Feb. 23, 2026 - Gray Area - Rex Jones & Tim Tompkins
03:07:08
Mexico under ATTACK + Casey Putsch LIVE | Gray Area LIVE #51
Casey Putch, Ohio gubernatorial candidate, attacks Vivek Ramaswamy’s "America First" credibility due to Elon Musk ties and pro-India stance amid cartel chaos in Mexico—where CJNG’s military-style operations (armored vehicles, drones) disrupted supply chains and schools. He blames Ohio’s policies for displacing native workers with foreign labor fraud, citing $113M spent suing his father while ignoring local manufacturing revival. Comparing Dubai’s exploitative migrant system to U.S. interventions, Putch warns AI could eliminate 30-50% of white-collar jobs, demanding systemic reform over corporate-driven governance. The episode ties Ohio’s decline to broader failures in regime change—like Iraq’s post-2003 collapse under Bremer’s purge of 400,000 soldiers—fueled by profit motives and ignored veteran trauma, urging public awareness in an "information war" for societal improvement. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I mean, these scenes just look like something out of a horror movie, right?
And I'm gonna be honest, I'm a stupid gringo, I don't know anything about what goes on down there, right?
I just assume it's like a mob movie or breaking bad, right?
That's just what I've always thought.
And I think that's uh kind of the case.
Mexican army kills leader of powerful Jalisco new generation, new generation cartel during Operation to Capture Him.
Okay, so these new generation guys, they're especially nasty, right?
They have all the military equipment, they have the tanks and the drones and all of it.
The Mexican army killed the leader of the Jalisco New Generation cartel, Namizio Rubin Oseguera Cervantes El Mincho.
We'll just call him that El Mincho on Sunday, decapitating what had become Mexico's most powerful drug cartel and thrusting swaths of the nation into total chaos.
The drug lord was the Mexican government's biggest prize yet to show the Trump administration.
See, we did it, Mr. Trump.
Please don't bother.
We did it in its efforts to crack down on the cartels.
And his death was met with a forceful reaction from the cartel, known by its Spanish initials, CJ NG.
So, in response to the government carrying out like a law enforcement or, you know, like military operation, they're doing one of their own.
I'm going to be honest, this is probably the reason why they didn't want to attack the cartel or directly, you know, involve themselves in something like that because of the fact that these guys like you'll just kill 100 civilians.
Cars burned out by cartel members, blocked roads in nearly a dozen Mexican states and left smoke billowing into the air.
Jalisco's capital, Guadalajara, was turned into a ghost town Sunday night as civilians hunkered down.
School was canceled.
You know, if it snows here, they cancel the school, whatever.
If the cartel takes over, they cancel the school in Mexico.
Schools cancel Monday in several states.
Ose Guerra Cervantes was wounded in an operation to capture him Sunday in Tapalpa, Jalisco, about a two-hour drive southwest of Guadalajara, and he died while being flown into Mexico City.
The Defense Department said in a statement, the state is the base of the cartel, known for trafficking huge quantities of fentanyl and other drugs into the United States.
So there was a guy, Gonzalo Lopez, and he was in prison for like attempted capital murder.
Like he tried to kill a cop, right?
And he's like a Mexican, like illegal migrant, like a gang member, like all like clicked up in the cartel.
So he's on a prison bus transport on Highway 79, going to the state hospital, right?
He's planning to have some illness or whatever.
He makes some kind of device.
They don't specify what it is.
He breaks out of his cuffs.
He takes the driver's gun and like stabs the driver and almost kills him.
He then is in the wilderness for three days and it's really rough country out there.
It's really hard.
He's got nothing, but he waits and he's patient and family visiting from Houston, a granddad and like three grandchildren, like as bad as you can get horror story.
Now, Mexico is becoming modernized to where the U.S. is starting to really pay attention and push harder than it has in previous years, especially with Trump being in play.
But at the end of the day, there's only one option.
You got to go total war against the cartel.
Like there's that's, I mean, but again, you don't even know who's cartel, who's not cartel because they look the same.
This is why, and this is why, this is an example of why I'm pro-gun ownership, right?
It's because you could say, like, what happens to America in 50 years?
Like, imagine we get rid of our guns now, and then we end up in a situation where we're poor, we're broke, we're desolate, and there's criminal gangs running around everywhere.
And they have the guns.
The government has the guns, but the government works with the cartel.
Yeah, I mean, and I definitely see the argument in that way because the only way that you can really get to a point where it's completely not necessary is if no one had them, but it's impossible these days when there's an infinite amount of ways to acquire a gun.
But do you think we here's it's it's hard to do anything to make it better.
I was at this well I'm thinking about it like okay, you either put troops on the ground, which you know Americans are going to have a very big problem with that.
You can't start bombing because Mexico is a sprawling city.
I think the special forces, you send the special forces in without the support of like a fleet, you know, with the bombing capability or whatever, there's a high chance that they get killed.
You know, so everyone's like, you don't say that, but our heroes, they can do anything.
It's like, well, yeah, that's true.
They're very tough.
They're very capable.
They're the best soldiers on the planet.
But when you're outnumbered 100 to 1 and the other guys were also very good and they have total mastery over the terrain and you don't have air support.
Casey Putch is an automotive engineer, small business owner, and Republican candidate for the governor of Ohio.
He is from Northwest Ohio and has worked in the car industry for most of his career.
He often speaks about manufacturing, energy, and the role of government.
He studied industrial design at the Ohio State University and worked in automotive research and racing.
He founded Putch Racing, a race-focused shop and designed a high-efficiency diesel prototype known as the Omega Car.
He also founded Genius Garage, which is a non-profit program that gives college students hands-on experience in engineer racing and design.
The program connects students with mentors and real industry projects.
Putsch questions electric vehicle mandates and current energy policy.
He argues that the government should not force one technology over another and believes different energy sources and vehicle types should be able to compete in the market.
He has become a public voice in this debate and is now running for governor to bring these views into state policy.
Without further ado, let's add Casey Putch to the stage.
And I think that's what these independent or more independent leading candidates have done is that they've really hit the ground and done the grassroots work.
I'm really good at understanding systems, even if I don't have a manual to them, and finding out where they're broken and why they don't work.
And when you pay attention enough to the world at large, government, industry, education, eventually you figure out how the sausage is made.
And if you're a person who actually cares about their community, their family, their future, the state, you get to a point where you just can't take it anymore.
And I passed that point some time ago.
And you get to a point where it's like, I don't care what you do to me.
I'm not signing up for this future that we have with Amy Acton or Vivek Ramaswamy.
I think those are terrible choices.
And I think we deserve a lot better than what we're being presented.
You know, I frankly, I got kind of pissed off back when Vivek first announced because I thought he was astroturfed in like crazy.
It was unnatural.
It was wrong.
It just didn't fit.
And I got really fiery back then.
However, a few years back, you know, back during the Biden administration, it was just obvious to me how all culture, all the social fabric America was being divided for political gain.
And I hated it.
And, you know, I was doing automotive YouTube and I ended up becoming an automotive YouTuber because I couldn't get any media attention for the nonprofit I was doing.
That was Genius Garage, helping engineering students get really amazing jobs for the last decade.
Just couldn't get any exposure.
I ended up being an automotive YouTuber.
And at the time, I was looking out there just at the world at large to see what's going on culturally.
And I thought, you know, there's nobody that's doing like automotive world industry or even kind of even connecting with the military at the time, you know, kind of in conservative land.
And I thought, I thought maybe I could be more of that role.
And I just didn't like what was going on with culture.
And kind of one thing led to another, speaking with some people I knew, one guy who had been part of Trump's administration and campaign way back when.
I just started to reach out and seeing how I can, frankly, try to make a difference, be a voice.
And got kind of serious about just thinking about running against Mercy Kaptur for Congress, CD9 in Ohio.
She's been in longer than Nancy Pelosi as a Democrat.
And I just was getting to thinking about that with people.
You know, nothing serious.
It was all hypothetical.
But just didn't come to be.
And maybe at the time, I wasn't ready to take that leap of faith.
And so after that, you just kind of try to live your life.
When Trump was running against Kamala, I just couldn't stand the thought of a Kamala presidency.
One thing that just one of the things that frustrated me was electric vehicle mandates coming out of the Biden administration as well as Gavin Newsom, which, you know, when you have government regulation of industry, which effectively that is, that's one of the, you know, one of the hallmarks or mechanical points of how fascism works.
And at the very least, I thought when the left is trying to mandate electric cars, that's destroying innovation for something better.
And you guys may have mentioned I built that 100-plus mile to gallon diesel recyclable car, which frankly has a lower carbon footprint per mile than an EV.
But I'd never tested the thing.
When Trump was running, I'm like, I got to get the numbers on this and speak out.
And, you know, like, I'm going to stick my neck out on the line for a Trump victory, you know.
And first day I tested it, just measured it like to fractions of an ounce of how much fuel was used in a measured distance.
And it got 104.7 miles a gallon with no testing and without the arrow fairings on it.
And the next day, excuse me, being a middle-aged dad, like drinking coffee too fast.
The next day I tested it and it outrun my Dodge Viper by two tenths of a second and exactly matched the Tesla Model 3 rear-wheel drive with full charge.
And the third day is when I did the math and figured out I had a lower carbon footprint, you know, per mile than an EV.
And so I spoke out why I thought Trump was a better choice for the future of America, industry, economics, all that jazz.
So I was happy about that.
But then later the next year, like I said, when I see Vivek getting astroturfed in and not doing, he didn't do no doge in at doge.
I just knew something's wrong and I didn't like it.
And my soul's kind of on fire again.
And some people, I started thinking about running for governor then, but some people talked me out of it.
They're like, he's not going to win.
Don't worry about it.
He's not going to win.
And that's coming from conservative lands.
So I figured they knew something I didn't.
But then I see throughout the year, he's just kind of buying his way in and they're clear in the field.
And I just, I just couldn't take it anymore, man.
It just, everything about my soul was on fire telling me had something had to be done.
When you make a decision to run a grassroots campaign to try to be the dark horse candidate and come in and take care of the who we view, I view at least or both view, me and you view as an establishment plant.
Really, it's just someone who came in and did very well in the 2024 GOP primary.
And now based off of like the debate performances or whatnot, like, well, you fit into the party or what we view as the party.
You're going to be our guy now.
And they kind of clear the field.
And, you know, something I really like about Fishback, something I really enjoy about people like him and you is that you're very decidedly different from the establishment GOP, shall we say.
You know, there's a Diet Coke and there's a real Coke of America First, what we were promised.
And I think you're more on the original Coke side.
The new thing is trucking companies in Ohio, where there's all these different trucking LLCs and the CDL licenses into the same building that basically don't exist.
And it's all these third world immigrants and migrants.
And a take I have on this, how I think we're being sold out as Americans and Ohioans here, and this analogy is interesting.
Have y'all ever been to Dubai or you know anything about Dubai?
And these people largely come from, say, like Indonesia and places like that.
And in Dubai, they can pay them a very small wage by what would be considered a reasonable wage in Dubai, but for being in Indonesia or wherever, that would be a lot of money.
Now, these people live in camps, which is interesting enough because when you drive on the highway to Dubai, it's like – it may be like behind the Louis Vuitton store in the high-end Ferrari dealership or something.
There's migrant camps that help build the – Yeah, hellscape.
But, you know, they hold their passports while they're there.
So they're in a very indentured servitude-like thing.
You know, you could even argue it's sort of like modern day slavery, but you know, it's okay because they get to live and they make a lot of money they can send home and all.
But in Dubai, at least they have the separation of it being migrant workers, that they're not natives.
But in Ohio, I feel like what's happening is whether it's trucking companies that want cheap labor or it's corporations that want cheaper labor to bring in H-1B visas, which just displace native workers and make it so all the wages go down and they can save hundreds of millions of dollars a year, or this Somali fraud, the Haitian things, all of this.
All this, what's so wrong about it are people are profiting.
There's scams and corruption going on like crazy across the board.
But the difference is, unlike Dubai, if we don't like it as Ohioans, we're just racist jerks because these people should be here too and just run all of the scams and all of the fraud and take away all the jobs.
And the United Arab Emirates are, they even tell you when you're on the Emirates airlines there of how they're all being tolerant of different cultures.
I don't mean it to be a direct analogy.
I just mean it to be another perspective to look at in the sense of like, hey, in Dubai, they want cheap foreign labor, but they make no bones about what it's about.
But here, politicians are allowing big corporations to take advantage of the state.
And then I don't even know to what levels of hell the scams go with Somali and Haitians because it makes no sense at all.
Why are we bringing in the third world and allowing tens of billions of dollars likely to be defrauded?
I mean, I spent the last 11 years of my life helping the brightest young engineering students get jobs with zero help from the government, zero help from any schools, fixing what's wrong with the American educational system.
And, you know, as an example, in Ohio, we have something called Ohio Means Jobs, where they will pay a minimum of $7,000 a year for the tuition of students that meet the same age demographics of what I teach and help to do something like that at trades and help get jobs.
And they'll do that for two years.
And then when they get a job, they'll pay the first six months salary of the job so the employer doesn't have to.
And I'm like, this is really great.
This will help the educational program exist.
And I'll be able to make a huge difference for these young people and getting them jobs in Ohio.
And then the fine print at the end is they'll only do it if the student is an ex-drug addict, alcoholic, like born into crippling depression, just all of these difficulties.
And there's nothing for anybody who really wants to work and has the best chance of getting a job.
And we're just hurting ourselves.
But then we'll have a politician like Vivek or someone come in and say, oh, well, the reason we need H-1Vs is because Ohio doesn't have smart enough people.
Like there's not enough education, but we do nothing to help it.
So again, we're just being sold out across the board.
And when for the benefit of clearly corporations and politicians and of a giant uniparty that won't go anywhere.
And then if the people don't like it, we get called names and say why we're so bad.
So the Republican Party, I feel like a big part of the success of Donald Trump was a rejection of like big business corporate interests.
Of course, like the famous moment where he's having the debate and he goes, well, of course you're all booing me.
All donating to my opponents, pointing to all the lobbyists, right?
But we've really seen, especially in this second term, you know, big business comes to make deals at the White House.
They get a lot of hundreds of millions of dollars.
They get deals, they get grants.
And we're told that we got to have these data centers everywhere, that it's the most important thing in the world.
Like, we cannot live.
We can't get water without JAT GPT.
We're going to die if we don't have it.
And they also tell us that, you know, hey, you know, in 20 years, these data centers are going to use two times the power of the entire human race.
But at the same time, they want to talk to us about climate change and carbon footprint.
And you're someone that's actually worked on these things, right?
With the diesel car and other such things, trying to actually reduce that carbon footprint.
Isn't it a bit ridiculous for the government to make all these environmental claims or just for these billionaires to make all these environmental claims when they want to take people's water and power?
And that's where all of these narratives are falling apart.
I mean, especially since 2020.
You know, the jokes about conspiracy theorists, that term back then just means I was right about everything.
The narratives are absurd.
I mean, the narratives that I broke with the leftist mandates on EVs and such with my diesel car was huge.
And again, that's a car that I originally built as a concept that something should be able to be bought, mass-produced for like $20,000 or $30,000 a pop, affordable, good for the environment.
It's good for people.
It's good for the future.
But every single thing we do, when you really chase the root of why they're trying to shove it down our throats, it's really only about power and control and manipulation, changing the nature of the way our very society or economy works and simply taking away the power from the people.
With regard to the data centers, that's something else that got me up in arms to actually be here now running for governor.
A friend of mine runs a company.
I started seeing this big building going on between my hometown and where my shop is in the other little town.
And I'm thinking, what the heck is this?
A housing development?
Why would they build something here?
This doesn't make sense.
And a buddy of mine says it's a data center and that they've got tax abatements, I think, on this one for 15 years, if memory serves.
And then with the amount of electricity it uses, our bills are going to skyrocket and we're effectively subsidizing the cost of the electricity.
And then you look at the amount of jobs that'll produce maintenance jobs that pay an okay salary.
But when you add it up, this is a multi-billion dollar project that basically brings in no taxes, no tax revenue.
They're not creating any new power generation.
We're paying for that.
And it's a small amount of money from the maintenance jobs that brings in, not to mention the environmental impact of using massive quantities of fresh water, which we think of things like Lake Erie or Ohio River, but our aquifers.
There's a massive amount of water underground here for the farmers and such.
And then you start seeing things.
It's always about what gets barely reported somewhere else that you got to watch out for.
But when they're talking about the rights of water, underground water for farmers and such, and then when I start hearing about how aquifers are being made dirty and people are having to go through tons of filters in their wells, that's shocking because succinctly put, the data centers are a net loss for the state they're coming in.
They are only a leech.
And so the politicians you hear about, they'll call, oh, it's a prestige project.
Prestige for nobody.
The reason they're coming into the Midwest like this in Ohio is we've got pretty good power generation, relatively inexpensive, pretty good infrastructure, roadways and all, and people there.
But it's a stopgap measure.
There was no foresight of creating new power generation or putting these things in a part of the country where it's not being basically stuck up everybody's tailpipe in a nice area where we all just want to live as Americans.
And that's shocking and scary because it seems like so many of these, they came in quickly, in under the cover of night, so to speak, when all you do is hear about NDA forms, and people are just barely being able to fight back.
But for me, this is a much bigger thing than just not liking it.
Like, yeah, I don't like them.
But this is the new nuclear arms race of the world for AI.
And the thing that, I'll be honest, scares the hell out of me.
You know, let's say it cuts 30 to 50% of white-collar jobs in the next five years.
How does that not create a Great Depression immediately?
Because no offense, but like white-collar people, I don't see them welding and building stuff or doing construction.
I don't see them making anything.
So if we change society so much that we do that, of course, the government and the, shall we say, the nefarious governing types don't mind because they're going to have to come in and be like, oh, well, I guess we're going to have to do universal basic income and we're going to have to restructure everything and we're going to have all the power once again because we just destroyed society.
And the scary thing is when you look at people, like we all want to have a job.
We all want to have a place in the community.
Like, isn't that the purpose of life is the human experience?
Have a family, live, grow, be part of it.
But we have AI come around and literally just think for you.
And now we're going to allow tech bros that have no roots, have no home anywhere because they're global, be able to completely change the structure of society when these people have no clear-cut, good goal of humanity?
It's not like we're all trying to go to the moon in the 60s and that's where our resources are going.
It's called, oh, we're just letting tech bros have totalitarian control.
So like, like, there's another part to the equation in terms of, and it might be a little bit white pill, but you have to think about like, like, a lot of technology, when controlled and implemented the right way, actually becomes a net positive for society.
The problem is, I think, with this technology specifically, is it's so new and there's so many different variables that we don't know what the implications are going to be that we kind of instantly write it off as like, okay, well, it's all going to be bad.
But in your experience as an engineer, don't you see some of the value of if the technology was implemented correctly, that it actually could make people's lives easier?
I'll go with kind of an interesting and then I'll come back to a slightly more black pill on that.
You know, it's interesting.
We hear a lot recently, we don't need to go into details of this.
People like to compare now to political times, shall we say, especially in Europe between the two world wars.
However, it's interesting because if you actually read of political parties and political goings on of the earlier industrialized age of the 1800s in Europe, I see a lot more similarities to then to now.
Because AI, in the sense of paralleling an early industrialized age, when a lot of craftsmen and artisans were losing their jobs to automation and machine work, et cetera, we have a similar sort of thing going on now.
So I would implore people to kind of look back at the 1800s politically, what was going on through Europe and England at the time, just as food for thought.
But in terms of a black pill thing, I will say this.
I don't want to be overly negative here, but I look back at my own life and think to myself, when in the entirety of my life has the government actually made our lives better and not actually just created all the problems that have made our lives worse.
And, you know, I'll give you an example, RFK, right?
He had a good line.
Said that any power that a government takes or creates or rights they take away, expect for them to abuse it to the maximum level.
So what, what is protecting any of us from AI?
I mean right now in in Ohio or America?
Do we have any protection for our face, our voice, our likeness, our ip, our data?
What about all you know with um, the rights of privacy for our own data, at which point it's in a cloud?
What, what?
What life do we have anymore and who's stopping it?
In one other example, one of the things that I was highly critical on President Trump in the past year or four was when we were going to see unregulated AI for 10 years in the big, beautiful bell.
And then later, I think he made an executive action to do so.
Understanding the power of AI, both to gather information, to grow, to assess, to predict.
to control and then whatever everything else that can be created.
I just look at that and go.
It's not going to take 10 years, it's going to happen sooner.
To where you know we're we already, as people in the United States, in Ohio and every state.
Billionaires have way too much power to influence the United States government over the people way too much power.
Um so, when you have tech bros with basically totalitarian surveillance control over every aspect of our lives, what I genuinely fear um, and not as like a who-hoo, you know, overly paranoid, but a generally like guys um, I don't think, I don't think the, the government's going to be anything more than the manifestation of Plato's allegory of the cave.
Yeah, and you think about the arrogance not only of that system being built, but they also want you to pay for it.
But like, you think about like, the ungodly billions that a lot of these people are worth yeah, and then we're subsidizing their projects.
That's a real insult to me and like that's why I have a real problem with this current administration is like, like the rich are getting richer and i'm told this is a win for me, but i'm having a real problem out here as a small business owner right, that's, that's a disconnect I think you represent because you are engineer, small business owner, you know you produce things, you're a builder yourself right right yeah, I spent my whole life working.
I uh, you know, in the shop there um, you know, I fix up old stuff and that's that's what we got to do.
You gotta, you gotta take care of your things.
But um, we we're at a time in history where, first of all, I think it's fair to say, the founding fathers never could have predicted any of this.
True true they they, they couldn't predict this.
Um, you know and I hate to say I i've said this in a video, I think I don't know if I said this on A rally.
It may have been a may seem a little extreme, but I feel like the reason why they're not going after the Second Amendment harder right now is because the tech bros know that that won't protect us from what they have in store.
And yeah, they are making us pay for the thing that will control us.
And that's another reason why, quite frankly, I despise the thought of a vec because to me, he looks only to be a manufactured globalist Trojan horse.
Respectfully, he was born to parents that are Indian foreign nationals.
He's an American in terms of being on paperwork, but he doesn't go back generations like mine.
He doesn't have family that have literally fought and sweat and bled for generations to try to have a future.
This place really means something to me.
And then when I see him out there in the campaign trail saying things like, I think Ohio River Valley could be the next Silicon Valley, initially kind of laugh at him.
I'm thinking, well, we've got Cincinnati down there, but we don't have the infrastructure for all this neat tech stuff like Silicon Valley.
So I thought it was kind of a joke.
But what you guys know even better than me, given your background, perhaps, is have you ever noticed that all the nefarious people always kind of like to tell you what they're going to do, but they sort of do it like a genie.
It's not going to be Silicon Valley.
That's code for we're going to stick data centers up your tailpipe.
And I'm here to try to make you normies not realize you're getting screwed by it.
And also people don't have, people don't even realize, and it hasn't been implemented on a mass scale, but you were talking about subsidizing where in order to power and build the data centers themselves, they've been passing silent bills in your electric bill that says, well, this is what costs for your usage.
And actually plugging into the power system, but there's hidden fees that the meta is making a deal with the electric company to basically say, well, we'll subsidize this across all the people in this area and their bills will go higher.
Instead of Meta, who's got billions of dollars paying for that themselves, they get significant discounts.
Yeah, the simplest, nicest way to put it is you have to be very, very good at recognizing, shall I say, the con and the griffs and the chess game.
Let me, I'll tell you a story from my childhood to relate.
So the family of business growing up was a little country public golf course.
It's not like Donald's golf courses.
Sadly, it doesn't exist anymore.
But that's where we worked hard.
6 o'clock in the morning, 10 o'clock at night.
And as an entire kid, grew up there working there.
So I was in front of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people.
I don't even know my whole lifetime how many people I've seen.
And, you know, when you're exposed to that as a child and, you know, and young adult and growing up, working in the pro shop, you're exposed to everybody, blue collar, white collar, attorneys, doctors, traveling people, anything.
You know, and they drink too.
So you see people in different states telling stories.
Maybe they're trying to pull one over on you.
You know, you have people getting belligerent on the golf course that you have to confront.
You know, you might have vandalisms or you might have to go out in the middle of the night because the police are calling, somebody's breaking it or something.
So I get exposed to a lot.
And that gave me an incredible education in terms of human nature and reading people.
And then going beyond that, just in my own life in the car world, I love cool cars and fast cars, but I grew up building them and restoring them and doing it from nothing because I couldn't afford to just buy stuff.
You know, like for instance, the red motorcycle behind me looks really, real nice, Ducati.
I'm fixing up.
I got the tank off, but I bought it for $600.
I saw it wrecked in the corner of a body shop covered in dust and fixed it up.
I just say that because I understand what it takes to earn a dollar.
It's hard.
And a fool and their money is easily parted.
Yeah.
So, you know, I got a couple of nice things, but it didn't come from just blowing money.
It came from working with hands.
But what I'm going with it is in the car world, I'm kind of an anomaly being able to build this stuff and restore stuff.
What you do is you do get a lot of guys with big money and big ego.
Sentiment millionaires, billionaires, the works.
And in the racing world, big egos.
And so obviously politics exists.
Obviously, big players like that.
And automotive YouTube's nasty too.
And it's kind of funny because being in the realm of politics right now, sometimes online, I kind of think I'm like, you guys are soft.
Like automotive YouTube is way meaner than politics so far.
But what I'm going with it is to answer your question, I've seen a lot of cons, I've seen a lot of griffs, I've seen a lot of intimidation.
I've seen a lot.
And you have to know how to position yourself.
You have to know who to keep at arm's length, who to get rid of at all costs right away, and read people.
And it's a constant battle.
It's a never-ending tale of people wanting to take advantage of you, to compromise you, to push you around.
And the simple answer is I'm going to use every bit of my life's acumen to fight back on that because there is nothing on earth that any man can possibly give or do to me to change who I am.
There are no, there's just, there's nothing.
I don't want anything in life.
I just want to have a better tomorrow for literally all of us to just live.
And I want to get in and get the hell out.
I have no interest in being a career politician.
And that's the best way I can put it.
I also want to implore everybody that are normies doing things for the right reasons to run because you can.
If I'm a normie that works with my own two hands and still has to make a living, actually, I got to build some watches.
Like I actually still have to work for a living while doing this.
I don't get paid from the campaign.
I don't have any foreign packs giving me money or anything like that.
I encourage everyone to consider running because you can.
You can still do that.
And they say we get the government we deserve.
And I think we've all been way too complacent and had it way too good for too long and forgotten that we have to stand up and fight too.
What it looks like is this, it's a positive grind.
It's staying course.
It's getting the opportunity to go on podcasts such as this and speak with you guys, have real conversations.
Obviously, in every conversation or every tweet or every video I put out there, I can't possibly tell everybody all of my policies and all, but we'll get to it.
And then, so hopefully, people watch, they think, they'll read and give a consideration.
So it's just reaching as many people as possible and it's fighting.
And at the very least, just by the virtue of me being out here and bringing up these concerns, being something of an example and doing this, I think that's already having a positive effect for all of us to remind us what we can do and what we should accept or not accept.
I can't stomach any of the fraud going on across the board.
And we mentioned that relating to Somali potential, Haitian things, things like that across the board.
There has to be fraud relating to Medicare, Medicaid, that sort of thing.
I mean, that's a massive part of the Ohio budget.
If there's not something going on there, I'll eat my hat.
So it's just, it's attacking, attacking, attacking.
I mean, if you've got YouTubers going out and TikTokers going out and finding this, we sure as heck can find it in the government too and eradicate it, period.
You know, another thing that concerns me great is the nature of law.
Actually, your father and what happened there was something that hit me really hard when I saw that.
I go, we have no legal system in the United States.
This is complete crap that doesn't exist.
I hate it.
And that's a horrible thing that happened in your world.
But if you could consider any good coming out of it, it's something that stuck with me.
So I despise lawfare like it's nobody's business.
That's one thing to attack because if the legal system can't work the same for an individual, regardless of what their financial horsepower is, as it does for a corporation or anything else, then what law do we even have?
So is it right that a public defender for somebody can't do as good a job as a paid attorney?
That's not fair.
That's not balanced law in that regard.
So there's a lot of things with law that I don't like either.
The other thing that makes me nervous, and this may seem small, but I think this is very important, cultural heritage, cultural heritage sites.
It could be anything from a century-plus old farm to a racetrack.
I'll give you an example.
So over in Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh, they had a beautiful racing track, permanent facility, nice facilities, cart racing.
There's many cottage industries and business that exist because of this track, and it was a mainstay for the car culture and Pittsburgh area.
Data center, gone, muscled out.
Right?
If we don't do anything to protect our culture, whatever that may be for all of us, what are we going to have in the future?
Who are we?
Nothing.
Why are we doing nothing about that?
But the other thing, so data centers, right?
We talked about that.
I don't like them, or at least I don't like the way they're being done.
The fact of the matter is we're not going to just make them all go away.
This so-called new nuclear arms race of data centers and AI is happening.
But why can't we have leadership that has the courage to push back or at least have the foresight to do something so it can happen so it's in a net gain for the state rather than a net loss?
Why aren't the companies being part of building new power generation?
Whether it's we have amazing coal over there or whether it's nuclear, whatever it is, and I mean real power generation, not just BS political gamesmanship, as we've seen with other things.
But why shouldn't it be that if they're coming here, we're creating new power stations that people's electricity bills go down?
And why can't we have politicians that actually think in 10 years and 20 and 50 years in the future instead of just two and four year cycles?
I'm tired of that.
So it's a thought.
The other thing is industry.
This is something I thought I had today.
So my wife and Kiddo and I went out this morning, a little shopping and lunch.
And Toledo, Ohio was a beautiful Gilded Age city back in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
We have an unbelievable art museum because of it because we have a lot of natural gas.
And this area of Ohio offered free natural gas to companies that could come in and use it for a period of time.
That's why it's called the glass city.
They would build, they would make glass and crystal, and that's what they use natural gas for.
But Toledo's pretty depressed.
You know, we have factories with nothing in them.
You know, there are companies building, bringing new factories and such to places all over the United States, but not Ohio.
Why?
There's roadblocks.
There's things that make people go to any other state but here.
Those roadblocks have to be removed.
Because Ohio, whether you look at its Cleveland or Toledo or even Dayton, it's like having a garage with a full toolbox and everything you need to work on projects, but have no projects.
And see, what politicians, and this is typically leftist politicians like to do, they're like, we'll give you a project, but it's going to be a money loss project.
What we need to do is bring in projects, i.e. businesses and factories and such, manufacturing, where it's a net gain.
So we have to remove the roadblocks so that comes back for jobs.
And another point about us driving around, you know, there's some neighborhoods in Toledo that are not very nice.
Actually, we have some very, very dangerous neighborhoods and a lot of crime.
And I look around and I see these big, beautiful mansions.
When you get off the highway, you're going over, let's say you're going to go to St. V's, the hospital that's right in some of the most dangerous neighborhoods of all Toledo.
There's big, beautiful mansions there from the early 1900s, turn of the century.
And so you have to look and go, there was a time when this area was amazing.
What happened?
Manufacturing left.
It's gone.
It's gutted.
And so this is what happens.
And what scares me even more about that.
So if there's all these bad neighborhoods in Toledo because we have no manufacturing and no jobs, what's going to happen when AI takes away 40% or more of white-collar jobs?
You know, it makes sense what you're talking about, the policies, because California is dealing with that exact thing when you think about how Hollywood is functioning.
They've done so much damage to that industry just from policy alone that now other cities are incentivizing like Atlanta, for example.
Yeah, where all of them are now, it's more economic for them to create things in Atlanta and have that whole entire industry go over there.
And you're going to see those people benefit.
What are the things that you see when it comes to incentivizing these companies to come in and build Ohio up?
What are the lowest hanging or most important things that you feel like should be done for this?
And I don't want to go into all the points yet because I want to have it spot on, but it's twofold.
It's not just incentivizing because politicians and such, they love to just cut, cut, cut, incentivize, incentivize, incentivize to the point where it's like, are you really helping the state of the city or is this only helping the company?
So you got to strike that balance right.
But the biggest thing is removing some roadblocks.
We have to look at why companies will go to other places like, be it Texas or anywhere else, but not Ohio.
That needs to change right there with basic incentives can work.
But another detail, if I may.
So we think about data centers and such.
What can we do to make that a net gain for the state?
And we think about the manufacturing and actually bringing it back and removing the roadblocks and some incentivizer, which perhaps those two things can tie in together.
Because if you're actually doing long-term power plant building each year and you start offering lower energy costs, that helps.
But the other thing that we are not giving any credit to is the resource of our people.
You know, I hope this doesn't sound hokey because it's not.
Well over 100 years ago, there were two bicycle mechanics that built their own wind tunnel to test airfoils and built their first powered flight airplane at a time when they were using basically like canvas and wood and they had engines that were incredibly heavy for the amount of power they put out.
And that was done by bicycle mechanics.
What incentive, what help are we doing at all for anybody to create a new business or innovation?
Like look at me.
I build a car with my own two hands on the cheap in the shed that puts EVs to shame when car companies aren't doing that.
But there's no help.
There's no support.
There isn't even any place where you can rent industrial space inexpensively or have any kind of help or startup capital.
Nothing at all?
Yeah, I don't think so.
That doesn't work for me.
The other thing to think of is, you know, we have tariffs going on right now, right?
That's supposed to help bring manufacturing back to America.
Well, for the last year and a half, I've been building watches from Swiss components.
That's my little business right now.
And I even prototyped a watch that meets the NASA requirements for astronauts.
And we're doing the Artemis missions back to the moon over the next few years.
Well, where's the incentive?
Where's the help for anybody to start a new business?
Because I could start a watch company here back in Ohio like we had 100 years ago, but there isn't any.
So that's something where I see that government is failing at.
I don't think our government cares about its people at all anymore.
I think they just see us as a battery in the maintenance matrix and an enemy and a nuisance.
But I see people as the one thing first and foremost that I care about, period.
The state is only a grouping of all its people and then it's land.
We've got to protect the land and we have to protect the people and we have to give them the opportunity to create their best future.
And we've got to get rid of the roadblocks so manufacturing and industry come back.
And then we've got to have leaders who think beyond their terms, think about the people because they are one and have the actual cojones and mind to stand up for what's in the best interest of the state and not just let big tech bros take advantage of us for data centers.
But at the end of the day, we still have to stand up and we still have to run.
So I implore everybody to think about that, to do it.
You know, me as a young man growing up in my 20s, my grandfather was a really amazing man.
You know, he was battle vocal in our World War II, graduated Ohio State in 1950 on the GI Bill, was an optometrist.
Didn't miss a home game for 50 years.
Really neat guy, really cared.
And he would always tell me about politics and send me things and what's going on and who's tied into what.
You know, in my 20s, I just wanted to build cool cars and chase pretty girls.
But as you grow and you build a family and you're more part of a community, you get roots down, you have to care.
No matter how good your life is right now, you have to care because I can promise you the government is only slowly more quickly and I'll make it worse.
She's a woman who's more than five months pregnant.
And sometimes if I leave, I just say, you know, the bread is there and the Glock is there.
Racket and rock if you need to.
It'll be the loudest thing you ever heard.
So when a normal woman who's pregnant is in the position of having to think of things like that, you know, and be with you steadfast, that's an incredible person.
You know, my wife, if my grandmother was around, you know, a World War II grandmother, she would be proud.
So that's awesome.
You know, in terms of work-life balance, I mean, it's challenging.
I grew up in a family that is self-employed.
So we're accustomed to working long hours and maybe not always seeing a direct reward.
I am not better off in any way for having done this, but I have to do this because there's too much at stake.
So, how it goes is this: the time that I have beyond just existing and living, and hopefully, I put on deodorant and took a shower today.
I'm there for my daughter, there for my wife, as much as humanly possible, to be a husband and a father.
And then it's this.
And then I just try to do the best I can to look after myself because if I fall apart, that's not going to be good.
But what has to be done has to be done.
And, you know, the sacrifices made pale in comparison to the sacrifices that many men in the United States of America have made before.
You know, I think it's wrong, frankly, that we live in a state and a country where, you know, I spent the last 11 years of my life not getting paid, mentoring young engineers, helping them get amazing jobs everywhere from Lockheed, Martin, even Tesla to, you know, GM and Ford and a whole host of other things, helping young people, but there's no support.
No support at all.
Are you kidding me?
I'm picking up what I'm fixing what's wrong with the American educational system.
There's no support to better society.
I've gotten a Lifetime Achievement Award from President Trump, one from Joe Biden.
I even got a fly with the Thunderbirds, but no support.
I built an over 100 mile a gallon diesel car that Al Accelerates, Madaj Viper, and has a lower carbon footprint per mile than an EV.
No support.
Like I can build a watch company tomorrow here in Ohio and supply all the astronauts with watches instead of giving that to the Swiss.
There's no support.
So I've spent 44 years of my life just trying to live a life, be a solid American, build a family, be cool with my community, help people, build a better tomorrow.
But it's like the society we're living in is that scene from the first Star Wars where they try to escape through the garbage chute and the walls are closing in.
And I'm pissed.
Like, you know, maybe I'm just like a wild animal.
It's like you put me in a cage.
I'm going to chew my way out.
And right now, this is the best place that I felt that I could apply myself.
And I'm going to keep going.
And that's all I'm ever going to do: I'm always going to look at the system at hand, whether it's an old car I'm trying to fix, the government, anyway, just relationships with people.
I'm going to look at whatever that system is and I'm going to see where it's off and how to fix it.
And I'm going to try to fix it.
And I just can't sit down and say silent anymore, guys.
If there's something that you could basically say, like, if you died like today, or let's say even in the future, like, what do you feel like would be like, my life is complete?
This is the mission I've accomplished while I'm here on Earth.
Because you do a lot of things.
I mean, you're employing people.
You're inventing.
You're now running for office.
But like, a lot of those things have different priorities.
But what do you feel like is your anchor point that you're like, okay, this is Casey.
Let me see if I can answer it like this, if this gives you the insight you're looking for.
You know, what Genus Garage, the nonprofit I've done for 11 years, it frankly really bothers me a lot that I haven't been able to plug it in for ongoing support.
You know, I think when I started that when I was, I don't know, my early 30s, I was a little naive because I thought since I knew the formula to pick up the slack from the American educational system and do the skills bridge to industry.
And I knew that it would help industry and business.
I knew that it would help school because the best would want to come to the school associated.
And I knew it even helped cottage sort of hobbies like historic racing and aviation and such like that to make it relevant.
I knew it was just a win across the board, but I was naive to understand how the world actually works.
And just because people say they want something or it should be something doesn't mean they actually really want it.
And so it bothers me that I haven't been able to make that work yet.
And when I talked to people in the past about how like, I don't know if I keep, I can't keep doing this anymore.
Like I've got a family now.
I can't give a thousand hours away for free to people I don't know just because I'm trying to make the future better.
It feels like a failure to me because I wanted to get it to where that it could exist and grow without me.
But if it only lives or die with me and it only exists because of the work I put into it, rather than even just being neutral, it's like me helping people comes to the detriment of myself, then it feels like a failure to me.
To other people, remind me, they say, Casey, think of all the people you've helped.
Think about the, you know, 100 plus students you've directly met and helped get jobs.
And think of the tens of thousands or hundreds thousands or whatever you reached on YouTube.
And that's nice, but if I'm gone, it doesn't matter.
So I guess in terms of a legacy, how I look at it, and I hope other people look at it is we need to plant seeds for trees that we won't get to sit under the shade of.
And we need to do it in a way that they'll be able to grow even without us.
So I wasn't spending my whole life trying to be this polished, professional, just right character to be a politician.
You know, I'm a real guy, but I think you can see my track record of what I've done and built.
And at the end of the day, I think that actually matters when you've got somebody who cares and is putting in the work to actually create a structure that matters for everybody's best interest.
Okay, it was having Casey in here because he had he had a setting that was turned off, and software didn't recognize when it when I tried to turn that setting back on, but totally fine.
Although, I think I'm lifting at home now instead of a commercial gym.
But I lifted and I did like one set of bench and it was really good.
So I did like 155 or like 15 or whatever it was.
And I didn't do it.
And I come back in there Wednesday and I did like a full push.
I did six sets.
I did three sets of bench press, three sets of overhead press.
I literally cannot move my arms to my ears.
The reason why it took me so long to get ready before we went live when I switched shirts is like I was trying to get the thing behind because I literally can't go any farther than this right now.
But like in general, you know, we try to have guests that bring different perspectives.
And honestly, you know, a big thing for the guys that are running, these grassroot guys, it's very important that they get on shows like this and be able to talk in front of people because it gives you that human feel, that human touch that everybody just wants nowadays.
And, you know, it is a little bit of a David versus Goliath.
I mean, Vivek is a billionaire.
I mean, he's got a lot of money to throw at a lot of shows, a lot of things.
He also was running for presidency.
So he has that extra like wind behind him.
And it just, you know, having this means a lot, even to us, just to be able to have different perspective than just the mainstream.
We'll talk about Vivek and Casey, but then you look at like Byron and James over in Florida.
You look at the signatorial race there.
And, you know, with the big money, with the big backers, with the big endorsement, whether that's Byron or it's Vivek, I feel like there's almost, you know, not from them directly.
I'm sure they're very like focused on running and whatnot, but from their campaign, from the administration, whatever you want to call it, there's almost like this like, oh, we don't have to talk to everyone because we got the money to run.
But at the end of the day, I mean, you can see grassroots guy still working for himself.
He's still trying to make a living for him and his family.
And he's trying to do this on top.
So we got to give a man his flowers at the end of the day.
Thank you guys for tuning in.
We are not done, though.
Every single Sunday, for people who do not know, we do a deep dive because the gray area is different than most shows in which we're not just doing commentary.
We're not just doing commentary.
We're not just doing interviews.
We actually like to take a little segment on Sundays and give you guys more of an educational thing, but in an interesting way that you never thought about.
And you will learn something tonight because what we're going to be covering shortly here is the Iraq war.
And the reason why I want to cover the Iraq war is because all the crazy talk with Iran and all the conflict and all the things that are going up, it's about time we unpack the laundry there and talk about the specifics of the context of what actually led to it, what happened, but then also kind of the gray area takes to understand the nuances that aren't really being broadcasted widely.
So that way you have more context.
So you're not going to want to go anywhere.
We're taking a short, like one minute, two minute intermission, not very long.
Do not go anywhere.
You are not going to miss.
You're not going to want to miss this.
We appreciate every single viewer that is on here tonight.
But before we even talk about America, our involvement, we actually have to talk about Iraq itself, especially the man himself, Saddam Hussein, who actually formally took the office in 1979.
But look, he's the guy behind the scenes that's making all the power, but he wasn't a good guy, dude.
No, not at all.
You know, on certain levels, we're like, all right, you know, America went in there and we toppled the government.
But I'm going to be honest, even though we made the situation kind of worse on certain aspects, it wasn't that much better of a situation under Saddam Hussein.
And he basically centralized all of the power under one uniparty authoritarian state.
And so he had like vast intelligence networks spying on people.
He had a culture of surveillance.
He was doing a whole lot.
And the military was personally tied to him at the same time.
And during the Iraq-Iran war, which is the real big deal, not a lot of people know about, I think four and a half million Iranian citizens died in that conflict.
In context, we first need to look at the man who raised him.
Saddam Hussein Al-Majid Al-Takriti was born in 1937 near Tikrit and arose through the Ba'ath Party as an enforcer.
Come 1968, he was suitably up there in the hierarchy that he was able to help engineer the coup that removed President Abdurrahman Arif from power.
Then in 1979, following the abdication of President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and the acquisition of considerable power behind the scenes, Saddam took his place and he'd keep it for 24 years, all the way until 2003.
And he started how he meant to continue absolutely brutally.
You see, near days into his presidency, Saddam convened a party congress where he read out a list of supposed traitors who, one by one, were dragged from the hall and immediately put against a wall and shot.
And what would you know it?
They all just happened to be people who may have threatened his position once the initial honeymoon period of his ascendancy had worn off.
And this became a common theme of his rule.
Dissent of any kind was nipped in the bud also very quickly, brutally, and with overwhelming force.
Take the town of Jail as an example.
I was there in 1982.
He had 148 people massacred following a failed assassination attempt and he bulldozed 250,000 acres of orchards to leave the survivors destitute.
Shal dude, what the f ⁇ ?
Salt the earth while you're at it, bro.
Externally, he plunged Iraq into the eight-year Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 1988, a meat grinder that may have killed somewhere in the region of 1.5 million people across both sides.
And what's worse, when the tide turned against his favor, he had his forces deploy chemical munitions, mustard gas and nerve agents, not just on.
Guys, do you understand how fortunate like, Rex, sometimes I, when I go and watch the content, when I go and do the deep dives, it makes me so grateful that I was born in America.
It happened as part of the 1987 to 1989 Anfal campaign against the Kurds, a calculated program of mass terror designed to quash Kurdish aspirations of statehood and bring them back to heal under Baghdad's foot, with the foul high point of the whole campaign being the 1988 Khalabja massacre, where as many as 5,000 were killed and twice that number were injured again in the single chemical attack.
The death toll for the whole campaign was somewhere between 50 and 182,000, depending on who you ask.
And then in August 1990, he started another war when he invaded neighboring Kuwait in the hopes of seizing the nation's sizable oil reserves that would allow him to right the Iraqi economy, which had been absolutely devastated by the Iran-Iraq war.
Does that, however, proved to be a little bit of a strategic misstep because as part of Operation Desert.
It makes a lot more sense from the perspective of like the American military trying to get a scalp, you know, and trying to show off what they could do.
We did steamroll, you know, and the insurgency was a real problem.
And we ended up being worse than when we got in there.
But, you know, we were able to, you know, take Saddam out.
So it speaks to the power of the American military, you know, even just a couple decades ago.
But the thing is, is when you've got that much power, it leads to circumstances.
And the important thing that we have to pay attention to is that, like in 1979, when Iran has its Islamic revolution and the Shah is replaced, and then you got the Ayatollah Khomeini, it's instilled.
Basically, Saddam sees this as a threat, right?
So then he goes in and he says, Well, Iraq, I mean, Iraq has Shiite majority, and the population is ruled by the Sunni elite.
So then a revolutionary, you know, Shiite theocracy next door could destabilize Iraq internally.
So he's like, All right, we got to do something about this.
So then there's a territorial dispute.
Go to the next, just click over here, go to the next image here.
But the shot Shahat al-Arab, whatever the name of this waterway is, I can point to it right here on the screen.
It's this guy right here with the dotted line.
If you guys can see this, this was a major area of dispute, right?
In the 1980, Iraq decides to invade Iran and Saddam expects a quick victory.
But the whole thing is, is this waterway between Iran and Iraq is extremely important because it leads for trade, all types of things to the Arab Gulf.
And the whole thing is, is if you control this river, you control a lot of the trade that goes throughout the entire country itself.
And you can see this river goes both into Iran and it goes into Iraq.
So they've been disputing this area for a very long time up until this conflict.
So then, you know, you've got Saddam.
He's like, all right, let's go in there.
And he's like, just like he, you know, it's kind of like Russia, where they thought they were just going to go in and win a quick victory.
And instead, the war lasts literally eight years, eight years.
So, you know, he says, okay, well, they're producing too much oil.
You know, the slant drilling that's happening in the Iraqi oil fields and there's certain overlaps of where they're drilling the oil and controversy over that.
And then refusing to forgive the war debt, he's like, all right, I'm not paying this back.
So, what ends up happening is oil prices kept falling, which meant Iraq couldn't pay its debt.
That was a big thing as well.
So, Saddam invades because he wants to stabilize the oil prices.
Because if Kuwait produces more, oil prices continue to come down because there's more supply out there.
So, he's like, All right, well, it's I can kill two birds with one stone.
And so, basically, what he does is he invades, and there's an international response immediately.
And we'll cut to us, but go ahead and pull this.
Go ahead and pull this video up because it's about to talk about, well, it's going to let's actually cover it, go to the next photo first.
And it's going to talk about the attack that happened during the Persian Gulf War, right?
So, Saddam invades, the international response happens, and then you've got the United Nations, which starts to authorize force.
And then in 1991, you know, the U.S. coalition, they launch an operation.
And I'm sure everybody's heard of this one.
It's called Operation Desert Storm, right?
And this is where you get the one that everybody talks about, like the planes coming in, and we killed all the people down there and all that type of stuff.
I mean, look, it shows you this discrepancy between the United States and keep in mind, it wasn't just the U.S. Daddy says, let's go in there and everybody else follows behind him.
And the UN is pretty much led by America, let's be honest.
And crucially, the offensive began well before 2000.
After the first Gulf War, the United Nations voted to implement a massive sanctions package against Iraq, the largest ever of its kind.
Side note, China and the Soviet Union voted with the U.S. for this proposal.
Can you imagine that today?
Yeah, history was super ended.
But also, yes, Saddam was that bad.
Anyways, under President George H.W. Bush, the U.S. largely adhered to the U.N. sanctions goal, compliance, getting Saddam to comply with conditions and dismantle a number of Iraqi weapons programs.
But when Bill Clinton beat Bush in the 1992 elections, the purpose of the sanctions changed.
Even after Iraq's weapons programs had largely been dismantled, compliance basically achieved, Clinton continued to press the sanctions to devastating effect on the Iraqi state.
Barred from exporting its only major product, oil, Iraq's economy collapsed.
Compliance was no longer the goal.
In the words of Madeline Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State, quote, we're talking about regime change.
And thanks to the sanctions, the regime was changing, but not in the way Albright seemed to mean.
Until recently, Iraq had been a top-down style autocracy, but the embargoes and economic collapse transformed it into a web of clientelistic patronage and corruption.
As state capacity dwindled, its regular functions transformed into black market transactions.
In a word, the Iraqi state was diminished, a shadow of its former self.
Decreasing Saddam Hussein's maniacal hold on power is cause for celebration, but the collapse of a state hurts far more than the strongman.
Following reports that excess deaths from starvation and illness increased dramatically in the 1990s, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of children dying as the public health sector proved unable to cope, Albright replied, We think the price is worth it.
We punish people with the sanctions, even if it has like a negative outcome.
But the thing I noticed from all that was like China, Russia, and the U.S. agree on something.
Like, when does that ever happen in the modern era?
It speaks to the fact that if you're going to do whether you want to call it regime change or like a good war or you want to do like a military intervention, whatever you want to call it, you have to have global goodwill to make something like that happen.
And everything that's been done now, we operate like we're still in the 90s, but we don't have these big, you know, silent partners that are, you know, and I'm willing to overlook something.
And I'm going to be honest, we label Russia and China as enemies fine, but they're not nearly doing anything comparative to what Saddam was doing, where you can definitively say, this guy is bad.
We need to take care of him.
Like, we need like something needs to happen.
Otherwise, a lot of people are going to be in trouble and they're going to suffer.
But then the problem is, is the United States doesn't think critically of the long-term impacts.
And we're like, you know what?
Let's just make these decisions that hurt everybody that's in the region.
And that is why sometimes I'm like, you know what?
This makes me appreciate America just a little bit more living inside of it because me not being able to, me, you know, having groceries cost a little bit more or significant more, depending on who you, who you talk to, is nothing comparative to getting gassed by your own freaking country, having extreme amount of sanctions to where like your inflation goes up dramatically overnight to the point where it's not even manageable.
And I think I agree with your assessment from the perspective.
We really have to realize how good we still have things here.
We need to preserve that.
We don't need to have the fallout into total hell world.
In a lot of places around the world, the reason why they're willing to cooperate with each other and make things better is not because they're not tribal, not because people aren't in different factions naturally and don't have interests relative to who they are and who their nation is.
But people have realized because millions of them have died in various conflicts around the world.
This is too costly.
It doesn't make sense.
We have to work together.
That's why a lot of people had issue with you saying like global conflict has gone down over the past century or whatever the statistic was.
And you know, I thought about it a lot.
I do agree with you, right?
Now, is it more dangerous to have proxy wars and have super weapons and have things that could spiral out of control?
Sure, you could make that argument.
And I probably would make that argument, but across the world, people really just want to live together and they want to live in peace.
And now you can go ahead and get this other video that's prepped.
But, you know, all of these circumstances prime us for like some of the other attacks that come after that, where you've got the United States actually getting directly involved.
By the way, the United States isn't even in a all-out war with Iraq at this point.
That doesn't happen until 2003.
But at the same time, even before then, after 9-11, 9-11 is the big one.
Right.
And then you've got the whole conflict that happens with the Twin Towers.
And then we go into Afghanistan, but it set a tone for us.
And we shift towards a policy of prevention for the very first time.
Well, not the first time, but again, getting to that escalation point where we're like, all right, if there's even a small chance that there's like a risk to America or something else that could happen, we're going to eliminate it early.
So I'll go into that briefly before we get into this clip because it's key for people to understand.
There was this woman and she was a member of like a Kuwaiti royal family or something like this.
But she, it came out later, basically.
The CIA told her what to say.
And she went to testify before Congress, before the, I'm not sure before which committee, but it's a very famous hearing.
And she goes, I was working in the hospital doing volunteer work in Kuwait, and I saw the Iraqi soldiers come in and take the babies out of the incubators and throw them on the floor and kill them.
So it's like, all right, you and I and the rest of us watching this, because I'm sure there's a lot of people who are primarily here in America.
Don't even have a reference point to understand what it feels like to have a missile blow up not even half a mile away from your house and the shaking of your house, the windows imploding.
Oh, and we've talked about this before, but like, um, I mean, we we operate the same way sometimes the Israelis do.
Like, if there's a guy that we need to go in, Israelis are more uh that they're really more aggressive about the U.S. collateral damage, the collateral damage is uh, it's like one one group to save the multitude of people.
So they'll level out a whole building, kill 500 people, and it's justified just to go after one guy.
We're like, all right, we're going to go in there.
We're going to make it fast.
And I mean, the regime collapses pretty quickly.
I mean, Baghdad falls within weeks.
And so, you know, on the whole, the whole thing, it looks like Desert Storm, but it's even faster and it's more overwhelming.
And you got to remember, like, at this point, Saddam's like military is already kind of in disarray.
Like, between the time that you go to war with Iran, between the time that you go and invade Kuwait, and then you're constantly having these conflicts over the next like nine to 10 years, there's no way you can really defend yourself against America.
It just, it's so historically poignant and relevant to what's happening right now, Tim, which is why, of course, we're doing the deep dive.
The American attack is always a two-pronged attack.
We attack you conventionally through like applying weapon systems around you or launching an invasion or doing whatever we're going to do, electronic warfare, you name it.
But the real weapon, the real cudgel that the West has always had, that America's always had since World War II is the Bretton Woods Agreement, is the petro dollar, is the fact that you pay for things in dollars and we will not give you the means to make more dollars.
I mean, it just, it reminds me so much of what's going on today.
And like we talked about earlier, we've spent so much of that social and political and economic capital over the years that now, you know, it's a one-two punch.
You have Biden, he weaponizes Swift and they make SIPs, right?
You have Trump, he weaponizes the tariff, and then they start trading with each other.
And we're going to a point now where the American military power is going to have to oppose and make up for the lack in American economic influence or soft power.
And it's a percentage gradient of when does that efficiency of what America is able to deal with drop below 50%.
And then the world views us as actually being able to do nothing.
Because right now it's like, oh, we can be in Venezuela.
Bremer, a graduate of Phillips Andover Academy, Yale and Harvard, whose father was president of Christian Dior Perfumes, cut a stark contrast with Garner.
And he had an equally different vision of what Iraq needed.
Guarantee you that guy got in there because he had some family connections, some backdoor opportunities or whatever.
But we decide because he goes into the room.
Somebody is buddy buddy with him, might have had some connection to Bush because obviously people who are also in presidency have businesses and other things that they're involved in before they get into power, by the way.
And they like to do business with their friends.
Okay.
So he says, sir, sir, I can do it for you.
And then we reward that guy because he's a yes man.
But the guy who was qualified, who actually had been in the military, had probably seen a lot of the mistakes that we have done in the past.
He's probably been through Vietnam.
He's probably been through the Korean War.
He's probably, I don't know how old he was.
He's probably been through most of those conflicts in which he saw this is what we need to do.
Well, I think the thing is, you know, I've been re-watching some of my dad's old documentaries on stream and he makes the point that ignorance is the greatest weapon, right?
Because ignorance, a person that's ignorant will even do worse things than a person that's evil because they just don't know, right?
The law of the universe is kind of entropy and things tend towards chaos, right?
So you have a guy, like you say, he's establishment, but he's good establishment.
He understands the cost of human life.
He understands logistics.
He understands the military and what it is.
And they get rid of that guy, probably because he said it's their country.
It's their oil.
And they bring in the son of a fashion executive who literally knows nothing.
And it's just frustrating because I see the parallel today.
Do you know how many people are in our government right now that have nothing to do with politics, have nothing to do with actually knowing the knowledge of what it takes to do their specific jobs?
What the hell does Marco Rubio know about being the Secretary of State and dealing with things internationally?
My dad calls it this lot straight out of central casting, right?
Instant classic, like, I'm not saying that person's a PDF file, but if you're going to cast him in a movie, Central Casting, that's what they would look like.
Just like if you were going to cast some like greasy slime ball guy that was going to like sell out millions of people to get murdered for the government, you'd probably cast this guy, right?
Straight from central casting.
And they want to find someone that you ever hear the phrase like an empty suit, Tim, like, oh, that guy's just an empty suit.
He just represents an interest, right?
That's what they want.
They want someone that's literally just like a Sims NPC.
They can put an outfit on and they will do the will of the deep state.
And this is this is also a part of the insane population or fired and banned from public employment, despite Garner's warning that it would cripple the state and the CIA Baghdad station chiefs that it would put, quote, 50,000 people on the street, underground, and mad at Americans.
Shortly thereafter, Bremer met with President Bush to request permission to expand his purge.
And, quote, you can get rid of an army in a day, but it takes years to build one.
On May 23rd, less than two weeks in Iraq, Bremer followed through with the second decree of his term.
With the stroke of a pen, he rendered 400,000 men, either young and healthy or old and respected, but all trained in violence and many armed out of a job.
And because he has no reference point to experience or has probably only been out of the country just to be on vacation in some nice tropical island and not actually see what it's like on the ground for the people that actually exist there.
First of all, firing 400,000 soldiers, not all of those people actually believe in what Saddam wanted to do.
Got a bunch of guys and they're standing around in like a dusty area and they all have guns, and then one guy with like a bigger beard starts holding up his gun and goes, I am the new leader.
And then they're all like yes, and then like literally, that's how.
That's how human beings work, like anywhere right, and and the orders come from top down.
So if he doesn't understand the nuances, it doesn't matter.
I guess you know.
I guess it doesn't matter because it's not his family right, because it's not his friends, because it's not his country right, because it's not anything to do with what immediately impacts him, and he's so far removed from the decision, just like most of our politicians and people in control.
They're so far removed from reality.
They think a stroke of a pen means everything and it's just gonna solve problems.
It's the magic genie in a bottle, the pen yes, and disgusting we.
If you like the message of the show, if you like what we're doing here, if you love what Tim's doing with the deep dives as I, I really do follow True As and Tim on x and repost the stream 100.
That's what they do, because a reasonable person, a military professional so, that's been trained in the schools and has seen the combat, or someone that's like no, a business owner, understands how things are supposed to be run.
We're not going to spend a trillion dollars on this.
We're not going to go.
Let uh, a half million people out of their job and when they have a gun and they're angry and they're going to blame the Us.
I don't hide that the worst part about this is the same people that were in the military that got laid off.
Do you know where they went?
Some of them went home.
They were like, damn, i'm out of a job, i'm not making money.
Other people were so angry they ended up going to terrorist groups themselves.
The reason why ISIS exists guys, is because of this vacuum that we created, because in 2011, when you had ISIS formed and you had all these things going on, it was because a lot of the people that were in charge in Isis were also top military officials.
True, they were the guys that were like damn, I just got screwed over by America, so I better do something about this right?
Other groups joined Al-Qaeda.
Other groups joined this terrorist group this, this militia group, and it becomes the wild west.
But here's the thing, Rex: it's one beautiful feedback loop.
If we create the problem and then rejection solution, then we get to create the solution, and then the solution creates another problem, which allows us to create another solution.
And then if you look at not just that, if you can't tell who the enemy is, we have a policy where it's just like kill anything that looks suspicious.
That's why you have very high-qualified immunity for it, right?
So imagine all the people that have innocently died because of the fact that these people are smart.
And we didn't learn how to adapt our strategy.
You know what we ended up doing instead?
We just started carpet bombing places.
We decided, well, let's just take a missile and blow up the whole area since we can't distinguish the difference between a civilian versus a military personnel.
And you could say, yeah, global conflict has gone down because of stuff like that and the threat of like, you know, real quick into the planet.
But these, these conflicts that have erupted in the real, call the name of the show is a gray area, but a real gray area, you know, and like who is the combatant?
Who is the ally?
Who is the soldier?
Who is the hostile in the situation?
It's created an environment where I think Americans are willing to sign off on wars because there's that ambiguity of like, oh, we didn't know.
And the environment that we're fighting in, it's civilized, first world, organized, clear roads, clear distinction of where cities are, how things are going.
And I'm not saying all these places aren't developed.
Honestly, Iraq has a lot of developed cities and stuff.
But at the same time, there's also a different environment.
Vietnam was the worst out of all of them, by the way.
Vietnam, I mean, absolutely.
The North Vietnamese said, let's go out into the countryside.
But you know, the pompousness of us, the arrogance, we think because we won in World War II that every other war is going to be the exact same in Iraq, even in Afghanistan.
One of the major reasons why we lost is because of terrain.
It was the same thing with Vietnam.
It's the same thing that happened in Korea.
There's so many reasons with the terrain that makes it difficult to operate as a soldier.
Oh, and when I, when we say civil, I mean, it's also civil.
We haven't even compared some of the other time periods where people were not as restraint as we were in a better sense, where they just killed millions of people.
But again, you're comparing like an evil to a lesser evil.
I don't want to get into bad, both bad.
But what I'm just saying is, is America doesn't moves too quickly.
I mean, moves too slowly to adapt to the actual current circumstances.
And the people that actually live there have a desire to, like you said, they want the country free so they know how to adapt their war tactics.
And it just, that's the main thing.
So this is the gray area take.
These are the things that I like to cover because I really thought about it.
I'm like, why did we lose these wars?
Why do we consider them like they'll go there and they'll preach?
Well, it was a military success.
And you spend all this money and you spend all these resources.
And you're like, well, why can't we ever beat the enemy?
I mean, this is the thing is like, how long can an American campaign of destruction from the air cow a nation?
I think we're rapidly approaching a time where that won't be the case, but I think we're still maybe in that time because I think that when we go in there eventually, when we do start the bombing campaign, whatever happens, we're going to see footage.
And we should just have this moment where we all come together and we all want peace.
And I think we're approaching that, right?
Because 100%.
We talk to people like Casey.
Casey cares about Americans.
He cares about, you know, I think peace.
We didn't talk about war with him, but I think you would have the same example.
And really, just the people that people that voted for Trump, people that didn't vote for Kamala or for Biden because they thought Trump was going to be pro-peace.
I mean, that's my big, that's my biggest gripe with Trump.
That's why I voted for him is because like, I'm tired of these wars, man.
I'm tired of seeing the death and the destruction.
Even if you can make an argument as to like, oh, we're going to help out the region.
We got to do it for our interests.
Blah, blah, blah.
It's like, well, you're going to kill a bunch of people and you're doing it in our name with our money.
Well, and let me bring a little bit of white pill into this because I also don't like always being black pill.
When America is on the right side of history, guys, we have dramatically changed the course of the entire planet for better.
There are more countries that used to be third world, world war, I'm sorry, world countries, which is not a correct term anymore because we got to be politically correct.
But countries that were third world before are now being elevated to second world and the second world's going into first world.
And it's because of the technological advances that have come from America as well as other countries, but especially America, because all of the mixing pot of people and the ideas and the things and inventions where people had the freedom to actually express and do the thing to actually build the technology.
Other countries wouldn't let them.
Other countries wouldn't let you just decide that I want to open up a business one day, Rex, and that I want to go out there and start something and make a name for myself and maybe help some people in the process.
The American government owns stock in American companies.
The Chinese government owns stock in Chinese companies.
The only difference between it, and they give subsidies the same, and it's all the same old thing.
Only difference is the American government, they say, oh, it's a free market, so anyone can succeed in China.
They go, yeah, we're the Communist Party and we work with the big companies and work with the little ones too.
And I just, I see it as very hypocritical for us as Americans to like say that we're any different from any of these, you know, kind of like structured or multi-level economies because we live in one.
We live in an economy that benefits, you know, big corporate interests that are connected to the government in the same way that these other nations do.
I just, I think that we as Americans, like, if we're going to do these things, if our government is going to do these things, let's at least not be hypocritical about it.
We're actually going to watch the whole thing because it's very important to understand the amount of money in the gray area of who actually made money behind it.
This is going to shock you guys, but it's also not going to shock you guys.
The American troops had to scrape and scrap for everything while other guys were getting rich, while companies like Halliburton were getting no big contracts.
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Private companies made an estimated $140 billion from the conflict, securing lucrative contracts in private security, reconstruction, and oil production.
War should be a last resort, and it should be something that we try to end as quickly as possible.
It shouldn't be a bonanza for scumbags to come in and get rich.
And that's what we saw.
We saw scumbags and grifters come in and get rich off a rock while we lost our legs and our friends.
So that cuts to maybe the most outrageous part of America's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is that some people gave everything and others got rich.
They want the war to go on so they can make more money and buy champagne.
That cuts to the core of how unequal it was and how dangerous it was for our national security to have the profit motive introduced on a level we've never seen before.
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Major American combat operations in Iraq eventually wound down in December 2011.
The war cost taxpayers an estimated $2 trillion.
But the cost to Americans went way beyond the dollars spent.
Approximately 4,500 U.S. service members would be killed in action.
Tens of thousands would come home injured, some of them gravely, missing limbs, suffering from traumatic brain injuries, racked by post-traumatic stress.
We're really good at paying to send people to war.
We're really bad at bringing people home and taking care of them once they get back.
Guys like Paul Wolfowitz and Don Rumsfeld said you go to war with the army you have.
That's right.
And then you come home to the VA you have.
And when I went to war with the army we had, I came home to the VA we had, which was a VA that didn't know how to take care of women, didn't know how to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, didn't know about roadside bombs, didn't know about ear injuries and the other kinds of wounds we were facing.
And already we've lost more people to suicide than we've lost on the ground in a look at this number, guys.
They get Jesse Waters out there to talk about the attack helicopter and how cool it is.
And that's the thing.
It's like, I don't understand how anyone can be pro-conflict when you look at numbers like this.
And it's like, you see, these people are as Ben Shapiro or Mark Levin.
And they're like, we're going to invade.
We're going to do it.
We're going to crush them.
It's like, you're not going to do anything.
You're going to make some young, like 24-year-old guy from Iowa pull a trigger on someone and then he's going to shoot himself in a hotel room four years later.
PTSD isn't like something light because at the end of the day, when you're in a zone and you're constantly experiencing stressors, it has a psychological effect on you that's almost irreversible sometimes if you aren't given the proper treatment to address it.
In all of these conflicts, we're talking about Agent Orange, 2.5 million total people exposed to very dangerous organophosphoid phosphorus type compounds.
And the American government just covers that up.
I mean, my great uncle, my grandma's brother died of pneumonia very early because he had been exposed to that stuff and it had gotten in his lungs.
But that's a non-issue.
They don't care about that.
They don't care about any of the people negatively impacted by war.
Definitely not what it's like, but let's go ahead and continue.
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Iraq and Afghanistan, and we will lose many more in the decades to come in the vacuum left by the removal of Saddam's regime and the end of a major U.S. military presence.
Extremism flourished and many more lives would be lost.
So you get ISIS after about 10 or 11 years of the crisis caused by the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
This is what happens when there is a shadow agenda, a shadow America that benefits one group of people at the expense of the greater good.
All they need is for you not to pay attention.
All they need is for you not to know where America's sons and daughters are dying or how much money they spend on a weapon system or where they're deploying troops.
They hope you don't pay attention.
If you don't pay attention, that's how this happens.
Well, and you think about it, and it's just like, you think about even if we had like fat wally people here and everyone was like 400 pounds, if we just spent that money at home giving people food instead of using it to kill people, you can't tell me it's not a better outcome.
You can't tell me people wouldn't like us more.
You can't tell me that we wouldn't be better off.
It's just why are we the people that have gotten used to like the most, I won't say the lowest, but the most degraded standard of living, you know, over the past 20 or 30 years as to what we expected.
And nothing that they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Well, is that not what we're doing 30 years later in the region?
We're trying to prevent history from repeating itself.
But also, you know, we're the next generation and people, you know, there might be older people watching.
There might be younger people watching.
It's a mix.
But at the end of the day, like we are all collectively the next group of people that will eventually get into positions of power, get into positions of authority, actually steer the ship the way that it needs to go.
And as you have younger people exposed to the ideas and the content is out there, people start latching onto the idea, like, maybe, maybe this isn't the way.
Maybe this isn't the way that things should be in society.
And I'm sure a lot of people have been paying attention to all of this.
It's a lot of work, guys, for me to spend the hours doing the research, putting everything together and giving it to you guys in a succinct way that allows you to be educated.
But we're willing to do these things because knowledge is power, but also at the same time, we want to be able to have something that's different than the rest of the shows.
We're not on here talking about Fort Waltuca, Wakahaka, like Candace Owens.
We're not out here trying to rage bait you, try to say, like, oh, we, we got to kill them all.
We got to, we got to get all the these people out.
We got to get all those people out.
You know, it's like we don't, we don't need to push that slop.
So this is a safe space for you guys to get something different and refresh your brain because honestly, it can get exhausting if you're hearing the same thing from a different show.
You go watch another show.
They're kind of have their own flavor or twists, but like it's all the same.
Like, I mean, we've said it before.
What's the real true difference between a Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens in certain aspects?
I mean, you look at someone like Tim Poole and it's like, oh, well, you know, I got valuable information from Tim Pool.
Tim Poole read that news headline out to me and covered that story.
That's great.
But ultimately, are you going to watch a show where a guy who's 40 years old who hides his bald head with the beanie sits there at Mr. Heavy Metal and Division Butt's teacher, and they talk about the Tibetan fox and why it has Asiatic eyes to cover up for the fact that they won't talk about real war and real issues?
Or are you going to watch a show like us where that's literally all we do?
This is for sophisticated people that want to become more informed.
Of course, Socrates said, I know that I know nothing, and we know we have a lot to learn.
But we go through that process with you to where it's a growth environment, where instead of taking something away or being a net neutral, we give you a net positive of information.
This is like, this is all we care about is making a place where our children can be happier and learn to love each other for once instead of having ignorance and being fat and bombing people in another country.