In this powerful episode, Joel Pollak, Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News, joins Jenny Beth to break down the rising tensions between Israel and Iran following the October 7 Hamas attacks. Pollak explains why Iran’s nuclear ambitions pose a global threat, how President Trump’s foreign policy differs from Biden’s, and why Israel’s recent preemptive strike may have changed the course of Middle East history. From the legacy of the Obama-era Iran deal to Trump’s red line on nuclear weapons, this episode explores what’s at stake if Iran is allowed to build the bomb—and why the world cannot let it happen.
In this powerful episode, Joel Pollak, Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News, joins Jenny Beth to break down the rising tensions between Israel and Iran following the October 7 Hamas attacks. Pollak explains why Iran’s nuclear ambitions pose a global threat, how President Trump’s foreign policy differs from Biden’s, and why Israel’s recent preemptive strike may have changed the course of Middle East history. From the legacy of the Obama-era Iran deal to Trump’s red line on nuclear weapons, this episode explores what’s at stake if Iran is allowed to build the bomb—and why the world cannot let it happen.
X/Twitter: @joelpollak | @jennybethm
Website: https://www.breitbart.com/
Joel Pollak (00:00:00):
That's the Trump position today, that we don't just want to stop Iran from having a weapon, but we don't want them even to have the capability in future to build one. If you let Iran continue enriching uranium and stockpiling uranium or plutonium, then Iran could eventually develop a nuclear weapon. Once it has the technological know-how to do so
Narrator (00:00:21):
Keeping our republic is on the line and it requires Patriots with great passion, dedication, and eternal vigilance to preserve our freedoms. Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. She's an author of filmmaker and one of time magazine's most influential people in the world. But the title she is most proud of is Mom to Her Boy, girl Twins. She has been at the forefront fighting to protect America's core principles for more than a decade. Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:00:53):
Today we're joined by my good friend Joe, a Pollock, who is the senior editor at large at Breitbart News and has been with Breitbart News for many, many years, maybe since the founding of Breitbart, or very shortly after that. He is also a Jewish person and he has been to Israel since October 7th, several times reporting on what has happened in Israel and standing with Israel, and he is from Los Angeles and was displaced because of the Los Angeles wildfire. So he's been in the thick of world events for a very long time, including literally in his own backyard, and I'm very thankful he is with us today. Before we go to Joel, I just want to remind everyone that back in 2015, tea Party Patriots held a rally or a protest in front of the United States capitol against the Iran deal that President Obama was pushing through at the time, at that rally before the rally, we spent the months of June, July, and August building up to the rally in September, opposing the Iran deal at the time.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:02:03):
And then when we had the rally, we had many notable speakers including Senator Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, duck Dynasties, Phil Robertson, Glenn Beck, and most notably Donald Trump, who was then a candidate at that rally. We all said Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, and we were concerned that what President Obama was doing would pave the way to make it easier for Iran to get a nuclear weapon rather than preventing that from happening. Of course, since 2015, president Trump was president, he pulled America out of that deal. Then we went through President Biden's years and he created a new deal with Iran. And then now in the current term with President Trump, he has been trying to negotiate some sort of deal with Iran, but he has been clear as he has been for well over a decade that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, and he has not changed his stance on that. And those of us who spoke that day a decade ago, I don't think any of us have changed our stance on it either. And even since the election in 2024, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. So today we're going to talk to Joe, get a background on this conflict with Israel, and then just explore some of the current events related to Israel and Iran today. Joel, thanks so much for joining me today.
Joel Pollak (00:03:27):
It's good to be with you.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:03:28):
So let's take a step back and talk about what happened on October 7th, and how did anything that happened on October 7th lead to what we're seeing right now in the last week or so with Israel and Iran?
Joel Pollak (00:03:47):
Well, we can zoom out even further than that. So let's talk about the broad sweep of history. The land of Israel has been the spiritual home of Jewish people for many millennia, and toward the end of the 19th century, there began a serious effort to resettle the land. There had been Jewish communities there for many, many centuries, but Jews who were fleeing persecution, especially in Eastern Europe, began settling in the land of Israel, which was called Palestine at the time, because the Roman governors, several or many centuries before, almost two millennia before had decided to crush a Jewish revolt by renaming the land. So it was then under Ottoman Rule, under the rule of the Ottoman Turks, Jews began coming back and reestablishing communities, building new communities, and planning as Theodore Herzl envisioned a new modern nation state. That effort began in earnest, especially after the first World War, when the British were given control of that area under the British mandate of Palestine.
Joel Pollak (00:04:54):
At the same time, you saw the Arab population starting to oppose this movement. And so there was a conflict that emerged really in the early 20th century between Jews who were settling the land and Arabs who were either being told that these Jews had to move in. Many wealthy Arab land owners were selling land to Jewish settlers, and there were also people from other Arab areas coming in and finding work in Palestine, which was becoming more prosperous with the arrival of Jewish settlers, but were also developing their own nationalist aspirations. So the conflict really begins then, and the British appointed a guy named Haj Al Husseini, who was the first major Palestinian leader. He was a radical Islamist during the Second World War, he sided with Adolf Hitler because he wanted Hitler to get rid of all the Jews, and he whipped up the Palestinian Arab sentiment against the Palestinian Jews.
Joel Pollak (00:05:55):
And so there were a series of pogroms, which were large ethnic cleansing events where Arabs attacked Jewish communities. And so there was a low level of conflict really through the twenties and thirties until the 1940s after the second World War, when the United Nations came into being, and there was a vote at the United Nations to partition the land that was controlled by Britain into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish community accepted the plan. The Arab community did not, and the surrounding Arab states attacked the new Jewish state. When Israel declared independence in May, 1948, Israel won that war, won its independence, and the Palestinian Arabs either left or were incorporated as citizens in Israel. 20% of Israel's population today is Arab, but the Palestinian state was never created, not by Jordan, which controlled the area known as the West Bank, not by Egypt, which controlled the Gaza at the time.
Joel Pollak (00:06:49):
Instead, the Arab states at the time decided to continue trying to get rid of Israel, and they were helped in this effort by the Soviet Union. Then when the Soviet Union fell, you had the appeal of radical Islam, which we are familiar with from nine 11, mostly of a Sunni Muslim variety, Al-Qaeda and those radical Sunni Muslim groups that used terrorism to try to challenge not just Israel, but the entire West Al-Qaeda's problem wasn't even primarily with Israel. It was primarily with the United States. And in the background, you also had Iran. Iran had actually had very good relations with Israel prior to 1979. Iran was one of Israel's major trading partners, in fact. But in 1979, a different group of Muslims, Shia Muslims or Shiite Muslims staged a revolution in Iran, which is predominantly Shia, and they brought in Ayatollah Khomeini who turned Iran into a theocracy run by strict Sharia law as the Shiite Muslims see it.
Joel Pollak (00:07:53):
And it was a bloody revolution. Political descent was stamped out, and Iran declared almost as a founding principle that it was opposed to the existence of what it called the little Satan Israel and the great Satan the United States, the founding ideology of the new post-revolution. Iran was anti-American. And soon after the revolution, we had the famous incident of the hostage taking at the US Embassy in Tehran, which lasted for 444 days until Ronald Reagan came to office. Throughout the decades, since then, almost half a century, Iran has attacked Americans and has sponsored terrorism around the world, both on American soil against American citizens and targeting Israel and Jews around the world, not just in Israel. The most significant of these attacks was the bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina several decades ago, killed many, many dozens of people, including people who happened just to be passing by on the street outside.
Joel Pollak (00:08:52):
So Iran has been a terror supporting state, one of the world's foremost sponsors of terror. It has been an anti-American state, and of course an anti-Israel state For a long time. In the 1990s, Iran began developing nuclear weapons or began trying to develop nuclear weapons. And Israel began speaking out about this danger saying that Iran could do so because it had access to uranium and because Iran had access to scientists as well. Iran is not a primitive society like Afghanistan. Iran actually has an ancient Persian civilization, and it has many skilled people. It has modern universities. Many of these suffered terribly after the Islamic Revolution, but they still exist. So Iran had some kind of infrastructure to build on. And when the United States attacked Iraq, Saddam Hussein next door to Iran, who had been a great rival to the Iranian regime, when the US went to war in Iraq because of suspicion of weapons of mass destruction in the post nine 11 world, the Iranians actually paused their nuclear program because they thought, well, if the United States is going to take military action against countries that develop weapons of mass destruction, maybe we don't want to provoke the United States.
Joel Pollak (00:10:04):
They soon resumed their program. And what happened was in the last years of the Bush administration, the entire western world started participating in sanctions against Iran. Why? Because Iran, while it was secretly producing nuclear weapons or hoping to produce nuclear weapons working on him, it also was a signatory to something called the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is a commitment not to build nuclear weapons. So Iran was violating its treaty obligations, and so the world applied sanctions to it. We often hear complaints, for example, why aren't there sanctions against Israel for its presumed nuclear weapons? Israel has never admitted to being a nuclear power, but it is presumed to have nuclear weapons, and that's because Israel never signed the same treaty. Israel never signed the Nonproliferation Treaty, so it's not subject to those sanctions. Iran made a public commitment not to pursue nuclear weapons, but it was seen to be doing so there were these sanctions.
Joel Pollak (00:10:55):
Obama came into office, and that's around about the time the Tea Party started up, as you mentioned. And Obama decided that he wanted to achieve a grand bargain with the radical Shia Islamic clerics who run Iran when he came into office. Ironically, the Iranian people rose up against their regime to get rid of it because it is deeply repressive. And we saw what is called the Green Revolution, or what was called the Green Revolution. It was led by students and young people, but they came into the streets to try to overthrow the government and they nearly succeeded. But President Obama didn't do anything to help them until it was way too late because he wanted to work with the regime. The regime was then led by President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, of course, the quote, Supreme leader is the religious ruler of Iran Aya, but the president of Iran who Hani allowed to be president, all their elections are very carefully managed, was Ahd.
Joel Pollak (00:11:53):
Ahmed Deja was a radical holocaust denying fanatic, and Obama preferred to deal with him because he thought that as a dictator, he could at least deliver a commitment to whatever deal he signed. So Obama ignored the movement for democracy and in a sense preserved the Iranian regime so that he could eventually reach the Iran nuclear deal, which happened in 2015. The Iran nuclear deal was an agreement where the United States and the rest of the world agreed to lift the sanctions on Iran that gave Iran access to up to $150 billion in assets. And in return, Iran made commitments not to develop nuclear weapons and not to enrich uranium, which is one of the materials necessary for nuclear weapons, except at a very slow pace and only for a limited time. The Iran deal only covered about a decade. So after about a decade roundabout now 2025, Iran would've been freed from the obligation to slow its uranium enrichment.
Joel Pollak (00:12:56):
Just a little bit on the science, there are two major ways to make nuclear weapons. One is through uranium, one is through plutonium, and the issue is whether two issues, basically you have to have enough enriched uranium, the kind of uranium that lends itself to nuclear chain reactions. And then you also have to have the mechanism for creating the bomb, which has to push the different nuclear materials together in such a way that they reach what's called a critical mass, and therefore detonate, it has to be timed very carefully and has to happen in a more or less spherical way. So the two difficult parts are enriching the uranium and building the bomb mechanism. Iran has been working on the enriched uranium part of that for decades. And under the deal Obama sign, they had to slow that down, but they didn't really have to give it up.
Joel Pollak (00:13:43):
They didn't have to destroy their enrichment facilities. They didn't have to come clean about the things they had cheated on in the past when the world suspected them of developing these nuclear facilities. And they also weren't barred from sponsoring terrorism in other countries as they had done. They also weren't barred from developing ballistic missiles, which is what Iran wants to use to deliver the nuclear weapons to targets in Israel and Western Europe. And the Iranian scientists continued working on the weapons mechanism, the mechanism that actually built the bomb. So if you remember in 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Congress. He was invited by the Republicans who then controlled the House and the Senate, and he was invited to address the Congress and to explain why he thought the Iran deal was a bad idea. And he said, you can have a deal, but you have to deal with these three problems.
Joel Pollak (00:14:31):
One, Iran has to completely get rid of its nuclear program. It doesn't need even civilian nuclear energy because it has so much oil. Number two, it has to agree to stop attacking its neighbors and sponsoring terror groups, and it has to give up its ballistic missile program, which is one of the weapons it's going to use to try to attack us with nuclear weapons when it develops them. Obama's deal did none of the above, and Obama and the Democrats used a filibuster mechanism to avoid sending the deal to Congress under the Constitution, any treaty has to be approved by the Senate and by a two thirds majority within the Senate. The Obama administration refused to consider this a treaty. They called it an executive agreement. So they went around the Constitution. So Republicans in Congress said, fine. Well, okay, we can't really stop you from doing that.
Joel Pollak (00:15:20):
I mean, they could have, but they decided not to have that fight. What they decided instead was to pass legislation that would require Obama to get the deal approved by Congress by a simple majority in both chambers, but all Democrats did was they filibuster the vote on the Iran deal. So it never happened, and it just went into effect. In fact, the United Nations Security Council got to vote on the Iran deal, but United States Congress never did. So the Iran deal went into effect, and Iran was cheating almost from the start. We now know when President Trump was elected and came into office, he looked at the Iran deal, he looked at the evidence, and in May, 2018, he withdrew from the Iran deal. And that was a popular choice at the time because people understood the Iran deal was deeply flawed, and Trump called it one of the dumbest deals ever signed.
Joel Pollak (00:16:05):
The Iranians were afraid of Trump, and so they didn't do very much. But when Biden came into office, they started enriching uranium very, very quickly. They also took advantage of the billions of dollars that Obama had given them in sanctions relief, and they had built up their terrorist forces, both directly controlled by Iran and indirectly Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who Biden also took off the terrorism list where Trump had put them, Iraqi militias, Shiite militias in Iran and other forces, and the Iranians eventually were behind October 7th. So this comes back to your original date of October 7th. On October 7th, after several years of quiet, the Hamas terrorist group, which is armed and funded by Iran, attacked Israel, invaded Israel, caught Israel by surprise, attacked Israel and murdered 1200 people, most of whom were civilians that launched the current war. The next day, October 8th, Iran's proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah started firing rockets at Israeli communities in the north of Israel.
Joel Pollak (00:17:05):
Both of these attacks were completely unprovoked. The hti in Yemen, who are also supported by Iran also began attacking Israel. Again, unprovoked. There's no common border between Yemen and Israel. And so Israel was now being attacked by these Iranian terror groups in three countries. Then Shiite militias in Iraq started firing drones and missiles in Israel, and you had, of course, the threat of a wider war with Hamas, which is not just present in the Gaza Strip, but also in West Bank, what Israelis call Judea and Sumaria. So Israel found itself fighting a war on seven fronts, as it says, and the Israelis pushed back and eventually they were able to crush Hamas for the most part. Although Hamas still has Israeli hostages about 20 living hostages just under 60 hostages total. The Israelis also through the brilliant surprise attacks of last fall with the pager attacks and other attacks, they were able to decimate Hezbollah and basically knocked them out of the war.
Joel Pollak (00:18:06):
And the Israelis also showed that they could attack the Houthis in Yemen, even though Yemen is very far away from Israel, the Israelis used midair, refueling, and incredible pilots in American made airplanes to attack the Houthis in Yemen and to show they were able to do that, the Israelis started pushing back these Iranian forces. And the Iranians of course didn't like it. One of the things Israel did was they attacked an Iranian general in Damascus. The Iranians had had troops in Damascus for a long time, and they were primarily responsible for propping up the Assad regime, but also for funneling weapons to Hezbollah. After the Israelis killed this Iranian general, the Iranians launched a ballistic missile attack at Israel, something like 300 missiles, including ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, drones. I happened to be in Israel during that. So I lived through that attack overnight on April 13th, I think it was last year.
Joel Pollak (00:19:01):
And Israel, with the help of the United States, United Kingdom, and several Arab states actually shot down almost every single missile or drone. There was only one I think that landed in Israel. And ironically, the only person who was injured was an Arab girl, young Arab girl who was hit by shrapnel. The Iranians attacked again in October. The Biden administration had been trying to hold Israel back both from fighting Hamas and from fighting Iran. So Israel didn't do very much, but what it did do in October was it knocked out Iran's air defenses. Its Russian made surface to air missiles. So coming into the Trump administration, Iran had no air defenses at all. Well, I shouldn't say at all, but essentially, they had no real air defenses left. They started rebuilding them, but they were not in a position to defend themselves, and they were the ones who had shot first, not just in terms of the ballistic missile attacks, but in terms of the October 7th attack by Hamas.
Joel Pollak (00:19:57):
And then of course, in terms of the entire sweep of the last half century since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when Iran started attacking the US and Israel with terrorism. That's a very long preamble to what's happening now. But last Friday, June 13th, Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. And the reasons that it did so were roughly three. First of all, the Israelis say they had intelligence that Iran was nearing the completion of the bomb mechanism necessary to create nuclear weapons, and they were afraid that Iran could field around nine nuclear warheads. All it would take is one of those Iranian missiles just to get into Israeli airspace and to detonate above Israeli airspace. It wouldn't have to hit the ground just detonate above Israel, and that would wipe out maybe of thousands of Israelis. So that was a real threat. So the Israelis wanted to act.
Joel Pollak (00:20:52):
Secondly, that point about air defenses, the Israelis realized that there might not be a better chance than right now to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. There had always been the fear of being shot down over Iran or being intercepted by some kind of system. The Iranian Air Force isn't very good. They mainly rely on planes that the United States sold them before the Islamic Revolution in 1979. But without air defenses, Iran was basically a sitting duck, and the Israelis preferred that because they don't want to risk their pilots or their planes if they don't need to. And then finally, I think the last four years of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris convinced the Israelis that if the Democrats were ever allowed back into the White House or even in charge of Congress, that they would not have the opportunity to defend themselves, that Biden or the Democrats would repeat their past practice of withholding weapons.
Joel Pollak (00:21:46):
Biden actually withheld weapons from Israel even after October 7th because Israel wouldn't listen to him about how it conducted the war. Israel did listen to some extent, but the Israelis said, look, we have to go after Hamas' leaders. Biden said, no, you can't do that. Israel said, we're doing it anyway. So Biden withheld weapons. It was really a terrible thing that they did, but Israel didn't want to take the chance again. So they thought, we have to do this with Trump in the White House and Republicans in charge of Congress. I think those are the three reasons they attacked. So Israel took Iran by surprise, which is amazing in itself because everybody had been talking about the possibility of a preemptive strike for many decades. Back in 2012, Israel had considered a preemptive strike on Iran, and Obama deliberately leaked that Israel was considering that. So it would give the Iranians the heads up and so that it wouldn't happen.
Joel Pollak (00:22:33):
Leon Panetta, the CI, A director at the time I believe actually testified in Congress that Israel had been planning to use Azerbaijan, which is north of Iran as a refueling stop. Azerbaijan is a Muslim country that has good relations with Israel. So that was leaked by the Obama administration to stop Israel. So the Israelis felt that they had to try to find some new way to create surprise, and it turns out what may have happened is that the very loud voices you hear on social media talking about how Israel should not attack Iran and the United States shouldn't support Israel, they may have actually lulled Iran into a false sense of security because the Iranians expected that Trump would never allow Israel to attack Iran, not while negotiations are going on. Trump clearly understood the Iranians were stringing him along. He gave them a chance to negotiate a deal.
Joel Pollak (00:23:19):
He said during the campaign that Iran couldn't have a nuclear weapon, but he also said during the campaign that he preferred to make a deal with Iran and that the future could be great if Iran made a deal. He came into office talking about a deal he announced in front of Benjamin Netanyahu that there were going to be talks with Iran. Netanyahu reportedly wasn't too happy about that, although that may have been part of the act that they pulled off, but he gave Iran a 60 day deadline and said, I'm giving you 60 days to reach a deal with me. The attack happened on day 61. It was the day after that 60 day period Iran had not come to the table. Trump became vocal about the fact that Iran was not offering compromises that were reasonable, like giving up its nuclear enrichment. Iran doesn't need nuclear enrichment for any civilian purpose.
Joel Pollak (00:23:59):
So Trump gave the green light, or we don't know yet which version of history is true, or Israel just decided to attack did so successfully, and then the Trump administration supported it in the aftermath. But regardless, Israel managed in the first 24 hours of the war to hit Iran's nuclear sites to start hitting its ballistic missile sites. And most importantly, to knock out the senior military leadership of the Iranian regime, Israel eliminated the chief of staff of the Iranian military. They also knocked out the nuclear experts who had been working on the bomb, and they killed many of Iran's other senior military leaders. They would later kill Iran's intelligence minister, and that's how it's continued for several days. Israel has targeted Iran's nuclear sites, military sites, and its military and political leadership, most of whom are now hiding if they have survived at all. And the Trump administration, as you and I speak right now, is weighing whether or not to join in.
Joel Pollak (00:24:58):
Now, why would Trump need to join in? Well, some people argue the United States already is involved because we've sold the weapons to the Israelis. We've provided intelligence most likely to the Israelis. We've moved our aircraft carriers into positions. So there is a sense of threat. If Iran does anything, if Iran a attacks on American in any way, then United States will get involved. So we're sort of involved on the margins, but why would we get more involved? There's one Iranian nuclear site inside a mountain. That site is called Fordo. It was previously secret. It was later revealed, I believe it was revealed by Iranian dissidents who made the information available to the West. But Fordo is inside a mountain, and it can't be bombed through conventional means. It has to be bombed through what are called bunker busting bombs. And the only country that has them is the United States.
Joel Pollak (00:25:43):
We have not given bunker busting bombs to Israel. Israel doesn't have the planes to drop them. Even if we did give them to Israel, because Israel doesn't have strategic bombers. These weapons are 30,000 pounds. They're much too heavy for the jet fighters that Israel currently uses in its bombing attacks. So the only country that can deliver that kind of bomb is the United States. So Trump is weighing whether or not to do that as well as whether or not to join the military effort against the Iranian regime more generally, he has given Iran many chances to come back to the negotiating table. They have continued to launch missile attacks against Israel, continue to say death to America. We're not having peace and so forth. Although there are some reports that Iran has reached out to some countries that have been mediators like Qatar and Oman. So that's where we are right now.
Joel Pollak (00:26:27):
The war basically is one. Israel has defeated Iran. Iran is still shooting missiles at Israel, but generally fewer and fewer and less and less effectively. Although it continues even today as I speak to you, it continues to fire at Israel. It also hit a hospital in Southern Israel, but Iran is defeated. I think the regime is on its way out. Anyway, so there's this debate about whether the United States should be involved in a regime change war. I think the regime won't survive, not after Israel has defeated it so thoroughly, and Israel is one 10th the size of Iran in terms of population. Iran is 75 times bigger in terms of geographic area. So it doesn't really bode well for the future of the Iranian regime that it's lost this war to a much smaller country. And I think the Iranian people will lose their fear of the regime.
Joel Pollak (00:27:11):
So I think the regime's doomed anyway, but all of this is what's on President Trump's mind as he ways whether or not to get involved. The Israelis say that they can destroy the Fordo nuclear facility even without the bunker busting bombs, but they might prefer to have the bunker busting bombs. Trump said something interestingly at the White House a couple of days ago where yesterday as you and I are speaking, which is that Iran should surrender, and then the United States should go in and destroy the nuclear facilities. So that could also happen. But right now, as you and I are speaking, the Iranian regime is being pretty stubborn, and they may be a little bit detached from reality. They're not really facing the fact that their regime is being destroyed by the hour anyway. So the deal they should take is basically to agree to surrender, agree to survive, and let Trump and the rest of the world destroy the nuclear program and just go on trying to live in what Trump wants to create as a more prosperous Middle East. But the Iranian regime is a fundamentally religiously fanatical regime. It's a fanaticism that is very hard for us to understand. It's not like ordinary religious fervor, religious faith. It really is a kind of Arian cult, meaning that it is a faith that believes in bringing about the end of the world. That's not how most Muslims believe, but that is the Iranian theocracy, and you can see just how irrational it is by how it's behaving. So another long-winded answer, but that's by way of explaining how we got to where we are today.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:28:33):
Joel, I think this was very good and very helpful. One of the things that, well, one of my observations is I've watched what President Trump has done related to Iran, and I am by no means the expert that you are, which is why I wanted to talk to you today. So we have an expert who can educate people, but as I watched everything that he was doing, even when he went on the Middle East tour, he kept saying repeatedly on that tour, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. We want to make a deal, but they're really close to bad things happening, and if they don't make a deal, it's going to be really, really bad. He was pretty clear if people were listening to what he was saying, including the people who were saying that maybe us involvement in this is not America first. Somehow he was clear just a few weeks ago as he was in the Middle East again, and then of course most recently in the last week, that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:29:41):
And I think his heart is like most people's heart, none of us want, or very few of us want war. I don't want war. Sometimes war becomes necessary because the alternative is untenable and just completely unacceptable. And I think that Iran having a nuclear weapon is one of those hard lines, not just in the sand, but it's in the cement. You cannot cross this, and if you do, we have to act. And it's not just America who doesn't want them to have nuclear weapons or America and Israel, it seems like the Middle East region doesn't want them to. No one in the world wants this regime to have nuclear weapons. Am I right about that?
Joel Pollak (00:30:31):
Right. Nobody wants Iran to have nuclear weapons, and many countries in the region have said that if Iran gets nuclear weapons, they consider Iran a threat, so they're going to want nuclear weapons as well. The last thing you want is the Iranians, the Saudis and the Turks and others to have nuclear weapons because that means those weapons will probably be used. They will also be stolen or given to terrorist groups who won't have the same moral scruples about using them. So the entire region, except for Iran of course, wants Iran not to have nuclear weapons. And I think Trump is correct. This has been the position of every administration, democratic and Republican, that Iran cannot have an nuclear weapon. If you go back to really the heyday of the Tea Party in the 2012 election, there was a debate between then Vice President Joe Biden and Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan, and in that debate, the Republicans and Democrats staked out two very different positions, but both within the idea that Iran couldn't have nuclear weapons.
Joel Pollak (00:31:34):
Biden's position was we're not going to let the Iranians have nuclear weapons. And Paul Ryan's position was, we're not even going to let the Iranians have nuclear enrichment capability. We're not going to let them have a nuclear program. They don't need it. That was a more ambitious position. That's the Trump position today, that we don't just want to stop Iran from having a weapon, but we don't want them even to have the capability in future to build one. If you let Iran continue enriching uranium and stockpiling uranium or plutonium, then Iran could eventually develop a nuclear weapon once it has the technological know-how to do so. So it's not good enough just to say they can't have a weapon because as long as they have the material to build one and they know how to build one, they could do it pretty quickly. So the consensus has been no weapon, and you could go further and say no enrichment.
Joel Pollak (00:32:25):
That was the basis on which Trump had started negotiating with Iran early in this term. He had said to the Iranians, no program whatsoever. The Iranians did not want to do that. The Iranians want to keep their nuclear enrichment capacity. Now, you'll hear people say that Iran has the right to civilian use of nuclear technology. They do. They can use nuclear technology for power plants, but the level to which Iran was enriching uranium, what does that mean? Uranium naturally occurs as a certain isotope, and it's a certain kind of uranium, and over time that uranium decays like many substances decay. But uranium is a very heavy element, and it decays by emitting radiation, basically radioactive particles. There's a heavier isotope of uranium, a heavier form of uranium, which decays more rapidly and more dramatically. And if you get enough of that uranium together, you can create a nuclear chain reaction that releases a huge amount of energy.
Joel Pollak (00:33:25):
And we call that a nuclear explosion. So what you do is you take the safer form of uranium and you put it in centrifuges, which spin the material very quickly, and those centrifuges separate out the different kinds of uranium by weight basically. And so the heavier uranium, which is the more nuclear facile uranium that collects on one side of the centrifuge. And over time, if you do that enough and you refine it enough and enough and enough, you get enough of that highly radioactive material that you can start stockpiling it to create a bomb. And basically they measure the degree of enrichment by percentages. So naturally occurring, uranium has very low percentage of enriched uranium or the advanced or heavier isotope of uranium. But when you put it through these centrifuges, through this process, you start to get higher and higher percentages of the dangerous kind of uranium.
Joel Pollak (00:34:16):
And you really don't need any high level enriched uranium for any civilian purposes. It's not necessary for medical research. It's not necessary for x-rays or anything like that. So what Iran is doing is just stockpiling all of this uranium that can only be used for military purposes, and they wanted to keep that. And Trump said, no, you can't keep that because all we're doing then is getting a paper promise from you that you're not going to build a weapon with it. There's no reason for you to have it at all. That was the impasse. Iran didn't want to give up its nuclear program at all. We're not talking about a civilian program. We're talking about a military program. So that's why we got to this impasse where we are now. Yes, Trump said during the campaign, Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. Trump never committed to using military force, and that's where you start to see some of the debate happening.
Joel Pollak (00:35:04):
The debate is over how to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Obama's approach was, if we're nice enough to them, if we give them enough stuff, if we give them enough money, maybe they won't develop a nuclear weapon. And even if they don't really promise not to do it, maybe they'll just refrain from doing it anyway, at least for the next 10 years. The Obama people pointed to this resolution that the Iranian parliament passed vowing not to develop a nuclear weapon, or they would point to some religious fois, religious declaration that some Iranian Muslim leader had signed saying that nuclear weapons are off limits. All of that was just on paper. The Iranian parliament doesn't have any power. It's controlled by the MUAs by a, so the Iranians were very good at giving the Obama people talking points where the Obama people could say, look, they've committed not to do it.
Joel Pollak (00:35:50):
But all the Obama people had was a paper commitment. The inspectors from international agencies who were supposed to then go in and look to see that Iran was complying, they weren't allowed into certain areas. They weren't given past records to show what Iran had done in the past. So Iran wasn't really complying. So I don't think that Iran would've voluntarily given, voluntarily given up its nuclear weapons program. But that was the argument of the Obama people. But even then, even Obama said, the military option is still on the table. Nobody took him seriously. Nobody believed him, especially after he let Syria get away with using chemical weapons on its own people. When he said that was a red line, he didn't do anything about it. Trump of course did something about it in 2017. Trump follows through on his threats. Obama did not. But the debate is really whether we should use military force to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
Joel Pollak (00:36:41):
That's one part of the debate. And then there's an additional part of it, which is about regime change. So there's another school of thought which says, well, we don't really mind that some countries have nuclear weapons. I mean, it's not a threat to us. If France has a nuclear weapon, the United Kingdom has nuclear weapons, Israel may or may not have nuclear weapons, probably does, but these countries are not threats to us. They're not threats even to their neighbors because these are democracies that are not trying to cause trouble. And maybe if Iran became a friendlier regime, a democratic regime, we wouldn't worry so much about its nuclear program because we then wouldn't worry that it was going to give nuclear material to terrorists or that it was going to try to destroy Israel or whatever. So maybe changing Iran's government is an easier fix than trying to go to war and taking out their nuclear program that way.
Joel Pollak (00:37:30):
That now has become wrapped up in the same discussion around events in recent days. And what you're seeing is a debate over forever wars regime change and so forth. It used to be that the people opposed to going to war in Iran were on the left, and they opposed going to war, partly because they're anti-war by philosophy or just by temperament, but also because they quietly sided with Iran against Israel and against the west. Remember that the left doesn't like the West, they don't really like America, they don't like Israel. And even though they didn't really have the guts to come out and say, we love Iran, they certainly are supporting all of Iran's proxy wars. They support the Palestinian cause against Israel. They support the Hezbollah cause in some cases against Israel. And generally they're okay with Iran being able to menace Israel because they like the idea that Israel will be scared and therefore they hope that Israel will concede things to the Palestinians and so forth.
Joel Pollak (00:38:35):
So I think that's where a lot of the Obama people were coming from. Obama threatened to go to war, but it was never going to happen because his advisors really hated Israel and they wanted to see a stronger Iran in the region to counter Israel. So the left has been opposed to military force against Iran for those two reasons, number one, number two, and anti-America on the right. It used to be pretty universal that we would support military action to destroy Iran's nuclear program. And that's what you mentioned, that 2015 rally Trump was there. I remember I actually spoke at that rally and Trump came in and he was pretty new as a candidate. What was funny was that the speeches were still going on stage, and this crowd just developed around Trump, and he kind of walked through the crowd, hard to imagine happening now.
Joel Pollak (00:39:18):
But he walked through the crowd and this giant sort of huddle of people just walked through the crowd with him, but he was at that rally to show support for the tea party and for the idea of standing up to Iran. So what happened over the years was, and especially after the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, conservatives became more and more skeptical of foreign wars in general. I also think that Trump was able to bring some people from the left into his coalition by saying, look, I'm not going to start these ridiculous wars. I'm going to do limited military engagements, but I'm not going to get us involved. We'll use our financial weapons. We'll use tariffs. We'll use sanctions. We'll use little strikes when we need to, but we're not going to get involved in these foreign wars. I want to get out of Afghanistan. I don't want the military industrial complex to control my presidency.
Joel Pollak (00:40:07):
And I think over the course of his first term, Trump became keenly aware of how the deep state law enforcement intelligence, the military, the procurement, the lobbyists, all these people were in fact trying to bring him down. So I think he became more hostile to the idea of these wars, these overseas engagements as time went on and he was able to bring in some anti-war people from the left into his coalition who saw after Trump was out of office that Hey, this is the first president who didn't start a war in the last several presidencies. Maybe we shouldn't have been so keen to get rid of him. So I think the Trump Coalition became a little bit broader, and I think events changed after the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And a lot of conservatives began saying, look, we tried regime change in Iraq. It didn't really work.
Joel Pollak (00:40:48):
I mean, Iraq is still okay, but it fell to ISIS or almost fell entirely to ISIS for a while. We had to go back in and fight ISIS because Obama left Iraq too early and didn't fight isis. He called in the JV team, but basically it was a mess. And look at what happened in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not a society that lends itself to modern day governance. It is very primitive, and they want to be run by these fanatical medieval Islamists. There's nothing we can do about it. And Trump had the right idea of leaving Biden messed up the plan and left all the military hardware there and left at the end of the summer rather than the beginning. So there was no Afghan government that was able to withstand the Taliban advance and so forth. Why are we getting involved in this at all?
Joel Pollak (00:41:30):
It's just a disaster. It's been a disaster. We should not do this at all. And I think as a society, America's pretty traumatized because when you think about who sends their sons and daughters to the US military, often it's more conservative Americans. And what they saw after Iraq and Afghanistan was that there were thousands of Americans who gave their lives for these conflicts, and they ended up achieving nothing because the politicians didn't follow through or botched the withdrawal. And because these corrupt elites in the countries that we were supposed to help hated us and didn't do their jobs, just stole our money. So there's this skepticism of any kind of foreign involvement in what people call regime change or forever wars. Totally understandable. So they came to this Iran issue saying, oh no, here we go again, not another one of these. We don't want to get involved in another war in the Middle East, and we don't want to get bogged down in this.
Joel Pollak (00:42:22):
The difference is that Iran is not like I, Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran really is a more advanced society. It is a country with a history of self-governance. It wasn't just put together by colonial powers the way Iraq was, and it doesn't try to live in a medieval world the way Afghanistan does. Even the Islamists who run Iran have modern aspirations. They have a vision, even if it's a fanatical vision of a Shiite Islam that is technologically advanced. So they still have scientists and they still have laboratories, and they still have highways and traffic jams and television stations and internet service providers and satellites. I mean, they are really almost a modern society just run by fanatical people the same way that Nazi Germany was a modern society with very primitive ideas, but run by the most highly efficient administrators and engineers and soldiers in the world.
Joel Pollak (00:43:17):
So Iran is a different society. It's not a broken place if you theoretically at least can imagine the regime disappearing. It's not as if there'd be this massive vacuum in Iran. There'd be a power vacuum for a while. There'd be struggles and debates and arguments and so forth. But Iran, more likely than the other two countries would emerge as a stable self-governing country. It would not require military occupations by the United States, by nato, by Israel, by anybody else. Nor could we really do that. Iran has 90 million people, and it's a large country. It's got many different cities. It would be incredibly hard to administer as a colonial power, which is why it's just never even been brought up. Even in the days of George Bush and Dick Cheney when they were talking about confronting Iran, no one talked about occupying Iran the way they did about Iraq.
Joel Pollak (00:44:04):
So it's a different kind of struggle. There's also a very well-developed Iranian opposition with a huge presence in the West, especially where I've spent most of the last 15 years in Los Angeles. And the Iranian people are very pro-American. They're not like the people in Afghanistan or in Iraq who have been really just isolated from the United States, and the only education they know is radical Islam. Iran, yes, there are people who have been indoctrinated to hate America, but the vast majority of the population loves America and has connections with America, would like to visit America. Many Iranian Americans would like to go back to Iran and see the old country. There's much more of a substance there to the relationship potentially between the United States and Iran. So I think that were we to become involved in some kind of regime change in Iran, it would not necessarily be a disaster.
Joel Pollak (00:44:56):
But anyway, that's where the debate has been online in the last few weeks. You have these conservative pundits who were once very vocal about confronting Iran now saying, Hey, we don't want to get involved in another regime change forever war on behalf of the military industrial complex and the deep staters who are trying to control Trump. And some of them go further and say vaguely antisemitic things like, we don't want to go to war for Israel as if Iran wasn't also a threat to the United States and not also trying to attack the great Satan to attack America. The final thing I'll say about this before giving you a chance to jump back in is that I think this entire debate is a moot point. I don't think the Iranian regime survives anyway. What we've learned about totalitarian regimes is that they are able to control their populations as long as they can tell the people that they are fighting a greater outside enemy.
Joel Pollak (00:45:49):
Once they can't resist that enemy, once they can't defeat or protect their own people from that enemy, the regime loses its reason for being. And also the people lose their fear of the regime. There was a moment when Israel bombed the Iranian state television broadcaster in the middle of a broadcast. You may have seen that video, a woman sort of going on some harangue against Israel, and then studio going dark and debris floating down from the ceiling. And millions of people watch that across Iran. They saw that the regime couldn't protect itself. You're no longer afraid of a regime that can't even protect itself, where the leading generalists have all been killed, where the leaders of the government are all in bunkers hiding. While you don't have a bomb shelter, you don't have any way of protecting yourself. You see that your leaders have abandoned you and that they're terrified.
Joel Pollak (00:46:34):
I think when the dust settles after this, even if the Iranian regime does a deal with Trump and remains in place, I think the Iranian regime is doomed. I think the Iranian people are going to rise up in one way or another, and they're going to say, enough is enough. You guys are just a bunch of corrupt people who want to tell us how to live, but don't want to protect us or even provide the basics that we would need to survive. And so we're getting rid of you. And I think regime change is inevitable. The real debate ought to be, in my view, what replaces it. It's not up to us on the outside. I think Iranians have to figure it out, but I do think we need to air that debate because I'm not sure Iranians are having it. It would help them, I think, for us to be very explicit about what the alternatives are.
Joel Pollak (00:47:16):
You've got the former Shahs family. Shah was an autocratic ruler, a king basically in Iran that United States supported, and then we pulled our support under Jimmy Carter. His son is out there, I believe, talking about how he wants to go back. Then you've got Iranians who want a democracy and they don't want to be ruled by king. Maybe there's some halfway constitutional monarchy they can figure out. I don't know, maybe culturally Iran will still be a Muslim country. Maybe they don't want to live like a western country. They want a free country, but it doesn't have to look like our system of democracy perhaps. I don't know. But the point is, you do run the risk of a vacuum if there's no discussion. So I think what we ought to be doing is saying, what's the future of Iran? Because this regime is so odious and so backward, it's on its way out. What ought to replace it and how can we be part of that process in a positive way that doesn't involve risks to the United States?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:48:07):
I think that that analysis that you just did about the online commentators and influencers and the conservative sphere was really very good, Joel, because you're not really attacking them. You're looking at where they're coming, how they're coming at it, at the discussions and the decisions that they're making, and being very fair about it, and then pointing out other issues that you see within some of their thought processes. So I think you did that very well.
Joel Pollak (00:48:40):
Can I say something more about that, just quickly?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:48:41):
Yeah.
Joel Pollak (00:48:42):
I think they're asking the right questions, most of them, which is what happens next? That really is the most important question. If the regime disappears, what happens next? So I think they're right to point to that and the right to say, we don't want to a repeat of Iraq in Afghanistan. And I also think if I give them the benefit of the doubt, they are coming from a place of some trauma. I mean, we as a country have suffered not just the nine 11 attacks, which I still don't think we're quite over, but we've suffered the complete debacle of our political leaders botching Iraq and letting ISIS take over and then botching Afghanistan. And I think we've lost confidence in our leaders. We've also lost confidence in ourselves. I think it's natural to be skeptical of our ability to follow through on changing even a terrible, terrible regime like Iran.
Joel Pollak (00:49:32):
So I get where they're coming from. I don't get their answers or I don't agree with the answers to the questions they're raising. And I think sometimes many of them are reaching for what seemed to be easy explanations, but really are fatally flawed explanations like Israel must be controlling our foreign policy, which is ridiculous. Trump has many times told Israel that he's not doing what Benjamin Netanyahu wants. I'll give you an example, a fascinating example. Actually right now, there's an American organization. It's a nonprofit organization. It's not part of the government, but it's supported by the Trump administration. They're in Gaza giving out food to Palestinians. Israel can't really do that because the Palestinians don't trust the Israelis, but you have American volunteers essentially. Some of them are paid, I suppose. But basically this American organization has started, it's called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and Trump is supporting them, and they're going into Gaza and they're giving meals millions of meals a day directly to Palestinians.
Joel Pollak (00:50:33):
The Israeli approach to Hamas is military. They say, okay, Hamas has our hostages. Hamas is attacking our people. We're going to go in and fight Hamas. And Trump often says, I don't think the military is the solution to everything. I'm going to undermine Hamas a different way, Benjamin Netanyahu. I'm going to provide food directly to the Palestinians, not through the United Nations, because Hamas steals that food and then keeps it for itself, or sells it to Palestinians, forces them to pay for food that they need that's supposed to be arriving for free. But Trump says, I'm going to undermine Hamas economically. I'm going to undermine them politically by giving the food directly to the Palestinians that is working. So you can see that Trump is perfectly capable of going his own way and carving his own path. So I don't think Israel controls our foreign policy at all.
Joel Pollak (00:51:20):
Israel is a very important ally. I think what's happened is that there's a small group of antisemitic nutcases who have become very vocal on social media, and they've become vocal in the real world sometimes. I've seen videos where they will go to conservative events and they'll disrupt speakers, they'll attack speakers. And so I think what's happened is that many conservatives have become intimidated by these people. Some may even be convinced that there's an audience for what these people are saying. And so I see some conservatives starting to entertain some of the ideas that these haters are pushing because they think they can either neutralize them that way or they can appeal to their audience, which is not as big as the haters make people believe it is. So I think there's been a kind of, if you will, weakness against that, which we can't really afford.
Joel Pollak (00:52:14):
It's not who we are as people to give in to that kind of hatred. And I don't think it's intrinsic to conservative pundits, and it's a much bigger problem on the left than it is on the right. But I think we have to shut it down now, and we don't shut it down by censoring people and kicking people off social media. I just think we have to be very clear about what we believe and why. And we cannot fall into the left's trap of believing that everything is a conspiracy theory and everything is controlled by small puppeteers and so forth. There are people like George Soros in the world, for example. There are people who do nefarious things, but we can't forget that we also have agency and that we can make decisions for ourselves as individuals and as a nation. And we are making those decisions with regard to Israel. And I think that Trump is weighing these things very carefully as he decides whether or not to get involved. If he does get involved, it's not going to be because Benjamin Netanyahu somehow has a leash around Donald Trump's neck. I mean, that's really not what's happening. And I don't think we should give that any more attention than it deserves or any more credibility than it deserves.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:53:17):
Those are really good points. And the conspiracy point, what you just said about Soros, I think that it's very important. I know that Soros funds a lot of activities on the left, and I also know that we were accused of being funded by the Koch brothers, which we were not. And so sometimes I hear those things that are coming from the right about the left, and I'm like, but wait a minute. My experiences, those same kind of accusations, but from the left were being made at us or about our supporters or whatever it may be. And they were just not true. So if they weren't true when they were made about us, it may not be true when they're being made about the other side. We have to just, I try and I know I'm not perfect, but I certainly try to be intellectually honest.
Joel Pollak (00:54:17):
Well, let me try to draw a distinction. So I think people on both sides are susceptible to being influenced by big donors and that sort of thing. But I don't see the same kind of debate on the left about Soros influence that I do on the right. Let's say about the Koch brothers or other people. So the Koch brothers were involved in conservative politics for quite some time. And then when immigration became a real issue, when the Republican establishment decided that they lost in 2012 because they were too hard on illegal immigration and they had to do this whole amnesty push, conservatives pushed back. And what emerged then was that the Koch brothers, and I'm just using that term loosely, but Koch Industries or whatever, that whole group of
Jenny Beth Martin (00:55:02):
Donors, chamber of Commerce, whoever it might've been,
Joel Pollak (00:55:04):
Yeah, they were very pro amnesty. They liked the ideas of open borders and they were proud to say it because they felt like we needed more people for more babies or for more people paying into the entitlements programs or for lower wages and higher returns for shareholders. It's a free market. They had an ideological commitment to immigration and conservatives pushed back, even conservatives who had worked with the Koch brothers or taken money from them or whatever, and they said, you know what? We do not believe that we do not have a country if we allow that policy to go ahead, we're not on board for that. So there was an internal debate, and what you see now in the conservative movement is a much more diverse field of donors. Trump didn't rely on donors to get elected. He had a lot of small donors, he had some of his own wealth.
Joel Pollak (00:55:52):
But you really see a system where there are people pushing particular ideas. There's no doubt about that, but there is much more of a debate that's going on on the democratic side. You cannot criticize George Soros. You cannot, Democrats are terrified of doing so because they're afraid they won't get jobs. And if you look at how the left works when they're not in power, they have all of these non-governmental organizations and nonprofit organizations that act kind of like the farm team, like the minor leagues or sort of sheltered employment for left wingers who are out of office. Conservatives have them as well, but far fewer of them because it's harder to be a conservative billionaire. You get attacked, you get canceled. So conservative billionaires actually don't create this whole ecosystem quite as well. You have the Heritage Foundation and a few things, but they're much smaller.
Joel Pollak (00:56:40):
The left has massive, massive reserves. The universities are all part of the left farm team, and so they don't criticize because they're terrified that if they go against this system of donors, Soros and others on the left, they're not going to get those jobs. They're not going to get placed in those things, and they need to stay in those jobs they believe to survive in politics. Conservatives aren't like that. Conservatives, myself included, we say if I had to lose my political job, my writing job or whatever, I'd get another job. I'd learn how to fix houses, I'd learn how to do something. I have other degrees I can use. There are other skills we have. Conservatives don't live for politics in the same way, and I just think that makes us a little bit more outspoken. So I think there is more of a dialogue about issues and there's a willingness to dissent.
Joel Pollak (00:57:29):
I do think Soros does a lot of bad things. I think he sponsors a lot of terrible projects, terrible ideas. It's not antisemitic to say that even though he happens to be Jewish, I happen to be Jewish. I think Soros is probably one of the most anti-Israel people out there. He's not pro-Israel in any sense. He started a lot of the anti-Israel groups or funded them. So I don't think there's any problem criticizing him. I just think that the habit of thinking that everything is a conspiracy is really much more on the left. It's not a way that people on the right tend to think. And so that's what I would caution pundits against doing when they try to consider this situation. If something's happening that you don't like in the Middle East, you see foreign policy moves that Trump is making and you don't like them or you don't understand them, don't agree with them.
Joel Pollak (00:58:11):
It's not because somebody got to him. It's not because somebody manipulated him. It might be because he is aware of things that you and I are not, and he's seeing things that we're not or has knowledge of capabilities that we don't. So I would just caution people and say, I get where you're coming from. I think you're asking the right questions when you say what happens next? But when you fill that with answers that basically come from the Soros dictionary like Israel first and Israel lobby and all this stuff, I mean that's straight out of the worst parts of the left. That's the stuff Soros and his groups use. I would just say you need to be a little skeptical about that because that heads in a very dangerous direction.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:58:55):
And if you can remember that we're all, we are conservatives and we believe in independence and we believe that people have, as you said, we have our own agency and we're independent thinkers. And so we're going to have disagreements from time to time. And you can disagree on a policy, you can disagree vehemently on a policy and still get along with on all the things that you do agree with. And the debate can just be because you don't think the same. It doesn't mean it's a conspiracy, it just means we're actually doing what we believe in as constitutional conservatives. We believe in independence. We believe in the ability to speak your mind and to have free speech. So when we keep that in mind, then we can look at the things that might be happening online and we see the different debates no matter what the issue, whether it's the issue of today, Iran and Israel or the issue of tomorrow, who knows what it'll be, but there'll be some other flashpoint that happens.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:59:58):
And just remember, find where you agree and work on the issues with your alliance that you agree on, the issues with that issue with. And when it comes to the next set of issues, you find a new coalition. It might be a lot of the same people. It might be some new people, it might be some people you just disagreed with on Iran and Israel, but you agree on the next set. And if you just keep it focused on Israel and remember not to take it all completely so personally and not to attack the people you disagree with. So personally, I think then we have a better shot of continuing to win politically and that's good for America.
Joel Pollak (01:00:39):
I would just give people two pieces of advice when trying to figure out these debates. If you're going to engage in debates on social media, which I think is a good thing to do, I would avoid using foul language. That's just the thing you'll notice. I almost never use profanity. Even when I get into big fights with people on X, whether it's fashionable or not, we're a lot looser, more accepting of four letter words in dialogue than we used to be as a society. But it still does represent crossing a boundary. And when you start swearing at people or using sexual imagery or putting people down in a very harsh way, it's very hard to walk that back because even if you delete the comments, someone will have preserved them or screenshot them. So if you get into that mood, you should walk away from social media or put down your phone.
Joel Pollak (01:01:29):
But generally just avoid profanity. I mean, I think you can avoid 90% of the aggravation of social media fights if you avoid profanity. Secondly, and more broadly, I don't think people need to feel that they have to understand everything. I see conservative pundits taking positions on regime change in Iran as if they have to know what the answer is, and they have to fit it into an all encompassing system of thought that they can then defend against all criticism. They are the knowledge, they are the experts. And I know a lot as you mentioned, I mean, I would say I know a lot about Israel in the Middle East. I've been to Israel probably 20 times, six times since October 7th. I speak Hebrew. I speak a little bit of Arabic. This is part of my life culturally, and yet I'm not even sure what's happening.
Joel Pollak (01:02:21):
A lot of the times I have to take a wait and see approach because I don't know what's going to happen. I know what might happen. I know what I think I would like to happen, but I have to accept that I don't know. So sometimes the best you can do is just observe a situation and sometimes observe the debates. I mean, you can learn from people who are debating even if they're doing the thing that I'm cautioning you against doing, which is setting themselves up as experts who know what's going to happen. I just think where I see people digging in defending their ideas and their positions, and I think there's a lot of unnecessary hostility because they're afraid to be wrong. I think you can be wrong. And if you're afraid of being wrong, then just be a little bit more skeptical and a little more open to what might happen.
Joel Pollak (01:03:09):
Because the reality is that even though personally what my personal preference is, I would prefer that the United States not get involved. That's my personal preference. I would prefer since Israel has done such a fantastic job so far that we allow the Israelis to do this. They're not going to have the bunker busting bombs that we have, but let's let them go into the nuclear sites and destroy them through other means, which they have said they can do. That would be my preference. But if Trump decides he's going to attack for his own reasons, maybe he wants to send a message to China and say, we are prepared to go to war. Maybe he's thinking about things that we're not necessarily thinking about. He's thinking about the broader picture. A lot of people in the debate about whether or not we should have bombed Japan with the nuclear bombs at the end of the Second World War, one of the arguments in favor of bombing is that we wanted to send a signal not to the Japanese emperor, but to Stalin and say, Hey, we know that there's a post-war situation that's shaping up, and we want you to know we have this destructive weapon, so do not mess with us.
Joel Pollak (01:04:13):
Do not push the gains of the second World War past a certain boundary because we are much stronger than you are. And Trump might be thinking of that. It might have nothing to do with Iran and regime change. He might be saying, you know what? I got this 30,000 pound bomb called the bunker busting bomb. It's never actually been used in combat, so why don't I just drop it on this nuclear facility? It's not going to kill any civilians like Nagasaki. And here RIMA did. Let's just drop it on Fordo the name of the nuclear facility and see what it does. And then China will understand, Hey, don't mess with us. Don't invade Taiwan, whatever. I mean, we are not privy to all of the considerations that the president of the United States, the commander-in-chief is seeing. And I'm not saying that because I'm part of some Trump worshiping cult or something like that.
Joel Pollak (01:04:57):
It's just the reality. He's got to consider the national interest, and he's getting information and advice from every possible source on every possible side of the argument. So we have to kind of suspend judgment. And I honestly don't know if it would be better in the long run if the United States got involved or didn't. My personal preference would be that we did not get involved. I think Israel will be stronger if it is seen as having done this itself. And I think that you can short circuit this entire debate among Americans by saying, at the end of this war, Hey, we didn't get involved. I also think a deal would be better than continuing the war. If Iran were to surrender and let us go in and make sure the nuclear program is destroyed. We don't have to bomb the reactor. We can have civilian demolition experts go in and do it.
Joel Pollak (01:05:38):
We can have nuclear experts go in and do it safely. So there are no radiation leaks and that kind of thing. I think that's the best possible outcome, but that usually doesn't happen. The best thing doesn't usually happen. So we'll have to see what happens. And hopefully it works out for the best, but I don't feel like I have to attach myself to a position. Once I do, then I've got to defend that position and new information is always going to come in. And I just see people arguing themselves into unnecessary corners and then lashing out. And so again, just to summarize the rules here for getting involved in these debates, don't swear and don't feel you have to nail yourself to a position because you can sometimes just observe.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:06:16):
Yeah, I think that's very, very good advice, Joel, and I appreciate that advice. I'd like to go back to a couple other things very quickly. I know we've gone kind of long, but I want to follow up on something. There is a lot of debate about the forever war and people don't want to get involved in a forever war. And I think that most people don't. As I said before, most people don't even want war. And sometimes it is necessary. When I hear all of that debate, the thing that I just keep thinking about, and when you think about Afghanistan as you were talking about, and our withdrawal from that and what happened in Iraq, I just want to know that if America is going to get involved, we're involved to win whatever the objective is. We are there to get the job done and to get out as quickly as we possibly can with whatever that objective is.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:07:13):
And I don't want the paper pushers in Washington DC to extend it beyond however long it takes to actually win. But I sure don't want to know that my friends whose children are going off to war at this point because I'm older and it's not just my peers anymore, it's my fringe children or my own children could potentially wind up having to go that it's happening and we don't intend to win. And that's one of the things that I think that Trump is pretty set on. It seems to me, if we're going to be involved in things, there's an objective and he goes and he gets that objective done, at least when we look at the first administration. And I think we will see the same kind of thing happening in this administration. And then the other comment that I would make, and then I'd love to hear your opinion on my comments, is that we hear President Trump's administration right now saying that we are going to have peace through strength, and I want peace through strength. And I think that sometimes to show that you actually are strong, you do have to flex the muscle sometimes. Otherwise they just, our enemies will think we're just full of hot air and then you can wind up being perceived as weak as the Biden administration was. I don't think people see the Trump administration as weak. I'm just saying sometimes America has to act to remind people that we're capable of acting. Am I right or wrong about those thoughts?
Joel Pollak (01:08:49):
I think you're correct. I think that we achieved that already, or we saw Trump achieve that in this administration when he attacked the Houthis for several weeks and then they agreed to stop attacking American ships. And so he stopped attacking the Houthis. I think Trump has shown an ability to end wars when he wants to. We didn't have to go into Yemen, we didn't have to oust the Houthis from power. We didn't have to rebuild Yemen as soon as they did what he wanted. He said, okay, war's over. And again, Trump showed he is perfectly capable of adopting an independent policy from Israel because the Israelis weren't happy about that. They felt isolated. At least they said so publicly. Maybe that was part of the ruse to get Iran to think that Israel wasn't going to attack Iran without Trump's permission or whatever. But the Israelis felt like, Hey, the Houthis are still attacking us.
Joel Pollak (01:09:38):
Why'd you do this separate peace deal with the Houthis that leaves us as the only target? So Israel had to deal with that, but Trump said, look, I'm out. We achieved our objectives. That was it. I mean, I just wanted them to stop attacking the US Navy. I wanted them to stop attacking global shipping, and they agreed, and they're just going to attack Israel. So the Israelis weren't happy. But Trump has taken both of those things into account. You get involved in conflicts, you can win, and you don't have this open-ended commitment to things you can't achieve. I don't think the United States can go into Iran and administer post-conflict Iran, but I do think we'll have something to say about what it should look like. It shouldn't be just another Islamic government that takes over. And I think that your criteria are correct. Most people would share them.
Joel Pollak (01:10:25):
We should only get involved if we can win. And I don't think we have to get involved just to show we can win. I think what Trump was actually very careful about this when Israel was clearly winning this war against Iran, Trump put out a statement on truth social saying the reason they're winning, and this may or may not be entirely accurate, but you'll see what I'm getting at in a minute. He said, the reason they're winning is they're using American technology and our stuff is much better than anyone else's stuff. Russia couldn't do what Israel did in three years. Israel did it in three days. And that's because our drones, our missiles, our tech is just so much better now. Is that true? It's partly true. I mean, Israeli pilots are flying these F 35 planes that are made in the United, the Israelis modify them, and the Israelis have amazing pilots.
Joel Pollak (01:11:17):
So it's partly true. But Israel is also using its own technology. I mean, the Iron Dome system was originated by Israel. All of these anti-missile systems were originated by Israel. They were then jointly developed with some American companies. But Israelis have their own high-tech sector too. But it's important for Trump to show that we can get involved and win. And what better way to do it than to show through Israel's success and not have to go to war yourself? So there's a joke going around among Israelis, which is that Trump doesn't have to attack the Fordo nuclear site with the bunker busting bombs or the B two bombers just lend it to us. I've seen the meme like, let us borrow the B two, we promise we'll return it without a scratch. So you could still achieve the same thing. Show that you have the ability, and we don't necessarily need to risk more than we have already.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:12:08):
Okay. That is very good. And then one last thought that I have as I watched and have learned about what Israel did last week is they went into Iran initially and then from previously what they did with the pagers. I just think their military is very creative and they're fighting a modern war, and they're fighting in modern ways that we haven't even, it is going to take a while for people to understand the way we fight wars is going to be much more like what Israel is doing, I think, in the future. And it's completely different than much of what we've seen in the past. And then the other thing that I've thought about as I've considered what Israel is doing is that old saying that loose lips syncs ships. They were able to pull off both of those attacks with the pager and then the things that they did with Iran, with the drones, and no one had any idea. And it took years of planning, especially for those pagers. So I just think it is rather impressive, and I hope that our military is learning lessons from what Israel is doing right now and that we become an even better military from learning lessons from what Israel is doing.
Joel Pollak (01:13:37):
I agree. And I think we will. I think we will.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:13:39):
Well, that is all that the questions that I have for you today. Is there anything else that you think people should consider as they're looking at what's happening right now with Iran and Israel?
Joel Pollak (01:13:49):
The only thing I would say is look at the statement that Mike EE sent to President Trump and whatever your religious belief, Mike Ee has a deep sense of the spiritual role in the world, and there's a consistent theme throughout Jewish history, which is the weak triumphing over the strong David defeating Goliath, the Maccabees defeating the Greeks, and this is the latest example of that. And it's a very powerful theme in human history. It doesn't just belong to Jewish people, even though it is something that's very deeply a part of the Jewish experience of the world. I think it's something people can tap into in their everyday lives. And just because you're faced with an impossible situation doesn't mean you can't somehow overcome it with the right planning and the right faith. So I think that's the lesson to draw.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:14:45):
Very good. Thank you so much for joining me today, Joel. I really appreciated it and I learned a lot.
Narrator (01:14:51):
Thanks Jenny Beth. The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, produced by Kevin Mohan and directed by Luke Livingston. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots action. For more information, visit tea party patriots.org.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:15:12):
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