Colonel Douglas Macgregor Like You’ve Never Seen Him
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My friends, if you don't know who this man is, get out of here.
Go someplace else.
I don't even want to talk to you.
You're at the wrong, you're on the wrong platform.
But I feel this sense of obligation in case somebody needs to know.
This is the one, the only, the inimitable, the ineffable, Colonel Douglas McGregor, that everybody, everybody knows.
And I'm going to say, sir, everybody loves a decorated combat veteran, best-selling author, one of the most influential military thinkers of the modern era, West Point graduate with a PhD, Dr. McGregor, in international relations.
He led with distinction the Battle 73, easting the largest U.S. tank clash since World War II.
His pioneering ideas in force design reshaped military transformation in the United States, Israel, Russia, China, and Korea.
He served as senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense under President Trump and has testified before Congress while appearing as a trusted analyst across major global media.
And again, sir, I thank you for being with us.
And my first question is, what the hell have we accomplished?
What have we?
You've been on every show.
You've been absolutely brilliant.
You've said exactly what needs to be done, but America is asleep.
Is anybody listening?
Have you ever felt, have you ever felt and ask yourself, what the hell am I doing?
I could be Jack Keene making a fortune, working for the Newlands and the Kagans, working for Raytheon.
What am I doing?
Will, you always ask the greatest questions.
Before we go into it, though, I want to tell you that after that introduction, I'm going to make sure you're invited to my funeral.
We'll let you write the epitaph.
That's very nice.
I appreciate it.
I think Americans are not focused for a whole range of reasons on what's happening overseas.
And truthfully, that's not a new development.
We're very much like the British Empire in the sense that what happens militarily usually is distant from our shores.
And unless we take heavy casualties as a result of something we do, no one pays attention.
You and I, I lived through the Vietnam War, and I remember that as the casualties rose and more and more men were killed and wounded, more and more people were interested in the Vietnam War.
Now, obviously, they were interested because it was a draft, and a lot of people didn't want to go, but the losses that we were taking were critical.
And when 1990, when I arrived in the desert with the squadron, the second of the 2nd Cavalry, we actually asked, what are the guidelines from Washington about casualties?
And we were told that we could lose the equivalent of one company of infantry per brigade.
That's about 150 to 200 men per brigade.
So if you look at the numbers of divisions involved, numbers of brigades, well, that meant that you could lose about 2,000 men the first three or four days, and that was probably acceptable.
Now, I'm not saying that anybody wanted that, and the use of the word acceptable is misleading because, frankly, the deaths of Americans in uniform are never something we regard as acceptable.
But I think that's kind of where we are.
So when you talk about what's happening in eastern Ukraine, what's happening in the Middle East, what's happening anywhere, unless you're going to experience a mass casualty exercise, and I would say something over 100 within the space of, say, an hour or two on any given day, people are probably not going to pay much attention.
And that's unfortunate.
The other thing is, I don't think they understand money either, Lionel.
People don't understand what a trillion means, what a billion means.
It's all sort of fuzzy math to the average American.
Everett Dirksen, remember that great line from Dirksen?
Yeah.
Exactly.
Eventually you start talking about real money.
But the average American will pay attention to his situation if he can't buy food.
If he loses his job, if he can't put food on the table, if he can't buy gasoline, you know, these kinds of things.
That's when people start paying attention.
So I've gotten to the point where I don't lose a lot of sleep over it.
You know, you have to go out there and say what you think and hope that people do take it seriously.
But I'm not a fool.
I know that until things get really bad, it's not going to happen.
Let me tell you, also, I think as a as a, maybe as a former prosecutor, maybe the trial lawyer in me, I remember one time when I was in law school, I was watching this closing argument.
I thought, this guy's fantastic.
And I was with this kind of old-timer, probably younger than me now.
And it was in an old southern courtroom, and he's actually doing snuff.
I thought, what is this?
Inherit the wind?
Anyway, he was doing this.
And I said, boy, that guy's doing a great job, business.
He says, no, not really.
He's why.
He says, well, he said, he explained it real good.
He said, but he just didn't persuade me.
And I thought, you know, you're right about that.
So I'm always thinking, how do I persuade people?
Let me tell you something that's happened here in New York and give an idea of a kind of a unique dynamic.
When you talk about the Middle East, there was a, I look at opinion almost like the murmurations of starlings, the way they move in these beautiful inkblots and worshipped movements in this coordinated effort.
And everybody at first was regarding the Middle East, absolutely, positively, 100%.
It was what Israel's doing is wrong.
This is wrong.
And this is a genocide or apartheid or whatever you want to call it.
No doubt about it.
And there was a sense of compassion and sympathy with Arabs and Palestinians and all this stuff.
Okay, fine.
Now, jump to this.
Here in New York, we have a guy named Zorhan Mamdani, a man whose name nobody can pronounce.
And all of a sudden, people are talking, Colonel McGregor, about Islamism.
Somebody said that progressivism is a religion disguised as a political party.
And Islamism is basically a political party disguised as a religion, not Islam, Islamist.
And all of a sudden, this one woman said, you know, I can't believe all that.
Tahijabs and Abayas and this woman at the Cinnabon in Wisconsin.
Okay, cut to the chase.
Because Americans can only think of one thing at a time, they never saw that man on Eric Bren on Ed Sullivan with the plates and the simultaneous.
They're saying, you know, maybe I had this Middle East thing all wrong.
Maybe these Arab folks, maybe they're the problem.
And it changed the direction of the conversation.
Does that make any sense to you?
Well, I don't want to say it's sensible, but it's predictable.
And we have to remember that we've had at least 25 years, maybe longer, maybe 30, of systematic propagandization related to demonizing Islam and Muslims.
Now, there are big problems with Islam.
I don't think anybody denies that.
I mean, historically, the problem for Islam is that it does not coexist well politically with anybody.
In other words, it either dominates or it's suppressed.
There's not much in between.
That's the sort of Islamist view.
I think you also have the problem in the United States with the Israeli issue, contrary to what many people are saying, people like Ben Shapiro or Levin, Americans do not hate Jews.
That's just nonsense.
No, exactly.
Exactly.
Exactly.
But they don't necessarily like what the Israelis have done.
And I don't see how anybody could like what they've done in places like Gaza and on the West Bank.
I mean, if all the people on the West Bank were, or excuse me, all the people in Gaza were Jews, I think we would be just as upset over the way they were being treated.
So I think you have to distinguish that from the other.
But the interesting part is what you're saying is true.
Look here, don't look there.
This is the new focus.
That's the old focus.
The new cycle continues.
And remember that most Americans, and I mean this, they're good people.
They care deeply about things, but they live remote from the things that Washington and New York City follow.
How many people in Kansas City or Seattle can tell you what NATO is?
I mean, I used to have these discussions all the time when I was on active duty with people when I was at MOMs at Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe.
And I would say, you know, here's the bad news.
The bad news is that nobody out there knows anything about NATO and is really not interested.
That's the bad news.
The good news is they don't know anything about it, which you do have some latitude to do things that make sense, but don't abuse it.
I think that's the real lesson.
There's great latitude in Washington to do things, provided you don't abuse it and overdo it.
And that's the danger.
That's what happened to us in Vietnam.
We convinced ourselves that that was easy.
That would not be a big deal.
Catastrophe.
People are talking about Venezuela.
It's not a big deal to be easy.
I think the Israelis made a terrible mistake because I know for a fact they thought that the whole Gaza business would be over very quickly.
Large numbers of people would willingly leave and pull out.
That wasn't true.
So they miscalculated.
We've miscalculated.
When you do that, the next question is, okay, how do we disengage from this?
And I think we can disengage, for instance, from Venezuela if we want to.
I think the president can announce that he's had another phone call.
We've come to an agreement.
There's no reason for direct military confrontation with Venezuela.
Unfortunately, for the Israelis, it's not that easy.
You know, it's funny.
I'm going to go back to the Vietnam thing.
I thought I'm 67 and I missed.
I was, I think I was junior in high school when they stopped elective service.
But when I was in seventh grade, sixth grade, I had a POW bracelet.
We were so engaged.
It was in our music.
It was in everything there was.
It was cool to have an opinion about Vietnam.
And then somebody said, you know what changed it?
When grandmothers started to protest, when priests and nuns, and they're saying, whoa, something happened.
It wasn't Walter Cronkite, you know, the Ted Offensive, but something happened.
And there's this, I always want to find that moment where we say, that's it.
Did you hear it?
It changed.
It just changed right now.
It's like, so I, anybody, and I always tell people, please go to Washington.
Please, please see the Vietnam Memorial.
Please.
How many people think it's that one main wall?
Like, that's a section of it.
I was so stupid.
When I first went there, I said, what the hell are all these?
He goes, that's, that's the, I, I, I, I thought this main wall was it.
No, it's all over the place.
58,000, whatever.
Every single.
Listen, I think you're right.
You know, the real tragedy.
And I was not aware of this when I was a cadet at West Point, but I discovered later on when I was in graduate school.
The great tragedy is that we lost more men after Richard Nixon became president than we had under LBJ.
Now, people are quick to point that out who hate Nixon, but the truth is that wasn't something Nixon planned on by any means.
He did run on the platform of getting us out.
And the interesting part is when he went in to see the senior officers in the Pentagon, the generals in the Army and Air Force, and specifically say, said, what do you think we should do?
They all said, Mr. President, leave.
Just leave.
And so he was impressed with that.
But then he sat down with Henry Kissinger.
And Henry Kissinger said, you can't just leave.
If you just leave, the Soviets will think we're weak, that we've lost, that we gave up.
I'm serious.
And over time, he was convinced, well, if we leave, we've got to do something before we get out to make the point that we're not weak.
And you end up with this terrible incursion in Cambodia.
You'll recall all these things.
Oh, yes, yes.
It was very, very tragic.
And things actually got worse as a result.
There's still a lot of that in Washington right now.
So it doesn't matter who you are as president.
When you try to do something you know in your heart is correct and right, there are lots of people around you who are going to give you what appear to be convincing reasons not to do it.
Right.
I think that's where President Trump is.
I think he's been there from the beginning in Ukraine.
Remember, I worked for him briefly, and I did have a very interesting conversation with him.
And he asked me point blank, this is in November 2020.
What do you think it will take for the Germans to invest in their own national defense?
I said, sir, we'll have to leave.
And he looked at me and he said, I think you're right.
Then he was also shocked to discover that we were in Korea 70 years after the Korean War.
So I know the way he is.
I know what he thinks.
His gut tells him.
But then he gets into a room with other people who have all these grandiose reasons why, well, you can't just leave, Mr. President.
You can't just tell Zelensky, that's it.
No more aid.
You refuse to negotiate.
There's only one way to end this thing now, and that is for us, the United States, to get out.
So I'm withdrawing all of our military advisors, all of our intelligence agents.
I'm cutting off the money.
You must sit down and work out an agreement with the Russians.
I've given them what I think is reasonable.
They will talk to you, but I'm not going to support this anymore.
People say, well, you're surrendering to the Russians.
People have already said that to me.
We think Trump is going to surrender to the Russians in Ukraine.
What?
Eastern Ukraine is not Kansas.
We don't own it.
What the hell are you talking about?
I used to, it's so funny you say that.
I used to say, I was joking.
I said, you know, a friend of mine who's in family law divorce.
Oh my God, that's the worst.
It's the worst.
By the way, the most heavily armed bailiffs in court are in family law.
It's the worst place in the world.
And so somebody, so I said, you know, I said, I have a way to stop the divorce rate in this country.
I said, just have the United States military end marriages.
They'll never end.
Well, like, they'll have this separation and then we did.
Because we never end anything.
We just kind of slow down and help people forget.
It's the most incredible thing in the world.
You would think, listen, I don't know President Putin, but he seems like a sharp cookie to me.
And I think he would say, you know, I don't know why I'm doing this accident.
You know, I think Trump's got it.
Why?
He left.
That's what you do.
That's how you convey to the enemy, the enemy, the other side, that you know precisely what's going on because you left.
You're thinking, uh-oh, he must be talking to McGregor.
Damn it, they're onto it.
He left.
That's not, you know, giving up and surrender and abnegation.
I don't understand this.
I also, I always think, Colonel, that when you, I'm sure that when you were given your commission and you were, you bright, you know, this new, newly minted officer, and you say, I'm in the military now.
And then you meet some old timer.
He says, okay, whatever you learned at West Point, forget it.
This is the way it really is.
This is what war is.
Who was it who said that the war plan stop as soon as the first shot?
Everything ends.
So, and who, I got to ask you this.
Who are the people the president surrounds himself with?
These are your eyes and ears.
You know, I think to myself, oh, keep something in mind, Lionel.
He did not send the Secretary of State to Moscow.
Right.
He sent people who are obviously close to him on a personal level, Witkoff and Kushner.
The problem is they have no credentials.
They have no standing whatsoever in the government.
So whatever they say or promise or do is truthfully meaningless.
But those are the people that obviously President Trump trusted.
So my concern here is if you don't trust the people that are appointed to the positions that are responsible for these things.
What are you doing?
You're making a mistake.
You need to go back and reconsider that.
I mean, you could send your son or your son-in-law or whomever you want, but that's not necessarily a good idea.
You really want to send the people that have been appointed and confirmed in the office to go talk to the people that are important to you in Moscow.
So I think the only good thing that came out of the visit to Moscow is that I think both Kushner and Witkoff said, look, this is going to work.
You know, we've done everything we can.
It's not because Putin is completely unreasonable, but we can't get the Ukrainians to come on board under any circumstances.
Neither can we persuade anybody in Europe, at least in London, Paris, and Berlin, to join us.
And so he said, okay, come home, which is the right thing to do.
But then the next question is, what's the story on the Secretary of State?
Right.
That's the man that should be doing things.
Now, right now, it looks like his great focus is on Venezuela.
And people are saying, well, that's because he's this lifelong adversary of Castro in Cuba.
And he sees Venezuela and Cuba linked.
And indeed, they are.
I mean, nobody disputes that.
Cuba is really on its last legs.
People of the United States don't understand how bad it is in Cuba.
So if you were to eliminate the cheap oil that comes out of Venezuela, that's going to have a big impact on Cuba.
No doubt about it.
But then again, Venezuela is a nation of what?
28.5 to 30 million somewhere in there.
The place is the size of Austria, Germany, and France combined.
You're talking about a substantial chunk of the Amazon jungle, 1,380-mile border with Colombia, 1,380-mile border with Brazil.
We haven't even talked about Guiana.
There's a border there with them as well.
And you want to go into the place and what do you want to do?
You want to install a new government?
Come on.
You know, I'm sure President Trump knows better.
So who's pushing this?
Who's demanding it?
Because if he had any, if he was absolutely certain of his ability to go in there and fundamentally change the place, Lionel, I think he'd have already gone.
Right.
So obviously the man is thinking very carefully, more than I guess people would like.
But to me, this is kind of a deal breaker with Rubio.
The president must be the man who decides yay or nay.
Now, Congress is, those people are fugitives from accountability, Lionel.
Oh, absolutely.
They don't stand up and say, we're the Congress.
We can declare war.
We have this right.
We want hearings.
You've got to come here.
Nobody really does that.
They wait for it to happen.
And then if it's successful, they say, see, we were all for you.
And if it fails, they say, you are a criminal.
You should never have done this.
I mean, it's a very dysfunctional government right now.
But, you know, one of the things that always stops people is they'll say, yeah, but don't forget his predecessor.
You know, after all, Biden was.
I'm so tired of saying, okay, I don't want Biden.
I'm not arguing that Biden was terrible.
Stop telling me that.
Remember the old joke where somebody, speaking of Bethany, they're having a eulogy and they're standing there and the rabbi says, is there anybody here who can say anything good about this man?
Anything?
Anybody?
Can anybody say anything?
And somebody stands up at the back and says, his brother was worse.
So that's the whole thing with Biden.
We're constantly referring to this.
I think deep down inside, President Trump is a good man.
See, I want to, when I was in Florida, my first job was working with a U.S. Senator.
And I got to see something one time.
I went to a political meeting and somebody says, we're going to take him to the mountain.
I said, what does that mean?
He says, you'll see.
And they're trying to recruit somebody.
And they said, I want to give you your legacy.
And they take him to the mountain and they describe what they could do for the party or whatever it is.
Somebody needs to take the president to the mountain and say, you've got to think about legacy.
You've got to understand what are people going to say about you?
What are people going to say right now?
And granted, your adversaries are going to say terrible things, but you want people to say he knew what he wanted.
He was clear.
He made up his mind.
Say what you want about George Bush.
This bumbling dunderhead.
Well, he made up his mind.
That's it.
That's it.
I think you're onto something and I don't have an easy solution.
One of the things that people are saying now is, well, who's going to be the next president?
We're one year into President Trump's term.
They're already talking about the next president.
It's absurd.
But I said, you know, Eisenhower was once asked what he thought presidents really needed to know.
This is long after he was retired.
And in so many words, he said, well, they need the following things.
First of all, you need to know how to get elected.
All right.
I mean, if you can't get yourself elected, well, then there's no further discussions.
That means you need to understand American politics, domestic politics.
Secondly, you need to understand the economy, how it works.
Third, you need to appreciate the international system and the people in it and how it works.
And then finally, you need to have an understanding of the American military in order to command it effectively.
So then he smiled and he said, now I covered three of those.
I couldn't cover the one how to get elected.
He said, because I'd never run for office before, and I was elected because people knew who I was.
I mean, when he ran, Adelaide Stevenson, who was a good man, had no chance whatsoever.
People were writing in Santa Claus.
It was no chance.
But he was right.
And when you look back on the presidents, one of the things I discovered was that both Richard Nixon and LBJ and JFK, all three of them, had lived through the Second World War.
Now, Nixon and JFK had been in the military, albeit at a very low level, and both of them in the Navy in the Pacific.
And that's important because when those young men went to war in 1943, 44, 45, they saw hundreds of ships, hundreds of thousands of men, thousands of aircraft.
And they said, my God, we're the greatest country in the world.
No one can stand against us.
That had a lasting impact on them.
LBJ flew out and visited.
He flew on an airplane that was supposedly attacked by a Japanese fighter.
Franklin Roosevelt asked MacArthur as a personal favor of him to give LBJ a silver star for being on the airplane.
And MacArthur says, what the president wants?
He's commander-in-chief, so he gave him the silver star.
But he really didn't see much, but he saw this vast armada.
He understood the production capability.
Now, here's Eisenhower.
Eisenhower is a totally different animal.
He is the supreme commander of the Alliance, for all intents and purposes, in December of 1944.
And from June to December of 1944, he's tried to convince everybody, let's get this war over with.
We just have to move quickly.
Let's move to the east.
And don't worry about the Germans.
They're finished.
They've lost so heavily on the Eastern Front.
They lost to Normandy.
They can't do anything.
We know the rest of the story.
Christmas 1945, we're overrun.
23,000 soldiers of the United States Army surrendered in the first 24 hours.
They were just overrun by German troops.
This went on for two months.
Our casualties, which were 90,000 a month until the bulge, then rose to 100,000 a month in December and January.
Then finally, FDR was frustrated with Eisenhower because he wanted to end the war.
He said, you got to get this war over with.
Why aren't you moving faster?
Why aren't you doing more?
And so FDR sent a delegation of women who were married to servicemen in the army to see Eisenhower.
He said, I can't deal with this.
I'm sending them to see you.
They literally came over.
It's a gaggle of about 30 or 40.
A gaggle.
Eisenhower said this was the most frightening experience of his life as a general.
He said, these women were just living.
We want this to be over with.
Subsequently, we have this movie, Patton.
And Patton runs around and tells everybody, God, I wish I could go with you to the Pacific and kill Japanese.
He actually said that to divisions under his command.
Lionel, they rioted.
They didn't want to go to the Pacific.
They had just survived from June of 1944 to May of 45.
We'd lost over 200,000 men.
All our heavy casualties were taken in Europe against the Germans.
An army with no air support, an army that was under strength.
It was ferocious.
We had 58,000 men killed in the 8th Air Force trying to penetrate German air defenses.
We had 18,000 bombers between ourselves and the British that were lost trying to penetrate German air defenses.
So when he said, you guys are so lucky, some of you are going to get to go to Japan now or the Asian fight the Japanese.
I wish I could come with you.
They rioted.
Now, what did Eisenhower learn?
Well, he learned a couple of things.
First of all, our resources are not limitless.
And yes, Americans will fight, but you can't expect them to fight forever.
You can't expect them to take heavy casualties without questions.
We're a democratic society.
So Eisenhower becomes president and he says, we must never ever do again what we did in the Second World War.
So his overriding strategic goal is to keep us out of a message.
Right.
Now we're dealing with people that follow him.
JFK in the early 60s, who kind of gets it, but not really.
And then you get Nixon and LBJ.
They kind of got it, but not really.
Now we are, what, 80 years later from the Second World War, we have people in Washington that think we're the greatest country in the world.
We can smash anybody.
Nobody can stand against us.
And I keep telling people that call me and ask me and ask me to come in and talk to them.
I said, have you looked at what's going on in eastern Ukraine?
Ukrainians have lost nearly 1.8 million soldiers.
Well, Colonel McGregor, that's not what we're hearing from the CIA.
I said, they're lying.
That's what they do.
Stop listening to them.
Okay.
We're not prepared to fight an enemy like this.
We're not a continental power.
We rely heavily on air and naval power.
We like to sail in, bomb, and go home.
You know, we're not in a position to challenge a continental power.
Had we and the British had to fight the Germans on our own, we'd have lost.
We don't understand that.
So our biggest problem right now, I think, is that you got too many people in Washington that grossly overestimate our staying power, our resources, and are completely ignoring our financial condition, which is very fragile.
The fact that we produce nothing anymore.
The fact that we're dependent on foreign sources for technology and various supplies.
They ignore all of that and they decide, well, let's go to Venezuela.
A country that is, what, two and a half, three times the size of Vietnam?
Are you insane?
The answer is yes.
It's a dumb idea.
And there's also, you know, you've said so much.
See, in addition to this, I would say, and maybe I'm really out of it, but it's like what imperils this country today, this republic, cannot be fought with a tank or a bazooka.
Right now, I believe, good sir, the number one, the only existential threat that we face is the perils of artificial intelligence.
And when we go AGI, when we go full singularity, it's over.
It's done, stick a fork.
It is existential.
It is beyond the mental capacity, the intellectual ken, the cognitive reference of people to even grasp that.
And when I hear people say the number one lobby in this country is AIPAC, nonsense.
It's big tech.
And the president is designing.
I'm sorry.
It's not just big tech.
There's more to it.
But I would be careful on the AI thing.
That bubble is about diversed.
And I think we already have grossly inflated expectations of AI.
Now, what you describe in terms of the singularity, that may or may not happen in our lifetimes.
In other words, you're talking about technology that moves and spurts and then stops.
I hope you're right.
Yeah, people have been trying to break the laws of physics for years.
If I take you back to about 2003, 2004, 2005, I could introduce you to all the people that told me when I was on active duty sitting there with generals, we're going to have laser pistols and laser cannon by 2020.
No, we're not even close.
Oh, yes, we are.
No, no, we aren't.
Just like this Golden Dome project, that's another money pit.
We're not going to achieve the aims of the Golden Dome project that Trump wants any more than we were able to build the national missile defense.
So when you talk about artificial intelligence, it's going to be devastating in some areas.
In other areas, it'll be very helpful.
And in some cases, it just won't have the impact at all that we anticipate.
I think the existential threats to the United States are internal to our country.
This is the criticality of breaking down the rule of law.
Oh, by the way, there's more existential threat than just that.
And this is something that I want everybody to note.
Pay particular attention.
Simonize your watch right now because I'm saying, Cardinal McGregor, I disagree with you on that one.
That's all I'm going to say as far as the existential threat of that.
But let's talk about something else.
Well, wait a minute.
I was going to say something else.
You've got to look at the economic weakness of the country.
President Trump has rightfully pointed to the fact that we have no manufacturing base.
What do we actually produce?
We produce military equipment.
We don't produce much beyond it.
Which explains why we have this pension for war.
You know, when you're a hammer, the world looks like a deal.
The other thing is we have a lot of people living under the poverty line.
There was a wonderful article that came out last week and at the top of my head, I can't remember the author.
I'll see if I can send it to you.
But he makes the argument that if you're making right now in the United States less than $110,000 or $120,000 a year, well, you're closing in on poverty.
That's how bad it is in the country right now.
We haven't kept up with real wages, real earnings.
Inflation is killing us in some ways.
In other areas, we have deflation.
You know, we're about to watch the housing market crash.
Houses in particular are going to end up costing, what, 20 or 30% of what you paid for them.
We're in very, very tough waters.
And when we talk about illegal immigration, what people don't understand is that in 1929, after the market crashed, Herbert Hoover sat down and they penned an executive order that resulted in the U.S. Army and police removing 8 million Mexicans from the United States.
Now, why did that happen?
Did Herbert Hoover, who, like me, was raised as a Quaker, suddenly decide he hated Mexicans?
Absolutely not.
He said these people are holding low-wage jobs that Americans are now going to desperately need.
We need to get them out of here and back to Mexico so that they will not be harmed by Americans who will be angry that they have employment and the Americans don't.
That's interesting.
For their own good.
FDR deported 3.5 million.
Harry Truman deported another 2.2 million.
Operation Wetback.
Well, that's Eisenhower.
That's 1.3 million.
My point is we have 52 million, 50 million, I've heard different numbers, people in the United States who were not born in our country.
That's a higher proportion than ever in our history.
Of that number, we estimate 30 million or more may be illegally here.
We don't know.
And everybody says, oh, well, that's too big.
We can't do anything about it.
No, it isn't.
And we've got to think very carefully about whose interests will the government protect, American citizens or foreigners, because that's what it's going to come down to.
Nobody wants to go there.
Everybody says, oh, well, that's ugly.
Well, other presidents have gone there and they went there.
It was a damn good thing they did.
We've got to think in those terms.
What are we going to do to protect American citizens?
It's only a matter of time until some American in the future is standing on the street corner and has nothing to do and hasn't got a job and no means of income.
We're going to have to deal with that.
We want to be sure that if there's something out there, he can get there.
I think that's the existential threat to the republic.
If we don't protect our citizens, if we don't care for our citizens, if what we do comes at their expense for people, that we're never welcome here, that we're never invited here, we're in a lot of trouble.
We also have to use this thing.
You know, people oftentimes, Colonel, use the term treason incorrectly.
Things aren't really treasonable.
You know how that is.
But there's a fellow named Soros, who I think he's kind of like the standard bearer for everything that's evil.
But he has bankrolled a number of district attorneys all over the country, trying to basically systematically destroy the foundation of criminal justice system, which I know a little bit about.
He's introduced this thing, this thing called restorative justice.
And this my favorite, a non-retributive justice, non-carceral, as though we want to find out the source of somebody's criminality.
That's a part of it.
Something happened this weekend.
You see, I always look at stuff and I say, you know, this means something more than you realize.
One of the things that we noticed is there was a case of a woman at a Cinnabon in Wisconsin.
Okay, fine.
She went crazy and said some terrible things.
They also use an edited version.
What that told me was the Rorschach test of that was that people are tired of people coming into this country and people should be paying attention.
And had it been anybody else, had it been anybody else, they'd say, well, maybe, you know, if it was an African-American, you know, from Memphis or something, they'd say that's, but all of a sudden they said, wait a minute.
So there is something that's happening here.
And as we conclude this incredibly fascinating discussion, I just want to say that's also a part of the many foci of existential threats.
We're really in a world of hurt.
And I don't know how, if the president can do anything about that, if we get, but what you said as far as stopping this immigration, this perfusion of people and unaccounted for, and the children who were just missing and something after 300,000 a year.
Incredible.
Yeah.
Listen, Lionel, these are important issues.
And my greatest fear is not what happens overseas, but what happens.
And I keep trying to tell people that.
And everybody is worried.
Well, we're falling behind, for instance, in AI behind China.
Well, here's a big message for everybody.
China is not this pristine society without problems.
The Chinese are acutely sensitive to the issues inside their own country.
Not every Chinese is running around trying to invent some new AI app.
It's a different world.
Okay.
So we need to look at ourselves objectively.
We also need to seek people overseas a little more realistically.
I have a friend who's in Moscow.
He's been there for America.
And he said, Doug, the one thing that stands out about the Russians is that in contrast to us, they know they have serious problems.
They do.
And they are working on them.
And they know they're working on them.
And they know the government is working on them.
And they are determined to fix them.
He said, in the United States, if you try to tell someone that everything is not perfect, then we have difficulties.
People begin to look at you and say, well, you sound like an America-last person.
Yeah, a naysayer, a Cassandra.
There you are again.
Well, Colonel McGregor, again, I love speaking with you.
You know, you're the kind of guy that somebody wants to sit across at a pub, you know, some like some midtown Irish joint, throwing a few back and just solving the problems of the world.
And I cannot thank you enough, sir.
But quickly, where should we look to your next venture, your next iteration of Douglas McGregor?
What are you doing?
What should we know about, sir?
Look at this website, nationalconversation.org.
We started that last year and we had our first major meeting in Dallas.
And the argument was, look, you vote for anybody you want, but if you vote for Democrats or you vote for Republicans, unfortunately, you tend to get the same outcome.
I mean, recently, I think it was earlier today, I was listening to an economist, very well known, hedge fund manager, very smart man.
And he said, you know, people complain about Bidenomics.
He said, well, Trumponomics don't seem to be that different from Bidenomics.
The out-of-control spending that we were dealing with under Biden is continuing.
My point is, we need to start looking at a third way.
I don't know exactly what that looks like.
Maybe it's a party in the future.
I have no idea.
But we need to start talking about it.
Because as people point out repeatedly, I voted for so-and-so.
I got John McCain.
I voted for so-and-so.
I still got John McCain.
And people are now saying, I voted for Donald Trump.
It looks like I got John McCain.
So we need a different way forward.
And one more thing very quickly.
If we could do this one time, this is my pipe dream.
I wish that we could have a national summer camp of taking children and their parents and bringing them in and re-educating and talking to people about the Constitution.
They talk about this like this is just to sit there and explain the rudiments because, you know, there was a time, maybe what I remember was civics and geography.
And we did these stupid things.
And I, and when I hear somebody calling somebody a socialist and a Marxist, you don't even know what you're talking about.
We have to understand the rudiments, apesidarian background, the, you know, the lattice work of what this country is about, because we can talk about anything if we don't know the rules of the game.
You can't play tennis if you don't know the rules.
And that's another thing.
Right.
When I was in graduate school and I had to sit down and interview people who were real communists, who were real Nazis.
These people that use those terms and hurl them at each other, they don't know what the hell they're talking about.
Have no idea whatsoever.
You're 100% right.
But I don't think we want to take parents and children and put them in camps.
So I would think you did summer camp.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, that's going to scare people.
Yeah, I know.
We do need education.
And remember, the educational process that you experienced, you grew up in New York City, right?
No, in Florida.
Oh, in Florida.
Okay.
Catholic schools.
Parochial schools.
Jesuits and the whole thing.
In New York City, which was one of the first places we had public schools.
The first one, by the way, was in Rhode Island.
None of them, by the way, were founded by the federal government.
They all were founded originally, locally.
And the reason was we had immigrants with children.
And people said, well, wait a minute, how do we ensure that these children are going to grow up and be good citizens?
Their parents are nice people, but they're not really Americans.
We got to make sure that the children become Americans.
What an awful idea.
Well, perhaps next time, Colonel Douglas McGregor, again, thank you so very much.
And thank you.
Do you realize the hours?
How many hours?
How many hours of tutoring this generation?
Because the number of folks, young people, or younger, everybody's younger than I am.
But the thing is, do you realize the impact you have and what you've meant?
And what you as this retired, somebody says, oh, I don't want to talk to some West Point.
What?
Who is this guy?
And then you realize, you know, he's cool.
He makes sense.
You must feel a great degree of honor.
And I mean that.
Well, it's nice of you to say, but, you know, my sons used to tell their friends, they would say, well, I really like your dad.
But he said he is so uncool.
Well, I beg to differ.
Colonel Douglas McGregor, thank you so, so, very much.
I'm sure this is early, but happy holidays to you and your family.
Thank you so much.
And thank you so much for the work you've done and what you've done for our country.