Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served as the Chief Weapons Inspector for the United Nation's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) for seven years in the Middle East. He also spent seven years as a chief weapons inspector in Iraq, disarming Iraq in the aftermath of the Gulf War. In this episode, Scott talks about his experience as a weapons inspector and talks about what he learned about weapons of mass destruction from being on the front lines of combat.
01:22:38.200Thank you all for being here. Good to see you.
01:22:41.980All right, so barely caught Speaker Johnson there.
01:22:44.420I know we're kind of ping-ponging between some of these live events, but you heard him there.
01:22:48.240He was asked a question about the fight right now within the Republican Party about this idea brought about by Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna,
01:22:57.740the Republican of Florida, to institute proxy voting for new mothers, for new fathers, for expectant mothers there in the House.
01:23:05.460This has really kind of split some divisions among some of these House Republicans, so much so that Luna stepped down as a member of the House Freedom Caucus earlier this week here.
01:23:15.860So in the meantime, we're at the bottom of the hour.
01:23:18.260That was quite the sprint over the last 30 minutes here.
01:23:40.480You've been watching all the reaction there from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Australian Prime Minister Albanese, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and so many.
01:23:49.220Before he gets into it, guys, do me a favor.
01:27:12.680And then this weekend, I will be able to do Fed Reacts, and I'll probably travel on Monday and go to Penn State and, you know, have that debate stuff over there.
01:27:26.080And then I will come back, or I might go from Penn State actually to London because we have some stuff set up there for April 9th and 10th or whatever, where we're going to be doing some collabs over there in the U.K.
01:27:39.880And then we might stay abroad a little bit longer.
01:27:42.740I'm still finalizing some stuff behind the scenes, which I don't want to talk about yet.
01:27:46.440But, yeah, basically we've got an action-packed week, guys, is what I'm trying to tell you guys.
01:27:49.820The next two weeks are going to be very crazy.
01:27:51.900You guys might not see me on the debrief as much or Fresh and Fit, but I understand that, you know, we're going to be traveling and doing some collabs.
01:28:12.620We'll give you guys Fresh and Fit on Friday.
01:28:14.580I'll probably do an episode of the debrief depending on what time I come in.
01:28:17.220Sunday, more than likely, I'm thinking, like, 90% chance we're going to do Fed Reacts.
01:28:23.240Then Penn State, from Penn State to the U.K., and then from the U.K., either back to the United States or some other stuff we've got kind of going on.
01:29:07.580Basically, as a businessman, Trump looks at it like, yo, these guys get all these benefits from us doing trade with them, and we're getting ripped off.
01:29:17.240We are going to go ahead and start imposing, you know, higher tariffs on these guys.
01:29:22.080And really what it's about, guys, it's about, think of it as like taking a step backward to take two eventual steps forward.
01:29:27.920It's to stimulate more American industry, right?
01:29:32.920The problem is that we used to make things, and we don't make things anymore.
01:29:36.600And that's the main reason why Trump has this gripe.
01:29:40.520And yes, is it true that the increase, because what tariffs do is it penalizes the importer, and they have to pay more money to get their product, right?
01:29:54.000And then what the importer does, a.k.a. these businesses, they don't want to lose their margins of profit, so what they do is they pass that cost on to the consumer.
01:30:03.280So the end consumer pays more for said product.
01:30:07.440And a lot of people are like, yo, this is bullshit.
01:30:10.400Well, though there is some tightening in the beginning, what it does is it puts pressure on the importer to utilize American industry versus importing it in.
01:30:24.360If I am importing something from China and I have to pay more money to get this product into China, I can only increase the price so much before American consumers start saying, fuck this shit, I'm not going to buy your stuff anymore.
01:30:37.760Because what's going to happen is they are going to pass it on to the consumer.
01:30:45.740But instead of passing it on to the consumer and potentially losing sales because there's other competitors there, what that does is one of two things.
01:30:58.240Either the person that imports is going to say, damn, I might as well just use an American company, which is good for the country.
01:31:05.940Or the consumer is going to say, fuck this.
01:31:10.160I'm going to go to the guy that sells the cheap brew who probably is using an, hold on, too much fire.
01:31:43.240That's what the benefit becomes when it comes to the tariff situation.
01:31:48.120It's basically a long-term strategy to keep industry here, prevent using foreign countries and their manufacturers, and motivate businesses to start building things again.
01:32:04.180That's one of the biggest problems that we made, guys, was we stopped building things.
01:32:09.340We started outsourcing it to other places, which, you know, is kind of an inevitable reality when it comes to capitalism because the companies want to increase their private margins, increase their private margins.
01:32:18.560They bring the cost of labor down, bring the cost of labor down.
01:32:20.720You can only do so much in the United States.
01:32:22.380You have to go ahead and move that labor to other countries, which will pay, which you pay far less to do.
01:32:29.940But what Trump is trying to do is get some of that leverage back and say, okay, you guys want this cheap labor?
01:32:34.920You guys want to experience these margins that you guys have been experiencing?
01:34:30.920Theoretically, over time, sure, you will reduce your trade deficit.
01:34:37.880Some of that will be at the cost of overall economic growth.
01:34:41.720And, again, so if you sort of take politics out of it, you know, we've organized the world post-World War II that free trade was a good thing.
01:34:51.920You know, getting, you know, ripped off in terms of Canada is like getting oil and electricity from Ontario and wood from B.C.
01:34:59.980So ripped off is sort of an interesting way to think about it.
01:35:04.220Now, he seems, President Trump seems to equate trade deficits with, like, you know, somehow being ripped off.
01:35:11.700Most economists would disagree with that.
01:35:14.520But the one thing we learned today in terms of all of these messages is he is very serious about these tariffs.
01:35:20.840And then, like you see from Canada, we'll get into the second derivative effects now with watching people, you know, do tariffs on us and just an escalation.
01:35:29.340And then we have to see where it ends.
01:35:30.880So, I mean, Al, the president is talking about returning to this pre-World War I, pre-Federal Reserve, pre-Federal Income Tax U.S. economy.
01:35:44.420And he says that essentially was the United States' golden age when it comes to wealth accrual.
01:35:56.680So, you know, back in the good old days, mercantilists, you know, before, you know, mercantilists was like, you go and you sort of take resources and you bring them home and you make stuff here and you put up tariff walls and domestic manufacturing is great.
01:36:12.280And then somebody had the good idea of, like, well, if we trade with you, you make this, we make this, you know, we're all both better off.
01:36:19.280It's sort of basic economic theory 101.
01:36:22.740You know, if you go, so it's almost like a weird debate, right?
01:36:26.340It's kind of like when you bring up something that nobody understands or has thought about for 100 years, you have to go, huh.
01:36:32.180But, you know, tariffs versus income taxes and things like this in the golden age.
01:36:36.300So, you know, I know for a fact they didn't have heated seats in their Toyota Corolla in 1887.
01:36:46.380I know for a fact they didn't have avocados 100% of the time.
01:36:50.600So these wealth estimates are, you know, Coke was in nickel, but that was two weeks of, you know, two weeks of your wage.
01:40:01.000So, um, but yeah, I just wanted to double check with you guys and make sure, um, shit's good here and it's not lagging or anything like that.
01:40:08.120Because it is telling me on the YouTube studio, uh, keyframe frequency or four, like, I don't know what the fuck this is, this shit.
01:40:15.860So, I just wanted to make sure that it's all good.
01:42:36.540Um, it's really starting to get to the point now where, um, goddammit, where he's starting to become, like, a straight-up Israeli propagandist is what it's coming down to.
01:42:50.420So, so, why don't you, I'm fixing this.
01:42:57.260Yeah, I don't know why the fuck it was all the way over there.
01:43:48.060And that, and, and him running cover for Israel has been one of the main reasons why the Daily Wire has, uh, taken such a fucking hit, man.
01:44:27.260So, like, you know, I do think that the Canadian milk tariff is too high, but I'm not sure what that matters.
01:44:32.000So this idea of sort of resetting the bar for fairness, and then on those, you know, we'll be fair, I think that is like a little carrot to people, like investors looking at the stock market reaction, hoping that, okay, there's room for negotiation.
01:44:45.720So if you do something, then I can do something, then we can reset the bar maybe lower, a little more fair.
01:44:52.120Um, but, you know, just the idea of reciprocal, I think that's fine.
01:44:56.880And then I think that, you know, we'll be fair is, is like the softest language he said today that maybe negotiation is still a possibility.
01:45:05.280I mean, in his view, though, some countries did get some type of reprieve today because it wasn't one-to-one reciprocally.
01:45:11.480Yeah, I mean, I'd have to go country by country.
01:45:13.440But, like, the tariffs on China and Taiwan vary, you know, worse than Wall Street expected, that's for sure.
01:45:19.960If you look at Apple stock, Apple stock is down seven, right?
01:45:44.400I think as, you know, when you held up that chart and then people sort of zoomed in on the chart and then started looking at the reciprocal tariffs, they were like, wow, some of these are actually pretty severe.
01:45:54.240Maybe it's because we didn't really realize how we were treated, like, with India or Taiwan or things like this because they're not really large trade partners.
01:46:04.140So, Al, I want to ask, because some Democrats are characterizing this as not Liberation Day, as Recession Day.
01:46:11.080Chris Van Hollen there from Maryland on the Senate floor just last hour said that what essentially happened today was a national sales tax was instituted on the American people.
01:46:22.480So is all of this a tax hike that President Trump just did last hour?
01:46:27.440Or do you think industries, knowing this was coming, I'm talking about domestic industries, knowing that this was coming today, prepared and absorbed as best they could what this was today?
01:47:00.640Yeah, as much as I want to talk about JFK and Ben Shapiro, this is going to probably, because he spent, what, 20, yeah, he spent almost an hour talking about JFK.
01:47:16.720So I kind of want to react to this and do it on its own day.
01:48:30.040And then it's just, so like the most immediate price increases are the things that turn the fastest.
01:48:35.120So you would see this in theory fastest at like the grocery store.
01:48:38.700So, you know, some of the produce that's imported, especially in the winter, yes, that would get more expensive.
01:48:45.180That'll get more expensive almost immediately.
01:48:47.240You look at Lululemon stock, that's down.
01:48:49.460You know, they're importing things from overseas on the textiles front.
01:48:53.580You know, there's a supply chain there.
01:48:55.280But within six to nine months, cars, flows, food, there should be some inflationary pressure on those.
01:49:03.360Again, like let's take cars, how much automakers will push back against their parts suppliers on price increases.
01:49:10.920They will cut costs to try and avoid raising prices.
01:49:14.840So I can't tell you like that disaster scenario.
01:49:17.720People like to publish like imported car up $10,000.
01:49:20.700Probably won't be that big, but there will be inflationary pressure all the way through the economy for like six to nine months while this unfolds.
01:49:32.480So Anderson Economic Group released its analysis today of these new tariffs, how they will impact the auto industry for consumers here.
01:49:40.540Tariffs are expected to cost an additional $2,500 to $5,000 for the lowest cost American cars and up to $20,000 more for some of these imported models.
01:49:51.960So I thought that was interesting here.
01:49:53.080So what about when President Trump says this?
01:49:56.620There is no tariff if you build here in America.
01:50:03.000And that's the main bottom line here is to penalize these importers for, you know, trying to use foreign labor to increase their profit margins.
01:50:13.900That's the whole purpose of these tariffs, guys, okay?
01:50:16.960The whole purpose of these tariffs is to basically get America back to building things.
01:50:24.260That's really what this boils down to.
01:50:26.080And the tariffs are a deterrence to businesses to avoid bringing in foreign products that are made via foreign labor.
01:50:42.900It's not so much as in, oh, let's go ahead and mess with these countries' economies rather than let's stimulate our own and incentivize our American businesses to use stuff from America.
01:50:54.740Employ American companies to give them the products that they need versus relying on foreign countries with cheaper labor so that they can increase their profit margins.
01:51:04.480Now, again, like I said before, does that increase the price to the consumer because the companies don't want to deal with the loss?
01:51:14.060But the goal here is to kind of let capitalism work its way out and people say, oh, now this shit's more expensive?
01:51:25.720I'm going to go to somebody else who probably does use American labor.
01:51:31.820It's basically giving American labor or companies that utilize American labor a fighting chance against these companies that use foreign labor.
01:51:39.360Again, I'm grossly oversimplifying this because I'm not an economist, but that's the general stance on things.
01:51:48.800Now, we could go ahead and, you know, doomsday plan and say, well, this country's going to do that.
01:51:57.880But I'm sure Trump has a team of advisors that are economists that literally can go into the most, you know, minutiae of detail as to what could potentially happen with putting tariffs on certain countries, consequences, ramifications, how long it would take for this to, you know, fix.
01:52:16.940Because obviously there's going to be a few months or a year of destabilized prices, but things almost always correct themselves.