Dan McKnight and James Dominic dissect the "Defend the Guard" movement, highlighting McKnight's 2005–2007 Afghanistan service and his controversial bypass of command to contact Governor Jim Risch during Hurricane Katrina. They analyze constitutional arguments under Article I, Section 8 against Title 10 deployments, citing endorsements from Daniel Ellsberg and General Bonson while condemning threats from Liz Cheney. The discussion critiques Biden's extended withdrawal timeline, Senator Jean Shaheen's "woke" justifications, and the military's failure in nation-building, urging veterans to pressure Congress for an immediate end to the Global War on Terror. [Automatically generated summary]
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Duty and Political Opportunity00:14:31
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
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Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Tear your host, James Dominic.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am thrilled to welcome to the show today Dan McKnight.
Dan, you were requested by a lot of people and highly recommended by some people who I have a very high opinion of.
So thank you so much for taking the time and joining me today.
You bet, Dave.
Thanks for having me on.
I appreciate it.
Absolutely.
Well, I was very excited to have you on because I think that you are a member of maybe the most important demographic in the United States of America in 2021, and that is anti-war combat vets.
It's a movement, a group that is not often discussed in the corporate press or in the mainstream at all.
I remember in 2008 and 2012 when I got very into the Ron Paul campaigns.
And he would mention, no one else ever mentioned this, but he would mention quite often that active duty military vets gave more money to, or active duty, current active duty military members, gave more money to his campaign than every other campaign combined.
And you would think that would be a really big story, that the guy who's saying, I want to end all of these wars immediately is the guy who's getting support from the active duty military.
But that doesn't seem to get discussed a lot.
So I'm very interested to talk to you about some of this stuff.
Great.
I'm excited to do it.
So I'm just curious.
I want to talk, of course, a bunch about the Defend the Guard movement, but I was just curious to kind of get your story a little bit for people listening who don't know.
How did you end up joining the military and where did you serve and whatever else is relevant?
Yep, I kind of was a bit of a derelict in high school.
You know, I was into sports and not really into school.
And when the ASFAB test, you know, that's the military test came out and they had required every senior in high school to take it.
I skipped school that day and said, there's no way in hell I'm going to serve in the military.
And after I graduated, I was living in kind of a really crappy apartment down in the north end of Boise, which is kind of the hippie district of Boise.
And didn't have a job.
I was just kind of partying and living life.
And looked at myself in the mirror one day and I'd gained a lot of weight and I didn't look like myself and I didn't feel good.
And I said, I need to do something.
And me and a buddy walked from our apartment because our vehicle was broken down.
And we walked to the Marine Corps recruiter and joined up and left a couple days later.
And I served in the Marine Corps in 1994 is when I joined and stayed in the Marine Corps until Bill Clinton tried to defund the Marine Corps and make it a part of the Department of Navy.
And they gave a bunch of Marines the opportunity to get out or to transfer to another branch.
And so I transferred to the Army, served three years in Fort Stewart, Georgia, came back to Idaho, went to college, served in the National Guard, and then got deployed.
I actually joined the National Guard after 9-11 out of a sense of duty and obligation.
And I bought into the whole, you know, America needs you mentality.
And so I joined, knowing that we would go eventually and finished my college degree and was getting ready to go to Afghanistan in 2005.
And right before we left, we got a call at four in the morning.
And my company commander said, you need to report out to the base.
You're going to lead a convoy from Idaho to Louisiana.
We have to deliver emergency supplies.
Hurricane Katrina has wiped out basically the lower part of New Orleans.
And so with no notice, we left Idaho and delivered a bunch of fuel and medical supplies down to Louisiana.
And we had to go there because the Louisiana National Guard was absent.
They were in Iraq fighting a war.
And the Louisiana National Guard is a group of civil engineers, bridge builders, road builders, levee and dam builders.
And they were in Iraq doing that, building roads and levees and bridges and dams instead of being in Louisiana where they should have been to build roads and levees and bridges and dams.
And so we did that.
And then as soon as we got done with Louisiana, we went straight to Fort Hood, Texas and deployed to Afghanistan, where we fought in 05, 06, and the first part of 07.
And when we were there, we were National Guard troops fighting an active duty war and nobody wanted us there.
The active duty military didn't want the National Guard.
They saw us as part-time soldiers, you know, kind of weekend warriors.
But we were well equipped.
We were well trained.
We were ready to do the mission, but we couldn't get replacement supplies like uniforms and boots and body armor and just the basic necessities.
And out of frustration, I went through my chain of command through the battalion commander as high as I could go trying to get these supplies for my men.
And no luck.
We couldn't get anything.
The active duty military wouldn't help us.
The Marine Corps wouldn't help us.
We were National Guard.
We were the bastards, right?
Nobody wanted us there.
And so out of frustration, I was deep in the Pesh River Valley, which is up in the northeast near the Corongall.
It was the valley of death early in the war.
I grabbed a satellite phone and I climbed to the top of a hill just outside of our base where I could get a real clear signal.
And I called a friend of mine back here in Idaho who put me in touch with the governor of the state of Idaho.
I called him directly in his office and he answered the phone and I said, Governor Risch, my name is Dan McKnight.
I'm a sergeant in the Idaho Army National Guard.
I'm one of your soldiers.
You're my commanding officer and we need your help.
And I went on to tell him what had happened.
And he said, Dan, I've only been the governor for a minute.
He had been the lieutenant governor and had been appointed governor when our governor left.
And he goes, I've only been the governor for a minute.
I don't know what I can do, but I'm going to do something.
And he goes, I'll get back to you.
And I hung up the phone, satisfied that that was the last option.
And 48 hours later, our supplies were on the way.
I got a message from our chain of command that Governor Jim Risch had done his job.
And so I always held Jim Risch up on this pedestal as kind of the hero, a supporter of the veterans, defender of the Constitution, Superman with his S on his chest.
And I kind of watched his career over the years.
I came home and I was injured in Afghanistan.
I came home and retired from the military.
And I watched Jim Rish's career where he went from governor to United States Senator and then worked up in seniority through the ranks of the senator of the Senate.
And in 2019, after President Trump had the midterm successes, the Republicans took control of the Senate.
And old Jim Risch became the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
And I'd been dormant from 2007 to 2019.
I'd just been upset, frustrated, pissed at the whole foreign policy structure, the war, seeing my buddies go back for their 10th, 11th, 12th deployments.
And so I thought, you know what?
Jim Rish was good to me once.
I'm going to call Jim Risch again and see if he'll help end the war.
He's the second most powerful man in the country in foreign policy.
Maybe he'll do it again.
And I tried to call his office, no luck.
And so I wrote an op-ed asking him under what conditions would need to be met for him to end this forever war.
And he didn't respond, but local newspapers, nine of them, picked up my op-ed and published it.
And so I knew that he had read it.
And he came to Boise to speak at a Chamber of Commerce event.
And I hired a buddy of mine that had a camera.
And I said, follow me to this Chamber of Commerce event.
We're going to corner Jim Risch.
And sure enough, I got a chance to ask him a question.
I stood up there.
I had fresh military haircut.
I was in a suit.
I looked strong, right?
Looked apart.
And I introduced myself and he stopped me right there.
And he goes, Dan, I remember you.
I remember the situation from 05.
I've read your op-ed.
I agree.
We're done nationbuilding.
We are through sending American dollars and troops over to Afghanistan and to a country that simply doesn't want it.
And I thought, my God, that was easy.
You know, I did my part again.
Jim Rish is going to do it again.
And then the son of a gun got on an airplane and went back to Washington, D.C.
And over the next 90 days, he voted three times to extend the war in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Syria indefinitely.
And that's when me and a bunch of my buddies that went to Afghanistan, guys that have come home maimed, guys have come home broke, filed bankruptcy, have been divorced, struggling with PTSD.
We got together and a group of us angry veterans said, enough is enough.
And we started this organization called BringOurTroopsHome.us.
And the goal was to influence Washington, D.C. and our elected representatives to listen to us, listen to people with actual skin in the game who've lost a brother, who have held their closest friend as they're dying, who have had to come home and talk to widows and mothers that have lost their child or their husband.
And it hasn't gone well in Washington, D.C. We've made a noise and we've gotten the platitudes and they'll listen to us and then they turn around and do exactly opposite of what we ask them.
And so now we're growing the organization even bigger.
And instead of messing around with Washington, D.C. and all the influence that comes in, the billions of dollars from the military industrial complex, we're now taking our fight to the states and having the states reclaim their authority under the federal system that our country was founded on.
And we're taking the fight to the local level and we're having a lot of success.
And that's where we're at.
That's a nutshell synopsis of how we got to where we're at today.
Yeah, it's a fascinating story.
And I suppose that there was maybe some more political opportunity in helping you get the supplies and stuff you needed while you were in Afghanistan, but actually opposing the war maybe isn't, maybe there's not as much political opportunity in that move.
It's really interesting.
A lot of stuff there, obviously, just an incredible story.
The point that you made that I really think, I don't know if I've ever heard that before or ever really thought about Katrina and the relationship to Bush having the National Guard out in Iraq.
The fact that everybody kind of thinks of Iraq as Bush's failure and Katrina as Bush's failure, but that connection is really interesting.
Do you think that there is, you know, I remember talking to, I'm not going to say his name because I don't know if he would want me to share this information, but I was doing a show at Fox News and there was a Green Beret who had served in Afghanistan who was on the panel with me.
And on camera, he was just like a George Bush Republican.
He didn't say anything against the wars or anything like that.
But a bunch of us went out to the bar afterward and we were grabbing a couple beers.
And over a couple of beers, he started really opening up to me about some of the experiences in Afghanistan.
And he basically like kind of leaned in and goes, listen, this whole mission is completely impossible.
He goes, what we're doing, the idea of building a military or a nation in Afghanistan is just, it's ridiculous.
I'm going out here.
I'm giving illiterate goat herders guns and then leaving and coming back a week later and finding out that he robbed everyone in the village with the gun that we gave him.
This cannot, he goes, and then I'm listening to Bush on TV, you know, talk about how the mission is going well and we're doing this.
And you're like, this is just lying to the American people.
And I do think that even some of the ones who won't speak up about it are much more aware than me or the average anti-war person in America is of just how impossible the mission in Afghanistan is.
Absolutely.
There were things in Afghanistan that we were asked to do that we knew that would be destroyed as soon as we turned our backs.
Towards the end of our deployment, when we first started there, we went there as warfighters.
We took a massive offensive operation called Operation Mountain Lion, where we came in just young and dumb and full of piss and vinegar, right?
We were going to go take it to the enemy.
We were going to kill Osama bin Laden.
We were going to end the war.
And we went and fought this offensive operation for almost two months.
And then when we got done, our mission changed and we became nation builders and we were told to go out and reconstruct.
And we worked in these things called provincial reconstruction teams where we would just go and shower cash by the millions in these local economies that have never seen a million dollars in their entire existence.
And we helped them build roads and schools and water treatment facilities and secure free and fair elections and schools for women and children.
And then we turn around the next day and those schools for women and children were being used as war headquarters for the local warlord.
And he was running his opium trade out of those brand new buildings.
It's a different culture and we can't give them what we have if they simply don't want it.
It's just not part of their culture.
And I think the average Afghanistan citizen, and it's funny we say that because Afghanis don't identify as Afghani, right?
They're tribal.
So when we say we're trying to build a central Afghanistan, that concept is foreign to everybody that lives outside of Kabul.
You know, anybody that lives out in the countryside, they don't get that concept.
And it's a mission that's changed over time so many times.
And it is impossible because there's no clear definition of what the mission was.
Right.
Right.
So one of the speaking of anti-war active duty military members, one of the moments that I think might be the most disgusting thing that I've seen in politics in my lifetime.
And I was curious to kind of get your thoughts on it, was Tulsi Gabbard's campaign when Hillary Clinton referred to her as a Russian asset.
And here is Tulsi Gabbard, who, you know, you can disagree with whatever you want to.
I have lots of disagreements with Tulsi Gabbard politically, but she was in a medical unit in Iraq.
I mean, she saw some, you know, she really was up close and personal with the costs of war in a way that most Americans are not.
And this was a war that Hillary Clinton sent her to.
I mean, Hillary Clinton sent her to this war and she agreed voluntarily to go.
And for her to come out and be speaking out against these wars and be the probably the most prominent anti-war voice in the country at the time, certainly the most prominent active duty military anti-war voice in the country.
And to have the previous Democratic nominee call her a Russian asset for the crime of opposing the war, which Hillary Clinton apologized for after it was beaten out of her.
But so you acknowledge that you sent these young people to go fight and die for the wrong reasons.
And then when one of them comes back, I mean, I would think you'd be getting on your hands and knees apologizing to this woman.
And instead, you're insulting her in the most profound, you know, like, you know, to call someone essentially a traitor to their country.
I just, I thought it was disgusting.
Celebrating War Wrongly00:08:02
Absolutely.
We have we have Tulsi prominently featured on our website, which is, you know, bringartroopshome.us.
She's one of, she is our, I would say, our role model for veterans opposing the war.
And she didn't just go and she wasn't just an active duty soldier.
She was a National Guardsman from defending her own state.
And if there's one state in the country that needs their National Guard to be home, I would bet that probably Hawaii is it, right?
The one state that's actually been attacked by a foreign power probably needs their defense forces.
But she went, and you're right, she was intricately involved and she saw the blood and she saw the injuries and she saw the damage that was done.
And to come back and call her a Russian asset was offensive to all people that have served, especially those that have raised their voice and said enough is enough.
And the problem is in America, we've made this hyper-militaristic sensationalism of treating us as superhumans.
You know, they give up seats on airplanes.
They buy us coffee.
They give us free fajitas on Veterans Day.
You know, you know what?
It used to be just on Veterans Day, a day off and a thank you was enough.
And for me personally, that would be more than enough.
I don't need all this hyper awareness and uncomfortable interactions in airports and all the things that come with it.
And so I think that by doing that, it's desensitized us to what when a veteran says the things that they say and the things that they've seen, it doesn't mean as much to them because, hey, I said thank you.
I put a goddamn yellow ribbon around my tree.
I stood up and saying, God bless America at a football game.
So what you have to say doesn't mean as much as it would once before.
And that's part of our culture as a country.
We've gotten to the point where we've where we prop, you know, we have propaganda that we feed to our children through video games starting at five, six, seven years old about how cool it would be to join the military and go kill all these ragheads.
And it's not the mentality.
It's not a good humanistic quality.
Nobody wants to go kill anybody, whether you agree with them politically or not.
And to make it so desensitized and have people accept the fact that the nation's leading Democrat at one time called a veteran a Russian asset, it's a disgusting place that we've gotten ourselves into.
Yeah, I think you're right.
And I think it's something that kind of permeates our society, like the tokens.
It's like, oh, well, we'll give you a token.
We'll say thank you for your service.
We'll do all this.
But there's no real substance of actually caring about these people and seeing how many suicides and just horrible injuries and deaths and all of these things and just the crying mothers of these young, brave men who have been killed.
It's like, how about instead of just all the thank yous and letting them board the airplane first, we really make sure we never send them into a war unless we absolutely have to.
And I agree with you also.
It's a really sick part of our culture, the kind of celebration of, you know, it reminds me of when, was it Brian Williams was talking about how beautiful the bombs that Trump dropped on Syria were, or even George W. Bush's whole mission accomplished thing, how kind of disgusting all of this is.
I mean, even if the mission was accomplished, which obviously it was not.
Right, right.
Well, you know, I mean, what are exactly are we celebrating if we still have a presence in the region to this day?
But it should be kind of somber.
I mean, even if you go and accomplish the mission in a war, a war is something that you just, if you're at all a decent person, you never want to see happen.
Not to say that there aren't necessary wars, but even when they are necessary, innocents are killed, lives are ruined.
It's a horrible thing.
And to take this opportunity to like spike the football or to kind of all this rah-rah celebration, it does seem like a real sickness in our in our culture.
Absolutely.
You go to the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C. and walk the World War II or the Vietnam memorials or any of the other ones that were set up to honor veterans.
It's a very humbling, quiet, reverent place.
There is no celebration there.
It is not, those monuments aren't built as a, look what we did, look how great we are.
It's to honor the sacrifice of the men and women that went and fought and died and paid the ultimate price.
And on that same point, we've gotten to the point where even those monuments now are becoming a thing of, like you said, chest thumping and spiking the football.
We've already proposed the Global War on Terror Monument in Washington, D.C.
The war is not even over yet.
And Jason Crow from Colorado has already, and I think Liz Cheney was a co-sponsor of it.
They've already passed a bill to build the goddamn monument to the global war on terror.
I mean, that's how sick we are.
We just want to celebrate how great we are, how great our military is and how dominant we are as an empire.
But if you really want to honor veterans, quit making them.
That's what I would say.
Let's honor them by letting them do a 20-year career training and being ready and never having to fire a weapon at another human being.
Let's create veterans that are able to retire healthy without the trauma, without the PTSD.
Let's create veterans that are able to retire with their bodies still intact, with all their limbs that they started with, with the benefits that they were promised, with the health care that they were promised, and let them retire in peace and fish in the swamps of New Orleans.
Let them go crawdad.
But we don't.
We put them on these pedestals and we want to showcase them and honor them in ways that the 97% of the population, 99% of the population that never serves thinks is appropriate.
I'll tell you what.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And it seems to me that there's a real disconnect.
And I'm sure this isn't true 100% of the time, but it seems like there's a real disconnect between the way the like veterans actually talk about this and the way that people who have never served, like myself, but I mean, I don't speak about it this way, but it seems to always be kind of like the drunk guy in the bar who's like, you know, that's why we kicked your ass in World War II, who had nothing to do with World War II.
You know, my grandfather served in World War War II.
My stepfather served in Vietnam.
Neither of them ever talk about the war.
It's something they don't want to talk about.
It's like it was that horrible that they just like it never came up.
It was never something that no one was like thumping their chest like, yeah, we kicked their ass or something.
It was like dark memories that they would wish they didn't have.
And so, yeah, it does, it seems like a lot of times it's the loudest, biggest kind of champions of these wars are the people who do not participate in the sacrifice.
Absolutely.
And I think the most offensive thing that I've ever been asked when I come home is always like, what was the war like?
Or did you kill somebody?
And you'll get those questions from, I coach high school football.
And a lot of the kids on my high school team will ask those questions not out of, not trying to be morbid, but because it's, you know, they play Call of Duty.
You know, they play all these video games and they just don't understand that what we do over there is not to be glorified and to be, you know, made to be something bigger than it is.
But so we don't talk about those things in public, but if you go to a poker game of a bunch of old army buddies that serve together that haven't seen each other for a year, you should hear the stories we tell each other.
It's never about remember that firefight or remember that mission we went on.
It's stuff, you know, remember when we were waiting for the next mission and we were sitting there and so-and-so did something stupid.
Remember when we were hacky sacking on an airplane and we got we got yelled at?
Remember when we got drunk in downtown, you know, Fort Hood?
You know, we don't talk about the crappy stuff.
We talk about the good times, the camaraderie, the brotherhood, the esprit de corps.
And those other things are, they do.
They stay in a very private and secure place in our memories.
And I know that probably isn't healthy, but it's the way it's the way it is.
They're not to be glorified.
And I don't think any soldier that's ever really served in the military would ever glorify the things that we do, good, bad, or indifferent.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's something really perverse about like the movies and the kind of, you know, the video games and the propaganda that does so.
I mean, it's just, you know, even in an absolutely necessary war, like a completely justified war, you still wouldn't want to glorify those aspects.
And I think a lot of people recognize that these current wars that we're in do not fit that definition.
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Defending the Full Constitution00:07:18
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One of the things that's really sick about the current warfare state is that it does it.
It's a magnet for some of our youngest, bravest men who would be willing to risk their life to defend the Bill of Rights.
You know, a really noble thing in its purest form, the most noble perhaps.
And what it turns into are these wars that don't need to be fought, that have nothing to do with our national security, and that, frankly, are a huge honeypot that big businesses are making billions and billions of dollars off of.
And it's hard to imagine that that type of money, I mean, when you're talking about the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Defense Department is spending every year, that that type of money is not having a significant influence in the continuation of these wars.
100%.
You talk about the able-bodied men that join and probably willing to pay that ultimate sacrifice.
I've got on my shoulder back here, I got three Time magazine covers that came out probably a year and a half ago.
And as soon as I saw it at the grocery store, I came right home and ordered the full 11 by 17 of it because I wanted to never forget what I saw.
It's celebrating three young Marines that were graduating from combat at our school of infantry in the Marine Corps and were headed off to Afghanistan to fight in a war that started before they were born.
And I keep that right there on my shelf to look at every single day to remember when I come in here, why I do what I do.
I do this full-time for nothing, for peanuts.
I own a company on the side that pays my bills, but I do this full time.
And that's why is because there are able-bodied Americans that are willing to make that sacrifice.
And when we raise our hand and swear that oath, I damn Ignite, do solemnly swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.
I think the military is probably the one branch of service that actually truly believes that, even if the officers and the diplomats and the politicians know that they're going to pull the wool over our eyes, we believe that when we take that oath.
I've taken it six times through my reenlistments in my different branches of service.
And if we're willing to defend that Constitution, all we ask is that if you're going to send us off to do that, to defend the Bill of Rights and the Constitution of the United States, then honor the Constitution.
Declare war.
Don't just send us off to go fight somewhere.
Do a proper declaration.
And, you know, Ron Paul, at the beginning of the Iraq war in 2002, the biggest anti-war man to probably serve in Congress in generations, he said, we're going to do this the right way.
And he was sat on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, or excuse me, on the Foreign Relations Committee in the House.
And he submitted a declaration of war resolution.
And he said, if we're going to go to Iraq, we need a declaration of war before we go.
And he goes, I'm going to put forward this resolution, a proper declaration of war, but I'm going to vote against it.
And I'm going to encourage everybody on this committee to vote against it because I don't think it's the right way to do it.
And Henry Hyde, who is the chair of the committee, chastised him and said, that part of the Constitution is obsolete.
We just don't do that anymore.
I'm sorry, my oath was to the entire Constitution, the full Constitution, not to the parts you want.
And there's no part of it that's been excused or dismissed.
And so that was my awakening was the Ron Paul era.
When I started hearing this crazy man from Texas, you know, screaming at the top of his lungs and beating his chest and stomping his feet and trying to get people to listen to him.
That was my awakening.
I was a George W. Bush sycophant.
That was my dude.
When I was at Fort Hood training to go to Afghanistan, we took a weekend pass and went and found his home in Crawford trying to see if we could just get him to wave at us, just pump us up before we went to the war.
But the Ron Paul era had just started and I started really paying attention.
And that was my conversion.
But that's where we stand.
We believe in the entire Constitution.
We would ask Congress to uphold every portion of that sacred document.
And if they don't like that part of the document, we have a mechanism for that.
We have amendments.
We have an amendment process.
It's difficult.
But damn it, it should be difficult.
It should be hard.
Just like it should be hard to take our nation from a state of war to a state of peace.
Yeah.
Well, it's funny, too, because of all of the parts of the Constitution to disregard, that is debatably the most important.
I mean, this was something that all of the founders really put a lot of thought into in the idea that the whole thing was built around preventing the consolidation of power that the monarchs in Britain had developed.
And the idea that the king-like figure would have war-making powers was a very reasonable fear.
And we see what this has become.
When you give the one executive the power to bomb whoever he wants to, send troops wherever he wants to, there is a power that no one individual should have.
And so, yeah, it was, you know, like I'm, you know, kind of in a similar way.
Like I lived in New York.
I was like a couple miles from 9-11, from the Twin Towers on 9-11.
And when George Bush came to New York and was like, the people who knocked these towers down are going to hear from you.
I was like, hell yeah, this Texas madman is exactly who we want in there right now.
And it's funny, you know, years later with Ron Paul, the contrast between the two of them, like they're both from Texas.
They're both Republicans.
But one of them is like, you know, this guy who just knows everything, knows everything about history.
He's a baby doctor who knows more about monetary policy than a professional economist, you know?
And George Bush was like a guy who's like, my daddy fought this war.
Now we're going to fight this war.
Like, I don't need to know anything.
I know that I can drop bombs on these guys.
And it was like, once you saw this kind of thoughtful Ron Paul approach, you were like, wow, there is just a lot more wisdom to what this guy is saying than just this rah-rah, let's go bomb everyone into Jeffersonian republics or whatever the plan was.
Absolutely.
You know, I didn't ever bought, I never bought into the, I'm going to avenge my daddy's failures in Iraq.
But the more you read, study it and the more you read about it, the more you know that that kind of probably was exactly what it was.
And I was in the Dominican Republic on my honeymoon two and a half years ago.
And a friend of yours, a friend of mine, Scott Horton's book, it just came out Fool's Errands.
I guess it was three years ago.
And I took that book with me on my honeymoon, not knowing what I was about to read.
And I'm laying on the beach, drinking umbrella drinks with my brand new wife, and I'm screaming at this book.
People around me are looking at me like I'm crazy.
And when I realized all the things that had led up to the war in Iraq and even the war in Afghanistan, too, how it was there was no real tactical or military reason for going.
It was about finishing daddy's mission.
I cursed Scott.
I didn't know him at the time.
And I got home and I wrote him an email and I'm like, you son of a bitch, you ruined my honeymoon.
And it kind of started a friendship.
And, you know, and so the more you read it, the more veterans actually love that book because we're able to kind of reconcile our feelings about why we were there.
It didn't quite make sense.
And as you read Fool's Erin, it reconciles those feelings a little bit for us.
Ending Daddy's Mission00:10:28
And you're right.
He's very much in the Ron Paul mindset.
And I think a lot of his learnings come from Ron Paul.
And, you know, God, we were lucky to have that man.
Yeah.
Well, by the way, there's a copy of Fool's Erend over here somewhere right behind me.
I love Fool's Eren.
I've given out dozens of copies of this book.
I highly recommend it to everyone.
I would not suggest bringing it on your honeymoon and reading it on your honey.
That would not be where I would say, you know what?
Where's a great place to really dive into this, your honeymoon?
But however you get there, you get there.
All right.
So let's talk a little bit more specifically about Defend the Guard, which you mentioned earlier and you mentioned attacking the states.
So what is this movement all about?
And what's the plan of action here?
Sure.
In a nutshell, the bill, it's a very clean bill.
It's less than a page.
It just simply states that the National Guard, which has been, that is the state militia.
The state militia is the National Guard.
They're one and the same.
The National Guard cannot be released into federal active duty, Title 10 orders, for overseas combat unless Congress has first declared war.
Pretty simple, right?
Very clean bill.
It's supported by the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 15 is the militia clause of the Constitution.
It says that the National Guard can be called into federal service to repel an invasion, to put down an insurrection, and to enforce the laws of the Union.
A declaration of war becomes the law of the Union.
And that's where the legal justification for sending citizen soldiers off into combat would come from.
Absent that, there's no legal justification for the National Guard to be fighting in Mozambique or in the Horn of Africa or in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, or Syria.
And so that's the bill.
It's very clean.
It's very simple.
It's very sound.
And it's neither left nor right.
It's not a political bill.
In fact, the Texas GOP state party platform actually has this in their party platform.
The ACLU of West Virginia has written a brilliant piece endorsing and supporting it.
So there we have the most Republican of Republican parties, Texas, and the ACLU, which is traditionally left of center, both supporting the same piece of legislation.
And we've taken it, it started in West Virginia with state delegate Pat McGeean, who was an Air Force intelligence officer, and now he serves in the West Virginia legislature.
He's tried this bill five or six years and has run into all kinds of resistance, including the general showing up in his dress uniform with all his ribbons and medals like Jack Nicholson or Nicholson off of a few good men, showing up at the Capitol building to lobby against it.
It made it out of committee last year and tied 50 to 50 on the House floor.
And then the House recessed for COVID.
This year, we're in 31 states.
So we've gone from one in West Virginia to 31 states.
We just had a killer hearing in Texas, and you can find the entire hearing on one of our websites, which is defendtheguard.us.
You can find the entire hearing where you can hear myself.
You can hear Scott Horton testify.
You can hear Diego Rivera, who is a combat infantryman.
He testifies about the pain of losing two of his brothers.
Louis Larada from Texas testifies.
Brian Sharp, you can hear all the testimony.
10 veterans and anti-war activists testified in favor of the bill.
Not a single person opposed it.
And right now it looks like it's about to die in committee because if it doesn't come out by today or tomorrow from committee, it won't make it to the House floor in time.
In Idaho, we pushed the bill and we had to go through what's called a print hearing.
It's like an introduction hearing.
And the committee voted in favor of the bill, but the chairman didn't like it.
He killed it.
It was a voice vote and he misinterpreted, misinterpreted the voice vote and said that it failed and gabbled out of session.
In Wyoming, Liz Cheney last year on this bill, she called her or her staff, called members of the Veterans Affairs Committee and told them if they passed this bill, that she would personally see to it that two C-130 aircrafts were stripped from their state and sent to another state that didn't have this bill.
We've had generals testify against me and Representative Aaron Elward in South Dakota and got up and just told boldface lies about losing missions and funding and people were going to die if we passed the bill.
So we know we're on the right track.
If the military industrial complex is fighting this hard and Liz Cheney, you know, the heir, the air profiteer or the heiress to the war profiteer fortune and the merchant of death is willing to fight this hard against it.
We know we're on the right path.
And so 31 states and we're about to see it come forward in Florida where Anthony Sabatini and Melanie Bell are pushing it.
And we think we have a good shot there.
So that's Defend the Guard.
DefendtheGuard.us is the website.
You can see all kinds of awesome information there.
You can even go there or bring our troopshome.us and sign up to follow along to find out where you can testify in these state hearings.
We just testified in Maine Monday.
I was actually on vacation in New Orleans at the time and testified from my hotel room wearing underwear and a nice shirt, of course.
And the hearing was great.
Eric Brake, who I know you've had on your show before, testified and he was dynamic.
The guy didn't wear the uniform, but nobody speaks more clear about the enumerated powers and the war power making than Eric Brakey.
He's just a sharp, sharp individual.
In fact, your debate with him was one of the few things on YouTube that I've saved and earmarked on my, I like to share with anybody that comes to my office.
It was so good.
Oh, thanks.
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
You bet.
And so that's Defend the Guard.
And we're hoping next year to be in 50 states, all 50 states.
We're going to pass it somewhere.
And once it passes in one, it's going to be like dominoes falling.
Everyone's just kind of waiting to not be the first state.
And we challenged Texas to be first, be the one.
And we thought we had a really good shot there, but the military industrial complex raised their ugly head and they came and did what they do.
And one more quick story about Defend the Guard.
We have 21 sponsors or co-sponsors in Wyoming, including a senator and a representative who are both going to be running against Cheney in the primaries for her congressional seat.
We had a Libertarian, I think one of the only Libertarians elected in the entire country, Marshall Burt, was a sponsor.
Democrat Andy Clifford, a Native American woman who has a husband and a son and a brother who have served, and a Republican, Ocean Andrews, a very liberty-minded Ron Paul Republican, were the primary sponsors.
And we had 21 co-sponsors, including members of leadership from the Republican Party.
And we couldn't get the Speaker of the House to even assign it to a committee because the night before it was supposed to go to committee, the general invited all 21 co-sponsors, the adjutant general for the Wyoming Guard, invited them all out to the base for a private tour to show them all the good that the National Guard does and see our shiny tanks and our shiny airplanes and our shiny helicopters.
And then the bill died.
And so we know we're on the right path here.
We know we're headed the right direction.
We've got some great endorsements.
Daniel Ellis or Ellsberg, excuse me, who is the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, he's endorsed the bill.
General Bonson, who is the most highly decorated Vietnam veteran, he's endorsed the bill.
And we've got a fantastic article on our website that you can find written by our communications director, Hunter Dorenzes.
And I think you know Hunter as well.
Fantastic article about Doc Bonson and his endorsement of Defend the Guard.
We had a recent op-ed in Responsible Statecraft that had a lot of attention that was picked up by Zero Hedge.
And Stark Realities, Brian McClinchy, wrote a fantastic article about Defend the Guard.
And PBS News Hour is coming to Idaho this week to do a one-hour special about Defend the Guard.
And so it's starting to get traction.
And we know that good legislation takes time.
We're not going to pass it the first time around.
It takes momentum.
It takes a movement.
It takes grassroots.
And so anybody that's interested, I'd encourage you to go to defendtheguard.us, sign up to be a part of the grassroots army.
And we're going to take it to the states where you can walk into the Capitol building and talk to your neighbor who's also your representative and make him answer to why we're still fighting these endless wars and why we're sending our teachers, our tradesmen, our mechanics, our doctors, our police officers from our communities off to go fight in Mozambique and the Horn of Africa and Niger and all these other places around the world where the National Guard has no responsibility or mission whatsoever.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a great plan of action.
And I would really encourage, because I know there are people who listen to the show who are anti-war combat vets.
This is your home.
You know, go join up with these guys because this is really incredible, what they're doing.
And as you mentioned, one of the things that's so beautiful about it is like it has equal appeal to the left and right.
It's not a politically divisive issue at all.
In fact, it's really one that any good leftist or good right-winger should be able to really get on board with.
Obviously, there's a long tradition of being anti-war on the left.
And the bill is a purely constitutional measure.
So any right-winger has something right there for them.
This is just enforcing the Constitution.
I mean, that's the spirit of the whole thing is like, it's not even saying you can't use the National Guard in a war, just that you have to follow the Constitution and Congress has to declare a war.
I also, I'll make sure to put in the show notes of this episode the video of the speech that you mentioned that Pat, how do you say his last name?
Pat McGeehan.
Pat McGeehan.
That speech that he gave was just incredible.
Like one of the most incredible things I've ever seen.
I highly recommend everybody go watch it.
It was just amazing.
And I think one of the real strengths of this movement that you just mentioned was that even when it fails, if it does fail, it still, it almost forces you to deal with it.
You know, it forces you to see, okay, look who was on this side and look who came out against it and look at the forces that it took in order to push this thing.
Here you have actual combat vets who have been through this, who are telling you that this is what, you know, that this is what they stand for.
And then you have the Liz Cheneys of the world who are kind of come in and try to break this up.
And even when it fails, there's real value.
You know, when it fails politically, there's still real value in people seeing this.
And as you mentioned, all it takes is it passing in one state.
And this is going to have a huge, huge impact.
The Failed September Exit00:15:04
Right.
And, you know, Socrates, but wait, but I like to talk about the philosophers of the past, but Socrates was brought before the Senate and put on trial, right?
He was put on trial because he didn't recognize the gods that the state recognized.
And he gave a speech, the Gadfly speech.
And I don't know if you've ever heard it, but he likened himself to the Gadfly, that it was his job to oppose things of the state and to constantly sting them and sting them and awaken the giant steed, the giant horse that is the state.
And we like to see ourselves as that gadfly.
We know that we're going to be an annoyance, but we're going to constantly sting them until they do something, something right, some sort of proper and virtuous action.
And so we are the gadfly and we don't worship the gods that our state worships, right?
We don't worship the gods of endless war, the gods of war profiteering or the gods of the of endless wars.
We don't worship those gods.
We're here to tell the state, we're going to sting you and sting you and sting you and sting you until you do your goddamn jobs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's beautifully put.
Absolutely.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
I wonder like what it must be like from your perspective seeing even, I mean, Joe Biden just said yesterday, or maybe it was the day before yesterday, that he officially said we'll be leaving Afghanistan in September, which spoiler alert, we won't be.
That's just, it's not going to happen.
He's going to get rolled again like they always do.
He also said we'd be leaving, I think, in 2014 or something.
You know, we're not leaving Afghanistan in September unless there's a change.
It won't just be because Biden decided this.
But it must be like almost surreal from your perspective to have served in this war a while ago and to see them still pushing back the date.
Like as if with over 100,000 troops, what couldn't be accomplished is going to be accomplished in the next three months.
Like we can't leave this summer like Trump wanted to.
So we have to leave this fall.
Like what, what exactly do you think?
But somewhere in those three months, we're going to build up this Jeffersonian nation that we've been trying to do for almost two decades now.
I mean, it's just so, it's so surreal and ridiculous.
And just, you know, anyway, it's really something to watch.
Yeah, when I was, when I was told that Biden had done this yesterday, I hadn't seen the news yet.
I hadn't turned the TV on or the computer.
And I get a phone call from a reporter at an article outlet that we talk to regularly, and he asked me about it.
And I was caught off guard.
And my initial response was like, FNA, right?
Great.
Fine.
September 11th.
I know it's four months and 10 days later than we wanted.
And I was excited about it.
And the more I thought about it, I was like, you know what?
He's playing loose and fast with American lives.
We could absolutely walk out of there today or on May 1st the same way we can on September 11th.
And I started really thinking about it and put some thought into it.
The September 11th thing is all it's just about poetic repetition.
It's all about ceremony.
He didn't pick September 11th because the mission is going to be accomplished on September 10th.
He picked it because he wanted to create this World War I armistice treaty 11, 11, 11 type situation.
But if you remember correctly from history, the armistice agreement and to end World War I was set to go in earlier than November 11th at the 11th hour.
But they wanted that repetition, that 11, 11, 11, so people would remember it always.
And in the time when it was agreed to to the time when it was assigned, anywhere between 2,700 and 11,000 new soldiers were killed in that war.
So if one more soldier dies between May 1st and September 11th, it is squarely on Joe Biden's shoulders.
He has to own it.
He cannot blame Trump anymore for that.
You know, he could absolutely walk out of there on May 1st and honor America's promise.
It wasn't Trump that made the promise in the Doha deal.
It was Trump speaking for America.
America made that promise.
We should be keeping America's word, packing up the circus tent and coming home on May 1st.
But if it does actually happen on September 11th, I will give credit where credit's due.
I will tell and say President Biden did something that his three predecessors couldn't do.
He ended a war.
He ended two wars.
Really, I mean, Syria is almost already.
Yemen, excuse me, is our involvement done there.
If he ends two wars, I will give him the credit that he deserves.
But if one American dies between now and September 11th, it rests squarely on his shoulders.
And the problem with Joe Biden is he's really good at those ceremonial things.
He's really good at going to the soldiers' funerals and talking to widows.
His personal connection with people is solid.
I would say that's probably his greatest strength as a leader is his ability to connect with people in a personal way.
And so it will come off as a triumph for him if he does attend a single military funeral, because the world will see how compassionate, how human Joe Biden is.
But I say not one more.
There's not a single life that's worth extending this war until September 11th.
And General Don Bulldock, I don't know if you've ever heard of the general before.
He was one of the original horse soldiers into Afghanistan that fought on horseback, 10 combat tours as a Green Beret.
He ran for Senate up in New Hampshire last year against Gene Shaheen.
I don't know if you saw her comments last week and we could talk about those in a minute.
But he lost.
Yeah, I'll tell you about it.
It's pretty disgusting.
But he's a general who is opposed to one more minute of war in Afghanistan.
He's there.
He's been there.
He commanded troops.
He's a brigadier general.
He knows the ins and outs, and he's very anti-Afghanistan war, and he feels that we should be leaving on May 1st, just like President Trump promised.
But Jean Shaheen, I wrote down the comment here.
Let's see if I can find it.
She's the senator from New Hampshire.
And here we go.
Supporting Afghan women is a human rights imperative.
And it also bolsters the stability of Afghanistan in any agreement.
There can be no equivocation.
Prioritizing women's inclusion and rights in Afghanistan must be a U.S. foreign policy priority.
Wow.
Gene Shaheen, Liz Cheney, Crenshaw, Lindsey Garner, Er Graham, all of the whole warmongering bunch.
They will find any reason to stay in Afghanistan beyond a military mission, anything they can find.
Oh, yeah.
No, now it's the woke justifications.
I mean, you know, it's just unbelievable.
And as you pointed to before, like, look, I mean, think about the mentality of somebody who would keep a war going because it's a more monumental date to end it on on September 11th.
I mean, think about that mentality.
You would really have to view human lives as pawns on a chessboard.
Like, this is to your game.
Well, this will look better and be a bigger moment for me politically.
I mean, it's really evil when you think about it that you would ever keep a war going one second longer than it had to be kept going.
And then these same people who will have no problem inflicting needless death and suffering on real human beings will also then turn around and put themselves forward as the champions of women's rights.
And even, you know, leaving aside the, even if their goal actually was women's rights, and I know there's a lot of, because I've talked to a lot of combat vets who served in Afghanistan.
I mean, look, it is true that the Taliban is not really good on women's rights.
But, you know, the guys fighting the Taliban oftentimes aren't very good on little boys' rights.
So it's not exactly just a clean decision here.
Oh, we just want girls in school.
So we're going to hand these kids off to the other side.
They've got their own pretty disgusting cultural norms as well.
So this is all.
But of course, obviously, they don't even mean any of this.
I mean, this is just to keep this baby train going.
Yeah, it's virtue signaling.
And I'm glad you brought that up, the little boys issue.
It's part of the Afghani culture called Bachibazi.
And Americans prop up these village elders and these warlords and we protect them and they abuse little boys.
They treat them as sex slaves.
When we first got there, we didn't quite understand it because it's not something we're really used to in our culture.
And the military used to say on Thursdays, they would dress these little boys up, paint their nails, paint their hair, put makeup on them, and they would travel with them when they would come onto the base to do their jobs on the base.
And it was disgusting.
And we didn't quite understand it until the Marines in 2000, I think it was 2010, might have been 2011.
And a dear friend of mine, Representative Ben Adams in Idaho, he's a state representative, two-time combat Marine.
He was working the radio one night when he took, he got a call that his soldiers, his or his Marines, his guys had been attacked.
And I believe there were four that had been killed by one of these sex slaves who had seen the American Marines as protectors of the abusers.
And he had gotten a hold of his abusers, AK-47, and had gunned down a group of Marines, killing four or five.
I'm not sure.
And Sergeant Adams had to work the radio and work the medevacs and call in the air support to go get his fallen brethren who had died because we were protecting a pedophile.
We were propping up the pedophile culture in Afghanistan.
We are propping up the opium production in Afghanistan.
We are propping up warlords who abuse women and children.
We're propping that up.
That is not our job as military men fighting for freedom and democracy around the world.
So you're right.
The Taliban is bad.
But the other things, Bachibazi culture is as bad, if not worse.
And it's not something we can cure by being on one side of the fight.
We need to remove ourselves.
And Afghanistan eventually will figure it out.
It might be another 3,000 years, but they don't need us there.
Obviously, in 20 years, we haven't been able to do anything to stop any of it.
Yeah.
And of course, they're not going to figure it out by us dominating them and forcing them or picking one of these awful sides and propping them up, as you were saying.
I mean, that's not going to be how they figure it out.
We're not the first empire to try to dominate Afghanistan.
And maybe we'll be the last.
I don't know.
But it's certainly not going to work for us.
And no, the truth is what you would hope for in some way is that you could open up the society and introduce some of them to the ideas of modernity.
And you would hope that they could, you know, maybe we could assist them in some way to grow out of this, you know, like dropping, I don't know, pamphlets or sending books of, I'd like to send a whole lot of Scott Horton books or something over there.
But yeah, like, no, this is not, it's not going to be by going in there and dominating them militarily.
This is, I mean, my God, if it was going to work, we would have had some sign of it by now.
And it really is.
It's unbelievable that this war is going to, you know, that the war is older than the kids serving in it.
There's a gentleman that I spoke to a couple of weeks ago and talked about the length of the war.
He was a late 30s senior non-commissioned officer, like a staff sergeant, maybe a sergeant first class when the war first started.
And he went in 2002.
He came home and his son, who was 18 years old, went in 2003.
And now his grandson is preparing to go off and fight this war.
So you're right.
Nothing we have done, pre-generation war.
And there's nothing we've done there that has changed a damn thing in Afghanistan.
So we're not in a two-generation war anymore.
We're now entering the three generations.
And can you imagine?
I mean, I say this often, you know, with lots of different government programs.
I mean, I've talked about this a lot with the COVID regime and when they said 15 days to flatten the curve and a lot of Americans went, well, okay.
I mean, you know, and look, that did sound kind of reasonable.
Like, hey, we could all give up a couple weeks' pay.
We could all give up a couple weeks of our lives to make sure that people aren't dying and stairwells and stuff.
And, you know, you wonder if they had said at the time, if they had got, instead of saying 15 days to flatten the curve, they had said, how about a year and maybe forever?
Maybe we just never go.
Probably there would have been a different reaction.
And I'm not even saying that they're lying.
I'm just saying in hindsight, had we known what the reality would be.
And just imagine if after 9-11, they had told people, yeah, we're going to go to Afghanistan in a nationbuilding effort.
It will be the longest war in American history by far.
But don't worry, by the time your grandson goes to serve in this war, we really think we'll be making some progress.
And really, we haven't made any progress by then, but we'll keep going until we do.
I mean, if they had been honest with the American people or even to give them the benefit of the doubt, if they had just known and the American people were told what would happen, there is absolutely no chance that this would have been accepted.
You know, so that's that's what we're dealing with now, hindsight being 2020.
100%.
And, you know, that's our statement right there for all veterans, especially those that serve in the global war on terror, but really all veterans, family members, everybody.
If we come together on a grassroots effort, we can finally tell these knuckleheads in Washington, D.C. that enough is enough.
Or as our friend Scott would say, enough already.
It's time to end the global war on terror.
It's time to acknowledge our successes and acknowledge our failures and come home, retool, regroup, prepare for the next conflict that comes to our shores and let the State Department drop the leaflets.
Let the State Department work on education.
Let the State Department work on women's and children's protection.
Let the diplomats do what diplomats do.
Let world organizations deliver the food.
The military doesn't need to be the one doing it because we're really, really bad at it.
Grassroots Action Now00:03:33
And one story on that, and then we can, I know we're getting close to the end of our time.
I was deep in that Pesh River Valley one time at a base called Assadabad.
In the middle of the night, a Chinook helicopter came in and our guys, we ran out to the helicopter pad just in time to see them leave.
They landed and they took off and they left behind a four foot by four foot by four foot tall box on a pallet and no note, no instructions, no nothing.
We grabbed it, we secured it, we opened it up and looked inside.
It was stacked full of $100 U.S. bills, full.
So four feet by four feet by four, 16 cubic feet, if my math is correct.
That's not right.
Is that right?
I'm not good at math.
You had me go.
Let's just say it was a lot.
And the next day, the mission was for the special forces guys that came back to pick it up.
They were to take that pallet of $100 bills and go distribute it throughout the community.
No accounting measures, no receipts, no nothing.
Just go distribute this money to the village.
That's what happens when you put a bunch of, and we can call ourselves this.
Nobody else that served is allowed to say it, but a bunch of knuckle draggers in charge of dispersing funds.
We're not good at it.
What we're good at is destroying things and blowing things up and killing things.
The military should not be the nation builder, the peacekeepers, the training of the police force, the protector of women's rights, the builder of water treatment facilities and gas stations.
And so call to all veterans, join us, join the movement.
There is no more powerful voice in the world than a veteran who has served in war that says enough is enough.
And if you want to join our organization, I'm going to encourage you to follow us on Twitter.
You can go to at TroopsHomeUS on Twitter and Facebook, bring ourtroopshome.us or defendtheguard.us and join the grassroots army, join our organization, a bunch of like-minded veterans who are just kind of pissed off at politicians.
We're ready to take the fight to them.
We're ready to fight in Boise and in Missoula and in Sacramento and in Carson City.
And we're ready to go to all the capitals and we're going to fight and get politicians just to finally, for once, do their job, listen to those that have skin in the game and do what's right by the Constitution and what's morally right for America.
Absolutely.
Amen.
And I just think that, you know, particularly right now in the history of our country with this movement building STEAM, it's just such a powerful opportunity.
Look, everybody knows we're not winning in this war.
We're not getting anything more than we've already got out of it in all the terror wars, you know?
And everybody knows our country's in a bad spot right now.
The economy is in a bad spot.
The culture's in a bad spot.
There's all of these problems that we have here at home.
We need to just end this nonsense already and get back to taking care of our own country.
And I just think what you're doing is incredible.
I'm very happy to help in any way that I can.
And I hope that particularly the people, because I know there are people who listen to this show who fall into this most important demographic, anti-war combat vets.
This is your home.
Go join these guys and be a part of something incredible.
And yeah, on that, Dan McKnight, thank you so much for your time.
I really enjoyed it.
It was really eye-opening and I think one of the most important episodes I've ever done.
So thank you very much.
And I'm happy to have you back anytime if you guys talk about.
Absolutely, brother.
Thank you, everybody, for listening.
Thanks for checking out the show.
And we'll see you next time.
Peace.
Hey, guys, thanks for listening to the show today.
Win a PlayStation 500:00:30
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