00:00:37.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:44.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:52.000Look, I was just at the Edison Labs yesterday.
00:01:55.000And again, my book, my focus here, this whole series, I call it turnabout tales, Charlie, because every one of us has, I think, a turnabout tale in their life.
00:02:05.000And that's a moment when, usually in your youth, you face an obstacle or a crisis and a decision is made in that moment that not only changes and opens up your entire life, but changes all of history in some ways.
00:02:20.000That's what happens in many of these great American lives that for some reason people don't want to talk about or they don't want to revisit.
00:02:27.000And I think we lose something when we do that or accept that.
00:04:22.000Well, look, everything we're doing right now, I'll just point out into the audience.
00:04:26.000Everything you're seeing and hearing is thanks to Thomas Edison.
00:04:30.000The microphone, the moving picture camera, the alkaline battery, which is really the precursor to the lithium batteries that all of our devices, including our cell phones, operate on.
00:05:48.000Yeah, a minor, his big invention, the phonograph.
00:05:52.000And he was really the first record label.
00:05:55.000Edison in the upstairs part of his lab, the music room, he recorded hundreds and hundreds of bands and orchestras and singers of the day, which he released on disc.
00:06:07.000And he, again, he wisely figured out what the public needed and then created it.
00:06:14.000And when you go there and sit in the room, the two things that blew my mind.
00:06:17.000One, he had a horn, an ear horn, because he was deaf.
00:06:22.000And when that didn't work, when he really couldn't hear in his good ear, he would take a piece of wood and bite down on it, really forward-looking to those cochlear implants they put in the back of people's skulls where the sound reverberates.
00:06:36.000He was using the wood to conduct the sound through his skull.
00:06:39.000An amazing person, a light that continues to illuminate our modern age.
00:06:46.000That would never have happened had it not been for the devotion of a mother who took Edison home and homeschooled him.
00:06:53.000I say he should be called the patron saint of homeschooling.
00:06:56.000And I hope we can restore him to that place.
00:06:59.000Yeah, so let's go through some of the lessons that could apply today.
00:07:02.000You mentioned several, allowing the kid to explore, allowing the, you know, the children to take risks, right?
00:07:09.000What are some of the other lessons today?
00:07:11.000I mean, and do you think that the current government progressive school system is maybe just tragically preventing the next Thomas Edison from finding that next innovation that could benefit humanity?
00:07:26.000You know, I'll leave you with Edison's words.
00:07:28.000We'll go to Edison himself, who said he hated the modern education system.
00:07:34.000He said it's a one-size-fits-all bucket that doesn't allow the child or his ingenuity to grow.
00:07:42.000And he preferred the Montessori approach, which was like the approach he was given.
00:07:47.000Deep reading into multiple disciplines and then hands-on experimentation.
00:07:52.000And most importantly, Charlie, and you do this every day.
00:08:04.000He had little groups, he called them muckers, his co-inventors, the people who worked in his shop and in his labs.
00:08:11.000They had little units, and he would run from one to another, pollinating them, all encouraging them, challenging them, reshaping what they were working on and perfecting it.
00:08:21.000And these people were like his little playmates.
00:08:24.000And when you get in that space, that creative space of play, whether you're in the theater or you're in a restaurant or you're doing a podcast or a television broadcast, that sense of play is infectious.
00:08:47.000I'm not sure if the educational system today permits that kind of attention to the child to accompany the child in the best mode of learning for him or her, and then allowing that force of learning to proceed and grow.
00:09:07.000The modern educational system is about checking boxes and fixed testing and memorization.
00:09:14.000And that is why Edison was thrown out of school because he really couldn't memorize and he didn't want to answer the questions and he was bored to tears after the exploration and curiosity that I think that mind had absorbed as a child.
00:09:46.000This is the first in a series, but yes, I've written three others.
00:09:50.000And again, they focus on great lives that I think had been neglected.
00:09:54.000You know, everybody knows some of the things Edison did.
00:09:57.000Few understand how the inventor got there.
00:10:01.000And rather than a womb-to-tomb biography, these books, The Turnabout Tales, focus on, again, a crossroads, a crisis point in a young person's life, a person we all know.
00:10:13.000And it shows that those obstacles are not really obstacles.
00:10:16.000Those are portals to your future, portals to your vocation and your destiny.
00:11:16.000Check it out right now: relieffactor.com, relieffactor.com.
00:11:22.000Okay, so Raymond, let me ask you about, there's been a fair amount of stories here about Pope Benedict reevaluating the celibacy vows for priests.
00:12:51.000And even Billy Graham many years ago wrote that there may be something to celibacy, he said, because he felt the conflict between his flock and his family.
00:13:00.000You know, later in life, he wrote in his biography that bought.
00:13:24.000Yeah, well, the Pope's been very articulate and forthright on this issue of trans rights and he called it, I think, a cultural colonization.
00:13:38.000It's interesting that that headline gets no coverage, Charlie, while the changing of the celibacy discipline gets all the front page news.
00:13:48.000Whenever you're dealing with a figure, particularly like a Pope, it's important, I think, to report them in their complexity and in the totality of their comments, because it tends to all fit together.
00:14:00.000Now, Pope Francis does freelance at times, and he likes to give interviews and say things in passing, which can be misinterpreted or open to misinterpretation.
00:14:09.000But so far, he really hasn't changed anything, but he's talked many times about revisiting certain things that have been already closed, certain questions, female ordination, for instance.
00:14:29.000On the issue of life, on the issue of man and woman and the genders, he's been very clear on that.
00:14:36.000So, and then finally, there was a memo, a disturbing memo, a couple of weeks ago that came out that said the FBI is trying to infiltrate Latin Mass.
00:15:19.000But as you know, Pope Francis recently outlawed and tightened the noose on the ability to celebrate that old Latin Mass, which I really don't understand.
00:15:34.000Whether it's right or not is a different question, but he has the right to do it.
00:15:37.000But for the FBI to then use the type of worship you want to frequent as a believing Christian, to use that as a means of targeting you with a list, that is really beyond the beyond.
00:15:52.000They claim these people were domestic terrorists or domestic terrorists in training or radicals.
00:15:57.000That it was apparently out of the field office in Virginia, and that individual has been reprimanded.
00:16:02.000But there should be an investigation into who did this, why, and at whose behest, Charlie.
00:16:09.000This all seems rather convenient to me.
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00:17:49.000Tell us about your book, Total Empire, which is technically fiction, but feels more like reality every single day.
00:17:56.000Well, you know, with all the breaking news today, Charlie, about China and Russia forming an alliance, well, Total Empire is all about China's ascendancy to global hegemony and their drive to do so at all costs.
00:18:09.000And so the protagonist, which is a recurring series protagonist with Macmillan San Martin's Press, my publisher, Garrett Sinclair, finds himself chasing down his goddaughter in the Eye of Africa, which is an obscure terrain feature in Mauritania near Morocco in the Western Sahara and the annexed area of Western Sahara and Morocco.
00:18:38.000And so what they end up doing is finding a Chinese hypersonic weapon in this area.
00:18:47.000And of course, then it's a race to prevent hypersonic nuclear vehicles from attacking the United States.
00:18:55.000And importantly, whenever I have a book that I'm writing, this is my 15th novel.
00:19:03.000I was reading the article a couple of years ago about hypersonic weapons.
00:19:07.000And if you put these on space shuttles, essentially, in orbit, we lose our ability to track ballistic signature, which is how we defend against nuclear threats.
00:19:19.000And so when you say Total Empire feels more like fact than fiction, there's a lot of that in there.
00:19:25.000So, yeah, the book is Total Empire, and people encourage people to check it out.
00:19:28.000And so, one of the dynamics in the book, and also something you dealt with, you know, serving in the Pentagon was this idea of obviously the two powers of Russia and China that under President Trump were they were friendly, but they were not as close as they are now.
00:19:44.000Putin is now flaunting an alliance with Xi as dear friends.
00:19:49.000Yeah, it's a rather breathtaking event that took place today.
00:19:53.000Of course, the corporate media will give all the top cover to the current administration that they need.
00:19:59.000And so, there won't be any real examination, except for venues like your show and other outlets that take a serious, hard-nosed look at this type of journalism.
00:20:10.000And so, really, what we have happening is Russia being backed now by China makes this Ukraine fight infinitely harder because we thought that Russia,
00:20:25.000we could do some economic sanctions, starve them off a little bit, use our ability to provide weapons into Ukraine and resources to allow them to defend themselves and then death by a thousand cuts on the Russian front there in Ukraine and let the Russians wither as they impaled themselves on the Ukrainian defenses.
00:20:53.000And now what we're seeing is that ostensibly China could be backstopping Russia to be able to buy more equipment, have better training, et cetera, et cetera.
00:21:07.000And so it really makes it problematic.
00:21:09.000And if you walk this all the way back, Charlie, this whole Russian invasion of Ukraine stemmed from the Biden administration's fumbling of the Afghan withdrawal and fractured NATO.
00:21:24.000And that's another thing the corporate media didn't really cover.
00:21:27.000NATO was fractured seriously because when I would see performing the duties as under Secretary of Defense for policy, we had a, you come into NATO, or NATO comes in together into Afghanistan, NATO adjusts together, and we're going to leave together if we left.
00:21:45.000And the Biden administration just lit a fuse and said, hey, we're leaving.
00:21:49.000And there was no lateral coordination.
00:21:52.000There were 30 some countries in there with everything from 20 person provincial reconstruction teams all the way up to battalion size combat teams.
00:22:02.000And so Putin saw that message, that strategic failure message to our enemies, we are not competent at foreign policy.
00:22:15.000And that lit the fuse on what's happening today in Ukraine, our two biggest adversaries today forming an alliance under the strategic agreement.
00:22:58.000I mean, Tony Blinken running the State Department right now is a total joke.
00:23:03.000And so I want to get your thoughts on the Russia-Ukraine thing.
00:23:07.000I mean, I'm sure you've seen or somebody told you.
00:23:10.000I mean, I don't understand why Russia should be considered an enemy of the United States at all.
00:23:16.000I'm just curious, what is the argument for that?
00:23:20.000Well, so in our national defense strategy, which is predicated on our vital U.S. national interests, we list China and Russia as our primary adversaries, and then Iran and North Korea.
00:23:34.000It's Russia's tendency for hegemony, at least in Europe, and their mischievous nature of poisoning their foes and try to put a stick in the eye of NATO.
00:23:53.000That's a fundamental reason is they have illusions of grandeur beyond the current Putin at least has that beyond the current Russian border.
00:24:04.000NATO's been a very effective alliance for us.
00:24:07.000They don't pay their fair share and they're using Russian oil, two things that President Trump harped on and got improvement in, quite frankly.
00:24:18.000But the alliance and NATO is an important alliance to our country because if you remember, it was predicated on the Marshall Plan that created the foundation for democracy in the wake of World War II and capitalist markets in the wake of World War II.
00:24:39.000Sure, there are some socialist countries in there, but by and large, the European Union and NATO are a good trading partner with the U.S. Same with Japan.
00:24:50.000And you saw the ascendancy out of the ashes of World War II.
00:24:53.000And it's important that we keep that relationship.
00:24:58.000And so I think from a military standpoint, the rotational brigades coming in to demonstrate U.S. resolve to NATO have been a good response.
00:25:09.000I think diplomacy has been anemic and ineffective to the extent that there's been any tribe.
00:25:16.000The economic sanctions are economic sanctions.
00:25:20.000And then, you know, thinking of all the levers of national power, the information campaign has been rather anemic as well.
00:25:28.000So when I think of diplomacy, information, military, economic, the real key levers of national power in our response to this, let's recall, Charlie, the Biden administration's first instinct on the eve of the war was to offer Zelensky a ride out of Ukraine.
00:25:50.000They offered, President Biden and Anthony Blanken offered to decapitate the Ukrainian government in preparation for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
00:27:05.000I don't like them, but I don't consider they've never attacked us, have they?
00:27:11.000Well, I think going back, growing up in the Cold War and being a military officer, we had proxy wars with all the Soviet satellite nations, many of them.
00:27:47.000I don't see that they view us, the United States, as long as we support NATO and we're involved in NATO, which is very important to our vitality as a nation.
00:27:59.000I don't think that they would welcome any kind of outreach from us because think about it.
00:28:08.000They were abandoning Open Skies Treaty.
00:28:12.000They were violating the Open Skies Treaty.
00:28:14.000They were violating the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty.
00:28:18.000And President Trump wisely said, look, if you're not going to play by the rules, we're not going to play by the rules.
00:28:24.000And again, the corporate media said, you know, Trump pulls out of these agreements.
00:28:28.000Well, why should we let them see our training exercises if they don't let us see their training exercises?
00:28:34.000So there's been some malintent on Putin's part.
00:28:39.000I think the President Trump's effort to open a dialogue and have transparency with Putin and Helsinki was important, but that the undermining of the Trump administration by the corporate media and the left has had very serious national security consequences for our country.
00:28:59.000And this idea that you should, you know, it's all important to destroy Trump irregardless of what happens to our national security, what happens to our allies and partners.
00:29:13.000That's the burn, the house down strategy that I see in the left right now as a lifelong foreign policy and defense official.
00:29:24.000It's a very frightening time in our country right now.
00:29:26.000I encourage you to check out the book.
00:29:29.000It is important, Total Empire, and it's very important.
00:29:33.000Former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and the Department of Defense and Deputy Commander in Afghanistan.
00:29:38.000So, General, I want to ask you, I'll just read a couple of headlines here.
00:29:41.000Military enrollment is down record numbers, 25% short in the Army.
00:29:46.000Every branch fails to meet their recruitment and their enrollment goals.
00:29:52.000Yeah, I think there's this two real issues that have plagued recruiting.
00:30:00.000One is, of course, the COVID vaccine issue, which did not resonate well with a lot of the typical population that would join the military.
00:30:11.000And the second is this drive toward, you know, some people call it wokeism or, you know, whatever you want to call it, this, I call it a lack of focus on warfighting.
00:30:24.000We should be recruiting and signing into service men and women that want to defend this nation.
00:30:33.000And we should teach them the combat skills to do so, whether that's bayonet training or communications training and everything in between.
00:30:46.000But we've really gotten sidetracked here with all this focus on things that divide us instead of unite us.
00:30:52.000And we are a very divided nation right now.
00:30:54.000And third, I think the Democrats have done a really good job of making people in general in this nation feel that this is not a great nation, that we've got a terrible history, that we're bad people.
00:31:09.000And so there's this lack of value that people, well, why would I want to defend a nation that you're telling me is horrible?
00:31:17.000So I'm going to go do something else with that.
00:31:19.000So I think it's really those three things.
00:31:22.000So, yeah, is there from any of your colleagues that are still in the Pentagon, do they think that maybe running transgender PSAs for Marines is probably not a good idea?
00:31:41.000Well, the political appointees come in and, you know, tell the generals in large part what to do.
00:31:51.000And, you know, you're confronted with that age-old decision.
00:31:55.000Do you throw your stars on the table and leave and say in protest?
00:31:59.000Or do you try to do the best you can and continue to serve the people that you swore that you would serve, the Constitution and the people?
00:32:07.000So at the end of the day, what we have in this country is the corporate media telling us how bad we are.
00:32:17.000Meanwhile, you have all these people with blue and yellow flags on their social media profiles and wanting World War III, essentially.
00:32:26.000And at the end of the day, they're not sending their kids clearly to this fight that they're doing.
00:32:34.000Many of them don't have kids, but yeah, that's right.
00:32:39.000So it's really bothersome because, you know, recruiting and retention is a real barometer of the health of the nation.
00:32:49.000And what a 60 to 70% recruiting number tells you is we're not a healthy nation right now.
00:32:55.000And it's the lack of leadership from the very senior levels of the chain of command with the commander in chief that I think has made us unwell.