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Episode: Stay Far Away From the Syria Quagmire

Author: Charlie Kirk
Duration: 00:31:49

Episode Shownotes

After almost 14 years of war, the Syrian regime has abruptly collapsed, practically out of nowhere. Charlie explains what just happened, assisted by K.T. McFarland, then moves onto the more important thing: Why America should stay far far away from the latest Middle East mess. Charlie asks why so many

D.C. Republicans are so giddy about an Al Qaeda-linked group taking over an entire country, and why they're always so eager to have America enmeshed in the world's most intractable problems.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Summary

In this episode, Charlie Kirk discusses the collapse of the Syrian regime following 14 years of civil war, highlighting the emergence of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a radical group linked to Al-Qaeda. He critiques U.S. military eagerness for intervention, arguing that democracy cannot be imposed in regions like Syria where complex tribal dynamics exist. Kirk advocates for non-intervention, emphasizing that solutions should arise from the affected populations rather than foreign interference. He relates this to historical patterns indicating that regime change often leads to instability, and stresses the importance of focusing on domestic issues first.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Stay Far Away From the Syria Quagmire) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
Hey, everybody from the Charlie Kirk Show. Syria, why are we getting involved? Well, we shouldn't. We explain the Syria conflict from our analysis, then bring in KT McFarland as well.

00:00:08 Speaker_00
Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast. Open up your podcast application and type in Charlie Kirk Show and become a member today. Members.charliekirk.com. That is members.charliekirk.com.

00:00:20 Speaker_00
Get involved with Turning Point USA at tpusa.com or turningpointaction at tpaction.com. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:30 Speaker_02
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:32 Speaker_00
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:35 Speaker_01
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:00:49 Speaker_00
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here.

00:01:01 Speaker_00
Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of The Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.

00:01:11 Speaker_00
Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com. That is noblegoldinvestments.com. It's where I buy all of my gold. Go to noblegoldinvestments.com. It was a remarkable weekend here in beautiful Palm Beach.

00:01:30 Speaker_00
We had over 1,000 of our top donors here and great friends. We raised a record number and very, very thankful for all of you who contributed. Just blown away, actually. Blown away by the generosity, by the spirit by the commitment.

00:01:47 Speaker_00
You know, some people would say that there would be kind of a retreat, that people would rest on their laurels. We did not get that sense at all. Instead, our donors and our top friends and supporters doubled and tripled down on

00:02:01 Speaker_00
The effort on saving the country, they are more emboldened than ever before.

00:02:05 Speaker_00
So we just want to say for all of us at Turning Point USA, thank you for digging deep and continue to pour into our efforts on our high school campuses, our college chapters, TPUSA Faith, Blexit, Turning Point Academy, and then of course on the Turning Point Action side, continuing with the Chase the Vote initiative, voter registration.

00:02:25 Speaker_00
We went through a whole presentation for our top investors, and they seem to receive it rather favorably. So thank you so much for all of you listening. I know many of you guys listened to the podcast. All the gifts were greatly appreciated.

00:02:37 Speaker_00
And now we are thrilled to also report at Turning Point, we have over 400,000 donors, 400,000 people that donate. So very, very big and substantial gifts, but also people giving $5, $10, and $15.

00:02:51 Speaker_00
So this weekend was just remarkable and gives us the ability to sprint into 2025 uninterrupted and continue to grow and to scale all of the necessary programming so that we can reclaim our republic. Some remarkable news happened this weekend.

00:03:06 Speaker_00
While we were doing our event at Mar-a-Lago and presenting to donors, I was keeping an eye on the story that I've cared about for the last decade. Now, I'm by no means an expert, but

00:03:17 Speaker_00
It doesn't require expertise to necessarily understand this from at least a 30,000-foot view, which is Syria has fallen. And for those of you that remember, back almost 14 years ago, it was the beginning of the Syrian Civil War.

00:03:30 Speaker_00
That was during the Arab Spring. And the Syrian Civil War received a lot of attention. Bashar al-Assad was especially cruel in how he would fight the Syrian Civil War against the rebels.

00:03:45 Speaker_00
And this was going on for years and years, and it's, oh my goodness, is Assad going to fall? Is the regime going to topple?

00:03:52 Speaker_00
And of course, Russia would come in, the very, very closest Syria for pipeline reasons and many others, and would always have Bashar al-Assad's back.

00:03:59 Speaker_00
And there were many moments throughout the last 14 years where it looked as if Bashar al-Assad was on shaky ground. But the last five to six years, It seemed as if the Syrian Civil War has kind of become a Cold War.

00:04:15 Speaker_00
The rebels were largely in exile, that they didn't have a lot of gusto, they didn't have really what it took to be able to eventually topple the Assad regime. Now remember, the Assad regime is a family dynasty dating back 50 or 60 years.

00:04:32 Speaker_00
It is a total dictatorship. Now, by no means am I a fan of Bashar al-Assad, nor are you. You must understand that these rebels are not exactly the most admirable people that you could be supporting.

00:04:46 Speaker_00
In fact, you could make a very, very good argument that the rebels are worse than Bashar al-Assad. And this weekend, the regime of Assad has fallen, and the rebels took over.

00:04:57 Speaker_00
Now, we have Katie McFarland joining us to kind of go through some of the details associated here. But the first takeaway is, is there a good guy and a bad guy in this equation?

00:05:07 Speaker_00
Like so much of the warmongering in the Middle East, it's actually a far murkier than the people in Washington, D.C. would tell you. The new rulers of Syria are a radical Islamic terror group called Hayat Tayyir al-Sham.

00:05:23 Speaker_00
This group's origin is a group known as al-Nusra Front, which often has been known as al-Qaeda's branch in Syria. Their origins trace back to the insurgents who fought America in Iraq. Now, these are the new leaders of Syria. And we've seen a pattern.

00:05:42 Speaker_00
We saw this largely in Iraq. We saw this in Libya. And we're probably going to see this in Syria, where the equation is something as the following.

00:05:50 Speaker_00
You have a strong man, brutal dictator, like Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, and the West doesn't like that person. Fair enough. However, when you replace that person, what do you get? in its stead.

00:06:08 Speaker_00
Well, with Saddam Hussein, you got the rise of ISIS and of course American taxpayers that had to pour hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq and didn't even do a good job of that. In Libya, we got a Libyan civil war. And now in Syria,

00:06:24 Speaker_00
What is going to replace it? Well, the leader of this new group, this new government, is Abu Mohammed al-Julani. He was a member of Al-Qaeda in Iraq when they were blowing up US troops. Now, there's several operative questions here.

00:06:40 Speaker_00
The most important, most significant is, is this a concern to the United States of America? Is it really matter who is controlling Syria for our immediate interests, for what we care about while our own border is open?

00:06:54 Speaker_00
Our currency is being jeopardized as American strength is being put in large question. And why are some people in Washington DC, including the Biden administration, trying to favor the rebels over

00:07:10 Speaker_00
Bashar al-Assad and the reason is they have this romantic idea that anybody but Assad would be better and that is not the case. Instead you have two ugly forces that are fighting it out in Syria and Christians are now in a lot of trouble in Syria.

00:07:27 Speaker_00
The Christian population is going to be targeted. They are going to be largely massacred. Al-Juwaini has made some maneuvers to represent himself as a moderate. Now, if that's correct, great.

00:07:40 Speaker_00
However, we should be clear, this man is a lifelong terrorist who has migrated from country to country for the sake of terrorism and Islamic extremism. And now he finds himself in Syria. And even some members of the U.S.

00:07:57 Speaker_00
Congress, including Republicans, are celebrating that this terrorist is now controlling a rather major country. I mean, Syria is a big, big country.

00:08:08 Speaker_00
with a lot of Christian history, with a significant Christian population, yet we were told for years by Lindsey Graham and by John McCain and the warmongers in the Republican Party that the rebels are the best people ever, the Kurds are wonderful, and that we need to give them armaments, and that as long as we fight Assad, things are great.

00:08:28 Speaker_00
It's not that simple. The D.C.

00:08:33 Speaker_00
uniparty warmongering machine oversimplifies highly complex tribal histories, cultural battles, to try to make it seem as if it is a black and white, good versus evil circumstance, when in reality, the truth in foreign policy is almost always found in the nuance.

00:08:55 Speaker_00
Our support for Syrian rebels caused Christians to fall from about 10% of Syria's population to just about 2% of Syria's population due to the ethnic cleansing and genocide.

00:09:07 Speaker_00
Syria is one of the oldest Christian communities on the planet, and now it's on the brink of extinction. So be very careful which side you are cheering for here. Again, nobody here is pro-Assad. He's cruel. He probably used chemical weapons.

00:09:22 Speaker_00
Not a good guy. However, these situations tend to get us overly involved because of the mythologies that are told by our politicians. So they put forward a myth on cable news. Bad guy falls, good guys rise.

00:09:42 Speaker_00
We feel as if we don't need to send armaments, money, support. What I'm telling you is it's not our problem. It's not. It's a tragedy that

00:09:53 Speaker_00
A lot of Christians are going to be hurt and we should try through any way possible of rescue efforts and getting them out. However, it's not our role to involve ourselves militarily.

00:10:07 Speaker_00
Every war in the Middle East is longer, more complex, more expensive, and more morally fraught than the people in D.C. will tell you. So we should stay out and maybe

00:10:19 Speaker_00
Instead of hubris and pride, the correct and the necessary attitude is a little bit of humility. We don't know. We don't know how to fix it. We don't know who's better. We don't know who's worse.

00:10:33 Speaker_00
And maybe we should put our own citizens first instead of a conflict that we can't even properly articulate. The last couple of years have been very tough on people economically. A lot of good folks have gotten into horrible debt just to survive.

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00:11:34 Speaker_00
So this, this guy I think I've met before, can we get that picture of Joe Wilson from South Carolina? I mean, I'm sure he votes in ways that I would like, but you must call out nonsense and quite honestly BS in your own party when you see it.

00:11:48 Speaker_00
So, so Joe Wilson next to an American flag and a Ukrainian flag, separate issue. I mean, when Blake sent this to me last night, I was, Speechless would be one word for it.

00:12:00 Speaker_00
So this is Joe Wilson who puts on social media, not just mentioning it, but he's holding up the rebel flag saying, celebrating December 8th as the day the brutal Assad regime fell. Hashtag free Syria. With a photo of him with the flag.

00:12:22 Speaker_00
And you have to just wonder, again, I've met Joe Wilson before, nice enough guy, obviously much more of a neoconservative than I ever would have thought. And it's just the arrogance it takes to do something like this.

00:12:35 Speaker_00
So he also tweeted this over the weekend. He's getting a lot of attention. The Assad crime family has terrorized the people of Syria for over 50 years. Their reign of terror is over. Okay. I agree. They probably are crime family. I mean, almost every single

00:12:49 Speaker_00
dictatorship in the Middle East has some sort of mafioso tendencies. But no one's debating that. That's a completely separate issue.

00:12:57 Speaker_00
The road ahead will not be easy, but the Syrian people have shown tremendous perseverance and hope from the beginning, even as the world failed them.

00:13:03 Speaker_00
Okay, this is, again, I didn't go to college, but you just have to pay a little bit of attention to have the fundamental misunderstanding.

00:13:12 Speaker_00
The equation in the Middle East, whether it be what we did in Iran to displace the Shah, again, Saddam Hussein in Libya is typically this, and there's almost not been an exception. The strongman falls because we want to spread democracy.

00:13:27 Speaker_00
The radical Islamic factions are more willing to use outforce terror, brute force, intimidation, and they tend to be very, very charismatic, like very charismatic.

00:13:40 Speaker_00
And so they use Wahhabism or some sort of sister of that, of extremely radical Islamic interpretation of theology to rally the masses, and you get something way worse than what you had before.

00:13:56 Speaker_00
And so I'll be honest, Joe Wilson, your tweet here is not going to age well. And you're a Republican, again, I'm sure you vote for stuff I like, but acting as if, with 100% guarantee, you can know what is coming next is going to be good.

00:14:12 Speaker_00
Not only is there no evidence of that, there's evidence to the contrary. And we go further into more and more of these social media postings of people calling for increasing military action.

00:14:24 Speaker_00
And remember, Trump won based on America first, not Syria first. I'm going to pull up Donald Trump's truth social here, which by the way, he was in Europe when he authored this.

00:14:34 Speaker_00
And I bet a lot of people were in his ear trying to say, you know, we got to get more involved in Syria. We got to get more involved in Syria. We got to get more involved in Syria. I'm going to read Donald Trump's Truth Social here.

00:14:45 Speaker_00
He was very busy this weekend. I'm going through this. A lot of memes. Here it is. This is one of a couple. He says, Assad is gone. He has fled the country.

00:14:55 Speaker_00
His protector, Russia, Russia, Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was not interested in protecting him any longer. There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place. They all lost interest in Syria because of Ukraine. This is correct.

00:15:06 Speaker_00
where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead in a war that should never have started. Now let me just say, Donald Trump mentioning how many Russians have died is like actually rather morally courageous in D.C.

00:15:16 Speaker_00
because everyone seems really afraid to say that both sides are losing human beings. Anyway, I found that to be noteworthy. Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now. One, because of Ukraine and a bad economy, and that is actually true.

00:15:28 Speaker_00
One of the reasons why Assad fell is because of how Russia, Iran, and Syria's economy has fallen apart. Likewise, Zelensky and Ukraine would like to make a deal to stop this madness. They've ridiculously lost 400,000 soldiers and many civilians.

00:15:41 Speaker_00
That's a million people unnecessarily that have died. There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin. Too many lives are being needlessly wasted. Too many families destroyed. The world is waiting.

00:15:50 Speaker_00
He also posted previously, even beyond that, more forcefully, I'm trying to find it here, when he said, this is not our fight. And he's right. It's not our fight. And the president understands that you must prioritize the homeland here.

00:16:06 Speaker_00
Actually, here it is. Thank you. It's very, very long. But he said, look, Let me kind of capture this. The United States should have nothing to do with it. This is not our fight. This is all caps.

00:16:16 Speaker_00
And when Donald Trump goes in all caps, listen carefully, let it play out. Do not get involved. He says here, opposition fighters in Syria made an unprecedented move.

00:16:26 Speaker_00
Outskirts, because Russia's tied up in Ukraine, Obama didn't force the red line in the sand. But now, like possibly Assad himself being forced out, do not get involved there. But that is a phenomenal sign for this incoming administration.

00:16:37 Speaker_00
Because you better believe there's clamoring neocons on Capitol Hill that want Donald Trump to say that we're going to have airstrikes and all sorts of military intervention. President Trump says, no, this is not our fight.

00:16:48 Speaker_00
President Trump is showing the promises he made on the campaign trail are things that will be acted into policy. This is not our fight. Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

00:16:59 Speaker_00
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00:17:11 Speaker_00
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That is mypatriotsupply.com to get your four-week emergency food kit, mypatriotsupply.com. Okay, everybody, we have now KT McFarlane with us. I've known KT for quite a while. KT, welcome to the program.

00:18:07 Speaker_00
It's been too long since we had an opportunity to chat. So KT, I would love your opinion on what's happening in Syria and whether or not you believe America and our government, our military should get involved. For God's sakes, no.

00:18:20 Speaker_02
I mean, President Trump had it just right, let this play out.

00:18:23 Speaker_02
And, you know, the people whispering, the military industrial complex, neocons whispering in Joe Biden's ear, I don't know if he's even paying attention, but they're now bombing, they're trying to bomb ISIS.

00:18:34 Speaker_02
Come on, we don't belong in the middle of anybody's civil war, and we sure don't belong in the middle of a multi-sided civil war. Let this play out, see where the, you know, see where the opportunities and the dangers are, help our friends Israel,

00:18:49 Speaker_02
Let Turkey know, which is probably the big outside player in this, that we're ready to talk if that's an opportunity that comes along. And then when President Trump comes into office, continue to pressure Iran economically.

00:19:01 Speaker_02
And Iran is now pretty wounded, as President Trump said. They've lost Hezbollah. They've lost Hamas. Their economy is not great, wasn't great before.

00:19:11 Speaker_02
It's going to be a lot worse now because President Trump's energy policy will push the price of oil down, which is their major revenue source. And then he's going to reimpose the sanctions on Iran.

00:19:22 Speaker_02
So Iran will be really wounded, um, economically, particularly in Iran has a great population, well-educated internet savvy, and the population of Iran every 10 years or so pops up and tries to throw over the overthrow of the mullahs and the Obama administration.

00:19:38 Speaker_02
And then the Biden administration, oddly enough, sided with the mullahs. I think president Trump will side with the people of Iran. And I do think that Iran's leaders have to look at what just happened to Hafez al-Assad.

00:19:49 Speaker_02
and his son Bashar al-Assad, they've been toppled in a matter of minutes because their own people didn't stand up to them, stand up for them. And you've got to think that the Mullahs look at that and think, yikes, could we be next?

00:20:01 Speaker_00
So can you explain for the audience, because I want to make sure we don't pass over this. Can you just explain what you mean by a multi-sided civil war, Turkey's involvement? Who are the rebels? Who are the Kurds? Who is Assad?

00:20:15 Speaker_00
Take a little bit of time here just to educate our audience. I mean, most Americans would struggle to probably find Syria on a map and even know Damascus versus Aleppo. I mean, even a presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, didn't know Aleppo.

00:20:32 Speaker_00
So just kind of take some time. What is the significance of Syria? How did Assad get into power? What on earth is a NATO country, Turkey, doing involved in this? What is Russia's involvement? All of that. Please, KT, educate our audience.

00:20:46 Speaker_02
Okay, this is a really complicated chess game, and it's been going on for 50 years. Russia, go back to the Soviet Union and the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Russia was all over the Middle East. They were the major dominant player in the Middle East.

00:20:59 Speaker_02
With Syria, they had relationships with all the Arab countries. Russia leaves. We kick them out. The countries kick them out during the 1973 for shuttle diplomacy negotiations of Henry Kissinger. I was working for Henry at the time.

00:21:14 Speaker_02
And at that point, Russia got pushed out of the Middle East. United States became the major power affecting events. We had relationships with Egypt, obviously with Israel, with the Saudis, with Jordan. And so Russia's been out in the cold for 50 years.

00:21:28 Speaker_02
When that happened 50 years ago, Bashar al-Assad's dad, Hafez al-Assad, he was head of Syria, and Kissinger negotiated with him. He negotiated with the Egyptians and the Jordanians and the Saudis and the Israelis.

00:21:41 Speaker_02
Assad and Syria was always the toughest because Syria has not just one ethnic group. They got a lot of ethnic groups. They have Christians, they have various kinds of Christians. They have Muslims, various varieties of Muslims.

00:21:52 Speaker_02
They have just a lot of people there. Now that was 50 years ago. Fast forward to today, what's in Syria? Well, Russia's in Syria.

00:22:00 Speaker_02
It got back into Syria and an involvement in the region and Russia cares about it because Russia's been using Syrian ports and airfields to do the Russian operations coming out of Africa. So Russia has an interest in it.

00:22:15 Speaker_02
But at the same time, Russia's had to prop up a corrupt and competent leader, Assad.

00:22:21 Speaker_02
And the Iranians have an interest too, because they've used Syria as their transshipment point to get weapons from Iran into Hezbollah to kill Israelis and try to, you know, try to destroy Israel. So Russia and Iran,

00:22:36 Speaker_02
outside powers have an interest in Syria. They don't care about Syria, but they care about the real estate in Syria, the ports. So they've cropped up this corrupt and competent leader, Bashar al-Assad, for years.

00:22:49 Speaker_02
Now, Russia's weakened because Russia's preoccupied. in Ukraine, so Russia's pulled out troops, it's pulled out equipment, it's been propping up Assad. The Iranians, they're really weakened too. Why? Because of Israel.

00:23:04 Speaker_02
Israel has gone after Hezbollah and Hamas, the Houthis, and so Iran is weakened in the region, and Iran is economically weakened.

00:23:13 Speaker_02
Now, when Trump was in office the first time, he understood the power of economics, and he understood if you could bankrupt Iran, if you could get them to the point where they have no real money, they won't have any money to pay for wars against Israel.

00:23:27 Speaker_02
They won't have money to pay for terrorists. And they'll have all, they'll have a hard enough time staying in power and keeping their own jobs, Samoans, because they have to feed their own people. So if you look now, where is Iran, where is Russia?

00:23:37 Speaker_02
Russia's preoccupied with Ukraine. That's why president Trump over the weekend said Russia's weakened. We could cut it. We could do a negotiation on Ukraine. And at the same time, Iran is weakened for the same reasons.

00:23:51 Speaker_02
economically weakened, and also thanks to Israel. So the chess pieces are moving all around the Middle East. Russia's going to be out of there.

00:24:00 Speaker_02
We don't belong in the middle of the Civil War because there's a lot of different sides still fighting each other. And who knows who comes out on top? It could be a pro-Turkey group. It could be an ISIS-Al Qaeda group.

00:24:12 Speaker_02
It could be, I don't know, maybe there's Jeffersonian democracy. I don't think so. But it could be any one of a number of groups who can probably now fight it out. And who knows who comes out on top? Wait and see.

00:24:22 Speaker_00
So that's a really important point that I want to emphasize here, which is the way the media is framing it. Is it okay? The government fell and now this new group controls all of Syria, but that's not correct. I mean, there's different pockets, right?

00:24:33 Speaker_00
Different cities, different regions. I mean, if you look at it, it's incredibly sporadic, right? One group controls like 10% of the territory here and 5% here. It's not as if just like one regime goes here, it's very fluid and Can you help explain that?

00:24:49 Speaker_00
How many groups are there? Three, four? And then there'll probably be subgroups and subterritories. I mean, a very messy and fluid situation.

00:24:57 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, probably one of the major groups is the one supported by Turkey, who says, well, we used to be al-Qaeda, but we're not really al-Qaeda anymore. And then there's some, look, it's tribes. These tribes have been fighting each other since

00:25:10 Speaker_02
you know, before Islam. I mean, there were tribal wars in the Middle East. There always have been tribal wars in the Middle East. We should not be in a position of trying to say, well, we like this one, we don't like that one. We don't belong there.

00:25:21 Speaker_02
Let them work it out. You know, one of the reasons, if you go back again, 50 years, why did we care about the Middle East in the first place? Well, we cared about the oil. We needed access to their oil.

00:25:32 Speaker_02
And so for access to their oil, we had to pick and choose countries that we liked and didn't like in the Middle East. If you fast forward today, we don't need their oil.

00:25:40 Speaker_02
America, because of American resources and really technological entrepreneurial capabilities, we've realized that we have oil and natural gas in the rocks right under our feet. And we have more oil and natural gas than any other country in the world.

00:25:56 Speaker_02
We can power the world for hundreds of years. just using our oil and natural gas. And we can produce it cheaper, simpler, easier, safer, cleaner, better than any other country.

00:26:09 Speaker_02
So our interest in the Middle East is no longer we need their oil for our economy. In fact, our interest should be we'll replace the Middle East as the world's hub of energy.

00:26:20 Speaker_02
We'll not only have our own and be energy independent, but if you listen to President Trump, he keeps saying this word energy dominant and nobody's really picked it apart.

00:26:27 Speaker_02
What he means by that is that we will be the world's major supplier of energy, not only for ourselves, but exported to all the world. So our interests in the Middle East have now changed. We care about Israel. We sure want peace.

00:26:40 Speaker_02
The Abraham Accords are the way to go, which is peace between Israel and the Sunni Gulf Arabs. Maybe that peace gets bigger under President Trump. I do think so, it will.

00:26:51 Speaker_02
The thing about the Middle East, you think you know it, you don't know it, because there's so many different tribes.

00:26:55 Speaker_00
Well, no, that's exactly right. And it's the more you know, the more you realize how little you know when you thought you knew it all. So that could best summarize Middle Eastern tribal politics.

00:27:07 Speaker_00
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00:27:18 Speaker_00
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00:27:31 Speaker_00
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00:27:45 Speaker_00
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00:28:00 Speaker_00
Fight naturally with Relief Factor, relieffactor.com. KT, you've been wonderful. Thank you. I do want to ask you, though, about Iran and something that you said.

00:28:11 Speaker_00
I'd love to just address some concerns that I would potentially have and work through it, which is, if the current Iranian regime falls, do we have guarantees that what will come after would necessarily be better?

00:28:25 Speaker_00
I only say that because it seems the Middle East, whatever is replaced is not always better. It seems to get more radical, not more Western. Please, your thoughts, KT McFarland.

00:28:33 Speaker_02
Yeah. I mean, the one thing we've learned from the Middle East is, is dictators get replaced and it doesn't necessarily get better. It usually gets worse because in various radical groups, um, what happens in Iran, who knows what happens in Iran.

00:28:45 Speaker_02
I've got to assume that if Israel was clever enough to do the attacks on Hezbollah and Hamas leadership, but particularly Hezbollah leadership in downtown Tehran, that they have sufficient connections with the underground.

00:28:59 Speaker_02
in Iran of the people who want the pro-democracy movement, the people who want to get rid of the mullahs. And so maybe that helps. We do not belong with troops on the ground anywhere near this stuff, and we should not be picking winners and losers.

00:29:15 Speaker_02
whether it was in Iraq or Afghanistan or go back to Vietnam. Every time we get in the middle of somebody else's civil war and start picking winners and losers, we're always the losers. We're not good at this.

00:29:25 Speaker_02
And so if the Biden administration thinks they want to get in the middle of Syria now and somehow affect that outcome, don't do it. And if anybody is saying, well, maybe we should go bomb Iran while we've got, while they're weak, don't do that either.

00:29:36 Speaker_02
Let regime change happen because the people of those countries want the regimes to change. And that's what the argument should be with Iran. You know, President Trump understood why Iran was powerful and how you diminish Iran in the first term.

00:29:51 Speaker_02
He understood, again, it's all about oil, natural gas revenues. Once Iran, at the end of Trump's first term, Iran was broke. They weren't giving money to Hezbollah and Hamas. They were having enough trouble feeding their own people.

00:30:03 Speaker_02
When Trump took office on January 20th of 2017, the price of oil was about $140 a barrel, $120 a barrel. When Trump left office four years later, the price of oil was $40 a barrel.

00:30:18 Speaker_02
So if you're Iran, you're Russia, your money comes from selling oil at those high prices. All of a sudden your revenue stream's been cut in half, cut by two thirds. They didn't have the money to go to war in Ukraine.

00:30:30 Speaker_02
or they didn't have the money to go to war against Israel in the Middle East. It's the same problem, whether it's Russia, Iran, Ukraine, Middle East, it's all about the oil money.

00:30:39 Speaker_02
And President Trump, one of the reasons he keeps saying, drill, baby, drill, is he's going to take the price of oil, which is now what, about $80 a barrel, thanks to Biden. Donald Trump is going to unleash the American energy industry.

00:30:52 Speaker_02
Oil and natural gas prices will go way down. Iran is going to be broke, at which point let the Iranian people decide for themselves what kind of a government they want.

00:31:01 Speaker_02
Chances are there's not much that gets worse than what they have now, but maybe, but let them decide. It's their decision. It's not our business.

00:31:10 Speaker_00
I think that's prudent. And I just said, we must remember that the Iranian mess that we have right now was brought to you by British and American intelligence. We, we displaced a democratically elected

00:31:23 Speaker_00
Mossadegh and put the Shah in, which then of course he was sick and unpopular. And then we get the Ayatollah regime that we have right now. KT, thank you so much. Excellent. And I hope to see you again soon. Thank you. Thank you, Charlie.

00:31:37 Speaker_00
Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always freedom at charliekirk.com. Thanks so much for listening and God bless.

00:31:44 Speaker_01
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.