Gas Prices Skyrocket, Trump Freaks Out & His Powerlessness Is Exposed: The True War Agenda Revealed | Tucker Carlson Transcript

Tucker Carlson analyzes the strategic targeting of global oil refineries and the limits of presidential power

Tucker Carlson delivers a solo monologue followed by an interview with defense analyst Brandon Wiker on the geopolitical significance of refinery attacks in the Ukraine and Iran wars.

Summary

Tucker Carlson opens with an extended solo analysis arguing that the most underreported story of the current wars in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf is not the blockade of shipping lanes but the systematic destruction of oil refineries — infrastructure that takes decades and tens of billions of dollars to replace. He contends that the resulting spike in diesel prices is not a side effect of these conflicts but their actual purpose, and draws a direct line between refinery destruction and the goals previously articulated by the climate change movement: reduced mobility, lower living standards, and population reduction. He then presents footage of Trump publicly demanding that Ukraine stop hitting Russian refineries, followed by Ukraine doing exactly that just days later — hitting a refinery ten miles from Moscow — and argues this proves Trump does not control his own intelligence agencies or his Ukrainian proxy. Defense analyst Brandon Wiker joins to expand on U.S. refining vulnerabilities, China's strategic surplus refining capacity, and the CIA's apparent autonomy from presidential direction. Wiker also raises the possibility of a nuclear strike on Iran's Fordow facility as a "third act" finale to the Iran war, and expresses alarm at what he describes as Trump's increasing fixation on nuclear weapons use in internal meetings.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

The Most Important Unreported Story: Refineries, Not Straits

Tucker Carlson: We don't want to be cynical, but it does sometimes occur that maybe we're talking about the wrong things. When a big news event happens and everyone in the media is talking about one element of it — and we're usually part of that herd, embarrassingly — you have to ask yourself at a certain point: could it be that the thing we're all talking about is not the most important thing? Could it be that we're talking about it, or being led into that conversation, on purpose? Not to be a conspiracy nut or anything, but it's possible that happens.

Here's an ongoing example: the Strait of Hormuz. We've done a bunch of different shows on the Strait of Hormuz. It's obviously inherently significant — it's the waterway at the eastern end of the Persian Gulf through which a lot of the world's energy flows. Iran has the longest shoreline along that strait. We're all geography experts now. And so we all know that it's essential to keep that waterway open. And then it curves around into the Red Sea along the coast of a country called Yemen, which is controlled — almost the entire country — by a group called the Houthis. People are getting an ongoing education in all this. And why is that meaningful? It's meaningful because you can't get oil out of the richest oil-producing region in the world unless you have access through those waterways, straight up from Hormuz into the Red Sea.

So the ongoing conversation — again, including conversation we participated in — has been about how to open the Strait of Hormuz, how to get that oil through. But if you think about it, is that really the most important question that arises from the Iran war? A waterway is, of course, inherently important. On the other hand, that's a problem you can fix really quickly. If you have a blocked waterway, if one country says you can't come through or we're going to blow up your tankers, you could reach an accommodation with that country and fix it in about ten minutes if all sides were willing. What's harder to fix is the destruction of energy infrastructure — pipelines, wellheads, but more than anything else, refineries.

What Refineries Are and Why They Matter

A refinery is the plant, the factory, where crude oil pumped out of the ground is turned into products you can actually use. People may not have an appreciation for how different crude oil is from the refined products made from it. From crude oil we get gasoline, jet fuel — also known as kerosene — all the way down to asphalt. We get diesel fuel, and we also get a lot of the precursor elements for fertilizer. None of those things come directly out of the ground. They are made from this commodity called crude oil, and they're made in things called refineries. Without refineries, you really can't run a society. You cannot run a country on crude oil. There's very little you can do with crude oil. You can't even put it in a diesel motor. You have to refine it.

Refineries are actually the most important link in the chain from drilling to turning on the lights in your house, getting on an airplane, or eating food that's grown in the ground. And the problem with refineries is there aren't very many of them. There are a lot of oil and gas wells — in fact, no one really knows the number. There are about 70,000 new oil and gas wells drilled every year globally. The U.S. alone has almost a million active oil and gas wells. But refineries, which are absolutely necessary, are a different question.

How many refineries are there globally on planet Earth right now? We know the answer because it's not a very big number. There are a total of 825 refineries on the planet for a population of 8.3 billion people. 825. That's about one refinery for every ten million people — one refinery for every New York City plus two million. So when you destroy a refinery, that's a big problem. A big refinery is incredibly expensive — $25 billion, for example — and time-consuming to build. It can take more than ten years to build a big refinery. When you destroy one, you have an immediate and long-lasting effect in a way that closing a strait does not achieve.

Seven Refineries Hit — and the Silence Around It

So with that in mind, you have to wonder what's going on with refineries. All of a sudden, they're getting hit. By our count — and this may be off, we may be undercounting — as of today, seven refineries in the Persian Gulf have been hit, destroyed, damaged, or shut down, maybe some long-term. So far in this war, not even a year old. Seven refineries.

If you're wondering why diesel is $6.50 nationally and much more expensive than that in other parts of the world, it's because of that. It's hits on refineries — and not just in the Persian Gulf, but in Russia, which makes about 7% of the world's diesel fuel. So what is that? How exactly is that helping? Even if you're waging a war, would you go after the refineries? Would that be your first order of business? Well, it has been the first order of business in both of those conflicts.

We've got footage — no sound, but just so you can see it. This is from the very early days of the Iran war, in early March. This is the product of an Israeli drone attack on a refinery in Iran. The war breaks out. We're told this war is an effort to stop the Iranian nuclear program because they're minutes away from nuking Miami, and that's what it's about — only that nuclear program, which we're not going to accept. But if that's true, why do the Israelis, instead of hitting a nuclear facility or assassinating more nuclear physicists — they've done that in Iran — why do they hit a refinery? No one has answered that question because almost nobody's asked.

Why would the Ukrainian government be hitting Russian refineries right now, which they are, all over Russia? Apparently 60% of Russia's refinery capacity has been hit. We're not exactly sure how much has been taken offline permanently versus short-term, but 60% of their capacity has been hit by the Ukrainians. Why refineries?

That's the first mystery. The second mystery is why is no one talking about this? Because the thing about hitting a refinery is that it releases massive, epic amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. For the last couple of years, people have not been talking about CO2 emissions. For the preceding twenty years, every child at every grade in American schools learned that CO2 is a poison, that it is increasing the temperature on the Earth, that Florida will soon be underwater, and that we are destroying the planet every time we emit CO2. All of a sudden, no one's talking about that. And there's nothing that emits CO2 in greater volume than blowing up energy infrastructure.

The Climate Movement's Silence

The Biden administration's destruction of the Nordstream pipeline — the natural gas pipeline from Russia to Europe — was the largest man-made emission of CO2 in human history, we think. And yet no one said a word. The Sierra Club, which is the best-funded environmental group and climate change organization in the United States — they've got something like a hundred-million-dollar budget — didn't say a word about the Biden administration blowing up Nordstream. That's very curious if you think about it.

They also haven't said a word about the bombs that the United States, under Biden and Trump, has sent to Israel. 2,000-pound bombs. How much CO2 does a 2,000-pound bomb emit? We know, because academics in London figured it out. They did the math: about three metric tons. How much is that? It's a lot. In fact, it's more than three times what the average gas-fired home water heater emits every year in a residential home. Biden sent like 14,000 of them to Israel. Trump is sending 40,000 of this bomb and lots of other bombs.

Why compare it to a home water heater? Because the Sierra Club has issued endless press releases on gas-fired home water heaters — the ones that work well, that are efficient — and has also paid a team of lawyers to make sure you can't have one. And not just gas-fired water heaters, but gas ranges, wood stoves, basically any household appliance that you enjoy that is effective: dryers, washing machines. All of these are threats to the earth according to the Sierra Club, our largest climate group, because they emit CO2. But the Sierra Club has, so far as we could tell, never mentioned the CO2 emissions from munitions, from dropping bombs, or from blowing up refineries.

Why is that? It makes you wonder if the environmental movement — the climate change movement, which really was the dominant piety of our ruling class for two decades — if they ever really believed it. If you ever had dinner with rich ladies in the past twenty years, with a private equity wife, you'd get stuck next to one at dinner. She would turn to you doe-eyed at some point and say, "I'm very concerned about climate. We're destroying this planet with our emissions." And she would get a little misty. They really meant it. But all of a sudden, there's not a word about the biggest CO2 emissions in our lifetimes, brought on by this war and the war in Ukraine.

Could it be that they never really considered carbon dioxide a poison? Because of course it's not a poison. You breathe it, you exhale it all day long. It's not a poison. And they never really believed it was. Could it be that the real appeal of the climate movement was its effects on the way people live?

The Real Agenda: Lowering Living Standards

What were the climate people telling you you were going to have to do? What were you going to have to give up? How were you going to have to change your life in order to save the planet, which you uniquely had destroyed — not China, the world's largest emitter of carbon, but you, as an American, as a European, as a Westerner?

Well, for one thing, your mobility. You're going to have to live in a fifteen-minute city. You couldn't go anywhere. You'd be locked down effectively, but for the good of the planet. You'd have to give up meat. You may have to wear a sweater indoors in the wintertime because it's profligate to heat your home to 70. You can't have working appliances. You can't have anything that actually gives you comfort at low expense because that's a sin. Instead, you're going to have to have a thermostat that can be controlled from Sierra Club headquarters or from your local state capital or at least your city council. You're going to have to give up your autonomy and dial down your standard of living.

These effects are wildly unpopular. Nobody wants to wear a sweater indoors in February. No one wants to be cold and hungry. In fact, for all of human history, the two main goals on the mind of every person on the planet were: let's not be cold, and let's not be hungry. There's no groundswell of support for being cold and hungry, but you were going to have to do that. And the people in charge wanted that. They said so, a lot.

But what's interesting is they're getting it anyway. Larry Fink, the single most powerful businessman in the world, the head of BlackRock, deeply embedded in the Ukraine war and profiting from it, dropped his demands for climate change compliance. BlackRock was not going to do business with you unless you signed on to the climate agenda. He's dropped that. Why? Maybe because they're getting the same thing from these wars. Because when you destroy refineries, you hike the price of diesel and gasoline and jet fuel beyond what most people can pay. And the trajectory is in place now — $6.50 for a gallon of diesel, which is the energy source that gets all of our goods from manufacturer to warehouse to home.

When you destroy the world's refining capacity, you achieve the same effect you would if you enacted whatever plan they were calling it to avert climate change. Exactly the same thing. And if you adjust people's standard of living down enough, what do you get? Fewer people — because either they starve to death, and we're facing that possibility very soon in countries around the world, particularly in Africa, which will needless to say spark mass migration to the West. There are a billion people in sub-Saharan Africa, and if they go hungry, they're not going to sit and starve to death. They'll be in Los Angeles and Frankfurt and Lisbon. Or they decide to have fewer kids.

One of the goals of the climate agenda was reducing global population, and they just said it. They said it a lot, all the time. Bill Gates — hate to blame everything on Bill Gates, that poor autistic elderly man, who is unique among rulers of the universe because he's damaged enough to say the dark stuff out loud because he clearly doesn't know what he's not supposed to say. Jeffrey Epstein famously — maybe not so famously. Here's part of an exchange that Jeffrey Epstein had in the now-famous Epstein docs. This is from 2016, and he's in an exchange with Josh Bach, a cognitive scientist, and he says this about climate change:

Jeffrey Epstein: "Maybe climate change is a good way of dealing with overpopulation. The earth's forest fire — potentially a good thing for the species. Too many people. So many mass executions of the elderly and infirm make sense. Is the fundamental fact that everyone dies at some time."

Jeffrey Epstein — and if you read the Epstein file, you know this was basically illiterate, so it's not entirely clear what that meant — but he's applauding mass death. And he's emailing this to a normie, someone who probably still has a job and is walking among us as a cognitive scientist. And they're talking about fewer people.

At a certain level, way above the level where you and I live, the people who run countries think in terms of population. If you assess your life, you think in terms of your kids and your job and your wife and how things are going and whether you're making enough money. If you're running a country, if you're in charge of a civilization, if you're part of the class of people making big decisions about giant populations, you think in terms of demographics. How many people live here? How many people do we need to live here? That's the very first question people who run countries ask themselves and their advisers.

The Ukraine War and Its Real Effects

So when you see big things happen in the world — if a completely pointless war breaks out in Eastern Europe and they're telling you, "Oh, it's about these three oblasts in eastern Ukraine no one's ever heard of, and we have to take a stand on principle because Churchill is at war with Hitler again" — you can be absolutely dead certain that's not the cause of the war and that's not the reason it's continued for almost five years. There's something else going on. Something much more important than who controls three oblasts, whatever an oblast is. Nobody cares, actually.

You have to think: maybe one of the reasons for that war is its effect. And its effect is to completely depopulate the largest country in Europe, which is Ukraine, which has fewer than half the people it had when the war started, and will never be Ukrainian again, ever. A child could have known that going into this. If this war continues, and if it's a First World War-type standoff, a meat grinder, the country with the smaller population is going to lose a sizable chunk of its working-age population. You think people didn't know that going in? You think NATO and the Biden administration, you think the Trump administration doesn't know that? You think the leadership of the EU doesn't know that? You think the British prime minister doesn't know that? Of course they know that.

So when the Western proxy, the Ukrainian military, tries to take out 60% of all of Russia's diesel production, it's probably not just about Russia, is it? It's about hiking the price of diesel globally, which it immediately did. And that has the effect of imposing the same restrictions they called for in the climate agenda, but which were broadly rejected by the population.

The same with the Iran war. Iran can have a nuclear weapon — okay, yeah, that doesn't sound great. But at this point, how many Americans care if Iran has a nuclear weapon? As a justification for $6.50-a-gallon diesel, they don't care. So what does that tell you? $6.50 diesel isn't an ancillary byproduct of this war. It's the whole point of the war. The point of a system is what it does. And that's how you know what's true. It doesn't matter what they tell you the justification is. Watch what they do. Consider the result it produces. If they keep doing it and it keeps producing that same result, that result is the point of the exercise.

When people get up on camera and say, "Oh my gosh, if this continues, we're going to have famine in Africa and mass migration — all of sub-Saharan Africa is going to move to Europe and the United States and Canada" — you think that hasn't occurred to them? If this continues, the standard of living in the United States is going to plummet. People won't be able to afford essentials. They're going to have to stop eating meat. You think they never thought of that before?

At some point, all of us need to wake up and ground our understanding of reality in reality itself. Be like your dog. Your dog doesn't understand a word you say, and yet your dog has an amazing track record of anticipating what you're going to do. How does that work? Because by not hearing what you say, the dog is restricted to watching what you do. And watching what people do is, over time, a far more reliable indicator of why they're doing it. Seek motive by understanding people's actions, not their words. Words mislead. Actions tell the truth.

These actions — both in Ukraine and in Iran, both in Eastern Europe and the Persian Gulf — have the same effect, which is to lower the standard of living in the West. Not in China. In the West. China has gone crazy with refineries, and none of them have been blown up. China is producing energy by liquefying coal, as the Germans did during the Second World War, because they don't have adequate oil reserves. They have a massive gasification program with coal. They're taking coal and turning it into liquid fuel, effectively diesel. China is actually fine. We're not fine. Europe is shafted. It was obvious when this started that was going to happen. They did it anyway.

Why did they do it? Don't listen, like your dog, to what they say. Assess what they do. They did it to destroy the standard of living in the United States and Europe, to make way for the Chinese empire. That sounds crazy. Is it crazy? Look at what they're doing. By destroying refineries, they are ensuring that the West will be a lot poorer than it is now. And that's not quickly fixable. And they know that.

And by "they," who are we talking about? Well, whoever's making the decisions in the Ukraine war. And it's not Putin. The Russians are responding at this point — responding to increased aggression from Ukraine. Ukraine is out of men. We don't know the numbers because they're still secret, but hundreds of thousands — likely over a million Ukrainians — have been killed, and certainly way over a million have been killed or wounded. So there is no Ukrainian fighting force left, but they're amping up the aggression. What is that? And who's making that decision?

Trump's Demand — and Ukraine's Defiance

Watch the following clip and you will know. This is Donald Trump, just the other day, as diesel prices start to climb in the United States. Trump, whatever his many faults, understands commodity prices because they're not hard to understand. A commodity is really simple. Diesel as a commodity is easy to understand — it's the liquid that goes inside trucks to keep the global economy going. Without it, the global economy grinds to a halt. Literally grinds to a halt. So Trump gets that. You can check diesel prices on your phone, and there's no question he does.

His fear from the very beginning of this whole conflict was that commodity prices would go up, and he's been very focused on the price of Brent crude. Brent crude is one of many markers of global oil prices — it's named after a now-defunct oil field in the North Sea called the Brent oil field, but it's kind of the measure that people use. It's like the S&P of energy markets. And the Brent crude price has stayed pretty reasonable relative to what's happened. But it's the refined products that people actually use — jet fuel, gasoline, diesel, and fertilizer — those are the ones you've got to start worrying about. And diesel in particular, because unlike jet fuel and fertilizer, they advertise the price of diesel at your local gas station. So you know what it costs.

Trump's watching this and it's freaking him out, because he'll be judged. He knows that no matter how many arches he builds or Kennedy Centers he names after himself, if the diesel price gets to eight bucks, there's no chance he'll be remembered as anything other than a failure. Period. And he knows that, because despite appearances, he's not stupid on this level.

So Trump clearly asked advisers what's going on with diesel, and they told him it's really not the Middle East causing the spike — it's the Ukrainians hitting all these Russian diesel refineries. Russia is one of the biggest producers, I think number two in the world for diesel. So Trump gets so agitated that he calls for Zelensky to stop hitting diesel refining.

Donald Trump: "Mr. Zelensky has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia. Let him go after targets, but not diesel fuel, because he's causing a shortage of diesel fuel. This isn't done by the Middle East. This is done by what's happening with Russia and Ukraine. So we spoke to Mr. Zelensky about it. There are plenty of other targets. Don't hit diesel fuel, because that's hurting the world. We don't want him to hit diesel fuel."

That's pretty clear. That's last Sunday. Trump says that, and it's actually a pretty good thing to say, a pretty smart thing to say. He's identified one of the main causes of the problem. Why are diesel prices going up? Because Ukrainians are hitting Russian refining. And he thinks, understandably, that he's in charge — like, there would be no Ukraine, there wouldn't be a Ukrainian nation, were it not for the support from the United States. And there certainly wouldn't be a Ukrainian war effort. It's not like the Ukrainian people want it. They're being held hostage by an unelected president who has eliminated civil liberties in the country, banned the biggest Christian denomination, put people in prison for criticizing him. He's a lunatic and a tyrant. And why is he continuing? The only reason he's continuing is because the Trump administration, through its intelligence agencies, is giving the Ukrainians targeting information. So when they hit a target in Russia, where did that information come from? From their intel agencies? No. From ours.

So whatever they tell you, the Trump administration is allowing this war to continue. It's just a fact. And so Trump feels, understandably, that he can shut it down, because this is only happening because he's allowing it to happen and aiding the Zelensky government. It makes sense that Trump would be like, "Okay, enough. Shut it down. You're hurting me. You're hurting America."

That was last Sunday. Here's Trump on Friday, just the other day, declaring mission accomplished.

Donald Trump: "We have the highest employment that we've ever had in history. All of these things are the lowest. We have the best poverty rate, the lowest poverty rate in the history of our country. And people are making more money today than they ever had. And we do have something that I'm very proud of. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. Now, for that, people are going to have to pay some extra gas. I think most people, if they had a vote on lower gas prices or letting Iran have a nuclear weapon, I'd be willing to bet it would be a massive landslide. People don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. And you know what? They won't. And the war is going to end soon. And when it ends, your gas prices are going to drop to a level that they were before, maybe even lower."

Ignore the stuff about Iran having a nuclear weapon. That's obviously the ramblings of an old man. Nobody cares, actually, at this point. Israel has a nuclear weapon. Israel has threatened to use nuclear weapons against various countries, and there are no nuclear inspections in Israel. Inspectors have never been to Dimona. So if there's one country on the planet that's breaking international law on nuclear weapons, it's Israel. They're a much greater threat than Iran's non-existent nuclear program. And honestly, at this point, nobody really cares, and Trump must know that, which is why he keeps repeating it.

But it's the first part of that statement that really feels almost poignant in retrospect. Here's Trump just a couple of days after saying he's going to tell the Ukrainians to stop hitting Russian refineries, and he's like, "Yeah, the economy is great." Because he feels like he's got it under control. He's working the levers of the global economy. If diesel prices go really high, well, he's the president of the United States. He can bring them down. It's not a magic trick. Just rein in your proxy and we're done.

The Radicalizing Fact: Trump Is Not in Control

The black pill here — the radicalizing fact, the moment you're like, "I don't know how we fix this" — is when you realize it doesn't matter what Trump says, because he's not in control. And of course he's not in control. He didn't want to go into this war in the first place, and he was pushed by Benjamin Netanyahu into doing it. The president doesn't have the power to make independent decisions on certain topics — the big topics. He doesn't have sovereignty any more than the U.S. has sovereignty. It's all an illusion.

But you would at least think he could rein in Ukraine, which is not even a real country, the most corrupt country on Earth. We could at least tell the dictator in charge of that country what to do, since we're the only reason he's still alive. But the radicalizing fact — and this is just a fact, because we know what happened next — is that Trump can't tell him what to do. He just gives Trump the finger and does whatever he wants, because he doesn't work for Trump. He doesn't work for the United States, despite appearances.

And by the way, Trump apparently has no control over his own intelligence agencies. You'd think he could haul John Ratcliffe in and the heads of the other sixteen intel agencies and say, "If you give any targeting information to the Ukrainian military, I'm going to bring you up on charges. You work for me. You weren't elected. I was. That's our system. You have no inherent legitimacy. You're not the president. I am. And I will have you brought up on felony charges, treason charges, if you're caught disobeying the commander-in-chief in wartime." That's super simple and legal, by the way. But he didn't do that. And because he didn't do that, and because he's not actually in charge of anything of substance — which may be why he's so focused on renaming the Kennedy Center, at least that's something he can do, build some arch at the end of Memorial Bridge, build his ballroom — on questions of global power apportionment, he doesn't get a say.

And we know he doesn't get a say because this happens. Here's a BBC news report from about two days later.

BBC Reporter: "With a wave of hundreds of drones and some missiles, a message delivered to Moscow with fire. This oil refinery just ten miles from the Kremlin is the capital's biggest, supplying fuel for the city. And Ukraine says for the Russian military, too. Ukrainian officials say the aim is to bring Vladimir Putin's war home."

So, a week after Trump publicly tells Zelensky not to bomb Russian refineries because it's spiking diesel prices in the United States and globally, Zelensky bombs Russian refineries ten miles from Moscow. And then the BBC describes it all in kind of pornographic, heavy-breathing detail — the amount of war pornography, the amount of violence worship in the news coverage of these conflicts is repulsive. People are dying and they're masturbating over it. It's disgusting, beneath contempt.

In any case, they're telling us the Ukrainians did this because they're going to tell the Russians there's a cost to what you're doing. No sane person thinks the Ukrainian military is going to push the Russian military into any kind of surrender or even a forced negotiated settlement. That's not going to happen. We know that for a lot of reasons, but one is population. Russia has about a hundred million more people than Ukraine. This is nuts and it's always been nuts. It's never going to work. And so what you're going to get is the total destruction of the Ukrainian nation and energy prices so high that you get fifteen-minute cities and people eating bugs.

So you have to ask yourself: is that the point? Was that always the point? The purpose of a system is what it does. And this system is doing that.

The Real Rulers: The CNN Panel

If you want to know how totally powerless the president of the United States is — and we don't mean to pick on Trump, who at least had the right instinct on diesel — watch this CNN panel as they celebrate the Ukrainian government giving the finger to its patron, the United States.

CNN Anchor: "Ukraine managed its largest drone attack that we've ever seen on Moscow, and it hit a major oil refinery after President Trump had demanded that Ukraine stop hitting Russian oil targets, because of course it's adding to the price hikes, particularly in diesel fuel in the United States. What do you make of this escalation? What does it tell you about capabilities and where we are in this war?"

Retired Admiral (CNN Guest): "I have a one-word response for the Ukrainians, which is: congratulations. They need to increase these strikes, and doing so is the only way they could put pressure on Vladimir Putin."

Save that tape, because that tape tells you everything. Who is that man talking? That is a retired four-star American admiral. That was the head of NATO under Barack Obama. Who is he speaking for exactly? What else does he do? Who is that man? He is a partner at the Carlyle Group. He was the former head of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is the current chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation. He is, in other words, the physical embodiment of the actual rulers of the United States and of the world. And they're not political figures. They're not people who are elected by anybody, because that would be democracy, and we don't have that. The actual decisions are being made by people with commercial interests in whatever conflict is ongoing, and with a much bigger picture of how this is all going to wind up in the end.

The point of this exercise is to dethrone the United States as the ruler of the world, to diminish the United States, to impoverish the United States and Europe — which is kind of an innocent bystander here, but will be completely destroyed by this — and to make way for the new era in which we will not be in charge, and of course, likely China will be.

These are the people making the decisions. You know that because that guy — the former head of NATO, the four-star admiral, the chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carlyle partner — is taking Ukraine's side, Zelensky's side, over the elected American president. Zelensky gives the finger to the president of the United States, and the former head of NATO, the four-star admiral, the guy who's dedicated his life to defending the United States, is like, "No, no, no. I'm with Zelensky." And he knows, because he ran NATO, that there is literally no chance this tactic or strategy will work. You could blow up every refinery in Russia. You could kill Putin. There is no chance Russia is going to surrender to Ukraine or anyone else. So the best you can do is destroy Ukraine and the nations that support Ukraine, which include the rest of the West. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the object of the exercise.

It feels like a lot of people know this. It feels like a lot of people who are much smarter than I am have thought this through from the very beginning and they know that there's no liberation here. They can call Zelensky Churchill all they want, but in the end, no one's going to be liberated. No one's getting sovereignty and freedom. In fact, the direct effect of all of this is death for military-age men and women in the West — the legacy population in the West, not the people who just moved here from some foreign country. They're not signing up, of course. But the people whose ancestors were here a hundred years ago — they're going to die. And the ones who survive will be much less free than they were when this all started.

The British Political Class Calls for War and Imprisonment of Dissenters

Now, how do we know that? That sounds dark. It sounds like some Alex Jones rant. But we've gotten to the point where they just say it on cable television. The only question is: are you listening? This doesn't require any interpretation. You don't need a Rosetta Stone to know what they're saying.

Here's a guy called Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg. We should warn you before this begins that the affect in this guy's voice — which we think is fairly fake — is so overwhelming that you think you're watching a cartoon, but this is apparently real. This guy is a conservative political figure in the UK, and he's on television on the conservative station in the UK, which is basically like our own conservative station — not conservative at all, violence-worshipping, a tool of whatever is coming next. That station and this guy are spear-carriers for that project. Obviously, there's nothing conservative about it. They're not trying to conserve what we have. They're trying to usher in the new thing. And the one thing we know about the new thing, whatever it is, is that you're not going to benefit from it.

Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg: "We may face a war. And if we face a war, we will need people who will join the armed services and who will go out and do their duty. We may even face circumstances where people have to die to save their country, as they did in the First and Second World Wars and in many other wars before and since. That is something that makes a country survive. If people are not willing to do their duty, then the country will be taken over by another country, ultimately, one way or another. This is part of the reason that ancient Rome fell."

Remember, this is a Brit. You would think he would know that the last time Britain was invaded was almost exactly a thousand years ago — in 1066, by Scandinavians posing as French, coming over from Normandy. They invaded the country, completely changed it, did what invading armies do, which is kind of enslaved the population, and then over time people sort of forgot and they became the aristocracy. You know the story if you're familiar at all with European history. But the point is it was a thousand years ago that Britain was last invaded.

The last two big wars that Britain participated in — the First and Second World Wars — were not in response to an invasion of Britain. No one was trying to invade Britain. Those were both wars of choice. And what was their effect? Their effect was to completely destroy the country. In 1914, when Britain joined the First World War, Britain ruled the world. By 1945, when the Second World War ended, Britain was a husk with rationing for the next ten years. And the prime minister who led Britain through that war, the much-loved-in-the-United-States Winston Churchill, was rejected by voters as a failure. They despised him because they knew what our historians will not admit: he destroyed the empire and destroyed their country, and it has never recovered.

So the wars that that buffoon cites as necessary were in fact the opposite of necessary, if you think war should be waged in defense of a nation for the benefit of the people who live there. And throughout history, people have assumed that's the only reason you have a war — to help the people who live in your country, because you're acting on their behalf and you're asking them, as the buffoon reminded us, to die for this effort. So if it doesn't help them, that's a lot to ask of anybody. Go die for something that helps me — something for which I'm not personally willing to die, and my children are not willing to die — but we would like you to go die for this thing that will not help your surviving relatives at all. In fact, it'll wreck our country. And that's exactly what Britain did in those two wars.

There's kind of no counterargument. They'll get huffy and call you names, and you're a hater if you say that. But what about that is not true? It is true. It is true, and it's disgraceful, and the people who defend it are disgraceful. So actually, if you point out something that is true and you take a position against killing people pointlessly, you are not the criminal. And of course they try to invert that immediately. "Well, you're the bad person. You have hate." No, I'm against people dying needlessly. I'm against murdering the innocent. I'm not the bad person here. You are.

It's very important to keep your wits about you and not succumb to moral vertigo. Moral vertigo is their only really effective weapon. You're like, wait, you're committing genocide. "You're a hater. Shut up." And you get censored. But the people committing genocide get to speak at the UN today. No, the way it works is: if you call for the deaths of innocents, you're the bad guy. I'm not the bad guy for calling you out for that. You are not the bad guy if you oppose sending your nation's young people to pointless death. You are the good guy, and you are facing off against the bad guys, and you should put them on their back foot. There's no way they should be allowed to continue to call for the pointless deaths of our people and hold the moral high ground. That's outrageous. What they're calling for is criminal and vile and disgusting and totally indefensible, and they should be ashamed.

In any case, they're trying to shame the population of the UK — the legacy population, people who watch GB News — into dying for a war that has nothing to do with Britain. And of course, Britain is not even controlled by British people. It has no sovereignty. There are American troops on their soil. The whole thing's a joke.

But what's the real agenda? Even Jacob Rees-Mogg probably isn't eager to have a totally pointless war. There's a point to it. There's a reason they want to do this. So we want to play you a clip. It's part of a colloquy between him and, you would think, his counterpart. The guy you just saw, Rees-Mogg, is what is known in the UK as a conservative. So he's on one side. Here's a guy called Paul Richards, who's on the completely opposite side. They have nothing in common. They agree on nothing. They're polar opposites, locked in this battle of ideas for control of a great democratic nation. Oh, but that's not true. Because as in the United States, both sides are aligned against the population on the questions that really matter. And the question that matters above all — because it touches on every other question — is the question of who gets killed.

Don't let them distract you with all this other stuff. What matters is who lives in your country and who gets killed. On those questions — who lives in your country and who gets killed — in the UK as in the U.S., both sides are in total agreement against the population, which wants none of this. They don't want to have a completely different country every generation because of immigration. And they don't want to go fight wars for other nations or commercial interests. They don't want to die for no reason. They will die in defense of their nation. They don't want to die for any other reason. And that's not bad. You're not an anti-Semite for thinking that.

Anyway, here's Paul Richards, the liberal, facing off against the conservative. Watch him just sort of say out loud what the point of all of this is.

Paul Richards: "I think the British would rise to greatness if they had to. We would have to lock a few people up, by the way. Some of the pro-Russian voices, people who are saying there isn't a threat, don't fight for your country, don't go to war — we'd have to lock them up."

Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg: "Well, we suspended habeas corpus during the Napoleonic Wars."

Paul Richards: "And under the Defense of the Realm as well. So, you know, we would have to go to those measures, and we would have to look at things like conscription as well."

What a picture. The very first thing they're going to do — and you can tell these are highly informed military tacticians because they don't start with, "Okay, the front in this war is here, we need to cross the Dnieper River to do that." No. The first thing we need to do is imprison anyone who disagrees with us. And then we need to send everyone else's kids to go die, because those guys are obviously not participating in a physical sense in this war. They're not going to go fight. You think Paul Richards is going to go fight? No. The first thing we need to do, the very first thing, is lock up people who are opposed to this war.

And then Jacob Rees-Mogg, posing as an expert in English history while clearly knowing nothing about it, is like, "Yeah, we did that during the Napoleonic Wars." No, buddy. You did that during World War II, when the very first thing the British government did was imprison the opposition party, calling them Nazis — which they weren't. The opposition was run by one of the great war heroes of the First World War, Oswald Mosley. "Oh, he was a Nazi." No, he wasn't. If he were a Nazi, he'd be living in Germany. He didn't want the war. And he has been slandered ever since. Whatever his views, in a free society you cannot imprison people for their opinions. And when you do, how are you better than the people you're fighting?

They did this in their last big war. And not only did they imprison the opposition party, they sent their wives to prison too. Why? What did the wives do? Oh, they were married to the guys they didn't like. That's called blood guilt. That's kind of not what we do in Western civilization. In the West, we judge people on the basis of what they do. We punish the guilty. We spare the innocent. We make every effort to spare the innocent. But they stopped doing that in Britain in 1940 and just imprisoned the wives, including pregnant women. People died in prison, and they were there for the whole war, under Churchill, Mr. Freedom Fighter Guy.

And you can't wait to do it again. You can't wait to slander anybody who opposes this war as pro-Russia, just as you slandered anyone against the last big war as pro-Nazi. "You're pro-Nazi." No, just against the war. How's that? That's their first plan of action: put in prison people who disagree with them.

Going back to our plan for understanding reality: that's not a byproduct of the plan. That is the point of the plan. The point of the war is to change not Iran or Russia or whatever they tell you. No, it's to change us. It's to change our lives. It's to change the way power is apportioned in our society — to take it from the population, this arrangement we had called democracy. In a democracy, you wouldn't go to war if the population overwhelmingly opposed it, because how would that be justified? Where would the authority for that come from? But we do. It's not even a question. People don't want it. Who cares whether you want it or not? Shut up.

And now clearly the plan is to take it to the next stage: "We're just going to send you off to go die." And by the way, anyone who tells you that conscription in the United States is totally off the table is lying, because it's not off the table at all. They've already put in place the mechanics to make it happen. But in Britain, they're just far gone. Britain is a failed society run by people with no authority, no credibility, and no legitimacy. And they're facing in effect a revolt of their own population, which is entirely justified. And their answer to it is not to improve the lives of the people they supposedly represent. The answer is to start a war that could end with nuclear annihilation, because they just don't care — they're nihilists. And to use that war to end all civil liberties in their country. If you think that couldn't happen here, if you think that's not part of what you're seeing now as they blow up refineries around the world, you should think more deeply about it.

Interview with Brandon Wiker: U.S. Refining Vulnerabilities and China's Strategic Position

Tucker Carlson: Brandon Wiker is one of the most informed people we ever talk to on any topic related to war and statecraft. He's informed because he pays attention to all the details. While the rest of us are doing whatever we do during the day, he's learning more about the facts, the actual facts as they unfold, which is not easy. If you're trying to track these wars on a factual basis — how many people have died, what's been blown up, how many planes in the air at any given time — it's not easy because there's just a haze of lying around everything. But he has pierced that haze, consistently. So we're really glad to have him join us again. Brandon, thanks a lot for doing this.

Brandon Wiker: Thank you as always for having me. It's always an honor to be with you.

Tucker Carlson: It feels to me like the attacks in Eastern Europe and the Gulf on refineries, on energy infrastructure, is a huge and undersold part of the story. How bad have these attacks been? How widespread? Can you give us a picture of what you've seen?

Brandon Wiker: Well, anybody who's ever played Jenga — you're pulling the pieces out one at a time and watching the tower kind of lean and list, and eventually you pull the one out and the whole thing comes down. The refineries are the most important block here. And I thought your monologue laid it out brilliantly. It already hit a lot of the points I had. But the point is that we can reopen the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb eventually. We can take control of the Panama Canal zone. We can reassert ourselves around Greenland, near the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap. We can do all of that, and that's fairly straightforward. The refineries are not coming back once they're blown up, and it's going to take years.

Now, in the United States, we have our own problems, and I kind of want to start there because you already hit on Russia. The United States has a very significant set of issues with refineries. First of all, we haven't built new refineries since the late 1970s. And one of the reasons we haven't built a new refinery is because of what you mentioned — the panic over global warming and climate change. We created regulations and disincentives for investors to put money into these very important refineries. So what we have is basically what we've had for about forty-plus years — really since the Ayatollahs took over in Iran. Pretty much that same time frame that we've been at war with Iran, we've had the same refineries.

Those refineries were designed to process heavy sour crude. We hear very often from our so-called leaders that we're standing on an ocean of oil in North America, and we are — we have a lot of, in many cases, untapped light sweet crude. Our refineries, though, don't process light sweet crude. So we drill, baby, drill, and then we export that stuff to the rest of the world, to refineries and countries that can refine it. We import a lot of our stuff — heavy sour crude — from places like Mexico and, wouldn't you know it, Canada, who we seem to have really aggravated lately. So we bring in a lot of stuff that we don't drill, and we use our refineries to refine that.

Somebody explained to me — I co-host Mario Nawfal's show, and we had an oil expert on — and he said it's sort of like we have caviar for oil and we sell that on the market, and then we bring in the quarter-pounder with cheese from overseas and we have to process and use that here. That's one of the biggest problems we have.

There's another issue, which is that we pretty much max out our refining capacity, and we do that because we're a capitalist country and we like to have the short-term profit. You max it out, you take the money you make off that, and you use that for profit. You mentioned China earlier. China has basically — they are the world's largest, most advanced refining capacity, and they don't even use roughly — I can't find the number now, but — 30% of their refining is in the teapot refining capability in Shandong Province. That capability is heavily sanctioned because those teapot refineries use and process a lot of oil from Russia or from sanctioned countries that we don't like to do business with.

But one of the things China has done is, on top of those capabilities, they've actually built out really new, advanced, sophisticated systems — like the Yulong Petrochemical Complex — and they've really developed some interesting refining capabilities, new techniques for gasoline and diesel, even for plastics. But the key thing here is the Chinese have spare refining capacity, and that is because they want to have a buffer. They anticipated many years ago that there would be a national security crisis in which you could either have an oil shortage globally or you could have sanctions being used and a lack of supply coming in. So the Chinese have excess not only storage — with their largest strategic petroleum reserve, which was numbered at 1.6 to 1.8 billion barrels before the war began — but they also have reserve capacity.

And you rightly noted knocking out these Russian refineries. I think the percentage is 45% of Russia's refining capacity has been taken offline as of this month. So almost half of Russia's refining capacity is now offline. The United States is already at capacity. We talk a lot about the supply issue, but we're not talking about the refining issue. And China has a lot of excess refining capacity. So we're creating a situation — either purposely or just because of stupidity — where China's going to have a lot of cards.

We've seen this play out with rare earth minerals, right? We always hear, "Oh, China has rare earth mineral dominance." Well, that's not exactly accurate. What they have is rare earth mineral processing dominance. It's the processing that makes the stuff work. They've got about 90% of processing dominance. The whole world's supply chain relies on it. The Chinese have replicated that strategy for everything. In fact, Chinese doctrine talks frequently about controlling not just choke points in terms of maritime straits, but they really focus on controlling the geoeconomic hubs of the 21st century — things like rare earth mineral processing, or the processing and refinement of crude oil, which the world needs. And they've got a lot of excess capacity.

I could foresee, if we continue blowing up or allowing the destruction of all these refineries around the world and we can't really build new ones that process the stuff we need here because of environmentalism or whatever — I could foresee the Chinese saying, "Hey, we've got a lot of excess capacity. You can deal with us." And you could have an entire new market arising for crude oil refinement occurring over time in China, which then just gives Beijing even more leverage.

And this whole war — notably the Iran war but also the Ukraine war — what has it done? It has knocked down not only the United States, which is the key rival for China, but it's also actually kind of knocked down their other rival, Russia, because Russia's having to fixate on Europe and fixate all their resources on opposing NATO. And in turn, Russia's had to pivot, and they're not natural allies with China, but now they're bosom buddies. The shotgun wedding has now become a true love story between Xi and Putin. And that is all because of these Western so-called elites — like Larry Fink, like Admiral James Stavridis. I had a very interesting conversation with him once in 2012 about drugs in Afghanistan, and it was very insightful into the psyche.

Tucker Carlson: Can you pause right there? Because he is —

Brandon Wiker: Admiral Stavridis is, I think, one of the key players in all this. Again, he's —

Tucker Carlson: Chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Brandon Wiker: He was the former dean of the Fletcher School.

Tucker Carlson: He's a Carlyle partner.

Brandon Wiker: And he was the head of NATO. So if there's someone who should be more famous than he is — and of course he was commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Tell us about your conversation.

Well, it was offline, and it was when he was commander. I was at an event in Chicago — it was the NATO conference in Chicago — and he gave an off-the-record briefing, but it was all about the poppy, the issue of drugs in Afghanistan.

Tucker Carlson: We created that problem, as always.

Brandon Wiker: And there seemed to be a kind of — we were okay with that. It was just a very interesting conversation.

Tucker Carlson: Yeah, it was. And that's who you're dealing with.

Brandon Wiker: And that's not to bash the guy, because I don't know him, and he wore the uniform, and I have a lot of respect for that. But the point is that he, I believe, is part of a cadre — dare I say, cabal — of people, government and private sector types, who have a certain worldview. And I don't know if they would describe it as harming America. They've probably convinced themselves it's for the greater good or whatever. But their actions are clearly — and again, Stavridis ran in the same circles as the Russia Gate crew did. And what's really astounding, Tucker, is how the president has empowered the same cabal that tried to take him out in 2016. He has empowered them, and every chance these guys and gals get to undermine him still, they take it, as that CNN clip highlighted.

But my point here is that there is clearly a policy in place that is negating our energy dominance, that is restricting our ability to process. And who benefits from this? It isn't the United States. It isn't Europe. It isn't Russia. It isn't our partners in the Middle East. It's one country: the People's Republic of China.

Who Is Running the Ukraine War?

Tucker Carlson: From the day the Biden administration had the vice president at the time, Kamala Harris, announce at the Munich Security Conference that we're going to push Ukraine into NATO — that was the moment the war was assured. They pushed this war. They wanted this war. From that moment, I thought everything that has happened since has diminished the United States and strengthened China. So you can't tell me — with almost without exception — that this is not a conspiracy theory to note that. And to say once again that the point of a system is what it does.

Brandon Wiker: Right.

Tucker Carlson: It's obvious to me that knowingly or not, they're taking the West out of competition with China and making way for this new age and this new empire.

Brandon Wiker: It is a new age. And to be fair, I talk a lot with people in China — there are a lot of investors I know, and a lot of people who are very pro-American, very pro-capitalist, very pro-open markets — and they are always telling me the hawks have got China wrong. And the one thing I could foresee is that the Chinese leaders don't really like America. They don't trust the United States — the military side, the national security side — understandably. And I don't think we should trust their military side. But the Chinese leadership — it doesn't sound like their play is to actively seek to take over the American empire. It's more headache than it's worth. But they absolutely want to undermine our ability to threaten them in their backyard. And so they're taking advantage of all of these self-inflicted disasters that we're creating. Even things like refineries — we haven't built a new refinery in forty years. The Chinese are looking at us going, "You're stupid. We're going to do what we need to do and we'll just outpace you that way." So the whole world depends on us and we'll reorient trade flows that way, and you can never be a threat to us again.

Tucker Carlson: And I mean, there are a lot of participants in this. If the Sierra Club says not a word about the carbon emissions from our bombing campaigns, it tells you they don't really care about carbon emissions. There's another agenda here, obviously.

Brandon Wiker: Well, and also the tech bros. I was a senior in high school, I believe, when the Gore movie — An Inconvenient Truth — came out. I remember they made us watch the movie as seniors. They wanted us to watch it. And I did, and I remember thinking, this is scary. And of course none of it ever happened. All of the fear-mongering. But you know what it did do? It was pushed first of all by a lot of fundraisers from Wall Street and Silicon Valley. And it was all about getting people to be so afraid of the weather that they would then invest in or purchase or promote these technologies — all the broligarchs' technologies. And now the broligarchs have a new set of technologies, a new set of clean energy, which is AI, and therefore they need all the power they can get. So you don't hear that much anymore about fossil fuels causing pollution. You now have things like nuclear power being promoted. Finally. Because we're now moving away from the fear of whatever to where we are now.

Tucker Carlson: But both have the same effect, which is the loss of sovereignty and freedom and choice for the average person, and greater control for the group that runs the country, which is not the population, obviously.

So in the specific case of the Ukraine war — and that amazing week last week where Trump comes out and says you've got to stop bombing Russian diesel refineries, two days later he's like "we won, the economy is going to get better, the war's almost over," and then three days after that the Ukrainians just do it anyway — who's making that decision?

Brandon Wiker: I think it's the CIA. I think it's very interesting to me that Trump doesn't pick up the phone and call John Ratcliffe and say, "What's going on? Because I'm the president, and I specifically publicly said don't do X, and then your boy in Kyiv did X. Why? Why did he think he could do that?" Because we know that this Ukraine war is being run out of Langley, partly at least. It's being run out of the CIA. And the CIA is clearly doing whatever the hell it wants. The CIA has its own policy. They don't give a damn about who the elected American president is. They're going to do what they're going to do, all the time. Period.

CIA policy is they want to go to war with Russia. As I told you before, I was at a location consulting for the Air Force on the West Coast, and I had a two-star general tell me, "Brandon, you don't understand. We're breaking the Russian army in the field for free." That's the mentality of those types of people. And so they're going to push this. The president could literally say, "Don't bomb these refineries," and then their guy on the ground is going to do it, because the president is not running the agency. The agency is running the administration. Clearly, he doesn't seem to be making any major decisions. He doesn't seem to have the capacity to make them, the power to make them. And if you look at his social media posts, which are becoming increasingly deranged — literally deranged — what you see, if you assess it coolly, is frustration. A guy who can't actually do anything.

Tucker Carlson: And he's enraged by that. And so then he's posturing — "I'm going to destroy their civilization." Well, no, because it's not up to you, actually.

Brandon Wiker: That's a very interesting take. Well, I mean, he's not that crazy. I've spent a lot of time with him. He's never talked like that in private or in public — not like this. I am surprised that he talks like this, because I remember the first term. He would get allergic to the thought of nuclear war. And now — I have been told by certain people that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Caine, basically — it's like dealing with a toddler. He has to kind of jingle the keys in front of the toddler to keep him from bringing up the n-word, nuclear war. In the last several meetings, Trump is fixated on nuclear war. "Why can't we use this bomb? What's the big deal?" That's crazy town to me.

Tucker Carlson: You should be removed from office immediately for talking that way. You can't threaten offensive nuclear war. You risk the life of every person on the planet. You're not allowed to do that. And he should be removed immediately for talking like that.

Brandon Wiker: Well, this is a question for certain people in the cabinet. Why have they not —

Tucker Carlson: They're cowards. That's why. They're cowards. Look, I like craziness. I grew up around it. I'm not bothered by craziness at all. I tend to be a little crazy. I have a very wide strike zone on crazy. But if you threaten offensive nuclear war against anybody, you are a criminal, and you are putting the life of every living thing at risk. And you're not allowed to do that. And so you're done. They could take him out and they should immediately take him out the second he talks like that. And they won't, because they're cowards. It's just that simple. What's the other explanation?

Brandon Wiker: No, I mean, they're cowards, but they're also all part of the grift machine. They're all getting something out of it. And Congress won't investigate. And unfortunately, it's probably going to take the Democrats taking power — and they have their own problems — to really get to the bottom of what's going on. Because the bottom line here is the president has unleashed the dogs of war. The dogs of war are now running wild, and nobody can rein them back in. And now we live in the nuclear age. So that means the dogs of war — we could be seeing a nuclear bomb strike, either on either front of these wars.

If they're willing to go after the refineries, if they're willing to go after the stuff that builds civil society in modern countries — I can't even remember anymore what we're fighting over. The Ukraine war — the same thing with the Iran war, nuclear weapons. The president said a year ago that we blew up the nuclear weapons. So what are we still fighting for? The point is, if they're willing to target these facilities, target the infrastructure, it's only a matter of time before the real powers that be say, "We're going to take this to the next level because we have to win." And I don't know what victory looks like, but it's not going to be pretty.

Look at the Russians. The Russians are advancing on the eastern front. They are decisively moving. It is slow going, but there is clear forward momentum for the Russian armed forces. They have taken two of the four big fortress cities in that fortress belt in Ukraine. They are probably going to take the third one soon. They're doing a classic encirclement campaign — this is the Russian style of war. They encircle, they seal, they use heavy artillery, and they crush until there's nothing left. And then they walk over and do it again. This is the war of attrition. They are going to take those two remaining fortress cities.

But I am concerned that you will see, as that Russian force advances closer and closer to the final fortress city, a European NATO country allowing their territory to be used to launch attacks on behalf of Ukraine against the advancing Russian army. I had the chance recently to talk to a Russian officer on the Mario Nawfal show, and I asked him, "What happens if the forces on the front line start falling under attack from these NATO countries?" And his response was, "The Russian battlefield commanders have been given authorization to protect their forces, and they will protect their forces." Which means if they are fired upon seriously enough from these European NATO countries, they will retaliate in kind at the place of origin. Which means suddenly now you have an advancing Russian army in eastern Ukraine potentially firing into European countries.

The Europeans are dying — I've never seen a group of people want to be bombed so badly. The Europeans want to be bombed so they can then declare Article 5 and get America to come back to their rescue and then have their very big war. And that's my fear of where that's going.

The Nuclear Question and the "Three-Act War"

Tucker Carlson: And then the West destroys itself, which is the whole point.

Brandon Wiker: And we're already there.

Tucker Carlson: This is a murder-suicide, right? Obviously. And it's happening against the will of the population. Nobody wants this. And you would think that in purportedly democratic countries, that would matter. It doesn't. One mystery of this whole thing is why Israel is so aggressively backing Ukraine. Putin has gone out of his way for twenty-five years to get along with Israel. He's never been anti-Israel. He's had good relations with various governments in Israel, including the Netanyahu government. And yet the Israeli government is very much pushing this war. Why?

Brandon Wiker: I think there's a lot of quiet money flow going on. I did a report many moons ago at the National Interest when I worked there, and I found that there were oligarchs in Ukraine who were also Jewish and were basically becoming dual citizens. They were gaining access to the foreign aid the country was receiving, stealing it, and then fleeing the country before the anti-corruption police could get them, because they had knowledge these raids were going to happen. And where did a lot of them end up? They ended up in Israel. And since — I think it's the right of return — the Israelis will not send those people back to be prosecuted, even though they are likely guilty of corruption, because now they're Israeli citizens and Israel wants the tax revenue. They tax the money that was stolen. They get a lot of money. It's a tax scheme. So you have a lot of wealth flowing in from wealthy Ukrainians who are also Jewish, fleeing the war, fleeing the corruption police, ending up in Israel with our money, and they're protected by the Israelis partly because of Israeli tax policy.

Then you also have, I think, a bit of a historical grievance. Russia — there were pogroms against Jews throughout the Tsar's reign, and I think Russia has always been viewed by certain hardliners in Israel as a threat, and as something to get revenge upon. And I think you've seen this in the support for Ukraine — a kind of historical, cultural reference of wanting to avenge themselves upon the Russian state for what they did to their grandparents and great-grandparents. The pogroms were terrible. I think that's part of it.

Then there's the pale of settlement, which was the relocation of Jews from Crimea and some of these parts of Ukraine. Incidentally, there are certain people like Victoria Nuland and the Kagan family who apparently had relatives affected by this over the centuries. Tony Blinken had relatives affected by this as well.

But also, Tucker, there's the issue of Russia's support of Iran. I believe the Israelis genuinely believe — and if I were living in Israel, I wouldn't want a strong Iran either, but I'm an American, not an Israeli — the Israelis are looking over their shoulder saying, "I don't want a strong Iran." And who's one of the number one or number two supporters of Iran? It's the Russians. So I think the Israelis view covert support for Ukraine as a way — and I realize they didn't always help with air defenses, because the Israelis are going to protect their interests first — but at the end of the day, if Israel can weaken Russia via Ukraine, the logic in Tel Aviv is that's less capability the Russians can give, or less aid the Russians can give, the Iranians as they fight the Iranians. And I think that's all sort of what's going on there.

Tucker Carlson: It makes sense, actually. There's no anti-Semitism involved in any of this.

Brandon Wiker: There usually isn't. Facts don't care about your feelings — that used to be the rule, but it's no longer valid.

Tucker Carlson: You know, the people who say that are often the most emotional and irrational. I've noticed they don't mean it. Last question. I know that you're so focused on the war in the Persian Gulf every day and you're immersed in the details. How do you think it likely ends, and when?

Brandon Wiker: I still think it's probably going to end in a nuclear explosion. They call me Blackpill Brandon for a reason, Tucker. I am very concerned that we are edging toward — Trump doesn't seem to have his hand on the wheel, as you rightly note. He's not in control. And I don't know if that's all because of Israel. He is the president of the United States. He could — look, Obama said no to Israel in a big way. So the president really could tell them to back off on some of this stuff, but he doesn't. And so he is responsible for this, and he's in quite a sticky wicket.

The president's instinct on this is to double down, which is odd, because originally his instinct was, "It's not my fault. I didn't do it. I'm out of here. It's too expensive to maintain." That was first-term Trump. Second-term Trump is, "I'm going to keep doubling down because I'm the big man." The only next thing he could potentially do would be to drop a B61-13 ground-penetrating nuclear device on Fordow. Now, it's not going to really do anything in terms of — okay, it knocks out Fordow. Fordow isn't even finished being built yet, that facility, by the way. So really, it's sort of like he gets his big finish.

An Israeli source of mine recently used the phrase "a war in three acts," and that's stuck in my craw. Because if you think about it, that is what this is shaping up to be. The first act was the twelve-day war. The second act is whatever you call the last six or seven months — there's kind of a pause going on as everybody reorients themselves to the new normal. The third act, the finale — the big finish, in screenplay terms — would be a mushroom cloud over Fordow, dropped from a B-2. And then Trump gets to say, "I'm the first president since Harry Truman to drop it. I got my big bang. It was a movie finish and I'm done."

The problem with that is: once you do that, Tucker, Russia and China and every other nuclear power gets a vote, and they're not going to be too pleased.

And to be fair to Trump — I talked to Anthony Aguilar last night and he kind of put this possibility in my head — Trump might not do a B61-13. He might realize this is a bridge too far. But the Israelis — we just sold them $2.6 billion worth of bombs. Lots and lots of bombs. Not nukes. They've got their own nukes, but a lot of bombs. Now, that's not going to be hitting their arsenals for many years. But the theory is it is possible that in the month of October, Netanyahu is up for an election and he's losing right now. Possibly Mr. Netanyahu needs his next war. He's going to take what he has in terms of weapons and fire them or drop them over Iran to kickstart that war again. And then the stuff we sold them will be used to backfill those arsenals over the years.

And at that point, remember what Marco Rubio — our Secretary of State — said. Three or four days into the war, after the February 28th war, he was in Congress and he said we had to attack Iran when we did, how we did, because Israel was going to attack them regardless in a few days, and then we would have been hit by Iranian retaliation. So we had no choice. Well, I could foresee, if that's the logic — if that happened before, past is prologue — the Israelis might decide to kick off another round, the final third act of a three-act war, by launching air strikes, or something, maybe even nukes from a Dolphin-class submarine off the coast of Iran. They've got six Dolphin-class submarines with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. The Israelis could kick off something that we get sucked into again.

Tucker Carlson: It's been over eighty years since the one and only time nuclear weapons were deployed. And that seems like a threshold that, once you cross it, the world is done. The voluntary offensive use of nuclear weapons. Do you think that's currently being discussed?

Brandon Wiker: Yeah. And I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of these generals and colonels are constantly dangling the keys in front of the two-year-old, because he starts talking about it and they're like, "Oh no, Mr. President, let's —" They're constantly trying. Somebody said — I can't remember who, in the last two days — that they're just giving him enough information to keep him on the path they want him on. But this is a guy who is going to go his own path no matter what.

I know there's fear among the retired uniformed officers that I know — and I know a lot of top people, retired generals in many cases — and whatever you think of them in terms of their politics, I think these people have a good read on what's going on inside the Pentagon. And they have intimated to me that the uniformed military command is very frightened about what might happen with the n-word being used so much.

Tucker Carlson: Do you think they would carry out — I would pray that they would not, as patriots and Christians and decent people — carry out an offensive use of nuclear weapons? No one's resigned.

Brandon Wiker: Well, if it's a B61, particularly a B61-13 — and I want to make it clear, this is from General Randy Manner, former head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, who I talked to last night about this — he said the B61, no tactical nuclear weapon we have, is going to be effective against Fordow. That's why they built it there. The yields — these are very smart people who knew our enemies are smart. They built this thing to survive the kind of attacks they figured we would subject the facility to.

So one of the things we have is a B61-13 — it's a ground-penetrating nuke. We have a B61-12, which I believe is an air burst nuke, and those are kept I think in Nörvenich. But the B61-13 is very convenient because we keep it at Whiteman Air Force Base, and the B-2s are there, and we can just load them up and fly them. And the thing is, we can dial the yield. It's not one yield, one strike. If we want a tiny explosion, we can literally dial back the yield on the explosive device and then you'll have a relatively confined nuclear blast.

So in that specific instance, Tucker, the president could give the order, and it's not like he's running through all the protocols for intercontinental ballistic missiles. They will give the order to the base commander. The base commander pulls the nuke out. They load it up onto the B-2. The B-2 takes off, and sixteen or seventeen hours later it does its thing. And the argument would be, "Hey, we can control it. Not a big deal. It's just a big bomb, basically."

And I would remind your audience of Elbridge Colby, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. He is writing the renewed nuclear warfare doctrine, which explicitly lowers the threshold for the deployment of non-strategic nuclear weapons. And why are they doing that? Part of it, Tucker, is because we've blown through all of our conventional munitions, or most of them. We've talked about that before. So how do you make up for the gap? Because the defense industrial base isn't making it up. So we have a lot of tactical nukes lying around from the Cold War, and some new ones that we're building. We'll just bring those to the fore and use those systems.

Tucker Carlson: These people — and I know a lot of these people, I do very well — but mass psychosis is an interesting thing. It's like you lose your capacity to hear yourself. So what they would be arguing is: because we fear that someday Iran might have a nuclear weapon, we're going to nuke Iran.

Brandon Wiker: I think they would say it's about China. It's about signaling to China.

Tucker Carlson: Yeah. Signaling to the world that it's permitted to use nuclear weapons — something that's been verboten for eighty years. Once you lose your nuclear virginity, there's no getting it back, and you're on inexorably a road to a real nuclear exchange in which everybody dies. This has been known. This is intuitive. You don't need a grounding in history to know that. It's obvious. And so even the fact that they're discussing it is grounds for imprisonment, as far as I'm concerned.

Brandon Wiker: Well, it's certainly grounds to get the institutions up and running again that are supposed to have oversight here. This is my bugaboo as somebody who used to work there many years ago. Congress is apparently not around. We don't have a Congress, because at the very least we should have friendly senators and congressmen privately calling Trump and saying, "Hey, man, you cannot do this. It's not okay." We don't even have that. Everybody's just like, "Yeah, we're going to do it, America."

And by the way, you mentioned the leadership. They have to know. I don't think we have responsible men and women in power. I think this gets back to the Epstein class. You look at what these people were doing to get power and wealth. They don't have moral clarity. They don't have personal judgment. Clearly, many of them are sociopathic people. We used to have leaders who really did worry about what the other side might do, who worried about the cost to people. One of our greatest presidents was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who actually did not want to build bullets. He wanted to build butter and have more butter than guns, because he recognized that when you build weapons, that's a theft from the American people. It does not go into anything productive. It just goes into destructive means. And Eisenhower saw war like very few other people did.

But we've had presidents who had that capability. We don't have people today because we don't have a moral country. We have a pagan country. We have a post-Western country. People keep saying we're a Western civilization. I don't believe that. I don't think there's anything about us anymore — except maybe the language — that's really Western. That's why you have people in the West — it's all the Western countries, by the way: the Europeans, the Brits, the Americans — we're the ones acting like crazy people.

The Russians are in Ukraine. But Putin could have nuked Ukraine. Putin could have flattened the western side of Ukraine. Instead, he keeps bleeding Russians because he doesn't want to escalate beyond where it is. And Xi Jinping — I changed my assessment right after the war began in Iran and I saw what was going on. For years, I was convinced that probably the Air Force was right: 2027, he's going to try something with Taiwan. I don't believe that anymore. I said back in June, I actually think Xi Jinping watched the Russian experience in Ukraine. He watched the American experience in the Middle East. He goes, "I don't want that. I can get Taiwan through peaceful means. I can reabsorb them through trade and economy on a fifty-year cycle." So I don't think he's going to try it militarily.

And that just tells me something. The leaders of these countries that we're at war with tend to be apparently more restrained than the American and European leaders. And I don't say that because I'm happy about it. I'm very worried about this. After watching the president of the United States threaten the use of nuclear weapons against a country that doesn't have nuclear weapons because he doesn't want them to have them — it's all so crazy that you can imagine normal Taiwanese saying, "Why would we want to be aligned with that?"

Tucker Carlson: People, by the way — the powerful force in any conflict is the one who restores order and peace. It's not the person who — that's dad. Dad comes home and stops the fighting.

Brandon Wiker: And so of course China doesn't need to invade Taiwan.

Tucker Carlson: It's also stupid.

Brandon Wiker: It's stupid. But that's another thing — intellectually, look at our educational system, or lack thereof. Three generations at least have been poorly educated in this country. It's no surprise that we have idiots from the movie Idiocracy running this country. And now we're talking about potentially world-ending events, and we have these people. We don't have John F. Kennedy secretly talking to Nikita Khrushchev through back channels. We don't have the kinds of responsible stewards of national security policy that we used to have. We have a CIA that is apparently running rogue and running their own operations against the Russians even after the president publicly tells them — their boss — don't do it. So that's kind of where we're at now.

Tucker Carlson: Well, I pray you're wrong. But I do think you're the single most informed commentator on all of this stuff. I worry that you're not wrong.

Brandon Wiker: I have a lot of haters out there, if you can believe it.

Tucker Carlson: You don't have much competition. I will say that. Brandon Wiker, thank you very much for all of that. It was great to see you.

Brandon Wiker: Thank you, Tucker.