Russell Brand talks about the election, war and the business of war with Colonel Douglas McGregor, and why he thinks the world has become a kind of 'sadistic simulation' of reality. Plus, a new post from Mahid Nawaz, who says the UK electoral system is 'not fit for purpose' and calls for a return to proportional representation. And, of course, there's still time for a quiz from the Awakenings Wanderers. Stay Free with Russell Brand is out now on all of the social medias, if you search for Stay Free, you'll find us. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. Our ad-free version of this podcast is available on all good podcasting platforms, wherever you get your favourite podiatrist. We apologise for the audio quality in this episode. We re working on a new microphone, which may not be great in places, but we promise it ll get better in the future. Thank you to our sponsor, Pfizer, for making great sound quality throughout the show. This episode was produced and edited by Matthew Boll, who is a good friend of the show and a good human being. We appreciate the support we ve had throughout the last few years, and we really do appreciate the feedback we ve gotten from you, the listeners. We really appreciate it. And I could not do this without you, so thank you for all your support. Stay free with your support, love you, bye bye, bye Bye Bye Bye, bye, Bye Bye. Love, bye. - Yours Truly, Eternally, EJ & Best Regards, Russell Brand - EJ - P.S. . - S&A. Timestamps: - The Best, Caitie - - Music: "The Best, Rory McElroy - Olly - "Bye, Rory" - "The Good Morninger" - "Au Rev?" - "Sue" - Bye Bye Bye bye, Rory - "Thank You, Rory - by Mr. Holmes - "A Little Late" - by P.B. - "I'll See You, Myself, Bye, My Dear Friend" - PSYCHOLOGICAL - "Good Morning, My Lord" - Ollie - "Ode, My Love, My Best Effort" by Fergus Reilly
00:00:15.000In this video, you're going to see the future.
00:00:29.000Awakening Wanderers, thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:32.000You don't need me to tell you that John Baudrillard wrote them free essays, there will not be a Gulf War, there was not a Gulf War, the Gulf War did not happen.
00:00:40.000You remember anyway that he said that in this age it seems that the reporting on phenomena is so diverse and in a sense cliched that in the end we don't have any connection to the events themselves reporting on a war so thorough so immersive yet presented to us as entertainment to the degree where we can't really connect ourselves to the tragedy any longer and perhaps that's gotten even worse with social media where one minute you're looking at a grueling and ghoulish image of a
00:01:12.000Dead child in rubble and then it's like an advert for the betting shop or some sort of gambling opportunity or a nutrition drink.
00:01:20.000How are we supposed to take life seriously?
00:01:23.000Even general elections or electoral cycles are presented to you like entertainment and we had an election in our country last night so today we'll be talking about the election then we'll be talking about war and the business of war with Colonel Douglas McGregor little later. Has everything become a kind of simulacrum?
00:01:43.000That's what John Baudrillard invited us to consider, a kind of deracinated,
00:01:49.000endlessly repeated set of images that in the end bear no relationship to reality. I
00:01:56.000mean does this seem to you a reasonable reaction even to a landslide
00:02:02.000election? Meaning that Labour, which is our version of the Democrats, has a
00:02:07.000massive majority in Parliament, which is our version of Congress, and he is our
00:02:12.000version of the news media doing their version of what sounds like a kind
00:02:27.000It won't make that much difference, I don't imagine.
00:02:29.000Perhaps it's all just playing out like a TV show.
00:02:32.000Maybe even my sceptical reaction towards another centrist, globalist, authoritarian being elected is part of the general televisual or media, at least, spectacle.
00:02:46.000Look, Labour won loads and loads of seats.
00:02:48.000Conservatives lost loads and loads of seats.
00:02:50.000Smattering of other parties one sees, including Nigel Farage's Reform Party, which in a sense still means that Nigel Farage will sort of perhaps become the most vocal opponent of the government.
00:03:06.000Or perhaps he will just be a kind of dissenting voice within the parliamentary system.
00:03:11.000This is a post that you might find interesting from Mahid Nawaz.
00:03:15.000He says, the UK electoral system is not fit for purpose.
00:03:18.000Reform, that's Nigel Farage's party, got four million votes and only four seats.
00:03:23.000The Lib Dems, that's a kind of centrist party.
00:03:29.000Labour won two-thirds of the seats with only one-third of the national vote.
00:03:33.000So, in a way, if we had proportional representation, if each vote meant something, then you'd probably have a very different parliamentary system.
00:03:43.000It's unlikely that we're going to get that.
00:03:46.000What we're going to get is a massive majority for the Labour Party.
00:03:49.000we're having in the UK while the rest of the world moves, it seems at least, towards populism,
00:03:55.000we're having our kind of Trudeau-Macron moment. It'll be an interesting few years. Last night
00:04:02.000I was trying to find in myself a kind of open-heartedness, a kind of good faith. That's what I'm still
00:04:09.000trying to find in myself. Certainly I can find a point in myself where it's none of
00:04:12.000my business. You know, no one really cares, do they?
00:04:17.000Is there anyone other than that person who have literally climaxed?
00:04:20.000Does anyone believe this is meaningfully going to impact their lives?
00:04:24.000Now sometimes, previously at least, when I was involved in more partisan and intricate conversations around politics, people would say stuff like, You know, the gap between the two parties might only be small, but millions of people die in that gap.
00:04:39.000You know, there'll be a 5% increase in this type of disability benefit or this party pledges that they will reform this tax by in this manner.
00:05:12.000The good news is, is that Keir Starmer, the new Prime Minister of the UK, Who, given the size of his victory, will likely be the Prime Minister for a couple of election cycles.
00:05:26.000Generally, I don't know, that's how the trend works.
00:05:28.000If people have enormous majorities of this nature, it tends to mean they're in power for a little while.
00:05:34.000It doesn't matter what you think of him, because he will literally be whatever you want him to be.
00:05:40.000This is really, even in the kind of Skeptical, unreliable and unstable space that is modern politics.
00:05:50.000Even with the spectacle of a senile president who moment to moment might declare himself a black woman, might mistake the 4th of July for Christmas Day.
00:06:02.000To see a politician change their mind so readily, so easily and so conclusively is still pretty astonishing.
00:06:10.000This is what Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the UK, stands for.
00:06:15.000I want to pay tribute to Jeremy Corbyn, who's a friend as well as a colleague.
00:06:19.000You wouldn't call Jeremy Corbyn a friend?
00:07:04.000Can you guarantee that under your leadership, the 2019 Labour commitments to nationalise water, energy, rail, the Royal Mail, they'll all be in Labour's next election manifesto?
00:07:22.000The Home Secretary was the wrong decision and I think it was a rushed decision.
00:07:27.000He must be a pretty accomplished individual, he's achieved loads of things in his life and in a way that montage isn't an indictment of Keir Starmer as an individual, or at least if it is, that's not what's primarily interesting about it.
00:07:39.000It shows us, I suppose, that we live in systems now that demand political figures that will
00:07:45.000just parrot the talking points that are required of them.
00:07:48.000What that indicates is not a moral failing of Kirstame, but a deeper truth, the truth
00:07:53.000that real power is behind the facade of the political processes in which we participate.
00:08:01.000The reason I'm saying that is because otherwise Kirstame would have an opinion and he would
00:08:05.000know what his opinion was because it's his opinion.
00:08:08.000He would have a policy, and he'd know what his policy was, because the policy would make sense, because it would be built on the basis of virtue or pragmatism, wouldn't it?
00:08:16.000So he wouldn't just say, like, I'll never speak to the Sun newspaper.
00:08:26.000Of course, all of us, including myself, continually grow And evolve.
00:08:30.000But what we don't all do, I don't think, is alter our perspectives entirely on the basis of a pressing ulterior force that is the true governing power.
00:08:42.000Just let me know what you think about that.
00:08:44.000If you're watching this on YouTube, We'll be there for a couple more minutes.
00:08:47.000Then we're talking to Colonel Douglas MacGregor.
00:08:49.000The reason I like talking to Colonel Douglas MacGregor is because you get the feeling you're talking to an actual military insider, because you are.
00:08:56.000He was an advisor for the Trump administration.
00:09:01.000You say, why are we continuing to fund the Ukraine-Russia conflict if indeed the conflict's essentially over?
00:09:07.000Why are we getting drawn more deeply into this?
00:09:10.000What's likely to happen if tensions keep escalating in the Middle East?
00:09:13.000You can ask him all of these questions.
00:09:14.000Did Julian Assange ever expose American military personnel to any threat or was he incarcerated for all that time just because he embarrassed people?
00:09:22.000What does it mean to be working class?
00:09:50.000Working class is, um, families that, um, you know, work for their living, earn their money through... Work for their living, they earn their money, like Dolly Parton in 9 to 5.
00:10:03.000Like, look at his eyes while they're talking.
00:10:12.000Working class families have the... Oh look, he's really thinking.
00:10:18.000How can you get to this position where you're at this point, you know, on the precipice of becoming Prime Minister?
00:10:23.000This was, I don't know when this was, a year ago, six months, who knows?
00:10:26.000But he doesn't look very certain about the world, does he?
00:10:29.000Whatever he has gleaned by passing through academia and becoming a lawyer and heading up the CPS and becoming an MP and the leader of the Labour Party and now the Prime Minister of a country...
00:10:46.000In the same way, has it worked, the remedies that you're applying in your own life through your own pursuits?
00:10:51.000Is their system working even for them?
00:11:59.000When you watch the election and experience it, you realise that British politics
00:12:05.000lacks the glamour of American politics. I'm not saying glamour is a good thing,
00:12:09.000by the way, but even the most sort of, let's say, popular, glamorous figure,
00:12:13.000the person who seems to be most adept at dealing with media, is still like actually rather clumsy.
00:12:21.000Particularly in a moment like this, Nigel Farage won his seat, even though reform, as we saw earlier, didn't win as many seats as was anticipated, or was possible, or plausible, or even fair, actually, given that they won, or got, four million votes.
00:12:34.000They got four million, they got four seats.
00:14:05.000We're on a popular British television program a couple of years ago talking about the Iraq war.
00:14:11.000This is what he had to say in front of one of the New Labour.
00:14:16.000New Labour was, I suppose, when the Labour Party started to mutate into what it is now.
00:14:21.000A kind of centrist party that, broadly speaking, supports corporate interests that are quite often global.
00:14:28.000It's just a I don't know how it's meaningfully different from any other party, really.
00:14:33.000Let's have a look at George Galloway taking to task Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell, who was Tony Blair's Chief of Staff, Head Advisor, who was present in the room while George Galloway said it.
00:14:44.000You'll see Alistair Campbell's reaction in the piece.
00:14:48.000I look forward to the day when Mr Blair is not in front of Establishment stooges, but in The Hague, facing war crimes charges at the International Court.
00:14:59.000And by the way, his gobles, his Lord Ho Ho, Alistair Campbell, who's got the same blood
00:15:10.000on his hands, ought to be sitting in the dock alongside him.
00:15:13.000You went there just before we gave you Alistair Campbell.
00:15:19.000So British politics does still pertain of course to global issues.
00:15:24.000Often we are used as the lubricant for America's international imperial projects.
00:15:31.000But when you see the kind of reality of our politics, it's sort of beset with mundanity and trivia.
00:15:53.000You know like the sort of even America's vulgarity and trash has a kind of high octane glamour to it and I suppose that's because you rejected so wholeheartedly Britain at the point of your independence.
00:16:07.000Because look at what... You know if you sort of think there was a fight... Imagine this story.
00:16:14.000There was a media scrap at a polling station in America.
00:16:19.000I sort of think of their moments where like MAGA folks have got their tops off and maybe they're fronting up or the moments at Gay Pride where there's sort of moments of controversy or conflict.
00:16:29.000Look at how sort of Awful and dismal it is when there's a moment of physical
00:16:35.000confrontation at a British political event.
00:17:47.000Jacob Rees-Mogg was one of the sort of more loathed political figures of our former establishment occupants of the, you know, number 10 and stuff.
00:17:55.000Here he is being defeated by a man who's got like baked beans on his face.
00:18:00.000I don't know if you do stuff like this in America.
00:18:47.000Hey, listen, if you're watching this on YouTube, we're going to leave right now.
00:18:50.000I'm going to tell you a couple of things about American politics before introducing Colonel Douglas McGregor, who will give us some pretty exciting insights onto both Assange, did he do anything wrong?
00:19:00.000The escalating Ukraine war and how the military-industrial complex maintains its stranglehold.
00:19:12.000So in your country, while all this was happening, Joe Biden Got confused about what the 4th of July is.
00:19:20.000Is the 4th of July the Declaration of Independence of the former colonies of the United States of America from Great Britain, or is it the birth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, or is it something to do with Saint Nicholas?
00:19:37.000And we give thanks to our commander in chief, the president of the United States, the extraordinary... She's not sure if he's president or vice president.
00:19:47.000He's not sure what time of year it is.
00:19:49.000President of the United States, Joe Biden!
00:20:02.000And however permissive and progressive our times have become, you, Joe Biden, are not a dubile young black woman.
00:20:13.000I remember as a Catholic kid growing up in an area where we didn't like, Catholics didn't get along.
00:20:19.000That young black woman can't get elected?
00:20:20.000the state of Delaware when I was a kid. Well you know I was I looked at John
00:20:25.000Kennedy and said well he, God, he got elected why can't I get elected?
00:20:29.000That young black woman can't get elected why can't I?
00:20:32.000By the way I'm proud to be as I said the first vice president
00:20:37.000first black woman served with a black... Look how sort of eagerly there are these
00:20:42.000sort of broadcaster goes mm-hmm that's good that I'm proud to be the first black woman in the Supreme Court.
00:20:51.000There's just so much that we can do because together we, there's nothing, look, this is United States of America.
00:20:58.000Yes, United States of America, we better get some insights.
00:21:01.000Quick, smart, bettin' we, bettin' we get some.
00:21:04.000Listen, Colonel Douglas McGregor's coming up.
00:21:06.000He was a military advisor under the Trump administration, and he will help us to understand the bigger picture.
00:21:12.000What exactly is it that this current apparent president and the new marionettes in our nation are leading us into when it comes to the ongoing conflict?
00:21:26.000I love Douglas MacGregor and you're going to love this conversation as well.
00:21:30.000Before we get into that, have you ever thought of deepening your spiritual practice?
00:21:34.000Have you ever thought of getting to know the Lord a little better?
00:21:37.000Have you looked at everything we've discussed today and thought, I need Jesus Christ now in my phone all around me?
00:21:46.000Here's a quick message from our sponsors, then Douglas MacGregor.
00:21:49.000You know how much I love the prayer app, Hallo, and our next prayer challenge is Witness to Hope, the life of Saint John Paul II.
00:22:00.000This challenge walks through the life of this incredible saint and is being led by the brilliant actor Jim Caviezel, who portrays Jesus, as you saw, in The Passion of the Christ and was even struck by lightning.
00:22:12.000Hopefully you saw my interview with Jonathan Rumi, He also portrays our Lord and Saviour Jesus in The Chosen, and he's one of the voice guides in the Halo app.
00:22:21.000In fact, you can often have either Jim Caviezel or Jonathan Rowe choose your favourite Jesus.
00:22:25.000I mean, what other app offers you that?
00:22:28.000For July's Prayer Challenge, I'll be using Halo every day, and you should as well, because this app can help you find peace and learn more about faith and just have a daily top-up of your connection to the Lord.
00:22:41.000Download it for three months for free.
00:22:43.000Join the July Prayer Challenge, Witness to Hope on July the 15th on hallow.com forward slash brand.
00:22:50.000Use our code then they'll know that we sent you and you will be held in our prayers too.
00:23:32.000Colonel, I want to know that this is the fundamental question.
00:23:35.000Most people around the world, I'm sure, are celebrating, perhaps with some caveats, the release of Julian Assange.
00:23:42.000But the counter-argument, the argument under which Assange was detained one way or another for what amounts to 12 years, was that the information that he revealed placed American service personnel at risk.
00:23:58.000I've heard elsewhere that not a single American service person has been put at risk, certainly hasn't died as a result of WikiLeaks revelations, whereas 22 American service personnel or former service personnel take their own lives every day.
00:24:11.000Who is it that's really putting the American military at risk?
00:24:15.000Julian Assange or the policies of the neoliberal establishment.
00:24:19.000But first, perhaps if you could start with whether or not WikiLeaks ever put American service personnel at risk.
00:24:28.000I was never convinced that there was any danger involved in most of the information that was released.
00:24:34.000But the biggest problem for Julian Assange was that he embarrassed people in power, revealed all sorts of things that we now know to be true.
00:24:42.000That no one wanted released to the public.
00:24:46.000And as far as danger is concerned, there's more danger of being vaccinated with the wrong vaccine than there is from anything that Assange ever released.
00:25:18.000New obligations among the press to report openly and honestly even if their reporting places the establishment in an embarrassing position?
00:25:26.000You know, how many Rs are there in fat chance?
00:25:30.000I don't think any of that is in the offing, unfortunately, although we strongly believe that free speech is the antidote to tyranny.
00:25:39.000And for that reason, we have always supported Julian Assange, and we're very glad that he's out.
00:26:23.000Just for a moment to touch on British politics.
00:26:25.000It's not something I would usually inflict on an American military expert, but something happened that was really intriguing, at least to me, recently.
00:26:37.000The populist British leader, Nigel Farage, who's about as close a thing as we have to Donald Trump, certainly he's You know he's Britain first, he's anti-immigration, he's openly patriotic and in fact historically I've had a number of struggles and even contretemps with Nigel Farage.
00:26:59.000But one thing he said publicly while campaigning for the Reform Party in the UK, sort of like a British Tea Party type movement I suppose, he said that And indeed there is footage of him saying that he warned while a member of the European Parliament that the continual provocation of Russia and the attempt to turn Ukraine into a vassal state and make Ukraine a NATO member
00:27:27.000meant that it would be likely that Putin would eventually invade.
00:27:31.000I've heard elsewhere people say that, you know, that we started reporting on the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the third act after numerous provocations.
00:27:42.000Both Kyostarma and The Prime Minister Assumptive of our sort of centralist, globalist Labour Party.
00:28:28.000And we knew it back in the 1990s, early on, If we expanded NATO to incorporate more and more countries closer and closer to Russia, eventually there would be confrontation and conflict.
00:28:43.000Virtually everyone with experience in the region and anyone with any knowledge at all of history knows that.
00:28:50.000I think the worst part of it is that President Bush, and I'm talking about the senior Bush, made it very clear that we would not exploit the vacuum created by the withdrawal of Russian military power.
00:29:19.000If we want this crisis that could lead to a real war between us and Russia, To end, it's very simple.
00:29:27.000You simply suspend all aid to Ukraine until further notice, although you should send humanitarian assistance, and make it clear that we're withdrawing all personnel from all NATO countries from Ukraine, and get down to some sort of negotiated outcome.
00:29:48.000If the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians or anybody else came into Mexico and set up missile batteries aimed at the United States, what would we do?
00:29:57.000Well, I can tell you what we would do.
00:29:59.000We'd send the Air Force in right away, and then the Army would invade.
00:30:16.000Your background is as a military advisor to a former Trump Secretary of Defense, and of course you're a combat veteran.
00:30:24.000I wonder how your perspective has changed on the way that the media reports on military activity, and I suppose specifically wars and hostility between nations, now that you work in this type of media.
00:30:39.000The reason I'm asking that question is because when you say something like Russia have been incredibly patient, I've seen people that have said comparable things, anything that's sort of sympathetic towards Russia or Putin, in the most literal sense I suppose it's true, being called Russian sympathizers, even being called appeasers.
00:30:57.000There's an ongoing media attempt to portray Putin as a kind of quasi-Hitler.
00:31:04.000And Russia as expansionist and imperialist.
00:31:08.000But under the kind of analysis you've offered us, that simply just doesn't hold up.
00:31:12.000And even to the common sense of the layman, it don't make much sense.
00:31:20.000How has your understanding of the media's role in presenting to the public forthcoming conflicts and ongoing conflicts changed from when you were within the military?
00:31:32.000When you were within the military, did you see it as necessary to ensure that the public were broadly supportive of a foreign campaign?
00:31:39.000Do you think that this problem has exacerbated, become more deceptive?
00:31:46.000Well, I can give you a couple of quick examples because For what it's worth, when I was in the desert in 1990 and 1991, miraculously, the BBC was the most accurate source of information and news about what was really happening in the Middle East.
00:32:04.000And we would routinely turn to listen to the BBC because their comments were very measured.
00:32:09.000There was no exaggeration, just statements of fact.
00:32:14.000And when they did invite people to comment, the people that came on to comment were very balanced.
00:32:20.000Even then, I thought that the American media saw the whole opportunity as a time to expand and exaggerate to the point where it became entertainment.
00:32:33.000So we were showing people photographs of munitions landing on the enemy and celebrating the arrival of all these rockets and missiles and artillery rounds as though something good was happening.
00:32:46.000In other words, the American media, even in 1990 and 1991, missed the point that it was a war and people were being killed.
00:32:54.000And when you kill people, there are consequences.
00:32:57.000At least at that point, I thought the BBC did a good job.
00:33:00.000Now, if you fast forward to 2003, as soon as we went into Iraq, the lies just began spreading and multiplying.
00:33:10.000One star, a brigadier general in the U.S.
00:33:12.000Army who was involved in the public affairs of what was happening on the ground in Iraq at the time, was telling people things that were just blatantly untrue.
00:33:24.000We had this young woman, I can't remember her exact name, I wish I could, I think it was Jessica something, but she was about five foot four, five foot five, All of 110, 120 pounds, and she was trying to drive a truck with some ammunition in it.
00:33:46.000She was captured, brutalized by the Iraqis that captured her, then dropped off in a hospital where an Iraqi doctor saved her life.
00:33:55.000And then the Iraqi doctor actually contacted us so that we could come and get the woman.
00:34:00.000Well, all of this was turned into some sort of heroic fight where she fired her M16 until she went down, which never happened.
00:34:09.000And then the special operations went in to rescue her, which never happened.
00:34:14.000So the lies were really taking off with great rapidity in 2003.
00:34:19.000And from that point forward, it became clear to me, and I was still on active duty in 2003, that anything you heard from the media Was probably not accurate, probably not true.
00:34:31.000And that you had to immediately assume it was nonsense.
00:34:34.000What did you feel about being involved in the Iraq war at that time?
00:35:44.000And tried to explain that the average person in Iraq was not prepared or even remotely interested in dying in a war to defend Saddam Hussein with their last breath.
00:35:59.000You know who drew the borders and the various lines that created all these countries that were formerly just tribes living inside the Ottoman Empire.
00:36:09.000And they're not terribly meaningful, frankly.
00:36:11.000But it's amazing that they lasted as long as they have.
00:36:15.000But there was no sense of the fluidity of the people.
00:36:18.000They didn't seem to understand that in that part of the world, you know, loyalty to your family, to your clan, to your tribe, Yes, that those concepts and constructs were convenient for us as we attempted to carve up the resources of that region, but hadn't become glommed on to the consciousness of the indigenous people of that region.
00:36:45.000And I wonder, How this expansionist and exploitative mentality has continued to affect that region.
00:36:53.000I want to mention to you a time that I saw a speech by Colonel Gaddafi after the execution of Saddam Hussein, where he said, like, to some kind of Arab council, I'm sure you know what it would have been, like, hold on a minute, Saddam Hussein's been executed.
00:37:07.000Guys, our region's under considerable threat.
00:37:10.000Now, you know, Gaddafi was indeed next to go.
00:37:13.000There have been some pretty dubious actions inside Syria, it looks like.
00:37:18.000You know, sort of arming militia, destabilizing that nation.
00:37:21.000In the 1970s, what went on in Iran was pretty peculiar and extraordinary.
00:37:26.000And what happens in the Middle East to this day seems to require an ongoing relationships with the United States and the United States military.
00:37:35.000I wonder, Colonel, how you feel about American resources and American lives continually being deployed to sustain, exploit, and advance wars within that region that, unless you have a partisan connection to it, seem pretty brutal, nihilistic, and unnecessary.
00:37:58.000Unnecessary is a bit reductive, but, you know, bloody hell, it's not helping, is it?
00:38:03.000No, look, you're absolutely right, and it's very obvious to anyone who's served for any length of time in the region that the social structures are very fragile.
00:38:13.000In other words, everything does revolve around family, clan, tribe, the local area, and it doesn't take very much to disrupt the lives of those people.
00:38:24.000And we continue to impute to the region the things which we take for granted.
00:38:31.000We're national political integration is a good example that we are integrated states, integrated governments with powerful bureaucracies and so forth.
00:38:42.000These kinds of things really didn't exist 25, 20 years ago.
00:38:47.000And so it was very easy to go in and disrupt these societies.
00:38:51.000The problem for us, Russell, and I think this is also true for Great Britain, because we are in many ways very similar to the British historically.
00:39:02.000We are primarily a maritime and aerospace power.
00:39:13.000Yes, we have a common border with Mexico, and we have a border with Canada, but there are very few people in both of those countries compared with us, and we have historically avoided conflict with those two groups of people as much as possible.
00:39:26.000So we've focused on everything beyond our borders over the seas.
00:39:30.000The problem is with us is we sail in or fly into a particular area and we stay for a period of time ostensibly to do good things, to build liberal democracy, to create utopias where everyone can live happily ever after.
00:39:47.000And no one is interested in being converted to this utopia.
00:39:57.000We kill large numbers of people, either deliberately or accidentally.
00:40:01.000And then when we've had enough, we simply sail away or fly away.
00:40:06.000In other words, wherever we go, we are temporary.
00:40:10.000And I think what you're seeing today with the Russians in Ukraine, you see it in the Middle East with the Arab states, the Iranians, the Turks, you see it in Asia with China, and all the countries, their attitude is, wait a minute, we live here, you don't.
00:40:30.000In other words, let us tend to our own affairs.
00:40:33.000We don't need or want your intervention.
00:40:36.000And this is the problem with this constant pursuit since 1991 of what I would call American political, military, economic, financial hegemony.
00:40:48.000We Americans don't really need the hegemony.
00:40:50.000No one in the United States is interested in it.
00:40:53.000It's only a small group of people in Washington who have essentially gotten on board the locomotive and have taken this train down a track that nobody in the United States, if they had been asked, would have ever opted for.
00:41:05.000And we don't need hegemony, and the world doesn't want our hegemony.
00:41:11.000That's really the big message that's coming back to us.
00:41:14.000And unfortunately, Washington takes this and uses the media to persuade everyone that the rejection of our hegemony means instantaneous hostility to us, which in turn then justifies the use of military power all over the world to beat back anyone who doesn't want to live with our hegemony.
00:41:33.000It's an endless doo-loop that leads to catastrophe.
00:41:38.000Increasingly, words like, you know, democracy and freedom, when used to fuel these campaigns, seem, if not euphemistic, downright dishonest.
00:41:51.000And when we think of the last of 50 years and American PSYOP and deep state operations backed by perhaps special forces or outright military action in Central America, South America and in particular in the Middle East.
00:42:06.000So there are obviously examples in Africa as well.
00:42:09.000It seems that this ability to impose hegemony Was, um, facilitated by the fact that it was, that the projects were being, uh, imposed upon regions, peoples, and in particular, I suppose, military forces that were easy, relatively speaking, to subjugate, and perhaps the information
00:42:30.000Uh, sphere wasn't so recalcitrant and immediate in its ability to offer counter-narratives and immediate reporting even though there's plenty of information available on what the CIA was doing in Nicaragua or Venezuela even and certainly Somalia, Syria, list goes on.
00:42:48.000And, and what struck me as outright absurd was that the kind of mentality that had been Somewhat deployed in Afghanistan or Vietnam or wherever you want to say it was being imposed on a country like Russia that has its own history, that has its own sovereignty.
00:43:09.000I'm not suggesting those countries don't but you know Russia is a military superpower and a nuclear superpower and in spite of whatever weakening took place with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire they remain a significant uh nation and it just the playbook didn't make sense to even a lay person like me and now we're starting to see that an individual's intuitive response is closer to an accurate appraisal than the oddly new newly framed bombast and jingoism that you find coming out of a neoliberal Biden administration.
00:43:44.000That uses similar tropes and terms and says that if you are interested in bringing about diplomacy and peace, that you are an apologist.
00:43:52.000So how is it, from a military perspective, that, you know, that... It seems like, because I've got so many questions for you.
00:43:58.000Like one, like, I wonder when the American appetite for this kind of expansionism expired.
00:44:01.000I wonder when manifest destiny was no longer...
00:44:04.000I wonder when, you know, nation-first movements like seems to be happening across Europe and certainly in your country took a true hold and what isolationism means and how much it's connected to the end of the sort of American Manifest Destiny project.
00:44:17.000But I suppose to start us off, I wonder, Colonel, Why it was assumed, and can it have been assumed, that a playbook that would work in those countries to the south of your nation or the Middle Eastern countries would in any way be effective in a country like Russia?
00:44:37.000Well, if you embark upon policies or policy directions without any strategic analysis, I suppose everything is possible.
00:44:47.000Remember that the people that you're dealing with in Washington today, in sharp contrast to the people that founded the country and governed us for most of our history, at least up until World War I, these people are ideologues.
00:45:02.000Ideology is a secular variant of religion.
00:45:05.000So you're dealing with people who are fanatics, who absolutely fervently believe that they have captured a monopoly on truth.
00:45:14.000They're very similar to the Crazed Bolsheviks of 1918, 1919, 1920, who believed that they had the answer.
00:45:23.000And of course, their answer, collectivization, nationalization of everything, state ownership of everything, produced tens of millions of dead inside the Soviet Union long before World War II broke out.
00:45:35.000Well, we're dealing with people that have the same attitude.
00:45:39.000You cannot have a useful discussion or debate with them because their position is, from the very beginning, that one size fits all.
00:45:49.000Liberal democracy, in their terms, has to exist everywhere, and when it does, there will be peace.
00:45:56.000In reality, the answer that George Washington and Hamilton and Madison and all the people that framed the Constitution and founded the country believed in was something very different.
00:46:06.000Their attitude was, The best thing we can do is to stay out of other people's affairs.
00:46:12.000And if we are successful and we build ourselves up financially, economically, defend our country, certainly, but build ourselves up and we become prosperous and successful, then others will want to emulate us.
00:46:26.000In other words, we're not interested in exporting what we do and how we live to anyone at gunpoint.
00:46:35.000And then we went through World War II, and you know we occupied Japan, we occupied Germany, and a great deal of mythology emerged as a result of those occupations.
00:46:45.000People believed that somehow or another we had rescued the poor, benighted Germans and Japanese from ignorance and squalor and stupidity and fascism.
00:46:55.000In reality, all we did in both countries was get these countries back on the track that historically they had followed before the war.
00:47:03.000So you still had a Japanese emperor, You now had a parliament, and all of these institutions in Japan worked, the same institutions in Germany sprung up and they worked, and the people themselves, culturally, were already predisposed to follow the same line that we're discussing right now.
00:47:21.000It wasn't exactly the way we govern ourselves, it was different, but it was quite similar.
00:47:27.000We thought, well, this model, what we've done in Germany and Japan, we can do the same thing in Afghanistan.
00:47:35.000And we forgot that the secret of success in both Germany and Japan was our fervent admiration and respect for the cultures and the histories of the people that we occupied.
00:47:48.000We actually respected the Germans and the Japanese.
00:48:16.000It appears, and certainly I've heard the discourse to the effect that Ukraine is a convenient
00:48:30.000Vassal state has certain resources, but it's strategically incredibly valuable.
00:48:36.000And when I see Zelensky panhandling for support from, you know, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, explicit deals done with BlackRock, and I know BlackRock is enormous and in some ways a diffuse organization, but nevertheless, To make post-war, if such a thing is possible, Ukraine into a kind of a digital utopia, which I sense in a way, Colonel, might be a pilot scheme for the rest of the world.
00:49:04.000There seems to be a sort of a globalist agenda to use technology to maximize power and citizen management and to exploit fissures where possible.
00:49:15.000To make the claim that these technologies are only being used to help people to protect people either from a pandemic or from a war or to facilitate safety or convenience.
00:49:26.000I wonder how that maps on to any potential post-war relationships economically with Germany or Japan.
00:49:35.000and even at the risk of not complicating but certainly expanding this conversation,
00:49:39.000I wonder what the significance was of American intervention in the First World War, if you
00:49:44.000consider the Second World War to be an epochal moment in America's confidence in ideological
00:49:51.000expansionism that became sort of deracinated from its original idea of protecting, or at least
00:49:57.000respecting, the heritage of the nations it was intervening on behalf of, and how that became
00:50:03.000colonialism of a more traditional hue. Well, you're touching on an area where
00:50:10.000there are lots of theories and lots of different explanations.
00:50:14.000World War I in particular, which I think is the first and greatest tragedy in the history of Western civilization, Tells us a number of things about the United States and Europe.
00:50:24.000And one of the things that we learned is about the banking system.
00:50:28.000And clearly, we had extended great credits to the French and the British.
00:50:31.000We said we were neutral and that the Germans could also come and utilize our credit markets.
00:50:38.000But of course, it's very difficult for the Germans to reach the United States and involve themselves in your credit markets when the British Navy is blockading the continent.
00:50:48.000So we were always lopsided in the sense that we were on one side more than the other.
00:50:54.000And inevitably, I think it became clear that if we did not intervene in the war, that frankly, Germany and Austria-Hungary would win.
00:51:03.000And people did not want that to happen.
00:51:06.000They saw that as a potentially devastating outcome economically in terms of finance for the United States.
00:51:14.000And then again, you also have this undercurrent of the United States wanting to participate in this great imperial experiment.
00:51:22.000Remember, we had gone into the Spanish-American War quite unnecessarily, frankly.
00:51:27.000The Spaniards agreed to virtually all the terms that we laid down for them, and we still invaded Cuba.
00:52:17.000Eastern Ukraine certainly has resources in it, but that's not what Putin was interested in, because Russia has enough resources on its own, as we've certainly discovered.
00:52:27.000Remember, we were told Russia is weak, it's backward, it can't stand the sanctions for more than a few months.
00:52:36.000Russia is very strong, has very strong social cohesion, has resources, has a strong economic foundation.
00:52:44.000They can outproduce us today in their manufacturing base with regard to military equipment.
00:52:51.000So there was no strategic analysis that was ever performed.
00:52:55.000It was all ideology and the belief that we could use our military power once again to bully people into accepting a status quo that they didn't want.
00:53:05.000And now I think we're on the verge of losing everything.
00:53:07.000If you look at the BRICS, which started out being a relatively small number of countries, everyone wants to join.
00:53:15.000We think there are going to be 84 countries joining this BRICS organization, currently led this year by Moscow, before the end of the year.
00:53:23.000Everybody wants to join it because they want to get out from under our financial system, out from under the Swiss system.
00:53:31.000This is why people are de-dollarizing.
00:53:33.000In other words, everyone is walking away from us or running away from us as fast as they can because they don't want to be bullied anymore.
00:53:42.000Many people believe, Colonel, that the economic collapse of America is in fact fait accompli due to many matters related to debt and mathematics so abstract to me that I'd sooner try to understand the mysteries of the Quantum well, but nevertheless America remains a though by some margin the world's most significant military power and what we're watching are the tectonic shifts towards militarism when it comes to the other potential threats to a unipolar world China and Russia and the
00:54:20.000That is the aim, that whilst you say it's driven by ideology rather than strategy, and I'm very sympathetic to that idea and fascinated by it, the idea of secular fanaticism and what fanaticism looks like if you extract the idea of the divine but maybe outside of semantics, If you believe you're right, that ultimately acts as a kind of divine access.
00:54:48.000you are a representative of God, and your way is God's way, inverted commas God in that instance, Then, you know, the whole idea of secularism starts to, well, be exposed, actually, I suppose is what it does.
00:54:59.000But I feel that, in a way, you can't have a nation without isolationism.
00:55:05.000In a sense, one needs harmony, but the whole point of a nation is this is a territory that governs itself.
00:55:12.000And it's, of course, obvious that that, over time and due to circumstance, could lead to conflicts, but historically, other than the Spanish, you know, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Spanish War that you described.
00:55:29.000There are not Chinese military bases encircling the United States.
00:55:34.000There are not, you know, Russian powers on the border of America.
00:55:38.000The United States of America, at least in terms of this sort of resurgent, what is usually referred to as populism, or sometimes referred to as the alt-right, or I don't know, the nation-first politics, or Trumpism, the hundreds of different things, seems to be a kind of a reawakening to the idea that America could just get on with being America.
00:55:54.000Protecting America, American manufacturing, American jobs, allowing constitutional rights to flourish religiously and ontologically and not be continually distracted by these crazed and destructive wars that benefit interests that can't even really be called American with a moment's scrutiny.
00:56:16.000They're kind of global interests and perhaps always have been. Is that what
00:56:22.000we're experiencing? A kind of an awakening to the, um, to the, an awakening to the, um, to
00:56:30.000the impossibility of ongoing expansionism given America's current economic position and condition?
00:56:39.000Well, it's important to understand that something else has happened over the last several years
00:56:47.000that we have not directly confronted over the previous decades,
00:56:50.000and that is this process of denationalization.
00:56:54.000The same people who are anxious to keep us engaged in conflict and crises all over the globe are also apparently committed to erasing our national identity.
00:57:05.000And this is a very strange phenomenon.
00:57:07.000And again, I go back to 1918, 1919, 1920 with the Bolsheviks.
00:57:13.000When they founded this thing called the Soviet Union, it was an internationalist state.
00:57:19.000In other words, they were going to create a new identity.
00:57:25.000They would erase the identities of Russians and Ukrainians and Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Mongols, Tartars, whatever.
00:57:35.000And everyone would become the new Soviet man.
00:57:39.000Well, that failed miserably, as we all know.
00:57:42.000The joke in Moscow was suddenly overnight, everything fell apart.
00:57:45.000Everyone looked around and said, well, where is the Soviet man?
00:58:25.000Why aren't we asking whether or not the person that wants to come into the country and live here doesn't already speak English, doesn't already have an education, doesn't already have skills that they can contribute?
00:58:37.000Why are we taking in vast numbers of people who don't fall into that category?
00:58:41.000In other words, this is not 1815 or 1900 or 1925.
00:59:07.000And if you can overwhelm that core population, the theory here I think in Washington is, then you just have this vast amorphous mass of consumers and they can be directed in
00:59:18.000whatever direction Washington wants to move them because after all, they're fungible. They're
00:59:24.000just material to be shaped and exploited.
00:59:26.000I think that's where we are right now and we're fighting against it here because we really believe
00:59:31.000there is such an animal called an American. We think there is a core American population,
00:59:36.000people that actually believe and love this country. So I don't know what the answer is,
00:59:43.000but I think we have to continue to fight against this tendency to treat us as though we're nothing,
01:00:41.000I completely agree with that and the idea of a centralised entity bleaching that into ruin simply to create a malleable and plastic set of tools for their own power disgusts me deeply and I see above all else the godlessness of the Project Kernel.
01:01:30.000Right, so I wanted to offer that because, like, you know, it's an act of faith, it's an act of collective faith, which is actually in itself a very beautiful thing, particularly if there is something collegiate and communal at its core, and something, I would suppose, altruistic, if there is service in it, if it love is probably the word I'm looking for, love, if there's love in it.
01:01:50.000This is a different, somewhat tangential, but I bet it'll make sense in some way.
01:01:56.000I feel that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, whilst what it led to, no doubt in the form of Maoism and Stalinism, you know, the numbers are in, the results are in, the gulags were evident and experienced, But what they've, I'm sure, at least what I've read and understood, felt they were doing was liberating Russia from a corrupt establishment elite under czarism and the trying to empower a serf class that had no power.
01:02:31.000And the project of the industrialization of Russia was sort of a kind of miracle.
01:02:37.000But the collapsing of all of those various identities, you're right, that is a kind of a Because I'm trying to actually think of what the real equivalency is.
01:02:46.000Because when, like, years ago, Jordan Peterson would say, this is, you know, communist, like, you know, what's happening in the USA now.
01:02:53.000I'd be like, well, how is it communist when it's so plainly read by corporate- led by corporatism, economics, globalism?
01:03:01.000Because it's sort of, but I now haven't understood, you know, I don't know if this is what he meant, but I do see that what's being created is a centralised authority that, in the way that you described, is eviscerating and castrating the entire population and making them bewildered and malleable.
01:03:21.000But I wonder whether you feel that the impetus for revolution in Russia, whether or not it was co-opted and subsequently corrupted, is one thing, you know, ...had behind it, at least, the same sort of urge and requirement for freedom that probably America is founded upon.
01:04:00.000You know, it's very difficult, I think, to sort of decentralize.
01:04:05.000You know, the idea that there would be, that power should be with the individual, power should be with the family, family should be, the power should be with the community.
01:04:15.000But I just wonder if you'll address, firstly, the idea that Being an American is an act of faith, you know, the same as being... Whereas England is actual and real!
01:04:24.000And, you know, behind the Bolshevik revolution was the same urge for freedom, certainly probably in the hearts of its participants, one might assume, if there is a common humanity for us to refer to.
01:04:35.000I wonder if you can see any connections there in those two ideas?
01:04:42.000I think Americans are more than just an act of faith.
01:04:46.000I think there is such a thing as an American.
01:04:49.000You know, we forget that a large portion of our population is descended from people who came here quite early and established themselves as Americans.
01:04:59.000Our national identity seems to be rooted, at least in part, historically in the French and Indian War, and then subsequently what we call the Great Awakening.
01:05:10.000in the 1770s, which was really another Protestant revolution, if you will.
01:05:16.000That's one of the reasons that Parliamentarian Edmund Burke called the United States, said that this is not what you think it is.
01:05:24.000This is nothing but a Scottish-Irish Presbyterian rebellion against the Church of England.
01:05:30.000Well, that was an oversimplification, but it also wasn't completely inaccurate.
01:05:35.000These things made us who and what we are.
01:05:39.000And what we decided to do, starting in the 1960s and 65, when I say we, people in the Senate, was to open the doors to others from various parts of the world that had never come to the United States previously.
01:05:53.000Now, some of that has been successful, but some of it hasn't.
01:05:56.000And I think what was discovered on the left first, and now collectively in Washington, is that if you can bring in enough people who are fundamentally different from the core American population that speaks English, that shares in these values and traditions and history, then you can destroy it.
01:06:14.000And literally, I think they've set out to destroy us, destroy our national consciousness.
01:06:20.000In the same way that I saw when I was in Great Britain 10 years ago, I remember talking to Englishmen who were upset over the fact that they were told to take down the St.
01:06:32.000George cross, the flag, the old original flag, white background, red cross.
01:06:51.000You have the red dragon on the Welsh flag.
01:06:55.000These things were symbols of identity.
01:06:57.000They were never seen as evil or as propagating bad things.
01:07:01.000They were seen as something around which people could unite and celebrate.
01:07:07.000We're going through something like that right now.
01:07:09.000We have people that say the American flag itself needs to be changed.
01:07:14.000All of this is very foreign to us, and I think what's happening in the United States is that Americans who historically have been, contrary to popular belief, remarkably tolerant.
01:07:26.000are now saying, wait a minute, perhaps our tolerance has gone too far.
01:07:31.000It's one thing to tolerate someone who's a little different, who has a somewhat different idea, but should we tolerate people who are actively opposed to us, who hate us, who hate what we are, and proselytize against us right here at home within our borders?
01:07:47.000You know, I like to say we're, you know, here in Orlando, we're pretty grounded in our country, our choice, even though we're a A very short distance from Disney World.
01:07:58.000And some people say, well, how can you be so well grounded and be so close to Disney World?
01:08:03.000I said, well, if you really want to visit Fantasy Island, you've got to go to Washington, D.C.
01:08:29.000And most Americans are quite contented to live in that kind of freedom.
01:08:33.000What's happened to us is without our, without consulting us, Without discussing it, we have been signed on for all of these expansionist overseas military operations.
01:09:14.000If we have 340 million people or 50 million people in the country, that's an enormous amount of human beings that have no connection to us whatsoever.
01:09:57.000I don't think the frog is dead, but I think the hope in Washington was that the frog would simply die.
01:10:06.000Remember there was um this other part of my question, Roy get that ironically frog out of your throat, is the uh the possibility is the the sort of the origins your backdrop, oh good thank god your back your background went for a moment Colonel, I'm glad that's back, um like We can stay on me while I ask this question, and guys, I know that we've got to wrap up, but I just wanted to ask this.
01:10:26.000The other part of my question, Colonel, was do you feel that the Bolshevik revolutionaries had the same fervour for freedom, even if that ultimately mutated into centralism in the same way that American power or American democracy seems to be morphing into a kind of centralised autocracy.
01:10:48.000It's interesting that there seems to be some sort of imprint, some magnetism that makes power centralised and it requires constant redress.
01:10:56.000I know there's a famous sort of Franklin quote to the effect that there has to be continual redress to assure it.
01:11:02.000I also identify or acknowledge your remarks about national identity.
01:11:06.000There's been too much time spent dehumanizing, demonizing, attacking and vilifying
01:11:13.000patriots that a century or half a century ago were required to fight wars precisely because we were told our nations
01:11:20.000were real and worth dying for and are now being told that our nations are not real.
01:11:25.000And I like the way that you seem to acknowledge that there is an explicit relationship between the subject of immigration and expansionism, and imperial expansionism.
01:11:35.000So would you just touch upon that Soviet thing, like, you know, everyone wants to be free, surely, question mark, even those revolutionaries, you know, the Bolsheviks.
01:11:43.000And also, were the American expansionism and imperialism to be reduced, does that mean that the American military would be reduced in size?
01:11:55.000Or do you imagine that the Pentagon wouldn't give half its budget to Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, etc., and some of it would go towards making sure the American service people had homes and the veterans were looked after and weren't killing themselves?
01:12:12.000I think the first thing to keep in mind is that there are clearly people, individuals, who have enriched themselves as a result of these overseas interventions and misadventures.
01:12:27.000And it's happened because Americans are somewhat complacent.
01:12:30.000As long as their lives go forward without much interruption, as long as they have food on the table, As long as they can buy the case of beer, watch cable television, and see the game on Monday night.
01:12:45.000In most cases, Americans are satisfied.
01:12:50.000They become enraged when the government intervenes in their personal lives and starts dictating to them.
01:12:55.000Now, you talked about democracy and the Soviet Union.
01:12:58.000The Soviet Union was convinced, or the people that founded it were convinced, That they represented true democracy in the same way that the people in Washington are telling us all the time about democracy.
01:13:11.000They had what they called the dictatorship of the proletariat, the notion that a few enlightened individuals were going to lead the masses to liberation and freedom.
01:13:21.000Well, we all know how that turned out.
01:13:24.000And the reason you had this vast concentration camp system that develops Early on in the 1920s, it houses millions of people, as Solzhenitsyn told us, is because the system didn't work.
01:13:38.000Now, we seem to be on a similar path right now with a dictatorship in Washington, a group of people who've decided they know best for us what's good for us, better than we do, which was never part of the Constitution and certainly not our notion of democratic Republican rule.
01:13:57.000And so now we have a situation in which people elected to office are essentially bought up by very wealthy billionaire oligarchs.
01:14:19.000You take contributions that help maintain your position.
01:14:23.000Because if you don't take the contributions, those contributions will go to your potential opponent and you can be replaced.
01:14:30.000In other words, what started out as a very effective Republican form of government is now completely corrupted.
01:14:37.000And there is no interest whatsoever in what the average American is concerned about.
01:14:42.000Oh, they'll throw the average American a bone now and again.
01:14:45.000Keep him happy, throw him this, throw him that, send him some free money, more food stamps, go away and just ignore us.
01:14:55.000We're here in Washington doing what's really important.
01:14:58.000And they thought they could get away with this because the military no longer relies on the citizenry.
01:15:03.000The military is a professionalized, if you will, a small body of people that can go and use high technology to bully people overseas in ways that enrich us.
01:15:14.000All of this is falling apart, Russell.
01:15:19.000We are already over the cliff, headed down into the abyss.
01:15:23.000We're going to hit rock bottom at some point, and then we're going to turn around, and we're going to go into a new world.
01:15:29.000A new world in which we are one of many great powers.
01:15:33.000A world in which we are not THE superpower, but we are still going to remain powerful.
01:15:38.000But I think what's most important is that we're going to emerge from all of this with the understanding That we have to live with the rest of the world and that we have to have a sense of mutual respect with the rest of the world, instead of showing up and saying, here, I have the answer.
01:15:59.000We're going to show up and say, we really want to do business, but how you govern yourselves, how you treat each other in your country is ultimately your affair.
01:16:09.000I think we're headed to that point, but it's still going to be a fight because the people that are in Washington right now will not change.
01:16:19.000So they've got to be thrown out of office.
01:16:22.000I would prefer that that happen peacefully.
01:16:25.000I wonder, Colonel, I have to wrap it up because I'm supposed to do something else, but I wonder
01:16:35.000sometimes I wonder what's the point of elections if there isn't one party that says
01:16:41.000once we are in office or in administration We will no longer accept donations.
01:16:48.000We will end the profession of lobbying.
01:16:50.000We will decentralize and federalize wherever possible and stay out of your lives except for in these areas and be continually vigilant about how principles and institutions such as the judiciary and democracy can themselves be inverted into tools for tyranny.
01:17:12.000Well, I think you've just described our country, our choice.
01:17:17.000We're looking for a different way forward, because we've concluded that the two parties, frankly, Russell, are not very different from each other.
01:17:26.000And in fact, you can make an argument for what we call the uniparty.
01:17:30.000Everyone can get together and agree on things, and the things they can agree about line their pockets, make them wealthy and make them rich.
01:17:38.000So they're not really too concerned about the levels of criminality in our large cities.
01:17:42.000They're not terribly concerned about who's coming into the country on any given day.
01:17:46.000Those things can be managed, remember?
01:17:48.000They understand the critical task for them is to sedate us.
01:17:54.000You sedate us by providing us with free things.
01:18:31.000Colonel, thank you very much for your time and thanks for that beautiful military and history lesson and also for sort of my sense that there is a kind of pathway forwards that comes down to rather basic values that you might find in Christianity or you might find in the Constitution and I'm sure there are various ways to discover those values because they seem to be about respect, seems to be one of the words that's sort of come up a lot.
01:18:56.000And I really appreciate your time in explaining those values.
01:19:01.000Well, you know, Russell, I'm glad this is over because we can disperse these crowds of women who've all showed up because you are interviewing me.
01:19:10.000I got to tell you, we can't manage this in the future.
01:19:13.000We're gonna have to find some sort of mutually amenable solution to this challenge.
01:19:17.000I'm very much looking forward to joining you on ourcountryourchoice.com, which is where your content can be found, and I'm looking forward to... I'm sure there were points when I was all listening to you... Yes, I was listening to you, but I was also thinking, what on earth will Colonel Douglas MacGregor ask me when I'm on his show?
01:19:48.000You know, so you can bet 100% I will definitely ask you about that film, especially some of your unusual physical moves that you made during that film.
01:20:10.000I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Colonel Douglas McGregor and that you feel a little brighter and a little better now and like there is some hope in this crazy little world.
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01:20:34.000That's certainly a point that I've taken on board, let me tell you that.
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01:20:51.000See you then, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.