TRUMP’S ULTIMATUM: U.S. Demands Iran’s Total Nuclear Surrender

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Brian Kilmeade Show

Episode: TRUMP’S ULTIMATUM: U.S. Demands Iran’s Total Nuclear Surrender
Date: June 1, 2026
Host: Brian Kilmeade
Notable Guests: Lawrence Jones, Mark Thiessen, Jeff Foxworthy, Michael Goodwin, Eric Metaxas

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Overview

This episode centers on the breaking developments in U.S.–Iran relations as former President Trump issues an "ultimatum" demanding Iran's total nuclear surrender, with discussion on the implications of these demands, ongoing military tensions, the Iranian regime’s instability, and U.S. political responses. The episode also covers major domestic and cultural stories, including the NBA Finals, the scandal-ridden campaign of Maine Democrat Graham Platner, and a deep dive into Jeff Foxworthy’s comedic process and Eric Metaxas’ new book on the American Revolution.

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Key Segments and Timelines

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1. U.S.–Iran Crisis & Trump’s Ultimatum

[03:00–16:00, 39:50–64:37, 76:51–80:45]

Main Discussion Points

• Escalation of Hostilities: Iran shoots down a U.S. drone; U.S. retaliates by striking Iranian radar and disabling Iranian ships in the Strait of Hormuz and disrupting the so-called “Mosquito Navy.”
• Iran’s Missile Strikes: CENTCOM confirms interception of Iranian ballistic missiles targeting U.S. bases in Kuwait.
• Iranian Political Unrest: Rumors of Iran’s president resigning amidst power struggles; IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) vs. political leadership.
• Trump’s Demands: Trump’s ceasefire terms now include the surrender of all enriched uranium and immediate opening of trade routes—a complete nuclear rollback.
• Negotiation Skepticism: Discussion on whether Iran is using talks as a stalling tactic; comparison to Libya’s nuclear disarmament and subsequent regime change.
• Expert Opinions: Mark Thiessen and Brian Hook (via clip) discuss whether a “Libya-style” outcome—physical seizure of nuclear materials—is possible and wise.
• Final Regime Change Argument: Thiessen stresses that only regime change will ensure lasting disarmament, advocating U.S. support for internal Iranian opposition.

Quotes & Moments

• “Does this sound like a group of people that want a deal? They don’t want to deal. The political leadership wants a deal because they want to live. The IRGC… they don’t want to deal.” — Lawrence Jones ([03:37])
• “You can’t do it both ways. No one pushes Trump into anything. If he’s getting too much of a one-sided conversation, he goes out and finds other people with different opinions.” — Mark Thiessen ([63:31])
• “I wouldn’t take Iran’s word for the paper it’s printed on, nor should our negotiators.” — Brian Hook ([55:59])

Notable Analysis

• War vs. Negotiation: Michael Goodwin (NY Post) argues that negotiation is preferable, but the administration must be prepared to return to military action if Iran continues to delay. ([40:26])
• Economic Pressure: Iran’s rial is near-worthless, citizens forced to use cash; economic pain may eventually force the regime to the table. ([80:30])

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2. Domestic Politics: Graham Platner Scandal & Democratic Dilemmas

[06:24–16:00, 28:49–31:35, 87:02–91:58]

Main Discussion Points

• Graham Platner’s Scandals: Maine Democratic candidate for Senate faces surfacing reports of a Nazi tattoo, racist posts, communist affiliation, and new revelations of sexting eight women (with some verified by his wife and staffers).
• Democratic Responses: Party leaders deflect, claiming not to follow the story or downplaying the severity (“He’s made mistakes…”).
• Implications for the Senate Race: Despite scandals, Platner leads Susan Collins by eight points in polls.
• Media and Ethics: Debate over whether coverage of Platner is focused on policy or “gossip”; Lawrence Jones lambasts the hypocrisy of Democrats.

Quotes & Moments

• "A mistake is a Nazi tattoo? I don’t want to hear about Republicans and past oppo… If it’s okay to have a Nazi tattoo, I don’t want to hear anything about that.” — Lawrence Jones ([11:13])
• “He’s the worst candidate you could possibly have on a ticket. But this new Democratic Party—this is what they like.” — Lawrence Jones ([08:19])
• “Platner is running against Susan Collins, the other definition of a moderate Republican who constantly is bucking Trump, including calling for his impeachment.” — Brian Kilmeade ([89:53])

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3. Big City Politics: Antisemitism, Urban Governance, and Mayor Controversies

[41:50–49:34]

Main Discussion Points

• NYC Mayor Absents Israeli Day Parade: For the first time since 1964, sitting mayor Zoram Hamdani does not march; charged by guests and host as “blatantly antisemitic.”
• Double Standards: Michael Goodwin critiques the mayor's bias (“He is an antisemite in the sense...he does not recognize the right of a Jewish homeland. That’s a very big portion of what modern antisemitism looks like.”) ([42:16])
• Urban Decay: LA and San Francisco cited as examples where ‘common sense’ reformers and sensible Democrats are shifting urban politics away from extremes; Harvey Levin describes LA as “a mess.” ([47:51])
• Moderate vs. Socialist Democrats: Worry that centrists are silent or complicit, allowing radical candidates to dominate. ([49:34])

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4. NBA Finals and U.S. Sports

[12:18–16:32, 38:26–39:44, 82:01–86:18]

Main Discussion Points

• Knicks vs. Spurs NBA Finals: Historic run for both teams; analysis of players like Victor Wembanyama (“Wemby”) and Jalen Brunson’s rise.
• Sports as Metaphor: The segment lightens the mood and discusses how team building in San Antonio resembles the American spirit of dynamic adaptation and working together.
• Ticket Prices and Celebrity Culture: Noted how NYC culture prices average fans out—“$18,000 for two seats in the Middle East section.” ([16:18])
• US Soccer: Optimism around the national team in World Cup play.

Quotes & Moments

• “First time back since ‘99. Knicks have won 11 in a row as the number three seed against the number two seed, Spurs. Your thoughts?” — Brian Kilmeade ([13:08])
• “They don’t have the largest salary cap...The franchise always finds the talent.” — Brian Kilmeade ([14:03])

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5. Jeff Foxworthy: Comedy, Craft, and Fox Nation Special

[19:02–28:00, 34:18–37:08]

Main Discussion Points

• Behind the Scenes: Foxworthy shares how his latest special (“The Joke’s On Me”) is unique in following the creative process—not just the polished act.
• Curiosity in Comedy: Jeff’s secret is asking people about their lives (“What’s the hardest part of your job?”) to find real, relatable material.
• Comedy Craft: How to recover when a joke fails, and the importance of stage time for young comics.

Quotes & Moments

• “People voluntarily tell you things they shouldn’t tell their therapist. People come up to me...‘Let me tell you what my brother did this weekend.’” — Jeff Foxworthy ([23:12])
• “After 42 years, I still don’t know what people are going to laugh at. You’d think you’d know, but something I think is really funny bombs, and something I think is stupid kills.” — Jeff Foxworthy ([36:13])

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6. Eric Metaxas: "Revolution" and America’s Founding

[92:42–106:47]

Main Discussion Points

• Epic Narrative: Metaxas’ book covers the nuanced, gripping story of America’s birth, focusing on neglected figures and the foundational principles of faith and virtue.
• Correcting the Record: Pushback against progressive depictions that downplay American exceptionalism.
• Relevance of Founders’ Values: Emphasis on faith, virtue, and the struggle to get American self-governance right, starting from the Articles of Confederation to the eventual Constitution.

Quotes & Moments

• “If you go to someone in 1960 on Main Street, America, you put a microphone in their face, they knew all these names and these stories. And we’ve drifted and drifted.” — Eric Metaxas ([93:53])
• “The reason the book’s titled Revolution and not American Revolution is this is the only true revolution that ever succeeded...the French Revolution failed miserably.” — Eric Metaxas ([97:08])

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Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes (With Timestamps)

• “Does this sound like a group of people that want a deal?” — Lawrence Jones ([03:37])
• “A mistake is a Nazi tattoo?” — Lawrence Jones ([11:13])
• “No one pushes Trump into anything...” — Mark Thiessen ([63:31])
• “After 42 years, I still don’t know what people are going to laugh at.” — Jeff Foxworthy ([36:13])
• “If you go to someone in 1960 on Main Street America...they knew all these names and these stories.” — Eric Metaxas ([93:53])

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Conclusion

This packed episode weaves together breaking international news, hard-hitting analysis, American cultural narratives, and lively personalities. Through the lens of Iran’s nuclear crisis, internal Democratic strife, the joys and costs of sports, and reflections on comedic and historical craft, Kilmeade and his guests present a sharp, fast-paced exploration of issues "all Americans are talking about."

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Timestamps for Key Segments:

• Iran/US Tensions, Trump’s Demands: [03:00–16:00, 39:50–64:37, 76:51–80:45]
• Graham Platner & Political Scandals: [06:24–16:00, 28:49–31:35, 87:02–91:58]
• NY & LA Urban Politics/Antisemitism: [41:50–49:34]
• NBA Finals & U.S. Team Sports: [12:18–16:32, 38:26–39:44, 82:01–86:18]
• Jeff Foxworthy – Comedy and Special: [19:02–28:00, 34:18–37:08]
• Eric Metaxas on the American Revolution: [92:42–106:47]

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For further detail or to revisit a specific debate, see the section and time listed above.

Transcript

[Brian Kilmeade]

From the FOX News radio studios in midtown Manhattan, it's the fastest growing radio talk show, Brian Kilmeade.

[Michael Goodwin]

Hi everyone.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Welcome to the Brian Kilmeade Show. So glad you're here. This hour we're going to be joined by Lawrence Jones. Don't ask me how I know. And Jeff Foxworthy, comedian, actor and host of a brand new Fox Nation special. He was just on our couch on Fox and Friends. Can't wait to talk to him again. It's also an exciting day for us, Lawrence, because we now have another great station affiliate in Texas, Coleman, Texas. Yep. 102.3 FM over in Coleman. We're going to be on live from 8 to 3 there with the time change. The station slogan is the heart of Texas News Source over a news source over in Brownwood. K X, Y L. Isn't that pretty cool with you? Here you are, Mr. Texas.

[Lawrence Jones]

I try.

[Stephen A. Smith]

All right.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So before we get to Lawrence and also this is a special day. This is now 16. Was it 16 years. This is the anniversary of our show 16 years ago it started. So that's pretty cool. The start of Brian Kilmeicho. So let's get to the big three.

[Stephen A. Smith]

Number three, the New York Knicks, back in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999, are primed and ready and rested to go. But the reality is they got a

[Brian Kilmeade]

7 foot 5 alien by the name

[Stephen A. Smith]

of Victor Webeyama from France.

[Brian Kilmeade]

They're going to be the favorites to win the championship. That is some great analysis from Stephen A. Smith. Talking sports, by the way, big Knicks fan, soccer and basketball as the US national team looks stellar as does their star who scored and assisted as they win a friendly against Senegal. Plus, the Knicks spurs tip off on Wednesday and it promises to be anything but friendly. Number two, I find it really shameful that there's a group of media outlets

[Mark Thiessen]

and people who are willing to spread gossip. Graham and I have a great marriage.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Just didn't show it there consequential primaries around the country. The most intriguing in California is the Republicans have high hopes and the gubernatorial race and the Los Angeles mayor's race, we're going to break it down. Meanwhile, a Dem star and Graham Platner continues to embarrass his party in the country. In Maine, his latest controversy that should be disqualifying. Number one, he said during an interview that initially the Iranians were committing to

[Mark Thiessen]

not having a nuclear weapon or creating

[Brian Kilmeade]

a nuclear weapon within their country. And the president raised a very important question, what if the Iranians try to

[Mark Thiessen]

Buy a nuclear weapon on the international black market. And ultimately this language was included in the agreement.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Here we go. A tax exchange between the Iran, Iran and us. As Iran's president allegedly resigns and Trump ups his demands for a ceasefire to be extended. We follow the fluid situation. Welcome, Lawrence.

[Lawrence Jones]

What's happening? You know what's so crazy? We never talk about what we're going to discuss.

[Brian Kilmeade]

I know, Ever, you just throw like.

[Lawrence Jones]

Do you have that much confidence in me?

[Michael Goodwin]

Yes.

[Lawrence Jones]

I never thought of it that way, but it kind of feels that way.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Well, the thing. No, I do have confidence in you. Plus you've been up since 3 o' clock in the morning and we've been doing stuff so there's nowhere I could go. You will sometimes ask and I go, why does it matter?

[Michael Goodwin]

Right?

[Brian Kilmeade]

Right. Because you know, you can handle it all. I guess I'll start. I'll start with Iran. Who? There's an exchange of fire. They blew up one of our drones over international waters. We answered them back by blowing up their radar. They were able to strike our base over in Kuwait on Saturday. I did not know that. We've answered pretty strongly. We've also disabled another ship that tried to ignore our blockade and we're blowing up little ships, the so called Mosquito Navy over in the strait.

[Lawrence Jones]

So when you got that report, finally, CENTCOM has put out a statement on it, I think. I sent it over to you. And they said that they intercepted two Iranian ballistic missiles targeting American forces based in Kuwait. These missiles were immediately defeated and no American personnel were harmed. I'll just say this. Does this sound like a group of people that want to deal? They don't want to deal. They don't want to deal. The political leadership wants a deal because they want to live. The IRGC, who runs the military, they don't want to deal. They want to continue to.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And the Supreme Leader hiding like a coward.

[Lawrence Jones]

Well, the Supreme Leader, we don't even know he's alert. We haven't seen his face. Apparently he's depleted on life support or whatever he's on. So until the IRGC is on the same page, by the way, breaking news, they'll never be on the same page, the IRGC and the political leadership, because they don't care. So we're in the impasse, Brian.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So I want you to hear what Senator Chris Murphy rooting for the other side again, cut eight. Well, the top priority is ending the war in Iran. This has been an absolute disaster for the United States. Obviously the primary impact is here at home as Families and businesses are being

[Mark Thiessen]

ruined by gas prices.

[Brian Kilmeade]

They're $6 a gallon in some places. But it's just been a humiliation for

[Mark Thiessen]

the United States and it's made Iran more powerful.

[Brian Kilmeade]

The lost up to 80 liters. Do you know that they've lost their ballistic missile, the ability to construct and make new drones. Do you know that they've lost their entire navy in the Air Force? The Mosquito Navy exists. But why is this a disaster?

[Lawrence Jones]

Well, not just that, they've also gotten a lot of their missile facilities as well and production plants as well. When it comes to those missiles, those projectiles, Brian, I would say typically, you know, it's just. Chris Murphy. The problem is a lot of people that are supposed to be moderate share that same point of view. It's totally wrong. I mean, if we stopped right now, we have done immense damage. Now do I think we should stop right now? Absolutely not. We're on the five goal line. I continue to say that every week. And the reason is, is I'm not so worried about the next four to five years. I'm worried about when a new president gets in. Right. What are the Iranians gonna do? And they're not gonna show any mercy.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Now.

[Lawrence Jones]

They're trying to do this last ditch effort because, you know, they're radical Islamists and they wanna unite the Muslim world, Shia and Sunni, nice try. And they wanna the Gulf states now after they attacked them, unprovoked them to join their side. I'm sorry, it's never gonna happen now.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So I wanna switch because we only have you for one segment to Graham Platner. So over the weekend, you know, about a year ago, six months ago, we found out that this upstart that really forced the sitting governor into submission, she's 74 years old and without any, you know, without any charisma, she thought she was gonna go against Susan Collins. So Graham Platner comes out of nowhere, the oyster farmer and with a who's a veteran. And he comes out and he starts getting the momentum in the crowds. He's backed by Bernie Sanders. Then we find out that he's got a bit of a radical past and he's got a Nazi T to which he has since covered up. Then we find out that he has called for caught on video on Reddit looking at a fellow soldier being shot and said this guy should die instead of getting a purple heart. And then over the weekend we find out about his sexting at least eight other women. And this was exposed by his wife and a former stat to A former staffer who made it public.

[Lawrence Jones]

Well, and then the wife is saying that they have a perfect marriage. Now, I'm not trying to get into what they have.

[Brian Kilmeade]

We don't care.

[Lawrence Jones]

But come on, like, just stop it. Just stop it. She said it took her 20 takes to do the video. This guy's a disaster. And I made this point earlier on Fox and Friends. You know, if you want a reasonable voice. I don't agree with everything that Susan Collins, but I understand she's representing her district. She has to win. She has to represent all of Maine. And it's hard for a Republican to win in Maine. She manages to do it all the time. She voted against. She voted for impeachment to impeach Donald Trump. So it's like, what more do Democrats want her to do to prove that she's a reasonable voice? So they're saying that they still want this guy because they want to stop Donald Trump. The guy is a devout racist. He hates every group. Every group. If you look at these posts, he's gone against Jews, black people, military people.

[Brian Kilmeade]

He says, I'm a communist.

[Lawrence Jones]

A communist. I mean, what more. He's the worst candidate you could possibly, possibly have on a ticket. But this new Democratic Party, this is what they like.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So I want you to hear Graham Platner talk about this and his sexting cut in. It's no surprise to me that the establishment media outlets are just going to run gossip. Instead of wanting to talk about the things that actually matter in this race, which are the react. The material realities that the Mainers are working with, these people are going to

[Stephen A. Smith]

try to make this race about anything

[Brian Kilmeade]

but what it's not supposed to be about, which is policy. They never want to talk about policy. Amy and I have a very loving and very happy marriage. They would very much like to try to rip that apart. We're going to come after us in every awful way that they possibly can. This is your former staffer that your wife went up to to say, when they came up and asked my husband to run, did they know about this? Here's more. Cut 11. He gets pressed. But the stories are true, right? About the texts? No, no, this is.

[Lawrence Jones]

This is the amazing part.

[Brian Kilmeade]

The Wall Street Journal, New York Times ran stories without any evidence besides the gossip from a former staffer.

[Stephen A. Smith]

I'm sorry, that's.

[Brian Kilmeade]

That's frankly journalistic malpractice. We pushed back on it. They won it. They did it anyways. So the messages, they did not. I'm confirming that what Genevieve McDonald said in the New York Times is not true.

[Lawrence Jones]

Why can't he completely.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So you never met with her about uncomfortable, for lack of a better word, sexting messages. As the campaign was going, we talked about things in Amy and I's marriage that we've gone through over the years. We talked about that because that's our marriage, and we discussed it with the campaign. What Genevieve McDonald claims isn't true.

[Lawrence Jones]

So it's true. Yeah. So it's true. I mean, come on.

[Brian Kilmeade]

But he does say it's not true. So when those. When they emerge again, he's gonna look

[Lawrence Jones]

like a liar 100%. Well, he walks the line. What he's trying to do is think that people are stupid and try to characterize it. It's like the way that they wrote the story was untrue. But we've had some problems within our marriage. But by the way, it's a perfect marriage.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Right?

[Lawrence Jones]

It's just. Come on.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So listen to what the. What Democrats are saying now. Listen to Andy Kim, the senator from New Jersey. Cut 14.

[Mark Thiessen]

Do you have concerns about Graham Platner? Well, first I'll say is, you know, I've been very much focused on the crisis in my home state, so I haven't been able to focus as much.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Let's see if Chris. Let's see if Chris Murphy's got a different answer. Cut 15.

[Mark Thiessen]

Yeah, I mean, I have not followed

[Michael Goodwin]

this story as closely as others, but,

[Brian Kilmeade]

I mean, Grant Platner is somebody that served our country. He served his community. He's also made mistakes, and he has admitted that character also involves standing up

[Jeff Foxworthy]

to people who are bankrupting and corrupting

[Brian Kilmeade]

this country because he wrote a book about characters. And she said, what about this guy's character?

[Lawrence Jones]

It's incredible. A mistake is a Nazi tattoo. Is that. I don't want to hear about Republicans and past oppo that you have and their past comments and past social media ever again. If this is the standard now, is that past racial. If it's okay to have a Nazi tattoo, then I don't want to hear anything about that.

[Brian Kilmeade]

I know anything ever again.

[Lawrence Jones]

And then the point of. I'm just focused on my state. When you have to serve next to that person in the Senate and he's running, running under your party. Come on.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Final moments Saturday night. Lawrence Jones's San Antonio spurs cut 35 ahead to foul. Who goes in for the dunk. And the San Antonio spurs have done it. There will be a new champion in the NBA. A new era has dawned. It's Wemby's West. The spurs are going to the NBA final. And here's their coach, cut 36. What were you guys discussing? What was going on as you prepared for this opportunity here tonight? We didn't know, you know, you have

[Jeff Foxworthy]

to go do it.

[Stephen A. Smith]

But we've played this team 12 times

[Brian Kilmeade]

now, and we played them our last six games. And we know what we're made of

[Jeff Foxworthy]

and what we're built.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And we had to go out and execute it. And they did that. So of course, I've been covering the Knicks in 90s and got back into it. My son is so into it over the last eight years. And watch the frustration. You know, they were great in the 90s. You know, fall short every time. Houston and San Antonio and losing to the Bulls to stop them when they were great. Bulls were better. And then the Heat got great with Alonzo Morning and they beat him. Sometimes they lost to him. And then up comes Reggie Miller and the Pacers frustrated him again. But Lawrence, here we go, first time back since 99. Knicks have won 11 in a row as the number three seed against the number two seed, Spurs. Your thoughts?

[Lawrence Jones]

This is going to be a great series. This is great. I do like the way that the Knicks are playing, but I got to go with my Spurs. I've been a Spurs fan since I was a kid. Tim Duncan was my favorite player. And we've experienced a lot of championships, I mean, five over my lifetime. But we want more. And the one thing about the spurs that has always been our franchise philosophy is that the team is not built on one person. We have a lot of role players that step up in big moments, but it's Wemby.

[Brian Kilmeade]

You have to admit. This guy's seven, not four. He's seven, five.

[Lawrence Jones]

Think about it. It was Tim Duncan at the time as well, or David Robinson, both.

[Brian Kilmeade]

But you surround them with Ginobili and

[Lawrence Jones]

Parker and then they turn out to be stars.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Yeah.

[Lawrence Jones]

Arguably hall of Famers.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And by the way, this is what I love about their franchise. And I put the Tampa Bay Rays the same way. They don't have the largest salary cap. They don't have the most attractive market. No offense to San Antonio.

[Lawrence Jones]

It's true.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Usually want to go to that Los Angeles, Chicago and the bigger deal. There's more money's there, but it's. The franchise always finds the talent.

[Lawrence Jones]

That's right.

[Brian Kilmeade]

You can. Anyone can draft a star, but then you find the talent in France. You, you know, you find. Where did Ginobili come from, by the way? Was it Argentina? Argentina. So you find that Tony Parker was

[Lawrence Jones]

from France, you know, so. But it's not built on one player.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And you got.

[Lawrence Jones]

You can't be a selfish guy and you got to be coachable.

[Michael Goodwin]

And.

[Lawrence Jones]

And I'm excited about it.

[Brian Kilmeade]

I think my prediction is The Knicks in six. In six. And I do game one. This could be. The Knicks won 11 in a row. We've never seen anything like this as a number three seed. No one expected this. Certainly not a dominant team. Jordan's not on the roster. So they did this win 11 in a row. Two straight sweeps. If they take game one, I think that all bets are off because I think that there might be some doubt because I went to the spurs next game at the Garden and. And they lost, I think four. And Wemby was pretty dominant and I think there might be some doubt. Can we do it against the West? If they take game one, all that doubt's gone.

[Lawrence Jones]

You know why they. There's some doubt is because. I'm not saying the talents in the West.

[Brian Kilmeade]

No.

[Lawrence Jones]

Well, yeah, I mean, they haven't had a. I mean, we just took down the reigning champions and so there is some doubt about that. But, you know, there's some youth when it comes to the Knicks as well. And they're gelling. They're gelling. And so that is. I'm worried about that.

[Brian Kilmeade]

They get 10 deep, how tired we are, and they go 10 deep. Yeah, they go 10 deep. And that's one thing that Thibodeau, who brought them into prominence, he got fired because he would not use his bench.

[Lawrence Jones]

Yeah.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And the guys were exhausted by the time they made the playoffs. Same thing when they was in Minnesota. And he wouldn't. In Chicago, he would not use his bench. But this guy uses Mike Brown uses his bench.

[Lawrence Jones]

And Mike has, you know, championship experience, you know, both with the Cavs and with Golden State as an assistant. So, you know, he, he. He knows what these pressure moments are. He's been on the bench, he's played with some, you know, he's coached some superstars. So it's going to be great. I'm going to enjoy. The tickets are outrageous though. It's the most New York thing ever is to celebrities come but the fans can't come because they can't afford it. Unbelievable.

[Brian Kilmeade]

18,000 for two seats in the Middle east section. It's amazing. Lawrence than. Thanks so much. Fox and Friends co hosts and does everything. We will talk throughout this series. Back in a moment. He just doesn't read the headlines. He breaks them down.

[Mark Thiessen]

Real talk Real news. This is the Brian Kilmeade Show.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Close your eyes. Visualize your appliances and home systems. Protected, covered. Repairs and replacements taken care of. Washers, dryers, AC units. Now say it with me. American home shield warranty. American home Shield. Don't worry. Be warranty for 20% off our plans.

[Lawrence Jones]

Visit ahs.com listen see ahs.com contracts for coverage details including limit amounts, fees, limitations and exclusions.

[Brian Kilmeade]

A talk show.

[Lawrence Jones]

That's right.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Real this is the Brian Kilmeade Show. Hey, we are back. And again, I mentioned this briefly with Lawrence Jones here for the 16th anniversary of the Brian Kilmeade Show. We started on June 1, 2010, and with Eric and Pete. We've been there from day one. And Allison and doing a fantastic job. Can you believe it's been 16 years? Allison,

[Stephen A. Smith]

I cannot.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Time flies. I know. I mean, to think about. We move from the. What floor were we on? 18. We were on 18 and 16 years is only you having the show starting as kill meet and friends, not from

[Stephen A. Smith]

when you took over radio from Brian and the Judge.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Oh, no. Tony Snow. Okay, so we did Brian and the Judge for a while. How would we do that show? Like a year and a half or two years. Oh, that was two years. Okay. Yeah, probably about.

[Stephen A. Smith]

So it's been a while.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So 27 on TV, 16 on radio, more than, I mean like 18 on radio, let's say with the bride and the judge part and then you with one nation. Is we coming up on four years?

[Mark Thiessen]

Yeah.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So that's pretty cool. So, yeah. And thanks to everyone who came out in Reno, Nevada. That was pretty cool. We did history, liberty and laughs. We got a big date coming up in Pensacola, Florida, and we're starting to weave in some things from the brand new book Uniting the States, the six crucial moments, the forge of the American miracle. And that got a pretty good response. So hopefully everyone will like that because we bring history to life in a way that Ken Burns can't or chooses not to because he probably can't. Jeff Foxworthy is next because he's funny and he has a special on Fox. You listen to the Brian Kilman Show. So glad you're here.

[Mark Thiessen]

A radio show like no other.

[Brian Kilmeade]

It's Brian Kilmeade. So Jeff Foxworthy's here. Why? Because he wanted to meet me in person. I can't blame him. Comedian, actor, host of the new Fox Nation special, Jeff Foxworthy. The joke's on me. And Jeff, I'll tell you what, what I get. And so great to see you again. But what I get is your promos are fantastic because, I mean, your name is perfect for what.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

It kind of works, doesn't it? Yeah.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So when they approached you on doing a special, were you reluctant? Because they go after people? Established comedians like Eddie Murphy throw all types of money. He's like, no, I'm done. And it is so much work because you have to throw out the material after. How did you feel about it? Or you don't have to.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Well, it was funny because before this, I think I've done like 11 specials, if you include like the blue collar comedy movies and all. And so when they, they said, would you be interested in doing a special? I said, how long you want it to be? They said, an hour. I said, I'm not interested because, and this is what people don't realize, but for a comedian to, to do a new hour, it takes a year of hard work. And, and by, I mean, that's being in clubs on Tuesdays in front of 30 people and 30.

[Brian Kilmeade]

You don't announce that you're there.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

No, I just walk, walk in with note cards and hey, is this funny? Is this funny? And, and, and I'd gotten to the point I, I, I said, I'm not interested in doing an hour. I said, but. Because I just watched that thing on the Beatles that was like 10 hours and watching them in the studio writing songs, and it's like, is this the lyrics? Is, is this the chord? And, and I was kind of fascinated by that process. And so I said to Fox Nation, I said, bud, if you would let me do a special and you show the process, show me going in, follow me into a little club on a Tuesday night. Show me doing things that don' things that bomb. Show how these ideas evolve into what you see on stage. I said, if you would do that, I would be interested. And when I hung up the phone, my wife said, all I'm going to tell you in the special before that I'd done for Netflix, she said, when you walked off stage after that last special, you looked at me and you said, never again. And I laughed and I said, yeah, but they're not going to let me do it this way, so don't worry, I'm not doing another.

[Brian Kilmeade]

How long, how long ago was Netflix

[Jeff Foxworthy]

that came out? Like 20, 22 or three.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Okay.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

And I said, they're not going to do it. Nobody, nobody's going to take a chance. Because you had seen it with music, you had been behind the scenes with music. Nobody had ever done it with. Stand up and they came back and said, all right, we'll do it. And I'm like, oh, wow, really? And I, I have to thank Fox Nation. They were so open to doing great, to doing something new. And we're like, all right, what would this look like? Would you, would you cut it in half? And what we ended up doing was showing me doing, which ended up, it wasn't 30, 30. It was probably 45 minutes of new material because it kept growing and 15 or 20 of behind the scenes. But we started, just started with the show and then we cut back to me and the club working on that idea. And I thought it turned out great because once you see the process, you have an appreciation for it. And like, I like people and I like to learn what they do, but I want to know, like, if I'm meeting a barista, I'm like, what's, what's the hardest part of your job?

[Brian Kilmeade]

You, you're curious, I'm curious.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

What's the easiest part of your job? What do people not know about making coffee that they ought to know? And you know, what's the hardest part of doing a podcast?

[Brian Kilmeade]

But Jeff, let me ask them. What do you ask that for material? Would you ask as a human being?

[Jeff Foxworthy]

I ask it as a human being. I don't have to. People. There's something, Brian, about being a comedian. People voluntarily tell you things they shouldn't tell their therapist. I mean, people will come up to me in the grocery store and they're like, hey, Jeff, let me tell you what my brother did this weekend.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And it's a lot of times it's funny.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Oh, my God. Yeah. And you're like, I don't know if I would have told anybody that, but I'm going to be using that on stage tonight.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So here is a little from the special cut 43.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

If you have ever answered a FaceTime call while sitting on the toilet, you might be a redneck. If the for sale sign in your front yard was put there by your neighbors, you might be a redneck. If the two biggest reasons you love country, country music is Dolly Parton,

[Brian Kilmeade]

you

[Jeff Foxworthy]

might be a redneck. If you think Hogwarts is your sister

[Brian Kilmeade]

in law without makeup,

[Jeff Foxworthy]

you might be a redneck.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Right? So I mean, you've clearly. That is never getting old.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

You know, what's so funny about it is it's one liners. You, you know, and we live in an age nobody does one liners anymore. But, and I look back, I think it helped me to be a better comedy writer because you had to tell the whole joke in one sentence.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Yeah.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

So it taught me to be very efficient with. With words. It was. I'd been doing them for 20 years when rich Scheidener pointed out to me. He said, you do realize the way you do Richard, comic friend of mine. He said, you do the punchline first and the setup second. He said, the setup is you might be a redneck.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Yes, people are.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

And he said, but you do it in reverse. I said, you're right. I never thought about that.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So do you remember when. How many years it took you to be yourself on stage? Or did you feel natural right away?

[Jeff Foxworthy]

No, I didn't feel. It's not a natural thing. And I tell young comics that. I said, look, here's. Here's the thing. Nobody else has your experiences. Nobody else has the way you think that. So the sooner you can become yourself on stage, the better you're going to be. But it takes a while and. And I think, for me, you know, because early on, I didn't know, like, Stephen Wright. Remember Stephen Wright? He had.

[Brian Kilmeade]

He had.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

He had just come out on Carson and. But Stephen was that slow monotone, drawn out. And I was like, should I be like that? Should I be. I didn't know. And, you know, I think Jerry Seinfeld said when I. I think you just do it every night for 10 years and then you have a style. And I'm like. And ends up. He was right. Because later on I would listen and I would go, why do I, like, hit sitting certain words? Because I'm not aware that I'm doing that. But it became my style. But I think it's when I embraced, because I had people telling me to lose my accent. People. And it's like, no, this is the way I talk. This is where I'm from. These are my experiences. And when I kind of got freed up enough to talk about that stuff, I got better at it. And I did. I was just talking to somebody in the lobby about this. Like, when I started, I would come to New York all the time. But in New York, especially for a young comic, somebody starting out, you might only get on stage two times a week. So we used to get a group of guys and like four, four of us, and go, if anybody gets on tonight, you gotta promise to buy a big pizza so we can all have dinner. Because you got 20 bucks. You got 20 bucks? Yeah. And we all four weren't going to get on. So. And so kind of the idea was you could either stay in New York or LA and you might get on a couple of times a week, but Leno was always a road dog. And I thought kind of the Malcolm Gladwell theory. If you do something for 10,000 hours, you're going to get good at it. And I'm like, I can go play Des Moines, Iowa, and I can go on stage every night for 30 minutes. So at the end of the week, you know, I've got 200 new minutes on stage.

[Brian Kilmeade]

You've established yourself.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Yeah, but as opposed to getting 12 new minutes in New York.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So you, you, you were open to, to traveling.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

I had my first eight years of comedy. I did over 500 shows a year, eight years in a row.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Wow.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

And. But I got better at it because I was, I was. Yeah.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And would your wife understood?

[Jeff Foxworthy]

She did. She, she would cherry pick my schedule. She'd look at it and say, okay, you go to Toledo by yourself, I'll go with you to Honolulu. And I'm like, no, I really need you in Toledo. You know, she understood, especially when you're

[Brian Kilmeade]

not making money in the beginning. Were you married without making money in the beginning? Established comedian.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

When was the only she was there? The first night I ever went on stage, a bunch of guys I worked with at IBM entered me in a contest.

[Brian Kilmeade]

How old are you?

[Jeff Foxworthy]

24. Enter me in a contest. I've never been on stage just because I was the funny guy at work. And it wasn't like an amateur night. It was for working comedians. First night on stage, I won the contest.

[Brian Kilmeade]

No way.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

And I met my wife. She was in the audience. So she saw me the first time I did it and we started dating. And she was the only person in my life because I had come from blue collar town. I thought you had to get a job that you hated. And she was acting, she was an actress. And she said, you have all this creativity inside of you and if you don't find a way to let it out, you're going to have a miserable life. And it had never dawned on me, wait, I could do something creative for a living. And I quit my job at IBM. My mother's first question was, are you on the dope? Whatever the dope was. And I said, no. I said, I think I have a gift for this. I think I can do this. Five years later, I was on Johnny Carson got called five years. Five years, got called to the couch. Same mother, you know, you wasted all those years at IBM. And I'm like, but, well. And everybody said it was going to take 10 years to be good enough to do Carson, which probably should have. Which was why I was doing 500 shows a year, because I knew Johnny wasn't going to stick around for 10 more years. And that was all I wanted to do, was be on Johnny Carson.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Right?

[Jeff Foxworthy]

And so I told myself I'm going to do it in half that time. Took me five years and two months. And I remember going home that night. Because you didn't know with Johnny, you didn't know.

[Lawrence Jones]

They.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

They told you if at the end of your set, if he just claps, he doesn't like you. If he gives you.

[Brian Kilmeade]

They told you before.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Yeah. If he gives you the okay sign, he liked you. And if he calls you to the couch, he loved you. Well, so I've been doing 500 shows a year. I get to the end of my six minutes, I'm scared to look because it's like Caesar saying, do I live or do I die?

[Brian Kilmeade]

Did it feel good? Did you think you killed?

[Jeff Foxworthy]

I did, because I could. I could hear Johnny laughing as I'm going, okay, all right. So then you look and I look and he's calling me to the couch. And literally, it was life changing. And I have, like, if you go through my home, I don't have a bunch of stuff from my career, but I have a photo that somebody gave me like six years ago when I did the Tonight Show. They went back through the archives and it's me sitting in the chair talking to Johnny. And Johnny's got his head back and his mouth wide open, laughing. And I remember going home that night thinking, oh, crap, I don't have a plan. This was my goal. What do I do after this? But.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And what did you do? And how long did it take you?

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Well, it was life changing because literally the next week, Caesar's palace is calling, going, do you want a headline for no other reason than Johnny Carson called you to the couch?

[Brian Kilmeade]

That doesn't happen with Kim. Okay, there's not.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

No, those days are gone. There's not. Johnny was a king maker. I mean, if he liked you, you had. You had a career.

[Brian Kilmeade]

But I'm going to add something to that. So I was obsessed with late night television. My senior thesis was on the history of late night television. And. And I got Dave Wettick on who was the one who hired Johnny for the first time. And I got Jack Parr on the phone.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Wow.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And we didn't. I didn't have a recording device at the time, so I transcribed it. And then I got Letterman because I was interning at NBC in the history of late Night. And he was in awe. But like. And then you just. Steve Allen. I ended up meeting Steve Allen later. But just seeing those kinescopes and going to the Museum of Broadcast, fascinated by it. When you look back, just like when people look back at Michael Jordan.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Yeah.

[Brian Kilmeade]

You're never. I don't care what happens in the future of basketball, you're never going to look back at Michael Jordan and say, that's the way you look back at Carson.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Yes.

[Brian Kilmeade]

You're not hyping it and saying, wow, what happened? You could watch that now and say, why is he the best?

[Jeff Foxworthy]

He's the best that ever did the job. Because he, he could interview the guy from Iowa that had the weird potato chips or he could interview Billy Graham or he could enter. And they were all interesting.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Yep.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

And.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And yet he was the star. But he didn't have to be the star of the conversation.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Well, and he. And he knew that Carson, like, I remember walking from this, as I'm walking to the couch, I'm thinking, what are we going to talk about? And he literally lobbed him up and let me hit him out of the park because he knew the next day at the water cooler, people weren't going to say, did you see Jeff Foxworthy last night? They were going to say, did you watch Carson last night? Right.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Hold that thought. More with. Do we have time? Okay, more with Jeff Foxworthy. Got a few minutes at the top of the hour. Got a great special on Fox Nation available now, Right?

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Yes. Go today.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Back in a moment. Increasing your intelligence quotient. What the hell did you just say? It's Brian Kilmeade. The more you listen, the more you'll know it's Brian Kilmeade.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Then on the ride home, she was driving me home. On the ride home, she said to me, I was Googling about antivenom. And she said, do you know that the vial they used to give human beings that the veterinarians use the exact same vial to give to dogs that get bit by poisonous snakes. So I tell you that, because if I ever get bitten by another snake, I have a bad feeling I'm going to the vet.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So that is some of your special. But I think with Jeff Foxworthy saying is you see the making of the special, which. That's what attracted you back to it on Fox Nation.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

I got bitten by a copperhead. And this is the sick thing about being a comedian. As it happened, I'm thinking, I'm gonna get a great bit of this. Most people would be thinking, am I Gonna die. I'm thinking, all right, you gotta. You gotta remember everything because this will be a good story on stage. But, yeah, most of the things. And people always say, where do you come up with stuff? I was very lucky as a comic because I learned early on what worked for me. And that was, if I thought something or my wife said something or my family did something, I was going to trust other people were thinking and saying, writing down the same.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Write it down.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Always, always have note cards in my back pocket or notes on my phone. But that's when you get the response. People come backstage going, oh, my God, I've done that. Or, oh, my God, I've thought, that is. You're finding that commonality no matter where we live. I mean, the accents change and the scenery changes, but people are the same. And so that's your job to find. You know, everybody has these thoughts or experiences, but comics learn to grab them, right. And go, oh, there's something funny in.

[Brian Kilmeade]

How many times do you have a joke and it doesn't kill? So you work the joke rather than lose the joke.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

A lot, you know, it's one of those things most people don't do stand up as long as I've done it. It's so fascinating to me that after 42 years, I still don't know what people are going to laugh at, because if you laid carpet for 40 years, you would know. This is how I do the stairs. This how I do the corner. I can think something's really funny and go into a club with a note card in my hand and go, what about this? Nothing. And I'm like, really? That's not funny. And then I can have something that I think, well, this is stupid. Throw that out there. And people are beating the table. And I'm like, really?

[Brian Kilmeade]

The crazy thing about comedy is that when you start off, it's the horrible situation. So you're not skilled to handle it. 3. The audience is seven people. They're all comics waiting to get up.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Yeah.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And then when you get great at it, these people come to see you,

[Jeff Foxworthy]

just to see you. Yeah, it's kind of not fair.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Yeah. But no, it is great. Just check out his Fox Nation special. Fox, you are Fox worthy. All right, thanks so much.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Oh, man. Always good to see you.

[Brian Kilmeade]

From high atop Fox News headquarters in New York City.

[Mark Thiessen]

Always seeking solutions, never sewing division, it's Brian Kill me.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And six in midtown Manhattan. Around the country, around the world, this the Brian Kilmeicho coming to you. Michael Goodwin standing by. We'll talk about what's happening at this Israeli parade. Why would I bring up a parade? Because for the first time since 1964, the sitting mayor of New York City does not march in the Israeli Day parade, who just happens to have a reputation well earned being anti Semitic. But it doesn't seem to matter. Mark Thiessen at the bottom of the hour in studio. And keep in mind, this is a big day. Par us the 16th anniversary of the Brian Kilmeade Show. It started 20, excuse me, 16 years ago on June 1, 2010. And also it's a great day because Coleman, Texas, 102.3 FM is where it's located. The station is KXYL, the heart of Texas news source over in Brownwood. They are now taking our our show. Our network continues to grow. So thank you so much everybody in Coleman. Now let's get to the big three.

[Stephen A. Smith]

Number three, the New York Knicks, back in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999, are primed and ready and rested to go. But the reality is they got a

[Brian Kilmeade]

7 foot 5 alien by the name

[Stephen A. Smith]

of Victor Wembanyama from France.

[Brian Kilmeade]

They're going to be the favorites to win the championship. And by the way, when he says alien, he means in a good way. Talking sports, I'm talking soccer and basketball. The U.S. national team looks stellar in their first game with the new 26 man roster in a friendly against Senegal. They win. Plus the Spurs Knicks tip off on Wednesday and it promises to be anything but friendly. Number two, I find it really shameful that there's a group of media outlets

[Mark Thiessen]

and people who are willing to spread gossip. Graham and I have a great marriage.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Well, consequential primaries around the country. The most intriguing is California. As the Republicans have high hopes in the gubernatorial and the mayor's race, we break it down. Meanwhile, as you just heard, the wife of Graham Platner speaking out as he continues to embarrass the party and the state of Maine, his latest controversy should be disqualified. Number one, he said during an interview that initially the Iranians were committing to

[Mark Thiessen]

not having a nuclear weapon or creating

[Brian Kilmeade]

a nuclear weapon within their country. And the president raised a very important

[Mark Thiessen]

question, what if the Iranians try to buy a nuclear weapon on the international black market? And ultimately this language was included in

[Brian Kilmeade]

the agreement, a tax exchange between Iran and the US As Iran's president allegedly resigns and Trump ups the demands for a cease fire to be extended. We follow the fluid situation and one of the things he's demanding is tell me exactly when I'm going to get in there to take out the thousand pounds of uranium and the straits gotta open up immediately and there's gotta be timing put on it. And we know they're masters of delay a game. President says I'm not in a rush. Let's bring in Michael Goodwin now. The New York Post. Michael, do you think the President should finish the job or continue to pursue a delay of game with peace?

[Michael Goodwin]

Good morning, Brian. Look, I think to the extent that the negotiations can deliver the objectives of the war, then of course that's always the most desirable. But I think it's really an open question whether the Iranians are serious about these negotiations or whether they're just using them to delay the inevitable. That certainly to me anyway, looks like they're not serious about the talks. I mean, and the President has reached that conclusion different times and then said that they had made progress. So I think it's something of a mystery. It's kind of a black hole for those of us on the outside. But I don't see the kind of progress that would say, okay, we won, we got what we started the war for, which is the no nuke and which is two other things, the ballistic missiles and the proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah. So I don't see that we're there yet. So I think you really have to continue to give the negotiations every possible chance to succeed because that's always preferable to war. But if is no other way but war, then I think the president is going to return to that. I think he will.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Yeah. Well, I guess we're going to see what's going to happen, what people think. What do you say to people say, what's the big deal? The mayor missed the Israeli Day parade and he decided to make it clear that he'd rather bike by himself than show up and do it. Mayor Bloomberg did. Mayor Eric Adams did what his commissioner did as grand marshal. Why do you think it was important for him to go to that parade?

[Michael Goodwin]

Look, I think it is such a tradition, as I wrote in a column. Not for six decades has a mayor skipped this, essentially since it began. So for him to do this, given the other issues, his embrace of the inaccurate Palestinian version of the birth of Israel in 1948. I mean, he never talks about the United nations partitions that created two states, one for Jews and one for Arabs. It's the Arabs who created the war that cost so many lives and that changed the landscape, changed the boundaries. He doesn't recognize reality when it doesn't fit his agenda. I believe he is an anti Semite in the sense, at the very least, he does not recognize the right of a Jewish homeland. And I think that's a very big portion of what modern antisemitism looks like. It's not about race, it's not about religion, it's about a homeland. So they're okay for what, 22 Arab countries and other Muslim countries to have a homeland where outsiders do not have the same rights, but only Israel. And it's that. That double standard that to me marks him as an anti Semite.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So I want you to hear what Bruce Blakeman, who wants to be the next governor, said about him. Cut. Let's listen. Why does he single Israel out all the time?

[Stephen A. Smith]

Israel is a democracy.

[Brian Kilmeade]

They have civil rights, they have religious freedom. It's the home of not only the

[Stephen A. Smith]

Jewish religion, but Christianity.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And he denigrates Israel. Never says anything about places like Iran, Russia, China, places that really don't have the kind of human rights that Israel does. So that's what Bruce Blakeman, who is Jewish and wants to be a direct contrast to the. To the. Not only the governor, but to the mayor. He wants to tell people it doesn't have to be this way.

[Michael Goodwin]

That's right. And I think that he's right about Israel being a democracy where all religions are respected and given equal rights. So. So that's the kind of thing that Mandani does not come to grips with. That's why his anti Semitism is so kind of clear that it is what it is. It's not a sophisticated intellectual position in any new way. It is a very old position.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Here's the great Commissioner, Jessica Tisch, who decided to stay on for the good of the city, in my view. She didn't say that to me, but I got that indication. I did speak to her, but she said this because she chose to march and he didn't listen.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Do you have any concerns about the

[Brian Kilmeade]

mayor not being there for security reasons too? No, it's the mayor's decision not to march, and it is my decision to march proudly. Little bit of a shot across the bow, right?

[Lawrence Jones]

Proudly.

[Michael Goodwin]

Oh, absolutely. And I think it's incredibly courageous for Jessica Tisch, the police commissioner, to take that stance. Obviously, she reports to the mayor and look, their relationship has been sort of on thin ice all along. I don't suppose this is going to help it, but it is a test of Mamdani. I mean, can he rise above his own personal feelings on things like this and do what the mayor has to do? Be A mayor first. Not a politician and not a Muslim, but a mayor. And I think that's what's missing from so many of his programs. They're very much about his socialist agenda, his left wing ideas, whether they work or not. He doesn't seem to care. He seems determined to impose his will on this city. That's not going to work when it's an unpopular will.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So I want to talk about Los Angeles because I think it's a bigger story than Los Angeles. And in the mayor's race that's going on, you had Spencer Pratt, who's just running on common sense. He said, yeah, I vote Republican, but I'm not running as a Republican. I'm running just on pure donations. Most of the people giving me money to run are Democrats. That's what he says. And the money is $4.4 million he's raised compared to the sitting mayor. And I believe this is the beginning, if he is successful, of common sense, maybe running in Chicago, certainly Los Angeles. And my hope is even New York, especially with a moderate Democrat doing well in San Francisco. So I asked Harvey Levin, who is in downtown Los Angeles living off celebrity and knows almost all of them are leaving. He said this about the reality of the city. Cut 21, 10 years ago, 15 years

[Jeff Foxworthy]

ago, downtown had this renaissance and people were moving down there, restaurants were opening up, businesses opening up, and it was really a place to go, it was a destination. And now, you know, the sense people have outside of that area is you're crazy to go downtown. Why would you do that? So that is kind of a glimmer of what's going on in this city. Homelessness is terrible right now. We just have a real problem here. And then when you hear people say, oh, it's gotten better, you know, it's sort of like, who are you going

[Brian Kilmeade]

to believe, me or your lion eyes?

[Jeff Foxworthy]

But this city is a mess.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So when he pointed that stuff out in Harvey Levin, I have no idea who he votes for. He doesn't want anyone to know who he votes for. He's not political. He said that, you know, that's why people are open to this guy. What do you expect to happen? Tomorrow's the primary.

[Michael Goodwin]

Well, and Brian, look, I think, of course it will depend on who turns out. But look, the idea that urban America has become sort of a wasteland in so many ways. I mean, New York, we're seeing it. We're seeing it in Chicago, of course, and downtown L. A. So I think that this is what this could be a reckoning for urban Democrats. I mean if you cannot get govern these municipalities, then it's time for a change. And I think we have seen this example and of course New York proved you can govern it. Giuliani, Bloomberg, even Eric Adams did a better job than Mamdani is doing. So I think that this is one of those tests like if you can't do it, we'll get somebody who can, regardless of political party.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Yeah, I just hope it's sometimes going to be the case that hasn't done it yet, but has the right intention. And that's where you see the guy from Levi's who took over San Francisco and started saying no more needles, no more homeless, let's just clean it up. But he's still a Democrat, but he's a sensible Democrat. And it doesn't seem, they say in over all the races, 60% of the primary races, between a so called moderate typical liberal Democrat and a socialist Democrat like Mondami and aoc, the socialist is winning. That is scary for the country. Final thought, Mike.

[Michael Goodwin]

Yes, I think that's right, Brian. And I believe that the problem is that the remaining mainstream Democrats go along too often. I mean you don't hear a peep from Chuck Schumer about the outrages of AOC or Rashida Tlaib or Ilana Omar. Right. They leave it to Republicans to fight these battles. So if you're a Democrat, you have a choice of going with the fringe on the left or really becoming a Republican because the centrist Democrats have gone silent and in effect are complicit. They are afraid of the left wing of their own party.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Michael Goodwin, thanks so much. Be sure to read his columns all the time in the New York Post. Thanks, Michael.

[Michael Goodwin]

My pleasure. Thank you, Brian.

[Brian Kilmeade]

You got it. Back in a moment. 1 866-4087669 Keep in mind we do have a YouTube page now. Everyone's talking about it. Go to YouTube.com@the Brian Kilmeade Show.

[Mark Thiessen]

Politics, current events and news that affects you. Brian's got a lot more to say. Stay with Brian Kilme. If you're interested in it.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Brian's talking about it.

[Mark Thiessen]

You're with Brian Kilmeade.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Can you, can you reorder that?

[Mark Thiessen]

Brian, what did you want?

[Brian Kilmeade]

Could I have the Tropical Butterfly lemonade refresher large, please? So that was me ordering my butterfly refresher and that was what I called. I went to Starbucks and I was tired of ordering the toasted coconut and it was hot latte, so I had a butterfly Cause I've never seen it before, but I go, wow, that looks. And it said, refreshing. I'm looking to be refreshed. Was it refreshing?

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Yes.

[Mark Thiessen]

Did you feel refreshed?

[Brian Kilmeade]

Martiessen is here.

[Lawrence Jones]

So.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Alison thinks that's the funniest thing she ever heard. So did everyone in the car. Yeah, but I enjoyed it. And then you walked in to celebrate my anniversary of 16 years. Our anniversary of 16 years.

[Mark Thiessen]

Exactly.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So thank you.

[Mark Thiessen]

You're welcome.

[Brian Kilmeade]

How much that cost you? $787.80. You get expensive.

[Mark Thiessen]

Thank you. I appreciate it. I think we already have.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And by the way, I'm working. I'm working on this, so. As you know, I'm a New York Knicks fan.

[Mark Thiessen]

Oh, wow.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Right. And like, I covered him for.

[Mark Thiessen]

Your tickets are going to cost more than $7, so.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And Lawrence is a Spurs fan, and the company is sending me to all the Knick games, and it's going to cost the company at least $12,000 a ticket, and they're gonna send me.

[Mark Thiessen]

Yeah, I saw the blue seats at Madison Square garden are like $5,000.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Is that crazy?

[Mark Thiessen]

And the courtside seats are going for 280,000.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Right. So that's why I asked to be on courtside, and they said, no. No, they're not sending me. Were you crazy? There's no column for that. Tickets for the show. That's not gonna work. So it is insane. But I do think that the whole country's gonna be watching this. Or am I New York centric? Is that me being New York centric?

[Mark Thiessen]

Well, you can be a little New York centric. I mean, it's the first time the Knicks have been in the finals since 73.

[Lawrence Jones]

Right?

[Brian Kilmeade]

No, they've been in the finals in 99 since 1.

[Mark Thiessen]

Since.

[Brian Kilmeade]

But they haven't won since 73. And I think it's so funny that Governor Hochul thinks they're going to exploit Donald Trump and go, I bet she doesn't even know anybody. She meant to say the 73 team, but she said the 93 team. Yeah, but the thing is, Trump is legitimately a sports fan. Yeah, he legitimately is.

[Mark Thiessen]

Oh, he's been a Knicks fan for

[Brian Kilmeade]

ages, but he goes all the time. He knows these guys. So all of a sudden, the video stops popping up. There he is with MARV Albert in 93. There he is saying, you know, with Isaiah Thomas taking free throws.

[Mark Thiessen]

But here. But here's the problem, okay? So all the MAGA Knicks fans are not the ones who are spending $5,000 on blue seats tickets that's true. The New Yorkers who love Donald Trump are not the people who are. So that garden is not going to be filled with maga.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Maga New Yorkers. He's going to go, right?

[Mark Thiessen]

I think he may, yeah. But it's not going to be his crowd. It's going to be people who can afford 280,000 doll courtside seats.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And we watched Spike wear his Palestinian garb one day.

[Mark Thiessen]

My gosh.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And then he wears this after the President's brawling with the Pope. He wore a Pope shirt the other day. So I mean, that's really the sentiment.

[Mark Thiessen]

A lot of them I loathe the NBA. Why I just do is where they're just the left wing league and it's just, it's. I just don't, I just don't like. I don't like pro basketball. Baseball is the all American sport. I'm a hockey fan. I like hockey. Hockey players generally tend to be conservative.

[Brian Kilmeade]

How do you feel about soccer fans?

[Mark Thiessen]

So I am coming around. I always used to think that soccer was a socialist sport. And I can go. I did a big piece about that a while back. But, gosh, I'll give it a chance. Got the World cup coming here. I think a lot of people are gonna give it a chance for the first time with the World Cup.

[Brian Kilmeade]

The one thing I asked the guys, I went down to the unveiling of the 26 man roster and I said, have the US hockey team inspired you? They said, absolutely. In fact, Christian Pulisic said, I left it. Ye went and watched.

[Mark Thiessen]

Wow.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So he went and went ahead and go watch one of the games and then went to the locker room after, but the beer was gone because Cash Patel was there. And unfortunately he couldn't celebrate with the guys because the FBI director was.

[Mark Thiessen]

Oh, that's so funny. You know, wouldn't it be amazing if we won the Olympic gold in the hockey and the World Cup?

[Brian Kilmeade]

It would be. They said that this would.

[Mark Thiessen]

What are our chances? You're a soccer fan.

[Brian Kilmeade]

This is what they told me.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Yeah.

[Brian Kilmeade]

That the US Team winning the World cup would be bigger than the 1980 win over the Soviets.

[Mark Thiessen]

It would not.

[Brian Kilmeade]

But it would. But that in terms of proportion, sports feats, it would be. Yeah.

[Mark Thiessen]

Except there was also the Cold War. Oh, that's a, that's, that's what made the Miracle on Ice so special is that I'm actually writing a book about this. I'm writing a book about. It's called We Win, they Lose. Did you just. How the, how the Miracle, miracle and ice turn the tide of the Cold War. It's gonna be the first book.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Radio that makes you think this is the Brian Kilmeade Show.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

I wouldn't take Iran's word for the paper that it's printed on, nor should our negotiators. But you can have performance based milestones where if Iran does something, there is then some sort of deliverable after it's proven and durable and lasting. So if the president can negotiate something around the highly enriched uranium getting the strait open and then closing a path for Iran getting a nuclear weapon, these would all be things that we could verify.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So that is Brian Hook, very respected, by the way. They put a bounty, you know, he's good because they put a bounty on him to try to kill him. Like Mike Pompeo, like John Bolton, Mark Thiessen, our guest. Mark has read in as well as anyone. If you read his Washington Post columns, you know that if you watched him last night on the big weekend show, you know that your thoughts about what Brian Hook said about something conceivable to come out of these talks.

[Mark Thiessen]

Yeah. So first of all, let's start with the, the overarching thing, which is that what Donald Trump did with Operation Epic Fury is one of the most courageous things any American president has done in my lifetime. And all these people saying, oh, well, he went to war and just got the same thing as Obama did. No, he launched 13,500 strikes against the Iranian regime, took out 82% of their defense industrial base. So they can't produce missiles, they can't produce things anymore, sunk their entire navy, grounded their entire air force. I mean, the damage that was done if you just do a battle damage assessment is magnificent. And on top of that, Israel launched another 8,000 strikes on top of the 13,500 we launched. And we've taken out their top leadership, their second tier of leadership, their third tier of leadership. So this has been a massive, massive military success that has made America and the world safer. But how you end the war is as important as how you start one. And this is where he's in a little bit of a quandary because the Iranians think that they have leverage because they control the strait. And so because they control the strait, they, they are, they are taking a harder line in the negotiations. And Trump has some red lines that he wants to get, he wants to get all the nuclear material.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Right.

[Mark Thiessen]

If he can do what we in the Bush administration did in 2004 when we went to the US military, aircraft went into Libya gathered up all the nuclear material, gathered up all the centrifuges and took them to Oak Ridge, Tennessee and then destroyed all the ballistic missiles on the ground and had all of it. That would be an immense success. And I think that's what he wants. But I don't know that the Iranians are going to give him to him.

[Brian Kilmeade]

You know, the problem is when Ukraine give up their nukes, they end up getting invaded. And when Libya give up their nukes, they end up getting the overthrown in Gaddafi. So that might be the wrong message. Those two actions, especially under Barack Obama, urged by Hillary Clinton to overthrow. But. Which is fine, but you have to have. But if you're going to do that, you have to have a plan.

[Mark Thiessen]

Yeah, but if you don't give a

[Brian Kilmeade]

bad plan, I'll take any plan.

[Mark Thiessen]

But guess what? If you don't, if you don't give him up, then you're gonna get overthrown now.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Yeah, right.

[Mark Thiessen]

That's, you know, you take your chances going forward. And this is, and this becomes the. But this is the quandary he's in. Because let's say we get what we all agree is a good deal, right? We get, we get all the nuclear material. We get. Maybe Saudi's joining the Abraham Accord, something like that. This is like a good deal. The problem with it is, is that then we are gonna have to do things like lifting sanctions, providing them with frozen assets. And there's talk, which is insane, of a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran. The idea that we would give these lunatics $300 billion in international financing to build up their country. First of all, it's a terrible idea. Second of all, the problem with it is that will kill the deal in the long run because they will only abide by the deal as long as Donald Trump is president. As soon as we get Gavin Newsom or AOC or Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg or who? Whichever Democrat. Name the Democrat.

[Brian Kilmeade]

What about Vance?

[Mark Thiessen]

Well, it'll be different if there's a Republican president, but let's say at some point we're gonna have another weak president like we had with Biden and Obama, right? It's gonna happen at some point. They don't have to comply anymore. And so the only way that of all the achievements I laid out about what he did with Operation Epic Fury, the only way that permanent and they are not able to rebuild and reconstitute is if the regime changes. And so what we ought to be doing is arming the Iranian people to overthrow the regime and providing them support like we did the, like we provided the Contras during the, during the Cold War, like we provided UNITA in Angola, like we provided to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to drive the Soviets out. We know how to over. There's two ways to overthrow, to have regime change. Right. There's the Bush way, which is sending 300,000 troops to occupy the country. We know we're not gonna do that. Nobody is advocating doing that. And then there's the Reagan way, which is give money to solidarity, give support to the, to the democratic opposition. And one of the flaws with the Trump doctrine is that all of his gains. And this is the same thing in Venezuela.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Right.

[Mark Thiessen]

So if Delsey Rodriguez now does whatever Donald Trump tells her, is she going to do whatever Gavin Newsom tells her?

[Jeff Foxworthy]

No.

[Mark Thiessen]

As soon as Trump is gone, she's gonna go back to doing what they were doing before because they're bad, they're narco terrorist regime.

[Michael Goodwin]

Right.

[Mark Thiessen]

So Trump's, Trump's success depends on him remaining in office. And as soon as he's gone, all of those gains will disappear in Iran and Venezuela and wherever else unless there's a change in government. So you need a democratic government in Venezuela before he leaves office. You need a democratic government in Iran before he leaves office.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So let's think about this. The President had his two hour meeting on Friday or Saturday. He stayed in Washington D.C. this weekend. Shows how serious he's taking everything. Not that he wouldn't if he went back to Mar a Lago, but he doesn't even want the travel time. He just wants to focus on this. So who's in the meeting? Mark that's consulting with the President. Now we know that he makes his own. He consulted himself, but he wants to hear other views. Who's with him?

[Mark Thiessen]

Well, I mean he's got, he's got

[Brian Kilmeade]

the Vice President rushed back to be there.

[Mark Thiessen]

Yeah, I mean he's got Vance, he's got Jared, he's got Witkoff, he's got Hegseth, he's got Cain. I mean he's got a whole

[Michael Goodwin]

group

[Mark Thiessen]

of advisors who are talking to him. And Ratcliffe as well. Cooper doesn't seem to be in the room as much. I think Kaine is sort of the primary military adviser to him though. He obviously he's, you know, Cooper's in the direct chain of command. Chain of command goes from president to Pete to Cooper.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Right.

[Mark Thiessen]

The chairman is the military advisor. It's crazy for him to be Pete.

[Michael Goodwin]

I know.

[Mark Thiessen]

I don't understand it either. And, you know, he's the guy who has all the operational answers. You know, when somebody raises a question, well, what if they do this? Cooper can tell you exactly that. They're very concerned about things like, you know, the Iranian ability to hit Saudi Arabia, the Iranian ability to hit the oil infrastructure, which could raise gas prices. Okay, well, Cooper has a plan for that. If he was in the room, he could explain it. So, you know, it doesn't make sense to me. And then he also reaches out to Jack Keane and other people outside. I know he talks to you, he talks to a lot of people. He's got a wide when he wants. This is not a guy who's, you know, everybody who says, oh, well, Netanyahu pushed him into the war.

[Brian Kilmeade]

You can't do it both ways.

[Mark Thiessen]

No one pushes Trump into anything and anyone. If he's getting too much of a one sided conversation, he reaches out and finds other people with other opinions. So he could weigh those as well. I mean, he's very broadly advised.

[Brian Kilmeade]

I just wanted you to hear what Mike Pompeo said. Former Secretary of State cut for.

[Mark Thiessen]

We should achieve and continue down the

[Brian Kilmeade]

path to achieve the very victory that President Trump has laid the foundations for.

[Mark Thiessen]

We've put an enormous amount of pain on their economy.

[Brian Kilmeade]

We've taken down their ballistic missile capabilities. Hamas and Hezbollah are on their back foot as well.

[Mark Thiessen]

We need to continue this effort to

[Brian Kilmeade]

make sure that the, all the hard work and the loss of American lives that has happened is worthy of the outcome.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

And that means an Iranian regime that no longer threatens the region, no longer

[Brian Kilmeade]

threatens Israel and is protected. And that's what you're saying. We're worried about the regime, but they go deep in radicalness. We're trying to get to a layer that we can deal with. And the one thing that we have now is that's changing things. We have not discussed this yet. Is the Internet's back? Yeah, and it's more than 50%. So just watching some of the Arab channels so this morning, and we're now

[Mark Thiessen]

getting video out of what the, what the Iranians did when they massacred those 40,000 people.

[Brian Kilmeade]

We should see more of that. So ugly.

[Mark Thiessen]

We're going to. But here's the thing, Brian. There's no layer of the regime that's moderate. I mean, you know, all these people saying, oh well, you know, we killed the Ayatollah and the top layer and like that, and now we've got an even more radical government. It's like, I'm sorry, that would be like saying we killed Hitler and Goering and Goebbels and now we've got the really bad Nazis.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Right.

[Mark Thiessen]

It's like there's no moderate Nazis. Right. They're all dedicated to their ideology. And it's the same thing with Iran. There's no, there's no Delsey Rodriguez in, in Iran. There's nobody you can go to and deal with who's gonna be reasonable. It's purely an exercise of who's willing to go up the escalation ladder and who's willing to go higher. And Trump usually is the guy who's willing to go up highest of the escalation ladder and dare people to follow him. And the Iranians are sort of saying, yeah, all right, try it.

[Brian Kilmeade]

I want to just bring up how this links to Ukraine. They know how to defend the shahed drones because they are manufactured in Iran. They sold the licenses, I guess to the Russians or gave it to them. And the Russ are making their own now, so they were able to counter that. So that helps. And then you have Ukraine who are basically finding a way to cut the Russians down to size with their own drone technology. And they have gained more, I guess in the last nine weeks than the Russians have gained in the last nine months. And the Russians are over a mil, well over a million casualties. And they can, for the first time, are not able to replace their soldiers with more soldiers. There just aren't enough people anymore. And never before has Vladimir Putin felt more insecure about his own security. And now they did a poll in Ukraine and they asked people, knowing the fear of the result, how many would you like to see? That's good. That's happening on the ground there. And this poll is staggering. Now. Can you imagine what it would be if they weren't in a oppressive society? The Levana, the Levada center, the independent Levada center has shown that 62% of Russians favor peace talks with Ukraine and only 27% want to continue the war. And that's in the knowing that if you vote the wrong way, you go to jail.

[Mark Thiessen]

Yeah.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And that's still. So things are beginning to turn there. And what the Ukrainians try and do is let me help you with low tech fighting in the region.

[Mark Thiessen]

And they actually, and they actually are, we're using their technology to protect Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, their Skynet anti drone technology. And that Admiral Cooper has said that we've been consulting with them on tactics and strategies in dealing with the shahed drones. You know, it's funny that when all of our NATO allies in, well, not all of our NATO allies, Romania, Greece, other people have been good. Poland has been good. But you know, when the Spanish wouldn't help us, when the French wouldn't help us, when the British wouldn't help us, Ukraine is the one who stepped up and say, how can we help? And we know how to fight these drones. We've been killing Iranian drones for three years. We know how to defeat them. Let us help you. They're the best ally we have in Europe right now. They're the most battle hardened, experienced army on the continent. They are loyal to America because we saved them. They're the best ally we have other than maybe Poland. And they also have the best defense industrial base outside the United States in terms of building weapons. They have just had to build it in the midst of a war. So, you know, I'll give you an example of how they can help us and we can help them. Right now we get, there's a shortage of patriots, right? And they need patriots to defend, to defend Kyiv. We need patriots for our purposes around the world. They have a defense industrial base that could build patriots if we give them the license. Why don't we give them a license to build Patriot missiles? And in Exchange for every four they, we get 1/4 of whatever they produce, 25% of whatever they produce. So all of a sudden, instead of them being a suck on patriots, they'll be producing patriots for us. They can refill our stockpiles and refill theirs. And if you don't want to do it in Ukraine, you could do it in Poland. There's ways to do this. So there's lots of creative things that we can do to help Ukraine, to help the United States and secure the peace.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And I know the German, we're at odds with Germans right now, but the Germans can produce things when they want to. They still have that industrial base and they're beginning to build up their own military. Here's a good thing about the world, whoever the next president is, is inheriting. They got Japan, who understands the threat. South Korea understands the threat. So you don't long have to explain it to the Germans, French and British, that you better both bulk up your defensive now. Do they have the revenue in their economy to produce this stuff? I'm not convinced. However the Germans got the potential to do that, I'm not convinced the French would ever do that or the UK is capable, we'll find out. But they understand it now. It's no longer spitting into the wind. And I saw this quote, it might even be from your column from Eisenhower in 1953. You can't. To our European allies. You can't continue to count on us soon, though. What will you do if the well runs dry? 1953. Eisenhower was trying to say what Trump's saying now.

[Stephen A. Smith]

Yeah.

[Mark Thiessen]

So what Trump is telling the Europeans is you have to take primary responsibility for the defense of Europe. And that's the right answer. Right. They should be taking. They should have probably done it decades ago. But we are critical to helping them. We're the backstop. Right. And we can produce weapons that they can't produce. We have a better defense and industrial base. And by the way, providing weapons, especially if they're paying for them, they're buying them. When we provide weapons for Ukraine and they purchase them, that creates defense jobs in the United States. That strengthens our defense industrial base. Because when you get ordered, I'll give you a perfect example. The Lima tank factory in Ohio. The Obama administration was going to put it out of commission, and Rob Portman and the Ohio congressional delegation came up with a plan to save it with foreign military sales. And that's why we now can produce Abrams tanks here at home. That's how now we can produce Strykers. Most of the production is for our allies, not for the US Military. So the way you keep the industrial base going is by selling weapons to friendly countries around the world. So selling weapons to Ukraine doesn't deplete our arsenal. It strengthens our defense industrial base and builds our arsenal because we're building more of them when we have orders from other countries.

[Brian Kilmeade]

All right, Mark Thiesen, a few more minutes when we get back. Don't worry. Move. It's Brian Kilmeade. Breaking news, unique opinions. Hear it all on the Brian Kilmeade Show. How do you square thinking that he

[Jeff Foxworthy]

may have had a stroke with what

[Brian Kilmeade]

you were saying in the days and weeks after? How do you square the. Well, look, Craig, look at it from my point of view.

[Mark Thiessen]

So I'm watching just like everybody else

[Brian Kilmeade]

was scared to death.

[Mark Thiessen]

Like, what is going on?

[Brian Kilmeade]

He gets off the stage. I see he appears to be okay. He says to me, jill, I really,

[Mark Thiessen]

in other words, messed up, didn't I?

[Brian Kilmeade]

And I said, yes, you did. And so we get off, and I know we're going into another event or we have two more to do. And my mind is racing.

[Mark Thiessen]

What do I say to him?

[Brian Kilmeade]

What do I say to him? I'm his wife. I've got to lift him up. Up.

[Mark Thiessen]

So we go to the next event.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And I'm thinking, what do I say that will lift him up? That is true. I want to say the things that are true. And so I said, you know, you answered every question. My mind's racing. You know, that's a pretty low bar. Well.

[Mark Thiessen]

And so, you know, I had to

[Brian Kilmeade]

sort of lift him up. I mean, I'm his wife.

[Mark Thiessen]

I'm not going to get out on

[Brian Kilmeade]

the stage there and say, joe, you really screwed that up. So, Mark Thiessen, and I know you have a million things to say right now, but just what are the top two things to that reaction?

[Mark Thiessen]

So she says, I'm his wife, so you know that there is no way that he could serve four more years as President of the United States. You see him up close every day behind the scenes. The American people knew this. 70%, even a year before the debate, 77 in 10Americans said that he was not mentally fit to be president. So everybody knows it, but you're the closest person to him. Your responsibility is to sit him down and take away the presidential car keys. You're his wife. And instead, what she did is she pushed him to run again and got

[Brian Kilmeade]

angry at everyone that told him to

[Mark Thiessen]

drop out and got angry at everyone who told him to drop out, fed the lie to the American people that he was perfectly fine, and then pushed him out on that debate stage to make himself a national laughingstock. That is not what a loving spouse does. That's not what a family does. It's the family's responsibility to sit down and say, joe, we got a year earlier. And say, you can't run for reelection. We need to transition, please. We need to have primaries. We need to have a process.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Big picture with the Democrats, I couldn't care less about the Bidens. I never liked them anyway. But now the Democratic Party has to deal with her and these questions. And then Biden's book is coming out.

[Mark Thiessen]

His book's coming out, too. Yeah.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So again, it's gonna bring everyone right back.

[Mark Thiessen]

You know what? Good. Because the reality is this is the worst presidential scandal in my lifetime. And the idea. They've lied to us for four years about that. The President of the United States was not Copus Mentis. Couldn't do his job, and they should pay. The Democratic Party should pay a price for it. All these people are trying to run away from it.

[Brian Kilmeade]

All right, Mark, is you really getting this? We're going to a hard break thing? Because you stopped a little bit earlier than.

[Mark Thiessen]

Because I heard the music.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Yes, you heard it. It gets louder, louder.

[Mark Thiessen]

A few minutes more minutes to talk here.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So bad.

[Mark Thiessen]

From the FOX News radio studios in midtown Manhattan.

[Brian Kilmeade]

It's the fastest growing radio town talk show. Brian Kilmeade, Everyone. So glad you're there. It's the Brian Kilmeade Show. Hope you had a great weekend. We're back in action now this hour we've got to be joined by Eric McTaxis at the bottom of the hour, New York Times best selling author. He's got a new book, revolution the birth of the Greatest nation in the history of the world as we have America to 250. Also it's great for us because we have a brand new station coming to you from Coleman, Texas. K XYL 102.3, the heart of Texas news. So that is great. And meanwhile we're following a bunch of different stories. We're trying to see if a deal is kind of going to be in place in Iran. And we're also looking back at yesterday. There's a big parade yesterday in New York City and for the first time since 1964 when they started with the Israeli day parade, we had a sitting mayor decide not to show. And it is Zoram Hamdani, our first Muslim, our first inexperienced, really supremely inexperienced mayor and a first mayor that has come out blatantly seems to be blatantly anti Semitic. So let's get to the big three.

[Stephen A. Smith]

Number three, the New York Knicks, back in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999 are primed and ready and rested to go. But the reality is they got a

[Brian Kilmeade]

7 foot 5 alien by the name

[Stephen A. Smith]

of Victor Wembanyama from France.

[Brian Kilmeade]

They're going to be the favorites to win the championship, no question. Talking sports, soccer and basketball as the US national team looks stellar in their first 26 man roster friendly against Senegal. They win 3, 2 plus the Spurs Knicks tip off on Wednesday and it promises to be anything but friendly but quite expensive. Number two, I find it really shameful that there's a group of media outlets

[Mark Thiessen]

and people who are willing to spread gossip.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Graham and I have a great marriage. Well, it's not for me to decide, but consequential primaries around the country. The most intriguing is California as the Republicans have high hopes for the governor's race. With Steve Hilton's first or second and LA's mayor's race. We're going to break it down. Meanwhile, what you were just hearing was the wife of Graham Platner, a Democratic stole. He continues to embarrass the party in Maine, especially his latest controversy that many would say is disqualifying. Number one, he said during an interview that initially the Iranians were committing to

[Mark Thiessen]

not having a nuclear weapon or creating a nuclear weapon within their country.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And the president raised a very important

[Mark Thiessen]

question, what if the Iranians try to buy a nuclear weapon on the international black market? And ultimately this language was included in the agreement.

[Brian Kilmeade]

There you go. Attacks exchange between Iran and the US As Iran's president allegedly resigns and Trump ups demands for a ceasefire to be extended. We follow the fluid situation and that's we're looking at now. I'll tell you right now, the president's thinking about what's going to take place because he, on some level, he was dealing with the president in Iran. And that president is so frustrated because he felt he and the foreign minister have been dealt out of these negotiations not by us, but by his own government. Government that he's resigning. So if you don't think there's a problem coming to a deal with a group of people that have no idea who's in charge, that is indeed, you are just too politically biased to pay attention. Essentially, Axios is reporting that Trump is making semantics more specifically, get the material. We want to know how we're going to get the thousand pounds of uranium out. And we got to have the timing in this deal. The second source says Trump wants to amend some of the wording around the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. And they do have some funds that are supposed to be unfrozen. And the president truly wrestling with that, with the Iran wants is the blockade to be lifted. Well, if they do their things, that'll be lifted, security guarantees and war reparations. Never will they get war reparations. Maintaining sovereignty over the strait, please. You're not going to have sovereignty over the strait. You're not going to get reparations in terms of unfrozen funds. That would be what you probably would exchange the unfrozen funds. But we'll see. Here's Secretary of War Pete Hegseth in Singapore talking about being ready to go cut one.

[Stephen A. Smith]

Ultimately, like I said, any deal that the president is willing to make, he's only going to make it if he

[Brian Kilmeade]

believes it's a great deal for our

[Stephen A. Smith]

country and the security of the world. And only one president was willing to

[Brian Kilmeade]

lay it out on the line and

[Stephen A. Smith]

ensure after 47 years that Iran is not capable of having a nuclear weapon.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So he's. You saw it in what he's.

[Stephen A. Smith]

How he's been talking about it publicly that those, those goalposts haven't shifted at

[Brian Kilmeade]

all, which is the expectation of the American people and what we've stated to Iran. So in the middle of negotiations, the

[Stephen A. Smith]

closer they come to that reality, both now and into the future, the closer we're going to get to that kind of a deal.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Meanwhile, they're exchanging fire right now between the two. There's no doubt about it. They went after our troops and our forces in Kuwait. They were successful. On Saturday they did wound some of our gu. We went out and took out one of their ships. We've taken out countless numbers, as many as 40 of these so called Mosquito Navy that they have. So we're having success at that. And also the president took out, after they took out one of our drones in international waters, we blew up their radar stations in one of their local islands right near the Kharg Island. So if you think people are just standing by looking at each other, you're not paying attention. In terms of our economy, yes, yes, oil and gas prices are too high. But there's other things out there that show the economy somewhat healthy and not even near a recession. Kevin Hassett went over it. He was on the Sunday shows on this Week with George Stephanopoulos, who never has. George Stephanopoulos on and Kevin Hast was listening as a, as an economics advisor and couldn't believe how inaccurate and partial they're telling the story. Cut to.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

We track inventories every day.

[Mark Thiessen]

We started out with billions, billions of barrels of private and government inventories and we are in the billions.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

And so there's plenty of Runway.

[Mark Thiessen]

But also, you know, there's a lot

[Jeff Foxworthy]

of pressure on Iran to finally agree

[Mark Thiessen]

to the president's terms. You know, one way to think about it is that if you look at

[Brian Kilmeade]

the real, you know, half a dozen

[Mark Thiessen]

years ago, then one would, 4,000 of

[Brian Kilmeade]

them would buy a dollar.

[Mark Thiessen]

Right now it's something like 1.4 million of them buys.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So their currency is, is beyond. I mean if I had a real, it would almost be worthless. It would be like having less than a penny penny and then trying to go buy something for your family. So how much are they going to cash in? How much pain are they going to deal with? And they're desperate to get E commerce going again, businesses communicating again. I mean, for example, do you have a square, do you have any type of Internet connected device? If you have a small store, a big shop, how do you do deal with that? We're back. You're back to Using cash. And what kind of cash? I mean you have to have wheelbarrows worth of reals in order to to buy a loaf of bread. So if you don't think they're in a desperate situation, you are not paying attention or you're too politically biased to really understand. So we'll talk about that too. I also want to talk about what's happening with the world of sports and I have not talked about this yet. The US national team has the hopes of the soccer world and the sports world. Fox has got the rights. You have 105 games. You have the biggest number of teams qualify ever. But most people are going to be looking at how the US team is doing. Nobody expects him to win or get to the semifinals. Quarterfinal. Finals could be considered a great showing. I expect more. Here's a Little of the USA as they get their 26 man roster together and look really good. Now people want to know is Pulisic going to start scoring? He did cut 34. Pisic across goal and it's knocked in from Dest1n for the United States. Sereno Dest with a goal.

[Stephen A. Smith]

One push forward down the right side

[Brian Kilmeade]

for Pepe to chase. Pulisic is in the middle. Pepe rolls it in. It's Christian Pulisic round the keeper. It's Pisic with a goal. What a start for Christian Pulisic. A goal and an assist is Baligan with a chance. Balan scores. The US restore their two goal advantage. But the final whistle goes. It's a victory for the United States against one of Africa's best as Mauricio Pochettino's men winning it by three goals to two. Yeah, I mean and you don't really care about the final score but you want to see how much they'll, how well they're playing. And what happens is he basically played the entire roster except for their starting goalie which is kind of strange. So I think you're going to, even for you non soccer fans, you're going to get into it. The other big story in the NBA is how the Knicks have put together 11 straight games. Two straight sweeps. And now we'll visit San Antonio to play the Spurs. Spurs. This is how that game ended. Cut 39. What makes this 35? I head to Purcell who goes in for the dunk. And the San Antonio spurs have done it. There will be a new champion in the NBA. A new era has dawned. It's Wemby's West. The spurs are going to the NBA Finals. Wemby. Yeah, wemby comes up this, this, that's a 7 foot 4, 7 foot 5 center, 23 years old from France. I'm sure every French person is going to want to try to come over here that has a few dollars to rub together. Here he is after the game, cut 37.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

You, you work all, all these hours

[Lawrence Jones]

we put in, it's for these type of emotions, like I want that I

[Brian Kilmeade]

want to win so bad. It's like my life depends on it. And look, I love that type of intensity that matters so much with a guy that never has to work again the rest of his life. Jalen Brunson. This guy's a fascinating story. A second round draft pick, first guy off the bench in Dallas, wants to get out, comes to the Knicks where he becomes the man. And his was college coach at Villanova. Jay Wright came out and said, I never thought he'd be this good and here's why he was never. He's somebody that has to be the number one option. I never thought about that as the point guard that he had to be the number one option. But obviously he thought he could do that in New York. Here he is cut forward. Your teammates always talk about how you make them better. Just how have they helped you become this conference finals mvp?

[Lawrence Jones]

They give me the confidence, they let me be me. I think most importantly, we all believe

[Brian Kilmeade]

in each other from top to bottom. It's an honor to play with them. Honestly, what are you most proud of about this group?

[Lawrence Jones]

Resilience. I think that we've been able to stay focused, stay composed.

[Brian Kilmeade]

It starts with top of the organization, starts with Mr. Dolan, front office coaches, all the way down to us. I mean, like I said, from top

[Lawrence Jones]

to bottom, it means something.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So there you go. And as, as dad's an assistant coach, we'll see what's going to happen. And if you're eight days, you are rested, but are you cold? Are you? Because coming off a big rest going into Philadelphia game, they needed a 22 point comeback in the fourth quarter in order and it was stunning. Just as stunning as it sounded to win in overtime. Stephen A. Smith finally put the lid on this. Talked about what the series looks like, knowing that he's pulling for The Knicks. Cut 41. The New York Knicks, back in the

[Stephen A. Smith]

NBA Finals for the first time since 1999, are primed and ready and rested to go. I'm a bit, I've got a bit

[Brian Kilmeade]

of trepidation, a little concern because Mitchell

[Stephen A. Smith]

Robinson, their backup, big at 7ft 245 pounds, somehow some way managed to break his pinky during the, during the week

[Brian Kilmeade]

off or so that he said.

[Stephen A. Smith]

Don't get me started with that.

[Brian Kilmeade]

But in the end going against the San Antonio spurs, their inexperience is something

[Stephen A. Smith]

that the New York Knicks can try and lead on. But the reality is they got a

[Brian Kilmeade]

7 foot 5 alien by the name

[Stephen A. Smith]

of Victor Wembanyama from France.

[Brian Kilmeade]

They're going to be the favorites to win the championship.

[Stephen A. Smith]

But I'm not counting the New York

[Brian Kilmeade]

Knicks out by a long shot. Yeah, Wembanyama, not only is he big and yeah he's lanky, but man, what an athlete. I could basically walk on his hands. He also does some martial arts so you gotta find a way around him. And it really helps when you're seven foot one. Center doesn't it would have helped had he not broken his thumb and needed emergency, excuse me, his pinky and not needed emergency surgery. So we'll take a short time out and come back and talk more about what's going on in the political circles. I am pumped up for Tuesday's primary in Los Angeles. I'll tell you why. I'll also give you the latest in Maine. What an embarrassment this Graham Platner is why people say it doesn't matter. We'll discuss that average after his latest scandal emerges. You listen to Brian Kilmeade show.

[Mark Thiessen]

From breaking news to big name guests, Brian brings you insight you won't hear anywhere else. You're listening to the Brian Kill Me

[Stephen A. Smith]

show,

[Brian Kilmeade]

The fastest three hours in radio.

[Mark Thiessen]

You're with Brian Kilmeade.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

But let me ask you, do you

[Brian Kilmeade]

have concerns with the weight of all these controversies that it may jeopardize Democratic hopes to get that Senate seat in Maine?

[Jeff Foxworthy]

Yeah, I have concerns. That guy has questions to answer and

[Brian Kilmeade]

that's what campaigns are for.

[Jeff Foxworthy]

So much is riding on Democrats taking control of the Senate that this election, if we do not get the votes

[Brian Kilmeade]

necessary to take care of the House

[Jeff Foxworthy]

and the Senate, we will continue to

[Brian Kilmeade]

have an out of control president. Yeah, that is Cory Booker who's running for president pretending to be just in New Jersey but he failed miserably last time. Never left seven single digits. I don't think it's going to be any different this time. And now he's talking about Graham Platner because revelations that he's sexting and with eight women, eight different women. We saw some pictures emerge over the weekend. Weekend. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal write about it on Saturday. And now all of a sudden people are Complaining that they're going for a sideshow instead of the actual issues. So Graham Platner, who was found out on Reddit, was mocking a fellow soldier, saying that he should have died, not gotten the Purple Heart. We know about the Nazi tattoo. We know about his obscene comments about women. We know how him declaring himself a communist, but yet he's leading Susan Collins by eight points. But now this emerges about the sexting scandal. Cut 11. But the stories are true, right? About the texts?

[Lawrence Jones]

No, no, this is, this is the amazing part.

[Brian Kilmeade]

The Wall Street Journal, New York Times ran stories without any evidence besides the gossip from a former staffer. I'm sorry, that's. That's frankly journalistic malpractice. We pushed back on it. They won it. They did it anyways. So the message is they did not. I'm confirming that what Genevieve McDonald said in the New York Times is not true. So you never met with her about uncomfortable, for lack of a better word, sexting messages? As the campaign was going, we talked about things in Amy and I's marriage that we've gone through over the years. We talked about that because that's our marriage. Marriage. And we discussed it with the campaign. What Genevieve McDonald claims isn't true. Hmm. We'll see. We will see. So it doesn't even matter. I don't want to get into Bill's relationship. It's not a part of that. But when they say that this guy is the next generation, the blue collar Democratic ideal of a real man, not like Governor Walsh pretended to be a real man with jazz hands. Not the case. But listen, when Democrat. By the way, Chris Murphy's releasing a book.

[Stephen A. Smith]

Book.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And he's releasing a book about values and ethics, how he wants to bring them back to politics. Then he's asked about Graham Platner. Cut 15.

[Mark Thiessen]

Yeah, I mean, I have not followed

[Brian Kilmeade]

this story as closely as others have, but, I mean, Grant Platner is somebody that served our country. He served his community.

[Mark Thiessen]

He's also made mistakes.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And he has admitted that character also involves standing up to people who are bankrupting and corrupting. So he goes ahead and we'll go on. I don't want to bore you with the interview. Go Couch. This Grand Platinum is running against Trump. What are you talking about, running against Trump? You run against Susan Collins, the other definition of a moderate Republican who constantly is bucking Trump, including calling for his impeachment. So anybody who says he's a. She's a MAGA person. Yeah, I mean, just stop him right there and say, you're just playing politics. Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey asked about Platner, cut fortune.

[Mark Thiessen]

Do you have concerns about Graham Platner? Well, first I'll say is, you know, I've been very much focused on the crisis in my home state. So I haven't been able to focus as much on this from my standpoint. You know, I will work with whoever the people of Maine elect.

[Stephen A. Smith]

Right.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And he's senator and he was put there because Senator Menendez had his gold bars and put in jail. So he was appointed there by the governor and Cory Booker, you heard him in the open, top of the hour. Any sense essentially kind of skulked out of this. But you know, that guy's got some questions to answer. I just think that Susan Collins trailing by eight is very typical. Susan Collins is always trailing against good candidates. He is not a good candidate. He's totally lied about his background. He's from a private school, cost a lot of money. An elite school costs a ton of money. And he says that, you know, he's some oyster farmer, but he came from prominence. His dad was a successful lawyer. Is a successful lawyer. And his grandfather was a worldwide known renowned architect. He eventually went to a normal public school, but that was after spending the gist of his career in a private school, which is fine. Just don't say you're different. Donald Trump never said I'm, I'm not a millionaire, I'm not a billionaire. He never said that. In fact, he would overinflate, if anything, how much he was worth. And then. But yet he got most of the blue collar vote. Just be who you are, whatever that is, be who you are. This is turning out not to be who he is. And if he is who he is, maybe he's that person on Reddit. We'll see. So coming up in Los Angeles, I cannot wait. I think you have a shot at Spencer Pratt actually pulling off an upset in a trend in this country where average people who just want to use common sense run for office because they want to fix things. They don't want to be rich, they don't want to be famous. They just want to serve the their country. Could Spencer Pratt be just the beginning, even in an area, even in an area where it is solidly blue. He's a Republican. The talk show that's getting you talking,

[Mark Thiessen]

you're with Brian kilmeade.

[Brian Kilmeade]

All right. Eric Metaxas is the number one New York Times bestselling author. He's got a brand new book. Certainly be bestselling Too. It's called Revolution. The birth of the greatest nation in the history of the world. Now, Eric, a lot of times I like to bump in with some people from the era of maybe Madison or Jefferson, but we don't have any sound or video. I apologize for that. But you bring it to you. You bring it to life in this book. Look at how many pages is that? A thousand pages?

[Stephen A. Smith]

It is. It is only 600 pages. Only six. It could have been a thousand. I mean, no joke in the writing of this. I wanted it to be definitive. And there's so many great stories. I don't want to leave anything out. So even to get it down to 600 pages was tough, but it is. It's like an epic narrative. This is the story of the birth of the greatest nation in the history of the world. This is not some piece of the story. It's the whole story. And you know this better than almost anybody. There are all these heroes, these insane stories. Every American should know these stories. It is criminal that we don't all know these stories. And I keep saying, if you go to somebody in 1960 on Main Street, America, you put a microphone in the face. They knew all these names and these stories, and we've drifted and drifted and drifted.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Why do you think that is, by the way?

[Stephen A. Smith]

Why do I think it is? Because we've been dealing with progressive lunatics who either hate America or only focus on what's wrong with America. And so they don't feel. I mean, you saw it in the. This pretty lame Ken Burns PBS documentary where he does 12 hours on the American Revolution, manages to make it not sound exciting or heroic. That's like, I'm gonna show you. We're gonna go see the movie Rocky, and you're gonna kind of struggle. I don't know who the good guy is. How do you do that with the American Revolution? Progressives don't feel comfortable cheering for America. They feel compromised. They're kind of tortured, and so they can't celebrate it. And so this has been going since the 60s. You've been hearing every bad thing and not the good stuff.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And before we get to the bulk story, which is the story, but it's in great detail. I was watching the Al Sharpton over the weekend, and he said, well, sorry, right? But they just. They showed a cut because of how. How farcical it was. And one thing he said is, well, how can you possibly celebrate America when women couldn't vote until 1912 and African Americans were not equal? Like, well, welcome to the Rest of the world.

[Stephen A. Smith]

It's 26. He probably doesn't realize there's slavery in Africa today. Al Sharpton, do you care about that? That the Muslim Islamists are enslaving Christians today? While you're talking on the ra, tell

[Brian Kilmeade]

Abigail Adams not to celebrate the winning of the revolution with the son who becomes president and the husband who was our second listen.

[Stephen A. Smith]

My goal in writing this book was simply to tell the story. I said, every American, we have a debt. We have a debt to the men that suffered and some died so that we could have freedom. We have a debt to them to know their story, to know their names, to know what liberty is, what they were fighting for with the prince. But we need to know that. And I said, I want to tell that whole story. In the course of doing the research, people kept saying me, okay, Eric, you're writing a book on the revolution. What's your angle? And I said over and over, I have no angle. I just want to tell the story. It's a beautiful story. It tells itself. But in the course of doing the research, you see an angle. Like, you see stuff that I'm not hearing. It's not being taught in the public schools. We didn't learn it growing up that the British were barbaric. I never heard that story. They were like the Japanese or the Nazis in World War II. They were barbaric. And the Americans, Washington, the head of the pack, were committed not to stooping to those barbarisms, to fighting in a noble way, fighting for a sacred cause. This is if I've ever seen a story of the good guys versus the bad guys or good versus evil. I did not expect that when I did my research that it would be so clear that the folks on our side were committed to this noble, sacred cause, willing to die for a sacred cause. And it just inspired me. And, you know, I. I learned so much. But now I feel, like, this compulsion to tell everybody in America, you need to know this stuff.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So what people should understand, too. It was the perfect storm because we had the founding fathers who had this fantastic Scottish education, who studied different civilizations, the Romes, Rome, Ancient Rome and Greece. And with John Locke coming up and emerging at the same time. So when they won the form of government, they weren't winging it. No, it was almost. Even though they were in their 30s, they were ready to. Ready to form it.

[Stephen A. Smith]

Well, see, this is the whole thing. It's like, think about the French. The reason my book's titled Revolution and not the American Revolution is this is the only true revolution that ever succeeded, the French Revolution, is a joke compared to the American Revolution. It failed miserably. They get rid of a king, what do they get? A dictator, emperor and a bloodbath. And why is that? And that the main reason, and this is a big thing that I did not know the way I now know it, is that the men of the American Revolution were men dedicated to virtue and to faith. And they knew that if we get rid of one king, we're going to have to look to God like the Israelites in the wilderness. Jefferson, Franklin, they all understood that. The narrative is, we're escaping Egypt under Pharaoh and we're gonna be in the Sinai wilderness looking directly to God. And only because of that can we govern ourselves because we have a faith.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Do you think that that's part of the reason why they were so reluctant to have a president early in the Constitution? They're like, hey, 13 states, you'll govern their own thing. I don't want, I don't want you being told by any central authority.

[Stephen A. Smith]

Yeah, no, that's what's so funny is you see them kind of trying to figure it out. And some of them are hyper dedicated to quote, unquote republican principles. You see, I mean, the greatest heroes, Samuel Adams and John Adams, were the most worried about, you know, Washington wants an army, a standing army, that seems like, you know, a departure from our, from our values. And so they're, they're trying to work this out. And obviously they don't really work it out till 1787, but it's so fascinating how dedicated they were to these ideas and how they understood it. But what's amazing to me, and again, I didn't know this going into it, is that because they all took for granted that we're all gonna look to God. Like we're not gonna reject God the way they did in France. We're gonna kill all the priests and nuns. Or in the Bolshevik Revolution, they kill all the priests and torture the Christians, where God is at the center of what we're doing. But they kind of of knew that that's what's going to replace King George III. And there's a point. August 1st of 1776, the day before they officially signed the Declaration of Independence, Samuel Adams, who's. What a hero. He gives a speech to everybody in Congress. He's a member of Congress. He gives a speech and he says, we have this day restored the sovereign. In other words, capital S sovereign. We have put God at the center. We kicked out the tyrant and now we are totally free, but we're gonna look to God. Now, again, this is voluntary. This is not a government forcing people to go to church or become Christians, whatever.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Because a lot of them didn't. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington were not typical churchgoing Christians, wouldn't you say?

[Stephen A. Smith]

Well, Washington was. No, Washington was a man of faith. And that's part of what I was amazed by doing my research. I thought he's painted as some kind of a deist. I don't see that at all. I mean, everywhere I look, he is being dramatically serious about his Christian faith. And that's kind of been, you know, I would say, avoided by people who have kind of the secular narrative. They got this French Enlightenment narrative and they keep pushing that. But it's like, I don't see it like Washington was, I mean, the term that a number of them used. They had this idea that it's like a Puritan idea, Reformation idea, that a covenantal theology that like Israel in the Old Testament. They said if when Israel honors God, God gives them, will honor them and they will flourish. And when they turn from God, everything goes wrong. All of these revolutionaries seem to get that narrative. And nobody got it more than John Adams and George Washington. And I thought, I never heard that. I never saw that. So I'm reading Washington's letters and I'm thinking he understood this. He is like speaking sternly to his officers, telling them, you know, you need to go to services on Sunday morning and we don't want swearing or gambling or like he's. He seems to get this in a way that I have no, never heard before, that if we behave in the right way, God will honor us. And that's not a deist talking. That's somebody who has a very old fashioned kind of view.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So we win. The Revolutionary War stuns the world. They're slow to get out. They finally leave and get out of New York. The British do, and they do everything possible to make sure we are not successful. But when we start, there's no constitution, there's no president. We are living off the Articles of Confederation and the thirteen colonies are all kind of rivals saying, wait a second, second, you know, you have war debt to pay. I'm not paying your war debt. You pay my. I'm not going to pay yours, you're

[Stephen A. Smith]

not going to pay mine.

[Brian Kilmeade]

But it took, it took an adjustment in real time to say, okay, what we want, we're about to blow it, guys. We got to get together and come up with a new set of rules.

[Stephen A. Smith]

Yeah.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And I think that is understated. Hey, we don't know it all. Oh, we got figuring this out on the fly and everybody in the world wants us to fail. Or the leaders, the rest of the world wants us to fail.

[Stephen A. Smith]

Well, I mean that's why I very conveniently end my book in 1783. Like I don't take it to the next thing because there's this moment, John Adams, I mean he kind of ends up in some ways being the hero of the narrative, even though I didn't set out that way. But I just see him in the beginning in Boston. He talks, the book opens with him. He says that in 1761 he was in a courtroom in Boston watching James Otis Jr argue against British writs of assistance. No, we never heard about this stuff. And he, he says later on, the older Adam says this was the opening scene of the revolution. Yeah, it was the open. He says it was the opening scene of the revolution. Basically it was where you begin to see the clash. In other words, the British, they have a new king, King George III, he ascends the throne. 1761. So they have to do this formality. Writs of assistance simply means that the people that are kind of patrolling, smuggling, keeping their eyes on our taxes being paid, are they smuggling stuff? We want to crack down that. And they have to do this formality where they reissue these quote unquote writs of assistance. And James Otis Jr. Who's a huge figure, we should all know his name, the 25 year old Adams sees him arguing in a Boston courtroom in 1761 against the rich assistance and saying, listen, this infringes on our rights as British subjects, British citizens, we are free. Our rights come from God. The government can't just bust into my house cuz they got a piece of paper, a man's house is his cash. All these ideas that basically says we believe we're free as British subjects, we are free men first come into focus at that moment. And John Adams is tracking this through the 1760s and you know, obviously gets very involved and it just escalates and escalates obviously with the stamp tax. But it starts in early in the 1760s. So a big part of my book is before 1775, how did we get to Lexington and Concord?

[Brian Kilmeade]

And you got the French Indian War,

[Stephen A. Smith]

which obviously that's the big one.

[Brian Kilmeade]

So would you say that this plays into why in 1770 it's John Adams, this young lawyer who wants to represent the British or chooses to represent the eight British soldiers.

[Stephen A. Smith]

Yeah.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Who were jailed in relation to the Boston Massacre.

[Stephen A. Smith]

Well, I'll tell you, that is. I'm glad you brought that up because that is a. It's like a sacred moment in our history. Because here you have John Adams totally siding with the patriots. But he says, and this is what you see happening with Washington and during the war, they say, listen, we wanna win, but we wanna win God's way. We're not gonna win by lying. We're not gonna win by railroading soldiers who are basically innocent. We're gonna stick to the rules. So John Adams says these men cuz he knew the story. He knew that the Boston mob had incited the Boston Massacre. The Boston Massacre.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Five died.

[Stephen A. Smith]

Okay, five died. But when you. It's one of my favorite chapters in the book because I thought to myself, I never really understood this story. There' the mob, like the guys on our side in that moment, they weren't behaving well. They were like, it was like a bunch of rowdy, you know, people in the street and they were inciting the soldiers. And I mean you can just imagine if somebody's in your face hitting with worse than snowballs and whatever and like we're in your face, in your face, in your face, poking you in the face. Eventually somebody snaps and we don't even know who fired the first shot. But the point is, it was definitely not a massacre. That's just not true. And here you have John Adams, even though he's siding with the American colonists strongly, he says, you know what, I side with him, but I side with law and order. I side with truth. We're gonna do this right if we're gonna win, if we expect anybody to take us seriously, much less Great Britain, we have to be honorable. These old fashioned ideas, we have to be honorable. And John Adams felt, and I say this in the book, he felt like if we honor God in our behavior, if we just do the right thing, that's the only way to move forward. And that's the classic case that here you have John Adams defending the British soldiers from effectively mob justice. The mob wanted those British soldiers hanging from the gallows on Boston Common. That was the only way to the

[Brian Kilmeade]

credit when it time to come to court. The eyewitnesses didn't make up a story. The eyewitnesses were honest saying, I don't know, I didn't see it. This is what I saw. I heard fire. I don't know who did it. More with Eric Metaxas in just a moment. He's got a brand new book out Called Revolution. The birth of the greatest nation in the history of the world. Don't move.

[Mark Thiessen]

Where big stories meet bigger conversations. Stay informed and energized with the Brian Kilmeade Show.

[Brian Kilmeade]

He's so busy, he'll make your head spin. It's Brian Kilmeade. So Eric Metaxas is in studio. New York, New York Times number one bestseller. And this one's probably gonna head right there. It's called Revolution. It's out tomorrow. The birth of the greatest nation in the history of the world. And Eric, you made it clear I'm not looking forward not telling you what happened after. I'm gonna bring you to. From 1775, I guess to say no before.

[Stephen A. Smith]

From 17. You know, it's basically 1763 until 1783. It's like the run up to how do we get to the war? So Lexington and Concord and then the war. And it's funny because I thought the stuff before the war, I'll just put in a little bit before Lexington and Concord. And the more I did the research, I thought, wow, this is the most fascinating part that I didn't know. I mean, the Stamp Act, I kind of thought, oh, you know, it's a paragraph in a social studies textbook. It's boring. It's not boring. It's insane. I mean, that the riots and the tumult.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Because it's more than stamps, it's paper.

[Mark Thiessen]

Oh.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And everyone's using paper.

[Stephen A. Smith]

It's. I mean. And even more than that, it's about the principle. These Americans. And this is the funny thing, you know, if you're a cynical person, a lot of people are cynical, but these men really believed in these principles. So, you know, we say, it wasn't about the money. It wasn't about the money. It was about. This is wrong. You are trying to tax us. You have no right to. It's like if somebody comes with a gun and says, pay me. And you say, who are you and why should I pay you? And they say, shut up. I have the gun. Pay me. You know, you're gonna say, look, if I have to, I will, but if I can get out of it, you're not convincing me that I owe you this money. So here you have these American colonists saying, great Britain suddenly decides that we gotta shut up and pay this tax. And they felt like if we go along with this, we're enslaved. We're not gonna go along with this. We want clarity on this, and if you can't clarify it, we're not paying you.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And if you see, the way the war. When you get to the actual war, it couldn't. You know, we have Bunker Hill where they lose. 40% of the British are casualties, dead or wounded. And they say, basically, one of the quotes, if I could just paraphrase, I don't know the exact words, was, if we keep winning battles like this, we're not gonna have an army left. Y.

[Stephen A. Smith]

This happens over and over again where they underestimate the Americans. These Americans actually believe this stuff. They're willing to fight and die for this stuff. And the British, they were very arrogant, very cynical. They really mocked the Christian faith and the principles of these colonists. They thought, you know, who are they kidding? They're a bunch of hypocrites, that they're not gonna. And in fact, that's what leads to the Boston Tea Party. I never really understood the whole story of the Boston Tea Party, so I did a lot of digging to understand it. And I thought it was a cynical. Like a bribe on the side of the British. They were like, you know what? These Americans, they say they don't want to pay taxes. We're going to lower the price of tea so much that they're just going to take that deal and shut up. And the Americans said, no, we are not going to. Unless you take the tax off this. We don't care if you have lowered the price dramatically to kind of suck it, to bribe us. We're not going to do it. The British never understood what they were dealing with.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And how about, why did they dress like Indians? That's one thing I understand.

[Stephen A. Smith]

It was because they wanted to be politically incorrect to troll the libs. Just kidding. They basically said, we're Americans. We identify as Americans. And the Indians, There's a number of places in my book where I show that when they would portray America, like in a Paul Revere engraving, it was as an Indian. So this is their idea of, this is America. We're Americans first and British second, which is a real break in 1773. But it's like they'd been pushed to the edge at that point.

[Brian Kilmeade]

Right? So when you see this, it makes more and more sense. The more research you did that we'd be heading to war.

[Stephen A. Smith]

It's what's funny to me is it reminds me like, there was no reason the British needed to keep pushing. It's kind of like Pharaoh, you know, you want to say, hey, have you learned your lesson now? What about now? What about now? Never. Okay. You know, so they never got their lesson. They kept pushing.

[Brian Kilmeade]

And, Eric, you have it all in your book, which is 600 pages. The birth of the greatest nation in the history of the world. It's called Revolution. It's out tomorrow. Pre order it today. Eric Nataxas. Congratulations.

[Stephen A. Smith]

Thank you so much, Brian.