Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - May 22, 2023


America Last Exposed: Biden Disasters at Home and Abroad, Live with Ret Col Douglas Macgregor | TRIGGERED Ep. 33


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 32 minutes

Words per Minute

165.78862

Word Count

15,294

Sentence Count

1,095

Misogynist Sentences

8

Hate Speech Sentences

46


Summary

Retired Army Col. Doug Mcgregor joins us to talk about the latest in the ongoing Russia scandal, and why we should all be worried about what the Deep state is up to in Washington, D.C. Doug has a storied career in the Army, and served as a senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration. He's been a strong voice in exposing the forever war agenda inside Washington, DC, and he'll give you all the explosive details that the Swamp does not want you to know. He's also the author of several books, including The Dark Side Of: The Deep State: A Guide to the Deep State, which is a must-listen for every American who wants to know what's going on inside the Beltway, and what the deep state is really up to! Doug also served as the commander of the last great tank battle in the 20th century, The Battle of 73 Easting, which may have been the greatest in the history of warfare, and has been one of the most influential voices in the anti-war movement in the past 20 years. He'll also give us the inside scoop on the latest report from the Durham report, the Steele dossier, and his thoughts on why the whole Russia scandal is a total FAKE NEWS STORY, and how we need to fight back against it. If you haven't checked out The Deep state, you won't want to miss this! Stay tuned for our next episode of Triggered, where we'll be talking all things Deep state and Deep state! - we'll have a special guest on this week's Deep state conspiracies. - Tom Pizzagate, coming soon! . . . - and much, much, MUCH MUCH MORE! - Tom Tom Connelly is a regular contributor to the Swamp Dweller Podcast! and the Swamp in the Swamp is a place where you don't have to pay attention to everything that s going on in DC, so make sure to check out the Swamp Podcast. and stay tuned for the Swamp Media Report, the Swamp Report, which will have the scoop on all things going on there! , and much more! ! And don't miss it! The Swampy Swampy - click here for more Swampy stuff! And stay tuned to The Swamp - The Swamp is not a place you need to know about the Swamp, folks!


Transcript

00:00:00.000 you you
00:00:27.000 guys good evening and welcome to another major episode of triggered thank you all
00:00:43.000 for tuning in as always means the world to us and frankly to the movement
00:00:48.000 because we got to fight back against some of the insanity that we see out
00:00:51.000 here on a daily basis tonight we're talking with retired army colonel Doug
00:00:57.000 Colonel McGregor has a storied career in the Army.
00:01:01.000 The colonel directed the last great tank battle in the 20th century.
00:01:07.000 I mean, that's sort of an interesting thing.
00:01:08.000 I mean, I want to hear all about that because, I mean...
00:01:10.000 Tank battles. I mean, when you think about the history of warfare, some of the most major.
00:01:15.000 So to sort of see the change out of that is actually incredible.
00:01:20.000 So that was the Battle of 73 Easting during the Gulf War back in 91, I believe.
00:01:26.000 But most recently, he served as a senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration.
00:01:32.000 And he's been a strong voice In exposing the forever war agenda inside Washington, D.C. And he'll give you all the explosive details that the swamp does not want you to know.
00:01:45.000 I imagine a lot of that has to do with money.
00:01:48.000 Some of it probably has to do with stupidity.
00:01:50.000 But we're going to talk to Colonel McGregor in a moment.
00:01:53.000 But first, we finally have the Durham report, folks.
00:01:58.000 And... It's basically just telling us what we've already known for years.
00:02:05.000 In my case, what I've known since about 2017 when they started saying that we were colluding with Russia.
00:02:13.000 And To break it down, they basically say that the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was a total hoax based on the lies of the Steele dossier and the FBI knew it the whole time.
00:02:29.000 I'm shocked, folks.
00:02:31.000 I'm shocked. The FBI, I thought they were such good actors.
00:02:35.000 I thought everything they do, like, concerned parents being domestic terrorists in their eyes.
00:02:40.000 Except for terrorists, they're not terrorists.
00:02:42.000 But domestic terrorist parents, like, that's a real thing, folks.
00:02:47.000 From the report, and I quote, Ah!
00:03:09.000 No shit! I'm shocked!
00:03:12.000 You don't say! But where's the accountability for all of this, folks?
00:03:17.000 Where's... The action, right?
00:03:20.000 These guys get away with it.
00:03:22.000 They get busted. They break the rules.
00:03:25.000 They don't follow the Constitution.
00:03:27.000 They're biased partisan hacks, but the problem is they get what they want and nothing actually happens.
00:03:35.000 The Steele dossier was Clinton bought and paid for opposition research.
00:03:41.000 It was all lies.
00:03:43.000 Now, anyone with a brain knew that, right?
00:03:45.000 Yeah, Donald Trump colluded with Russia because, oh, he needed the money.
00:03:50.000 Like, It was used as a pretext to spy on Team Trump.
00:03:56.000 Remember? Trump was right about that one also.
00:03:58.000 They're spying on me.
00:03:59.000 It has to be. Because you see this stuff coming out, and you say that there's no other logical answer.
00:04:06.000 Of course they were spying on it, whether it was Obama and Hillary and all those people.
00:04:10.000 They did it.
00:04:12.000 There was never any evidence of collusion, and it was always obvious.
00:04:17.000 But... They play on the minds of people who don't have the time to get into the details, who don't think about it.
00:04:24.000 They whisper in their ear for seven years that, you know, a small percentage of people are like, well, there's gotta be something to it, right?
00:04:31.000 We gotta trust the FBI. They're honorable and they're acting in good faith and all of this bullshit that we know isn't true now.
00:04:38.000 But again, we're paying attention.
00:04:40.000 We're watching this stuff every day.
00:04:41.000 This is what we do.
00:04:44.000 Average people working hard to put food on their table, trying to live their American dream, listening to five minutes of news in the background every day.
00:04:52.000 You know what? Nah, there must be some truth to it.
00:04:56.000 The reality is that these people are bad actors.
00:05:00.000 They're corrupted, partisan, broken agencies, and we need to start from scratch.
00:05:09.000 The Russia hoax was an operation hatched by left-wing political operatives, and it had nothing to do with a serious investigation.
00:05:18.000 It never did. It had to do with creating a shadow over Trump, trying to hurt him in the midterms, trying to make his job in D.C. harder, trying to make his mission impossible to fulfill, and yet he still did a lot of it.
00:05:35.000 But it would have been a lot more because you would have won over some of the weak Republicans that also were afraid of the backlash associated with all of the stupidity.
00:05:46.000 Guys, not everyone sees it the way you guys see it.
00:05:49.000 Not everyone's eyes are open.
00:05:51.000 And even those sometimes that perhaps know what's going on and eyes are open, they're We're too afraid to take on the machine.
00:06:00.000 And we must become unafraid if we're going to push back against the insanity that's enveloping our country and destroying once noble institutions.
00:06:11.000 And meanwhile, there's actual threats facing the country.
00:06:15.000 Joe Biden is facilitating the entry of drugs, suspected terrorists, and millions of unknown illegal immigrants in our country.
00:06:26.000 Title 42, which was instituted by my father, President Donald Trump, in 2020, allowed for the swift removal of illegal immigrants.
00:06:35.000 Biden let it expire last week.
00:06:39.000 Shocking again.
00:06:41.000 I know we're all surprised.
00:06:43.000 You know, we heard the rumors.
00:06:44.000 He may be renewing it.
00:06:46.000 It's like, I don't think that's going to happen.
00:06:48.000 But, you know, Biden let it expire last week, and the flood at the border is exactly what we expected, and it's gotten worse.
00:06:57.000 Last week, the Border Patrol reported that illegal boarding crossings topped 10,000 per day, the highest levels ever recorded.
00:07:10.000 And guys, that's just counting the ones that they actually catch.
00:07:14.000 Okay? Thousands more get away with it.
00:07:16.000 Every day. Probably...
00:07:18.000 I mean... You know, that's a long border, folks.
00:07:21.000 You think that 10,000 that they got, you think that's a number?
00:07:24.000 I bet it's double, probably triple, and maybe a lot worse.
00:07:29.000 The liberals tell you that these are all, they're moms and kids.
00:07:33.000 They're seeking asylum and a better life.
00:07:36.000 But take a look for a second at this footage of an overcrowded border patrol station.
00:07:41.000 Tell me exactly how many pregnant women you see here.
00:07:48.000 Huh! That's funny.
00:07:59.000 An overcrowded facility that seems to have zero women.
00:08:03.000 Zero young children.
00:08:06.000 It's all young men, and they're wearing masks so you know they're voting Democrat.
00:08:13.000 And that's the plan all along, folks.
00:08:17.000 Okay? That's the plan.
00:08:19.000 Overwhelm the systems.
00:08:21.000 Let them vote.
00:08:22.000 Let them skew the future census data to be able to get more liberals in Congress.
00:08:29.000 That's all the game is, folks.
00:08:31.000 They'll get released into the country and likely never, ever deported.
00:08:37.000 The Washington Examiner is reporting that illegal immigrants released into the United States have received notices to appear in court in 2033.
00:08:51.000 Guys, 2033.
00:08:53.000 Okay, it's 2023 right now.
00:08:56.000 I thought it was a typo.
00:08:57.000 Okay, like later this year.
00:08:59.000 No, no, no. In 10 years, in a decade, right around the time of the next census, that's when they have their court appearance.
00:09:12.000 10 years? 10% of the century.
00:09:17.000 That's when they're going to start showing.
00:09:19.000 How many of you think are even going to show up?
00:09:22.000 By the way, even if they do to court and a judge rules that they should be removed, as long as there's a Democrat in office, they're 100% safe.
00:09:31.000 They'll be in our schools.
00:09:33.000 They'll be taking advantage of our healthcare systems.
00:09:36.000 They won't be paying for any of those things, but you, you will have the privilege of paying for yourselves, your children, and them and their children.
00:09:46.000 There's over 1.2 million illegal immigrants currently in this country that have been ordered to be deported by a judge.
00:09:55.000 I thought, I was told, because this is what they said about me and my family for a while, I thought and was told that no one was above the law.
00:10:04.000 But that's just what Democrats always tell us, right?
00:10:09.000 They said it about me, they don't seem to have a problem with Hunter.
00:10:13.000 They'd say about someone who's conservative coming in legally, but not someone who will ultimately vote for Democrat, be dependent on their systems, and help further the radical left agenda.
00:10:27.000 Guys, apparently if you're an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, then you are above the law.
00:10:33.000 You'll actually get better treatment than Americans who are actually subjected to these laws.
00:10:40.000 And where do all these illegals go?
00:10:42.000 Well, guys, in the case of New York State, they are going into hotels where they are kicking out homeless veterans out of hotels to make room for illegal immigrants.
00:10:56.000 So again, no one's looking for equality here, folks.
00:11:00.000 They're looking for much more than that.
00:11:02.000 They can come here illegally, they'll get free housing, and they'll displace.
00:11:10.000 Veterans who need our help.
00:11:12.000 Veterans who put their life on the line for our country.
00:11:17.000 Veterans who could be suffering from PTSD and other things.
00:11:21.000 Why there's 22 a day that kill themselves.
00:11:26.000 An illegal immigrant crosses the border, gets a hotel, displaces an American vet.
00:11:33.000 Think about this for a second, folks.
00:11:36.000 Biden's prioritizing the care of people who aren't even from this country and have no right whatsoever to be here over the people that fought and bled for it.
00:11:50.000 Are you fucking kidding me?
00:11:54.000 Like, I don't even want to curse.
00:11:55.000 I try my best to not do it.
00:11:57.000 And sometimes, this is insanity.
00:11:59.000 But this is what Democrats want.
00:12:01.000 This is Democrat policy.
00:12:03.000 They hate you.
00:12:05.000 They hate your guts.
00:12:09.000 And they're not even pretending to hide it anymore, folks.
00:12:13.000 Otherwise, there is literally no sane, rational, or reasonable explanation for a policy like this right now.
00:12:23.000 This isn't going to go over well with even liberals, as insane as many of them are.
00:12:29.000 In Chicago, for example, they want to put hundreds of illegal immigrants in the South Side.
00:12:37.000 Listen to the press conference here.
00:12:39.000 The local residents, who are Biden voters, by the way, they are pissed.
00:12:46.000 Check it out and see for yourself.
00:12:48.000 Resources that have not come to us, now you want to overly compensate for people who've never lived here before and they really need to be taken care of first and foremost before anything else happens here.
00:13:05.000 Why would any leader put our black communities already riddled with crime at further risk by placing unbedded non-taxpayers steps away from our seniors, our children, and our homes we've worked so hard on our own to secure?
00:13:26.000 Guys, I don't know that man.
00:13:28.000 I don't know who he is.
00:13:29.000 I imagine we don't have a lot in common politically.
00:13:32.000 And yet, on this one, we agree.
00:13:35.000 And yet, it continues to happen.
00:13:38.000 What good can come from this?
00:13:40.000 Who are the people whose jobs are going to be displaced?
00:13:43.000 Probably America's lowest income earners.
00:13:46.000 People who saw real wage growth under Donald Trump.
00:13:49.000 And probably people who saw that disappear immediately under Joe Biden.
00:13:54.000 But you think an influx of millions of illegals is going to help or hurt that problem?
00:14:00.000 Guys, like the guy says in the video, these are unvetted people.
00:14:05.000 Like the unvetted people that they stuck on planes and flew in from Afghanistan.
00:14:10.000 What could possibly go wrong, folks?
00:14:13.000 But just last week, in one day...
00:14:17.000 Five separate illegals on the terror watchlist were caught crossing the border.
00:14:25.000 Five in one day.
00:14:27.000 For comparison, there were three terror watchlist arrests at the border in all of 2020.
00:14:36.000 There were five in one day.
00:14:38.000 How many more are getting in?
00:14:41.000 Just days before that, an Afghan national, reportedly on the terror watch list, also were caught at the border.
00:14:50.000 But ask yourself, again, folks, How many people aren't being caught?
00:14:56.000 We know over a million gotaways.
00:14:59.000 They're gotaways. A million people because, you know, we can't finish our border wall.
00:15:03.000 We can't really patrol it.
00:15:04.000 That would be, you know, homophobic or something or misogynist or I don't know.
00:15:10.000 One of the ists.
00:15:11.000 It doesn't actually have to be anything because it's all bullshit.
00:15:16.000 Spoonfed to us by the press secretary and the Biden administration, gleefully carried by big tech and the mainstream media, even if it makes no sense whatsoever.
00:15:26.000 But we now have a million gotaways under Biden.
00:15:30.000 They've escaped authorities.
00:15:32.000 How many of those are on a terror watch list?
00:15:35.000 What's the worst that could happen, folks, right?
00:15:37.000 I mean, come on, it could only be maybe a few hundred.
00:15:41.000 Maybe a thousand? You know, of a million gotaways.
00:15:44.000 I mean, what's a thousand terrorists running around our country?
00:15:47.000 What could they possibly do, folks?
00:15:49.000 And of course, it's not just terrorists coming across, but deadly drugs.
00:15:54.000 Biden has blood on his hands.
00:15:57.000 Take Santa Barbara County, California, of all places, for example.
00:16:01.000 Between 2020 and 2022, Overdose deaths in Santa Barbara have more than tripled, okay?
00:16:10.000 And that's not just the pandemic, folks.
00:16:12.000 This is going on now, and the pandemic's long been over, okay?
00:16:17.000 That's happening because we don't have control of our border.
00:16:21.000 It's a sieve, and the Democrats and their policies are just fine with that.
00:16:27.000 It's unleashing a scourge that's killing Americans all over the country.
00:16:31.000 And now, folks, every state is a border state because of this insanity.
00:16:36.000 To you or I, this is a crisis.
00:16:40.000 The drug cartels control our border and are sending fentanyl.
00:16:46.000 There are millions of unknown illegal immigrants from all over the world streaming across.
00:16:52.000 I spoke with a governor in the last week who was down on the border.
00:16:57.000 They're finding Chinese nationals, Russian nationals, again, all over the Middle East.
00:17:03.000 You've seen the terror watch list items.
00:17:06.000 This is real, and yet no one's actually talking about it.
00:17:09.000 No one wants to cover it for fear.
00:17:12.000 Of being called, you know, again, a bad name, even though, you know, has nothing to do with that.
00:17:17.000 Like, God forbid we put America first.
00:17:19.000 I know, that's terrible. Putting the citizens of America.
00:17:22.000 I mean, it's strange.
00:17:24.000 When I say it, it's racist when that gentleman from Chicago says it.
00:17:27.000 Like, hey, maybe we should take care of our citizens first when we have crime riddled streets and gang warfare.
00:17:33.000 What are we going to do with this?
00:17:34.000 No, no, no. I think we're all on the same page here, folks, except for the elites in Washington, except for the radical Democrats who are in charge.
00:17:44.000 The moderate Democrats, and even those that are probably not so moderate in many respects, they get it and they see it.
00:17:51.000 But Joe Biden doesn't care.
00:17:55.000 Democrats encourage it because they know it will get them new voters and cheap labor.
00:18:02.000 Here's Joe Biden laughing about our nation being destroyed.
00:18:10.000 Much better than you all expected.
00:18:14.000 Do you have any plans to visit the border?
00:18:17.000 Pardon me? Do you have any plans to visit the border?
00:18:20.000 Not in the near term, no.
00:18:22.000 No, just be disruptive, not anything else.
00:18:27.000 Oh, he has no plans to visit the border.
00:18:29.000 What is Joe Biden doing? I mean, he's failing on every conceivable metric that there is.
00:18:34.000 We're on the brink of nuclear war.
00:18:37.000 Inflation is through the roof.
00:18:39.000 Banks are collapsing.
00:18:40.000 Interest rates are going up.
00:18:42.000 We're no longer energy independent.
00:18:44.000 And, you know, he thinks it's just going great.
00:18:46.000 It's wonderful. I mean, he's doing as good a job as Kamala Harris with the border.
00:18:49.000 The borders are, right? You know, go to the border.
00:18:51.000 No, no, no. It's not my job.
00:18:53.000 I mean, well, it's my job, but it's not really something I'm going to do.
00:18:56.000 I mean, we're just going to cackle like a hyena, and that makes it all okay.
00:19:02.000 Guys, you might see this as a violation of our sovereignty and a threat, but Biden says
00:19:10.000 the threat is actually you.
00:19:13.000 Biden is pushing to ban rifles and AR-15s and we'll actually do a whole show probably
00:19:19.000 next Monday on the insanity of the pistol brace thing and again, how you can go about
00:19:23.000 doing that if you want to deal with it or not, that's up to you.
00:19:26.000 But we'll get into the full details of that probably a week from today because that'll
00:19:29.000 give you about a week to get everything squared away if you choose to and I'm not saying I
00:19:33.000 recommend that.
00:19:34.000 I'm just saying, you know, perhaps me with certain things, I will not be held to the
00:19:39.000 Hunter Biden standard.
00:19:40.000 I'll be held to the highest possible standard.
00:19:43.000 And so it'll be an interesting one.
00:19:44.000 So you're going to want to tune in probably next Monday on that one.
00:19:46.000 But only the MS-13 gang members that are coming across the border can own guns, right?
00:19:53.000 That's fine for them, right?
00:19:54.000 And get this. The drug cartels are flooding our nation with fentanyl aren't the biggest threat.
00:20:00.000 No, no, no, guys. They're not the biggest threat, right?
00:20:03.000 Human trafficking, sex trafficking, drug trafficking, tens of thousands of fentanyl deaths a year.
00:20:11.000 A lot higher than that, actually.
00:20:13.000 Killing our children, our grandchildren, our friends, our family, and our loved ones indiscriminately across every demographic.
00:20:22.000 No, no, no, guys. The people peddling that stuff across the border, they aren't the biggest threat.
00:20:29.000 No. It's So-called white supremacy.
00:20:34.000 That's the biggest threat that America faces right now.
00:20:37.000 Hear Joe Biden in his own words.
00:20:40.000 To stand up against the poison of white supremacy as I did my inaugural address to single out
00:20:47.000 as the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.
00:20:56.000 Yawn.
00:20:57.000 I mean, I guess Biden thinks he's playing to a hometown crowd speaking at a historically
00:21:02.000 black college, but like, give me a break, folks.
00:21:05.000 Like, I have been all over this country.
00:21:07.000 I don't know that I've seen any of these so-called, you know, like, you know, sure, there's a lunatic out there somewhere, and just like there's plenty of lunatics on the left, but, like, the biggest threat to our country, the biggest threat to our homeland...
00:21:21.000 I mean, this guy's been smoking a bit of what Hunter's got, okay?
00:21:25.000 Give me a break. Biden and the Democrats are undermining our sovereignty.
00:21:30.000 What else could explain their actions?
00:21:33.000 And by the way, if America was so evil, like we hear from the leftists, if it's so racist, so terrible, Why exactly would millions of, let's say, non-white people journey across our border every year?
00:21:50.000 Why would they risk life and limb to come here?
00:21:53.000 Please explain that to me.
00:21:56.000 Maybe, maybe, it's all bullshit.
00:21:59.000 Maybe it's just a sound bite that gets him credit.
00:22:05.000 Because it is, folks.
00:22:06.000 That's all it is.
00:22:08.000 We need to take control of our border.
00:22:11.000 It's going to take serious leadership, actual leadership, not a demented old idiot that can't find his way off a stage.
00:22:20.000 And that means a second Trump administration.
00:22:24.000 We need to treat our border with the same urgency that Democrats give to Ukraine's border.
00:22:32.000 And until that happens, folks, We're in trouble, and as far as I'm concerned, if we don't have borders, we don't have a country.
00:22:41.000 Another very wise man once said that, and that's your favorite president and my father, Donald J. Trump, and he's 100% right.
00:22:48.000 So guys, before we get to our interview, I want to make sure to thank our great sponsors.
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00:25:21.000 And with that, we're going to go to retired Colonel Douglas McGregor.
00:25:26.000 Doug, welcome aboard, or I should say Colonel.
00:25:30.000 These days, I have a lot of respect for our military, especially the door kickers and the guys that are doing it.
00:25:37.000 I used to probably have a lot more respect for military leadership, but when I see some of the woke crap...
00:25:44.000 That has come out of their mouths these days.
00:25:48.000 It's actually hard, right?
00:25:49.000 And I mean, I think that's reflected in the recruitment numbers.
00:25:52.000 You know, it takes a lot of patriotism to sign up for something like the military.
00:25:59.000 And it's hard to do that when you're risking your life potentially.
00:26:03.000 If you don't believe in the things that are their stated values.
00:26:07.000 So when you see some of the woke nonsense that's going on in the military, what do you see yourself?
00:26:11.000 Because it's got to be frustrating from someone like yourself, who I know, just staunch America First patriot.
00:26:19.000 Well, you know, the American military establishment is in the same boat as your political structure, and I would argue your economy.
00:26:27.000 It's afflicted with stage four cancer.
00:26:32.000 What I'm saying is that when your dad took office, he spent four years suppressing the cancer.
00:26:40.000 Trying to keep it at stage two, because we were already in trouble.
00:26:44.000 We've been in trouble for many, many decades.
00:26:46.000 That's why President Trump's arrival was a returning faith to tens of millions of Americans, that there was, in fact, hope for the country, a belief in the rule of law, a belief in the republic, belief in our national identity, history and culture.
00:27:02.000 Unfortunately, since January of 2020, we've jumped from Stage 2 to Stage 4.
00:27:09.000 We're in a lot of trouble. And for the military to get anything right, you'd really have to decapitate it, because most of the people at the top are among the least impressive that I certainly remember in all the years that I served.
00:27:22.000 And these people are affected and afflicted, not just with The sort of stage four political cancer of wokeness.
00:27:30.000 These are people who frankly will adopt whatever you want them to to get ahead.
00:27:36.000 We have a Washington community and a military full of opportunists who don't really believe in much of anything except in whatever gets them promoted, whatever lines their pockets with cash.
00:27:49.000 The whole notion of service has largely vanished from the senior ranks.
00:27:54.000 We see it, as you point out, at the lowest levels, but we're having trouble keeping good people in uniform.
00:28:00.000 They don't want to be there anymore because they're sick of listening to the nonsense, characterizing everybody who ever did anything to build the United States and to protect it as some evildoer that deserves to be erased from the historical record.
00:28:14.000 All of this sickens real professional soldiers, sailors, airmen, or Marines.
00:28:19.000 So yeah, we're in a lot of trouble.
00:28:21.000 That's why I call it now the political equivalent of stage four cancer.
00:28:25.000 I mean, that's saying a lot, but yeah, when you see that, when you see Millie, I'd like to learn about white privilege, like, no one's even heard of this shit before he even said that, but he said it in front of Congress.
00:28:37.000 Meanwhile, you know, he could maybe learn about, like, winning a war or something like that, or not having the disastrous Afghan withdrawal, but, like, that was his concern as that stuff is going on, and when you say stage four cancer, yeah, it has to be, because there's, again, Let's just say I know nothing about Afghanistan or, you know, military leadership.
00:28:57.000 I know he's wrong.
00:28:59.000 It doesn't take a genius to figure that out.
00:29:01.000 It doesn't take, you know, General Patton to understand that this guy's an imbecile.
00:29:06.000 And yet he's there.
00:29:07.000 He's amassed that kind of power.
00:29:09.000 And I feel like they've backfilled all the leadership positions.
00:29:12.000 You saw that with the mandates where they're, you know, The highest trained people in the military were the ones that were sort of anti-vax.
00:29:19.000 They weren't going to go for it. That's our great fighter pilots, our SEAL team type, you know, and other special operations operators.
00:29:26.000 And they're like, no. And they're like, okay, fine.
00:29:28.000 We'll get rid of you guys.
00:29:29.000 Like, they spend millions training them.
00:29:31.000 It's like, we'll replace you with like a trans, like, checkmark person.
00:29:35.000 And, you know, they may not be able to operate or fly a plane, but like, we'll be really woke and we can...
00:29:40.000 Pretend that that's important for our military and that's going to somehow help win a war.
00:29:45.000 Well, keep in mind that the vast majority of people who govern your country that sit on Capitol Hill, that are operating in the White House, they have no idea what a real war looks like.
00:29:56.000 For the last 30 years, we've been fighting people without armies, without air forces, without navies, essentially large numbers of people running around with AK-47s and bedsheets and planting mines.
00:30:07.000 Our military has suffered as a consequence.
00:30:10.000 One of the reasons that your dad was very interested in extricating our forces from many of these countries wasn't simply because there was no mission.
00:30:17.000 This was an open-ended opportunity to throw money into a large pit.
00:30:22.000 But there was nothing there to accomplish in the interests of the American people.
00:30:26.000 There was no strategic benefit to us.
00:30:29.000 We weren't accomplishing anything.
00:30:31.000 He understood that, but he also understood that had a very negative impact on our military.
00:30:36.000 You get lazy when you can dominate everyone with firepower, when there's no real threat to you and you go to war.
00:30:45.000 There is no war.
00:30:47.000 This becomes a colonial expedition.
00:30:49.000 The problem for us now is that we're looking at Ukraine and the Russians on the other side of Ukraine.
00:30:55.000 These are not Iraqis.
00:30:57.000 These aren't Afghans.
00:30:58.000 This is a real military establishment.
00:31:01.000 And when you listen to fools like this Admiral Aquilino from Pacific Command talk about our ability to fight a two-front war, That he's not worried about Russia and he's got what he needs to deal with China.
00:31:14.000 This is the kind of insanity that we absolutely do not need.
00:31:19.000 Your sober-minded father would have fired him.
00:31:22.000 That's absolutely outrageous nonsense.
00:31:25.000 The last man to talk about a two-front war being child's play was Otto Hitler.
00:31:30.000 We don't need people that even remotely think like that in uniform.
00:31:34.000 That's where we are. There's no strategic common sense.
00:31:37.000 There's no interest in the national interest.
00:31:40.000 The whole thing is about who makes money in Washington and bully whomever we want to overseas.
00:31:47.000 All of these ugly chickens are coming back to roost right now.
00:31:50.000 The whole world is not with us on this Ukraine business.
00:31:54.000 Most of the world is very much against us.
00:31:57.000 And everything is at risk.
00:31:58.000 Our economy is at risk.
00:32:00.000 The reserve status of the dollar is at risk.
00:32:03.000 We're facing terrible times ahead.
00:32:05.000 Things are not going to get better until we remove the principal metastasizing cancer from Washington, DC. And I'm not just talking about an election for president.
00:32:15.000 We need to make a clean sweep.
00:32:17.000 So say you were given the keys to the Pentagon tomorrow, or under a Trump administration.
00:32:24.000 What are the first moves that you make?
00:32:28.000 Because I think, again, you're right.
00:32:31.000 It's not just Joe Biden or Milley.
00:32:35.000 It's much deeper than that.
00:32:37.000 It's much further entrenched.
00:32:38.000 And I think you were also right that when you said it earlier, That it's probably been on the wrong track for quite some time.
00:32:46.000 But it was Trump and or Trump derangement syndrome that actually brought out the insanity, right?
00:32:52.000 We saw the disease much more clearly.
00:32:55.000 It was sort of hidden.
00:32:57.000 It was doing its damage.
00:32:58.000 But Trump really brought it out where they stopped pretending that it wasn't real.
00:33:03.000 They were saying the quiet parts out loud.
00:33:05.000 But you're handed the keys to the Pentagon tomorrow.
00:33:07.000 What do you do? Today, as we speak, we have 44 four-star generals and admirals on active duty in the United States military for a force of a little less than 1.1 million soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.
00:33:26.000 Now, at the height of the Second World War, 1943-44, when we had 12.2 million in uniform, we had only seven four-stars.
00:33:38.000 What's wrong with this picture?
00:33:40.000 Anyone who has spent more than a few weeks in business and understands how to organize businesses effectively to be profitable looks at the overhead and quickly discerns what he's dealing with.
00:33:52.000 We have this enormous bloated overhead.
00:33:55.000 Of course the generals hated Donald Trump.
00:33:58.000 He was prepared to do something about that.
00:34:01.000 He asked hard questions.
00:34:03.000 So the first thing you've got to do is get rid of them all.
00:34:05.000 They all have to go.
00:34:08.000 You need to reduce that number to about 10.
00:34:10.000 But all the ones that you've got right now should be retired immediately.
00:34:15.000 Go away. Then you have to appoint new service secretaries.
00:34:20.000 You cannot appoint a golf buddy to be your service secretary.
00:34:24.000 You can't pick somebody because they did well in some corporation.
00:34:29.000 You've got to send people in there who know something about the military.
00:34:33.000 And they can't just be corporate executives from the defense industry who know how to spend money on weapons platforms.
00:34:40.000 You've got to have people that are really qualified, that can make the hard choices.
00:34:44.000 And you tell them, you've got to get all these people have to go.
00:34:47.000 I want all of their resignations.
00:34:49.000 Then you need to convene boards to pick successors.
00:34:52.000 And you've got to be prepared to go low.
00:34:55.000 This whole thing of, oh, we can't offload General Doofus.
00:34:59.000 He's so experienced.
00:35:01.000 But getting rid of him may be the best way to possibly improve the whole situation.
00:35:06.000 I mean, this thing of he's got experience sounds great.
00:35:09.000 But what you need is energy.
00:35:11.000 You need integrity.
00:35:12.000 You need intelligence.
00:35:14.000 People that study their professions, they're out there.
00:35:17.000 Most of them are captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels.
00:35:21.000 And just as Marshall in 1939 began immediately removing general officers, in fact, the first year that he was Chief of Staff, he retired 54.
00:35:30.000 By the time the Second World War ended, every single general officer in the Army had been replaced except one.
00:35:37.000 Now we've got to get going, or we're not going to win anything anywhere in the future.
00:35:43.000 Look at that withdrawal from Afghanistan.
00:35:46.000 Those people are a disaster.
00:35:48.000 McKenzie and CENTCOM, a Marine four-star responsible for that?
00:35:53.000 Who in the hell was paying attention?
00:35:55.000 Who reviewed the plan?
00:35:57.000 Who received the briefing?
00:35:59.000 Sullivan? Who got it?
00:36:01.000 This is outrageous. That should never have happened.
00:36:04.000 And they picked the wrong airport for the wrong reasons.
00:36:07.000 And we have nice photographs of people hanging onto wings, hanging onto wheels, people that have no interest in coming to the United States for any of the right reasons.
00:36:17.000 And we're flooded with people again.
00:36:18.000 We know nothing about them.
00:36:20.000 We haven't vetted them.
00:36:21.000 This is part of the larger problem.
00:36:23.000 So when you talk about open borders, uncontrolled immigration, or what I call weaponized immigration, it's weaponized because it's being used against the American people, because the government in Washington is literally waging war on the core population.
00:36:38.000 You know, those are the people that say, I'm an American, not something else and then an American, not a part-time American, not a conditional American, but an American.
00:36:49.000 That's the enemy, and that's what they're going after here at home.
00:36:53.000 And when you go overseas and you look at our behavior there, there's no strategy.
00:36:58.000 No one has thought through anything.
00:37:00.000 You know, your dad asked an important question when they tried to ambush him into a war with Iran.
00:37:06.000 He essentially said, well, if we do what you're arguing, if we launch these strikes against the Iranians, what happens then?
00:37:15.000 How do things look afterwards?
00:37:18.000 Nobody asked the question.
00:37:20.000 Oh, let's go. We can sell a couple missiles.
00:37:23.000 We'll get a board seat at Raytheon.
00:37:25.000 It's fine. I mean, who cares if we get sucked into another 20-year war and billions of dollars and thousands of Americans maimed, butchered for no real end?
00:37:34.000 You know, some general's got a board seat.
00:37:36.000 He's making, you know, high six figures to do nothing other than peddle more missiles.
00:37:41.000 But, you know, you only keep that job if you keep that cycle going forever.
00:37:46.000 And the President said, President Trump I'm talking about now, said just a few weeks ago, said, look, we can handle Russia.
00:37:53.000 We can handle China.
00:37:54.000 We understand those issues.
00:37:56.000 He does. He knows there's no reason to go to war with anybody.
00:38:00.000 He said, the real problem for us right now is the open border.
00:38:05.000 And not just the open border in the South, because the Northern border is equally open.
00:38:09.000 We just don't pay nearly as much attention to it, and it's also a highway for drugs and criminality into the United States.
00:38:16.000 There is no rule of law in our country.
00:38:18.000 Where I grew up in North Philadelphia has, from time to time, been a combat zone.
00:38:23.000 I'll tell you right now, it's a war zone.
00:38:26.000 There is no rule of law there any longer.
00:38:29.000 Criminality is rampant.
00:38:31.000 And the American people, yes, they're beginning to figure it out, but we're about to go into a serious economic crisis.
00:38:36.000 And once you start talking to people that can't get enough food, who can't afford to buy the food because the prices are so high, you end up the way the Parisian population did in 1789.
00:38:50.000 And we're headed in that direction right now.
00:38:52.000 It takes real leadership by the president, but he's going to need an army of people to fight with him.
00:38:59.000 He's got to be prepared to come into this city, clean it out, and start over.
00:39:04.000 He's got to have foot soldiers in every precinct, in every state.
00:39:09.000 It's the only way to win.
00:39:12.000 We didn't have that the last time.
00:39:14.000 We've got to have that or there's no chance whatsoever for us.
00:39:18.000 So you've been pretty outspoken also about sort of the never-ending, you know, war in Ukraine, which I feel like, you know, again, first it was just a, you know, $130 billion proxy war.
00:39:28.000 Now, not surprisingly to anyone who's been watching for the last, you know, seven or eight years, you know, we have boots on the ground there, and they're doing that without congressional approval and without the approval of the American people.
00:39:39.000 You know, just another money pit, you know, creating the next class of sort of Ukrainian oligarch.
00:39:45.000 But do we even know what, because they haven't been clear to me, what would victory, you know, victory be like in Ukraine?
00:39:52.000 I mean, you know, I know they tried sort of sidelining my father with that at the CNN town hall.
00:39:57.000 He's like, I'm not thinking about victory one way or the other.
00:40:00.000 I want people to stop dying.
00:40:02.000 And that doesn't seem...
00:40:04.000 To be very clear to these people, where there's a binary victory, it's like they're playing Call of Duty, not actually dealing with real lives.
00:40:15.000 Trump said we should be doing everything to stop the bloodshed.
00:40:19.000 Do you agree?
00:40:20.000 What do you see happening there?
00:40:22.000 What is the endgame if that's not correct?
00:40:26.000 Well, for the globalists that are running the show, this is the globalist neocon elite, both on the Hill as well as in the White House.
00:40:34.000 And these elites in Europe, particularly in Paris, Berlin, London, they're all interested in seeing BlackRock take over Ukraine, number one, so that it can be systematically stripped of its resources and turned into a subjugated state that belongs to the larger globalist elites.
00:40:54.000 But they also want to see that happen to Russia, which is why this war was never about Ukraine.
00:40:59.000 It was always about what can be done to destroy Russia.
00:41:03.000 And of course, since the people in charge didn't perform any strategic analysis, they never thought about purpose, method, or end state.
00:41:11.000 They concluded that Russia today is still the Russia of 1992.
00:41:16.000 It's weak. It's prostrate.
00:41:18.000 Its economy is ineffective.
00:41:20.000 Remember the McCain statement?
00:41:22.000 Oh, Russia is Spain with a gas station.
00:41:25.000 All of these arrogant displays of American hubris treating Russia as though it was a third-class nation with a fourth-class military.
00:41:34.000 Well, we're getting an education right now.
00:41:36.000 We paid no attention to the Russians who had legitimate concerns about what we were doing in eastern Ukraine.
00:41:42.000 We were building an army to attack them.
00:41:44.000 We put a hostile government into that country in 2014.
00:41:48.000 And we kept telling them that it made no difference to us what they thought or what they cared about.
00:41:53.000 They said, we don't want NATO on our border.
00:41:56.000 No one paid attention.
00:41:58.000 President Trump tried to listen, but he was surrounded by people who subverted him, people who were not loyal to the president, who took an oath of obedience to the orders of the president and then ignored them.
00:42:10.000 So what's the outcome?
00:42:12.000 You've got a very serious war that could become regional, even global.
00:42:16.000 And no one in the White House seems to really grasp that.
00:42:19.000 But we're losing.
00:42:21.000 The globalists are losing.
00:42:23.000 And when the ground dries, and in June, you're going to see a massive Russian offensive, and most of what we call this thing called Ukraine is going to be swept away, especially that government in Kyiv.
00:42:35.000 But that government doesn't represent the interests of the Ukrainian people.
00:42:39.000 They represent the interests of this globalist elite who are interested in resources and stripping them and using them and exploiting them to make money.
00:42:49.000 Yeah, and there are also people that don't seem to have any of America's interests at heart, even if America's the guy funding all of this to the tune of 130.
00:42:57.000 And, you know, that'll double and triple, and the Pentagon lost 220—you know, they lost, they misplaced $220 billion in their budget.
00:43:04.000 If you lost $6 in your, you know, IRS statement, they'd be auditing you, but they can lose 220.
00:43:09.000 So I imagine most of that went to Ukraine.
00:43:12.000 It feels like, you know, the biggest threat to America is actually what's happened to the petrodollar.
00:43:18.000 When you have Putin now talking with the Saudis and Putin now talking with Xi, and you get rid of the petrodollar, and all of a sudden all that borrowing that we do, where we're living way above our means, that's no longer possible, plausible, or worse.
00:43:34.000 And it seems like we've opened the door for that.
00:43:38.000 So, you know, I guess that works for the globalists because they're probably the guys coming up with this idea and they don't care about taking and getting rid of American hegemony.
00:43:48.000 That's a real problem for America.
00:43:50.000 But again, this is still the Americans pushing this, even though it's literally happening before our eyes and everyone's pretending like this is a non-issue because I guess it's a non-issue.
00:43:59.000 If you're in France or the UK or any of the other places, because you get to knock America down a peg.
00:44:05.000 But what that does to the American people is disastrous.
00:44:08.000 No, I think what you're seeing is this war has become financial as well as military.
00:44:13.000 And the globalists understand that they're going to lose this war.
00:44:17.000 And what will come of this is that the BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, are going to be increased by 81 additional members.
00:44:28.000 And all of these people are going to go to a currency that is backed by gold.
00:44:34.000 And once they go to that currency backed by gold, whether it is one currency or a basket of currencies, it doesn't make any difference.
00:44:42.000 Yes, we are in a lot of trouble.
00:44:44.000 The globalists know that, and it is why they are so desperate right now.
00:44:48.000 And the greatest fear that I have Is it when the Russians do attack and it becomes abundantly clear that Ukraine is finished?
00:44:55.000 I mean, it's already obvious to anybody who visits the place for any length of time, it's in ruins.
00:45:00.000 But once that occurs, I fear that there will be pressure to commit US forces in Poland and Romania, along with Polish forces and potentially Romanian ones, to Western Ukraine.
00:45:13.000 And if that occurs, the gloves will come off.
00:45:15.000 Because truthfully, thus far, Putin has exercised tremendous restraint, tremendous patience.
00:45:21.000 He does not want a war with the West.
00:45:23.000 If he wanted that, we'd already have it.
00:45:26.000 But if we intervene in Western Ukraine, it's over.
00:45:30.000 We'll be in a full-fledged war.
00:45:32.000 Expand on that a little bit because it's sort of interesting.
00:45:34.000 You know, you say, like, hey, you know, this started, maybe Putin was going to do it anyway,
00:45:39.000 but the reality, this started, in my opinion, because, you know, NATO was talking about taking a,
00:45:43.000 let's call it a 500-mile-long buffer zone that has been historically a buffer zone
00:45:47.000 since basically World War II, which was the Ukraine, and moving NATO's borders towards Russia.
00:45:53.000 Now, maybe Putin was going to do it anyway.
00:45:56.000 I'm not saying he's, you know, a good guy or a nice guy.
00:45:59.000 I'm not apologizing for him.
00:46:02.000 But no one seems to talk about that the movement of and the talk about moving NATO onto Russia's border when you had this very large buffer zone of the Ukraine was sort of the excuse that they needed.
00:46:15.000 I mean, it is as though we were goading him into this to begin with.
00:46:20.000 And, you know, what are your thoughts on all of that?
00:46:24.000 I think we've grossly miscalculated.
00:46:26.000 Putin had made several speeches over the last 20 years, repeatedly saying, please do not advance the border to Russia.
00:46:33.000 Do not try to transform Ukraine into a hostile actor, an actor with hostile intentions towards Russia.
00:46:41.000 What happens in Ukraine is of existential strategic interest to us.
00:46:46.000 Just as Theoretically, what happens in Mexico is of existential strategic interest to us, although this administration has decided to ignore it.
00:46:56.000 That's going to come back to haunt us, and if you're looking for future conflict, that's where to look for it, not in Europe and not in Asia.
00:47:02.000 But the point is that Putin wasn't pulling any wool over anyone's eyes, and Putin absolutely didn't want a war.
00:47:08.000 If you go back and look at the force That he sends into Ukraine earlier in February of 2022.
00:47:16.000 He goes in with about 90,000 troops.
00:47:19.000 He limits his advances to the periphery.
00:47:22.000 Because he expected that we would negotiate, that he would demonstrate that this was serious and that Russia wanted its population in eastern Ukraine, which is really Russian, to have equal rights before the law.
00:47:37.000 He wanted to end the oppression of the Russians that lived there.
00:47:41.000 And he wasn't going to surrender Crimea.
00:47:43.000 The reason he went into Crimea is he was afraid it was going to be turned into a US naval base by the Ukrainians at the earliest opportunity.
00:47:50.000 He wasn't going to allow that to happen.
00:47:52.000 Now, he went along and thought that he might get a negotiated settlement, and he finally figured out after several months, nobody's going to talk to me, especially after Biden said, our goal is regime change.
00:48:04.000 Our goal is to get rid of Putin.
00:48:06.000 And our goal is ultimately to divide Russia into constituent parts, then exploit it.
00:48:12.000 All of his supporters, his staffers, everyone in the globalist camp knows this is the truth.
00:48:18.000 The so-called oligarchs, Kolomoisky, Soros, and others are all part of this.
00:48:22.000 None of this is news. Finally, he said, enough's enough.
00:48:27.000 He stopped. They set up a strategic defense.
00:48:30.000 They ran an economy of force mission.
00:48:32.000 And now they have a force in place that can go as far as it needs to go, which includes to the Polish border.
00:48:38.000 They have a plan for a 31-month war against us if we insist on fighting it.
00:48:44.000 And we are in no shape to fight a war.
00:48:47.000 We can't even recruit the United States Army or the Marines.
00:48:51.000 The Marines are running around trying to recruit illegals and are being encouraged to do so by the administration.
00:48:57.000 Is that what you want in the ground force to fight for this country?
00:49:01.000 Forget it. It's not going to work.
00:49:03.000 So, I mean, yeah, I guess that's interesting.
00:49:05.000 I mean, a lot of people probably aren't aware of that, because I think when you look at it sort of on paper, you know, you obviously have the media reports, right?
00:49:11.000 Every time, you know, Russia takes a big town, well, it's not really of strategic importance, but every time Ukraine claws back seven inches, In a major military victory.
00:49:23.000 So, you know, you see the gamesmanship happening in the media, but I'll say this as an outsider who doesn't know and perhaps, you know, didn't know that, hey, maybe that was the, maybe him coming in was to bring everyone to the table in a negotiating tactic.
00:49:35.000 But, you know, you think of it like me with sort of, again, that Cold War mentality of like, you know, the Russian army will steamroll.
00:49:42.000 It's like, well, how did they not take over this country in two weeks, let alone, you know, a year and a half now?
00:49:47.000 To me, and maybe to the uneducated on the subject, it feels like maybe one of the bigger sort of miscalculations or underperformances of recent military history.
00:50:00.000 Is that not the case, or is that also a combination of it?
00:50:03.000 Did he misjudge some of it, or is that just because, you know, 130 billion in missiles given to a militia— You know, can still hold back someone who's not going all out or, you know, using tactical nukes or whatever it may be, that next escalation where he could, you know, again, take over the country rather quickly.
00:50:22.000 Russia is not the Soviet Union.
00:50:24.000 Russia is an orthodox Christian country that is rooted in Russian nationality, history, culture, language and ethnicity.
00:50:34.000 So forget the Soviet Union.
00:50:37.000 Ukraine is a brother Slavic country.
00:50:41.000 The last thing Putin wanted to do was destroy Ukraine.
00:50:45.000 Putin would have been perfectly happy to have Crimea recognized, to gain those equal rights for Russians inside eastern Ukraine, and to declare the place neutral.
00:50:56.000 Because the neutral Ukraine would have provided exactly what you're discussing, not only a buffer for NATO and the West, a buffer for him, for Russia.
00:51:05.000 He wasn't interested in any of the things that he's been accused of.
00:51:10.000 That's what Professor Mearsheimer has said.
00:51:12.000 Anyone who understands Russia knows what's happened over there since 1992 gets it.
00:51:17.000 All of that's over now.
00:51:19.000 Your dad, President Trump, could have intervened in February or March and put an end to this quickly, and I'm confident that he would have.
00:51:27.000 We would have convened talks without preconditions, we'd have come to some sort of new territorial arrangement, and I think we would have had a neutral Ukraine, which was in everyone's interest, and no war.
00:51:40.000 But now, those days are past.
00:51:44.000 This government in Moscow, it's not just President Putin, his entire population is enraged.
00:51:49.000 They don't trust anyone in the West, especially since Chancellor Merkel and now President Macron have both admitted that the so-called Minsk Accords, which were supposed to address these issues, were a facade.
00:52:01.000 They were a fraud.
00:52:03.000 They were designed to, quote-unquote, buy time to build up Ukraine.
00:52:07.000 And they built it up.
00:52:09.000 That was not a militia that was defending Eastern Ukraine.
00:52:12.000 They were actually very good soldiers.
00:52:14.000 Most are now dead.
00:52:16.000 They've had 300,000 to 350,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers.
00:52:21.000 Another 300,000 or 400,000 wounded.
00:52:23.000 They're now forcibly dragging old men and boys into uniform to fight.
00:52:28.000 They're desperate, which is why they'll take anything they can get.
00:52:32.000 The Russians are not desperate.
00:52:33.000 They don't have a recruiting problem.
00:52:36.000 They've had 100,000 volunteers in addition to the 300,000 reservists or more that they've mobilized.
00:52:43.000 Russia's population is squarely behind Putin.
00:52:46.000 What have we got here in this country?
00:52:48.000 We have a divided society, divided along every conceivable issue from economics, class, race, you name it.
00:52:56.000 And this Society doesn't even support the military establishment that desperately needs talent and Americans inside uniform.
00:53:05.000 And this is what this administration thinks it can commit to a war?
00:53:09.000 I mean, this is sheer lunacy.
00:53:12.000 We need to get out of this before we're dragged into something.
00:53:15.000 And the notion that we could take on the Chinese, a nation of 1.4 billion people, what do you plan to do with your military power against that?
00:53:25.000 What makes you think anything we would do would influence them?
00:53:28.000 And as President Trump pointed out, that's an economic competition, one that he could handle.
00:53:34.000 Unfortunately, we're not even in the competition anymore.
00:53:38.000 We've surrendered. Well, the Navy has a drag queen influencer that's going to help the recruitment problem right now, Colonel, so I'm sure things will be just fine.
00:53:48.000 What could go wrong? That's true.
00:53:51.000 Maybe Xi will laugh himself to death because I have a feeling that's probably not going to have the intended effect.
00:53:59.000 Or maybe it will have the intended effect, and that's just where the military is right now.
00:54:02.000 But maybe talk about your military background.
00:54:06.000 How did it shape your views on foreign policy?
00:54:10.000 Because I know as we talk about the wars, I think your views on war and perhaps America's involvement in war have also changed, right?
00:54:19.000 Some of the early Middle Eastern stuff, where you were at the beginning of that to where you are now has probably grossly changed.
00:54:26.000 So how did that evolve?
00:54:30.000 Well, remember I and most of the people of my generation, our formative experience was service in NATO, in Europe.
00:54:37.000 And when NATO went away, most of us stood around in 1992, 93, 94 and said, well, NATO has to go in one of two directions.
00:54:47.000 Either it becomes Europeanized, in other words, Europeans take responsibility for themselves, we can still be a partner, or we just leave because there's no mission for us in Europe anymore.
00:54:58.000 By the way, I had plenty of experience with Russian Organizations and units after the fall of the wall, and I can tell you they were absolutely not our enemies.
00:55:08.000 In fact, they did great work for us, particularly before we went into Afghanistan.
00:55:13.000 But if I go back to the 1970s and I look at the ruins in which the military was found at that point, and then look through the 1980s where we rebuilt and we improved our position dramatically, it took very little time after 1991 for that military to be dismantled and ultimately to be ruined.
00:55:31.000 And we got more and more and more generals and more and more headquarters and fewer and fewer soldiers.
00:55:37.000 We lost 163,000 experienced combat soldiers in 1991 and 1992.
00:55:45.000 And we kept every general officer we had on active duty and added some.
00:55:50.000 This is the problem. This rot has been underway for a long time.
00:55:54.000 And we've lost the discipline, the cohesion, the esprit de corps.
00:55:59.000 I would say Special Operations Forces was an area where there was a holdout.
00:56:04.000 And of course, the administration hates Special Operations because they claim it's another hotbed of white supremacy.
00:56:11.000 So they're now talking about trying to do away with as much of it as they can.
00:56:15.000 Everything is white supremacy or climate change, just so we're clear.
00:56:18.000 I mean, at least in the minds of the left, any problem can either stem from white supremacy or climate change or both.
00:56:27.000 So, you know, yes. So my argument is in 1991, we were a very healthy organization, but we were also disappointed, many of us, because we thought that we had gone over there to fight a war and win it.
00:56:40.000 We discovered after a very short period of time, hostilities were ended.
00:56:44.000 And then the big lie was perpetrated that, well, we really didn't set out to remove Saddam Hussein.
00:56:50.000 That's not really why we went.
00:56:52.000 We just wanted them out of Kuwait, which is not true because we then began trying at every opportunity to kill Saddam Hussein wherever he went.
00:57:00.000 We bombed the place into the Stone Age.
00:57:02.000 So the bottom line is we stood around and said, well, wait a minute, we could go to Baghdad with 5,000 men And pick up Saddam Hussein and that bunch and put another group of Iraqi generals in charge and let the UN handle it.
00:57:14.000 The last thing we needed to do was occupy anything.
00:57:17.000 And of course, when we went back in 2003, originally that was the plan.
00:57:21.000 We were not going to occupy.
00:57:23.000 But again, the same people that pushed nation building in Somalia, nation building in the Balkans, suddenly we were going to build a nation in Iraq.
00:57:33.000 And the insanity took off from there.
00:57:35.000 If we had picked up Saddam Hussein and simply said, thanks very much, we're out of here, you and I and a lot of other people wouldn't even talk about the place today.
00:57:45.000 But we stayed and tried to govern it with our military.
00:57:49.000 What a catastrophe. The last thing you want to do is occupy anything.
00:57:53.000 Now we're trying to fight a proxy war for all the wrong reasons, and we're killing the Ukrainian nation.
00:58:00.000 They're down to perhaps 14 to 18 million now from an original population back in January of 2022 of about 34 million.
00:58:10.000 Everyone's left that could go.
00:58:12.000 They've either gone east, almost 2 million into Russia, or 10 million west into Europe.
00:58:17.000 And when you talk to them on the way out, as most of the news media have, they say, well, you go back.
00:58:23.000 Never. Ukraine is the historic breadbasket of Europe.
00:58:28.000 It is enormously productive.
00:58:31.000 It could be the gleaming jewel economically if we had neutralized it.
00:58:35.000 It could be as wealthy and prosperous today as Austria is.
00:58:40.000 That was the model.
00:58:42.000 That's what we should have done.
00:58:43.000 Instead, we got this terrible war.
00:58:45.000 And today, Russia is not weak.
00:58:48.000 Russia's military is now larger and stronger than anything that we've seen since the 1980s.
00:58:53.000 Its economy is booming.
00:58:56.000 And as I said earlier, 81 nations are headed to St.
00:58:59.000 Petersburg in June for a major conference, the purpose of which is to bring them into this larger plan To back currency with gold.
00:59:08.000 And the gold in China, the gold in Russia, the gold in India is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
00:59:14.000 It's just the beginning.
00:59:15.000 The question is, what do we do?
00:59:18.000 And these people in Washington have no answers.
00:59:21.000 And that's why prices rise, services fall apart, the armed forces are in ruins, our borders are open, and there is no rule of law.
00:59:31.000 We are being destroyed by this regime in Washington.
00:59:36.000 Are there moments in your service that stand out to you?
00:59:40.000 You know, what inspired you to join the Army in the first place?
00:59:43.000 And, you know, did you see, you know, in a sort of longer and storied career, I mean, you led the last tank battle.
00:59:49.000 We've got to get to that one, too. But the last sort of great tank battle.
00:59:52.000 Because, listen, I think from a military history standpoint, that's sort of fascinating when you talk about the evolution of warfare and how that doesn't exist.
01:00:00.000 But what did you see in those changes?
01:00:02.000 What moments... You know, sort of stood out to you.
01:00:05.000 Any sort of interesting stories where you're saying, wait a second, this isn't what I got in for.
01:00:11.000 This isn't what our military was like when I signed up initially.
01:00:17.000 Well, in 1958, when I was five years old, my mother took me to West Point.
01:00:23.000 And that was it. I decided that's where I wanted to go and that's what I wanted to be.
01:00:29.000 And in the 1950s, as you can imagine, I grew up in a household where people like Douglas MacArthur, Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill were heroic figures that I was brought up to admire and respect.
01:00:44.000 And that led me down this path of interest in the military.
01:00:48.000 And it never changed, to be perfectly frank with you.
01:00:50.000 The only other interest I ever had was classical music, and my grandmother was a concert pianist, so I enjoyed playing the piano, but it wasn't something I was going to do for the rest of my life.
01:01:00.000 So that was the beginning.
01:01:01.000 Then I went to Germany as an exchange student from 69 to 70, and I lived with a family whose father was a professional soldier, a German officer in the Second World War, and at the end of the war had been...
01:01:14.000 Except into the general staff system.
01:01:16.000 He was fluent in Russian, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.
01:01:19.000 He was a classical scholar, and he spent a lot of time with me and taught me a great deal about the military and warfare.
01:01:26.000 My maternal grandfather had served in the First and Second World Wars.
01:01:30.000 He was an army officer in World War I, became an officer in the Navy in the Second War.
01:01:34.000 My father hated the military, but my parents were divorced.
01:01:37.000 But he served in the Second War.
01:01:39.000 He commanded what you would call a Higgins boat.
01:01:42.000 And his last mission was in Okinawa, where he landed troops in Okinawa in 1945.
01:01:49.000 So everybody had served in the military.
01:01:51.000 I knew what it was about.
01:01:52.000 I knew the good sides and the bad sides, and I chose it as a profession.
01:01:57.000 And I didn't get in the first shot.
01:01:59.000 I lost out to somebody recruited for football at West Point.
01:02:02.000 In Philadelphia, so I ended up going to the Virginia Military Institute for a year, which was a very good thing for me.
01:02:08.000 And it did a lot for me, changed my attitude towards a lot of things.
01:02:11.000 And it didn't turn me into a Confederate, but I certainly gained an appreciation for the South.
01:02:17.000 And then I went on to West Point, and I would think after that I was very fortunate.
01:02:21.000 I served under a number of excellent officers and had great success with soldiers.
01:02:27.000 I discovered pretty quickly that 90% of the soldiers are top-rate people, top-flight people.
01:02:32.000 Our biggest problem are bad officers.
01:02:35.000 We had too many officers and a lot of them are mediocre.
01:02:38.000 And one of the things that I learned from the German that I lived with for a year was one good officer is much better than four or five mediocrities.
01:02:47.000 The soldiers deserve the best.
01:02:49.000 And if you want them to perform to the best of their ability, you give them the best possible officer.
01:02:54.000 And I've stuck by that for the rest of my life.
01:02:57.000 And the other thing was that he and everybody else that I grew up with was very much convinced that you had to lead from the front.
01:03:04.000 And so I went into a tank and I led the 1100 man formation from a tank.
01:03:11.000 We had 42 tanks, 42 Bradleys, 8 guns.
01:03:15.000 We were part of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regimental Battle Group of about 7,000 or 8,000.
01:03:20.000 And we were the lead element in the 7th Corps.
01:03:23.000 And to be frank with you, there was no plan for us to collide with and fight the enemy.
01:03:28.000 In fact, they were trying very hard to position us in such a way that we did not make contact directly.
01:03:34.000 They were going to try and destroy as much of the enemy with indirect fires as they could.
01:03:39.000 The problem was, we ended up in a sandstorm.
01:03:42.000 And we drove headlong into the enemy, but the soldiers were brilliantly trained, great captains, great noncommissioned officers.
01:03:50.000 We went into the attack, and within about 30 minutes, destroyed most of what was the rear guard for the Republican Guard Corps, about 25 to 2,800 men, 30 or 40 tanks, 100 other armored fighting vehicles and artillery.
01:04:04.000 And then we were told to stop.
01:04:07.000 And we stopped at this thing called the 73 Easting.
01:04:10.000 This is a north-south line in the desert because, of course, in the desert, you can't point to some town or a mountain.
01:04:17.000 There's nothing there. Not a lot of natural waypoints, right?
01:04:19.000 Right. So they said, where are you?
01:04:21.000 And I remember we reported that we were at 736 or something.
01:04:26.000 I've forgotten the rest of it.
01:04:27.000 But we were a little bit beyond the 73 line.
01:04:30.000 And they said, well, you've got to fall back to the 70.
01:04:34.000 I said, fall back?
01:04:36.000 And I said, why? You know, why?
01:04:38.000 And of course, I got into an argument.
01:04:39.000 Finally, I said, no, we're not falling back.
01:04:41.000 The regimental commander knew me and the deputy regimental commander said, all right, let McGregor stay there.
01:04:46.000 So we stayed there.
01:04:48.000 We ended up fighting for another two and a half hours because once we broke through the Republican Guard's rear guard, we started having large numbers, hundreds of tanks and armored fighting vehicles, thousands of troops retreating north.
01:05:04.000 Only since we were out in front by about two miles ahead of everybody else, they started slamming into us.
01:05:12.000 And so we ended up doing a lot of damage until these people were either surrendering or disappeared.
01:05:19.000 So it was an extremely successful battle, and like many successful actions, it was an accident.
01:05:24.000 One that I'm very proud that I was part of, simply because of the enormous professionalism, bravery, and courage of these soldiers Sergeants, lieutenants, captains, and warrants that were there with me on the ground.
01:05:36.000 Meaning, I cannot begin to tell you what spectacular soldiers they really were.
01:05:42.000 If I could have, I'd have given every man in the unit a silver star.
01:05:46.000 But of course, you can't do that.
01:05:49.000 That's amazing. A lot of history right there.
01:05:51.000 It's sort of, I guess, the culmination of a lot of history.
01:05:53.000 And I guess you haven't really heard much about tanks since then, except for, I guess, now that we're back to Ukraine, where there seems to be a resurgence, and they're sending American tanks, maybe it's surplus, or perhaps some of the stuff that's more obsolete over there.
01:06:11.000 But you're watching these things. A tank goes in, and a missile takes it out from five miles away, and it's It seems like it's a very different game with the advent of a lot of technology.
01:06:18.000 I don't know that I'd want to be in a tank right now.
01:06:20.000 It's a very secure place when someone's got a rifle, not so much when they have Hellfire missiles.
01:06:26.000 Well, actually, when you're walking around on the ground with a weapon, everything can kill you.
01:06:31.000 You have no protection at all.
01:06:34.000 So you're better off in an armored fighting vehicle in 90% of the cases.
01:06:38.000 The problem is that if you go out there without effective air and missile defense, You're done.
01:06:44.000 You've got to be able to counter the enemy's air and missiles.
01:06:48.000 We have lots of systems, but our army has neglected this for decades, simply because since World War II and even during the Second World War, we didn't need much air defense.
01:06:58.000 Remember that when we fought the Germans in Western Europe, their air force was largely stripped away or defending cities against bombing attacks.
01:07:06.000 So we were usually dealing with, you know, one or two airplanes, and we had 5,000 over us protecting us.
01:07:13.000 Well, that's all changed now.
01:07:15.000 But there are lots of systems that can annihilate these small drones.
01:07:19.000 You can shoot down cruise missiles.
01:07:22.000 What you cannot shoot down are hypersonic missiles.
01:07:26.000 But hypersonic missiles are not meant for troops in the field.
01:07:29.000 They're meant for headquarters, command and control, bunkers, ships at sea, large capital ships, aircraft carriers, this sort of thing.
01:07:37.000 But we have to rethink how we organize.
01:07:41.000 And it's a question of, do you need tanks?
01:07:44.000 Of course you do. How many do you need versus other things?
01:07:46.000 And what kind of air and missile defense do you have with you?
01:07:50.000 The Ukrainians are in a lot of trouble right now because the Russians have spent months annihilating all of the air defenses that they have.
01:07:57.000 Because the Russians learned from the Second World War, once the air defense is gone, You can operate as you wish and annihilate everything.
01:08:05.000 And that's where the Russians are headed now.
01:08:07.000 Ukrainians have almost no air defense left.
01:08:09.000 And we, by the way, have almost nothing we can afford to ship them unless we're willing to operate without any air defense ourselves.
01:08:16.000 We don't have the war stocks anymore.
01:08:19.000 We've given it all up. All the artillery, ammunition, missiles, and so forth.
01:08:22.000 It'll take years. To replenish the arsenals in the United States and elsewhere across Europe.
01:08:29.000 Again, another reason why it makes a lot of sense not to go to war.
01:08:33.000 We just don't have the ammunition, the missiles, the rockets.
01:08:38.000 We don't even have the right structure and organization for it.
01:08:41.000 So back to your first point, you got to get rid of those 44 four stars.
01:08:46.000 Then you need a new structure where you take it down to about 10 four-stars and you simplify your structure.
01:08:51.000 We've got too many headquarters with too many focuses and too many interests.
01:08:56.000 And in the meantime, you take 30,000 or 40,000 U.S. combat troops and you put them on the Mexican border immediately and stop it.
01:09:06.000 You had mentioned hypersonic missiles, and I couldn't help but remember around the time that we have the botched Afghan withdrawal and Milley is saying he wants to learn about white rage, China was in the process of literally, I guess, testing nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles.
01:09:25.000 You know, talk about that, the threat of China, the growing concern about Taiwan, and what an invasion by China could look like.
01:09:35.000 I mean, I think based on the incompetence that we're displaying on a national stage, you know, there was probably always a timeline that China was going to do this.
01:09:42.000 But it feels like whatever that timeline is, it is...
01:09:47.000 It has been greatly accelerated.
01:09:50.000 What are the national security interests in Taiwan?
01:09:53.000 What does that look like as far as military readiness is concerned, etc.?
01:09:59.000 Well, remember that all of your intercontinental ballistic missiles that fly at a rate of...
01:10:07.000 30,000, 40,000 feet per second, they are all hypersonic.
01:10:12.000 So we have hypersonic missiles.
01:10:14.000 They're intercontinental ballistic missiles.
01:10:16.000 The hypersonic missiles we're focused on at the moment are designed for shorter ranges on a regional basis to be largely conventional.
01:10:25.000 Can they be nuclear? Of course.
01:10:26.000 But the nuclear option is not the first option for the Russians and the Chinese.
01:10:31.000 Both have made that very clear.
01:10:33.000 China embraced a no-first-use doctrine decades ago.
01:10:38.000 Now, as far as their arsenal is concerned, you're right.
01:10:41.000 Over the last 10 years, it's been rather modest.
01:10:44.000 They've only maintained what they thought they needed, which was, by our standards, maybe a few hundred warheads to protect themselves against a nuclear attack.
01:10:55.000 They're now doubling that overnight.
01:10:57.000 They're building far more missiles.
01:10:59.000 But the Chinese have been far more afraid of us And afraid of our attacks than anything else.
01:11:06.000 And there's no interest in China in conquering Taiwan.
01:11:09.000 The timeline for reunification, according to Xi, who is the current emperor of China, we need to stop thinking about communism and now start thinking about the Chinese as an imperial state as it once was for thousands of years, because that's what it is.
01:11:25.000 Xi has said 2044, 2045, 2046 was the target date.
01:11:31.000 And the thing that we don't understand in this country is that Taiwan and China are very similar in the sense that both peoples in both places want the same thing.
01:11:42.000 They all want to live in a society that looks a lot like Singapore.
01:11:48.000 None of them are interested in liberal democracy.
01:11:51.000 They're all interested in prosperity, making money, having the freedom to make money, having the freedom on a personal level to live as they have lived for hundreds and thousands of years.
01:12:02.000 They're not interested in a society like ours.
01:12:06.000 In fact, the Chinese look at our society and can't even begin to imagine how we live in it.
01:12:12.000 Because if you think the kind of criminality we tolerate would be tolerated in those countries, you're very much mistaken.
01:12:19.000 I'll give you a quick example.
01:12:20.000 The Chinese military is really largely defensive at its orientation.
01:12:25.000 There are no Chinese armies massing to prepare to march into Southeast Asia.
01:12:30.000 In fact, they met with the Vietnamese and the Vietnamese and the Chinese have reassured each other there will be no war between them.
01:12:38.000 And we have been trying to goad the Vietnamese into a relationship with us, thinking that somehow or another we can leverage them against the Chinese.
01:12:46.000 You have a similar phenomenon on the Korean Peninsula.
01:12:49.000 South Koreans aren't interested in going to war with China.
01:12:52.000 China is their biggest trading partner.
01:12:54.000 And then there's Japan, very similar.
01:12:57.000 The Japanese now have with China something they have not had ever in their history.
01:13:02.000 They have what we would call a free trade arrangement.
01:13:05.000 They have access to Chinese markets.
01:13:07.000 One of the reasons the Japanese and the Chinese fought with each other is that the Chinese emperors always insisted that you pay tribute to China.
01:13:14.000 It was kind of a tax that allowed you access to the market, but you had to pay tribute.
01:13:20.000 Japanese don't pay tribute to anybody.
01:13:22.000 And so the Japanese went to war.
01:13:24.000 Well, that's over. The Japanese have factories in China.
01:13:27.000 The Japanese can send their agricultural products to China.
01:13:31.000 They may have disputes, but no one is going to go to war with them.
01:13:34.000 No one in Asia is talking about a war except us.
01:13:39.000 And if you think you can fight a war with China, with the United States Navy, you're insane.
01:13:44.000 All those surface ships, if they come within 200 nautical miles of China, they'll be targeted and sunk.
01:13:50.000 There's no future for that.
01:13:52.000 And we don't need to do it.
01:13:54.000 Everything has changed.
01:13:55.000 Submarines, unmanned submersibles, space-based intelligence reconnaissance surveillance platforms, those are the things that dominate warfare.
01:14:05.000 Large surface fleets are a thing of the past.
01:14:08.000 Which I think is part of the reason the Navy is so anxious to paint China as this great enemy on the scale of Imperial Japan.
01:14:16.000 But we're not going to fight that way in the future.
01:14:18.000 And China is not interested in a war with us.
01:14:23.000 Does that mean Chinese are friends of ours?
01:14:27.000 Of course not. I mean, we're the ones with the open borders.
01:14:31.000 Why is the fentanyl coming into the United States?
01:14:34.000 Because our borders are open.
01:14:37.000 Why are the Chinese stealing from us our IP? Because we let them in.
01:14:42.000 I go to business in Northeast Asia, the Koreans and Japanese look at me and say, what are you, stupid?
01:14:46.000 You see any Chinese in our universities, our laboratories?
01:14:50.000 This is nothing new.
01:14:51.000 The Chinese have been stealing everything for centuries.
01:14:54.000 That's why they end up being thrown out of everybody's country across Asia every so many years.
01:14:59.000 I mean, the point is, protect the United States.
01:15:03.000 That's number one. And much of the difficulty we have with China will go away.
01:15:09.000 So you wrote a book a couple years ago called Margin of Victory, Five Battles That Change the Phase of Modern War.
01:15:14.000 You're talking about sort of the changes in all of that.
01:15:19.000 What, if any, now are some of the history lessons that we can learn from those battles?
01:15:24.000 Does it even apply anymore?
01:15:25.000 Because you're right, we're waging a different war.
01:15:28.000 We could build a thousand aircraft carriers next week, and it doesn't really mean anything given where war is going and what people can have as countermeasures to them.
01:15:38.000 What are some of those lessons that we can learn from those battles, again, if it's still applicable?
01:15:43.000 Well, I wrote the opening chapter for Americans because it's all about something called the British Expeditionary Force in 1914.
01:15:51.000 The British rather haphazardly stumbled into World War I, suddenly saying that the survival and victory of the French was vital to their interest after having fought the French for 800 years.
01:16:04.000 Rather a miraculous transformation.
01:16:07.000 So they sent this 150,000-man force over initially, eventually it grew to about 200,000.
01:16:13.000 They were largely professionals, but they also had a lot of reservists but experienced soldiers.
01:16:18.000 And this army performed brilliantly, and it was largely annihilated by the Germans.
01:16:23.000 They paved the road to Paris with the dead of the British Expeditionary Force.
01:16:28.000 The lesson of that is We, Americans, are not a continental power.
01:16:34.000 The British were never a continental power.
01:16:36.000 We are primarily maritime and aerospace powers.
01:16:40.000 We try to solve our problems as much as we can with air and naval power.
01:16:45.000 We don't like to put large numbers of people ashore to fight anywhere because they have a bad habit of getting killed.
01:16:52.000 World War I was a great example.
01:16:54.000 We sent two million men over there, and in 110 days of fighting, we had 318,000 casualties, including 110,000 dead.
01:17:04.000 What was the result of that?
01:17:06.000 We didn't have another Democrat in office after Wilson until 1932, when the Depression hit.
01:17:13.000 People were furious.
01:17:14.000 We should never have fought in that war.
01:17:16.000 We should never have been in World War I. That's what most people thought at the time, and they were right.
01:17:22.000 We didn't want to become involved in these continental wars that absorb millions and millions of casualties.
01:17:29.000 Thomas Jefferson wanted us to join the French in the French Revolution.
01:17:34.000 And Washington said, I like Tom, he's a nice man, but I think he's a little crazy.
01:17:38.000 If we did that, then we'd have the Austrians, Prussians, Russians, British, everybody landing on the North American continent to destroy the United States.
01:17:47.000 The point is, we are not designed as a republic, as a people, to fight large wars on the Eurasian continent.
01:17:56.000 We don't usually field millions of men in armies.
01:17:59.000 We have no history of that.
01:18:01.000 We're not geared for it.
01:18:02.000 We don't want to do it. Again, the President, President Trump I'm talking about, understood this instinctively.
01:18:09.000 Americans don't want to fight in these wars.
01:18:12.000 So now we have forces in Europe, we have forces in Asia, then they're positioned right on the edge of these conflict zones.
01:18:20.000 And today, all of them could be erased in the space of minutes by precision guided missiles.
01:18:27.000 Because everything is detectable from above.
01:18:30.000 So there is no value to putting a large force 6,000 miles away from the United States on the border of a potential opponent.
01:18:38.000 All you're doing is offering them up for destruction.
01:18:41.000 That was the key lesson to take out of World War I and the British Expeditionary Force.
01:18:46.000 We're not going to build forces of millions who are going to fight.
01:18:50.000 We don't do that. So we have to limit our interventionist impulse.
01:18:55.000 We have to limit what we do to places where our interests are clearly and narrowly focused, and where if we do engage, we benefit strategically.
01:19:05.000 That, again, was President Trump's message.
01:19:08.000 That's why he told the Europeans, you've got to become your own first responders.
01:19:14.000 Stop waiting for us to show up and rescue you.
01:19:17.000 But he concluded, I think, very rightly, that until we get out of Europe completely or mostly, no one over there is going to spend the money to defend themselves.
01:19:28.000 And that's the problem.
01:19:30.000 Speaking of debacles, what should Biden have done to complete Trump's order to get out of Afghanistan?
01:19:37.000 I think no one wanted to be in the never-ending wars.
01:19:40.000 It feels like until Ukraine sort of became the new religion of the left, I think the one thing that the American populace actually agreed on is that we didn't want to be in the never-ending wars.
01:19:52.000 So what should Biden have done to get out of Afghanistan without creating the disaster?
01:19:58.000 You know, because I think there's a way to do it.
01:20:00.000 I think there's probably a fairly clear way to do it.
01:20:03.000 But what do you see?
01:20:05.000 You know, they tried rushing it.
01:20:06.000 They did it out of the, you know, in the fighting season instead of in the winter when people are hiding in caves.
01:20:10.000 And, I mean, it seems like a lot of obvious ones.
01:20:13.000 But, you know, as someone who's been there, as someone who's commanded these trips, what could they have done differently?
01:20:18.000 Well, the very first thing is what you pointed to.
01:20:20.000 You don't leave in the dead of summer when all the snakes have crawled out from underneath their rocks and are prepared to bite you.
01:20:26.000 So that was big mistake, number one.
01:20:29.000 They'd have been better off waiting until November of the year, October, November.
01:20:34.000 And then instead of announcing your intention to withdraw, you need to begin immediately taking equipment out.
01:20:42.000 In other words, identify everything that you want to keep.
01:20:45.000 That you're not going to leave behind and start getting it out of the country.
01:20:48.000 That's going to take some time.
01:20:50.000 But if you do it intelligently, it can be done in 60 to 90 days.
01:20:54.000 The other thing is that you don't identify Kabul, this airport, right next to the city as your departure point.
01:21:01.000 That was the wrong place to leave from.
01:21:03.000 And then finally, you know, we have this airfield that we built.
01:21:07.000 In northwestern Afghanistan, that wasn't something that we necessarily needed to completely abandon.
01:21:14.000 That had some strategic value beyond- You're talking about Bagram, correct?
01:21:18.000 Yeah, exactly. Strategic value, like it sits close to the border of China.
01:21:22.000 Probably a good one to keep, but minor details.
01:21:26.000 It made sense to hold on to that.
01:21:27.000 But again, these things don't appear to be addressed.
01:21:30.000 And then the other thing is we learned from Iraq.
01:21:33.000 If you tell everybody exactly when you're leaving and where you're going to go from, you get shot to pieces.
01:21:39.000 When we finally left Iraq in 2011, we left in the dark in the middle of the night after telling nobody we were leaving.
01:21:47.000 That's how we got out without getting people killed because you have no friends you can trust.
01:21:52.000 This is crazy. Everyone is going to rat you out.
01:21:55.000 As soon as you told the Iraqi army anything, everybody knew it.
01:21:58.000 And that meant you were going to get killed.
01:22:00.000 So the bottom line is in Afghanistan, every conceivable strategic mistake that could be made was made.
01:22:07.000 And we just kept coming up with excuses to keep people there, once again, because you mentioned money going to Ukraine.
01:22:13.000 Well, most of the money never gets to Ukraine.
01:22:17.000 The money pays for equipment.
01:22:19.000 The money is then laundered through the Pentagon and back into the defense industries to pay for replacements.
01:22:25.000 In turn, you get donations on the Hill rewarding everybody for supporting this fiasco.
01:22:31.000 So the amount of money that actually shows up on the ground is minuscule.
01:22:35.000 And what does show up there pays for the Ukrainian government, just as we paid for the Iraqi government and the Afghan government and the South Vietnamese government.
01:22:45.000 We can go down this list.
01:22:46.000 It's the same insanity over and over and over again.
01:22:49.000 All of it is designed to maintain the fiction that we're doing something good and important.
01:22:55.000 It's not. It never was.
01:22:58.000 When you look at some of the other presidential candidates out there, besides my father, do any of them actually seem prepared to you to take on the major crises facing the U.S. on a world stage right now?
01:23:13.000 Well, let me give that some thought.
01:23:16.000 No, none of them.
01:23:18.000 I had a feeling.
01:23:20.000 Listen, it's always risky putting that out there.
01:23:23.000 You never know. But I hear what you've been saying, and I'm like, I'm looking at the other, you know, some of the stuff going on there right now.
01:23:28.000 I see the people who flip-flop because of their donors in two seconds.
01:23:31.000 You know, some pretty major issues.
01:23:33.000 I'm saying, you know what? Let's send this one out there.
01:23:37.000 Well, when you look at somebody like DeSantis, and I'm sure Governor DeSantis is a terribly nice guy, that's not the issue, but when he announces very logically, we have no vital strategic interest in Ukraine that justifies our investment there or the commitment of any military power, which was correct, and then just a few days later, after his donors contact him, says, well, I guess I was wrong.
01:24:00.000 It's really important for us to be there.
01:24:02.000 I mean, you want to put that guy into office?
01:24:06.000 What a catastrophe. I can't imagine.
01:24:09.000 That's the last thing we need.
01:24:10.000 Everybody fails to understand something about President Trump.
01:24:13.000 He didn't go to Washington to get rich.
01:24:17.000 Too many people do.
01:24:19.000 That's our problem.
01:24:21.000 Government has become lucrative.
01:24:23.000 Yeah, the biggest lie, you know, there's a lot of lies.
01:24:25.000 Reagan had a couple of good ones about, you know, I'm here from the government.
01:24:28.000 I'm here to help. Like, that's a pretty big lie.
01:24:30.000 But the other one is the whole lie of, you know, public servant.
01:24:34.000 Once they get to D.C., you know, maybe there's one or two, but man, that's been bastardized a lot, as evidenced by, you know, Nancy Pelosi being a lifetime public servant and being worth a couple hundred million dollars.
01:24:45.000 I mean, that doesn't happen if they're actually public servants, you know?
01:24:49.000 So the D.C. swamp is a disaster.
01:24:52.000 But, you know, for me, what's interesting is, you know, growing up, you know, generals, you know, we're our heroes.
01:24:57.000 You know, you've spoken about, you know, we've spoken about Patton, we've spoken about MacArthur, but...
01:25:02.000 What happened? Are there any generals left that we could look up to now for real leadership?
01:25:09.000 Are there others in there?
01:25:10.000 And maybe if there are, maybe don't mention them by name, because if you do, they'll probably be on the chopping block, you know, in the new woke military tomorrow.
01:25:19.000 You know, what happened?
01:25:21.000 You know, are there guys still out there that we could look up to for real leadership?
01:25:25.000 Are there guys, you know, that are children, at least those of, you know, patriotic Americans, you know, that could look up to to be like, you know what, I want to be like that guy.
01:25:34.000 Because, you know, I'm not aware of any right now that are in there.
01:25:37.000 I see this stuff daily, and the guys I respect from the military, most of them are operators and door kickers.
01:25:42.000 They're saying, I can't believe I signed up to defend this crap that I see coming out of them every day.
01:25:49.000 We select people for senior leadership, for flag rank, for many reasons, but in most cases they have nothing to do with demonstrated character, competence, or intelligence.
01:26:02.000 We pick people because we like them and because they're just like us.
01:26:08.000 And in peacetime, where there is no tension, there is no compulsion to get anything right.
01:26:15.000 And frankly, when you fight the kinds of enemies we have, where virtually anything you do works, I mean, you're not dealing with an enemy army, an enemy air force.
01:26:26.000 You have no air attack to worry about.
01:26:28.000 You have overwhelming firepower.
01:26:32.000 And in those circumstances, there is no call for any professional competence.
01:26:36.000 And again, in this chapter in the book, Margin of Victory, it's one of the things I talked about early on.
01:26:42.000 You had British general officers that were very successful in India and Africa who failed miserably in front of the Germans.
01:26:49.000 The French had similar problems, though not as severe as the British.
01:26:52.000 It's very hard. So you've got to change that.
01:26:55.000 And of course, now we want to select everybody on the basis of race.
01:27:00.000 And if you're going to compete in that environment, then you have to be subservient, as I would expect a white man or a Northeast Asian, to the wokeness.
01:27:12.000 Demonstrate your fealty and readiness to implement these destructive policies that are divisive and will cripple us militarily.
01:27:19.000 So I have no faith in any of them anymore.
01:27:22.000 If there are any of real character, God bless them, but I haven't found out about them.
01:27:28.000 And I'm perfectly willing to just clean it out and reach low and find people who are competent.
01:27:35.000 That is what Marshall did.
01:27:36.000 And it's not personal.
01:27:38.000 If you pick the wrong guy, you fire him and replace him.
01:27:41.000 There's nothing special about it.
01:27:42.000 Somebody said, well, what is a general?
01:27:44.000 And I finally told this senator, Senator, it's a colonel you promoted.
01:27:50.000 That's it. What's a colonel?
01:27:52.000 It's a lieutenant colonel you promoted.
01:27:54.000 Come on, let's wake up.
01:27:55.000 And the guy who you actually want in that position is the guy that's never going to get the nod because he isn't going to pledge fealty to the woke bullshit.
01:28:03.000 He is going to say what needs to be said.
01:28:05.000 He is going to ruffle feathers to ask the questions that those in the D.C. establishment and those in the military-industrial complex don't want the American public to hear asked because they may actually have to answer them rather than cashing...
01:28:20.000 Billion-dollar checks paid for courtesy of the American taxpayer.
01:28:24.000 Well, remember, it's also a case of when you go to confirmation with the current bunch, the people sitting in this, they don't care about the individual, whether that individual actually knows anything.
01:28:33.000 They're very concerned about whether or not he's going to keep the money flowing.
01:28:38.000 Are you going to maintain the programs that are there?
01:28:40.000 Are my constituents and donors going to benefit?
01:28:43.000 Are you going to go along with the policies?
01:28:46.000 There's no question about military competence, demonstrated competence.
01:28:50.000 What have you done, General, that justifies your advancement to this position?
01:28:56.000 Explain it. And most can't because the only thing they've done is go from job to job without notice.
01:29:02.000 Yeah. Well, hopefully, maybe.
01:29:06.000 We've got to bring you in there to actually clean house one day.
01:29:09.000 And again, hopefully the American people wake up to that.
01:29:11.000 But, Colonel, I just want to thank you for joining us.
01:29:14.000 As more happens on the front in Russia, I'll be curious to see what happens in May, as you said, when things dry out a little bit.
01:29:20.000 But we'll have to have you back on to hear from someone who gets it and who's willing to call it out.
01:29:25.000 So I really appreciate it.
01:29:26.000 Your time today. For those of you guys who are watching, I just want to thank you for doing that.
01:29:30.000 Make sure again to like and share this content.
01:29:33.000 Go check out the Colonel's.
01:29:35.000 Go check out his book.
01:29:37.000 I think we can probably learn a lot.
01:29:39.000 And Colonel, you're on social media.
01:29:41.000 Why don't you let us also know where we can find you there?
01:29:43.000 Actually, I'm not.
01:29:45.000 I stay off of it.
01:29:46.000 So if you want to know anything about me, you can go to YouTube, Google me.
01:29:51.000 You can see lots of podcasts and speeches and presentations.
01:29:55.000 You can go and find all my books on Amazon.
01:29:59.000 You can go to my website.
01:30:00.000 All you have to do is, it's DougMcGregor.com or FutureDefense.com or Colonel Douglas McGregor.
01:30:06.000 You'll get there. So, no, I try not to tweet and do things like that because it's kind of an opportunity to be stupid, you know.
01:30:13.000 Hey, relax. I don't know.
01:30:15.000 But yes, guilty as charged, sir.
01:30:18.000 Thank you very much, Colonel.
01:30:19.000 I really appreciate the time.
01:30:21.000 Again, guys, go check out those books.
01:30:23.000 Make sure to like, share, subscribe, download the Rumble app so other people can see this, and they will.
01:30:30.000 I want to also take two seconds to thank our sponsors for everything that they do.
01:30:36.000 Go check out the guys at Gold Co.
01:30:38.000 Go to DonJrGold.com.
01:30:40.000 You actually heard what the colonel was saying about the globalists and their intentions
01:30:44.000 for what they're going to do, going back to the gold standard, crushing all of that.
01:30:49.000 But again, beyond that, we see what's just happening in the regular system.
01:30:52.000 We see inflation, the rise of interest rates.
01:30:55.000 It's 2008 seemingly all over again.
01:30:58.000 So go to donjrgold.com, learn how to hedge, learn how to protect yourself from the insanity, the stupidity, ESG and woke DEI policies driving the decisions that don't necessarily mean anything good for your retirement, but the government's going to try to force down your throat.
01:31:18.000 So again, go check out donjrgold.com and the folks at Gold Co.
01:31:22.000 can help you out there. Also make sure to check out Patriot Mobile, America's only Christian conservative wireless provider.
01:31:31.000 Again, guys, you're going to have a cell phone in your pocket.
01:31:34.000 You're going to use it.
01:31:35.000 You're going to have a plan.
01:31:37.000 Do it with people who give back to the causes that you believe in, and Patriot Mobile, I think you'll like it.
01:31:56.000 I really appreciate you guys.
01:31:58.000 Like this, and for those of you who are on Locals, I'm going to head over there now.
01:32:02.000 You can go check me out for my Ask Me Anything.
01:32:05.000 I really appreciate you guys.
01:32:06.000 You're the best. Having a lot of fun doing this, and it's all because of you.
01:32:10.000 So go over there to Locals if you're on that.
01:32:12.000 Otherwise, I will see you on Thursday, and we'll have some fun.