The text of our full discussion appears after this:
by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
July 29, 2026
My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!
Frank and I discuss:
The rise of the Red-Green alliance, and why Marxists and Sharia supremacists make common cause against America’s constitutional order
The shared Marxist-Muslim playbook for taking over free countries
What the Michigan Senate race and Massachusetts S. 2134 reveal about the Islamist political project in America
The Muslim Brotherhood’s Explanatory Memorandum, taqiyya, and whether committed Sharia adherents can honestly swear to defend the Constitution
Finally, disturbing reports that a planned U.S. strike on Iran may have been called off because its details were leaked from inside our government
It’s a half-hour of in-depth analysis you can’t get anywhere else. If you prefer to read rather than watch, the full transcript is below. Watch, read, like, and share!
Now, here’s our full discussion:
Frank Gaffney: Welcome back, and a very, very heartfelt welcome to the great Rod Martin. I say “great” not just because he’s the chairman of our Institute for the American Future. Did I mention that it makes this program possible? I think I did. Support us at USFuture.org, please.
Rod Martin, in addition to that exalted status, is also a very accomplished businessman, having cut his teeth in the private sector with the PayPal Mafia back in the day, and having also been a guru to now-Ambassador Mike Huckabee when he was governor of Arkansas, as his policy director.
He is a man of many parts, now serving a very important role as the proprietor of RodMartin.org, where you can find The Rod Martin Report. It is required reading every day. You must subscribe, for that matter, because you need to know what he knows, which is a lot about a lot of things. He also features some very impressive guests.
Rod, welcome back. It’s good to have you with us once again.
Rod D. Martin: Great to be here.
Frank Gaffney: I started in on a riff with our friend Brent Money in the Texas state legislature about what the jihadis are up to over the next 48 hours, as we’re speaking.
We talked a bit about the first order of business, which is likely to be the vote in McKinney, Texas, on whether to approve yet another Sharia-supremacist, jihadist forward operating base doing business as an Islamic society, I think, in that fair city.
Having covered that, I wanted to talk to you about two other aspects of what I call the jihadist trifecta.
This evening, we will probably hear the results of the Democratic primary in Michigan aimed at filling the seat of retiring Senator Peters, quite possibly with a jihadist Marxist by the name of Abdul El-Sayed.
We’ll come to the next one in a minute, but I wanted to get your thoughts, Rod. I don’t know how much you know about this character, but he seems to be the sort of Mamdani-like character we’re told we’re going to see a lot more of: Democratic Socialist-ish, if not literally a member, and very much jihadist, I think, as well. Your thoughts, sir?
Socialism, Islamism, and the American Left
Rod D. Martin: None of that should surprise us. It’s very much like our argument about socialism in general. All these young kids think they’ve reinvented the wheel. Sorry, guys, this has been around for a couple hundred years. If you count the French Revolution, longer than that.
We’ve seen this play, and we know how it comes out. We know what the planks of the DSA platform translate to once in power. We don’t have one or two outlier examples. We have a world full of examples going back a very, very long time.
And guess what? With Islam, we have way more examples for way longer. This is not unknown territory.
One of the things that boggles my mind, and always has, is the pure parochialism of the American Left: their certainty that everyone around the world whom they happen to like likes them back, and that everybody they want you to hold in respect also respects you and them.
Of course, we saw just how much they respected Barack Obama, but that’s not even the point. The Left projects onto these people what it believes about the world. And they lump all religious people together as basically the Sunday School class they went to as children and then rejected.
They have this idealized view of religion that isn’t based on anything except a half-remembered version of Protestant Christianity. They reject it. They deplore it. And yet they assume that Zohran Mamdani is basically a liberal Methodist church lady; he just calls God by a different word.
That is not at all true.
Whatever their similarities may be, every different religion is really different, and simple respect should require us to take those differences seriously. They are entirely different ways of looking at the world, with entirely different ethical systems and political beliefs, including beliefs about the use of deceit and violence.
The more dangerous aspects of Islam, in particular, certainly can be mitigated if you take it in a somewhat different direction. We don’t have the kind of jihad problem coming out of Indonesia that we have coming out of Afghanistan. These are different places, different peoples, and different subsets (“denominations” if you will) of Islam.
But what we’re seeing here isn’t a different subset of Islam. Mamdani, El-Sayed, and the rest of these guys are true Islamists. They’re what you keep calling “Sharia supremacists,” and they have a distinctly political program based upon it. As Battlestar Galactica would say about the Cylons, “they have a plan.” And they’re not being quiet about it.
You put these guys in political office, where they are able to legislate, issue executive orders, let contracts, change zoning, and do all the different things they want to do in power, and you’re not going to get what you would have gotten if you’d elected a Methodist, or even Haley Stevens. You just aren’t.
What you’re actually going to get is something that increasingly looks like Britain, where the socialist government now arrests 10 times as many people for so-called speech violations as Vladimir Putin. And somehow, those arrests are always of the people opposing the Islamic conquest of their country, not of the Muslim rape gangs running wild across the country.
This process ends exactly where every country in the Middle East ended up, and exactly where every Balkan country ended up under the Turks. It’s the same story again and again for 1,400 years.
If you’re dumb enough to let yourself be conquered, that’s one thing. But if you’re dumb enough to vote for your own conquest and subjugation, that has to be the dumbest thing in human history. Yet Democrats never cease to go there.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s Plan
Frank Gaffney: You mentioned the plan. As it happens, I’m holding up a little pamphlet — I guess you’d call it a booklet — called The Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Group in North America.
This is one of my favorite props. Why it’s so important, Rod, as I know you know, is that it is the Muslim Brotherhood’s secret plan for, quote, “destroying and eliminating Western civilization from within by their hands,” meaning the nonbelievers, “and the hands of the believers, so that Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
As you say, they couldn’t be clearer that that’s what they’re doing. This was written back in 1991, by the way. They continue to do it.
You and I may have some differences on certain points of this, but I think fundamentally Sharia is what is operating throughout the Muslim world. There may be outliers. I think, actually, Indonesia is less and less an outlier than it has been.
Rod D. Martin: Oh, it has problems. I’m not disagreeing. I’m just saying it doesn’t look like Syria.
Frank Gaffney: Not yet. But my basic point in all of this is that, in Michigan, we may well see a Senate candidate who exemplifies all the horrors you just shared with us. If he gets past Mike Rogers, he will bring them to the United States Senate and become a further vector for the takedown of our country.
Rod, I want to ask you this question because I know you, like me, took an oath on probably multiple occasions to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
One of the things our campaign to save Texas and save America is going to focus on like a laser is this: If you are a Sharia-adherent Muslim who believes you have to impose Sharia in this country because it is Allah’s will, you can’t take that oath of office faithfully, honestly, and reliably.
The oath says you will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, or words to that effect, so help you God.
What’s wrong with this picture? You’re going to hear a guy like this profess that he can take the oath when taqiyya — lying for the faith, lying for their program — is not only an option and not only condoned, but obligatory if it’s necessary to advance the cause. Right?
Rod D. Martin: That doesn’t mean every Muslim is necessarily going to do this. But if you believe in Islam to the degree these guys do, you absolutely believe this is morally required.
You might have a Muslim friend down the street who isn’t quite there, just like I have Christian friends who aren’t really very Christian. But these guys are the real deal, and they’re very clear about it.
There’s no question that their religious beliefs tell them not only that they can take that oath while deliberately lying, but that they must.
Frank Gaffney: Hand on the Quran, which says exactly that.
We have to take a short break. We’ll be right back with the great Rod Martin on the other side of it. I hope you’ll stay tuned.
The Massachusetts Sharia Supremacy Bill, and Why Marxists and Islamists Make Common Cause
Frank Gaffney: We’re back. So is Rod Martin, praise the Lord, the author of The Rod Martin Report, a very impressive service to our country.
I’m going to give you a sneak preview: He’s also writing a book. We’ll come to that in due course, but very, very important content is being advanced by a man I call our time’s happiest warrior. He’s darn optimistic about most things, and that livens these kinds of conversations because, generally, we’re not.
Rod, I did want to ask you about another piece of this trifecta.
You’ve got the McKinney mosque — a mega-mosque, a jihadist mosque that Steve Bannon just regaled his audience with — being enabled by a lot of rich Texan businessmen who aren’t Muslim and are just interested in making money.
We just talked a little about this idea that a guy who wants to bring about Sharia instead of the Constitution is just the guy to put in the United States Senate because he’ll swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Not.
Let me turn to Massachusetts. As I’m fond of pointing out, Massachusetts was in the very vanguard 250 years ago in bringing about this country: the Adams guys, the Hancocks, Paul Revere.
Well, they’ve got a vanguard working now. In the Senate of that state, there are a couple of legislators who are determined to see whether they can get the rest of the legislature to pass a bill. It’s S. 2134, I think, and I don’t remember exactly what they call it, but it is a submit-to-Sharia bill.
To wit: Not only is it just uber-sensitive to the priorities of Muslims, but they’re going to give preference in state employment positions to Muslims. They’re also going to work really, really, really hard to come up with ways to ban “Islamophobia.”
What’s wrong with this picture, sir?
Rod D. Martin: I was born in 1969. I grew up on a steady diet of liberals telling us that there was no greater threat to liberty whatsoever than mixing religion and government. Now that’s all they do.
It’s remarkable. They do it with a straight face. They don’t say, “Hey, we were wrong.” That’s not how they feel about it. They feel like the greatest threat to American liberty is a Baptist Sunday School lady at a fellowship supper, but somehow these jihadists are just great.
There’s a reason they feel that way. They hate America. The jihadists do. The Marxists do. That may sound extreme. Just read Howard Zinn.
The entire point of Zinn’s so-called history is that America is hopelessly, irredeemably evil and must be burned down and started over. That’s the entire point of the 1619 Project too. That’s what the Left has been teaching in graduate schools since I was a little kid. This hasn’t really changed.
What the Left has always done in every country we can name — and one that leaps to mind, of course, is Nicaragua — is create a “popular front,” as they always call it, in that case to overthrow the dictator Anastasio Somoza.
They achieved that. The Communists were a very small part of the popular front, but they were the most ruthless part. They knew why they were there. Within 18 months, all the other parties involved in the popular front were gone.
You saw the same thing in Czechoslovakia in 1948. “We’re going to have a government of national unity.” Okay. “We’re Communists. We’re on board with that. We believe in democracy.” Okay. “What do you want to be part of our coalition?” “Oh, nothing much. We just want the defense ministry and the interior ministry.”
Almost immediately, they had taken over the country and turned it into a Communist dictatorship.
Frank Gaffney: Another dictatorship, just their dictatorship.
Rod D. Martin: Czechoslovakia was a decent place until that. They had a moment of freedom after the war, even if there were Soviet troops present.
Their subjugation was a shock, I think, to Truman. It really surprised the not-yet-Beltway and crystallized support, I think in a big way, for the anti-Communist efforts in Greece and Turkey, and just a few years later in 1953 in Iran.
But we haven’t learned the lesson. This is what they do. They make common cause with anybody who hates the target, which in this case is the entire American constitutional system. Afterward, they figure, “We’re going to kill them all. It doesn’t really matter.”
The Islamists are exactly the same. If they ever beat us, if they ever turn America into this nightmare they want to create, the very next thing that would happen is that all these people would start killing each other. And it is worth noting that just about the only place the communists in the popular front did not come out on top is in Iran in 1979.
We have seen this play so many times over the last century and a half. I don’t know how anybody missed it, except — oh, wait! — we don’t teach history anymore, and the history we do teach was written by Howard Zinn.
It’s nightmarish. We can sit here and watch it coming from 20 miles off. The only thing we can really do to stop it is understand it as the political program it is, no matter how it masks itself, and defeat it by persuading the American people that all of this is horribly wrong.
You don’t want to become Canada. You don’t want to become Great Britain. And you sure don’t want to become Qatar. But that’s where the entire West is headed, now including states like Michigan and Massachusetts.
Frank Gaffney: Big time, and a lot of this is made possible, in fact, by the Qataris through their financing.
This is such an important point, Rod. I so appreciate you not only tying this all together. I would just add to the mix that there’s another totalitarian vector: the globalists. They may not be quite as violent, but they equally have in mind that their world government is going to result from all this.
They will, as you say, fight it out after we’re gone. But they’re making common cause to get us gone because we’re in the way.
We’ll be right back with much more with Rod Martin, about Iran among other things. Stay tuned for that, please.
Iran’s Popular Front and the Cold War
Frank Gaffney: We’re back, and we have one more segment with my dear friend and chairman, in the best sense of the word, Rod Martin.
We’re going to talk now about some of the same forces operating in a place called Iran.
Interestingly, as you were talking, Rod, about the sorting out that takes place between Communists and jihadis, Iran was one of those places. There was a popular front that got rid of the Shah back in 1979, as I recall. The Communists and the jihadis under the Ayatollah were going to govern alongside Democrats and all of that.
In short order, everybody was killed except the Ayatollah’s loyalists, and the rest, as they say, is history — specifically, a history of trying to bring death, yes, to Israel, but also death to America.
I wanted you to lay out for our audience, because I read an opus by you on the subject, how what’s going on with Iran at the moment is in accordance with the interests of the United States. If not exactly according to plan in every respect, nonetheless it’s coming up pretty well, if not roses. Give us that laydown.
Rod D. Martin: No plan survives contact with the enemy, so we knew it would have ups and downs.
But circling back to something you said a minute ago: We were talking about Czechoslovakia in 1948 and Greece and Turkey in the several years following that. Of course, we could have added China, Korea, the rest of Eastern Europe, and so forth.
It’s worth remembering that we’ve been dealing with that popular-front situation in Iran all the way back to the beginning of the Cold War.
We are constantly treated to this bunk about how the CIA overthrew a popularly elected government in Iran in 1953. No. They took out an attempted Communist takeover. Mossadegh was a Communist. He was a Soviet puppet. And, yes, we took him out. You bet we did, and I’m proud of it.
Had we not, it would have put a hole in the entire containment strategy that we had just articulated, of course, in the Long Telegram, at the exact moment the Soviets had just detonated their first hydrogen bomb. This was just not okay.
We bought ourselves several decades. Then the popular front came back, and Jimmy Carter thought it was great, so he encouraged it. We got the Ayatollahs for 47 years, and Carter got to be a one-termer.
Defanging Iran and Routing Around Hormuz
Rod D. Martin: What’s happening now? Trump has a lot of aims here, but they all boil down to one simple point: There is not a single armed conflict of consequence that you can point to in the Middle East that isn’t armed, funded, and directed from Tehran. It’s just how it works.
It’s the same kind of alliance approach we’re seeing here with the DSA and the Islamists. These Shiites do not like the Sunnis at all, but they’re very willing to use them. They were very willing to use Assad, Hezbollah, and Hamas. They will continue to do anything that gives us a black eye.
So, yes, Trump wants them gone. You have to get to a point where the regime can be overthrown from within.
He’s made very clear from the first that we’re not going to put boots on the ground. We’re not going to invade. But we can facilitate an uprising that may or may not come, because if we aren’t on the ground, you can’t guarantee that it will.
What you can do is defang them. And you can build around them.
You’ve got this massive increase in pipeline construction from the UAE to Fujairah; in Oman; across Saudi Arabia to Yanbu; and now across Syria. We just let contracts to two American majors to make that all happen.
In something between 18 and 36 months, we ought to be able to route as much as 75 percent of the oil that would normally pass through the Strait of Hormuz completely around Hormuz, with hardened infrastructure that’s going to be really hard to kill.
These are all positive things.
Now, what happened this weekend? Trump prepared this huge strike. So what happened? That was part of the point of my piece.
When Trump says he’s negotiating with the Iranians, he’s honestly spending more time negotiating with the Arabs, because you need to get them onside to do what really needs to happen. They’re all squeamish, which is dumb but normal.
Were the Most Recent Strikes Called Off Because of a Leak?
Rod D. Martin: But I’ve been hearing a couple of interesting reports out of the Middle East just in the last 12 hours suggesting that the operational plan was leaked at an incredibly dangerous moment. That’s the real reason we called off the strikes: The Iranians were going to be ready for it.
That suggests we have a serious problem at the highest levels of the United States government. I can imagine where it might be coming from, but it doesn’t matter. That’s something for Kash Patel to sort out.
Frank Gaffney: That does leave us hanging. Are you willing to vector any identification as to who you think would have leaked?
Rod D. Martin: It would be purely speculative, so it wouldn’t be fair. But I think it’s reasonably obvious who in the administration is against this war.
I think they are probably acting in good faith, unless they actually leaked. You can have a difference of opinion on these things. I just think they’re wrong.
Partly, that’s because once the president is committed to a course of action, everybody in the administration needs to be on board or resign.
Second, there was no way we were ever going to be able to do this again if Trump didn’t act when he did. The Iranian negotiators came to Oman in February telling us - bragging - that they had enough nuclear material to build 11 nuclear weapons.
We saw them building toward their goal of 20,000 ballistic missiles. We saw them launch two IRBMs against Diego Garcia that could have just as easily hit Paris. At that point, they’re about a half-step from an ICBM that can hit Kansas City.
Frank Gaffney: We have to leave it at that, Rod. This is a topic to which we will return, of course, very soon.
God bless you, my friend. Keep up the good work at The Rod Martin Report.
I hope the rest of you will join us again for more next time. Until then, go forth and multiply.
