In this Episode, Col. Douglas Macgregor joins PBD and Tom. They discuss Russia, Ukraine, the woke military, the Trump Tape, China, and much more. Douglas Macgregor is a decorated combat veteran, the author of five books, a PhD, and a Defense and Foreign Policy consultant.
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
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So if you're somebody that's wondering what's still going on with Ukraine and Russia, or even the Wagner group that recently created some ruckus in Russia, as well as the military-industrial complex, we have the right guest here for you today, Douglas McGregor, Colonel Douglas McGregor, a retired Army colonel and government official, an author consultant and television commentator.
I believe you've written five books.
The most recent one, Margin of Victory, Five Battles that changed the face of modern war.
He played a significant role on the battlefield in the Gulf War.
And in 1999, NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and his 1997 book, Breaking the Phalanx, established him as an influential, if unconventional, theorist, a military strategist.
His thinking contributed to the U.S. strategy in his 2003 invasion of Iraq.
After leaving the military in 2004, he became more politically active.
In 2020, President Donald Trump proposed McGregor as ambassador to Germany, but the Senate blocked the nomination.
On November 11, 2020, a Pentagon spokesperson announced that McGregor had been hired to serve as senior advisor to the acting Secretary of Defense, a post he held less than three months.
Trump also controversially appointed him to the board of West Point Academy, his alma mater.
He is loved by many, but he is hated both by the left and the right.
Some would say the establishment.
He's also the EVP of Burke McGregor Group.
Thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast.
Yeah, thank you.
So why are you pissing so many people off?
What's wrong?
What's going on there?
Gee, I thought I was popular.
It's very shattering to me.
You're popular, but some people are sitting there saying, why has this guy got these weird opinions and strange opinions?
Well, anybody that Washington likes these days is suspect inside the United States, let's put it that way.
So I'm happy to be unpopular inside the beltway.
It's almost like a compliment nowadays.
I think it's a tribute, yes.
So we got a lot of things I want to go through with you on today's podcast.
Obviously, your background, your expertise.
When you're getting calls from people asking, how do we handle this issue here in Iraq?
How do we handle that?
And you're given the most unique perspective where everybody else is saying the same thing.
You're given something else.
One has to pay attention to your strategies.
But let's start off with Ukraine-Russia.
When it first got started, you know, you were one of the ones that said, this is going to be done in no time.
It's almost done.
It's going to be done.
It's going to be done in a week.
It's going to be done in a month.
It's going to be done in two months.
So a lot of people felt the same way as you, but you were one of the main spokespeople that kept saying this is going to get done.
Why is it still going on today?
And it's been as long as it's been.
No, I think that's an important question.
And it surprised me as well as lots of other people by the by the way, the Russians went into Ukraine.
Their initial operation was very different from what anybody anticipated.
And I think President Putin went in with the following objectives.
Remember, he's been talking for at least 15 years about his opposition to the movement of NATO to his borders.
He's made it very clear that he regarded it as a threat.
One of the reasons he moved into Crimea was that he saw that becoming a NATO naval base, principally for the U.S. Navy, obviously in the Black Sea.
So he moved on that first and then said, look, it's got to stop.
Well, what happened, of course, as you know, is we had the coup in Kiev, or now the Ukrainians call it Kiev.
And as a result, we installed a government that was prepared to do essentially whatever we wanted them to do.
We poured billions of dollars in very early to build up an enormous Ukrainian military force whose sole objective was to attack Russia.
And it wasn't very long before Putin concluded that if I don't act soon, I'll have missiles sitting on my border that will be able to reach my nuclear deterrent in no time and rob Russia of any sort of security at all.
So he decides to go in, but I think he thought at the beginning, and this was a false assumption, that he would have someone to negotiate with.
So he said, I'm going to go in really initially with only about 90,000 troops organized into small contingents.
He gave strict orders that they were to avoid collateral damage at all costs, didn't want to kill anybody.
He knew he was moving into an area which was largely Russian anyway.
But he also didn't want to kill Ukrainian forces at that point.
He said, I want to demilitarize the place, but he said, I don't want unnecessary casualties on the Ukrainian side.
And remember, from his vantage point, these were also Slavic cousins, brothers, whatever you want to call them.
And the Russians felt that way, I think, initially.
And so he moves in with this very small force.
He encounters a lot of resistance.
I think the resistance is exaggerated in the sense that the Russians have never taken heavy casualties.
But nevertheless, he encountered a great deal of resistance, but most important, when he met with people for negotiations, he discovered there's no willingness to reach an agreement because Washington, principally, is in charge.
Washington doesn't want an agreement.
I mean, he can read the tea leaves, and the tea leaves are very clear.
This is Washington's opportunity to, quote-unquote, bleed Russia.
In addition to bleeding Russia, once we've bled it, we're going to see Putin and his regime removed.
And ultimately, then we'll think about what we want to do with Russia to include stripping it of resources, breaking it up into smaller parts, whatever.
This, of course, was a horror story that he had not really believed in.
And he found out, gee, I was wrong.
And so by the summer, he has a meeting with all the senior officers, and they say, look, we wanted to go in hard.
You told us to go in soft.
We wanted more troops.
You said no.
Now we're in the middle of something.
We're not going to end this conclusively unless we build a larger and more decisive force with the right capabilities.
And so you had this change in strategy.
It says we will consolidate control over what we've got, which is about 20 to 22 percent of the territory where most of the Russians, but not all of them, lived, where most of the resources are too, by the way.
And we will run essentially an economy of force mission.
Our strategy is to build an impregnable fort and then let the Ukrainians expend themselves against it.
And then when we're ready, we'll take the offensive.
And that's effectively what's happened.
And the Ukrainians have expended themselves.
They're now at a point where I would say there's practically nothing left.
Anybody who is really trained to do much is dead or wounded.
It depends on which source you want to trust, but it runs from 250,000 dead up to 300,000 dead to 350,000 dead on the Ukrainian side.
And that's military force, not just soldiers.
That's just soldiers.
Now, I don't know how many civilians have been killed, and I'm very, very suspicious of that because despite the change in strategy that resulted, he has always been unwilling to kill the quote-unquote innocents.
So if he strikes something, are you seeing?
See President Putin.
Yeah.
So if you see a strike going somewhere, as we did quite recently, the objective was to kill, frankly speaking, foreign forces that were billeted in a hotel.
This included U.S., U.K., and others, because he's been warning everybody in NATO, get out.
If you don't get out, you're going to be at risk.
And then, of course, next to it, I guess, was a school or something.
And so immediately the Ukrainians say, see, the Russians are killing people in schools.
You know, we went through this repeatedly where the Ukrainians would set up gun positions inside hospitals, schools, malls.
And once that happened, the Russians had no choice but to destroy those gun positions, which meant that they were inevitably attacking what were formerly only civilian targets.
I mean, this is not new.
We've been through this in the Middle East.
We've experienced something similar.
So the bottom line is that now we're at a point where the Ukrainians really have expended virtually everything they've got.
They're now talking about mounting one last counteroffensive.
I don't know how they're going to do it.
Whatever they do, it won't succeed.
They have no chance of breaking through Russian defenses.
In the meantime, I think we've had a certain amount of unrest in the senior ranks of the Russian military because a lot of the senior officers want to attack and end this war.
And they're very concerned about...
A lot of what senior officials?
General officers in the Russian army, the senior generals.
So then there's a misalignment between Putin and his leaders.
Well, I don't know if I'd call it a misalignment as much as Putin is still reluctant to take decisive action to end the war quickly because he's concerned about our predisposition to intervene.
The great fear from the beginning has always been that once it became clear that the Ukrainian position was hopeless, there would be pressure in Washington to intervene, to rescue what's left.
We almost have to protect our $150 billion investment.
It's almost a ⁇ if you think about it, it's like hedging.
If that does happen, hey, we're so in it now that we said once we're not going to send them tanks.
If we do, it's going to be this.
Now we're talking planes and all this stuff.
We almost have to defend Ukraine now.
Well, I don't think so, but you're not going to be able to do it.
I'm talking from the Biden's administration.
Yeah, well, your argument actually probably sounds more like how we got ourselves into the First World War.
But the bottom line is with this crowd right now, they've expended enormous sums of money.
So I'm sure there's pressure from BlackRock and Raytheon and others.
Somebody told me the other day there are only three branches of government in the United States now.
One is BlackRock, one is Raytheon, and the other is the pharmaceuticals.
So there's some tragic truth to that since the Hill is basically owned by donors and we have government by donors.
The American people really don't have much of a voice and they don't know much about it, so they don't say much about it.
But the truth is right now, the Ukrainians are on the ropes.
There's no doubt about it.
And there's this discussion, I think, behind the scenes.
Do we just move now and end this thing decisively because they can?
Or do we wait some more and let the Ukrainians expend some more time and effort?
And now you have discussions in the West about a joint Polish-Lithuanian intervention into Western Ukraine.
And that's exactly the sort of thing that the Russians have been concerned about.
And that could never happen without us, without us authorizing it, supporting it, and encouraging it.
And Putin knows that.
So we're at a kind of crossroads right now in terms of what's next, and the Russians have to make a decision.
There's a lot there.
I'm sorry, Tom.
There's a lot there that we covered.
A few things.
So from a strategist standpoint, you know, the world, when they think about who Putin is, you know, former KGB, this guy's going to be a shrewd guy.
He's going to be 15 steps ahead or he's going to identify his next 5, 10, 15 move.
So you're going to sit there and say, if we do this, that guy's going to do this.
If we do this, are we going to push NATO to want to move quicker to support them?
If we do this, maybe it's going to be easier to take over a part of Ukraine that we want under Biden, not Trump.
I'm picturing him as a guy that sat there with his generals looking at every single possibility that could happen.
How did he miss the ball on, hey, let's go soft on this.
It's going to be fine.
They're going to cave in.
We're going to get him in no time.
His military guys say, no, let's go hard.
That's a big miscalculation there on his end, isn't it?
Well, I think President Putin, you mentioned his KGB background.
One of the things that people do not understand about the KGB is that the individuals that served in it were practically the only people in the Soviet Union that were allowed to travel beyond the borders of the Soviet Union.
That meant that they could travel in the West.
Putin was very familiar with the West, particularly with Germany.
And by the way, he likes Germans, speaks pretty good German because I've listened to him in his interviews.
So from his standpoint, he saw a West that he thought they could work with, they could deal with.
And he's always been criticized inside Russia for taking that position.
Because I would say the mainstream Russian position is you can't do business with the West.
The West is our implacable enemy.
That will never change.
We are Russians.
We are not part of Europe.
We are not part of the West.
I think Putin took a different position.
I think he thought that Russia should be part of the larger European concert and should have a role in the West.
Well, it turns out his critics were right and he was wrong.
Now, he's still a very popular leader because he has improved the standards of living, prosperity.
He's restored a lot of Russian national pride and dignity.
I think his latest poll, unofficial poll that we get out of Russia, puts him at about 89% approval, whereas Biden is at about 30%.
So I think Putin is very secure in that sense now, but he has always struggled with this idea of how far do I want to push it because Putin is a smart man.
He says, when this is over, we want to live with the Europeans and we want to live with the United States.
We never thought about that during the Second World War.
There were some people who did because we did enormous damage to Japan, enormous damage to Germany, which is one of the reasons we had to stay there for 50 years.
And there were a few voices.
Admiral Leahy, who was effectively the chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time for Roosevelt, brought in the generals and said, look, you're doing terrible things to these people.
We want to be able to live with the Germans and the Japanese when this is over.
Well, we didn't pay too much attention to that, but Putin is taking a different position.
And he has also made it very clear that this is Russia.
This is not the Soviet Union.
And the Russian military, contrary to what the Ukrainians have been claiming, have not committed atrocities all over the place.
They've not murdered and raped and pillaged.
In other words, this is not Stalin's force, his slave army of 1944 and 45.
Putin's made that very clear.
He still wants to get along, quote unquote.
He wants to avoid a direct war with the United States and with NATO.
That drives much of his behavior.
But as I said, now he's at a point where he's got to make some decisions.
And that is, what do we do?
Do we continue to move slowly and deliberately and watch as the Poles and Lithuanians, presumably backed by the United States, intervene in Western Ukraine?
Is that what we do?
Or do we act?
Because what he doesn't want is whatever remains of Ukraine when this is over.
He wants that to be neutral.
He doesn't want it to be militarized.
He doesn't want it to be a platform for attack against Russia.
He views Ukraine the same way we viewed Cuba in 1963.
We don't want it to be a platform for attack against us.
We still don't.
And that's his position.
Now, can he achieve that if he stands by and allows the Poles, the Lithuanians, or anybody else, even U.S. forces, to move into Western Ukraine?
I think the answer is no.
Colonel, is the position you just described very eloquently on President Putin, is that the resolved view that is in front of President Biden?
Is that where the Joint Chiefs are?
Or are they taking a different view?
What I do know is that the senior officers in the army and the Pentagon, I can't speak for the other services, but certainly the Army have made it very clear that we are in no position to wage conventional war against the Russians.
And are they presenting what you just presented as Putin's attitude and position with that?
I doubt it, simply because if you try to present that position to the people who are really running the government, they are so full of hatred and animosity and antipathy for Moscow and what it represents to them that no one will listen.
So I think they have what we call ideological blinders on.
So is that why there is so much willingness, if that is a prevailing view that's being propagated not only to the president's daily threat report, I assume, and to the president himself, then is it any surprise to you that senators are greenlighting billions of dollars for Ukraine?
Because it's to defeat this evil, not to go Middle East on you, but to defeat this evil Satan that is the old USSR, Russia.
Well, remember, part of the problem here is of Putin's own making.
At the beginning, because of the way he went in, it conveyed to the West this notion that, see, the Russians aren't serious.
They're weak.
They're weak.
They don't know what they're doing.
And then we flooded the airways with all of this propaganda about the Russians are stupid.
And they described the Russians exactly the way the Germans described the Soviets during World War II, which, of course, was nonsense.
I mean, I was in graduate school in Soviet East European studies, so I'm very familiar with it.
And they literally lifted phrases and things out of books that had been written about the Soviet army and the end of the Second World War, and they were hurling this crap at the Russians.
And everybody in the West, of course, was eager to believe it.
Remember, we have the Cold War behind us.
So it's not very hard to say, you know, the Russians are really bad.
Sure.
Oh, yeah, yeah, right.
They were bad a few years ago, so they must be bad again.
That's part of the problem.
But Putin went in.
He was too easy.
And it looked as though he was weak.
Well, now everything has turned around.
You've got about 750,000 troops focused on the Western military district in Russia.
In other words, the Western theater.
About 350,000 in the South.
Now, where are the other 400,000?
Well, some of them are tied up in logistical support infrastructure.
Some of them are in missile rocket artillery batteries.
Some of them are up in Russia.
Some of them are just in Western Russia.
The point is that this is an enormously powerful force now with all the most modern equipment and technology.
I think even the biggest skeptics are shocked and surprised at the precision, the accuracy, and the responsiveness of Russian missile and strike assets.
For people who are listening who don't have a map in front of them, when you say the Western theater of Russia, you mean the eastern also border of Ukraine, right there.
And the south, you mean Crimea.
I'm talking about in southern Ukraine, the area which is referred to by the Russians as Novorusia.
This stretches from basically Odessa all the way up to Kharkov.
Most of that is now under Russian control.
With this force of three-quarters of a million.
Yes.
So, okay, so let's go back to thinking, trying to think what Putin was thinking about.
So let's go soft instead of going hard.
What's the advantages of going soft?
So for you as a strategist, to be fair, I mean, you know, when you're saying, you know, how you would do it and what you would do, you have a PhD, I think, in international relations from University of Virginia, if I'm not mistaken.
So what is the advantage of going soft?
Are you going soft because you're thinking that guy's going to cave?
Okay, fine.
So let's flip it.
What is the advantage of going hard right off the bat?
Where his soldiers are saying, no, we have to go strong with these guys to get what done.
What's their argument of going hard instead of going soft?
Well, first, let's be clear about the PhDs and degrees.
You know, thermometers have degrees, and you know where you stick those.
I'm not disparaging my PhD.
I'm just being honest.
There are a lot of people walking around with degrees that don't know anything.
In fact, I would argue that most of them don't amount to anything.
They don't produce anything.
They're not practitioners.
I focused when I went to graduate school on military matters because I'm a professional soldier.
And it was my obligation, I thought, since the American people were funding my education, to focus on military affairs and specifically at that point on the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent, East Germany and Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Those are the areas where I focused.
Now, having said that, again, it goes back to a set of assumptions.
I think that Putin, if you go back and look at his willingness to negotiate, there was a point during the first three weeks when the negotiators met that Putin said, I will immediately embrace a ceasefire while these negotiations are on.
And they stopped.
The Russians stopped in their tracks.
Of course, people in the West said, well, that's because they're logistically unsustainable and all this.
But that wasn't true.
He was sending a signal.
I'm serious.
I'm willing to negotiate.
And remember that the whole thing revolved around the Minsk Accords.
Nobody in the West pays much attention to those accords, but they were signed by Germany, France.
We backed them.
And we promised that the Russians who live in Ukraine would be treated as equal citizens, equal before the law, along with Ukrainians.
They would not be pressured to become Ukrainian as long as they were good citizens and obeyed the law.
They could speak their own language, go to their own schools, go to their own church, and so forth.
That was a big lie, as it turns out.
And Angela Merkel, who was the German chancellor, was the first to come out publicly and say we lied.
That was just to buy time for Ukraine to build itself up into the military power that it has become.
Subsequently, Macron admitted it was a lie.
So even after having been lied to prolifically about all the things that were important to the Russians, he decided, I'll call a ceasefire.
We'll see how these talks progress.
Well, the talks didn't progress.
And then suddenly we had this man, Boris Johnson, who flew in as effectively a surrogate for Biden and said, stop, don't give up anything.
And that was because Zelensky had said, sure, I think we could live with neutrality.
Actually made that statement, which was the end goal as far as Putin was concerned.
We wanted to be neutral.
Belarus has this nice, large, neutral state the size of Texas that lies between Russia and NATO.
Gosh, that's a good thing.
In fact, back in 1999 and 1998, when I was the director of the Joint Operations Center at SHAPE Headquarters, Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe, these discussions went on, and somebody said, well, where's Ukraine in all of this?
And everybody said, Ukraine's mission is to be a nice buffer.
You know, don't fight there.
Don't go there.
Let them be a nice buffer between Russia and us.
I mean, that was widely viewed as a positive thing.
Well, that was thrown out of the window.
And instead, Boris Johnson says, we will back you to the hilt.
We will give you everything that we possibly can.
Your job is to go out there and fight, and we'll back you.
And eventually we will be victorious.
The Russians will collapse.
Putin will be gone, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
None of that's happened.
And today, Russia is stronger, I would argue, economically than it was before the war began.
Our sanctions have been ultimately quite helpful to the Russians.
They are not a part of our Western financial system to the extent that they might have been hurt by us seriously.
How have the sanctions been helpful to Russia?
Well, they've managed to sell all of their energy products, all of their minerals, everything, agricultural products through others at higher prices that have ultimately reached their target destination in Europe and other parts of the world anyhow.
So the amount of hard currency, if you will, from the West that's pouring in has actually increased.
At the same time, they've discovered that they could sell virtually everything if they needed to to China and India to a lesser extent.
Those two countries, these are over a billion people in each country, enormous economies.
They want to do business with Russia.
So the absence of the European market per se has not turned out to be this terrible experience that everyone in the West assumed it would be.
Wasn't that a chess game a lot of people saw coming because both India and China cannot self or will never be self-sufficient on energy.
Well, I suppose so.
You know, I don't know that anybody regarded it as a chess game because the difference between Putin, whatever mistakes he made in terms of assumptions, shrink to insignificance next to the mistakes that we've made, I would argue, because we made assumptions about Russia that were just completely wrong, just like the rest of the world.
Number one, Russia is a backward economy that will collapse quickly if we sanction it.
In other words, they're not a true nation state in the Western sense.
They don't have a developed economy.
They can't survive.
We regarded it as some sort of mega-island.
Yeah, yeah.
They don't have a real scientific industrial base.
Now suddenly we see all of these factories in Russia running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, producing ammunition, weapons, missiles, all these things we said they were going to run out of very, very quickly and couldn't replenish.
We said that no one would support Russia, that Russia would be isolated.
Well, in fact, I would argue that most of the world actually backs Russia against us, that we and the Europeans are increasingly on an island all by ourselves.
And Russia is not going to fall apart.
Russia has become more cohesive.
This is a state that rests on the foundation of Orthodox Christianity and Russian ethnicity.
Now, there are plenty of people inside Russia who are not ethnic Russians.
Those people are treated very well.
They are treated as equal partners inside Russia.
All you have to do is look at the Chechens.
And the Chechens are brilliant soldiers, by the way.
I keep hearing people say, well, they're not really that good.
Well, you could not be more wrong.
Those people are superb and they are fiercely loyal.
And by the way, if you go back to the czarist period, every czarist army had contingents in it that were Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Chechens, others, Turkic peoples, Tartars, working with them and fighting with them against whomever the enemy was, whether it was the Ottomans or the Austrians or whomever.
So the point is that Russia is more cohesive than we are.
If you're looking for internal unrest, discontent, divisive forces, you can find those in spades inside American society.
But that's not the case in Russia at all.
So when you look at the economy-wise, one may say, yeah, they're doing better today.
But even prior to the war, they had a big birth and death problem.
I don't know if you've seen the numbers on their birth and death rate.
If you want to pull that up, that's not a good look.
The closest thing you can compare that to as a case study, they're having more people dying than being born.
There's only one other country you can compare this to, and you know who that is.
It's one of their allies.
It's China.
Those guys have the similar issue.
India is the complete opposite.
And we're not doing that great ourselves.
But Russia's not a good place when it comes down to that.
But I want to go back to the thought.
Wait a minute.
Before you leave, Putin agrees with you.
And Putin has tried very, very hard to reverse that.
The first thing he tried to do is to prevent the brain drain.
Everybody with any talent or ability had been getting out of Russia since 1992.
So he's tried to reverse that.
I think he's had some success.
He's tried to encourage people to have.
Oh, by the way, if you don't mind, how did he do the first one?
I'm curious.
Basically, by finding employment for scientists and engineers that otherwise had nowhere to go.
He said, well, we've got to find employment for these people so that we can keep them here.
We have to reward them for their talent.
I think he's done reasonably well there.
When it comes to the rest of the economy, you know, turning around this attitude that why should I bring two or three children into a world that's dominated by alcoholic men that are destroying themselves and committing suicide has turned out to be pretty tough.
I think he's made some progress there.
I think this war is going to help him enormously because I think the war is awakening a sense of Russian identity that is far, far stronger and greater than anything we thought existed.
All you have to do is talk to the people that are inside Russia and ask Russians what they think.
Everybody says, well, they're all afraid of Putin, so they're not going to tell you the truth.
That's not true.
That's just not true.
And we're hearing exactly what I said.
Russia is closer, united more today than I think it has been in at least 30 years or 40 years.
Okay.
So then as a competitor, whoever you go up against, you're going to do better if you put them as being overly calculating.
Meaning, it's naive to just say it's a simplistic war.
Let's just do this.
This is what's going to happen.
We're going to be this, right?
Okay.
You know, for me, sometimes you know how an enemy forces you to do something to come out and say, see, I told you this is what they wanted to do the entire time.
So, for example, I want to get your feedback on this.
So, you know, NATO is trying to do whatever they can to get Ukraine to be part of NATO.
No, that's not what we're trying to do.
No, that's exactly what they're trying to do.
And this is why they promised us they would never do this.
And now they're going to be doing this.
Nope, that's not what they're doing.
So he's pushing, And then all of a sudden, you know, the article comes up from Guardian.
If you want to show that article real quick, I think it's Guardian.
You know which one I'm talking about?
NATO accelerating the membership.
NATO allies back fast track membership for Ukraine says cleverly, U.S. Foreign Secretary says Ukraine has evolved quickly.
As Zelensky tells Summit, it can be engine of green growth.
So all of this time that they're talking about this, this is now leading to, you know, we have to use this as an opportunity to bring him into NATO.
Then Putin's going to come out and say, well, I told you guys this was the entire intention, the entire, you know, this is why I'm doing XYZ because I knew you guys were doing this.
Is he that calculating of a guy that he's forcing his opponent and his enemy to expose their hand?
Or is it just accidentally that this happened because he didn't think the war was going to last this long?
You know, I hesitate.
You know what I'm asking?
Yeah, yeah, I do.
And I think the man's highly intelligent.
And there is no doubt in my mind that he views what you just said as a welcome development, that his opponent is essentially revealing his hand, saying this is what we're really all about.
But I do think at the beginning, he still thought there was a degree of goodwill in the West that he could exploit.
And there is none.
That's what he's found out.
Unpack that.
I think because of his experience watching various administrations, remember he met with Bush.
He subsequently met with Obama and ultimately with Trump.
Each time he was trying to understand us, trying to understand what we were about.
And I think he listened to what was said in private and he convinced himself that these people really aren't the enemy.
You know, they are unreasonably obsessed with or fascinated with NATO, which he doesn't see any reason for.
I mean, quite frankly, you know, since he had, one of the things that's very funny is people say, well, he was going to invade Eastern Europe.
Well, wait a minute.
You told me back in March that his army was small and incapable.
And now you're telling me he was always going to invade.
I mean, which isn't.
It's a bunch of nonsense.
So he wasn't going to invade.
He wanted to do business with everybody badly because he knows that if Russia is to continue to develop and grow, he needs technology.
Most of the technology that he wants is in Germany.
So Germany is enormously important to Russia and always has been.
Well, now he's turning away because he's trying to substitute Chinese, Indian, and other economic powers for German cooperation.
But the bottom line is that I think Putin miscalculated up front.
There was no goodwill.
He thought there was.
And now he knows it.
So what are you going to do about it, Mr. Putin?
And I think the Russians are all standing around saying, okay, we like you.
You've done a great job.
You know, the army is ready.
It's up and running.
It's now large enough and strong enough to do what needs to be done, Mr. Putin.
What are you going to do?
Yeah, and, you know, makes sense.
We're going to see how much of that was, you know, wasn't expecting it.
He was just kind of going in to do it.
And then now all of a sudden the hands are being shown.
But let's look at the other side.
You know, the other side is anytime it happens in sports.
It happens in families.
It happens in companies.
Oh, look what's going on in Amazon.
Six of Jeff Peso's C-suite executives all resigns on the same day.
You know, hey, look at Elon Musk today with Twitter.
1,250 employees resigned.
That place is a civil war today, right?
And they'll say things like this.
And us as readers, we're not in it.
We're like, oh, wow.
Shit's hitting the fan in Twitter.
Shit's hitting the fan in this place.
If you look at it where with Wagner Group, okay, Wagner Group or whatever they want to call themselves, these guys come out and he's a billionaire himself.
He's done well for himself.
And hey, our goal is to do this and our goal is to do that.
And then story comes out saying Putin disappears after Wagner coup, chaos, Daily Mail.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has not been seen publicly since he addressed the nation regarding the Wagner group failed.
Poch emits rumors of Putin's flight to Tver region.
U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, wonderful guy, by the way, noted cracks emerging in the Russian administration.
Putin, in a pre-recorded message, termed the Wagner troops move as a stab in the back of our troops around the people of Russia.
What we are facing now is a treason.
Okay.
And then obviously talks about who Yevgeny is and what he's done, all this stuff, which I'd love for you to talk about that as well.
When that happens from the outset, it's very easy for the enemy to say, look what's going on over there.
Even his people don't support his decision.
He's about to be replaced.
It's about to be very quickly like the last time this happened.
We saw this 25 years ago when this took place.
Within a week, somebody came in and took over Russia.
That's exactly what's going to be happening, right?
Opposing message of how you said this thing's going to be done in Ukraine very quickly.
The other side said, he's about to fall in the next week.
Watch, this thing's going to happen very quickly.
That's not a good look when that happens where the leader of a country has to leave because they're worried about what's going to happen to him.
So one, from the optics standpoint, two, from he's got an 89% approval rating.
If he does, why are people going against him?
And there's clips of people supporting Evgeny saying, hey, thank you for doing this.
Optics matter.
Well, the people that were thanking Evgeny Progozhin were not thanking him for rising up in some sort of uprising.
They were thanking him and the Wagner group for their heroic performance on behalf of the Russian people.
And those same people that were doing that also said, you know, we love Putin.
We love our president.
I think people, first of all, made a mistake of assuming that what was happening was an uprising.
It never was.
And Purgozhin made that very clear.
We'll learn more in the future.
But what we know at this point is the following.
First of all, Putin didn't flee anywhere.
Putin wasn't afraid of anything.
He has 30,000 troops.
He did take 10,000 in the Ministry of Interior Forces.
These are very, very heavily armed police and moved them into various areas because they had intelligence already on many Ukrainian terrorist cells.
They simply went out there and eliminated all of these.
That was simply a case of, let's go do it, get it over with, in the event that there's something going on between them and this group in the Wagner group.
It turns out that Putin did talk directly to Progozhin.
That came out today.
Assuming that's true, he claimed that he was talking to Lukashenko, who's the president of Belarusia.
Now, if that's in fact true and Putin talked to him, then the whole thing ended very quickly.
And the argument for ending it, according to Progozhin, was we don't want to shed any Russian blood.
So then the question is, why did you do it?
And one of the key reasons I think that there are two possibilities.
One is I think Progozhin was speaking for a lot of people who were very dissatisfied with Garazimov and Shoigu because they feel strongly that this Ukrainian war should be brought to a close.
Let's stop it.
The only way to stop it is to advance, to attack, and crush the enemy.
And their view is that there's so little left now on the Ukrainian side.
Why are we waiting?
Let's get this done.
The longer we wait, the greater the possibility that NATO and its friends will find an excuse to intervene, and we don't want that to happen.
Putin's taken the position, well, I'm holding back just in case NATO intervenes.
In other words, I've got hundreds of thousands of troops.
I've got a huge strategic reserve.
If they're dumb enough to intervene, then I've got that on hand that I can employ.
That's a debate that is unfolding.
We're hearing about a shake-up in the Russian high command.
You'll recall that Putin had a meeting with some journalists, a small group of them, and he talked to them for three hours, something you never hear anybody in the United States do, any politician that is.
And he was very straightforward and frank.
We had the transcripts, and one of the things that came up was a discussion about the senior leadership.
And one of the journalists said, you know, we're concerned because we're getting feedback from a lot of soldiers that we can do better, that we need more aggressive, more capable leaders.
And he said, you know, I think there's something to that, and I've got to look into it.
I've got to look at it.
I think we're going to see a shake-up in the high command.
Now, there's an unsubstantiated rumor out there that the commander-in-chief of Russian airborne forces is now taking over the theater.
I don't know.
I haven't seen it confirmed anywhere.
That could be the case.
Also, in the same report, Garazimov is returning to his essential duties as chief of the general staff.
He's no longer going to run anything in connection with the war in Ukraine.
Shoigu seems to be Shoigu.
He's Putin's friend.
I don't think Putin holds him because he's a civilian.
He's not a professional soldier directly responsible for anything that's not right.
So I think we'll see some shake-up in the high command, and that may foreshadow some offensive action.
Now, here's another theory, that this was a carefully constructed show for the West to convince everybody that Russia was falling apart and see who said what and so forth.
I don't buy that.
Yeah, I don't either.
I buy the first argument.
And people say, well, you know, my gosh, how could this happen?
George Marshall relieved 32 Corps and Division commanders during less than three years of fighting during World War II.
Large numbers of senior officers were removed and changed and moved around and given new commands.
This is not unusual in war.
It happens.
If it doesn't happen, you're in a lot of trouble.
I mean, one of the complaints that I've had about the U.S. military and the army in particular is no change.
Why no change?
Well, it's a stagnant pool of people and talent.
You need fresh blood, fresh eyes.
And I'm sure that Putin has discovered that's required in the Russian military.
And I think we'll see it.
Beyond that, I can't speculate anymore because I don't know.
And I haven't talked to anybody who does.
You know the whole thing about, you know, look, if we keep going the way we're going, this NATO thing is going to get done with Ukraine and they're going to become a member.
We've got to kind of slow our roll the way we're going.
Look, whether they go hard or go soft, what do you think are the chances that Ukraine is eventually going to be part of NATO?
Non-existent.
Non-existent.
Yes.
That's not going to happen.
No.
And this is the problem.
We don't seem to understand that if we continue to insist that whatever remains of Ukraine become part of NATO, we're going to see hundreds of thousands of Russian troops on the Polish border.
They're just going to roll right across Ukraine.
They will not stop until they hit the Polish border and the Romanian border.
That's very clear.
That's not what he wants.
And I keep trying to explain this to people.
If you know anything about Western Ukraine, I grew up with people from Western Ukraine.
They do not want anything to do with the Russians.
And Putin knows that.
He doesn't want to run the place, doesn't want to govern it.
He just doesn't want it to be a platform for attack against Russia, which is what we tried to turn it into.
I also think the majority of Ukrainians that are still there, and maybe even the majority that are away, they may not like Russians, but I don't think they support this war.
And the reason I say that is that if you go back to the election that brought Zelensky to power, when he was picked up from nowhere as a comedian and sponsored by Kolomoyski, who's a very powerful oligarch in Ukraine, he ran on a peace platform.
He said, if I'm elected, I'll make peace with Russia.
Well, virtually everybody, something like 89%, went out and voted for it.
They wanted peace with Russia.
There were only a very few people in the far west of Ukraine that didn't support that.
So I don't think Zelensky is by any stretch of the imagination as widely supported as people think.
And, you know, you talk about their situation right now.
He has press gangs, press gangs or groups of people that go out and forcibly drag Ukrainians into the Ukrainian military because they need manpower.
He's now doing that in the far western portions of Ukraine where he said he wouldn't do it, in Galicia and in the Carpathian, what used to be called the Carpathian Military District.
Ukrainians are leaving.
Ukrainians are moving out.
There are reports now that Ukrainians are actually stoning and in some cases shooting at these press gangs from the Ukrainian army in western Ukraine, that they don't want to go to war.
They don't want to fight.
We're getting reports that platoon and company-sized elements down in southern Ukraine are defecting.
They're simply saying, look, we've had it.
We can't do this anymore.
And they're coming across and surrendering.
And very, very smartly, the Russians from the beginning have treated all of the Ukrainian prisoners very, very well.
They have not harmed them.
They have not abused them or brutalized them.
They facilitated prisoner exchanges, whereas we've got videotape of Ukrainian soldiers kneecapping with AK-47s, Russian knees of soldiers that are in captivity.
We have video of them executing because the Ukrainian soldiers that did it actually posted it on YouTube on the internet.
So he's run a very good campaign in the sense that he's made it very clear, we don't want to kill you.
We're not really the enemy.
We want this to end too.
And it has had an effect inside Ukraine that we are not hearing about.
These things are not reported to us in the Western media because it undermines the narrative.
Did you see the Wall Street Journal story about a few days ago of Wagner mutiny revives U.S. fears over control of Russia's nuclear weapons?
The Wagner parliamentary, parliamentary, paramilitary group failed insurrection in Russia, led by Yevgeny, has reignited concerns over control of Russia's nuclear arsenal.
As U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken put it, anytime you have a major country like Russia that has signs of instability, that's something of concern.
Despite these tensions, U.S. officials stated that they detected no irregular activities or changes in alert levels related to Russia's nuclear forces.
Is that a real threat or is that just a story to over exaggerate what's really going on to put fear in the American people?
Absolutely.
Second one.
Yes, absolutely.
You're not hearing anything truthful from this administration.
And the media is conspiring with the administration to misinform the public.
It's simple truth.
The same thing is happening in Western Europe.
Nobody is being told the truth.
The only way to get the truth is to talk to people who are over there on the ground.
Fortunately, I have some people who are willing to do that and pass me information.
And we forget that there are people in Poland that have grandparents who are Ukrainians living in eastern Ukraine.
We forget that there are people who are Slovakian, some are Czech, who actually have brothers-in-law or cousins working in banks in Moscow.
In other words, there are people over there that are telling the truth.
I just don't think we're getting it, and I don't see any evidence that that's going to change anytime soon.
And that worries me because if we continue to push this false narrative and we make it abundantly clear that there will be no negotiation, which is what we're effectively saying, right now, Putin has the following choice.
You can pull all your forces out of Ukraine.
You can prepare to commit suicide in public and remove yourself from office, and then we'll talk.
I mean, that's absurd.
There's no chance of any of that happening.
So where are we headed?
I think we're headed to lots of Russian troops on the Polish border unless someone wakes up in Europe.
And I think it could happen in Germany and it could happen in France, where those governments are very fragile right now.
I think Schultz's approval rating is about 32 or 33 percent.
If they get rid of him and you get a new coalition involving the alternative for Germany and maybe even the left on the far left, those two groups are all opposed to this war.
And there is no support in the German population for going to war with Russia.
If you ask anybody in Germany, are you prepared to suit up and go to the Eastern Front?
Everybody says, are you out of your mind?
Of course not.
If that were to happen, then Putin would have someone he could talk to in Berlin.
And Berlin then could conceivably lead us out of this dead-end road.
But that hasn't happened yet.
And again, I think that's something else that Putin is watching for.
I think that's another reason why he's held back.
Hadn't Russia and Germany grown close over energy deals and pipelines?
And there was this, wasn't there a story narrative that they, you know, thanks to the Russians turning off the pipeline as part of the Ukraine conflict, these poor Germans are going to be freezing in the winter.
And so aren't they fairly in recent times fairly dependent on Russia and probably, you know, in a position where it might not be a bad idea to be the moderating voice?
Right.
In 1914, Russia and Germany were each other's principal trading partners.
In other words, when the war broke out, they were already each other's principal trading partners.
Interestingly enough, the British were entirely dependent on the optics industry in Germany for all of its military applications.
I mean, these things happen.
Sometimes dumb ideas become policy without anybody consulting on the wisdom of doing something.
In 1941, Russia and Germany were each other's principal trading partners.
Germany could not have launched any offensive in the West in 1940 without copious amounts of steel and coal and iron and oil and gas and so forth from Russia.
Impossible.
Grain poured into Germany.
In other words, this is a symbiotic relationship that's been there for a long time.
This existed between Prussia and Russia, and the Prussians were always pro-Russian as a result and worked to avoid any conflict.
This was Bismarck's argument.
The Austrians were less open-minded, but they too sort of shut up and colored because they weren't in a position to do much.
My point is, this is a natural relationship.
It benefits both sides.
We have looked at this and said, this is evil and bad because this makes Germany dependent upon Russia.
But we forget that Russia was also dependent upon Germany.
And what happened in 1941 in July that changed everything?
It's called Lend-Lease from the United States.
We compensated Russia with everything that it had formerly been receiving from Germany.
Technology, steel, locomotives, you name it, all the resources, aluminum, all the precious metals, everything that the communists in Moscow needed to survive the German assault, we started providing immediately in July 1941, and we were not even part of the war.
It was illegal.
And FDR did that.
Now, I'm not here to debate the wisdom of that.
That's another subject.
But my point is, Russia also is dependent on Germany, just as Germany has been dependent on Russia.
So the notion that it's a one-way street is just inaccurate and wrong.
So, Colonel, worst case, best case, worst case scenario here, best case, obviously we know what the best case is.
They figured out it's done.
There's a way to coexist and everything goes smoothly.
How bad is the worst case?
This question's been asked.
Many people have gone to different places.
Give different elements of worst case.
Here's the thing that concerns me most of all, that could lead to the quote-unquote worst case, which I regard as a nuclear exchange.
All right.
No one in Russia, Putin, no one in Beijing, neither government has an interest in launching a nuclear weapon.
I mean, they understand that if you use a nuclear weapon, the rapidity with which war will escalate is mind-numbing.
That's the great myth of the so-called tactical nuclear weapon that you hear from the U.S. Air Force and others and the Navy.
Oh, well, we can shoot a nuke, a low-yield, only five kilotons, only kill maybe 30 or 40,000 people.
No one will notice.
In other words, this is a useful battlefield weapon.
Outrageous nonsense.
It is not.
If any nuclear weapon is used, everybody escalates.
And the reason for that is simple.
Everyone's afraid that if they don't use their arsenal, they'll lose it.
So we don't want to get there.
How do we get there if we're stupid?
If we're stupid and we try to engage the Russians conventionally, we'll lose.
If there's one thing the Russians can handle, it's conventional warfare.
You've already seen that in Ukraine.
They can defeat us conventionally.
We don't have enough forces to send.
We don't have enough troops on active duty.
If we try to suddenly mobilize and send someone across the Atlantic, we're going to encounter a huge Russian submarine fleet, which will sink everything that tries to cross the Atlantic.
We will have no support out of anyone in Northeast Asia.
The Koreans, the Japanese, nobody wants to be part of this war.
So if you think you're going to have a back door into Russia across the Pacific, you've lost your mind.
So if we engage them in conventional terms, we will lose.
And we don't want to do that.
In other words, let's not push that envelope.
But that means that you have to recognize two things.
First of all, in Europe, these borders have changed dozens of times over a thousand years.
Everybody looks at this border that constitutes the current Ukrainian construct and says, oh, well, that can never change.
It's absurd.
It never made any sense when Lenin created it because the Ukrainians lived primarily west of the Dnieper and a little bit to the east to the very northern edge of white Russia.
That's it.
And this thing called Ukraine, Ukraina, which means on the edge or the margin or something, had been ruled by the Duchy of Lithuania, then the Kingdom of Poland, then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for hundreds of years.
And ownership passed back and forth with Russia because the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth fell apart largely on its own.
My point is that we are imputing a degree of legitimacy to these borders that was never there.
And that was Putin's speech that he gave months ago, long before the war, saying, look, these borders don't make any sense because you've got all these Russians in the east.
Brzezinski, when he was alive, pointed to that and said, that's dangerous.
We need to sit down and talk with the Russians and fix this problem because otherwise the presence of all of these Russians in eastern Ukraine is going to end up being a catalyst for war.
Now, we thought, we thought we could get the Ukrainians to maintain a quote-unquote multinational, multicultural state where these people would be accepted and could live as co-equals.
This is the Minx Accords that you said later people said, no, we were lying.
Yeah.
But the truth is, in Europe, how well have multinational, multilingual, multicultural states worked?
Well, not so good.
You know, the Soviet Union fell apart instantly.
And what do you have now?
Multiple nations.
Yugoslavia fell apart very rapidly.
You have multiple nations.
Czechoslovakia fell apart instantly because Czechs and Slovaks didn't want to live together.
This is the history of Europe.
And historically, great powers have come to terms with each other and said, look, let's come up with this compromise.
It may not be perfect.
We may have to revisit this in 20 years, but let's get peace.
In other words, let's establish peace first.
Then we can come back and revisit it in the future as necessary to ensure everybody's interests are met.
We won't do that.
We have built ourselves up into this foolish notion that we're the indispensable superpower.
We must dominate everything.
Nothing on this planet can happen without us.
Wrong.
This planet went on for thousands of years before we showed up.
You know, we can go anywhere you want with the Armenians, with the Turks.
Talk about Azerbaijan.
I was talking to somebody and they said, you realize these are Azeri Turks.
And this was a member of Congress.
Said, what's that?
I mean, Americans don't know anything that happens beyond their borders, frankly.
We don't study it.
And the people that are governing us aren't paying attention to it.
Right now, you try to explain Ukraine and they don't understand what that is, what it really means.
It's history.
If they understood any of it, we wouldn't be involved in it.
We're not competent to sort this out.
The Europeans need to sort it.
Why, though?
Unpack that.
So if we did know the history, we wouldn't be involved in it.
Why wouldn't we be involved in it?
Because there has been so much hatred and bloodshed in that part of the world over the last hundred years that it's virtually impossible for us to go in and reconcile all of these parties.
In other words, to some extent, it has to be fought out.
And I think that's already largely happened.
And if we were smart, we would sit down and recognize that this has happened and say enough is enough.
How much more blood has to be spilled?
I don't think we need to spill any more blood in that region.
And we need to redraw the borders.
We need to make Western Ukraine, whatever remains of it, neutral.
You remember the whole two days before 9-11, Rumsfeld comes out saying $2.3 trillion of money has been missing.
And, you know, that whole story of what happened and a 9-11 took place.
And hey, you know, weapons of mass destruction.
We have to do all of that that led to there was no weapons of mass destruction.
And that one video where President Bush says, well, you know what, what's going on right now?
And they're, you know, trying to take over Iraq.
He says, oops, you know, similar thing.
I don't know if you've seen when he's given that speech.
So a lot of people are sitting there saying, okay, so who wants this thing to continue?
Eisenhower prepped everybody right after he was done saying, be careful with the whole military-industrial complex.
JFK was kind of pushing the envelope saying, hey, we've got to also go through this.
Trump was also saying there's no need to go into half these worlds, wars, why do we have 780 military bases?
But who wants this thing to continue?
And who benefits the most if this thing continues?
Well, remember that the bases that you're referring to are really a product of the Cold War and the fact that after the Second World War ended, we were literally the only man standing.
Europe was in ruins.
The Soviet Union was by no means strong enough to wage a new war.
They'd lost, we think now they've lost during the war, 39 million.
So we were the only power.
Japan was prostrate.
We had to stay in Japan because we had left Japan.
It could have become a Soviet satellite.
In other words, most of the things that we did after 1945 have to do with communism, containing it, suppressing it.
And remember, the idea was that you don't confront directly militarily.
You contain it until it finally implodes.
Guess what?
It worked.
They imploded.
We like to say, well, we caused it, but the truth is the system itself was so dysfunctional, it was going to implode on its own.
Totally get it.
So then this ends, and then you've got a lot of people in Washington say, well, we hold all the cards.
We're the only superpower.
In other words, we're the British Empire after Waterloo.
You know, we can intervene everywhere.
We can reshape the world in our own image.
You have this man, Wolfowitz, who wrote a document in the Pentagon that essentially says we're going to become altruistic imperialists.
We're going to go over there, right the wrongs, make the world safe for us, make it safe for our lives, make it safe for Israel, whatever, you know, go down the list.
This was Wolfowitz.
Everybody adopted this and said, this is great because there's no one who can challenge us.
Remember Desert Storm?
Desert Storm sent this message.
Look, we've got things nobody else has.
Nobody can take us on.
Well, the truth is that everything that we had in Desert Storm as a monopoly has been lost.
And all the technologies and capabilities that we had then that no one else did are now everywhere.
Everybody's got them.
And you can see that happening right now in Ukraine.
So the world has changed, but we did not.
We decided, well, you know, we're going to run this place and we're going to structure the financial system, the global financial system, to suit us.
We're going to use it to force people to do the things we want them to do.
And we're doing it all in the name of this crusading liberal democratic approach.
In other words, we're crusaders for liberal democracy.
Well, that doesn't hold up to close scrutiny.
I mean, let's face it, that's a lot of nonsense.
Behind the scenes, you have all of these people invested in personally and in terms of their wealth invested in this global structure.
We call it security, and the rest of the world looks at as potentially dangerous American military presence.
I don't know that Americans realize that this hangover from the Cold War is primarily responsible for it.
But if you have lots of money going into weapon systems, into programs, into policies, into foreign aid that have been going there and going there and going there and going there, you have lots of people on the hill and you have lots of donors who control the hill that profit from that.
They don't want that to stop.
And that was Trump's great sin, if you will, in Washington.
He's disrupting the money flow.
If Trump gets away with this, we're going to go broke.
We'll lose money.
That was the reason Trump was hated, despised, and successfully subverted, I would add.
But we still have to do it.
We still have to stop it.
And we're up against a group of people in Washington who want to keep it going.
Now, when does this end?
When, you know, what had Ben Stein said, it goes on until it can't.
And, you know, we can debate about the true structure of the economy, the underlying fundamentals, which I don't think are particularly good.
I'm there with Ricards and others who think we're headed for serious trouble.
But there are lots of people who say, oh, no, we can print money in perpetuity and do whatever we want.
I think it's going to end.
When it ends, what happens historically is the empire, the overseas possessions vanish.
Troops come home, the investments end, and you start over from scratch.
And I think that's where we're headed.
When it ends, will Putin still be the leader of Russia?
Of course.
Oh, remember, he's dying of terminal cancer.
Remember, he was supposed to be dead at least a year or two ago.
Right.
He'll probably be around.
So what you're saying is, if you're saying when it ends, he's still going to be the leader of Russia, you're saying it's going to end pretty soon.
It's not going to be ending any time.
You know, I don't know.
You know, the black swan concept.
I think there's a pond out there with lots of black swans swimming around.
When will one of them take off?
You know, if I knew that, I'd be a billionaire.
I'd be as rich as you.
Does BlackRock want it to continue?
Does BlackRock want it to keep going?
Well, I think BlackRock wants to control as much of Ukraine as it can.
Monsanto and a number of other firms are all in there because you're talking about some of the richest agricultural land in the world.
You have about 15, 20 feet of black earth.
I mean, it was so rich that during the war, Hitler tried to load boxcars with it and bring it back to Germany.
That's how valuable it is.
I've had Russians and Ukrainians tell me, you know, stick anything you want in the ground.
It'll grow something.
It's that good.
So I'm sure that there are lots of people who would like to get at lots of people who would like to get at Russia's resources.
I mean, there's always that aspect in any war.
But will this work?
I don't know.
I mean, I feel badly, personally, for the Ukrainians because they're the victims in all of this.
Tom, do you have any questions on the Ukraine-Russia Wagner before I move on to the next topic?
Not on Wagner.
It's a very interesting perspective to see that, you know, what it was and what it wasn't as far as you see.
And also, I think the history lesson is very instructive because most Americans don't understand that Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe in terms of the amount of wheat, corn, sugar beets, and all the things that we have over here that are our principal crops.
I mean, that is phenomenal.
And now this is all being disrupted, and there is a big parlor game going on to see who's going to win the spoils of rebuilding it the way, you know, Halliburton rebuilt, you know, dams and power plants and sewage treatment plants and big infrastructure in Iraq.
No, I think that's right.
Keep this in mind.
During World War I, 400,000 Germans starved to death in the last two and a half years of the war because of the British Royal Navy's blockade.
Enough food simply could not reach them.
These weren't the soldiers.
These are citizens in the villages.
They weren't the soldiers.
And in fact, I knew people when I was an exchange student whose grandparents had made the decision to die so that the rest of the family would have food.
I mean, that's how bad it was in Germany and Austria.
When World War II breaks out, what is Hitler obsessed over?
Ukraine.
He wants to get it.
He wants to control it and hold it because of its capacity to produce food.
So that tends to distort the whole strategic approach to the war in Russia.
That's how important it is.
And there's no doubt that people would like to get control of it.
Now, the point is, if it's going to be a neutral place, I don't know if anybody is going to help the Ukrainians sort through all of this so that they are not stolen blind.
But I guess that could happen.
So you've said where today we have 44-star generals to 44 one-star, 44-stars.
It's 44 four-star generals today to 1 million total soldiers.
1.1.
1.1.
In World War II, we had 10 four-star generals to 16 million soldiers.
Let me see now.
I've got to go back and look at this.
You had Eisenhower, MacArthur, Arnold, and MacArthur, Arnold, Eisenhower, and Marshall.
So that's four.
And then you had Nimitz, Leahy, and King, three.
That's seven.
So at the height of the war, in other words, 1943-44, you had seven four-stars in command of a 12.2 million man force.
Now, that was not an accident.
That was by design.
Because Marshall made it very clear that he did not have time to argue with people.
And see, as soon as you create another four-star, you have to argue with the four-star.
I'm a four-star.
You have to listen to me.
Marshall didn't want to be bothered.
This changes in January of 1945 because we knew the war was going to end.
And we started promoting people not to positions of greater power and influence, but as honorifics.
In other words, we make Bradley a four-star.
Thank you for coming kind of thing.
We picked other people and made them four stars.
And then, of course, the men that I just mentioned to you became five-stars.
The seven.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Most of them became five stars because they had done such wonderful things.
I don't know that Leahy did.
I think he may have retired as a four-star, but the bottom line is there was an understanding that you had to have unity of effort.
There is no unity of effort unless you have unity of command.
There must be someone in command in charge at every level.
In other words, who is in charge?
Remember, there's this wonderful scene in Kubrick's movie about Apocalypse Now.
And I think Martin Sheen walks up as a captain and says to a soldier, who's in command here?
I thought you were.
In other words, everything's falling apart because nobody knows who's in charge.
So Marshall was absolutely hard over to prevent that from happening.
And I think King had a similar attitude so that he didn't want to have to fight with other Navy four-stars over the disposition of resources, the allocation of landing craft, the allocation of oilers and tankers, the allocation of carriers and submarines and so forth.
But the point with that from there to today, 1.1 million today to say 12.2 million in 1944, right?
Okay.
How many of the 12.2 million were drafted?
How many of the 12.2 million didn't volunteer?
They were just kind of, you have to go out there and do it.
Do you know the number on what the 12.2 was it?
Two-thirds?
I would surmise at least two-thirds.
Okay, let's just say two-thirds.
So let's just say 8 million of the 12 million were drafted.
4 million were there.
So that stat, what does that stat say about us today?
Does it mean, this is how I read it, and then correct me and challenge me and say, no, that's not what that means.
So the way I see it is, are four-star generals today turning into politicians?
Are they more politicians than their military leaders?
And two, do I feel safer with the military we have today of 1.1 million, where you're looking at the advancement other countries are making investments into, say, a China, say a, you know, any of our enemies that we have.
They're making investments into things where you're reading about.
You know, for a longest time, people would say, well, there's a pandemic coming.
There's a pandemic.
And Bill Gates 2015, whatever the speech was, a pandemic one day is going to come.
A pandemic one day is going to come.
I was like, yeah, whatever.
I'm going to go back to my business.
I'm going to watch the Laker again.
I'm going to go back to my job.
Now they're talking about, well, what are you going to do when the banking system collapses?
Come on, man.
What are you talking about?
Go back to playing the video game on Fortnite.
And what are you going to do when they do a cyber attack on you?
And this is what's going to, what are you going to do when they attack you from this way?
Okay.
So are we safer today, more experienced today, with a stronger military to defend our enemies?
Or were we more capable of defending our country and defending our freedom 30 years ago than we are today?
Well, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago, the military establishment understood that its preeminent mission was to defend the United States and the American people.
Does engaging in an intervention in eastern Ukraine against Russia constitute defending the United States and the American people?
I would argue it doesn't.
Does removing Qaddafi in charge of Libya, who had effectively agreed to do everything we asked of him, does that constitute an act of defense of the United States?
I would say no.
I don't think we've been defending anything for a long time.
And indeed, we don't even defend our borders.
For 100 years, from roughly 1848, 49 until 1948, the United States Army secured and guarded the border with Mexico.
It also secured and guarded most of the border with Canada.
We had dozens of cavalry regiments, and that was their whole mission in life.
Every general of the Second World War, Eisenhower, Patton, Pershing, everybody, they had all served on the Mexican border.
That was considered a strategically vital mission.
All right.
Suddenly, there's nobody there.
The borders are open.
What's wrong with this picture?
We no longer need to secure our borders.
So I would argue that we got a real problem because right now, where's the money go?
It goes into exotic things designed to sustain us overseas.
Most of our investment goes into things that we want to use to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries.
The first principle of our foreign policy as enunciated by Washington and was followed really up until the time of McKinley when he decided to go into the Spanish-American War was non-interference in other people's affairs.
Our goal was to stay out of wars.
Wars were destructive.
They were losers, bad for business.
We didn't want anything to do with them.
So that's the first thing.
Second thing is these 44 four-stars, imagine trying to get anything done.
How many of these people are in the regional unified commands?
How many of these people are in functional commands?
In other words, you've got a strategic command, you've got transportation command, then you've got central command, and then you have what used to be Pacific Command.
We've now extended that and called it Indo-Pacific Command.
Really?
What are we doing in the Indian Ocean?
I mean, what's our goal?
Are we interested in colonizing India, for God's sakes?
I mean, this is absurd.
I remember when Africa Command was created, and I was still on active duty, and I said to the man, one of the men who was going over there, I said, has anybody considered the possibility that large numbers of Africans are offended by the fact that we have established a military command called Africa Command?
How would we respond if the Chinese or the Russians stood up a headquarters with four-star general in command and other dozen other generals?
It's called America Command.
Why do you need America Command?
Well, we're going to attack America.
Why do you need Africa Command?
Well, we want to intervene in Africa, effectively attack it.
This kind of thing is crazy.
So all of these people are sort of minor satraps.
In other words, it's minor emirs, if you will.
And you can't run the show.
You can't get anything done that makes any sense.
And each of them has an interest in building up his or her fiefdom.
In other words, they have to exaggerate their importance to American national security.
You know, so the man who's got Southcom, Southern Command, who deals with the Caribbean and Latin America, he needs X number of resources.
The person over here in Africa needs X number of resources.
The person's in European command and so forth.
Do we really need all of these commands?
Well, you live in a world today with instantaneous satellite-based communications.
The reason, if you look at army posts in the West, that you have an army post in Fort Leavenworth, and then you have an army post at Fort Riley, and then you had another army post in Western Kansas.
It was one day ride on a horse from post to post.
That was the logic and the rationale for where we built posts, communications.
What do we need all these commands for?
We don't.
We are not living in the mid-20th century.
It's over.
We live in a very different world today.
And how much does it benefit us as Americans to intervene in the internal affairs of others?
I would argue, what, $7 trillion lost in the Middle East between Afghanistan and Iraq?
That doesn't even begin to address the damage we've done to our own citizens that served in uniform, that need medical care for decades.
Is this a benefit to us?
And where did all of this money come from?
Well, I guess we know where that, the answer to that.
It came off the printing press.
We borrowed it.
We need a lot of printing presses for this, though.
When you're looking at the budget here for national defense, it's give or take somewhere around $840, $850 billion.
Who determines where this money goes to?
Like, if we were to say, you know, we're going to buy this, we're going to buy this, we're going to buy this, we need to invest into this.
Who's in the room that decides here's what we need to invest into to be ready for future wars that could take place 5, 10, 15 years from now, not the wars that we fought 10, 20 years ago.
Who makes that decision?
Well, you're asking a question of who?
There is no one person that makes those decisions.
You have lots of different people from the various armed services and commands, as well as the federal agencies that support them that have input to that decision.
In other words, they have wish lists.
They have recommendations.
And then you have the Congress.
And remember that Congress has a very different incentive structure.
When you go to the House of Representatives or the Senate, if you turn to Mitch McConnell and say, you know, Mitch, we don't think we really need Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
You know, Fort Campbell, Kentucky, we don't need to be there.
We could move those forces elsewhere.
They would be more readily deployable and readily.
I'm offended.
I was at the Hunter First Airborne.
That would offend me.
Yeah, but you understand you say that, and the whole Kentucky delegation will throw itself in front of that on-rushing train.
Well, the building knows that.
The generals in the Army know that.
They want to keep that 101st, which in my judgment is increasingly an anachronistic organization.
If you look at what's happening in Ukraine, what happens to all the helicopters?
So what are we doing with this thing?
You can say the same thing about the 82nd.
I mean, there's a wonderful, wonderful book that's called When Failure Thrives.
It's all about the failure of airborne operations for the last 60, 70 years.
So if that's true, do we need 15,000 paratroopers?
You know, we haven't even begun to address the Marine Corps.
And the Marines are fighting within themselves right now over what they think they should be doing.
Well, has anybody decided what the mission for Marines ought to be who is actually in charge on the civilian side?
Uh-uh.
So the people on the Hill, they love these headquarters.
Oh, you're sending a four-star to Tuscaloosa, nowhere, Alabama.
Oh, we love that.
How much money are you going to spend for the building that the four-star is going to occupy?
And how many jobs are you bringing?
This is crazy.
But this is a result of the Cold War because the Cold War created the appetite and the opportunity.
Our budget was $3 billion in 1944.
I just looked it up right now.
So $3 billion, seven four-star generals, let's just say, less than 10 four-star generals.
They're sitting there.
They're talking what to do with this.
I wonder in the following way where the last time we had a president that served in the military was what?
Was it President Bush?
It was senior, right?
Senior is the last one.
So that's 30 years.
That's a long time ago since we had a president that served in a military.
W was just the reserves.
W was just the reserves, right?
But when you think about this, how does, like, what I would want, and I don't know if you have the answer to this question, how does China decide where they invest into their military?
How does Russia decide where to invest into the military?
If we were to pull up our top five biggest enemies, how did they make the decision on where the money is being invested in?
Are they unified in the decisions that's being made there versus in America, it's political what the investments are being made.
I mean, we're living in an era right now, which I don't know if you agree with this or not.
According to, you know, some of our guys, whether you want to talk about Kirby, whether you want to talk about, you know, many of the generals we have today, the super soldier today is part of the LGBTQ community.
You know, today's super soldier has got to be a trans because, you know, we're learning.
I mean, that's the way to go, right?
And imagine the amount of innovation and research we've done to realize that the best soldiers are them.
But I want to know how my enemy decides the budget.
Do they sit in a room and they're fully unified?
Do they sit in a room and they say, hey, how about we make that company blackrock all this money?
How about we get this contract to Raytheon Northrop Grumman?
How about we get these guys that 30 years ago we had 50 different companies that we bought military equipment from?
Now they bought each other out.
There's only five of them left today.
You know, why don't we need that guy's money for campaign distribution?
That's the part I have a concern with, because if we're going to make these investments like this, that's going to benefit a company out there.
Well, we're not really protecting this country.
We're just figuring out a way to get re-elected and get more campaign donations.
Oh, listen, you've broken the code.
There's no question about it.
And it's useful to just pause for a second and talk about the Chinese dilemma.
People are imputing all sorts of things to China right now.
They are magically shipping all the fentanyl to the United States.
No, they're selling fentanyl to the drug cartels, and it's not the government.
It's organized crime in China, actually, that's involved in this.
And the organized crime problem in China is enormous.
There are 1.4 billion Chinese.
And every morning, Xi does not wake up and think about how he can defeat the United States.
He wakes up and wonders how he can stay in power, how he can manage this chaotic mess, how he can hold it together.
I mean, he just destroyed the shadow banking industry in China.
That's beginning to have a terrible effect on the economy because shadow banking was the source of many of the loans that were necessary to sustain growth.
They got a growth problem in China.
They have a huge corruption problem in China.
A few years ago, they arrested and then ultimately executed, as I understand it, the man who was responsible for shipbuilding because he was deliberately overseeing the building of faulty holes in the PLA Navy.
You know, everybody says, well, this is a 300-ship navy and China has outstripped us.
100 of those vessels are Coast Guard vessels.
Nobody ever brings that up.
Nobody ever brings up the fact that Chinese really don't like to go to sea.
They don't want to be out there.
It's not a seafaring nation.
They have just started a submarine fleet that is nuclear and nuclear capable.
Well, we've been doing that since the 1950s.
It takes decades to build a force like that, to train the people, to organize them and equip them effectively.
China has huge problems just holding itself together.
So I think we should set China aside and understand that.
It is not this juggernaut that is led in one particular direction.
I would see it as a nation that has to feed itself, to feed itself.
It has to have commerce, to have commerce.
A lot of that has to go over land or oversea.
Those things are real, but that doesn't mean that it's a juggernaut bent on war with anybody.
Now let's turn to Russia, which is a smaller entity, and it's easier to understand, I think.
Putin was responsible for tearing apart, reducing, and trying to modernize the old Soviet military structure.
The old Soviet military structure was enormous.
They had over a million men under arms in just the Soviet army.
They had vast stores of equipment.
Most of this stuff had long since become obsolete.
This is the problem when you try to modernize a large force.
You can't do it without facing the very high probability that 10 years after you've modernized it, it's hopelessly obsolete and you have no savings with which to do anything else.
So he tried to make it smaller, and he succeeded.
He made it much smaller.
He tried to professionalize it.
He tried to stop the brutality inside the old army barracks, which was so characteristic, not just of the Soviet military, but also the czarist armies.
He had some success.
Then it turns out that he had to use it, and it was too small for the purpose that he decided to use it for.
So now it's up to $750,000.
There's a plan to make it $1.2 million.
Congratulations, President Biden.
Congratulations, NATO.
You just created the very thing that you said you were setting out to stop.
Do you understand?
And so in Russia, one man at the top with the defense minister has enormous power.
He has much more power than Biden, much more power than almost anybody else who sits in that position to allocate resources, to establish factories, to disestablish factories, to build new formations, to disestablish old formations.
Think of Putin not as Stalin, but as a czar.
He is roughly as powerful today as the Tsar of Russia was before World War I. That's the kind of power and influence he wields.
And I'm sure he's under a lot of criticism right now because there are always people in Russia that say, we need a bigger force.
We need a bigger force.
They border how many countries?
How many thousands of miles across is the place?
Shit.
I mean, you know, it's legitimate, but he tried very hard to economize.
Now he's stuck with the requirement to maintain a much larger, more lethal military force.
And you wonder how long until, you know, the whole thing about 40 laws of power.
I don't know if you've read 40 laws of power, Robert Green, rule number one, never outshine the master.
There's always somebody that's looking for you to fall so they can kind of take over your position.
You're sitting there saying these guys are probably, even in the mob, it happens all the time where, you know, Paul Castellano is the boss and then John Gotti and Sammy DeBoe, hey, I kind of want to take the throne and then John becomes the boss.
And then, hey, is Sammy going to want to do the same thing I did to Paul?
There may be a little bit of that paranoia in him as well for how long can I really keep this thing together?
People are now rich.
They now have money more than they've ever had before.
People were not this rich.
They are richer than ever before.
So those are certain concerns and fears that they have.
But you know what you made me think about?
You made me think about that the number one person, maybe, I may be wrong.
Rob, if you want to pull up this article, if we were to say who is the number one person that wants the war to continue, could be Zelensky, because Zelensky just recently said that there would be no elections until the war is over with.
And by the way, this was verified by Snopes.
If you want to go to Snopes, I know some of our friends are watching.
Let's go all the way to the bottom.
It says true.
So he probably doesn't want the war.
I mean, you've got a monopoly.
If the war continues, he's going to be able to stay in power for as long as possible.
And maybe his, you know, he's already had Ben Stiller that came and visited him.
He's at Sean Penn, I believe, that spent some time with him.
Who knows at this pace?
He may get De Niro.
He may get Pacino.
He may get a lot of different Hollywood celebrities show up and nicer documentaries.
I think the sweaters are becoming higher quality sweaters.
You know, there may be a sponsorship by, you know, Sachs 5th.
I don't know.
Maybe Valenciaga, some of these guys can do stuff with him.
But he also probably doesn't want the war to stop.
I know it's a very strange, paranoid way of looking at it, but there are many situations like that where when there's controversy, even here, sometimes when a war is going on, we kind of typically tend to re-elect the same person because we're worried about the mess that's going on.
Do you think there's an element of him wanting the war to continue?
The population of Ukraine at the beginning of this war was 30.5 million, at least officially, that's what they said.
If you go back into the 90s, it was well over 50 million.
Ukraine has been losing population for a long time because it's a failed state.
It's a terribly corrupt and dysfunctional society.
That was true long before Zelensky showed up.
The war has made matters worse.
So now you're down to, we think, between 18 and 20 million people still living in Ukraine.
Wait, from 30 and a half million to, can you, can you vary?
34.5 million.
So that's smaller in California now.
Can you look this up, Rob?
Okay, so I see the 50 million.
That I totally see, the population from 45 in 2013 to 44 in 2020 to 41.
Where's the state?
The camera's hiding it, sir.
So can you come up a little bit, Rob, so I can see it?
Okay, 2022, 38.
Under the 38 line, pat.
So what is?
Can you google Ukraine population today?
Oh my god.
If that's the case well, I don't know that they're that their data has caught up with reality.
These are the numbers that are coming out of Europe.
Well, it's 21 to two years from now.
So you're saying the pop.
If that can be verified.
I don't think it was that high in in 2021.
I think that's an exaggeration because Ukrainians have been leaving forever.
I mean, you know I go.
I'm sure you travel.
I've been on business in London and Vienna sure, and inevitably, I end up talking to someone who's Ukrainian, and they speak perfect English, they're well educated, and I say well, good lord, what are you doing here in London?
And they always say well, I can't make a living in Ukraine, I can't survive there.
You know you got to become part of some mob boss's structure if you want to get anywhere.
I don't want to do that.
And then, of course, i've said well, why don't you come to the United States?
And they say immediately, I can't get in.
You know, I say so, you're Ukrainian, you're well educated, you speak English, you're obviously smart, and we can't get you in.
And you know we ran this stupid thing called a lottery for years.
Every month two, two people's names were pulled out.
And you're in a European capital.
It's just ridiculous.
You know, we could have had this guy in the United States, where he could have been very productive.
That's another story.
But my point is I don't think that that original number of 41 is is accurate at all.
I think there were several million who had already left because they saw no future for themselves.
Remember, this also counts Ukrainians, citizens who are overseas.
They, they include them, but they're gone.
They're never going to go back in Germany, where this is also the expat workforce.
So this really isn't representing no, and i've got friends in Germany right now are telling me, and they've got Ukrainians arriving by the train load every day and they've told me that in their conversations with Ukrainians, every single person says, I will never go back.
I will never.
By the way, I found this article, Rob.
If you want to pull this up because this is uh uh, uh.
Can you pull up this article?
I just sent you what it shows.
So 1990, it says it was 51 million.
Then, a few months ago, it says it was 36 million.
And then, if you pull up this article.
This says, um, I don't know what this organization is tax.
Uh, pull up that article right there and go up a little bit.
According to a think tank, zoom in.
According to a think tank, since the start of hostilities in Ukraine last february, 8.6 million people have left the country and have not returned.
I would say that's wrong.
Uh, what i'm getting from my European sources in Poland and Germany is that it's over 12 million and climbing every day and I think tasks kind of Russian Reuters controlled by the government.
Is that correct?
Oh, I would assume.
So well, got it.
So this is a.
This is a Russian site as well.
Okay, got it.
Well, I mean if, if these numbers are accurate, people are leaving.
You also saw the article that came out that people from Russia were also leaving.
How much, how much has a Russian population lost the last 12 months?
I think they lost uh, a few hundred thousand.
That that left as soon as it became clear there was going to be a war and frankly, a lot of the Russians Have said, when they've been asked about, good, let's get them out of here.
They don't really want to be Russians anyway, the hell with them.
That's more their mindset.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Russians' historic population.
But remember that at least 2 million Russians who were in Ukraine have moved to Russia.
Can you go a little lower?
Rob, I don't know where you just went.
You were good where you were at.
Rob, what'd you do?
You just did some magic there, buddy.
You went, okay, there you go.
Russia's historic population drops bearing demographic crisis amid war in Ukraine.
Russia to need up to 1 million immigrants a year for eight years to maintain current population levels.
Go a little lower to see what else the article says.
Keep going lower.
Not the video.
Keep going lower.
Western defense officials have estimated that as many as 250,000 Russian soldiers have been dead in Ukraine.
It was about 1 million.
So particularly Putin's.
Yeah, but this is BS.
It's just not true.
These are fabricated numbers.
They're just not true.
The Russians haven't taken those kinds of losses.
And I mean, I confront this all the time.
I mean, this is Fox News saying this.
Yeah, well, they're all part of it.
They're all singing the same tune.
These narratives are cooked up in London by MI6 and in Langley by the CIA.
Why would they lie about these stats?
Trust me, I'm the same person that doesn't trust.
They're trying to get you to believe that Ukraine is winning.
Ukraine has never been winning.
Ukraine cannot win.
That's why Orban, the president of Hungary, came out just recently in the last 24 years.
There's no chance for the Ukrainians to win at all.
Anybody who's on the ground over there knows the truth.
They're finished.
The Russians haven't lost that kind of numbers.
They've lost maybe 40,000 dead, maybe.
Colonel, normally, you know, you'll say people are 50-50 on this.
I don't even know if people are 50-50.
I listened to Mark Levin give an emotional speech about this himself, about how he feels about Putin.
I don't know if you've seen this one or not or where he's at.
I think this is an argument where 80% of the population, I may be wrong, the number may be closer to 70%.
80% of the population is closer to defending Ukraine, and they see Russia as the bully in America.
It's very easy to make people think that because, as I said from the very beginning, the hangover from the Cold War.
And remember that the population in New York City, of which Mr. Levin is one, is very much in favor of everything from open borders to endless war with Russia to permanent war in the Middle East against whomever.
So, I mean, I don't take anything that comes out of New York City very seriously.
Well, let's transition into the, I got three more topics before we wrap up.
So the consequences of what's happening with woke in the military.
I was in the military, and when I was in the Army, Hunter First Airborne, there was gays, there were lesbians, and we knew about it.
We went out, we went to Nashville, we'd party, and we'd find out, this guy's this, she's this, he's both, she's both.
Okay.
But it wasn't like, hey, you know, let's advertise it as you're a hero and you're a this.
It was just that's kind of where you were at, right?
Versus today.
Now, when you hear what.
You're talking about the don't ask, don't tell, right?
The don't ask, don't tell.
Yes.
I'm from the don't ask, don't tell era.
Today it's the hero-making machine LGBTQ era.
It's a different era we're part of today.
John Kirby rejects bogus claims of woke policies dragging down army recruitment.
There is no wokeness in the military.
This is what he said, right?
And Army Secretary concerned woke military criticism could hurt the service, right?
This is recently, this article just came out.
I'll read this entire article to you on what's going on where some are saying, well, the reason why recruitment is low is because of all the woke agenda and all the woke ideology.
No, that's not the reason why people are not joining the Army.
You know, Army Secretary Christine Warmout expresses concern about the negative impact of accusations of a woke military on recruiting efforts, stating, I hope that we do not see more of any of the kind of talk that's been out there in the past few days while Republican lawmakers and pundits criticize the military efforts towards diversity and inclusion.
Warmout clarifies that the Army is focused on being a ready army, not a woke army.
She emphasizes that concerns about a woke military have not been a major challenge in recruiting, according to market research and a Defense Department survey.
Warmout acknowledges that some young Americans may be reluctant to join the Army due to the perception of its being woke, but highlights the importance of countering the negative rhetoric as it can have counterproductive effects on recruiting.
She emphasizes the influence of news and social media on young Americans' perceptions.
So, is the Army and the military getting more woke, and is it negatively impacting recruiting?
This kind of reminds me of a non-commissioned officer many years ago who told me, you know, and I think at the time I was a captain, you know, Captain, I've never had intimate relations with anybody but an attractive woman.
But I have changed my standards on occasion.
My point is, I think Christine wants too many drinks at night at 2 a.m.
I think Christine Vormood is living in fantasy world.
I think that if you're an average 18, 19, 20-year-old man, single guy who's even remotely athletic, who wants to be tested, wants to accomplish something in life, wants to join an elite organization, and he looks at what's presented to him in these commercials and what he sees, he says, thank you, but no, thank you.
I'll go somewhere else.
I mean, as soon as we started telling everybody, and this started by the time, you know, even in the 90s, and we saw it begin in the 70s, frankly, this is a long process of what I call rot.
If you say that little Susie over there, who weighs 90 pounds or 110 pounds, is just as good as Bob, who's six feet tall and weighs 220, and she can do everything he can do, and there's no difference.
Good, you're going to get a lot of Susies, but you're not going to get the other guy.
Saying that, well, there's no reason why they can't be in combat.
I had an exchange with a senator when I testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Airland Subcommittee, and he said, Well, Carl McRudder, I don't hear you mention women on the battlefield very much.
Are you opposed to women in combat?
I said, Yes, sir.
He said, Well, why is that?
I said, 5,000 years of recorded military history.
You can imagine that didn't go over very well.
You can force whatever you want on federal forces.
You can.
But the people that are going to show up and fight effectively for you will not stay.
They'll leave.
I can guarantee it.
That's true for the Marine Corps.
It's true in the Army.
I can't speak for the Navy and the Air Force, although I saw recent comments from this man, General Brown, C.Q. Brown, who's supposed to be the next chairman, who is talking about too many white people, too many white pilots.
We need more non-whites and so forth.
I'm sure that that will have a deleterious impact on the Air Force.
But maybe it's not as noticeable.
Years ago, I had to put together a study.
I was on active duty to look at the impact of various experiences and problems in militaries.
And I came across the French Army between the years of 1850 and 1871.
And everyone thought in 1870, when the French Army met the Prussians and their allies, that the French Army would effectively annihilate the Prussians.
Prussians had almost no serious combat experience in their judgment.
They'd only fought a six-week war against the Austrians.
That wasn't serious in their interview.
And the French, they'd fought Mexicans.
They'd fought Berbers.
They fought the Russians in the Crimea.
And they were going to be very effective and so forth.
And what happened was the exact opposite.
The Prussians utterly annihilated them.
The point is that the rot that undermines discipline, leadership, capability can go on for years without notice until suddenly you're thrown into the buzzsaw and you have to fight.
Then everything that was previously unidentified or concealed comes to the fore.
That happened to the British in 1914.
It happened to them again in 1940.
You have to look carefully at these social programs and policies and the standards of discipline.
And if they're not high enough and they don't work, you can't brush them aside.
You may get by if you're just going to occupy a forward operating base and you're fighting an enemy that has almost no capability.
And let's face it, the people we faced in Afghanistan and Iraq had very little capability.
They might be able to get off an occasional mortar or rocket, but most cases they had to depend on remotely detonated mines, what we call IEDs, and they had AK-47s and RPGs.
And, you know, frankly, we had everything.
We had absolutely devastating artillery, devastating air power.
So there was never any question as to who was going to dominate and who was going to win.
You had, frankly, something similar in Vietnam.
We always had overwhelming firepower that could come in and crush the opponent.
He just couldn't put it together rapidly enough and effectively enough.
Well, those days are over.
And if we are going to fight someone like the Russians or the Chinese or any of these other countries, we have to come to terms with the reality that they do not implement woke programs.
They're not interested in that.
They're not interested in making people feel good.
They're interested in forces that can fight.
Soldiers exist to do one thing, to fight and kill the enemy.
That's it.
Now, they can do a lot of other things, but that's the preeminent purpose of the whole structure.
We've lost sight of that.
We lost sight of it a long time ago.
Yeah, you know, when you think about that and you see a speech that Putin gives, and he says the West, you know, America is trying to get their military to be woke.
He uses it in his own words.
And he says, we're not compromising our values and principles.
Here's what we're all about.
We're about defending, you know, Russia.
And you see the applause it gets from the audience.
There's thousands of people out there.
By the way, when is the last time we got a message like that from our current president defending America, what a great nation it is and what it stands for, our values and principles?
You can take the same exact message Putin gave, and Biden's done this a few times before, where he takes messages from other people around the world and he uses that.
His writers can literally take that, put it in JATGBT and say, change it up a little bit to make it sound like Joe Biden.
Put it on the teleprompter.
If he gave that message, you know what the American people would do?
They would lose their mind.
They would applause.
They're saying, oh, my God, who is this guy?
But we are not given the pro-America message.
We are given the pro-let's confuse the hell out of everybody message where nobody knows who's a hero today, where we once did know what a hero was.
Today we don't know what a hero is.
But I want to play this recording for you of President Trump that just came out.
And I'm sure you've seen it.
And there's a response from the president as well.
If you want to play this, this is what everybody's CNN, everyone's playing saying, this is it.
It's the end of it.
After this, he shouldn't be qualified to run.
If you want to go in and play this, and then we'll show his response.
Sick people.
That was your coup, you know, against you.
That started right at the end of the day.
Like when Millie's talking about, oh, you were going to try to do a kick.
They were trying to do that before you even were sworn in.
That's right.
Trying to overthrow your election.
Well, with Millie, let me see that.
I'll show you an example.
He said that I wanted to attack Iran.
Isn't it amazing?
I have a big pile of papers.
This thing just came up.
Look, This was him.
They presented me this.
This is off the record, but they presented me this.
This was him.
This was the Defense Department and him.
We looked at him.
This was him.
This wasn't done by me.
This was him.
All sorts of stuff.
It's pages long.
Keep playing it.
Keep playing it.
Wait a minute.
Let's see here.
I just found, isn't that amazing?
This totally wins my case, you know.
Except it is like highly confidential secret.
This is secret information.
Look at this.
You attack.
Hillary would print that out all the time.
She sent it to Anthony Weiner.
The program.
By the way, isn't that incredible?
Yeah.
I was just saying, because we were talking about it.
And he said, he wanted to attack Iran.
He said, well, this was done by the military, given to me.
I think we can probably get it.
We'll have to see.
Yeah, we'll have to try to figure out a president.
I could have declassed it.
No, I can't.
Isn't that interesting?
This is so cool.
Can you pause this, Rob?
So who's recording this?
According to CNN, the audio recording comes from a July 2021 interview Trump gave at his bed minister resort for people working on a memoir for Mark Meadows, Trump's former chief of staff.
OK, so go to his.
Who's that lady?
Who is that lady?
Is that one of his staffers?
It says here in the article that the people present a writer, publisher, and two of Trump's staff members.
Two of Trump's staff members.
Okay, so now go to Trump's response on what he says about this on Truth Social.
You know, so the deranged Special Prosecutor Jackson, working in conjunction with the DOJ and FBI, illegally leaked and spun a tape and transcript of me, which is actually an exoneration rather than what they would have you believe.
This continuing witch hunt is another election interference scam.
They are cheaters and thugs.
So when you see this recording and you see, you know, him talking about Millie and, you know, where he's at and Hillary and all this other stuff, how do you process this when you see this recording that the media is using to make sure he can no longer compete for 2024?
Well, the first thing that I think is that President Trump is not unlike most of his predecessors in that many of the papers that they took with them when they left office were not necessarily carefully vetted, registered, declassified, whatever.
I think we've, over the years, become very relaxed in that area.
Secondly, I think we classify too much.
That's certainly true.
And it's unfortunate that they're trying very, very hard to pin some sort of criminal action on him, which is, of course, absurd.
Now, his point is effectively true.
Millie and others came across, along with Bolton, and as I recollect, the former Secretary of State who was Pompeo, who said he wanted to run for president and bowed out.
They were all advocates for war with Iran.
And you have to look at, at least with Bolton and Pompeo, who their quote-unquote donors are, where their money comes from.
They wanted war with Iran.
Milley, I'm not sure he was a strong advocate for it.
I have no idea.
But he certainly wasn't going to stand in the way.
We know that McKenzie, who is down in U.S. Central Command, Apparently, his fingerprints are all over this global Hulk unmanned aerial vehicle that was shot down.
It was plotted to follow the edge of the air defense identification zone, which under international law says that any military aircraft that violates that zone is liable to be shot down unless it identifies itself, explains its position and so forth.
Of course, we didn't do that.
So in a court of law, the Iranians, international law, would have won the case.
At the time, no one could say what happens if we go to war with Iran.
The idea was we got to go to war with Iran.
It was similar to the Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Shaney cabal that took us into Iraq.
The purpose is to get us into Iraq.
Then we'll figure it out.
Very similar to things that were said in 1965 and 66 about Vietnam.
Well, what are we going to do there?
Well, we've got to get in there.
Let's get in there.
We'll sort through that.
We'll, quote-unquote, muddle through.
You never muddle through.
You have to know what the purpose is.
You have to know how you're going to achieve that purpose.
And then you have to have a vision for what you want it to look like at the end.
We call that purpose method end state.
Donald Trump, as president of the United States, prevented war with Iran because he asked, first of all, what happens after we launch all of these strikes?
What happens?
Now, he said at the time, I was concerned about the loss of human life in Iran, which is legitimate, especially since we did not lose any human life.
What we did is we lost an unmanned aerial vehicle, which he did not think rose to the threshold that justified war with Iran.
And of course, he was right.
But it was also a question of, okay, we launch all these strikes, then what?
And you have a lot of people in Washington that just want to start something and then convince themselves they can drag us in and that somehow or another, the military will make it work.
That happened to us in Vietnam.
It happened to us in Iraq.
It happened to us in Afghanistan.
It happened to us in Libya.
It's happening right now in an attempt to bring us into some sort of confrontation with the Russians over Ukraine.
And there's no serious thinking about what are the implications.
Iran is an enormous country.
It's almost the size of Western Europe.
It has a large population.
Let's assume that you can destroy Iran.
All right, let's just assume you can destroy it with enough weapons.
They can't stand up to us with their air defense networks or anything else.
So let's assume you're right.
We destroy them.
What do these people do?
Well, they leave.
They begin to pour into surrounding countries because there's nothing for them to eat.
There's no water to drink.
If you destroy Iran, what's the impact strategically on the region?
Is there anybody there who benefits from it?
Well, a lot of people seem to think the Turks would.
Mr. Erdogan would then emerge as the preeminent power in the region because Iran's really his principal rival.
So why would you do that?
Does that make sense?
Doesn't make a lot of sense.
These are the discussions the British and American general staffs behind the scenes had during World War II.
You want us to destroy Germany, then what?
Who supplants Germany?
The Soviet Union.
Is that our goal?
You understand what I'm saying?
I'll follow.
Trump did a good thing.
He said, no, I'm not going to do this.
I'm not going to support it.
And of course, you know, donors everywhere were very unhappy because they donated prolifically to that administration in the hopes of bringing on a war with Iran.
Remember, I think it was Poteretz who said, every morning I get up and pray that we go to war with Iran.
And he was advising John McCain.
McCain was an advocate for going to war with Iran.
McCain was in Kiev saying, we'll fight the Russians.
We'll stand by you.
This is before he passed away.
I mean, this is lunacy.
What is happening?
Who is in charge?
The American people don't know what war means.
I've seen a country devastated by war.
I've seen more than one.
They don't understand that we are no longer in a position of splendid isolation where we can destroy other people's homes without risking the same here.
When you start dealing with the Russians and the Chinese, all sorts of potentially bad things can happen.
If you think Mexico is our friend, I have news for you.
The Mexicans have always sided with whomever was against the United States.
So is Venezuela and so is Cuba.
Now, you really want to go to war with these people and then have a second front in the Caribbean, in Latin America?
Do you want to be dragged into that?
No one is thinking.
There is no strategic thought.
And no one is thinking about the American people.
What's in the interest of the American people?
You know what's in the interest of the American people?
Build prosperity.
Recover this economy.
Repatriate jobs.
Get control of the border.
Stop the influx of labor that we can't employ.
And if we believe the AI fanatics who are telling us that by, what, 19, what is it, 1940, or what is it, 2040 or something, 80% of all the current low-skilled jobs will be replaced by AI?
What are we bringing most of these people in to do?
It's insane.
It doesn't make any sense.
So who's thinking about the United States, American society?
Do you think this can be used to eliminate him as a candidate or it still doesn't do anything?
Like they're using everything possible to eliminate him.
Do you think, you know, yesterday I tweeted something.
Rob, if you can go to Twitter, this is just something I tweeted yesterday and it got some people that were some were upset, some were curious, and some were like, you know, why the hell would you even put this out there?
So go in and zoom in right there, that one right there, if you can make it bigger.
Okay, 2024 strategy to have Newsom replace Biden.
Okay, step number one, have Newsom go around defending Biden, selling Biden's record, shows loyalty.
Step number two, have him constantly attack DeSantis.
Dems are convinced Trump will be forced to drop out.
Step number three, if Biden doesn't step down, have mainstream media attack him.
It's already happening.
ABC, CBS, NBC all went after him starting this week.
Step number four, once Jill, Jill Biden, notices these endless attacks, have a private meeting with Biden, sharing strategy to save face if he steps down.
Step number one, multiple documentaries showing him as a modern date FTR.
Number two, massive Simon ⁇ Schuster book deal.
Three, defend his legacy and be pardoned by Newsom if shit hits the fan.
Next one, choose one of few options to step down.
Number one, due to help.
Number two, Jill and I prayed about it and decided it's time for us to go spend time with our grandkids.
Number three, we fixed everything Trump broke and now it's time for someone else to do it.
Number four, edify Newsom as being loyal to Biden, unlike DeSantis, not being loyal to Trump.
So then, in order to prevent Kamala from backstabbing, let her become the first female president for a split second, when Biden steps down, Hillary will lose her mind, but what's new?
And number seven, divide DeSantis and Trump camp to make sure MAGA doesn't vote for DeSantis.
Step number eight that says Newsom becomes 47, but I should have said 48.
And last but not least, it's very likely none of the above will happen, which is why it's called a prediction.
But only the paranoids survive.
So do you think like, you know, do you think Trump's going to be there next year as a Republican candidate?
Well, first of all, Only the Paranoid Survive is one of the best books I've ever read.
Andy Grove.
He recommended it to me.
And if you want to understand what's wrong with the military establishment, all you have to do is read what he describes in there with IBM and all these other major corporations.
It's a brilliant book.
I try to get everybody to read it.
Now, secondly, first of all, I think it's brilliant.
And I think that if we were living in a linear world, in other words, where one event follows the next logically, you're absolutely right.
I don't think we'll ever get to the 2024 election.
I think things are going to implode in Washington before then.
I think our economic financial condition is fragile.
It's going to come home to roost in ugly ways.
I will tell you, I don't know exactly how it will happen.
I think we're going to end up in a situation where we find out the banks are closed for two or three weeks and nobody can get into them.
You think so?
I think we're going to run into something like that.
I also think that the levels of violence and criminality in our cities is so high that it's going to spill over into other places in society.
People that normally think they can live remote from the problem are now beginning to be touched by the problem.
Then I look at this thing in Ukraine.
I think Ukraine is going to lose catastrophically.
It's going to be a complete collapse.
And that, too, is going to have an effect here at home because people are going to say, well, wait a minute.
Everybody told us Ukraine was winning.
Everybody told us X, Y, and Z.
I mean, sort of the Russian hoax on steroids.
All of those things are going to come together or converge in some way that's going to prevent us from reaching the status quo.
Oh, another election.
Oh, another set of campaigns and so forth.
So what you're saying to me is eminently plausible because I don't think Biden will make it through the year.
I think he'll be gone.
And I think everybody knows that this person, Kamala Harris, lacks the ability under any circumstances to be president of the United States.
When you say gone, you mean passing away because of his age or merely being incapable and finally being, what is that?
What do they call it?
25th Amendment or whatever it is?
Shuffled off the stage.
They'll safe face, though.
They'll do it in a way to safe face.
Exactly.
That's what Patrick's.
Yeah.
I think what Patrick wrote is accurate.
Something like that will happen.
And then the search begins, and Newsom is the logical candidate for them.
He's presiding over California, which is their poster child for the future of America.
If you want to know what the Democrats want America to become, look at California.
How deeply in debt is California?
What's the state of affairs in that country of its own?
It's a catastrophe.
Everyone who can leave that has any talent, ability, or understanding is leaving.
Businesses are leaving.
No one wants to be there.
So what are you going to end up with?
A very small minority of very wealthy people and millions of poor people, most of whom don't even consider themselves to be Americans.
So that's the dream world for the left, California.
I don't think we'll tolerate that.
So I don't think it'll ever get that far on the national level.
Now, I could be wrong, but I don't think we're that complacent.
I also know that you get revolutionary change when people can't eat, when the supply chains break down and you can't deliver food, when they can't afford to buy the food, when they can't afford to buy the gasoline.
These things are the catalysts for real change.
And everyone's betting that the left in charge in Washington can keep all of this going without any interruption.
Maybe they're right.
I don't think so.
Yeah, I think that the gloom and you know, what is it?
Gloom and doom?
Gloom and doom of the chances are that for me, it's less than 5%.
Again, my opinion.
See, I don't see that as gloom and doom.
I see that as our savior.
Fine.
By the way, but here's the challenge.
I actually agree with the fact that if they would have allowed Powell to do his job as the Fed chair to increase interest rates and the rate to decrease inflation, we would have gone through a transition phase where people would have realized, hey, man, this whole fake success we had the last 128, 129-month economic expansion is done.
But we realized, everybody, including us, that we thought Jerome Powell was one of the most powerful men in America or the world.
He's not Congresses.
Congress came out and said, no, here's Prince of Money.
Send it into the economy.
It's going to be fine.
Don't worry about it, guys.
We'll show more fake success to the economy.
Holy shit.
You know, these stocks are back up.
These guys are doing back again based on the seven stocks that's coming back up.
You know what?
You know, it's not going to happen.
So he's preventing that.
It's like a delay in the time bomb.
We're eventually going to go through.
It could be 5, 10, 15.
Someone has to eventually go through with the right policies.
But whoever does, they're not going to get re-elected.
So you almost have to have more fake success to get re-elected.
It's terrible for America.
It's not a good thing, but it's the structure that we've created.
Here's what I want to do before we wrap this up.
I got the last topic I want to talk to you.
You've said about third party.
I want to ask you about RFK Gank.
We're about to launch the third live, I think it's going to be our fourth one, live podcast at our comedy club with a guest.
And I'm telling you guys, it's going to sell out the moment we announce who would, especially the VIP package, all of that stuff.
We'll be sold out in no time.
Rob, if you want to go to the 5990 live website, if you want to be the first to find out who that guest is going to be at our next live at our comedy club, our cigar lounge, text award podcast to 310-340-1132.
Once again, text award podcast to 310-340-1132.
We had the last time we had Rudy Giuliani and Dave Rubin.
It was an entertaining debate, and we did one ourselves.
And we had a chance to spend a lot of time with many of you guys.
We're talking to some people that you're going to want to be at this next one here, but make sure you text award podcast to 310-340-1132.
So, Colonel, this has been a fantastic conversation.
You've said before, I think it's time we need a third party to rise up.
You're seeing RFK.
I don't know if you saw him yesterday on that town hall that he did.
Did you get a chance to see some of the things he said?
Let me tell you, if you haven't seen it, highly recommended the answers he gave on drug addiction.
And he says, I remember when I fathered that, I dealt with drug addiction for 14 years, and I've seen, I've lost family members, brothers, this, this, that.
And then the way he addressed Trump, he says, what do you think about the fact that many Republicans and Trump are supporting?
He says, listen, I love the fact that I'm getting respect from people like that.
I'm not trying to bash Biden.
I'm not trying to bash Trump.
I'm just talking about ideas.
Then she talked about fentanyl.
Then she talked about vaccine.
One of the doctors got up and challenged him.
And then she says at the end, so, you know, what do you think about the fact that your own family members have said this about you?
Your own family members have said this about you.
And then RFK calmly turns around and says, well, let me ask you this.
Do you mean to tell me everybody in your family agrees with you?
She says, no, you got me there.
So in every way, he crushed it yesterday on this town hall.
He showed a lot of poise and he's creating a lot of momentum with Musk, with Rogan, with people from the right or the left, and some people that are not Trump fans, but they're Republicans.
Some people that are not Biden fans, but they're Democrats.
And he's created a lot of momentum for himself.
Do you think we're at a point right now where an RFK actually has a chance?
Well, he'll be forced to run as an independent because there's no way they're going to let him be on the stage standing next to Biden debating.
We all know that's not going to be taking place.
But if he runs as a third party, do you think RFK will just end up being a ROSPRO 2.0 or do you think he actually stands a chance to create real momentum and real change?
Well, RFK Jr. has an attribute that Trump possesses.
It's called authenticity.
When you listen to him and you talk to him, and I have, it's very clear he's telling you exactly what he thinks.
That carries enormous weight with the American people.
Ideally, I would like to see those two gentlemen get together and form a third party.
I think it's time.
I think it could be done.
You've got to get on the ballot, but that's not an insurmountable obstacle.
The problem I have is beyond, you know, just get on the ballot.
It's the election process itself.
I mean, it's corrupt.
I grew up in North Philadelphia.
We haven't had a clean election in that city in 60 years.
Come on, wake up.
Smell the coffee.
Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, forget it.
Now with mail-in ballots, absentee ballots, I mean, not even talking about the software.
This is just crazy.
It's nonsense.
You know, the French tried it.
It didn't work because the whole system was corrupted.
Anybody who's looked at this reasonably and objectively has said this can't work.
The reason the states are in charge of our electoral process is because when the Constitution was written, people all agreed that the federal government in 1787 had no money, had no money, had no staffing.
All the states had it.
So they said, well, we'll have to let the states run the elections.
It was a practical decision, but we've never addressed it.
We've never gone back.
If you go to most European states, modern European states, they have strict regulations and a strict process that requires proof of citizenship, proof of legal residence.
You have to show up in person.
Then your party affiliation is checked if you're registered to a party.
Then everybody who's there from the various parties approves you.
Then you get a ballot.
Then you go, you turn it in, bring the ballot back.
They take the ballot.
They put it in the box.
That's how you run an election.
We can't run an election in Georgia that is radically different from the election we run in Philadelphia.
We've got to have them be the same across the country.
And no one wants to do that.
And, you know, that's a constitutional amendment.
We forget the Constitution was also designed, what, in the 1780s?
It's hardly relevant to the nation that we have today.
There are many good things about it, but the Constitution is the structure of government.
Didn't say the Bill of Rights.
Bill of Rights or Sacro Sanct.
Those are what make us as Americans.
They're being trampled on left and right these days, and that needs to stop.
But as far as the Constitution is concerned, we've got to rethink this whole structure of government for the 21st century.
Once again, nobody wants to go there.
But if you have the kind of upheaval that I think is coming, we may have the opportunity to do that.
Make some real changes, apparently based on that.
You know, some people on the left will say, all this stuff you're talking about, election.
Come on, Colonel.
I mean, we saw what happened two months ago, three months ago, Fox, you know, $787 million, Dominion, all these guys that talk about elections, the biggest fine ever paid, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
And then Fox releases Dan Bongino.
He's no longer there.
And the next person and the next person and the next person.
And then the GOAT of Fox, Tucker Carlson, they have their dispute that's going on there.
So the credibility, like from the left, the left is going to use that for the election cycle, the next 17 months.
They're going to keep talking about the big weapon that they got, which is one, Roe v. Wade, the red wave, didn't come through because the timing of it was terrible.
Two, $787 million.
They're going to say, hey, if you think you're right with the election, then why do Fox, your crusader mainstream media company, why did they pay $787 million?
So this whole hoax about election fraud, nothing like that exists, or else you wouldn't have to pay the fine.
What do you say to that?
I think the election litigation was about Dominion software.
I wasn't present there.
I am somewhat familiar with it, but I can't comment on it from a legal standpoint as to whether or not it's a meritorious outcome.
But I do know that when it comes to absentee ballots and mail-in ballots, that's a catastrophe.
That is an open door for corruption on steroids.
And if that's what we're going to see, and I think we will in all the blue states, I don't see any evidence at all that anyone on the right can win that election.
So based on what you're saying, 2024, November, whatever the date it's going to end up being, is most likely going to be either a Biden, a Kamala, a Newsom, or Michelle.
Well, if we get to 2024 and the left does what I think it's going to do, which is what it did the last time, they're going to win the election.
Who do you think is going to be the last man or woman standing?
I don't know, but I don't see this is back to the question of what happens then.
Yeah.
In other words, do you sit and take it as an American?
Or do you say, no, I'm sorry, I don't agree with that.
Yeah.
I mean, look, you know, there's four things I pray about, and I'm struggling with one of them a lot lately.
I pray for courage, wisdom, tolerance, understanding.
I do.
And those are four things.
I need courage to do what I'm doing on a daily basis, family, business, all this stuff.
I need wisdom because I'm talking to people that are smarter than me, and I want to get as much wisdom from them as possible.
So God's surrounding me around smarter people than me that I'm learning from everybody.
Tolerance is what I prayed for for the longest time.
And then understanding to be able to see the other side of the argument, somebody I disagree with or disagrees with me.
On the tolerance side, it's to the point where I think sometimes if you were to look at the most tolerant denomination or sect or religion, you would say the most tolerant religion is the non-denominational Christian is who it is.
You would have to say that because they're very forgiving.
Oh, it's okay.
You know, turn the cheek or do this or do that.
Okay.
And we're seeing that the country in the world with the least amount of LGBTQ members is Indonesia.
Less than 5% is not LGBTQ members.
Indonesia doesn't support same-sex marriage.
Less than 5% of Indonesia support same-sex marriage.
I think in America we're at 72% give or take what the numbers it just dropped off 7% to it was 71% now 64%.
I think Christians are part of the problem in America.
I think lazy Republicans are part of the problem in America.
I think libertarians who are like, man, I don't give a shit what you do.
Just leave me alone.
Let me make my money.
As much as those are all honorable type of things to look at, I think they're all part of the problem because they don't realize that a part of what Jesus or who they admire did, they had a level of intolerance to compromise certain values and principles.
They were not from the mindset of it's okay, it's okay, it's okay.
They were like, no, no, I'm not crossing the line here with you.
You want to do that, you, but you're wrong and I disagree with you.
That's where we're going to stand.
Where it's more like to each a zone, to each a zone, to each a zone.
And this concept of being too tolerant has gotten America to go from being the greatest country in the world where we were feared, respected, admired, and secretly everybody kind of wanted to be like us.
Of course, we're hated.
Anytime you're number one, you're going to be hated.
Who's the most hated football quarterback of all time?
It's very easy.
Who's the most hated basketball player of all time?
It's very easy.
Who's the most hated country of all time?
It's very easy.
We were able to do something these countries for 2,000 years, 1,000 years couldn't do.
We did it in 150 years, 200 years.
Of course, you're going to hate that country because it shows incompetence in your philosophies and your ideas, right?
So I understand that, but I kind of agree with you where I think the American people from those three sects, the lazy Republicans, the libertarians that are like to each a zone, and to the two tolerant Christians that are saying it's okay to everything, I think they've kind of compromised what these 56 men, brave men that started this country with the reason why I'm here as an immigrant from Iran, they kind of hurt that.
But anyways, right at the end of the podcast, I'll give you the last word here to you.
Any final thoughts you have?
Is there any level of optimism for the future?
Because if someone's listening to this right now, they're probably moving to Singapore.
Some of the people that are listening to this in America, they're saying, maybe I'll go hide in a place in Hawaii, in Kauai, in the mountains with my family of six people.
Should I be optimistic or pessimistic about the future?
Tolerance for the intolerable is the path to certain destruction.
It has to end.
That's what's given us the criminality and is reinforcing it everywhere.
Secondly, if there are no standards, nothing works.
Everything falls apart.
Finally, I would say, yes, there's reason for optimism because there are a lot more people out there listening to us right now who know that what you've said is true, what I've said is true, and are willing to fight.
When I say fight, I don't necessarily mean immediately pick up a gun, but if you can't vote your way out, at some point somebody's going to suggest we're going to have to find another way out.
And I don't think we should exclude that possibility.
I'm very disappointed in the left because there are some good people over there that should be more sensible.
They should be concerned with voter integrity too, but they're not.
Right now, the people running the government, the people on the left, the people on the rhino right are about power and money, and that's it.
We've got to get back to what's in the interest of the American people.
We don't have that right now.
I think R.F.K. Jr. believes that.
I know Donald Trump believes that.
Can they work something out between them?
Can we build a third party at this point?
I don't know.
But that's the direction we need to go.
Are you confident with DeSantis as well as a candidate?
I don't know the man, but when I heard him speak very logically and say, we have no vital strategic interest in eastern Ukraine.
There's no reason for us to become involved in a war there.
And then two days later say, oh, I was wrong.
I guess it's really important that we be there.
It tells me he's donor focused.
I don't want anybody who's donor focused.
Donald Trump was never donor focused.
Very interesting.
Well, there you have it, folks.
We're going to put the link below to your most recent book that came out a couple months ago, Margin of Victory, Five Battles That Changed the Face of Modern War.
Colonel, somebody put a super chat in here.
Let me just give credit to the person that asked this question.
I'll ask it from you as well.
It's Gaius Jodias.
He asked the question, what a weird name, but he asked the question about, Colonel, would you be willing to return to the PBD podcast and debate someone like a Peter Zahan who disagrees with you?
Would I be willing to do that?
Sure, I can, if people think that would be useful.
Okay, fantastic.
So we'll reach out to Peter, Rob, if you want to make a note of that to see if that's something, because I think that would be definitely, he has certain views that are very different than yours.
The audience will be able to win there.
In FYI, we had roughly 120,000 concurrent people, 120,000 people listened to us the last two hours.
This is going to get a few million views on the conversation we had with you.
Gang, for those of you guys that are from the business standpoint of the audience, last time we did our live when we had 200 people in attendance, 85% of people that raised their hands were business owners, small business owners.
To the small business owner community, the executives, the founders, the salespeople, those of you guys that are running businesses, we are hosting a Vault conference, August 30 to September 2nd with myself, Tom Brady, Mike Tyson, Will Guidera from 11 Madison, the book he wrote, Unreasonable Hospitality, to discuss different strategies to grow your business, a great place for proximity to meet other people like yourself, especially at a time like this to know what strategies are working today.
Not what worked in 2021, not what worked in 2022 or 2018, but what's working today and beyond.
We are running a special for 4th of July.
It's buy one, get one free, grab your spouse, grab your business partner, grab your partners, running mates that you have.
Get yourself two tickets.
It's only 4th of July special that we're running here.
Get registered.
We'll spend three days together in Miami at the Diplomat.
Rob Let's put a link below where they can get registered for this.
And I'm looking forward to seeing yourself with your partners there to spend some time with myself, Tom Brady, Tyson, and Will Guidero.
