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Nov. 23, 2025 - Jim Fetzer
53:18
UKRAINE SHATTERS — Russia Takes Control, America Falters | COL. Douglas Macgregor
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Well, I'll give you the same advice that I gave President Trump.
And I told him that the first thing he needed to do was to announce that we will no longer support the war in Ukraine against Russia, that we want an immediate end to the conflict, but we're prepared to sit down and host whatever conference is necessary in order to bring the people together to sort through this.
But first and foremost, we are ceasing. any further support to this corrupt and criminal regime in Kiev.
The only thing they've managed to accomplish is mass murder of their own population in a war that was easily avoided.
And unfortunately, President Trump has been badly advised, I would argue, by people telling him that he can't do that.
No, he absolutely can do it and he needs to do it.
It's not just a function of wasting billions of dollars.
Washington does that very well on its own anyhow.
It's a question of putting us in opposition to Russia when there is no reason for us to be in opposition to Russia.
You know, for some reason, there are people in Washington who liked the Soviet Union.
The neocons seem to have been comfortable with them.
Now that Russia is an Orthodox Christian country that rests on the foundation of Orthodox Christianity, they're very unhappy.
They're unhappy because Russia has a national identity.
Russia is defending its borders.
And Russia is doing what we would do.
If we had an enemy force building a Mexican army for the purpose of reconquering Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California, I think we would act exactly as the Russians have done.
We would destroy that force.
That's right.
That's what they've done.
So I don't know why President Trump continues to waste his time on this matter, to be perfectly blunt.
He ought to divorce himself from it and say, I'm out.
America doesn't want any part of this.
We want to normalize relations with Russia.
There's no reason why we should not.
And we urge our European allies to follow suit.
On the other hand, if they want to go it alone, and we all know they can't, then they may do so.
But we have just taken terrible steps.
We've offended people, the Russians.
We don't seem to understand that most of the world is actually aligned with Russia on this matter because they live in various parts of the world where they have hostile borders.
And they understand exactly what that kind of threat means.
We should understand it as well.
All you have to do is look south of the Rio Grande.
And if anybody thinks that's friendly territory, they should have their heads examined.
It isn't.
So, you know, the bottom line is I said that's what he should do.
It's what he should do now.
And walk away from this disaster.
Yeah, I agree.
Thank you for that.
I'm going to have two questions back to back.
The first one, I want to kind of dig deep in the process of our open borders that the Democrats had for a long time, Biden, Harris regime.
And we see a lot of sleeper cells, we want to call it, where these radicals, you know, jihads and stuff like this.
And I'm hearing it spreading in various cities and, you know, with New York City falling.
Just wanted to get your guidance.
And if you heard, if there's any planned attacks coming in December coming up.
Over?
Well, first of all, let's go back to Tulsi Gabbard.
Shortly after she took over as the director of national intelligence, she actually went down to the border down in Texas.
And there was a news conference and she stepped forward and she said, open borders has allowed millions of people to enter the United States, people about whom we know absolutely nothing.
And these people were not only encouraged to come through the open border, they were then given monetary support, transportation to various parts of the country, once again, without knowing anything about them.
If anything, I think you could make a very convincing argument that President Biden committed treason against the American people because it was not in our national security interest to do this.
Even Bill Clinton, who was caught unawares at the time, was asked, well, what do you think about what's happened?
And they started listing the criminal acts, the murders connected with drugs in some cases or child trafficking or just wanton slaughter.
You know, you know the names of these people, these young girls who were killed pointlessly.
And he said, well, you know, this wouldn't have happened if we'd vetted these people.
Well, thank you.
Then who is ultimately responsible for this disaster?
And the person responsible was President Biden and his administration.
They seem to have celebrated this.
And right now, they and their supporters are doing everything in their power to keep these people inside our country.
The only criticism I have for President Trump is that he has no strategy to deal with this.
You know, I know Tom Homan.
He's a nice man.
He's a good man.
What's the strategy, Tom?
Where are the resources?
Who's going to round these people up?
And I keep trying to tell people that historically, two things are true.
Number one, the United States Army guarded our borders.
We act as though this is some sort of terrible thing if we have soldiers on the border.
From 1846 to 1948, the Army guarded the Mexican border.
It also guarded the Canadian border.
So what's wrong with putting troops on the border, particularly when you know that the customs officers have been bought off by the cartels?
People turn a blind eye and let people and children and money and drugs and everything else go through those legal ports of entry.
That has not stopped.
The second thing is, if you're going to go after these criminals inside the United States and you're going to go after the illegals that we did not invite who are not legally in this country, you use the army.
After the crash of 1929, Herbert Hoover directed the deportation of 9 million Mexicans.
Not because he disliked Mexicans.
They were not here legally.
He simply said, look, if I don't get these people out of here, Americans are very shortly going to demand the jobs they're doing because Americans need the jobs.
Who came in to do that?
It was the United States Army.
FDR deported another 3.5 million.
Harry Truman, 2.1 million.
General Eisenhower as president, 1.3 million.
Now, let's stop the nonsense about this is inhumane.
The only inhumane act is keeping these people here when we can't afford it, when our own population doesn't have adequate medical care, when our own population is struggling to get jobs and put food on the table.
Everybody keeps saying, well, you know, unemployment is way down.
How many people have left the workforce because they couldn't find jobs?
Let's tell the truth.
It's much higher than 4%.
Anybody out there can point to people that haven't been able to find work for years.
And then on top of that, President Trump has allowed these H-1Bs now from Saudi Arabia to come into the country.
It's outrageous.
Absolutely not America First, is it?
No, that's a betrayal of everybody that voted him into office.
And also, it's this big lie.
Well, we don't have the talent and the human capital to do the job.
Nonsense.
I have a son who was in the IT business for five, six years.
He was making very good money and he told me repeatedly, we don't need any of these foreigners here.
We have all sorts of Americans who can step in and do these jobs.
But you have to pay an American a living wage.
You know, for what it costs one American, they can hire three software engineers from India.
Well, I'm not here and neither should you be to line, you know, Elon Musk's pockets or Bill Gates's pockets or anybody else in the high-tech industry.
I don't give a damn about them.
Pay the Americans for a fair day's work.
Pay them good wages so that they can live decently.
Stop bringing in foreigners as cheap labor.
The lie that we don't have people has got to be killed.
And President Trump should apologize to the American people for telling that lie.
So do you think we're going to have surprise attacks coming from these groups?
It depends.
A lot of these people that come here, they're here for one reason and only one reason.
They didn't come to become American citizens.
Let's be ridiculous.
Look at Dearborn, Michigan.
Look at Patterson, New Jersey.
These places have become fortresses of Islam.
And people in these areas are practicing Sharia law.
They are practicing polygamy.
Now, why did they come here?
Well, they came here to make money, to live well, to improve their standard of living.
But they didn't come here to be us.
And they're not about to become us.
I was talking recently to an American who is a Muslim.
And he said, you know, Doug, any Muslim that comes to this country and says they should implement Sharia law should be arrested on the spot and deported.
That's not why you come to the United States.
You come to the United States because of the laws that we have, the equality before the law, the freedom of movement, all of these things.
That's why you come here to become an American.
You don't come here to bring Sharia law or your culture from some other part of the world with you.
Unfortunately, since I would say certainly over the last 20 years, we've been witnessing exactly that.
These entities that are foreign and alien to us springing up.
And when an American points to it and says, you know, this is wrong, oh, well, you're a racist.
You're a bigot.
No, he's an American who's pointing to something on American soil that is not American.
Everybody else assimilated and became part of the country.
And you know something?
What a society cannot assimilate, it eventually destroys, or it goes out of existence.
Wow.
In your September Substack briefing, you argued that neocons have already decided on another disastrous war with Iran, risking American lives for Israeli homogamy.
How can a Trump administration dismantle this deep state warmongering, prioritize energy independence at home, and avoid all of these escalations that could ignite World War III over foreign oil grabs?
What say you?
Well, you know, I had the privilege of interacting with President Trump during the latter part of his administration, and I have never made it a secret that I actually like the man.
I mean, he's a pleasant person.
This is not some sort of ogre that doesn't listen to people or treats people badly privately.
Absolutely not.
I never saw any evidence for that.
But I think we have to accept something as fact now, and that is that he would not now be president if the seven or eight top Zionist billionaires in the United States had not decided that he should have the White House.
And I think he made agreements before he was elected that if he were given the opportunity to be president, that he would fulfill certain obligations, and those obligations were to Israel.
Now that's wrong, but it's happened.
It's unambiguous.
When you look at something like what's happening today to the Palestinians, and people forget that 15% of the Palestinians who are being murdered or driven out of their homes are Christians.
And in Gaza, it is one of the oldest Christian churches in the world.
Now they're Catholics.
Some are Protestants, very few, and there are Orthodox Christians.
The same thing is happening in the West Bank.
By the way, some of the oldest Christian churches in the world exist in Syria, and they are being destroyed, and Christians there are being killed.
But apparently, that suits Mr. Netanyahu.
And so we say and do nothing.
We actually welcome Jolani, the former al-Qaeda and ISIS commander, into Washington, put him into a suit and pretend he's a civilized human being.
You know, this man is a criminal.
Why are we welcoming him to the White House?
And by the way, the forces that he has control of are now killing Christians too.
So, I mean, the whole thing disturbs me because that's not the Donald Trump I knew in 2020 at all.
This is a different person, and he's obviously constrained in what he can and cannot do.
And I think it all goes back to the promises and deals that were made before he was elected.
Wow.
So, those that are watching live stream, we open up to our panel members to be able to engage with Colonel McGregor.
That's coming up.
Okay.
In your recent SEPSTAC with Glenn Dyson, he powerfully declares that the era of unchallenged Western dominance is over, brought down by arrogant miscalculations in Ukraine and the self-inflicted wounds of deindustrialization at home.
What bull America first reforms do you advocate to rebuild the United States manufacturing/slash wasteful foreign aid and position America as a self-reliant superpower rather than a global policeman begging for scraps from China and Russia?
Well, look, we're not begging for scraps.
We're trying to bully people into doing what we want them to do.
That's the problem.
The Russians want to do business with us.
The Chinese do.
Now, let's take a break here for a minute and let me just digress to China.
I have been in Northeast Asia and I've done business there.
And I had Korean and Japanese businessmen ask me, Colonel McGregor, why are you Americans so stupid?
And I said, what do you mean?
He said, do you see any Chinese in our universities?
Do you see any Chinese in our laboratories?
Do you see our Chinese anywhere in any government installation?
I said, well, I guess not.
He said, of course not.
The Chinese are doing what they've done for 2,000 years.
If you let them in, they will steal whatever is there and send it back to China.
That's what they do.
Well, what does this go back to?
First of all, why are we letting 600,000 Chinese students into the country?
And for Donald Trump to sit there and say, well, if I don't allow this to happen, these colleges will go out of business.
And I was so proud of Laura Ingren because she said so.
You know, if these people cannot sustain themselves economically, then perhaps those colleges should go out of business.
Perhaps we have too many for the size of our population right now.
And I don't mind telling you that lots of young men and women go to college for four years, come out and can't get a job because education is not a path to employment.
My point is, everything is out of whack.
If you're about America first, then you're about preserving, protecting what is our country.
So you don't let foreigners in that you know are going to steal from you.
By the way, we've had a big problem with that with the Israelis as well.
And they're not the only ones.
There are lots of people that come to this country with the wrong intent, with the worst intention of stealing and taking whatever they can get and sending it home.
So being America first, that has to stop.
You know, send these foreigners out if you're serious about protecting the country.
Don't let any more Chinese students in and figure out how many you've got now that you don't need and stop the nonsense.
I mean, if you're serious about it, don't go to war with China.
That's a dumb idea.
We don't need to go to war with a major power over this, but we need to make it very clear what we will not tolerate inside our own country.
And by the way, the Chinese are accustomed to this.
The Vietnamese have thrown all the Chinese out of Vietnam.
The Indonesians threw all the Chinese out of Indonesia.
This is an old story.
You know, we've got to wake up and smell the coffee and understand that we have an obligation first and foremost to our citizens.
If you're going to provide health care at the least expensive level you can, then get rid of all the people that are freeloading that are not Americans.
Get them out of here.
Send them out.
Let them go home to where they have luxurious medical support, right?
No.
That's not our problem.
We should be concerned about Americans getting the health care.
And we need to reformalize these things.
I mean, healthcare is outrageously expensive here.
And we're not getting much return on our investment.
That's the bad news.
I could take you to Finland or Germany or Austria, any number of places.
You'd find it's infinitely better care at much lower cost.
Now, is it perfect?
No.
But we need to do better.
That's where we should be focused.
We should be focused on what is the standard of living inside the United States.
And we want businesses and we want industries to be competitive.
Now, we embarked upon this massive tariff offensive.
Tariffs usually are implemented to protect industry.
In other words, to nurture the growth and development in the industrial base.
We've used tariffs as a sledgehammer to allegedly punish everybody we don't like.
Well, apparently we hate everybody because we treated our friends as well as our competitors and opponents equally.
It's insane.
It's done us unnecessary damage because we live in the 21st century.
If you treat people badly, they don't get in line and say, well, we'll wait until you like us again.
They go elsewhere.
And where do they go?
They can go to China.
They go to India.
They can go to Europe, any number of different places.
They don't have to come here.
We live in a different world now.
We're no longer the great superpower that no one can compare to.
We are a great power.
In many ways, we are still a superpower.
But we don't have to be in a permanent state of hostility to everybody who may not agree with us.
You know, there's something that President Trump, I think, has not come to terms with.
You can't turn to any foreign country and expect that country to move beyond the limits of its interests.
Now, he was just in Japan, and the Japanese want to do business with us.
They've done business with us for years, but they made it perfectly clear that when it comes to buying cheap oil and gas, they're going to buy it from Russia.
It's right next door.
It's very inexpensive.
That's not because they don't like us, but that's what they're going to do.
By the way, they've also said we don't like the Chinese either, but we're not prepared to go to war with them.
So don't come here and talk to us about going to war with China.
This is true all over Asia.
We got to get out of this mindset that you're either with us or against us.
Remember George Bush?
He gave his great speech after 2001 and said you're either with us or against us.
It's a very dumb idea.
You know, the British Empire was around a lot longer than we've existed.
And one of the things that they did well, and they made many mistakes.
We don't need to dwell on that.
Most of the biggest one of all was not granting us home rule.
And we'd still been in the British Empire.
It would have helped them enormously.
But the bottom line is the British Empire practiced economy of enemies.
They've said, well, there are five groups of people in this part of the world.
Who can we get along with?
Well, finally, you discover that out of the five, there's only one hard-headed individual that refuses to do business with you.
So you isolate that one.
You do business with everybody else.
You cultivate them.
And eventually the rest abandon the one who does not do business.
You don't just say blanket, either you're with us or against us, because you understand that not every single issue is going to be viewed the same way by other countries.
This is the sort of hangover from the Cold War.
We've left that world.
So we have to see the world differently.
I'll tell you something.
You talk about Christianity.
We could use a good dose of it in the conduct of our foreign policy.
I don't know of any teachings in the New Testament that tell us it's a good thing to murder people and we're going to support you as you do it.
I don't see that.
I don't see any evidence that, you know, whether you like Muslims or not or Christians or not, it doesn't matter.
They're human beings.
Do we want to be part of the mass murder and mass expulsion?
No, of course not.
And remember, there's a big difference between people that showed up and came into our country illegally and have refused to leave and in many cases have committed crimes and are now dependent upon our largesse.
The big difference between that and people that have lived in the place for 2,000 years and are suddenly being told, get out or we'll kill you.
It's wrong.
I just can't wrap my head around it because I've spent time in Israel and I like the Israelis and I worked with the Israeli Defense Force.
I just can't understand it.
You know, I've heard all the rationales for it, but it's just wrong.
So, you know, I think it was Lincoln in so many words said the challenge in American foreign policy is to link the contingencies of power, in other words, the needs of power with the principles of justice.
We've thrown the principles of justice out of the window.
And we're looking at this so-called transactional administration.
I'm so sick of hearing that word.
You show up, you offer enough money, you can have what you want.
What in the hell is that?
It doesn't make any sense to me.
So you warned us about America's eight-day missile stockpile, you know, nuclear or nothing vulnerability.
It's hard.
Amit, the ongoing Ukraine aid.
What fiscal conservative measures would you push as a defense advisor?
Because, you know, the Pentagon, I'm hearing a lot of budget cuts are happening, right?
So we need to stop the endless NATO handouts.
We've just got to stop that.
But what do you think about that?
I think President Trump has discovered the hard way that you cannot print missiles the way you print money.
It takes time to build complex weapon systems.
And it takes a lot of time to turn on missiles.
I was told the other day that Raytheon, that builds the Patriot missile system, as well as others, has now said they'll produce 600 a year instead of just 420.
Well, let me tell you what that means in practical terms, if you're trying to stop incoming missiles from destroying your country or infrastructure or forces.
Every time the enemy fires a missile in your direction, you fire two missiles at the incoming missile.
Sometimes you fire three.
So do a little math.
You've got 600 missiles.
Let's say best case, you know, you're going to shoot two missiles at every incoming missile.
How long does it take for a thousand missiles to overwhelm your system?
It'll be over in three days.
You've got nothing left.
And that's in effect what was told to President Trump.
And President Trump says, well, you need to build more missiles.
Well, you can't surge quickly.
You don't have the manufacturing base for it.
You see, what the Russians did in the intervening years since the Soviet Union fell apart is that they put their manufacturing base for the military industrial requirements into sort of suspended animation.
They didn't dismantle it.
They didn't destroy it.
They just put it on hold.
So when they needed it, they could send in people and rapidly ramp it up.
Well, what we've done since 1991 is that we've gone in the other direction, down, down, down.
We have reduced the numbers of people who actually deploy to fight in terms of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.
They're way down.
We still have 44 four-star generals.
We never dismantled the overhead, the useless headquarters.
We made no changes there at all.
They're talking about it, but nothing's really happened yet.
And no strategy exists how to guide that and manage it so that we don't hurt our military capability.
But you've got to make a decision.
What's your top priority?
It ought to be the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines that you're going to employ in a war, right?
Not this massive overhead of generals.
That's number one.
Number two, you better look at your military industrial base, your manufacturing capability.
We went from, say, dozens of defense firms down to just five.
Well, when we did that, that put those five firms in the driver's seat.
If you don't give the firm enough money for a particular program, it says, well, I'm sorry, you know, we're going to have to shutter the assembly line in Ohio because you're not providing enough money.
See, when we had a number of different firms, it was competitive.
You had people that would stand up and bid to do something, and then you would give them the contract and they would execute.
Right now, with only five firms, you're stuck.
They are effectively state-owned enterprises.
They've got the Senate and the House under control.
By the way, the same thing's true in the media industry.
You know, 20 years ago, we had, or 30 years ago, we had 50 media companies.
Today we have six.
And guess who owns them?
Zionist billionaires.
And so what does that mean for the pre-digested news that is then fed into the mainstream media?
Well, I think everybody knows the answer to that question.
Those need to be broken up.
This is presidential business.
This is where the president needs to step in and say, We're going to break these up.
We need to break up the high-tech firms.
How many do we have?
How many do we need?
Well, we don't need three or four that then dictate to us what's going to happen.
That's a disaster.
All of these things need to happen.
This is America first business.
It's dealing with the problems here at home to elevate our prosperity, to lift us out of the doldrums that we've been in.
You can't just stand up there and say, This is the hottest country in the world.
We're the greatest.
Listen, President Trump, I'm an American.
Don't have to tell me that my country is a great place.
I believe that.
That's not the issue.
The issue is, what are you doing to make it greater?
Because it's not great enough right now for most Americans.
On that note, Colonel Douglas McGregor, we're opening up with our panel members.
They got 30 seconds to ask you a question, and then you got like two minutes to respond because we got to try to get a lot of people to ask you questions.
We're going to start with Teresa Wiggins.
She is our pillar Christian leader of Red America First.
Go ahead, Teresa, with your question.
Thank you.
Colonel McGregor, thank you so much for coming tonight and giving us your time.
My question is: What is your response to the six people that are on the news that are telling the military that it's okay for them to not listen to the duties that they're being told?
That, you know.
Oh, this is a very important question, and it's being misinterpreted by a lot of people.
I listened earlier to a discussion between John Mearsheimer and Andrew Napolitano.
I respect both of those men enormously.
But it's misinterpreted.
They are saying, well, you should not obey an illegal order.
Well, that's patently obvious.
All of us that have served in the armed forces for any length of time have gone through the instruction, the socialization, the training, and we understand what an illegal order is.
That's not really what these people are talking about.
But let me give you an example of an illegal order and how it was handled.
Back in 2003, we had a three-star Lieutenant General Sanchez, not one of my favorite people, but he was the second in command when we went into Iraq.
And he came upon in a hallway in a building in Baghdad, a number of recently apprehended prisoners who were unruly.
There were a couple of them that were unruly and were giving the military police a hard time.
And he turned around and said to the staff sergeant in charge, shoot that man, shoot that man.
And the staff sergeant said, it's all right, sir.
We'll get him under control.
We know what we're doing.
And he said, no, I want you to shoot that man right now.
And the staff sergeant said, no, sir, they're not going to shoot this prisoner.
We'll get him under control.
And indeed, that staff sergeant, the military police, did that.
So there was no illegal order because it wasn't followed.
Because it wasn't followed, there was no murder because we don't shoot prisoners in our custody.
That staff sergeant was right.
The three-star general was wrong.
Now, that's one of the few instances that I can recall when I was on active duty of something like that happening.
And I was in for 28 years.
No, I think what we're dealing with from the people on the hill is something else.
Even though they will not admit to it, I think they are trying to deliberately undermine the authority of the president.
And he is the commander in chief.
He is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States.
He commands the armed forces.
Now, I am not someone who thinks that we should be intervening in Venezuela.
I think there are lots of things that we can do short of going to war that would meet our requirements and needs.
But I'm not the president.
And if I were on active duty and I was ordered to go into Venezuela, I would go in.
I would do as I was told to do.
I was in the regular army.
I went into action several places under different occasions.
We did not take a vote about what we would or wouldn't do.
You know, there was no debate.
We were given an order.
I didn't question its legality.
It came from the commander-in-chief.
Under the law of the Constitution, as the commander-in-chief, he has the right to order me into action at home and abroad.
And I think that's what's very sinister.
These are Democratic members of Congress who are effectively trying to encourage soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines not to obey orders from the president.
Didn't say illegal, just orders.
I have not seen President Trump issue any illegal orders.
And I watch that very carefully.
I mean, I may not like a lot of the things that he does.
I'm sometimes disappointed by the way he expresses himself.
But the notion that he has deliberately ordered anybody to do anything that is not legal is nonsense.
Wow.
This is seditious, frankly.
It's on the edge of sedition.
Well, thank you for that, Colonel.
We're going to go to Oklahoma.
Leslie Mayhan is up next.
Then we're going to go to Rob, Ohio, Ron, Nevada, Larry, Texas, Megaso, Hawaii, Christian, California.
Please, guys, 30-second question, two-minute response.
Let's go.
Colonel McGregor, thank you so much for coming back on the show.
My question to you, sir, is there is so much misinformation that's being thrown around on both sides right now.
What do you say is like the best way for us to get the correct information?
I yield.
Thank you.
Well, I'm quick to yield back to others who may want to answer that question.
My approach is to turn to alternative sources of information and news.
If I had paid attention to anything coming out of the mainstream media, then I would have been sadly misinformed from the very beginning as soon as this Ukraine war began.
But I dug and I found other sources on the ground in Ukraine, as well as in Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, and Russia, where I could put together a more accurate picture.
At one point, I had a gentleman who actually called me with a cell phone through another individual from a hospital in Ukraine.
This is back in the fall of 2023.
And he wanted to tell me what he was seeing because we were promoting the notion that the Ukrainians had just attacked the Russian defenses and won some victory.
And he talked about the hospitals overwhelmed with people in the hallways who were badly wounded, who were dying for lack of treatment.
He talked about ambulances that would not pick anybody else up off the battlefield unless you paid them to do it.
And he said, we're running out of blood.
This is a catastrophe.
This has been a huge defeat.
Well, that wasn't the first time or the last time that I was called like that.
There are people out there trying to get the truth out, and you've got to go find it.
And then you have to make a choice.
You have to decide what you think is reasonable.
I can't tell you how to judge what you hear, but you've got to dig beyond what comes out of the mainstream media.
That's just useless drivel for the most part.
You have to always kill the onion because there's always an inner lining agenda that the mainstream media and our enemy is pushing.
So let's go to Ohio now.
Drake, Ohio, go ahead and unmute and ask your question.
Thank you so much.
Colonel, it's getting better to the two-minute response.
Go ahead, Drake.
Thank you.
Okay, good evening, sir.
Drake Ross from Ohio, as he said.
First, I like to just mention that a lot of people approach me and say, I think President Trump should do this and I think that.
And, you know, sometimes they're knowledgeable and sometimes not so much.
One of the first things I always say to people is, have you seen the classified Intel?
Of course they haven't.
Okay.
I say, you cannot, you can have an opinion, you can have a thought, granted, okay, but you don't always know what's going on.
So I try to give him a little bit of present, anyone for that matter, some latitude, just like with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
A lot of people would say, we shouldn't do an embargo.
That's mean.
Well, here's the satellite photos.
So the other part of this, Colonel, is that I think we'd all agree the president's, the first, this year, this first year of his term has been tumultuous.
You know, Charlie Kirk's assassination, activist judges, you name it, it's been thrown at his administration.
Given that, okay, all that I just said, how do you feel that Secretary Hagseth and Joint Chiefs Kane are doing given that backdrop?
Thank you, sir.
I'm going to go.
I'm going to mute now.
The last time that I had an active clearance, top secret compartmentalized and so forth, was when I was in the Pentagon in November of November, December, January of 2020, 2021.
But I have a lot of experience with intelligence.
A lot of the intelligence is wrong, number one.
Number two, remember that intelligence is frequently massaged by people in the middle.
You'll have someone at a lower level who's a solid analyst, whether he's in the field or she's in the field or she is looking at overhead photography, satellite intelligence.
They put together something.
Then it goes to the people who are appointees that are just below the presidential and secretarial level.
They decide what they're going to send forward.
And every administration has agendas.
So the truth doesn't usually get to where it needs to go unless the president demands it.
Now, you mentioned JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
He was having such difficulty getting the truth out of the United States Air Force at the time that he actually had people called down to carrier-based air to make flights to ensure that he was getting an accurate picture.
And that's not the only time.
Henry Kissinger, when he was working for Nixon, became very frustrated because he said, I don't believe these intelligence assessments of the Russians, and I need to know more.
And so with Nixon's permission, they brought back the station chiefs from the Central Intelligence Agency in Eastern Europe, Turkey, and Central Asian China, where we had a station at the time.
And they sat down to evaluate the truth to find out what was really on hand in Russia in terms of its nuclear missile capability and weapon systems and what wasn't.
That produced a very different picture from the one that Langley sent over to the president.
My point is, you're half right.
Most of us don't see all of that intelligence, but having been someone who's seen a lot of it, I can tell you, whatever you do, if you're at the top, you're going to have to dig down lower.
You're going to have to go down to lower levels and talk to people and get the truth.
One last point.
General Marshall, when he was chief of staff of the army before and during the Second World War, he would ask for a position paper, a two-page paper explaining what should we do?
What's the right course of action?
What are your recommendations?
And he would get this paper and then he would turn around and he would say, now I want to see.
everybody, including the man who wrote the paper.
Well, having been in the war plans division of the Army staff, I can tell you those papers are usually written by majors and lieutenant colonels.
And I was a lieutenant colonel at the time.
And so he would line up the major, the lieutenant colonel, the full colonel, the one star, and sometimes the two star.
And then he would take this paper and he would say to the major at the bottom, show me what you wrote originally and how it was changed.
He only had to do that two or three times.
That scared the living hell out of the generals and colonels because they fiddled with it.
And what he wanted was straightforward facts and analysis based on facts.
Now, we don't have that right now in the building.
We have a very, very politically astute group that is providing to the president what they think the president wants.
That's not their job.
Very good.
Now we're going to go to Texas really fast.
We're jumping around.
Larry, go ahead with your question.
Larry, Texas.
And we're getting closer to two minutes every answer.
Keep going.
You guys are doing good.
I'll go real fast.
Colonel, thanks so much for being here.
I have just a quick question regarding Trump.
I see things a little differently.
I don't see him as bringing MAGA, but I see him as ushering in the New World Order.
I'll list three points.
First, when you look at Doge, Doge did not save us any money.
None of it will go into effect because none of it was voted into law.
All we saw was Elon Musk grabbed the data from the IRS, Social Security, and Treasury and sent it to Pal and Terror to create a surveillance database on each of us Americans.
The tariffs, the tariffs are not being used for business, so to speak.
It's being mostly used to force countries to give us their biometric data.
And we have multiple reports that capture that.
Thirdly, the open borders was designed to increase violence in order to say to the American people, if you want peace, we got to have digital IDs.
Remember the Patriot back in 9-11.
So I don't see Trump being the guy to BAGA, but I see him bringing the New World Order.
What am I missing?
Well, I don't think he's bringing anything.
The New World Order is being forged right now by BRICS.
And right now, Moscow and Beijing are now working with New Delhi and others to manage the chaos in Washington and manage our decline as a great power.
So they are the new world order.
We are not.
Now, as far as inviting all of these people in to create violence, I think we have to be a little more astute than that.
These people were invited in because they were overwhelmingly non-Europeans.
And that was the goal, to dilute the core American population.
And they've done a very good job of that.
And all you have to do is travel around the country.
Go to the top 10 cities in the United States today.
Look at the demographics.
The top 10 cities in terms of population in the United States are majority non-white.
Now, nobody is supposed to say that.
Well, how did that happen?
That didn't happen last year.
This has been going on for a long time.
And what do you do with that?
That becomes a weapon in your arsenal against us, the Americans.
Somebody mentioned earlier something about Mamdani in New York City.
That's the outcome.
That outcome has been in the cards for years.
We're just reaping the harvest now.
Wow.
Rosemarie, our editor-in-chief of magazine for Red America First is up next.
Go ahead.
First of all, thank you very much for your time and joining us on RAF.
I have a question regarding the attacks being made on the Venezuelan boats with respect to the fentanyl.
And I was wondering what your views are about that.
And also, if you would be as kind enough to give us a page for a magazine so that we can put whatever you would like as a message to go out to all of our viewers and participants.
Okay, well, let me try the first one.
The fentanyl is not coming out of Venezuela.
I don't know why the president repeats that.
In fact, Venezuela's participation in the so-called introduction of illegal drugs into the United States is somewhere around 4%.
Thirdly, right now, the cartels in Mexico are actually making more money with human trafficking than they are with drugs.
Human beings are worth more than the drugs that they're peddling.
When you look at Mexico and the cartels down there, they effectively control that country.
I mean, they really do.
Mexico is just a narco-state.
Venezuela is not.
Now, Venezuela may not be the perfect liberal democracy, but it's not a narco-state.
And Maduro, whether you like him or not, is holding that place together.
Latin America is not an easy place to live.
It's a tough place to govern.
And the last thing that I would want to do as an American is to go down there and end up making us responsible for the governing or the governance of Venezuela.
So I think you have to look at Mexico and you have to understand that the fentanyl that's coming up is not being deliberately manufactured by the Chinese to destroy us.
The Chinese organized crime syndicates are like anywhere else.
They operate on the basis of money.
You pay them enough money.
They're going to do what they have to to make profits.
There's a lot of money to be made in fentanyl.
The drug problem is inside our country, ladies and gentlemen.
We've got to suppress that appetite, and we need much more stringent laws.
And I get into trouble because people don't like to hear this, but there was a man named Lee Kuan Yew who created Singapore.
And Lee Kuan Yew had a terrible drug problem.
He solved it.
If you were caught peddling drugs, bringing drugs into Singapore, you were tried in a court of law.
And if you were found guilty, you were executed.
That's what needs to happen.
By the way, I would do the same thing with child traffickers, human traffickers.
If you are trafficking children, women into the United States or trying to capture them and move them out of the United States into Mexico or somewhere else, and you are then tried in a court of law and found guilty, you should be executed.
If we don't do these things, these things will not stop.
Thank you for that.
Rob, Ohio, go with your question, sir.
Thank you so much.
Welcome back, Colonel.
My question is, it seems to me that Russia since day one has not been trying to win the war with Ukraine.
When they first invaded, they didn't turn off their tvs, any electronics.
They've just been more or less fighting to hold a position.
Uh, what's?
Why would they do that?
Well, I would say they're doing a little bit more than that.
Now put yourself in the position of uh, president Putin and he I think his judgment in this regard was uh, not good, but he believed that the Ukrainian orthodox Christians and the Russian orthodox Christians were brothers under the skin.
He issued orders initially that they were to avoid as much as possible doing any infrastructure damage and avoid as much as possible killing people.
Remember that the areas that they were moving into initially are overwhelmingly Russian.
And the Russians, you know, reacted interestingly to the arrival of the Russian troops.
They went out and said, well, thank god, you're finally here.
You know, we never thought you were would come to liberate us.
And the commanders of the Russian units that were there said, well, we're not staying we're we're we're, we're here, you know, to send a signal that that we want change in Ukraine.
We want Russians to be treated equally before the law.
And you know what the Russians said to the soldiers, well then, get the hell out of here, because as soon as you leave, the Ukrainian secret police is going to show up and put a bullet through our heads.
So you're no damn good to us.
It took a while for Putin to figure that out.
The second part was he went in with a relatively small force.
First of all, the Russian military at that point wasn't that large.
The Russian military was really focused on defending its borders.
There was no plan to invade the West or attack anybody.
So then you have the, the meeting in Istanbul, and the Russians thought they had a deal, because the people in Istable said yeah, we can live with this outcome.
And of course, the individual who said that was later executed by the Ukrainian government, the SBU, the secret police.
Boris Johnson flies in on behalf of Biden and says, no, don't settle for anything.
You have the entire weight, power and influence of the United States and NATO behind you.
You're going to win.
You need to fight.
So they threw the whole peace business out of the window.
Then the general staff sat down with Putin and said, look, if you, if you're going to do this, we need a much larger army.
We need to take this very seriously, because the Ukrainian force arrayed against them had been training for years at great expense to the American taxpayer, the British taxpayer, the French taxpayer and they were extremely well equipped and said, if we're going to win this, you've got to change your mode, modus operandi.
So then it went to a defense, a strategic defense, which was very effective, and the idea was, we need this strategic defense until we build it up.
And that's what happened in 2022 and 2023 and the Ukrainians, thanks to the terrible advice our senior military leaders gave them, impaled themselves on this defense routinely and million people were killed unnecessarily.
But my point is that when, When you learn about this, and I didn't understand this at the time, I was in a state of complete shock when I saw the initial move into Ukraine.
I said, What are these people doing?
But when you find that out, you begin to understand that there were a lot of assumptions made up front.
Now, the Russian generals didn't like those assumptions, but they clicked their heels, saluted smartly, and went off and did the best they could.
But President Putin had to change his mind.
When he began to change his mind, you see a tremendous improvement.
But there's something else that Putin has made clear repeatedly inside Russia to the forces.
I do not want a war with the United States or NATO.
Therefore, we will not have any lightning offensive, sudden deep attacks all the way to the river that might send off alarm bells all over Europe and in Washington.
I don't want to precipitate a war.
And so we will move carefully.
Secondly, I don't want to kill Russians unnecessarily.
I'm not going to sacrifice Russian lives pointlessly.
If it takes us longer to systematically destroy the Ukrainian armed forces, that's what we'll do.
So, so, Douglas McGregor, thank you so much for coming on tonight, Town Hall.
How was your second experience with us?
How was it tonight?
Well, I'm sorry that we didn't have more time for questions.
No, no, it's okay.
We're going to squeeze you in probably in January if you're up for it.
Well, if I'm still here, I'll be happy to do that.
Oh, outstanding.
You never know.
Well, thank you so much for coming tonight.
And we're going to definitely schedule you back on.
And it was definitely a good, engaging discussion tonight.
And I want to thank Leslie, Larry, and Rob for their good questions.
I appreciate it.
They're important questions that had to be answered.
And I'm not sure I gave you the complete answers.
I did the best I could in the time constraints.
Oh, you did a great job, Colonel.
And we're going to have you come back.
What did you think of Valerie's questions?
Valerie is delightful.
Thank you.
No, I appreciated that, but that was an easier one to hit out of the park.
The one that Larry asked and Rob's questions, those are really, really important.
And they deserve a lot more time and attention.
By the way, I had dinner with Peter Thiel.
Sometime we'll talk about that, Larry.
Oh, wow.
I want to hear about that too, because we don't trust Peter Thiel on this platform.
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