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Aug. 28, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
44:07
Col Douglas Macgregor - 'War, Debt and Revolution'

Doug Macgregor breaks the bad news to America - things are worse than people understand.

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Time Text
Colonel McGregor's Popularity 00:05:32
The Colonel needs very little introduction.
We all know him.
The one thing I can say personally is I think this man is being interviewed every day of his life because every time I go on X, somebody is interviewing Colonel McGregor.
And so his popularity, I would say, ever since he was on a Tucker Carlson show, has just skyrocketed.
And it couldn't have happened to a better man.
You know, President Trump likes to give a very tough persona.
And in a sense, you know, with what he overcame with the Democrats, that wasn't an easy thing.
So he deserves credit.
But now that he is president, he's not doing the tough stuff that needs to be done.
And if this gentleman who is going to be speaking to us were a president, A, he already, we know he's tough.
He's a colonel.
And if he were president, the stuff would get done.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome again, Colonel Douglas McGregor.
Well, thanks very much.
That's the warmest reception I've had in a long time.
Sometimes the reception is mixed.
There's nobody in the audience with any bricks or rocks right now, so I feel pretty comfortable.
But I have faced some tough audiences.
No, I do want to get some business out of the way up front.
Dr. Paul, of course, is not here in person, but I did want to mention something that I think applies to him.
A few years ago, I guess this would have been 2008, 2007, 2006, I was working in the shadows, if you will, as a strategic analyst for the Secretary of the Navy, which was an interesting experience.
And I met some wonderful people, and one of the people I met was an individual who had served for many years with Admiral Hyman Rickover.
I don't know if many of you remember Rickover.
My maternal grandfather was actually a friend of Rickovers, which is an interesting story.
I was supposed to go to the Naval Academy.
I never went.
Went to West Point.
And anyway, this man looked at me and he said, you know, of all the people I've served with in my lifetime, no one was ever more right than Rickover about everything.
And that's my view of Ron Paul.
I don't think I have found anybody else in Washington over the last 20, 25 years who is more right about everything than Ron Paul.
So if he's listening, and I hope Dr. Paul is listening, some of what I'm going to discuss today is Ron Paul, vintage.
No question about it.
The second thing is I do have some administrative business that I want to take care of.
For those of you who enjoy Judge Napolitano and me and others, the judge and I and Natalie Brunel, some of you may know her, are going to be in Dallas on 4 October.
And we're going to be speaking at the Museum of Flight, which is sometimes called In-Flight Museum or something, but it's in Dallas.
We've got the place to ourselves.
It will start at five in the evening.
There'll be a cocktail reception, lots of hors d'oeuvres, and then we're going to sit there for the next two hours and interact with the audience.
We're not going there to lecture.
We're going there to make some remarks, and then we're going to be talking to the audience.
We want to hear what the audience has to say.
And the goal is, if this is a successful appearance, that we will then, every 90 days, go to another place in the United States until we cross back and forth all over the nation.
We think that there's an appetite right now in the United States to hear something other than the drivel that the two parties put out.
So if you, you know, I'm sure that Dan McAdams is going to provide some sort of advertisement.
The Ron Paul Institute is sponsoring us, so is the American Conservative.
We're looking for other sponsors right now.
But I think it may be something for those of you who live out in Texas, and even if you don't, if you're nearby, you may want to put that on your calendar for 4 August.
And very shortly, there'll be a website and you can go up and register and so forth to participate.
But I think we'll have an audience of no more than 300, 350.
The idea is we want it to be intimate.
We really do want to talk to the audience and we want the audience to talk to us.
We will film it for posterity, obviously.
So if you're afraid you're going to go there and say something you'd rather not hear again, think about it.
Okay.
Well, this has been an interesting afternoon for me, not just because Nassim Talib was here, but all the speakers, I think, have brought something special to the project today.
You know, I was watching a tape of the ceremonial opening of Congress earlier this year, and it was really quite striking to me.
Advanced Ages, Young Exhibits 00:09:55
And the reason it was striking is I suddenly realized, my goodness, all of these people seem to be of a very advanced age.
And I had this sort of vision of a column of golf carts that was moving down into the Congress.
Now, truth in advertising, I'm 72.
I don't play golf, and I don't ride around in golf carts.
But it just struck me that we live in golf cart America.
We are governed by people who ride in golf carts.
We are governed by people who spend a lot of time on the golf course.
I don't think that's a very good thing, frankly.
I don't like it.
But I think we have to accept the fact that that's where we are.
The average age in the House is 63.
The average age in the Senate is 64.
Now, when you look at the numbers, for that average age to be that high, that tells you you've got a lot of people who are part of this sort of geriatric justice league.
Now, I was watching, and it also struck me that these are the kinds of people that when you try to hold a substantive conversation with them, they always have their talking points.
And that if you bring things up, they immediately associate it with one of their talking points.
So I've been thinking about going up to the hill and walking around and asking people about the Big Bang theory and find out how many of them think that was their last trip to Epstein Island.
So the bottom line is the place is beginning to look like a museum where the exhibits get to vote.
And that's something I think we desperately need to change.
But it's tough because money is powerful.
And all of these people, frankly, have a lot of money behind them.
The late Lou Dobbs used to say it on a routine basis.
We've got the best government that money can buy.
And it's being bought.
And that's part of my discussion today.
We never seem to get past any serious matter.
We go out, we vote, we vote for somebody who claims to be new and different.
We discover that at the end of the day, we get more war, more debt, and more governmental control.
These are the three things that I want to focus on a little bit: war, debt, and governmental control.
The Americans who've lived outside of the Beltway aren't beginning to notice this.
They're beginning to figure out that they're not simply ignored, they're being shouted down.
They're not even represented on the Hill today.
And for all the talk that Donald Trump engaged in before he was elected, he's no longer saying things that resonate with the people that voted for him.
And his base is beginning to erode.
Now, there are some diehards.
It doesn't make any difference what happens.
It will always go down with the Titanic.
But I think he's beginning to figure out things are actually changing and not for the good.
And I think they're beginning to figure out that, you know, at the end of the day, they haven't really found anybody new.
They essentially got into a car and changed lanes, but the destination is unchanged.
And that destination is, as I tried to point out earlier when I was talking about Nassim Talib, who I think gets a lot of the financial stuff right, that's a bad destination for us.
So what I'm going to do is talk a little bit about history.
History can be a mirror if we have the courage to look into it.
And I want to go back quite a distance.
I want to go back to 18th century France in the years that led up to the Revolution.
And you find out something that's very edifying.
You discover that France at the time was the greatest power in Europe.
It was the richest state in Europe, some people would argue in the world.
And even more important, it was the most powerful.
It fielded vast armies.
Its navies were not bad.
But then suddenly things started to change.
The society began to rot from within.
They began to engage in wars that were frankly unneeded.
And they lost.
And confidence, public confidence in the French government and the French leadership began to erode.
Ultimately, the economy was badly managed.
And by 1789, the French population discovered that it could no longer afford to buy bread, effectively the staple of life.
Now stop and think about that.
This was the superpower of the 18th century.
Remember, France was very strong.
It had great social cohesion.
The French nation became a nation very early, much earlier than the other European states.
And yet it was all destroyed.
It was destroyed by a ruling class that preached virtue, practiced vice, that behaved so badly, the French public began to notice.
And eventually, people discovered this class has no right to rule.
And you've got a revolution.
Do you think there's a similarity with us today?
I think we're discovering that the people that are running the show in Washington have no business being there.
Now, for many years, we had governments, at least for the first 150 years, where despite their problems and occasional excursions into corruption, they still were people that had a covenant with the American people.
They were Americans.
They didn't forget that they were Americans.
They were ultimately, in addition to probably lining their pockets, still interested in doing what was in the interest of the American people.
Lincoln described it as government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Today, I think we see government which is of corruption by conniving and for the worst.
It's a disaster.
It doesn't work at all.
So if we're going to have government of the corrupt, by the crooked and the connected, the result is that working Americans pour their life's blood into everything and they get nothing in return.
And they continue to work.
They work very hard.
They try to feed themselves and their families.
They obey the law.
They do whatever is expected of them.
And at the end of the day, they figure out that Washington is more corrupt.
War is multiplied.
And the legalized theft has been accelerated.
So why has this been the case?
So I want to run through some observations.
The first is the financialization of our economy.
And people ask, you know, what are you talking about?
Well, financialization is really the problem that people invest their funds in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, because they want to take advantage of rising asset prices.
Funds are not invested in building anything, least of all in hiring people and developing human capital.
Financialization is a system that transfers wealth from people that really can't afford not to work, and it punishes the production capitalist.
In other words, the production capitalist is somebody who builds something, manufactures something.
These are the people we talk about.
We call them robber barons, but they built the United States.
They produced enormous wealth for this country.
Even someone like J.D. Rockefeller was hardly a saint by any stretch of the imagination.
He was an American.
In fact, there's an interesting story about J.D. Rockefeller.
He went to Teddy Roosevelt, and of course, he and Roosevelt locked porns periodically.
Remember, that was the standard oil problem.
He broke that, broke up the monopoly that really made J.D. Rockefeller enormously wealthy.
But Rockefeller said, I want to see the president.
They said, of course.
He came into the Oval Office and talked to Teddy Roosevelt.
He said, I've got a proposition for you.
He said, what's that?
He said, we've discovered oil in the Persian Gulf.
And they said, really?
He said, yeah, I want to go in there.
I want to capture the oil fields.
And once we've done that, we'll control the whole world for a long time.
And he said, well, what are you talking about?
I'm not going to give you the Army or the Navy to do that.
He said, you don't have to.
I've got that.
He had his own army, and he had his own Navy.
He said, well, what about the people that live there?
He said, well, the hell with them.
And he said, well, you can't just push these people out.
He said, well, what did we do to the Indians?
This is 1909.
Teddy Roosevelt said, look, you're on your own, and I can't support this.
It's an astonishing thing to think about.
But J.D. Rockefeller, whatever his virtues, whatever the downsize is considered, he was an American.
He was interested in acting in the interests of the United States and the American people.
And I don't think we have very many of those right now.
We don't have very many production capitalists.
I give Musk credit because he's built something.
He's an engineer.
You don't have very many engineers at the tops of the corporations anymore.
Fake Money's Toll 00:04:34
Ultimately, financialization has converted the free market or the stock market into a big casino.
And the House always wins.
And the House is not the American people.
BlackRock manages roughly $10 trillion right now.
Think about that.
That's more than the GDP of every country on the planet except the United States and China.
And now we're hearing that people that are earning $300,000 a year are in trouble.
They can't pay their bills.
What?
Somebody said, well, the system isn't working.
No, the system is doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
That's the problem.
The Federal Reserve, Ron Paul's favorite.
The Fed facilitates all of these developments with 23,000 workers who collectively probably couldn't manage a lemonade stead.
They charge 0% interest for the money that they provide to banks, and then the banks charge you 7% interest for a mortgage.
When three out of five Americans discover that they're broke, all they have to do is look carefully at the Federal Reserve.
And the Federal Reserve thrives on something else.
In fact, my good friend that contributed to my remarks today, Dave Ramaswamy, he's standing up against the wall in the back.
He loves the term fake money because that's really what we're dealing with right now.
I'm surprised that Nassim Taleb did not talk about that because that's really the heart of everything.
Fake money.
Fake money is fiat money.
Well, what's fiat money?
It's money that's not backed by anything tangible.
No precious metals, no commodities, no gold, no silver, nothing.
Well, then, what's it based on?
Public confidence and trust in the U.S. government.
So what do we have?
We have Nassim Taleb telling us gold is a reserve currency.
He's telling us that everyone is investing in gold.
You know, the Indian housewives in India probably dispose over more gold right now than the Fed.
The problem is we are living in isolation from reality.
We don't understand this.
So fake money is responsible for everything.
Fake news, fake experts, fake elections, fake prosperity.
It's the mother of all scams.
Everything else is just the offspring, including the greatest distraction of all.
That's the U.S. government.
The U.S. government is a show that costs us $7 trillion a year to watch.
Think about that.
Fake money destroys whatever it touches.
Government subsidizes and destroys education.
Government subsidizes health care and costs rise dramatically.
Government subsidizes housing.
These are the three pillars of American society, by the way.
And what happens?
You can't afford to buy a house.
Everything skyrockets: healthcare, housing, everything.
Fake money subsidizes mortgage.
And pretty soon, homes become unaffordable.
So every fake dollar results in the production of $2 in inflation.
So how do you deal with fake money?
We'll come back to that.
Now, somebody said, well, Doug, where are all the gold-plated highways?
Where are all the fantastic benefits of all of this fake money?
Well, what happened to all of the wealth?
Where did it go?
It vanished into the pockets of your financial capitalists.
These are the people that charge transaction fees.
Have you ever heard of that transaction fee?
You ever move any significant cash from one place to the other?
And then you find out, well, why doesn't this happen sooner?
Because the longer it sits in somebody's account, the more interest is accrued, not for you, but for them.
We could go on and on, but transaction fees have gotten us into a hell of a lot of trouble.
2007 and 2008, you could blame much of what happened there on transaction fees.
And of course, we bailed everybody out at 100% on the dollar.
One person, Sheila Bear, said, well, why not bail them out at 10 cents on the dollar?
These people are crooks.
They've stolen money.
They lied to people.
Well, you know how far Sheila Bear got.
She didn't get very far.
This is legalized criminality.
Wealthiest Counties and War Machine 00:07:07
But the real tragedy of all of this is the endless outsourcing that hollowed out the interior of our country.
By the way, contrary to popular belief, The Chinese did not steal our manufacturing base.
They didn't take anything from us.
The donor class, the CEO class, and Congress gave it to them for a price, obviously.
But nevertheless, they sold us out.
Today, we have lost an estimated $10 to $14 trillion, depending upon whom you want to talk about, in the Middle East, in Libya, Iraq, Somalia, and now increasingly Ukraine.
That brings us to the war machine.
The war machine sends Americans in uniform to die in deserts, mountainous, and jungles that are either of marginal or no value whatsoever to the American people at a cost of $10 to $14 trillion.
Washington, by the way, you know, spent 20 years in Afghanistan and at least $2.5 trillion to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
That's a hell of an achievement.
You know, what happens in the meantime here at home?
Well, in the meantime, we had open borders, we have opioids, we have deaths of despair, opioid overdoses, and suicide.
All you have to do is drive across the country, go through places like Iowa, Michigan, Illinois.
This is, by the way, where most of your soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines come from, Pennsylvania, Ohio, these places.
They don't have golf carts.
Most of them don't play golf.
And they're the ones bearing the burden of defense because they actually believed they were going somewhere to defend the national security interest.
So where are the seven wealthiest counties in America?
Well, you're sitting in them.
They're all around Washington, D.C. How did that happen?
Well, the war profiteers certainly benefit enormously.
The pharmaceutical industry certainly contributes that with their lobby.
So does the banking industry.
Of course, Lockheed Martin's stock price tripled during the Afghan war.
Defense executives became millionaires for selling missiles that we launched into mud huts.
Washington today thinks that military power is effectively equivalent to Kleenex.
Use it up, throw it away, then grab another.
But Americans who are in uniform, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, they are not Kleenex.
And there's a willing, there's a reason why nobody wants to join.
There's a reason why we can't recruit.
Oh, you can always recruit someone.
But human capital is everything.
If you think you have a good force, it's usually because the people in it are high quality.
One of the things that impressed the hell out of me in 1990 and 91, when we went into action, was that I had very intelligent soldiers who could actually make good decisions.
They could act without being told exactly what to do all the time.
They did not need a nanny.
Well, I'm told that's falling apart because we're recruiting people now that we otherwise would have never taken.
And we make all sorts of waivers for all sorts of bad reasons.
Now, where does this lead all of this?
Well, as previously mentioned, where the wealthiest counties are, I think it's important to note that the globalist class, the retired generals, all of these people who have profited from our strategic failures all live around here.
And they're enjoying life because there is no accountability.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's critical.
When there is no accountability, there is no performance.
How many times do we have to deal with these four stars that stand up and pretend that they're heroic figures based upon what they claim they did in Afghanistan or Syria or Iraq or some other poor, sad, tragic place?
They're not.
They sat behind desks.
They sat inside offices.
They approved PowerPoint slides for strikes on the hapless, the people that have no air defenses, no means of defending themselves.
Then, of course, you have the media.
The media doesn't help.
The media doesn't help because the media is in the business of spinning up narratives.
If the mega donors want to exploit the media as a megaphone, then they can do it.
When Vanguard, BlackRock, or any of the financial titans decides that they want to crash a sector, the media steps forward and creates the narratives.
How many times have you heard people in the media complain about vulture capitalists, complain about the destruction of industry in various states by vulture catalysts, people that buy up something that's not doing well, not for the purpose of reinvigorating it or making it better, but to sell it off and make a profit?
You don't hear that.
Instead, what you get is you defense contractors who need a new war.
Well, the headlines write themselves.
Fake news isn't just propaganda.
Fake news in this country is a business strategy.
Then there's the developing digital prison.
This is a new development, something that I've only recently become familiar with.
It's now subsidizing a surveillance state.
Are we subsidizing a surveillance state?
You're damn right we are.
If you look at this thing called Palantir, that was a CIA startup.
People don't seem to understand that.
You know, the Central Intelligence Agency, DARPA, these entities, they create startups with technologies, and they put people in charge of it who will do their bidding.
I mean, how would you like to be offered the leadership of Palantir?
If you're willing to do whatever we and the MI6 and the Mossad want you to do, we'll make you a billionaire.
Seems to be a good business model, at least for the people that want to do that.
The digital prison now has AI.
AI algorithms decide if you're a threat before you've even gotten around to committing a crime.
Your phone tracks you better than any secret police.
And then there's the Fourth Amendment, something that's very much at risk these days.
Silicon, oh, I'm scary.
Somebody in NSA is listening in.
Okay.
They've created a prison without walls where the guards are algorithms and the warden is artificial intelligence.
You know, that bad news there is education.
We already have created generations of people who don't read.
Now, thanks to AI, they won't be able to write either.
Eisenhower's Dilemma 00:09:59
So what's happened?
Well, every military intervention has failed, backfired.
Every mandate made things worse.
Every so-called expert got richer while the small businesses died.
You had the third mask, the fourth jab, the fifth booster.
All the while, the Americans who kept society running were called non-essential.
Isn't that interesting?
Now, there is a myth, and it's very widespread.
I had somebody tell me this just the other day who works for one of the major media outlets and said, come on, Doug, these things aren't new.
They've always been problems in this country.
This has always been a problem.
I said, no, that's not true.
Things in this country were not always this way.
So let's digress for a second and talk about a different country, a different world, a different America.
In June of 1945, there was a massive victory parade through the ruins of Berlin.
The first people that marched in the parade were the British in order that they entered the war.
Subsequently, you get the Soviets.
They marched through.
And then finally came the Americans.
Harry Truman flew over to watch this parade.
And Harry Truman had commanded a battery in the U.S. Army National Guard during World War I.
So Harry Truman knew what it meant to be a soldier.
And he was deeply moved by the sight of all these American soldiers who, by the way, contrary to the ones you saw recently on the Army's birthday, these guys were all in step.
And they paraded their equipment and so forth.
And he was so impressed that after it was over, he grabbed Eisenhower by the arm and he said, come with me.
And they went behind the reviewing stand and he said, Ike, I am so proud and I'm so pleased with everything you've done.
I want to confer on you the Medal of Honor.
Well, Eisenhower, much to Truman's surprise, stepped back and almost turned white as a sheep.
And he said, no, Mr. President, you can't do that.
He said, what do you mean?
I'm the president.
He said, no, sir.
I've never made it a secret that I have never seen action.
I have never been under fire.
And if you were to give me this award, that would be a disgrace to all of the men whose lives were sacrificed to win this.
You must not do that.
Well, this was the last thing that Truman expected.
Truman was enormously impressed.
I mean, he was still a Democrat and hated Republicans, but he was impressed with the response that Eisenhower gave.
Now, why am I mentioning this?
Because things have changed.
Look at the generals that you have today.
My God.
These are people who are in forward operating bases.
I know several of them.
I roomed with some of them at West Point.
They've never been under fire.
They never pulled a trigger.
They never killed anybody.
They never led anybody into battle.
Now, are there some exceptions?
There may be.
But the overwhelming majority, absolutely not.
They are back as PowerPoint Rangers, approving strikes on hapless villagers in Afghanistan or Iraq.
But if you look at them, they've got more decorations than a Christmas tree.
It's outrageous nonsense.
And then on top of that, you have the returning soldiers.
One will have to remain nameless.
He was a staff sergeant, multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He came back to his hometown.
His family owned a restaurant.
Well, COVID killed that.
So they no longer have a restaurant.
He now works three jobs to help support his family.
He's got a wife.
She's got a child, but also his parents.
And this is in a town that his great-great-grandfather helped to build.
There's something radically wrong with the picture.
Now, the guys who are decorated like Christmas trees, they all live in these counties around here.
But that staff sergeant doesn't.
He has to deal with harsh reality.
Now, please forgive my frustration.
I did not come here to curse the darkness.
I really came to light a bonfire.
I mean it.
I wanted to illuminate the path to peace because peace abroad means prosperity at home.
Something that Eisenhower understood.
You know, we talk about presidents who were in World War II.
Nixon was in the Second War in the Navy.
JFK was in the Second War in the Navy.
Eisenhower, of course, was also in the Second World War as a soldier.
Those three men came out of the Second World War having experienced very different things.
Kennedy used to talk.
You can read the books.
He used to talk about this country.
Look at the millions of men we put in uniform.
Look at the enormous numbers of ships we built.
There's no nation in the world like the United States.
There's nothing we can't do.
Richard Nixon, frankly speaking, took a similar position.
I mean, he saw this giant military machine that sprang almost from nothing between 1939 and 1945 and decided we could do anything.
Eisenhower was very different.
Eisenhower recollected in his memoir that the most frightening experience he had during World War II was a visit from the wives at service men in March of 1945.
They came in and said, you need to end this war.
I want my husband home.
We can't go on like this.
You need to bring these soldiers back.
He said he didn't know what to do.
And you know who sent the wives to see him?
FDR.
Because FDR said, you're going to have to deal with this.
I can't.
Now, there was something else that happened that Eisenhower knew about.
I know you've all seen the movie Patton.
George Patton stands up there and says, well, you're all right.
Everybody goes, at the end of the Second World War, everything was over.
This is in May of 1945 after the surrender.
He went out to speak to all these divisions.
And he went out there and he said, you guys done a great job.
We've beaten down these Germans.
Now you're going to get a chance to do something I wish I could do.
And you're going to get a chance to go to the Pacific and kill Japanese.
He was boomed off the stage.
He was talking to men that had been in service since late 42, early 43.
They'd fought the German army.
You know, we never did better against the Germans than one for one in terms of an exchange.
In fact, maybe not that good.
The Germans were great.
They just didn't have an Air Force.
Without an Air Force, there wasn't much they could do.
But they could still kill large numbers of us, and we lost huge numbers.
All the generals during the war lied about the losses.
Patton was the biggest liar of all.
He didn't tell anybody the truth.
You know that scene in the movie where they say, he's defeated more divisions in the last six months than anywhere else in history?
It's all crap.
It's all crap.
We paved the road to the Rhine on the bodies of hundreds of thousands.
Most of our dead during World War II was fighting the Germans.
And so Eisenhower had a very different view of things.
His view is, we must never do this again.
Whatever we can do to avoid another war like this, we must do it.
He was right.
And so he spends his time in office doing several things.
First, he's trying to pay down the debt, which he damn near succeeded in completely.
In fact, the debt that he leaves today isn't even worth mentioning.
It was so minuscule.
And he cut defense.
Ah, General Eisenhower cut defense.
Absolutely, he cut defense.
Generals came into him and said, sir, we need 22 divisions to stop the Russians if they attack in Europe.
22 divisions.
He said, really, how much sea lift and airlift do you have?
He said, you come back tomorrow and tell me.
So they came back the next day and said, well, we only have enough airlift and sea lift for 15 divisions.
He said, that's your requirement.
Get out.
He was not going to go to war with the Soviets.
And there was a damn good reason for it.
He was standing next to someone at that victory parade.
His name was Zhukov.
And Zhukov and he were talking to each other, and Zhukov was watching as these various pieces of equipment rolled by, and one of them was a mine-clearing device.
We call it mine rollers, where you bring this thing up in front of the tank and you roll it across.
And Zhukov said, What is that?
He'd never seen anything like that.
And Eisenhower explained it through the interpreter.
And he said, Well, how long does it take to get that mine roller up to the minefield?
Oh, well, that may be an hour or two, two hours, or three hours.
And Zhukov said through the interpreter, he said, if you fight the Germans, if it takes more than 10 minutes, you've lost.
And so Eisenhower said, well, how did you breach it?
He said, I would use one or two battalions and sacrifice them.
The real count is not 27 million.
When I was in Moscow in 2001, the count that was delivered to me at the General Staff Academy, used to be called the Voldershilov, was 39,900,000 dead, more than 15 million Soviet soldiers, and another million who were executed by Stalin who refused to fight.
Eisenhower's Warning 00:06:48
What am I trying to get across to you?
What was Eisenhower's impact?
Eisenhower said, Oh my God, this is undoable.
We're not built for that.
What are we built to do?
We are a commercial empire, much like the British Empire.
Now, the empire business is about to go away for reasons that I won't go into that Taliban Nassim Talibus mentioned.
We're going to go under financially.
That's not an if, it's only a when.
So that'll take care of the empire.
But we have to get back to building prosperity.
You build prosperity by building things, manufacturing things, selling things to other people that they need.
We got to get out of the debt finance trap that we're in.
We can't sell our bonds.
So now they're trying to sell T-bills.
That's not going very well.
I don't see that happening at all.
So to wrap up, I want to recommend some things.
And I know nobody will do what I tell them.
I'm used to that.
When I was in the army, people do what I told them to do, but now they don't do it.
First, we need to break up the financial cartels.
Those things are a disaster, and they wield enormous power.
You know, we've got to make banks serve communities, not speculators.
We have to restore sound money that holds the value for working families, not fiat currency that enriches those who print it.
In other words, it's got to be real.
It's got to be backed by something.
We have to restructure the national debt.
You know what that means?
Default.
And people say, oh, we've never defaulted.
That's not true.
We defaulted twice under Franklin Roosevelt.
You know what they called it?
Restructuring the debt.
Now, why were they able to do that?
Well, at the time, we had the largest manufacturing base in the world.
We had the largest skilled labor force in the world.
And finally, we were demanding that the people that owed us money for the First World War pay us in gold.
So the British and the French and others were shipping tons of gold to us.
And everybody looked at this and said, well, the Americans obviously have a real problem economically, but you know what?
They're going to come out of this.
We don't know when or how, but they'll come out.
And so they were willing to restructure the debt, which meant restructuring the payments.
And it worked.
And we did come out of it.
What's the problem today?
We don't have the largest manufacturing base.
Our labor force is so unskilled in so many critical areas that we're being told privately by people in the micro-circuitry industry, you don't have the human capital to do what needs to be done in these factories.
You know, we need to make education a path to employment.
But again, in education, there has to be accountability.
You don't give a gold star to everybody in the room for showing up.
We've got to hold people accountable for whatever it is they do or not do.
How do we protect American workers?
Well, you defend the nuclear family.
You protect and defend free speech.
You restore education to what it ought to be.
And then finally, you have to exercise strategic restraint.
The word diplomacy has been eliminated from the strategic vocabulary of the United States.
Strategic restraint means recognizing that the world has changed.
We live in a world today where civilizational states, India, China, Persia, Russia, these places are roaring back with vengeance.
These are the great powers of hundreds of years ago, even a thousand years ago, or 2,000 years ago.
Somebody said to me the other day, oh, well, you know, the Chinese, they're the richest country in the world.
This is so bad.
I said, do you realize that for most of the last 2,000 years, China was the richest country in the world?
China was the manufacturing power in the world.
India has a history that here no one knows.
My point is, we have to live in a world not where we think we're the only game in town.
We have to understand there are other cultures, other civilizations, other economies, other people.
We have to respect them.
We need to base our relations with others on equality.
We cannot afford to look down our nose at the rest of the world.
I think that's an unfortunate habit that we inherited from the British.
Now, the hour is late.
I know that.
And it seems hopeless.
The people that rule us, they rule through division.
They rule through fear.
They rule through despair.
They're counting on your apathy.
You have to be the leading edge of change.
And I know somebody says, oh, come on, give us a break.
No, you have to be part of the counteroffensive.
Like the signers of the Declaration of Independence, you've already taken risks and you are standing by the truth, which is not always public and profitable.
The Republic, though, is not lost.
It waits to be reclaimed.
So I want to leave you with a few choice observations.
I learned early in my family that the sacrifices, the performance, the things that my ancestors did actually counted.
And I also learned that the destiny of any great nation always rests on the shoulders of the few, the courageous and the strong, not the many, not the comfortable, and certainly not the fearful and the complacent.
We are Americans.
We can only survive and succeed if we are Americans first and last and always.
The future is not written.
It waits for us to take up the pen and write the future if necessary, as Winston Churchill said, with blood, sweat, and tears.
So when you leave here, go home and be truth-tellers.
Go home and develop alternative structures for information and power.
Begin to think about the world that has to come back in strength when the world we live in right now collapses, because I think it will.
Be Prepared, Be Ready 00:00:08
Be prepared.
Be ready.
Don't be afraid.
Don't get lost.
It'll work.
We'll be successful.
Thanks for listening.
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