Lionel Nation - Scott Ritter: What the Media Won’t Tell You About US, NATO and Russia

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Aug. 26, 2025 - Lionel Nation

01:14:27

Scott Ritter: What the Media Won’t Tell You About US, NATO and Russia

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	My friends, I am, and I'm going to say this, I am honored to have this gentleman.
	I am such a fan.
	I don't want to be sycophantic, Mr. Ritter.
	I don't want to be a lick spittle of boot liquor.
	I don't want to be fawning and obsequious, but you are an absolute hero of mine.
	What you have endured and how you are unrelenting and relentless in your capacity for the truth, I just...
	I want to thank you, sir, for that.
	And I'm not trying to be full of what I mean.
	Thank you very much, but I won't let you be obsequious and all this because that's just not who I am am.
	I'm just buried down to earth.
	And I, you know, at the end of the day, I think you'll find out at the end of this interview, I'm just another person.
	I'm like your neighbor.
	I'm like everybody else.
	I have dogs who are going to interrupt this program frequently.
	But I think we all agree that life should be led by certain standards.
	We should seek justice.
	And we should seek ways to live in peace with one another.
	You know, that's what I'm trying to do, imperfectly at times.
	I don't claim to be the best at what I do.
	I just claim to say that I do what I do because I believe in what I do.
	Well.
	Well, and believe me, and you've had to pay.
	Now, in the event, Scott, that there's somebody who has been in a coma, or if I'm in a parallel universe, doesn't know anything.
	Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps Intel Officer and United Nations Weapons Inspector, best known, ladies and gentlemen, for his work in Iraq during the nineteen nineties, serving as part of the UN Special Commission Unscom.
	He was tasked with verifying Saddam Hussein's compliance with disarmament obligations after the Gulf War.
	mister Ritter became a controversial figure when he resigned in nineteen ninety eight.
	alleging alleging and for good reason that the u.s government and the u.n.
	of undermining genuine inspections for political reasons since then he has he has been absolutely superb imman colossal in his uh his role and kind of like a new a new version of truth seekers by the way scottritter.com is where you need to go scottritter.com and scott i gotta tell you one thing just as what i love the most about you because first of all you gotta understand i hate everybody i
	mean i am so misanthropic i i I think there should be a mood ring to determine how full of people are just because most people don't know what they're talking about.
	Or they are doing it just for the glory of it, you know, just for the, you know, what can I say now?
	Very quickly, have you ever talked to somebody who thinks they are a baker?
	Like, I make a great cheesecake.
	Then they talk to a professional baker and they say, you don't know what you're talking about.
	Or somebody says, I make a great spaghetti sauce.
	And then you talk to a chef or some line cook at a Brooklyn diner.
	There's cooking and then there's like the Marine Corps of Cooking.
	Everybody read San Zhu or is it General So?
	I don't know who it is, but anyway, everybody thinks they know it.
	We don't know anything about it.
	When you are at your best is when you just throw at us the best military jargon, the best initials, acronyms, explaining the art, the lethal art of warfare,
	weather, artillery, logistics, food, mud, things that, you know, this particular high rams and sea cams and because, of course, as you know, Scott, I'm a lawyer by profession.
	Everybody's an expert on law and the constitution.
	Everybody knows history, and everybody thinks they know military.
	So that is what you do, which I absolutely thank you so much for.
	I have learned so much.
	And doesn't that, first of all, drive you crazy when people say, yeah, let's go to Iran.
	Yeah, let's do this.
	Sure.
	We've got all the military, all the equipment and loads of it, limitless, and the best fighting force.
	What do you say, sir?
	Look, it's something I have to confront all the time, listening to people talk about.
	First of all, I think anybody who sees my resume knows I never had four stars on my shoulder.
	Three, two, one.
	I didn't have the eagle.
	I'm not a colonel.
	I didn't make it to Lieutenant Colonel.
	I spent 12 years in the military doing what I did, but I was very fortunate.
	I don't want to bore everybody with it, but I was the first direct access intelligence officer.
	in the Marine Corps since Vietnam.
	That meant that normally to become an intelligence officer, you have to spend three to five years in combat arms for good reason, because Marine Corps is a combat arms institution.
	And then you can lap move into intelligence.
	I decided that I just wanted to go straight into intelligence.
	I wrote a letter to the commandant of the Marine Corps and he agreed with me.
	And next thing I know, I became an intelligence officer as a second lieutenant.
	The Marine Corps didn't know what to do with me, so they put me in the 7th Marine Amphibious Brigade, which is the Marine component of the Rapid Deployment Force.
	And I had to learn things from the start.
	I was doing things as a second lieutenant that majors do.
	And I was doing it well.
	I happened to be a quick learner and all that.
	Then they put me in an artillery unit.
	and I had to learn all about fire support.
	I'm pretty aggressive.
	I don't claim to be perfect, but I fail often, but I learn from my failures.
	And as second lieutenant slash first lieutenant in the 5th Battalion, 11th Marines, I learned about fire support.
	I learned about nuclear fire support.
	I learned about reality in the field.
	We spent over 270 days a year, two and a half years straight in the field.
	I was trained as a naval aerial observer.
	That means I went to flight school to learn how to fly in the backseat of OV-10s and OA-4s.
	I learned how to do forward air controlling.
	I learned about intelligence collection, every aspect of it.
	And so I won't claim that I'm an expert in warfare.
	I will say that I'm very good at what I do.
	Plus, I came in the Marine Corps at a unique time when General Al Gray was transitioning from World War II, Vietnam legacy concepts into maneuver warfare.
	And so as I was doing everything I just described, you know, I often tell people, you know, how do you become an expert?
	You become an expert by, A, either knowing it, meaning being a real expert, or being the first person to do it.
	Sometimes that makes you an expert because then you're the only one who ever did it.
	I came into 29 Palms as field artillery was transitioning from legacy operations into the modern requirements required by maneuver warfare.
	I helped write the book on it.
	So I have, you know, when I say I have some experience i was the expert not because i was better i studied i was the first person to do it what i was doing in 29 palms as an intelligence officer with 5th battalion 11 marines had never been done before we were writing the book i'm sorry stupid question i'm gonna i hope you get you don't mind me asking too what is 29 palms what does that mean 29 palms is a horrible stretch of desert in the middle of california actually i loved it it sounds beautiful sounds like a wonderful development doesn't it 29 palm
	community It's an oasis where there are 29 palm trees.
	But outside of that oasis, you have the Mojave Desert, the high desert.
	And it's the perfect training ground.
	General Patton trained in this in the lead up to going to North Africa.
	He developed some, you know, the concepts of armored warfare were developed in the area around 29 Palms.
	And 29 Palms is a massive training area where you can go out and you can shoot live ammunition.
	You can maneuver.
	You're not constrained by space.
	So we got to practice every precept of maneuver warfare.
	When we needed to move, we moved.
	And we moved where we needed to move.
	We didn't have to say, artificially constrained, we will simulate movement.
	We moved.
	And so, you know, I mastered this kind of conflict early on.
	Then I went on to be a weapons inspector in the Soviet Union.
	I was the first inspector on the ground in the Soviet Union, serendipity.
	But I, again, I became an expert on on-site inspection because it had never been done before.
	I was literally the first person to ever do it.
	And I helped write the book on it.
	That made me an expert.
	It doesn't mean that I studied it.
	I didn't get a PhD in it.
	I was just the first.
	You don't have to, you don't have to, you know, you don't have to.
	Look, like I told you, I'm a trial lawyer by a former prosecutor.
	And when we qualify somebody for an expert, All you have to do is do you have a little special knowledge?
	And by the way, the expert is the only person who can give an opinion in court.
	Nobody cares about your opinion.
	Did you see it?
	Did you smell it?
	Did you taste it?
	The onlybody who gives opinion is an expert.
	And the expert is just somebody who just knows something a little bit more.
	Maybe he's a doctor.
	Maybe he knows about developing or scuba diving.
	Don't sell yourself short.
	But first, I want to make the point that I learned this by doing it.
	I didn't learn it from the book.
	I got pulled out of that course.
	It doesn't happen.
	When you once you start a professional level school, you stay in it.
	I got pulled out on orders of the commandant of the Marine Corps to work at the warfighting center under Major General Caulfield to develop amphibious warfare plans against.
	I designed as a captain, a junior captain, I designed a core level insertion, amphibious insertion into Al-Fal Peninsula.
	The reason why I bring this up is I studied every aspect of war.
	I was doing work that colonels and generals do as a captain.
	So when I talk about things, when I listen to things, it's not that I'm sitting there going, oh, well, at the Amphibious Warfare School, when I read our curriculum on this, no.
	I'm saying I planned a core level attack.
	I know what's involved logistically, operationally, from an intelligence standpoint.
	And I listen to people talk about war today.
	And I'm like.
	you you literally have no idea what you're talking about you're you're drawing arrows on a map but you haven't done the basic work into this I did a I General Walt Boomer who commanded Marine Forces in in Kuwait gave me one of the greatest honors because he told General Caulfield who wrote this in a letter of appreciation he says I me am responsible for saving the lives of hundreds if not thousands of Marines because I me designed the attack.
	How did I do that?
	By spending a month and a half on a computer system called Janus, where we programmed every detail of the war and worked it over and over again.
	And in doing this, you learn about casualty generation.
	You learn about, you know, how different weapon systems work, et cetera.
	The plan that we did helped the Marine Corps capture Quaid City in three days.
	But by doing this and by designing this plan, I got a feel for war.
	I don't claim to be the world's best expert, but I can call BS.
	on people who don't know what they're talking about because I can listen to them and say it's like a brain surgeon.
	If you were a brain surgeon, you've cut open a head and looked at a brain, you may not know the most, the newest technique of this, that, and the other thing, but you know if somebody's claiming to be a brain surgeon and they don't know anything about what the brain is, you know it's BS and I listen to people over and over again talk about modern warfare talk about what's going on I'm going no it's in what you're saying literally is impossible because you're missing the foundational elements the basic stuff the logistics logistics is so important and people overlook logistics to give them the glory of the
	the gunfighters well the gunfighters can't do anything without you know bullets bandages you know and in and in food um beans and so Anyways, that's just a long way of saying that, you know, I don't claim to be what I'm not.
	I know what I am.
	I know what I'm doing.
	But that's what, put it this way, when you give an opinion.
	It's just like when a brain surgeon gives you something, he'll tell you something and he doesn't, it would take him six weeks to tell you, let me tell you how I got this opinion.
	Let me tell you why I say this.
	It may not seem like much to you, but if you notice I'm squirting, I'm irrigating with this, that took me 12 years to figure that one out.
	But let me ask you very quickly, Scott.
	How is right now our United States military force, whatever you want to call it?
	And what do you think about the Secretary of Defense?
	Okay, thank you so much.
	You just answered.
	The Secretary of Defense position is a senior management position.
	You know, he's not supposed to be a general officer.
	He's supposed to be a civilian by design.
	He's a manager.
	He manages a department that is bigger than divisions, corps, and armies.
	He manages the whole thing.
	He gets into the politics of this, how we get money from Congress, the strategic vision of it.
	And you don't, nobody would run a business by going down and picking out a competent warehouseman and say, now you're going to be the CEO of the company.
	What about finances?
	No, don't worry about it.
	You're a good warehouseman.
	You can figure this one out.
	Nice.
	Pete Hagsith is a good warehouseman.
	I mean, he was, you know, I think he was would make a sound battalion operations officer.
	I don't know if he'd be a good battalion commander because he's got some quirks.
	But, you know, he's not incompetent at what his skill level is.
	He's not a secretary of defense.
	He can't operate at this level.
	He doesn't understand what he's doing.
	And it shows everything that's being done and we're going to see things down the road that are going to be manifested by the failures that this man is doing not failures of leadership i mean this guy can lead Hell, he goes out there and runs every morning, does pull-ups.
	That's really cool, but that's not the Secretary of Defense's job.
	Exactly.
	His job is to get fat behind the desk, listening to your people that you delegate authority to come up to you and brief you on the very complex, heavily nuanced reality of managing this multi-trillion dollar enterprise called the United States military.
	He was funny to say that, you know, we have become into this hyper-masculinized world, which is fine, I guess.
	But recently we had Hexeth and Bobby Kennedy Jr. instead of him talking about vaccines and autism, they're doing pull-ups.
	And then we had a case here in New York, in my New York right here, where Zoran Mamdani may have done the worst.
	Forget the fact that he's a crypto-marxist.
	Forget about that.
	He couldn't bench press.
	That was worse than that was like to the Dukakis and the helmet.
	So this is where we are today.
	We are so into these ridiculous labels and these little news blurts.
	But a couple of the questions, who was one of the great secretaries of defense as far as you're concerned?
	People might not like this answer, but I'll give it to Dick Cheney.
	When he was secretary of defense, he was outstanding.
	He made the right decisions.
	Look.
	We blame him today for, rightfully so, for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
	Do you know when he was secretary of defense, he fought against the temptation to go into Baghdad.
	We had a plan.
	I was part of it.
	The Arnold plan to exploit victory on the battlefield in Kuwait and punch through all the way to Baghdad because we said they don't have the forces to stop us.
	We could take Baghdad and we could have.
	And he said, but then what happens?
	The right question.
	Brent Scalcroft said that.
	I remember Brent Scalcroft and others said, listen, we don't want to do it.
	This is not that.
	And in fact, we, now, some guy at the end of the bar, some drunk.
	was like, I can't.
	But wait a minute, wait, wait, wait.
	That's the fact that we showed restraint.
	I remember thinking, wow, this is terrific.
	This was.
	It was the wisdom of the state.
	It was the smartest thing ever.
	But it's not just that.
	Do you remember Rumsfeld saying that we go to war for what we got?
	Yeah.
	No, that's your fault, Rumsfeld.
	Yeah.
	We go to war with the best damn equipment in the world because you as Secretary of Defense made sure that every soldier, sailor, airman, marine had the best equipment in the world because that's your job.
	You know, we went to war in the Gulf War with the best equipment available.
	We were the unbeatable military.
	We had everything we needed.
	Why?
	Because we had good secretaries of defense, not just Cheney, but the people before him.
	Because we were the Cold War.
	We were training seriously for conflict in Europe.
	we had the best military ever there was nothing better than the military schwartz cough get aside from that just exuding because let's face it there's a you know you know when you talk about the theater of war there's two ways to look at it one is the actual war theater the actual area but it also is the theater the camp the production the hollywood the theater the the ronald reagan the guy who was patten who gave you something who made you proud after that can you really do you think that odurno or
	rick sanchez or who i mean where were these where were these people and by the way i i don't know what you thought about petraeus but there was a lot that petraeus said that i thought was terrific and then i don't know what what happened with that but what what happened i believe is after the gulf war i'll just give you a small story from from my own back you know the marine corps is all about leadership i mean it's just if you're an officer you're a leader that's all you are your job is to lead um and leadership requires you to have a number of
	skill sets etc including know proficiency in the in there you've got to be an expert in what you do you can be unchallenged i mean when you make a decision the marines have to look at and you go boss knows what he's talking about we're going to obey unquestionably because that's what we have to do um so we were trained as leaders but when the gulf war endeded, I ended up in Louisiana with the Marine Reserve Forces managing the intelligence manpower there.
	And suddenly the Marine Corps transitioned from leadership, raw, straight up leadership, which is hard to describe, but as a Marine, you know what it is because you were trained to do it.
	And suddenly we went into total quality management, TQM.
	And all of us young Marines were going, we're not managers.
	We're never meant to be managers.
	Our job is to lead.
	I don't manage.
	I lead.
	I make decisions.
	I get out there and motivate people.
	I become an expert in my field.
	I don't manage.
	I don't sit back and manage.
	and do paperwork.
	You lead the managers.
	Well, we would kick the managers out.
	We don't want managers.
	Maybe that's half the problem, but the point is, it's a mindset.
	And that mindset infected the entire military.
	From an intelligence standpoint, we went from having real experts to having, you know, basically – We don't want well-rounded people.
	We want experts.
	We want people to know how to close with and destroy the enemy through firepower maneuver, not somebody who can manage different problem sets through the purple haze of joint, you know, joint military command and then the clinton administration um basically purged our military of real leaders and what happened is we've got managers and so the the generals general gray was a leader if you met general gray he wasn't a manager he was a leader he kicked your ass he came in i remember as a second lieutenant
	him coming to the theater telling us, you know, if we're going to spend our whole career running around in tight little red shorts, you know, seeing how fast we can run three miles, get the hell out.
	He said, I'm going to put 90 pounds on your back.
	I'm going to make you a hike 25 mile force march.
	And I'm making you do military things at the end because that's what war is about.
	Man, the guy was a leader.
	He didn't, you know, he wasn't, you know, the most physically fit.
	But when he came in front of you, that was a combat leader.
	And you went, my God, I'll follow this man into the gates of hell.
	The leaders that came after that, you they're they're doing things and maybe that's the you know the way society changed but when i look at the the the general officers officers today i don't see the old school leaders that we had even people who were capable of leadership like Petraeus became managers in the end.
	And you became politicized.
	General Gray wasn't afraid to tell anybody to pound sand.
	He told Schwarzkopf to pound sand.
	That's why he pulled me and other people into to look at amphibious operations because he looked at Swordsgubbs and he said, what you're doing is suicide to the Marines.
	We don't, you know, we don't want to build another Iwo Jima monument called Kuwait City.
	We want to fight smarter.
	And we ended up fighting smarter.
	But, you know, that's leadership, combat leadership.
	That's the kind of leadership we need.
	I don't think we get this today.
	We get managers.
	We get people who are politicized.
	You can't get promoted unless you impress the politicians, which means you have to make the compromises that normal leaders won't make.
	You know, we have to understand that the military is different from normal society.
	Yes.
	If you're going to succeed on the battlefield, you can't, you know, live life as if we're living in mom and pa and neighborhood.
	No, you've got to be out there eating raw meat, doing the dirty job, out there closing with and destroying the hypothetical enemy in case we ever have to really do that.
	But this requires a different mindset, a different approach that is lacking today.
	That's just my opinion.
	I look at things today.
	Well, of course it is, but you're an expert.
	But I'll tell you something, as a civilian.
	The guy, a couple of things that, and correct me if I'm wrong, anytime, please, I'm sure you will.
	I always thought that some people who were basically, I don't want to say, F-ups in, I don't want to keep this clean, but in real life, maybe great in the military to be a general.
	When you look at people like Patton, this guy may not have been good at anything else in real life, but boy, was he good at really thinking outside of the box.
	Curtis LeMay, Doolittle, my favorite is George Marshall.
	I just think he was just on from another planet.
	Ike, Ike, Omar Bradley, just go down and remember at the time, maybe you know this, at the height of World War II, Scott, how many full generals, four stars, did we have?
	compared to now?
	I mean, it was I I Where did that come from?
	So these people showed this ability to think outside of the box.
	They were great at what they did.
	I got to tell you very quickly, Eisenhower, I love this guy.
	He was the most understanding.
	He was a general of the army versus general of the armies, the six-star general, only two of those.
	That's a different story.
	But this guy was so good.
	Wore this little eye jacket, couple of ribbons, no big deal.
	And later on in real life, he says, I'm not going to salute.
	I'm not in uniform.
	And there's Reagan like this.
	Everybody's going like this.
	And Trump, bless his heart, like this.
	Everybody's playing soldier.
	When Ike, Ike could have done anything.
	He was God, he said, I'm not in uniform.
	He had this, he was like a soldier, legitimate.
	And don't let that avuncular old, you know, uneducated.
	uncle grandpa this guy was a killer and he every day figured out how many people are going to die and i've got to get the job done he was this is hardcore badass and that The burden of leadership, I mean, nobody talks about that, He was making decisions that he knew would result in the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.
	He had to make those decisions every day and live with those decisions.
	But the other interesting thing about Ike and Bradley and everybody, you know, there's a very famous general, Terry Allen.
	Oh, yeah, terrible Terry.
	Terrible Terry.
	By the way, that Marshall fired.
	Fired, but this is the beauty of it.
	He fired him.
	And then terrible Terry came back and commanded another division with distinction, meaning that he made a mistake.
	And Ike and Bradley and everybody went, you got to come out.
	You got to calm down.
	to take a chill pill go over here but they said you're one hell of a leader i mean what you did with the big red one was unbelievable so they brought him back and they gave him the same second chance to shine and he shone.
	I mean, he was brilliant.
	You know who talks about that?
	I don't know what you think about him, but I like some of his stuff.
	It's Tom Ricks, whatever the author who talks about how he, and how Marshall, on Marshall's first day, first day, Hitler.
	advanced into Poland.
	I mean, World War II basically had commenced and he had nothing.
	We had, we were having wooden rifles.
	They had nothing.
	This was it.
	And by the way, look at Terrible Terry's son in Vietnam.
	That horrible story.
	Oh my God, the, the, the calamity of history.
	I, see, Scott, I respect people who do this.
	I love people who say, look, I'm not asking you to like war or be moral.
	I'm a weapon.
	I study how to kill the enemy and destroy property, and that's what I do.
	I'm not an ambassador, but I'm not winning the hearts and minds.
	It's just like when people talk about the criminal justice system.
	Did we rehabilitate?
	It's not about rehabilitation.
	It's about punishment.
	That's what it's about.
	I love these people.
	I love them.
	I think they are so terrific, even though I hope we never need them.
	I just don't think that people like me have the, frankly, opine too much, and they do all this stuff, and they do this.
	And you can always tell, Scott, the inverse proportionality between the size of somebody's lapel pin and what they know about history.
	And Tolstoy said history would be a wonderful thing if only it were true.
	People just make stuff up.
	Now, we've got to get down to two things.
	First of all, Ukraine.
	And there's so many things I want to ask you.
	You talk about the Russians.
	The Russian.
	Don't you think a part whenever you look at this, being a leader or being a battlefield tactician is to number one, know the mindset of your troops, but also the mindset of the enemy.
	Is there heart in it?
	That's why the Vietnamese, they kicked our ass because the great Shelby footline where there was a general, union general, he said, son, to a Confederate, why are you fighting us?
	He goes, because you're here.
	That was it.
	You say, okay, that about...
	So there's this mentality.
	But let's just talk about the...
	No BS line is that this war was thrust upon Russia.
	Russia wasn't looking for this war.
	You know, a lot of Americans, we color what we think we know about Russia today based upon Cold War analogies of the Soviet Union and things like that.
	And we never even got the Soviet Union right.
	I mean, we never understood Stalin.
	We never understood Khrushchev.
	We didn't understand Brezhnev.
	We certainly didn't understand Andropov and Chernyenko.
	And Gorbachev, well, he was just trying too hard to please us.
	But, you know, we bring all these prejudices that accrued because of the red scare, McCarthyism, and this.
	And they carry over to to Russia today.
	Why?
	Well, because the decade of the 1990s when Boris Yeltsin was president, Russia was subservient.
	Russia bent the knee.
	Russia allowed itself to be pillaged by the West.
	It's not just me saying this.
	There's the charge of the affairs, the head of political section in the embassy in 1993, 1994, last name Mary, wrote the modern day long telegram.
	You know the original long telegram written by George Kennan, 1926, led to the containment policy that led to the Cold War.
	totally misunderstanding Stalin and the Soviet Union.
	Well, this guy wrote a long time.
	But he came around later with that X letter.
	Where he basically said, Soviet Union is done.
	And everybody else said, look, that's it.
	That's it.
	Done.
	There is no Soviet Union.
	Kenin came around.
	There's no doubt about that.
	But Mary got it right.
	He sat there and he said, we're not building democracy here.
	We're building the opposite of by supporting Boris Yeltsin, who's the antithesis of democracy.
	He put tanks.
	in the streets of Moscow in October of 1993 to blow up the Russian parliament because they wouldn't do what he wanted them to do.
	And we got him re-elected in 1996 by buying the Russian election.
	We're the ones that interfere with elections.
	But Russia was totally destroyed.
	The Russia of 1999 was a nation in total collapse and free fall.
	And had anybody not named Putin taken over from Yeltsin, we wouldn't have a Russian Federation today.
	And therein lies the problem.
	Because that was the goal.
	That was the objective.
	Vladimir Putin took over and went, you know, I'm not ready to just give up on Russia yet.
	Fact is, I'm going to rebuild Russia.
	Not because I want to be a threat to you, because I love Russia.
	I think Russia's a great place.
	Imagine that.
	He loves his country.
	Imagine that.
	Make Russia great again is what he was all about.
	Every MAGA person out there needs to understand that Vladimir Putin is what Donald Trump wants to be.
	Vladimir Putin is the guy that took a nation that was totally in the doldrums and rebuilt it not by being a threat but just by respecting his people and teaching his people to respect being Russian and what's happened is that the people who were so used to Russia being subservient in the 1990s resented this.
	This is where you get Fiona Hill.
	This is where you get, you know, McCall McFall, Michael McFall, the former ambassador.
	This is where you get everybody out there today, Victoria Nuland and everybody who are postulating Russia as a threat.
	Russia's a threat to nobody except those nations who threaten Russia.
	And if you want to live in peace with Russia, Russia will live in peace and harmony with you.
	So in my day, happy birthday.
	Indeed.
	My world was Boris and Natasha.
	That was it.
	I didn't even know who the hell these people were.
	And I was born in Tampa, by the way, where McDill is.
	And this is CENTCOM and all.
	And so I grew up with this whole thing.
	We were at the, they're going to hit us first and all that.
	Okay, fine.
	I didn't know what the hell I was talking about.
	Then later on, it was Drago from Rocky to Khrushchev and banging shoes.
	And these people were evil and everywhere you turn around.
	Okay, fine.
	And those reds and those communes.
	And they're still talking about these people.
	Okay.
	So here comes Putin.
	And what does he do?
	What does he do after 9-11?
	He basically offers condolences.
	What can we do?
	There was a candlelight vigil in Tehran!
	In 9-11!
	And after the Boston bombing, Boston Marathon bombing, whatever that was about, with the Tsarnaev brothers, the flying Tsarnaev brothers, They're in the caucasus.
	Let me tell you, I can help you.
	I know who these people are.
	Not interested.
	Let me give you the rest of that story.
	Not only did he say, I know who these people are, let me help you.
	He actually brought in his best counterintelligence guy from the Caucasus, and he said, bring in your people, and we're going to work together.
	So the FBI came in, and they brought in their FBI guys to sit down with this guy, and he's helping them.
	He's passing the intelligence on to the FBI to help with this.
	We didn't act on it here.
	they were giving us the intelligence before boston The Russian, I know I spoke to the guy who said, no, I handed it to him.
	They failed to act.
	He was in the U.S. when Boston happened and the U.S. was embarrassed to acknowledge his existence because they know that he told them this was going to happen.
	But here's the worst part.
	The FBI then, the CIA said, can we see those files who are you meeting with the fbi is like well this is this is a pretty cool guy and the cia instead of saying wow can we have a guy come in and meet with you too because this is where you learn a lot that's not how the cia operates you see they can't have a situation where a russian is actually working with the united states the cia has to control you has to own you so the cia tried to recruit this guy And if you remember the infamous case of the American agent with the
	wig and the money and all this stuff, he was arrested by that agent when he tried to recruit him.
	That agent put him on the ground and they came in and arrested him.
	This is how we screw up.
	The Russians are trying to work with us, live with us as equals, as partners in this planet.
	And we can't handle this.
	There you go again, Ritter.
	There you go in, you Russian apologist, you Putin.
	By the way, any truth to the rumor going back when FDR died kind of, well, not mysteriously, but rather quickly in Warm Springs.
	Didn't Stalin say, I want to send my man Gromyko because I think he might have been poisoned.
	Did you ever hear this story?
	And then Elliot?
	I've heard that.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I don't know if it's true.
	Then Elliot Roosevelt even said later on that he said, yes, I tried to send my guy because apparently Gromykoko knew poisoning or something.
	And Eleanor said, no, you don't.
	Don't get near him.
	I don't know if that's true.
	But the idea is that we, they were our, like it or not, they were our allies, sort of.
	And listen, I'm not standing up for Stalin or any of that other kind of nonsense.
	But we have enough enemies.
	We should have some kind of triage to enemies.
	Yeah, okay.
	But we've got some other people we should be paying attention to first.
	And basically, Putin said, what, three things.
	You are not going to have a NATO country on my border.
	In 1962, and I know this because I'm in Florida, I was four years old.
	We almost went to war with Russia.
	It was really Turkey, but basically we were going to say we will go to war with world war unless you get missiles out 90 miles from us.
	This is on the border.
	What about that do we not, can we not identify with?
	Well, the problem is, first of all, let me, I have to start this way just so people understand.
	You're never going to meet a more loyal American than me.
	You know, I joined the Marine Corps to defend my country.
	I joined back in the height of the Cold War.
	kill a commit from mommy better dead than red those weren't just slogans that was real i joined to kill russians close with and destroy when i was in 29 palms training it was to fight the soviet threat every morning i woke up totally dedicated to the mission of killing Russians.
	It was only when I became a weapons inspector, lived in Russia for two and a half years and got to meet these people and know these people, I realized I like them.
	I don't want to kill them.
	They're not our enemy.
	They're not out to get us.
	Everything I learned was wrong.
	But most Americans are infected by this Russophobic idea.
	We don't know anything about Russia.
	That's why I've made it my mission today to go to Russia to learn Russian reality and bring it back.
	Not because I'm a Putin apologist or a Russian propagandist, because I'm a loyal American who believes that America's best interests are served by not committing suicide in a nuclear army head that doesn't need to be fought.
	Here and here.
	And so everybody out there saying, well, we have to do this, Russia's doing that.
	No, if Russia's going to be our enemy, then it should be an enemy based upon reality, on truth.
	We can't call Russia our enemy by making things up about the Russians, about the Russian government, about what they want, what they don't want.
	The Russians are the best friends imaginable.
	I will be hard pressed throughout history, especially modern history, to find an example where the Russians straight up lied to us.
	straight up lied to us.
	The Russians actually are very honorable.
	When they sign a treaty, they adhere to it.
	Look at the INF treaty.
	Donald Trump withdrew from it because he was told that the Russians were developing this missile, the 9M729, which could, you know, flu in range of screen.
	The Russians were like, no, no, here, here's the missile.
	They actually set it up, said, here's the missile, here's its derivative, come in, look at it, let's work on this one, guys.
	We'll prove to you that this, and we went, no, no, no, no, no, no, we already made up our mind.
	And we withdrew from the treaty.
	Now the Russians have the Ereshnik missile.
	which is an intermediate range missile that's better than anything that exists in the world.
	We don't have anything to touch it.
	It destabilized it.
	Russia didn't lie.
	Russia didn't cheat.
	Russia didn't want to build the Ereshnik.
	When we withdrew from the treaty, Russia said, we'll maintain a moratorium on developing these missiles so long as you don't deploy any of these missile systems these new systems into Europe well we did in a training so the Russians went well now we got to build these things we got to test them and then they said but we'll we'll have a moratorium against deploying them as long as you know you don't carry out policies that seek to undermine our strategy we allowed the Ukrainians to launch a drone strike against the Russian strategic bombers so the Russians went I guess we got to deploy this thing now it's in cereal production going out there
	and everybody's going look at the Russians provoking us Guys, they didn't want to build that missile.
	That missile shouldn't be there.
	We did it because of what we did in everything we have with the Russians right now is because we started it.
	There was the ABM Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
	We withdrew from that treaty.
	The New Star Treaty is about to expire.
	We're the ones that negotiated in bad faith.
	The Russians don't trust us anymore.
	It's not about us learning to trust the Russians.
	It's about getting the Russians to want to trust us because we have lied.
	We have cheated.
	Our current policy today, just so your audience understands it, is to achieve the strategic defeat of Russia.
	That's the policy that was articulated under Joe Biden and Donald Trump has not withdrawn from that policy.
	Strategic defeat.
	That means that we're seeking to economically crush them.
	I want everybody in your audience to imagine what would happen if the local economy collapsed?
	Everybody's unemployed, no money, no food, starvation, the whole thing.
	That's what we're trying to do to Russia, economic collapse.
	And then we want turmoil on the streets.
	We want a revolution.
	Imagine that, riots burning down.
	That's what, if Russia was trying to do that to us, don't you think we'd be a little irritated about it?
	And then we want the collapse of their system.
	That's like saying we want the constitution ripped up and a totally different kind of government.
	If a nation tried to do that against us, we'd declare war against them.
	This is our policy.
	But is this some kind of a weird vestige of some kind of a patella reflex that we have??
	Is it because, as I once said, NATO exists upon the threat of Russia?
	No Russia, no NATO.
	doesn't exist.
	All that money, all that, if there is no threat, they're almost like, And then we have these other people, the Lindsey Grahams, and we have the Jack Keynes and the Institute for the Study of War and the Kagans and the Newlands and these folks and military-industrial complex.
	We keep saying that.
	And then the Lindsey Grahams and others who were talking about this.
	And then you have other people.
	have these these these fox news apparatchiks who basically i get into this frothing drumbeat and i'm thinking to myself what is do you not remember anything about the vietnam war did you not remember how we and by the way we're we're we love vietnamese we we vacation there with tourism we love the food we got over that somehow even though we wanted to destroy them so what is it scott is it is it amnesia is this some kind of a psychosis is it is it purely
	profit oriented what is behind this uh unfortunately i think it's profit oriented look your man ike warned us about this in his farewell address in 1961 the military industrial congressional complex he took the congressional out out, but it was in there originally.
	It's all about money.
	It's about creating a permanent, I mean, I love it when people say America's not a socialist state.
	What do you think the military-industrial complex is?
	It's socialism.
	It's basically the government handing free money out to people to build things we don't need.
	But we needed to sustain this, and it became an important part of our economy.
	Study the bomber gap, study the missile gap, study, you know, The Symmington, I think, was a senator from Missouri back in the day and how he artificially created a bomber threat so that he could have a General Dynamics factory built in his backyard but then they had to break up and get one built in Texas so that Lyndon Johnson could have the money too.
	It's all about money.
	It's all about power.
	It's about, you know, jobs and all this.
	There is no Russian threat.
	There has never been a Russian threat.
	Russia threatens nobody unless you threaten Russia.
	This is the reality.
	So much is dependent upon.
	Then what happens is we get this permanent bureaucracy that is designed, that is built It's not about doing the right thing.
	It's about sustaining power.
	And then what happens?
	You know, every four years we get a new president.
	Sometimes they extend to eight.
	But the bottom line is we have Republicans and Democrats coming out.
	It's a revolving door.
	The permanent bureaucracy is designed to sustain the intent, the strategic intent that is equal amongst both parties of maintaining the military-industrial complex.
	We do this by building academic institutions that aren't there to educate people, but to rubber stamp people into sustaining the system.
	I'll just give you, again, a personal example.
	My daughter graduated from Georgetown University a year and a half ago.
	She got a degree in Russian Area Studies, Southern Caucasus specialty.
	She accompanied me to Russia when I went there in December 23, January 24.
	One would think that if you're studying Russia and the Southern Caucasus or the Caucasus regions, that this is a plus, especially since I took her to Chechnya, where she got to have lunch with Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic.
	And she got to meet Apti Aladanov.
	She got to meet all the senior Chechen people and have frank, honest discussions about the reality of Russia, the reality of Chechnya, the Southern Caucasus.
	You would think that Georgetown, when she came back, went, whoa, what's going on?
	Come on in here.
	Let's line up the professors, ask questions, students, special seminar.
	Patty, tell us everything about it.
	They tried to kick her out.
	They said, you disgraced the institution by going to Russia.
	This is the reality of American academia today.
	They can teach the subject.
	They can teach it.
	Just don't go there.
	Just don't know anything about it.
	They can't teach the subject.
	They don't know the subject.
	Do not veer from this particular, this doctrinaire.
	The doctrine.
	That's academia today.
	Columbia University.
	They let Victoria Nuland come in to teach.
	Yeah.
	And Hillary Clinton.
	And Hillary Clinton.
	Look at us, Stanford, Michael McFall.
	Our academic institutions are corrupted.
	They're part of the deep state.
	Everything about what we do today is designed to promote the lie that Russia is a threat.
	And that's, and our mainstream media does this as well the mainstream media is not about thinking if they were about thinking hell i'd be on there 24 7 because i have more experience in russia than any one of those people in the mainstream media you can take all their so-called russian experts lump them together and i got more on the ground experience in russia meeting real people than they do look at the defense intelligence agency ask them what was the last time they sat down and had a meaningful dialogue with the uh russian defense attaches in uh in moscow they don't they're not allowed to talk to them at all I get invited
	to Defender of the Fatherland Day.
	I get invited to, you know, May Night celebration.
	It's pretty cool to go there.
	I'll go there just because it's a fun time.
	I spend more face-to-face time with Russian defense attaches.
	attachés talking about interesting military subjects than anybody in the defense intelligence agency does.
	All right.
	And yet, they won't bring me on to talk.
	they won't do because I'm not saying the right thing.
	You have no problem traveling?
	It seems to me my recollection was that one time you might have had a trip or something.
	It wasn't a problem traveling.
	They took my passport.
	I was going to speak at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which you've heard about Davos in Switzerland.
	Right.
	The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum is the NFL to the Pop Warner of Davos.
	This is big league real world stuff.
	And I was going to speak on two panels and then go on a 40 day tour of Russia to meet the Russian people, begin citizen diplomacy.
	The State Department freaked out.
	So they pulled my passport, wouldn't explain, didn't give me a receipt, nothing.
	It took me forever to get, you know, finally I had to apply for a new passport when they, but here's the problem.
	You're a lawyer, you know this.
	You falsify a federal document, you're screwed.
	They asked a simple question, did you lose it or was it stolen?
	Well, I didn't lose it.
	So I had to declare it stolen, but I had to build the case.
	And the funny thing is, I built that case, documented everything, sent them everything, and they gave me a passport, which means they acknowledge they stole my passport.
	So I just got back from 10 days in Russia, very intensive discussions, interviews.
	I interviewed six or seven people a day.
	I'm starting to publish these interviews at scottrooter.com.
	You can go there and look at them.
	But the whole idea is to capture the Russian voice and let the Russians tell you about Russia.
	You know, I'm not asking you to believe them.
	I'm not asking you.
	I'm asking you to listen to them.
	But look what happened when Tucker Carlson talked to Vladimir Putin.
	You would have thought that.
	I mean, listen, you know, the worst thing to do, if you want to really kill something, say, go ahead, do it.
	Go talk to them.
	What?
	Yeah, talk to them.
	Who cares?
	You just take it off.
	It's like when you got a kid, when you tell somebody, don't listen toisten to that music don't grow your hair long don't do don't don't don't don't because it's forbidden fruit listen we live in a world right now which is kind of a tangential subject where you on a speaking to college campuses where if you were to say something that is contrary to somebody's ideology you're fired or dismissed or expelled because you're quote anti-Semitic but you can say whatever you want about this country be anti-american no problem in fact it's preferred I don't understand that one and by the way I don't have to explain my whether
	I'm an American.
	I love my country, not my government.
	I don't have to explain anybody who I am.
	I'm not going to explain it.
	Let's pretend...
	By the way, it's not the flag, it's the Constitution that I abide by.
	So I don't have to explain that to anybody.
	And in fact, one of the things that I thought made us kind of great is the fact that we can ask these things.
	You know, that we can ask.
	I remind people in Russia the whole time, they're like, aren't you afraid to speak out like this?
	I said, no, I'm American.
	Fear the Constitution.
	gives me this right.
	It's my duty as an American to speak out.
	I don't work for the government.
	The government works for me.
	Let's get the relationship correct.
	I and my fellow citizens elect the government to act in our name.
	And then we hold them accountable for what they do in our name.
	But the government isn't America.
	The government isn't what the constitution is America.
	And the American people who live their lives in accordance with the constitution define the constitutional republic.
	The government's temporary.
	It comes and goes.
	The American people who believe in the constitution, that's forever, baby.
	Listen, I got to tell you something.
	It's funny, one of my wife and I, we go to Philadelphia quite a bit.
	And that is really something to sit there and think, what did these guys out of their minds, especially when they said, listen, we have this First Amendment thing.
	And frankly, it's like, are you sure?
	Are you sure about this First Amendment?
	Do you really know what this is about?
	Do you really understand?
	Yes.
	No, you don't.
	Because today, the president, President Trump, and by the way, he's like that rock band that your mother, your father said, would you turn that crap off?
	That's me with him because he's like, I've lost so many.
	bad friends with him sometimes he does things with this uncanny sense of of genius and then sometimes he does things where i think he's it's schizoid schizo effective but today he said, I want to have a law again that's going to make it a law against a law to burn an American flag.
	Now, look, I don't know why this is a problem and maybe, but the expression in the First Amendment is a bitch.
	It doesn't guarantee the Johnny Mann singers or the Osmonds.
	In 1971, the Supreme Court said, we have the anarchist cookbook.
	It shows you how to kill people for God's sakes.
	And they said, well, that's okay.
	But burning a flag, oh, no, no, that's verboten.
	And there are people with an American flag, LaPalpin.
	remember the inverse going clapping over what is nothing but a I don't know.
	Is there a 1989 Supreme Court?
	Yeah, it was already...
	But this is this group of people.
	And to think that my speech, and by the way, what we do now is the government doesn't come at you necessarily directly, but it comes at you through proxies.
	They create a situation, something that you love, maybe perhaps a platform, and then we get them to do the dirty work.
	And people sit back after COVID.
	I can't, and you know what I love, Scottott, is all of a sudden it's okay to talk about things.
	Can we talk about ivermek?
	Is it okay?
	I guess it is.
	there's no rule that says it's okay now and now all of a sudden people are coming out of the woodwork who were saying this before but all of a sudden now it's cool so what it does is it puts us into a perpetual case of learned helplessness where we don't know what the rules are we're just this dog that keeps getting shocked and we just we just give up and we just ask for permission and just hope nobody bothers us and yes sir no sir and we'll just I'll watch what I say.
	We're losing our guts and our balls.
	I agree 100%.
	Look on the flag.
	I mean, you know, if you've ever served as officer of the day in a Marine Corps installation.
	You know, one of the major tasks is you raise the colors in the morning and you bring the colors down at night.
	And they have the flag manual.
	And you have to memorize the flag manual.
	You have to inspect the flag before it's raised.
	You have to inspect the flag afterwards.
	The whole thing, the care and custody of the flag, it's the living emblem of our nation.
	And I bought into it and I still buy into it.
	I love my flag.
	I've cried on overseas territory looking at the flag when it flies over the embassy.
	There you go.
	I'm with you on this.
	And I used to think this was so stupid when I was a kid.
	I'm thinking, what are these people and their flags?
	This vexology, this federalism.
	I love fighting.
	But here I would get in trouble because I was a volunteer firefighter for 10 years.
	And they have a tendency to put flags on the back of the fire truck.
	I said, you can't do that.
	That's disrespectful to the flag.
	I go up and down my street.
	My wife would go for a walk every morning because the older you get, the more you have to try and stay active.
	And I look at flags.
	People have their flags out at night, but they don't shine the light on them.
	People put the flag.
	I look at Olympic athletes who wear a cloak as a flag around their shoulders.
	You can't use the flag as a piece of clothing.
	I look at Pete Haggs that put the flag in his pocket.
	And I'm like, you can't do that,.
	Yes.
	So at least be consistent.
	Okay, if you want to do the law and you want to get the Supreme Court to come out of it, and again, whatever.
	Right now, the Constitution, the way it's interpreted as the Supreme Court, says you can burn the flag, and that's part of free speech.
	Okay.
	They treat the flags like a consecration.
	And it can't be.
	And it's got to be 45 degrees.
	And I go, and I've read this before.
	You know, one of the things which is very interesting, there was a case years ago called Newdow.
	And Newdow was the case involving under God in the Pledge of Allegiance.
	And it was added in 1950 something by the Knights of Columbus to show those heartless pagan atheist Ruskies that we're a God-fearing monotheistic group.
	So there was this amendment.
	And in the legislative intent, there was this statement that said, this is to show the world that we are a monotheistic.
	And somebody suggested, this is a violation of the Establishment Clause.
	Anyway, I thought, it is because it is because we're basically saying, guys, it goes, well, it doesn't really matter.
	No, no, this is a document.
	This is granted.
	It's a legislative intent.
	Anyway, it went to the Supreme Court and per usual, they take the case, they grant cert, and then they punt.
	They say, well, you know what?
	You weren't, you didn't have custody of your kid, so we're not going to answer.
	It's like, well, what the hell did you grant cert for?
	Anyway, when, when, when Bellamy, Francis Bellamy, whatever, came up with the Pledge of Allegiance, in the old days, there was this thing where you would pick your hand and you would put it out and it looked like a Nazi salute.
	This is the way you, you, I mean.
	And if you tell people this and can you compel somebody to take, look, we love symbology and the semiotics of this and that, but the real essence of this is number one, consistency and understand that expression trumps everything.
	Expression, your ability, so long as it doesn't hurt anybody, it's not a clear and present danger.
	You're not yelling theater in a crowded fire.
	You know, you're not doing any of that stuff.
	We forget all about that.
	There's a guy I love, Tench Cox in Philly.
	He is the founder, he's like the godfather of the militia.
	And somehow through the Second Amendment, we thought that militias, they're expressly provided for.
	And nobody, and I'm the only one actively suggesting that we consider this, which of course you in the military don't particularly care for.
	This is this weird.
	The Third Amendment, imagine this, quartering soldiers against.
	your will at your house?
	How bad was this?
	This was bothering these people.
	God damn it, we got to stop that.
	This is our history.
	It's weird.
	It's quirky.
	It's strange.
	It's inconsistent.
	I don't know.
	But I love it.
	It's all we have.
	We are a constitutional republic, not a democracy.
	That runs the show.
	Not what 51%, not what tyranny by the majority tells us.
	I mean, look, I'm preaching to the choir.
	But sometimes I think, I swear to God, Scott, we need to have some kind of a summer class, maybe in the Berkshires every year, to have parents and bring their kids.
	Let's teach them.
	We used to study civics.
	yeah i i as a look when i learned the Pledge of Allegiance, I'm probably giving away my age here, it was one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all, not one nation under God.
	And that's when they added that.
	That was the Knights of Columbus.
	That was that.
	You know, so to this day, whenever, you know, so to cite the Pledge of Allegiance, my first inclination is one nation indivisible.
	But we had to study civics.
	I just remember as a kid, you know, civics lessons, civic lessons, civic lessons.
	My wife is from the former Soviet Union, the Republic of Georgia.
	To become an American citizen, she had to take a test.
	on the constitution.
	And the passing grade is 100%.
	And she did it.
	She studied.
	She did it.
	And the sad fact is, you know, I'm going to put a high number on there.
	I'm going to say over 90% of Americans would fail this test.
	Absolutely.
	And they're all like, I'm an American.
	You don't know what it means to be an American because to be an American, it's defined by the constitution.
	The constitution is who you are.
	And if you don't know the constitution and you don't live the constitution, you don't breathe the constitution, then you're not an American.
	You're faking it.
	You're faking it to make it.
	It's the rule book.
	And when we were talking about, you know, under the Article II provisions of 35 years old natural-born citizen.
	And by the way, citizen for what, 14, 16 years, whatever.
	I forget that part, which they always forget that almost snagged Herbert Hoover.
	Here's the best part, Scott.
	Nobody reads anything.
	Hello, Scott, chat GPT.
	I can answer.
	We are loath to even ask, well, what is the rule?
	What's the secret behind it?
	Why does this, I cannot tell you.
	How recently the hardest part was when the Supreme Court finally put an end to this substantive due process nonsense of Roe against Wade.
	I'm pro-choice.
	There's nothing nothing to do with whatever that means, whatever my pro choice means.
	But there's nothing in the constitution that gives a right to an abortion.
	It's just that simple.
	Or sodomy or fallacia or anybody, anything, or color TV.
	They don't even mention the Air Force or how many justices there are in the Supreme Court.
	The constitution, you just don't, you don't add on to it.
	Okay.
	They went berserk over that without spending one minute saying, let's learn a little bit about what this privacy is.
	Let's learn about Grizzwell.
	Let's spend a little bit of time.
	And by the way, that's the way I felt.
	Like a yapping chihuahua.
	I was furious at the time with what these people did.
	But anyway, but I don't want to...
	See, but you and I...
	I've got to say something.
	Your tutorials, I don't know how many total, you have been on every show, I think, put it this way, there's a phrase in the Bible that says, wherever two or more of you are, Scott Ritter is on your show.
	You have been on every show giving, seriously, free tutorials, reminders.
	You have inspired thought.
	You've inspired people to say, I never thought about this.
	How many times somebody says, you know, I never thought about this.
	And remember, you only.
	take flack when you're over the target.
	So the more garbage they give you, the more correct you are.
	Nobody's arguing about Sasquatch and Yeti and whether Elvis is alive.
	Nobody cares about that.
	But when you hit pay dirt, then they get upset.
	And that's when I know you're on to something.
	The more they hate you, the more they try to kill you, the more correct you are.
	Congratulations.
	Well, thank you very much.
	Look, I live by the same credo.
	I don't seek attention.
	It's just we live in a time where I learned this as a weapons inspector.
	When I resigned, I resigned on principle.
	I resigned because I believe that my government was involved in things that were unprincipled, that went against what we stand for as a people and ultimately as a Marine, you know, will cost the lives of my fellow Marines if we have to go to war when we don't need to go to war.
	But I never wanted to go public.
	I just want to play golf, you know, run around with my dogs and, you know, go to the mall and not have anybody know who the hell I am.
	But there's a moral responsibility.
	Leadership abhors a vacuum.
	And as I told you, the Marine Corps trains you to be a leader.
	And when you stand there and you see people saying things and no one step up to correct them and you know what the right answer is, silence is sort of self-critondemns you.
	You have a duty and responsibility to step up.
	And today, you know, we just happen to be talking about issues that I have some experience in, arms control, nuclear weapons, disarmament, the Middle East, Russia, Russia, Russia.
	And so when people call me up, trust me, if somebody called me up and said, I want your opinion on a 60-69 Chevy with a 396 Chile heads and a Hearst on the floor, you know, I'd say you might want to talk to Bruce Springsteen because I don't know anything about that.
	You know, so I'm not going to talk about things I don't know about.
	Not as an expert.
	But so many people want to know about Russia right now.
	And it's so important that they know about Russia because the Russophobia is leading us to accept policies at face value that could lead us to nuclear war.
	The CIA last year said there was a better than 50% chance that we changed the year of nuclear conflict with Russia.
	Better than 50% chance.
	How many Americans were willing to roll the dice on total annihilation last year?
	We just were going through.
	No, we have to know what the threat is so people can say.
	Why would we go to war with Russia?
	There's no reason to go to war with Russia.
	Right.
	And there's a couple of things too.
	There's a, there's a, you talk about the image.
	Sergei Lavrov versus Marco Rubio.
	Oh my God.
	And by the way, you've you got whitcoff marco's not even there they they you can say the worst things putin too you can tell you're coming and pushing and pushing and pushing and i appreciate these people he never he's like would you say something stupid so we can hate you would you would you would you say would you insult us never my favorite is i can imagine on the flight back
	from Alaska.
	Starmer turning to Macron and goes, what the hell was that?
	What was that about?
	What the F just happened?
	Did we get anything?
	Did I miss something here?
	And Trump, and this is the Trump part.
	Because Trump says, I'm stupid.
	He has the entire world sit in front of him like children.
	And he says, thank you for it.
	And get nothing.
	he says, want to see my hats?
	Hey, Zelensky, want to see my hat?
	You want a hat?
	What size are you?
	Want a t-shirt?
	Yes, Mr. President.
	What is going on?
	And meanwhile, there's Putin in the beast, and people think that that was a moment.
	Come on.
	Or my favorite is when the B2 flew over., Putin said, oh my God, you don't think he knew what that was?
	They've got hypersonic missiles.
	All of a sudden he heard this noise.
	He went like that.
	Okay.
	But the way we portrayed it, he was in aw.
	And I think deep down inside, Trump knows this guy I can deal with.
	I respect him.
	He's a cool dude.
	He's kind of scary, but he's right.
	Because all he said was three things that he has been in, he's been consistent with and never backed down once.
	Never.
	When Trump held up the photograph of him and Putin?
	Mm.
	Well, man, that's Samboy stuff.
	That's Trump saying.
	What else he says?
	I'm next to Putin.
	Yeah, right.
	What he says, come to Russia.
	He said, oh, I'm going to get in trouble.
	Don't say that.
	Of course he should do this.
	This is what I don't understand.
	This will upset the entire apple cart if all of a sudden you realize.
	See, people don't understand.
	You see, Scott, Gore Van Allen says, I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
	I'm a conspiracy analyst.
	And I'm a conspiracy theorist.
	You know, and there's this thing called the deep state and the shadow government and all these people behind the scenes, behind this Potemkin village, that's Washington a movie set.
	And these people run the show.
	And these people are the ones that scared the hell out of me.
	And they're the ones that portray this.
	And they've got these sycophant little proxies, like I hate to say, like the Fox News and others, they do a good job, but they're basically proxies of this.
	Don't talk about RT or TAS or PRAVDA.
	That's TAS or PRAVDA.
	It's the most incredible thing I've ever seen in my life.
	And what you're doing and I'm saying is, can we worry about stuff here?
	We have fentanyl.
	Here we have crime.
	We've got a border.
	Remember that?
	We've got so many problems.
	We've got Plato.
	I'm sure in your town, wherever you are, I'm sure you've got, you don't have any problem potholes you don't have any infrastructure problem no but we're sending how many billions to ukraine i mean this this isn't this isn't even beyond worth discussing it's a no five five minutes five minutes from my house in downtown albany there's clinton street and clinton street 50 of it's boarded up um it's boarded up uh The fire department is slow to response.
	The police don't go there because it's just, it's a part of the city that the establishment has forgotten about because it doesn't pay taxes.
	It doesn't do this stuff.
	Clinton Street should never exist.
	in America.
	We should not have Clinton streets.
	How ironic the name.
	We should have, well, I mean, we can call whatever we want to call it.
	Right, right, right, but I understand.
	But the point is the money we spend abroad just makes everything worse.
	We're not improving, we're not solving any problems.
	We're making problems worse.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	The world doesn't trust us anymore.
	We've lost the trust and faith of the world.
	We're not the leaders.
	You know, leadership isn't bullying people.
	Leadership is coming in and being the expert and have moral foundation, have people say, I want to follow you.
	That's leadership.
	We don't lead the world anymore.
	We intimidate people.
	We bully them.
	But eventually the world's going to lift more weights than we do.
	Eventually the world's going to look at us and say, you can't even lift 135 pounds anymore, America.
	You know, we're out here, you know, pumping out 250.
	This is, this is, America's got to fix itself.
	I still, I love my country.
	I love us.
	I love our potential.
	That's what I tell people all the time.
	They say, what do you love about America?
	You got so many things wrong.
	I said, I love our potential.
	But also, but see, but Scott, they love us.
	We gave people the greatest music in the world, the greatest TV.
	We give computers.
	We're the us, the us part., the first thing I would do was if somebody came to our country, I would say, I'm not going to take it to Washington.
	Let's go eat.
	I'm in New York.
	Where do you want to go?
	You like music?
	We brought it to you from Jelly Roll Morton to Jazz to Gershwin to the Beatles because we gave the Beatles blues and they brought it back.
	We were cool.
	There was a time in Tehran where people wanted to wear blue jeans and be like us.
	And there was a chance for a bloodless revolution, a revolution of ideas.
	And I thought that's who we were.
	We were just regular kind of fun, kind of goofy sometimes.
	And then this stuff and it was from Vietnam on, I don't know where we lost our way.
	And let me ask you one question, my final question.
	If you had a young man, a son, who was said, Dad, I want to join the Marines, should I?
	What would you tell him honestly today?
	That answered my question.
	No, because it's a harder question than that.
	I would tell him that the Marine Corps made me who I am.
	And I love the Marine Corps.
	I wouldn't be who I am today without the Marine Corps.
	And the Marine Corps is about many things, but foremost it's about serving your country, serving your country, not your president, serving the constitution, serving the country.
	But is that what you do?
	Is that what you do?
	Or do you serve your government?
	Are you serving Bechtel or Raytheon or whoever the hell is that?
	What I would tell them is this, you can't control what's going to happen once you raise your hands and swear in.
	You will be trained.
	You are responsible for your own actions.
	But you can't control the wars you're going to be asked to fight.
	You can't control the presidents you're going to serve under.
	You don't join today because you love this president because in four years, you may get somebody totally different.
	You join to be there when your country needs you.
	And God forbid the country will never need you.
	And God forbid the country doesn't abuse the trust and confidence that you've put in them by serving.
	understand this, that when you join the Marine Corps, you join, you're going to fall in love with your fellow Marines.
	Your job is to protect them.
	Your job is to take care of the people on your left and right.
	You be loyal to the Marines.
	You be loyal to your country.
	Be loyal to your constitution.
	understanding that you're going to get used and abused and you're going to be asked to do things that you don't agree with.
	But as long as you're not violating human rights or international law, you've got to obey that that order if you can live with that then join the marine corps because if you survive you'll be a better person for it oh without listen without a doubt you know what's so funny we have here i'm on the west side here in hell's kitchen and we have west side highways here in the intrepid and every every memorial day we have we have fleet week and we have the marines and the navies and they and they they they perfuse uh midtown and they walk around and every year i think oh my god they're getting smaller and
	tinier and they look so much like babies but it's like don't kid yourself that guy who's 19 years old this is a killer now final question i've been saying final question because i'm a i'm a perennial liar who is the best military in the world?
	How do we stack up pound for pound?
	Is it Turkey?
	Is it Russia?
	Is it us?
	Who's really pound for pound the best of the best?
	Right now today it's Russia because they're fighting war, real war, high intensity conflict, and they've perfected this art.
	The kill ratio between the Russians and Ukrainians, who are the second best army in the world, by the way, the Ukrainian army.
	Look, they're doing things.
	Our military...
	Practice.
	We don't know anything about drone warfare.
	If we rolled in, we don't know how to operate in a high-intensity air defense environment.
	Our planes wouldn't survive.
	We're so dependent upon communication interconnectivity.
	What happens when we can't communicate?
	When the Russians take out our satellites, take out our ability.
	Do we train our Marines today to do compass and map?
	or is it all GPS?
	If it's all GPS, then you're not going to be able to navigate.
	We don't train the way we used to.
	We do a lot of simulations and all that.
	The Russians today, when they started in 2022, I think the events proved that they were more hyped than not, meaning we put the Russians up here, but they were really down here.
	The Russians, though, are some of the most adaptable people out there.
	They make a mistake, and they learn from this state.
	And then they, to give you an example, on the battlefield, they had this general who was with the 58th Army, he was doing the battle around Mariupol.
	they pulled him out of the battlefield, sent him to the General Staff Academy and said, redesign defensive warfare for us because we got the Ukrainians coming.
	He spent a couple months rewriting the manual.
	Then they said, okay, now go back and build the defenses.
	And the reason why the Ukrainians hit there, you know, took this NATO-trained military and crashed it against the Russian defensive wall is because the general built the defenses designed to defeat NATO.
	And then they went back and they learned, they pull guys out all the time, send them to the academies.
	And then they bring that back.
	They built small academies.
	They retrain.
	This is during wartime.
	Their troops are constantly updated with the new tactics and everything.
	They've perfected drone warfare.
	I just spent, when I was in Russia, I spent an evening with a commander of a drone unit and um he just telling me that you don't understand war if you don't understand how drones and we're and so if we went to war today we would get killed and i say this as a as a marine who loves my marines but you know the bottom line is We may be motivated in the training we get, but our training is legacy.
	That's like being a really good cavalry officer.
	Right.
	Right.
	Well, now you got to charge a trench in World War I with machine guns and artillery.
	You could be the best cavalry officer and 100 years ago, you would have wiped the field with everybody.
	But now you're going up against machine guns and artillery and you're going to die.
	Our Marines are wonderful.
	Our soldiers are wonderful.
	They don't know how to fight this fight.
	You know, as long as you say that they're the best.
	I don't know sometimes the hype.
	I don't know if China is really our or China is a president Trump would say.
	I don't know really who is our lethal enemy.
	I don't know.
	But, you know, we have here the US Open here in Forest Hills.
	And I thought to myself, you know, because I always think to myself, I would be a really bad person.
	Because I would say, I want to be as unconventional.
	I would go into terrorism, guerrilla warfare, mind control, psyops.
	I would have EMP, Carrington class stuff.
	I would, you wouldn't know.
	And remember this, and you know this, AI is going to be the existential threat of all humanity.
	AI is going to change, it's going to destroy everything.
	But that's another story.
	But as I was watching this, and there's the US Open, and they've got drones and pictures.
	If I said, you know, if I was, let's say, pick your China who are, I don't care.
	And I'm going to take about half a pound of fentanyl, and I'm going to just disperse it over a drone, and they wouldn't know, and the drone takes off, and all of a sudden people are, you because we're being attacked, we're being poisoned by someone.
	This is an overdose.
	This is a this is a form of warfare that doesn't have uniforms and doesn't have battalions, doesn't have a general, but we are being attacked.
	And we're being attackeded culturally, scientifically, sociologically, psychologically.
	That may not be your bailiwick.
	But drones are it.
	Drone is going to be that transcendental, transformational weapon that, first of all, there's nobody in there.
	You can make a bunch of them.
	They can pull Gs that humans can't.
	I mean, it's a no-brainer.
	And we should have known this.
	And I just hope somebody along the way is thinking that.
	Scott Ritter, I have taken far too much of your time.
	But take it from me.
	Believe me when I say, I hope we speak to you again i hope when you hang up you don't say oh jesus christ this guy no no but i mean it is it is so it has been so so important and i want to thank you there's a lot of people watching right now who want to thank you because you have taught us so much stuff that we would have never learned any place else on behalf of a grateful nation i say this sincerely thank you scott rider scott rider scott rider.com and i wish you all the best my friend and
	thank you Thank you very much.
	It's been an absolute joy talking with you and I hope to do it again soon.
	Indeed, sir.

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