Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller, who is leading a group of rank and file service members in support of Pete Hegseth, joins the program. Also, what is with all the drones? Where are they coming from? What is the mothership? We dive into that.
00:00:00.000Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller, who's leading a group of rank-and-file service members in support of Pete Hegseth, joins the program.
00:00:24.000Glenn Beck, Steve Bannon, Patrick Bet-David, Ben Shapiro, Speaker Mike Johnson, Donald Trump Jr., Matt Walsh, Tim Pool, Ben Carson, the next ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Michael Knowles, Ted Cruz, Rob Schneider,
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00:03:18.000President Trump also commented on Pete Hegseth, and he says he loves the military.
00:03:25.000He loves the military a lot, and he has the back 100%.
00:03:27.000He also commented on the drones flying over New Jersey, saying that there's something weird going on there.
00:03:35.000By the way, we're going to be covering a lot of ground on the drone story.
00:03:38.000But isn't it refreshing just to hear from a president who is able to, without any notes, any preparedness, take open questions from the media, be able to have back and forth, dive into any possible topic, Syria, Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, economy, soft bank, investment, inflation, TikTok. soft bank, investment, inflation, TikTok.
00:03:58.000President Trump says he has a very warm spot for TikTok.
00:05:31.000I'm a lieutenant colonel from the United States Marine Corps, served in Iraq and Afghanistan, combat vet.
00:05:37.000My whole life has been serving this country over the GWAT generation, the same wars that Pete Hegseth bought in.
00:05:44.000I got out under weird circumstances on August 26, 2021, during the Afghanistan withdrawal.
00:05:51.000It was just a long list of mistakes that I saw.
00:05:53.000You know, I've got a master's in military science.
00:05:55.000I've been studying foreign policy my whole career.
00:05:57.000And it was just obvious the mistakes that were happening.
00:06:00.000And I had been playing the game long enough to know that no one was going to be held accountable.
00:06:03.000So I made a video in my uniform demanding accountability of my senior military leaders.
00:06:08.000And at the time, I didn't mention any politician and it wasn't political.
00:06:11.000I thought holding senior military leaders accountable would be like one of the last apolitical things we could all agree upon.
00:06:18.000But when you get thrust into the stratosphere of these types of things, it's hyper-political, and that's kind of what happened.
00:06:25.000Every headline was, Lieutenant Colonel Scheller criticizes President Biden, when at the time I wasn't saying anything about President Biden.
00:06:31.000I was just sick of the apathy and the lack of accountability in the senior military ranks.
00:06:36.000Well, after that, I was fired, later given a gag order, imprisoned in solitary confinement, court-martialed, and drummed out of the military, short of my retirement.
00:07:49.000And you go back and look at that now of all the picks.
00:07:51.000But Pete's just, to me, always been one of those down-to-earth guys.
00:07:55.000I feel like In a lot of ways, I see myself in him and I think that's why all the warriors are rallying around him.
00:08:01.000And so, you know, after I wrote my book, I did media for another two years, everyone wanted me to go into politics and I'm just not a politician.
00:08:08.000I've always loved the military and been focused on wanting to make the military stronger.
00:08:12.000And I kind of just went out and started living life, started a business and dropped out a little bit.
00:08:17.000And it wasn't until Pete got the nomination And everyone started attacking and canceling him with the anonymous sources that I felt the need to get involved.
00:08:25.000So how have those meetings been going and what exactly are you doing to help lobby people on Capitol Hill for Pete Hegseth?
00:08:33.000Yeah, the takeaway is, bottom line, the warrior class overwhelmingly wants Pete Hegseth.
00:08:41.000I mean, if you remember Scott Mann, the Operation Pineapple guy, if you remember Matthew Lohmeyer, who asked the question of President Trump, I've talked to all these guys on the phone, the Black Rifle Coffee guys, Eddie Gallagher.
00:08:54.000I've talked to probably 50 influential military influencers.
00:08:58.000Not a single one doesn't I've spoken to the congressmen that I respect the most, whether it's Mast, Mills, these actual warriors of our generation, they all support Pete Hegseth.
00:09:11.000And so first step was making sure that I could get the pulse of the community.
00:09:16.000And once I realized that the pulse of the community Absolutely wanted him.
00:09:19.000I had to figure out how I could unify this voice.
00:09:23.000So what I've done is I've gathered up all the petitions out there because there's a Navy SEAL petition with over 3,000 signatures.
00:09:30.000There's a Heritage Foundation petition.
00:09:38.000And then I plan to go up to Capitol Hill on Wednesday and meet with U.S. senators and their staffs that are willing to To talk to me.
00:09:46.000So I've got at least 10 meetings on Wednesday, which is huge.
00:09:49.000And, you know, one of them, like Rickett's office, who's meeting with us, he's the chair of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, being able to hand him these petitions and tell him exactly what I'm telling you.
00:09:59.000You know, Pete Hegseth is obviously a smart guy, Princeton, Harvard, great orator on Fox and Friends.
00:10:04.000But the reason that veterans want him so bad is because he's an outside establishment pick.
00:10:08.000Not only as a combat veteran from our generation, but the last two general officers have literally gone from the board of the military-industrial complex to SECDEP, and then they go back.
00:10:25.000The ties of the military-industrial complex is a real problem, but even more so, these senior military leaders that get selected, they protect the status quo.
00:10:33.000Because their authority comes from navigating the current system, and the current system is what needs overhauled, and that's why I think someone like Pete Hegseth is so important.
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00:11:59.000So, can you add more to that distinction of the warrior class versus the highly credentialed general class?
00:12:07.000One of the reasons you made the video you did at the time, and I want to play that video here, this is cut 23, when you were relieved of your post, is that you did not feel as if we were a mighty fighting force up against the enemies that wish to kill us.
00:12:23.000Play cut 23. We have a Secretary of Defense that testified to Congress in May that the Afghan National Security Force could withstand the Taliban advance.
00:12:31.000We have chairmen of Joint Chiefs, who the commandant is a member of that.
00:12:34.000We're supposed to advise on military policy.
00:12:41.000All of these people are supposed to advise.
00:12:42.000And I'm not saying we've got to be in Afghanistan forever, but I am saying Did any of you throw your rank on the table and say, hey, it's a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Airfield, the Strategic Airberries, before we evacuate everyone?
00:12:56.000And when you didn't think to do that, did anyone raise their hand and say, we completely messed this up?
00:13:00.000And from my position, potentially all those people did die in vain if we don't have senior leaders that own up and raise their hand and say, we did not do this well in the end.
00:13:15.000What happened after you made that video?
00:13:51.000I would be hidden in a cubicle and make PowerPoints for some general officer for the next three years limping towards my retirement.
00:13:57.000And I just knew I couldn't live my life that way, number one.
00:14:00.000And number two, I fully believed all those comments I made and no one was addressing the content of my statements.
00:14:05.000And that's what really deeply bothered me.
00:14:07.000So it became this fight, you know, and I continued to fight all the way to the end.
00:14:11.000So, if Pete Hegseth is to be confirmed as Secretary of Defense, what can he do from a policy perspective to better prepare the American military to fight our enemies?
00:14:24.000So, Matthew Lohmeyer, there's a lot of people out there advocating to get rid of woke generals, and I think there's a lot of generals that need to get cleaned out.
00:14:33.000Historical precedence for George Marshall after World War I is probably the best example.
00:14:38.000That being said, just going after wokeism is actually attacking the symptom, not the root cause.
00:14:43.000The root cause is that you have general officers that it takes 40 years to make a four-star general.
00:14:49.000Every evaluation for an officer in the military is a subjective evaluation, i.e.
00:14:53.000I'm trying to please my boss and get a higher evaluation than my four peers.
00:14:57.000And so the people that are four-star generals have literally pleased their boss for 40 years more so than all of their peers that are competing for the same jobs.
00:15:05.000And I'll tell you what, it should be based on the best performers, but pleasing your boss and being the best performer diverge at certain places in your career.
00:15:14.000Anyone that's worked at a bureaucracy understands this.
00:15:16.000And so the reason why wokeism is so prevalent, one, because some of the moves that President Obama too made, But two more importantly, the general officers are so fickle, they care most about self-advancement, and they'll do whatever is the topic du jour, and they have no backbone.
00:15:32.000I mean, when Carter Hamm was in Germany and Benghazi took place, and he was watching on screens Americans fighting 1v1,000, and he had eight military options, and he was told to stand down, and he did.
00:15:43.000Because he's conditioned to please his boss, and that's what all general officers do.
00:15:46.000I think what Pete Hegseth needs to do is he needs to get into the military, He needs to clean out a lot of the archaic leadership, but then he needs to implement a performance-based system.
00:15:54.000Because at the end of the day, if you've got the best performer, if I as an infantry officer go against another infantry officer and the best one wins and whatever that competition is, then all other things go away.
00:16:05.000Because the focus of the military should always be on lethality and winning.
00:16:08.000And so, how did we get away from lethality, winning, destroying the enemy?
00:16:16.000What specifically, what year, what period of time did that start to change?
00:16:21.000You know, you look back to the last generation that won a war, it was World War II, and we didn't have the national security establishment then.
00:16:28.000World War II is when we literally built the national security establishment that we have today.
00:16:32.000It went through the National Security Act of 44, 47, 50. And then finally, what structured what we have now is the Goldwater-Nichols Act after Vietnam.
00:16:41.000Where we really went off the rails was Vietnam.
00:16:43.000I mean, Korea was still a generation of World War II vets and the rigid structure of the current DOD was not in place yet.
00:16:50.000What happened was we created this military industrial complex.
00:16:53.000We created this system of officers that are self-pleasing.
00:16:57.000And in Vietnam, what we did after our loss, instead of going back and holding the general officers accountable, we let the general officers sing the song that it was the draft and the drugs and it was the junior service member.
00:17:07.000And what we really did was we empowered these general officers that failed.
00:17:10.000I mean, if you go look at someone like Khe San, where we lost hundreds of thousands of lives and then it was strategically important one year and then not the next year.
00:17:18.000I mean, these are huge failures that no general officers were held accountable.
00:17:20.000The massacre in Vietnam, My Lai massacre, if you look at that, only company grade officers were held accountable.
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00:18:43.000Lieutenant, what is going on with these drones on the east coast of the United States right now?
00:18:48.000Yeah, there's only a few things that the drones would be up there for.
00:18:51.000And at the middle of the night, it really dwindles it down.
00:18:54.000So I'll start with the government absolutely knows what's going on.
00:18:58.000We have such a robust capability that, first of all, they know what's going on.
00:19:03.000Second of all, what they are doing is really the deeper question.
00:19:06.000The best guess that I can come up with is some type of CBRN, chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear detection system, or they're just testing capabilities.
00:19:15.000But it is disheartening that the government, John Kirby, no one is being transparent about it.
00:19:21.000I think it's just another head shake in the long list of things that don't make sense.
00:19:27.000We, the people, probably deserve answers, especially with the coverage this is getting.
00:19:30.000But my position is that it's the government.
00:19:33.000Yeah, and so if it is the government, what would they possibly be doing, sending drones in the sky to surveil us, to be looking for something?
00:19:43.000Yeah, like I said, there's only a couple reasons you would do it.
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