The Tucker Carlson Show - War Update: Israel’s True Motives, Potential False Flags, and Oncoming Global Crisis

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

Could this be a religious war designed to rebuild the Third Temple on the ashes of Al Aqsa? Hope not. Paid partnerships with: American Financing: NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org.   APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.196% for well qualified borrowers. Call 800-685-5696 for details about credit costs and terms.  Visit http://www.AmericanFinancing.net/Tucker. Dutch: Get $50 a year for vet care with Tucker50 at https://dutch.com/tucker TCN: Watch ‘The Great Gold Scam’ for a limited time only on https://tuckercarlson.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's a safe bet that almost no one involved in the war now ongoing in Iran and the Gulf would like to see it continue much longer if you were to poll, well, the Iranians or the Americans, basically anybody. How long do you want this to go? Very few people would say, I want it to go a long time. But that doesn't mean it won't go a long time. Unfortunately, it is likely to. It's unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.

Of course, that could prove to be untrue. You never know. It's an utterly dynamic situation. But big picture, there are still a couple of unresolved questions that this war may resolve. This war may be the only thing that resolves them. And so until there's a consensus on the answers to those questions, it probably is going to continue. What are those questions? Well, the first is geopolitical, and it's the biggest question of all, which is who runs the world,

who gets to make the decisions, not simply who's richest, but who makes the rules, who sets the terms. And for most of our lifetimes, there has been no question about that. the answer has been the United States. The United States sets the rules. The United States runs the world. That's been true in the western half of the world since 1945, when the U.S. emerged stronger and richer than any other nation after the end of World War II. And it's been true since August of 1991, 35 years ago, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The United States has reigned in a unipolar world. That's what they call. There's just one pole. There's one center of gravity. There's one power center. And that's been the United States.

But that has changed over the past several years, maybe decades, certainly since China was admitted into the WTO in 2001. Now it is a multipolar world. You've heard that phrase, no doubt. And that means there are a couple, at least a couple, centers of gravity. Really, there are two. There's the U.S. and the constellation of states with which it's allied. And then there is on the eastern hemisphere of the globe, China.

And China is now a peer with the United States, at least, almost no matter how you measure it, population, of course, much bigger. Military power, well, we're not quite sure, but certainly from a technological and industrial output standpoint, at least a peer. And then on a pure economic level, well, China has a bigger economy, a bigger real economy than the United States. So, yes, China is a peer. And so the question is, since you now have two countries that are roughly evenly matched,

we think we never do know until they come into conflict, but they seem roughly evenly matched, who gets to set the terms for commerce and diplomacy and everything else that happens on the globe? Well, if you were to reach a diplomatic solution, there would be, in effect, a power sharing agreement between these two countries. You take the east, I take the west, here are the terms. But unfortunately, no such agreement formal or informal has been reached for a bunch of reasons. It's everybody's fault. But one of the reasons is almost nobody in Washington can get his head around the current, present, obvious reality, which is, no, we don't run everything anymore.

We are in competition, not necessarily in conflict, but in competition with this other country that's at least as powerful as we are called China, different system, language, culture, et cetera, but at least every bit is powerful. And so you can't make unilateral decisions anymore. It's sort of that moment that many parents face when used to Barking orders that their kids, they realize the kid is taller than them. And like, it's a new relationship in some ways. You're always the parent, but you can't just bark orders anymore. That's pretty much where we are with China. Or maybe it will pass that, actually. And what we've noticed over the past several years

is the total unwillingness, the inflexibility of Washington policymakers to just acknowledge the reality. And instead, even as we speak, there's probably some symposium underway in Washington about what will we do if China invades Taiwan? Well, of course, from China's perspective, Taiwan is part of China. It's just sort of run off for the past 75 years, but it's still part of China. That's their view. And the United States, of course, isn't in a position to stop the reclamation of Taiwan. Let's stop lying.

And yet only in D.C. is that not obvious, which is to say people in Washington are still acting like they're running everything unopposed, but they're not. And the rest of the world is looking on and thinking at some point, you got to knock it off and face reality. Now, there are a lot of people in the United States, me included, who would like to live in a unipolar world. It's way less fun to be constrained, to have to come to terms with another country before you make a decision. No one wants to do that. No one wants to be challenged. But again, it's sort of not up to us or anyone the moment that you live in.

You're not in charge of reality, actually. And so this is the reality we live in. And the question is, are we going to come to terms with it in a reasonable way, or are we going to be forced through use of arms to face that reality? And it looks increasingly like the latter. Unfortunately, that is not the way to settle matters like this because you can emerge greatly diminished from those contests and find yourself in a much weaker negotiating position. Better negotiate while you're strong than when you're weak. Our leaders weren't wise or far-sighted enough to do that. Seized by hubris, they were dictating terms like Baghdad Bob.

It's sad, actually, no reason to laugh about it. But that is one of the questions now being decided in Iran. Why Iran? Well, because these questions are always decided by proxy. No two great powers want to go to war with each other. Of course, especially in the nuclear age because that could mean simultaneous elimination, and no one wants that. at least consciously. And so typically these things play out in third countries, like Vietnam famously or Afghanistan

for both the Soviets and the United States or Korea and now Iran, Iran, which is part of alliance that includes the other big powers, Russia and China. So they may not be explicitly weighing in, which is to say they're not fighting alongside the Iranians yet, but they're certainly on Iran's side and they're certainly helping in a multitude of ways, one expects, and a lot for them rides on the outcome. And because it does, makes it harder to settle this thing. So that's the geopolitical, very obvious overlay here. That's why this is not just a debate about whether the Ayatollah has nuclear weapons. Stop. It's much bigger than that and much more serious than that. And the consequences are much more

profound than that. So that's the first. But there is another layer that most Americans are not aware of, but much of the rest of the world is highly aware of. And that is a religious layer. Now, Lindsey Graham is on tape saying to a gaggle of reporters, his bloodshot eyes, his puffy face, God knows what he's been doing, saying explicitly, this is a religious war. This is a religious war. Now, his motive in saying that, you know, he's not here to answer the question, we can only guess. Is he trying to foment a religious war? Probably. He's an end times kind of guy. But it almost doesn't matter. He's telling the truth for once. This is a religious war, fundamentally. And that is not obvious to most Americans because this is the most secular society, not just the United States, but the West, the English-speaking world, Europe and the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, in history.

There's never been a more godless, to be blunt about it, a more secular society at scale. Never. Nothing approaching this has ever happened ever. Every society is fundamentally a religious society, explicitly religious except ours. So we lack the terms to describe what we're seeing and we lack the imagination to think about it. And, well, to quote Jesus, we have the eyes, but we cannot see. We don't see what's happening around us, but the rest of the world very much does see. So you often hear people talk about the Middle East crisis and they usually mean energy. You know, people want the oil, the gas. But traditionally, when people have talked about the Middle East, they're talking about Jerusalem. We're talking about the holiest spot on

earth. Let's be a lot more specific when we say the holiest spot on earth. The holiest spot on earth is something called the foundation stone. The foundation stone is literally a rock in Jerusalem, on what used to be called Mount Moriah, which was at one point the highest place in the oldest part of Jerusalem. And it's on that spot, on that rock, on that stone, that Jews believe the world began, that the Old Testament or the Jewish Torah tells us that Abraham brought Isaac bound to be sacrificed to God. It's on that spot that Muslims believe that the Prophet Muhammad ascended into heaven. And of course, it's right nearby that Christians believe Jesus was crucified and then rose to heaven. So on that spot or right nearby, a lot has happened,

but critically on that spot, because it was the place where Abraham brought Isaac, and again, to American ears, this sounds weird, but to the rest of the world, it's like, yeah, everyone knows this because it's the center of their lives. On that spot, Solomon built his famous temple. Now, in the Torah, it says pretty clearly, and Correct me if I'm misreading it, that Jews, followers of God, can only publicly worship God and sacrifice on that spot. In that city, Jerusalem, on that spot. And on that spot was built a temple, the first temple. Now that was destroyed by Babylonians, famously.

And then it was rebuilt and later improved by Herod. And it was at its completion, I think, the largest building, certainly the largest religious building in the ancient world. And it was in that building that Jesus preached in what we call the second temple that Jesus preached, the very center of Judaism, building without which you can't really have toward Judaism. The religion just sort of didn't work without it by its own terms. In its own book, it said that. And during one of his sermons in that sermon, Jesus, who Christians believe is God sent to earth, says, this will be torn down.

Not one stone will be left standing. And it was shortly after that that he was put on trial in the middle of the night and tortured to death, crucified. As it happened, so that's the religion. Here's the history. About 35 years later, 37 years later in that range, in 70 AD, Titus, the emperor, the Roman Empire of the Roman Empire, got into quite a conflict with the Jews of Judea. in Jerusalem. And it's complex and incredibly brutal, but the bottom line was in AD 70, the Romans besieged Jerusalem, finally broke through the walls, and tore that temple stone from stone, not a single stone left upon another. Really a kind of dedication to destruction that's hard for the modern

mind to imagine. We talk about genocide, this, genocide that the Romans tried to genocide. side the Jews for real. And they succeeded in destroying the temple. And with it, temple Judaism. Tora Judaism. You can't have the religion that existed before AD 70, after 8070, because there's no temple. And so this has been an open wound for 2,000 years and certainly understandably. people have wanted to rebuild the temple, to build what they call the third temple. To reestablish this religion at its birthplace, there are a couple problems with this. One, exactly 500 years after Titus destroyed the temple in AD 70, in 8570, a man called Muhammad was born in Mecca and built one of the world's great religions, the world's second, largest religion, as it stands today, in a very

short period. His name was Muhammad. He was born in Mecca. He died in nearby Medina. But in the meantime, he built or inspired the building of within 50 years of his death, one of the great religious monuments in the world, certainly one of the prettiest, called the Dome of the Rock. And it's in Jerusalem on Mariah, in fact, built over the foundation stone. And if you've ever been to Jerusalem, or if you've ever seen photographs of it, you will remember vividly a gold dome. It's called the Dome of the Rock. Why is it called that? Because there's a rock underneath it, the foundation stone.

That is built on the site of the Second Temple. And that's within what's known as the Al-Alexa complex. There's a mosque next door called the Al-A-Mosk. And that spot is one of three holy places, apparently co-equal holy places, in Islam. Mecca, Medina, Dome of the Rock, Al-Axa. So that is at the very center of Judaism, I mean, physically the center of Judaism, that spot, that exact spot over the foundation stone, and Islam. And it has been occupied by a mosque. A mosque has been sitting there since the 7th century, since the late 600s.

Amazing. You may be dimly aware of this. Now, why go on at length about this? because now is the moment right now, like this week, is the moment that some people, not a huge number. Most people, Christians, Jews, Muslims are not fully aware of all this, but some people are highly aware of it and would like to begin the process of tearing down the dome of the rock, tearing down Alaksa Mosque and rebuilding the third temple. Now, there are a lot of things to say about this about its likelihood, the potential effects of it. But first, just a quick side note on the theology of this from a Christian point of view. Now, it was Jesus who said this temple will be torn down, shocking everyone around to me,

if it's in the Gospels, it's in at least a couple of the Gospels. And the people heard it just couldn't believe it. And, of course, the people running the temple, the Pharisees and the Sadducees were gravely offended by it. why wouldn't they be? But then it happened. Less than 40 years later, it actually happened. He was right. He called it. And so from a Christian perspective, he did that. God called for the structure of the temple. And as Jesus says plainly in the Gospels, I'm the temple. I'm the temple now. The temple will be rebuilt after three days. When I'm resurrected, I am the new temple. Says that. But there has been at least one attempt in the last two,

thousand years to rebuild a physical third temple. And it happened in the fourth century. And it happened without getting too far afield shortly after the death of Constantino. Constantine was the fourth century Roman emperor who converted to Christianity and very famously turned the Roman Empire Christian, thereby spreading Christianity basically instantly across the west where it's remained, more or less, ever since. That was in the 300th of the fourth century. Now, his next, became emperor, not long after he died, and his name was Julian, referred to very often by Christian historians as Julian the apostate. And he was an apostate. He was the last non-Christian emperor of Rome, of the Roman Empire. And he had been born a Christian apparently, but he was a fairly

enthusiastic pagan, polytheist, and very aggressively opposed to Christianity. And for that reason, He decided, Julian the apostate decided in 363 to rebuild the third temple. So it has been tried for those who were thinking, could this ever happen? Oh, it happened. They tried to rebuild. He spent a ton of money doing it in 363. Inflation makes credit card statements particularly scary. You work 40, 50 hours a week just to buy groceries and gas, things you used to be able to

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outstanding offer. And if you don't feel like ordering online, you can buy them nationwide. your local Sprout supermarket. Stop by and pick up a couple of bags before somebody else does. Home loans. What happened next? Well, let's read the account of the only attempt ever made at rebuilding the Third Temple. And this comes from a personal friend of Julian the Apostates who wrote it contemporaneously. And we still have it amazingly all these years later.

I'm quoting. Julian thought to rebuild at an extravagant expense the proud temple once at Jerusalem. Jerusalem and committed this task to Olympias of Antioch. Olympia set vigorously to work and was seconded by a governor of the province when fearful balls of fire breaking out near the foundations of the building continued their attacks till the workmen after repeated scorchings could approach no more. And he gave up the attempt. By the way, just a few months later, Julian, Emperor Julian the apostate was killed.

You know what he was killed doing? invading Iran. Literally invading Iran in 363. Yeah, he was killed doing that. So it was during his invasion of Iran that he decided to rebuild the temple. You can't make this up. And we're not making up Israel. And by the way, there was an earthquake at the same time.

There are many accounts of what happened when they tried to rebuild it. And all of them described the earth rending and flames coming out. It all sounds kind of spooky and supernatural. like it's just too perfect, right? Jesus tears down the temple and begins this new relationship with God directly through him. No need for a building anymore in Jerusalem. A city he went out of his way not to spend the night in, walk over to the Mount of Olives, even after the last supper, but whatever.

And there's this one attempt by a guy who hates Christianity to rebuild the third temple. And by the way, the workmen get burned to by fire from the ground at an earthquake. And you can sort of laugh at that if you're a rationalist and materialist, a modern man until archaeologists discovered that actually there was a big earthquake in the region, Galilee to Jerusalem in 363. So that actually happened. In any case, why the long history lesson? Because it's not history anymore. It's happening right now. There are key players involved in this war, the one happening tonight, who believe that what we're seeing on our television screens and on Twitter will usher in. a series of events that begin with the destruction of the dome and the rock,

Oxa Mosque, and then the rebuilding of the Third Temple after which the world will end. God will come back. And they mean it. And by they, we mean literally some of the guys fighting the war. So you may have read reports today that commanders in the field of American troops, a lot of them, and who knows that this is true, but it's out there. there, told their troops on the eve of the outbreak of this war that were doing this for Jesus because it is Jesus' will that we do this and that by doing it, we will usher in a series of

events that bring about the end of history, the end of time, Armageddon, the last days. It's hard to believe that's true, especially since, by the way, there are a million Christians in Iran. so if you were doing this for Jesus, presumably you would go out of your way not to hurt his followers in the country you're attacking. Did the U.S. government or any government make any attempt to spare the Christians? Are we making an attempt tonight? Of course, we're not. And of course, when the smoke clears, ultimately, we will find out just to guess that Christians suffered disproportionately in this as they do all wars.

From the Iraq War to the bombing of Nagasaki, the seat of the Christian church in Japan, etc., etc. Christians have a way of dying disproportionately in these wars, which tells you something about their real motive. But in any case, there was a spade of stories suggesting that U.S. commanders told their troops they were doing this for some weird anti-Christian reason posing as Christianity. But it's not just the U.S. side. Here's an IDF soldier, apparently an American by his accent, describing why he's at war. Watch this. They call this operation the swords of iron. but what are we really fighting for?

We're fighting for the right of the Jewish people to exist, be Jewish, practice the religion, and be free. And one day our true leader will come and will be united as a whole Jewish nation so we can rebuild the Betama McDash. Bedham McDosh, probably mispronouncing it. That's the Hebrew term for the temple, the third temple.

We are doing this so we can rebuild. the temple. Now, you'll notice he's pulling off patches on Velcro on his IDF uniform. These are not civilian clothes. This is the uniform of the government of Israel, of its military. And he has patches on that uniform, one of which is a symbol of the temple, the third temple. So it just couldn't be clear. Why are we doing this to rebuild the third temple? Now, if you think we're just cherry picking this off the internet, one guy wearing an unauthorized temple patch paid for, by the way, a uniform paid by us, armaments paid for by us. The U.S. taxpayer pays for all this stuff one way or another. The U.S. taxpayer pays for the military of Israel. Boy, does it.

If you think we're being unfair and just, like, found one guy, well, here's a bunch of guys. It took us about two minutes on the internet to find this today. Here is a selection of IDF soldiers. Let's put it on the screen. There you go. And all of them have the same patch. Look for many, look carefully at that. What is that? That's the temple. That is the third temple. And we'll get to a minute, in a minute, about how this might actually happen and what it would mean for the rest of the world. And just to be clear, these are conversations that most Americans, certainly me included, never wanted to have. Everybody's religious beliefs, sincere religious beliefs, when held up to the light of the rational world, to the man-made world, seem a little spooky and crazy,

which is one of the reasons that in the culture some of us grew up in, we don't talk about them in public because they're personal. They're the most personal part of a person. So it is without judgment, by the way, that we're airing this, okay? Just describing it because it is significant to the future of the world, to the future of this war and to our future as Americans. So how exactly did the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, a military that the U.S. taxpayer pays for that lots of wealthy Americans send money to to friends of the IDF? How did all these guys wind up wearing patches suggesting the point of this war was the destruction of one of the holiest places in Islam and the rebuilding of a temple that is,

totally anathema to Christianity. Like, how did this happen? Well, there are a lot of ways it happened. The main way it happened is because no one in the United States noticed because it's such a secular place. And as noted, we have eyes but can't see in ears and can't hear. But this has been going on a long time in public through, in part, the efforts of a group called Habab, C-H-A-B-A-D.

And you may know people who give money to B-B-D or run to B-B-B-A-S-E-E-E-B-E-E. Engaged in all kinds of charitable activities, drug-rehearts. have, you know, there's a lot about Habad that's really good. But what is Hibabad exactly? Well, Hobad, you can look it up, is a very old organization, about 250 years old, and it's a branch of Hasidic Judaism. It's an organization that was overseen for many years by a guy called Rabbi Monacham-Schnearsen, who was famously in Brooklyn, considered the Messiah by some of his followers, who was a friend of presidents or certainly someone presidents visits. It's a very powerful man in the Orthodox and the Hasidic community. And he was the overseer.

of Habbat, which predated him and outlasted him, but he was its most visible ambassador. And Habad has been pushing in a pretty subtle way, unless you look carefully, for the reconstruction of the third temple. And it seems like from the reading we did recently that those patches actually came from Habbat. In any case, Habbat is pushing for the building of the third temple. but it's not just Hasidic groups from Brooklyn, and it's not just IDF soldiers. There are amazingly a lot of American evangelical leaders, Christian Zionists, whose main point is rebuilding the Third Temple.

Now, how could an American Christian or any Christian call for the building of a temple whose presence, whose inherent presence, denies Christ? who said clearly, and Christians believe this, it's a core point of faith. I am the temple. You want to speak to God? You speak through me. That's Christianity. That's the whole religion right there. So if you're a Christian preacher calling for the rebuilding of the third temple,

you kind of missed the whole point. That's more than apostasy. That's like not even knowing what the religion's about. So it's hard to believe there could be any ordained Christian leaders pushing for the rebuilding of the third temple. Oh, but there are a lot. There are a lot. And here's just one. This is Pastor Greg Locke. Listen to this. The Gaza strip, which has now been cut off by Israel, and rightly so, they should have cut them off a long time ago.

I don't care how insensitive you think I am to that. There's six doors in this church you can leave any time you want to. They've cut them off, you know, electricity, they've cut off their water. They should have. Now, listen, I'm not for hurting anyone that's innocent, but anybody that supports terrorism is, not innocent. You can stand out. Israel should make the Gaza strip a parking lot by this time next week. Destroy the whole thing. What they ought to do is evacuate up there on the hill and get a great big missile and blow that wicked dome of the rock plumb off of the spot where it's standing right now so we can get that third temple rebuilt and us you're in the coming of Jesus.

Boy, it is embarrassing and shameful as an American Christian to hear that and to know that videos from a few years ago. It's been on the internet. No one bothered to highlight it. Most people weren't even aware this was going on. Oh, it's definitely going on. These are very common views. Seems obvious that Mike Huckabee has them. That a lot of the Christians, I mean, is John Hagee.

Do you think just like Israel? They just like Israel a lot. No. These are clerics. So their lives were informed by their religious views. What are their religious views? Well, you just heard it right there from Pastor Locke, who's quite a prominent Christian Zionist. He's not some lone wacko.

And there he is with an Israeli flag waving behind him, casual calls for genocidal violence. Just blow it up, make it a parking lot. Well, 2 million people live there. What happens to them? They're terrorist sympathizers. That right there is the tell. This is not Christianity. Imagine Jesus saying, just kill them all.

They're terrorists. Is there anything in the gospel that suggests Jesus believe that? No, there's a lot to suggest, in fact, to tell us in very clear terms, he thought the opposite. Of course. But the last part, let's build the third temple and bring about the return of Jesus is a direct contradiction of core Christian theology. And even people without theology degrees who didn't go to some eminent Bible college can tell you what? Jesus says, I am the temple. That is not Christianity.

It's not even a close facsimile of Christianity. It's clearly evil. And it is, in some sense, the driving force behind the efforts to rebuild the third temple. Julian the apostate, who was the last guy to try it, who died invading Iran, he was not Jewish. He was a pagan, just like Pastor Locke. But for some reason, he was the instrument of trying to do this. There are many of these people, and not just in the theological realm, in the political realm. And that's relevant to you, whether you believe in God or not, or interested in the history, the Abrahamic faiths or not.

Global leaders believe this. People you wouldn't expect, and you wonder, what is going on here? It's not to make the hair in your arms go up. Did everyone know there was an effort to rebuild the third temple and the foundation stone except me? I can't believe I was left out of this conversation. No, all of us took place in public. And if we'd been paying attention or been tuned into that frequency, the spiritual frequency, we've been spiritually sensitive enough to pay attention.

We would have known this. But of course, when you grew up in a materialist culture, when the only things you believe are real are the things that can be measured or purchased on Amazon, you tend to miss a lot. And we miss this. Here's the president of Argentina, Javier Miele, who we know personally, at the Western Wall, which is believed by some to be a remnant of the Second Temple, the last stone from the second temple, that's the claim. Here he is there, the famous wailing wall, saying this, watch the subtitles.

There's a prophecy about the destruction that relata that a sorro, there's a prophecy about the desertion. that says that a fox will break into the holiest of holies. There is another prophecy that relata that this same place will be rebuilt. There is another prophecy that says that the same place will be rebuilt. Now that I see with my own eyes, I'm going to be the first prophecy come true.

I'm rio of joy and hope, so that, of sure, it will be sure, it will be a second prophecy. in joy and full of hope as the second prophecy will surely come true. So a correction, that doesn't appear to be the Western Wall, and there were no subtitles. You heard him say it through his translator. I laugh and quiver with joy when I think about the third temple being rebuilt. Now, this is the supposedly, maybe, who knows, Catholic president of an overwhelmingly Catholic country, South American country, wonderful country, Argentina, who got a laugh.

and was presented to American news consumers as a libertarian economist who was going to fix their debt problem and get rid of inflation and just make life better for Argentines. And there he is in Jerusalem saying that he's weeping with joy, thinking about the return, the rebuilding of the Third Temple. What the hell is that? You would think that would not even be on his to-do list. If you're running a country as complex and damaged as Argentina and as promising in great, is Argentina, but like there's a lot of things you got to do in Argentina if you're running it. But you take time to fight to Israel and say the thing you really want in life is the rebuilding of the third temple? What is going on here? And why haven't we talked about this before?

Say, before we invaded Iran with troops who say out loud we're doing this to bring about the creation of the third temple. Why weren't the rest of us informed? Now here's a piece of tape you may have seen and that I personally don't want to play since I know the guy and I like him. But it does make you wonder. So this is the current Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, former Fox News employee. Nice man. Very nice man. In 2018, in Jerusalem. And as someone who knew him well, I can tell you, I had no idea that he had such evolved and specific and apparently very informed opinions on rebuilding the third temple of all questions. This is not something they teach you in Sunday school

in the Presbyterian Church. This is not something that people talk about at dinner in the United States. This is not something our Congress ever mentions that the president ever talks about. This is considered so esoteric and weird and crypto-historical and religious and kind of culty and what's Habbat

and no one ever mentions it. But here's Pete Heggseth. football player from Princeton going on about it in a way that suggests he's thought a lot about it. This is 2018. Today, Jennifer and I and others had a chance to go see the western wall of the Temple Mount, the western wall tunnels, so much of the old city. And as you stand there, you can't help but behold the miracle before you. And it got me thinking about another miracle that I hope all of you don't see too far away.

Because 1917 was a miracle. 1948 was a miracle 1967 was a miracle 2017 the declaration of Jerusalem of the capital was a miracle and there's no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the temple on the temple mount is not possible

I don't know how it would happen you don't know how it would happen but I know that it could happen what is that that's the secretary of war right now overseeing the war with Iran, that people fighting it are starting to say actually is about rebuilding this third temple.

It's the same man. Okay. This is the point where you begin to think, maybe we should have talked about this and its implications. And what are its implications? Religious war, global religious war. So the first heavily publicized move by the United States military and the United States, the Israeli military in this conflict was to kill the head of state of Iran, the 86-year-old

Aitola Aitola Kamenei, who was replaced today by his son, who's apparently more anti-Western than he was, so I guess, strictly speaking, that wasn't very effective. But if you take three steps back, and no one did, because everyone's busy denouncing him as Hitler and the most evil man in the world, and we're so grateful he's dead, what was the last time the United States military or the Israeli working in conjunction with the Israeli military killed the head of a world's religion. Is that wise? It's not because we agree with all world's religions. It's not an endorsement of Shia Islam to say maybe we should pause before killing

its 86-year-old leader. It is instead an acknowledgement that that might have consequences that affect the United States and Europe and the world, but particularly the United States since we are the United States and we have children and hope to have grandchildren and what will be the downstream effects for them when you kill a religious leader. Did killing the religious leader cripple their command and control structure? Were they unable to launch missiles and drones when we killed the 86 year old Ayatollah? No, because he knew he was going to be killed. That's why he stayed above ground apparently. He wanted to be martyred. Now, why would he want to be martyred?

Maybe because he wanted a religious war. Why did we kill him? Maybe because we wanted a religious war. Now, why would we want that? Why would the Israelis who got us into this war, everyone admits that now, sorry, why would they want that? I don't know. Think about what would happen if this war leads to the destruction of the Dome on the Rock and the Alexa Complex on Mount Moriah and Jerusalem, and we'll explain in a second how that could happen, a war that began with the killing of the head of Shia Islam, what would happen?

Well, here are the numbers. There are about 15 and a half million Jews in the world, total. They're about 2.5 billion Christians, and there are about 2 billion Muslims. So whatever happens next is not going to be a fight between the Muslims and the Jews, because 2 billion versus 15 million. not much of a fight. This is likely to be, if not brought under control immediately, or maybe it's too late, a war, a religious war, the one that Lindsay Graham just described between Muslims and Christians.

And it's not going to play out in the Middle East because this is a regional conflict, but as noted at the beginning, it's a global conflict where every big power has a stake in what happens. This will play out globally, and it'll play out in our cities. Islam is the fastest growing religion in the United States. They're not that many Muslims in the United States, what, 5 million or something like that? But it's the fastest growing religion. That's enough to cause problems for sure in Europe. 65 million Muslims, second biggest religion in every European country.

Fastest growing in every country. Australia, same thing. Second biggest, fastest growing. New Zealand, same thing. second biggest, fastest growing. Canada, same thing. What happens in all those countries? Those Christian, Western, white countries. What happens there?

If there's the religious war that Lindsay Graham and clearly the Israeli government and some in our government are hoping for, what happens? Those countries suffer more than they have suffered. And so it's possible that the real target here, it's just possible, it's throwing this out there.

is not the mullahs in Iran. It's us, as it always has been. But don't take our word for it. Here's a particularly candid and honestly kind of articulate clip from a couple of years ago. This is from August of 2024 from an Israeli rabbi, Joseph Misrak, describing how Israel should take advantage of a then-ongoing conflict with Iran, much less than-towing conflict with Iran, much less intense in the current conflict we're seeing with Iran, to destroy the dome of the rock and Al-Axa.

Watch this. If it was up to me, the last time when they shot hundreds of missiles, I would pretend that one missile came from Iran and shoot it down. You know, then all the Arabs will go against Iran. There will be the end of the problems. You make them fight with each other, this bunch of lunatics.

Never too late. deal with a bunch of cowards. Shoot it down into the dome of the rock in Al-Oxha. Destroy what's on what the Israelis call the Temple Mount on the foundations. Don't destroy it

and blame the Iranians. And that has the effect, as you just heard him say, of turning our enemies against each other. Turning our enemies against each other. Although they've refused to recognize it for quite some time, the European

are the enemies, the mortal enemies of the Israelis. That's the Israeli perspective, obviously. Look at the effects. And so if that were to happen in this conflict, it's not the Israelis who would bear the brunt of it. It's the Europeans. It's the Australians. It's the Australians. And it's the Russians. 20% of Russia is Muslim. All of those countries would be in for serious turmoil and bloodshed, and maybe already this shortly into the war. Turn them against each other, you heard the rabbi say. Now, how could this play out? Very simple. Iran is sending drones and missiles into Israel right now, mostly into Tel Aviv.

Is it beyond imagination that in the fog of war, maybe one of those missiles hits the dome of Iraq or were told that it did. And of course, during war, the first thing you see is censorship, so it's very hard to know what's going. You're already seeing it today. Is there less or more video available on the internet today than there was yesterday from this war? Well, there's much less, of course. That's called censorship. They're censoring video of what's actually happening. It happens in every conflict. Every war sets off the same cycle at home, far from the fighting. censorship and persecution. Censorship and persecution, persecution of the enemies, real or perceived to the people prosecuting the war, and censorship of their views.

So in that environment, when you can't really know what's going on is thousands of miles from here, all of a sudden, the aloxic complex is just vaporized. Oops, the Iranians did it. Then we have this debate. It's like a hospital bombing in Gaza. Who did it? Well, it was a booster from a Hamas rocket. Well, how do I know? I wasn't there.

All we know is it's gone. Oh, so sorry. Could that happen? Oh, yeah, it could happen. The army is fighting with patches of the third temple on their arms on their official uniforms. And what happens then? Global religious war. Talk about high stakes.

You thought nukes were high stakes. At least nukes are over quickly. There are survivors. A generational religious war? That's worse than any virus and more deadly. That could happen. Do the people in charge know what could happen? Some of them do.

They don't seem worried about it. They should be worried about it. We should all be worried about it. No, you can't do that to the world. We hope to give to our grandchildren. Hate you brag, but we're pretty confident this show is the most vehemently pro-dog podcast you're ever going to see. We can take or leave some people, but dogs are non-negotiable. They are the best.

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50% off labs, 20% off supplements. Join bloke. Get your edge. back. So what is going on in this war? It's, again, hard to know because of the censorship, but there is a man and independent analyst called Brandon Weikert, who we think, after spending a lot of time looking at analysis from a bunch of different people, is one of the most informed people in the United States who can speak freely and publicly about what is actually happening and not just in a conceptual big picture way, but in a detailed way. And coming at this

with an understanding of the technology, in use, the tactics, and the strategies. We've been super impressed, and we think you will be, too, with that. Brandon, Wicker joins us. Now, Brandon, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. And thank you for those kind words.

That was very, I'm very honored. Well, it's true. We've never met, but I've just been watching your stuff recently, and, you know, wars tend to bring out phonies and people like, oh, I was on SEAL Team 27, and I know what's going, you know, and they don't know anything. But your analysis has been... I'm just a nerd.

I'm just a nerd. Yeah, well, I have been very impressed. by your by your grasp of what's happening. So can you just give us really quickly the overview of where we are today? What are the big developments? Well, the big developments, as you saw with Secretary of War, I guess he's calling himself now. Hegg Seth is they're transitioning the munitions.

So now the claim is that it's been so successful this air war. They don't need to use what's known as standoff weapons. So think the Tomahawk cruise missile. And they're going to now shift the Air Force and the Israeli Air Force. They're going to shift now to flying large sorties of warplanes into Iran and bombing targets with what are known as gravity bombs. And these are things like the joint directed attack munitions, J-DAMs. They require you to be close to the target. So the risk factor to our pilots is now increasing exponentially.

But I would just like to posit a theory, and it's just a theory. I actually think the real reason we are doing this shift is not because of realities or facts on the ground that are amenable to the U.S. and Israeli strategic position. I think we are being dictated to by the depletion of our stockpiles. And what I mean by that, I have some numbers for your audience. We all know the Tomahawk cruise missile going back to the Clinton era where he would just pop those things off, you know, as soon as Lewinsky impeachment got underwisky. way. 4,000 Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles are believed to be in the arsenal. We have been draining those since 2022, 2023 in Ukraine at a disproportionate rate. In the last four days of this conflict, we have expended 400 of those systems, which means that's 100 per day with the operational

and tempo not ceasing. In 2026, the budget request was only for 59 new missiles. We need several hundreds every year. The reason we're getting such low numbers, Tucker, is because our defense industrial base is broken and we have no business starting a world war or a major regional war as we are in the process of doing. So I believe the real reason the U.S. and Israeli militaries are starting to get more daring and dangerous with their airstrikes is because they cannot afford to blow through the munitions that are already depleting and it is in fact a race to depletion between us and iran and right now i think the iranians still have a very sizable unused increasingly sophisticated missile arsenal

colonel rob manis is a friend of mine he's in a former air force colonel he disagrees with me he says look these these missiles that are being popped off by iran are basically a bunch of dead enders it's going to fizzle out and heggseth made a sort of argument about that today that there was a decrease. But I actually think that those dead enders, if that's what you want to call them, actually are probably still combat effective. And that is why we are now having to still continue the war, even though we have blown through these standoff munitions, which really were protecting our people. In fact, I got word from a source of mine who's monitoring this on open source, which it looks like the USS Abraham Lincoln is going to be repositioned to within anti-ship

ballistic missile range of Iran. So either the U.S. really believes we've degraded the Iranian capabilities sufficiently, or we're just throwing caution to the wind because we've got to get this thing over before we run out of materials. And that'll probably start happening this weekend. This is not a surprise to people who watched carefully the few days in the run-up to this conflict where there were uniformed service. I mean, there were flag officers who apparently That's right, by Semmer Kotcher. Yes. Exactly.

That we just don't have the munitions to sustain any kind of real conflict. They said that, right? Yeah, in fact, it is my understanding, and this is, again, take from this what you will. It is my understanding that last Friday, the order went out at 3.38 p.m. Eastern. Before that, there was a, quote, particularly contentious meeting between General Dan Raisin-Kane, who is Trump's handpicked chairman of the Joint. chiefs, staff. He was pulled out of retirement by Trump. So this is Trump's guy. And Kane tried to get to the word to the president that this thing is not going to go like you think it is. This is not

Venezuela. This is a very different operation. And the president, for whatever reason, still decided to ignore the best military advice he got and went forward with this. In turn, Vice Emerald Fred Koch, who was an adjutant basically to Kane leaked parts of that meeting to, I think it was Reuters. Now, the question that I've been hearing from people is, was that Kotcher acting on his own volition, or was that, in fact, Kotcher executing some kind of informal order from Dan King because Kane is, the rest of the military is very, the high level, is very worried about the blowback from this operation. And it is my contention that the permanent bureaucracy is desperately trying to push blame away from itself to, the,

politicians, and even as we're seeing Marco Rubio now to Israel itself, which is not how a winning war would look like. There'd be no blame shifting. So do you have any insight into how the decision was made to kill Iran's head of state slash chief cleric? And this has not been a conversation anyone's been willing to have because, of course, the proponents of it have been screaming about how he's Hitler. He's the worst person. If there's any question about whether there's a good idea to kill him. You're an Ayatollah lover, you know, just the normal low IQ crap that you see on Fox News. But it's a real question. Like, why would, what, what was the thinking there? Do you know? So, again, this is all, you know, background and sort of piecing the puzzle together with what I know

about how it works up in that horrible city we call D.C. But basically, what it sounds like is the administration used the idea of diplomatic talks. to lull Kamani into a false sense of security. We were going into a holy week at that time, and the Iranians wanted, or Kamani wanted to basically come out of his hole. And he thought, okay, we're going to get a reprieve. We'll kick this down the road until Monday, which I think was March 2nd. They got the word on Friday that, hey, we're open to negotiating.

So Kamani and his cadre let their guard down. and at the moment they did, Israeli missiles were fired at a very interesting. It was actually, if I can nerd out here for a second, the Israelis did a very interesting performance with their missile, where they fired it into space from, I believe, F-16s or F-35s. It went into the space above Iran and came down at hypersonic velocities, and it came within millimeters of the known position of Khamani. So from a tactical standpoint, yes, it was very technically. impressive but the key thing here was that the US used its honor in to lull the

the counterparty into a false sense of security using our diplomatic word that hey we're we're gonna hold off and try to talk to you and I actually think and I say this is somebody who's a fan of Steve Whitkoff I actually think Whitkoff and probably Cushner were probably in on the whole thing to to basically lull the Iranian leader into a false sense of security so we could clip him. And I think, Tucker, I think the assumption was that if we lopped off the head of the regime, Kamani, that the whole thing would implode like a house of cards in about 72 hours, which is why I think Trump didn't really care when Dan Kane was warning him last Friday that, hey, we've got eight

days of munitions and sent com before we have to start cannibalizing endopacom, and then we have a real crisis on our hands. I think Trump was thinking, we can probably do this at about 24 to 72 hours. get Kamani, the Israelis will, and then it'll all work out. It's all going to work out. And obviously, nobody took the time to brief the president on, and I could have done, and I wrote a whole book about it, on basically what the Iranians have been doing for pretty much 47 years to harden their regime and to make it relatively survivable. And that is why now we find ourselves, what is it, day four or day five now, and they're already having to panic and change the munition structure because we're depleting them too fast. This is why, by the way, the heads of those defense

companies are now being summoned to the White House because Trump is going to try to read those leaders, the Riot Act, saying you've got to boost production, and they're going to say to him, sorry, we can't do it because the defense industrial base is both broken and corrupt. I don't know the truth about what you said about the diplomacy as a cover for action lulling community into vulnerability. I have heard just the opposite that the Israelis are telling everybody that the U.S. knew the strike was going to happen, and they're doing that to shake the faith of any of our partners in the region in our diplomacy and make us sound decisive. I don't know what the truth is. Well, obviously, like I said, take from this because this is all, you know,

I don't have evidence of this to present to you. But I find it, just if I can speculate here for a moment, I find it impossible or improbable to think, given the level of fusion between the U.S. and Israeli command and, I mean, for goodness sakes, there are Israeli officers permanently stationed in the Pentagon. And I was just told by a former CIA case officer at Langley. So basically, I find it really hard to believe that the administration, did not have any involvement in this. Now they wanna say that they did it,

and I think they are saying this because they're worried that there's gonna be significant political and possibly legal blowback, you know, over time, because this war is, anyway. But so I don't believe that particular story when they say, oh, we had nothing to do with it. I think we probably did not have an active role in the sense of bombardment,

but I do believe that we were aware of what was going to happen and I think we probably nudged it along. If that's true, that's one of the craziest things that's ever happened. I mean, we're trying to negotiate an end to the war we've been waging against Russia, which is right at the... Are we? Yeah, well, exactly. And the Russians aren't stupid, the Iranians aren't stupid. Not everyone other than us is stupid, and which is our assumption. They're all a bunch of savages. They're all posh tunes, you know, living in the Hindu Kush, but they're not, actually. They're really smart. And they look at this, like, why would we

enter into negotiations with the same negotiating team that just did this? So, okay, but here's my macro question, which is, what about the safety of the United States? Like, when you kill an 86-year-old leader of a global religion, which Shia Islam is, it's the smaller but still enormous branch of Islam, you're going to, you're going to expect to create religious extremism. You kill the religious leader during Ramadan? Like, was there no one in the room? And I know you're not supposed to say this because it makes you like a Muslim lover or something. I just want to say this as a Jesus person, but as an American who wants peace in my own country, nobody stood up and said, like, hey, what are we doing here? Like, we're going to create a generational war that our grandkids are

going to have to deal with at the shopping mall. Did anyone say that? No. No, I think General Kane was the closest and he was making sort of a tactical, technical argument. And I have to say, as much as I do like the general and I do like him, I think he's a decent guy. Yeah, I think he's gone down in my book a little bit because he didn't resign in protest because whatever they're saying in public, the logistics does, it's like math. It doesn't lie. It's gravity. It doesn't lie. And the logistics are not in our favor if this becomes, Trump said it was a forever war yesterday. Now, he's putting in sneer quotes, but, you know, this could become at least a five to eight week war. Hegseth said eight weeks today. And so I'm starting to remember COVID. And, and,

two weeks to flatten the curve became you know years of you know dealing with fallout so i am i am very concerned that the president has really bad advisors uh these are not people that i think have the best interest of maga or america first the coalition that got him elected uh in in their hearts i think these are these are deep staters masquerading as maga lovers um and i think that that this is why we're here. This is one of the most strategically irresponsible moves I've ever seen. And the fact that the president, I don't believe, was informed the truth about what was going to happen in the way it was going to happen. I think now that's why you're seeing the administration expanding the war talking about giving Kurds, weapons, and money, and we're going to now

expand it into Iraq and destabilize Iraq as if that's another thing we need on our plate. This to me is somebody who, this to me is a country that has made a very serious mistake with triggering this war. And now they're just making the mess bigger and bigger and bigger, hoping that they can clean it up once it's totally, you know, out of hand. Or maybe they don't even want to clean it up. I don't know. That's speculation. But I do believe that we were involved on some level with what was going on behind the scenes the day that.

And by the way, I just want to make something clear. I am very much anti-Islamic Republic of Iran, that regime, all of that. I'm on the record. People know this about me. So I'm not saying this because I'm mourning the loss of Kamani, but it is, it is very dangerous what we're doing. And I think that we really damaged America's credibility for a long time, for a long time when it comes to diplomacy. The gold industry bankrolls a lot of conservative media. Much of the gold IRA business is not actually about selling gold at all. It's about selling massively marked up coins to people who trust the voices delivering the

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Great gold scam. Watch it now at Tucker Carlson.com. People are getting robbed. We're sounding the alarm and we hope you will join us. Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to put up with that for one second. That whole like call your patriotism. Some guy working for Israel is calling me unpatriotic and a country. Right.

Ancestors founded. I don't think I'm not going to play along with that at all. And it's shocking that they would even be. be throwing that out there at the most patriarchal in the world. I've gotten it. I bet you have. So let me, I mean, you look at this and it's so heartbreaking and it's so potentially catastrophic that you keep thinking, all right, point made, can we pull back? Can we just pull back and declare victory and go home in the famous phrase? Are we at a place where that's possible? Well, I'm reminded of a 2004 interview that Donald Trump gave to your old colleague, Neil Cavuto,

and it was during the Iraq war at the height of the insurgency. And at the time, everybody made fun of Trump, but I thought it was brilliant. Trump told George W. Bush on that interview, he said, listen, just declare victory, bring everybody home. We got Saddam. You've won. Let's just call it a day and let the Middle East figure out the mess. Now, people mocked him at the time, but I actually thought, actually, that's probably the best at that time way out. Well, he could do the same thing right now.

Because get this, he got rid of Kamani. He got rid of very top, bad IRGC guys. He can claim that. He has done what he can to help the people. There is a way forward. It's a golden off ramp, but he's got to take it in the next probably 48 hours. Because if he doesn't take it, Tucker, this thing takes on a life of its own. The Iranians are not going to surrender.

They're not going to stop popping off missiles. They have planned for this. Like I said, for 47 years. Yeah, they're degraded. Yeah, they're hurt. But so are our allies, by the way. And the oil coming out of the region is not coming out of the region. We are now looking at spikes in the price of energy.

I saw a report from Seeking Alpha, which is an investment publication, saying that if this continues for four to eight weeks, this could take oil over $200 a barrel. That's recession territory going into a midterm election. Yeah. So I think 200 is depression. I mean, well, who knows, right? But I think that's extreme. Yeah, that's the extreme. But I mean, listen, listen, they're destroying not, they're not just blockading the

straight. They're destroying the refineries in Qatar, in Saudi Arabia. And the Qataris are saying they're not going to get this stuff online for months, if not years. So that's going to be a gaping hole in the global economy for oil and natural gas. So even if Trump gets a quote victory here in Iran, and I don't even know what victory looks like anymore, we're going to be. cleaning up this mess economically for many, many years thereafter.

All of that is awful. All of it is managed. They don't call me Dr. Doom for nothing. All of it is manageable, though. You can imagine working through those problems and convincing yourself that it was worth it somehow, or you could concoct a story to tell yourself. There are certain things that are not possible to recover from. And one is the use of unconventional

you know, highly destructive weapons that just changed the calculation forever. And I worry about that. And everyone I ask about it's, oh, no, no, no, that would never happen. Do you worry about it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and I think I tweeted about this in the last 24 hours. Trump responded to what I've been writing. And I'm not going to get into how I know that.

But somebody told him what I've been writing, and he's quite cross with me. And, you know, I'm a three-time supporter of Trump. I'm saying this out of love, you know. Not out of hate. But I was told that the statement he made yesterday in the Oval Office was partly responding to my claims about the stockpiles. And he said something very specific. He said not only we have enough weapons to fight a quote forever war, which, holy cow. But he said that we're depleted a little bit on the, and I'm paraphrasing, on the lower level weapons.

But we've got enough higher end and middle tier weapons. to fight forever. Well, the higher-end weapons would be things like, I don't know, low-yield nuclear weapons. And, you know, you don't want to think that an American president would go there, especially over something like this, where we weren't attacked, which we were not. And I'm not a fan of the Iranian regime, and they do support terror, but we were not attacked. The Israelis weren't even attacked. This was all sort of the machinations of Netanyahu's worst fears. And it is my concern that if we truly are reaching depletion, that we might have an incident where a nuke is used. And, you know, it's not the likeliest, but it's no longer impossible.

It's now moved into sort of the realm of it could happen. And the longer this goes on and the more that we run through these stockpiles, and if we start losing planes to some of the remaining Iranian air defense systems, then we're going to have some problems. And I want to also say something about the strategic side. I was on a, I was on Bannon Show earlier today, and there was one of the guests was saying, basically saying I was wrong, and maybe I am, well, you know, who knows. But he was saying that we've got local air superiority, and from there we'll be able to grow out and go farther. And the only reason you get local air superiority is because you've degraded the enemy so much. Well, Well, yes and no, but that's just a small slice of a very large country.

They probably in Iran, if they've decentralized those missile capabilities to the local commander level, anticipating that we would degrade command and control, they likely have hidden and decentralized their air defense capabilities. And that means we have to do sort of a long-term air defense hunt. And in the meanwhile, the Iranians are still combat effective. And the longer this lasts, the longer that straight is closed down, the more the oil is disrupted. And basically, the more we get to these really nightmare scenarios, in my book, I said, a war over Iran will likely trigger a World War III.

Now, that book came out in 2022. I remain convinced that we are at the opening salvo of a true world war. And it's happening because of our actions and the actions of our partner is, Israel. I would say even more precisely, it's happening because of Benjamin Netanyahu and the hammerlock he has over the American government, including Mossade officers at CIA headquarters and IDF officers at the Pentagon. I mean, that one came from a, you would know this individual. He's a very famous CIA guy. I got off the phone with him about an hour before I came on with you. And it's scary. It's scary. I mean, remember though, Gary Vogler, who wrote a great book,

for the Libertarian Institute. It was called, I think Israel was the winner of the 2003 Iraq War, something like that. He was an oil guy working for the coalition provisional authority, and he identified this guy named Makovsky, who was a Pentagon bureaucrat, who ran the Iraq War desk for the first part of the Iraq War in 2003, and he was a Mossad officer, not just IDF, and he was Doug Fythe's son-in-law. So, you know, this is, you know, our country is, is unfortunately not being wrong, entirely by the United States and the American people.

No, it doesn't, you don't see a lot of sovereign team. I'll get emails for that one, I'm sure. Well, it's true. It's factually true. And the Secretary of State, God bless him, admitted that two days ago and said we did this because Israel made us do it. They were going to go anyway. So what about the question of hypersonic weapons? You read that Iran has them?

They've been given them. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, they've got them. In fact, I got an interesting report from overseas yesterday. And again, you know, these are sort of, I take with a grain of salt, But they've been right. And when they're right, though, they're really right. This one came from our friends in Russia.

So take from this what you will. But the report that I received was a retired Russian general is telling the press over there that he knows for a fact there is a cluster of Chinese high-tech officers or technical officers on the ground in Iran right now, perfecting and maintaining Iran's growing, they're still building them, growing hypersonic weapons capability. And the reason is because the Chinese want to test these systems because they're basically very similar to the Chinese ASBM, which of course when and if, and I really hope it's if,

the war with China erupts, the first thing the Chinese are going to do after they knock out our satellites and disrupt our electromagnetic frequencies is they're going to use thousands of ASBMs ringed in those man-made islands to either keep our, keep our carriers at bay so that we can't launch planes in range or to sink or destroy the carrier's

flight deck. And the Iranians are the, Iran rather, is the test bed, the same way that we've been using Ukraine as a test bed against Russian tech. And so the Iranians have them. They're buried in those underground missile cities. They have not really fired them. I believe they fired four ballistic missiles at the carrier after Kamani was killed. That was a symbolic. attack though. If the Iranians really wanted to go ham on the carrier with a missile swarm, they absolutely could. The only thing that would be preventing them was if we had degraded their C2 functions enough. And at that time, I don't believe we had. What's the C2 function? I'm sorry, that's command and control. So basically their ability to control their systems

and issue commands. That's why before the war began, the Iranians, basically the government said to their local field commanders, we're going to give you permission to take command of your individual missile batteries so that if something like killing Kamani happens, you can just start going and you won't have to call in for orders or for range. And by the way, the Chinese are using their Yao Gan, I think it's their Yau Gan satellite constellation to do surveillance of the carrier and of the U.S. air bases in the region. And they are providing increasingly accurate targeting sets to the Iranians. In fact, I believe the reason the Iranian missiles have been so effective in damaging our bases, and boy, have they done a doozy, it is not being reported accurately.

They have done a real doozy to these bases. It's because of the fact that the Chinese are providing direct real-time signals intelligence and electronic assistance to the Iranians. So we're fighting a proxy war with China right now. It's a world war. I mean, this is a world war. and the Chinese are more than happy to see us stew. Now there's this, there's this like story that the politicians keep telling us. It's really the Republican side that keeps saying this that, well, you know, we went after Venezuela and we went after Iran and that's going to really kill China because they rely on these countries for their oil. It's not really accurate. The Chinese got less than, I think, 4% of their oil from Venezuela.

it was a nuisance, if anything, to lose. If anything, they were sinking more money into rebuilding the refining capacity because the communists had ruined the oil industry in Venezuela over 25 years. And then with Iran, they get at most, I think, 14% of their oil and natural gas from Iran. What they were doing is the Chinese knew, because they could read the room, they knew we were going in. So what they started doing was shifting their purchases of oil from, Iran to places like neighboring Russia and to other Middle Eastern countries.

In fact, I think that the largest amount of oil purchased by China in Saudi Arabia occurred two weeks before the war began. So while this will hurt the Chinese, absolutely, economically, it's not going to trigger a collapse. It's not going to, the Chinese were prepared for this, just as the Russians were prepared for what we were going to throw at them in 2022. These regimes have been studying us for years, for years, and they know our pressure points. And we're like the gentle giant.

We're like the lovable giant. We're just too stupid to realize, you know, these people are serious and they're killers. They're killers. And you know, we're trying to lecture the world about, you know, transgendered rights in Namibia. And you know, these guys are playing hardball and they're playing for keeps. And I was actually speaking to Brendan O'Reilly, who's probably one of the foremost China scholars, real world intelligence type scholar practitioner. He wrote a great book called

Everybody is, Everyone is Wrong about China. And I just talked to him this afternoon. And he tells me he's convinced that at the end of the day, the real winner of this conflict is China. Of course. That we are going, yeah. And I think actually this, this conflict, worst case scenario, because you laid out a pretty bleak scenario too. But worst case scenario is this is the end of American military power for a generation. I mean, I think that's clear the goal. and that's up to us at this point. I mean, the second you, it's the same in a fist fight, the second you punch someone, everybody standing around

finds out how tough you actually are. Would you say, would you say? But the second, the blows start, it's like we know. And you don't always want to reveal that. It's better, it's better to keep it mysterious, I would say. Same with nudity. Like, none of us look better naked. So, but I would, okay, so the hypersonic weapons, missiles,

which they possess. Yeah. You suggest they might be deployed against surface craft, right? Yes. What about Israel? Would any of them wind up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've got two classes of hypersonics.

I apologize. I was fixated on the carrier because I got that text. But yeah, so you've got the maritime targeting of surface warships. But then you also have what you've seen a couple of times in the last year where the Iranians did. deploy hypersonics against Israel, and it did an incredible amount of damage to Tel Aviv, if I remember correctly, in the 12-day war. And I think, although this might have been AI, I think in the last 48 hours, they deployed another, the Iranians did another hypersonic against Tel Aviv that did a lot of damage. So these hypersonic weapons, there is no active defense against them. Our air defense

systems cannot, and the problem is, it's really what makes them very interesting, is, they come in fast and then they sort of zigzag unpredictably right before they land. And this is the problem for our AD systems, our air defense systems, because they sort of just track and then go. But if you've got a target coming in and then they, you know, those AD systems are not, because the AD systems are older and they're based on older generation, being able to track incoming regular ballistic missiles. So this is where we get real concerned because we, I don't think we really know.

how many hypersonic weapons they've got, I would imagine they've got at least, I would say at least a hundred or so because they've been just churning them out. And the Chinese have been helping them. And of course, the Chinese have overmatch with us in terms of industrial mass production. What is the damage right now to Israel and to U.S. bases in the Gulf, do you think? Well, well, the bases in the Gulf, you know, I wish I had kept the window open that I was reading. but basically at least three of the bases have been devastated. The Fifth Fleet headquarters, I am told, and if you look at the satellite imagery that you can find on open source information,

it looks like actually the base in Bahrain looks like Gaza. It's completely moonscape. So the American Fifth Fleet, now I don't believe, I don't know if there's any, because I think we might have evacuated that base before this started. So I don't want to say there's casualties because I don't know. But just looking at those satellites, images that it looks like that's been flattened and that's a very expensive base that you and I paid for

and that was the sort of the hub for the U.S. Navy in the Middle East for many years and it has been completely taken offline and I have serious doubt I was talking also to a Middle East expert not long ago and he was saying that with these bases being obliterated basically to use a term essentially he doesn't think because he thinks the Arabs are going to be so irate with us for having kicked over this Hornets nest because it is not going to end anytime soon. His belief is that once the war does end or settles down enough for us to say, hey, we're good, we're done. The Arabs are going to say you're not building back in our countries anymore. So why would they? We didn't defend them.

I mean, this is a reciprocal relationship. They're not doing this because they love us. They give us deals on hundreds of billions in foreign investment in the United States, all this. But in exchange, we promised to protect them and we didn't. That's right. And in fact, there's reports, and I think they're credible. In fact, the Saudi official was complaining about this two days ago. Basically, whatever air defense systems were in these Arab countries were sent over to Israel.

Yeah. And they actually left our own bases and people vulnerable. our own government did to protect Israeli targets rather than to protect our men and women in uniform. Do you believe that's true? Do you believe the U.S. government prioritized Israel over our own troops? If you had asked me this a year or two ago, I would have said no way. But after seeing that Huckabee interview, by the way, Bravo.

After seeing that Huckabee interview, I can't imagine how we didn't do that. I mean, it is very clear the United States is being led around the nose right now by what should be its proxy. I mean, let's get it real. I mean, of course. It should be, you know, so. They're the housekeeper. We're the homeowner.

Like, what is this? I don't get it. No, I'm serious. I don't understand. I agree. I agree. So I do believe, yeah, we probably did. And the worst part here, one of the worst parts is I have a colleague who's in the Gulf

States. And he tells me, he sent me a picture of the warning he got from the State Department to get out. And to cut to the chase, it basically said, you're on your own to get out. Like, we're not doing flights. That's true. And meanwhile, I hear that until 24 hours ago. The British government was evacuating their people. No questions asked.

So you mean to tell me that the sole superpower is picking a fight with this missile city that is Iran, and we're not even going to provide exfiltration for our people? That's not an empire. That's not a superpower. That's the power and decline. That's what the Chinese see, by the way. And the Chinese think their time is at hand because we are committing national suicide with this insanity. I wish I could disagree.

It's one of the saddest things I've ever seen. I wish I didn't have to say these things. I don't take it joy. No, I totally, totally agree. And you think of the men whose lives are going to be taken, Americans, who are like the best people. Already have been. Already have been. And you look at, I think the DOD has only released the hometowns of four of them, I think.

But it's like Iowa, a couple from, and it's like the best people we have. These are our people. No private equity kids in that group, I noticed. That's right. That's right. And I just want to just say something. And I probably shouldn't, but I was, as I said, a very early supporter of Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. I thought his takes on hypersonics were good.

I thought that he was a warfighter, so he understood in a way that maybe you and I could never understand. But I was mortified by his press conference this morning. The glibness, six Americans are dead because of a political decision that was made. Obviously, I don't expect him to challenge the president on this publicly, but at the very least it's a solemn day. and we should probably not be acting like this is just another walk in the park because this is not. This is not. This is not going to plan. Now, hopefully we can pull it out of the fire, whatever that looks like.

But right now, this is not going the way we were told it was going to go. And certainly not the way the president assumed it would go once Kamani was whacked. So the question, I think, is do we commit ground troops, Americans on the ground? They already are. Okay. So explain what you know if you don't mind. So again, I don't have any, but just for the record, because I know I'm going to, I have no access to classified information. Right.

I am an open source guy, but I can read a freaking room. And I can tell you right now, if the president went into this air war thinking I'm going to be over in three or four days, I don't have to worry about the stockpiles. And now he's waking up and going, holy cow, everything's running out. And I've got to keep fighting. He's talking about now opening up a front in Iraq using the Kurds, which is lunacy. What are the Turks going to do? Exactly. Well, by the way, the point is because Israel's next priority is Turkey. So the point is to diminish Turkey. It's the truest, yeah.

Yeah. And so there's that. And then there's the fact that the president wants to be seen as quote-unquote winning. And winning means he's already outlined what the objectives are. And this was also a big bugaboo of mine. War and strategy is about objectives. Attainable political. objectives, Klausowitz, war is an extension of politics through other means. Trump came out on Saturday. He's repeated it since. The aims are regime change. The aims are denuclearization and the aims are getting rid of the ballistic missile system. He's now added on getting rid of the Navy of Iran. So those four objectives, what is the objective of the Iranian regime? Survive. That's all they have to do. Survive long enough because

they know, because the Chinese and Russians are giving them the intel, they know that our stockpiles are about to be depleted. So all they have to do is hold out until we have to start cannibalizing Indo-Pacom, and there's going to be a real political fight at that point. I'm told that Indo-Pacom leaders are already raising quite a stink behind the scenes, because they know once those systems are gone out of their arsenal, they ain't coming back anytime soon. So the question of ground troops, this gets us to that. I don't believe it would ever be an invasion like Iraq and 03. First of all, we don't have that capability anymore, which should scare every American because we don't have that capability anymore. Second of all, the way the country is

arrayed, Trump is trying to do this in like a light footprint methodology. So he, I think, is going to replicate the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan in 2001, where we sent a bunch of special forces A teams and CIA paramilitaries infiltrated the country, linked up with already organized locals. It was the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. This time it'll probably be the Mujahideenikalk, MECA, to try to basically organize a movement with the Kurds coming in, probably from the Iraqi side in the, I think it's the north, I think it's the northwest of the country, and we'll be coming in from the south. And it will kind of link up in whatever's left of Tehran.

That's the plan, I think, using air power as an interdiction like we did, exactly like we did against the Taliban in 2001. Well, first of all, the MECA is not. the Northern Alliance at its height. It's not. Second of all, you're talking about far greater ground that's going to have to be covered and a logistics tale that is going, I mean, we're talking like this is not going to work. Then you're going to have to deal with the rugged terrain of Iran. Iran is basically like Switzerland. It's just surrounded by mountains. It's a desert in the middle. I mean, this is not

good geography for the kind of tactics we're talking about. And again, the size matters. This is a much bigger country than Afghanistan with many more people. So we're talking about a much longer end commitment on our part. And I think the president knows this. And I think he's sort of like the frog boiling the water, boiling in the water. He's just sort of slowly getting us used to the idea before he has to send troops in because he wants to, quote, win. Well, winning for him is regime change. The regime is not going to change on its own. It's not going to be the people who can do it because they're not organized enough. They're too divided amongst each other. So He's going to need to send in special forces in CIA to basically do the organizing on the ground and to do force multipliers.

And I'm sorry to say that the likelihood of this working is very, very low. And now we're talking about being seen in this region as strategically defeated by what we were told was a backward military force in Iran. The first American to die in the war in Afghanistan was a CIA officer, Johnny Michael Spann. Yes, right. That's right. Yeah. So these forces, the CIA paramilitaries, special forces, would be deployed to do what? The goal is what here?

Well, it's exactly what, well, again, the goal that we are told and that Trump continues to say is regime change, regime change. We don't want the Islamic Republic of Iran in charge anymore. We want, I don't know, M.E.K or the Shah's son, who's a lobbyist in northern Virginia. I'm sure he'll do great, or any of these other, you know, groups. The thing is we don't really know, and I think it's very interesting that... Can I just guys ask you it? So is the problem... I mean, I do detect, I don't detect, I notice.

It's very obvious efforts by Israel and its proxies in the United States to foment a religious conflict in our country. Hate all the Muslims, deport the Muslims, as if that's better than saying hate all the Jews. It's not better. It's the same thing. but they're trying to turn religions against each other in our country. And I see the same, which I resent more than anything I've seen in a long time, because it's not going to make a peaceful country for my children.

No. But I see that in this effort. So the idea is like they're not allowed to have an Islamic country or something. Like how far allies are Islamic countries? Like what kind of country are we calling for? It's their country, no? Let me just clarify. I was just using the official name of the, I don't know if this, I'm sure, for something.

people it is but but they just want to replace it with anyone other than the current crop of of leaders and i believe that that is not possible because this regime is deeply embedded so you know we killed kamani and a dozen new leaders replaced all of these other leaders this is this reminded me a lot of the early days of the ukraine war when the ukrainians and the nato types would be oh we killed this Russian commander, we got this guy. Well, within 24 to 48 hours, the leadership was replaced and the Russians kept going. So this is, you know, who knew a nation of 96 million people would find other generals and people to promote, you know, you know, it's like. Well, also you wonder like how much, if you really believe that killing an 86 year old cleric is going to topple the government,

how much do you know about the country and how much of what you think you know? Well, that's my point. filtered through some CIA source who wants to be president like the former king. Exactly. Do we know a lot about Iran? I don't sense that we do. Well, I know a lot about Iran, but, you know, I was boxed out of the administration almost from the beginning. So it's like, you know, and people like, I think, well, I think there's some personnel in the White House that doesn't like me. And I think that they don't like that I don't play ball. And, you know, I moved, I got out of D.C. moved to Florida. And I, and I, I, never looked back, but there are people like me as well who were boxed out who know a lot about these things and we are not talking. Can I ask you who if you can say who because you're clearly very knowledgeable, you seem sensible, you seem pro-American. I'm going to tell you offline. I'll tell you offline. I really don't. I'm really not looking to start a mixture rating. I understand. So let me take to you a broader question, which is, and I know the answer,

but I want to hear you say it, was there from the very beginning of this second Trump term an effort to exclude anybody who might conceivably stand in the way of an Iran invasion. Yes. Yes. Even though I, again, again, understand, I hate the regime, you know, I don't like that regime. I'm just not like I'm some lover of, you know, but I was, I was a friend of mine joked, I wasn't sufficiently on board with this program. With this Iran invasion program, Iran war program. Yeah, because I think it's, this is the stuff of lunacy.

And this is literally, this is like the mad can. you know, this doesn't make any, this doesn't make any sense. Yeah. It doesn't. Unless, you know, what you were saying in your monologue, which I think you're probably right. I think that's definitely at play here. Yeah, I mean, I just want to be clear. I don't think that most U.S. policymakers have any idea what the foundation stone is or Alaksa

or Dome of the Rock or the Third Temple. This is just so far from the concerns of average people in this country, even our policymakers. Their minders are not paying them to know. Their minders are not. Well, that's it. But there are people who do know, and certainly in the, the region in the Middle East and the rest of the world, people are religious. They're not Americans. Like, they care. So these are big questions to people around the world.

Well, I care. These, I'm a Christian. Well, I care too, actually. So let me ask you, since you said that you're constructing most of your analyses through open source materials, you're reading publicly available things on the internet. Have you noticed an effort to clamp down on videos? Yeah. Okay, tell us what you've noticed. There's also an interesting effort, Tucker. to, and I think this is coming from our guys, to spread AI videos of what look like war scenes, and then you share it, and then they say, ah, that's AI. We got to get him dinged now. We got to get him, you know, this is all, you know, we have, it is a, Tucker, it is a sad day in this country when we have official,

and I have a feeling I know the group that's doing it. we have official U.S. intelligence people being paid with our tax dollars to sit around a basement in Langley or Arlington, Virginia, and harass American citizens online for sharing their opinion. But that is where we are at in this country. That is where we are at. And I can tell you right now, I have been the victim of bot attacks. I have been the victim of cyber attacks in the last 24 hours on my personal email, which I didn't know people had, but apparently they do. We have been I had to file a police report in fact yesterday with my local police On this ever since coming out in the last week and sharing my my opinion

And this is not an organic Phenomenon this is either ours or Israel or the British You know because they're always in there somehow or the French that's right or the French that's right. That's right So this is you know this is where we are. This isn't really America anymore This is some censorious state and I thought that we were going to be cleaning that up, but we're instead giving the keys to these guys and telling them to go start World War III.

I wonder if we're going to see, this is purely speculative, but wars tend to create an environment where there's actual persecution of critics of the war. Well, I was told, and again, take from this what you will, because I have no way of proving it. I was told two years ago that the Biden regime had concocted a list of high-profile MAGA supporters that they were going to basically go to and say,

if Kamala had won, say that, hey, you got to leave the country as, you know, you can't get out, or we're going to basically prosecute you until you're broken lawfare. And thank God that never happened, but those lists are still around. And, you know, in 35 months, we have an election coming up. and if this keeps going the way it is, Tucker, I don't think the Republicans stand a chance to win the next election if things keep going the way they are. I don't care if it's J.D. or if it's Marco.

Yeah, well, I unfortunately agree with you. Last question is to put, and I hope you'll come back because I think this has been so smart, unknowledgible. Thank you. So here's my question. I saw video, maybe AI, of the governor of California today, Gavin Newsom, saying, point blank, Israel led us into this war, Israel leads us around by the nose,

Israel's community genocide in Gaza, and we can't, we're not getting anything out of this, and we need to reassess our military support for Israel. Yeah, that's probably your next president right there. Well, and I don't, I know him, and I wouldn't credit a single word he says with sincerity, he doesn't believe anything, but he's smart, and I know that Donald Trump thinks he's formidable. He has said that in public a lot. I mean, if that's real, then, I mean, that guy has a shot. Do you think?

Yeah. Yeah, I think I wouldn't be surprised. Look, this can all be, I just want to make it clear. This can be reversed in the next 48 hours of Trump's clear's victory. Thank you. And just gets out and says, look, I got everybody we needed to get. If the people of Iran can't do it, then they're never going to do it. You know, this is, it's an easy out.

It's a golden off ramp, Mr. President. It's a golden off ramp with your name on it. Take it and you'll be a huge. Can Israel? Will Israel allow that? You know, I don't, I probably, they will probably try something, but, you know, I, all I can't dictate what Israel is going to do. All I can say is the president has got to make it clear he's getting out now. We've achieved our objectives.

We're done. That's what he needs to do. In terms of, in terms of Newsom, you know, I don't, he will probably be the nominee because he is wily enough. He kind of reminds me of Bill Clinton a little bit in a weird way. Oh, yeah. But I wouldn't be surprised. if his VEP is in my old state where I used to live, Virginia is Abigail Spanberger because the CIA wants to have one of their own sitting in the White House.

Man, that's not democracy. That's really, really dark. I hope you're wrong. No, it's a deep state, man, and we're supposed to dismantle it. Brandon Weikert, that was great, and thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much for having me. Great to meet you. Thanks. And thank you for joining us. We'll be back next Wednesday. Thanks for watching the Wednesday edition of the show. We stream live every week, Wednesday, 6 p.m. Eastern on Tucker Carlson.com. Members can watch the show live, join the members-only chat, and take part in the conversation in real time.

We're grateful to be doing it and grateful that you watch it. Thank you.