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Feb. 25, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
39:17
Don Loucks reveals the most disturbing MYSTERIES about the Ohio train wreck...
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All right, welcome to the Health Ranger Report.
I'm Mike Adams here on BrightTown.com and BrightTown.tv.
And today I'm joined in studio with now a second-time guest, Mr.
Don Lauchs.
Welcome to the studio.
It's great to have you.
It's a privilege to be here.
I appreciate it.
Well, I'm honored to have you on.
We did an audio-only interview, kind of an emergency interview, I guess last week, about the Ohio train crash situation.
Now, your credentials are quite substantial in this area.
You're trained, I mean, you're well-educated and experiencing hazardous incident response, but I mean, can you tell our audience exactly your area of expertise in that?
Because I might get it wrong.
Well, I served 35 years in military service, 22 in the Air Force as a fighter pilot, and then 13 at the Texas State Guard as a soldier, and as a county commissioner, elected office, as a certified volunteer firefighter for 15 years.
But in regards to hazardous material, I worked for the Texas Department of Public Safety as a hazardous material emergency preparedness officer.
Which got me very involved in hazardous material, which dovetailed with my knowledge as a firefighter.
Oh, wow.
I mean, that's a tremendous amount of experience in all areas, including as a fighter pilot.
Which fighter jet did you fly?
I'm just curious.
I flew the F-111.
Really?
I did.
2,700 hours.
My favorite was the F-111F model at the 48th Fighter Wing, Lake in East England.
No kidding.
Okay, wow.
It's an honor to have you here.
Thank you for your service and for all that you do.
You and your audience are worth it.
Well, thank you.
Okay.
Let's get right into Ohio then.
So in our initial interview, the first one we did, audio only, I believe you mentioned that it looked like the response, like they should not have ignited all this material, that they could have perhaps or should have tried to put out the small fire first, and it would have given them more time of how to deal with the vinyl chloride.
Since then, of course, more information has become available and so on, and the NTSB has issued an initial report.
What have you Have you changed any views of that?
Or is that still the best option?
Or what has come to mind in the last week that you think is relevant to the response to this?
Well, I think with regards to the accident itself, a 150-car train is a very, very long train.
And I confess, I'm a train enthusiast.
I was fascinated with them when I was a child, and I still enjoy them.
A hotbox situation is rare these days because we have such lubricants.
But if a lubricant is absent from the axle bearing in the truck, the wheel assembly, it just gradually tries to weld itself together.
And if brakes are applied, as you may have mentioned earlier, there's only one shoe on each wheel.
So you put another force on it, that would be the braking factor.
That would be something that would knock it loose.
Yeah, you're referring to the NTSB put out a preliminary report on this accident.
And in that report, they indicated that the, I don't know what it's called, but the hotbox detector that's on the side of the railroad.
Infrared thermal detector.
Okay.
That it had flagged that there was a hotbox situation and that this alerted The engineer or whoever's running the locomotive, I don't know the appropriate titles.
It would go through the railroad command post and radio to the engineer.
So the engineer knew something was wrong and then they tried to apply brakes.
Well, they did apply brakes and then apparently somehow, at least my understanding is, the train went into kind of an emergency braking I don't know the mechanics of this, but then they were trying to stop it too quickly, and then you just mentioned 150 cars, and those cars slammed into these cars, the one with the hotbox, which was probably close to coming off, and then that's what caused the derailment.
Does that all kind of...
Does that all sound feasible?
It's all feasible.
The fact that the braking system on a train is emergency operation is when the hoses between the cars, if that is severed, the air pressure in that system is expelled, and then the brakes contract on the wheels automatically.
Oh, right, right.
It's just like a freight truck, a diesel truck.
Right.
So you have to have air pressure in the system to keep the brakes off.
To release the brakes.
To release the braking, yeah.
So in emergency, the brakes come on.
Well, that must be exactly what happened.
That could very well be.
It's very feasible that that's what happened.
It shouldn't have happened.
I think that the contributing factor was the length of the train.
That's a huge train.
Well, why would they run a train so long?
Is it just more profitable to do so?
That's it.
The more cars you can put on a train and move them with the same number of engines a certain distance, the more money you make.
And that's really Well, that's one of the reasons I've talked to you before.
And also, we used to have, back up until the 1980s, have cabooses.
Yeah.
On a freight train, the last car was like a passenger car for crews who had a cupola on top and side bays.
They could look out and they could watch the train.
They could watch for derailments, which you'd see if a car was out of alignment and bouncing on the rails.
Yeah.
Or on the cross ties.
Or if you see smoke or you see sparks, then you know you have a hotbox or some problem and you want to stop the train immediately.
Okay, now the NTSB report didn't refer to any fires or igniting this material at all.
They called it a controlled venting.
Now, right?
Double speak, right?
Controlled venting.
I think it's triple or quadruple speak, actually.
Yeah.
Now, have you ever...
I mean, why wouldn't they just describe it as it was?
We set fire to the material, or to the product, as it's called.
They're trying to make it sound, in my opinion, trying to make it sound complicated, like it was the only avenue they had.
I was not on scene.
I can't say that that's the situation.
I can refer to things like the NFPA 2020, which is the handbook for hazardous material.
Oddly enough, this is published by the U.S. Department of Transportation, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
Emphasis on pipeline.
Pipeline is obviously the safest way to transport hazardous material like this, fluids.
Jet fuel, gasoline, oil, almost anything.
You can actually transport solids in it in a slurry.
Right, okay.
But the question on this particular mishap in my training in hazardous material, the object is to prevent ignition.
One of the things I heard, and there's so much floating around here, you know, you hear this and that, you don't have the whole picture.
One of the things that I heard that stuck in my mind is that, well, there were fires there, and we didn't want the car to explode.
Well, this particular material will ignite and is volatile with temperature.
So the higher the temperature, the more likelihood is it could polymerize and explode.
But if you're fighting a fire and you have fire somewhere else, which is what they said they had, and they were in danger, they thought that might set this thing off, then what you do is you protect the exposure.
So you protect the tank cars that are carrying the hazardous material with a constant stream of cooling water.
And then you try to put out the other things that are burning.
So it puzzles me why they didn't do that.
They might not have had the equipment.
They might not have had the water.
See, that was my next question for you.
When a railroad runs through a town, isn't it required somehow that that town can respond to an incident of a railroad?
That's a good question.
The railroad is responsible for responding to incidents.
Now here, we've been trained by Union Pacific specifically for how to deal with emergency situations with train incidents.
Exactly this sort of thing.
What to do.
And basically, they said, you know, take care of the small stuff and don't get near the really, if there's anything really hazardous, stay away from it, we come and take care of it.
Right.
Or they're designated contractors.
Right.
Well, so when the NTSB and also the railroad, in this case Norfolk Southern, when they say, well, we were afraid that the car carrying the vinyl chloride might explode, therefore we set it on fire...
It seems crazy just from a common sense perspective.
It's like you were saying, why not just put a fire hose on it, spray it with water, keep it cool?
Because obviously those product-carrying train cars, whatever they're called, they are robust carriers.
Otherwise, they'd be breaking and leaking all the time all over the place.
And to heat that volume of liquid, maybe 125,000 gallons of whatever it is, To heat that volume of liquid would take a tremendous amount of time exposure to high heat.
Like, it's not just going to heat it up instantly, right?
Well, but in a tank vehicle like that, if you had a fire, say, on one side, the material next to that area, next to the steel on the area would get hot.
But wouldn't it dissipate because it's steel?
You know, it's going to share that heat.
Yeah.
If you have a hot enough fire, you could cause ignition because of dislocalized heat.
I mean, it's not circulating in there.
Yeah.
And the heat would have to go through.
It would be dissipated through thousands of gallons of material, which takes time.
So it's logical to me, knowing the situation, that it could happen.
But you can put a monitor on.
A monitor is like a giant garden sprinkler.
It's basically a fire hose nozzle on a stand hooked up to an engine some distance away, and all it does is spray water.
You aim it and it sprays.
It's called a monitor?
It's called a monitor.
We've used them here on structured fires, and it's very effective because you keep people away from it, or you keep people available for other things besides just spraying water in one particular place.
I see.
There's one thing you mentioned I wanted to jump in.
The excuse they used was that they wanted to, and this really caught my attention.
They were afraid it would explode and shrapnel would fly around.
Right, that's what they said.
It doesn't make sense to me.
A tanker vehicle is a tank.
It's a tank of fluid.
It's not like an army tank.
It's not like heavy armor that if you explode, it would have a lot of pressure involved before it would fracture.
It would just kind of pop like a balloon.
And for them to say that rang completely untrue to me.
Yeah, that is interesting.
And why would it generate...
So much shrapnel, as you say, the pressure internally wouldn't be I mean, I don't know.
I guess we have to give relative numbers here.
Why did they not evacuate?
If they were afraid of shrapnel and they realized what was in that tank car, I think there were three of them with that.
I thought it was five.
Well, five with hazmat.
I think there were three with that.
It doesn't matter.
But in fact, they should have evacuated immediately.
And the criteria for evacuation for a material like that is a mile away.
To start.
So shrapnel's not going to fly a mile.
No, of course not.
Anyway.
It's going to go...
So they should have evacuated a mile and then put out the fire.
Right.
And then they could have had time to deal with...
Whatever cars had fallen over, but those cars weren't spilling the material.
There was no indication that I see and what they said, I go by what they said, that the vinyl chloride was actually burning.
It was other stuff.
Initially.
Initially.
There was other stuff burning.
Other stuff burning.
And that they were afraid of it exploding, so they released it and poured it into a drainage ditch or, you know, onto the ground and then set it alight.
Okay, so this doesn't make any sense.
But, I mean, what you're saying is accurate of what they said.
But if they could release the vinyl chloride into a ditch, then there's no longer any risk of explosion that would cause shrapnel.
So couldn't they have just left it in the ditch for a little bit?
Then there's a problem of getting rid of it.
But they could have done that with some other hazardous disposal tankers.
Here's what we do with tankers.
We had a jet fuel tanker overturned recently.
Well, it was a few years ago.
How did we deal with it?
We cordoned off the area around the tanker.
Now, jet fuel is very hard to set fire.
It's considered hazardous material, but the same procedures would be done with any kind of fluid in a tanker.
And that is, if you can hook up, if this is overturned on its side, if you can hook up to the valving on the tanker and pump it out through that, you do that.
Right.
And that's the responsibility of the trucking company.
So if you can't do that, then you drill holes in the top of the tank and then pump it out from the top.
And that's what we did.
So in this situation, it's a little bit different because this material is very, very tricky to handle.
In fact, in the ERG, Emergency Response Guide, it says that if you are working around there, the vapors are very hazardous.
If you're a firefighter and you're wearing PPE, this is the bunker gear and helmet and gloves, and when you're done using it, it has to be destroyed.
Uh-huh.
Because it absorbs this stuff.
Yeah.
This vinyl chloride.
And the other thing is, if you're going to work there, they recommend using a fully pressurized SCBA. You're kidding me.
Basically a spacesuit for firefighters.
Whoa.
So nothing can get in.
Yeah.
And, I mean, you're dealing with poison, and then you're making it more so when you burn it.
Okay, that's fascinating.
Yeah.
And let me redirect you to the last question on that.
Once they had the material in the ditch, the liquid, the vinyl chloride material in the ditch, there was no emergency at that point.
They could have dealt with that over a matter of hours or a couple of days.
They didn't have to set fire to it once it's in the ditch.
I don't understand their logic.
And I was in the business a long time.
And taking a material like that and dumping it on the ground is really bad.
Setting on fire is really bad.
Is that something that, setting material like that on fire, is that something that you've ever seen done, like a kerosene truck turns over or jet fuel turns over, it spills out, do emergency responders in Texas come along and say, hey, let's set that on fire?
No.
No, we don't do that.
Good.
Good.
I don't understand the situation, but what we would do is put a cofferdam, build a cofferdam around the area to contain whatever is spilled if it's starting to run out.
Right.
Now, this material complicates things because it's so volatile.
Yeah.
So you have problems with personal exposure to it.
You have problems with danger like explosions with it.
So I can understand the logic of minimizing the casualties of the emergency responders.
And since it is a company job to do that, to provide that, I can understand why they were not willing to risk people's lives to do it.
To do what?
To go in close and pump the product out and do that because it was dangerous to do.
But then, okay, and I've been talking about this for several days, but then in setting fire to it, because it's a chlorinated compound, it creates some level of dioxins, which are like crazy toxic, way more toxic than the original material, right?
So the original material had this level of toxicity when you set fire to it at relatively low combustion temperatures.
It doesn't incinerate every molecule.
It forms these compounds with oxygens now.
So now the toxicity goes to here, and it's blown by the wind everywhere.
All fire does is rearrange molecules.
That's right.
That's all it does.
But then for them to say that's a controlled burn, when it's like, no, there's a giant smoke plume in the sky, and the wind is taking it who knows where.
I think what may have happened there, and I don't have the details, but it looks to me like they set fire to that ditch, and then it went back, because it says right here it'll go back up to the source and make it explode.
You think?
I think, because there was a big, there was a sudden, really big...
Mushroom cloud came out of that.
That's true.
If you burn something in a ditch, that's one thing.
But I think the fire went back to the source and blew it up.
That's what I think.
That's just my opinion.
Wow.
Well, then how could they call that a controlled venting?
Because they're the government and they want you to think that.
Yeah.
There's also a resident there, lives 1.4 miles away from the epicenter, found not only ash in his yard and car and everything, EPA sent out scientists to collect some of the ash, but says he found what he called a blasting cap that was not detonated.
And this was written up in, I think, the Western Journal.
But they didn't show a picture of it, so we don't know what's he talking about, what kind of blasting cap.
Are any kind of blasting caps or squibs, are they used in emergency response in order to ignite fires when you want to?
I've never heard of that.
I'm sure there's a possibility in some esoteric chemical like this to maybe use that.
How would you ignite a fire if you wanted to in this kind of situation, like with a flare or something?
Well, if it was raining in a ditch, a flare, I mean, we have things like propane torches, you'd want to set it off.
There's all kinds of ways to ignite it.
But again, to have them set fire to it in a ditch and then have that giant cloud, because that was obviously a massive release.
It wasn't just laying in a ditch that did that.
So there must have been an explosion, and then this blasting cap is found 1.4 miles away, which seems crazy, insanely far for a blasting cap to fly.
I mean, there are a lot of weird things going on with this.
Well, one of the weirdest things is what it says in here is to, in the manual, this is...
The word.
And people can download this themselves.
You can download this.
How do they search for it?
396 pages, PDF file.
What do they search for?
2020 Emergency Response Guidebook.
2020 ERG. ERG? Oh, ERG. Emergency Response Guidebook.
ERG. And which agency has this?
If you just Google it, you'll get it.
But the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Okay.
And go there and do a search.
Okay.
We don't use Google.
I'm sorry.
I don't either.
It's just a matter.
It's a terminology.
I just want to clarify.
Please, I apologize to everyone.
That's quite all right.
Okay, so people can find this.
They can find it themselves.
They can read it, and it will back up what you're saying.
Absolutely.
And this is 396 pages.
It is a wealth of material on all kinds of things.
I mean, how to transport, what you do to protect yourself against whatever is in there.
It's amazing.
And every emergency vehicle that I know of So if you're a firefighter responding to a scene like this and there's a chemical, all the carriers are labeled, Right.
And you turn to that page for that chemical?
You'll see a symbol kind of like this.
This isn't a good representation, but it's a diamond.
It's a square diamond, and it'll have symbols on it and a number.
And you look up the number that's on it, like 1830, and you go into the manual.
It tells you exactly what it is, and you have all this information about it.
Oh, okay.
It'll be a class of material.
And this particular material that was in that train that is causing this trouble, there are probably six or eight other materials that react kind of the same way, so they put them together in one place.
I see.
Do you happen to know, does this material, does it...
Does it boil off itself at sort of normal temperatures, you know, room temperature?
I don't know what the boiling point is, but it has a high vapor pressure.
And that's why when you...
It'll pressurize the vessel if the temperature gets too high.
I see.
But then again, these carriers are designed to handle high pressure because they're not keeping it cooled on the train.
Interesting you should say that.
That reminds me of something with these things.
Sometimes the carriers, the shippers must rely on the timetable of the train From the time it leaves where the car is filled to the time of delivery.
So it might be refrigerated when it's loaded.
And then they count the time in transit and figure out the temperature increase on the way and how long it'll take.
No kidding.
So it's got to be within certain parameters to be able to deliver it.
Well, that brings a whole new level of concern to the trains.
Well, yeah, derailing and falling on the side kind of delays the delivery.
Yeah, exactly.
Because what I'm wondering is, if they just had this in a ditch and left it there, would it just start to evaporate?
Would it...
Would it self-ignite?
Would it, you know, what would it do if you just left it there for a while?
I'm not, you mean exposed to air?
Yeah.
I don't, it has, it says the vapors are dangerous.
Yeah, we get that.
Similar to things like phosgene gas.
Right.
It's dangerous to be around.
And it also says that you shouldn't rely on your sense of smell to detect it.
Oh.
So it might smell like something else.
Yeah.
It's really not.
So laying in a dish, I'm not familiar enough with it.
I'll just say it.
But to do what they did, now, what they should have done, in my opinion, if I had the resources, they might not have the resources.
They might not have had the water available to set up a monitor to keep it cool.
Maybe the water would be too hot.
That they had, you know, if it was warm weather or somewhere else, it depends.
Right, a lot of variables.
But you can protect exposures, other things you don't want to catch fire by cooling it with water.
Okay.
In a small town like that, and this will come out eventually, there may very well have been a limit to the amount of water they had.
Because when you have a situation like this where you're pumping water to cool something, that takes a lot of water.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, let's broaden this discussion, if you don't mind, a little bit to transportation in general.
We've seen a lot of problems in the last year or so.
We saw the FAA had a NOTAM failure.
They grounded all commercial flights one day for the morning, I think.
We've seen barges having problems because of the low levels of water in the Mississippi.
We've seen massive train problems, strikes by train unions, Union Pacific, telling fertilizer companies, we can't carry your product anymore.
We just don't have the manpower to do it.
You think Pete Buttigieg is doing a good job right now?
Pete who?
Oh, the one that showed up after the former president showed up?
Yeah, Mayor Pete, the Secretary of Transportation.
Who knows nothing about transportation and is now the Secretary of Transportation.
Is he doing a good job?
No, it's all mismanaged.
Sitting back and staying away from the situation and not making an appearance To me means you want to go away as soon as possible and not be in the news.
Right.
That's the way it strikes me.
I don't know if you saw this video, but Savannah Hernandez was there trying to talk to Pete Buttigieg's press secretary.
Did you see that one?
Was it private time or personal time or something?
Yeah, she was like, turn off your cameras.
Oh, yeah.
I don't want to be on camera.
This is the press secretary.
Oh, yeah.
And Savannah's like, wait a minute, aren't you the press secretary?
Aren't you supposed to talk to the cameras?
Well, not now.
And she was like, I'm triggered, I'm a snowflake, you know.
Don't ask me questions.
I'm only the press secretary.
Professionalism is lacking in a lot of areas of this administration.
I don't know who they think they can rely on if they can't lead, because that's what it boils down to.
But, you know, we talked about the actual cause of the accident and the derailment and the hotbox and literally the wheels falling off.
Is it a metaphor for what's happening here?
Yeah, yeah.
It's a good way to put it.
But why is it that pipelines Are not being used more to ship hazardous liquid materials.
And you can ship solids, too, in a slurry.
That means I miss your water and materials.
Coal can be shipped that way by pipeline, by the way.
That's wild.
Why is it that that isn't happening?
Well, let's see.
Who owns the railroads?
Who's the major investor in Norfolk Southern?
If you look that up, one of them, there are several.
There's one I can't think of, but one stands out in my mind.
BlackRock.
Wow.
Warren Buffett also has a large interest in railroads.
And Joe Biden, the first thing he did when he got into office is he's canceling all the pipelines.
Yeah.
But see, and you and I both agree on this, and it's a fact.
Pipelines are the safest way to move materials.
Absolutely.
Period.
Fewer accidents, fewer moving parts.
No exposure.
I mean, it's underground.
Mostly underground.
Right, exactly.
And, I mean, the pipelines sometimes get attacked by eco-terrorists, though, and then they have a spill, you know, when they're attacking the pipeline.
And there are other accidents from time to time.
But in terms of, let's say, tonnage of material per mile, pipelines must be vastly safer than any other form.
That is correct.
That is correct.
And then I would say trains would be next.
And then, of course, road trucking would be probably the most dangerous and the most expensive versus trains or pipelines.
Yeah, well, you can't put trains everywhere.
So you have the hierarchy of supply.
You have the field, the refinery.
And then how do you get it to the gas pump?
And it goes usually by train to a depot, and then offload it to a truck, to a tank farm somewhere, or a pipeline to a tank farm, and then to truck, to gas stations or whatever.
And that's the way it works.
If you don't have that supply chain set up, then you have problems.
So here we are.
We've got trains that run on diesel.
We have trucks that run on diesel.
We have trains that are falling off the rails.
Do pipelines run on diesel?
I don't think they do.
So it's a pretty economical way and a pretty safe way from a power standpoint.
And even from an environmental standpoint, if you love the environment, you should support pipelines because that's going to have the least amount of spillage per tonnage of material moved.
What's the exposure?
You compare a pipeline to a surface transportation, there's no comparison.
And who owns what?
Who has a political influence and who stands to make money by inhibiting pipeline usage?
Okay, yeah.
If Trump were still in the White House, the Keystone wouldn't have been canceled.
And we would have energy more affordably and more safely.
That's right.
And everything that President Trump did...
It was canceled almost immediately.
It went by the same day, canceled Keystone Pipeline, canceled construction of the border wall in the south border, and then all the programs that Trump instituted.
But, you know, we talk, this diverts a little bit.
We talk about Pete Buttigieg.
The legacy of Barack Obama is far-reaching.
Because his legacy lives on in the bureaucracy.
What he did before he left office was promoted bureaucrats he wanted to stay in government to higher levels of authority where they can't be fired by law.
And many of those people are still persisting in the system.
And that's what Donald Trump had to deal with.
Those people are kind of like dioxins.
They never go away.
Yeah, and they mutate.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, well, this is truly fascinating, and I appreciate you coming in studio to share this with us.
I would actually like to invite you back to talk in a broader sense about These policies and things as they're happening.
And, you know, I don't, you're tracking, I assume you're tracking the whole Russia-Ukraine situation pretty closely.
Can I ask you a question in that area?
I follow this, you know, I follow this very closely.
I keep track of them.
Well, it's a question about munitions.
So as you were an F-111 pilot, and as you know, it has to be a supply chain of munitions and things that you're going to fire, you know, air-to-air missiles, air-to-ground missiles, or ground-to-air from the opposing forces and so on, or anti-tank systems, whatever.
You've seen that we have a real munitions supply chain problem right now, right?
In Army fights, on logistics, if you don't have the ability to get war materials to where the fight is, you're not going to fight and you'll lose if you try.
So what's happening is that you are right, we are depleting our munitions supply, giving it away, giving it away, billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine.
And our replenishment isn't there.
So we've got, we have now, we have two enemies who sense weakness.
We have China, communist China, always add the communists in there.
And we have Russia, communist Russia, essentially.
They still are.
So what do you do?
Well, if I were them, I would say, this is the opportunity we have.
To lay the United States low and knock them out of contention as a world power.
And their window of opportunity, so to speak, to strike America has to be Now or soon, because we've seen announcements from the Pentagon that there are going to be efforts to build new munitions factories and then try to shore up our supply chain.
But it's going to take them, I think, two years to build the factories just for artillery.
And then you know how these things go.
It'll probably take three years, and then it'll be another year to work out the bugs.
So sometime in maybe 2026, we'll be able to manufacture artillery shells At a pace that we used to be able to do in 1990, you know, or Desert Storm era, right?
But since Desert Storm, Bill Clinton came in, you know, gutted the military, shut down bases, shut down manufacturing, and we have not recovered our industry, our military industrial capabilities ever since, right?
Let's see.
We have an ocean between us and Europe and another ocean between us and China.
What are the Europeans doing if the problem is so desperate with Ukraine that they can't step in?
Themselves.
It's their continent.
What is the problem?
Well, they don't have much.
I mean, as far as the military goes, they're very weak.
Right.
But they're not even making an effort.
They're relying on us completely.
And something that Donald Trump did when he was president, he said, you guys pay up.
We're tired.
We're trying to pull in a wagon for you.
And they got results.
But they hate spending money on defense.
They'd rather spend it on social programs to keep their power base.
Right.
They want to spend money on welfare and then send us, America, the bill for their national defense.
Essentially.
And what we did with China, I mean, for decades, is empower them economically by them supplying...
Let me see.
Which is more expensive labor-wise, union help or slave help?
Is it union help or slave?
I think it's slave labor is cheaper.
And that's what they're using over there.
And that's what they use to flood our markets with cheap goods.
And then we borrow money from them.
I wrote this in one of my columns.
I said, how do you go to war with your creditor?
Yeah, good point.
How do you do that?
Who do you borrow money from?
If you have to borrow money at all, you shouldn't have to.
Well, any guess on how quickly Russia is going to launch its anticipated offensive?
Are we close to that, in your view?
I think Russia is very good at surprise.
I think Putin really did have a bad turn in Ukraine.
I think he's lost a lot more than he ever expected he would lose.
But I'm looking at China more so than Russia.
Russia has a nuclear weapon, so does China, so do we.
But China is, I mean, if you look at the Chinese War fighting mentality.
It goes back to Sunshu.
You study your enemy.
You have to know yourself.
You have to know your enemy.
You use your enemy's strength against him.
What's our strength?
Well, in the case of China, it's consumerism and demand.
But our weakness is money and economic trade.
We're very bad at it.
So that's something that they have a tremendous advantage over us now.
They own all the manufacturing.
That's right.
So they said, we're not going to ship you anything like the drugs we make, pharmaceuticals.
Right.
They already ship drugs like the precursors to fentanyl and all these other awful drugs.
In fact, now I think they're shipping fentanyl direct to Mexico, to the cartels, and they're using their pill factories to make all that.
Yeah.
It's a terrible thing.
But just to touch on that, I wrote also in a column some time ago, what better way to destroy the youth of America, to kill young people, than flood America with cheap, dangerous, fatal drugs?
Yeah, that's exactly what they've done.
Yeah, they're killing something like 60,000 young American men every year.
I lost a family member to that.
Did you know that?
No, I didn't.
One of my distant cousins died of a fentanyl overdose.
He was quite a bit younger than me, but they found him dead in a parking lot with a needle in his arm.
Yeah, I know as a firefighter, I've been to scenes where that's happened.
It's a plague upon our nation.
It's heart-rending.
Well, Don, I hate to leave it on such a sad note there, but I really do appreciate your expertise and your time.
Thank you for visiting us, and I hope we can bring you back and talk about other events as they unfold.
I'd be honored to do so.
God bless America.
Well, thank you so much, sir.
And how can people, you know, reach you?
Are you on social media or anything?
I'm on Facebook.
It's at Don Lauchs, D-O-N-L-O-U-C-K-S. Okay.
And I have a website that needs to be updated, but it's Don Lauchs at Don Lauchs dot O-R-G. Dot org.
Okay.
All right.
Nice tie, too, by the way.
That's very vibrant.
Rush Limbaugh would be proud of that.
Oh, yeah.
That is true.
Well, thank you so much for coming in, and thank you for watching, folks.
I hope you enjoyed this conversation.
We're really working to bring you just the best of the best people here in studio here in Central Texas, the brighttown.com studio that you see here.
And we've got a lot more coming.
We've got a lot of great minds coming in to keep you informed about all these issues that really matter.
I'm Mike Adams, of course, the founder of Brighteon.
Feel free to repost this video on other channels and platforms.
And thanks for watching.
Rody, come on up.
And Rody says hi, too.
Thanks for watching from all of us here at BrightShot.com.
Take care.
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