00:00:51.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:38.000Colonel, thank you so much for joining the program.
00:01:41.000Several topics I want to explore with you.
00:01:43.000The first of which is this news about Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia restoring diplomatic relations as it was pushed along by China, it seems.
00:01:54.000And Iran and Saudi Arabia actually seemed closer to war a couple years ago.
00:01:59.000And there's a lot of religious reasons for that and sectarian reasons, see Shia and Sunni Muslim.
00:02:05.000But it seems as if they're having restoring of diplomatic relations and China's brokering it.
00:03:21.000Because frankly, we're debasing their currency.
00:03:24.000Whenever they do business in dollars, we pass our debt on to them.
00:03:28.000Our debt is now, what, 33, 34 million, something, a trillion in that department.
00:03:34.000Nobody wants to do business with us anymore.
00:03:38.000And what is it safe as the kind of new 21st century geopolitics is setting in that China is now the one that is not just trying to broker deals between Iran and Saudi Arabia, but also they're the only ones talking about a ceasefire or potential peace deal with Ukraine and Russia.
00:03:58.000Well, the thing that Americans don't understand because they've been propagandized for years in the wrong direction, China is not interested in war with anybody.
00:04:07.000China is entirely about business and prosperity and self-enrichment.
00:04:11.000They are going to be the dominant power in Asia for reasons of economics and finance.
00:04:16.000It has nothing to do with military power.
00:04:19.000So they're in a position to visit with Zelensky after they visited with Putin and probably offer a deal of some kind.
00:04:25.000I suspect the Chinese will say, if you're willing to come to a new territorial arrangement with Russia, we will bankroll your restoration, your reconstruction.
00:04:36.000The problem for Zelensky is that he's entirely dependent on the Cabal in Washington and the Kolomoyski and Soros and other oligarchs, if you will, in the West.
00:04:47.000So I doubt seriously he'll take the deal.
00:04:50.000But I think that's what the Chinese will ultimately do.
00:04:53.000The Chinese want desperately to build rail lines to carry commerce and commodities and services back and forth between Europe and China, Japan, and Korea.
00:05:04.000Central Asia can be stable now thanks to Russian influence and control.
00:05:10.000The problem they've got right now is Ukraine.
00:05:12.000Ukraine is in the way of that commercial traffic and that economic relationship.
00:05:20.000And I think they're probably going to get it.
00:05:22.000They're just not going to get it immediately because I don't think we'll allow it.
00:05:26.000I'd like the latest take on the details on the ground, your latest take between Russia and Ukraine.
00:05:33.000According to the Daily Mail, it says that Russia suffers deadliest day in Ukraine war as 1,090 men lose their lives.
00:05:42.000And the Daily Mail says Putin's bloodlust takes horrendous toll on his own forces with bitter battle of Bakhmut raging.
00:05:50.000What is the latest on the ground in Ukraine and how does it apply to us?
00:05:55.000Well, all those headlines are lies, Charlie.
00:05:57.000The Russians haven't taken those heavy casualties at all.
00:06:00.000In fact, we think that the Russians have had, since the beginning of the war, somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 dead.
00:06:08.000The exchange rate over the last few weeks has been about one Russian for every five Ukrainians.
00:06:14.000The Ukrainians have been bled white, and they're getting ready for reasons that make absolutely no military sense to commit more forces to Bakhmut, which has turned into an enormous ambush, if you will, for the Ukrainians.
00:06:28.000The Russians are happy for thousands of Ukrainians to pile in there so that they can be concentrated and become easy targets for artillery, rockets, missiles, drones, and so forth.
00:06:40.000There's very little direct fire between the two sides in the area because the Ukrainians have simply made themselves lucrative targets.
00:06:48.000And they've taken tremendous casualties.
00:06:50.000We think that they're up to 200,000 dead at this point.
00:06:54.000So you've just got to take anything that comes out of the Western media and quite frankly dismiss it.
00:06:59.000They're all lies trying to bolster the Ukrainian cause because Ukraine is on its last legs.
00:07:08.000And the muddy season followed a very, very short winter.
00:07:11.000The Russians opted not to attack in the winter because they just didn't get the hard freeze all over Ukraine that they need for hundreds of thousands of troops to advance.
00:07:21.000So they've decided to sit back and the Ukrainians continue to come to them, which makes it easy for them to kill the Ukrainians.
00:07:27.000Ukrainians have become pop-up targets.
00:07:29.000And at the same time, you've got this terrible mud.
00:07:32.000And the black earth in Ukraine is 10 to 15 feet deep.
00:07:36.000So you're talking about a mud pit in which tanks and trucks and anything, frankly, on the ground that moves will just sink to the bottom.
00:07:45.000So there's nothing going to happen in terms of major offensive operations from the Russian side until the mud dries out.
00:08:51.000In fact, the Ukrainians have complained bitterly in Bakhmut about the fact that the Russian people there continually informing the Russians as to their location.
00:09:00.000And one of the reasons the battles in the Donbass have taken so long to fight is that the Russians have declined to use their conventional weapons of mass destruction, the thermobaric warheads on their heavy rocket artillery.
00:09:13.000If they did that, the battles would be over within a day or two.
00:09:17.000But they've got thousands of Russian citizens, Russian speakers who live in Ukraine in those areas, and they're not willing to kill them.
00:09:25.000So the Ukrainians have naturally tried to get close to the Russian speakers.
00:09:28.000That hasn't worked out very well for them because they tell the Russians where they are.
00:09:50.000And when we finally get to the truth, we're going to find out that the only serious war crimes committed in this war were committed by Ukrainians against Russians and against the civil population.
00:10:00.000I mean, the situation in Iran, in Ukraine, is really desperate.
00:10:05.000I mean, you're now dragging in boys and women to fill the slots that young men formerly filled.
00:10:10.000He's got very few reserves left of able-bodied men.
00:10:14.000His generals keep telling him to pull out of this, but he keeps feeding the meat grinder.
00:10:19.000And if you're willing to come and impale yourself on the Russian defenses, there's not much incentive for the Russians to move.
00:10:26.000Why not wipe out the Ukrainian army, what's left of it?
00:10:30.000By the time the spring rolls around, there'll be almost nothing left.
00:10:34.000Now you're talking about blackouts everywhere, all over Ukraine.
00:10:38.000The whole energy sector is being destroyed.
00:10:40.000There's almost no air defense left, which means the Russians can use whatever they want, aircraft, missiles at will.
00:10:48.000Colonel McGregor, the New York Times, the CIA via the New York Times says they didn't bomb the Nord Stream pipeline.
00:10:55.000With all your experience, who do you think bombed the Nordstream pipeline?
00:10:59.000Well, you know, I'm told that Santa Claus and the Good Fairy died in the same car crash that killed Santa Claus and a whole host of other fictional characters.
00:11:12.000Look, the idea that a private boat, a yacht, sailed with very dangerous and volatile explosives into the Baltic and somehow or another magically found a spot and sent divers down on their own to do this damage.
00:11:32.000And they were allegedly Ukrainian is absurd.
00:11:35.000There is no Ukrainian naval capability.
00:11:38.000There's no naval capability in the Baltic other than American or potentially British capability, with some exceptions with the Norwegians and Swedes that could do this.
00:12:03.000The intelligence agencies do this via the New York Times, where they say something.
00:12:08.000Can you just kind of talk a little bit about this, where they say something where they try to mislead you, but technically, if in many years from now declassified documents come out, they can say that, well, we told you that it was a force close to Ukrainian forces, but it's the way that they could deny it.
00:12:26.000I mean, they're just lying by other means.
00:12:29.000Well, look, Charlie, everything that is being told to the American people and the Europeans in the West about the Ukraine war has been largely fictional.
00:12:38.000There's very little truth in any of it.
00:12:41.000I mean, that was the point that I was trying to make when we last spoke.
00:12:44.000The Nordstrom problem is very much the same.
00:12:47.000Remember that initially the answer was, oh, well, the Russians must have done it to themselves.
00:13:04.000The whole narrative for this war is nonsense.
00:13:07.000People don't understand how much they've been lied to, but this is helpful.
00:13:11.000The bad news is the Russians know the truth.
00:13:14.000And we effectively executed or committed an act of war against Russia, but we also committed an act of war against Germany.
00:13:23.000The German population is quietly enraged.
00:13:27.000And it's going to be very difficult for the Germans to stay with us much longer, whether it's NATO or it's this phony war with Russia in Ukraine.
00:13:53.000So kind of in closing here, what is your prediction then of the next year of how things end up getting resolved in the Ukrainian-Russian dispute?
00:14:31.000As this happens, it's going to be impossible for us to sustain the level of support that has kept Ukraine alive, at least to the Ukrainian forces fighting against the Russians.
00:14:42.000That's why I think Xi's visit is important.
00:14:45.000And remember that China, Russia, India, increasingly Brazil, all of the Central Asian states, parts of Southeast Asia are all exiting the financial system that we dominate and control.
00:15:00.000Everyone is getting away from our debt.
00:15:02.000And excuse me, these countries are now pegging their currency to gold.
00:15:30.000They're done supporting companies that rake in hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes billions of dollars, while trashing the country that made their success possible.
00:15:39.000Until recently, we had to take it, but companies like Patriot Mobile are building a whole new economy, one which embraces the values that made America the greatest nation on earth.
00:15:49.000Look, Patriot Mobile is America's only Christian conservative wireless provider.
00:15:54.000Look, they offer dependable coverage for all three major networks and they offer you a performance coverage guarantee.
00:16:00.000If you're not happy with your coverage, you could switch to a different network for free without changing carriers.
00:16:05.000All this, plus the knowledge that you're supporting free speech, the sanctity of life, Second Amendment, and our military first responder heroes.
00:16:13.000Their 100% U.S.-based customer service team makes switching awfully easy.
00:16:18.000Just go to patriotmobile.com/slash Charlie or call them today at 878-PATER.
00:17:19.000It's important to understand what's going on.
00:17:20.000So, Silicon Valley Bank is a bank in Silicon Valley that has many tech startups and tech companies as its clients, as its depositors.
00:17:28.000What they did is they took those deposits and they invested in some risky securities, including mortgage-backed securities that lose their value when interest rates go up.
00:17:37.000But here's the other thing: their clients, the tech startups, also do more poorly when interest rates go up, which means they need more access to cash.
00:17:45.000So, what happened in our country to fight inflation created by Biden?
00:17:49.000That was a double whammy for Silicon Valley Bank, and the bank crashed.
00:17:53.000So, what happened last night is the federal government stepped in and said that if you're a depositor at Silicon Valley Bank, one of those tech companies, you still get your money above the level that you had previously said was the rules of the road: $250,000 to protect mom and pop.
00:18:08.000No, you get it even if you're Roku, a tech company that had nearly half a billion dollars in there, even though you made a risk management decision to put way too much money in Silicon Valley Bank without diversifying it, you still get your money back because the government's going to help you do it.
00:18:23.000That was the decision that was made last night.
00:18:24.000So, before criticizing it or anything else, that's what happened.
00:18:27.000Now, I think that that is crony capitalism.
00:18:32.000Anytime somebody issues a press release, especially if it's the government that says this is not a bailout, that tells you all you need to know.
00:18:38.000They changed the rules of the road after the fact to help people who took risks that they shouldn't have taken to still get that bailout.
00:18:46.000And the thing that bothers me about it, there's a lot of things that bother me about it, Charlie, but the irony is Silicon Valley Bank itself was one of those banks that was lobbying for a really long time, saying that we get to take these risks, that other bigger banks don't, that we aren't having to be subject to the same capital requirements because we're not systemically important.
00:19:05.000The government should and will never step in to save us.
00:19:12.000In their hour of need, not only Silicon Valley Bank, but all of their cronies in Silicon Valley, and I know this, I got calls from many of them over the weekend trying to influence what I was saying, said that, you know what, in their hour of need, yes, we are systemically important.
00:19:26.000Declares an emergency status, declaring them to be systemically important last night, and actually backstops those depositors anyway.
00:19:33.000I think it's an egregious risk failure if you're the CFO of a multi-billion dollar company to park that much money at Silicon Valley Bank without diversifying it.
00:20:19.000So if the business still works, if it's the same business, then their investors can put in more money, those venture investors that back them.
00:20:26.000That's painful if you're a venture investor because that means more dilution.
00:20:30.000That's painful if you're a CEO or a founder.
00:20:40.000But what they're doing is they want to hide that fact.
00:20:42.000And they're saying, no, no, no, this is just about the workers because we'd have to fire the workers, even though the business model still works because the CFO made a big mistake.
00:20:49.000And I think they're trying every trick in the book, Charlie, where they said, no, this is about American innovation.
00:20:54.000These are the people in Silicon Valley who shouldn't be punished.
00:21:18.000Not for Silicon Valley Bank, but for Silicon Valley itself, the tech startups that made the poor decision of putting way too much money with Silicon Valley Bank.
00:21:28.000Many of them were privately rewarded for doing it because Silicon Valley Bank had special deals with some of those founders and companies that required them to put that money in Silicon Valley Bank.
00:22:34.000But I also think that there's a separate issue that I want to recognize, which is there is a loss of trust right now in banking.
00:22:40.000And so no one wants a run on the bank across America.
00:22:44.000And I think that what the federal I argued this in my Wall Street Journal op-ed is the thing that we should see done is strongly prospectively in advance, not changing the rules after the fact, but prospectively for everybody else.
00:22:55.000If we want to raise that FDIC threshold, we should raise it, but we should raise it for everybody evenly.
00:23:00.000We shouldn't do it selectively for people who are in the favored class of Silicon Valley Bank depositors.
00:23:06.000I'm not rejecting the importance of protecting those banks.
00:23:09.000The counter to your point would be: I agree with you ideologically, but what do we, how are we going to prevent bank runs then, right?
00:23:18.000So if we don't make Roku whole, if we don't make Etsy whole, or I'm sure there's so many other companies that would be recognizable, then you could see another 20, 30, 40, 50 banks collapse this week because people start calling for their money to be withdrawn or transferred or put into other places.
00:23:41.000So I laid this out in my Wall Street Journal op-ed today too, because I think it's really important to be clear.
00:23:45.000We can separate how I think we should have handled Silicon Valley Bank from prospectively how we need to handle everyone else.
00:23:52.000So I think the Federal Reserve is a lender of last resort.
00:23:55.000The Federal Reserve does a lot of things that it shouldn't do, but this is one of the few things that it should.
00:23:59.000I think that you can raise the FDIC threshold temporarily during the conditions of fear of a bank run to a higher level as a way of averting that bank run, but do it prospectively in advance without tinkering with the rules after the fact.
00:24:11.000And then here's the thing, Charlie, is we're actually seeing a lot of that fallout today.
00:24:15.000So it looks like what Janet Yellen did last night didn't necessarily have the panacea effect.
00:24:20.000And I think the way I would have done it, I'm running for president, right?
00:24:24.000If I were president right now, I mean, this is going to be a different situation two years from now, but right now, the way I would have done it is said, if you made a bad decision in the case of Silicon Valley Bank, which was poorly mismanaged, no bailout, no amnesty, or else you're actually going to just create incentives for more of that bad behavior in the future.
00:24:41.000But prospectively, we're changing the rules of the road for everyone together, not picking favorites after the fact, but everyone together to say that we'll temporarily raise the FDIC cap to a level significantly higher than $250,000 and use the Federal Reserve as a lender of last resort to shore up confidence.
00:24:59.000In some ways, Charlie, I actually think they actually, we actually have the worst of all worlds where for years, Silicon Valley Bank and the federal government claimed that these would be the kinds of banks that you wouldn't save, that would be fine to let die if they make bad decisions, because they're not systemically important.
00:25:15.000What did they do last night, Janet Yellen and the federal government?
00:25:18.000They invoked an emergency rule, emergency authorization.
00:25:26.000What they do is they effectively say that this is an emergency.
00:25:30.000Do you think that inspires public confidence?
00:25:32.000So this idea that you're actually preventing the bank run by doing some extraordinary thing to save a bunch of Silicon Valley tech startups that you said you were never going to save, not only are you not solving the problem, you might even be throwing kerosene on the underlying fire.
00:25:45.000And that's a possibility that ironically, no one's actually considered.
00:26:02.000Because the bigger that perceived risk was, the more likely it was that as of Sunday night, before Monday morning, before there's that Monday morning bank run on America, they got bailed out, those tech startups did.
00:26:12.000So in some cynical way, kudos to them.
00:26:15.000You know, they won the game of crony capitalism.
00:26:17.000But at the end of the day, that's not good for the country.
00:26:20.000And I think people need to get accustomed to understanding the incentives of the people they're hearing from, from Mark Cuban, from David Sachs.
00:26:27.000I'm not impugning these guys personally.
00:26:29.000I'm just saying that when you listen to them, you need to understand that their portfolio companies and maybe even their own portfolios are banked with Silicon Valley Bank.
00:26:37.000And so the bigger perception there is for a national emergency, for a national bank run, the more likely it is they were going to get bailed out first.
00:26:45.000And so I think that's a big part of what was going on here that people missed.
00:26:48.000And I got plenty of calls over the weekend that really...
00:26:51.000Without saying any names, do you think some of the leading voices are actually personally exposed here that they actually were above the threshold significantly and they stand to lose tens of millions of dollars?
00:27:01.000Yeah, I think the way it plays out is more that they're portfolio companies.
00:27:04.000So a lot of venture investors were pushing this, but their portfolio companies had exposure at Silicon Valley Bank.
00:27:22.000This is a little abstract, but even to the Ukraine situation, the way you deter Russia isn't by doing it directly, but by doing it via Ukraine.
00:27:28.000Here, the way you save the system is by saving Silicon Valley Bank rather than just focusing on the system.
00:27:33.000It's a form of argument you see often these days, Charlie.
00:27:35.000I want to explore this because I also am curious, did it go through, did we exhaust every private option to potentially purchase Silicon Valley Bank?
00:27:48.000Look, it is time to consider a rollover of that 401k into an IRA.
00:27:54.000The investment world is completely different in 2023, and you cannot do the same thing as last year.
00:27:59.000Woke companies are aggressively implementing ESG.
00:28:04.000Interest rates are going up and inflation is still lingering.
00:28:06.000If you have over $150,000, now is the time to move your money to a biblical responsible investing strategy with my friends at PAX Financial Group.
00:28:45.000I'm enjoying engaging in open debate across the board.
00:28:48.000One of the things I've enjoyed doing is also, and I think it's going to be something I'm going to double down on this campaign, Charlie, is I'm going to debate the left in their own home turf.
00:29:08.000I'd say the disappointing part about this is just the corruption that I see in the entire process.
00:29:12.000It's been eye-opening coming in as an outsider.
00:29:14.000I mean, I'm going in to fight corruption in the federal government.
00:29:17.000I've been one of the only candidates to actually talk about express ways of how you actually gut, fire, constitutionally take the guts out of the federal administrative state and bureaucracy.
00:29:27.000But the eye-opening part is, you know what, it starts at home.
00:29:30.000I mean, the RNC, I've called on Ronna McDaniel how many times to just clearly state the rules of the debate.
00:29:36.000Well, if you want a loyalty pledge, how about just saying what the rules are for actually making the debate and how you're going to conduct it?
00:29:41.000You know, this idea of a consultant who calls me and, you know, it's a broken system is the answer.
00:29:53.000Now, Vivek, one of the kind of pillars of your presidential campaign is to try and push back against all these woke idea pathogens.
00:30:03.000I mentioned on Friday that Silicon Valley Bank seemed very interested and invested in DEI programs and all this other stuff.
00:30:13.000I didn't say that was the only reason, but I said I venture to guess that it played into the culture and the prioritization of things that don't matter over things that do matter.
00:30:36.000And I've been, as you know, no greater opponent of woke capitalism in America in the last few years than me.
00:30:41.000But I'm not going to claim that's the essence of the story.
00:30:43.000It was what we talked about before, but it's a side story that matters.
00:30:46.000So their head of risk management out of the UK was issuing her own lived experience as a queer person of color without actually just how about focusing on risk management if that's your function at a bank.
00:30:56.000And risk management was actually a big failure at this company.
00:30:59.000But it runs deeper than that, Charlie.
00:31:32.000They depend on, guess what? the current administration to show up and help.
00:31:36.000And in some ways, you could say the gambit paid off because they're bailing out the depositors of that bank and the culture that created that ESG virtue signaling.
00:31:44.000So in a certain way, ironically, Charlie, because of the bailout of those depositors of those businesses, tech companies that bank there that shouldn't have, you know what?
00:31:52.000They were vindicated because that virtue signaling has a role to play in the way the whole charade works out.
00:31:57.000Yeah, it's an interesting point you make here because I do have a heart for people that are running virtuous small businesses and really trying to make it.
00:32:07.000But the picture that you're painting, and I want to make sure I'm understanding this accurately, is that Silicon Valley was also a major underwriter of these highly speculative, incredibly woke, sometimes financially risky companies.
00:32:23.000And when people like Rokana and others go on and say, you know, you're going to see so many small businesses and entrepreneurs fold, that's not, it's not exactly a true picture.
00:32:33.000These are people that also have venture funding and they didn't want to overly dilute themselves, right?
00:32:39.000And so then can you talk about that for a second?
00:32:42.000Yeah, so they're now using the lexicon.
00:32:44.000I just had a debate with somebody else on a different podcast on this with, you know, David Sachs, who's a venture capitalist and a good guy, but very self-interested lens that I think affects the way that they analyze this problem.
00:32:54.000These are not the small businesses that most people think about when they think about American small business.
00:32:58.000These are venture-backed tech startups.
00:33:01.000It's how they get to be a trillion-dollar company and make billions of dollars for themselves.
00:33:05.000But now claiming, hey, it's just small business status.
00:33:08.000If I put, why were they, why were they able to put?
00:33:11.000Let me ask you this, these small businesses, tens of millions of dollars, or even in certain cases, hundreds of millions of dollars in Silicon Valley Bank.
00:33:18.000The answer is it's not the kind of small business that they're using as the connotation to argue for now.
00:33:29.000I'm a fan of innovation in this country, including venture-backed innovation.
00:33:33.000But when you make that mistake and you have a capital hole, then your investors or those business models, if they really work, you can attract equity capital from someone else.
00:33:41.000But you know what happens when someone else puts in equity capital to your company?
00:33:53.000And Silicon Valley Bank was one of the unique institutions that provided venture debt to those founders, which allowed them to preserve motor ownership.
00:34:37.000It was fearmongering over the week and said, there's going to be a bank run on America unless Silicon Valley Bank specifically is bailed out by Sunday night before Monday market opens.
00:34:44.000Well, that's what they ended up getting in the end because that's a lot easier of a way out to just say, hey, I'm the CFO of Roku.
00:34:50.000I park half a billion dollars or nearly that in one bank, unstable bank, Silicon Valley Bank.