The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3599 - Trump Claims Higher Gas Prices Are Good; Iran Refuses to Relent w/ Murtaza Hussain

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

It's an Emmajority Report Thursday on The Majority Report   On today's program:   Palantir CEO Alex Karp is going out to promote Trump's war in Iran which I'm sure has nothing to do with his technology being heavily integrated into the operations. Karp also tries to appeal to MAGA men by claiming that the AI revolution will disempower highly educated women and empower working class men.   Murtaza Hussain, journalist at Drop Site News join Emma for a conversation about the most recent updates in the war in Iran.   In the Fun Half:   Brandon Sutton and Matt Binder join Emma.   Ed Gallrein, the Trump approved candidate primarying Thomas Massie joins the president onstage at a rally in Hebron, Kentucky.   Joe Rogan just realized the Donald Trump is old.   A former employee of Elon Musk's DOGE fails to define DEI but knows that a documentary about woman who were killed in the holocaust is DEI.   Bill Maher and Sam Harris have a conversation about the "rise of antisemitism" over the last 3 years and how Trump is the best friend Israel has ever had.   all that and more   To connect and organize with your local ICE rapid response team visit ICERRT.com The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: SELECT QUOTE: Get the right life insurance for you and save more than 50% on term life insurance at SelectQuote.com/MAJORITY ZOCDOC: Go to Zocdoc.com/MAJORITY and download the Zocdoc app to sign-up for FREE and book a top-rated doctorTY SUNSET LAKE:  Head on over to SunsetLakeCBD.com and use coupon code "Left Is Best" (all one word) for 20% off of your entire order. Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com

You are listening to a free version of The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. To support the show and get another 15 minutes of daily program, go to majority.fm. Please. The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. It is Thursday, March 12th, 26. My name is Emma Vigeland, in for Sam Cedar, and this is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, Mertaza Hussein of Dropsite News will be with us to talk about the latest on Trump and Israel's criminal war in Iran.

Will Iran relent in the straight and more? Also on the program, Iran's new supreme leader, issues his first statement saying the attacks on Gulf countries and Strait of Hormuz closures will continue as oil prices spike and people start to feel it at the pump in the U.S. U.S. intelligence has determined that the Iranian regime is not at risk of collapse anytime soon. Whoopsy! Multiple ships have been attacked in or near the strait. Every Senate Democrat except for John Federshreck calls for a probe of the strike on the Girl's School in Iran,

which was confirmed to be on the U.S. target list. The Pentagon tells lawmakers that the Iran War has cost over $11 billion in less than one week. The Israeli military drops charges against five soldiers caught raping a Palestinian prisoner, on camera. It did arrest the woman who leaked the video, though. I'm glad they're on top of that. Israel has killed at least 630 people, 91 of them children in Lebanon in just the past week. If this were Europe, do you think that there would be any hesitation about causing Israel

bombing seven countries a world war? One third of Americans, 82 million people say they have had to cut spending to pay for health care costs last year. Skipping meals and other examples. 85-year-old Jim Clyburn is running for re-election. Yes! Yes! Disgusting. What everyone wants.

More gerentocracy. John Thune signals that the Senate will debate the mass voter disenfranchisement save act next week, as Cornyn reverses his position on the filibuster to pass it amidst a primary fight. And lastly, Cash Patel says UFC fighters will train FBI agents this week. Don't you feel safer already? All this and more.

On today's Majority Report, welcome to the show, everybody. It's an M Majority Report Thursday. Hello, Matt. Hello, Brian. Hello, audience. I'm glad to be back. I mean, the news, not so much, not so much. I'm excited to talk to Mertaza Hussein about some of drop sites, excellent reporting on the Middle East, on this conflict, etc.

But let's start here because Trump is now basically saying that you just got to suck up higher gas prices. That's what his spin is this morning. But the national average for a gallon of gas has jumped around 35 cents in a week. And experts on energy are essentially saying that this is like the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Just to underscore the significance of this, the Iranians have shown no signs that they want to let up here. because what their objective is going to be is to cause enough pain to the West that they're

not going to indiscriminately bomb civilians and their country again. I mean, the new Supreme Leader's father and mother were just I'm not sure if it was actually his mother, but father and the wife

of the Ayatollah were just killed in these strikes dozens more of senior leadership. And at least 1,300 people in Iran have been killed, let alone the environmental catastrophe that the Israelis and the United States set off by bombing the oil despots. Despots? Depos? Depos. Depos. Deepots. Definitely not right. Sometimes those similar words get mixed up in my brain. But this was Trump yesterday at a rally in Kentucky. Now we're moving from calling the

war in Iran a limited operation or an operation to something different. Oh, it's like a little jaunt, potentially. Here he is with his new spin on this criminal war in the Middle East. The end of the year, we did an excursion. You know what an excursion is? We had to take a little trip to get rid of some evil, very evil people. It should have been done for 47 years. they've been killing our people. 47 years. 47 years. And I can only say this.

They were all prepared. They're very strong. You know, they're going to try and take over the whole Middle East. They were going to knock out Israel. They don't know what the hell hit them, right? They don't know what they're going. They got hit by the American

military, they don't know. They say, what the hell is happening? They didn't expect anything like this. To bring down energy costs for American workers and families and businesses like this when we ended the Green News scam. You know the scam? Bringing down energy costs, huh? First of all, a little excursion to get rid of some really evil people. The people that wanted to take over the Middle East, and it's not Israel. Yeah. As the opposition leader to Netanyah, who is endorsing the Greater Israel theory,

and that guy's supposed to be the liberal in the Israeli body politic representation, yeah, no, we're pretty sure we know which entity in the Middle East is trying to take over the whole thing. So he's talking about how the green new scam, which was never passed, but Biden did have some green-related

infrastructure projects as a part of his legislative agenda that the Trump administration just halted, even sometimes in the middle of construction that would have brought down energy costs for people because our grid is so overloaded right now due to the giveaways to AI and the data centers that are trying to outpace local opposition and build and build and use all of their energy and raise people's electricity prices so they can beat the clock before they're regulated. Those guys, the AI guys, are all in bed with Donald Trump. And they're raising energy prices as Trump is killing projects that would have helped energy prices and starting a criminal war in the Middle East that is resulting already in just a week in massive

increases for prices at the pump. As I mentioned, it's been a 35 cent increase in the week. And the markets are starting to understand. that and not listening to Trump trying to talk people off the ledge right as the markets close. So this is where Trump is moving his messaging at this point. He's got to do the weave and pivot. The United States is the largest oil producer in the world, he said

this morning, by far. So when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money. Who's we here? But of far greater interest and importance importance to me as president is stopping an evil empire Iran from having nuclear weapons and destroying the Middle East and indeed the world. Sure. I won't ever let that happen. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

I'm sure the whole freedom across the other side of the world thing, he cares about as much as the all of my buddies are going to get rich off of the price of liquid natural gas going up. And we're actually going to be insulated from the price Yalshmucks feel at the pump. And it's interesting you say that because this was an analysis here done by Science Direct where they looked at the fossil fuel profits. And this is a chart here that shows that 50% of all profit, I'm going to read here from the study, claims by U.S. beneficiaries are held by the top 1% of wealth owners and 84% by the top 10%. And you can see here that in contrast, the bottom half of the population, receive hardly any profits at all, only 1%.

The top 0.1%, 131,000 households, receive 26 times as much as half of all Americans on profits for oil. So, yeah, rich assholes who are going to stand to benefit from being investors in this stuff, they'll happily pay, fill up their mazoradis with, you know, $5 a gallon gas.

It's you, everyone else that works for a living that's going to have to feel that. That's just, you know, look, freedom. It's worth it. It's a small price to pay. So the spin now is that you may be paying more at the pump, but it's really good for making me and my friends rich. It's amazing to have him just say it out loud.

It's truth. These people are insulated from all of this stuff. They don't care. They don't care if there's a recession. They don't care about any of that. Because if there's a recession, they just get to buy stuff up for free. On the cheap. That is why wealth concentration at this level,

is so dangerous is because they're the ones who can benefit from the dip. We saw that income inequality got worse after the Great Recession because Obama and the Democrats, along with the Republicans, ended up bailing out the banks as opposed to homeowners directly. And it's not like that money trickled down. We saw that it allowed them to reset and continue to rip off people and buy politicians and get richer and richer. I mean, they are marching on us. Zuckman who worked with Thomas Piquetti

on the inequality in capital in the 21st century. Points out, like, it's been every year, every year since then, they've reached record highs and the amount of wealth concentrated at the top. We have put the Gilded Age in the rearview mirror. It looks quaint compared to what we see now. Yep.

The age of oligarchs. And speaking of those oligarchs, Here's another piece that I wanted to kind of hit on as we're marching or we're in the midst of this horrific war. Just bringing up the name Krupp, I think that's how you pronounce it, for this reason, Nazi Germany's arms manufacturer, some of the... Oh, yeah, big steelworks Kru, P-P, yeah. Just some of the companies, corporations that worked closely with the Nazis during the, Hitler's rule is it's important to point out that there will be many corporations and companies that are known that will be complicit when we look back in this moment in history but I'm not

sure if there's one company and corporation that will be more complicit in Trump's crimes both domestically and internationally than Palantir. Palantir was a part of helping the IDF create their AI lavender bombing technology, kill lists in Gaza, where they had different programs, including one that was called Daddy's Home, where they would bomb residences with anyone that they suspected was a Hamas militant, and it didn't essentially matter if their entire family was there. Yeah, anybody they suspect of being a Hamas militant means any male from the age of 12 up. And we know from the Epstein emails

that Peter Thiel was connected with Jeffrey Epstein and then Epstein connected him to Ehud Barak. And that was conveniently when Israel shortly after that ended up opening its Tel Aviv office and was a part of the Palestine Laboratory experiment where they essentially test out surveillance and weapons technology on the Palestinians in Gaza. And this is how Palantir

got to where it is and why it's one of the biggest corporations in the country right now. And also on the backs of the U.S. taxpayer, we, there is no company that I think has gotten more contracts under the Trump administration than Palantir in July. The Army issued a contract with Palantir worth up to $10 billion over a decade. And that includes a nearly $800 million, dollar intelligence targeting software, this thing called Maven. And Maven uses Anthropics AI tool clawed. And Anthropic has been getting a lot of good press for trying to say that they don't want the Trump administration to use some of their technology.

In fact, the Pentagon ended up retaliating against them because they had some sort of some qualms about the use of their technology in wartime. Now, cynically, my view is that Anthropic is looking beyond the Trump administration to a new administration that might want to have the good AI on their side. Open AI is angling in the same way as the Palantir gets richer and richer. But Alex Carp said on CNBC that they're still using this technology. It's integrated into Maven. So for all of Anthropics' kind of public stance on this, their technology is still being used right now in war time by Palantir. Palantir also, of course, we know, has gotten billions and no-bid contracts for ICE,

and the number of federal contracts that they had doubled in 2025. So that's... Is a company reliant on taxpayer money? They don't do anything else besides that. And here is Palantir CEO Alex Karp talking about why he supports Trump's war in Iran. I wonder why, given all the context that I gave you, he was on CNBC this morning. And this is him lobbying for even more contracts from the federal government. You should view this appearance in that light.

The total power of our fleet and all of our resources and bring it to bear against. against adversaries and enemies has shifted the way in which war is fought. And I have read that Palantir's Project Maven is the core backbone of that. And then I've also read that all the allies, Arab and non-Arab in the Middle East, may or may not be users of our platform as well, and that's expanding rapidly. I think the most important thing, leaving aside the heroism of our troops, which is the most important thing is our adversaries and enemies are witnessing an ability to fight that they don't have and they are going to find it very hard to acquire for a couple

reasons we have for better or worse as many know I've been essentially an anti neocon I don't really believe in the wars we fought in the past but but because I don't believe in regime change or and that's one of the reasons I'm supportive of this policy that we currently have but it we that what you want is to have a capacity that no one else can replicate and America is the center of the AI revolution the large language models in the battlefield are only useful if powered inside an ontology, and that's our ontology.

And yeah, I guess I've read we're at the core of everything. And maybe that's, maybe that's exaggerated. Maybe. Yeah, for investor pitch. Yeah, on CNBC. So, yeah, it's, I found that amazing. I've not been supportive of regime change wars in the past. Did he say that on Joe Rogan or something like that?

They know that they have some issue with their past statements on this. But with this war, which the Trump administration said was for the purpose of regime change until they said it was actually for to destroy their nuclear program, but they already destroyed the nuclear program last year. They now know that they can't do regime change. U.S. intelligence assessments have shown that the infrastructure of the Iranian government has stayed in place in spite of the sadistic bombing campaigns that our government has engaged in. And anybody who has any familiarity with the Iranian state would have been able to tell the administration that. But they still use the concept of regime change to push this war forward. So CARP is just like lying based on the past 48 hours of changing PR from the Trump administration because it's another public bid for more free money from our government.

We have the AI revolution has given us capabilities that the Iranians could never imagine, like the capability to double tap a school and then pretend like, oh, whoops. Oh, whoopsie daisy. That was a mistake somehow with our great capabilities. So that's the big, I think, also reason that he's probably on television is if it gets out that Palantir's supposedly incredibly precise technology of AI bombings was involved in selecting this target, this school for little girls that may have been a military installation 10 years ago. We had Robert Pape on the show to talk about how it is a complete fallacy that in the smart bomb era, that one, that, uh, one, uh, you can't institute a regime change, which Carp is now saying he's not in favor of. You can't airily bomb your way to victory. Right. You can't airily bomb your way to victory. But also, we know that, uh, you know, even, even the, they don't. have the, they didn't have the intelligence necessary to know

what they were striking, even if they can be precise in the way that the Israelis can, where they send a drone down and assassinate a doctor in a hospital know exactly where he is. And that's probably Palantir's technology too. Well, it looks like

U.S. maps might have been outdated. And Palantir's technology can't solve that, buddy. So, like, they're constantly trying to oversell the efficacy of their technology and they'll do that also

by saying like, God, it could be this really terrifying tool, but we could also use it for good. Oh, sure, yeah. They don't have a business model besides selling it to the government to surveil you and to kill kids. There's no business model for these AI companies to exit all the amount that people have invested in.

It's a big house of cards and the only way it's being sustained is based on government money. And this is the other angle that he took trying to appeal to Republicans in the Trump administration on its economic benefits. This was immensely cynical as well because he's going to try to drive a wedge here and say that AI is going to be liberatory. Maybe not for all people in America.

We're going to have to start to concede that they're going to take jobs away from people. But worry not Trump administration, it will benefit. wink and a nod. Your voters, maybe. Industry has to support the warfighter. The one thing, though, that I think even now is underestimated by all actors in industry, and including the Silicon Valley, is how disruptive these technologies are. If you are going to disrupt the economic and therefore political power significantly

of one party space, highly educated, often female voters who vote, mostly Democrat, and military and working class people who do not feel supported. And you feel like that's, you believe that that's going to work out politically. You're in an insane asylum. Like, you cannot have, this technology disrupts humanities trained, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less and increases the power, economic power, of vocationally trained, working class, often male voters, And so these disruptions are going to disrupt every aspect of our society.

And to make this work, we have to come to an agreement of what it is we're going to do with the technology. How are we going to explain to people who are likely going to have less good and less interesting jobs from their perspective? And how is it that we are going, and by the way, on the military thing, these technologies are dangerous societal. The only justification you could possibly have would be that if we don't do it, our adversaries and we'll do it and we will be subject to their rule of law. So if you decouple this from the support of the military. Their rule of law. All right. That's really good.

That means that we need the Americans to get behind our AI technology because we have copyright protections here in the United States and intellectual property. And in other countries, that's not necessarily the same. law. So as we talk about this as an AI arms race, you need to give us boatloads of money because we need to keep up with the Chinese here, but keep up with them in a way that protects our, that protects our wealth and our intellectual property. And it's foolish. It's throwing good money after bad. China last year, you created an AI that basically does everything you need with using less energy. They will continue to do that. There's nothing you can do to stop them. from continuing to do that.

So betting that we're going to be able to create an AI god that keeps America the innovation capital of the world. We're losing that. It's because of people like this. Because we keep giving them whatever they want. And instead of solving real problems, like how do I get from Chicago to New York? It's to give these freaks of money

so they can put everything you've ever done and everything you ever scrolled and every checkout page you've ever shopped online into a fucking database so they can protect your information for marketers. and if you say anything bad about their allies, they can create a dossier on you so the government can track you down. Like, we're not solving real problems because of crackheads like this guy.

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And when he mentions there to the, well, let's put up three, just so to bolster your point about how much money has been given. Like, this is Palantir, this is a chart from a month ago. Palantir went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September 30th, 2020. with a price of 725 per share. It closed on its first day trading at 950. And now you can see, at least in February,

who's at $147 a share. And that is in large part due to your money, taxpayer money, giveaways by the taxpayer for the enrichment of guys like Alex Carp. And the rich people that are giving money to Pallenteer, they want to, they're throwing money. at politicians to make sure that the government, their politicians, make sure the government gives money to Palantir. It's, it's a self-feeding loop. And the last thing on this is, is that

the, when he's appealing there to the MAGA base and says that it's a good thing, women are going to be impacted more by R-A-I replacing their jobs. No more Genzi Bost and a mini. Yeah. And that means they get to be back in the home. That's almost the implication of what he's saying. Now, it is true that white collar workers, which is with the implication of what he's saying, when you look at them as a whole, are a little bit more disproportionately women on

like the entry level. But it's, they're more disproportionate on the lower level white collar scale. I was reading, there's something in Pew that was analyzing this from a few months ago. They're overrepresented in lower paying jobs in like the

kind of the more professional setting than he's saying is only going to be impacted there. So, yeah, they might, their jobs are likely to be replaced by AI. But what he's talking about with men in manufacturing, working class males, no, no, no, it might be even worse in those situations. We're already seeing how AI manufacturing and AI robotics are replacing those jobs at a rapid rate. Manufacturing jobs are on the decline under Donald Trump rapidly. we bounce back under Biden due to infrastructure investment.

So what Corp is saying there is a lie, saying it on a national news platform, a financial news platform, in order to appeal to a specific Republican constituency and stave off a popular anger, a populist anger about AI, which is pretty bipartisan. And when you look at some of the polling on this, especially in areas where their data centers are really harming electricity bills and the environments in certain communities, Carp has got to be aware of some of that backlash. Plus, this really unpopular war where your AI technology is telling the Americans, time to bomb this school might be a problem.

Hakeem Jeffries, you're going to take their money still? Apparently. Apparently. In a moment, we're going to be talking to Mertaza Hussein. But first, a word from our sponsors, raise your hand if you've been putting off a dental cleaning, an annual checkup, or honestly, any kind of doctor's appointment while podcast audience. My hand is up to

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select quote dot com slash majority they shop you save link below in the video and episode descriptions and at majority.com quick break when we come back will be joined by Murtaza. We are back and we are joined once again by Mertaza Hussein

reporter covering national security and foreign affairs at Dropside News. Mertaza, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me, Emma. Of course. Good to see you. Good to talk to you. Let's start here. What is the latest on the closure of the straight of Hormuz? Because the new line from the Trump administration is short-term pain for long-term gain. What is your assessment of that spin? What is the long-term gain here? Well, it's really a risable statement, and I think Trump has gotten himself into a situation which is far more serious than he may have calculated at the beginning.

For those of those straight-of-hormuz is a passageway, a relatively narrow maritime passageway through which but 20% of the world's energy transits. And you can imagine the knock-on effect of disruption of that straight for even a few hours or a day or so. In the 80 years, we've been used for the purpose. It's never really been shut down at all. Now, we're over a week now of disruption and the total shutdown of the strait to various degrees. And it looks like the Iranians are digging in to shut it down for a long period of time.

So crude oil today has already exceeded $100 Brent crude per barrel. It was from about $68 the start of the war. It's an unbelievable sort of parabolic increase in a short amount of time. And the market is still pricing in a relatively short war, although there's no really indication of an op-ram here. So, you know, this is kind of a devastating situation for, first of all, the global economy, obviously the American economy, American domestic politics being impacted, but also the whole structure of the American Empire is very much based on the idea that the U.S. is the protector of this area, of the Persian Gulf, of the Gulf of the Gulf countries around the Strait of Hormuz

in the Gulf, and then also of the Strait itself in the maritime traffic. And it turns out that the Iranians can control the straight. The U.S. has not had the ability to defend the countries around the Gulf. It does not have the ability to defend the strait from someone taking it over, the Iranians in this case. And, you know, if they were to, let's say, launch a major operation to open it, that would take, you know, a very long time to get together. Even exporting ships through, if we take very long time, it would be very dangerous as well, too. You could make weeks or months even to organize the logistics for that.

And then, very likely, you'd have to invade Iran. You'd have to invade Iran in the coastal areas of bordering the Gulf to sort of we're being controlled that. And that would be an incredibly difficult task. You'd be suffered. You need like Iraq style beyond level of invasion force, again, which would take a very long time. And during all that time, they straight is still close.

And the global economy is still being impacted. So you are really, you've almost generated a situation where you're almost guaranteed a global recession or global depression even as a result of this huge shock to global energy markets by this decision to launch the war and then for the Iranians to close the strait. So I really see only a few really unambiguous options for Trump now. The first is you could do that. I think you could escalate

and start a much larger war with Iran including a ground invasion and what have you to try to open the street by force. Again, it would have all the negative consequences that talked about. On top of being very unpopular in America, the war is already unpopular, being worse, if they have their ground invasion and casualties and all these things,

it would be devastating. Secondly, he could just sort of back up. He could declare the war over and say he's done with it regardless of what's going on in the ground. He's hinted that he is on the verge of doing that anyways. He's almost, he's been saying several times and wants to wrap it up already. It's only been about two weeks now. But then what do you do then? He's he effectively surrendered the strait and the Persian Gulf to Iran because Iran would be the, have demonstrated the power, we're able to have control over it. So what does that mean? All the Gulf Arab countries love to rearrange themselves towards accommodating Iran. Iran's status will be tremendously boosted as a result of that.

So that's not really a great option for Trump either. So I don't really know what his endgame here is. Maybe you can negotiate something with the Iranians and give them something that allows them to back off or makes them feel comfortable backing up. But I'm really skeptical of that, too, because the Iranians don't trust any of the U.S. negotiating position because the last two negotiations, the U.S. attack them in the middle of the negotiation. that sort of duplicitous behavior and diplomacy was not even done in World War II. Because you know that, you know, whatever morals, ethics aside,

you may need to talk to someone later on. You may need them to trust your assurances in negotiation. The U.S. doesn't really have that option anymore. So if they're trying to bomb Iran and submission and cause all the civilian casualties, just harm them and so forth, to see if they'll break. That seems to not be working. It seems to be having the opposite effect. They nominate even more hard-line that Supreme Leader,

who today gave his first address saying that, first and foremost, the war is not going to end. we're not opening the straight. So now what? And so I don't see a really a good offering for this by any means. And the Trump administration and the U.S. is claiming that it's destroying these Iranian mine layers. It does not appear that they are successful, but they are trying to at least kind of give the impression that they're having some impact on the mines that the Iranians have laid in the strait. What's your assessment on that? Well, these mine layers, they're just like speedboats. And the Iranians apparently have thousands of them.

And I think the U.S. Sencom said it's short 16, some militia may have been inactive. That really doesn't really move the needle too much on the subject. The Iranians can just place a few mines in the straight and as close. If they place thousands or tens of thousands of mines, you can imagine how long it would take to clean that up, even if the war did go in America's favor later on. So it's not really such a pertinent issue. But secondly, it's two things. First of all, the Iranians have developed ballistic missiles, which can be used to lay mines as well, too.

So there are certain types of missiles they develop, which you fire them in the strait, and they discharge mines anyway. So you don't even need the boats. They have to thought through many different ways of doing this. And secondly, you know, the Iranians don't need to mine the straits to close it. All they have to do declare the strays closed and that's closed, because ships won't take the insurance cost of going through an air region that they view is dangerous. The ship's crew won't want to do it even just for their own safety.

well too. And most of the ships or all the ships that have been hit so far, not be hit by mines and hit by drones. And the drones are launched from within Iran. So that's, the mines are really a secondary issue. They built all these redundancies into their strategy for closing the straight. And I think the fundamental problem this whole conflict is, is that from Trump's perspective, this was an issue on his checklist. He was trying to get off before we moved on to Cuba or ICE or a millionaire of things. From the Iranian's perspective, this is the conflict they've been preparing for for several generations now the day that the U.S. came to try to invade them, and they viewed as an existential issue. And the Trump administration has said it's an existential

issue for the Iranians, so they're sort of viewing it appropriately. So they haven't thought of this a million different way as what they would do in the situation. And the Trump administration has seemingly done no preparation for this. I'll give you one more, a quick example. The reason that the Iranians are even able to step down the strait is because these bases that the U.S. would build around the Gulf, which is supposed to protect the strait and protect the country in the Gulf. They were evacuated before the war because the U.S. didn't want to take casualties. And now those bases are being hit very heavily.

Radars are being knocked out. All these things, there have been some casualties in Kuwait as well, to them and maybe Saudi Arabia from the attacks on these bases. But now you don't even have the bases necessary to project the force to reopen the street in the first place. So how do you even get out of this without going a million times more deeply into it? And even if you do invade Iran, I don't even sign it clearly win that war. It's a very mountainous country. It's 90 million people.

they're preparing a game for the invasion as well too. So yeah, I mean, I think that we're headed for a huge economic catastrophe here, barring some sort of, you know, unlikely at the moment diplomatic offrant. The claim that, oh, actually, let me pick up on something else that you said there, because I think that's really important, where you're talking about the interceptors and the United States running low on them. We saw, and, you know, them getting hit pretty hard. We saw that Korean media ended up publishing a few days ago an image of the United States

dismantling one of their defense systems from South Korea to send it to the Middle East. Obviously, North Korea is one of the, you know, few nations isolated from the West that has refused to denuclearize. And so it appears that the U.S. is so desperate for this kind of technology that Trump doesn't really care if this ally is put in the difficult position. And also, I think they took some heat domestically for allowing the construction of this previously. But perhaps you can shed some light on this. So these missile interceptors, they're a very important part of American defense strategy, not just in the least. least globally. Because, you know, it's actually what's happening right now is increasing the risk of a war in Asia. Because the reason it's not war in Asia is because people, the country's in Asia that

the U.S. has, you know, conflicts or hostility with, believe the cost is too high or they believe their missiles won't get through or things like that. So if you move the missile batteries out of Asia, it makes the idea of, let's say, North Korea attacking South Korea or China attacking Taiwan more attractive because they feel that it could be becoming easier now, the missile batteries are gone, and we're building up our own missiles ourselves. You know, the balance of forces is getting more on our side. So this is actually increasing the risk of a major war in Asia at the same time, either now or any year or two. Because, you know, one thing is very important, these missile batteries are not easy to replenish.

The U.S. makes a couple dozen a year, and they fired, no one knows how many in this war, but in the last 2,0.25 war, Israel-Iran war, they fired about 3,000. 25% of all their missiles. So years conservatively of production of being expended on this, as giving, let's say, the Chinese, a very perfect window of opportunity to, let's say, attack Taiwan or attack U.S. interests in the region and become the hegemon of that part of the world. So it's really cannibalizing all aspects of America's, the imperial American system, the physical footprint of it,

to fight this war, which is a war of choice and for which no one has actually defined any injective at all in Iran and no one's defined endgame. It's really, it's really crazy. So, you know, you mentioned that the internet intercept are running out too. These figures are classified, but you can kind of see the impacts a little bit because in Dubai, which is a beneficiary of a lot of American interceptors, the interceptions are not happening anymore. The strikes are happening on Dubai more and more heavily. And this is going to cause that death spiral from Dubai because the whole attraction of Dubai and the other Gulf Arab states is that they're a completely safe haven for capital and individuals from around the world to come and invest and things like that.

There's clearly no longer the case. The U.S. is not able to defend them. It's not defending them. They're being hammered. And then the next shoot and drop might be Israel. Like Israel is now engaged in another war with Hezbollah. They're being hit. Iranians focus is now shifting to the Gulf states to hit Israel more often. So if they run out of interceptors and start running low, then what happens exactly? So I see this is complete Pandora's box, which has been opened. And like I said, implications and not just for the Middle East, they have implications for Europe and the war of Russia, but also for the war which may take place, which now is odd that being increased with China or with

North Korea. And that war would be magnitudes more damaging than the war of Iran. As bad as the war Iran has been, that would be truly, you know, a situation which would be deserving of the description of a world war if that were to happen. And, you know, people before the Trump administration, even people in the current administration have warned about this and warned not to do it. and yet they're doing it as we speak. Well, I guess for South Korea's purposes, they can maybe be a little bit less concerned about an attack from China, in my estimation,

because why would China really do anything except sit back and watch the United States expend enormous amounts of military resources right now, destroy their global standing in the world, especially when China's reliance on oil that's coming through the strait is less significant than some of the other countries, like say, I know Pakistan is experiencing that crunch right now. South Korea is likely to be impacted Japan as well. But China can kind of just wait this out and essentially say, like,

hey, the U.S., you want to punch yourself in the face? Go for it. Well, this is just an unbelievable. So like the knock-on effects are so crazy. You mentioned Pakistan and many other Asian countries, there's like rationing happening in these countries. People are being told to work from home and not drive their cars. Entire countries, you're talking about hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people

who are currently going through this in Asia at the moment. And one country is not affected is China. For a number of reasons, they have strategic reserves for, you know, situations like this. They're a large, well-referenced country. But also Iran is still selling its own oil through the trade. Its own shifts are passing. They're selling more, actually, at higher prices.

And we're buying them. China's buying them. because China was willing to sort of ignore the sanctions and buy the Iranian oil. It almost makes you think that this is somehow coordinated. It's so strategically perfect for China in the situation because it's heavily damaging all derival or competing powers around them in Asia. They're still getting oil even. And it's also draining America's resources and political tension and, you know,

many other critical factors they would need to contain or compete with China in the future. This does remind me a lot of the position of the U.S. in the World Wars, because before the World War is the U.S. is not a global superpower. The European countries were global superpowers, and it seemed like it was almost like an invulnerable position of superiority. What happened to the World Wars is the European countries exhausts themselves fighting, and by the end of World War II, the U.S. had taken much more of a supplementary role later in the conflict. It wasn't one of the initiating parties that suffered most of the damage or loss. It was the only country standing and became the global superpower. which exists today, what China is doing is very similar. They are not getting involved directly in the Ukraine war or the Iran war.

They're feeding weapons. They're giving intel. They're giving other sources of support to help Iran or help Russia and keep the war going longer. But they're not going to waste their own resources getting involved in the war of choice like that. They're just sitting and capitalizing on the benefits. And I do think this is going to end up being a historical turning point,

one way or another, given what they're doing, which frankly is quite wise. I mean, so China has these reserves. They also are much further along on the renewable energy front, where they have that capacity where the United States doesn't. And of course, some of the other smaller Asian countries that are going to be impacted by this. When you're comparing it to World War II, I had been kind of thinking about this. I was listening to Jeffrey Sachs speak about how this is already a world war. And I don't see. how you can classify it as any other way. Classified any other way. If this was in Europe and there was a country that was attacking seven other countries, bombing them, invading

them in the way that Israel is, and as the proxy of the United States, I don't think we would have any hesitation in calling of the World War, but because of kind of, you know, Western privilege, there's a sneering at the sovereignty of nations in the Middle East

and also Iran, of course, that prevents it from kind of being classified as such, but certainly also with all these Western countries involved in this multi-nation war, it would be fair to classify it as such. And obviously the U.S. and Israel are on the sides of aggression and cruelty. Well, yeah, you know, it's also very important that a lot of these countries, several countries being hit by Israel, several countries being hit by Iran now, too,

and the Persian Gulf as well. Iran is a very different country from a lot of the other countries that the U.S. has fought in the last decade or two decades in the Middle East. In the sense that it has a sort of, it wasn't created by Sykes Pico. It has its own natural borders, you could say. It was a civilization which was destroyed and then we created itself several times in history as well, too. It's much more that the foundations of its statehood were don't have a recent providence. That's why I think that when Trump thought that he just killed one guy, the whole thing would collapse,

he didn't really understand what the situation was. It was not a personalistic regime centered around a dictator who, you know, his bloodline or whatever or his personality sort of defying the state. And without that, it would just be anybody. No, it's deeply entrenched system. And maybe it's not popular with people. Maybe it's a third of the people support it. But that's a lot in the country of 90 million people.

That's enough to create a strong social base. And you can see that the government has not collapsed. So these characterizations of it seemingly did not match reality. These very optimistic characterizations will happen should the war have begun. So I do think that, you know, I don't know, it's really going to become now a contest of political will. And in some ways, it does seem to me that as bad as it is, the best option for Trump maybe should just be to walk away now. And just declare victory. You can say he destroy the Iranian Navy or killed social people and just say he won.

And, you know, as supporters, many of them almost have this uncritical support of him. Maybe they'll buy enough that we can walk away. but, you know, I don't really know what he's going to do other than that, other than going more deeply in and getting into situations even more of a disaster. I agree that domestically, politically it would make the most sense for him to do that. But he has been, I mean, really talked into this by Netanyahu by seemingly Lindsay Graham. The reporting was that Laura Lumer and Tom Cotton were some of the voices that he was listening to. And if you're listening to Tom Cotton, that is perhaps the most bloodthirsty person. in the Senate. And yes, I'm including Lindsay Graham in that. Graham is just much more vocal and

enjoying his appearances on cable television after a few drinks or something like that. But, you know, it is pretty horrifying that Trump seems to have listened so quickly to the neocons and acted with such urgency that, and look, this is part of his proclivity as well. I don't want to let him off the hook there. But the way that he launched this war seemed to have such a such little forethought that it's hard for me to view it as anything except him kind of ordering his cronies to act immediately. Well, you know, Trump's, you know, whole self-image is as an iconoplast. He's like the person who does what everyone else says you can't do and then he gets away with it. And it seems like that

was working for him. He was on like a gambling streak where he was hitting. He killed Kassin Soleimani in 2020. Nothing really happened. He bombed the Iranian nuclear program. Nothing really happened. Just last month, it seems so long ago, sorry, in January, he captured Venezuela and president Nicholas Maduro. Again, he got away with it. So I guess in his view, this was just another sort of thing he was going to do that someone said you couldn't do and then he would win and he'd be seen as a Maverick. But he miscalculated because the Iranians, actually it's a very important and sort of ironic aspect of this, is that the person, one individual who was holding back the Iranians from retaliating more forcefully, even in the last Trump term, was

Ali Khamini. Ali Khamini is a very elderly, was a very elderly man. He was very risk-averse. He had a policy of not having a war with America and not to develop and picking a nuclear weapon, not having peace with America either, not giving up the nuclear program itself,

but just not crossing any threshold, saying in a graze on all time. He's a very cautious individual. And many other people that the U.S. has killed in the last two years, and we're very cautious. Hussein Nessarlo was also a very cautious individual. So now he has a younger generation of people,

more of our poor in Iran who never agreed with this and who view it existential crisis and they've been preparing for this. And Murtaza, sorry, just to interject, who also witnessed what happened to Gaddafi when he gave up his nuclear program and the United States still overthrew him and he

was executed in like the most gruesome possible way. And younger leadership I would imagine in Iran is saying like, we don't want to end up like this or I don't want to end up like my dad. Absolutely. They know very well. I mean, we're kind of really negotiating these things at the nil now.

Like, you can say that there were some U.S. administration, which are more conciliatory. You have to look at the whole view U.S. system in its totality. I don't think the U.S. is structurally capable of making a deal with Iran. They made one in 2015 under Obama. It was torn up a few years later. That was pretty much it. There's no real, you know, consensus for that without that. And, you know, it's really kind of depressing a little bit.

because I would even say that the Democrats, while they did not, they did not the ones who initiated this war, I think they also helped lead Trump into it. We had some reports about this at drop site. It was not that they egged the war on explicitly, but they didn't really oppose it. And I think the reason it is, and people said this, is that they do it as an opportunity to trap Trump, to destroy the Trump presidency, destroy the GOP. You know, it'll destroy Iran and kill up people in Iran anyways, but, well, we get our political win out of it.

And a lot of people in the Democratic Party wanted to have a war with Iran, but they just didn't want to be paid as horrible cost as not going to be paid by Trump and the whole global economy as a result of that. They want someone else to do it. And so Trump just happened to be the Patsy for Netanyahu and for some of the Democrats and these people around me mentioned who was stupid enough to do it, to stupid enough to sacrifice presidency and enter this quagmire that U.S. presidents have resisted doing for over 30 years. And when we talk about the Democrats, I think it's also notable that when, you know, Iran has no incentive to negotiate with the United States or the Israelis any further because the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal that you just referenced, it being torn up immediately by Trump when he got into office in the first term meant that the Democratic Party actually retreated into a, position that was way more hawkish than Obama's even policy on that. Like to the to your point about where the Democrats are right now, Chuck Schumer, who was against the Iran deal, became the leader of the Democrats in the Senate. And the Israel lobby

for their money got even more powerful because the in a post-Obama world, not to say that Obama was antagonistic to Israel, but at the very at least this was not something that the Zionist lobby wanted, they kind of quadrupled down their efforts on the Democratic Party and were able to buy them as opposition and undercut them. And that's part of probably why we're in this position. Totally. I think it's a corruption and infiltration of the American political system. And it's not just me saying this, you saying this. You know, members of Congress are saying this.

Chris Murphy was saying it. Many other people are pointing out, Blumer, you know, many, you know, many. extreme news organizations are pointing out that the U.S. is sort of dogwalked into a war by the Israeli prime minister, by the prime minister of a foreign country, the manipulation of the people around him. People who are basically almost like acting as agents of Israel who are embedded in the U.S. government, Jared Kushner, Steve Whitcock, behaving in that manner. They were instrumental to engineering the circumstance. And so glaring this time, there's almost hard, it's a conspiracy to deny it at this time. That's supposed to be a conspiracy to say it's happening.

And I do remember the run-up to the Iraq war, and, you know, in retrospect, you was seen such a scandal and unprofessionalism and failures and deceit that led to the war. That was like a masterclass in professionalism and honesty compared to this. This is a parodic sort of, you know, reprise at that episode. They didn't even bother trying to get the American public on board with the Iran war. There's no sort of public campaign explaining to them. There's no campaign explaining to them now. no one's really prepping them for the possibility, as I laid out earlier,

they may have to invade Iran and huge numbers and take casualties and engage in the occupation of Iran for a period of time even. That all has not really happened. And I think that, you know, it's really sort of a sad sort of commentary on the state of American democracy. Because the people in power now feel that they can just act with impunity, they don't even have to talk to people about. They don't have to talk. They're treating the American public basically like subjects of a king or an impure. ruler. That's the way the Trump and the people, his courtiers around him or viziers around him

are acting. And, you know, I think that eventually what's going to force people to pay attention to this and not be very happy is when the economic pain starts hitting, which is going to be very, very soon. It's already started with gas prices and so forth. And, you know, gas prices is just one after you can fill in your car. The entire economy is sort of built on this substrat of transportation costs. Everything will go up, plane tickets, food, you name it. And I think a fertilizer. Yeah. Fertilizer.

Yeah. Fertilizing the Strait of home was one of the critical export points of fertilizer of the whole world. Also, you know, the whole AI data revolution, so forth, it relies on power and also helium and things like this for manufacturing of chips and running data centers. So the whole U.S. economy is built on AI, then what? And the whole U.S. economy, a lot of it's built on the investments from the Gulf

Arab countries, pushing money back into the U.S. at this point and these sort of tech investments and so forth, that's all going to dry out. then what happens? We're in a very, very dark situation, potentially, unless someone can think of a way out, which maybe would have to entail making some other very unsaved recombomizes. Absolutely. Actually, let's put up the Ilhan Omar thing, because we'll maybe play this later, but Chris Murphy said on MS now that Israel made us go into this war, which I think is a really interesting development, to see at least the Democrats that feel that they have a future in politics, as opposed to Chuck Schumer, understanding that politically that's the correct line.

But I was fascinated by this clip from DropSite from last week where your reporter, Julian, I'm so sorry, it starts with last name, Andrioni. Thank you. At DropSite, your colleague, asked Ilhan Omar this question about potentially compromising information on Donald Trump that the Israelis may have. Now, I'm open to this theory, but I'm actually curious about what you think about it because I think, you know, there are forces beyond simple blackmail that propel the United States into wars of aggression that we don't need to consider. But Ilhan Omar responded to this question and was not dismissive of it in a way that I thought was kind of interesting given the fact that she has more information than we're going to have in some of these briefings as it relates to Epstein and as it relates to, you know, wartime things. here is a question from Dropside about whether or not Trump is caught in an Israeli honeypot. There is to thrive on our backs. And then the last question is we've done a series reporting on Jeffrey Epstein's ties to intelligence agencies, namely the CIA and the Mossad. There was an Israeli spy named Yoni Korin,

who was basically directly under Ehud Barak, who's stating his New York City apartment for several periods of multiple weeks on end. He negotiated a back channel between Russia and Israel during the Syrian Civil War. I mean, this is geopolitical. And I'm wondering, whether you think there's any self-protection going on. We spoke about special interests, but do you think there's any self-protection going on related to those ties between Epstein and Israel and then what's coming with the FC Palestine?

Well, I call the Republicans the Perophile Protection Party and their chief in command is the president of the United States. Back to Russia Gate, we've always talked about what blackmail for the president looks like. There's always been talks about the fact that there are compromising photos somewhere out there. Maybe those compromising photos exist, either with the Russians or with Israelis. And I wouldn't put it past these spiesians to use, you know, honeypot has been used by Mossad, often very documented when it comes to their operations in Palestine, when it comes to

their operations in Lebanon, when it comes to their operations in Syria and in Jordan. So I wouldn't be surprised if one of those operations includes President Trump. Little wink and a nod at the camera. Is there any besides her and Rashida Taleb, a federally elected Democrat that is speaking so plainly about Israeli intelligence honeypots? I just give her credit for even acknowledging that reality because 99% of politicians won't. But the fact that she wasn't dismissive of the fact that Trump could be implicated here is

really interesting to me. Yeah, well, you know, we're all wondering what compelled this almost like suicidal decision for his presidency at the best of a foreign leader to do so much. And that's the theory which, you know, if you look at the chronology of the events of the war and so forth, it's kind of very much timed around these F-10 file disclosures and certain key depositions that are happening in the Epstein case. I've not to say that the war was launched for that reason per se. I don't have the evidence suggests that. But certainly it's being used conveniently to snowball and sort of like snow in, you could say, the public focus on that subject. I do wonder at this point, how bad could any photo or whatever of Trump be at this point to, you know, his supporters

don't care anyways. There's a lot of bad stuff in the files that have been released, you know, one way or another. What could it really be to force him do that? I don't really know. Another theory people have had is that maybe he's threatened. Maybe he didn't know, threaten him. or his family. I really don't know about that, to be honest. There's so much there. Trump is such a cipher. He's sort of someone who's very much, although he's decided in some ways, he's also very much susceptible to influence by the people around him, his court, you know, individuals, people around him in the White House and so forth. And they can use various forms of coercion and incentivization and manipulation, of which, you know, it could be some negative thing,

information about him. No one knows. It could be financial pressure. It could be major things. That's a problem with having sort of a corrupt government. When you have public officials are corrupt, they don't necessarily act in a way which is rational towards national interest. You don't have public servants. You have people who are acting on their own personal benefit. And I think the Trump is obviously an individual of this. He's an individual that's par excellence.

And it leads to these questions. So I would like to see if Illinois Omar has information about that or suggestions about that. I would hope that that will be close public in the future because I think the public needs to know, especially since they're killing and dying now in a foreign country for reasons which are to this day very unclear. Lastly, before we let you go, Mertaza, I just wanted to ask you about what the damage to Israel and some of the other deaths and injuries to U.S. troops, like what those numbers and what that damage actually looks like. You're not going to know fully. No one knows there's very strict censorship out of Israel about. Iranian missiles penetrating the Iron Dome, although we've had some unconfirmed footage come out of Israel, they could arrest you for publishing that.

I mean, we talk about Israel as a democracy, but they have, they're not letting Western reporters into Gaza, but Iran is letting Western reporters into their country to report on this, just to give people a sense. On Tuesday, the Pentagon kind of whispered 140 U.S. service members have been wounded, which was a lot higher than had been previously known. and kind of slowly them announcing the deaths of U.S. service members. What has, you know, drop site found and what is your view on what, like, the actual damage to both Israel and kind of U.S. forces and installations actually is? Well, since the start of the conflict, I've been getting messages from people who were connected to the military, military families, saying that there's a tremendous number of U.S. wounded in Germany and elsewhere have been evacuated. And, you know, I think the public disclosures about this have not really been very forthcoming. I think what they're trying to do is trip out this information, such that if you were to release information about a very large number of people injured or killed in the war right at the beginning, you might generate opposition to the war continuing right up front.

So I do think that deaths sometimes are a bit harder to conceal in the sense that people in the military families tend to talk to each other and these things get out. some deaths in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have been reported as medical conditions. People deployed them with diet and medical conditions without any other explanation. So that's the way you can also push the data a little bit. And then the wounded, you know, you mentioned there was a stark disclosure by Reuters earlier this week, about 150 wounded in that attack in Kuwait. That's a lot of people, and some number of them are apparently serious. People who could still pass away.

So this is only the early phases of the war. And the war is not really, nothing has been settled. by any means at this point. So Trump has been saying you expect the numbers to rise, so that could Jesse maybe have more plans for rescuing the conflict. It's not to say at the moment. In regards to Israel, you know, it's very important

that during the 2025 war, the last war, within Iran and Israel, there were this huge number of videos that came out of Israel, of ballistic missiles, striking targets to Israel. In some cases, doing very devastating damage, destroying whole city blocks, huge military building, security buildings,

in Tel Aviv were hit. And I think this, they would not like to reprise that, you know, information disclosure. They don't want the situation again where people are looking at those videos, assessing the damage and, you know, extracting political insights from that or even intelligence insights. This time they're making very much a lock and key. But you get some hints of what's going on there,

because as you can see, the recorded Israeli press, the numbers of property damage claims, people fairly wounded in attacks and so forth. I don't think we really know at all, but it doesn't sound very good. And secondly, it's a very, very important detail we have gotten from Israel is that because of the Iranian destruction of many of the sensors in America's integrated missile defense system in the region, those sensors are supposed to give people in Israel advance warning for when missiles are coming.

So you should get like 10, 15 minutes of warning. Now you're getting like two minutes, or you're not even getting a warning sometimes. the missile is just hitting. So that shows you the centers are degrading a lot. And they're being struck more often and more harshly. And, you know, last night on Wednesday, the Hezbollah and Iran launched an integrated shared attack on Israel. Hezbo launched many, many missiles from Lebanon,

while Iran's launching from Iran, they're coordinating each other. That's meant to overwhelm the system, such as whatever exists today. And I think the operation is still ongoing as well, too. We've been told that drops that they reported this, that the Iranians plan to focus more on hitting Israel in the future and not the Gulf states. So, you know, one can... Well, due to their success, due to their success, that's, I mean, because the hypothesis

had been the drone attacks, you're going to get more bang for your buck, for lack of a better phrase, attacking the gold states, and then you can put pressure on the U.S. that way. But is that kind of the assessment now? Is that the missile attacks have been effective enough that they're going to continue? Well, on Israel? We sort of lean from this, and it kind of makes sense according to the strategy, is that the initial waves and missiles were not meant to hit anything. They're meant to exhaust the missile interceptors.

So they fired that lower end, older missiles at Israel during that time, just to kind of, you know, drain that down a little bit. They're saving the good missiles for when the defenses are down. And that's when they're firing, that's what they said publicly and reporters, well, too. They're saving those missiles in eastern Iran and the missile basis, which haven't really been hit, to hit Israel when the defense is a weaker, and then they can extract a lot of damage. So really every missile fire now is an investment on a larger attack expected to come later. So that's actually what I agree with, recently whether the Israelis and the Americans would like to end the war, too, because leaving aside all the economic consequences I mentioned, their situation starts looking very unenegovable the longer the war goes on. And you, America and Israel, their militaries are designed to fight short, quick, decisive, brutal wars.

They're not meant to fight long wars and attrition. Iran's military is meant to fight a war of attrition. So their advantages militarily start to accrue the longer the war goes on. And there's an example of this from the Iran-Iraq War. The Iranians fought an eight-year war with Iraq. A million people died in that war. Many of the leaders of the country are veterans of that war. So what's going on right now is not really the worst thing that's ever happened in that per se.

They've been to do things like this, worse things in the past. Whereas for the U.S. and Israel, they don't really have any desire or capacity to fight a conflict that would disrupt the Israeli economy. We have mentioned all the reasons they'll be very destructive in America. they don't really want to conflict like that. So, you know, we have sort of a misalignment of expectations there. The one thing is how much punishment are the Iranians willing to take? And it seems like they're willing to take a lot because their view is that if they just,

you know, tap out today, what's going to happen is that the U.S. Israel are going to rearm themselves and six months to be back hitting them again with the advantage again. Better to just do it all now. Bite the bullet, accept that we're going to take a lot of suffering now, but hit them nonstop, keep going for months, years, whatever it takes. to gain the advantage, at the end of which you may be in a very, very different situation. So I think that's the situation. And the missile receptors are basically exhausting at the point that myself and others

expected them to exhaust in the war. And the war will get a lot more painful for the Gulf Arab state and for Israel, should the Iranians continue to fire. Murtaza Hussein, a reporter covering national security and foreign affairs at DropSight News. I mean, one of the best in the business right now. Can thank you enough for your work. Really appreciate your time today. Thank you.

With that, folks, we're going to wrap up the free part of this show and head into the fun half. We will read your IMs. We'll probably take your calls. We'll see how it goes. Matt, what's happening on the Jacobin Show and with Left Reckoning? Yeah, a great left reckoning earlier this week. Tomorrow on the Jacobin Show, Ida Elam, the Refusnik from Israel, will give us a update on what it's like being anti-war in Israel in this current moment.

It's going to record that with David soon. Siren permitting. And also Kurt Hackworth and Holtus, Luis Granada Seha, I believe, will be talking about Shinebaum's debt relief and other stuff that's going on with our neighbors south of the border. So check

that out tomorrow. New time at 3 o'clock p.m. Eastern time Jacobin Show will be on after a little bit after majority report. So check that out. Check that out. And also today, it's all right.

Also today, I'm going to be on the bituation room with Francesca Furentini. We did sell out the live show that is in, you know, a week and a half in L.A. But if you want to watch it, you can become a member at not join the majority report.com, but you can become a patron of the bituation room. But I'm going to probably be doing Francesca's show like once a month going forward, just because we like to chat. We like to enjoy our time together. So I'll be on today this afternoon pretty shortly after this show wraps.

Hello, Brandon. Hello. How are you today? I'm doing wonderfully. How are you doing? I am doing well. What's happening on the discourse? Well, a lot of things are happening on the discourse.

Before I tell you, I just want to say that yesterday was my mother's birthday. So happy birthday, Mom. Oh, happy birthday, Brandon's mom. That's very wholesome of you. The mama of the country. Exactly. She may not be the mama of the country, but she's the mama of my heart and also me, literally. That being said, over on the discourse, we are, I mean, we stream every morning between 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. Eastern.

So head over to the discourse with Brandon over on YouTube. We should have some more clips out today. We've been following, I don't know if you've been following the Jimmy Door, Alex Jones debate. I have not. No. So, yeah, I mean, we've been following that. We've also been covering the UK's attempt to get rid of jury trials for a certain subsect of cases there. So, you know, check out the discourse over on YouTube over on Twitch.

Use your third eye, remote view it, whatever you want to do. All right. Do it, folks. We'll have been here soon. We are going to head into the fun half. Join the majority report.com, just coffee.coop. you know the drill. See you in the fun half. Okay, Emma, please. Well, I just, I feel that my voice is sorely lacking on the majority report.

Wait, what? Look, Sam is unpopular. I do deserve a vacation at Disney World. So, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to welcome Emma to the show. It is Thursday. I think you need to take over for Sam. Yes, please. Sir, I'm going to pause you right there.

Wait, what? You can't encourage Emma to live like this. And I'll tell you why. So it's offered a twerk, sushi, and poker with the boys. Twerp, sushi and sushi and poker. That's what we call bids. Twerp, sushi. And I just think that what you did to Tim Poole was mean.

Free speech. That's not what we're about here. Look at how sad he's become now. You shouldn't even talk about it because I think you're responsible. I probably am in a certain way, but let's get to the meltdown here. Twirp. Ugh. Sushi and poker with the boys.

Oh my God. Wow. Sushi. I'm sorry. I'm losing my fucking mind. So it's offered a twir? Yeah. Sushi and poker with the boys.

Logic. Twerk. Suci and poker with the boys. Boy, boy. I think I'm like a little kid. A little kid. I think I'm like a kid. Twer.

People just don't understand. So I'm not trying to be a dick right now, but like, I absolutely think the U.S. should be providing me with a wife and kids. That's not what we're. talking about here. It's not a fun job. It's a real thing. That's a real thing. That's a real thing.

That's a real thing. Sam has like the weight of the world on the shoulders. It was so much easier. One of the majority of report was just you. You were happy. Let's change the subject. You're doing great. Now, shut up.

Don't want people saying reckless things on your program. That's one of the most difficult parts about this show. This is a pro-killing podcast. I'm thinking maybe it's kind of with very. the hatchet left his best Violet twer Incredible theme song I Bumblr

Emma Viglin Absolutely one of my favorite people Actually not just in the game Like period