take it to the crazy extremes of the liberal internationalists like Woodrow Wilson, who thought you could just put everybody in a room and they'd rule by committee and all war would cease, or the crazy extreme of the neo-conservatives who believe that, oh, yeah, we can just invade any country we want, want, stay there for 20 years and remake them in our image. No, there are limits to American power, but American power is awesome, and it can be used

for awesome consequences if we have a little bit of patience and a little bit of realism, and ideally that moral direction you're describing. Just one other point on that that you referenced a minute ago, I'm for free tray. I imagine you are too. I would imagine everybody really is if they think. think about it because it is better for everybody, except there are countervailing factors, the chief of which is we've never, ever had it. The illusion that we had free trade was honestly deceptive because what we actually had was a global trade order that was designed for the purpose

of winning the Cold War, which meant rebuilding our allies and actually some of our former enemies for the purpose of containing communism and keeping us all from being enslaved. And so we gave all these countries disproportionate access to U.S. markets. We let them tariff the crud out of us. And when the Cold War ended, we didn't stop that. So 30 years later, we're actually rebalancing this to something that's kind of even. And if you want to get to free trade, that is your ticket because that incentivizes every country in the world to negotiate the tariff rates down. And maybe by the end of the century, we could get to something that looks a lot like the free trade that I have in Florida with the people of Alabama.

Well, ironically, we're talking about a market correction. Yes, we are. What we're talking about, ironically, people who love free trade, is to say we need to write the wrongs over the last 30 years. we need to bring things into alignment so that it actually reflects reality. What we've been dealing with in a sense, it's kind of like socialism. We've been propping up, you know, we could say, well, you know, Eastern Europe, it's too big to fail, and we need to give them this money and that money.

We need to do this. And you think, well, at some point, we've got to kind of let things go where they're going to go. We've got to see what we actually have. and that's really what President Trump has been trying to do. So, again, ironically, it's like it's, it is like a market correction except using tariffs. I just find it funny. Well, it's just absurd to call it free trade when Germany is allowed to charge four times the tariff on American autos that we charge on German.

It's just insane. And it wasn't ever free trade. Maybe you can help us understand. What is their argument for that? Now, those, for the people who believe that that's a good thing, why would they believe that's a good thing that Germany could do that? Well, they're in a form of inertia. You know, they never got over the Cold War. You see that in how they handle Russia.

Russia is a very, very weak regional power at this point. You can see it by the fact that four years later, they still haven't taken Kev. I mean, these guys are going to somehow march on paper. Are you kidding? It's just absurd. So they are a very weak power with an economy that is now smaller than Texas that also has some nukes. And some of those nukes may not even work. We're actually having quite an interesting policy debate about, you know, are these things still actually operable?

So they have been built up as this boogie bear because we had to get Trump. and prove that he was in collusion with the most dangerous people in the world, well, the Russians are a problem, but they're not the most dangerous people in the world. And because of that foreign policy inertia, then we have to do these absurd things to buttress NATO, when the truth is the matter is NATO would be fine if our other allies stepped up and paid their fair share. We've been paying more than 70% of the cost of the defense of the alliance now, for decades.

And let's be clear. When you say we, when you say we, the United States. Right. But we, we United States, that's you and me

and the people listening to this program. These are people. Out of your pocket, money has been taken out of your pocket to do stupid, wicked things. And I think the people

who think it's their money, you know, they spend your money and they kind of act like, well, it's our money. It is the money of we, the people. And,

we the people really don't have an infinite amount of money. And so we want our money to be used wisely. And to me, it is scandalous that for 30 years plus since the fall of the Soviet Union, we're in a new day. But there are people, I guess, for whom it was not convenient. It was not helpful for them to be in a new day. They wanted to stick with the old order and to pretend that we need this bulwark against Stalin and against Khrushchev and against Brezhnev and Andropov and on and on and on.

And we're in a new world, but they kind of want to act like, no, we're still in the old world, I guess because it was good for business for them. And it's brought us to this preposter situation. I really think that in the same way that we, you know, can use our power against China and to get them to behave in a certain way, we are doing that now, I hope, with Europe and saying, Hey, Starrmer, Germany, France, if you do not have free speech, if you are imprisoning people because of that, you know, we're going to put tariffs on you. If you don't believe in a way that we think is right, if you are crushing your citizens, you know, to some extent the way China does, maybe not quite, but you're leaning in that direction more than you're leaning in this direction, you know, you're not our buddies. We are not, we're not, it's not like we've got to get, we've got to all, you know, get together to defeat communism.

We're in a new day now and we expect you to behave better. And if you don't, we will take that seriously. Well, and to bottom line it, you know, if they actually start paying their fair share, you know, this is 300 plus million Americans subsidizing the heck out of nearly half a billion Europeans. And there's no sense in it. if they pay their fair share on defense, they are stronger, Russia is relatively weaker, and the NATO alliance is strengthened. If they have tariff deals with us that are in balance, they are incentivized to negotiate down those tariff rates and we get towards something that really is free trade in time, where they weren't incentivized to do that before. And finally, if they buy

U.S. energy, which they're now committed to do, instead of Russian energy, they stop being hostages to a third-rate power in Moscow that can't otherwise threaten them. They chose to be under the Russian yoke. It was absurd. And even today, the European powers that chastise us constantly for not doing enough in Ukraine have sent more money to Moscow for oil and gas than they've sent to Ukraine for aid. So it's just all obsided and absurd. Donald Trump is restoring some kind of balance to it. Everyone will be better for it and the world will be more peaceful as a result.

Wow. Should we talk about Tucker and Huckabee or about the Mexican cartel wars next? Take your pick. And either one of those is good. But Tucker is especially annoying. Well, let's just give us a couple of minutes on that. I've covered it a little bit on the program, but go ahead. Well, let's just start with the most basic and obvious point with regard to Tucker. When he had Nick Fentz on saying Hitler is cool and Stalin is cool, which nobody who pretends to believe what Tucker Carlson has always said he believed could possibly let go by without a challenge. Tucker let it go by without a challenge. More to the point, he let Nick Fentis

taught for two-thirds of the time of their interview. When he gets Mike Huckabee, it's all hardball. It's all an interrogation. And he let Huckabee talk one third of the time in the total interview. So it's just completely unbalanced once again. And we see Tucker has actually turned a corner. He is not merely anti-Israeli. And what he's doing is plain for all to see unless they're already bought into what he's doing now.

So it was very very. telling. I thought it was very enlightening. It also spoke well of Mike Cuckabee to be willing to go be interviewed by a man who had already said in public that there's no one on earth he hates more personally than Mike Cuckabee and Ted Cruz. Well, Tucker did, I believe, say that he misspoke when he said I hate Christian Zionists. And I, you know, he actually did say that. But the most preposterous thing. I've touched upon this on this program. This lie, which I don't know, I heard maybe a year and a half ago. Some people said, oh, yeah, you know about the Kassarian Mafia, right? No, never heard of that.

Oh, yeah. There are these people that really took over the identity of the Jews. And so the modern day Jews are not, you know, the actual Jews. But it's some group. It's some bizarre conspiracy theory. there are people who earnestly believe this. Tucker seems to have bought into this. And this is part of the argument of saying why those who are living in Israel have no right to Israel or have no particular right to Israel. And what I say, which again, I find this funny and sick, imagine that all of the Jews who are Jews claiming to be Jews are not really Jews. And you think, well, so what's the big benefit it for them, like being murdered in the Holocaust, being singled out. A Jew.

That's a good way to get killed. But I mean, this is the preposterousness of it. What could be dumber than the people who are making this argument? It just falls apart immediately. In Germany, if they said you're a Jew, they will murder you. So it's in your best interest not to be a Jew. So why do the Jews stick to their identity through the millennia? Why would they do that?

Because they actually are Jews, because they actually believe in what they believe. It's so ridiculous that I'm, it's actually grievous to see people could believe something that dumb. I mean, you know, it's one thing to have disagreements. But on something like that, the fact that Tucker seems to have bought that is, you know, it speaks to the shallowness of his research. He hasn't really looked into this or been logical about it. So that's a kind of madness. I don't know. And then he says, he asked the question about, yeah, is Bibi Netanyahu, like, isn't his family actually from Poland?

And I thought, yeah, the Jews were chased out of Jerusalem, I don't know, about 2,000 years ago. And also the diaspora. What's that? And also Pennsylvania. So, you know, does that make you a fake Jew? Yeah, yeah. You're talking about the Khazars. It's worth noting first that there have been like 16.

major studies by reputable institutions that have disproven that theory completely, and those never get cited by the people who want to propagate this like it matters somehow. But they forget, yes, Judaism is simultaneously an ethnicity and a religious point of view, and those things are, that's a little different from Christianity. We get that. But Judaism has always, always had conversion. So the Khazars actually at one point did convert to Judaism, and if the descendants of those Jewish converts were now in Israel, that would be perfectly legitimate. There wouldn't be any difference between them and the mixed multitude that left Egypt with Moses. So that's just absurd. But all of this, all of this is just nonsensical. It

comes back down again and again to the idea that we can actually relitigate whether a country gets to be a country or not. I'm sorry, polls get to have their own country, Germans get to have their own country, Frenchmen and Japanese and Chinese get to have their own country, and nobody questions it. So why do we question it when it comes to the Israelis? It's just nonsensical unless it's motivated by actual hate. for that specific group of people. I think, honestly, to give folks like Tucker the benefit of the doubt, I don't think they're aware that they're motivated by hate.

They are ultimately, but I think they're confused. You also have people saying that the modern state of Israel is atheistic. What does that mean? What about France? Is France not atheistic? And do we have to be a... to all countries that are or that believe in some other religion besides Christianity? Well, the thing is, first of all, even to make a statement like the nation is atheistic,

there are many, many, many, many, many, many believers of every kind in Israel. Many people who believe in Jesus in Israel. There are many people who are religious Jews, conservative Jews who live in Israel. So to label the nation as atheistic, you know, it's like, saying because of the rainbow lunacy under the Biden administration, America is an atheistic thing. Well, it's a little bit more complicated than that. There may be some people who have that worldview, but to label the nation that way or to label the tribe that way, to say that's who they are. Sounds anti-Semitic. It sounds, I mean, it's just logically wrong. But that's the kind of

sloppiness we're dealing with right now. It's very, it's diabolical because it's confusing just enough people who get sucked into it. And I know people, friends, who've been sucked into this. I can see it. I talk to them. Some very smart people I've had a lot of respect for through the years. And that includes Tucker Carlson. And I have one friend in particular who was a pastor until just a couple years ago. He writes a daily long form essay that is just, you know, phenomenally well researched and, you know, just really helpful to a lot of negative things that have been going on in evangelical Christendom over the years. In the last six months or so, he doesn't seem to be capable of writing anything that isn't

an attack on Israel. And you just look at this and say, how did you become this obsessed with something that is so tangentially related to anything having to do with you? And of course, the assertion is that the Jews somehow control the entire planet. I thought the Babylon B was funny the other day. when it said, you know, that we have found proof that the Jews control Israel. So, yes, yes, they do control at least one country. But I'm sorry, I don't actually think that you can hold that up. I don't think that you can make that case successfully.

Are there Jews around the world? Yes, because they've been exiled from their homeland repeatedly. Do they contribute dramatically to the societies they join? Yes, the number of Nobel Prizes held. by Jewish people is just off the chart. They are brilliant. They are successful in what they do. Do they agree with me on theology?

Absolutely not. But they also don't want to strap on a suicide vest and kill me. And that's very different from Hamas. And these same people are very pro-Hamas because of what they call, and it's completely made up, this supposed genocide in Gaza. But when Hamas' sponsors the Islamic Republic of Iran massacre tens of thousands of peaceful demonstrators in the streets, these same people are dead silent. They're not in the streets protesting. They're not writing up.

Well, this tells you, Rod, that they are insane and guilty because whatever happened to the enemy of my enemy is my enemy, ladies and gentlemen, is my friend. Whatever happened to that idea that we have Islamal fascism rising up around the world, including in New York City where I live. Yes. In London, in Paris, rape gangs in Germany, throughout England. That is a level of wickedness. If you're not talking about that, why should I ever listen to you? If you don't care about that.

So the most basic reason to stand with Israel is because those people, the Islamof-Fascists, want to wipe Israel off the map, and Israel is, is standing against these bloodthirsty lunatics. You want to talk about theocracy? That's theocracy, folks. And not a word really from the left. They seem, and this is so bizarre. I mean, years ago, I thought it occurred to me, and I still hold to this,

that the only thing that makes sense logically is that it's spiritual and that is a fundamental visceral hatred of God. And so that's what unites you. It's so you will look the other way when, Islamists subjugate women, treat women like dogs. You'll look the other way. You say you're a feminist. You care about women, but you'll look the other way when they treat them that way. You won't speak about that. It reveals you to have no values. It reveals you to be a hypocrite to whom no one should ever listen. That really, to me, is the worst of this, is that there's no integrity

to their point of view. I completely agree. And I, you. I would note, Iran declared war on this country in 1979. They have been killing Americans nonstop since 1979. So most of my lifetime. And this is just manifestly obvious in their pronouncements. They do speak of Israel as the little Satan. They speak of America as the great Satan. We're the real target.

We're the people they want to destroy. They're building nuclear weapons and a mass of ballistic missiles not to hit Israel. They're building them to hit America. And they believe in a theology. Now, this is not common in the Muslim world. This is unique to the Iranian leadership. They believe in this eschatological position called 12verism, which dictates that it's their duty to burn the world down with fighting.

to bring in their Messiah. Now, that's really different from Mike Cuckabee. My Cuckabee would love to see the Messiah come next Tuesday. Iran wants to nuke, New York, to cause the Messiah to come. Well, and let's be clear. The Satan's Messiah, just so we're clear, that's the Antichrist, ladies and gentlemen. It's not the Christ. It's the Antichrist.

It's not the Messiah. It's the anti-Messai. It's the anti-Messia. And who they would call the Madi. And this is their position. Now, can you actually have any kind of reasoned, mutual assured destruction strategy with a country that actually wants to burn down the world and says so all the time? No, that's nonsensical.

So I don't know how some of our friends missed that between 2011 and the bombing of Fordo, Donald Trump said 58 separate times in public that Iran must never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. I don't know how they miss that, but to hear them talk, he's betraying MAGA and all these things. No, he's not going to go invade. We're not going to occupy Iran, not for two months, not for 20 years. None of that's going to happen. But we are going to do something decisive to prevent this threat from metastasizing any further. and we are going to put America first when we do that.

You know, you remind me that Tucker was one of the voices speaking stridently against our using stealth bombers bombing those nuclear sites in Iran. He spoke so strongly against that. There are others, Marjorie Taylor Green. I really don't get it. In other words, do they. do they, does Tucker not seem to understand we're talking about an existential threat? The Soviet Union was infinitely more easy to deal with.

Yes. Because they didn't want to be destroyed. They weren't cheering the destruction of the world for ideological reasons. They were dumb enough to be atheists. They weren't dumb enough to worship Satan and the destruction of the world to bring about the Mahdi and the Antichrist. That's what we're dealing with in Iran. So if they have nuclear weapons, we're going to have a problem.

How is it that Tucker cannot get that? I'm fascinated. Well, it's really important to draw these lines yet again. Hamas is an arm of the Iranian regime. Hezbollah and the Houthis are arms of the Iranian regime. They are not indigenous in any respect. They are completely funded and directed from Tehran. So Tucker and his crew supported Hamas during the recent unpleasantness, and now they're dead silent on the Iranian regime murdering tens of thousands of its own citizens who are peacefully seeking their freedom.

It's not without note that the Shah was very, very pro-American, very, very much our best ally in the region. at the time, and pro-Israel as well. It's the Shah who kept selling us oil during the two Arab oil embargoes in the 70s. It's the Shah who was our steadfast friend again and again. It's the Shah who modernized Iran. It's the Shah who moved it toward democracy. It's the Shah who opposed all of this 12erism. And here's Tucker Carlson, who just bought a home in Qatar, which is very much Iranian aligned and has been housing the leadership of Hamas, and suddenly he just doesn't see any of those things as problems. Why would he buy a home in Qatar? Can somebody explain that to me? If I had the money to buy a home someplace, why would I buy a home there? Yeah. Why do you go, you know,

deliberately to live in a place that gets to 130 degrees in the shade? I mean, you just wouldn't do that. I can understand my house in Switzerland. crazy that is as anti-Christian as can be. And he's deluded into thinking that that's not because maybe they'll treat him well, but they don't treat your average Christian well. On the contrary, converting to Christianity is a capital offense in these countries, folks. You know what a capital offense is? Look it up. We have two minutes left. Can you say something about the Mexican cartels before we go? The real problem with the Mexican cartels is that they're incredibly good at buying government officials. That is manifest in Mexico. They've controlled more of the judges and police

officers and much higher ranking people than that for a very long time, not all of them, but many, many of them, more than enough to do business. The thing that has gotten ignored is how many they probably have bought in the United States, certainly in border states, probably in Washington. Some of our policies over the last 30 years make no sense until you connect the dot that, oh, wait, the cartel wanted that. And that's certainly true of the border security issue under Biden. I understand what that does to pump up Democrat Electoral College votes and House seats and all the other things they want to achieve. But at the end of the day, the people that most directly immediately benefits are the cartels. And we need a wide-ranging investigation of who actually has been corrupted.

by this mass of wealth and corruption. And I will say that I believe that if you are a government official that has taken money like this, if you're corrupt, you should get the death penalty. Oh, yeah. So anybody who's interested in running for office, you should think about that. It's treason. If you are not going to be honest, if you are caught taking money, if you are corrupt, you should get the death penalty.

You are the enemy of the United States of America. You might as well have a bomb strapped to yourself and walk into a mall and kill people. You are killing people through fentanyl, through other drugs. Corruption is so wicked. Corruption is a nice word for it. It is a level of wickedness that the idea that we would have governed officials

that would take money to do evil, I obviously, I can't say anything stronger about it than I have. Rod Martin, always a joy and a privilege to have you on this program. Thank you so much. Good to be here. Unlike some government programs, Medicare is not a handout. It's something you have earned. You worked for decades, paid your taxes, and contributed to a system that's supposed to serve you when you retire. So when it comes time to choose a Medicare plan, you deserve one that actually works for you, not the one that fills someone's pocket with the biggest commission check. That's why when you need to choose a Medicare plan, I recommend Chapter. They're not an insurance company.

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