Health Ranger - Mike Adams - BVN, May 4, 2026 – Trump Trying to Start NEW WAR with Iran + Col Douglas Macgregor...
Aired: 2026-05-04
Duration: 01:48:57


=== Provoking War in the Strait (13:12) ===

[00:00:11]  Okay, so Trump has announced Project Freedom.
[00:00:16]  What a name, right?
[00:00:17]  Project Freedom is, well, it begins today, by the way, and it's an effort to, as Trump claims, to escort ships out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.
[00:00:31]  And these are tanker vessels that would be escorted through the Strait of Hormuz.
[00:00:36]  And apparently, there are going to be 100 aircraft involved in this.
[00:00:44]  I don't know how many ships are going to be involved.
[00:00:47]  Basically, this is, it looks like an effort to provoke a response from Iran in order to justify a reignition of a much larger war, a larger attack on Iran.
[00:01:01]  So essentially, the way I see it, Trump is provoking Iran or actually just daring Iran, like, we dare you to attack us as we escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz.
[00:01:14]  Now, the Strait of Hormuz, you know, the Strait is called international waters by Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio and probably Trump as well.
[00:01:25]  But according to maritime definitions, it's not really because every nation has 12 miles from its shore of water that it controls.
[00:01:37]  It's considered its own territory.
[00:01:39]  It's 12 miles.
[00:01:40]  And it turns out that the Strait of Hormuz is so narrow.
[00:01:44]  That when you combine Iran's 12 miles and Oman's 12 miles, that covers the entire strait.
[00:01:51]  And so there really isn't a segment of the strait that you could call international waters, even though it has functioned as such for quite a long time, you know, until this war started, that Trump started this war February 28th.
[00:02:06]  And it's only after that that the strait became, quote, closed in response to Trump's attack on Iran.
[00:02:13]  So the northern portion of the Strait of Hormuz is clearly within Iran's territorial waters.
[00:02:20]  There's no question about that.
[00:02:21]  Just look at a map.
[00:02:23]  And the southern portion of the strait is believed to have been mined.
[00:02:29]  And so ships may be forced to use the northern portion of the strait, putting them well within range of Iran's drones or missiles or maybe even slingshots.
[00:02:41]  It's going to be that close.
[00:02:43]  So the question is what ships exactly does Trump plan to use to escort?
[00:02:52]  These other tankers out of the Strait of Hormuz.
[00:02:57]  It's also a little bit hilarious that Trump is calling it a humanitarian operation, given that this is the same Trump who said we're going to end a civilization.
[00:03:08]  Trump supporting genocide, supporting the bombs in the hands of the IDF to bomb women and children in the hospitals in Gaza, and Trump that has approved the bombing of civilian infrastructure.
[00:03:22]  In Iran, and said he's going to bomb all the power plants, etc.
[00:03:25]  I mean, these are widely recognized by treaties and also under previous war crimes tribunals' laws that resulted from that.
[00:03:37]  These are all recognized as war crimes, by the way, and Trump often openly brags about them.
[00:03:42]  So to say that all of a sudden we're on a humanitarian mission, not a lot of people are going to buy that.
[00:03:49]  But that's the cover story, I guess, to say that this is humanitarian, not military.
[00:03:56]  Well, But we also know that the U.S. military under Trump is very deceitful.
[00:04:04]  For example, the U.S. will pretend to have negotiations and then will bomb and kill the negotiators or have Israel do so.
[00:04:12]  So, what if this is just a way for the U.S. to sneak U.S. Navy vessels into the Persian Gulf as part of an attack plan by claiming, oh, it's humanitarian?
[00:04:24]  Well, that would mean that the U.S. Navy would be using civilian commercial tankers as human shields in order to wage an attack against Iran.
[00:04:33]  Is that the plan?
[00:04:34]  Well, who knows?
[00:04:36]  I suppose we'll find out sooner or later, but that could be the plan.
[00:04:38]  It would be consistent with the way the U.S. has operated so far.
[00:04:43]  But here's the real question.
[00:04:46]  What do you suppose Iran will do in response to this?
[00:04:50]  Because Iran has said that no ships will pass without Iran's permission and consent.
[00:04:57]  And clearly, Iran has the capability to harass naval vessels or commercial ships.
[00:05:03]  And Iran has attacked and destroyed some commercial vessels that have tried to transit the strait without Iran's permission.
[00:05:11]  So will Iran attack the commercial vessels?
[00:05:16]  Will Iran attack U.S. naval vessels?
[00:05:20]  Or will Iran do nothing?
[00:05:22]  Or will Iran maybe deploy more mines and wait for ships to hit the mines?
[00:05:27]  Who knows?
[00:05:29]  But the takeaway from this, in my analysis, is that Trump and the Pentagon are really getting desperate here.
[00:05:38]  They have not been able to force Iran to hand over control of the Strait of Hormuz to the United States of America.
[00:05:45]  And they probably never will, actually, just because of geography.
[00:05:50]  But they've failed in every effort they've tried.
[00:05:52]  They tried the financial attack with Scott Besant bragging about the financial terrorism against Iran, the currency attack.
[00:06:02]  They tried mass bombing.
[00:06:04]  We've all seen that.
[00:06:05]  Bombing power plants as well.
[00:06:07]  They've had economic sanctions.
[00:06:10]  They've, as Trump brags about, they've destroyed.
[00:06:12]  Iran's air force and navy, not that there was much of a navy to begin with, but they've tried everything they can think of.
[00:06:22]  They've tried having a domestic uprising with protesters.
[00:06:25]  You name it, it's all been tried and none of it's working.
[00:06:30]  So as a result, right now, Iran is in a situation where it still has the leverage over the Strait of Hormuz.
[00:06:37]  So this is just the next desperate effort, it seems, by Trump and the Pentagon to try to.
[00:06:43]  Maybe to change the perception of this in the public eye, to try to present the United States as victims.
[00:06:51]  Oh, we're only there for humanitarian reasons.
[00:06:55]  It has nothing to do with an attempt to destroy Iran's government and overthrow the country and take all their oil.
[00:07:02]  No, no, no.
[00:07:03]  All of a sudden now we're little angels, little naval angels floating around just trying to save innocent people.
[00:07:10]  That's us, the United States Navy.
[00:07:13]  Again, I don't think anybody's going to buy it.
[00:07:17]  Clearly, if the United States Navy wanted to achieve a humanitarian release of all of those vessels out of the Persian Gulf, then the Navy would just leave.
[00:07:28]  They would leave because Iran will allow the vessels to leave, to sail out of there under Iran's control.
[00:07:38]  They've already said that.
[00:07:40]  Iran has no benefit from forever blocking the strait, they just want to control it.
[00:07:46]  And they want to charge a toll for tanker ships from certain countries to pay, you know, a million dollars or whatever it is, maybe two million dollars to transit the strait.
[00:07:57]  And then all the oil would begin to flow again.
[00:08:00]  But the U.S. Navy, specifically Trump and Hegseth, they don't want Iran to have control at all.
[00:08:09]  And so they think that through this mechanism, they can try war one more time.
[00:08:15]  They can goad Iran into attacking ships.
[00:08:20]  And then they can respond with maybe landing troops or bombing the bejesus out of Iran one more time.
[00:08:30]  Or who knows?
[00:08:31]  What their plans are.
[00:08:32]  But it's certainly not humanitarian.
[00:08:37]  It's the opposite of humanitarian.
[00:08:38]  So this is just the U.S. pretending to be in favor of freedom.
[00:08:43]  You know, they always brag about freedom of navigation.
[00:08:46]  And then the very next day, Trump will brag about, we're pirates.
[00:08:50]  We just take their ships and board them and steal the oil just like pirates.
[00:08:55]  That's an actual quote.
[00:08:56]  I mean, parts of that are an actual quote from Trump.
[00:08:59]  He bragged about the U.S. Navy operating as pirates.
[00:09:03]  The U.S. doesn't believe in freedom of navigation.
[00:09:05]  Not for anyone else.
[00:09:07]  Only for the U.S.
[00:09:09]  The U.S. doesn't believe in freedom for other countries or sovereignty for other countries.
[00:09:14]  Only believes that countries should be obedient to the American empire and nothing else.
[00:09:21]  So to call this humanitarian, to call it Project Freedom, is kind of a slap in the face of logic and reason and recent history as well.
[00:09:29]  But it'll probably sell to the Fox News audience, the kind of brainwashed MAGA supporters that are still out there that don't.
[00:09:41]  Think critically or read any kind of independent media.
[00:09:44]  You know, you could throw this across Fox News and probably fool a lot of people into thinking that we're the good guys and all our ships are in the Middle East because we're humanitarians.
[00:09:57]  That's just not the case at all.
[00:09:59]  And you know, one more question.
[00:10:01]  U.S. aircraft carriers clearly won't get close to Iran's shoreline because, well, it seems like they've been getting hit.
[00:10:10]  I don't think that was a laundry room fire on the USS. Gerald R. Ford, either.
[00:10:16]  So, what ships is the U.S. going to send exactly into the strait?
[00:10:21]  That's not clear, and Trump didn't say, and nobody's talking about that, so I don't know.
[00:10:29]  We'll have to wait and see.
[00:10:32]  But whatever ships they are, it seems to me that Trump and Hegseth are sending U.S. sailors into the strait as bait, hoping that they get killed.
[00:10:46]  So that they can have a reason to start a new 60-day war under the War Powers Act so that they don't need congressional approval to wage another 60 days of war.
[00:10:57]  But using U.S. sailors as bait is, you know, extremely unethical.
[00:11:03]  It's horrific.
[00:11:05]  And it could very well cost many U.S. sailors their lives.
[00:11:08]  It could be dozens or even hundreds of sailors could lose their lives if a U.S. ship is actually destroyed in the strait.
[00:11:17]  But it seems to me that's exactly what Hegseth and Trump are looking for here.
[00:11:24]  And that's sad.
[00:11:26]  In the meantime, the oil shortage on a global scale keeps getting worse.
[00:11:33]  And if the strait is not open for business soon, within the next few weeks, the consequences of the ongoing oil shortages and gas shortages and helium and so on are going to become really dire.
[00:11:47]  It's going to get a whole lot worse from here forward.
[00:11:51]  So let's all pray for peace and let's hope that the situation gets resolved.
[00:11:56]  And let's hope that Trump may finally have some people around him who will talk some sense into him and say, you know, this is a bad idea to try to defeat Iran militarily or to land troops or to use our sailors as bait or whatever.
[00:12:14]  These are horrible ideas.
[00:12:16]  Why not sit down and actually just be willing to compromise with Iran?
[00:12:22]  But.
[00:12:23]  Trump's not willing to compromise at all.
[00:12:26]  At least that's become apparent recently.
[00:12:28]  So that's not a way out of this, unfortunately.
[00:12:31]  So stay tuned.
[00:12:33]  We'll see where this goes.
[00:12:34]  In the meantime, you can follow my work at brightvideos.com, and my articles are at naturalnews.com.
[00:12:43]  And you can support us at healthrangerstore.com.
[00:12:47]  So thank you for your support.
[00:12:49]  I'll do my best to keep you informed, and I'll do my best to keep calling for peace, too, through all of this.
[00:12:55]  That's what's going to help.
[00:12:56]  The whole world is to have peace and let the oil flow again and the fertilizer flow again so we can maybe stave off the worst projections of famine and mass starvation that are approaching.
[00:13:12]  You know, 2027 is going to be a very bad year if we don't get the fertilizer flowing again very, very soon.
[00:13:19]  So keep that in mind and thank you for listening.
[00:13:22]  Take care.

=== Ancient Superfood Foundations (10:40) ===

[00:13:24]  You've probably heard me talk about shadow food.
[00:13:27]  But today we're going to dive into a really intriguing piece of history about ancient superfood.
[00:13:35]  Well, maybe the word ancient isn't quite accurate.
[00:13:38]  We're talking, well, 15th century, right?
[00:13:40]  So hundreds of years ago, there was a superfood that was developed in what later became Germany.
[00:13:49]  And it's called pumpernickel bread or rye bread.
[00:13:56]  It was also called the Black Loaf of Westphalia because, of course, It had its origins in that region of what later became northern Germany or parts of northern Germany.
[00:14:08]  But most people don't know the miracle of pumpernickel rye bread, and that's what I want to share with you today.
[00:14:16]  Now, personally, I've never been a fan of the taste of pumpernickel rye bread, but after doing this research, I have ordered some and I can't wait to taste it now with a new understanding of what it is and why it's a superfood upon which.
[00:14:35]  A very large portion of civilization, of Western European civilization, was built on this bread because of its unique properties that were almost discovered by accident and that turn it into a superfood that actually supported population growth for centuries and gave rise to modern Germany.
[00:14:57]  It's really that big of a deal.
[00:14:59]  And it's nothing like the spongy wheat garbage that we call bread today with high fructose corn syrup in it.
[00:15:07]  And mostly air, and you know, it doesn't even fill you up.
[00:15:12]  You eat a slice, it's like nothing.
[00:15:14]  It's just, you know, it's like processed garbage, carbohydrates, etc.
[00:15:19]  So today we have shadow food.
[00:15:22]  What they developed in the 15th century was superfood.
[00:15:25]  So let me explain how this all begins.
[00:15:29]  First of all, rye, it's a robust crop, it can grow in very poor soils, it can handle much colder temperatures, it avoids rot.
[00:15:42]  You know, it germinates even in cold temperatures.
[00:15:44]  So, rye was considered a weed for centuries, and it was a weed that was plaguing the wheat crops of the region.
[00:15:52]  And the farmers there would try to pull out all the rye as much as they could in order to grow their wheat.
[00:15:59]  But wheat crops were failing, especially all over northern Europe in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries.
[00:16:07]  There were some changes in climate and temperature, rainfall, etc.
[00:16:15]  Were horrible.
[00:16:15]  Sometimes they were heavy clay.
[00:16:17]  Sometimes they were heavy in sand.
[00:16:20]  Very infertile ground, right?
[00:16:22]  Sometimes drought impacted fields.
[00:16:25]  And you can imagine this is also relevant today in many areas, by the way.
[00:16:30]  But where wheat cannot grow, rye often thrives.
[00:16:38]  And, you know, it was known in the Roman Empire.
[00:16:41]  And it was used in some ways in the Roman Empire.
[00:16:45]  And it was even cultivated by the late Roman Empire.
[00:16:48]  But It wasn't really appreciated until this creation of the Westphalia Pumpernickel Rye Bread, which takes that rye and does something really miraculous with it that even the people of the time didn't quite understand, but you will.
[00:17:08]  You'll understand it here today.
[00:17:10]  So there's a town that is believed to be the origin of this bread.
[00:17:15]  It's called Zost, or it's spelled S O E S T, Zost.
[00:17:21]  And it was involved in a lot of.
[00:17:24]  Of wars, you know, wars raging across Europe.
[00:17:30]  And in these wars, food supply became really critical because some of these wars, of course, destroyed farms and laid siege to the food supply, etc.
[00:17:40]  Kind of like the way today our modern empire, you know, tariffs and blockades and halts oil.
[00:17:47]  Well, back 500 or more years ago, they would just lay siege to the food supply.
[00:17:53]  And so, Food that would last on the shelf for a very long period of time was more than a luxury.
[00:18:01]  It was a strategic asset for the region.
[00:18:04]  And this Zost town, at least this is the way the story is told, it may or may not be factually correct, but there was one particular war, and then there was a baker that had to leave his rye bread in his oven and to rush to the city walls to defend the town of Zost.
[00:18:27]  He didn't want looters to steal his bread, so he bricked up the oven, which caused the humidity to rise inside the oven, almost to the point of creating steam.
[00:18:37]  And he also, of course, reduced the fuel to it.
[00:18:41]  So it was a low-temperature, long, steam-filled bake.
[00:18:47]  And the bread had been baking by the time he returned after fighting to defend the town.
[00:18:52]  The bread had been baking for almost 24 hours at a lower temperature.
[00:18:57]  And what he found?
[00:18:58]  Was not a ruined loaf of bread, but rather this really fragrant loaf that was black through and through, not just the crust, but all the way through.
[00:19:09]  And it was very dense and it was more tasty.
[00:19:13]  It was sweeter, more of a rich flavor.
[00:19:16]  Some people say it has hints of chocolate or hints of coffee in it.
[00:19:24]  And then over time, as he experimented with this, and then other bakers and other families over many, many years worked to experiment with this, they found that this very simple rye dough, which was nothing more than rye and water and some bacteria cultures, not even rising yeast, you know, they didn't use yeast to make the bread rise, okay?
[00:19:47]  It was just rye and water and some bacteria.
[00:19:50]  And if they subjected it to a long, slow steam, Filled bake that it changed it into something completely amazing, which we now know as classic Westphalia pumpernickel rye bread.
[00:20:09]  But this bread, there's something about it that we haven't even gotten to that changed history.
[00:20:16]  Now, many people over the centuries mocked pumpernickel bread, even it's said that Napoleon claimed that the bread was only good for his horse.
[00:20:28]  Right?
[00:20:30]  And it was mocked for causing gas and flatulence.
[00:20:37]  And some people think that's where its name even came from.
[00:20:41]  However, the bread eventually became known as the foundation of the food supply for that portion of European civilization.
[00:20:51]  Why?
[00:20:52]  Because it could last six months on the shelf without spoiling.
[00:20:58]  Whereas other breads would go bad very quickly, and of course, mold would grow.
[00:21:03]  So, fungal colonies would break out on other breads.
[00:21:08]  But for rye, that didn't happen for some reason.
[00:21:13]  Even at the time, they didn't know exactly why.
[00:21:16]  And the taste became known as more exotic.
[00:21:20]  It didn't have any sugar added to it, which also helped to prevent the growth of mold and bacteria, etc.
[00:21:27]  But it didn't have any sugar, it didn't have any yeast.
[00:21:31]  It didn't have any salt.
[00:21:33]  It was something that a farmer could grow and make himself.
[00:21:38]  And it didn't need all these other inputs.
[00:21:39]  It didn't need flour from wheat.
[00:21:42]  And so it was a single source food product that could last for six months on the shelf and that had rather unique flavors.
[00:21:52]  At least it was something different in the diet of the 15th century, which was a pretty poor diet, by the way, where people there mostly couldn't afford much meat.
[00:22:02]  Couldn't afford much in the way of milk or dairy or cheese or anything along those lines.
[00:22:08]  They had occasional meat, but not anything like what we have today.
[00:22:13]  Mostly they were malnourished.
[00:22:15]  And that brings us to the other advantage of this bread.
[00:22:19]  This bread gave double or triple the bioavailability of zinc and iron and magnesium and other trace minerals compared to wheat breads.
[00:22:33]  And there's a very specific chemical reason why that's the case.
[00:22:36]  And we're going to get to that.
[00:22:37]  But the people that lived on this Westphalia pumpernickel rye bread, they actually had better immune function because they had zinc in their diet that was more bioavailable.
[00:22:48]  And the women in particular were able to replenish the iron that they lost through menstruation.
[00:22:52]  It was able to give them better strength and stamina because you don't want to be anemic and iron deficient, especially if you're trying to get pregnant and have a child.
[00:23:05]  And so the iron bioavailability combined with zinc and others actually made these populations healthier, with better stamina, better energy, and more children, more reproduction, larger families.
[00:23:19]  So the populations grew.
[00:23:21]  And as the populations grew, the number of bakeries baking this secret bread recipe, the Westphalia pumpernickel rye, that number also grew.
[00:23:33]  And the specific bacterial cultures that I'll talk about here in a second were guarded like family secrets.
[00:23:40]  Because remember, this was long before the microscope, this was long before anybody really understood microbiology, but they knew that there was something special in this culture, and that if you had the right culture, And you worked it just right with the right amount of moisture and the right ratios with the rye, that you would get this end product that was amazing, that would also last on the shelf for six months.

=== Microbial Bread Secrets (08:31) ===

[00:24:04]  So, let's talk about the microbial basis of this amazing superfood that gave rise to much of European civilization.
[00:24:15]  So, a lot of it's about the lactic acid bacteria, LAB, but there were others.
[00:24:21]  There were also some wild yeasts that. were part of this mixture, probably just collected out of the air, even accidentally, because they didn't use yeast to make the bread rise, but they did have this culture.
[00:24:36]  And it primarily consisted of lactic acid bacteria.
[00:24:39]  And there were many of them.
[00:24:41]  This has all been analyzed since then, so we know what it is today.
[00:24:45]  But there's a fructolactobacillus san franciscensis, which sounds like San Francisco, probably where somebody identified this.
[00:24:55]  Anyway, this is a very famous sourdough bacterium.
[00:25:00]  And this produces lactic acid.
[00:25:03]  And along with the other strains of bacteria, I have some others here listed in my research.
[00:25:10]  Lactobacillus acidophilus, that's common, very common.
[00:25:14]  Lactoplantabacillus plantarum, it's an antifungal organism.
[00:25:21]  It produces very strong mold inhibiting metabolites.
[00:25:26]  But back to the lactic acid bacteria, it produces lactic acid, which Of course, lowers the pH of the overall loaf of bread.
[00:25:35]  And lactic acid is used today in a lot of personal care products.
[00:25:39]  You may not know that, but it's used to lower the pH to halt the growth of mold, bacteria, fungi in personal care products.
[00:25:49]  And it also works in bread.
[00:25:52]  And so if you lower that pH to, I don't know, 4.5 or something like that, then that begins to block a huge percentage of possible fungal.
[00:26:02]  Strains.
[00:26:04]  It stops them from ever even getting started.
[00:26:07]  And then, when you add to that the mold inhibition metabolites of these other strains, like I said, the Lacta plantobacillus plantarum, then you have another vector of an antifungal capability.
[00:26:20]  And there were others.
[00:26:22]  Others that add to the aroma of the bread, others that produce acetic acid, which is the acid that you find in vinegar, for example.
[00:26:32]  And acetic acid also contributed to the lowering of the pH.
[00:26:37]  And when you combine all of these, they form a community of bacteria that transform rye flour into this matrix, this complex, aromatic, tasty, seemingly non bread substance.
[00:26:58]  I mean, it doesn't even resemble bread anymore.
[00:27:01]  It's a black loaf, it's like a solid loaf at this point, but it's highly resistant to mold.
[00:27:08]  Highly resistant.
[00:27:10]  And so when you wrap it properly, and especially after it's baked for 16 to 24 hours, and then you wrap it properly, and remember it was baked at low temperature too, with steam.
[00:27:20]  So the steam also killed any mold, spores, or anything like that that might take root later on.
[00:27:29]  And then you wrap it up.
[00:27:30]  You could put this on a shelf for six months, which means that this became the soldier's bread.
[00:27:37]  This became the farmer's bread through the harsh winter months of northern Germany.
[00:27:42]  This became the family bread when you had nothing else left to eat, when all the spring and summer crops had been consumed, and you were out of dairy, and you'd already butchered the lambs or whatever, and you had nothing left to eat, you could still count on rye.
[00:27:59]  And yeah, you were probably really tired of rye bread after two months of living on rye, but you didn't die.
[00:28:07]  You didn't die.
[00:28:08]  You had nutrition, you had calories, you even had prebiotics.
[00:28:12]  That were part of this naturally because of this rich colony, this community of bacteria that were feeding on the natural maltose and the glucose that's in rye.
[00:28:25]  So they would convert those sugars into lactic acid, acetic acid, and even ethanol, by the way, a little bit of ethanol.
[00:28:33]  And this blend, which was controlled through temperature and time and consistency of the dough, which came down to the art of the baker and the knowledge passed down from family to family.
[00:28:46]  This gave them the knowledge of how to produce more acetic acid in the bread.
[00:28:52]  Or they could produce more lactic acid, which changed the flavor of the bread.
[00:28:59]  The lactic acid would make it taste more like yogurt, and the acetic acid would make it taste more like vinegar.
[00:29:06]  But these were craftsmen and women, and they knew how to do this, and they knew that a particular kind of firmness of the dough, or a particular temperature, or a particular duration, would result in a an end resulting flavor, and a shelf life of the bread.
[00:29:26]  And so this bread became what maybe the Bible referred to as manna from heaven.
[00:29:34]  This was the miraculous bread that fed soldiers and fed families and kept people alive throughout the centuries of Germany, or what became Germany.
[00:29:46]  Of course, modern Germany wasn't founded until the 19th century.
[00:29:51]  But these were Germanic people who became.
[00:29:55]  Modern day Germany.
[00:29:57]  And so, what's amazing about all of this is that it's a multi layered antibacterial approach that almost seems engineered by modern science.
[00:30:06]  You know, if you were to try to make a bread that had a long shelf life, and this may be very important in the coming, you know, global famine situation we're facing, but if you want a long shelf life without refrigeration, without freezing, they didn't have those in 1450, but they had bacteria, they had the cultures.
[00:30:28]  And so, It was a multi vector approach.
[00:30:31]  I already mentioned the lactic acid and the acetic acid.
[00:30:34]  But some of these bacterial strains produced hydrogen peroxide, which had its own antibacterial properties.
[00:30:40]  Some of them produced ethanol.
[00:30:43]  Some produced carbon dioxide.
[00:30:45]  And then there are other substances that are known as bacteriocin like inhibitory substances or BLIS.
[00:30:55]  I know it's an acronym you probably forget.
[00:30:58]  But these are small antimicrobial peptides.
[00:31:02]  That are secreted by the lactic acid bacteria that are another different level of defense against bacteria and molds and so on.
[00:31:11]  There were also phenolactic acids that are antifungal.
[00:31:16]  There's a propionic acid, diacetyl, a little bit of that in there as well, which is kind of interesting.
[00:31:23]  Basically, it was a chemistry lab in a loaf of bread, and the resulting chemistry just nailed it.
[00:31:32]  It gave it shelf life.
[00:31:34]  It gave it taste, it gave it character, and it gave it nutrition.
[00:31:39]  And we'll talk about the nutrition in just a moment, but I want to mention that the steam oven baking was really critical to make all of this happen.
[00:31:48]  They would bake it from maybe 100 to 130 degrees Celsius for at least 16 hours, sometimes up to 24 hours.
[00:31:58]  Now, you have to fill the oven with steam, and you have to close it up so the lid to the oven stays completely closed.
[00:32:07]  Unlike modern day bread, which might bake for 30 or 40 minutes at a much higher temperature, the pumpernickel bake is 30 to 50 times longer, basically, at half the temperature.
[00:32:20]  This is the longest baking time of any modern bread, I mean, of anything known in the world.
[00:32:27]  And so, as a result, it doesn't just burn the crust and make it harder and make the crust crack or anything like that.

=== Pumpernickel's Nutritional Miracle (16:10) ===

[00:32:35]  Not that there's anything wrong with that for those other kinds of breads.
[00:32:39]  But the pumpernickel bread undergoes something called the Mallard reaction.
[00:32:44]  I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly.
[00:32:47]  Mallard reaction.
[00:32:49]  Normally in breads, it only happens on the surface.
[00:32:52]  It's something that happens when the crusts brown.
[00:32:55]  But in the baking of the pumpernickel bread, this reaction happens very slowly and evenly throughout the entire loaf.
[00:33:03]  And what it means is that the starches of the rye are broken down into sugars.
[00:33:09]  By enzymes that are still active at the low baking temperatures, those enzymes which would be destroyed at higher temperatures.
[00:33:16]  And then those resulting sugars react with proteins that are in rye to produce the colors and the flavors that are unique to pumpernickel bread.
[00:33:28]  And this is a slow process, you can't rush it.
[00:33:33]  And the result is that you end up with a bread that reminds many people of dark chocolate or espresso.
[00:33:41]  Or different flavors of coffee, etc.
[00:33:43]  But there are no flavoring chemicals, there's no dyes, there's no sweetener, nothing.
[00:33:48]  This is pure chemistry.
[00:33:51]  And it's a miracle of agriculture.
[00:33:55]  It's a miracle.
[00:33:55]  This is the bread that outdoes all other breads throughout history.
[00:34:00]  It is a superfood compared to the shadow food that we are eating today.
[00:34:06]  But there's one more element of this that may surprise you.
[00:34:11]  The biggest secret of all this bread provided two to three times better bioavailability of mineral nutrition compared to wheat breads.
[00:34:20]  See, wheat contains phytic acid, so phytic acid is a chelation chemical and it binds to minerals that are in wheat.
[00:34:33]  Those minerals can include magnesium and iron, zinc, calcium, copper, you know, other trace minerals, selenium, etc.
[00:34:40]  So, when you eat Wheat bread, even though the bread may contain those minerals, they stay locked up with the phytic acid and you're not able to extract those minerals from the wheat bread.
[00:34:54]  It just passes right through your digestive tract and out of your body.
[00:34:59]  The minerals stay bound to phytate resulting from the phytic acid.
[00:35:04]  That's the chelator, is the phytate.
[00:35:06]  So in the 15th century, imagine, or the 16th century, nutritional deficiencies were extremely widespread.
[00:35:17]  And even though they were eating wheat bread, they weren't getting the nutrition that they needed.
[00:35:22]  It was very different from today where we have far too many calories, but somehow we're still nutritionally deficient.
[00:35:28]  But in those days, if you were nutritionally deficient, That was a life or death kind of risk.
[00:35:35]  You could die from a lack of iron.
[00:35:37]  You could die from not having a functioning immune system because you were zinc deficient, for example.
[00:35:42]  And especially, again, if you were a woman of childbearing age, you really needed a lot more minerals in order to create your child's body inside your own body and to be able, even after birth, to engage in breastfeeding and so on.
[00:35:56]  I mean, it was an incredibly taxing event in a food ecosystem where nutritional deficiencies are very common.
[00:36:05]  You know, you've got to give credit to all the moms that survived all those centuries without the superfoods nutrition that we have today.
[00:36:14]  But, see, rye bread had, because of all the long baking time and because of the breaking down of all these chemicals, because of the enzymes that were still active, there's one enzyme in particular called phytase.
[00:36:33]  And phytase, as you might imagine, breaks down.
[00:36:38]  Well, ultimately phytate.
[00:36:40]  So it eliminates almost all of the phytate from the rye bread.
[00:36:45]  And as a result, when you eat rye bread, you absorb two to three times more iron, zinc, and copper, and so on, and magnesium compared to wheat.
[00:36:57]  So the long fermentation and the long bake time of the rye bread degrades about 90% of the original phytic acid that's in rye.
[00:37:09]  Again, because of the phytase activity.
[00:37:11]  And then that makes those minerals more available to you when you eat the rye bread.
[00:37:18]  So it wasn't just that the bread had a long shelf life, and it wasn't just that it could be made from a grain that could grow in the poor soils with very strong temperature variation and short growing seasons and so on.
[00:37:32]  It was also that when you ate the rye bread, you got, let's say on average, three times more nutrition compared to wheat bread.
[00:37:42]  And that.
[00:37:44]  That made the difference in the success of what became the rising civilization from that area of Westphalia, pre modern Germany.
[00:37:54]  It was just that tipping point of nutrition from that bread that made all the difference.
[00:38:02]  So remember, if you're magnesium deficient, you can suffer heart problems, cardiovascular problems.
[00:38:09]  If you're zinc deficient, you can suffer immune system problems and skin problems, and your body doesn't heal.
[00:38:15]  as effectively as it should.
[00:38:16]  You know, zinc is necessary for so many things.
[00:38:18]  And so on.
[00:38:19]  We could go down the list.
[00:38:21]  And maybe at the time in the 15th century, they didn't know all these things.
[00:38:25]  And certainly they didn't know.
[00:38:26]  They just knew that people who ate pumpernickel were healthier people.
[00:38:30]  You want to be healthy?
[00:38:31]  Eat more pumpernickel.
[00:38:33]  This was, realistically, this bread became the quiet engine of population abundance of the pre-German people.
[00:38:43]  It was an everyday food that could resolve Iron deficiency in the population.
[00:38:51]  It could boost zinc intake.
[00:38:54]  It could, in many ways, because it boosted iron intake, it could really help people who were meat deficient.
[00:39:01]  You know, they couldn't afford the meat.
[00:39:04]  It wasn't, you know, abundant.
[00:39:05]  It just wasn't economically feasible for poor families to eat meat at every meal, unlike today's Germany, you know, where they're eating meat all the time.
[00:39:17]  But back then, you needed other sources for iron.
[00:39:21]  And rye, through this pumpernickel bread process, provided that mechanism.
[00:39:27]  So, when you put it all together, it's really a miracle.
[00:39:32]  It's a miracle of food history.
[00:39:35]  And the long shelf life of this bread, I already mentioned several of the reasons why it achieves that, you know, the antifungal compounds and so on.
[00:39:44]  But it also had very low free water activity.
[00:39:47]  Even though it was a semi moist bread, the water is bound up inside the dense matrix of the rye grain components.
[00:39:58]  And that water is not available.
[00:40:00]  To microbes.
[00:40:01]  So even though the bread feels moist, that moisture couldn't be used by fungal spores or bacteria.
[00:40:10]  And the baking itself was a kind of pasteurization as well.
[00:40:14]  It killed everything during the baking, especially when you think about the steam factor as well.
[00:40:19]  So then they would bake it, they would pull it out of the oven, and they would seal it very quickly.
[00:40:25]  And sometimes later on they would can it.
[00:40:28]  And if you canned pumpernickel bread, then, well, you had a long shelf life right there.
[00:40:33]  And The fact that it had almost no crust because the whole thing was almost homogenous throughout the entire loaf meant that you didn't have this kind of open outer surface with cracks in it that spores could fall into and start to grow.
[00:40:52]  So it kind of became its own armor.
[00:40:56]  It had its own outer armor, and then it had its inner chemistry that also inhibited any kind of growth.
[00:41:03]  And so that's why this became not only the soldier's bread, like I said, but.
[00:41:08]  The sailor's bread.
[00:41:10]  This is the bread that you could put on a ship.
[00:41:14]  And oftentimes on a ship, you'd be out there for months.
[00:41:18]  And you would have enough carbohydrate energy to feed a sailor.
[00:41:23]  But also, you would avoid some of the nutritional deficiencies that sailors often faced.
[00:41:28]  Now, of course, this did not address a vitamin C deficiency, scurvy.
[00:41:33]  But that was solved later by taking limes on the boats, right?
[00:41:38]  And that's why they were called limeys, because the limes had vitamin C.
[00:41:42]  And prevented scurvy.
[00:41:43]  But it was the rye that prevented immune system collapse and iron deficiency or anemia.
[00:41:49]  Interesting, isn't it?
[00:41:51]  Now, this was the perfect food for travelers.
[00:41:54]  It was the perfect food for surviving a military siege.
[00:41:58]  It was a survival asset.
[00:42:02]  In fact, the city or the town of Zost was besieged in the late Middle Ages, and the pumpernickel bread allowed its people to continue to thrive.
[00:42:13]  And defend the town.
[00:42:15]  And then more recently, in World War I and World War II, the German military was issued rations of pumpernickel bread.
[00:42:24]  And there was a related version called Graubrat.
[00:42:27]  And these portions were called the iron rations of the German military.
[00:42:33]  There's a word for that, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but the Eisern portion, or iron ration.
[00:42:40]  I guess that's in German, but I don't speak German.
[00:42:44]  Anyway, the density of it.
[00:42:46]  Meant that you could get one slice, could fill you for a meal.
[00:42:54]  And you could carry days and days of this bread without spoilage, even in hot conditions, in summer fighting or wet conditions, where other breads would have easily molded.
[00:43:06]  And it didn't take up much space because it was very dense.
[00:43:09]  And if you actually get the chance to eat pumpernickel bread, you're going to find out one slice will fill you up.
[00:43:18]  One good slice of the real bread, unlike today's shadow bread that you get at the grocery store, where a whole loaf, you know, you can squeeze it down and it's got less nutrition than one slice of pumpernickel bread.
[00:43:33]  Seriously, it's a big difference.
[00:43:37]  So, on top of that, this bread became a diet for modern day astronauts.
[00:43:43]  Isn't that wild?
[00:43:44]  So, there was a German astronaut named Thomas Rieter.
[00:43:49]  or Reiter, maybe that's the way to pronounce it, but he requested to bring a piece of this pumpernickel bread from a famous family bakery in Germany when riding on the, going to the space station.
[00:44:06]  So that he brought this Westphalian food technology into orbit, and then he ate it in orbit, and it served the same purpose there as it did for a soldier or a sailor, which was that it didn't mold, And it lasted, and he could eat it at any time he wanted.
[00:44:24]  He could rely on it, even in orbit.
[00:44:27]  Wow.
[00:44:28]  So, from siege warfare to poor soils to the food of astronauts on the International Space Station, this is the history of Westphalia pumpernickel rye.
[00:44:43]  This is one of the most important innovations in food science in human history that we know of.
[00:44:51]  It's an art and a mastery that is guarded today and it is appreciated today.
[00:44:56]  It's practiced today.
[00:44:57]  Thank God that this has been kept alive by various bakers across Germany today.
[00:45:04]  In fact, in other areas, there's even an association called the Westphalian Pumpernickel Protective Association that was founded in 2010 to safeguard the tradition of this amazing food innovation.
[00:45:21]  They've documented more than 3,000 varieties of pumpernickel.
[00:45:26]  Isn't that amazing?
[00:45:28]  And this was even recognized by the German UNESCO Commission in 2014 as a cultural heritage.
[00:45:36]  So, in every way that you could imagine, this bread is living history.
[00:45:43]  It's about the history of mankind and its interaction with soils, with crops, with bacteria.
[00:45:53]  And the The gentle patience of taking time to do something well and to experiment and to have a mindset for quality rather than just mass production.
[00:46:07]  This isn't about producing processed junk food at the cheapest, lowest price for mass consumption by obese but nutritionally deficient populations.
[00:46:17]  That's today's shadow food industry.
[00:46:19]  Rather, the Westphalian pumpernickel rye was about producing something that was the best. possible source of energy and nutrition that would survive the most difficult circumstances imaginable, whether you're on a ship, fighting a war, surviving a siege, or orbiting planet Earth.
[00:46:40]  In all those cases, this bread, centuries old, pulled through and kept people alive.
[00:46:49]  It's not shadow food.
[00:46:53]  It's food history.
[00:46:54]  It's food technology.
[00:46:56]  And it's one of the most important inventions in the history of food that we know of on planet Earth.
[00:47:02]  So there you go.
[00:47:04]  So now, with that said, would you like to try some pumpernickel bread?
[00:47:10]  I certainly do.
[00:47:11]  So I ordered some.
[00:47:14]  I haven't received it yet.
[00:47:16]  But now I have to challenge my own memory of not liking pumpernickel bread because I just didn't like the taste.
[00:47:25]  Well, I didn't know anything about it.
[00:47:27]  I was ignorant of it, of course, as most of us are.
[00:47:31]  But now, now, whew, I'm going to eat pumpernickel bread in a whole new light.
[00:47:37]  I'm going to savor it.
[00:47:37]  I'm going to enjoy it.
[00:47:39]  I'm going to respect it.
[00:47:41]  And I'm going to give thanks to all those generations of bakers and innovators and the scientists and everybody who made this possible and kept it alive to this very day.
[00:47:53]  So if you'd like to join me in this, I encourage you to seek out real traditional Westphalian pumpernickel rye bread.
[00:48:01]  If you're in Europe, go visit.
[00:48:03]  The town of Zost.
[00:48:05]  You can visit the actual historic bakeries where this was created.
[00:48:11]  Wow!
[00:48:12]  That would be an amazing thing to do.
[00:48:14]  I would like to do that, but I'm too busy.
[00:48:16]  I'm hanging out in Texas.
[00:48:18]  But I'm going to buy it.
[00:48:19]  I'm going to have it shipped to me.
[00:48:20]  It survives shipping for all the reasons we've talked about here, right?
[00:48:24]  It has shelf life.
[00:48:26]  But I'm going to support these bakeries and I'm going to add this bread to my diet.
[00:48:32]  My diet of high nutrition and superfoods and smoothies and everything else.
[00:48:36]  I'm going to add.
[00:48:37]  traditional, genuine Westphalia pumpernickel rye bread.
[00:48:43]  And I'll let you know how that goes.

=== Discoveries with BrightLearn AI (03:52) ===

[00:48:45]  So, if you'd like to hear more stories like this, I'm covering discoveries.
[00:48:52]  And I should mention that because of all my AI engine research over the last couple of years and my collection of millions of books and millions of science papers, I mean tens of millions, I've been running an in-house discovery engine for several weeks now.
[00:49:10]  And it pulls out discoveries when it finds them.
[00:49:13]  And this discovery of this pumpernickel bread, this was one that my AI engines flagged as being very interesting.
[00:49:21]  And so I did additional research and brought this story to life to share it with you.
[00:49:26]  But my AI discovery engine, last time I checked, had so far identified 437 discoveries.
[00:49:35]  This is number one.
[00:49:37]  There's much more yet to come.
[00:49:39]  Much more.
[00:49:41]  You'll be able to read about these discoveries in my articles at naturalnews.com.
[00:49:46]  You'll be able to hear about these in my coverage at brightvideos.com.
[00:49:51]  That's my video site.
[00:49:54]  And in addition, I've also created an entire book on this subject in particular.
[00:49:59]  That book is available right now at brightlearn.ai, which is my book creation engine that now has over 50, what is it, 55,000 books that are all available completely free of charge.
[00:50:12]  With hundreds of them in Espanol and over 500 books available as free downloadable audiobooks.
[00:50:19]  And yes, eventually we'll have books in German.
[00:50:22]  We've started translating into Spanish first, but we'll go into French and German and also Chinese and other languages, including Russian, etc.
[00:50:31]  The direct website for the books is just books.brightlearn.ai if you want to go directly to it and you can start searching the books.
[00:50:39]  If you click on the most popular books, you'll see my name there because my books are among the most popular on the site.
[00:50:48]  And you click on my name, you'll be able to find this book about.
[00:50:52]  Pumpernickel, and you'll be able to download the book, the PDF file, completely free of charge if you want to see it there.
[00:50:59]  Finally, one more thing all of these platforms and all my work is supported by your shopping with us at my online store, which focuses on lab tested superfoods and high density nutrition, and that's healthrangerstore.com.
[00:51:15]  So if you want to shop with us, and if you want ultra clean food, because we do mass spec testing for heavy metals and glyphosate and atrazine, plus microbiology and so much more.
[00:51:26]  We have a lab, a very high end lab with multiple mass spec instruments.
[00:51:32]  I've shown videos of that before.
[00:51:34]  The lab is ISO accredited.
[00:51:36]  Our manufacturing is GMP compliant, by the way.
[00:51:40]  And we're going for another ISO accreditation for the manufacturing side.
[00:51:44]  We're about to get that.
[00:51:46]  You can enjoy all of these benefits with high density nutrition, superfoods, and long term storable food formats, as well as nutritional supplements and personal care products that are ultra clean.
[00:51:59]  You'll find all that at HealthRangerStore.com.
[00:52:03]  And every purchase there helps support our platforms, our laboratory, and all of this work that we do, our AI engines, and everything else.
[00:52:10]  So, anyway, bottom line hundreds more discoveries are coming your way.
[00:52:15]  Hundreds more.
[00:52:16]  Each one is amazing.
[00:52:18]  And as everybody in the world is sick and tired of politics right now, I'm going to focus more on these discoveries because at least this is something that can help you.
[00:52:28]  This is something you can use today.
[00:52:30]  So, thank you for listening.
[00:52:31]  I'm Mike Adams, the HealthRanger, brightvideos.com.
[00:52:34]  And naturalnews.com.
[00:52:36]  Take care.

=== Supporting Our Platforms and Labs (15:23) ===

[00:52:38]  You know, the establishment has failed yet again to silence Alex Jones.
[00:52:43]  They failed dramatically.
[00:52:46]  Even though they've tried to take over InfoWars, and I don't know, maybe the courts will allow them to have the domain name and all of that.
[00:52:54]  It seems like that might happen.
[00:52:56]  I don't know.
[00:52:57]  It's hard to tell because the court case keeps going back and forth.
[00:53:00]  It's wild.
[00:53:01]  But, you know, the building, I mean, the studios have been.
[00:53:05]  You know, left now.
[00:53:07]  Alex has his own network, Alex Jones Live, I think is what it is.
[00:53:12]  And all of his crew members and so on, they're working out of their own studios.
[00:53:17]  And I got to tell you, the establishment is so angry that they still could not silence Alex Jones that they are trying to attack him now through me, through what, a 12 or 14 year old friction between myself and.
[00:53:39]  And Alex.
[00:53:40]  So I just wanted to clear the air here.
[00:53:41]  In fact, this whole thing was cleared up, you know, 12 years ago, whatever it was, between me and Alex.
[00:53:46]  But if you hear any voice recordings, or even, I don't know, you might hear 11 labs, deep fakes, but if you hear old voice recordings of me railing on Alex Jones, that's nothing.
[00:54:02]  In private conversations, well, and I'll explain all this, but in private conversations, I was very frustrated with Alex.
[00:54:10]  you know, whatever that was, 12 years ago, 14 years ago, or whatever.
[00:54:15]  And I'm sure he was frustrated with me too.
[00:54:17]  And you should hear the stuff that I said that has never been broadcast because I didn't know I was being played at that time.
[00:54:29]  I was being played by nefarious actors run by the feds.
[00:54:36]  And they do what's called, well, I call it now a man-in-the-middle attack.
[00:54:42]  And what they do is they kind of weasel their way in between.
[00:54:46]  Two people, and then they would tell me bad, false things about Alex, and then they would tell Alex, or through other people, try to get information to Alex, bad, false things about me.
[00:55:00]  And this is a classic strategy by the feds.
[00:55:05]  And it got to the point where, see, they were taking advantage of the fact that when I fill in for Alex, he's not there.
[00:55:15]  And so there was actually very little communication between myself.
[00:55:20]  and Alex Jones directly.
[00:55:22]  I mean, almost none.
[00:55:24]  And so when these people who I foolishly trusted, when they would tell me things, oh, Alex said this about you, and then they would tell Alex, oh, Mike said this about you, they were doing this on purpose to try to get us to blow up publicly against each other or to try to get me to discredit Alex publicly or try to get him to do the opposite to me or the same to me.
[00:55:51]  And that never worked, but Privately, man, privately, I said things about Alex that I quickly learned were based on just the bad information that I was being fed.
[00:56:08]  And, you know, I was kind of, I mean, I was younger then.
[00:56:10]  I was really naive about how insane the effort would be to try to take down Alex Jones.
[00:56:16]  I had no idea how intense that it would be.
[00:56:20]  You know, for Alex, he had been living this for, you know, 15 years plus, but for me, that was a whole new thing.
[00:56:29]  I really had no idea that these were fed people trying to play me off against Alex.
[00:56:35]  I didn't know.
[00:56:38]  So, anyway, if you hear any voice recordings of me from back then, those were all private conversations, and that's nothing compared to what I thought in my mind because I had believed what I was being told.
[00:56:53]  Well, anyway, they went too far.
[00:56:57]  They went too far.
[00:56:58]  They went so far, at one point, I'm not even going to tell you exactly what they did because it doesn't matter, but they tried to get me to go public with a story on Alex that they told me would be very damning to Alex and it would destroy Alex and everything.
[00:57:21]  And I'm like, wait a second.
[00:57:23]  This is not my role.
[00:57:24]  I'm not here to tear down somebody else in alternative media.
[00:57:27]  What the hell is this?
[00:57:29]  So I went to Alex.
[00:57:32]  With this.
[00:57:34]  And I sat down with Alex in his conference room.
[00:57:37]  It's the, for those of you who've ever been in the studio, it's the conference room that shares a wall with the office of Rob Dew.
[00:57:46]  And, you know, it's the big, it's the main conference room.
[00:57:49]  And I sat down with Alex in that room and I just laid it out for him.
[00:57:54]  I said, Here's what they've been doing to me.
[00:57:57]  And they told me this about you.
[00:57:59]  And here's what they wanted me to do.
[00:58:02]  And he was like, Oh my God.
[00:58:05]  I know exactly who this is.
[00:58:07]  Or, you know, in his voice, which I can't really do, he's like, I know exactly who this is.
[00:58:12]  I know exactly what they're doing because they tried the same thing through other people and they tried these other tactics and so on.
[00:58:18]  And immediately that cleared the air.
[00:58:23]  Immediately.
[00:58:24]  He knew exactly what was going on.
[00:58:27]  And I even told him, look, you know, I've said some bad things, you know, in private conversations.
[00:58:34]  And he's like, yeah, I know that that's what they do.
[00:58:36]  They feed you information and then they surreptitiously record you and this and that.
[00:58:42]  They do that to everybody.
[00:58:43]  And then they try to leverage that against you.
[00:58:44]  Yeah.
[00:58:44]  I said, yep, that's exactly what they did.
[00:58:46]  He said, I understand.
[00:58:49]  This isn't the first time.
[00:58:51]  Don't blame yourself, but you figured it out soon enough.
[00:58:55]  And I said, yeah, great.
[00:58:59]  I suppose so.
[00:59:00]  And that was the end of it.
[00:59:02]  And that was like, I don't even remember what year that was.
[00:59:06]  It was like 2011 or 2012 or I don't remember.
[00:59:12]  It was a while ago.
[00:59:14]  And then after that, watching what they did to Alex.
[00:59:20]  I knew.
[00:59:21]  I knew it was all coordinated.
[00:59:23]  I'm talking about the Sandy Hook trials.
[00:59:26]  They had the deep state.
[00:59:28]  They had everything rigged against Alex.
[00:59:30]  Remember, he never even got a trial.
[00:59:33]  He didn't get a trial.
[00:59:35]  I mean, the judge just said, You're guilty.
[00:59:38]  And then they had the jury decide the punishment or the financial punishment.
[00:59:44]  And in order to do that, they called in all these experts that lied about how much money Alex had and so on.
[00:59:49]  And that's how they got a judgment of $1.5 billion.
[00:59:52]  And.
[00:59:53]  I saw this happening and I knew from back channels that at any point Alex could have given in and they would have backed off, they would have dropped the case.
[01:00:06]  And by give in, what I mean is that he could have just said to them, okay, I'll do what you want, I'll parrot the narrative that you want, which he never did, obviously.
[01:00:16]  And that's why they pursued the case and that's why they have continued to go after him.
[01:00:23]  Alex Jones in 2012 or again, whatever year it was, maybe 2011, whatever I thought about Alex got completely reformed through the Sandy Hook trials and watching Alex stand up for the First Amendment in a way and paying a price that nobody else had paid.
[01:00:47]  And it was through that trial that any questions that I had about Alex's determination and his principles, any question I had faded away at that point.
[01:01:01]  You know, you could argue that early on, none of us saw that side of Alex, but once he went through that trial, man, it showed that he's a warrior.
[01:01:12]  And that's why I actually wrote a letter on his behalf and gave it to his attorney.
[01:01:19]  I think it was Norm.
[01:01:21]  And a letter to be submitted to the court on behalf of Alex.
[01:01:27]  And I heard back from people who saw the letter that it was the single most compelling letter in that entire case, you know, letter from an outside party, I should say, to the court.
[01:01:40]  I don't know if that letter ever got entered into the court record, but if it did, you should read it because it tells the story of how I came to know that even though I didn't agree with Alex on every single thing, that he was an absolute First Amendment.
[01:02:00]  Warrior, and he would not compromise his principles.
[01:02:04]  Now, you didn't have to agree with him on everything, and even he himself never claims that he's 100% correct on everything all the time.
[01:02:13]  But he 100% has the right to speak his mind and to question events, including mass shooting events or terrorism events or war-related events or anything like that.
[01:02:26]  And I so strongly agreed with that position that I sat down and penned a letter and signed it.
[01:02:34]  And it's a matter of record, either privately with Alex's attorney or with the court if they ever filed that.
[01:02:42]  I don't know if they did or not, but that letter's out there.
[01:02:46]  Now, there's another interesting, well, noteworthy thing about this whole situation, which is that we all learn and grow over time.
[01:02:57]  And I think that's also true with Alex.
[01:03:00]  And I think that the Alex Jones that exists today is.
[01:03:06]  Far more dedicated to principles.
[01:03:11]  He has learned the hard way.
[01:03:13]  He has been raked over the coals.
[01:03:14]  He has been subjected to a completely rigged, falsified civil trial.
[01:03:21]  He's been, you know, smeared and deplatformed.
[01:03:24]  He's been set up.
[01:03:26]  And like I said, one of the attempted setups against him tried to leverage me against him.
[01:03:32]  Ultimately, it failed.
[01:03:35]  But they did that to a lot of people, you know, not just me.
[01:03:39]  That's why, by the way, some of his ex-employees turned against him and took a payoff.
[01:03:45]  I actually am aware of a couple of them doing that.
[01:03:48]  They took a payoff to say things in articles like UK Daily Mail did.
[01:03:58]  I forgot when it was.
[01:03:59]  It was a few years ago.
[01:04:00]  One article in particular about Alex Jones that I read it.
[01:04:05]  I was like, this is utterly and completely false because I've been in Alex's offices.
[01:04:11]  And none of these things are true.
[01:04:13]  You know, for example, I think the story said that there were like Nazi pictures on the wall or something, or people were wearing like Nazi tennis shoes or things like that.
[01:04:22]  It's like, what?
[01:04:23]  It's all made up.
[01:04:25]  But my point is that over time, I think that Alex found his own way through the crucible.
[01:04:35]  In other words, the harder they tried to attack him, the more it forced him to double down on his own internal.
[01:04:42]  Principles of freedom of speech, principles of fighting for what you believe in, principles of not surrendering to evil.
[01:04:50]  And I think that Alex, you know, again, regardless of what you think of him, whether you like his style or not, Alex from 10 years ago is a completely different person than the Alex Jones today.
[01:05:04]  He has forced himself to be reformed with an extremely powerful emphasis on.
[01:05:14]  A few key principles, such as freedom of speech and not surrendering to evil enemies and so on.
[01:05:22]  And if anything, that actually proves the character of Alex more over all these years.
[01:05:29]  Whereas in his early days, you know, he hadn't been really tested, nor had I or any of us when we were younger.
[01:05:37]  You know, we learn more over time.
[01:05:39]  Hopefully, that's something that we all share.
[01:05:41]  We gain wisdom, we gain experience.
[01:05:44]  We stop being fooled so easily by nefarious parties and things like that.
[01:05:49]  We learn.
[01:05:50]  We grow.
[01:05:51]  We gain wisdom.
[01:05:52]  And if we are good people, we deepen our commitment to our principles.
[01:05:59]  And that doesn't happen with everybody.
[01:06:01]  It only happens with some people.
[01:06:03]  And it definitely happened with Alex.
[01:06:06]  He deepened his commitment to his freedom of speech.
[01:06:10]  And so did I because I started getting deplatformed and completely blacklisted in 2014.
[01:06:18]  So, you know, a few years after all this stuff initially started, I was getting deplatformed.
[01:06:25]  And in fact, that reminds me, one of the threats, yeah, this is crazy, one of the threats that came at me was that if I didn't turn against Alex, that I would be deplatformed, that I would be removed from every major platform.
[01:06:44]  Now I'm suddenly remembering that.
[01:06:45]  I forgot to mention that earlier, but that was one of the very specific threats.
[01:06:51]  Like, you know, if you do our work for us, then we'll make sure you still have a voice on all these platforms like YouTube and so on and Facebook.
[01:07:00]  And when I refuse to do what they wanted to do then, within a couple of years, sure enough, I started getting deplatformed, and then so did Alex.
[01:07:13]  So you know that we were targeted because we were telling the truth.
[01:07:20]  We were targeted, we were deplatformed.
[01:07:21]  This was, remember the early days of Trump.
[01:07:24]  And then, in 2015, when he started campaigning to run for president, and we all got behind Trump at that time because he was, you know, saying the right things as a champion of liberty and freedom.
[01:07:37]  I'm going to reform this country.
[01:07:39]  And a large part of his focus was deporting illegals, but a lot of other reforms as well.
[01:07:46]  And so it was pretty easy to support Trump in his first term like that, which I did, and Alex did, and many millions of other people did as well.
[01:07:56]  And then we saw Trump get shut down in his first term.

=== Alex Jones' Hardened Beliefs (13:25) ===

[01:08:01]  He had Jeff Sessions as the AG, which was just a delay tactic, and then William Barr also.
[01:08:08]  You know, come on.
[01:08:10]  And then the fake Russia collusion hoax, all that stuff against Trump.
[01:08:17]  And I remember thinking, oh my God, they're doing the same thing to Trump that they were doing to Alex because during these years was when the Sandy Hook trial started up and Alex started to have huge, huge legal fees.
[01:08:36]  I mean, I don't know the exact numbers, but I would imagine some months he probably paid.
[01:08:41]  Half a million dollars in legal fees in one month, I'm guessing.
[01:08:46]  And Trump's legal fees would have been through the roof as well.
[01:08:49]  And so, you know, here I was in those years, 2016, 2017, 2018, like I'm totally deplatformed and banned.
[01:08:58]  Alex is totally deplatformed and banned, and Trump is getting completely attacked.
[01:09:02]  They're trying to dismantle his entire administration to destroy America and destroy our First Amendment.
[01:09:11]  So, you know, at that time, we were all fighting from the same posture.
[01:09:17]  It's like, you know, we have to save this republic and we have to save our freedom of speech.
[01:09:22]  And then, of course, they rigged the 2020 election against Trump.
[01:09:26]  It was clearly rigged, 100%.
[01:09:29]  And when they stole that election from Trump, I thought America was lost then.
[01:09:36]  But then for four years under Biden, think about how much Alex Jones suffered.
[01:09:42]  And that's when, you know, the government.
[01:09:45]  The federal government really went after him in the trial.
[01:09:49]  At least as I'm remembering it, sometimes, you know, our minds tend to kind of summarize these events, but under Biden, they went after Alex hard.
[01:10:03]  And so that's, it was the Biden years also that Alex really, I think, developed more, a deeper character for the values that he now champions every single day.
[01:10:18]  And You know, all of us were on a target list, by the way, myself included.
[01:10:23]  We were all on a target list.
[01:10:24]  And many of my colleagues and friends were named as the dirty dozen of disinformation for COVID.
[01:10:31]  You know, people like Sayer G and Dr. Mercola and Sherry Tenpenny and so many others.
[01:10:37]  They were all named.
[01:10:39]  So you could see the government was really starting to attack everybody that was telling the truth.
[01:10:44]  And they were literally targeting people left and right.
[01:10:48]  And also, my organization was targeted.
[01:10:51]  Through different means, through all kinds of slander and smearing, and then I was deplatformed and I was debanked in certain ways as well.
[01:10:59]  And the whole focus of this was to try to strangle those of us who refused to do the bidding of the establishment.
[01:11:11]  So the only question you have to ask of who can you trust?
[01:11:19]  Who can you believe in all of this?
[01:11:21]  All you have to do is look at who was viciously attacked.
[01:11:25]  and deplatformed and censored.
[01:11:28]  And there's your answer.
[01:11:30]  It's really very simple.
[01:11:33]  And even to this day, my company has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in a lawsuit against YouTube and Google, Meta, Big Tech, and also departments of the government, including the DOD.
[01:11:47]  That lawsuit is still pending.
[01:11:50]  And it doesn't seem like we're getting a fair trial at all in that lawsuit.
[01:11:55]  It's cost a small fortune and it's been delayed and delayed and delayed.
[01:12:00]  And I feel like I'm experiencing a smaller version of what Alex went through, getting totally railroaded by the court system.
[01:12:08]  But why?
[01:12:09]  Well, it's for the same reason.
[01:12:11]  Because we both refused to surrender to the false narratives and the control system.
[01:12:21]  We stuck with our principles.
[01:12:23]  We said we're going to fight for freedom of speech.
[01:12:24]  We're going to fight for the truth.
[01:12:26]  We're going to fight for our right to exercise our First Amendment.
[01:12:29]  And to question events.
[01:12:31]  We're going to fight for that right no matter what, no matter how much we lose financially, no matter how much we lose in terms of traffic or even reputation because we were all being utterly smeared every single day in the press.
[01:12:45]  Some days Alex would have a hundred negative articles written about him across mainstream media.
[01:12:52]  And every article would repeat the same lies.
[01:12:56]  Lies that they were clearly handed, scripted lies.
[01:13:00]  You know, probably the CIA or somebody just handed them lies.
[01:13:04]  Here, print this.
[01:13:04]  And they all printed it.
[01:13:06]  And they would say crazy things about Alex Jones.
[01:13:08]  Can you imagine living through that year after year after year?
[01:13:11]  Every day you wake up and there's hundreds of lies about you in the mainstream media.
[01:13:17]  That's what Alex lived through.
[01:13:20]  And in doing so, it hardened his belief system in what he was fighting for.
[01:13:29]  And look, I'm not claiming Alex is a perfect person.
[01:13:32]  None of us are, right?
[01:13:35]  We all make mistakes.
[01:13:36]  We've all had bad judgment.
[01:13:37]  I already, I just told you, I was really naive about all of this years ago.
[01:13:42]  I had no idea the depth of the nefarious operations that would be leveled against me.
[01:13:51]  I was really unsuspecting of the level of desperation that the establishment would demonstrate to try to control speech and control every narrative.
[01:14:04]  I really had no idea 15 years ago that it was going to come to where it is right now.
[01:14:11]  But now we are all wiser.
[01:14:13]  We all see this.
[01:14:16]  And there is no question at this point that in our modern world, Alex Jones is the champion of the First Amendment.
[01:14:26]  There's nobody else who has paid a higher price or who has suffered more just in order to try to exercise his First Amendment rights.
[01:14:37]  And yes, the establishment and the feds and who knows, whatever deep state groups, they use every tactic in the book.
[01:14:45]  They tried to turn me against Alex years ago, they tried to turn others.
[01:14:48]  Well, they successfully turned others.
[01:14:49]  Against Alex publicly, not just privately.
[01:14:53]  I mean, yeah, I had private conversations years ago where I was screaming about what I thought, which turned out not to be true.
[01:15:02]  But there are people who went public with mass accusations against Alex.
[01:15:11]  And it was more than one person.
[01:15:13]  And that was all done.
[01:15:16]  It was all coordinated.
[01:15:19]  Clearly, it was all engineered.
[01:15:23]  And again, I'm not saying Alex is a perfect person.
[01:15:25]  He's talked publicly about his drinking issues years ago.
[01:15:32]  And he got a DUI or something like that years ago, the sheriff.
[01:15:38]  I forgot the details.
[01:15:39]  Maybe it was a DWI or whatever it was.
[01:15:42]  I mean, he's talked publicly about a lot of stuff.
[01:15:46]  I'm not going to rehash the stuff that he's talked about himself.
[01:15:49]  He's not a perfect person, and none of us is a perfect person.
[01:15:55]  But at the end of the day, Alex Jones is a champion of the First Amendment.
[01:16:01]  And he will always have that.
[01:16:05]  He will always be known for that.
[01:16:07]  He has made himself legendary in fighting for the First Amendment against all the odds.
[01:16:16]  So that's where things stand in 2026.
[01:16:19]  It's going to get rough out there because probably the Democrats are going to come back into power because Trump has done such a horrific job as president, at least in the last few months, gas prices rising and so on.
[01:16:33]  I've been very critical of Trump in these last few months and the war and how he basically takes orders from Netanyahu at this point.
[01:16:42]  At least that's the way it appears.
[01:16:44]  So I've been very critical of Trump.
[01:16:46]  It doesn't mean that Trump can't turn things around.
[01:16:50]  Take power in the midterms, which seems almost like a certainty, they're going to have investigations and impeachment proceedings against Trump every single day, you know.
[01:17:01]  And then if the Democrats win the White House in 2028, assuming we still have a country by then, which I'm not entirely sure of, but if they take power then in early 2029, guess what?
[01:17:13]  They're probably just going to go after Alex Jones again, or maybe myself, or all of us.
[01:17:20]  Because if there's anybody that loves censorship in America, it's the Democrats.
[01:17:25]  Even more, I mean, they love censorship more than the Republicans, even though to some extent it's just one giant uniparty when it comes to government controlled speech.
[01:17:35]  But the Democrats are definitely worse on that issue.
[01:17:38]  And plus, they want to take away your Second Amendment rights on top of it, too.
[01:17:43]  So, Alex may be facing yet more attacks and yet more, you know, lawfare or cyber warfare.
[01:17:51]  I mean, the kind of things they did to him were off the charts and insane.
[01:17:55]  For example, they, like the Deep State, they would email him an email with a porn attachment.
[01:18:04]  Even though Alex doesn't have personal email, but they would email it to the company's server using like a public company email address.
[01:18:11]  And they would have like porn attachments.
[01:18:13]  Or maybe child porn attached.
[01:18:16]  And then they would go to the court and they would say, well, there's porn, there's illegal content on InfoWars email servers.
[01:18:24]  And then it would turn out it's just an email that the deep state sent.
[01:18:29]  I mean, total obvious entrapment.
[01:18:33]  And they would do that again and again and again with so many things.
[01:18:37]  That's the way they play.
[01:18:39]  That's how desperate they are to silence Alex.
[01:18:42]  But look, at the end of the day, what Alex has proven is that he can't be silenced.
[01:18:47]  He would rather die than be silenced.
[01:18:51]  And I think that many of us have proven, because we've all been through the ringer on this.
[01:18:58]  We've all been lied to.
[01:19:04]  There have been attempts to exploit all of us in various nefarious ways.
[01:19:10]  And those of us who have made it through this with our integrity intact and our values intact, we are.
[01:19:19]  We are really untouchable by the nefarious establishment forces because it doesn't matter what they do, we won't give in.
[01:19:29]  We won't become parrots of their propaganda.
[01:19:32]  We will always promote independent thinking.
[01:19:36]  So, for those of you feds listening, you're just going to have to shop somewhere else.
[01:19:42]  You're not going to succeed in tearing down Alex because Alex has already proven that he's got, More balls and more courage than all of you put together.
[01:19:53]  I mean, yeah, you can demonetize people.
[01:19:55]  You can, you know, you can destroy a person's reputation.
[01:19:58]  You can destroy a business.
[01:19:59]  You can destroy advertisers.
[01:20:02]  You can destroy search engine rankings.
[01:20:03]  You can get people banned off of every platform like I have been to this day.
[01:20:09]  But you can't silence the truth because the truth is more powerful than all of your tactics combined.
[01:20:17]  And at the same time, you know, InfoWars is bulletproof.
[01:20:23]  You can't tear down the InfoWars spirit with a court judgment or even a wrecking ball and a bulldozer.
[01:20:32]  Even if you tear down the building, you don't tear down InfoWars because it lives in the spirit of the people.
[01:20:39]  And even if Alex himself were to retire, even that wouldn't end InfoWars because he's built a movement that's larger than himself, much larger, that will outlast him.
[01:20:53]  A movement that's carried on by so many other people, other Info Warriors, and even his son, Rex, who's doing a lot of interviews now and just nailing it, and the younger host, Harrison, and others, who are just doing an amazing job.
[01:21:10]  So the InfoWars spirit is truly eternal because it's that fundamental spirit of human freedom and human dignity.
[01:21:19]  And every nefarious weapon that they forge against Alex will fail.
[01:21:26]  And they tried it.

=== The InfoWars Movement Legacy (03:10) ===

[01:21:27]  They tried it with me.
[01:21:28]  They tried it with him.
[01:21:29]  They tried it with other people.
[01:21:31]  And although they did damage and they cost Alex a lot of money and time and effort, they have still failed.
[01:21:38]  They failed to silence him.
[01:21:40]  And so that's why I support Alex's right to speak and his organization.
[01:21:47]  And I will continue to be happy to fill in from time to time as a guest host whenever that's needed.
[01:21:56]  And I've never been paid for that, it's just purely volunteer.
[01:21:59]  And for my own work, look, you know.
[01:22:04]  I'm the Health Ranger.
[01:22:05]  My focus traditionally has been nutrition and foods.
[01:22:08]  And right now I'm getting kind of fed up with politics, actually.
[01:22:17]  It's just so frustrating and it just seems pointless at times, doesn't it?
[01:22:22]  You know, to cover politics every day.
[01:22:26]  So I'm actually going to be covering more discoveries in the realm of food and nutrition and science.
[01:22:34]  I just did a recording about the history of Westphalian.
[01:22:38]  Pumpernickel rye bread, which comes out of northern Germany.
[01:22:42]  I know it sounds funny, but it's actually one of the most important superfood innovations in the history of human civilization.
[01:22:52]  And I spent 40 minutes going through the history of that bread and its chemistry and its nutrition and why it actually allowed the pre Germanic people to thrive and even survive, including surviving.
[01:23:08]  You know, sieges of the Middle Ages and so on.
[01:23:11]  There's a fascinating history there.
[01:23:13]  And I have 437 discoveries that my AI engine has located so far in my indexed book library.
[01:23:24]  And so I have covered one out of 437.
[01:23:28]  And if I cover one a day, which probably isn't possible, but if I covered one every weekday, you know, even then I could only do 250 in a year or something like that, right?
[01:23:41]  But I would like to do that more.
[01:23:43]  I'm hoping to do that more.
[01:23:44]  I want to bring you more information about discoveries that are practical, things that affect you, that help you enhance your life and enhance your self reliance and personal redundancy, your survival capabilities, because what we're facing is going to be very tough to survive, you know, with the global famine and things like that.
[01:24:06]  So that's some of my focus, anyway.
[01:24:10]  Plus, I'm doing a lot of AI vibe coding and AI development and tech and things like that.
[01:24:15]  Check out my channel at brightvideos.com and also my articles at naturalnews.com.
[01:24:22]  And also, you know, check out Alex's new network.
[01:24:25]  I think it's Alex Jones Live.
[01:24:28]  If not, you can probably find it pretty easily.
[01:24:31]  And, you know, just get your information from multiple sources.
[01:24:36]  Check out multiple people.

=== Petrodollar Shifts and Gold (08:23) ===

[01:24:38]  Do your own thinking.
[01:24:39]  Do your own research.
[01:24:40]  Make up your own mind about what's happening.
[01:24:43]  And bottom line, if you want to know who's authentic?
[01:24:48]  It's those who are censored by the establishment.
[01:24:52]  That's your number one gauge right there.
[01:24:56]  So thanks for listening.
[01:24:57]  I'm Mike Adams.
[01:24:58]  Take care.
[01:25:00]  We have forces built for maneuver.
[01:25:03]  Everything is built for the offense.
[01:25:05]  And what we're seeing now, whether we like it or not, is that the strategic advantage lies with the defense.
[01:25:11]  And Iran has demonstrated that you don't need much in the way of a Navy or an Air Force to defeat.
[01:25:17]  An attacking enemy.
[01:25:18]  We've got to stop wasting money on these giant capital ships.
[01:25:22]  They're just going to decorate the bottom of the ocean in the future.
[01:25:26]  Welcome to today's interview.
[01:25:27]  We have Colonel Douglas McGregor joining us for part two of our conversation.
[01:25:32]  In part one, if you missed it, we were covering the current situation in the Middle East and the economic impact on the world of the lack of fertilizer supplies and oil supplies, and some of the, well, the real ramifications, the humanitarian ramifications of this.
[01:25:48]  And now, here in part two of our interview, I want to ask the Colonel, and thank you again, Colonel, for staying with me here.
[01:25:55]  It's always a pleasure to speak with you.
[01:25:56]  But you and I both share concerns about the future of the American.
[01:26:01]  Or the existence of the Constitutional Republic.
[01:26:04]  You and I both love the founding principles.
[01:26:06]  We are loyal to those founding principles of our nation.
[01:26:10]  And yet we both share concerns that things may not last.
[01:26:14]  Can you walk us through where you think we're at risk of not making it, or maybe our currency not making it, and what you think needs to be done to put us back on course?
[01:26:25]  Well, remember, President Nixon took us off the gold standard.
[01:26:30]  He said that was temporary.
[01:26:32]  But like so many things that happen in Washington that start out as temporary, they become permanent.
[01:26:37]  His goal was to create the petrodollar, which he did, which has been one of the engines of our prosperity, frankly, as a nation, because people are compelled to do business in dollars when it comes to the oil and other commodities.
[01:26:51]  That's been very helpful to us.
[01:26:53]  The world is now moving away from that.
[01:26:55]  They're moving away from using our dollars.
[01:26:57]  They are gradually de dollarizing.
[01:27:00]  And unfortunately, China now looks like a better safe haven for.
[01:27:05]  for currency and wealth in the United States.
[01:27:08]  That's something I never thought would occur in my lifetime, but that seems to be underway.
[01:27:12]  But the bigger problem for us at home with going off the gold standard was very simply that you no longer had to raise taxes in order to pay for military operations.
[01:27:22]  In other words, if you went to war somewhere, you had to raise taxes to pay for what you'd done.
[01:27:27]  Once you took us off the gold standard, you could print as much currency as you liked.
[01:27:32]  So that was number one.
[01:27:33]  Number two, we abandoned the whole idea of national military service or universal military service.
[01:27:39]  So, you end up with a fraction of the population, a little less than 1% of the American population, has any relative in the military or knows of anybody in the military.
[01:27:50]  That was not the case 40 or 50 years ago.
[01:27:52]  When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, virtually all of us had fathers that had served in the Second World War, served in the Korean War.
[01:28:01]  In some cases, we had grandfathers that served in the First World War.
[01:28:06]  Vietnam changed all of that because it was a bogus war, it was begun on a lie.
[01:28:11]  It was badly handled.
[01:28:12]  It made no sense.
[01:28:14]  And that took us down a new road in the history of this country.
[01:28:17]  And I think we are now at the end of this process.
[01:28:21]  We have a force structure which was designed to refight World War II.
[01:28:25]  It's the wrong answer for today and for the future.
[01:28:28]  I think that's going to have to change, hopefully sooner rather than later.
[01:28:31]  And that's our problem right now in the Gulf.
[01:28:33]  You go within 500, 600, 700 miles of the Iranian border, and you're going to be targeted from overhead surveillance.
[01:28:42]  Either terrestrial or space based, thanks to Chinese and Russian assistance to the Iranians.
[01:28:47]  And then you're going to be struck by precision guided missiles or unmanned systems.
[01:28:52]  So you can't even get close enough to deliver any force, especially ground forces.
[01:28:57]  It's impossible.
[01:28:58]  If you try to do it, you're going to take heavy casualties, which is why I don't think we've seen that done thus far.
[01:29:04]  And then finally, you know, the nation that we live in today is, I think, a very confused place.
[01:29:10]  I don't think Americans are really conscious of what's happening beyond their borders.
[01:29:15]  Many cases, they're only beginning to figure out what's happened here.
[01:29:19]  If you go to Patterson, New Jersey, for instance, there's a sign outside of Patterson, New Jersey announcing that this is America's first Islamic city.
[01:29:29]  Stop and think about that.
[01:29:31]  You have another place called Dearborn, which is effectively the same.
[01:29:35]  What we've had happen with many, many groups coming into the United States, legally and illegally, who are fundamentally alien to the American population, its values, its experience, its history, its culture, its language, is that they are building islands.
[01:29:51]  Of autonomy and independence within our society.
[01:29:55]  This is not going to end well because whatever a society cannot assimilate, it usually destroys.
[01:30:02]  So I think we're on a very dangerous path here at home in the midst of all of this.
[01:30:06]  And that's obvious inside the armed forces right now.
[01:30:09]  And many of the people in the armed forces who are very good human beings and they work hard, they serve their country, they do everything that's asked for them are beginning to say, What are we doing?
[01:30:18]  What is this really for?
[01:30:20]  And the answer is nobody's really sure.
[01:30:23]  Because when this began, President Trump did not go to Congress.
[01:30:27]  He did not make the case.
[01:30:28]  Well, he didn't have to, because the Israel lobby and its agents in the United States, the billionaires, basically control Congress as well as the White House.
[01:30:38]  So he really didn't have to ask permission.
[01:30:40]  He didn't have to go over there and ask for support, but he should have.
[01:30:44]  He should have made a case.
[01:30:45]  And as a result, there's never been any clarity with regard to what we can actually accomplish.
[01:30:51]  How are we going to do it?
[01:30:52]  And what do we want it to look like when it's over?
[01:30:55]  I can guarantee you that nobody, neither Donald Trump nor anybody else in the White House, ever carefully thought through and expected that the Persian Gulf, which was an international waterway, would suddenly become the property of Iran.
[01:31:10]  It is.
[01:31:11]  Yeah.
[01:31:12]  It is.
[01:31:13]  You know, and the British discovered during World War I, when they tried to seize the Dardanelles, they couldn't take it away from the Turks.
[01:31:20]  Eventually, there is this thing called the Montrose Convention, and Turkey was placed in custody.
[01:31:26]  Of the Dardanelles or the Bosporus.
[01:31:28]  And the Turks have handled it very well.
[01:31:29]  No one's complained.
[01:31:31]  They've done a great job of managing that waterway.
[01:31:34]  I think now, whether we like it or not, whenever this ends, Iran is going to end up in the same position as Turkey is, only it's going to get in the Persian Gulf.
[01:31:43]  Yeah.
[01:31:44]  What did we do this for?
[01:31:45]  We did this because of Israel, because Israel has insisted it cannot live, it cannot survive, it cannot flourish in the Middle East until Iran is destroyed.
[01:31:54]  You know, you're mentioning how some of the backlash of this, for example, Iran is probably going to end up in control over the Strait of Hormuz, which means Iran will be able to determine which ships are allowed to sail and also what tolls might be paid, but importantly, in what currency those tolls might be paid, right?
[01:32:16]  So that's probably not going to be the dollar.
[01:32:18]  We already know that.
[01:32:19]  But also, the UAE now leaving OPEC, very likely.
[01:32:22]  I thought I saw an announcement, not sure it's not confirmed yet, but I think they would be selling additional.
[01:32:29]  Over 3 million barrels of oil per day.
[01:32:32]  They'd probably go to 4 or 5 million barrels, but they'd be willing to accept yuan for those barrels of oil, not the petrodollar.
[01:32:39]  Now, what I want to ask you, sir, and by the way, let me mention the website of the organization that you're part of here.
[01:32:45]  The National Conversation is home for the politically homeless, right?
[01:32:50]  So I want to encourage people to visit your site.
[01:32:52]  It's thenationalconversation.org, and you can click join right there.
[01:32:56]  You can join the email list or you can click donate if you want to support this organization.

=== Drone Carriers and Naval Power (06:44) ===

[01:33:01]  Which has conversations and thoughts about how we have a true independent party.
[01:33:06]  I'll give you a chance to talk about that a little bit more.
[01:33:08]  So, pardon me for my extended question, pardon me.
[01:33:11]  But the protection of the petrodollar status has throughout history been provided by the projection of naval power.
[01:33:22]  And that is now the whole world is questioning U.S. naval power projection, which is, I think, leading to countries saying, why are we using the petrodollar?
[01:33:32]  Does that make sense?
[01:33:34]  Well, it's not just the Navy.
[01:33:36]  I think it's a fundamental paradigm shift in warfare.
[01:33:41]  I've written about this.
[01:33:42]  I wrote a book called Transformation Under Fire in 2003, and I talked then about what I called the ISR or Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance slash or dash strike complex.
[01:33:57]  In other words, that we were reaching a point where we could identify targets from space or even from the seabed, as well as just overhead, anywhere on the world, and we could target that.
[01:34:12]  Location or the ship or the train or the bus or the tank, whatever it is, and we can target it with precision and deliver a warhead in a very short period of time.
[01:34:24]  Now, since 2003, we now have hypersonic missiles, and the hypersonic missile that flies in excess of Mach 4, Mach 5, thousands of miles per hour is unstoppable.
[01:34:37]  We can't develop a missile to shoot it down.
[01:34:40]  That is a fundamental change in warfare.
[01:34:43]  What that means is that surface sleets.
[01:34:46]  That are restricted in terms of their ability to move just by the water.
[01:34:50]  I mean, you have to deal with how you plow through the water inside a ship.
[01:34:54]  You can only do so much with existing engineering and existing technology.
[01:35:00]  These vessels now, when they fall within range of those batteries ashore of various missiles, they're not going to survive.
[01:35:09]  And so when you start talking about something like forward presence, which we have bet very heavily on, certainly since the end of the Second World War over the last 80 years.
[01:35:19]  If you put someone forward in an area that can be reached by an opponent's missile batteries, that means that you're going to lose that ground presence or air presence or naval presence in the opening minutes of any conflict.
[01:35:33]  What it means is that no, we cannot go back into the Persian Gulf and promise everybody who lives there that we're going to be able to protect them.
[01:35:40]  We can't.
[01:35:41]  Technology has changed.
[01:35:43]  We now need to look at the structure of our armed forces and where we're putting our money and come to terms with the fact that this is kind of a Supernational World War I style battlefield.
[01:35:55]  What do I mean by that?
[01:35:56]  It means that people are immobilized.
[01:35:59]  They can't move very far.
[01:36:00]  If they try to move, they'll be destroyed.
[01:36:03]  And so you end up with a World War I style stalemate.
[01:36:10]  This is not sinking in.
[01:36:11]  We have forces built for maneuver, everything is built for the offense.
[01:36:15]  And what we're seeing now, whether we like it or not, is that the strategic advantage lies with the defense.
[01:36:22]  On a level that we have not seen, certainly since 1916, 1917, 1918.
[01:36:28]  Yeah, this is why every time Trump says, Well, we destroyed their Navy, we destroyed their Air Force, I'm thinking that none of that even matters.
[01:36:35]  It doesn't.
[01:36:35]  That's right.
[01:36:36]  And Iran has demonstrated that you don't need much in the way of a Navy or an Air Force to defeat an attacking enemy.
[01:36:43]  Right.
[01:36:43]  We'll take notice because it's important.
[01:36:46]  And we've got to stop wasting money on these giant capital ships.
[01:36:50]  They're just going to decorate the bottom of the ocean in the future.
[01:36:54]  Yeah, decorate the bottom of the ocean.
[01:36:55]  Did you see that China just unveiled a drone carrier?
[01:37:00]  Yeah, sure.
[01:37:00]  And I mean, we could build things.
[01:37:03]  Years ago, a man named Andy Krepanovich talked about an arsenal ship, and it looked sort of like a monitor.
[01:37:09]  If you remember the monitor from the Civil War, it sat very low in the water.
[01:37:13]  It was almost a semi submersible for all intents and purposes, and it was designed to launch missiles.
[01:37:19]  That was it.
[01:37:20]  That's what it did.
[01:37:21]  It showed up at some location at some time.
[01:37:24]  It was very difficult to track and find, and it launched.
[01:37:28]  I think we're going to end up doing that sort of thing, and I think you'll see something very much like drone carriers.
[01:37:34]  The point is that this old aircraft carrier battle group structure that is the centerpiece of naval power is ultimately going to change.
[01:37:42]  It's going to go away.
[01:37:43]  You're going to end up with other things.
[01:37:45]  But what I'm trying to get across, and this is something Americans have to understand, is that if you're not careful and you keep doing the things that we have done over the last 80 years with air and sea power, we're going to end up in one after another example of Pickett's Charge.
[01:38:05]  In other words, we're rushing headlong into disaster.
[01:38:08]  And the frontal attack won't work.
[01:38:10]  So, if you're going to have to fight someone in the future, you're going to have to think very carefully about the advantages that the strategic defense confers on that opponent.
[01:38:21]  And it may simply be impossible in the future for us to rapidly reinforce or go anywhere and make any difference quickly.
[01:38:29]  So, that means that our military dependencies in places like Europe or the Persian Gulf or in Asia are going to have to defend themselves.
[01:38:37]  And the good news is.
[01:38:40]  Iran has demonstrated it can be done and it could be done very effectively at very low cost.
[01:38:46]  And look at the damage to the U.S. military bases in all the Persian Gulf nations, right?
[01:38:51]  And some of which had not been admitted, you know, some of it's come out, but it looks to me, clearly, there have been billions of dollars of damage.
[01:38:59]  Those bases are largely uninhabited now, and many of them are probably uninhabitable forever at this point.
[01:39:08]  Yeah, I mean, if you're.
[01:39:10]  In the Persian Gulf today, what are your chances of stopping hundreds of unmanned systems or missiles from reaching you in the United Arab Emirates or Qatar or Kuwait or Bahrain or Saudi Arabia?
[01:39:23]  The answer is slim to none.
[01:39:25]  Right.
[01:39:27]  This is the other problem.
[01:39:28]  How many missiles does it take to shoot down an incoming missile?
[01:39:32]  And if you go to Raytheon or Northrop Grumman, any of these places, and you ask that question, they'll say, well, normally you want to fire two, maybe three missiles at an incoming missile.
[01:39:42]  Well, you're going to go through your inventory of anti missile missiles very rapidly.

=== Immigration and Financial Buckles (08:07) ===

[01:39:46]  Yes.
[01:39:47]  And that's been the problem.
[01:39:48]  And if you're sitting at sea, you're going to have to reload.
[01:39:53]  How do you reload at sea?
[01:39:54]  Well, reloading at sea right now is not possible in many cases.
[01:39:58]  You've got to go to a port.
[01:40:00]  That takes time away from your commitment to the force, and you may lose the port.
[01:40:06]  If they know where the ports are, why not destroy the ports?
[01:40:10]  It's not going to be very difficult.
[01:40:12]  Again, we live in a new world.
[01:40:15]  Now, we have to adapt to it.
[01:40:17]  And I think one of the things we absolutely must do is look at alternatives to the use of force.
[01:40:23]  This business of bullying everyone in sight on the grounds, well, I have more explosive in my disposal than you do.
[01:40:29]  Well, that's not working out very well in Iran.
[01:40:33]  I don't think it's going to work out very well in the future almost anywhere.
[01:40:36]  We've got to get out of that business.
[01:40:38]  I don't think that's what we want to do for the future.
[01:40:40]  Yeah.
[01:40:41]  Well said.
[01:40:42]  Now, as the last question for you here today, I want to ask you about your organization, the National Conversation.
[01:40:49]  And why do you think this is the right time, or why is this critical for us to have this conversation?
[01:40:56]  And let me just give a little prelude.
[01:40:58]  Increasingly, former MAGA are very disappointed with Trump, and they feel like there's really just a uniparty system that it doesn't matter who you elect.
[01:41:08]  You always get John McCain, right?
[01:41:10]  So, what's your take on your organization here, the national conversation?
[01:41:16]  I think people that are interested in an alternative to two choices are going to be attracted ultimately to the national conversation.
[01:41:24]  What we're trying to do is set up meetings across the country.
[01:41:30]  Assemble people from in various regions, in various towns and cities in the country, let people express their views, bring in speakers that will talk to them.
[01:41:39]  But ultimately, we're really interested in hearing what Americans think.
[01:41:43]  One of my frustrations has been this sort of insoluble division, whatever you want to call it, or unbridgeable division between Democrats and Republicans.
[01:41:55]  I grew up with Democrats.
[01:41:56]  That's all I knew from the time I was a child until I was in my late teens.
[01:42:01]  Democrats were everywhere.
[01:42:02]  It was Philadelphia.
[01:42:03]  It was a one party city.
[01:42:05]  But the Democrats I grew up with were no less patriotic and no less committed to the country, no less hardworking, no less religious in many cases than the Republicans.
[01:42:17]  And I think there are a lot of Democrats out there who are equally frustrated.
[01:42:21]  And so one of the things we wanted to do is say, what do we build as an alternative?
[01:42:28]  What does this third movement, if we can get it off the ground, really look like?
[01:42:32]  It's been difficult.
[01:42:33]  And everybody that you talk to about this is, oh, forget it.
[01:42:36]  That'll never work.
[01:42:38]  Well, that's what they told the Republicans.
[01:42:40]  And it ultimately took abolition, the abolition of slavery, to make the Republican Party viable.
[01:42:46]  And that's how Lincoln was elected.
[01:42:48]  But until that happened, the Republicans were just an annoyance on the side of the road that nobody paid attention to.
[01:42:54]  So I think now we're going to have some real issues.
[01:42:57]  I think our economy is going to sink, it's going to tank.
[01:43:01]  I think our financial system is going to buckle.
[01:43:03]  Why?
[01:43:04]  Because you can't outspend everyone in the world and produce nothing in response to the spending.
[01:43:11]  In other words, we've got to find a way to be productive.
[01:43:13]  We've got to build new ways forward.
[01:43:16]  We have to reinvigorate our agriculture.
[01:43:18]  We have to look at high end manufacturing.
[01:43:21]  We don't want to go back to making aspirin.
[01:43:23]  Everybody agrees with that.
[01:43:24]  But you do want to build things that the rest of the world needs.
[01:43:28]  I think we can do those things, but nobody's given it much thought lately.
[01:43:32]  And we continue, thanks to a Congress that's very complacent, to just send money where we always have.
[01:43:38]  You know, send it down the same rat hole, put it in the same program.
[01:43:41]  Well, I think we're going to reach a point where we don't have the money to spend that way.
[01:43:45]  And I think in defense, for instance, it's going to have to be cut way back.
[01:43:49]  I don't think you're ever going to see this $1.5 trillion, which on closer inspection looks like more than $2 trillion.
[01:43:56]  We just can't afford it.
[01:43:57]  It won't work.
[01:43:58]  So when you can't spend recklessly, what do you do?
[01:44:02]  You've got to think carefully and move in new directions.
[01:44:05]  I think the whole country is going to go down that road in the future.
[01:44:09]  But we're going to need new leadership.
[01:44:10]  Because if you think anybody in Washington today is capable of doing this, with one or two exceptions, I'd tell you you're absolutely crazy.
[01:44:18]  They are addicted to spending.
[01:44:20]  If you go to the Hill and you say, What do you do? they'll tell you, Well, we spend.
[01:44:24]  That's our job.
[01:44:25]  Really?
[01:44:27]  Is it your job not to spend?
[01:44:28]  Oh, no, no.
[01:44:28]  If we don't spend, how can we survive?
[01:44:31]  Remember, they're dependent upon donations from big spending billionaires and others to stay in office.
[01:44:37]  And they're worried about their districts and states, and they don't care where the money goes as long as some of it goes down into the district or the state.
[01:44:45]  I think those days are coming to an end.
[01:44:48]  Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
[01:44:49]  And especially as the suffering kicks in.
[01:44:51]  You know, the suffering that's already on the way because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which still has not been resolved, the suffering of the American people with food inflation and fuel prices increasing, higher prices of transportation, supply chain disruptions from lack of helium, which affects microchip manufacturing, all those things.
[01:45:11]  I think the suffering is going to.
[01:45:13]  Before we leave it, there's an area that's going to become, I think, a serious point of contention inside the United States, a real catalyst for conflict, and that's immigration.
[01:45:24]  Uncontrolled legal immigration, and I say uncontrolled because it really is.
[01:45:29]  And then, secondly, illegal immigration.
[01:45:32]  We have an estimated 50 million people inside the United States today who were not born here.
[01:45:38]  Now, that's not the end of the world, but that's a huge, huge portion of the population, greater percentage wise than anything in our history.
[01:45:48]  And the thing that we have to keep in mind is that most of these people, not all of them, but most of them, especially those who are illegal, didn't come here to become Americans.
[01:45:56]  That's not what they're interested in.
[01:45:57]  They've come here because they want a better standard of living.
[01:46:00]  Well, I certainly understand that because they want to get something.
[01:46:04]  And they've learned that if they come here, they can ultimately get things for nothing, things that our own citizens don't have access to.
[01:46:13]  Now, when this economy tanks and we go from this condition of abundance to a condition of scarcity, which is really what we're doing right now, that's the big transition.
[01:46:24]  When things get scarce, Americans are going to say, wait a minute, who is this person?
[01:46:28]  Where did this person come from?
[01:46:30]  Why is he or she getting all these things?
[01:46:32]  They're not citizens.
[01:46:33]  They're not even Americans.
[01:46:35]  It's going to get ugly.
[01:46:37]  Now, we don't normally bring this up, but after 1929 under Herbert Hoover, until he left office and was replaced by FDR, he deported 9 million Mexicans.
[01:46:49]  Not because he disliked Mexicans, because he said, I've got to get these people out of there because they're holding jobs that Americans are going to need.
[01:46:56]  Franklin Roosevelt deported another 3.5 million.
[01:47:00]  And then ultimately, Truman about 2.1 million.
[01:47:04]  Eisenhower, before he left office, 1.2, 1.3 million.
[01:47:07]  It was called Operation Wet Pack.
[01:47:09]  Now, why did we do this?
[01:47:10]  Because we didn't like Mexicans?
[01:47:12]  No, because we were opening up employment for others.
[01:47:16]  And if we look at the employment statistics, most of the people that are getting jobs are not Americans.
[01:47:23]  That doesn't work.
[01:47:25]  That cannot work.
[01:47:26]  Somebody needs to stand up and say until every American who can work has a job, nobody gets in.
[01:47:33]  By the way, that's the law in Austria.
[01:47:36]  That's increasingly the law that's showing up on the books in Scandinavia.
[01:47:39]  Wait a minute.
[01:47:40]  Tell everybody who's really a Dane and really an Austrian, or in my judgment, really an American, has a job if they can do it and they're able.
[01:47:50]  Well, then, damn it, nobody else gets in.

=== Jobs Before Borders (01:03) ===

[01:47:53]  All right.
[01:47:54]  The website, folks, for you to check out is thenationalconversation.org.
[01:48:00]  And that is going to be, I think, a force to reckon with here in terms of the debates and the philosophical discussion of where we're going.
[01:48:07]  Colonel, thank you so much for your time today.
[01:48:09]  It's always an honor to speak with you.
[01:48:11]  Hey, thank you so much for inviting me.
[01:48:12]  Absolutely.
[01:48:14]  All right, God bless you.
[01:48:15]  Be well.
[01:48:17]  All right, that was Colonel Douglas McGregor there, folks.
[01:48:19]  Hope you enjoyed this.
[01:48:20]  And of course, if you missed part one of this interview where we talk about the actual details of the war in the Middle East, you can also find that at brightvideos.com.
[01:48:29]  I'm Mike Adams, and thank you for watching today.
[01:48:32]  God bless you all.
[01:48:32]  God bless America.
[01:48:34]  We want our country back.
[01:48:35]  All of us do.
[01:48:36]  You watching as well.
[01:48:38]  I think Colonel Douglas McGregor is on the right track here.
[01:48:41]  So thanks for watching.
[01:48:42]  Take care.
[01:48:44]  Biostructured Silver Gel deserves a spot in your emergency bug out bag.
[01:48:48]  It's made with three types of silver, seven powerful essential oils, and lab tested for glyphosate, heavy metals, and microbiology.
[01:48:55]  Get yours at healthrangerstore.com.