The Tucker Carlson Show - Former CIA Officer Amaryllis Kennedy： Iraq, JFK, and Everything Else Our Intel Agencies Lied About

00:00:00.000 So this is a tweet from you.

00:00:01.740 I don't normally read people's tweets, but in standing with Ukraine, the Biden-Harris

00:00:05.980 administration convinced them, Ukraine, to abandon a peace deal that would have ceded

00:00:09.760 only half of the territory that Russia now occupies.

00:00:12.960 And for that opportunity to lose twice as much of their homeland, they paid with tens

00:00:16.460 of thousands of innocent lives.

00:00:18.140 We did this to control the 11 trillion of minerals under the Donbass.

00:00:22.040 We did it to grind down the Russian war machine on the grist of Ukrainian teenagers. 0.86

00:00:26.160 We did it to hand out hundreds of billions of dollars to U.S. hedge funds who are, as

00:00:30.900 we speak, carving up rights to Ukraine's fertile soil and vast mineral resources.

00:00:35.140 The truth is the United States has never stood with the people of Ukraine.

00:00:37.960 That is simply a jingle, an ad campaign broadcast to those who have never been there designed

00:00:42.780 to sell taxpayers on the appeal of prolonging war for profit.

00:00:46.640 We have cost Ukraine her territory. 0.99

00:00:48.540 We have cost Ukraine her children. 0.99

00:00:50.320 The war hawks and the bankers are no friends to Ukraine.

00:00:54.080 Whoa! 0.71

00:00:54.520 I was applauding as I read that, alone in my truck.

00:01:09.500 Welcome to the Tucker Carlson Show.

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00:01:26.860 Here's the episode.

00:01:28.460 I mean, it's a horror.

00:01:29.880 It's a horror.

00:01:31.040 And we are, we just allocated another hundred billion.

00:01:34.680 I mean, it's, and where is the end game?

00:01:37.840 How did you get here?

00:01:39.420 How did you get, I mean, I, you're, we're from, you know, the same city basically.

00:01:44.840 And you were a CI officer and you're just from a world in which that is an extremely unpopular, never uttered sentiment.

00:01:54.000 How did you get to that?

00:01:56.040 Well, part of it is pattern recognition, right?

00:01:58.860 I mean, we have done this before.

00:02:04.740 And, 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.

00:02:24.120 Because 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.

00:02:37.400 Uh, and the answer the last time around was 20 years.

00:02:41.960 And I, I want to make sure it's not again, because, you know, here we are at $33 trillion worth of debt.

00:02:53.220 And we're now paying more on those interest payments every year than we are on defense, completely unsustainable.

00:03:03.720 And most importantly, are the human lives.

00:03:06.940 Tens of thousands of people who won't, you know, proverbially dance at their children's wedding.

00:03:12.820 That's right.

00:03:13.460 And see the sunrise and drink a cup of coffee.

00:03:15.900 And it's just, that part of it is completely lost.

00:03:18.920 And when you, when you hear our generals and our political leaders saying, don't you understand, this is a great thing.

00:03:27.740 We are achieving the strategic aim of diminishing Russian military reserves, and we don't even have to put a person on the ground.

00:03:35.380 But, 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.

00:03:53.300 And, you know, that doesn't fly with me, so. 0.97

00:03:57.620 It's repugnant.

00:03:58.300 And I know you don't want to talk about yourself, but I'm, because I do, I think I understand your background pretty well.

00:04:05.500 I 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.

00:04:17.720 And so, what, what, how did, how did you reach this conclusion?

00:04:21.940 Of course, it's pattern recognition.

00:04:22.940 You're saying it's common sense.

00:04:24.180 Like, how could you not reach this conclusion?

00:04:25.600 I agree with you.

00:04:26.720 But how is it that almost no one else in Washington is saying anything like this?

00:04:31.580 Yeah, I mean, I wish they would.

00:04:33.040 And I think some of them are saying it, you know, in the privacy of their own conversations.

00:04:37.520 But 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.

00:04:54.720 I mean, there's some recognition now that poor choices were made there.

00:04:59.200 But 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.

00:05:10.660 And I remember gleefully participating in that to my shame.

00:05:13.680 Yes.

00:05:14.100 It 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.

00:05:28.860 And I went to Oxford overseas and it started in October.

00:05:33.240 So I was home for it.

00:05:34.440 My mom lived in D.C. at the time.

00:05:37.760 And I had a whole plan.

00:05:40.000 I was going to go to Thailand after graduation and do human rights journalism.

00:05:44.600 And I sort of had a background there on the Thai Burmese border before school.

00:05:52.340 And everything changed, as it did for so many in our generation.

00:05:56.460 I think, on September 11th.

00:05:59.160 And for me, I had lost one of my best friends in third grade on the flight that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland.

00:06:07.160 And it brought a lot of that back.

00:06:10.560 And I think hearing the war drums beating, for me, I hadn't, oddly enough, heard much about the intelligence world.

00:06:20.580 I mean, I didn't know many of the things that I know now.

00:06:24.580 I don't think I probably would have gone into it if I had.

00:06:27.080 But I liked the idea of a kind of a secret diplomatic service.

00:06:31.320 I 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.

00:06:50.080 Which, admittedly, was a kind of naive early 20s understanding of the intelligence business.

00:06:57.400 But at its best, you know, that is what it does or what it intends to do.

00:07:02.240 I 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.

00:07:15.920 But is when rather than going in and actually reporting what is happening in every corner of the world, they are making it happen.

00:07:27.440 Yes.

00:07:28.220 So it's not really intelligence gathering.

00:07:30.300 It's a kind of secret military.

00:07:34.140 Right.

00:07:34.400 I mean, rather than reporting that a coup is about to take place, you know for absolute sure it's about to take place.

00:07:42.480 Right.

00:07:43.400 And that has not worked out in 100% of cases, as far as I can tell.

00:07:49.540 And yet, again, we never learn our lesson.

00:07:52.480 I mean, you look at what's happening in the Middle East now, you know, what, 70 years on.

00:07:58.980 Um, post-Mosedeck and every, oh, if only we had a democratically elected leader in Iran.

00:08:05.260 We did.

00:08:07.240 You 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.

00:08:17.540 We had our own revolution in this country.

00:08:19.760 It was a very important, um, you know, stealing of our national values.

00:08:27.200 And I think you have to go through that yourself.

00:08:31.280 And 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.

00:08:51.540 And it just, it does no one any favors.

00:08:55.420 So, I mean, what you're describing is conceptual corruption, like a corruption of, of first principles.

00:09:00.720 If the point of your foreign policy is to spread democracy, you can't end democracy in the name of democracy.

00:09:07.140 I mean, you just, that's, that's insane.

00:09:08.700 And no one says that.

00:09:09.880 Yeah, 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.

00:09:20.240 And 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.

00:09:39.800 We undermine every other candidate of our own party in the courts, censor American citizens, undermine the Constitution, all in order to save democracy.

00:09:52.940 So, I think what we, what we reap overseas, we sow, or what we sow overseas, we reap at home.

00:09:58.700 And we're in the midst of that.

00:10:00.320 Does seem like our foreign policy drives our domestic policy or that there isn't actually much of a domestic policy?

00:10:06.140 There's not a great concern about what happens in the United States, in Washington.

00:10:09.740 I have noticed, I came to this over 40 years of watching, but it, that maybe was inevitable.

00:10:15.840 If you start overthrowing democratically elected governments abroad, why wouldn't over time you think that's acceptable in your own country?

00:10:22.700 Acceptable, maybe even noble.

00:10:23.940 I mean, you know, the lies people tell themselves in order to persist with what is ultimately an incredibly profitable business model.

00:10:33.500 But 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.

00:10:47.240 And I think we really are seeing that bear out in our domestic politics, where increasingly I'm seeing the First Amendment as an obstacle.

00:10:58.060 Does the Constitution, you know, actually serve us?

00:11:02.040 These kinds of questions and articles coming out in the media and Democratic leaders.

00:11:07.440 And I think it really is a symptom of what we have been spreading around the world.

00:11:12.420 And 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.

00:11:22.000 We, our nuclear clock, you know, we've ticked closer to midnight than at any time since its creation in 1947.

00:11:31.320 More, 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.

00:11:44.840 And not even just because of Ukraine, even if you take Ukraine out of it.

00:11:48.420 And 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.

00:12:04.920 You 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.

00:12:13.060 And 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.

00:12:30.500 And it's really time for a shakeup.

00:12:36.000 Um, everything you said is, uh, so nicely put and true.

00:12:43.120 I 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.

00:12:54.700 Like, 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.?

00:13:06.360 Well, they were sure keen on doing it in other countries, um, and used a lot of the same tactics.

00:13:14.960 I 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.

00:13:39.640 So, 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.

00:14:09.640 Or the, the preferences of, of whatever leader is in power here.

00:14:14.080 And I think that we are seeing that across the board in media, except for new media like this.

00:14:20.540 And that's been a godsend, um, to our domestic politics.

00:14:24.540 So, you think that we're seeing federal agencies, intel agencies, um, influencing American media surreptitiously?

00:14:32.320 Absolutely.

00:14:33.200 I don't think that it's in as, I mean, I doubt they're actually investors.

00:14:38.820 Um, there, there are layers of this, right?

00:14:41.760 I 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?

00:14:50.920 Which is the oldest exchange in the world.

00:14:52.660 Well, maybe the second oldest.

00:14:53.640 Um, 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?

00:15:10.920 What does that mean, a formal source in the media?

00:15:13.360 I 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.

00:15:24.420 And of course that happens, you know, all across the world.

00:15:29.080 Um.

00:15:29.680 But when it happens in the United States, then it's the end of democracy, of course.

00:15:33.360 Well, 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.

00:15:51.420 Can you explain what CISA is?

00:15:53.180 Yeah.

00:15:53.580 Well, 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.

00:16:07.900 And at the beginning of the Biden administration, a decision was made that information is infrastructure.

00:16:16.100 Oh, it is now, is it?

00:16:18.200 Which has, you know, an Orwellian tang to it.

00:16:21.420 Um, 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.

00:16:48.660 And 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.

00:17:11.320 Um, naming and shaming them if they took, you know, longer than a week to respond on something from the podium in the White House.

00:17:19.160 And, uh, Mark Zuckerberg has, you know, spoken publicly and, and written, um, about the degree of pressure that he felt to censor American people.

00:17:29.540 And 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...

00:17:44.160 What do you mean?

00:17:45.000 So 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.

00:18:07.300 That 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.

00:18:23.540 And, uh, you know, this is...

00:18:26.980 Wait, they would be the dreaded foreign actor interfering in our democracy, correct? 1.00

00:18:31.240 That we're always hearing so much about.

00:18:32.660 It turns out to be the Brits.

00:18:33.700 Turns out to be the Brits. 0.54

00:18:35.480 Uh, you know, and many others, right?

00:18:38.420 But there is...

00:18:39.500 Nobody's fighting them because Labour has just sent, you know, I think 30 people over to campaign for Kamala Harris.

00:18:45.520 Is that legal?

00:18:46.240 That seems like foreign interference in our... 0.52

00:18:48.280 Evidently, 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.

00:18:56.680 But, 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?

00:19:15.120 You don't go to another country and campaign for a particular candidate for office.

00:19:18.800 Yeah, or try and shut down their most basic rights. 0.98

00:19:22.940 I mean, the First Amendment, as everybody always says, it's first for a reason.

00:19:28.960 The 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.

00:19:42.140 And, 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.

00:19:57.780 For talking.

00:19:58.600 Yeah.

00:19:58.840 You're half English, you're educated heavily in England.

00:20:02.020 I love England.

00:20:03.360 And, and, and, and by the way, that does not reflect England, uh, or, or Great Britain.

00:20:08.020 It 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.

00:20:22.620 And yet our leaders persist in doing it.

00:20:24.620 So, um.

00:20:25.560 Are you, are you surprised as you look across and see what's happening there?

00:20:29.160 I am.

00:20:29.980 I mean, I, I have a law degree, um, from Oxford on, you know, in English law.

00:20:37.080 And 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.

00:20:49.900 And, 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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00:22:42.140 Can I just ask you to pause?

00:22:43.400 Our going into Iraq is what set off the demographic shift in Europe.

00:22:47.620 Yeah.

00:22:48.600 That's, of course, true beyond debate, but I think it's underappreciated.

00:22:52.500 Oh, yeah.

00:22:52.780 We 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.

00:23:02.920 And 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.

00:23:24.440 And 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.

00:23:39.260 And I think that escalatory cycle is what keeps us trapped in the bad decision-making.

00:23:47.320 And, 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.

00:23:56.580 And 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.

00:24:08.740 Oh, for sure.

00:24:09.320 But 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.

00:24:24.640 It's the same with lockdowns.

00:24:28.260 And those numbers are incredibly hard to ever even peg down.

00:24:32.480 And 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.

00:24:47.060 And that goes so far beyond what the U.S. will speak to.

00:24:53.840 And then those that were forced to migrate are in the many millions.

00:24:57.540 And when you take homogenous, you know, Europe is balkanized, but each element there is accustomed to being very homogenous.

00:25:10.240 Those are the indigenous populations of the continent.

00:25:12.640 Yeah, right.

00:25:12.860 And 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.

00:25:30.000 Because 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.

00:25:38.220 And 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.

00:25:56.760 And that is, I think, deeply underappreciated.

00:26:01.500 It's not that they don't necessarily plan to, at some point, have their demographics look different.

00:26:07.820 Right.

00:26:08.500 But when it's forced so quickly that nobody can absorb—

00:26:12.740 The pace of change matters.

00:26:14.020 Yes, it matters.

00:26:14.840 We can't metabolize it.

00:26:16.360 People are not designed for this pace of change at all.

00:26:20.140 It really, really matters.

00:26:21.400 Whatever, you know, that's it, that madrasa bars and hookah bars are in the Middle Eastern context.

00:26:29.420 But 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. 1.00

00:26:43.900 Or, you know, hotels all being shut for the same purpose while veterans sleep under bridges on the streets.

00:26:54.060 It's—the scale of it and the deluge is what makes it impossible for any society to absorb.

00:27:03.580 And that doesn't make it, you know, that doesn't make it racist.

00:27:07.120 It doesn't make it wrong.

00:27:09.220 It's human nature to need time and the nature of economies and societies to need time to be able to expand and adapt.

00:27:19.240 And I think our going into Iraq—Afghanistan a little bit, though, in the early days, that was actually pretty well managed before it sprawled.

00:27:30.820 But 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.

00:27:46.420 And then having utter disregard for the social chaos that was resulting.

00:27:51.680 Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And people's need, which is inherent, for order and predictability and continuity in their lives and their communities.

00:28:02.900 We always talk about communities. Nobody actually cares about communities. They'll blow them up in a heartbeat.

00:28:07.180 So 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.

00:28:16.820 9-11. 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.

00:28:29.660 Yeah.

00:28:30.620 Why we would have so many classified documents from that time. What's the excuse for that? I don't get that at all.

00:28:37.720 I mean, why do we still have classified documents from the 60s?

00:28:40.860 Oh, 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.

00:28:51.980 And 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.

00:28:59.080 Right. And I agree entirely, and I agree—I mean, the same applies for the 60s.

00:29:05.120 I think, ultimately, you know, when most Americans go to work for a third of their working week, they are working for the government.

00:29:14.400 They 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.

00:29:23.060 They turn it all over to the government.

00:29:24.320 The government works for the people directly. I mean, they are directly paid by the people.

00:29:32.040 And 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.

00:29:42.140 And, 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?

00:29:53.260 Sure. But there are actually quite few and far between.

00:29:56.960 And, you know, I think there is a bureaucratic inertia here.

00:30:01.820 Some of it is CYA, and some of it is, you know, probably more nefarious than that.

00:30:07.880 But 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.

00:30:17.520 But, 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.

00:30:29.200 Like, nothing sexy about it at all.

00:30:31.200 There'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.

00:30:39.880 It's just, everybody goes through it.

00:30:41.920 And the email client that you use there looks a lot like Gmail.

00:30:46.420 I mean, it's provided by Google, and it has all the normal fields, and then an additional field that's for classification.

00:30:55.040 And it's a drop-down menu, and it, when it first drops down, it's all checkboxes with their own, you know, subsets.

00:31:05.360 And it's hundreds of different classifications, all different numbers and codes.

00:31:09.800 And you can hover over them, and they say when to use them.

00:31:13.480 But, 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.

00:31:35.080 Well, 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.

00:31:50.060 And 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.

00:32:02.300 And the problem with that is that it is completely exempt from any declassification threshold ever.

00:32:09.480 And 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.

00:32:22.220 Now 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.

00:32:32.300 And I think that is being done across government.

00:32:36.540 So literally, the default is secrecy from the public.

00:32:41.840 Yeah.

00:32:42.940 The default is you will never know.

00:32:46.300 You 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.

00:33:02.480 But there's no accountability.

00:33:05.140 And there's no way to know.

00:33:06.100 And there's no way to know.

00:33:07.560 And there could be, right?

00:33:09.380 I have a lot of respect for the role of intelligence agencies in saving lives and in preventing conflict and attacks.

00:33:22.540 I 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.

00:33:36.580 But there is a very valuable role for them.

00:33:38.780 And in that, there are some things that do, you know, need to remain secret.

00:33:45.140 But 20 years later, 40 years later, 60 years later, you know, that, then it becomes about, quote unquote, preserving trust in our institutions.

00:33:56.340 Right.

00:33:58.960 Continuing to lie to you.

00:34:00.240 You know, code for, if you knew what we did then, you would shut us down now, you know.

00:34:05.640 I assume that's the motive behind continuing to classify documents from 1963 in the Kennedy Assembly.

00:34:13.080 Well, it's sure not sources and methods, right?

00:34:15.820 I mean, if it is, then, you know, we've got, we need to update our sources and methods.

00:34:22.040 But it's not, I mean, from time to time, they will say this is about protecting allies.

00:34:32.120 Of 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.

00:34:42.000 So protecting anyone above the American people who you work for doesn't really make a lot of sense.

00:34:49.380 They'll actually say it's to protect allies.

00:34:51.160 Well, not about a specific operation, but as a reason for long-term classification when pushed, yeah.

00:35:01.320 That's pretty outrageous that they would admit that.

00:35:04.140 I mean.

00:35:04.920 So the interests of a foreign country are more important than the interests of the American people? 0.59

00:35:08.120 I think their, I think their kind of argument would be, if I were to steel man it,

00:35:14.560 eventually the American people will be protected by something that we need from that ally.

00:35:21.160 Some kind of, you know, security collaboration or whatever we might need down the road and therefore, you know, we must keep that relationship strong.

00:35:29.140 And 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.

00:35:37.300 And maybe that's still true 40 years later.

00:35:40.840 You know, it's possible that it is in certain circumstances.

00:35:44.780 But.

00:35:45.560 How about, how about 61 years later?

00:35:47.980 Yeah.

00:35:48.280 I mean, less and less likely.

00:35:49.540 What do you think that's about?

00:35:54.520 The assassinations of the 60s?

00:35:56.240 Yes.

00:35:57.880 Oh, I could talk to you about that all day.

00:35:59.500 I bet.

00:36:01.080 You've intersected with it on various levels.

00:36:03.380 I have.

00:36:04.200 Yeah.

00:36:04.720 And.

00:36:06.300 And I feel something of a responsibility to.

00:36:10.680 To get to the bottom of that, at least in my lifetime for my children.

00:36:14.640 You know, I mean, my, my daughter, Bobcat, is Bobby the fourth.

00:36:19.960 So her great grandfather was RFK.

00:36:23.780 And.

00:36:25.140 And.

00:36:26.580 I don't.

00:36:27.520 I want to be able to look at her and.

00:36:29.760 And.

00:36:31.760 For her to know whether or not her own government was involved in these assassinations.

00:36:36.860 And 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.

00:36:45.440 And I think when you look at the collaboration that was going on in those days between.

00:36:54.700 The intelligence community and organized crime and the mob, you know, there were very blurry boundaries.

00:37:03.300 And.

00:37:05.500 I worry that.

00:37:08.720 Today, the cartels have kind of taken the mob's role in that.

00:37:14.180 World.

00:37:14.580 The cartels, meaning the Latin American drug cartels.

00:37:18.020 Do you think that the U.S. government is working with the cartels?

00:37:24.260 I.

00:37:25.220 I mean, working with is a is broad.

00:37:28.100 Right.

00:37:28.440 I mean, the the intelligence community's job is to protect the American people.

00:37:33.420 And sometimes they interpret that as requiring.

00:37:37.840 Collaboration with criminal elements, with terror organizations.

00:37:41.160 Um, 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.

00:37:55.900 Clearly, in the 60s, that ended up being manipulated into a broader collaboration that allowed.

00:38:12.220 U.S.

00:38:15.300 U.S. government elements to undertake activities that they could not directly undertake by law.

00:38:22.940 And, you know, I think we've seen that even with liaison partnerships.

00:38:30.240 Um, 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.

00:38:46.280 Because there's no prohibition on sharing intelligence.

00:38:50.060 Right.

00:38:50.260 So you get a foreign intel service to do the work for you.

00:38:52.540 And then you get the information.

00:38:54.700 Right.

00:38:54.980 And 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.

00:39:16.340 And 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.

00:39:30.260 Of the U.S. government collaborating or having some relationship that's not purely antagonistic with the Mexican and or other drug cartels.

00:39:39.660 Sure.

00:39:40.220 And I, and, and I think, you know, again, the steel man would be, this is for the benefit of the American people.

00:39:49.000 Well, it's always for your own good, for sure.

00:39:51.540 And 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?

00:40:02.140 Sure.

00:40:02.580 These, I mean, many of them are as powerful and threatening as, as a, as a nation state.

00:40:10.220 Um, the problem though is money.

00:40:14.920 Right.

00:40:15.540 And 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.

00:40:25.060 And 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.

00:40:36.720 Um, 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.

00:40:47.680 I can't prove that, but I, I was shocked to hear that.

00:40:51.320 You don't seem shocked to hear that.

00:40:53.080 Well, I mean, look at Iran-Contra, you know, I mean, look at Air America and Vietnam.

00:40:57.140 Like these are, it's not, this is not a new pattern for intelligence.

00:41:01.300 And 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.

00:41:13.640 So who's funding that?

00:41:14.640 Um, right.

00:41:16.000 And 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.

00:41:39.900 Given 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.

00:41:52.300 I mean, that's like kind of at this point, like Nazi collaboration level immoral, I would say.

00:41:58.500 No.

00:41:59.500 It is, uh, it's pouring over the border, um, and along with it, you know, humans and children.

00:42:08.480 And, 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.

00:42:30.120 So we're getting pretty close to presidential election.

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00:44:16.020 So what about congressional oversight?

00:44:30.580 I 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.

00:44:44.000 Is that your perception?

00:44:46.020 I mean, look at Chuck Schumer's comment.

00:44:48.320 Yes.

00:44:49.020 They have six ways to Sunday to get back at you.

00:44:52.240 Remember when he said that to Rachel Maddow?

00:44:53.700 Vividly, yeah.

00:44:57.460 And, you know, she didn't look too surprised.

00:44:59.500 I think it's a known quantity.

00:45:04.080 Obviously, it goes back to Hoover.

00:45:05.940 That was very well known.

00:45:08.360 Even within intel, people will say, oh, yeah, you know, that guy has a Hoover file on him, meaning this or that policymaker.

00:45:16.820 Something is known that means that.

00:45:19.700 So that's real.

00:45:20.980 Oh, yeah.

00:45:22.420 Yeah.

00:45:22.680 I mean, I look at the Speaker of the House whose views on everything kind of changed instantly on the foreign policy questions.

00:45:29.500 And 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.

00:45:40.680 And you sort of wonder, like, what is that?

00:45:42.180 Well, 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.

00:45:57.500 Both 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.

00:46:15.320 And 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.

00:46:40.600 And if not a Hoover file, then a, you know, a second house, wherever.

00:46:50.020 But I think between.

00:46:51.040 That is so corrupt.

00:46:52.400 It's hard even to believe. 0.90

00:46:53.680 It is.

00:46:54.520 It is.

00:46:55.340 But 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.

00:47:05.280 And 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.

00:47:27.240 So that, A, we can fix them and, B, the American people know this was happening and can prevent it from happening again.

00:47:37.120 And, 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.

00:47:49.340 It oversees election integrity?

00:47:51.560 Yeah, those are its two, it's two outside of, you know, bridges and ports and regular infrastructure.

00:47:57.600 Those are its two big focuses are censorship of social media and election integrity.

00:48:05.000 Of course, you can't have election integrity with censorship because censorship is itself an interference in the democratic process.

00:48:14.220 Certainly. 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.

00:48:27.480 We would kind of roll their eyes, not the Hunter Biden laptop story again.

00:48:30.720 But 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.

00:48:53.040 And 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.

00:49:08.680 When 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.

00:49:17.520 And here we have, you know, that's for the rank and file. 0.91

00:49:21.700 But 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.

00:49:45.560 Yeah. And maybe you're somebody who would look at the correspondence in that laptop and not be bothered by it.

00:49:53.500 But you should get to make that decision before you cast your vote.

00:49:57.180 And 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.

00:50:13.100 And then CISA can actually get to work for the coming four years while that person is president.

00:50:20.860 And 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.

00:50:37.880 I 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.

00:50:45.720 And 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.

00:51:11.580 It's hard to know what it is.

00:51:13.980 So nicely put.

00:51:15.720 Were you shocked by that when you saw it?

00:51:19.460 I was shocked by it when I realized that it was intentionally manufactured in that way.

00:51:31.180 I 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,

00:51:42.860 you know, laptop story was, you know, laptop story was like it, it seemed like too audacious an intrusion into domestic political life.

00:51:58.440 I 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.

00:52:06.740 And, you know, and they did.

00:52:10.440 And 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.

00:52:22.180 It's pretty dark.

00:52:25.520 Like, it must be bewildering for you who were once part of the machine.

00:52:30.380 Yeah.

00:52:30.580 I mean, to.

00:52:31.060 Yeah, 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.

00:52:41.260 And nowhere in any of those offices was the, like, overthrow governments and metal with domestic politics office, right?

00:52:50.860 So, you know, I was never exposed to it.

00:52:56.720 And 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,

00:53:08.060 where 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.

00:53:24.200 And 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.

00:53:38.060 To put it mildly.

00:53:41.020 And 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.

00:53:58.020 Did that happen?

00:53:58.680 I 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.

00:54:10.240 And 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.

00:54:18.420 And I was literally that far and I mean, so, so brand new.

00:54:23.000 And if that hadn't happened, I wouldn't have recognized it.

00:54:26.440 But, and it ended up, you know, actually being right.

00:54:33.020 I mean, they, they, they, it was a wrong person.

00:54:35.960 And by the time that was recognized, they, you know, force fed him through his nose and, you know, just a whole human rights nightmare.

00:54:43.980 I'm sorry to laugh, that's just so horrible.

00:54:47.800 It's so, so horrible as to not be.

00:54:50.760 They force fed him through his nose?

00:54:52.160 Well, I'm, I'm sharing what was in public, just, just to be clear, I'm sharing what was in the public account.

00:54:59.580 So I, you know, I don't want to get, go beyond that.

00:55:03.220 But it was the first time that I said, you know, this is, who do I talk to about this?

00:55:08.040 This shouldn't have, you know, this shouldn't be happening.

00:55:09.980 And 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?

00:55:21.700 Like, she'll, she, she will make trouble. 1.00

00:55:26.140 I, I think I, I got filtered out of the go foment coups in foreign country recruitment program, thank God.

00:55:37.340 But I never witnessed any of that there.

00:55:39.940 It was actually really once I left that, in some ways, I feel like my education on the intelligence world began.

00:55:47.040 And 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.

00:56:06.020 I didn't find it to be an evil place at all.

00:56:10.300 But I also am aware that I never came across any of the kinds of operations that, you know, now are being uncovered.

00:56:18.140 And 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?

00:56:32.880 And so, I never was exposed to any of that.

00:56:38.880 And it was deeply distressing after leaving to, to watch all of the subsequent declassifications of what was being done at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

00:56:52.280 And, you know, Cat's Eye in Thailand, and I hadn't, hadn't been aware of any of that.

00:56:58.780 And then, to see it weaponized domestically was the, because, of course, that's the end of that story, when you really think about it.

00:57:09.520 Yeah.

00:57:09.600 You 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.

00:57:20.380 And 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.

00:57:47.000 So, 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.

00:58:03.600 Can you explain what an EMP is and what changed?

00:58:06.800 Yeah, 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.

00:58:21.820 So, let me sort of explain a little about what it is.

00:58:24.640 Do 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.

00:58:39.340 And 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.

00:58:46.860 Those solar storms can be far more powerful than that, naturally, so before even getting into human weaponizing of that.

00:58:59.280 There 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.

00:59:24.980 And 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.

00:59:47.100 And that these, that these, that these electromagnetic ejections happen from the sun every 100 to 150 years of that, of that magnitude.

00:59:58.340 Of course, that was, you know, in 1850, so we're coming up due for one.

01:00:03.480 Their 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.

01:00:15.340 In fact, there was one in 2012 that came extremely close to us that would have been absolutely catastrophic, but didn't, didn't hit.

01:00:21.780 And that would mean no electricity for years.

01:00:25.440 Right, 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.

01:00:35.260 But 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.

01:00:42.580 But 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,

01:00:58.720 which 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,

01:01:10.980 when to turn on the coolers in a nuclear power plant to make sure that there's not a meltdown,

01:01:15.960 when 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.

01:01:31.240 Yeah, 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.

01:01:47.040 But humans being what they are, they've learned to weaponize this, right?

01:01:50.980 And we know this because we have done it.

01:01:55.220 Starfish Prime was the first test in 62, where the U.S. realized that this could be used as a weapon,

01:02:02.860 and did the test above the Pacific, and it knocked out, you know, capabilities in Hawaii and farther beyond.

01:02:11.640 And so there was that recognition.

01:02:12.960 We now know that the Soviets figured it out even earlier. 0.84

01:02:17.560 They told us during the kind of detente in the 90s that they had already done seven tests at that point over Kazakhstan

01:02:24.900 and wiped the entire power grid of Kazakhstan, actually, you know, created a lot of suffering in the process.

01:02:32.080 But 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,

01:02:42.440 which is very specifically tuned not for yield but for electromagnetic pulse.

01:02:53.600 And these are, you know, these are detonated 30 kilometers or so above a country.

01:02:57.520 So you're not actually destroying anybody with the explosion.

01:03:02.420 It 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.

01:03:14.100 So this is, you know, win World War III without ever having to have contact with the adversary.

01:03:19.560 And 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.

01:03:38.640 I mean, North Korea in 2013 ran the exact optimal orbit with its KSM-3 satellite over New York and Washington, D.C.

01:03:51.900 That would be the optimal delivery for this kind of a weapon.

01:03:56.760 And 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.

01:04:23.880 And North Korean.

01:04:25.060 Well, 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.

01:04:37.080 What did they do at the PG&E substation?

01:04:39.500 They-

01:04:40.200 Pacific Gas and Electric, by the way.

01:04:41.500 Yes.

01:04:42.020 For our East Coast viewers.

01:04:42.920 For our East Coast.

01:04:44.600 They were assessed to be extremely professional by the SEAL trainers who came in later to look at the site.

01:04:51.680 They 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.

01:05:07.460 In the United States?

01:05:08.680 In the United States, yep.

01:05:10.120 We had a North Korean team of saboteurs or saboteurs sent by North Korea.

01:05:14.620 Certainly, professional special forces of some variety thought to be North Korean.

01:05:23.280 Just outside San Jose in Coyote, California.

01:05:27.920 We did an interview with a woman called Casey Means. 0.87

01:05:31.300 She's a Stanford-educated surgeon and really one of the most remarkable people I have ever met.

01:05:38.080 In the interview, she explained how the food that we eat, produced by huge food companies, big food, in conjunction with pharma, is destroying our health, making this a weak and sick country.

01:05:51.380 The levels of chronic disease are beyond belief.

01:05:54.320 What Casey Means, who we've not stopped thinking about ever since, is the co-founder of a healthcare technology company called Levels.

01:06:03.260 And we are proud to announce today that we are partnering with Levels.

01:06:06.720 And by proud, I mean sincerely proud.

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01:06:17.440 It helps you understand how the food that you're eating, the things that you're doing every single day, are affecting your body in real time.

01:06:24.360 You put stuff in your mouth, speaking for myself anyway, and you don't think about it.

01:06:29.500 You have no idea what you're putting in your mouth and you have no idea what it's doing to your body.

01:06:32.380 But over time, you feel weak and tired and spacey.

01:06:37.580 And over an even longer period of time, you can get really sick.

01:06:40.240 So it's worth knowing what the food you eat is doing to you.

01:06:44.400 The Levels app works with something called the Continuous Glucose Monitor, a CGM.

01:06:49.980 You can get one as part of the plan or you can bring your own.

01:06:52.200 It doesn't matter.

01:06:53.540 But the bottom line is big tech, big pharma, and big food combine together to form an incredibly malevolent force, 0.71

01:07:03.160 pumping you full of garbage, unhealthy food with artificial sugars, and hurting you and hurting the entire country.

01:07:09.100 So with Levels, you'll be able to see immediately what all of this is doing to you.

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01:07:54.280 This is the beginning of what we hope will be a long and happy partnership with Levels and Dr. Casey Means.

01:08:00.280 I was, you know, I was an adult in 2013.

01:08:18.400 Obama was president.

01:08:19.380 I was reading the news.

01:08:20.520 I don't remember reading about this.

01:08:21.760 No, it was very, very downplayed as vandalism.

01:08:27.620 And, you know, people who are in the past,

01:08:30.280 two months later, July, we had, or a few months later, in July, they found two SA-2 nuclear-capable missiles

01:08:44.480 in the bay of a tanker in the Gulf of Mexico.

01:08:51.220 And 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.

01:09:05.980 And now, you know, under Biden-Harris, we have North Korean troops being pulled by Putin into the war in Ukraine.

01:09:14.360 So that escalation is back in play again.

01:09:17.360 But those are three distinct ways to attack our electrical grid that were all mounted within, you know, a handful of months.

01:09:28.240 And 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.

01:09:40.920 So they've taken it very seriously for their own force protection, which is good, but not for the rest of us.

01:09:48.320 And can you just give us the cliff notes on what that means, hardening Cheyenne Mountain?

01:09:52.920 Okay, so it's actually very easy.

01:09:56.400 If you put your phone in the microwave, right, it is safe from this kind of electromagnetic radiation.

01:10:06.280 And so the question is, when you look at something as complex as our entire national grid,

01:10:12.120 what are the nodes that are most vulnerable to this kind of attack?

01:10:16.780 And really, there are sort of two categories that are highest consequence.

01:10:24.020 One 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.

01:10:39.460 And they are as easy to protect as, you know, putting them in a metal shed instead of a wooden shed.

01:10:46.780 Or taking the wooden sheds that exist and covering them with, you know, metal mesh.

01:10:53.260 To the point that, you know, you could put that out for people in each community with specs.

01:11:00.440 And I'm sure that they would get together on a Sunday and do it, you know.

01:11:03.940 But regulation in our country doesn't allow us to do that.

01:11:06.760 So the SCADA systems protecting those and then the extra high voltage transformers are a huge issue and sticking point for our grid.

01:11:23.220 They only make about 200 of them a year.

01:11:25.140 And they're incredibly expensive, hundreds of tons, you know, to move.

01:11:31.500 And the coils are done mostly by hand, amazingly.

01:11:34.640 I mean, they're custom made.

01:11:36.080 And they were invented here in the U.S.

01:11:38.700 Tesla invented them here.

01:11:40.280 But we don't make them anymore.

01:11:41.940 And most of the ones for export are made in Germany or South Korea.

01:11:47.180 And they're designed custom for each spot.

01:11:53.160 So it's very hard to have extras for each one on hand.

01:11:57.240 And they need to be in Faraday cages, which is, you know, sounds fancy, but it's basically just a...

01:12:06.820 Wire mesh cage.

01:12:07.800 Yeah, wire mesh cage.

01:12:10.200 And, 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.

01:12:25.460 You know, an EMP attack or a solar flare are low probability, high catastrophe events.

01:12:31.960 But weather-related damage is the opposite or sometimes catastrophic in its impact, as we've seen recently, right, in North Carolina and elsewhere.

01:12:43.120 And 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.

01:13:09.980 And then you look at sabotage and vandalism, which is another really big issue that they have to protect against.

01:13:16.380 And 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.

01:13:25.980 Which 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.

01:13:36.840 And it has a chain-like fence around it, you know, no cameras.

01:13:40.480 And that's the same all over the country.

01:13:42.880 And everyone just sees those, you know, they see the little coils and don't really think much of it.

01:13:48.940 But...

01:13:49.180 I've been here 50 years and never noticed it was there.

01:13:52.020 That's right.

01:13:53.640 I mean, and that's true.

01:13:54.880 Our eye just, you know, we're so accustomed to filtering these things out.

01:14:00.020 But 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.

01:14:11.220 And it's not just, you know, detonating a nuclear weapon above the United States.

01:14:16.940 Obviously, there's a deterrent effect.

01:14:21.220 There would be a response because Cheyenne Mountain and other parts are completely rad-hardened.

01:14:27.380 So 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.

01:14:35.820 But 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.

01:14:52.080 And, you know, if you pick the right nine substations to put that suitcase next to, you have achieved the exact same thing.

01:15:03.600 And 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.

01:15:14.400 So there's vandalism, there are natural weather events, including the solar flares, the storms that you mentioned, and then there's EMP.

01:15:26.340 So the threats to the grid and to the lives of 350 million Americans are completely real and in some sense imminent.

01:15:33.860 Like we know this is going to happen at some point.

01:15:36.220 So the federal response hardening the grid changed when Biden got elected?

01:15:44.400 Yeah, and this is what is really hard to accept.

01:15:49.600 And it's very similar, actually, to what happened with the border wall, which is here you have two policies.

01:15:53.980 The 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.

01:16:19.820 And 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.

01:16:31.920 You 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.

01:16:54.860 And 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? 0.55

01:17:11.940 Putting a nuclear weapon into orbit on a satellite.

01:17:16.220 And at the time, the media made it out like this was maybe a danger.

01:17:22.560 And even if it was a danger, it was only a danger to other satellites, right?

01:17:26.600 And it would get in the way of your car's GPS.

01:17:31.360 And, you know, maybe it would be problematic for the military.

01:17:35.120 And so we should pay attention to it.

01:17:36.280 But they definitely downplayed its impact on anyone on the ground, right?

01:17:40.200 And 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. 0.51

01:18:02.240 You put a nuclear weapon on a satellite headed up from the South, where we have virtually no detection set up.

01:18:15.440 And you don't even get the 22 minutes that you would get with a solar flare.

01:18:22.180 It just comes completely out of the blue and there's no preparation whatsoever.

01:18:26.640 And in general, in the, you know, in the military theory of these adversaries, it's a multi-pronged attack, right?

01:18:35.480 That's the initial, you take out, you know, you send everybody into chaos and you take out their ability to communicate with one another.

01:18:41.580 And then it's followed by whatever comes next.

01:18:44.900 And 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.

01:19:01.720 It's in three of their manuals, China, Russia, and Iran, Russia, we know, is putting a nuclear weapon in, in orbit.

01:19:13.840 China's sending the space balloons.

01:19:15.600 I mean, the Hyl-2 balloons have already come across our own territory.

01:19:20.120 North Korea, three, three-way attack simulation that all three were successful. 0.73

01:19:28.340 Clearly, this is on the minds of our adversaries and it's an imminent danger.

01:19:34.240 Certainly, the, the vulnerability, the, you know, the area in which we are most vulnerable for maximum casualties and impact.

01:19:43.840 And 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.

01:20:01.420 And by the way, it's not even that expensive in the big scheme of, you know, government spending.

01:20:07.460 To do it really well, the cost estimate was $2 billion, which, you know, we've just sent another $100 billion to Ukraine.

01:20:16.480 So, then Biden takes office and, frankly, in my mind, just inconceivably revokes that.

01:20:29.080 And 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.

01:20:48.520 And he reversed for, you know, with, with no, with no replacement plan in place.

01:20:58.180 But, you know, with the border wall, you could, and I think that's a, a more complex topic than we appreciate.

01:21:05.940 Like, what is the point of what they just did?

01:21:08.180 I, I don't know, but at least there was a perceived political constituency in favor of mass immigration.

01:21:15.960 Okay, they thought it would make it a one-party state.

01:21:18.500 That's why they're for it.

01:21:19.460 Got it.

01:21:20.500 What could possibly be the motive for not defending yourself in a sensible way from an EMP attack?

01:21:27.540 Like, I don't get that at all.

01:21:28.860 Support from the electrical industry.

01:21:31.500 Ooh, really?

01:21:33.220 Yeah.

01:21:33.700 There's a huge amount of pushback.

01:21:35.660 So, it gets a little bit in the weeds and boring, but there's, there are these two things, the NERC and the FERC.

01:21:40.860 Yeah.

01:21:41.040 Yeah, and they, uh, are supposed to regulate one another, basically, or one, you know, FERC is supposed to regulate her. 0.99

01:21:48.580 Um, and unsurprisingly, in that kind of a cozy relationship, it doesn't work.

01:21:54.200 And 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.

01:22:08.260 Um, and really push back on the costs that would be involved.

01:22:15.720 And 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.

01:22:36.260 And keep millions from starving to death.

01:22:38.160 Right.

01:22:38.840 Billions, potentially.

01:22:39.980 I mean, these are global.

01:22:42.440 I 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.

01:22:55.640 Right.

01:22:56.080 And so it's really important to recognize that everybody else will be going through the same thing at the same time.

01:23:03.380 It's not like you can find a way to walk to outside of that area so that you can get order something and bring it back in.

01:23:12.420 Right.

01:23:12.820 In terms of rebuilding your grid.

01:23:14.280 And, um, so potentially catastrophic, non-zero chance of it happening.

01:23:20.320 I 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.

01:23:34.900 But 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.

01:23:44.600 Their 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.

01:24:06.500 Right.

01:24:06.700 So that's lost right away.

01:24:09.100 And then.

01:24:09.680 Everyone on an airplane does.

01:24:11.100 Right.

01:24:11.240 So that's half a million people at any moment, any given moment.

01:24:15.620 And then you have, um, you know, obviously traffic and everything that, that happens in that immediate chaos.

01:24:26.980 Um, 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.

01:24:40.120 And then refrigeration has gone out at supermarkets and at the regional food warehouses.

01:24:49.920 So 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.

01:25:06.640 So 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.

01:25:23.900 Um, you are in an incredibly vulnerable position that there's absolutely no reason to risk putting our own people.

01:25:30.320 And 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.

01:25:37.760 And, 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.

01:25:55.100 Yeah. 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?

01:26:00.320 And, 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.

01:26:30.320 You know, you know, puts us in a direct hot war with Russia for the first time ever.

01:26:38.040 You know, that, that actually puts us at a higher risk of this kind of attack than ever in our history.

01:26:45.860 And 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.

01:26:54.620 We did a live tour last month, one of the funnest things we've ever done.

01:26:58.500 And coast to coast, 16 different cities speaking.

01:27:02.040 Well, next week, our grand finale.

01:27:04.580 Halloween, October 31st, 2024 in Glendale, Arizona.

01:27:08.680 Our special guest that night, days before the presidential election, Donald Trump.

01:27:13.920 All proceeds donated to Hurricane Relief.

01:27:16.920 We're proud to do it.

01:27:17.860 Hope to see you there.

01:27:18.540 So 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.

01:27:45.240 And yet, when you hear it, it makes sense and it's clearly true.

01:27:49.060 So that raises the question about our information, you know, the integrity of our information sources.

01:27:54.720 And why aren't we hearing this from the press, from the media?

01:27:59.780 I don't understand that.

01:28:00.820 Well, you know, I think there's a party line right now in the media, if you haven't noticed.

01:28:08.600 And this, I think, does not support the security state's thesis about how safe the current administration has made us in the world.

01:28:24.380 Right. 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.

01:28:44.680 And 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.

01:28:55.620 So, 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.

01:29:16.000 What was your, tell us, what was your experience?

01:29:17.580 I 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.

01:29:32.960 And, and many of those people, you know, were very clear that he was, should be the next president of the United States.

01:29:39.900 So 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.

01:29:49.280 And, 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.

01:30:10.400 That has a commercial interest in the outcome of the election, right?

01:30:14.460 I 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.

01:30:32.980 You 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.

01:30:44.100 And it's the same, you know, we see it with certainly all the cable news channels who are also reliant on pharmaceutical advertising.

01:30:51.160 And 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.

01:31:09.180 I mean, you look at Amazon Web Services and the Washington Post and, you know, GE and NBC and so forth.

01:31:14.300 I mean, there's a long, long history of that.

01:31:17.380 And how much does Boeing spend on Politico every year?

01:31:20.380 Yeah, I mean.

01:31:21.260 But 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.

01:31:36.300 It never made sense to me.

01:31:37.280 And I didn't get the obvious point, which is it's protection money.

01:31:40.480 Yep.

01:31:41.500 That's exactly how I never got that.

01:31:43.660 I mean, sometimes you even see the Boeing ad or, you know, the Northrop ads and it's like impossible.

01:31:48.360 As a consumer, you, there's, it's, you actually can't, there's no way to buy their product.

01:31:53.160 No!

01:31:53.680 No, it's just like completely naked bribery.

01:31:56.500 I never thought of that.

01:31:57.540 Yeah.

01:31:57.740 I'm like, why would Northrop be advertising in Politico?

01:32:01.960 Like what?

01:32:02.700 Is it going to go buy a bomber?

01:32:06.000 It's to keep its reporters from criticizing.

01:32:07.960 That's right.

01:32:08.740 It is their entire.

01:32:09.500 Defense expenditures.

01:32:10.740 It's their salary and they know it.

01:32:12.500 And, you know, a free market is a free market.

01:32:17.720 Fine.

01:32:18.660 But 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. 0.96

01:32:28.740 And every single time they see Bobby's name, he's like a psychopathic, crazy, dog eating, you know, joke. 0.95

01:32:38.720 Right. 0.94

01:32:39.020 And that was their approach was either to absolutely not cover him whatsoever.

01:32:42.960 I mean, he would give these extraordinary speech.

01:32:45.940 He had this peace speech that he did in New Hampshire in the, at the outset of the campaign.

01:32:49.800 And 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.

01:33:03.700 And 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.

01:33:12.880 And then none of them ran any of it because they, you know, because they were such strong speeches.

01:33:17.700 And so we, we were up against that throughout.

01:33:21.560 And.

01:33:21.780 Did 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.

01:33:28.660 But did you appreciate how this works before you started running this campaign?

01:33:35.040 Not nearly to the degree that, you know, the, the degree of politicization was surprising to me.

01:33:42.560 And I think I had not really come to understand the, the kind of deep commercial drivers behind editorial lines.

01:33:51.600 And, 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.

01:34:04.100 And they've been very few and far between.

01:34:07.840 I mean, I really, I'm hard pressed to even come up with an example.

01:34:12.340 I'm glad to be sitting across from you, but I will say, thank God for Elon Musk.

01:34:17.300 Yes.

01:34:17.740 I 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.

01:34:29.840 And, you know, even the internet archive is offline now.

01:34:33.480 So there's nothing left.

01:34:34.640 There's no other way to know.

01:34:37.500 And sure, are there things on there that turn out not to be true?

01:34:40.320 Absolutely.

01:34:40.980 Are there things on there that you're going to disagree with or find offensive?

01:34:43.940 Absolutely.

01:34:44.380 And, you know, such is the nature of free speech.

01:34:47.980 And it's audacious and bold and beautiful and sometimes infuriating.

01:34:53.700 But that's what we've built our entire country on.

01:34:57.100 And when it, I mean, I remember recently explaining this to my daughter and she was, you know, she's five.

01:35:04.520 And she was asking me why, why I'm always traveling.

01:35:09.920 I'm working in the moment.

01:35:10.720 And, and I was explaining about the importance of free speech and, and how I wanted her to have it when she was older.

01:35:18.920 And she said, so are there countries where if you criticize the leader, you know, they'll put you in jail?

01:35:24.840 And I said, yes, there are either a lot of those countries.

01:35:27.120 They, that used to be all the countries, basically.

01:35:29.020 And 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.

01:35:40.540 And 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.

01:36:03.380 And that as a result, because no government is ever going to cede power given to it in an emergency.

01:36:08.740 So 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.

01:36:23.580 And I just can't, I can't abide that.

01:36:26.840 I can't let it happen.

01:36:28.140 And 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.

01:36:45.560 Oh, serious.

01:36:46.300 To protect.

01:36:47.920 He's not a money worshiper.

01:36:49.240 Right.

01:36:49.440 Unlike so many billionaires, just to be blunt, they're money worshipers.

01:36:53.000 That's why they're billionaires.

01:36:54.080 Right.

01:36:54.320 He's not.

01:36:55.280 No.

01:36:55.580 And I, I think he is genuinely driven by the desire to see human freedom endure.

01:37:06.460 And I don't know why more of us are not, because there's nothing more important and it's ours to lose, you know.

01:37:19.680 And, um, uh, it's bewildering to me when I hear people say, well, you know, our government can be trusted with those.

01:37:30.140 Like they can make the judgment of what I should be able to say and what I shouldn't.

01:37:33.900 And he just, the, the idea that, but what about the next leader?

01:37:39.840 You 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.

01:37:56.980 And, um, and, um, and yet they took on that challenge and achieved it so beautifully.

01:38:03.480 And 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.

01:38:18.820 And I just, and just being incredibly moved by the courage that it takes as a society to defend such abhorrent speech.

01:38:29.260 Yes.

01:38:29.520 Because, you know, that, you know, it's, it's not a sliding scale.

01:38:34.140 It's just, you either have it or you don't.

01:38:35.980 I 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.

01:38:44.060 But 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.

01:38:55.940 Um, I mean, you've got to be in the one 10th of 1% of people, you know, who've taken this position.

01:39:01.440 You 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.

01:39:08.640 And 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. 0.65

01:39:18.380 I mean, I just know that because I, I know that world.

01:39:21.000 So like, did you even hesitate before doing that?

01:39:23.100 What was your thinking?

01:39:23.900 And like, I'm sure none of your classmates did anything like that.

01:39:26.920 Why did you do that?

01:39:27.800 I, 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.

01:39:53.500 Where, 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.

01:40:15.100 That is, you know, illegal and, and, and, and results in, in children being lost around the country.

01:40:24.820 And 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.

01:40:54.820 More 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.

01:41:16.620 If you take that into account, if you take that into account, we have 24.9% true unemployment rate.

01:41:21.140 So 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.

01:41:50.660 I mean, literally, Dean Phillips, Marianne Williamson, Robert Kennedy Jr., obviously President Trump, no labels, Jill Stein, everybody.

01:42:02.200 There'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.

01:42:21.300 Every single one of them was attacked in court to get their name off of the ballot.

01:42:28.160 It's like, we believe in democracy.

01:42:29.940 You can vote for anyone as long as it's me.

01:42:31.960 And 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.

01:42:58.820 I think the challenge is that we are evolutionarily designed to retain the approval of our group.

01:43:13.360 When you're walking across the early savannah and your group shuns you, you know, you're out of luck, right?

01:43:23.120 It's a lot harder to survive.

01:43:24.380 And 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.

01:43:43.160 And 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.

01:43:54.720 So, 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.

01:44:07.860 And I think that, honestly, my friends who don't support President Trump, I think that's why.

01:44:13.480 I think, you know.

01:44:14.300 Of course it is.

01:44:14.660 I 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.

01:44:34.320 And every society has that class and that's fine with me.

01:44:36.740 I think it's inevitable.

01:44:37.600 It's part of the human ordering.

01:44:40.020 But that class should be able to think critically and rationally.

01:44:44.260 That's their job.

01:44:46.120 And they're not.

01:44:47.400 And I just don't understand how this happened.

01:44:49.280 A total breakdown in the sort of mental faculties of the people who run everything.

01:44:55.740 Like, what the hell?

01:44:57.100 Yeah.

01:44:57.400 I 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.

01:45:08.820 You 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.

01:45:17.860 And that is horrifying and true.

01:45:20.240 I feel that the same has really been done to our information ecosystem.

01:45:26.360 And part of it is for, you know, for corporate profit and part of it is for political control.

01:45:34.360 And 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.

01:45:59.820 So, 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.

01:46:20.960 And 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.

01:46:29.400 And you're listening to live radio broadcasts in, you know, Russian and just living the life of a Soviet leader in the bunker.

01:46:39.220 And every day you're writing what you would do.

01:46:41.980 You know, you know, today I would push on the Berlin Wall, et cetera.

01:46:48.620 And 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.

01:46:59.240 But 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.

01:47:09.760 It was like, well, now you've gone native, you know, now like you, maybe you're the enemy now. 0.99

01:47:19.660 And 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.

01:47:38.340 And 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.

01:47:49.260 And you were generally put on some kind of like a teaching assignment or some, you know, somewhere you couldn't really do any harm.

01:47:55.900 And 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?

01:48:09.800 And 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.

01:48:20.940 Okay, presumably you're like pretty dyed in the wool, you know, blue team.

01:48:27.920 And 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?

01:48:44.940 Like you might've just had a full conversion experience.

01:48:47.600 I think that is what's happening.

01:48:49.400 I mean, I think that media approach is now the experiment that's running all around us all the time.

01:48:57.940 Yes, I agree with that.

01:49:01.120 It's such a terrifying effect.

01:49:03.620 I wish we had more time.

01:49:05.760 There's always more time, all in God's time.

01:49:08.860 But 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.

01:49:30.900 And in the end, this is what's at stake.

01:49:34.420 I 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.

01:49:47.240 I 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.

01:50:02.340 And, 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.

01:50:21.260 And, you know, if it weren't, I wouldn't be fighting for it so hard.

01:50:27.040 But thank you for taking the time to really dig in to those issues rather than, you know, the latest photo op of the day.

01:50:38.020 You're welcome back anytime.

01:50:39.200 Thank you, Amaryllis Kennedy.

01:50:41.080 Thanks, Tucker.

01:50:41.660 Thanks for listening to the Tucker Carlson Show.

01:50:45.640 If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson.com to see everything that we have made.

01:50:50.300 The complete library.

01:50:52.380 Tuckercarlson.com.

The Tucker Carlson Show - October 25, 2024

Former CIA Officer Amaryllis Kennedy： Iraq, JFK, and Everything Else Our Intel Agencies Lied About

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