In this episode of the Tucker Carlson Show, host Tucker Carlson sits down with his good friend and former colleague, Alex Blumberg. They discuss the Biden-Harris administration s decision to pull out of a peace deal with Ukraine, why this is a terrible mistake, and why the U.S. should have stood up for Ukraine in the first place. Tucker and Alex talk about how they came to the conclusion that the United States should go all in on Ukraine and why they think it s a good idea to send our own children to fight on the front lines in the Donbass region of Ukraine. They also discuss why we should be concerned about the number of innocent Ukrainian children being drafted into the conflict, and how we can stop this from happening in the future. Tucker is a former CIA officer, and Alex grew up in a world where this kind of thing happens and why it should never happen again. Tucker also talks about how he came to this conclusion and why he thinks we should stop sending our own kids to fight in the Ukraine conflict. Check out the full show on his new book, Fighting for Freedom fries. Click here for a copy of the book, Fighting For Freedom Fries: A Guide to Fighting for Real War, Real Food, Real Peace, Real Fight, Real War. And don t miss it! Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices and more. Subscribe on Audible Learn about our sponsorships and become a supporter of our show, Poshmark, Podcoin, and Vaynerd, the podcast that helps you get 10% off your first-ever ad-free version of the show, The Tucker Carlson s Unfiltered. and Alex s Uncut Podcasts Uncut, The Uncut. Learn more on all things Uncut on the Uncut and Uncut & Uncut and much more! - Subscribe to our new podcast, Subscribe on Podulism Uncut + Uncut with Alex Blunt and Alex Blotter, Uncut at Podulium, the best podcast on the Untold Podcasts, the Best of the Unrivaled Podcasts Podcasts and more! Subscribe to Uncut in the Unedited Podcasts - Uncut Unedited and Unedited, Unedited & Unedited in the Real Talk Podcasts - Unedited by Alex Blocked, Unsegmented, the Unseached, the Real Deal Podcasts.
00:02:04.740And, you know, it's just how many times can you wade through years and years of a war with absolutely no stated end game and, and dwindling public support and mounting civilian casualties and disintegrating homeland.
00:02:24.120Because all of your money is being spent, you know, fueling weaponry to blow up over foreign skies and continue to print more money to pay for it.
00:02:37.400Uh, and the answer the last time around was 20 years.
00:02:41.960And I, I want to make sure it's not again, because, you know, here we are at $33 trillion worth of debt.
00:02:53.220And we're now paying more on those interest payments every year than we are on defense, completely unsustainable.
00:03:03.720And most importantly, are the human lives.
00:03:06.940Tens of thousands of people who won't, you know, proverbially dance at their children's wedding.
00:03:13.460And see the sunrise and drink a cup of coffee.
00:03:15.900And it's just, that part of it is completely lost.
00:03:18.920And when you, when you hear our generals and our political leaders saying, don't you understand, this is a great thing.
00:03:27.740We are achieving the strategic aim of diminishing Russian military reserves, and we don't even have to put a person on the ground.
00:03:35.380But, you know, what they are saying is that those Ukrainian children, and now, you know, old men and anyone else that they can put up against the front line, are lesser children of God than our own that we would send over there.
00:03:53.300And, you know, that doesn't fly with me, so.
00:03:58.300And I know you don't want to talk about yourself, but I'm, because I do, I think I understand your background pretty well.
00:04:05.500I just, I'm fascinated by the fact that you are saying this, and that no one, very few people in the world from which, honestly, we both come, are saying anything like this.
00:04:17.720And so, what, what, how did, how did you reach this conclusion?
00:04:33.040And I think some of them are saying it, you know, in the privacy of their own conversations.
00:04:37.520But I came to it, you know, after 9-11, there was kind of a suspension of opposition to war in our country that, you know, maybe has never let up.
00:04:54.720I mean, there's some recognition now that poor choices were made there.
00:04:59.200But in the moment when, you know, France was objecting and we decided to call French fries freedom fries and, you know, that there was a real hunger for war.
00:05:10.660And I remember gleefully participating in that to my shame.
00:05:14.100It was a collective psychosis, maybe a grieving process or, you know, and for me, I'd just 9-11 happened as I was going into my last year at university.
00:05:28.860And I went to Oxford overseas and it started in October.
00:06:10.560And I think hearing the war drums beating, for me, I hadn't, oddly enough, heard much about the intelligence world.
00:06:20.580I mean, I didn't know many of the things that I know now.
00:06:24.580I don't think I probably would have gone into it if I had.
00:06:27.080But I liked the idea of a kind of a secret diplomatic service.
00:06:31.320I like the idea that rather than conduct an incredibly expensive kinetic war, expensive both in terms of lives and treasure, that you could find out about something before it happened and prevent the attack from happening in the first place.
00:06:50.080Which, admittedly, was a kind of naive early 20s understanding of the intelligence business.
00:06:57.400But at its best, you know, that is what it does or what it intends to do.
00:07:02.240I think where they get into tremendous trouble is, I'm tempted to say mission creep, but actually it was kind of built in to the entire OSSCA history.
00:07:15.920But is when rather than going in and actually reporting what is happening in every corner of the world, they are making it happen.
00:08:07.240You know, and I, people may or may not agree with, with each of these governments, but they are for the people of each country to work through.
00:08:17.540We had our own revolution in this country.
00:08:19.760It was a very important, um, you know, stealing of our national values.
00:08:27.200And I think you have to go through that yourself.
00:08:31.280And I, I worry in Iran that we're, you know, hearing the beginnings of that again with this kind of royalist sentiment, monarchist sentiment of, you know, well, the human rights abuses there are so egregious that anything would be justified.
00:08:51.540And it just, it does no one any favors.
00:08:55.420So, I mean, what you're describing is conceptual corruption, like a corruption of, of first principles.
00:09:00.720If the point of your foreign policy is to spread democracy, you can't end democracy in the name of democracy.
00:09:07.140I mean, you just, that's, that's insane.
00:09:09.880Yeah, unless you're the Democratic Party in the United States these days who seem to be, you know, have cut their teeth on ending democracy to save it overseas.
00:09:20.240And now are practicing the same theory here in the United States, where they've told us for the last two years, you know, Donald Trump is such a threat to democracy that we must stage a palace coup, you know, replace our candidate with someone who hasn't received a single vote.
00:09:39.800We undermine every other candidate of our own party in the courts, censor American citizens, undermine the Constitution, all in order to save democracy.
00:09:52.940So, I think what we, what we reap overseas, we sow, or what we sow overseas, we reap at home.
00:10:00.320Does seem like our foreign policy drives our domestic policy or that there isn't actually much of a domestic policy?
00:10:06.140There's not a great concern about what happens in the United States, in Washington.
00:10:09.740I have noticed, I came to this over 40 years of watching, but it, that maybe was inevitable.
00:10:15.840If you start overthrowing democratically elected governments abroad, why wouldn't over time you think that's acceptable in your own country?
00:10:23.940I mean, you know, the lies people tell themselves in order to persist with what is ultimately an incredibly profitable business model.
00:10:33.500But also, you know, if your end is stability and you tell yourself that stability requires control, you know, and that there need to be small, short-term sacrifices.
00:10:47.240And I think we really are seeing that bear out in our domestic politics, where increasingly I'm seeing the First Amendment as an obstacle.
00:10:58.060Does the Constitution, you know, actually serve us?
00:11:02.040These kinds of questions and articles coming out in the media and Democratic leaders.
00:11:07.440And I think it really is a symptom of what we have been spreading around the world.
00:11:12.420And the results are plain to see, you know, I mean, we had more Americans slip into poverty over the last two years than, I think, any year in the last 50.
00:11:22.000We, our nuclear clock, you know, we've ticked closer to midnight than at any time since its creation in 1947.
00:11:31.320More, more people died around the world in the first two years of Biden-Harris for more and violence than in all four years of Donald Trump, which I think people don't really recognize.
00:11:44.840And not even just because of Ukraine, even if you take Ukraine out of it.
00:11:48.420And so I think that, you know, the insecurity that we see there, and then the fact that at home we have more children living in poverty than any rich nation except for Romania, our life expectancy sits right above Algeria's.
00:12:04.920You know, in the 1990s, if you were born in the United States, you could expect to live as long as in any other pure nation.
00:12:13.060And now you die six years earlier, you know, six years of hanging out with your grandchildren and watching the sunrise on your porch has just been robbed through absolute, utter lack of leadership on domestic health priorities.
00:12:36.000Um, everything you said is, uh, so nicely put and true.
00:12:43.120I wonder, because you know, a lot of the, you know, you know, a lot of the people operating our current foreign policy and you worked at one of the agencies prosecuting that foreign policy.
00:12:54.700Like, did you detect these attitudes when you worked there, when you worked at CIA, did you get the sense that people felt it would be okay to interfere in domestic politics in the U.S.?
00:13:06.360Well, they were sure keen on doing it in other countries, um, and used a lot of the same tactics.
00:13:14.960I never witnessed any tendency to do it in the U.S. at all, but it also, you know, I was working very specifically around, I worked UK liaison and then, um, worked operationally, uh, uh, on, uh, non-proliferation, but specifically within the context of non-state actors.
00:13:39.640So, very focused overseas, watched the exact same playbook of going in, finding underfunded, uh, newspapers and radio stations and TV shows, you know, a benefactor would arrive with funding, um, and all of a sudden, you know, that mouthpiece is, is presenting stories in a light that, you know, aligns with U.S. foreign policy.
00:14:09.640Or the, the preferences of, of whatever leader is in power here.
00:14:14.080And I think that we are seeing that across the board in media, except for new media like this.
00:14:20.540And that's been a godsend, um, to our domestic politics.
00:14:24.540So, you think that we're seeing federal agencies, intel agencies, um, influencing American media surreptitiously?
00:14:33.200I don't think that it's in as, I mean, I doubt they're actually investors.
00:14:38.820Um, there, there are layers of this, right?
00:14:41.760I mean, you see at the most basic level, it's, uh, you run this story for me and I'll give you the best tip the next time that I have a leak, right?
00:14:50.920Which is the oldest exchange in the world.
00:14:53.640Um, and, and it goes on, you know, every day, but there's no doubt that there are also actual formal sources throughout the media and always have been, you know?
00:15:10.920What does that mean, a formal source in the media?
00:15:13.360I mean, you know, an asset, somebody that would be paid by intelligence organizations to, uh, to work on their behalf, play stories on their behalf.
00:15:24.420And of course that happens, you know, all across the world.
00:15:29.680But when it happens in the United States, then it's the end of democracy, of course.
00:15:33.360Well, look, I mean, we have CISA operating basically a JIRA ticketing system for any tweet that the White House chooses to, that they would like to see deleted, even if it's ingest, even if it's satire, they just put it in the ticketing system.
00:15:53.580Well, what's interesting about CISA is that it, you know, it's a, um, a part of the Department of Homeland Security, but it's supposed to protect our, our nation's infrastructure from terror attacks.
00:16:07.900And at the beginning of the Biden administration, a decision was made that information is infrastructure.
00:16:18.200Which has, you know, an Orwellian tang to it.
00:16:21.420Um, and as a result, in order to secure it, um, you know, CISA was quietly empowered with the ability, sometimes directly and sometimes through NGO cutouts, um, to present to all the social media companies and Wikipedia and Amazon, uh, any content that was flagged as concerning.
00:16:48.660And they, you know, BOLO alerts went out beyond the lookout, uh, and they held weekly meetings and said, you know, here, here, put, put an enormous amount of financial pressure on these companies saying, you know, that their legal protections, uh, from liability would be withdrawn if they didn't cooperate.
00:17:11.320Um, naming and shaming them if they took, you know, longer than a week to respond on something from the podium in the White House.
00:17:19.160And, uh, Mark Zuckerberg has, you know, spoken publicly and, and written, um, about the degree of pressure that he felt to censor American people.
00:17:29.540And we're now seeing UK's Labour Party doing the exact same thing here in our own country, which is, you know, in some ways more egregious and, uh, and in other ways, you know, at least it's not our...
00:17:45.000So UK, the Labour Party, uh, which is currently in power in the UK, um, has a series of NGOs that it funds and directs, um, that have waged war on free speech, especially, uh, what they call, um, Twitter under Musk or Musk's Twitter.
00:18:07.300That they have gone into multiple offices, uh, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, and said, you know, that they want to participate in and provide support for destroying Musk's Twitter.
00:18:46.240That seems like foreign interference in our...
00:18:48.280Evidently, their, their approach is that as long as you're not donating money, as if you're out on the, if you're out on the campaign trail volunteering, that it's legal.
00:18:56.680But, uh, you know, certainly unwise in my opinion because, uh, you know, if President Trump wins this election, which he's looking very likely to do right now, um, you know, it's, it's an improper way to conduct foreign relations, right?
00:19:15.120You don't go to another country and campaign for a particular candidate for office.
00:19:18.800Yeah, or try and shut down their most basic rights.
00:19:22.940I mean, the First Amendment, as everybody always says, it's first for a reason.
00:19:28.960The Constitution, you know, was written a decade later, but largely in response to our secession from Great Britain to come and to meddle with that Constitution in our own country.
00:19:42.140And, of course, this follows suit, um, with some of the challenges that we're seeing free speech face in the United Kingdom, where people are being thrown in prison for 10 months, for two years, and so forth for, uh, for social media posts.
00:20:03.360And, and, and, and by the way, that does not reflect England, uh, or, or Great Britain.
00:20:08.020It is a, a very small, um, group of leaders there who have aligned themselves with a very small group of leaders here in the same way that censorship, uh, and, and undermining the Constitution does not reflect the American people.
00:20:22.620And yet our leaders persist in doing it.
00:20:29.980I mean, I, I have a law degree, um, from Oxford on, you know, in English law.
00:20:37.080And it was always clear that, you know, it's not a written constitution, it's much more based in precedent, but that there is a deep and abiding respect going back to the Magna Carta for, uh, civil liberties.
00:20:49.900And, uh, the idea that, uh, a flood of immigration, which, you know, we must take a measure of accountability for, because largely our going into Iraq was, uh, was what began that entire shift in the demographics of Europe, um, would have such an impact.
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00:22:52.780We broke the world for, I used to say we broke the world for 20 years, but here we are, and I think, you know, the ramifications we're continuing to deal with.
00:23:02.920And they, you know, they compound because as a result of that, you know, we have Brexit, we have many of the pressures that have led to the Ukraine war.
00:23:24.440And as a result of that, we're facing, I think, really unprecedented dangers in this country that are also greatly underappreciated, and we will respond to if they happen.
00:23:39.260And I think that escalatory cycle is what keeps us trapped in the bad decision-making.
00:23:47.320And, you know, I remember at the time in Iraq, it was, you know, six months, we'll be out, they'll greet us as heroes.
00:23:56.580And the same thing was said in Ukraine, and we find ourselves in these quagmires without realizing that, yes, there's a body count, and by the way, that is generally largely lied about and hidden.
00:24:09.320But then there's this vastly higher body count of those whose lives have been uprooted, and who have either died early as a result of, you know, migration or deaths of despair.
00:24:28.260And those numbers are incredibly hard to ever even peg down.
00:24:32.480And when you look at the millions and millions displaced, I mean, Brown University pegs the global war on terrorism as having killed or led to the deaths of 800,000 civilians.
00:24:47.060And that goes so far beyond what the U.S. will speak to.
00:24:53.840And then those that were forced to migrate are in the many millions.
00:24:57.540And when you take homogenous, you know, Europe is balkanized, but each element there is accustomed to being very homogenous.
00:25:10.240Those are the indigenous populations of the continent.
00:25:12.860And when, you know, when I was in, when I was at Georgetown, I did my master's at the School of Foreign Service there, and the focus of my thesis was trying to get very quantitative about predicting terrorism.
00:25:30.000Because at the time it was a very squishy subject, it was post-9-11, and it was mostly qualitative the way people were describing it.
00:25:38.220And one of the closest corollaries that I could find to being predictive was the ratio between hookah bars and madrasas, but not just the ratio, the rate at which it changed.
00:25:56.760And that is, I think, deeply underappreciated.
00:26:01.500It's not that they don't necessarily plan to, at some point, have their demographics look different.
00:26:21.400Whatever, you know, that's it, that madrasa bars and hookah bars are in the Middle Eastern context.
00:26:29.420But when you look at what we're experiencing in the U.S., where you have kids who've just come back from a pandemic, then being sent home again to do Zoom school so that their classrooms can be used to house migrants.
00:26:43.900Or, you know, hotels all being shut for the same purpose while veterans sleep under bridges on the streets.
00:26:54.060It's—the scale of it and the deluge is what makes it impossible for any society to absorb.
00:27:03.580And that doesn't make it, you know, that doesn't make it racist.
00:27:09.220It's human nature to need time and the nature of economies and societies to need time to be able to expand and adapt.
00:27:19.240And I think our going into Iraq—Afghanistan a little bit, though, in the early days, that was actually pretty well managed before it sprawled.
00:27:30.820But 2003, I think, was really the beginning of this era where we were shifting, you know, we were talking about a rules-based order and breaking every single rule in that rules-based order.
00:27:46.420And then having utter disregard for the social chaos that was resulting.
00:27:51.680Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And people's need, which is inherent, for order and predictability and continuity in their lives and their communities.
00:28:02.900We always talk about communities. Nobody actually cares about communities. They'll blow them up in a heartbeat.
00:28:07.180So can I just ask you—there's so many threads—but just to get back to what drew you into this kind of amazing life that you've lived, which was 9-11.
00:28:16.8209-11. I don't understand—I sincerely don't understand, maybe you do, why 23 years later, when, you know, every regime in place in 2001 is now different, including the Saudi government.
00:28:30.620Why we would have so many classified documents from that time. What's the excuse for that? I don't get that at all.
00:28:37.720I mean, why do we still have classified documents from the 60s?
00:28:40.860Oh, I completely agree. But because 9-11 was, you know, was the world-changing event of our lifetimes, I think it's fair to say in retrospect, I don't understand the justification for that.
00:28:51.980And I don't know why nobody demands, like, why not declassify it? Like, why shouldn't—it's our country. All these people died. We should know.
00:28:59.080Right. And I agree entirely, and I agree—I mean, the same applies for the 60s.
00:29:05.120I think, ultimately, you know, when most Americans go to work for a third of their working week, they are working for the government.
00:29:14.400They are taking that money, having spent the day away from their families, sacrificing whatever they would prefer to be doing, and they don't get to keep any of it.
00:29:23.060They turn it all over to the government.
00:29:24.320The government works for the people directly. I mean, they are directly paid by the people.
00:29:32.040And if your boss asks what you've been doing, and, you know, you say, sorry, I can't tell you it's classified, it doesn't cut it, you know.
00:29:42.140And, you know, are there moments where, you know, the actual identity of a source who's, you know, preventing nuclear war with the Russians is at stake?
00:29:53.260Sure. But there are actually quite few and far between.
00:29:56.960And, you know, I think there is a bureaucratic inertia here.
00:30:01.820Some of it is CYA, and some of it is, you know, probably more nefarious than that.
00:30:07.880But there is also a lot of bureaucratic inertia, and it's one of the reasons I'm excited about the prospect of Elon getting in there, but to do some surgery on some of that bureaucracy.
00:30:17.520But, you know, CYA 101, when you start, you have this one week, you know, fill out your tax forms, get the same as you would with any other job.
00:30:31.200There's just, here's the insurance program, and the person who's going to work in, you know, the coffee shop is sitting next to someone who's about to go down to the farm.
00:30:41.920And the email client that you use there looks a lot like Gmail.
00:30:46.420I mean, it's provided by Google, and it has all the normal fields, and then an additional field that's for classification.
00:30:55.040And it's a drop-down menu, and it, when it first drops down, it's all checkboxes with their own, you know, subsets.
00:31:05.360And it's hundreds of different classifications, all different numbers and codes.
00:31:09.800And you can hover over them, and they say when to use them.
00:31:13.480But, but there are a lot, and we were told in that first day, you know, in that first course, you know, just to make it easy on yourself, pick HCS 404, checkbox it, hit save as favorites, it'll come up every time, and then you don't have to worry about it.
00:31:35.080Well, that's, you know, human compartmented sensitive information, it's usually reserved for, you know, the actual identity, address, or identifying details of a source that, whose life could be in danger for what they're doing.
00:31:50.060And yet here it's being used for, you know, I'll meet you at 4.30 at Dunkin' Donuts, and everything in between, good and bad, nefarious and not.
00:32:02.300And the problem with that is that it is completely exempt from any declassification threshold ever.
00:32:09.480And as a result of this kind of administrative tweak, which is either just to save people time, or maybe to, you know, reduce the number of things that will ever eventually be published.
00:32:22.220Now you have class after class after class of CA officers that, you know, just chronically make sure that every single email they ever write will never see the light of day.
00:32:32.300And I think that is being done across government.
00:32:36.540So literally, the default is secrecy from the public.
00:32:46.300You never know how much money was spent, what it was spent on, whether it was legal, you know, whether you spent that Tuesday away from your family working to pay taxes, and those taxes went to kill someone, or went to save someone's life.
00:33:09.380I have a lot of respect for the role of intelligence agencies in saving lives and in preventing conflict and attacks.
00:33:22.540I think they're actually far more valuable in that than many people realize because they have so sullied their name by getting into all kinds of other business that they shouldn't be doing.
00:33:36.580But there is a very valuable role for them.
00:33:38.780And in that, there are some things that do, you know, need to remain secret.
00:33:45.140But 20 years later, 40 years later, 60 years later, you know, that, then it becomes about, quote unquote, preserving trust in our institutions.
00:34:00.240You know, code for, if you knew what we did then, you would shut us down now, you know.
00:34:05.640I assume that's the motive behind continuing to classify documents from 1963 in the Kennedy Assembly.
00:34:13.080Well, it's sure not sources and methods, right?
00:34:15.820I mean, if it is, then, you know, we've got, we need to update our sources and methods.
00:34:22.040But it's not, I mean, from time to time, they will say this is about protecting allies.
00:34:32.120Of course, I think we would all want to know if, if there were allies or any other nation states involved in what happened in the 60s or what happened in 9-11.
00:34:42.000So protecting anyone above the American people who you work for doesn't really make a lot of sense.
00:34:49.380They'll actually say it's to protect allies.
00:34:51.160Well, not about a specific operation, but as a reason for long-term classification when pushed, yeah.
00:35:01.320That's pretty outrageous that they would admit that.
00:35:04.920So the interests of a foreign country are more important than the interests of the American people?
00:35:08.120I think their, I think their kind of argument would be, if I were to steel man it,
00:35:14.560eventually the American people will be protected by something that we need from that ally.
00:35:21.160Some kind of, you know, security collaboration or whatever we might need down the road and therefore, you know, we must keep that relationship strong.
00:35:29.140And again, if it is the identity of somebody who's working with you, whose family is going to be in danger, that is absolutely true.
00:35:37.300And maybe that's still true 40 years later.
00:35:40.840You know, it's possible that it is in certain circumstances.
00:36:31.760For her to know whether or not her own government was involved in these assassinations.
00:36:36.860And if so, what's been done about it to make sure that that never, ever happens again, that there's never a coup like that in this country again.
00:36:45.440And I think when you look at the collaboration that was going on in those days between.
00:36:54.700The intelligence community and organized crime and the mob, you know, there were very blurry boundaries.
00:37:28.440I mean, the the intelligence community's job is to protect the American people.
00:37:33.420And sometimes they interpret that as requiring.
00:37:37.840Collaboration with criminal elements, with terror organizations.
00:37:41.160Um, ostensibly as part of cover to, you know, to complete an operation that will save American lives or provide information that, you know, would be helpful to American leaders.
00:37:55.900Clearly, in the 60s, that ended up being manipulated into a broader collaboration that allowed.
00:38:15.300U.S. government elements to undertake activities that they could not directly undertake by law.
00:38:22.940And, you know, I think we've seen that even with liaison partnerships.
00:38:30.240Um, you know, it's clear that five eyes has been used, um, you know, liaison, intelligence liaison partners have been used to, uh, surveil leaders in our own government when our intelligence agencies could not do it directly.
00:38:46.280Because there's no prohibition on sharing intelligence.
00:38:54.980And similarly, you get an NGO or a contractor to censor the American people, or you get, uh, a criminal organization to undertake a criminal act that, you know, you might, it might not be so savory for your own officers to do.
00:39:16.340And that, you know, I, I never worked in Latin America, so it's not, um, it's not something that I have directly witnessed, but I certainly have direct, you know, knowledge of it happening.
00:39:30.260Of the U.S. government collaborating or having some relationship that's not purely antagonistic with the Mexican and or other drug cartels.
00:39:40.220And I, and, and I think, you know, again, the steel man would be, this is for the benefit of the American people.
00:39:49.000Well, it's always for your own good, for sure.
00:39:51.540And look, is there an argument for having penetrations in the top of the cartels in the same way that you do at the top of, you know, the Iranian or Russian or any other adversarial government?
00:40:15.540And there's just so much money spinning off of these enterprises, these, the cartels that, I mean, you could just see corruption happening very easily.
00:40:25.060And I, I know one person who was involved in that, who, who I trust, I can't prove it, but who worked for CIA as a contractor moving over as so many do from the military.
00:40:36.720Um, and, you know, he's told me at great length about the money, uh, that CIA was getting from, from drug cartels in Latin America and South America in his case.
00:40:47.680I can't prove that, but I, I was shocked to hear that.
00:40:53.080Well, I mean, look at Iran-Contra, you know, I mean, look at Air America and Vietnam.
00:40:57.140Like these are, it's not, this is not a new pattern for intelligence.
00:41:01.300And when you look at black budgets, you know, I mean, Congress was stunned that there were operations happening in Niger and obviously they control the purse strings.
00:41:16.000And so that pattern has gone back, uh, a long way where, um, where the narcotics trade has, uh, has funded off book activities or that, you know, that is obviously what happened with the Contras and, um, has, has happened before and since.
00:41:39.900Given how many Americans are dying or whose lives are being destroyed, families wrecked entire parts of the country, just devastated by drugs, um, it's, it's a little much.
00:41:52.300I mean, that's like kind of at this point, like Nazi collaboration level immoral, I would say.
00:41:59.500It is, uh, it's pouring over the border, um, and along with it, you know, humans and children.
00:42:08.480And, uh, I think we really are seeing, um, the devastation that that reaps, as you say, the, I mean, the, just the sheer scale and the sum of the revenue involved makes it, uh, uh, uh, a real challenge.
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00:44:16.020So what about congressional oversight?
00:44:30.580I mean, you wonder about the committee chairman in the House, a couple of Republicans who I know, who seem to me as an outsider, sort of outsider, completely controlled by the intel agencies.
00:45:22.680I mean, I look at the Speaker of the House whose views on everything kind of changed instantly on the foreign policy questions.
00:45:29.500And I think what are the I mean, there's never been a more obedient speaker to the to the will and whims of the intel community than Mike Johnson.
00:45:40.680And you sort of wonder, like, what is that?
00:45:42.180Well, I mean, I don't know the answer, but you look at, you know, the legislation that has come up through the House on multiple things, you know, on election integrity, on EMP preparedness.
00:45:57.500Both are two, you know, completely different things, both of them, actually, the Shield Act in both cases, but several other iterations that passed the House with real bipartisan support and then just got completely gummed up in the Senate.
00:46:15.320And these are things that seem so unassailable and supported across the board by, you know, regular American voters and the base across both parties that you have to ask what Hoover files are involved.
00:46:40.600And if not a Hoover file, then a, you know, a second house, wherever.
00:46:55.340But it's harder to believe that we're not going to do anything to root it out, you know, and I think you have to name a problem and really recognize it before you can fix it.
00:47:05.280And it's something that I admire about what, you know, Matt Taibbi and Schellenberger did with the Twitter files was for Elon to go in and say, you know, before I even touch anything on day one, please document for posterity all of the abuses that have been happening here.
00:47:27.240So that, A, we can fix them and, B, the American people know this was happening and can prevent it from happening again.
00:47:37.120And, you know, if that hadn't happened, we wouldn't know what SOSA had been up to, which also oversees election integrity, by the way, and how important that.
00:47:51.560Yeah, those are its two, it's two outside of, you know, bridges and ports and regular infrastructure.
00:47:57.600Those are its two big focuses are censorship of social media and election integrity.
00:48:05.000Of course, you can't have election integrity with censorship because censorship is itself an interference in the democratic process.
00:48:14.220Certainly. I mean, when you look at the Hunter Biden laptop story and, you know, it's been so successfully kind of sidelined that it's hard to even bring up, honestly.
00:48:27.480We would kind of roll their eyes, not the Hunter Biden laptop story again.
00:48:30.720But what I find really astounding about that is that, you know, it was Tony Blinken as a campaign official for now President Biden who rang up the CIA and said, you know, we have a debate next week and we need to be able to rebut this.
00:48:53.040And can you write this letter? And in it, I mean, it's just such clear politicization of our security services, which is foundationally against everything that I was taught.
00:49:08.680When I mean, when I started there, I was told that if you had a partisan pin in the felt of your cubicle wall, you could be fired.
00:49:17.520And here we have, you know, that's for the rank and file.
00:49:21.700But the seventh floor are, you know, writing false intelligence estimates to get a presidential candidate out of hot water for his son's documentation of business deals that frankly look pretty corrupt and that the voter should get to make up their own mind about.
00:49:45.560Yeah. And maybe you're somebody who would look at the correspondence in that laptop and not be bothered by it.
00:49:53.500But you should get to make that decision before you cast your vote.
00:49:57.180And having a government agency where, you know, the CIA can come in and say, this is Russian disinformation when it flat out was not, was completely authentic.
00:50:13.100And then CISA can actually get to work for the coming four years while that person is president.
00:50:20.860And memory holding that because every single post about it is then flagged as misinformation is truly a violation of election integrity if ever there was one.
00:50:37.880I mean, all of the studies around that, the polling around it, say that it would have changed a sufficient enough votes to have an impact on the election.
00:50:45.720And if having your security services step in to lie about a foreign adversary's involvement in the election in order to conceal from voters correspondence of your own corrupt dealings with other foreign adversaries and have it change the outcome of the election is not interference.
00:51:15.720Were you shocked by that when you saw it?
00:51:19.460I was shocked by it when I realized that it was intentionally manufactured in that way.
00:51:31.180I mean, I think when I first heard it, you know, it seemed unlikely to me, but I hadn't really fully caught on at that point how manufactured the entire,
00:51:42.860you know, laptop story was, you know, laptop story was like it, it seemed like too audacious an intrusion into domestic political life.
00:51:58.440I felt like I felt like I felt like they wouldn't, they wouldn't have gone that far, that publicly to just out and out lie about it.
00:52:10.440And not only did they, but then the person who orchestrated it is now our secretary of state going and preaching democracy all around the world.
00:52:31.060Yeah, I mean, I can walk around that building in my, you know, with my eyes closed and say, you know, that door goes to this office and I go.
00:52:41.260And nowhere in any of those offices was the, like, overthrow governments and metal with domestic politics office, right?
00:52:50.860So, you know, I was never exposed to it.
00:52:56.720And it could be because in the early days, I definitely threw up the flag on a few things and said, hey, this, you know, they were using a lot of honorifics in the early days after 9-11,
00:53:08.060where kind of in English, it would be like Mr. Doctor, you know, but after 9-11, everybody was sending in Arabic language threat reporting or they were getting Arabic language threat reporting from their sources and they were not Arabic speakers.
00:53:24.200And so there were these huge files for people like Haji al-Yemeni, which is like someone who's completed the Hajj and comes from Yemen, which is, you know, many, many people.
00:53:41.020And so picking one person up and, you know, rendering them to another country because they fit that description when it's not a name and it's not an identifier was, you know, a human rights nightmare.
00:53:58.680I mean, it's not a different name, but I remember raising my hand around that because I was taking like Arabic 101 in my last year of grad school at Georgetown.
00:54:10.240And I had a wonderful Egyptian professor and he had just done a class on honorifics at the beginning to kind of like warm people up and teach them pronunciation.
00:54:18.420And I was literally that far and I mean, so, so brand new.
00:54:23.000And if that hadn't happened, I wouldn't have recognized it.
00:54:26.440But, and it ended up, you know, actually being right.
00:54:33.020I mean, they, they, they, it was a wrong person.
00:54:35.960And by the time that was recognized, they, you know, force fed him through his nose and, you know, just a whole human rights nightmare.
00:54:43.980I'm sorry to laugh, that's just so horrible.
00:54:52.160Well, I'm, I'm sharing what was in public, just, just to be clear, I'm sharing what was in the public account.
00:54:59.580So I, you know, I don't want to get, go beyond that.
00:55:03.220But it was the first time that I said, you know, this is, who do I talk to about this?
00:55:08.040This shouldn't have, you know, this shouldn't be happening.
00:55:09.980And I think from that moment on, my sense is that I was kind of put in the pile of, like, this is a person who will make, she's not going to just go along, right?
00:55:21.700Like, she'll, she, she will make trouble.
00:55:26.140I, I think I, I got filtered out of the go foment coups in foreign country recruitment program, thank God.
00:55:37.340But I never witnessed any of that there.
00:55:39.940It was actually really once I left that, in some ways, I feel like my education on the intelligence world began.
00:55:47.040And I knew a lot of really great people there, intellectually curious, smart, good-hearted, many theologians, many poets, like, really, like, interesting, unique group of people who argued a lot about where we should be and what we should be doing and the morality of things.
00:56:06.020I didn't find it to be an evil place at all.
00:56:10.300But I also am aware that I never came across any of the kinds of operations that, you know, now are being uncovered.
00:56:18.140And so, I think I was working, you know, the, keeping nuclear precursors out of the hands of terror suspects is, like, a fairly easy moral choice, right?
00:56:32.880And so, I never was exposed to any of that.
00:56:38.880And it was deeply distressing after leaving to, to watch all of the subsequent declassifications of what was being done at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
00:56:52.280And, you know, Cat's Eye in Thailand, and I hadn't, hadn't been aware of any of that.
00:56:58.780And then, to see it weaponized domestically was the, because, of course, that's the end of that story, when you really think about it.
00:57:09.600You know, there's no, in the end, the way that we treat other people is how we treat ourselves, the way that we treat people outside ends up in our home, you know, it's just the natural way of things.
00:57:20.380And I think it's, and I think it's no surprise when we've subjugated the world into kind of us versus them thinking and control, being at our kind of benevolent, benevolent control, being our love language globally as a nation, that, you know, our leaders end up doing the same thing at home and feeling like it's noble.
00:57:47.000So, again, nicely put, you made reference a moment ago to changes under, in the first years of the Biden administration, first months, to our EMP preparedness.
00:58:03.600Can you explain what an EMP is and what changed?
00:58:06.800Yeah, I mean, this is increasingly relevant now, and it's, it's a great credit to President Trump that he prepared us for it, and then, unfortunately, to President Biden that he revoked it.
00:58:21.820So, let me sort of explain a little about what it is.
00:58:24.640Do you remember over the last couple of weeks, there's been, there have been solar storms, and we've gotten to see the northern lights much, you know, farther south, which is beautiful.
00:58:39.340And maybe people were warned there might be slight disruptions to electronics, but for the most part, it's been, it's been beautiful and uneventful.
00:58:46.860Those solar storms can be far more powerful than that, naturally, so before even getting into human weaponizing of that.
00:58:59.280There have been lots of examples, but the Carrington event is probably the best known, right, in 1859, and was so, I mean, it set, you know, telegraph operators on fire, set forest fires, damaged the, the transatlantic cable miles beneath the ocean.
00:59:24.980And NASA says that were it to happen again, now, given the interconnected electrical grid that didn't exist then, that, you know, we'd be looking at, at darkness around most of the globe, possibly for years, up to seven years, is what they have said.
00:59:47.100And that these, that these, that these electromagnetic ejections happen from the sun every 100 to 150 years of that, of that magnitude.
00:59:58.340Of course, that was, you know, in 1850, so we're coming up due for one.
01:00:03.480Their current estimate is about 12% chance per decade, okay, so a non-zero chance, right, fairly likely that in our lifetime or our kid's lifetime, we will experience another one of these Carrington events.
01:00:15.340In fact, there was one in 2012 that came extremely close to us that would have been absolutely catastrophic, but didn't, didn't hit.
01:00:21.780And that would mean no electricity for years.
01:00:25.440Right, and that, you know, that sounds inconvenient, and, you know, maybe people can see how it would be, you know, it would cause some loss of life.
01:00:35.260But I think there's part of us, when we hear that, that thinks, like, I could use a break from Twitter, you know, like, it might be kind of nice.
01:00:42.580But the thing is that what, what people don't realize is that the world is no longer what it was in the 19th century, that, that almost everything at this point involves what they call SCADA systems,
01:00:58.720which are these small computers that use sensors to move valves or, you know, whether it's how many, how much natural gas can move through a pipeline,
01:01:10.980when to turn on the coolers in a nuclear power plant to make sure that there's not a meltdown,
01:01:15.960when to allow water to go over the Hoover Dam to prevent flooding, you know, air traffic control, traffic lights, and so on, all operated by SCADA systems now.
01:01:31.240Yeah, and those are all susceptible to this exact same kind of attack, or in the early days, you know, what we were just talking about was in the case of a solar flare.
01:01:47.040But humans being what they are, they've learned to weaponize this, right?
01:01:50.980And we know this because we have done it.
01:01:55.220Starfish Prime was the first test in 62, where the U.S. realized that this could be used as a weapon,
01:02:02.860and did the test above the Pacific, and it knocked out, you know, capabilities in Hawaii and farther beyond.
01:02:12.960We now know that the Soviets figured it out even earlier.
01:02:17.560They told us during the kind of detente in the 90s that they had already done seven tests at that point over Kazakhstan
01:02:24.900and wiped the entire power grid of Kazakhstan, actually, you know, created a lot of suffering in the process.
01:02:32.080But they saw it as having huge potential as a weapon because of that and began developing out, you know, what they called a super EMP,
01:02:42.440which is very specifically tuned not for yield but for electromagnetic pulse.
01:02:53.600And these are, you know, these are detonated 30 kilometers or so above a country.
01:02:57.520So you're not actually destroying anybody with the explosion.
01:03:02.420It is with the using the EMPs to kill the grid, what is now by many of our adversaries mentioned in their military manuals is no contact wars.
01:03:14.100So this is, you know, win World War III without ever having to have contact with the adversary.
01:03:19.560And when you look at the delivery mechanisms that are available here and the way that we're seeing EMPs discussed in China and Iran and Russia, North Korea, there are a wide variety of them.
01:03:38.640I mean, North Korea in 2013 ran the exact optimal orbit with its KSM-3 satellite over New York and Washington, D.C.
01:03:51.900That would be the optimal delivery for this kind of a weapon.
01:03:56.760And on the very same day, in April of 2013, sent military special forces, essentially, that have never been identified in to break into a substation, PG&E substation near San Jose in California.
01:04:25.060Well, thought to be North Korean, never actually identified or apprehended exactly the same day on the West Coast that they did the satellite run on the East Coast.
01:04:37.080What did they do at the PG&E substation?
01:04:44.600They were assessed to be extremely professional by the SEAL trainers who came in later to look at the site.
01:04:51.680They knew about an underground comms tunnel that they went in and cut communications and used sniper fire to damage but not take offline 17 transformers.
01:05:10.120We had a North Korean team of saboteurs or saboteurs sent by North Korea.
01:05:14.620Certainly, professional special forces of some variety thought to be North Korean.
01:05:23.280Just outside San Jose in Coyote, California.
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01:08:21.760No, it was very, very downplayed as vandalism.
01:08:27.620And, you know, people who are in the past,
01:08:30.280two months later, July, we had, or a few months later, in July, they found two SA-2 nuclear-capable missiles
01:08:44.480in the bay of a tanker in the Gulf of Mexico.
01:08:51.220And this was all really as the North Korean tensions were mounting, you know, which President Trump gets far too little credit, in my opinion, for that resolution or detente.
01:09:05.980And now, you know, under Biden-Harris, we have North Korean troops being pulled by Putin into the war in Ukraine.
01:09:14.360So that escalation is back in play again.
01:09:17.360But those are three distinct ways to attack our electrical grid that were all mounted within, you know, a handful of months.
01:09:28.240And as a result, in 2014, NORAD announced that they were fully moving and investing hundreds of millions of dollars into further rad-hardening Cheyenne Mountain.
01:09:40.920So they've taken it very seriously for their own force protection, which is good, but not for the rest of us.
01:09:48.320And can you just give us the cliff notes on what that means, hardening Cheyenne Mountain?
01:09:56.400If you put your phone in the microwave, right, it is safe from this kind of electromagnetic radiation.
01:10:06.280And so the question is, when you look at something as complex as our entire national grid,
01:10:12.120what are the nodes that are most vulnerable to this kind of attack?
01:10:16.780And really, there are sort of two categories that are highest consequence.
01:10:24.020One are the SCADA systems that would allow for the resulting forest fires and nuclear meltdowns and floods and plane crashes and hospital failures and traffic crashes and so forth if they fail.
01:10:39.460And they are as easy to protect as, you know, putting them in a metal shed instead of a wooden shed.
01:10:46.780Or taking the wooden sheds that exist and covering them with, you know, metal mesh.
01:10:53.260To the point that, you know, you could put that out for people in each community with specs.
01:11:00.440And I'm sure that they would get together on a Sunday and do it, you know.
01:11:03.940But regulation in our country doesn't allow us to do that.
01:11:06.760So the SCADA systems protecting those and then the extra high voltage transformers are a huge issue and sticking point for our grid.
01:11:23.220They only make about 200 of them a year.
01:11:25.140And they're incredibly expensive, hundreds of tons, you know, to move.
01:11:31.500And the coils are done mostly by hand, amazingly.
01:12:10.200And, you know, the benefit of this, despite, you know, in addition to protecting against this kind of attack, is that there are a lot of other grid vulnerabilities that are maybe lower damage when they happen, but higher likelihood.
01:12:25.460You know, an EMP attack or a solar flare are low probability, high catastrophe events.
01:12:31.960But weather-related damage is the opposite or sometimes catastrophic in its impact, as we've seen recently, right, in North Carolina and elsewhere.
01:12:43.120And a lot of the same guards around, especially around protecting from cascading SCADA failures where, you know, the charge can be, the surges can be prevented is really important to the EMP safety, but also would help prevent in those kinds of storm environments.
01:13:09.980And then you look at sabotage and vandalism, which is another really big issue that they have to protect against.
01:13:16.380And a Faraday cage, depending on its construction, can also, you know, prevent people from seeing where it is that they're letting off small arms fire or that they're targeting.
01:13:25.980Which we see, I mean, you know, when I drove in here, when you first arrive in your town, on the left, there's a little substation.
01:13:36.840And it has a chain-like fence around it, you know, no cameras.
01:13:40.480And that's the same all over the country.
01:13:42.880And everyone just sees those, you know, they see the little coils and don't really think much of it.
01:13:54.880Our eye just, you know, we're so accustomed to filtering these things out.
01:14:00.020But the entire basis of our life and our community and our country and our national security and our healthcare, our financial system, all relies on them.
01:14:11.220And it's not just, you know, detonating a nuclear weapon above the United States.
01:14:16.940Obviously, there's a deterrent effect.
01:14:21.220There would be a response because Cheyenne Mountain and other parts are completely rad-hardened.
01:14:27.380So even if the entire country were out, you know, the United States would be able to respond and has had subs overseas and so on.
01:14:35.820But you can achieve pretty much the same impact with commercially available EMP suitcases that you can buy for industrial reasons with no, you know, no special license or anything like that.
01:14:52.080And, you know, if you pick the right nine substations to put that suitcase next to, you have achieved the exact same thing.
01:15:03.600And as you can see, you know, with the San Jose attack, those people were never actually seen on camera and they were never, I mean, you can see them as figures, but they were never identified.
01:15:14.400So there's vandalism, there are natural weather events, including the solar flares, the storms that you mentioned, and then there's EMP.
01:15:26.340So the threats to the grid and to the lives of 350 million Americans are completely real and in some sense imminent.
01:15:33.860Like we know this is going to happen at some point.
01:15:36.220So the federal response hardening the grid changed when Biden got elected?
01:15:44.400Yeah, and this is what is really hard to accept.
01:15:49.600And it's very similar, actually, to what happened with the border wall, which is here you have two policies.
01:15:53.980The EMP executive order that President Trump was the first president to ever direct all parts of government to work together to be sure that the American people were protected from intentional EMP attack after decades of knowing that our primary adversaries were all considering it, training for it, had weapons programs designed to do this.
01:16:19.820And by the way, I mean, before we get to Biden, you know, the primary delivery mechanism in all of those tests was a high altitude balloon.
01:16:31.920You know, when we then have China, a primary adversary who we know have talked in their training sessions and their training manuals about using high altitude balloons to deliver this kind of an EMP device and have done tests where it's the same exact payload as the high altitude balloons that were recovered.
01:16:54.860And then you have Russia, what I'm sure you remember last year, Washington worked itself into quite justified, in my opinion, state about, you know, the quote unquote space nuke, right?
01:17:11.940Putting a nuclear weapon into orbit on a satellite.
01:17:16.220And at the time, the media made it out like this was maybe a danger.
01:17:22.560And even if it was a danger, it was only a danger to other satellites, right?
01:17:26.600And it would get in the way of your car's GPS.
01:17:31.360And, you know, maybe it would be problematic for the military.
01:17:36.280But they definitely downplayed its impact on anyone on the ground, right?
01:17:40.200And yet we know from past Russian trials and the SA-3 satellite that the North Koreans sent over, that this kind of delivery is the exact same setup as an anti-satellite weapon.
01:18:02.240You put a nuclear weapon on a satellite headed up from the South, where we have virtually no detection set up.
01:18:15.440And you don't even get the 22 minutes that you would get with a solar flare.
01:18:22.180It just comes completely out of the blue and there's no preparation whatsoever.
01:18:26.640And in general, in the, you know, in the military theory of these adversaries, it's a multi-pronged attack, right?
01:18:35.480That's the initial, you take out, you know, you send everybody into chaos and you take out their ability to communicate with one another.
01:18:41.580And then it's followed by whatever comes next.
01:18:44.900And for us to know, to have seen that in, you know, war games in at least two of our largest adversaries, both Iran and Russia have included in their training simulations.
01:19:01.720It's in three of their manuals, China, Russia, and Iran, Russia, we know, is putting a nuclear weapon in, in orbit.
01:19:15.600I mean, the Hyl-2 balloons have already come across our own territory.
01:19:20.120North Korea, three, three-way attack simulation that all three were successful.
01:19:28.340Clearly, this is on the minds of our adversaries and it's an imminent danger.
01:19:34.240Certainly, the, the vulnerability, the, you know, the area in which we are most vulnerable for maximum casualties and impact.
01:19:43.840And yet, President Trump was the first president to, to say across different parts of government who sometimes have a hard time talking to one another, I want you to work together to make sure that the American people are protected from this.
01:20:01.420And by the way, it's not even that expensive in the big scheme of, you know, government spending.
01:20:07.460To do it really well, the cost estimate was $2 billion, which, you know, we've just sent another $100 billion to Ukraine.
01:20:16.480So, then Biden takes office and, frankly, in my mind, just inconceivably revokes that.
01:20:29.080And in the same way that he says, with the wall, you know, both of those, to my mind, are initiatives that are already underway, that are designed to protect the American people's security and homeland.
01:20:48.520And he reversed for, you know, with, with no, with no replacement plan in place.
01:20:58.180But, you know, with the border wall, you could, and I think that's a, a more complex topic than we appreciate.
01:21:05.940Like, what is the point of what they just did?
01:21:08.180I, I don't know, but at least there was a perceived political constituency in favor of mass immigration.
01:21:15.960Okay, they thought it would make it a one-party state.
01:21:41.040Yeah, and they, uh, are supposed to regulate one another, basically, or one, you know, FERC is supposed to regulate her.
01:21:48.580Um, and unsurprisingly, in that kind of a cozy relationship, it doesn't work.
01:21:54.200And they do have some self-imposed EMP standards, but they are for a reasonably light solar storm and would not come anywhere close to being able to withstand any kind of nuclear fallout.
01:22:08.260Um, and really push back on the costs that would be involved.
01:22:15.720And the, the difficulty, you know, it could be passed on to consumers at 20 cents per consumer per year, which I think most consumers, when they really understand that this is, this would, you know, keep their power on not just in those extreme circumstances, but also help in storms and with vandalism and with these other.
01:22:36.260And keep millions from starving to death.
01:22:42.440I mean, in our, in our country, not, but, uh, but these certainly will be global issues and there will be global competition for the very slow to build transformers that would fix them.
01:23:14.280And, um, so potentially catastrophic, non-zero chance of it happening.
01:23:20.320I mean, 12% per decade is, and I should say that the EMP committee that Congress, um, put in place and unfortunately was disbanded under President Obama.
01:23:34.900But prior, prior to that, um, included really the intelligence community's best analysts based on all of the testing that they'd seen hostile countries to.
01:23:44.600Their estimate was eight to nine out of every 10 Americans could lose their life by the end of the first year, which is a staggering and almost impossible to believe estimate until you realize that, you know, within, obviously at the outset, you have half a million people in the air at any given time on a thousand flights.
01:24:11.240So that's half a million people at any moment, any given moment.
01:24:15.620And then you have, um, you know, obviously traffic and everything that, that happens in that immediate chaos.
01:24:26.980Um, but very quickly after that, the SCADA systems begin to fail and you have fire, you have flood within 72 hours, you have meltdown at all nuclear facilities.
01:24:40.120And then refrigeration has gone out at supermarkets and at the regional food warehouses.
01:24:49.920So the food supply ends, there's no, you know, there's no access to ATMs or money or financial structure of any type, any type, no access to your prescription medications, you know, no access to law enforcement, um, and no clean water and no food.
01:25:06.640So unless, you know, you have your Berkey that you can put lake water and, and, you know, a year's worth of food, uh, and a way to protect yourself, uh, you know, you've, which the vast majority of Americans don't have.
01:25:23.900Um, you are in an incredibly vulnerable position that there's absolutely no reason to risk putting our own people.
01:25:30.320And if you're, and that's just for people who are outside the cities, but if you're in the middle of a tightly packed metro area, you're just done.
01:25:37.760And, and the, and this, the, I mean, I can't even imagine people's be having, you know, covered chaos in Baghdad and hurricane Katrina, you know, anyone who's ever seen the, you know, disappearance of authority knows that like within hours, people start going crazy and hurting each other.
01:25:55.100Yeah. And you have, you know, you have your kids in your apartment and how do you get them out and how do you get them to safety and where do you take them?
01:26:00.320And, you know, the prospect of even rolling any kind of dice to put our, our own people in that situation while then glibly taking the money that we could spend doing that and instead send it to, to arm Ukraine when sending ballistic missiles into Russia using American satellites.
01:26:30.320You know, you know, puts us in a direct hot war with Russia for the first time ever.
01:26:38.040You know, that, that actually puts us at a higher risk of this kind of attack than ever in our history.
01:26:45.860And at a moment where instead of spending our money to protect ourselves from that attack, we're actually spending our money to provoke that attack.
01:26:54.620We did a live tour last month, one of the funnest things we've ever done.
01:26:58.500And coast to coast, 16 different cities speaking.
01:27:18.540So I don't know that one in a million Americans has ever heard any, really anything you just said or certainly not heard it fleshed out in the way that you just did.
01:27:45.240And yet, when you hear it, it makes sense and it's clearly true.
01:27:49.060So that raises the question about our information, you know, the integrity of our information sources.
01:27:54.720And why aren't we hearing this from the press, from the media?
01:28:00.820Well, you know, I think there's a party line right now in the media, if you haven't noticed.
01:28:08.600And this, I think, does not support the security state's thesis about how safe the current administration has made us in the world.
01:28:24.380Right. And, you know, when you look at the economy versus stability, you know, four years ago and now it is just absolutely clear that we should be talking about the fact that the world has been set on fire over the last four years.
01:28:44.680And yet it's really not front and center in our news at all, you know, with the exception of of the Middle East, which, you know, gets, I think, pretty slanted coverage.
01:28:55.620So, you know, having come through two years of the RFK campaign, I will tell you, it is, I mean, it's truly amazing to me how, to what degree a media blackout really can be coordinated and be successful.
01:29:16.000What was your, tell us, what was your experience?
01:29:17.580I mean, it was clear to me pretty early on that, you know, you were, if you were someone who had heard from Bobby, then you were someone who was at least considering voting for him.
01:29:32.960And, and many of those people, you know, were very clear that he was, should be the next president of the United States.
01:29:39.900So you're either somebody who had heard from Bobby or you were somebody who had heard about Bobby, right, from your cable news source or from your newspaper and so on.
01:29:49.280And, you know, you begin to realize when you're on the inside of, of, you know, the receiving end of all of that is that every place, you know, anything that you know about this election, you know about it because you have read, heard, or seen it on a platform.
01:30:10.400That has a commercial interest in the outcome of the election, right?
01:30:14.460I mean, you look at Google, hundreds of millions of dollars in, in, um, pharmaceutical ad revenue, billions of dollars in pharmaceutical ad revenue, uh, that Bobby said in his very first speech when he announced for president that he would bring us in line with the rest of the world by banning pharmaceutical advertising on TV.
01:30:32.980You know, what business do you know that is going to give fair coverage to somebody that could cost them billions of dollars a year in their business model that, you know, it's not in their fiduciary interest.
01:30:44.100And it's the same, you know, we see it with certainly all the cable news channels who are also reliant on pharmaceutical advertising.
01:30:51.160And then, you know, the reliance, I mean, Bobby's determination to cut excess military funding when so many of these media companies have board entanglements or common ownership with, uh, defense contractors or are themselves.
01:31:09.180I mean, you look at Amazon Web Services and the Washington Post and, you know, GE and NBC and so forth.
01:31:14.300I mean, there's a long, long history of that.
01:31:17.380And how much does Boeing spend on Politico every year?
01:31:21.260But so that is kind of the, I didn't understand this actually until Bobby explained it to me, having spent my entire life in the media, in television, not realizing that the point of the pharmaceutical ads was not to sell the drugs to consumers who can't prescribe the drugs to themselves, of course.
01:32:18.660But when, when voters are so steeped in a media environment and especially with algorithmic things where, you know, they're seeing their Google news feed.
01:32:28.740And every single time they see Bobby's name, he's like a psychopathic, crazy, dog eating, you know, joke.
01:32:39.020And that was their approach was either to absolutely not cover him whatsoever.
01:32:42.960I mean, he would give these extraordinary speech.
01:32:45.940He had this peace speech that he did in New Hampshire in the, at the outset of the campaign.
01:32:49.800And the America's strong speech about building a unity government based on Lincoln's team of rivals were two of the most incredible speeches I've, of the campaign.
01:33:03.700And neither of them, they were all attended by 30, 40 reporters with cameras, obviously waiting for him to say some terrible things so they could play that one clip.
01:33:12.880And then none of them ran any of it because they, you know, because they were such strong speeches.
01:33:17.700And so we, we were up against that throughout.
01:33:21.780Did you know how the America, I mean, obviously been around, you worked at BBC, you've been around the American media for your whole life.
01:33:28.660But did you appreciate how this works before you started running this campaign?
01:33:35.040Not nearly to the degree that, you know, the, the degree of politicization was surprising to me.
01:33:42.560And I think I had not really come to understand the, the kind of deep commercial drivers behind editorial lines.
01:33:51.600And, you know, I guess had a little bit of idealism still from the old, like Edward R. Moreau, like, you know, there must be some journalists still out there kind of thing.
01:34:04.100And they've been very few and far between.
01:34:07.840I mean, I really, I'm hard pressed to even come up with an example.
01:34:12.340I'm glad to be sitting across from you, but I will say, thank God for Elon Musk.
01:34:17.740I mean, I really believe that every American should include him and his family in their prayers every day, because, you know, he is holding our constitution together right now.
01:34:29.840And, you know, even the internet archive is offline now.
01:35:10.720And, and I was explaining about the importance of free speech and, and how I wanted her to have it when she was older.
01:35:18.920And she said, so are there countries where if you criticize the leader, you know, they'll put you in jail?
01:35:24.840And I said, yes, there are either a lot of those countries.
01:35:27.120They, that used to be all the countries, basically.
01:35:29.020And when you, when you go back and you look at the, at the audacity of what that idea was at the beginning and the fact that it wasn't happening anywhere else.
01:35:40.540And then hundreds, you know, of, of other countries now have followed suit and that we're just going to give that up for the short-sighted gain of one political party in one election cycle or one blob for, you know, five to 10 election cycles while, you know, their lust for power continues.
01:36:03.380And that as a result, because no government is ever going to cede power given to it in an emergency.
01:36:08.740So even once that runs its course, it still means that my kids' kids will not have the freedom of speech that, you know, that they, that is their birthright given to them by our country's founders.
01:36:28.140And to see Elon, who wasn't even born in this country, step up and defy the commercial interests, you know, I, I don't know his finances, but it seems to me that he has taken a serious financial hit.
01:36:55.580And I, I think he is genuinely driven by the desire to see human freedom endure.
01:37:06.460And I don't know why more of us are not, because there's nothing more important and it's ours to lose, you know.
01:37:19.680And, um, uh, it's bewildering to me when I hear people say, well, you know, our government can be trusted with those.
01:37:30.140Like they can make the judgment of what I should be able to say and what I shouldn't.
01:37:33.900And he just, the, the idea that, but what about the next leader?
01:37:39.840You know, every government, is it, is it Federalist 51, the one that where Madison talks about, you know, if, if men were angels, we wouldn't need government enough government where angels, it wouldn't need to be regulated, but we're making, you know, the challenge is making a government of, of men over men.
01:37:56.980And, um, and, um, and yet they took on that challenge and achieved it so beautifully.
01:38:03.480And I remember Mr. Saar at NCS tell, um, my last two years of high school in DC, when I came back to the United States, telling, uh, telling us about Skokie versus Illinois.
01:38:18.820And I just, and just being incredibly moved by the courage that it takes as a society to defend such abhorrent speech.
01:38:29.520Because, you know, that, you know, it's, it's not a sliding scale.
01:38:34.140It's just, you either have it or you don't.
01:38:35.980I think it's Salman Rushdie who says the minute somebody says, I believe in free speech, except, you know, stop them right there because they don't need to finish the sentence.
01:38:44.060But I get, I just refer back to my first question, um, which is since I'm so familiar with, you know, all the schools you went to, the credentials you have, you know, the world that you're from.
01:38:55.940Um, I mean, you've got to be in the one 10th of 1% of people, you know, who've taken this position.
01:39:01.440You took such an unpopular position and I know, you know, you're married into the family and all that, but still you became Bobby Kennedy's campaign manager.
01:39:08.640And now Bobby Kennedy's endorsed Trump and I just don't think you could hoist a bigger middle finger in the face of the world that you're from.
01:39:18.380I mean, I just know that because I, I know that world.
01:39:21.000So like, did you even hesitate before doing that?
01:39:27.800I, you know, I think that if you gave them the choice, I mean, if they came down from Mars and you put the exact occur, you know, what is happening right now in front of them without the names of the parties or the names of the participants and said, you know, you have one four year stint where no new wars are started.
01:39:53.500Where, you know, bread costs half of what it costs now, gas a third, you know, et cetera, et cetera, you know, rises in standard of living across the country, lower suicide rates, lower depression, you know, lower homelessness, lower incarceration, lower immigration.
01:40:15.100That is, you know, illegal and, and, and, and results in, in children being lost around the country.
01:40:24.820And then you compare it with four years of another government that is endorsed, by the way, by Dick Cheney now, and a host of neocons that involves two new wars, you know, printing $8 trillion of additional debt that is a tax on the poor and on future generations in order to pay for more war.
01:40:54.820More children going into poverty, more, you know, that we have a real unemployment rate of 25% in this country, a quarter, when you take into account people who want a full-time job and don't have one, or people who have a full-time job but don't make $25,000 a year, which is not a living wage.
01:41:16.620If you take that into account, if you take that into account, we have 24.9% true unemployment rate.
01:41:21.140So when you, I think that you asked about people in my world, I think if you put any of that to them, and then on top of that said, you know, and this, this leader that has plunged people into poverty and unemployment and, you know, had two, two additional wars started on his watch is censoring speech on social media, weaponizing the courts to take people of his own party and every single other party off of the ballot.
01:41:50.660I mean, literally, Dean Phillips, Marianne Williamson, Robert Kennedy Jr., obviously President Trump, no labels, Jill Stein, everybody.
01:42:02.200There's nobody that, as far as I know, that didn't face some kind of a lawsuit to try to challenge their actual ballot access, the ability for an American to turn up and exercise their own sacred individual sovereignty of thought and choose whether or not to vote for them.
01:42:21.300Every single one of them was attacked in court to get their name off of the ballot.
01:42:29.940You can vote for anyone as long as it's me.
01:42:31.960And I believe that anyone who I knew growing up, and hopefully any American that I didn't know growing up, when they see it with the in-group, out-group coding stripped away, would all, I mean, would all choose the same outcome here.
01:42:58.820I think the challenge is that we are evolutionarily designed to retain the approval of our group.
01:43:13.360When you're walking across the early savannah and your group shuns you, you know, you're out of luck, right?
01:43:24.380And there's a study that DARPA did around news, you know, reading news, where they expected the frontal lobe to light up because you were assessing the logic of what you were reading.
01:43:43.160And actually, it lights up second after this area over the ear, which is if you hold up a shirt and think about whether your friends would make fun of you if you wore it.
01:43:54.720So, you know, you are using your analytical mind, but only after you've already decided whether you're using it to poke holes or, you know, to reinforce.
01:44:07.860And I think that, honestly, my friends who don't support President Trump, I think that's why.
01:44:14.660I guess everything you've said is true and for the third time, nicely put, but I also have a little more difficulty giving that group a pass because that's our leadership class raised and to some extent, to be brutally honest, bred to rule.
01:44:34.320And every society has that class and that's fine with me.
01:44:57.400I mean, part of it, I think, is this intentional, addictive, hypnotic quality of media and social media that has really intentionally been designed that way.
01:45:08.820You know, Cali Means talks about how the tobacco companies bought, you know, the food companies and sent over their chemists and made them, you know, intentionally addictive.
01:45:20.240I feel that the same has really been done to our information ecosystem.
01:45:26.360And part of it is for, you know, for corporate profit and part of it is for political control.
01:45:34.360And as that media environment has also become more global and these partnerships with, you know, other parties in other countries assist in censorship, it's, I think it's difficult to think critically without a single input telling you that you're living in the Truman Show.
01:45:59.820So, you know, and I mean, at the agency, they used to have this, these things called red teams, right, where they would in the 80s, they started putting people in, analysts in kind of a bunker for three to three months or six months that looked for all the world like you were living in Soviet, in the Soviet Union.
01:46:20.960And all of the books that you had available were all the things that you would be reading if you were military or leadership class there.
01:46:29.400And you're listening to live radio broadcasts in, you know, Russian and just living the life of a Soviet leader in the bunker.
01:46:39.220And every day you're writing what you would do.
01:46:41.980You know, you know, today I would push on the Berlin Wall, et cetera.
01:46:48.620And that is actually one of the things that came out of it was when, was the time, a suggestion of the timing for when Reagan should push on bringing down the wall.
01:46:59.240But it allowed people to really channel their adversary to such a degree that they were viewed with a lot of suspicion when they came out.
01:47:09.760It was like, well, now you've gone native, you know, now like you, maybe you're the enemy now.
01:47:19.660And after 9-11, they started ramping these things back up around Islamic extremism and reading, you know, all of the old academic writings of, you know, some of the more violent jihad leaders and so on.
01:47:38.340And that suspicion remained as, the better you performed in there in terms of really being able to get into somebody's mind, the more suspicious people were of you when you left.
01:47:49.260And you were generally put on some kind of like a teaching assignment or some, you know, somewhere you couldn't really do any harm.
01:47:55.900And I tell that story because it's very interesting to me that it's like a tacit acknowledgement that you are what you read or you are what you're immersed in, right?
01:48:09.800And you can have been, you know, this 1980s cold warrior, so much so that you're working, you know, as an analyst in Russia house at CIA.
01:48:20.940Okay, presumably you're like pretty dyed in the wool, you know, blue team.
01:48:27.920And then you do this three months or you do this six months and it is so convincing, this immersion in the thoughts and radio and books and, you know, beliefs of your adversary that you might just be lost forever when you come out, right?
01:48:44.940Like you might've just had a full conversion experience.
01:49:05.760There's always more time, all in God's time.
01:49:08.860But this was so nice to stop and actually talk about some of the real challenges that, you know, I think sometimes in the final weeks of the campaign, everything becomes about, you know, the day's polls or, you know, whatever the media opportunity of the day was.
01:49:30.900And in the end, this is what's at stake.
01:49:34.420I mean, we're talking about decisions over the very constitutional ideals that this country was built on, the physical safety of our communities, of our families.
01:49:47.240I mean, you are putting, it's really one of the only times that as a parent, you are putting the lives of your children in the hands of someone who frankly is a stranger to you.
01:50:02.340And, you know, when you look at these EMP scenarios, and then you look at these censorship scenarios, you know, the well-being of our constitution, of our children, and of human freedom is at stake here.
01:50:21.260And, you know, if it weren't, I wouldn't be fighting for it so hard.
01:50:27.040But thank you for taking the time to really dig in to those issues rather than, you know, the latest photo op of the day.