anything about it. Nope, nope, surprise. You can't prove we knew anything about it." And maybe it will go away. But it could be such an important funding source that they might have a money problem, and maybe the money problem would be enough to give them a big problem. We'll see.

Anyway, Trump has ordered an attack on the Houthis. Now, if you're not keeping up with this, the Houthis are a group in Yemen, and they're right there by the Red Sea. And if you can't do shipping in the Red Sea area, you're going to have to go all the way around the Horn of Africa, which is really expensive. Your insurance rates for your shipping will go through the roof. And apparently American shipping has been targeted. It looks like some other countries perhaps have not been targeted. And we don't know if that's because they're allies of Iran that backs the Houthis, or is it possible that they're paying bribes? Because I learned today that the Houthis are blackmailing some of the shippers. So I'm guessing the Americans are not paying the bribe, and maybe some other countries are saying, you know what, we'll just pay the bribe because it's a lot cheaper than being attacked. So I don't know how that works.

But remember, I always tell you that the only thing that you can rely on that's real is that which predicts. Those things which predict the future accurately probably are telling you that there's something real. If something's an idea but it doesn't predict, probably wasn't real.

So one of the things that's interesting here is that Thomas Massie had made the following prediction, and he said it publicly. He said that, I recently said to watch for a new military engagement to compensate for the pullback in Ukraine. Oh, this is good. This is a very specific prediction. The military-industrial complex demands about 50 billion a year from our government above and beyond what's necessary to defend our country.

So immediately after we got out of Afghanistan, oh, look, we better pay a lot of money in Ukraine. And as we're winding down Ukraine, oh, look, coincidentally there's a brand new military conflict with the Houthis. Now, we've bombed them before or attacked them before, but not at scale. So I'm going to give Thomas Massie the win for the correct prediction right on schedule, another major military action.

Now, does that mean that we shouldn't do it? No, that's a separate question. But it also seems again to support Massie's prediction that there's always a reason, right? There's always a reason. The reason may not be one you agree with, but we always have a reason, some kind of reason. Oh, we better stop Russia there or it'll get worse. We better have a big... and we better do a lot in Afghanistan because that's where the terrorist training camps are. Their reasons, they're not crazy reasons. And attacking the Houthis, well, it's a really good reason. It's a really good reason.

But then Thomas Massie went further. He went to Grok, and he expressed in billions of dollars, list the five countries and five corporations that will benefit the most from the US military activity to eliminate shipping disruptions caused by the Houthis in the Red Sea. And according to Grok, the countries that would benefit the most are China, Saudi, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the US is not in the top five. And then of the corporations, none of the corporations are American, the top five.

So this would suggest that America is just sort of creating another reason to spend another 50 billion because the old reason is decaying, the Ukraine war, and they just need a new military-industrial complex war to keep selling weapons. Now, that's a pretty good prediction, so I take it very seriously.

On the other hand, I went to Perplexity the AI, and I asked the following question. So sort of an AI battle here. I said, Perplexity AI, what would be the change in inflation rates in the United States if the Houthi thing is not resolved? And according to Perplexity, our current inflation rate is around 3 percent, and that if things went the way they're going in the next year, the cost of shipping not just to the US but to other places that might end up as US products at some point, that our inflation rate from that alone could go from 3 percent to 5 percent in a year because the shipping cost would just be outrageous.

Now, do you believe that? Do you believe that Perplexity AI is a good source? Do you believe that when it says our inflation would go from 3 to 5 percent, which would be devastating, by the way, that would be a devastating economic problem. It's not just a little percentage going from 3 to 5 percent. That's pain. That's some serious pain. And that it would be by next year, which is pretty close.

So here's my take. I don't think you can trust the Perplexity estimate, but I also don't trust Grok's estimate because I don't think that it's understanding that some of those countries like China, I don't believe China is being attacked by the Houthis. And I'm not sure that Grok knew that. And I think that China is not being attacked by the Houthis because they have a better relationship with Iran, and Iran is running the Houthis. So I don't trust Grok on this question, and I don't trust Perplexity on this question.

But the thing we know for sure is it's really, really making our shipping prices go up. It's creating delays, long delays, and it's creating uncertainty. And so I am in favor of the attacks, but I'm not in favor of the attacks if they have a pinprick. Hey, if we'll stop doing this or we'll come back. We almost have to completely destroy every technological capability they have back to the point where you just severely destroy that part of the country. If you don't go that far, I think we can say for sure it won't make any difference. They'll just reconstitute and get new weapons from Iran. And as long as there's anybody alive, Iran will say, "Are you still alive?" "Yes, I am." "Would you like something to do, and maybe you'll make some money too?" "I don't have any other options." "Okay, here's some missiles and some drones. Just send these at American shipping."

You almost have to get to the point where there's nobody left. Now, I'm not in favor of genocide, but how else is it going to stop? And do we have a legitimate self-defense? I think it's legitimate. And unfortunately it's a part of the world where if anybody's left, they'll keep fighting. It's not like traditional enemies of our past where if you give them a really serious black eye, they'll say, "Okay, I don't want to do that again. So let's work something out." It will never be like that. It will never be like that. If there's anybody left, that one person will be firing a missile.

So I don't want to say that I'm in favor of just wiping out the entire civilization, but what's the other way that works? Can anybody give me a better idea? Because here's what we can't do. We can't surrender in the Red Sea. We can't surrender. So I think that they get to choose whatever outcome they want. And the outcome that they seem to have chosen is complete destruction of their own civilization. I feel like it's just their own choice. And I feel like if they need some compassion, they should talk to AI because I don't have any.

And if they want to kill all of their children by screwing with shipping to the point where it just makes sense for the people who don't want to be killed to kill all of their children, I'm not in favor of it, but I'm not the one choosing it. I'm not choosing it. That is their own choice. And if Trump wants to deliver to them exactly what they've chosen, I'm not going to complain too much.

All right. Meanwhile, Trump has ordered the shutdown of something called the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Now, that was the entity that oversaw the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty. So these are all the media broadcasting things that we would broadcast propaganda, but it was left-wing propaganda from the United States. It was sort of anti-conservative. So if we had a conservative allied country, we were even working against our own allies because they might have been more conservative. And the radio was propaganda that was more left-leaning.

Now, Carrie Lake had been put in charge of, I'm a little unclear if she was in charge of Voice of America or the entire agency. They had some other entities. But she did a video today. By the way, if she's in charge of the entire thing, we'll figure that out by the end of the show. She's doing a great job because the whole idea was, you know, get in there and find out if any of this makes sense to keep alive. And it looks like she has decided that at least to a large extent it doesn't need to exist.

And she did a video today about a brand new, really expensive-looking building that was built for this entity that's empty. And I guess the plan was to move from the existing building to this building. But as she points out, this new building, it's empty, and they would spend a quarter of a billion dollars per year on an empty building. And they could have just fixed up the building they were in. And now I think that option is going to go away, and there won't be anybody to be in any building because it just wasn't a good enough reason.

So yes, it does look like this was yet another situation in which there was enough oversight, and probably a lot of money got pushed to cronies and friends and well-connected people to build a building that didn't need to be built. And maybe it wouldn't have made sense if we'd all known what was going on. So good job, Carrie Lake.

Mike Benz is having the time of his life, I think, watching DOGE uncover all the things that he's been warning us about, but we didn't quite understand. We couldn't kind of conceive of the larger picture because it's just so large, and you really have to wallow in it to get any sense of what's really going on. But here's a little sample from Mike Benz. Apparently USAID gave George Soros's Open Society Foundation five million dollars for its NGOs. So Soros had some NGOs in a little country called Macedonia that has fewer than two million people in it. And the money was going to create, to train citizens with a little booklet that would train them to protest using Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. You know what that is, right?

So American activist Saul Alinsky had his own book, Rules for Radicals, and it teaches you to do things like, oh, I don't know, organize protests against Tesla. Sound familiar? And mock people and call them communists. Sound familiar? Or call them Nazis. Sound familiar? So apparently we were spending our money to train people in Macedonia to use Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. That's right. We gave money to a billionaire to teach an Eastern European country how to do a rent-a-riot. Rent-a-riot, which is exactly what you're seeing happening with the Tesla protest. It's just a rental riot.

By the way, Cernovich had an interesting observation today on X. He said, remember when the quote smart people who write about politics for a living were saying the January 6 pardons were a huge deal and really would hurt Trump? LMFAO. He says, remember when those people, remember that those people are losers. They don't leave their bubbles. They are always wrong. Keep pushing. That's a really good observation.

I have to admit that when the January 6 pardons happened, which I was fully in favor of and fully in favor of pardoning everybody, didn't care what they did, so I'm all in on that completely. But I did worry that maybe it would create a weakness that would be exploited by the left to say, there you see, those pardons. But it's been weirdly quiet. And I think it's because partly because so many things are happening so quickly that the Democrats could never really aim at anything. If it had been the only thing that happened and there had never been a DOGE, it probably would have been a target. Maybe it would have made more difference politically. But now it just seems like it was 10 years ago. You know, we're all on Trump time. You know, every Trump year is seven years. And I'm thinking to myself, like, who would care about the January 6 pardons? Wasn't that at least seven years ago? Almost can't remember them. And it became so small looking in hindsight.

But also here's what I wonder, and maybe this is something the Trump administration needs to look into, but I don't know how they could because this would be totally a state's issue. Who gets to control the history books about January 6? In other words, will the children of, let's say, a year from now or two years from now, are they going to learn that there wasn't an attempt to overthrow the country by Republicans on January 6? Is that what the hi