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Sept. 17, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:19
8) Douglas Macgregor - "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"

Which way America? What are the forces conspiring to bring us down and destroy our country? Former senior advisor to acting Secretary of Defense Doug Macgregor offers insights into what we can do to reclaim the Republic...

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Time Text
Paul's Admirer Shares Insights 00:05:02
It's my absolute pleasure to introduce someone that I've grown to know over the years who's also an alumni of the Ron Paul lunches, a terrific mind, a terrific patriot, former senior advisor to the acting Secretary of Defense, hopefully future Secretary of Defense, and my great friend Colonel Douglas McGregor.
thanks again well thanks thanks for the nice warm reception It's always nice.
It's much better than a brick through a window, which is from time to time what somebody attempts.
I was in a state of shock when I drove into the parking lot just a couple of hours ago.
What?
Is that better?
And I saw this sign.
And I thought I was in the wrong place because I thought this conference was Which Way America, and instead I saw peace and prosperity.
And then I got closer and I said, oh, well, this is RPI.
Okay, I understand that.
Now I understand why this conference is in Virginia and not in Washington.
Because every week in Washington we have another conference.
It's called War and Spending.
So I've been to several of those.
They're very depressing.
First, I want to point out, again, my admiration for Dr. Ron Paul.
He is the sort of person, I told him that the first challenge for anybody in politics and my own personal challenge in military affairs is to outlive your opponents.
And he has thus far managed that.
I hope he continues to do so for some time.
And the other point I wanted to make is that Isaac Newton, when he was finally recognized for his contributions to physics by the king, the king knighted him, said, you've done wonderful things.
And he said, if I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.
I feel as though we have a giant here, Ron Paul, and I stood on his shoulders.
Now, I was thinking about remarks last night, and I threw them out this morning and started fresh again.
And the reason for that is as follows.
You know, I went to, I think, a total in my lifetime of nine graduations from West Point.
I had to go because I was a cadet at the time, or I had to go because I was an instructor.
And then, of course, other people graduated later on that I was friends with.
And all of these graduations involved a keynote speaker.
And I must tell you that all of those presentations were horrifically boring.
And one of them was particularly noteworthy, and that was a graduation while I was a cadet.
And we had the dean of academia of the academic side of West Point, a man, interestingly enough, with the unusual name of Smith.
Well, General Smith was remarkable because he was decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross during World War II for his performance during the Battle of the Bulge, where he as a Corps of Engineer lieutenant led the effort to blow up all the bridges so that the German Army could not cross the critical bridges over the River Meuse.
And he would frequently fall asleep during presentations.
And one time, the superintendent, who is a three-star wonderful man named Sid Berry, good soldier, great person.
I was so fortunate to see these men in a different army from the one that we have today.
And he was standing up there saying something.
He saw some cadets giggling in the front row.
He looked over and here was old General Fred Smith.
And he immediately said, come to attention.
And we all stood up.
And we said, you know, this is a different academy from the one you see now.
And he said, that man can sleep through any damn lecture I give or anybody else gives in this place, and no one, no one will criticize him.
Am I clear?
Yes, sir.
Sit down.
So then we got on with it.
But Fred Smith was a great person, a wonderful man.
And if Dr. Paul wants to fall asleep during my remarks, he can do it.
Now I'm kind of obligated to talk about some of the things you've already heard, but not in great detail.
I think we have to have a brief snapshot of where we are right now.
It's hard to believe.
Hundreds Injured Publicly 00:04:55
I cannot conceive of the America we live in today having grown up in a very different place.
You know, I grew up in North Philadelphia, and I was really raised in an area that was, interestingly enough, full of Ukrainians.
Wonderful people.
I loved them.
They were great.
Bear no resemblance to this regime in Kiev today, I can tell you that.
And I also grew up with Poles and Lithuanians.
They tossed a couple of Italians and Irishmen in for the mix just to give it some color.
Most of them were Democrats.
We had Republicans and Democrats, but I got to tell you something.
All of those people, all of those Democrats, were as devoted to this country, as committed to this country, and ready to defend it as anyone I have ever known in my life.
In other words, we did not view Democrats, and I say we because I was raised in a Republican environment, as the enemy.
I remember when John F. Kennedy won the election under dubious circumstances, and Richard Nixon summed it up very well when they went to him and said, are you going to protest this?
He said, no.
And they said, why not?
So I don't think it's good for the country right now.
We were in the midst of the Cold War.
And I know Jack Kennedy, the nation will be safe in his hands.
That was a different world from the one we live in today.
Our nation, in my judgment, is not safe in the hands of the people that currently govern it.
It's very unsafe.
Stop and consider for a moment the tremendous changes that we've witnessed just in the last two and a half years.
I would go back to the summer of 2020.
Remember the BLM and Tifa riots and destruction all over the country for six months?
$2.1 billion worth of damage.
Hundreds of policemen injured.
Hundreds of citizens who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time injured.
Several on these sides killed unnecessarily, killed by hatred, hatred and violence.
It was shocking to me.
I hadn't seen anything close to this since 1968, frankly.
And it was appalling.
But what was most disturbing was the willingness, the readiness of the entire media and political establishment to tolerate it.
That's what was surprising.
Not that the violence happened.
We know how that got started.
We know why.
But no one seemed to be disturbed by it.
So I date the beginning of the rapid decline into the abyss, as I call it, with what happened in the summer of 2020.
And I ask every day why we are currently allowing our children, the most vulnerable citizens of our country, to be sexualized.
Why are we allowing them to be trafficked across borders?
Not just our children, but other people's children.
No one mentions at least 60,000 Ukrainian children who've simply disappeared.
These things are incomprehensible to me.
Why are we doing it?
There was a time when if you had come to someone and said, this 16-year-old, this 12-year-old, this 6-year-old thinks or has been told by his teacher or her teacher that she can change her sexual identity and wants an operation, we would have considered that child mutilation.
We would have put them in jail or worse, probably in jail with the wrong kind of people in the cell.
But the point is, where did this come from?
What is happening?
I look at the Justice Department.
Just a couple of weeks ago, a black teenage boy was convicted of raping two little girls, four and nine.
He was sentenced to six months in jail.
And we had this man, one of the men involved on January 6th, who was accused of breaking a window into the Capitol building, and he was sentenced to eight years in prison.
What has happened to this Justice Department?
And today on the way in, as I was telling Dr. Pohl, I was listening to him on the radio.
Somewhere along the line, he managed to say in 1988 that he thought the FBI was being used to essentially intimidate, harass, or pursue people who were obviously opposed to national policy.
He thought that was wrong.
Well, today, our institutions have all been weaponized against the broader American public.
We are supposed to celebrate these things.
We're supposed to say we are so much happier now that we have the cult of LGBTQ and other kinds of cults, the cult of climate change, the cult of open borders, the cult that argues for the destruction of our history, our culture, our way of life.
Celebrating Our New Categories 00:14:33
And if you're not willing to support these things, if you don't sign on for it, well, you're probably going to lose your employment.
You could be castigated and pursued and prosecuted in public.
You could be excoriated and your so-called friends distance themselves from you because you've taken a position that is obviously not popular and doesn't align with the administration.
So the question is, what are these elites about, this ruling political class that Professor Vlajos mentioned and to whom Max Blumenthal was referring?
Who are they?
What are they?
What do they think?
Why are we in the position that we are in?
Why do we have a Fed chairman who miraculously just a couple of weeks ago when he was asked, what do you see happening in the near future?
Where do you think you're going to take the Fed and interest rates and so forth?
He said, well, you know, we're navigating under a cloudy sky.
It's very difficult.
All the while, he's printing $90,000 a second on average.
This is the chairman of the Fed.
The only thing that I can come up with at this stage is this is a runaway train.
It is going down the side of a very steep mountain.
It's going to stop the hard way at some point.
I can't predict with certainty when, but it will.
I look at the bond market.
I do that sort of thing.
And I'm shocked at the T-bills.
Let's talk about the T-bills.
The T-bills that all of the banks in this country and most of the banks overseas have invested in years ago have an interest rate of something around 0 to 1% or 2%.
Our interest rates are on the way up.
People can't get car loans.
Credit is tightening.
The average life of the average American is terrible.
And what's happening in the banks?
Well, everybody's looking at this pile of T-bills.
If you're in China or Japan or Saudi Arabia or here in the United States, these things aren't worth much.
Everybody's waiting around for the big short.
When do we dump these?
When does the fire sale begin?
And when that begins, because people say, We've got to dump this, this is toxic.
It's of no value.
It's lost its value.
Get rid of it.
When that happens, we're in a lot of trouble.
We just watched as Saudi Arabia and several other countries, the Emirates, join the so-called BRICS.
Brazil, China, Russia, South Africa, so forth.
India.
What is happening now?
Well, Saudi Arabia, which is really the foundation for our petrodollar, has now decided to join with this new Russian-Chinese-led movement in the direction of gold-pegged currency.
What is that going to have for an impact on us?
It's incomprehensible at this point, but if the petrodollar goes under, and I think there's a real high probability that that will happen because all of these countries now are doing business in their own currency, we are in a lot of trouble.
It's not just a question of the reserve currency.
What is our currency going to be worth?
For that matter, what do we make?
What are we producing that the world buys?
We characterize ourselves as the leading scientific industrial power in the world.
Well, we got that way thanks to people like J.D. Rockefeller and Vanderbilt and Carnegie and others between 1861 and 1922.
Who are they?
Where are they?
Who's doing it?
The only one that comes close right now of the noteworthy names is Elon Musk.
And still, he's not in the same category as those men.
What is driving all of this?
Well, there's two things.
First of all, remember, if you don't know this, you need to understand this.
Most of the people in Washington that man your federal government and are at the top of your armed forces really don't believe in very much of anything.
So if you're looking for a belief system that is necessarily guiding them, you're not going to find it.
Why is that?
It's because everybody wants a job.
Everybody wants to be employed and everybody wants to make more money, particularly once you retire.
You know, people said to me the other day, Doug, how can these general officers sign on for all of this woke nonsense?
I said, well, it's very easy.
If you sign on for it, when you retire, you're rewarded with seats on boards all across the country.
You're invited to join financial firms in New York City like Dave Petraeus or Jack Keene.
And of course, I can tell you that between those two, all the knowledge about finance wouldn't fill a thimble.
So they don't know anything about finance.
But they're all lining their pockets with large quantities of money now as a reward for having gone along with a whole series of bad policies and bad ideas.
So they're not really believers, but the people at the very top and what I would call the oligarchs in the West, Zuckerberg or Soros and others, they are believers.
And you need to understand what they believe.
Or maybe you need to understand what they don't believe in.
I call these the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
And you need to understand that these four horsemen I'm going to describe are no longer running roughshod across the country.
No, they're sitting up in Capitol Hill.
They're sitting in the Justice Department.
They're sitting in the White House.
The horses are watering in the Potomac because they think they've won.
There's no reason to ride all over the country anymore.
So what do these four horsemen stand for?
They stand for atheism, nihilism, Marxism, and globalism.
You need a quick snapshot of each of those and what these mean.
Atheism rejects the supernatural and embraces the notion that all events are random or meaningless.
The concept of afterlife is the adult equivalent of Santa Claus and a good fairy.
It rejects the notion that anything exists beyond the five senses.
If you can't touch it, feel it, smell it, speak to it, et cetera, et cetera, it doesn't exist.
Atheism argues that mankind is better off without the divine, without providence, without divine guidance.
Elevate this mentality to the national level, and there is no moral compass.
That's important.
If you exclude all religious principles and belief in the supernatural or a divine being of some kind, you have suddenly abandoned any hope of devising a moral compass.
Nihilism.
Nihilism.
If there is no power higher than yourself, then only principles exist that you yourself decide on.
In other words, nihilism says values, if they exist at all, are undefined.
If it feels good, do it.
You remember that from the 1960s?
I'm sorry, I'm a little older than you.
I was always bitter because I never had a chance to do it as much as I would have liked.
If life exists at all, then it's a matter of living for yourself and not much else because, after all, this is all that exists.
And it justifies whatever behavior you think is appropriate.
It's just straight out of Ivan Turgenev's work, if you read the Russian author.
Life is empty, meaningless.
These two pillars of the four are very, very important because you can't go to the next two without having essentially internalized those first two.
Marxism.
Now, Marxism has changed.
I say that because originally Marxism was about class conflict and pitting capitalism against labor.
But what these people think of Marxism today is actually quite different.
Marxism posits the destruction of pre-existing values and traditions to resolve class warfare.
It confers on its followers, and this is very important, a monopoly on truth.
Truth.
If you don't agree with them, you're wrong, to the point of being criminal.
Today's interpretation turns Western civilization into the enemy that must be purged.
That the last 400 years on this continent of English-speaking and Western Christian civilization is wrong and it must be purged.
It imagines a utopian state where equity is the dominant value.
It imagines that equity allocates the resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome for everyone.
Well, just who is making these determinations?
Well, we know who they are.
They're across the river, living in Washington, D.C., funded by the oligarchs, who are really deciding what you should or should not think, where you should or should not live, and how you should behave.
Marxism kills meritocracy.
That's very important.
Because if you have a meritocracy, you risk the emergence of people, whether in uniform or not, who stand up and say, no, wait a minute, that's a very dumb idea.
Just because I took an oath to the country doesn't mean I swore unconditional obedience to dumb ideas.
We don't want those people.
We want them out.
And of course, it creates new categories of human beings.
If we say race, religion, language, and culture are artificial constructs, meaningless, then we have to create new categories based on a whole range of different ideas, a lot of which go back to this notion of victimology.
I mean, just the other day, somebody was talking to me and was shocked to discover that at about the time of the American Revolution, there were more Irish Catholics enslaved in the United States than blacks.
Yes, that's true.
Now, it didn't last long because ultimately, large numbers of those Irish slaves didn't turn out to be very effective.
They died.
Strong, tall black men from West Africa were far sturdier, tougher, and could be relied on to perform heavy labor.
That's what it was in those days.
But nobody brings that up.
Of course, my Irish friends have now taken this up and they want to be a new category of victim, and that's another problem.
Globalism.
What is globalism?
Originally, the idea was, well, let's integrate economies across national lines.
That's reasonable.
If we can integrate economies, then we can prosper together, right?
But it's changed.
It's now an ideology that overrules all institutions and national policies and traditions.
Globalism, as practiced by the European Union and Washington, creates open borders, revises history, of course, which is very important so that we understand what really happened, to align with whatever narrative they're spinning.
And ultimately, it enables them, the enlightened ruling class, to police the world that has surrendered its sovereignty.
It surrendered its rights.
The Bill of Rights, as we know it, are simply thrown out and redefined.
History, culture, national identity are destroyed.
Having survived many years in Soviet labor camps, the Russian writer and philosopher Alexander Soltzenitsyn concluded something that I think is very important.
He said, the Russian soul belongs to God, not to the state.
I think the American soul belongs to God and not to Washington.
Now, there's been a lot of talk today about potential civil disorder and war and so forth.
It's a real possibility.
It may not seem so at the moment, but it's something that has to be considered.
But I would ask you to ponder this for a moment.
There's a monument at West Point.
It's called, let's see, what do they actually call it?
I think it's called Battle Monument, Battle Monument.
It memorializes the 2,360 officers and soldiers of the regular army who were killed in the Civil War.
It's a beautiful thing.
The monument stands about 43, 44 feet high.
It's one of the largest granite columns in existence on the planet.
It's a beautiful thing to look at.
All the names are engraved there.
And for many years after the Civil War, Southern cadets used to smirk and point to it and say, there's the monument for Southern marksmanship.
Kind of grim, but it was not inaccurate.
But today, I think we need to look at that monument and remember this.
No one outside our borders can conquer us.
Impossible.
However, the damage we can do to ourselves is infinite.
The Civil War nearly destroyed us.
If at all possible, we want to avoid it.
We don't want to go through that.
We don't want the killing to start because once it starts, as we've seen in Ukraine, it's very difficult to stop.
The more blood that is spilled, the more hatred grows, the more anger and hostility develops and spreads.
So when you go to West Point to visit, stop off at Battle Monument and ponder that one.
There's also something else here.
There's no threat overseas that we cannot master.
Donald Trump said that recently, and I think RFK Jr. made a similar statement.
We can deal with it.
Don't Buy Into China Nonsense 00:03:20
Don't buy into this China nonsense.
China is the oldest continuous civilization on the planet.
It has never been able to expand beyond roughly its current borders because it cannot manage itself and stay together.
And for most of the last 500 years, about 394 of them, China was ruled by foreigners.
Mongols, Tartars, Turks, Manchus, Europeans, British, French.
The Chinese are not preparing to invade anybody, and the last thing they want is a war.
Because if the Chinese are preoccupied with anything, it's business.
And war is bad for business.
So don't buy it, because, as my friends in the Pentagon told me recently, when it became clear that the much celebrated Ukrainian counteroffensive had failed miserably, suddenly it vanished from the daily updates and it was replaced with aggressive Chinese moves in the South China Sea.
Chinese have never stopped a commercial vessel.
Think about that.
The Chinese depend on those waters more than we do.
So the whole nonsensical idea that China is an inevitable war for which we must prepare is about as silly as suggesting that the aliens who are lurking somewhere out there 100 million light years away are way ahead of us and therefore we need to prepare now to defend ourselves against them.
No.
No.
So what is the basic message?
And I'll leave you with this.
It's time to recognize that wokeism is perversion, ladies and gentlemen.
It's sick.
It's wrong.
Our government is in the hands of parties addicted to money and psychiatric drugs.
The few believers at the top hate our civilization and are determined to destroy it.
What must happen is we must disengage from this war in Ukraine.
I can tell you from personal experience, and I studied it in graduate school, no one in here understands Ukraine.
No one understands Russia.
Forget it.
Nor should we involve ourselves in their affairs.
It's not our business.
We need to stay home.
It is time to restore the rule of law.
That's vital.
It's breaking down everywhere.
You know that.
That always set us apart as an English-speaking country.
Everyone knew they could come to the United States and do business.
There were no bribes involved.
There was no corruption.
Well, there was always corruption, but it was manageable.
We've got to crush the criminality.
We have to return integrity to the electoral process.
Right now, most of us have very little faith in it, and with good reason.
And this is a struggle that will take years, but it's vital.
And finally, we must protect the innocence of our children and halt the sexualization of our children.
Restoring Integrity 00:00:27
And I do not agree with the notion that the people running this town are invincible, invulnerable, or strong.
I've dealt with them.
Most of them remind me of people that we used to punch out at bars for entertainment.
or kids that we didn't like in school and beat the hell out of at recess.
Don't be afraid of these people.
Once there are enough of us, and there are growing, growing numbers of us, we will prevail.
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