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I'm Heather Mullins, guest hosting the Mike Lindell show today.
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We'll be right back.
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And welcome back to the Mike Lindell Show.
I'm Heather Mullins, guest hosting today for Mike Lindell.
Joining me now is another guest.
As you guys know, I am a Pentagon correspondent for Lindell TV.
And joining me now is another one of my fellow Pentagon correspondents from New Media, John Conrad.
Thank you for joining us.
And John Conrad, actually, let me give a little background for John.
John is the CEO of G-Captain.
He's a U.S. Merchant Marine, a ship captain, Pentagon Press, author of Fire on the Horizon, and a shipbuilder.
So John, that's quite the impressive resume.
Well, I thought so, but apparently some of the old Pentagon Press Corps does not think so.
Yeah, and let's talk about that.
We have an article here from the Washington Post that came out after John and my trip to Newport News, Virginia with the secretary headlined, I voted so hard for this, how the new Pentagon Press Corps covered Venezuela.
John, your reaction.
Oh, I did a long post breaking down exactly what they did to disparage me.
It was a hip piece, and the author of that, the Washington Post author, wrote it.
You know, he emailed me ahead of time and said, specifically, this is not a hit piece.
And after I called him and explained exactly what was wrong, he, you know, they gaslight, gaslight everyone.
They gaslighted me and said, this is not a hit piece.
He continues to hold it's not a hit piece, but I went down exactly what he did.
And it started with source laundering.
So my good friend Ryan Halliday, a best-selling author, he wrote a book, Trust Me I'm Lying, about how the media does these fake things.
So anonymous sources, the Washington Post can't use an anonymous source from a classified plane.
You and I were both on a classified plane.
So CNN, Haley Brixie, leaked it to a disreputable blogger.
And once it's out there, the Washington Post can grab that, look at the article, who else was on the plane, and contact all of us and rebuild that story up.
So that's just one of the things.
The other thing he did that really aggravated me is I wrote a 13,000-word article after our last trip.
For people who don't know, a book is typically 100,000 words.
So this is more than one-tenth the size of the book, this article I wrote.
Took me all week to write, and it takes over an hour to read.
And he took five words out of that 13,000 words.
Those five words were: you know, Pete Hegset has a 10,000 candlelight smile.
And in that article, I had referenced that, it was a reference to reminding me of my dad.
And while you were there, I had done a video of my dad's grave site at Arlington National Cemetery.
And I was tearing up.
And he took that particular emotional, most emotional moment of my life out of a 13,000-word article and made it a headline feature of that article.
And then, you know, he has these little signal flags.
So in mine, he goes, oh, and John topped it off with an American flag emoji, as if that's a bad thing.
And I saw with you, he, you know, he nailed you in that article for, you know, the absolutely horrific thing of mentioning Jesus in an article.
We have a clip of my mention in that article.
It said Mullins commended Hegseth for his speech in Newport News, in which he championed American shipbuilding with a remark about how Jesus was a carpenter, not a politician.
And I said, Can we just take a minute to appreciate the fact that we have a secretary of war that thinks of Jesus in the middle of his speech to American shipbuilders?
Christ is king, Mullins wrote.
And then he actually went on to say, after posting a live feed of Trump's White House news conference Saturday, Mullins reposted a comment saying the U.S. should do to Minneapolis what we just did to Venezuela and added, I can name at least five other American cities occupied by Majuro-like criminals.
So I stand by what I said.
I mean, even just today, right, John Solomon, an investigative reporter with Justin News, put out something saying in Minneapolis, $1 million per day was being smuggled out by Somalians and TSA New under the previous administration.
So like, there's so much corruption, John.
And these media outlets going after you and myself for being on this trip is just wild.
Because I also want to bring up your original tweet John had posted before these hit pieces had came out.
Where I think we have that, if we could put that on the screen, when they were going after you, you said, stand by at least for at least two fake news hit pieces about me.
How dare Pete Hegseth invite a guy licensed to captain the largest ships who's built billion-dollar monsters, won world records, wrote a critically acclaimed book with shipbuilding in it, and built the most read maritime news site on earth to a check notes shipyard tour.
So why don't you talk a little bit more about your background?
Because like you hit the nail on the head.
You are probably the most qualified person of the Pentagon Press Corps and the old Pentagon Press Corps to actually go on a tour like that because that's your background.
Yes, and that's specifically why they invited me on this one.
I would have preferred to have a nice press junket to Singapore.
As the CNN reporter told us in the thing, you know, the previous Lloyd Austin invited them on a tour of royal palaces around Singapore where she wasn't allowed to wear regular shoes and she was dining in five-star luxury.
We got a tour of a mini-mall where he was swearing in young recruits that almost made me tear up the passion of these young folks and a dirty, ugly shipyard where Americans are building the future, you know, the future protection of our world.
Like, you know, how dare they invite a ship captain?
You know, there are very, we've decimated our U.S. Merchant Marine.
There are only 82 ships in international waters compared to the over 5,000 China has.
And Hegseth brought me in and said, hey, we want to focus on the American marker, on the Merchant Marine, on these forgotten stories.
And then, you know, we keep getting called fake news.
And, you know, I had to say to several of them, you know, this book is a best-selling book.
I have built ships in shipyards.
I have captained ships in stormy weather, hurricane force seas.
And I built like Mike Mendel, I'm not as successful.
We're a smaller niche, but I built G-Captain from a tiny, you know, blog up to the largest maritime news network in the world.
And frankly, you know, I should be running that company.
I should be handling our journalists.
I should be running the business side, but I believe in America.
I believe in this shipbuilding.
I took the time, drove down on my own, dime.
You know, they're not paying us for this, everyone realized.
CNN's Haley Brigsy comes in in a luxury Tahoe with a chauffeur driver.
And, you know, you and I were sharing a car ride back.
And then they attack us.
And, you know, people are saying, I'm tired of you, you know, because I'm just hitting them back, hitting them back on my Twitter.
And they say, can you get back to ships?
I said, I would love to get back on ships.
But I grew up in the Bronx, poorest family.
We moved to the richest suburb at Abandoned House.
And I got beat up a lot as a kid.
And you got to stand up to these bullies and call them out.
And this is just so, so outrageous.
I have a very liberal friend who is mad about me going and, you know, is calling me all sorts of names.
And I sent him the article and he knows me.
And he was laughing out loud when he wrote this.
That's how ridiculous this article is.
And it's not just me.
They say Pete is the unqualified, you know, he was just a TV journalist.
I wrote one best-selling book.
He's written five best-selling books.
I mean, this is a guy who's actually taken the time to sit down and write it.
And for journalists to call him unqualified, CNN, Haley Brigsy, Drew at WAPO, and this Oliver Darcy guy who hit me.
Let me see your books.
I would love to read your hard-hitting journalistic books that won prizes.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And so can you explain?
I want to go back a little bit.
Talking about like the reduction in number of merchant marine ships.
Can you explain, like, like, I don't even know this, the difference between like the merchant marine ships versus military ships?
How does that all tie together?
It gets very confusing.
I will try to simplify it.
So, um, you know, with it, when the globalists opened up our borders and did everything overseas, you know, they had to send the factories, you know, they packaged up factories and sent them overseas.
And if, you know, who would know that?
Nobody knows that.
No one could see it.
You know, you can divide it out on dozens of different trucks and the truckers won't notice, but the ship captains notice because it's all got to go on their ships.
So it's very important for the globalists to destroy the use, the U.S. merchant marine and build up these flags of convenience, Panama, Liberia, China, with foreign ship owners.
So you didn't have ship captains like me who were, you know, noticing that the entire United States and ringing the bell on the entire United States is getting moved to China to support their factories and manufacturing.
And, you know, the neocon conservatives supported this because they wanted free trade and lower prices and deregulation.
And the Democrats supported this because they don't care about industrial and manufacturing.
They want to pour all money into social services and such.
So no one noticed.
We went from the largest merchant marine in the world, tens of thousands of ships after World War II, to 82 in international service.
And those 82 are the law requires that the military transport our material on U.S. flagships with U.S. captains because a lot of this material is secret.
If you put it on a Chinese ship, they can break into the containers and photograph and do the secrets.
Unfortunately, George W. Bush in the Gulf War, there weren't enough of us.
So he said, go ahead, put it on Chinese ships.
And we lost a lot of secrets.
But Hegseth realizes we have to rebuild that.
And it's not just the U.S. flag commercial ships, oil tankers, container ships, specialty ships like the car carriers.
The U.S. Navy, all of their support ships.
So people think aircraft carrier doesn't have to, you know, refuel because it's nuclear.
And we saw the aircraft carrier.
That's true.
But the planes need fuel and the crew needs to eat.
So those military sealift command cargo ships, the replenishment ships, the oilers that bring the aviation fuel in, and a lot of the ships that bring Air Force fuel overseas, Air Force bombs, Marine Corps supplies, that's all government ships that are captained by U.S. merchant mariners.
Okay, so U.S. merchant mariners are civilians, correct?
Not military?
Are they like contractors?
Well, now I'm going to get upset at you.
It's fine.
It's a common.
So the Navy wants the Navy budget to be really strong.
So they've gone out of their way in this campaign to call us civilians.
Every corner for the last 50 years, they have gone out of their way to denigrate us and to a lesser extent the Coast Guard.
We are civilians.
In college, I had to wear a uniform, the Maritime Academy of New York.
There's also the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.
There's Kings Point, West Point, Annapolis.
There's a Federal Maritime Academy on Long Island, completely free.
If your viewers are interested and you graduate with an engineering degree, you can make $240,000 your first year working for the Navy.
They're so desperate.
But we have the choice if we want to go in the Navy reserves and then they'll pay for our fur college.
During war, they will activate us, or if we want to be civilian and work alongside the Navy, and we continue to be civilian, but when we enter a war zone, we can be subject to the UCMJ.
Why does the Navy do this?
Because they don't have to pay us veteran benefits, they don't have to give us medals, they don't have to.
But these merchant mariners are right alongside the carriers getting shot at by the Houthis.
And we do, in fact, have our own admirals and officers in it.
It's a very small military corps, but there is a vice admiral of the merchant marine.
We have a commandant of the merchant marine.
But the reason people think we are civilians and they try to, at all corners, make us civilians, even though historically we're uniform, is simply because they don't want to pay us veteran benefits.
Wow.
You know, as soon as you started saying that, I actually grew up in Massachusetts, and I remember we had Mass Maritime Academy.
I don't know if you're familiar with that.
Maritime school.
They just put a ton of money in that school.
And yeah, there's Maine, Mass, New York, Texas, California, and then there's a small Great Lakes one.
But Mass Maritime has the newest facilities.
They've done an excellent job there.
Okay.
And so, like, so with the shipping that you guys do, is it strategic or strictly in partnership with the military, or do you also deal like commercial imports, exports, that sort of stuff as well?
Oh, we can do.
My license is a master unlimited.
So I can sail any ship on any ocean, anywhere around the world.
So you can go and get your like 100-ton or 1600-ton captain's license, but you're not really considered a full captain.
You know, the newspapers don't call you a captain.
And that was another thing I was upset about.
WAPO.
You know, it's in their style guide.
I'm a captain because of that unlimited license.
So I can be the captain of cruise ships.
I could be the captain of any of the large container ships or tankers, but they have to pay me more, right?
Because my college is more expensive, my cost of living is more expensive.
And they would prefer to hire Indonesians, Indians, Filipinos who are excellent, but their pay is a lot lower.
So I can captain any of those ships and I can transfer my license to many of the flags, but they, you know, they basically can't afford me.
So most of us try to compete for those very few jobs that are mandatory, you know, military cargo, those 82 ships in international service, plus the Jones Act ships.
If a ship goes between U.S. ports, like the oil from Alaska to California, those have to be mariners also.
But again, very, very few ships are left.
And the ships that we have left are extremely old.
So Biden, we had an underground oil tank, enormous.
We spent billions on it.
During World War II, we constructed it because the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor.
Biden closed that whole oil tank.
First, the Navy caused a massive leak by replacing steel pipes of PVC.
And then instead of fixing it, Biden just closed it.
So we have, you know, if we're, if there's a war in the Pacific and forget even more, like if we got to retreat our troops, we had 300,000 military independents in Okinawa, in South Korea, in the Philippines, in these bases.
If we have to bring them out, well, we can't put them on an airliner because they're going to get shot down.
They're defenseless.
We got to get them on ships.
We don't have the ships, but we don't even have the fuel for the military aircraft because Biden closed down that massive storage facility.
And because we only have eight tankers in the tanker security program, we don't have the oil tankers to refill the tanks that don't exist anyway.
So They just throw their hands up and they buy fuel from, you know, China or South Korea or Japan overseas and pretend that's going to survive a war.
And as we saw in Ukraine, the very first thing anyone does is hit those refinery and pipelines.
And then, meanwhile, Gavin Newsom, you know, our Navy is absolutely dependent on the refineries because our largest military base is San Diego Navy Base.
And Gavin Newsom's just, you know, forcing two refineries to shut down now for his environmental.
So even if we have the tankers, we're not going to have the refineries very soon to bring the fuel over for those aircraft refuelers to get our troops out.
And they're going to be stuck there.
Is that a recent decision of his to close those refineries, or is that something he's been doing prior to Trump taking office, President Trump taking office?
Well, he didn't make the decision himself.
He's not mandating.
What he is doing is increasing the red tape, increasing the taxes, increasing the regulatory burden.
And, you know, Chevron's one of the largest companies in the United States.
They've been headquartered in California from their beginning.
A couple years ago, they said, this is this is, we can't do this anymore.
And they moved the whole headquarters staff to Houston.
And the other refineries there saw that as a message and, you know, begged, begged Newsom.
He said, you lost your biggest oil company.
So please, please help us with this regulatory relief.
The California Coastal Commission just nails them.
I mean, look at the Pacific Palisades fire was over a year ago.
These are the wealthiest, liberalest, most connected citizens in the world, and they can't even get their house demolition clear.
They haven't started reconstruction of their houses because of this California Coastal Commission and Governor Newsom's rules.
Now, imagine how bad that's that's to rich people who live on.
Imagine how bad those rules are to refineries.
So it's making it impossible for operating, and their only choice is to close down.
That's insane.
So, what do you see Venezuela playing a role in this now?
Like, I know there's some oil down there, like a stockpile of oil that the U.S. now running Venezuela essentially.
Do you see that impacting the merchant marine sector?
Absolutely.
So, the commandant of the merchant marine wrote an article two years ago saying we need 100 oil tankers to replace, to just withdraw our troops from the Pacific if there is a fight.
And it was done in countless studies, but we have eight tankers in the tanker security program.
And it takes, as you saw, it takes years to build these ships.
And we don't have the capacity.
We don't have the workforce in yards.
So, how are we going to get these ships we need?
And Trump said, Hey, you have all of these ships that are operating the shadow tanker fleet.
They're not registered.
They're illegally operated.
We're just going to start seizing.
So, he's been sending Coast Guard crews on board these ships and taking them over and bringing them to the United States.
And, you know, not confirmation yet exactly where it's going to go in the merchant marine and who's going to operate it.
But Trump says, We're going to keep the oil and we're going to keep the ships.
And we're going to need those ships for the military.
But in the short run, before there's a war, or hopefully, there is no war.
I don't think there will be a war because Trump is very, you know, he's solving war.
He's preventing war.
But those tankers will be brought in.
It'll provide jobs for merchant mariners and ship captains like me.
And then he will use those to get the oil from Venezuela and not send it out to the rest of the world, but send it into the US to American refineries to reduce the price of gas for people at the pump.
Now, we produce the best oil in the world, light, sweet crude.
Venezuela crude is the nastiest, thickest, ugliest stuff you can imagine.
But we also have the smartest refineries, the best engineers who can take that nasty crude and turn it into gasoline.
So our refineries, because they're so good, the Americans are so good.
We could take that cheaper Venezuelan fuel, lower gasoline prices, and export the light, sweet, expensive stuff that we make overseas and reduce that trade deficit.
So just a master stroke by this Trump administration and saying, hey, we'll bring in these tankers.
And the other thing, sorry to ramble on, but the United Nations created these massive environmental laws that made oil tankers illegal.
Mike Waltz in the UN and Rubio and Sean Duffy and Chris Wright fought that tooth and nail and they were able to overturn it.
That UN carbon tax was going to make tankers illegal and make it really difficult for U.S. flagships.
And it was going to create a many hundred billion dollar slush fund for the UN to use on all their DEI programs around the world.
So Trump stopped that right away.
He's investing in shipbuilding.
He's renovating the UN United States Merchant Marine Academy so we can get more merchant mariners in the pipeline.
He's bringing in that cheap oil from Venezuela and selling the expensive stuff.
And he's shutting down the UN's ability to chop our head off here.
Now, and how about like, I want to go back to, you make a lot of great points.
And it's funny, as I'm listening to you talk, I'm taking it all in because this is news, you know, news to me.
And you're the fountain of knowledge here.
And if, you know, CNN and Washington Post had any like ounce of intelligence, I feel like they would have been picking your brain.
And I actually don't want this information out because it's so valuable.
It's going to point to how the globalists, the Europeans, control 90% of trade.
They control.
They're moving our factories overseas.
They're bringing in good.
They are scared.
That's why they're attacking me.
You know, there are how many?
There are dozens of journalists in the new Pentagon Press Corps.
I don't care about, I'm not the political guy.
I'm not nailing.
I do a little bit on Twitter just because it's so ridiculous, but I'm the ship guy.
Why are they going after me?
I will tell you because the Marxists hate experts.
I'm a true expert.
I built ships.
I have captainships.
And you see other people like Jack Pesovic.
He was a Navy intel officer and they go after him relentlessly.
They go after the people with the real expertise.
Why?
Because we can explain, we can tie this back straight to the UN and the globalists, right?
And that's what they're scared of most.
That's why they're coming after me because they, and look at any communist revolution, what do they go after first?
The experts.
Those are the ones they assassinate, send to the re-education camps.
They get rid of those experts because those experts have the facts to counter their absolute ridiculous narratives.
Excellent point, John.
I want to show some clips, though, of our trip at Newport News.
We have some B-roll here of when we were on the PCU, John F. Kennedy there having lunch with some of these sailors.
We'll show a little clip of that.
I mean, they were well received.
The secretary was well received by them.
And one thing I want to point out that I know some of the other networks probably didn't, but one thing the secretary said is he actually put members of his staff at each of the tables with all these men and actually asked them to provide feedback.
Like if there's something we're doing that's not working or what can we do to make your life easier?
Let us know.
And I thought that was actually a really good decision by the secretary to do that to show that he's actually looking to improve things.
And one of the big things, John, that he said that they want to do that the Trump administration is prioritizing is making more ships, making more submarines.
But to the, you know, he wants to cut regulations.
And what I learned on this trip is that, you know, they build all these submarines in the dry docks, which I think we also have a video of the Arsenal of Freedom tour area where some of those welders and engineers were all gathered to hear him speak in front of that nuclear-powered submarine that you see there in the background.
But those are built in the dry docks, right?
And then they're moved over to the water once they're able to flow, where they're continued to be worked on there.
But how I guess like my question is, how many ships and submarines do we have the capacity to currently make, given the number of dry docks and things like that?
And is the administration expanding that so that we can start producing more ships and more submarines quicker than we are now?
Well, that's an excellent question.
And, you know, the answer is anywhere you look in the ship maritime naval enterprise, it's all bad.
We don't have enough shipyard workers, welders, pipe fitters, electrician.
We don't have enough naval architects.
We don't have enough dry docks.
We don't have enough merchant mariners.
We don't have enough cargo ships.
We don't have enough Navy ships.
Every single element, the Coast Guard budget is absolutely ridiculously tiny.
They can't intradict the shadow fleet tankers because they get the pass-me-down helicopters from the Navy and they just can't keep maintaining them on the budget.
So we're a shell of our former self.
That's the problem.
The good news is we have allies that are absolutely amazing of us.
South Korea builds the best ships in the world.
Japan builds some of the best military ships for their work.
France and Germany have the best cruise ships in the world.
Italy builds a little bit of everything.
So we have those expertise.
And dry docks are expensive, but we can bring in floating dry docks from a number of places.
We can bring in cranes.
We can bring these allies in and they can train up Americans.
If you remember back when, you know, the 80s and under Reagan, the Toyota and Hyundai absolutely devastated us.
And then Reagan and Herbert Walker Bush said, you're not doing this anymore.
You need to build your factories over here.
So they came over with full Japanese factories.
They built the factories in places like Mississippi.
And then those Japanese trained their replacements, the Americans, and the Japanese left, went back overseas.
And now we have some of these, a lot of these Japanese brands are built in here in America.
So we can do this.
We can do this rather quickly.
We can do temporary floating dry docks.
Well, we're trying to dig out those ones.
But we got to reinvigorate the Army Corps of Engineers, the CBS to do this.
And we need immigration reform.
Instead of these skilled workers on very temporary visas, months or a year in order to do the train up, we're giving the most unskilled people unlimited, that's what Biden did, unlimited time in America.
So, and a lot of, you know, I'm Republican.
I get frustrated.
And at times I want to say, shut down the border completely, but that's not the solution.
The solution is we got to identify who our allies are.
We need very temporary, very pro-American.
These guys have got to be voted.
And it's got to be, there's got to be that time limit, right?
When it's their time to go, it's their time to go.
And we can ramp this up.
But it's very contested.
And quite frankly, all the European leaders are just anti-Trump, anti-Trump, anti-Trump.
Korea and Japan are still very good allies.
Australia, the government's, not the best there, but the Australian people.
So we got a lot of partners in the Pacific, but I don't see us getting much help from Europe at this point.
Yeah, and it's unfortunate because we keep hearing like so many of these different countries are quote-unquote allies, but it just seems like whenever America or the Trump administration is actually trying to prioritize, you know, American shipping and things like that, our allies don't seem to be standing alongside us, like at least our usual allies, right?
But I did hear, I don't know if you can confirm this, but I thought I heard that we were actually like partnering with other countries to have them build ships for us.
Yeah, that's South Korea is particularly doing that.
Hun Wa bought the Philadelphia shipyard, this historic shipyard that used to build a lot of our Navy ships.
You know, Philly was the big shipyard.
Brooklyn Navy Yard, which is now turned into a hipster paradise with all these Wegman organic food and latte shops.
There's still one dry dock there.
I hope that Hegset takes over that dry dock and builds it up.
But the Philly one, a Korean company, bought it out and they're even doing it better.
Instead of bringing all the Koreans over in order to train Americans, they're saying, hey, we're going to take all these American workers and we're talking there are going to be tens of thousands of them working in Philly as it expands.
We're sending them on a vacation to Korea.
They're going to spend six months in Korea learning everything we do and then come back to America and build the ships the way that we do.
So that's another option.
If we want 100% seal border, we could send these workers overseas and bring them back.
But that capital has to be there.
And here's another thing.
These shipyards aren't making much profit.
They're all going bankrupt.
VT Halter, which makes our icebreaker, they spent $500 million, a Singaporean company, building out new factories, new buildings, new dry docks to build these icebreakers.
And they got $9 billion in government contracts.
And the red tape that they instituted under the Obama and Biden, you know, all of these environmental standards where you have to have 100 environmental people.
If any snail is a little bit endangered, you got to shut down whole sections.
You can't use what they call toxic paint.
You can't, all these safety violations.
You know, everyone's bubbled wrapped.
And God forbid you put on a harness with one strap and go on the ship.
You know, you need multiple harness and securing devices and it makes the job actually more dangerous.
So all of this bureaucratic and red tape made that yard so far behind that this $500 million investment, $9 billion, they sold the entire yard for $16 million.
They are losing money hand over fist.
And as you saw, Hegseth, you know, you got all these unions too, you know, which are trying to slow down the work to pad the hourbook.
And Hegset said there, he's cutting through this.
We will support the union workers.
We will support the companies.
We want you to be profitable, but no more slowdowns.
You have to accelerate.
You have to do good work.
They slow down so people can get hours working on it more.
Those days are over.
Well, now, one other thing that President Trump actually said within the last day or two was that he was going hard against defense contractors that were doing the stock buybacks and things like that.
Is that something that you see impacting your industry?
Like the companies.
Huntington Ingalls is a private.
You can buy their stock on the stock market, HII.
It's probably going to do pretty good because they're getting all these contracts, but they don't want to build the dry dock.
So if you say a dry dock for a new super carrier or the new Trump battleship, that dry dock is going to cost about $15 billion.
So they can go to Congress and they can say, hey, we want $15 billion in order to get that dry dock.
And then Congress can give them, but we are taxpayer money.
We can't afford that anymore.
We got to stop writing checks to everyone, including these companies.
So what they can do instead is they can go to Wall Street and they say, hey, we want to issue bonds.
You pay for it.
Can we get near zero interest bonds?
And Wall Street goes, well, every single ship you've ever built has been delayed.
So why are we going to give you money?
We'll give you money, but we're going to give it to you at 20% credit card rates because your customer is absolutely terrible because you're delayed on everything because your union labors are broken.
And the U.S. Maritime Industry Administration under DOT, they haven't done a shipyard survey.
So they haven't had government, you know, if you want to invest in the car industry, there are government reports that say we got this many factories.
This is the production level.
This is the state of the cranes.
The DOT is required to do that shipyard survey every single year for the banks so that they can invest, but they haven't done it in 20 years.
They've just thrown up their hands and say, we're not going to do this.
So by fixing that capital and Feinberg, the deputy undersecretary of the DO Department of War, he was Cerberus Capital.
This is why they're saying this.
They're saying, hey, we'll fix this thing, but you got to go and get the bonds in order to reinvest in the yards.
Because instead of getting that $15 billion from Congress in order to build a dry dock, what they've been doing is they've been asking the Navy, hey, let's do a study.
Let's get into AI computers and the smartest people and McKinsey and all these consultants from Harvard and give us just $5 billion to do a study on why we can't build ships on time.
So this is what the company does.
And then they get the $5 billion.
They hire six people.
When the study is done, they don't have any expenses.
And then what does the study say?
The study says, well, what they really need is a $10 billion AI computer program that can study this analysis.
So then they get $10 billion to build a $100,000 computer program and pocket the rest.
But the more important thing is with all this fraud underneath, they don't have to, that dry dock has to be maintained.
The workforce has to be paid, whether the ship's being built or not.
You have to knock the rest off of these dry docks.
You actually have to dig it up and maintain it for 20 years.
So they don't want that.
What they want is all of this AI and consultants and study and McKinsey people to generate capital.
And then they take that money from the capital and they give style.
First, they give options to their executives, which is, and then in order to get that, because they're failing, that stock price won't reach the execution price of the options.
So they do these massive STI buybacks to artificially lift the stock price so that the executives can sell the options.
Trump said, no more, we're not doing that.
We're going to help you in the back end with this federal financing, cutting red tape and such.
But you're taking that profit money and instead of giving it to buybacks, you're investing in cranes, dry docks, and the yards.
Yeah, I love that, putting America first.
And he really has been an incredible president.
And it's funny.
I keep thinking back to Washington Post, that guy on Twitter that we were going back and forth with.
And he was like, oh, you know, you are admitting your bias or whatever.
And I'm like, I think I responded to him and I said something like, you know, is it a bias if you just approve of the work they're doing?
Because I'm pretty sure if John or I had an issue with something that they were doing, we'd be the first to call it out, right?
Like, don't you want leaders that are actually putting your country first?
And like, that's, I mean, that's the way I see it, John.
Well, my, my book, Fire on the Horizon, was edited by Tom Schroeder, a storied editor of the Washington Post in the 80s and early 90s.
He would, you know, editors don't win Pulitzer Prize, but a number of his journalists won Pulitzer Prize.
Just fantastic guy, liberal, but he cared about the facts.
And he said, John, if you read my book, the very first chapter is all about how the oil companies really messed with me and caused me a lot of trouble.
And he says that that gives you some anger towards them.
And you have to tell that to your readers.
So I make no bones.
I call back the Washington Post journalist, and you can see he edited and I demanded he edited at the bottom saying I am biased.
I am absolutely biased towards this administration.
Not because, you know, I think Pete Hank says smile is a thousand wad, and that excites me, because they are actually building ships.
And I was the biggest critic on the entire internet.
I'm known for this against Mayor Pete Buttigieg because he got $2 trillion to fix these dry docks and problems and roads and bridges.
And where are they?
You saw them.
They look like they spent $2 trillion on those roads and dry docks and waterways, Heather.
I mean, it's obviously that money disappeared or was never spent or who knows what happened.
Secretary Duffy says it's so well held in, they can't find out what happened.
I mean, that's a $2 trillion.
You could build 200 aircraft carriers.
People can't conceive of how much money Pete Buttichek.
So, man, I nailed him every week.
I still nail him.
I mean, that guy, that guy took money and the Gaza Pier, 61 casualties, including three deaths.
Two of them were aboard his DOT ship that caught fire on the way to the Gaza Pier, which nobody in the Pentagon Press Corps would write about.
That's my other issue with Haley Brixie and these CNN.
I wrote about it and I begged them.
I was like, these are Americans who died on that Gaza Pier and they absolutely refuse.
They refuse to report about Budicek's involvement in this and wasting the $2 trillion because they go, oh, we're Pentagon reporters.
That has nothing to do with.
Well, I just explained it was DOT ships that were supporting that operation.
And, you know, they pretend, they pretend this ignorance, like, oh, that's not us.
We don't know about it.
So that they can focus on Trump.
But if you look at it, it's all important.
But my point is, if you go back to my post in the beginning of the Trump Biden administration, I was very pro-Budichech.
I'm embarrassed by it now, but I was so excited he was there because he's a naval officer.
He understands this.
He understands not as much about shipbuilding, me, but a lot more than CNN.
So I go, here's a guy who really understands what we need.
He's a naval officer.
He's a Navy veteran.
He understands the importance of shipyards.
And that shows how criminal they are.
They pretend they know nothing, but how do you pretend you know nothing about ships?
And you're a Navy veteran, Pete.
So, I mean, it's complete, complete gaslighting.
But I'm saying, you know, I am Republican.
I've always been Republican.
I'm pro-Republican.
But if those guys are doing a good job, I'm a big supporter.
Carl Del Toro is the one I will first to admit that brought the Koreans in, man.
Biden's Navy secretary.
I love that about the guy.
I had some problems, but I love it.
I'm willing to call balls and strikes here, but to tell me to stop being excited that we're building ships, to stop being excited that these young recruits, I mean, you saw them, they were excited to work for Pete Hegseth.
Everyone in that shipyard, when you showed that photo on the carrier, I talked to Democrats, Republicans, minorities, people from all over the country, and everyone, everyone is engaged.
I've been to so many of these shipyard tours and people are on their phones.
They're playing with their food.
They're looking up.
You were there.
Everyone from the shipyard, civilian shipyard workers up to the captain, even the admirals, they were locked in.
They were engaged.
They were excited.
And when we go back to that, that Jesus being a carpenter, you could see, go back and look at the video, you could see the shipyard workers getting excited about that.
They're excited about getting back to work and killing these delays in the red tape.
Amen.
I mean, we just showed a video as you were talking there of the recruits putting up their hand and Secretary Hegset swearing them in.
And we've seen a record number of people recruiting under this administration as well.
I mean, this is something where they're CNN and Washington Post want to report on it.
Like it takes a lot to want to put your life on the line and fight and die for your country.
And if you don't believe the person leading that country is going to do right by you and right by your country, you will see young men not enlist.
And that's what we saw in the previous administration.
And so to see those young men to, you know, when you were like, I voted for this, that right there, when they were all putting up their hands, that is a sign that our young men in this country feel that they have a commander in chief now that is going to lead them in the right direction and lead our country in the right direction.
And so that's what that means.
So I totally understood what you meant when you said I voted for this because I did too.
We want, I come from a military family, my father, my brother, my uncle, my grandfather.
It's like you want your commander in chief to look after our servicemen and women.
And we didn't have that.
In fact, the two people you mentioned on that boat, was it two people that passed away with the Pete Boutige there?
I didn't even know that until you just brought it up because we have a million dollars.
Many guys, because they refused to do it because it was against their administration.
And I didn't say I voted for this.
I'll correct you.
I said I voted so hard for this.
I am 100% biased.
And they tried dogpiling me and saying, well, your journalists are supposed to be unbiased.
And why don't you walk it back?
Trying to bribe you with a, well, we'll make this not so much a hit piece.
I'm not walking anything back.
I am biased towards American strength.
I'm biased towards our young high school recruits who signed up for the uniform.
I am biased to any administration that wants to build ships, cut red tape, support those ship workers, and support Jesus Christ.
Absolutely 100% biased.
And they sit there and they pretend they're not, oh, we're objective.
We're not biased.
They have a biased hatred for Donald Trump.
And they have a bias, some of them, not all of them, but some of them have a biased hatred for American success.
And if you want to be a reporter and you want to do that, fine, but don't pretend you're objective and go at a hit piece of us.
Come out, say, say, you know, I'm a communist.
Go write for the Daily Worker.
I'm sure they pay pretty well.
CNN gives chauffeur Tahos to people.
I'm sure the Daily Worker even played more.
Be a journalist, but this pretending that news is unbiased.
Fox did that for years, biased and were the only unbiased news.
No, they were pro-Republican at the time.
What's wrong with anything?
And the bottom line is this, they think that the readers, the viewers are dumb.
They think they're dumb.
Think that they can say they're unbiased and the readers don't believe it.
And half the country is below the average IQ.
But most readers, they understand, you know, they understand my biases.
My bias isn't for the Republican Party.
I've criticized the Republican Party from day one.
I've done it multiple times here.
My bias is for the successes.
Trump's just nailing down the door.
And I'll say one final thing.
When I was the very first person to get the new media pass, the very first reporter.
And I was the first on Monday morning showing up.
And several people in the administrations, I won't say who because it's on background.
They don't want giving names.
The first thing they said to me is, We brought you in, John, because we know you swing back when there's BS.
They want reporters to swing back.
Look at our plane.
WAPO says, oh, they're freezing out the old media core.
It was 2 CNN, Fox News, who Jennifer Griffith hates, you know, is the worst hater of Hanks at the Trump.
And Bloomberg, who got sick at the last minute, but he was invited.
How many billions has Michael Bloomberg gave to Democrats to overturn Trump?
That was half the plane right there.
And then it's me, you, and the Federalist guy.
They outnumbered us and they're saying that the old media press corps is freezing out.
It's just, it's a flat out lie and they don't mind flat out lying about this.
Yeah.
Well, what was really disheartening to me is because like, you know, I'm a Christian, John, and going into this, like, I am not a fan of CNN.
I'm not a fan of Washington Post.
I never met either of or any of the people that were on the trip with us prior.
So like, as a Christian, I'm like, you know, like, love everyone, give everyone the benefit of the doubt, treat people kindly.
And like, I have to say, like, like to our faces, everybody on the, in that van and on that plane was so nice to me.
And so it was just like, it was really disheartening to when you had mentioned walking out of there on our way back that like, you know, some reporter reached out because they had heard some stuff that you had said.
Like it was really disheartening for me, like just on a basic human level that one of the people that we were in there with like is leaking stuff so sinister, like, because it was like we were all getting along, we were all there.
And it's like, how did we get to a point where as like basic humans, right, we should be able to disagree on policy, disagree on ideas, but fundamentally, like we're united because we're supposed to be representing the same country as members of the press, right?
Like we should all care about America and maybe disagree on like the methods of what's best for America.
But like that for me was just really disheartening because you're such a good person.
You're such a good guy.
And, you know, your father would be proud to see all that you're doing.
Thank you.
You know, and I want you to actually use some of this, our final time here, to talk a little bit about your dad and who he was and how he served the country.
You said he was buried about a thousand feet from the Pentagon where we were.
So why don't you use these final moments here to give us all a little background into your dad and his service?
Oh, you're going to make me cry now.
But, you know, John Adam Conrad I was, I'm John Adam Conrad V. John Adam Conner I was born in Germany.
The second was born in Germany.
The first brought the second at five years old over to America.
And it was really hard.
The day they landed in Ellis Island, the little five-year-old, they said, you're not speaking German anymore.
He couldn't communicate with his parents for a year because he said, you are speaking English.
And then that, the second son, my grandpa, when World War II broke out, they said, you know, told him and all the cousins, you pick a side here.
And if you pick Germany, you go back to Germany.
You pick here, you pick here.
And, you know, within 40 years of them landing in America, my grandpa was bombing Germans.
He was bombing Conrad's, his family members, because that's, you pick a side, right?
And my dad went to Vietnam.
He could have gone into medical school.
He had to delay for Cornell.
And, you know, he was very frustrated.
He was Ivy League graduate.
He graduated Cornell.
It's an Ivy League, surrounded by all these liberals.
He went to Vietnam.
He served.
And then he came back.
And then New York City, because of these liberal policies under Lindsay, who was the 1960s version of a rhino-Republican.
He was a Republican and then at the last minute switched to Democrat and went on these crazy liberal policies.
They bankrupted New York City.
They completely destroyed it.
The entire Bronx was burning when I was a kid.
People of that, you know, ask anyone in the 80s, if you went back, what's the most dangerous place?
Not in America, in the world.
It was the Bronx, crack epidemic, AIDS epidemic, the burning from these liberal policies.
And my dad could have got a job, you know, as a plastic surgeon from his reconstruction.
Reconstruction surgery on Vietnam soldiers over there.
He said, no, I'm going to be a fireman.
I'm going to build up the ambulance corps.
So he did that.
And we were poor because of it.
My mom was a visiting nurse, but he said, these democratic policies are dangerous.
And it's people who put politics aside and are willing to go into these streets.
And, you know, now you have all these people who are saying, well, let, you know, the left is cheering on Mam Domni, a straight out communist who, and they, and the right, but the right is saying, a lot of people on the right are saying, oh, New Yorkers vote for it.
Let it burn so that they can learn their lesson.
They'll learn their lesson.
And as a native New Yorker, this frustrates me, Heather, because we, they learned their lesson.
The entire city burned in the 70s and 80s.
I sat there as a little kid watching it.
I watched people burning up outside with my dad, body bags on the side of the road.
I watched it.
These Marxists, these communists do not learn their lessons.
And the voting is, you know, proven.
There's no voter ID.
There's no, they have stolen these elections.
And, you know, the whole place can burn up in a nuclear cloud tomorrow.
And the communists will continue to push these policies.
They don't learn lessons.
So there has to be voter reform.
There has to be getting in there.
And forget the politics.
Build up the roads, build up the bridges, build up the tunnels.
Again, this is why I was so excited about Pete Butticek in the beginning.
You know, one, two trillion dollars for these roads to tunnel the bridges in the poorest minority communities in New York City.
I was clapping up and down.
And then he goes, and where's the progress?
Where are the roads?
Where are the bridges?
They're not here.
All that money went to fraud.
And they call us racist.
Like I grew up in the Bronx with black people, Puerto Rican people, you know, the Jewish people.
You call me racist.
I'm the one fighting for this money is spent on the roads and the shipyards in the shipyard giving them jobs.
It's not the Democrats.
They are voting on destruction.
And if you were a communist in the 60s, you know, the one thing my dad said with Lindsay after he fought the communists in Vietnam, he goes, back then, we didn't know how bad communism was because all the death camp numbers of Stalin hadn't come out.
All of the, you know, Mao Zigdong, the mill, the hundred million people who died, it took years to come out.
He goes, the enemy, I didn't have anger for him in Vietnam because maybe he's right.
Maybe communism will be good.
But so if you were a communist, a boomer in Woodstock, it kind of makes sense.
But now there's overwhelming evidence overseas and in New York City itself from that EADS and crack epidemic.
It's provably wrong.
And to support these policies on something that is provably wrong, you know, this, again, I am biased.
I am a devout anti-communist and I am a devout supporter of building shipyard jobs and things.
And whatever party wants to help, you know, we'll support, but this is rational common sense.
And there's no rationality in this.
Like I said, my friend who's extremely liberal, lives on NPR and New York Times knowing me, he read that article and straight up laughed.
I mean, it's straight up hit piece.
And it's a hit piece against those experts who, and particularly me, because for years I've been pointing the finger at the UN and saying it's these globalists that are controlling trade, putting money in our elections and such.
So that's why they have special hatred for me.
Well, I don't.
I think the world of you, John.
You're a fountain of knowledge.
And I'm just super grateful you were able to join us.
I mean, we used up the whole show here today because I just felt like you have so much that I want our viewers to take in because it's so important to hear from people that are directly impacted by the administration and all these different industries.
You're one of them.
So I hope and I pray for the people over at the Washington Post in CNN.
You know, what's that scripture that says forgive them?
They know not what they do, right?
Like one day they're going to have to answer for everything.
We're all going to have to answer for everything.
So I hope that at least going forward, if we're on any trips together, you know, just be basic, good human beings, you know, be honest with each other.
Don't, you know, I mean, if you're leaking stuff from a tiny little Pentagon press pool trip, I mean, it's, it's kind of obvious why, you know, they had to make you sign paperwork now to be at the Pentagon that you weren't willing to do.
Because if you're going to leak little bits of information like that, I mean, like the Pentagon is.
Everyone's like, how did the Maduro raid go so well?
Well, it's because you picked out the Pentagon Press Corps and you didn't inform any allies.
There were no allies.
There's no France and Britain arguing about, should we get them?
Should we not get them?
It was just let the American soldiers do what they can without all that nonsense.
Amen.
Amen.
And well, please, please, please pray for us.
I'm a devout Christian myself.
I am Catholic and we need all the prayers we can get for everyone on the press corps, including yourself.
You got a lot more scoring there on the scene.
I got a lot more after, but a lot more nasty looks on the screen.
How dare you mention Jesus?
I pray, and I'll say it right now.
I'll pray that we build ships here.
And I ask all your readers, please pray for me.
I'll pray for you guys.
And pray for our leaders that they continue to have discernment and do the right thing going forward.
John, thank you so much for joining us.
Tell people where they can go to follow you and what you're doing real quick.
gcaptain.com.
That's the maritime news site, biggest in the world, one of the only American-owned fully, completely, gcap.com, all the maritime news.
And then, of course, if you want something a little more spicy, the hotter takes and some of these controversies, we keep politics out of GCAM.
Go to John Conrad, spell with a K on X. Perfect.
Thank you so much.
Captain John Conrad, thank you for joining us.
Thank you so much for having me.
All right.
That will do it for today, guys, on the Mike Lindell show.
Thank you so much for watching.
And I hope you enjoyed that.
I know I did.
We got a lot more coming up in the weeks ahead with both John and myself covering things down at the Pentagon.
So stay tuned.
Keep watching Lindell TV.
I'm Heather Mullins.
Thank you for watching.
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