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Dec. 8, 2023 - The David Knight Show

03:06:11

The David Knight Show - 12/08/2023

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	Thank you.
	You're listening to The David Knight Show.
	All right, and joining us now, and joining us now, our guest has written a book, Mals America, a survivor's warning. Mals America, a survivor's warning.
	And I am really anxious to talk to her because she grew up in China.
	She was there during Mao's Cultural Revolution.
	She eventually came to America.
	And I have seen this over and over again.
	You had Rod Dreher said he had his friend's parents Who had been in Stalinist Russia were getting very upset.
	They said, this is exactly the same stuff we saw in Russia.
	This is exactly the same stuff she saw in China.
	And we need to understand where these people are taking us, and we need to understand what their tactics are.
	So joining us now is Xi Van Fleet.
	Her book is Mao's America, A Survivor's Warning.
	Thank you so much for joining us.
	Thank you for inviting me.
	And you came to prominence.
	I mean, you were just kind of living a quiet life here in America, and you came to prominence in Loudoun, Virginia, because you were speaking out against some of the things that you saw in school.
	You said, this is exactly what I saw as a child growing up in China.
	This is the communist tactic.
	Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, of course that was something that I was not prepared for so I went to school board and thinking I'm just doing my duty and have no idea that my video went viral and at the same time I was shocked to find how few people I
	It's just, oh, the left went crazy.
	But for people who experienced cultural revolution and who lived under communism, you don't have to experience the exact, what I experienced, the Chinese cultural revolution.
	If you live under communism, it's, we recognize it.
	Yes.
	Yes. That's what Rod Dreher was saying.
	He said the people who have lived under it, whether it was Russia or China, they can smell it a mile away because you can't not look the other direction.
	I was surprised because we adopted our daughter from China.
	I was surprised when we went there about 15 years ago to see all these pictures of Mao everywhere because I knew the hardships that people had gone through and how many people had died, the cultural revolution, all these other things.
	I was surprised to see him still essentially revered.
	But we do that, don't we, in various countries?
	Yeah, and Marx, you know, the evil genius that his toxic ideology led to the deaths of more than 100 million people, he still has been revered by this left and by the professors and the university and the students there as well.
	So, yeah, because this ideology has never been public, trialed, and denounced.
	And that is the problem.
	And that's why your book is very important.
	Tell us a little bit about what it was like growing up as a child in the Cultural Revolution.
	Did you get sent out into the rural areas and everything as they were doing?
	Yes, yes. Yeah, it's a long history and it's complicated and I do my best to just make it short and still, you know, make sense.
	Okay, so I was in my second semester of the first grade when Cultural Revolution started in 1966.
	So I had one semester of...
	More or less normal education.
	And I remember very little, but I do remember, you know, in the reading class, we were learning sentences that just describe nature, kind of peaceful, kind of memorable, and normal kind of thing.
	Mm-hmm. And then that was it.
	That's the only thing I remember.
	And then heading on to the second semester, that's when the Cultural Revolution started and pretty much immediately the school was closed because all the principals and teachers were ousted by the students because they were They become the target of the Cultural Revolution because Mao condemned all of them as counter-revolution,
	reactionary intellectual authority, meaning they were the enemy of the state, should be altered.
	So the students turned against the teachers and the school were closed.
	Closed, for me, two years.
	And for other places, as long as four years.
	No school. Total chaos.
	And so we, as little kids, had nothing to do.
	So we went to the streets every day.
	And then what we witnessed is the unfolding of the cultural revolution, of the struggle sessions, parade of those people being denounced.
	And the Red Guards...
	debate each other and pretty soon and cancel culture definitely smashing of statues and taking down any signboards of stores that were traditional anything that is not communist or revolutionary were all smashed and destroyed and pretty soon It turned into violence.
	You know, I did an interview not too long ago with an individual who wrote a book about a Project Veritas whistleblower's experience in a corporation and how they were pushing, you know, this critical race theory and things like that.
	And he was very upset about it. He was black.
	And he was still upset about it.
	He didn't like it. And so he started taking notes.
	And then he became a whistleblower for Project Veritas.
	Then he wrote the book. And when I talked to the guy who wrote the book with him and really for him, He was saying, yeah, you know, all this stuff that's happening, critical race theory and all the rest of this stuff, people want to call it Marxism.
	It's not Marxism. It's like, oh, it is Marxism.
	It absolutely is.
	And so many different ways.
	I couldn't believe him when he said that.
	I didn't really, you know, get into it with him because I really wanted to find out this guy's experiences.
	But, you know, it really is purely Marxism.
	Talk about the struggle sessions.
	And people can understand.
	If they understand some of the specifics of these things, what does struggle session look like?
	They'll start to see how it aligns with what we're seeing here in the United States.
	Yes, yes. But I want to add to what you just said.
	Too many people. I'm not talking about people on the left.
	I'm talking about conservatives.
	Still, we don't have enough people to understand the nature of folkism.
	It is pure cultural Marxism, and it's pure Maoism.
	And that's why I call my book, Mao's America.
	It is Maoism with American characteristics.
	And that's why I don't like to use the term woke.
	I mean, first of all, these people are not awake.
	They're not conscious of what's going on.
	And the people who use that term, that's another trick that they do.
	They come up with their own labels for themselves and their labels for you.
	And we must not use those labels because that's propaganda too.
	The CCP used the same word, woke.
	Did they really? Yeah, they did.
	They did. And in Chinese, it's called jiewu, meaning awakening inside you, a consciousness.
	And we have to raise our class consciousness and see everything in terms of class.
	And so anyone that's somehow run against the party narrative is casted as the enemy of the state or the black class.
	And you always want to do anything to remain in the red class, which is the allies of revolution.
	And constantly everyone has to raise their class wokeness or consciousness.
	Now, same terminology.
	People, of course, they don't know because they never learned the history.
	I think it's interesting in this country, too, that they got everybody to agree with, okay, we've got the red states and the blue states.
	And it's like, no, the blue states are pushing Marxism, socialism.
	The red states, you know, red has always been the color of the communists, as you just pointed out.
	Yeah, revolution. Yeah, exactly.
	And so, you know, they do that to muddy the water, to confuse people.
	And you've got people out there saying, yes, we're the red states.
	I know, see?
	I am so disgusted with communism.
	For the longest time, I don't want to wear anything red.
	Because that just reminds me of communism, of revolution, of blood, of violence.
	And then come here, okay, you know, we are, you know...
	Republican is red, but then I found out the Democrats did the switch because they don't want to associate with communism, which is exactly what they are.
	Anyway, so now I embrace red because now I'm conservative because stuck with the color red.
	We just have to make the best of it.
	I just try to avoid that term, red and woke, as much as I can.
	And you know, if you go back and you look at Antifa, I got a friend who was in Germany, and he says, go back to the 1930s, they haven't even changed their flag.
	They had the same flag in Germany in the 1930s that they've got now.
	And so, yeah, it is amazing how they just import this stuff over them, because Americans don't know their history, and they don't know what has happened in other countries.
	They just, they swallow it, hook, line, and sinker.
	So tell us about the struggle sessions.
	Yes, struggle session. What is struggle session?
	Actually, I'm going a little deeper what that really means.
	Struggle session is a term used not just during the Cultural Revolution.
	It started as soon as the Communists took over China in 1949.
	And then one of the major campaigns they launched is called land reform.
	Land reform is what Communists did To fulfill their promise to the peasants who support their revolution, that they're going to give the free land to them.
	Go ahead, that's okay.
	Yeah, and I got some free gift for you here.
	Okay, good, good.
	Yeah, okay. So here, listen to it.
	How do you get all the peasants together And fight the landlord in order to get their land to raise their class consciousness.
	Because the peasant did not know such a thing as a class.
	That was an alien to them.
	So they have to be taught.
	And just like a DEI training.
	So the communists trained the peasants and told them, you are poor, not because you did not work hard, not because you are not smart.
	Mm-hmm. And we're seeing that now in terms of reparations because I do agree that, you know, there they used and in Europe they used class.
	And that doesn't work here in America because, you know, nobody really saw themselves as being a different class, but they did see themselves as being a different race, a different skin color.
	Yeah. So that's what they focused on, and that's why there's been so much focus on white privilege and all the rest of this stuff, and why the reparations is really very much like the promises of land reform.
	They even go back and say, well, you know, after slavery, you're supposed to get an acre and 40 mules or something like that.
	They actually make these kinds of analogies.
	Yeah, same idea. But anyway, to raise your class to be woke is the condition to have a revolution.
	And then the peasants finally said, okay, We are poor.
	They were taught. They are poor because the rich exploited and oppressed them.
	So now everyone knows there are two classes.
	There's a black class, there's a red class, and they are enemies.
	And then the goal of the red class is to eradicate the black class.
	So that is the beginning of the political Identity.
	And that was the thing that the CCP used to permanently divide Chinese people.
	Okay, going back to the...
	So the struggle session started in the land reform in 1949 to 1951.
	The same formula, the same tactic is the landlord Or the rich peasants will be struggled against, like a public trial, and the peasants would condemn them, and the peasants were coached to retell their suffering and then blame all their suffering, all their problems, to the landlords.
	And then they will say, what do we do with the landlord?
	And I will dance to the landlord and then dragged out and executed.
	And that's how it started.
	And during the Cultural Revolution, the enemy has shifted.
	It's no longer the landlord and the rich peasants.
	They become those in power, meaning those were the CCP. Bureaucrats or the CCP leadership.
	Why? Because Mao felt like he was no longer in control of his party.
	He wanted to purge everyone.
	He can't purge everyone because that would look like he was after his own party.
	He had a better idea.
	He mobilized all the young people from his government schools and his universities.
	Those were called the Red Guards.
	So they mobilized the Red Guards, gave them Power.
	Pure power and dismantled the police and the law enforcement and no one can stop them.
	Anything they do was justified.
	Anything they do has no consequences.
	So they went after those in power.
	All levels of the government from the village to the central government.
	So that is what the Red Guards did.
	Struggle session is I witnessed the struggle session for the governor of my province.
	Because the governor was pretty tall, so they got two basketball players to hold him on the stage, and so to make the governor look small.
	And then the Red Guards have a loud speaker and denounce him, and so then people shout slogans.
	And during that particular struggle session, I did not see violence, but he was beaten.
	He was struggled against...
	He probably went to like a hundred of this kind of a struggle session.
	And his wife was also part of that struggle sessions.
	And during one struggle session, they pulled the red guards, pulled all her hair off.
	And eventually she committed suicide.
	So that is...
	There was violent struggle session that people were beaten to death right on the spot.
	And there were milder, which is just verbal abuse.
	That's what I looked at. But that's not it.
	It's not just... Struggle session is not something against denounced enemy.
	Struggle session really, really means struggle against yourself.
	And in CCP's word, it's...
	Criticism and the self-criticism.
	As a young kid, I went through it's routine it's every week there is a political study and then we have to read some of the Mao's quotation and then we carry out this self-criticism and self-criticism so each kid will say whatever the person you know the kid did not do well enough According to most instructions.
	So you denounce yourself.
	Wow. And we see that today.
	We see that today. Kids have to denounce themselves because of their, you know, their gender, you know, and their normalcy or whatever that we would say, or their skin color.
	It's exactly the same thing that they do.
	See? See? You see?
	Yeah. So you denounce yourself, and then you denounce your classmates.
	So we go around and around and around.
	You say, okay, I did not do this right, you know.
	Of course, we did not say we have privilege.
	You know, just say we were not up to mouse instruction and we should do better.
	And then say, so-and-so, that day I saw you say this, and I saw you act like that, and that's not right.
	So that is really the core.
	It's not those kind of public trials.
	It is at every level.
	Every person is involved in struggling with So that's exactly what we're seeing now.
	You denounce your privilege if you're white.
	And you swear that you'll do better.
	And then you denounce your co-worker who you heard saying this and that.
	And that's Absolutely the same thing.
	Oh, yes. I remember the testimony of a young girl who was pressured into gender mutilation and surgery and things like that.
	And she said, you know, I got into this group because, and I forget what it was, it was some pop group that she liked or some game that she liked or something like that.
	And so it was just a special interest group.
	But everybody that was in it was into this type of struggle session thing.
	She didn't call it that. But she said, you know, they were all leftist and, you know, and I was just heterosexual and I was white and I had to denounce myself to be a part of this group.
	And so I started denouncing all the...
	It wasn't enough to just say, okay, you can do whatever you want.
	I had to hate myself for that.
	And I had to make these confessions to them.
	That is what they're doing to all the kids.
	It's amazing... How they have very insidiously and subtly and undercover inserted all of these psychological tactics that were used by Mao in America.
	Of course, because people have no idea because they don't know history.
	And people like me see through right away because it's the same, absolutely the same thing.
	So you can't be just not a racist, right?
	You have to be anti-racist.
	Yes. Yes. Yeah, so exactly the same idea.
	Yes. Tell us a little bit about the cancel culture, of course, which is tied with that as well, and the need for them to destroy statues.
	We just saw this fetishized destruction of a Robert E. Lee statue, and they took up a very high-quality video of them melting it down, all the rest of the stuff.
	This is a very important thing for the communists to take down statues and to erase the culture that's existing there.
	Yeah. The goal is to erase past, period.
	Cancer culture is really to, in China, it's called destruction of the four old.
	Old idea, old culture, old habit, old custom.
	Anything that is traditional, anything that is pre-communist, Communist regime has to be erased, has to be destroyed.
	And you start with something very symbolic, right?
	Anything that everyone can see, and then what you do?
	You go and destroy the statues.
	And so, in China, we did not have many public statues as in the West.
	Most of them were religious statues, such as in the Buddhist temple or in church.
	And that's what they went after.
	They destroyed all the statues, and that's not it.
	They changed the names of everything that is not traditional, that is traditional, such as institution names, store names, food brand.
	Sounds familiar?
	Yeah.
	Oh yeah, exactly.
	Great names. Oh man, we're deep into this.
	We're deep into this, aren't we?
	So the four olds, old ideas, old culture, old habit, what was the fourth one?
	And old customs.
	Old customs, interesting.
	It's just the civilization of China.
	Yeah, it all has to go wide.
	Because if you want to install Maoism as the supreme ideology or the religion of the land, you have to remove everything before it.
	And the cancel culture went to the next stage.
	Okay, they destroyed everything in the public.
	Okay, and they said there were more.
	They were hidden in people's homes.
	And we have to go after that.
	That's what they did.
	They raided people's homes.
	and took whatever they think is old, destroyed them or confiscated them.
	This is the largest looting operation in history Wow.
	Wow. Of course, you know, we have the IRS is going to be made five to seven times bigger depending on which budget they go through.
	And that's what I'm concerned about is that they're going to go around confiscating not necessarily statues because people don't have that many statues or things like that on their own, but go around confiscating any physical property.
	Tell us a little bit about what they did to the family.
	Because that is a key part of this, you know, in America.
	Was there, as part of the four olds, would that, I don't know, would the family fall into one of these in terms of culture or custom or something like that?
	Yes. Okay.
	I'm sorry. Oh, that's okay.
	Take your time. Drink something if you'd like to.
	Go ahead. Go ahead. I'll cover here for you.
	You said that, again, we look at things like critical race theory and stuff like that.
	that again we're talking about race rather than class uh that's the difference in in communism in america versus uh china or europe uh but again old ideas old cultures old habits and old customs and uh and i imagine family fits in there somewhere absolutely so for family you don't have to guess You just read Communist Manifesto.
	It's laid out there clearly.
	There's three things they want to abolish.
	One is private property.
	Another is religion.
	Another is family.
	So, that is laid out there, you know, clear for everyone to see.
	They have to destroy religion because in order to implement communism as the religion and this is very very important communism is not A community is a religion.
	Even though they say they're against religion, but it is a religion.
	It replaces religion.
	So they have to destroy religion.
	And they have to destroy family.
	Because those are the foundations of any society.
	So... That started very early on, especially in schools.
	And so it was very, very clear to everyone, not just to kids, but to parents as well.
	The kids belong to the state.
	Yes. And the parents understand that.
	And so if you have to choose between your parents and the state, you choose the state.
	And there's no question about it.
	Many kids reported their parents during the Cultural Revolution to the authority.
	And some of the parents were arrested and some were executed.
	It was so clear in my mind, in every kid's mind, the party was our parents.
	and the chairman Mao was our parent and that is if you talk to any any people lived under communism it is a common threat they destroy religion they destroy family Yeah, and of course, you know, those of us who knew about that understood and saw that when Hillary Clinton said it takes a village to raise a child.
	You know, you destroy the family, you put the children under the care of the government.
	We had MSNBC running the Public service announcements a few years ago.
	Melissa Harris Perry, I think was her name.
	She said, we've got to get over this idea that children belong to the parents.
	And at that point in time, they hadn't really found something that they could use as a wedge.
	Now what they're doing is they're using this transgender thing as a wedge.
	And that's where it's coming in.
	But it'll be other things. You know, you'll be denounced.
	It'll be other things. Yeah, it'll be other things.
	That's just the first thing they're doing right now.
	Yeah. Yeah, that was not on the horizon.
	You know, people are looking at this.
	Oh, okay, fine. You know, the village is there.
	They're going to help to do it.
	But, you know, where is the conflict here?
	And so they came up with a conflict.
	First, they sell you the idea that kids belong to the state and to the society and to the village, and then they find the issues of conflict to punish the parents with.
	But actually, they have been doing that before transgender.
	Transgender really just showcased how they are trying to cut the ties between parents and children and actively set children up against their parents.
	But for decades, they have been teaching the values of communism and Marxism.
	And even though... That's not what Americans know about, but they have been developing the children with a new set of ideologies and created this conflict between generations, right?
	And there's a lot of families, especially in recent years, a lot of families just broken up just like the Cultural Revolution because they don't agree That's right.
	That's right.
	Class in China and Europe as a dividing thing.
	And here they use skin color.
	Then I think also in the same way, this dividing wedge, I've seen this as you talk about.
	This has been going on for decades, of course.
	And I remember one of the first cases that I saw this is up in Massachusetts.
	And it was a father who didn't want his eight-year-old girl in a sex education class.
	And at the time... Was not into all of these, shall we say, highly deviant sexual practices that are going on right now.
	It was just straight side.
	But she was eight years old. He said, I don't think she's mature enough for this.
	And they said, well, she has to do it.
	So he went to school to take her out.
	They arrested him for trespassing.
	And the judge said, when you drop your child off at the school, you have surrendered them to the state, and we will act in loco parentis in place of the parents.
	And so there's been this wedge...
	You know, they've been making the wedge, the sexual wedge, they've been making it wider and wider with all the different diverse practices and everything.
	But just as they began to use this wedge of sexuality against the parents, and this really kind of does go back even to the mid-20th century, you know, where you had the, and then following up, you know, in the 1950s, the generation gap, and then the sexual revolution, all this stuff.
	They've been using the sex thing as a wedge issue, especially with the parents, And they've really weaponized it in a very visual way, especially in just the last few years.
	But they'll find other things, as you pointed out.
	It always is something. Yeah, sex was their secret weapon.
	But it's really anything traditional, anything kind of normal they are challenging right now, right?
	And in a communist country that we were taught, we were equal to the parents.
	We can educate our parents.
	So many times we were taught that we were better than our parents because we know better.
	We are more updated in our learning.
	And so we should always watch out our parents and make sure they are up to date with their learning.
	And so and that's why in communist countries and they worship or they give power to the youth.
	And that's what we're doing now.
	The young people, they know we let you believe that they know better or they know what's best for them.
	And the same ideology, the same idea that the children are better off knowing what's best for them than the parents.
	That's right. And I saw that, you know, even though I was a child at the time, You know, you can see that there was something different that had happened, and it was really flowing out of the schools.
	They used the schools even at the beginning of all this.
	The idea that we've got in America, one of the things that's made us very vulnerable is we love the idea that we're constantly reinventing culture.
	Our culture is very fluid.
	I would imagine That in China, it was a lot more conservative and not as fluctuating as it has been in America because of the embracing of media and entertainment and of the baby boom teenagers and all the rest of the stuff.
	They were able to then have this rapidly evolving culture that really kind of played into their hands, I think.
	But was it more conservative in China when Mao came in?
	In terms of culture and family?
	Yeah, it was very traditional.
	But during the Cultural Revolution, everything turned upside down.
	In the Cultural Revolution, to us, the world was turned upside down, just like today.
	We're taught similar things.
	I think some of them were not as extreme as what we see in America.
	But we were also taught that there's no difference between men and women.
	We're the same.
	Whatever men can do, women can do better.
	The other half of the sky is the same.
	The other half of the sky. Yeah, like Biden told it.
	So we dress like a man.
	We talk like a man.
	We think like a man.
	We act like a man.
	So if you go to China in the 60s and 70s, you see a sea of gray.
	People look like and you can hardly distinguish the gender.
	And so we were made into a genderless society.
	And so Mao always bragged that he liberated women from the oppression of the old society and of the patriarchy.
	But they did not give them choice.
	So they're all liberated from the household shores and their children were sent to daycare by the government.
	So they were forced to join their workforce.
	They become The work be for the party.
	They work side by side with the men.
	So they become men.
	So it's not extreme to say that women can be men and men can be women, but it's close.
	Same idea. Same idea.
	Same idea. Same idea.
	Yeah, we just add in a kind of a sexual deviance overtone to it.
	But it is that radical leveling, which is another, you know, everything in communism is leveled, right?
	You know, we take everybody down, except for the people at top.
	And everybody else owns nothing, and they're happier in all that, aren't they?
	Yeah. No, that's what I say.
	Now we're taught that we should own nothing and be happy.
	In Chinese, in the communist China, in most time especially, that we had nothing and we have to be happy.
	If you show that you're not happy, if you show that you're dissatisfied, you will end up in a struggle session or in the gulags.
	Yeah, that's what they're working on here.
	If you are not happy, you better take the Brave New World approach.
	You can self-medicate with drugs or alcohol or sex or whatever to just drop out of the world.
	But if you pay attention and you get upset about it, you get the 1984 treatment.
	It's amazing how this is all coming around and we're seeing exactly the same type of thing.
	So... What do you...
	You've written the book.
	You've gone around and talked to a lot of people and trying to wake up Americans.
	Are they starting to see the light in this?
	I do. I think when I started to talk, and I remember one particular place, and I went to talk, and I talked about cultural revolution, Red Guards, and I just noticed there's this kind of blank...
	Look from the audience.
	And I realize, my God, they really don't know anything.
	I have to start from the very beginning.
	And I can't just say the Cultural Revolution.
	What is Cultural Revolution?
	Why Cultural Revolution?
	What is Red Guard? How it come into being?
	And there's just too much to explain in a, you know, like 40 minutes speak.
	And in the process, a lot of people ask me, you know, I met a lot of people in the past two years.
	And they said, do you have a book?
	I'm going to write a book.
	And it's because that I know that I need to write this book to explain everything in more detail.
	How and why and where and all that.
	And I hope that it's going to be helpful for people to understand what the Chinese Cultural Revolution is about and why it's so similar to the American Cultural Revolution that is unfolding in front of us.
	Yeah, you know, people talk about communist subversion, but the reason they mention that is because these people have brought the exact same tactics and plans in and, you know, pretended that this is just something that they thought of.
	And if we don't understand the pattern and how this has been used and what it led to, it's going to be really bad.
	Now, were you there during the period when there was a lot of starvation and things like that?
	No, no. I was born in that time.
	And it started in 1959, lasted three years.
	So, no, I... So you're not, as a child, you're not really caught up in the great leap forward type of thing, right?
	No, I was too little for that.
	But... Everybody, you know, like my parents' generation, know about stories or still alive that I know enough growing up.
	But I did not understand why, but I just understood that it was a time that everyone was going hungry and those were lucky ones because they were in the city.
	And they have ration.
	They have ration of a certain amount of food, even though everybody was going hungry.
	But in the countryside, that's where deaths took place.
	Up to 50 million Chinese peasants died.
	Wow. It's very interesting how both Stalin and Mao use so many of the same tactics, as you're pointing out, struggle sessions and everything.
	You know, Stalin had his purges.
	But then at the beginning of all this, you know, Stalin had his halamador and Ukraine goes to the place where it's the most fertile and starves the people to death.
	Mao does the same thing with his great leap forward.
	And it's very troubling to see that now that we have our technocrat overlords who are saying, well, we're going to have to change the way you do food, and we're going to dismantle the food supply, we're going to dismantle energy, we're going to do all this stuff, all of that stuff.
	Seems to be that same tactic seems to be on the horizon.
	And of course, that really is kind of at the leading edge of the oppression.
	Because first, you have to take everything away from everybody and do your great reset before you can impose this new system.
	And I think they've got a timeline for this new system of 2030.
	So I think they're going to escalate this pretty quickly.
	What do you think? Yes, I think that people absolutely need to understand this.
	Communism has nothing to do with communalism, right?
	Communal, we're just sharing, we're happy together, we take away private property, so there's no exploitation, we're all happy together.
	Communism is all about one thing, control.
	Yes. Okay, control everything.
	In people's lives.
	Control what you can have.
	Control where you can live.
	And now we're told 15 minutes a city is where we should live.
	Control where you can move during the mouse time.
	They control in such a way that nobody can really move Just to visit another place because they give you a coupon for food and that coupon only applies to where you live.
	So if you say, I'm going to take three months vacation, travel around the country, you can't do that.
	First of all, you have no money.
	And second, your coupon could not apply to another city.
	So you're kind of stuck where you were and how many children you can have.
	Right? When before, they want to have as many children as possible.
	They follow Stalin's policy.
	As many, and then they change it.
	Only have one. If you have more, you're dragged to the hospital and your baby will forcefully abort it.
	And then what you can say, There's no freedom of speech.
	Zero. Okay?
	And if you have to praise the party, you have to praise it correctly.
	If you praise the party incorrectly, you're also in trouble.
	And mostly, mostly, people pay attention to what you can think.
	So that is communism.
	In a nutshell. Control.
	That's true. And so people think, do you know that what you're taught was a lie when you were in school?
	How do I know? I have no idea.
	Because all the information was controlled.
	I have no idea to compare to anything, right?
	It's just one thing.
	Version of everything. One version of truth, and it's from the party, and one source of information is from the party media or from the school.
	Everything is controlled by...
	So when you have no other information, you can't think.
	You cannot think critically without access to information.
	That's right. And that's why they're working so hard on censorship now.
	Yes, exactly. It is a very insidious program.
	And, of course, it's interesting when we talk about the one-child policy, because what China has done is that they've aligned themselves with this globalist climate movement.
	And the globalist climate movement is a perfect fit, a perfect rationale for them to institute communism.
	You know, one of the clips that I've played several times is Justin Trudeau.
	He was asked, what's your favorite country in the world besides, of course, Canada?
	And he says, China, because I could tell everybody what to do to save the environment.
	That's exactly what this is all about.
	They have a rationale to tell everybody what to do, and they're going to control everything in our lives on the basis of that, including how many kids we have.
	And, of course, the whole climate and environmental movement was born out of depopulation and the idea that humans are a virus and we've got to reduce humanity, which is exactly what Stalin and Mao wanted to do with their starvation programs.
	There's too many people here to control, so let's reduce the number of people here, and as I reduce them and devastate the population in my country, I can show my authority and establish myself as the dread authority in this particular country.
	It's amazing how they have followed through to the letter all of these same policies, and it's a plan that's just rolling out to us.
	And also, you know what's happening in China now, right?
	They ran out of cheap labor.
	They are in deep, deep trouble.
	And the population is so aged.
	And really, the future is dire.
	And then, you know what?
	The party said, you should have three.
	Yeah, see, that is worse than depopulation.
	In the very beginning, Stalin encouraged births after the Second World War, right?
	They have like an award to mothers who have nine children, ten children, and Mao did the same thing.
	They control everything according to their needs.
	So now they ask people to have three.
	Well, that's not that easy.
	You just ask and people just have three.
	But this started with party members.
	Party members, if you want promotion, you are required to have three children.
	Well, that's communism.
	Control. Control of everything.
	I had no idea what Christianity was.
	That's the truth. And so, no idea, because religion removed out of our lives.
	The only thing that, you know, in China, the largest religion is Buddhism, has been Buddhism.
	Okay, so there are temples, and even though some of them were destroyed, but there are still some in the city, but they turned into parks.
	So growing up, I go into this so-called Buddhist parks.
	So I know there's such a thing.
	And then we're told they're all superstitious.
	And it's all backward and primitive.
	So I just go there and look at the Buddha and just thinking that's just so stupid.
	They make a statue like that.
	So religion was absent in our lives.
	And of course, I know better.
	We had a religion, that's communism.
	And we had a God, that's Mao.
	And we had a Bible, that's the most read little book, right?
	But only in the early 80s, and so I was working in a college for training school teachers, and then Americans started coming in, and they want to see churches.
	Mm-hmm. And so by then, some of them started to open.
	And I was shocked to find there is a building that I passed through there countless times was a church.
	And so I took them there, the American teachers, and there I met a young guy.
	And so he said, They, he was, you know, I was 20, in my early 20s, and he was two.
	So he said he was Christian, and because his parents had passed it down to them, they just do it at home.
	I was like, really?
	I have no clue. I really had no clue that there was such a thing that in China, among us, there are some underground Christians.
	So, of course, later, you know, it opened up a little more in the 90s and early 2000s.
	But now, you know, it's crashing.
	Then they're closing churches, and the churches that are not closed become closed.
	The party churches.
	Yes. And if you go to some of the churches, in the altar, it's Mao's portrait and Xi Jinping's portrait.
	Yes. And next to the cross.
	I've talked about that many times, that if you're going to put up a cross, you've got to put Mao on one side and Xi Jinping on the other side.
	And I said, do they realize that they've got Jesus and the two thieves on either side?
	So, if you, today, if you go to China, you can still go to church.
	There's still some open. Those are CCP's church.
	Yes. And the real church is underground.
	And then later, after I came out, I met more people who were part of that underground church.
	So... They call it the church of the three-person self or something like that, don't they, isn't it?
	Something like that. Yeah, the three-self was a policy that was installed early on.
	Basically, they are going to make church, Chinese church.
	You know, and not even Chinese church, CCP's church.
	Yes, yes. So if you go to today, if you go to...
	I went, actually, I checked the Association for Buddhism in China, Christianity, Catholic, whatever.
	If you go to their website, their landing page is the support, the Communist Party, the support socialism, the support...
	Forget it. You know, they are not really independent.
	And you find that, you know, what they started doing, even the churches that were doing that, you know, trying to bow and scrape to the Communist Party, they would then come in and tear them down anyway, you know?
	I mean, it's just, you know, it depends on what their whim is.
	I remember when we were there, we were there for a couple of weeks, and then as we went south into Hong Kong and were on the train, I saw crosses for the first time.
	It's like, you know, I thought I hadn't seen any churches or any crosses or anything like that the whole time we were there in China.
	You know, it was all underground. But it's pretty big underground from all reports because that kind of persecution really grows a church.
	And it grows real strong church members who...
	They're not going to be coming for the ice cream social.
	That's just that way they're there for it, because they're really serious about it.
	Well, I tell you, that's another thing people should know.
	Under communism, there's absolutely no freedom there.
	Or religion, or faith.
	Well, I think they're right to understand that the church is their enemy, because I think that is the most effective guerrilla organization to oppose this kind of authoritarianism.
	Christianity was the roots of our liberal society in the West, and it's going to be the way that they're going to uproot the communists from the ground up, I think, in that country.
	But, you know, when you're talking about the fact that even they wanted to control What you think.
	That was when Rod Dreyer was talking to people who had come from Russia and places like that.
	And in the tradition of Solzhenitsyn, he actually named his book Live Not by Lies because that was an essay by Solzhenitsyn.
	That's what they want you to do.
	They want you to, as you point out, as a child, you're given one source of information.
	That's just the way that it is, and so you just go with that.
	But for the other people, and if you come up with something, eventually they're going to come to you and tell you that they want you to repeat 2 plus 2 equals 5.
	Until you believe it.
	Yes. Until you believe it.
	Exactly. And so that's the thing.
	It's about breaking your will to eventually come in.
	And I think that's another aspect of what we see with this gender stuff.
	You know, you have to, regardless of what you actually see or know or whatever, you've got to deny that and go with what they say is real.
	And so that's the key thing.
	You know, and that was the one thing that Solzhenitsyn saw that was the common thing amongst all these different totalitarian societies is that ultimately you're going to have to bend your what you know is true is going to have to be bent to what they want you to say just as a power exercise and we see that happening now.
	In the United States. And that's why it's so important for people to say, nope, not going to go there.
	And understand where all of this is coming from.
	All of these things, as you point out, Mao's America, warning America of the fact that this is a plan.
	It is an agenda.
	They've executed this plan, and it's going to be so much worse for us because now they have the leverage of technology.
	And also, just this morning, I watched a clip of the interview by this guy, George.
	He used to be Clinton's advisor, a Greek name.
	I can't remember right now.
	George, whatever, Kalaplos.
	Oh, Stephanopoulos? Stephanopoulos?
	Yes, and the interview, a Congress member, and he just kept doing that.
	Can you say that 2020 election is not stolen?
	And then when he was talking about something, he'd bring it back, he'd bring it back, he'd bring it back.
	Can you say yes or no, it is stolen?
	That's exactly the same tactic.
	A woman is a woman.
	Can you say, this man is standing in front of you, that he is a woman.
	You have to say it. Can you say it?
	Say it now. Same tactic.
	It's a struggle session, isn't it?
	Well, it is time for us to struggle against these people, and you have to, people need to understand, that's why your book is so important, people need to understand the tactics.
	This is nothing new.
	There's nothing new under the sun.
	You know, Solomon was wise enough to say that, and of course this kind of stuff has been going around forever, but it has been honed into a fine tactic of psychological manipulation by the communists, and now what they're going to do worldwide is take that tactic, that agenda that you lay out here that Mao did, and they're going to wed it to modern technology to give them more leverage on people, I think.
	Just realize they have established the truth, right?
	The climate is changing, and they're going to destroy the earth if we don't do anything.
	Otherwise, you're a denier, denier, denier.
	And that is exactly what Mao did.
	One truth, and everyone has to go by it.
	And if you question it, you're an enemy of the state.
	Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we see that over and over again.
	It is so important for people to see this.
	Again, the book is Mal's America, A Survivor's Warning.
	Best place to get that?
	Anywhere the books are sold? Or do you have a website that you sell that directly?
	I know. I should have. But I don't.
	It'll get you a little bit more money. So I always want to offer that to authors because I know that they make a little bit more money if they sell it direct.
	But again, Amazon, anywhere that books are sold, Mao's America, A Survivor's Warning, very important.
	Thank you so much for speaking out about this and telling people this and speaking out in these...
	You know, the beginning of the struggle sessions that are there.
	Thank you so much for a message that is so needed and a historical context and perspective that is so missing in America that people can find in your book.
	Thank you very much. Thank you.
	Thank you. Xi Van Fleet.
	Thank you very much. We'll take a quick break, folks, and we will be right back.
	Stay with us.
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	You're listening to The David Knight Show.
	If you like the Eagles, the cars, and Huey Lewis and the News, You'll love the classic hits channel at APS Radio.
	Download our app or listen now at APSradio.com.
	All right, and joining us now, our guest is, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, Charles Van Vick.
	Is that correct? Did I say your name correctly?
	That's very close, David.
	Thank you very much. Charles Van Vick.
	Thank you. Okay, that's as close as I'm going to get.
	I'll spell it out for people because your website...
	It's C-H-A-R-L-V-A-N-W-Y-K dot info.
	That's correct. It might be easier for people to find you if they look at the title of your books because that's pretty easy to remember.
	Shooting Back was your first book.
	You've now got a new book, Reloaded.
	Is it Reloaded Shooting Back?
	Yes. Yes, Reloaded, and the subtitle is Shooting Back Again.
	Okay, so Shooting Back and then Reloaded, and then the subtitle Shooting Back Again.
	And let's talk about this because the subtitle to your first book, Shooting Back, was about the right and duty of self-defense.
	Spoiler alert, after he went through this struggle, as I mentioned before, They played a key role in the St.
	James Massacre in terms of protecting about a thousand lives.
	So let's talk a little bit about your concern about it as a Christian missionary.
	Tell people, because you wrote this book long before we had any church shootings in the U.S., and now we've had several, I'm afraid.
	And so you were trying to warn Americans about what was coming.
	Take us back to...
	Before the St. James Massacre and what you were thinking as a Christian, what you went through in the process.
	Yes, David, it was quite strange because I'd been in the military in South Africa.
	All white men at the time during the apartheid days needed to do national service, and that included two years in the military.
	And I could understand theologically and biblically how...
	A man could defend his homeland and defend his family from that sort of perspective.
	But I really question the idea of carrying a gun in civilian streets and supporting yourself if somebody was trying to attack your family.
	Strange enough as it is, that was an issue for me.
	And let's talk about that because, you know, that really is the point of attack on the Second Amendment here in the United States.
	It's like, well, you know, the military can do it to defend the country and defend innocent lives because they've got the imprimatur of the government, but you as an individual shouldn't be allowed to do that.
	We see that all the time, even about the teachers in the schools.
	So you were there where we are right now in this debate, and what did you decide about that?
	Yes, so I really struggled with this issue, and then I read an article by Larry Pratt, who was the executive director at the time of Gun Owners of America, and he basically laid down a biblical foundation for Christian men arming themselves to protect their families, and as I said, in Civilian Street.
	So I thought it was an excellent article, really changed my mind on these issues, and then very soon after that, Wow.
	Wow. And I managed to do a U-turn and get away there as quickly as possible, drove to a police station to tell them what had happened, to report the issue.
	But then I decided straight after that incident that, you know, I was unmarried at the time, but I thought, I'm going to get a firearm now, and if anybody threatens to kill myself, all my friends and my family in the future, I'm going to defend us with lethal force.
	So that's very much how it panned out.
	Did the police say, well, they were mostly peaceful, right?
	That's right. I understand.
	There's this argument that, you know, in fact, I had somebody previously on an interview in America saying to me, we can trust our politicians so we can give firepower to the state.
	But, you know, in Africa, you can't.
	So, I don't know how that's panning out.
	I don't know how that's panning out for you.
	Yeah, I don't really trust politicians to protect us.
	Of course, even people who are well-intentioned and who would risk their life to save other people, you know, they're heroes, but there's not always a hero around, right?
	So, you have to act in self-defense.
	Talk a little bit about the challenges that you had as a Christian and what Larry Pratt was saying in terms of convincing people.
	Because I've had a lot of Christians who have pushed back and said, no, I can't do anything even in self-defense to harm somebody else.
	What was it that Larry Pratt said that convinced you?
	Larry Pratt quoted quite a lot of scripture.
	I'll quote that too.
	Exodus 22 verses 2 to 3.
	If a thief is found breaking in and is struck so that he dies, there shall be no blood guilt for him.
	But if the sun has risen on him, there shall be blood guilt for him.
	In other words, talking about a life-threatening situation, if you take a person's life when they're threatening your life, it's dark, you can't see them, you don't know what they're doing in your house, then there's no blood on your hands for that.
	But if it's broad daylight, you can see somebody's just stealing a loaf of bread, then you don't take their life for that.
	And then he also quoted Jesus Christ in Luke 22, saying, But now let the one who has a money bag take it, and likewise a knapsack, and let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one.
	So Jesus Christ speaking to his disciples, telling them to purchase the greatest military weapon at their time.
	And, you know, some people argue that, you know, the Apostle Peter pulled out his sword and he took off Malchus' ear, one of the soldiers of the high priest, And if we look at that scripture, we see that Jesus actually tells him to put it back in its place.
	He doesn't tell him to get rid of the sword, because he had told him to buy swords.
	So, Larry did a really good job of taking one through these ideas in scripture.
	There are many more, obviously. But, you know, it would just be a very basic one.
	You shall not murder. We're not allowed to take a judicially innocent life.
	But straight after God gave that command, He sent out His people to go wipe out other nations.
	And so the whole idea is that there are times when a Christian might need to kill, but you don't take a judicially innocent life.
	In other words, we don't murder people.
	And so these are ideas that Larry was talking about, which I felt very refreshing, very encouraging, and it really changed my mind on this whole issue.
	I agree, yeah. I've often wondered if Peter had an open or concealed carry permit from the Roman government for his sword.
	What do you think? Yes.
	Well, some theologians that have written about this, you know, saying that the disciples were young people, they were teenagers, carrying the finest weapon of their time.
	And apparently, from what I could gather, it was actually legal for them to be doing it under Roman supervision or Roman control.
	They weren't allowed to just have swords.
	So it seems like Jesus was doing something very disruptive at the time.
	Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the Roman Empire was in many ways a lot freer than the American Empire.
	They certainly didn't have biometric surveillance at the very least.
	It's interesting to see how things have devolved and centralized.
	But yeah, I think that even beyond those, my opinion, even beyond those excellent examples that you gave, I think it runs throughout the Bible, both Old and New Testament, that we are to defend innocent life.
	God is defined as the defender of widows and father to the fatherless and all the rest of the stuff.
	And that doesn't mean just helping them financially.
	That means literally defending people when you need to do that.
	And... No, it speaks out constantly about injustice and, of course, people who are swift to shed blood, but we have a right and a duty, I believe.
	That's the subtitle of your book, Shooting Back, A Right and a Duty of Self-Defense.
	What year did that book come out?
	Oh, that's a difficult question.
	I think it's a good 15 years ago already, so it's quite a while back.
	So it's pretty old already.
	But David, I have to agree with you.
	You know, in 1 Timothy 5 verse 8, we can read, But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith, and he's worse than an unbeliever.
	And provision...
	It's obviously also the security.
	It's not just food. It's not just clothing.
	You also need to provide for the security of your family.
	So, yes, the book's quite old already, and the second book has come out, and Lord willing, I'm hoping to have a third book out for the commemoration, the 30-year commemoration, which is happening on the 25th of July this year.
	So, we'll see how that pans out.
	That's good. Yeah. As we're talking about this, I also think about Jesus.
	He says... Yes.
	Yes. We had not had any shootings, I believe, in the U.S. Maybe there had been one, I don't know, but it wasn't a thing when your book came out.
	You were warning people.
	I remember the first time I saw the book was on WND's website, and you were talking about that this is coming to America, and it now has come to America.
	We've seen, unfortunately, several incidences of this, and we've seen that these incidents only stop I think?
	Sure, David. That was on the 25th of July, 1993, so it's just almost 30 years ago that that happened.
	Do you want me to give some detail about that right now?
	Yes, yes. Let's go into it.
	Tell as much about it as you want, kind of set it up, what was happening and everything.
	Great. So we were sitting in a church service in Cape Town, South Africa, when all of a sudden there was a noise at the front door of the church, and a terrorist stepped into the church.
	And as soon as I saw them come in and I saw their rifles, I thought that a play was taking place in the church.
	I had a young girl that was working for me at the time in the insurance industry, and she was a youth leader at the church, and she told me they were going to do a play for the youth.
	And they were going to have people dressed up as soldiers or as policemen and they would take away the church youth leaders and accuse them of spreading the gospel when they weren't allowed to be doing that.
	So I had that on my mind and these men walked in with their automatic rifles.
	They also had hand grenades with them and they had put nails on the outside of the grenades.
	Wow. And they opened up fire with their automatic rifles, and they lob grenades into the congregation.
	So you can just imagine everybody got down as low as they possibly could onto the floor, trying to hide behind the benches, and they were, strangely enough, very, very quiet.
	And I realized only when the grenades were blowing up and the rounds were hitting the wooden benches and splinters were flying up into the air, I realized this is not a show.
	It's not an act. It's not a play.
	This is the real thing.
	And so I had a 38 special revolver, five shot revolver with me.
	I was sitting fourth row from the back of the church.
	The church is a very large auditorium.
	It could sit about one seat, about one and a half thousand people.
	There weren't that many that night.
	It was a cold winter's night in Cape Town in the middle of July, which is our wintertime in the Southern Hemisphere.
	And I just took my 38th Special, took it out of the holster, which is on my ankle, And I knelt behind the benches.
	It was very much like a cinema, the church.
	It was very high at the back and low to a stage in the front.
	And I could kneel behind the bench and take two shots at the attackers at the front door of the church.
	I then realized that I was far too far away from them.
	Anybody that's listening or watching might know that the 38 Special...
	A snap-nosed revolver is not for shooting across a thousand people when you're in the fourth row from the back of an auditorium.
	So, David, I had to get down on my hands and knees and I leopard-crawled.
	We call it leopard-crawled. I don't know what you call it in America.
	You're on all fours and you get down as low as possible.
	And I leopard-crawled to the side, to the aisle.
	And I ran out the back door of the church and the idea was to come in behind the attackers and shoot them in the back at close range to stop the carnage.
	And as I ran down the back stairs and I was about to round the corner, I realized then that they'd already left the church.
	So what I didn't know then was that one of my rounds had hit one of the attackers inside the church and so they ran back to their getaway car.
	So I came around the corner, I saw them and I jumped back behind the corner because one of them was standing at the back door of the getaway car and he had his rifle on his hip.
	Looking at the door they had come out from.
	So one of them had been hit.
	They ran out.
	They thought that maybe I'd become running after them through that door and he would have lowered his rifle and just blown me away.
	But I was behind him.
	So I took another three shots from stepping out from behind the wall and they jumped in the vehicle and drove off.
	And what came out afterwards at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was a government...
	Thank you.
	This random person threw what we call a petrol bomb at them, which is petrol or gas inside a bottle which you light with a rag in it, and you throw it.
	And this thing exploded, and this car drove off as quick as possible.
	So all these strange stories start coming out later.
	Wow. Somebody's just driving around in their car with what we call a Molotov cocktail.
	They threw that at them?
	Yes, that's right. Yeah, that's it.
	Imagine that. You park outside a church, the next thing somebody starts shooting at you and throws a Molotov cocktail at your car.
	Anyway, so they drove off very quickly.
	Now, let's say that happened in 1993, and then five years later, you know, the communists take over and...
	In order to, because there's a lot of atrocities going back and forth on both sides, and so to try to shut everything down, I guess, or whatever, however you want to interpret these committees, they had these Truth and Reconciliation Commission where they would offer people amnesty for any crimes that they had done if they would talk about it from their perspective.
	And that's when you found out a lot of the stuff that was happening, some of it that you mentioned.
	I mean, what all did they say in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission?
	What was their motive in doing this?
	They had various motives.
	They argued mostly that they were under command and they were just obeying orders.
	But one of the young men argued that the white people that came to Africa stole the land, and so he didn't have a problem with We're good to go.
	A story that's been going around in South Africa and probably other parts of Africa as well.
	So he was justified in his own mind.
	Reparations. What we call here reparations.
	That's why they're trying to build up now with, you know, the 20...
	The 1619 Project and all the rest of the stuff is a sense of entitlement, a sense that you are okay to take vengeance on people because of this injustice that happened centuries ago.
	So now you can take it out on people today.
	That's really what they're trying to build up here.
	So that's another element of this that we really haven't seen that much.
	We've seen a little bit of this.
	We just had a lady...
	Decide that she was going to steal something like $1,000 worth of food.
	And she defiantly said, this is my reparation.
	It didn't go down too well for her.
	But the day is coming when there's going to be violence and they're going to feel completely justified in doing it because the government and the schools have been telling them this line for a very long time.
	And so that's what one of them said.
	What did some of the others say? Well, they were arguing that they didn't even know it was going to be a church, that they were under commanders who commanded them, and they just carried out and did what they were told.
	So some of them argued right up to the point of, until they arrived at the church, they didn't even know it was a church that they were going to attack, never mind the fact that the church was multiracial.
	So there were these sorts of arguments.
	They admitted to the fact that they murdered the people which they did.
	There were 11 murdered and over 50 that were injured.
	And some struggled with it.
	I know the one chap that I actually hit with one of my rounds, he told me that he apologized to some of the survivors afterwards and That took place behind closed doors.
	And as he said to me, he said, this is politics.
	So you play one game in front of people or the cameras and then something else happens behind closed doors.
	So I wasn't involved in that, but that's apparently what happened.
	But a couple of the other interesting things that happened in the church was there was one young man with the name of Gerard Harker.
	He was 21 at the time and he fell on top of a hand grenade and took a full body blow to himself to protect the people around him and unfortunately his younger brother, 13 year old younger brother also died in the attack and Then there was another youngster, 17-year-old boy, Richard O'Keele, who had two young girls, Lisa and Bonnie.
	I'm actually friends with Lisa.
	And they all went down onto the ground.
	And Bonnie, who was so surprised, she sat up or stood up to see what was going on with the whole attack.
	And she didn't She was so shocked she didn't know what to do with herself.
	So Richard went up on his haunches and he pulled her down.
	And as he pulled young Bonnie down onto the ground, a bullet hit him in the back of the head while he was trying to save her life.
	And we also had a ministry to Russian sailors at the time.
	And one of them, with the name of Dimitri Makagon, was 23.
	He was traveling around the Cape on a large ocean liner ship, for want of a better word.
	And the ministry leaders at our church would fetch these Russian soldiers and bring them through to come and hear the gospel being preached.
	And so a bunch of them were in our church that evening.
	And one of them, Dmitry, had a hand grenade land on his lap and it blew off both his legs and one arm.
	But he survived? He survived.
	He survived that and the church brought his fiancée over from Russia and they actually ended with a fairy tale story by getting married in that church later.
	So there's some really interesting things that happened under those circumstances.
	Now, were you a member of that church, or were you just kind of visiting that church?
	Did you know these people, or were you just visiting that church?
	No, I wasn't a member, as in signed up member, but I went to all the Sunday evening services, so I was an attendee, a regular attendee, let's say that.
	I only joined as a member later, the denomination.
	They said at the time, I believe, that they thought there were multiple people shooting at them and didn't they pick that church because they thought that it would be a soft target?
	That's correct. In fact, the leader, the commander of the attackers, said on a television interview with me, or no, sorry, it was a newspaper interview, and he said, this was a terrorist attack in the true sense of what terrorism is about.
	It was to instill fear in the whites in South Africa.
	And so he was very clear about it.
	And then he went further. He introduced me to a friend of his at Parliament, And he said, this is Charles von Beek who defended the people at the St.
	James Church massacre.
	And there we thought the church was a gun-free zone.
	But boy, did he have a surprise for us.
	So, I mean, to say it straight from the horse's mouth, he didn't mince his words.
	He didn't try to pretend it was something that it wasn't.
	He was very open about it.
	Wow. You know, when I look at this, it makes me think of David and Goliath.
	You know, he didn't have a sword.
	He had a slingshot with some stones.
	He had five of them.
	I think it was... Goliath had some brothers there.
	God can do amazing things, and certainly when we look at this and the way that God used you, you can see God's providence and care for a lot of people.
	I know a lot of people died. It was 11 people who were killed, 58 who were wounded, but it could have been many, many more.
	And God used you and confounded them with just the things that you were ordinarily doing.
	You know, well, I can't hit them from here, even though you had.
	And you crawl around the side and take some more shots.
	They think they're under fire from multiple people.
	It truly is amazing to see how God used you to protect those people.
	Yeah, it was actually a real honor because, you know, under the circumstances, you know, I had one interviewer once ask me, were you scared?
	I said, of course I was scared.
	So he said, well, I would have peddled in the pew.
	But, you know, the idea is that...
	When you have these circumstances, I had been trained in the Defence Force for the two years that I spoke about earlier.
	So we've been trained how to deal with chaos around us, grenades going off, lots of gun noise.
	And so I don't want to say, you know, once...
	Trying to keep your cool, to be able to think clearly under those circumstances and to react appropriately.
	So, by God's grace, I'd forced to be trained in that manner.
	And so, you know, you just did what your muscle memory and was trained to do.
	It was John Wayne who said, you know, courage is being scared but saddling up anyway, you know, and that's basically what you did.
	That's right. You know, if you're not scared, you don't really have good situational awareness about what's going on.
	So, scared is one thing, but, you know, having the courage to take it on is another thing instead of just hiding.
	I was just going to say, we've seen that even with some police who have shown up.
	Unfortunately, some of these school shootings like Uvalde, Texas, they showed up, there's a massive number of police, and they all were there with their stuff.
	They refused to go in and do anything about it.
	Finally, Some officers from, I can't remember what it was, is it Border Patrol or something like that?
	SWAT team guys showed up.
	But I mean, they were there for so long doing nothing that you had parents who heard about it who went to the school and went into the school and got their kids out While this shooter hostage situation was still there.
	And so there's plenty of time for them to do something about it, but they didn't do it.
	So it's not just sometimes a response time for people to get there, but it's whether or not they're going to put their life at risk to try to protect other people.
	And that is a courageous thing to do.
	That is something that you did.
	So what was your message in general?
	Tell us a little bit about your first book, and then we'll talk about Reloaded.
	Shooting back, what did you want to get across to people?
	Was it really about the fact they had a right and a duty or, you know, how to do it, the necessity to do it?
	What was your core reason for writing that book?
	The book was written, David, to Christian men.
	So the idea was to give them the biblical theological basis to own a firearm.
	And a firearm is just an instrument.
	So the idea is actually to defend the family.
	Whether you're going to use a baseball bat or a firearm is really irrelevant.
	The issue is, are you going to protect your family or not?
	So I want you to give Christian men a biblical basis to protect their families and to take it further and say to them, this is not just a right, you know, a God-given right.
	But this is something you have to do.
	You have to protect your family.
	You actually don't have a choice as a godly man.
	So it's a right, but you also have a duty, a God-given duty to provide for your family, and that includes the security of your family.
	And we've seen all over Africa, gun-free zones are the most horrendous places.
	We've seen 700,000 people murdered in Rwanda that was a gun-free zone.
	I've done mission work or I do mission work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which wasn't Democratic or Republic, although things are getting much better now.
	But, you know, I've had my colleagues over there, they've had colleagues, pastors that have been buried alive by rebel soldiers.
	And I said to them, Why didn't the deacons pull out their firearms and say to the rebels, go ahead, make our day?
	And he said, well, we were completely disarmed.
	I said, well, who disarmed you?
	Was there a law passed in parliament?
	He said, no, it doesn't work like that in the Congo.
	The president just sends the army in and they just go door to door and they just disarm everybody.
	That's the way it's done. Wow.
	And I said to him, you know, I showed him that if there were godly Christian men around with firearms, they could have stopped the pastor from being buried alive by their soldiers.
	And the accusation against the pastor by the rebel soldiers was that the prayers of the saints, the prayers of the church, were so powerful that it was changing the war in a negative direction against them.
	Now, I don't know about you, but I've never been accused of changing a wall by my prayers.
	But, you know, these guys are really hardcore prayer warriors, and the way the soldiers want to deal with them was to kill them and bury them alive.
	That's a pretty good commendation.
	I've heard some really amazing stories in third-world countries like that of things that have happened when people are praying.
	But that is a pretty good commendation.
	A horrible way to die, certainly.
	And of course, this is in 1993.
	Earlier today, I was talking about Waco, and it was three months after Waco had happened, and everybody was still kicking that stuff around.
	So the St. James Church Massacre really didn't get that much attention here in America at the time, because we were looking at the aftermath of what happened with Waco just a couple months earlier.
	Tell us a little bit, where are you now?
	Are you still in South Africa?
	Are you in the U.S.? Where do you live now?
	Yes, I'm in Cape Town, South Africa, so I still live here.
	My family's been here since the late 1600s, so we're born and bred Africans, and probably going to stay here for a very long time until the Lord takes me home, as they say.
	Yeah. Tell us what it's like now.
	What has it been like?
	Because I know there's a lot of issues with the taking the farmers land, the white farmers, and a lot of concern about that.
	I've talked to some people several times in the past who are living there, an incredible amount of violence being done to white farmers.
	So what is it now that they've had the truth and reconciliation and everything is just all, you know, flowers and roses for everybody, right?
	Or is it? No, well, that is not as it is.
	It's absolutely chaotic here, David.
	There's pandemonium.
	Things are falling to pieces.
	But I just want to add quickly about not being in America, not visiting.
	Unfortunately, your government is protecting you still in America, not allowing us who are unvaccinated to visit yet.
	I know. No international guests are allowed to visit America.
	So you've been very well protected from the rest of us in Africa.
	It's amazing. I talked about this last week when they theoretically took off this emergency order.
	It's like, okay, so then can the people in the UK were saying, so now can we, people, those of us who are unvaccinated, can we now go to America?
	It's like, no. There's no other developed country that is doing this.
	It's a lot of third-world, tin-pot dictators who are doing this.
	But again, many of us who look at Biden see him as fitting into that mold.
	Well, I often say to people in the rest of Africa, you know, we in South Africa are following you.
	We will look like you very soon.
	So maybe in America you're going to be looking like South Africa soon.
	But let me give you just a bit of background to your question.
	We've been plagued with just Loads and loads of crises since Nelson Mandela's communist cadres have taken over the country.
	We have the murder of the pre-born, which Nelson Mandela introduced into South Africa.
	We have massive, massive unemployment, up to 50 and 60 percent in certain age groups.
	The poverty is devastating.
	We have insufficient electricity capacity in our country.
	In fact, in the next 30 minutes, our electricity will be going off in the area we're in at the moment in this church building.
	We have contaminated water supplies.
	Sewer failures are happening.
	Disastrous public hospitals.
	We have rampant crime, as you've just mentioned.
	The society is literally crumbling around us.
	And The Mandela government that took over, they didn't just fail to maintain what they inherited.
	They actually caused major regression.
	And so we're going backwards in South Africa.
	Our real GDP has been shrinking since 2014.
	And we're about 10% poorer than we were in 2014 right now.
	18 million people, one third of our population...
	It's living below the poverty line.
	Malnutrition is common.
	We're plagued with the crime, looting, with vandalism, and it's chaotic out there.
	In fact, two of my children have just flown off to Europe to go work there, and we're ecstatic about it.
	Praise the Lord. They've got jobs and second of all, they're living in a society where they don't have to be concerned about leaving their home.
	And even at our home, my one son went running on a field one day and he was attacked there.
	We've had a grocery store that's been attacked down the road.
	I've had an elderly neighbor who saw burglars in our house and they tried to run over with their getaway car.
	Another neighbor was murdered.
	I can carry on and on.
	Another one The farmers, you know, they have a campaign of terrorism to try to drive them off of the farms and they're even more isolated than you are in the suburbs.
	I've just heard horrific stories about what is happening to the farmers.
	Yeah, you're 100%, Dave.
	Let me tell you a little bit about the farmers.
	The main challenge with the farm murders is the severity of the torture that takes place that accompanies these attacks.
	And it is horrendous.
	I'm talking about burning their victims with blow torches, using clothing irons and putting it on their bodies, and burning women's breasts with clothing irons, pouring boiling kettle water onto people, onto their bodies, slitting their throats, Drilling a hole through their skulls with an electric drill.
	Wow. That most of the people walk free.
	They don't even get caught and no justice is meted out.
	And of course, even though apartheid was covered from front cover to back cover by the press all the time, before Nelson Mandela got in, after this beloved Marxist took over and these things started happening, complete silence here in America about all of this stuff that is happening.
	I'm absolutely amazed and appalled whenever I talk to somebody from South Africa and we talk about how society has been deliberately destroyed there and we see a little bit of you know kind of a leading edge of this and a lot of the big democratically controlled cities with Soros appointed district attorneys where there is no punishment for people they're encouraged in a sense to get violent but that's just the very very beginning of this you
	You are living through, what if we don't stop this and the big cities will become commonplace here in the U.S.? And what I think that they really want to do in terms of reparations, I think that's where they want to take all this stuff.
	You said abortion, as we call it, the murder of children, that was made legal.
	It was illegal before the Marxists took over?
	Well, they had it in the special cases, but it's not just the Marxists.
	It's Nelson Mandela personally forced this through Parliament.
	So we don't have a democratic system in the sense of Western democracy, the way you think about it.
	We elect a party.
	And on the percentage of the vote that they get, that party gets that percentage of seats in parliament.
	And the party leaders appoint people to sit in those seats.
	So if any of the people that they've appointed as members of parliament in their seat...
	Wow.
	Wow. And, you know, try not to do it and we'll see what happens because he controlled the seats.
	And so apparently the Catholics in the party didn't go to Parliament on that day and they were fined for not being there, but they didn't lose their seats.
	And the rest followed, they towed the line.
	They did what they were told.
	They didn't want to lose all the money they were making.
	I mean, the country's poor, everything's going down the drain, and they're getting fat salaries and living it up and driving nice cars and got government housing with electricity that works.
	So, yeah, very difficult circumstances for us with that kind of parliamentary system, but that's the way it stands at the moment.
	You know, to give you an idea of just how ignorant America is about what is happening there, when you had the indictment of Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a big Trump supporter and a Republican, goes to New York, and in an interview she says she compares him to Nelson Mandela.
	I thought, this is a conservative Republican who is absolutely clueless about what she's talking about.
	She might as well compare him to Che Guevara or something, right?
	Perhaps Che Guevara might have been able to do the things that Nelson Mandela did, but he is celebrated as a hero by people outside of South Africa, on both the left and the right, and it is profoundly ignorant for these people to be held up that way.
	You also created a civilian gun rights group as well, didn't you?
	Yes, I was involved with the group that we established called Gun Owners of South Africa, and they are running full steam ahead.
	I've spent much more time in my ministry, traveling to different countries, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Congo, Cameroon, doing mission work.
	So I was part of the instigators to get the organization up and running, and we've got some really, really good people that are running it at the moment, and they're doing an absolutely wonderful job Let's call it to preserve our privilege in South Africa to own a firearm.
	It's not a right according to our constitution.
	Even although it's a God-given right, our constitution creators think they could override God on this matter.
	Well, even though ours is recognized in the Declaration of Independence as a God-given right and also in the Second Amendment, we have politicians who believe that it is a privilege that should be taken away on every occasion, and those are people in both parties who believe that.
	Tell us a little bit about the second book, Reloaded, and didn't that just come out recently?
	Yes, it's actually a few years old already, but I'll give you a bit of a background to that.
	I was at a course that we were running, a Christian mission course, and I had to go into town, away from the place we were staying at, to go and prepare a radio show.
	And I had a former terrorist.
	In fact, he was a former unit commander of the group that attacked our church in 1993 at the St.
	James Massacre. And he had come to faith in Christ.
	And he said to me, please, could you drop me off in Kaya Lucha, which is a very large, we call it a black township at the time, and A very large area of grouping of people.
	There's probably one and a half million to two million people staying in the area.
	And he asked me if I could drop him off there.
	And I said, sure, jump in the car.
	I'll go drop you off, no problem.
	And as I dropped him off in Kailitsha, And I got out of the vehicle as a pickup and we have like a canopy, a fiberglass canopy that you build over the back of your pickup.
	And so he was sitting in the flat bed of that with a canopy over and he was shouting to me as I did a U-turn telling me where I need to park.
	So I parked the car to drop him off, and I got out of the car to open up the canopy so that he could get out and grab his bags.
	And the next thing, there were two people standing behind me.
	I could sense them. And as I turned around, I saw these two characters.
	They both had guns. The one wasn't...
	I couldn't see his firearm at the time, and the other one had his gun in his hand, and he wasn't pointing it directly at me.
	It was just off slightly to the side of me, and he said, I want your gun, I want your cell phone, and I want your wallet.
	Very specific about what he wanted.
	Could he see your gun?
	No, no. He just assumed that you had it, right?
	He assumed. So it looked like I'd been taken into a difficult situation there by the person in the back of the vehicle.
	And these people seemed to have been waiting there for me.
	So it appeared to be an ambush.
	So I lied to him.
	I said I had no gun. And I handed over my wallet to my cell phone.
	And they body searched me.
	I kid you not, David, they body searched me and they didn't go down low enough to see my firearm in my ankle holster.
	Wow. And so they were convinced that either I or my passenger was armed.
	And so after body searching me multiple times, they left me and they went to harass my elderly person that was with me in the car.
	He was sitting alone in the car at the time while I was out in the front of the single cab, Bucky, we call it a pickup truck.
	And they started bothering him and they were body searching him and they asked for his phone.
	He said, I don't have one. They asked for cash.
	He said, I don't have any. I'm going to do a radio show now.
	I'm not carrying cash and money and things with me.
	They said, give us your gun.
	He said, I don't have a gun.
	And so these two attackers, both with their guns in their hands now, were looking in the car, opening up the cabinets in the car, searching everywhere, body searching him.
	And this gave me time to then pull out my gun.
	And I went below the car window so that he couldn't see me and I went to the front of the car and I shouted at them to distract them from bothering my elderly passenger and I opened up fire at them.
	And they were really good.
	They were running in a zigzag fashion to get away from me.
	So they were well trained.
	They knew exactly what they were doing.
	But to my surprise, this is a shanty town where I dropped them off.
	And the next thing, they had had a sentry standing around amongst the metal housing there, and he opened up fire at me.
	So they had a sentry protecting them.
	So this was a fully organized...
	A crime that was taking place right over there.
	So I had to duck and avoid bullets that were coming straight from me from a distance between the housing, the little metal housing there.
	And I jumped in the vehicle and we drove off and went to a police station to report the incident.
	So that's why the second book is called Reloaded.
	And then shooting back again.
	It's not the first time it happened again.
	So that's the background to the writing of the second book.
	Wow. And you said you thought that maybe it was an ambush.
	The elderly passenger you had there, who is now a Christian, he wasn't a part of that, was he?
	Or do you think, perhaps?
	No, not at all. Not the old passenger that was with me that they were body searching, not him.
	Only the person in the flatbed at the back.
	So the person who asked me to please drop him off in the area, he's the one that did that.
	Oh, I got you. There were two passengers.
	I didn't catch that. Yeah, sorry.
	One in the back.
	The guy in the back was the one that was...
	That's right. He's the one shouting, telling me where to park and that sort of thing.
	So that's what happened there.
	But one of the interesting stories, if you don't mind, I'd just like to tell you one of the quick stories about a farm attack that I mention in my book.
	It's actually a lady in South Africa called Silke Kaiser.
	She mentions this in her book about farm murder.
	She's a polygraphist.
	And so she goes to the farms and interviews the farm laborers and that after a farm murder or a farm attack has taken place, But she tells the story of a man with the name of John, a farmer, him and his wife living on a farm alone.
	He gets up 3 o'clock in the morning to attend his chickens every morning, and he takes two staff members with him in to go deal with chickens in the morning.
	He doesn't carry his gun in the morning.
	He thought if anybody wants to steal chickens or eggs, they can take it.
	He's not going to kill somebody over a chicken or an egg.
	Mm-hmm. So, off they go into the chicken coops, and the next thing, him and his two staff members are accosted by four gunmen.
	They take the two farm workers and they tie them up, and two of the attackers remain there with the two victims, and the other two take John into the farmhouse, into the kitchen, and they tell John to call his wife Elise.
	So he shouts her name.
	She's still busy sleeping in bed.
	And he wakes her up.
	And they're an Afrikaans-speaking farming couple.
	But he used an English word.
	He called her Lavi.
	And what everybody didn't know was that Lavi was a pre-agreed password for alerting their spouse to there being trouble on the farm.
	So here the two bad guys are with a farmer in the middle, they're both on his side, they're both standing with guns, and they step into the passage and stand by what we call in South Africa the rape gate.
	So many of us have security gates inside our homes.
	outside inside our homes that closes off our bedrooms from the rest of the house in other words if people break into our lounge and they steal our tv they can take it at night but we don't want them to come into our bedrooms and accost our family so he he and these these criminals were standing by the rape gate and lovey elise comes out of the bedroom
	she's armed and they were expecting her to give in straight away when they saw when she would see the guns being pointed at her husband.
	But what they didn't know that Elise was an expert shot She had grown up with guns.
	She had grown up with guns. And not just that, she'd worked for a shooting range for 15 years.
	She trained other people how to shoot.
	So she emerges from the bedroom carrying a loaded firearm.
	She takes a shot at the first perpetrator and hits him twice in the chest.
	Both bullets just narrowly miss his heart.
	Then she moved the gun slightly to the right and she shot the second thug in the head and killed him instantly.
	Wow. So the first thug tried to run out, trying to breathe.
	His lungs were damaged by the bullets.
	He got out of the door and they found his corpse later under a bush outside.
	So the one attacker had already committed two other farm attacks.
	He hadn't murdered anybody yet, but his specialty was torturing his victims.
	And so they obviously cleaned up that evening, and the other two accomplices that had held the farm workers down, they fled the scene very cleverly.
	So this is one of the attacks that didn't work out for the bad guys.
	And praise God, That these were not pacifist Christian farmers who believed that they would make the environment safer for the bad guys to operate.
	And praise God that Elise was ready and armed and that she could shoot straight.
	Yes. Well, that is an amazing story.
	What is the...
	You're there in South Africa.
	You said you're going to be there the rest of your life.
	What is... I understand because I've talked to other people who've said, nope, we're staying.
	We're not leaving. But what is the hope that you have?
	How do you see this happening?
	I mean, are you in a mutual community of self-defense and you know that you're under siege by this large majority?
	Is there a hope or a plan that you're somehow going to restore some kind of an ordered republic there and a rational government that's going to keep peace and order?
	What is it that you see in the future there?
	Yes, I believe strongly in that the gospel of the kingdom of God is what changes hearts and minds of people.
	And if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be a Christian missionary.
	So I've seen that happen in nations.
	I've seen people that have come to faith in Christ.
	They've submitted not just their personal lives, it's affected their family lives, it's affected their churches, it's affected their businesses, and it's affected their countries.
	And we've seen nations changing because of people turning to God and obeying His word and His law.
	And I believe that that will happen in the future.
	Maybe in the next generation.
	Maybe I won't see it.
	But there's a scripture in the Bible that says that the earth will be filled With a knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
	So I think we're fighting a winning battle.
	We're not going to give up.
	We're going to carry on. And if the only thing I do is be a splinter in the fingers of the bad guys, then I'm happy to carry on doing that as we preach the gospel and disciple the nations.
	That's a great witness.
	And you know, it's great to hear that.
	You have such confidence, and it is well-placed confidence in the power of the gospel to not just change individual lives, but to completely reorder society.
	And we have seen that throughout history.
	And so it is so good to hear somebody who is living their faith and knows that they have the only power that is going to be there to transform society.
	That's great to hear. I interviewed someone who was now doing the work here in America, and it was in Zimbabwe where there was a farmer who...
	He said there were three different ways that people would do it.
	They could run away, they could fight, and he said the people who fought died for the most part, trying to resist the takeover of the Marxists in Zimbabwe.
	He said though he lost his farm, he taught them how to farm.
	And as part of that, he used that as an opportunity to give them the gospel and to change lives in the community.
	And what you're doing is exactly the same thing.
	We're busy building a mission base in Zimbabwe right now in an area called Gwai River.
	It is very difficult. The people are really poor.
	They're struggling for their lives.
	And Zimbabwe is moving towards an election this year.
	And so things get really dangerous now.
	So if American listeners can please pray for Zimbabwe, we'd really appreciate that.
	Sure. Absolutely. Do you have a missionary site that you'd like to tell people about?
	Yes, my website, or shall I say my blog you can get to is shootingbackbook.com.
	Shootingbackbook.com. You'll get to my blog there and you can purchase the books from there and that sort of thing.
	And then as you spelled out my name earlier, it's a bit complicated, but you're able to find your way around if you get my name at the blog.
	Okay, good. So it is shootingbackbook.com.
	Is that correct? That's correct.
	That's correct, David. Thank you.
	All right. And I'll put that in the interview there.
	I'll have a link to that. That's a lot easier than your name is for people.
	I was somehow able to find you on that website.
	It had been years since we had talked.
	And, of course, I guess people can find your book on Amazon, but it would be better to go directly to you because Amazon takes a big kick, and we don't like the things that Amazon does with all the money that they do is the key thing about that.
	I think... I think they're going to be taken to Amazon anyway through my site.
	Okay. All right.
	So shootingbackbook.com will take you there.
	And again, the missionary group, is there a website that you want to tell people about with that?
	Yeah, they'll get to my mission work also from the same site.
	So it's charlvanwick.info, not pronounced that way, but the way it's spelled, charlvanwick.info, and then shootingback.com, and they'll be able to find my ministry and about my books on those sites.
	Well, it is always a pleasure to talk to you.
	It truly is amazing where God has put you and the way that he is using you.
	And you are an example to so many people.
	And also, a warning, a harbinger to what may be coming to this country if we're going to allow the radical Marxists to use race as a weapon.
	We know that in America, this has been the tactic that they have found more effective.
	It was Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground who said at the very beginning, when they were trying to create a Marxist-Communist revolution here in America, and they were bombing buildings and doing other things like that, they realized that it wasn't going to happen by dividing people economically into different economic classes in America, but they could do it by dividing people racially.
	And so they stopped bombing buildings and they went into education and now...
	The white-skinned privilege that they were setting there has now become one of the fundamental things.
	But it is also, everything that we see happening throughout the educational system, it is a plan to take everything down.
	It is great, always again, to talk to you, Charles, and thank you so much for coming on and telling us about that.
	Again, the book is, you'll find the website with the book, links to the book, as well as to the missions there if you want to help them in Zimbabwe, shootingbackbook.com.
	And I know that you're going to have a big, you've already had a big impact on a lot of people's lives.
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	You're listening to The David Knight Show.
	APSRadio.com Welcome back, and joining us now is Stephen Friend.
	I have talked about Mr.
	Friend and what he did in terms of standing up to the weaponized, politicized FBI, coming after people after January the 6th.
	And of course, what began with January the 6th?
	It's now metastasized to the Department of Justice and the FBI being concerned about parents who show up at a PTA meeting or at a school board meeting or things like that.
	This is the danger of this, and I'm always interested in talking to whistleblowers.
	I've talked to John Kiriakou many times about blowing the whistle on CIA torture program, which ultimately bore the fruit of lying us into the war in Iraq.
	I've talked to Joe Bannister, who was an IRS agent who was an investigator, part of the Criminal Investigation Unit, carried a gun.
	And he did that for a number of years.
	And then he came across some things that people were saying.
	He said, well, how do I answer this?
	How do I answer this concern that they've got about the income tax code?
	The supervisor said, don't talk about that.
	What? When you look at people who are honestly concerned about the law and about justice, this creates a real conflict of conscience for them.
	And of course, many had that same kind of situation presented to them throughout 2020 and 2021.
	With the mandates and the lockdowns and do I give up my job?
	What do I do? I'm violating my religious principles if I take this type of thing.
	These types of tests are always coming to us.
	He's now written a book. It came out yesterday.
	True Blue, My Journey from Beat Cop to Suspended FBI Whistleblower.
	And it dropped yesterday. You can find it on Amazon.com, Barnes& Noble, all the regular places that you buy books.
	Again, it is True Blue.
	The author is Stephen Friend, who joins us right now.
	Thank you for joining us, sir. Thank you very much for having me today.
	And thank you for being a whistleblower.
	I really do appreciate it. I know that's a difficult thing.
	I know that it had tremendous consequences for you and for your family, and I want to talk about those.
	But first, tell us, what was the tipping point?
	You had worked as an FBI agent for, what was it, 12 years, I think?
	No, actually, today would have been my nine-year anniversary date of my hiring.
	I'd worked in law enforcement before that, so I've got about 14 years of law enforcement experience at a state, local, and federal level.
	So what was it that you saw in this that, I can't go along with that, is what you had to say.
	Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, I didn't really have a moment where I sat down and said, I'm going to become a whistleblower.
	I just had a concern about the cases that were in my office that were January 6 related.
	And to take a brief step back on my background, I joined the FBI in 2014.
	I spent my first seven years on Indian reservations.
	And the nature of those cases are quickly evolving.
	You have a huge, tremendous volume of cases.
	And as a result of that, I became very familiar with the FBI's rulebook for how to work cases and brought that with me when I eventually transferred to Daytona Beach, Florida, where I am currently.
	And once I was reassigned to work domestic terrorism cases in my office, I was reassigned from child pornography cases and told that those were no longer going to be resourced.
	Those were a local matter.
	Really? Correct.
	Well, what kind of cases were you seeing at the Indian reservations?
	I mean, it was a lot of drug trafficking and stuff like that and, you know, violent crime, things like that.
	Yes, it's violent crime, major offenses.
	You know, I've worked a lot of aggravated assaults and homicides, sexual assaults, child molestation.
	You really do the work of, like, a city violent crime detective on the reservations.
	And that that it's an interesting jurisdiction that the FBI has to take on due to some some weird federal laws that we currently have on the books.
	And it basically precludes the tribal police officers from investigating some some defendants who aren't Native American and then even from bringing heavy charges against others.
	So they could only really charge misdemeanors for some fairly significant crimes.
	And the FBI has to come in and fill that gap.
	Well, that's interesting.
	So you were a police officer.
	And then when you started working for the FBI on these Indian reservations, you're still kind of doing police officer type of work that you're doing that.
	But when you became an FBI agent, they'd first put you on child pornography and things like that?
	Yes, I accepted a transfer in the summer of 2021, and my understanding was it was going to be a position in the office to work on pornography cases and human trafficking cases, which are sort of a weird kissing cousin to the Indian reservations within the FBI because they're very hard to staff.
	People don't want to work it.
	It's sort of a violation that you can actually beg out of because it's so mentally taxing for a lot of folks.
	Oh, I imagine I imagine it.
	I imagine it.
	And I became concerned about, not because I had any sort of political ideology attached to it.
	I'm not a simp to one side or another, but I'm a law enforcement professional.
	And when I go to trial, I want to make sure that my case is buttoned up as properly.
	And the fact that these cases have been just rubber stamped as they've gone through the District of Columbia doesn't mean anything to me.
	If my name's at the top, I want to make sure my case is buttoned up.
	And I knew for a fact that That these cases were not in, they were departing from the FBI's rules for how they managed the cases, which was interfering with how we were able to actually do our investigations.
	We were waiting for directives from Washington, D.C. when we were on paper supposed to be in charge of our own cases.
	Wow. So it's coming straight from D.C. Your concern is, like a prosecutor, I don't want to take this case to court because I could lose, right?
	And you don't want to have a long streak of losses there.
	But you're concerned about that.
	And this is coming straight out of the District of Columbia.
	They're identifying people and telling you to do what to them.
	Well, the January 6th case should be one case with however many subjects that are being investigated.
	But very early on in the process, a decision was made that they were going to open up a separate case for every single person.
	And then instead of running those from Washington, D.C., where the incident happened, they were going to assign those cases to the field, to all the various 56 field offices around the country, where the subject lived.
	So if you lived in Florida and you went to the Capitol that day, the office in Florida would be handling your case.
	And you could make the case that it is in compliance with the FBI rules.
	It's a little atypical, but it certainly...
	Yeah.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	which could be attributed to a black swan incident.
	And I compared it to the September 11th World Trade Center.
	So if you look at police officers in the line of duty deaths, there's a spike in 2001.
	And that's because there were a significant number of officers in the towers who died.
	That doesn't mean that nationwide there was a spike in violence against police officers.
	It's a statistical anomaly.
	And the FBI has now perpetuated that and has brought it the last three fiscal years and argued in front of Congress the need to enhance funding.
	And then on top of that, the bosses in each one of the field offices get bonuses for hitting the quotas because there's a demand for domestic terrorism cases.
	It is the charge du jour that we are seeing now from the political leadership in Washington.
	So the FBI, if you ask for it, you shall receive.
	And because of the quota system, the FBI that's been around for the last 10 years, it's not really a mystery why the number of domestic terrorism cases has quadrupled in the last 10 years.
	Yeah, yeah.
	They're trying to make a case to grow.
	They succeed by growing their little fiefdom.
	That means a bigger head count.
	That means more responsibility and a higher salary for everybody at the top if they do that.
	And the big game that they always play is statistics.
	And we've seen these types of games played by a lot of different agencies.
	The FBI has played these kind of statistical games to show that you've got to increase...
	But again, they're like every other bureaucracy, and it is a federal bureaucracy of investigation, if you look at it that way.
	You know, we have seen this, Stephen, we've seen in the past.
	The FBI has, in my opinion, been weaponized against people on the left, and conservatives said, that's right, you know, we don't like those people, let's go after this, and they kind of bent some of the rules with that stuff in the past.
	But now the politics has, the pendulum has swung in the other direction.
	And now they're starting to come after people who are conservative.
	And it really does seem like a politicized issue here.
	But before we get into that, I'm jumping ahead a little bit here.
	Tell us a little bit about some of the incidents that you had that really bothered you.
	Because you mentioned one of them, in particular, that you went to interview somebody.
	Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, the cases that were in my office were basically investigated, and there wasn't much to do on them, which is, again, they were sitting in Washington, D.C., our own cases.
	We weren't really in charge of them.
	So I didn't have a whole lot of investigative work to do.
	I really had only a couple things.
	One was I was tasked to go and interview a gentleman who was said to have been at the Capitol that day and had been Inflicting violence against police officers.
	The folks in Washington, D.C. had done a workup on his phone GPS, and that was negative.
	The facial recognition that they had was negative, and it was an anonymous tip.
	So there was really no way we could actually bring a successful prosecution forward, even if the man were to confess, because he could just be a crazy person.
	But nevertheless, I was told that I didn't have the option to just say it shouldn't be resourced.
	And I went and contacted that gentleman at his house and wasn't going to waste his time, but it was very direct and said, we're at the Capitol on January 6th.
	And he responded that he was not because that was the day of his son's funeral.
	And that is just one case of the collateral damage of this giant dragnet that the FBI has now inflicted on the population.
	And we see that even with righteous subjects who may have committed crimes on January 6th.
	And in the case with my office, where I eventually came forward and said I didn't want to participate, was an individual who's going to be charged with a felony, but had pledged to be cooperative with the FBI.
	And when he'd spoken to the FBI, a year and a half had transpired between him being recontacted.
	And they were going to send SWAT to his house to arrest him.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	And I'm a SWAT guy.
	I mean, I was on SWAT for five years.
	But I know that that is not in keeping with the tradition of law enforcement.
	You should be using the least amount of force necessary.
	That's an unnecessary risk to the public, to our personnel.
	And I voiced my concern because I felt like the person in the room the day before Waco or the day before Ruby Ridge.
	And we can Monday morning quarterback those incidents into perpetuity.
	And say, well, if I had been there, I would have voiced a concern.
	Well, I was there for that incident that I foresaw the potential to have another incident like Ruby Ridge or Waco, and I wanted to voice my concern.
	And unfortunately for me, for my professional future with the FBI, at every level, I went to three different levels of management.
	I was rebuffed, and I was told that I had a really great reputation and that I was risking my career by...
	Expressing my concerns.
	And, you know, I've always said I had an oath of office to upkeep.
	I had specific training where at the FBI Academy they send you to the Holocaust Memorial Museum and they send you to the MLK Memorial.
	And the purpose of that is to really hammer home that unless someone throws the flag in law enforcement and law enforcement just puts their head down and follows orders, that can only lead to civil rights atrocities and genocide.
	Yes. And it was my sincere belief that that is what the FBI is on course to do at this point.
	But again, management didn't share my sentiment and actually pushed back when I said that I had an oath to upkeep.
	They told me I had a duty to the FBI and had to follow orders and was being insubordinate.
	Wow. And we've seen this even with military who were told that they had to take the vaccine.
	And they said, well, you know, we've got a lot of problems with that.
	Religious liberty, for example, is one of those that I have.
	And people say, well, you have an obligation to obey orders.
	I said, no, I have an obligation to defend the Constitution, and that's what I'm doing by defending my rights.
	You're very right to point out How Ruby Ridge and Waco blew up because of the excessive use of force and so many people died.
	I wanted to get back, though, to this person that they reported to you that was an anonymous tip or something that somebody had accused them.
	There were so many people who were flagged Because of geofence information, because I had the phone companies and Google and all the rest of them turning over people's records if they were anywhere in that area.
	We had Bank of America go even further, and they gave a list to the FBI, presumably, of anybody who had any financial transactions around the Capitol, but not necessarily buying anything there at the Capitol, but anywhere In Washington, D.C. or in the suburbs of Virginia or Maryland.
	I mean, they had a very big net.
	Anybody that bought anything went to the FBI. And presumably the FBI then looked at their political background and looked at whether they owned guns or anything like that.
	And it was that type of circumstantial stuff.
	That got people caught up.
	Did you have any situations like that?
	That kind of wild, circumstantial geofencing or transactions?
	And then, oh, by the way, this person's also a conservative, maybe owns a gun, so let's go visit them.
	Was that what you were saying too?
	I know that the individuals in my office saw that, but when it came to my involvement, I was moved over in October of 2021, and all of that background work had already been done.
	But that is very consistent with everything I've talked about with the other agents who investigated those cases, and not in my office, but in a multitude of other offices.
	And I think it's sort of in line with, you know, Thank you.
	Thank you.
	And it is circumventing the constitutional protections, and they sort of think they've found a hack.
	But, you know, nobody's in the room saying, well, if you're doing the bidding of the government, regardless of whether or not they've asked you to with the proper service, proper subpoena or a search warrant, you are in fact an agent of the government.
	That's right. And that needs to be challenged in court.
	It needs to be upheld, and it needs to be confronted at a legislative level by our elect officials.
	I'm glad to hear you say that.
	I've talked for the longest time about, you know, everybody likes to talk about the deep state, the dark state, all the rest of the stuff.
	It's the deputized state.
	And we've seen it, as you talk about information, we've seen it with censorship.
	They deputize the social media companies, but they also deputize Bank of America to do the search warrants for them.
	And the pretense that they've got, of course, with it, Stephen, is that they always go back to the rulings where AT&T was spying on people.
	And they said, well, you know, you want to get this information from them.
	You got the pin number stuff.
	And it's data that belongs to you.
	So would you like to turn it over to us since, you know, we give you a nice monopoly of all the phone lines and all the rest of this?
	Sure, yeah, we'll turn this over to you.
	Well, happy to be of help to you.
	And so that's really kind of, you know, part of there's a lot of different things that are going on.
	To violate the Constitution, due process, search warrants, and all the rest of this stuff to say that, well, this data belongs to the corporation.
	The corporation is voluntarily complying with us, and we're not actually doing it.
	Now we see that there's all these back channels where they're actually telling them who they wanted to come after and all the rest of this stuff.
	This is very concerning, and I'm glad that you're talking about this because I think as a whistleblower who has seen this kind of stuff happening, you've got a lot of weight and a lot of integrity for standing up to this.
	Tell us a little bit about How, again, you raised your concern and they said, well, gee, you know, we really would like, you got a great job here and a great work history, would really hate for you to ruin it.
	I mean, how did they really respond to this?
	Was that kind of it?
	And then what happened? Yeah, so the real seminal moment for me was the day before the arrest operations were going to be happening.
	I was summoned to my headquarters in Jacksonville, so I drove up there and had a long conversation with two assistant special agents in charge of my office.
	I expressed all the concerns here that I've spoken about and said I believe that we could be putting people's Did we lose?
	Okay, we're going to try to reestablish contact there.
	Has it dropped or still connected?
	Okay, drop it and then try to reconnect with him.
	And we just lost our line there.
	But I do want to ask him about that, and I want to ask him, Is he back?
	Okay. Oh, good. Okay, great.
	We lost. Yeah, I never lost you there.
	Sorry. Oh, you didn't? Okay. All right.
	Good. Well, it froze up on our end for some reason.
	I'm sorry. You were in the middle of talking about how they responded when you told them that you weren't good with this.
	If you can back up a little bit.
	Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I expressed that to them.
	We had a long conversation about it.
	During that meeting, several remarks were made to me that were incredibly concerning, especially when I said, I have an oath of office, and they said I had a duty to the FBI. One of the bosses in the room said that police officers were killed on January 6th by the protesters.
	And when I said that that was not actually factually accurate, he told me I needed to go and reexamine the facts.
	I proposed alternatives that we could use to bring folks into custody.
	I mean, it could just be a phone call to an attorney, surrender.
	We could send local law enforcement.
	We could use surveillance to interdict somebody.
	I didn't feel that SWAT was necessary, but all those were turned down.
	And at the end of the meeting, I'm a pretty straight shooter, so I said, you know, fellows, Where were we left with this?
	And I was given the assurance that this was going to be a long process.
	This is the federal government and things take a really long time.
	And I went on my merry way and three hours later got an email that told me that I was insubordinate and I was ordered to stay home the following day and report myself as AWOL. Wow.
	So I never actually had the opportunity to be insubordinate and not show or something like that.
	I was ordered to be AWOL, which I did and was Dr.
	Day's Bay before returning to work.
	And then subsequently had a meeting with the next level of the chain of command with the special agent in charge, in which she told me that I was a conspiracy theorist and that I represented a fringe belief and that I needed to do soul searching to determine if I wanted to have a future with the agency.
	And then after that, she told me she had already referred me for investigation to the FBI's inspection division and to the security division.
	Wow. And at that point, I kind of knew that the writing was on the wall because the FBI has retaliated against whistleblowers using a very nefarious process, and that is the security clearance.
	Because in order to work at the FBI, you need to have a security clearance.
	Mm-hmm. So my security clearance was suspended 30 days after my initial disclosures that I made to my bosses.
	And the reason that it was suspended was not because I blew the whistle or raised concerns.
	It was because they determined I accessed the employee handbook improperly.
	And therefore, they had to do a full investigation of that and walk me out the building.
	I was placed in an unpaid yet still employed status.
	Which is a strategy that they use to essentially wait people out and hopefully, I hope that due to financial stress that they will resign and then they can attribute any sort of accusations that you make as being the concerns of an angry ex-employee and not taken seriously.
	But unfortunately for them, I'm pretty stubborn and I'm also pretty financially savvy.
	I had done a fair amount of saving in preparation to be fired during the COVID vaccines.
	I knew that they were developing a registry and I told my wife, look, we're going to have to prepare for a time that I'm going to be looking for a new job.
	So we had sort of a war chest built up.
	Didn't anticipate having her lose her job, which did happen a few weeks after my suspension under some suspicious circumstances.
	Her Facebook account was also shut down immediately, and I was denied my training records, which I would need for outside employment.
	I put in two requests for outside employment, which you're entitled to do when you're unpaid, and they denied both requests.
	My medical information was leaked to the New York Times.
	And they also told the Times that I was accused of shooting a firearm in my backyard.
	And finally, I received communication from the FBI Inspection Division that attempted to put a gag order on me, and I was told that I was not allowed to speak about anything that was happening as far as the investigation of the allegations against me with anyone, to include my family, friends, attorneys.
	Which is an illegal gag order.
	So this is just a long, long train of humiliations and abuses that came from the FBI and ultimately culminated where I had an opportunity.
	I had a job offer from the Center for Renewing America.
	They had a fellowship come available that I applied for, submitted samples of my writing and interviewed for and was actually offered a position for.
	And ultimately accepted the day that I testified in a closed deposition for the Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
	And I want to talk to you about that.
	I want to talk to you about the organization that you're working for now.
	But that is absolutely amazing.
	The fact is that they were the ones who were insubordinate.
	They were insubordinate to the Constitution.
	They told you you had a duty to the FBI. You got a duty to the Constitution.
	You are supposed to be subordinate to that.
	And yet, you know, it doesn't surprise me that they would call you a conspiracy theorist, because, of course, that's what the FBI coined, that phrase, you know, in terms of JFK assassination.
	But it is truly amazing.
	To see the links that they will go to in order to set up dirty tricks and to, again, leak what they think is derogatory information about you, make accusations about you that aren't true, shut down your wife's social media account to try to gag you with all this stuff.
	That truly is amazing.
	But I've seen this before, Steve.
	I talked about how I've interviewed...
	You know, whistleblower for the CIA, John Kiriakou, and Joe Bannister from the IRS, but of course also talked to some NSA whistleblowers, Thomas Drake, William Benny.
	Thomas Drake, when you mentioned the fact that they, you know, accused you of something about the employee manual, they tried to get Thomas Drake sent to prison because they said that he had taken home documents with him.
	He denied that he had them, but, you know, the documents that they had were things like, security is my friend.
	It was an opening employee trainer manual.
	And, you know, it was ludicrous what they even considered to be documents that were of concern, and then the fact that they tried to set him up with those and tried to put him in jail.
	Did they ever come after you with any kind of criminal charges?
	I mean, you're mentioning things about, you know, well, he had accusation of shooting a firearm in his backyard and other things like that.
	Was it even a setup to try to say, we're going to take your security clearance and And then wait and see if you latched a hold of something that had security classification on it?
	Was that part of it? They tried to set me up to be charged with a process crime for lying to an investigator.
	So I had to submit to a compelled interview with the FBI Security Division.
	And one thing that you have to know is in the meeting that I had with my two assistant special agents in charge, I wanted to memorialize, and I was law enforcement.
	I live in the state of Florida.
	It's a two-party consent state.
	There's a law enforcement exemption to recording conversations.
	I consulted with state-certified law enforcement beforehand to confirm that I was in the good to do that.
	I might be outside of the FBI's policy, but policy isn't the law.
	And I recorded the conversation that I had with them.
	And when I submitted to this compelled interview with the security division, they asked me, point blank, did you record the interview?
	And I answered, honestly, yes, I had.
	And it was very apparent to me, and it's sort of like one magician trying to impress another magician with a trick.
	When you're a trained investigator or a trained interviewer, I kind of knew what they were doing.
	And the natural follow-up to that question, where I had made some...
	I'd given them some information that there had been some pretty damning statements made during this interview, this meeting that I had with these executives that were trying to compel me to violate my oath of office.
	You would think the natural follow-up would be, Steve, can we get a copy of that interview?
	And they never did that.
	They were hoping that I was going to say no, and then they could cut the search warrant for my house and charge me with lying to a federal investigator.
	Because in going back and having listened to that meeting that I had, which I actually have transcribed and it is in my book.
	So anybody who gets a copy will have access to.
	And then the FBI tried to get me to redact during the publication process, but I'm not going to do that.
	It was very clear to me that they were recording the interview as well.
	They were trying to divorce my ability to come forward as a whistleblower from my orders to submit to participating in those operations.
	And they repeatedly kept saying, so what you're telling me, Steve, is you're refusing to do your job.
	And I kept saying, no, I'm doing my job.
	So I think that they have a recording of it.
	They know what was said, and they weren't concerned about what was said.
	They were just worried about the exposure that the FBI has because the FBI, their prime directive is protect the image, protect the shield.
	That is the reputation.
	That is all that matters to the FBI. Well, I'll tell you what, their reputation is in the toilet now.
	It's the things that have happened in the last few years, especially.
	That must be a very interesting transcript because I can imagine, and that is what I've always said about all this Trump stuff.
	I said his real jeopardy is going to be a perjury trap, you know, blathering about something and carelessly talking about things.
	And so you know that.
	You know things like how they come after celebrities like Martha Stewart.
	They got her for lying to the FBI, not for insider trading.
	So this must have been a real mental battle to try to carefully phrase these terms in ways that they could not get you with a perjury trap.
	It must be a fascinating read. Of course, that transcript is in your book, True Blue, Stephen Friend.
	I imagine that would be worth the price of the book right there to see that back and forth With you and these interrogators trying to entrap you, you know, any kind of an error that you would make, you know, any kind of factual error.
	They would come after you as a crime to lock you up.
	It's truly amazing. And it is frightening for the rest of us.
	Because you know how those rules are and you know how they're operating, but the rest of us don't.
	We're babes in the woods, right?
	Somebody is accused of something and our first instinct, if we're innocent, is to say, yeah, I don't mind talking about this.
	I've got nothing to hide. I'm innocent.
	And it's that kind of an entrapment that is really a danger for the average citizen, isn't it?
	Exactly right. And we've gotten to a point now where the FBI is no longer an objective force for good.
	They have weaponized the process crimes to go after people.
	We saw that happen with somebody like Mike Flynn, where James Comey sent agents over to specifically get him to answer a question that lacked candor or could be contrived to have lacked candor in a way, and they can bring charges to force his either criminal charge or at least his firing from the National Security Advisor to And that is why we'll see these ongoing investigations of somebody like former President Trump, where they could just say, you wore an illegal necktie.
	And he could say, that's ridiculous.
	That's not illegal. I'm not going to participate in your witch hunt.
	And they could say, oh, well, now you've obstructed our investigation, and we'll charge you with a process crime.
	Wow. Yeah, it truly is amazing what has happened.
	Now, you are working, since you testified, before we get into what you're doing right now with the Center for Renewing America, let's talk a little bit about the response from Washington, congressional hearings, all the rest of the stuff.
	I mean, what has been the response, since this is a politicized investigation, what has been the response from Republicans, for example, to any of this?
	Or even from Democrats? You know, do Democrats care?
	Are they full on with this?
	What have the Republicans said, if anything?
	There was definitely some appetite from some of the Republicans on the select committee on the weaponization of the federal government.
	Matt Gaetz and Dan Bishop both participated in my deposition.
	They both brought questions forward and seemed genuinely interested in not only the information I had as a whistleblower, but also other information and concerns that I have, which I feel is vitally important to bring to not just Congress's attention, but to the American population's Unfortunately, the FBI and the Democrat Party and mainstream media have all colluded and attacked the messenger.
	And here's the thing about being a quote-unquote whistleblower.
	I've been a self-styled whistleblower, as I believe what CNN says I am.
	It's 5 U.S.C. 2303.
	I followed it with the letter of the law.
	I made a protected disclosure to numerous members of my chain of command, the Inspector General, the Office of Special Counsel, and to Congress, both Democrat and Republican.
	So I've gone through a list of those.
	Each one of those was a protected activity on my part.
	I don't have to be right about my concerns.
	I just have to be reasonable.
	And it is incumbent on those authorities to take that information and do an appropriate investigation and assessment as to whether or not I'm right.
	I brought that information and they could say, Steve, you're wrong.
	Here's why. And I would have said, okay, going back to work now.
	Or they could say, Steve, you're right.
	We're going to fix the problem.
	And I said, okay, I'm going back to work now.
	But instead, all of the guns were turned, all the energy and the resources of the FBI and the Democrat Party and the media were turned against myself and the other gentlemen that were at the table with me when we testified last month, which, in fact, can only mean one thing.
	You get the flack when you're over the target.
	They are not willing to entertain any of the information we brought forward, which we were prepared to discuss in great length, in great detail.
	But instead, the members of the minority there were happy to just pontificate for five minutes each and then accuse Marcus Allen of tweeting improperly, even though that wasn't his Twitter account, account and accused me and Garrett of oil of being bought and paid for when we were given a charitable donation several months after being suspended indefinitely without pay.
	And and we're accused of doing that by Dan Goldman, who is one of the wealthiest members of Congress.
	Yeah.
	Truly is amazing. How many other people were there?
	Were they other FBI whistleblowers in this testimony or were they from other agencies?
	Were they all FBI people? How many were there?
	There were three FBI whistleblowers and Tristan Levitt, who was an attorney for Empower Oversight, who represents me.
	And that's an organization, 501c3, that represents government whistleblowers.
	And then they've been defending me as well as Marcus.
	So he was there to sort of be a subject matter expert and share his knowledge.
	He has a wealth of it with Congress.
	But, you know, it was just the three FBI personnel, two agents and one support staff.
	And we were able to present some information.
	I mean, obviously, I wanted to get in the, you know, there's the more salacious information about, you know, having gone to school board meetings and gotten license plates from people as part of the FBI's effort to marry school board protesters with domestic terrorists.
	But to me, my project now at this point is the Integrated Program Management Center.
	I think we're good to go.
	There's games played, like where they will open up thousands of domestic terrorism cases off of January 6th, which is not an adequate and accurate representation of what that actually was.
	And now you have the special agents in charge of all 56 field offices since those cases were spread around the country.
	They're all collecting bonuses somewhere in the area between $30,000 and $50,000 because those numbers were met.
	Wow. Wow, that's amazing.
	I've covered the case of Adrian Schoolcraft, who is a New York City whistleblower for the police.
	And he had situations like that where they said, you know, hey, it's Halloween.
	I just want you to round up anybody that you can bring them back and we'll book them and we'll find out what to charge them with later.
	We don't care. Just bring people in.
	You know, you've got to quote a type of system like that.
	And he started recording and recording other police officers.
	Once they found out about that, his father was a police officer.
	And he was a, again, your book is True Blue.
	He was a True Blue believer as well.
	He really believed in being a cop.
	They tried to punish him by making him walk a beat.
	And he goes, well, that's good. I think it's a good thing for me to be out there and deter crime and get to know the people in the community.
	He didn't see that as a punishment.
	But they eventually came around and he had another recording that was up on the wall behind some books that memorialized what happened with that.
	But they went to his apartment, the guy who was number two in the New York City Police Department.
	They arrested him and put him in an insane asylum.
	His father, who was a retired cop, found the other recording and got him out.
	But, I mean, that's the thing.
	They turn against people.
	And when the institution becomes that level of being corrupt, exactly what do you think we should do with the FBI? I mean, is it to the point where it is salvageable?
	I don't think it is. I think you need to do away with the FBI entirely.
	And I know that sounds scary to people, but this country existed before the FBI. It can exist after the FBI. There's a strong argument that I've been making for the last several months that the FBI isn't a constitutional organization.
	There was no legislation brought forward to originate it.
	It was actually backdated. And so the FBI was about preserving status quo.
	Not necessarily about protecting the Constitution or the rights of Americans.
	So in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, the FBI, to preserve the status quo, went after communists.
	And I think Americans assumed that they were the good guys.
	But then the FBI went after draft dodgers because, you know, and then you can have the debate over the legitimacy of the Vietnam War.
	And I think there were still people that thought they were doing good work.
	But COINTELPRO and infiltrating the Black Panthers, there's some civil rights concerns there.
	And we can jump all the way into the 21st century, where after 9-11 and national security, mission creeps started to occur because our military stomped down the foreign threats significantly.
	The FBI had to justify its national security branch existence and budget.
	So they started to look from counterterrorism abroad to homegrown terrorism.
	And that's where you saw some entrapment of Muslim Americans.
	And then when they ran out of those, now they've come after violent domestic violent extremists, as they call them, which are the conservative Americans.
	And you look no further than last September, the red speech that President Biden delivered at Independence Hall.
	He identified Republicans.
	First, it was MAGA Republicans.
	Then it eventually evolved into Republicans as being anti-government white supremacist.
	And two of the top priorities for the FBI in counterterrorism are anti-government extremism and ethnic extremism, parenthetically, white supremacy.
	So you've now got the FBI preserving the status quo for a very radical left that is in charge of our government.
	Yeah, it is.
	To answer the question about the FBI, I think that you can look to locals.
	I think very similar to the way we used to elect senators in this country where they came from the state houses.
	We can eliminate the FBI and empower U.S. marshals to deputize more.
	We already currently do it. But more local detectives in sheriff's offices, police departments.
	And allow those guys who have the local knowledge of what's going on in their town, they know the usual suspects, they know the crime that's going on on Main Street, they can pursue criminal cases at a federal level, local, state, however they see adequate, bring those cases to a U.S. Attorney's Office if it's appropriate.
	And that will empower the local agencies to essentially staff the federal government and really let federal law enforcement do what's best for the locals as opposed to what their minders are asking them to do in Washington, D.C. I
	couldn't agree with you more And now a lot of people who have been applauding them are seeing this, but it's always been that way.
	And it's always been an unconstitutional agency.
	Let me ask you, because we talked about the deputized state, what about things like, you know, the Southern Property Law Center has been used as a consultant for the FBI in the past, pointing the finger at other people.
	It gives them plausible deniability.
	It gives more credibility to these charges, but they work in a kind of public-private partnership type of thing.
	Did you see some of that when you were working there?
	Yes, yes. Even at the FBI Academy when we had training on terrorism, we had to watch a video provided to us by the Southern Poverty Law Center where they ranked pro-life activists as higher on the threat level than ISIS. Wow, really? That's amazing.
	Doesn't surprise me, I guess, but that truly is amazing.
	Let's talk about what you're doing right now with the Center for Renewing America.
	You're a Senior Fellow on Domestic Intelligence and Security Service.
	Tell us a little bit about the organization first and then tell us what you're doing there.
	Well, thank you for that. So Russ Vogt, the director of the OMB under the Trump administration, is our president and founded this organization.
	And we are focused on confronting woke and weaponized government in any way we can.
	And my contribution to that is in this We're good to go.
	During that week-long event that we had in January, and brings those concerns forward and has basically crafted a new budget that should be implemented on day one if power were to change hands.
	And I'm trying to just provide my insight there, as well as advising this select committee on the weaponization of the federal government.
	So in a cruel twist of irony, I get to investigate the FBI who is investigating me.
	And they continue to just represent, you know, what this group means and speak out.
	And, you know, I've just started to come around to the message of, you know, I'm swinging a hammer at a giant stone and it might not break.
	For the first 999 times, but on the 1,000th strike, it does.
	And that doesn't mean that my 1,000th swing of the hammer was what did it.
	It was everything along the way.
	And then I'll just continue to hammer away to get this message out there to as many people as possible.
	That's right. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance and its persistence as well.
	And this is such a dangerous thing with the power, the money, and the technology that is behind the federal government.
	For it to have this massive, weaponized, politicized police force is a very, very dangerous thing for all of us.
	I mean, we should learn the lesson from the Stasi.
	And they didn't have, you know, but only a fraction of the power.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	And I hope that they get that again.
	The book is True Blue, and Stephen Friend is the author.
	You can find it wherever books are sold.
	He doesn't have a separate website to sell that, but you can find it on Amazon, anywhere that you buy your books.
	Is there anything else that you would like to, in kind of a parting way, to tell people in America about the dangers of this, or anything else you'd like to tell us?
	Well, yeah, thank you.
	And thank you for allowing me the opportunity to share the information about the book.
	You know, it's not intended to be, it's not political in any way.
	It's just the information being brought forward.
	And I certainly share your sentiment with this growing intelligence state that is now, the FBI has evolved into an intelligence agency with a law enforcement capability.
	If there's any final idea that I just threw out into the ether, everybody wants to say that they're a First Amendment absolutist, and the Second Amendment is there to support that.
	I think we need to start looking at our Third Amendment, and I know that that's the quartering of soldiers, and it kind of makes an eyebrow raise, but when we look at things like the way that big tech has colluded with government, there's not a whole lot different than a red coat listening on your bedroom wall From the guest room than the cell phone that's next to your night table that you're charging every night.
	Boy, Stephen, you and I are on the same page.
	I have said that so many times.
	I said, they're living on your computer.
	It's even worse than living sitting on your couch asking you for potato chips.
	That is so good.
	We are in 100% agreement on these things, and I'm so glad to hear you saying that.
	You have so much credibility for walking the walk.
	Freedom is not free. Somebody has to pay the price for it.
	You've paid the price for this.
	You have kept your integrity.
	You've been honest and faithful to the Constitution.
	I cannot thank you enough.
	And certainly, you are spot on in understanding what the real dangers are here, and you have the courage to speak out.
	I can't thank you enough for doing that.
	Thank you. Well, thank you very much. Have a great day, and God bless you.
	Thank you. Again, the book is True Blue.
	The author is Stephen Friend, and I think it would be worth the price of admission just to see the transcripts going back and forth between him and the FBI. Obviously, he won because he's not in jail.
	Thank you, Stephen. Whether you're feeling like the blues or bluegrass, APS Radio has you covered.
	Check out a wide variety of channels on our app at APSradio.com. APSradio.com
	APSradio.com
	You're listening to The David Knight Show.
	Go right into it, I guess.
	I wanted to kind of focus, you know, obviously on what you are an expert on, which is the military stuff, what's happening on Ukraine and China and all the rest of that.
	So let's just jump into it.
	Ready? Okay. Okay.
	Are you recording? Okay, good.
	Joining us now is Joel Skousen.
	You can find him at worldaffairsbrief.com.
	And that is an excellent source of information, and nobody knows what's going on, follows it more closely than Joel Skousen does.
	Thank you for joining us, Joel. It's always good to be with you, David.
	Thank you. Let's talk about, first of all, it's been a lot of developments.
	Things are happening very quickly in Ukraine.
	We now see in the headlines just yesterday, it was 200,000 troops are amassing by the Russians and then the Ukrainians say 500,000.
	Is it 200,000? Is it 500,000?
	Is that happening? The fog of war.
	What is really going on in your opinion?
	Well, it's very hard to say.
	I rely primarily on the Brits at russi.com, which really is a very good non-globalist, honest intelligence outfit that has access to British intelligence and some American intelligence. honest intelligence outfit that has access to British intelligence and But you really can't tell what the Russians say or what the Ukrainians say.
	You can't take it for face value.
	There's a lot of propaganda on both sides. - That's right. - There's no way that the Russians could be amassing 500,000.
	They already committed, of the 300,000, they committed 100,000 of the new conscripts untrained into the battle, and most of those have met their fate and have been killed.
	So that leaves about 200,000 that they did give extensive training to, or at least whatever they could do in the battlefield conditions there in Ukraine.
	And, you know, you've got the Wagner Group that still has about 50,000 or 60,000, you know, top-line fighters, but that's it from what the Russians have.
	So, you know, we're looking at a maximum of about 300,000, which is what they started the original invasion with.
	According to Russian sources, Putin is demanding the same three-pronged attack like they tried it the first, with Belarus coming out, Russian troops and equipment towards Kiev, and then Crimea coming out of the south to attack the southern flank of Odessa,
	and then the Russians breaking out of their defensive positions in the Donbass to attack, frontal assault with the Ukrainian troops opposing them, etc., And there's apparently a little bit of a rebellion among the Russian generals that they don't feel like this is going to work any more than it did at first, especially if the U.S. gets their new main battle tanks into Ukraine, which could take at least three months.
	And that means it won't be a winter offensive.
	It would have to be a spring offensive after the ground gets solid again.
	Starting in February, when you start to have some thaw...
	Really into March, you know, the ground gets really soft and won't support tank warfare.
	And so it's really a little too late now for the Russians to start a winter warfare across the frozen ground because in the middle of it, you'd get rain starting to come and you'd get bogged down.
	So I think...
	Both Russian and British intelligence say the Russians will wait until the ground solidifies in April or May, most likely May, which gives a chance for the West to get their main battle tanks into Ukraine.
	And it's looking like most of those are going to be Leopard 2 tanks from Germany and other NATO countries.
	You know, one squadron of Challenger tanks, 14 Challenger 2 tanks are coming in, and then the U.S. is shipping about 31 Abrams M1 tanks, but they have to wait until they get The depleted uranium armor stripped off the US versions of those tanks, so they won't be coming out of the tank crews in Germany.
	The US tank crews in Germany, they have to be shipped from the United States, because this is top-secret armor that the US has on the Abrams tanks with depleted uranium, and they don't want those to get in the hands of the Russians.
	Well, they don't have the armor.
	They're going to be somewhat a great deal more vulnerable, of course.
	But I covered a couple of days ago, a retired lieutenant colonel whose specialty was tank forces.
	And he was saying, you know, first of all, we're looking at months, I don't know, three, three months, six months before they get the tanks.
	And he said, nobody's going to know how to use them.
	You've got to train in these things.
	So what is going to happen with that?
	Is that going to be a further delay in addition to the delivery of the tanks before anybody can really use it?
	That was his point. They're already training Ukrainian crews in Poland on Leopard 2 tanks.
	And that's going to be providing the bulk of...
	They're also training in terms of the verbal learning the systems in the Challenger tanks and the Abrams tanks in NATO countries as well.
	So they're already doing the training.
	It's just a problem.
	You've got to get your supply chains established because there are parts that have to be replaced and maintenance and other things.
	Now, the Challenger 2 is probably the most reliable tank, main battle tank in the West.
	And it could probably survive out there without maintenance problems for a month or two.
	But after that, you know, you've got real problems.
	The U.S. Abrams tank has a turbine, gas turbine engine.
	And so it's not a diesel engine.
	It's going to be very difficult.
	To do any maintenance on those, they'll have to be shipped back out of and replaced with other new gas turbines.
	So the Abrams is a real problem.
	The Leopard 2 and the Challenger are not so much of a problem because the parts pipeline is already in Europe for both of those, whereas there isn't an extensive Abrams 2 pipeline in Europe except for American forces here, and they don't have a lot of extras to ship out to Ukraine.
	So that looks like that's a bit of a problem.
	His main point, what the lieutenant colonel was saying, was not even the equipment and not even having a few months training to understand the equipment, but he said the real issue is knowing how to use them strategically, maneuvers, tactics, that type of thing. He says that takes years to learn that, especially if you're going to go on offense and And it appears that that is really the purpose of this, to try to dislodge Russians from where they are.
	He says offensive is completely different from defense, and they have absolutely no training and can't possibly know how to do that.
	He said we do that for years before we put people out there.
	Yeah, he's absolutely correct about that.
	The United States and NATO practices combined arms warfare, and then it's combining tank maneuvers with infantry, and you've got to protect tanks with infantry that have anti-tank shoulder-fired missiles to protect them against other tanks, etc. You've got to have combined air power to shield those tanks and to blast your way through, and He's absolutely right.
	The Ukrainians don't have that, won't have that.
	And so they'll be relegated to Israeli-type tank warfare, which is to maneuver with speed, being able to fire on the move, which our tanks can do much better than the Soviet tanks, and to do it at night where you don't use some of the same combined warfare.
	The U.S. and NATO tanks have really good infrared warfighting systems that they can see in the dark.
	They can see the heat signatures of these other tanks, and the Russian older tanks don't have hardly any of that.
	So they don't fight at night.
	But the Israelis have been able to develop a doctrine where you use tank warfare alone and still win against the Arabs with their T-72 tanks and T-80 tanks.
	So they still can be effective.
	They just won't be as effective as if the main battle tanks were in Western hands.
	And of course, you know, their newer tanks, they have a longer range as well, besides the night vision stuff, right, than the Soviet tanks?
	That's right. They can out-distance, and they're firing the other tanks, and that's the strategy the Israelis use with their Merkava tanks, is they could shoot out to three kilometers and kill other tanks, and the Russian tanks had to get within, you know, a kilometer to make a kill.
	Mm-hmm. So they couldn't even get close without being hit.
	So the Israelis won in several of those wars 100 tanks versus 300 or 400 tanks just because of these tactics.
	Now, the Russians are dug in very deeply in eastern Ukraine, and the Ukrainians intend to mount an attack and punch through those lines with these new tanks, which they can do, and then come around the back and surround troops.
	So that they're fighting both front and rear, which would be very difficult.
	The Russians could try to thwart that with air attacks, but the trouble is the U.S. has supplied such sophisticated anti-aircraft weaponry to the Ukraine that the Russians don't dare fly close air support in a battle.
	Their only effective strategy is to launch far away with long-range missiles.
	And those are only effective against Ukrainian aircraft.
	So if you keep the aircraft on the ground and don't fight this as an aircraft war and threaten the Russian aircraft with short range missiles over the battlefield, then it will be just a tank warfare and not combined air tactics that require this level of training.
	And I always enjoy the level of detail because the devil is in the detail.
	We can talk about the big picture and the strategy, and we will talk about that coming up.
	But it's one of the things I like about you, Joel, is that you've got so much detail about the equipment.
	And it's fascinating, but...
	At the same time, again, going back to the retired lieutenant colonel saying that he thought that it was not going to be, in his opinion, a very effective strategy, that it was going to mainly be a provocation to the Russians.
	Everything that we're doing seems to validate their fears and their anxieties that NATO's purpose is to take Russia apart.
	This is what people like Alexander Dugan has been saying for a long time.
	And it seems to be fulfilling all of their worst concerns.
	So he sees it primarily just as an escalation.
	And Biden said a year ago when this began, it was actually in March, But he said, no, we're not going to send tanks.
	We're not going to send jets. He said that'd be World War III. So what do you think is going to be the...
	And immediately after Ukraine got the authorization for the tanks, they immediately started saying, well, we want planes now.
	So is this something that is rapidly escalating into World War III? Many of us have been saying it's World War III already.
	Well, I don't believe it is escalating to World War III because World War III cannot be fought without nuclear weapons.
	And Western doesn't dare use their top-of-the-line nuclear weapons against the West as long as they don't have the capacity in the conventional military to occupy.
	That's why I've said for a long time in my analysis, they have to wait for China.
	China does have the manpower, the Blue Water Navy, it's the largest navy in the world now, to ship troops around and control other countries once you nuke them.
	If you nuke the military and you can't occupy, then you simply wait for them to rebuild and they come back after you.
	And so that's why Putin has not made good on any of his nuclear threats and won't, in my opinion, because it's premature.
	China is not backing Russia and Ukraine.
	China, in fact, thinks Russia made a mistake and antagonizes the West early because China has always said, let's wait till we're ready and then we'll throw a joint nuclear attack on Western military targets and then blackmail them into submission and avoid You know, World War III, a destructive World War III. The West knows that.
	They want that preemptive nuclear strike in order to talk Americans finally into joining a militarized global government, which Americans don't want and wouldn't ever want unless you provoke them with a Pearl Harbor, even worse than Pearl Harbor, you know, a nuclear preemptive strike on U.S. military forces.
	If our forces are decapitated, it's easy for our leaders to come out of the bunkers and say, you know, we didn't know this was going to happen.
	Now that it has, we have to join with other non-communist countries in a militarized global government.
	And in fact, in tomorrow's World Affairs Brief I am covering, I guess it'll be today when we broadcast this interview, today's World Affairs Brief will cover the fact that the Britons have specifically denigrated their own military while secretly giving millions of pounds to the EU to finance a new EU army.
	In other words, this has to be factored into the thing is that this EU army is meant to replace NATO and is meant, I think, to be the seed stock of the new militarized global government that will start when World War II, when World War III starts.
	But it has to wait for China to be ready.
	And China has even admitted we won't be ready till about 2027.
	Which is just in the middle point of when I've always said this war is at greatest risk in the latter half of this decade when Russia and China will both be ready to attack the West.
	Just in time for the 2030, you know, reset everything for the 2030 timeframe.
	Let me go to... And one of the reasons that will motivate that war to happen before 2030 Is that the U.S. is going to build a new ballistic missile system to replace the antiquated 1950s Minuteman III missiles, which have had their three warheads removed and replaced with a single warhead.
	So Russia has about 10,000 warheads on missiles, and we have 400.
	So this is not a fair fight.
	And that's part of the reason why the U.S., You know, is going to let those missiles be struck, because it will take about three warheads on each of the 400 silos that the US has, and use up about 1200 of the Russian and Soviet missiles, just killing our relatively useless Minuteman III missiles.
	You mentioned the EU army, and I want to go back to that.
	That was something that was denigrated as a conspiracy theory when the Brexiters were talking about that.
	And then right after Brexit and the election passed, they said, we're going to get out of the EU. Then it came immediately.
	They admitted, yeah, we're working on an EU army.
	Let's talk a little bit about that.
	You said the UK is denigrating its forces.
	I thought this is a bizarre, humorous article talking about, and it came out of the sun in the UK. The defense minister there, Ben Wallace, is very upset about the fact that they found that a subcontractor was doing repairs on a nuclear sub with superglue.
	Some of the cooling stuff came off.
	They just superglued it on and it was discovered by accident.
	This thing is running four years over the schedule and $370 million over budget.
	Sounds just like our military.
	But they're downsizing their military drastically, almost making it disappear.
	I think we've got more police officers in New York City than they do.
	And their army, I don't know, I don't know exact numbers, but it's approaching that.
	They just cut another 10,000 troops in Britain as well.
	And they're also killing the British military industrial complex by not giving them any contracts.
	And so what's really happening, I think this is the British version of what the U.S. is planning on absorbing a nuclear first strike.
	The British version is when that nuclear strike hits the Trident missile base in Scotland, for example, which is their main deterrent against the strike.
	When it gets hit, and I think they'll be under the same, you know, absorb a nuclear first strike dictate that we're under PDD-60, which is still in force.
	That's Presidential Decision Directive 60 in 1997 that instructed our nuclear forces, you will be instructed to absorb a nuclear first strike and retaliate afterwards.
	Not launch on warning.
	And launch on warning, of course, is the most important strategy because when our satellites detect a missile launch from Russia and China, Those missiles are targeting something already.
	And if we launch, their missiles hit empty silos and our missiles then hit live targets.
	So launching on warning is a very powerful strategy.
	And by eliminating that from our U.S. arsenal, you know, we set ourselves up.
	It invites a nuclear first strike.
	I'm sorry, go ahead. I might say.
	That even our anti-nuclear lobby doesn't realize or has long forgotten about PDD-60 because it's been top secret ever since 1997.
	And Bruce Blair, a big anti-nuclear fanatic in the mainstream, came out and said, you know, what Biden needs to do in revamping our nuclear policy is to eliminate launch on warnings.
	The nose is already gone.
	It's already gone.
	And I emailed the disarmament people at the Federation of American Scientists and other things, and I said, you know, do you have information that PDD-60 has been overruled, you know, that already eliminates?
	What's Bruce Blair talking about?
	And the guy wrote back and said, what's PDD-60?
	And Nobody talks about that, really, but you.
	I mean, most people don't know it's there.
	It's been so secret for so long that even the disarmament lobby's forgotten about it and thinking they have to do it all over again.
	But this is a very insidious strategy, and I don't believe, as I say, we're going to have nuclear war until they're ready to do this preemptive strike.
	And it won't be just launching one missile and taking out London or something.
	That would be a provocation that would require a response from the public.
	But when you hit all of our nuclear bases in a preemptive strike, it uses up most of their missiles.
	And it does drive Americans into throwing them and saying, what do we do now?
	And our government will have the answer.
	That's what this Pearl Harbor-type strategy is, is provoke the U.S. into something and mandate the solution, etc.
	But now, you might ask, how does the West intend to win a war when you allow a preemptive nuclear strike on your military forces?
	Well, I think the answer, you know, as I may have discussed in one of our earlier interviews, is putting up space-based interceptors in space so that you can hit any further missiles.
	In other words, to...
	To stop the blackmail, you have to be able to say, no, we're not going to let you take over.
	Go ahead and try to nuke us, and then be able to hit their missiles in the boost phase before they release their warheads, and then you can destroy the missiles.
	And you can only do that from space, of course.
	When General Mattis at the Booz Allen annual financial conference told the attendants, you'd be surprised how many trillions we have going into space that aren't on the budget, I think he's referring to top-secret offensive or defensive weapons in space, the brilliant pebbles and other things that were talked about by Dan Graham in the Reagan administration, which they said they never built.
	But I believe that it has been built.
	Because the West would not do this PDD-60 and absorb a nuclear unless they had some strategy to stop any further attacks from occurring once they decided to fight back.
	Unless they have gone full suicidal.
	But let's talk about, you talk about early strikes and that type of thing.
	We just had, and you talked about this on worldaffairsbrief.com, Russians sent a, as kind of a provocation or, you know, They sent a ship off the East Coast that had hypersonic missiles on it.
	First of all, how long would it take for a hypersonic missile to reach a target?
	And is that just one warhead on a hypersonic missile?
	Would that just be something that you said would be a provocation, taking out a city or something like that?
	But how long would that take, and is it just a single warhead on it?
	Well, you know, if they were, let's say, you know, 50 miles outside of the 12-mile limit, 50 miles off the coast, and they send a hypersomic, it would be up there in Washington, D.C. in about, you know, 15 minutes.
	So it doesn't give you much warning time.
	We're talking about, you know, Mach 5 for it to get up to speed.
	But... You know, it's a limited small warhead that'll fit on a hypersonic missile.
	This is not something that's even going to take out the whole city of Washington, D.C. It's a point target weapon.
	And how many missiles would they have on that?
	Maybe 20. So 20 targets.
	It would just cause a hornet's nest.
	It wouldn't decapitate the U.S. or stop them from retaliating.
	And that's why it's foolish.
	I said when I heard that, you know, this is not the beginning of a nuclear confrontation.
	This is just more saber-rattling, you know, to deter the West from, you know, beefing up Ukraine.
	Ukraine is really a...
	The Ukraine war is really a deciding factor in...
	In the Russian military strategy because it has embarrassed them.
	It's put Putin in a very untenable position where opposition is going to him, especially a lot of military people who don't keep going in Ukraine, where you're embarrassing us.
	It's hard to tell because we hear that and they haven't been able to finish the job, if you will.
	They're kind of a stalemate there.
	And we hear that Putin, there's internal things that are happening there.
	The knives are out for him. We've got generals that are And other people who are being defenestrated.
	You know, things like that.
	And yet, the US and Europe is desperate to escalate this with tanks and jets.
	So, you know, there's this, again, the fog of war.
	What can you believe? I mean, how does that...
	If he's... Struggling and embarrassing them and having this opposition internally, and I'm sure there's an element of truth to all those things, and yet they're very concerned about putting these weapons there, but that's essentially because they're going on offense.
	Is that correct? That's right.
	The Ukrainians have to go on offense to drive the Russians out.
	Otherwise, if it's just a drawn-out stalemate, the U.S. and the NATO is going to run out of weapons to give Ukraine, and it's not going to end.
	And that would be very embarrassing for the West to let Ukraine fall.
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