Iran promises a surprise... but just seems to be collapsing (06-18-2025--Hour1)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalinarshow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:29] We're going to get to the Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson soundbites. We got two of them now. The full interview, I think, is dropping at some point today, maybe in like another hour or something. But it highlights the infighting that is occurring inside of the Republican Party, or I don't even know if it's MAGA world or not.

[00:00:52] But this fight has been percolating for a while. Because you have people who, I think, believe themselves to be the standard bearers for MAGA. Because their audience is MAGA, and their audience tells them that they are so awesome.

[00:01:14] And so they have now sort of adopted this posture that they speak for MAGA world.

[00:01:24] And it is quite, it is quite the development to hear people that hitched their wagon to the Trump train and now call themselves more MAGA than Donald Trump. To the point where Donald Trump was even asked about this. And he said, like, I created this.

[00:01:55] No, I am this, I'm the leader of MAGA, which of course he is. Of course he is. It's so bizarre, but it ties into this thing, this woke right fight that that's what I mean by it's been percolating. That's, there's, there's an element on the right that doesn't actually believe in the MAGA principles.

[00:02:20] They believe in other stuff. And they use the tactics of the Marxist dialectic, they use the Mott and Bailey tactics. They use these things either for grifting purposes or, you know, to gain influence or in some more nefarious cases in order to splinter the MAGA movement.

[00:02:44] And so they, they've now, this is their line in the sand apparently is the Iran attack by Israel and Trump's role in it.

[00:03:01] I, I said yesterday, like, I do not want Iran to have nuclear weapons. And I am with about 80 something percent of Trump voters and like 70% of Americans. Iran should not get the bomb. And I've heard some really stupid arguments over the last 48 hours coming from quote unquote conservatives and libertarians about it.

[00:03:28] And I, I have to say the dumbest one, I think is that, uh, well, you know, Netanyahu and Israel, they've been saying that Iran is, you know, close to getting a nuclear warhead. They've been saying it for 20 years or 30 years. Yes, they have been, they've been saying that absolutely correct.

[00:03:50] And the critics point to this as proof that those are lies and they ignore all of the things over the last 30 years that Israel has done in order to thwart the nuclear program in Iran.

[00:04:09] Right. Here's, here's a riddle for particularly, uh, Democrats that are now making common cause with, um, a lot of these woke right folks. In opposing Trump, cause that's what it's about for people on the left. It's about just, you know, opposing Donald Trump on anything that he does, even if they agreed that Iran shouldn't have a nuclear weapon. And by the way, Democrats did agree with that until about a minute ago. You know how I know that?

[00:04:36] Well, because they backed the Obama regimes, JCPOA agreement, which should have been a treaty, but Obama did an end run around the Senate in, you know, conflict with the U S constitution. I would submit and did argue at that time, but Democrats said, no, no, no. It's, you know, this agreement is, is going to put a pause on Iranian,

[00:05:01] Uranian enrichment aspirations. And of course it did not. Um, because they really, really want the bomb. They want to be able to murder as many Jews and wipe Israel off the map. That's what they have said. That's what everybody knows. Everybody knows this. Like I said, Democrats used to know it too. Most Republicans understand it. Most MAGA world understands it. Donald Trump understands it. Donald Trump has been saying it for like a decade and a half. They can't get a nuke.

[00:05:30] So Israel like has obviously been, been planning all of this stuff out from the initial, uh, you know, response to October 7th, then the hit on the, uh, Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon.

[00:05:47] And now going after the command structure and the facilities that produce not just the nuclear centrifuges and, uh, the, the ballistic missiles, right. But also the weaponry that has been deployed through their proxies, through the Iranian proxies against Israel, but also American troops when they were in Iraq.

[00:06:13] Hundreds, if not thousands of American deaths are at the hands of the Iranians. They don't like us. They call us the great Satan. They chant death to America. Now you can choose to believe that that is not true. You can choose to believe that they didn't mean it, or that's just for domestic consumption. And, oh, you know, those, you know, Middle Eastern countries over the top rhetoric and all of that.

[00:06:40] See, but I remember 9-11 and because I remember 9-11, I say, yeah, you know what? I'm going to trust them. So, radical Islamists really do want to kill non-Muslims, particularly Israel and America. They really, really want to do it when they can't find other Muslims to murder a little bit closer to home. But, like, if they can travel, they, they definitely, they definitely like to kill a lot of Jews.

[00:07:08] They like to kill a lot of Christians. Africa is a good example of that. I think, just saw there was another slaughter of Christians in another African nation at the hands of Islamists. They really like doing this. It's their jam, okay? They are compelled by their radical ideology to do it. So, when you have folks like that running a country and they've made these promises,

[00:07:35] I think we should listen to them. I think we should believe them. And I think Donald Trump has actually, like, I have made jokes for years about whether or not Donald Trump is playing six-dimensional chess or whatever. And for the most part, I have rejected that idea. It doesn't seem like he is playing these, you know, deep-level games and stratagem and all this stuff.

[00:07:58] But on this, it definitely seems like he is playing a different game than a lot of other people, particularly in the magosphere that are detractors of him now and his approach to this. How dare he stand by Israel? How dare he support their action? How dare he participate in the deception that allowed Israel's surprise attack to be so successful? I think it's actually brilliant on the part of Donald Trump.

[00:08:28] Let Israel do what they're going to do, and then you can say, hey, come back to the table. We offered you a 60-day window. You refused to take it. Like, you've got maximum leverage now over Iran. All of that being said does not mean that I'm advocating either, A, American troops, boots on the ground in Iran, nation-building, none of that. Israel's doing it. What about the refugees?

[00:08:58] What about them? When people leave the country and if the country falls into collapse because of it, that's not our problem. Our problem was the regime was working on a nuclear bomb. Oh, that's what they said about Iraq. Yeah. Except this is a little different because we have now like 40 years of evidence.

[00:09:23] And this is like the Hillary Clinton server when everybody on the left was like, oh, it's just where's her emails? Oh, it's her emails. No, no, no. The smoking gun is the existence of the server. And in Iran's case, because by the way, you would not have the server unless you needed to permanently delete emails. Right? That's the only way you could do that is to actually control the server. For Iran, the smoking gun is the enrichment levels.

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[00:11:05] Or check out all there is to offer at cabinsofashville.com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. All right, so Israel struck a centrifuge production site in Tehran after successfully intercepting more than two dozen missiles launched by Iran towards Israel in the preceding hours.

[00:11:25] Over 50 Israeli Air Force jets flew to Iran where they struck a facility in which centrifuges were manufactured to expand and accelerate uranium enrichment for Iran's nuclear weapons program, according to the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force. Okay. There is no reason to enrich uranium past 3% if, as the Iranians have claimed in the past, that they only need it for civilian energy production purposes.

[00:11:55] 3% is what you need, apparently. 3% enrichment. By blowing past that, getting all the way to 60%, and knocking on the door of the 90% threshold which is necessary to create the weapons-grade nuclear weapon, well then, there is no other explanation for why you would do that. Except for a nuclear bomb. Oh, and by the way, last night is very weird. Let's see here, what did I do with it?

[00:12:25] There was, I have so many papers in the stack of stuff. There was a, there it is. There was a, no, there was a tweet that the Ayatollah, oh, I don't think I printed it. Did I not print that? Hang on a second, let me pull it up. The Ayatollah put out a, Khomeini, put out a statement. Sorry, yeah, the Iranian state media, quote,

[00:12:53] There is a surprise tonight that the world will remember for centuries. Okay? Okay, first off, my initial response was, why are you announcing this? That's not really a surprise at that point? That's like inviting somebody to their surprise party and then yelling surprise. Like, you don't, you say something is coming, you got this, okay, well, what was it? I don't know.

[00:13:20] It doesn't seem there, it doesn't seem that there was anything unless it was the launching of two dozen missiles, which Israel successfully took out of the sky. Now, maybe one of those missiles was some sort of a nuclear weapon. Why do I suggest that? Well, last night, the Iranians released a 17-second video. And it's got some music playing.

[00:13:46] And it says in, I think in, I don't know, in two different foreign languages, maybe Israeli or, why am I drawing? Hebrew, drawing a blank on their language. Hebrew, maybe Arabic or I don't know if it's Farsi or whatever. And then in English, it says maybe. That's it. Okay, so that's all it says. Your music playing, it says maybe.

[00:14:10] And it shows this close-up of a, what appears to be almost like a cartoonish nuclear bomb. It's like a little missile with the radioactive, you know, the little three-legged thing or whatever, that symbol, the nuclear symbol that's on the bomb. And so it's this close-up of a nuclear warhead. But then there's a hand that comes in. And the hand is like three times the size of the bomb.

[00:14:37] So that's when you realize the scale of this thing, that the bomb is actually just like a little toy. It's like a toy nuke or something. It's really small. And you see this hand, and it starts petting the bomb. It's petting it. And it says maybe. So maybe that was the surprise that we're going to remember for centuries to come. I don't know. I'm not sure what the surprise was.

[00:15:06] But they kind of left us hanging there. And maybe, like I said, maybe they've got a very tiny nuke. Maybe they've got a really small nuke. They're going to, you know, pack it in a lunchbox someplace and send it into Israel or America. I don't know. But see, this kind of proves the point that they are willing to use nuclear weapons. Because that's always been the deal about mutually assured destruction with, like, the Russians.

[00:15:28] And I hear people talking about the, oh, well, if, you know, the Russians and we have nukes and mutually assured destruction is okay for us, why not Iran? Yeah, because, like, we weren't out there screaming that we're going to nuke you. Like, that wasn't our official government position, you know? Mutually assured destruction was we don't want to die. You don't want to die.

[00:15:52] So as long as we know that we can hit each other first strike, second strike, third strikes, whatever, then we're at detente, right? There's no, there's going to be no movement. It's just a stalemate. But Iran doesn't care.

[00:16:07] Because, again, their religious ideology and offshoot this branch inside of Islam that they believe that the only way to bring about the end times is to kill every Jew in Israel. And a nuke does that. Hence, their desire for nuclear weapons since the very beginning. This is not new. From the very beginning when they took over in the revolution. All right. So spring is here.

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[00:17:34] Get all the details at createavideo.com. This is from Karen. It's a Pete tweet. Karen says, I don't understand why people cannot believe, one, Iran should not have a nuclear weapon. Two, we can and should support Israel without American troops' boots on the ground in an unwinnable ground war. And three, the Iran-Israel conflict affects us way more than the Russia-Ukraine conflict does.

[00:18:01] Like, yeah, it's all perfectly reasonable. Again, this is Israel protecting its national interest. It is taking out a threat that has been attacking it in various forms for the better part of 40 years. And they had, you know, with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, they have used their proxies to bring the war to Israel.

[00:18:30] And they've been doing it for decades. And Israel says, you know what? After October 7th, we're done. We're done living like this. We know where it's coming from. And we're going after all of the operations. And they just started with Gaza. They moved into Lebanon. They hit the Houthis a little bit. And now they're going into Iran. And it's their national interest. It's their call.

[00:18:58] And Iran has, you know, laid out enough evidence against themselves for why a just war by Israel is allowable. That's why you're not like, where are all of the Muslim countries? Like, oh, it's going to spread into a regional conflict. Why hasn't it already? Why hasn't it? Nobody's coming to Iran's defense so far. Nobody's, oh, sorry. The Houthis were like, we got your back.

[00:19:28] Like, Russia abandoned them almost immediately. Where are all these other countries? Let me go over to Travis. Welcome to the program. How are you? Hey, Mr. Pete. I just wanted to lay out what I see as the dominoes that kind of define where we are right now and setting up where we're going, where I don't think we've fully thought about where we're going yet.

[00:19:54] So the first domino is Donald Trump's negotiating with Iran, right? And at some point, he must have received credible information that made him think, Iran is negotiating in bad faith. Correct. And he began to work with Israel to, you know, do what we do now. Hang on, Travis.

[00:20:15] I would say another possible theory there is that he knew from the very beginning that Iran was operating in bad faith, but wanted to try to do a deal and just told Israel, hold off. So he may have known about Israel's plans for a very long time and just said, you know what, I'm going to do this. And that's part of the deception that he engaged in. Right. I mean, I think you would have been happy with the deal, but I think you could easily be right. Yeah. Either way. And I don't know.

[00:20:44] Like you said, like you, I'm just like, these are different ideas for what we could have seen. Well, the next domino in line is when you decide to strike nuclear infrastructure, you know Iran's going to respond. So you also have to take out their air capabilities and their military installations, right? Right. And the launch pads for their ballistic missiles, yeah.

[00:21:09] And when you do that, now we get to the domino where I don't think any of us really could be expected to know, because at this point you get into the weeds of Iran, right? But inside Iran, you have what's called Balakistan, right? It's the Balaki people. And that's a region that borders, that spans the border of Pakistan and Iran. You have the Kurds in the northeast, northwest, sorry, northwest. And you have some Arab communities in the southwest.

[00:21:39] And all of those have militant separatist groups that no longer have to worry about helicopters or Iranian air force taking them out. And I've seen that the Balaki nationalists are starting to up their attacks on Iranian installations.

[00:22:00] And what's interesting to me about that is that on the Paki side of Balakistan, China has invested a lot into the port of Guadar. And right now, Trump is meeting with one of the top-ranking officials of the Paki military. So who are the Balaki nationalists? Will they end up being kind of a Chinese proxy in the area? Are they seeing the extremists? Who's rising next?

[00:22:31] And I'm happy to see Iran collapse, but what's happening now? Yeah, no, and this is the problem with any kind of toppling of a dictatorship, right? Whether we do it, Israel does it, or it collapses on its own, it doesn't matter. In the aftermath of these dictatorships, particularly in the Middle East, you end up with a lot of these blood feuds that have existed for decades or even hundreds of years prior.

[00:23:00] And they then get into the score settling. We saw it in Iraq, right, where you had the different militias that rose up and they were fighting each other in the neighborhoods and such. Nobody knows what happens in collapse of a dictatorship. It's just there are too many variables. And I make no predictions about that either.

[00:23:21] But that being said, it seems like Trump has a limited goal, which is what Israel's limited goal was, which was destroy the nuclear capability. And if you do that and Iran says, OK, fine, we won't pursue nukes anymore or whatever, and they can remain in power. I think that I think both Israel and and America allow them to stay in power.

[00:23:47] I don't like Trump has made no argument or no assertion that we're going to, you know, topple that regime and we're going to go in there, let alone in the nation build. When that's not even on the table, I don't think Trump is interested in doing that at all. I would be interested to hear any Indian listeners to your podcast or your show who might have insight into Balakistan, because I agree that we don't know where we're going. And I'm curious to know where we're going.

[00:24:17] I don't think we're going to engage in nation build. This is not Iraq 2.0. We're not going to repeat that mistake. No, there's not there's not support for it. And Donald Trump made, you know, a lot of comments about the Iraq war for years. He is not a fan of of that project. And so he got us out of out of Afghanistan for the same reason. So, like, I genuinely believe when he says that he does not like war, he wants peace. I believe him. And this is a this but it's peace through strength.

[00:24:45] And when you have an enemy that is weaponizing uranium developing on one track and on the second track, developing the ballistic missiles and cranking them out in production factories and is threatening to nuke Israel and hit America with an intercontinental ballistic missile. Well, you know what? But I'm sorry, but the world is governed by the aggressive use of force. And Donald Trump, as an America first guy, the founder of the movement, that's America first is to protect America from that kind of aggression.

[00:25:15] So if we can take out their nuclear capabilities, you've got a unique opportunity to do it by letting Israel do it. So that's what I think he's doing. I think it's very straightforward. Yeah. Thanks, Pete. Have a good day. You too. I appreciate the call, Travis. Yeah, there are a bunch of different factions inside of Iran, no doubt about it, different ethnic groups. The Persians are the biggest. They're like 61 percent of the population.

[00:25:41] There's – he mentioned Balochistan, B-A-L-O-C-H. They represent 2 percent of the Iranian ethnic composition. You've got the Azerbaijanis. They're about 16 percent. Kurds at 10 percent. And then everybody else is single digits. Gilaks, Mazandaranis, 2 percent Arab.

[00:26:10] Turkmen and Turkic people at 2 percent. So the vast majority, 61 percent, are Persians. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do too. And you've probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News.

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[00:27:24] So I guess I'm wondering, is Trump a neocon or maybe he's just being conned by the neocons? Is that the deal? Is that what's happening here? They got to him somehow. Now, he's no longer the leader of MAGA because the neocons have conned him or he's been a closet neocon this whole time. He lied about not getting us into any wars because this is what a lot of people, the influencer, the MAGA influencer crowd is saying.

[00:27:55] And I think it would be different if we had launched the attacks on Iran, right? But we didn't. Israel did. And we're backing their play because their goal, eliminating Iran's nuclear program, is Trump's goal and has been America's goal for 50 years.

[00:28:20] So why wouldn't we back the efforts to achieve our goal? Why wouldn't we support that? People are making a lot of this comment that Trump made about how they used our equipment to do it. Of course they used our equipment. They buy our stuff. That's what the military aid is for. Like, they buy our stuff.

[00:28:43] So it's actually, like, the money that supposedly, like, that goes to Israel, it goes to our defense contractors. I mean, because they buy the military stuff from us. They make changes to it and they upgrade it and they do various things to it. But that's, like, that's now supposedly evidence that we're involved in it. Okay. But, I mean, if we're selling military equipment to Israel, why wouldn't they use our stuff?

[00:29:12] Now, I think the real question that Trump has to decide on is, well, I guess he's got two, right? One is, if Iran, as has been reported, is now interested in coming back to the negotiating table, does he entertain that? Does he try to do that? But he sent out a tweet yesterday that said, unconditional surrender. And that is one way to go about doing this if you're Iran, is to say, we give up.

[00:29:39] We're not going to leave power, but we'll give up all of the nuclear ambitions. We'll stop doing it. Just make this all stop. That's one way they could preserve their regime. I don't know if Israel would allow that, but maybe Trump negotiates that kind of a deal. I don't know. The other is, do you make available or actually run the flight itself with American service members?

[00:30:04] I think you would have to, to drop these bunker-busting bombs on Fordow, which is the Iranian nuclear facility that's buried 90 meters deep into a mountain. And by the way, that's also a smoking gun. You don't do that if it's for civilian purposes. You do that after the Israelis have taken out all of your centrifuges and your factories and stuff over the years.

[00:30:34] And now you're like, we need to harden this target. We need to make it impossible for them to stop us from enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels. And so that's why you'd build a facility deep in a mountain and encase it in concrete. So, do you, if you're Trump, do you give the bunker-busters to the Israelis? Do you give the B-2 bombers with the bunker-busters? Do you let the Israelis borrow them?

[00:31:04] Do you fly the mission ourselves? Like what, I offer no advice on this. I'm curious what you think, because that would be like, that would be definitely involvement. That would be more involvement if we're actually flying, if America's flying the flights in, dropping bombs on Fordow. Now, I mean, it's definitely not on the same order as like, you know, flying drones and whacking American citizens in foreign countries like Obama did. It's totally different.

[00:31:33] This is just a facility. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So, if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalendershow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.