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Oct. 23, 2025 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr
01:08:36
Corrupt UN Carbon Tax Exposed, Interview with John Konrad | TRIGGERED Ep.285
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Hey guys, and welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.
And today is going to be a special one because we have first-time guest, John Conrad, a brilliant mind when it comes to shipbuilding, maritime security, and so much more.
For all of you who love battle history, military strategy, and cutting-edge technology, you're in for a really enlightening interview.
This is going to be a wide-ranging discussion, and we're going to cover a lot of ground.
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Joining me now, founder of gcaptain.com and the author of Fire on the Horizon, maritime and shipbuilding expert John Conrad.
John, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me on, Don.
Oh, it's my pleasure.
So obviously, it's very timely for someone with your expertise to start.
Can you just introduce yourself to the audience a little bit and give a big picture view of your story and sort of maritime expertise?
Yeah, absolutely.
I was born in the great city of New York.
My dad was a Vietnam vet medic and put himself through Cornell Medical School.
His specialty was plastic surgery.
It was just emerging at that time, but he really wanted to help the people of New York.
He was frustrated by the liberal policies.
The Bronx was absolutely burning.
People don't realize just how bad the city got in the 70s and 80s.
I was there.
I mean, I was born in 77.
So, like, you know, I get it, man.
There were places that you just wouldn't even think of going if you were actually from New York because you probably weren't going to make it out.
Yeah, he was averaging, he was rescue three, so they were kind of like the Navy SEALs of the fire service, only went to the biggest fires.
He actually had two SEALs on his team.
And, you know, the bottom line is we grew up poor because he wanted to help prevent this spread of fire.
He was averaging two to three fires a night.
So I grew up in the Bronx and then in grade school, moved to one of the wealthiest, most liberal suburbs, Larchmont.
And here is a poor kid, very conservative, just thrown into this.
You know, everyone says that the liberals, the Democrats are this party of empathy.
I tell you, they've been nasty and mean, you know, at least that upper echelon since I was a kid.
Got beat up a lot.
And I remember going to Fleet Week and seeing a big Navy ship and being like, you mean I can get on there and get on a uniform and leave and actually go out to sea.
So I went to the Naval Academy, studied up.
Unfortunately, my dad died of cancer, buried in Arlington, transferred to the Merchant Marine Academy in the Bronx, and worked my way up to captain.
But as you know, there's nothing like heavy construction.
I mean, just actually building something with your hands, whether it's buildings or ships.
So I went into offshore construction, got the Guinness Brooklyn World Record, biggest LNG find in the world, and then built ships in Korea, some of the biggest, most technologically advanced, and worked my way up.
And then you work six months on, six months off, at six months off.
I built G-Captain.
All the maritime news in the world was kind of run by the globalists, Lloyds List.
It was the longest running publication in the entire world at the time.
And, you know, there was no American perspective.
So we built G-Captain to be the largest, most read maritime and Navy news site in the world.
Well, you know, as the saying goes, whoever controls the seas controls the trade of the world.
And I guess going back for a few years, especially with trade being so relevant right now, we've seen a major convergence of Chinese port investments and Russian naval presence across Latin America.
Why is that?
And what does it mean in the context of the growing U.S. Navy fleet currently in the Caribbean?
Well, we've abandoned our maritime policy, our naval policy.
We've maintained a strong Navy, but the Navy has really become a support structure for these forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Navy recruiting has moved more towards SEALs, which are awesome, and submarines and the aviation aspect.
But we've really knocked down a notch on the warships.
The great white fleet of Teddy Roosevelt is no longer.
And on the other side, the maritime side, the logistics, the one thing I would like everyone to remember is every single lesson from Eisenhower back to Washington, logistics wins wars, and that is critical.
And we had, you know, after World War II, we had a vast network of bases and ports and slowly atrophy in those.
And the Chinese have filled that void, and they couldn't build the warships right away.
Now they have a larger fleet than us.
But how they did it was filling that vacuum and getting into the ports and getting into our backyard.
They know we have the best satellite technology in the world, but one EMP up in that space and you're back to surface level, submarines, drones, combatants, and those ports, the cranes, they're all built by China.
They all have cameras.
They have Chinese nationals in it, providing that network of intelligence.
90% of all world trade is at sea.
It's a big intelligence operation back to China.
Yeah, I mean, talk about that a little bit.
You mentioned sort of logistics controlling so much.
During World War II, we had those bases around the world.
We used to joke as real estate guys.
It's like if something was a former U.S. naval base, it was probably the best location, location, location of anything that there was.
You wanted a development there because we had all of these things.
Those logistics were so critical for World War II.
That cut off the supply chains of the Germans and the Axis forces.
It's a really big deal.
What made us sort of seed all of those things?
I mean, when we're giving up air bases and ports and they're getting swarmed and taken over by the Chinese, it doesn't make any sense.
But how do we get there?
That's a long story.
I don't know how long you have, but the answer is Alpha Threyer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History.
Teddy Roosevelt read this.
Like your dad, Teddy Roosevelt was a best-selling author.
He had written the book on the naval battles of the War of 1812.
So he had that, you know, being an author, understanding the topic, and then brought in Mahan, the preeminent naval thinker of our time, and they built the Great White Fleet together.
But what the Great White Fleet wasn't just power, strategic power, and guns on ships.
This is back in the coal days where that was really a signal to the world that not only can we put this firepower forward and send it around the world, but we have the coaling facilities, we have the oil facilities, we have the logistics network to sustain that entire fleet.
And that's something that China has struggled with.
They kind of underweight logistics, but how they're doing it otherwise is getting in these ports and particularly these choke points.
Mahan said you need strong Navy ships.
And unfortunately, when you go to a Navy conference now, these admirals don't know what they're talking about.
They talk about the half of the book that's about battleships and destroyers and the surface, but they don't talk about the other half, which is the merchant marine and the power of these logistics hubs.
Remember, back in World War II, we delayed that D-Day for years.
We put the Army on the back seat as we built up that naval component into the Pacific, and those ports were the string.
That's why the Marines had such casualties, because you had to take those islands to be the logistic port.
Well, the service that lost the highest percentage of people in World War II was the Merchant Marine because these ships were defenseless.
And these German submarines came in and absolutely obliterated our merchant fleet.
We did not have enough destroyers and they came in right into the Pacific.
You go back to Hemingway, had his option, you know, the guy who loved being in the front line.
He was in the Spanish Civil War and fighting in Italy, and he decided he was going to spend the beginning of the war in the Caribbean protecting it.
Because look at this war in Ukraine.
Everyone gets this wrong.
They think that this war is about land territory in Ukraine.
That's not what it's about.
Those rivers are absolutely vital for moving equipment and traffic down the entire inland waterway, which is massive of Russia.
They don't have good roads.
Their railroads are only decent.
It all goes down through Crimea, that Kirch Strait Bridge.
That's what he's focused on.
That's why the war on the eastern side is so much more intense and he's not going in.
Well, that is their New Orleans.
Our New Orleans enters into the Gulf of Mexico and then in the Caribbean.
So you lose that absolute choke point, and then you lose choke points like Panama.
You lose Gibraltar.
You go to Diego Garcia, which the Brits are now giving up to the indigenous people, our military base there.
These critical choke points.
It's ridiculous.
Well, yeah, no, the Hemingway story is a great one.
I remember reading that book.
I mean, he was out there on his fishing boat.
I guess it was called the Pilar, right?
I think so.
And, you know, literally looking for submarines and other things that would be obstructing those channels in the Caribbean back in the day.
Because we didn't have enough destroyers and the destroyers we needed, we needed to send out to the Pacific.
You know, we did, as much as that shipbuilding was awesome in World War II, it didn't really start until 1936.
It was still ramping up at that beginning of the war.
So how do you view the critical need for shipbuilding and maritime dominance within the framework of sort of this new Monroe doctrine we're seeing under my father's second term?
Absolutely love it.
It's critical.
I mean, look at this, this Panama, the initial focus of Ruby on Hegseth going down there.
You have China controlling both sides of the Panama Canal.
Why is that important?
And I've seen pushback just yesterday.
I retweeted some of the Democrats saying, why are you giving Argentina $40 billion in loan?
Because our Navy is split.
We're two coasts, right?
Our Navy is in Norfolk, and the other half of the Navy is in San Diego.
And if we can't get warships back and forth, we've cut our sea power, our projectum power in half.
So it's absolutely critical that we control these choke points and control the resources.
I mean, the Gulf of America has, I love this, you know, 10 years ago when they said peak oil, we're going to run out of oil.
I worked on the drill ships in the Gulf of Mexico.
We've only gone out 100, 120 miles.
There's the entire rest of the Gulf of America.
It's just rich with resources and oil and minerals on the seabed.
Your father understands that, and he understands this is our backyard, and it's not the Gulf of Mexico.
It's the Gulf of America.
But if we don't invest, if we don't build the ships to actually go out there and drill for this oil to get these resources to spread our trade around the world, our exports.
Now you have China clamping down on American shipping companies.
We only have 82 merchant ships in international service right now.
How did we get there?
Because I mean, you're talking about splitting up our Navy by losing the canal or the ability to get back and forth quickly.
How did we get there to only have 82 merchant marine ships in service?
I mean, was it because no one until my father actually cared?
Or was it this apathy?
I guess the Navy folks called it sea blindness engineered.
Right.
That's the conception is that just nobody cared.
Our heroes in America are generals, the Western expansion.
That's why Teddy Washington.
Not lately.
We haven't had a lot of generals that have won wars since Eisenhower's out.
That's the reason once.
I'm talking back to the Grants and the Washingtons.
That's the myth that Americans just don't care.
Well, I'm here to tell you it was an engineered withdrawal from maritime trade.
90% of everything, everything in the world is transferred on ships.
And the elites love their airplanes.
They love roads.
They don't love trains so much.
But they understand the importance, especially these globalists in London, that that is the critical.
That's 90% of everything.
And not just trade itself, but it's all dollar denominated.
So I love building ships.
You love building buildings.
But when we put a billion dollars into a building, that money is kind of stagnant.
It's sitting there.
It's slowly while you're constructing, but then you're just getting rents over the time.
Every transaction on the sea, when I sell a container ship full of stereos or their grain shipments, every time that's moved from port to port, it's transferred in dollars.
And that puts liquidity in the system.
Without the liquidity, you don't have reserve currency status.
So the elites understood this.
And what happened is after World War II, we took over from the UK this reserve currency status.
We built the maritime UN organization and put it in London.
We built the system for this trade using flags of convenience.
And a lot of these shipping companies are not U.S. crude, but they're on the stock exchange.
Well, Britain got really angry and they said, you know, their economy fell apart.
So what they decided to do was go into the shadow banking world.
They weren't going to get the reserve currency for the stuff above board.
They went into the shadow.
What does that mean?
That means they went into Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Ireland tax havens, and all of this flowed through Panama.
And this is what George Bush understood.
We say we invaded Panama because of Nor Riega.
No, it was all this illicit activity.
And it all started with a delegate from the International Maritime Organization.
You look at the Panama Papers did not make a big scene in the U.S. In the UK, it did.
And all that money tied back to London and the insurance and Lloyd's registry.
And what happened was it was, you know, America gets blamed for these forever wars.
And the Middle East and Iraq, it was Margaret Thatcher and the Europeans who convinced Bush to leave Panama and send into the first Gulf War.
And that's what really started it.
American oil companies, and I worked for them for years, they did not extract a lot of oil during these forever wars.
It was the Shells and the BPs that were pushing it.
But really, it was to get us out of our backyard, this Panama, the Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, where all of this, you know, we've totally neglected our own hemisphere.
But you're saying that was actually by design because, you know, again, I'm no fan of the elites and the globalists, but America has their fair share of elites and globalists as well.
Well, they love the system because they can put their tax money in the Cayman Islands with everyone else.
And what happened was the globalists really backed Bill Clinton and Ross Perot to split the money and the ticket so that Bush, after Kuwait, he wasn't able to get back and focus on Panama, back to focus on our backyard.
And the deal they made with Bill Clinton is, we'll let you be president, but you're not getting into the maritime world.
You're not investing in the IMO.
We haven't had a maritime ambassador.
Every other country has a full-time maritime ambassador there.
That was the deal they made, back away and kind of get the mainstream media away from the media, get the education away from sea power and Mahan and everything else and turn our back on it.
And I think that was the deal that Clinton made in order to win that election.
And it's just been going downhill ever since.
And, you know, frankly, the GOP loved it too because it lowered the price of trade without American ships and American crew.
It was cheaper.
Which consequently basically created our only export for the last 50 years, which was the American dream, which we sent abroad forever.
And you're saying that all originated really in shipping, tax law, trade, et cetera.
Yes, it's all based on all our laws are based on the British Commonwealth system.
We've taken it, we've revised it, we've done better.
But that system, the UK system, is based on two things.
One, Christianity, the laws of the Bible and what Jesus said.
Not anymore.
Not anymore, exactly.
And number two is this world trade where the complexities of this global network have gotten so complex that they had to create new laws to manage it.
And after World War II, we took over the system and we took the power.
You know, we have a lot of veto laws.
We have a lot of things that are baked in the system that people have forgotten about.
And that's, you know, what I was working with the White House a little bit last week in the State Department, reminding them, we built the system.
We have leverage over the system.
Just because we haven't used it, just because we haven't had a maritime ambassador since Bill Clinton, doesn't mean we don't have the power to reassert our needs here.
So how do we do that?
How do we take that back?
How do we focus back on our hemisphere and regain that kind of control?
You know, when you're up against, you know, again, you know, multiple decades of sort of policy that was designed to minimize our efficacy and power.
Well, that's a problem.
And it wasn't just efficacy and power.
This UN carbon tax at the maritime organization, this was written by the U.S. representative, Mete Medina.
She was born in Panama.
She went into the Coast Guard and she married an American who happens to be homosexual and they got divorced right afterwards.
But she got that citizenship, went to the IM, Biden centered to the IMO, and dual citizen, and she was working with the Panama interest and the U.S. interest.
She wrote the entire policy.
And this is what Biden and Obama were so good about, telling Americans this isn't important, getting rid of the, you know, demoting the admirals, demoting the maritime ambassadors, demoning that, putting these junior staffers who have no idea, young people, what they're doing in these critical and letting them just write whatever laws and things they want.
And this is the result with this carbon tax.
And luckily, no one, you know, up till last week, nobody knew about this maritime tax.
Yeah, like, listen, I do this, right, for basically for a living at this point.
And I had no idea this was even coming.
This was a resolution over at the UN about this carbon tax.
My father said, you know, you're putting it off for at least a year.
Can you give us the full background on what it means?
What are the implications?
How we got there?
How someone who even, again, follows this stuff really closely had no idea this was even a thing.
And what were the implications of it had it gone through?
Well, they're really upset that we are asserting control.
And the editorials this week since this happened, just anti-Trump, anti-Trump from the European.
Well, we're used to that, but yeah.
But this is, these are the globalist family.
These are the families that have run trade for centuries.
These are families that have more wealth.
It's better hidden, but more wealth than Elon Musk.
Because 90% of everything moves through this organization.
And like I said, it's been so well hidden by our mainstream media and our education ignoring it that no one knows about it.
Thank God your father understood this.
I have no idea how this crossed his radar, how Rubio and Waltz doing an amazing job said, wait, this is important because nobody else in America realizes it.
But they want to control that 90% of trade and they want to kick us off of the reserve currency status, right?
So what they came up with was this green tax and the Wall Street Journal said it was $200 billion tax.
Well, that's just in 2030.
This balloons in 2040 to 2050 if ships don't hit zero emissions.
So ships have to hit zero emissions by 2050.
Batteries and saltwater really work well together.
It's impossible.
So it was a slush fund, and they were going to use that for these NGOs that Rubio shut down with U.S. aid.
And this was going to be a U.N. slush fund, not only for the NGOs and all these liberal circumcisions in Uganda and all this nonsense that USAID shut down, but an attack on America reasserting its dominance in the world.
And I have to tell you, they do this thing.
Hey, Trump is anti-environment.
Trump is anti-humanity.
He's against poor people.
Well, what has lifted more people out of poverty than anything in the history of the world?
It's the shipping container, which was invented by American.
The fertilizer, these grain ships, the humanitarian aid, these guys were going to tax all of it, Don.
And your dad understood that.
And CO2, let's talk about CO2.
What's the number one cause of CO2 in the world right now?
The number one new cause other than China's coal factories.
It's all of these ships having to go all the way around Africa, enormous hundreds of millions of cubic meters of CO2 going in.
And, you know, then you got Greta Thurnberg actually, you know, clapping the Houthis on while these ships have to go full speed around.
It's just, you can't make this stuff up.
But that's.
What's the resolution called again?
Because I think, you know, the more people hear about it, at least they start paying attention to what's actually going on.
Because again, it sort of surprised me and they were like, oh, it's a UN tax thing.
It's just a green new scam thing.
They're covering up.
What was it specifically called?
And again, how did it get this far without us being able to figure it out?
And what happens?
I know they stalled it for a year, but what happens after that?
Well, the stalling it for a year, first of all, was just absolutely brilliant 4D chess by your dad's administration, Mike Waltz.
Because if they had, you know, there's a lot of MAGA, you know, giving me comments.
Well, it's just a delay.
We didn't shoot it down.
Well, if we had shot it down, they would have came back with a brand new, probably worse resolution in April that was worse.
This gives us an entire year to come out and fight this thing.
So the delay isn't like some sort of, you know, you're succumbing to those guys.
It actually has a tactical advantage over just shutting it down entirely.
Right.
They're going to keep trying.
You know, of course, they never stop.
They're right back at it.
They're right back at it as we speak.
So this made them take a full stop for a year.
And we don't have any representatives at the IMO.
We just have a temporary team that goes out there.
We don't have a lot of appointees.
Your father created the first shipbuilding maritime office in the White House.
Now it's with Russ Voigt's team, Jerry Hendricks there.
We don't have, we have it there, but we don't, you know, Senate's waiting on confirming the U.S. Merchant Marine Commandant, the Maritime Administrator.
You know, you got huge number.
The Navy people don't understand this.
Whatchamacallit?
The MARAD only has 600 employees.
Compare that to the FAA, which has 30,000 employees.
And it's not just that.
Go back to World War II.
What was the biggest fleet in the world?
It wasn't the Navy fleet.
It wasn't even the Merchant Marine fleet.
It was the Army watercraft that were those landing craft in the beaches.
Well, Mark Milley, you wouldn't believe this.
He sold all of our expensive Army watercraft at auction.
We had a multi-million dollar tug boat.
He sold for $51,000.
And this is why Pete Budicek and Milley's Gaza Pier was a disaster.
62 Army casualties on that pier.
Three Americans died.
One soldier and two shipyard workers fixing at the fire.
I mean, if we can't get humanitarian aid into Gaza, which is not a big security deal, how are we going to fight a war in the Pacific?
And a lot of MAGA here are like, well, we don't want to fight for Taiwan.
First of all, that's your dad's decision.
It's no one else in this world's decision.
And he has to have the options.
Well, I think people are rightfully skeptical of the forever wars.
And when you look at what's going on in the Middle East, when you look at what, you know, and 30 years later, people still can't articulate the purpose of why we were there or we were there for just all-out lies.
I understand some of that, but I understand what you're saying.
Also, I mean, there's other things, Taiwan especially, that are critical, whether it's the, you know, they produce 90% of the microchips of the world.
So, why we have to be able to onshore some of these things, why we need to be able to have control of our own shipping and supply lines.
I mean, it all does add up.
Absolutely.
And, you know, the fight in World War II, if you go back and you read Nimitz, you read MacArthur, the number one thing was the Taiwan Strait and the Philippine Strait right there, because that's that choke point.
All the ships have to coordinate on that.
So it's not just chips, it's this choke point that China is focusing on.
But whether you want to defend Taiwan or not, we have over 300,000 servicemen and dependents within the Chinese missile shield in the Pacific right now.
How are you going to evacuate them?
You can't airlift them out because where are those air tankers going?
They're going down to Midway and Hawaii to refuel.
Well, guess what Obama did?
He took the massive air and ship fuel facility in Hawaii and he completely closed it.
And then he drained out the strategic petroleum reserve.
So we literally do not have the fuel.
We only have 10 tankers left.
There are thousands of tankers in the world.
China has thousands of ships.
We only have 10 left under the tanker security program.
And guess what?
A month ago, a Russian captain T-boned right into one of our only 10 tankers, going back to the shadow war thing that your father understands and no one else seems to.
Wait, when you talk about Millie selling off a big portion of the fleets, obviously the landing crafts wouldn't have been a part of this.
But is that also why perhaps we left $82 billion worth of equipment in Afghanistan?
We just didn't even have the ships to bring the stuff back because I was like, it doesn't make it.
Oh, it's cheaper to leave it there.
I'm like, really?
It's cheaper to leave tanks and helicopters?
It doesn't seem like that would be cheaper at all relative to shipping them back and not having to build them from scratch.
I love these conversations.
The Trump family just gets right to the heart of it because that's the thing.
It took us 20 years to get all that equipment in.
And again, the media and the education, they keep reminding us of the Berlin airlift and saying our air might.
Well, it was just like it was less than 100 miles from our airfield to Berlin and we barely made that.
The entire airlift capacity of the Air Force, which I love, and we need to revitalize that too because Obama and Biden killed that.
But the entire airlift capacity of the Air Force is less than the cargo capacity of one Chinese ship.
All of that equipment got in there by the Merchant Marine bringing ships into Pakistan and then the Army taking those securities.
That's why there were so many casualties.
That's why you look at the Tom Sawyers EOD, these explosive devices, because we had to caravan those in.
We were not flying these big, massive tanks and ammo and food in through Bagram Air Force Base.
And when Biden wanted to leave, Pakistan said, no way, you're not using it.
You're not withdrawing all of this because we don't like the Taliban.
They're going to use that equipment against us.
So it was leveraged by Pakistan to make us stay, not letting us export through the port, which is the only way we could have got that amount of equipment out.
I mean, it's crazy when you think of, when you think about it, it's like, you know, managed decline on purpose by people who should know better.
Because, again, if you're a general, you should probably understand basic logistics, especially after being in a war for 30 years.
Yeah, but Biden and Obama specifically went after the guys who are brilliant at logistics.
The commandant of the Merchant Marine, who hopefully your father's pec, Steve Carmel, will get confirmed today.
The Senate's been sitting on it, but those are the lobbyists saying, well, we'll confirm everyone else before this because they understand how important this is.
And not just that, you know, what ships the Army can't get its supplies.
We can't evacuate soldiers, but the Navy ships need these supplies going back to the coaling stations in Mahan.
This is why your dad just got me so excited talking about battleships.
And there was such a pushback from these admirals saying, battleships are ridiculous.
They're old.
They're a thing.
Well, what is the only thing working in the Red Sea right now?
It's not the submarines defending commercial ships.
It's not the two carrier groups we sent there.
It's these destroyers.
But we only have 70 destroyers and only a third can be forward deployed.
A lot of them are getting old.
And once they run out of their missiles, they can carry 96 missiles and only a portion of those are anti-air.
Once they run out of those missiles, they got to steam for two weeks to get reloaded.
A battleship is just a big destroyer with more missiles, more sensors, and more fuel because going back to tankers, we only have 10 tankers.
So we lose a couple of those tankers and suddenly we're not getting aviation fuel to our carriers.
And your dad just intrinsically understands that a battleship is its own little logistics hub, right, that moves.
So, you know, John, I guess, you know, given all that, you know, in the last few weeks, I've even had, you know, people talking about sort of, you know, the change of warfare, right?
The infantry is not the same since the advent of drones, but now you also have maritime drones and these sorts of things where, you know, no different than a crappy IED was taking out tanks with a little cell phone connection to some dynamite or C4.
You know, how does all of this change as it relates to battleships and destroyers that are out there that now can perhaps more easily be taken out by, you know, these are billion-dollar ships taken out by thousands of dollars drones?
I mean, how do we adjust for that?
Or does it still not matter?
We have the capability of doing it.
Because again, it feels like even in the last few years we've seen with the Russian-Ukraine war, you know, the entire battlefield dynamic has changed because of drones and some of these autonomous weapons.
There are serious problems, the drones.
These Chinese merchant ships, they have thousands of them.
They're built to military standards, which means they are hard to sink.
Well, they can put containerized drones, containerized hypersonic missiles on these, and suddenly there are thousands of merchant ships.
We only have 82, are weapons of war.
I think your dad understands that intrinsically, but the drones themselves, they have prompts.
It's 5,000 miles to Taiwan.
Our greatest drone has a 1,100-mile range.
And once they get there, they're either one use only if you can't get the tankers and the ammo ships to refuel them.
This is why your dad's most brilliant thing was he brought in three people into the Department of War.
Heg Seth, who's like lethality, lethality, and just pushing on these facts.
Dan Driscoll at the Army saying these drones not only have to be more lethal, but they have to incorporate that logistics.
How do we get them 5,000 miles?
We have not solved that.
And then John Phelan, who's, I wish he would do more interviews.
I wish he would get out there on the Sean Ryan show and your show.
But the reason your dad, I think, picked him is because here's a capital market guy.
Shipbuilding ports is a financial problem.
It's a construction problem.
You can't send a Navy Admiral to fix shipbuilding.
Do you know every single one of our Navy shipbuilding projects is delayed?
And most of them are delayed because, going back to this IMO-UN thing, there's a exclusion in the rules.
When we wrote the rules after World War II, we said these cannot pertain to Navy ships.
Well, Biden and Obama decided we're going to make our Navy ships comply with these rules.
So that's what Obama.
You had the whole green diesel fuel where they were taking French fry oil to fire our ships.
But they also put these massive scrubbers on our oilers in order to clean out the sulfur.
And they just, they don't work.
So we have these brand new oilers.
We've only deployed one.
This is the Harvey Milk, the infamous Harvey milkship.
It's useless because you have this UN carbon scrubber cleaning up the emissions of a Navy warship.
It's just absolutely, and you have these IMO guys.
They're all in our shipyards.
And the Merchant Marine, say, we can, if the war comes, we can take some Chinese ships.
We can force some of our allies to give us ships.
But who's going to sail into danger?
We don't have enough Merchant Mariners.
We only have a couple thousand of us.
There are only a couple hundred U.S. Merchant Marine captains like me.
The Navy had to lay up 17 ships, 17 ships they pulled from commission at the end of Biden.
And why?
Because the Coast Guard is mandating U.S. standards.
Our standards are higher.
And they're mandating U.N. standards.
So where everyone else in the world goes to these minimalist UN standards, I got to do all of the Coast Guard training, and then I got to do all the IMO training, and then I have to do all the Biden DEI leadership training.
To me, I've been out, I haven't been back to sea in 10 years.
If I want to go command a ship again, I got to go sit through three weeks of courses on DEI, and then the U.S. very relevant, though, to steering a ship.
I guess, I don't know.
This is the thing.
They say they protect women.
They protect, and I understand that.
I get that.
I have daughters.
I like to protect women too.
Look at the Midshipman X scandal.
We had the biggest rape scandal in the history of our country.
It made the Armed Forces rape scandal look tiny on the Merchant Marine ships, and Biden did absolutely nothing dealing with that.
I don't know anything about it.
What happened there?
Well, they hid the whole thing.
Students at the Federal Academy.
We have a Naval Academy, Coast Guard Academy, Merchant Marine Academy, Merchant Marine Academies on Long Island.
These girls who are Navy Reserve officers, but they're going to go into the Merchant Marine Reserve.
They were going out on their summers.
They go out on ships and straight up getting drugged and raped.
And during the whole Obama and the Biden and your dad's first presidency, because some of his staff weren't very good in there, they did not arrest one person.
There have been hundreds of rapes of college students at the Merchant Marine Academy.
There has not been one arrest by the Coast Guard.
How is that possible?
The FBI refuses to go out there.
And then when they go, oh, it's too hard to get on a ship.
And then when they finally do, they say the NBA.
You didn't stop them from raiding Mar-a-Lago with the HRT squad.
So, I mean, you'd think they'd be able to get out of ship.
But they were told, going back to Clinton, this was the deal Clinton made: do not mess with the ships.
Do not touch the globalist ships.
Do not send FBI there.
This is why we have huge cruise ships that are owned by foreign companies.
And, you know, none of them are U.S. flagged.
You know, the FBI, sometimes, if someone gets brutally murdered and it hits the news, the FBI will go out.
But they were given very clear instructions by the globalists: do not investigate ports, do not investigate ships, do not investigate any of this.
And this is, your dad understood this from day one, reopening the port.
If you looked at the union boss, DAG saying, you know, this is happening.
They're controlling us.
These companies are all foreign-owned and they're squeezing the American longshoreman.
Your dad understood that and reopened.
That would have absolutely devastated the economy.
Well, that was the deal Clinton made with the globalists to get into office with the Pero, you know, to knock Bush Sr. thing.
Don't look at the ships.
Don't look at the IMO.
Don't look at these bodies.
Pull out all our diplomats, pull out our CIA, our FBI.
And it worked for them for 10 years.
The globalists made a lot of money.
Everyone made a lot of money, but all of those factories got moved to China on ships.
That was part of it.
So we didn't notice that.
But what happened?
The Europeans were making all the money.
And then China came in.
They can't defeat us, but we didn't control maritime anymore.
And they could easily defeat the Europeans.
And this is why those NGOs with funds from China are absolutely knocking us over the head right now, trying to push back.
No one here cares about this.
They care about it and they care about it because they don't want you guys, they don't want Cash Patel investigating this organization, which traces its back right through the Panama Papers.
Look at the Panama Papers.
Biggest corruption scandal in the last 20 years.
That was started by an IMO delegate.
Well, so, I mean, a big theme in all of this is really, I guess, my father refusing to just accept that status quo that's been established by the elite and sort of accepted by the Americans for whatever reason.
I mean, is there a nexus between the Panama Papers, the cartels, perhaps juxtaposed to my father's agenda against tyrants like Maduro, the cartel traffickers that were shooting down, and yet the MS, the mainstream media, the Democrats seem awfully willing to help them out and protect them at almost all costs.
Is that what makes my father such a threat to the globalist status quo?
Or are the globalists in bed with darko-terrorists?
I mean, it almost seems like it.
What don't they want us to know here?
Well, like I said, we took the reserve currency from the Brits after World War II, and then they were fine for a little while, but they shut down factories and labor took over.
And they decided they are going to be the reserve currency for this shadow banking.
And you see it, all of these tags, Apple is incorporated in Ireland, a former British colony.
You have some of the biggest companies in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda.
It all ties back to this Panama Papers.
And the cartels are doing their dark money too.
So they couldn't control the reserve currency.
They had to get that British pound.
This is why the British pound did not go in with the Euro when they went into the European Union.
Interesting.
Because all of this money, and guess what, too?
This is the special relationship.
This is why the five eyes.
On this IMO board, the four countries that fought us the hardest was the UK, Canada, Denmark, and Brazil.
And you got to look at two Commonwealth countries there that are absolutely pushing back.
But those two are part of this five Eyes.
Well, that intelligence, they are connect plugged right into CIA and FBI headquarters.
Things that Cache Patel and Pam Bondi cannot get from these guys are flown into MI6.
Right across from this IMO headquarters, across the Thames, is James Bond, MI6.
All of this five I information is going from the CIA into there.
Why?
It's to make business decisions.
And this is the European media.
Reuters and the Deutsch, you know, all of these different countries, these journalists go out.
I was not allowed to get a press pass at the IMO, but all of these Europeans do.
And they're calling up the Pentagon people to get the information back, feed it to the security states, which are also sucking down this five eyes information and pushing it out.
And by the way, look at these navies, the Canadian Navy.
This is something else I want to bring up.
The Canadian Navy is absolutely pathetic.
It's not called the Cajun Navy could kick their butt.
They got like six old ancient destroyers.
Look at all those missiles coming from China.
If the Golden Dome, a lot of them are coming over Canadian waterways.
And Canada, New Zealand, Denmark's Navy is an absolute joke.
They got hit by the Houthis.
Their whole weapon system went down.
We can build back shipbuilding, but we need their participation.
Because even if we built the battleships for the Golden Dome, a lot of this is Canada's water.
Canada is the largest coastline in the world and no icebreakers.
They're having, they say they have a dozen icebreakers.
Most of these are tiny boats.
They're not big icebreakers like ours.
And then you got you and Charlie Kirk up in Greenland.
That's important.
It's a big one.
That's a big one.
So, you know, just for, you know, for those, because, you know, obviously, you know, we're sort of covering big picture issues that I think we all recognize, but there's a lot of, you know, sort of, you know, small detail in there.
I mean, for those who aren't that familiar that are watching, can you get into a little bit of the details explaining the Panama Papers and what that means to the average person?
Yes.
So the Panama Papers was a leak.
So everyone knows about Julian Assange and these leaks, the NSA leak.
Prior to that, there have been these big leaks and they've hit the U.S. news.
A lot of the times they hit the U.S. news to hurt your dad or other Republicans.
Well, the one that did not, which was bigger than all of this, bigger than WikiLeaks, bigger than Snowden, was this Panama Papers.
And it was just a firestorm in Europe of how much corruption led back to Panama.
And that Panama Papers was started by the delegate in Panama who was friends with the Secretary of General today's dad, Arsinio, who's in charge of this maritime organization, and Biden's junior Coast Guard staffer, Mete Medina, who wrote all of this.
It all ties back, their fathers in Panama early on were together.
The UK representatives went and talked to them, read the Taylor of Panama, talking about the absolute surge of MI6 officials into Panama to control that country.
And it was to establish a hub because you can't just have a reserve currency without the trade and logistics.
So they wanted to tie all of these networks of shadow banking, Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Switzerland, Ireland, into a logistics hub.
And Panama was the perfect place.
And George Bush and drugs were going through there too.
You know, what I was jumping up and down, Charlie Kirk brought me on the show when we first met because I texted him.
I said, why is the migrant issue even an issue?
Teddy Roosevelt literally built a moat across Central America.
You can't swim across that moat.
All we got to do is shut down the Panama Canal.
And the migrants can't come up from Colombia and Venezuela, but they refused to do it.
China paid the UN Migration Agency in the UN paid buses to bus migrants over the canal.
If we had just sent three special forces teams to take each of the bridges, we would not have had a migrant problem.
But they know this.
So for them, it's a fight to the death.
I mean, every NGO organization, I heard the president of the EU, Ursula, was on the phone the night before, just constantly berating every diplomat.
You have to vote with the EU on here.
Because if we dig into this, if Cash Patels opens an investigation on this maritime, if he ties it back to this Panama and starts asking questions like, who was bussing these millions of migrants over the canal that we built?
I mean, is that an FBI thing?
Is that domestic enough to be covered under the FBI?
I'm not an intelligence expert.
FBI, CIA, you would probably know more than me, but it's definitely in our purview to do this.
And that's the other thing.
When Clinton pulled this out, Carter sold the canal, and then Clinton pulled this out.
Where did that Southern Command headquarters, this beautiful building that we built on the canal that was the entire headquarters of our Southern Command, which used to be important with the Monroe document, that was all handed over to NGOs?
It's filled with these Marxist NGOs now.
And I don't know who can investigate it on.
That's not my expertise, but these are American agreements.
We signed over these NGOs.
It was our delegate at the IMO under Biden who created this UN global carbon tax.
Yeah, I mean, Carter is just, I mean, what a mess.
But I mean, he gave that over.
Didn't like 35,000 Americans die building the Panama Canal?
Yeah, and he knew better.
Here it is.
We'll give it back to you for a dollar.
And he was a naval officer.
He was a submarine officer.
He knew better.
He understood the thing, Alfred Thayer-Mahan.
This is what they play dumb.
Obama pretends he doesn't know anything about maritime.
He didn't even put a maritime administrator.
He didn't confirm it for five years of his administration pretending, dumb, I don't know anything about this.
This is complicated.
And then we saw him last week going to London and he was campaigning for this slush fund at a maritime organization that for eight years he says he knows nothing about it.
It's not worth our time.
I mean, it's just, it's so ridiculous.
I mean, that's sort of crazy.
I mean, yeah, you mentioned Carter being a submarine captain.
I mean, again, we touched on it a little bit earlier, but looking back to World War II, German U-boats were sinking hundreds of ships in the Caribbean before our Allied forces improved their anti-submarine warfare capabilities.
Now today, we sort of have a dark fleet of sanctions evading tankers that operate with impunity and a similar stealth, but with a different purpose.
So maybe I'd like to ask you, what lessons from the Battle of the Caribbean back in the 1940s can impact how we think about this new shadow maritime network?
Well, this is what the Germans tried to get in the canal.
They tried to get in the ports.
They failed at that, but they had this logistics chain for the submarines.
They had shipbuilding.
They were able to build a number of these.
And then they had actual logistics submarines, so these whales that went out and they were submarine tankers to provide that logistics chain into the Caribbean.
This is the shadow tankers.
Now we have, you know, we have drones.
I said before, drones don't matter because the Pacific is so big and those drones cannot go out and attack a battleship 1,000 miles.
Most of them can't even get 100 miles out.
But now you start putting these containerized drones on container ships.
And a container ship, I'm thinking, a Chinese container ship passes by a nuclear aircraft carrier in the Singapore Straits and suddenly the containers open up, drones come out and 50 guys come out with javelin missiles.
We don't have point defense systems for that warfare.
And this is going back to the Caribbean.
This is what FDR understood.
He said, I want Q-ships.
What are Q-ships?
They were merchant ships where they had cargo stacked over their guns and they dropped the cargo at the last minute.
They wait for the submarine to come attack.
They drop the cargo and hit it.
That's what China's building.
That's why these Chinese merchant ships, the thousands of them, they're not built to commercial standards.
They're built to Chinese military standards so that they will be hard to sink.
And it doesn't take much for them to just load them up with, and then they have the legs, right?
They have the range.
And where are they going to go first?
They're going to go to the choke points where all the ships converge.
The Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Singapore Strait, the Philippine Straits, Taiwan Straits.
These are where they're going to send them.
And any ship that comes by, this is why your dad's doing such great work at the Red Sea.
It's not just about the largest bombing campaign in aircraft carrier history.
It's not about the Houthis.
The Houthis are a bunch of bandits.
It's about China has a base there in Djibouti.
They're putting this control.
They're building a bridge over the Panama Canal right now so that when we close down the other three bridges, they can keep that migrant, that illicit stream over.
They can keep their people in.
These choke points, going back to what Mahan said, are what matter and the potential militarization of, and not just the thousands of container ships.
They have tens of thousands of fishing fleets just raking the ocean.
This is what all these Europeans, their number one thing is Trump hates the environment.
He does not care about the environment.
He's a meanie.
You have these tens of thousands of Chinese ships that are absolutely raking all the oceans of fish and all this carbon from going around the Houthis that your dad's trying to solve.
And the thing that, sorry to go on a rant, the thing that frustrated.
It's actually fascinating because it's like, it's hard to believe it's, you know, again, I'm not surprised with anything anymore, but it's hard to believe it's this bad and it happened, you know, under everyone's nose.
Yeah, it goes back.
Follow the money.
Follow that dark money to the Panama Papers through the IMO.
Follow the money of Rubio and Mike Ben shutting down this USAID.
They need that slush fund.
And here's the thing.
So is this the backfill of what they shut down with USAID?
Yes.
This is just the other, the end around around that idea.
Yes.
I mean, it's not new.
If you ask them, they're going to say, well, we've been planning this for years.
Well, when Trump came in office, they put speed on it.
And again, it wasn't, it was our person, Mayte Medina, our representative at the IMO, this junior level person, because Biden wanted to appoint a maritime ambassador.
And if one thing, please ask your dad to appoint a maritime ambassador there.
Because between sessions, all this happens in the back room, the smoke-filled rooms of London with these NGOs.
And they wanted the money.
And here's the crazy thing.
You know, we didn't think we would win this vote.
They had everything lined up against your dad, everything.
And it wasn't until the last minute that, you know, we really woke up to this vote.
Everyone I talked to said, we're going to try, but we're probably going to lose this vote.
And, you know, they were so arrogant that they were going to win this that they would not negotiate at all.
I was talking to State Department representatives.
They were willing to take a deal.
That's the crazy thing.
Your dad offer him a decent deal, and he's willing to take it.
And I told them, all you have to do is take our 82 ships.
We only have 82 and exempt them.
They don't have to pay the carbon tax.
And we probably would have signed on this slush fund to maybe let them do what they want with their ships.
But they were so arrogant and so want to attack the United States and attack your dad that they wouldn't even negotiate that minor point to grandfather and 82 ships.
I mean, there's just no rationality, which means something bigger's at play.
And what's bigger is at play is this hundreds of billions of dollars of NGO cash.
So, you know, John, you've compared today's shipbuilding crisis to the destroyer gap that worried naval strategists before Pearl Harbor back in World War II.
If those admirals were alive today looking at our shipyard capacity versus, say, China's, what would they tell Congress?
Oh, they would be apoplectic.
And that's what angers me so much is what you had absolute rusting ships.
I mean, what an embarrassment, an absolute embarrassment.
All our Navy ships were covered in rust.
They look like Russian ships from the 80s, and Biden didn't care.
And that's the image.
It's not just the power of the United States, but the image of the power that Roosevelt and Mahan knew.
That's why their ships.
The Great Wave Fleet was painted white.
That's a horrible color.
It's easy to target.
You're a shooter.
I'm a long-distance shooter.
You don't paint the target white unless you want it to be hit.
He did that because white is the hardest thing to hide the rust.
And that shows our attention to detail on these things that Biden threw out the window with this.
And that's why we had a recruiting crisis was all these drag shows on Navy ships.
Plus, teenagers, my son goes to Edmund Reynolds.
Jack, he's a big fan of yours.
He's watching him.
He watched these videos, and I was trying to get him into the Naval Academy.
And he goes, Dad, why would I go on that rusted ship?
I want to go on something that looks cool and an F-35 or something.
So it's just, they've not only attacked shipbuilding, but they attacked the very fabric, this attention to detail I learned at the Naval Academy.
The only ones to resist it is the Marines.
And look at the Marine Corps budget.
They're absolutely been squeezed the last 20 years because they stood up to this.
And our admirals, they won't talk about it.
You won't see an admiral go in Congress and say, yeah, it's bullshit that our ships are rusted.
And I talk to them in private, they're all upset about it, but none of them have that moral courage to get up, stand up and say, we're going to fix this.
And even this day, they're still fighting behind the scenes, the shipbuilding.
And that's why I'd love John Phelan is, you know, they wouldn't go to Wall Street.
It's a construction project.
All of our shipyards are private and public companies.
You have to raise capital.
And when, you know, the Morgan Stanleys and the Goldman Sachs went and said, hey, we would love to give you $10 billion for a shipyard.
Here's what happened.
They go, I would love to give you $10 billion.
Show us the statistics.
Well, Biden ended all.
There are no statistics.
This maritime organization, they got rid of all their inspectors, all these statistics.
So the risk analysis goes, we have no federal numbers to even look at for this.
And then you go to the big defense contractors like HII.
Well, if they build a $10 billion dry dock, they got to maintain that over 20 years.
So Obama said, well, don't build the dry dock.
What we're going to do is we're going to hire McKinsey to do a study.
We're going to pay you $5 billion to figure out why the ships are why we can't build them.
And then when that study ends, what's the study say?
Well, we didn't dive deep enough.
Now we need another $5 billion.
And every year they get to study this.
This is why there are so many Democrats in D.C. You got buildings full of people to study problems where you know construction.
Yeah, it's not rocket science, John.
The hard hat, hard hat and boots.
Well, man, there's a lot to unpackage here.
I got to educate myself clearly a lot more as well.
So, John, we're going to have to have you back because clearly, there's just so much we got to cover.
And just make it, get it out there for the people.
That's why we ask them to share.
Think about these things.
Because again, even a guy like me who does this, like still had no idea it was this bad or that this little thing that they were trying to slip through under our noses had such major implications.
But maybe to close on a broader note, did you see the Secretary of War Pete Hegstein's speech to the Navy football team after their win over Air Force?
I'm just curious what you think moments like that mean for recruiting.
And what's our opportunity to really rebuild our military, which clearly needs it?
Well, my dad was a medic in Vietnam and then a New York City firefighter.
He gave me three rules in order to live through my 20s.
He said, if you avoid these three things in your youth, you're going to live.
Don't drink and drive.
Do not ride motorcycles and do not join the Marine Corps.
He said 90% of all the deaths, and he saw thousands of young guys' death come from those three things.
And the Marine Corps weren't the intellectual branch.
And then they got so squeezed by Clinton that they invested in with John Boyd, the fighter squadron guy, invested in higher education and really looking how we do more with less.
And what they came up with that is while everyone else is closing bases and dropping standards, we're going to double down.
They fought this DEI from the beginning.
And right now they are ready.
They're ready to go.
And Hexa keeps saying the Marine Corps has it, has it been.
And your dad brought a Marine Corps general in charge in the Naval Academy.
I can't tell you what apoplactic shock this created with these DEI admirals.
The Marine Corps, they know what they're doing.
It works.
Focus on those attention to details.
Focus on the lethality.
Get rid of the damn rust and start building ships.
Okay, we can't build 100 destroyers today.
Put the hard hat, the boots on, go into the shipyards, get those statistics, get the data, and bring them to Goldman Sachs.
You know, that's what you can put on a hard hat and then you can put on a suit and walk into the finance.
You do it all.
It's not difficult.
Well, John, I really appreciate it.
John Conrad, guys, check him out.
And John, we'll have to have you back because it seems like there's a lot more we didn't unpackage in an hour here.
But I look forward to hearing more.
Thank you so much for your time.
That was great.
Thank you so much.
And what we said in the beginning, sea blindness.
We got to get this information out.
You guys are amazing.
Thank you for having me.
We got to leave that to the guys watching.
Make sure they're sharing, liking, sending it out there to the world because, yeah, it's hard to believe something this big just totally went even under my radar.
But we won.
Your dad did it.
He closed him down.
Thank you, John.
Appreciate it.
We'll see you soon.
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I mean, that's a big deal.
I'll behave for the kids.
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