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July 5, 2024 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:20:55
‘THE US IS FALLING APART’ - EXCLUSIVE Colonel Douglas MacGregor Interview (and UK Elections) - 401
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And I could never be a better man on this...
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In this video, you're going to see the future.
Awakening Wanderers, thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
You don't need me to tell you that John Baudrillard wrote them free essays, there will not be a Gulf War, there was not a Gulf War, the Gulf War did not happen.
You remember anyway that he said that in this age it seems that the reporting on phenomena is so diverse and in a sense cliched that in the end we don't have any connection to the events themselves reporting on a war so thorough so immersive yet presented to us as entertainment to the degree where we can't really connect ourselves to the tragedy any longer and perhaps that's gotten even worse with social media where one minute you're looking at a grueling and ghoulish image of a
Dead child in rubble and then it's like an advert for the betting shop or some sort of gambling opportunity or a nutrition drink.
How are we supposed to take life seriously?
Even general elections or electoral cycles are presented to you like entertainment and we had an election in our country last night so today we'll be talking about the election then we'll be talking about war and the business of war with Colonel Douglas McGregor little later. Has everything become a kind of simulacrum?
That's what John Baudrillard invited us to consider, a kind of deracinated,
endlessly repeated set of images that in the end bear no relationship to reality. I
mean does this seem to you a reasonable reaction even to a landslide
election? Meaning that Labour, which is our version of the Democrats, has a
massive majority in Parliament, which is our version of Congress, and he is our
version of the news media doing their version of what sounds like a kind
of orgasm.
Oh my god!
Oh!
It won't make that much difference, I don't imagine.
Perhaps it's all just playing out like a TV show.
Maybe even my sceptical reaction towards another centrist, globalist, authoritarian being elected is part of the general televisual or media, at least, spectacle.
Here's the results.
Look, Labour won loads and loads of seats.
Conservatives lost loads and loads of seats.
Smattering of other parties one sees, including Nigel Farage's Reform Party, which in a sense still means that Nigel Farage will sort of perhaps become the most vocal opponent of the government.
Or perhaps he will just be a kind of dissenting voice within the parliamentary system.
This is a post that you might find interesting from Mahid Nawaz.
He says, the UK electoral system is not fit for purpose.
Reform, that's Nigel Farage's party, got four million votes and only four seats.
The Lib Dems, that's a kind of centrist party.
Got 3.4 million votes and 69 seats.
Labour won two-thirds of the seats with only one-third of the national vote.
So, in a way, if we had proportional representation, if each vote meant something, then you'd probably have a very different parliamentary system.
It's unlikely that we're going to get that.
What we're going to get is a massive majority for the Labour Party.
we're having in the UK while the rest of the world moves, it seems at least, towards populism,
we're having our kind of Trudeau-Macron moment. It'll be an interesting few years. Last night
I was trying to find in myself a kind of open-heartedness, a kind of good faith. That's what I'm still
trying to find in myself. Certainly I can find a point in myself where it's none of
my business. You know, no one really cares, do they?
Is there anyone other than that person who have literally climaxed?
Does anyone believe this is meaningfully going to impact their lives?
Now sometimes, previously at least, when I was involved in more partisan and intricate conversations around politics, people would say stuff like, You know, the gap between the two parties might only be small, but millions of people die in that gap.
You know, there'll be a 5% increase in this type of disability benefit or this party pledges that they will reform this tax by in this manner.
But what's true?
Is it that we're facing some massive crisis?
And both sides of the aisle present you arguments of that nature.
If it's the left, they'll say in the form of climate crisis.
If it's the right, they'll say in the form of perhaps these escalating wars.
And so how can incremental responses be appropriate to what are meant to be catastrophic events?
It just doesn't really make sense.
The good news is, is that Keir Starmer, the new Prime Minister of the UK, Who, given the size of his victory, will likely be the Prime Minister for a couple of election cycles.
He'll probably win the next election.
He's such a huge majority.
Generally, I don't know, that's how the trend works.
If people have enormous majorities of this nature, it tends to mean they're in power for a little while.
It doesn't matter what you think of him, because he will literally be whatever you want him to be.
This is really, even in the kind of Skeptical, unreliable and unstable space that is modern politics.
Even with the spectacle of a senile president who moment to moment might declare himself a black woman, might mistake the 4th of July for Christmas Day.
To see a politician change their mind so readily, so easily and so conclusively is still pretty astonishing.
This is what Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the UK, stands for.
I want to pay tribute to Jeremy Corbyn, who's a friend as well as a colleague.
You wouldn't call Jeremy Corbyn a friend?
No.
We have to make the case for freedom of movement.
We don't want open borders.
Freedom of movement has gone and it's not coming back.
Cutting off power, cutting off water.
I think that Israel does have that right.
I was not saying that Israel had the right to cut off water, food, fuel or medicine.
Wounded by the media.
The sun in this city.
A hurt for this city.
And I certainly won't be giving interviews to the sun during the course of this campaign.
Do you write an article for some newspaper the other day?
Surely that's not going to gain you any support across the North West.
Would you write for them again, Sir Keir?
I would do, yeah.
Can you guarantee that under your leadership, the 2019 Labour commitments to nationalise water, energy, rail, the Royal Mail, they'll all be in Labour's next election manifesto?
I've made that commitment.
Will you nationalise the big six energy companies, yes or no?
No.
No, you will not?
The Home Secretary was the wrong decision and I think it was a rushed decision.
He must be a pretty accomplished individual, he's achieved loads of things in his life and in a way that montage isn't an indictment of Keir Starmer as an individual, or at least if it is, that's not what's primarily interesting about it.
It shows us, I suppose, that we live in systems now that demand political figures that will
just parrot the talking points that are required of them.
What that indicates is not a moral failing of Kirstame, but a deeper truth, the truth
that real power is behind the facade of the political processes in which we participate.
The reason I'm saying that is because otherwise Kirstame would have an opinion and he would
know what his opinion was because it's his opinion.
He would have a policy, and he'd know what his policy was, because the policy would make sense, because it would be built on the basis of virtue or pragmatism, wouldn't it?
So he wouldn't just say, like, I'll never speak to the Sun newspaper.
I write for the Sun newspaper.
Israel shouldn't have done this.
They had every right to do that.
You would have a position.
Of course, all of us, including myself, continually grow And evolve.
But what we don't all do, I don't think, is alter our perspectives entirely on the basis of a pressing ulterior force that is the true governing power.
Just let me know what you think about that.
If you're watching this on YouTube, We'll be there for a couple more minutes.
Then we're talking to Colonel Douglas MacGregor.
The reason I like talking to Colonel Douglas MacGregor is because you get the feeling you're talking to an actual military insider, because you are.
He was an advisor for the Trump administration.
You say, why are we continuing to fund the Ukraine-Russia conflict if indeed the conflict's essentially over?
Why are we getting drawn more deeply into this?
What's likely to happen if tensions keep escalating in the Middle East?
You can ask him all of these questions.
Did Julian Assange ever expose American military personnel to any threat or was he incarcerated for all that time just because he embarrassed people?
What does it mean to be working class?
What does it mean?
I suppose they are actually, speculatively, but at least the conjecture is based on experience.
Colonel Douglas MacGregor is a very brilliant man, rather articulate, and someone you might
enjoy having as an uncle.
That last bit's more of a personal experience really.
What does it mean to be working class?
What does it mean?
Tell us, Prime Minister.
was working class.
Sakir, define working class.
Working class is, um, families that, um, you know, work for their living, earn their money through... Work for their living, they earn their money, like Dolly Parton in 9 to 5.
Like, look at his eyes while they're talking.
Like, look and see what's in there.
Going out to work every day, not through other means.
Don't middle classes do that?
Working class families have the... Oh look, he's really thinking.
How can you get to this position where you're at this point, you know, on the precipice of becoming Prime Minister?
This was, I don't know when this was, a year ago, six months, who knows?
But he doesn't look very certain about the world, does he?
Whatever he has gleaned by passing through academia and becoming a lawyer and heading up the CPS and becoming an MP and the leader of the Labour Party and now the Prime Minister of a country...
In the same way, has it worked, the remedies that you're applying in your own life through your own pursuits?
Is their system working even for them?
Is globalism working even for them?
Is it working for, I don't know, Klaus Schwab or Albert Baller or Bill Gates or George Soros?
Unless they do have some sort of demonic occultist worship of Moloch style benefits that we don't know about,
where there are sort of sacrifices and glory and frequency shifting ceremonies and events,
then I don't see how it can be of any real benefit.
You look into their faces, they're just like us, people that are gonna expire,
that only have a chance of living in eternity if they're willing to make certain personal changes.
What's it all been for?
And more importantly, what is working class?
Ordinary hope to get on in life.
the ordinary hope to get on in life.
What would it once have been like if you were a peasant and you work on the land or you work in industry?
That's what it would have once meant, innit?
Like you get your hands dirty.
I've heard people in America say people that shower before and after work, but that could just be a pervert.
When you watch the election and experience it, you realise that British politics lacks the glamour of American politics.
So what's the distinction?
I was addressing...
When you watch the election and experience it, you realise that British politics
lacks the glamour of American politics. I'm not saying glamour is a good thing,
by the way, but even the most sort of, let's say, popular, glamorous figure,
the person who seems to be most adept at dealing with media, is still like actually rather clumsy.
Particularly in a moment like this, Nigel Farage won his seat, even though reform, as we saw earlier, didn't win as many seats as was anticipated, or was possible, or plausible, or even fair, actually, given that they won, or got, four million votes.
They got four million, they got four seats.
One of them was Nigel Farage's.
Here's Nigel Farage, Sort of enjoying himself and making you realise that Britain doesn't do cool that well.
Nigel Farage, MP?
Yes.
Great good times, come on!
It's been a long time coming.
With his champagne and everything, amazing.
Also, Nigel Farage, I suppose he's somewhat styled after Donald Trump.
I said to you before, he's the closest Britain has to a Donald Trump figure, although of course Donald Trump is rather unique.
But you know how people like Donald Trump's This is a revolt against the political establishment.
So on July the 4th, do different.
Vote for real change.
was used somewhat in his campaigns but it looks like he's when approaching the
end of his name about to draw a penis and I don't know if it's something they
should be branding around. This is a revolt against the political
establishment so on July the 4th do different vote for real change vote for
a voice in Parliament that will give real opposition.
Another a independent voice George Galloway friend of the show lost his seat just
a couple of months after winning it in rather spectacular fashion.
The Labour Party candidate won in that constituency.
George Galloway is not popular with the establishment.
He is detested.
He is loathed.
Maybe Because of moments like this.
We're on a popular British television program a couple of years ago talking about the Iraq war.
This is what he had to say in front of one of the New Labour.
New Labour was, I suppose, when the Labour Party started to mutate into what it is now.
A kind of centrist party that, broadly speaking, supports corporate interests that are quite often global.
It's just a I don't know how it's meaningfully different from any other party, really.
Let's have a look at George Galloway taking to task Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell, who was Tony Blair's Chief of Staff, Head Advisor, who was present in the room while George Galloway said it.
You'll see Alistair Campbell's reaction in the piece.
I look forward to the day when Mr Blair is not in front of Establishment stooges, but in The Hague, facing war crimes charges at the International Court.
And by the way, his gobles, his Lord Ho Ho, Alistair Campbell, who's got the same blood
on his hands, ought to be sitting in the dock alongside him.
You went there just before we gave you Alistair Campbell.
So British politics does still pertain of course to global issues.
Often we are used as the lubricant for America's international imperial projects.
But when you see the kind of reality of our politics, it's sort of beset with mundanity and trivia.
and drabness.
You know all of the memes that were posted yesterday on the 4th of July?
Like people on like sort of speed boats lifting barbells or barbecues, cooking barbecues on jet skis.
This is what it is to be American.
You know like the sort of even America's vulgarity and trash has a kind of high octane glamour to it and I suppose that's because you rejected so wholeheartedly Britain at the point of your independence.
Because look at what... You know if you sort of think there was a fight... Imagine this story.
There was a fight.
There was a media scrap at a polling station in America.
I sort of think of their moments where like MAGA folks have got their tops off and maybe they're fronting up or the moments at Gay Pride where there's sort of moments of controversy or conflict.
Look at how sort of Awful and dismal it is when there's a moment of physical
confrontation at a British political event.
Oh, that fella's had a shove!
Oh he's done it again!
What's going on?
He's fighting using his back!
Oh god they're having a proper scrap!
Good, yep, nautical metaphor.
Love it, love it.
We're a seafaring nation.
Keep going.
Ship shape?
we attempt to use sort of oratory and rhetoric that's colourful and magical. Look at this.
And yes, the implosion of the Conservatives and the SNP has put wind in Labour's sails,
but the only reason we've got...
Good, yeah, nautical metaphor, love it, love it, we're a seafaring nation. Keep going.
...sails on the ship and the ship is ship-shape...
Ship-shape, a ship should be ship-shape.
...is because Keir Starmer took the...
Starting to realise, look at his eyes widen as he realises, oh no, I'm too deep into this
analogy and I can't find my way out.
way out.
From the shipwreck in 2019, rebuilt it and made it ship, you know, ship shape.
You know, it's about ships really.
I just thought ships are nice, aren't they?
And seaworthy again.
Yeah, happy with that.
That'll do.
Jacob Rees-Mogg was one of the sort of more loathed political figures of our former establishment occupants of the, you know, number 10 and stuff.
Here he is being defeated by a man who's got like baked beans on his face.
We do stuff like this.
I don't know if you do stuff like this in America.
We have like candidates who'll say like, call things like bean face and we're just, that's part of politics over here.
Like we don't, I don't know.
It's like we don't take it fully Seriously.
And also stuff like this happens as well.
Where, like, where they're waiting for the new Prime Minister to emerge.
And then, like, a cat attacks a pigeon.
This is what Britain is!
This is what we can't escape.
We shouldn't emulate America, actually.
We should accept our Britishness.
Look.
Yeah, he retired.
He retired, yeah.
I'm actually quite into it.
It was quite good actually.
It's probably the most exciting, meaningful, organic, natural thing that happened in the evening.
Although the pigeon does get away.
Hey, listen, if you're watching this on YouTube, we're going to leave right now.
I'm going to tell you a couple of things about American politics before introducing Colonel Douglas McGregor, who will give us some pretty exciting insights onto both Assange, did he do anything wrong?
The escalating Ukraine war and how the military-industrial complex maintains its stranglehold.
It's a brilliant conversation.
Join us for that.
Click the link in the description.
Join us over there.
So in your country, while all this was happening, Joe Biden Got confused about what the 4th of July is.
Is the 4th of July the Declaration of Independence of the former colonies of the United States of America from Great Britain, or is it the birth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, or is it something to do with Saint Nicholas?
Let's have a look.
And we give thanks to our commander in chief, the president of the United States, the extraordinary... She's not sure if he's president or vice president.
He's not sure what time of year it is.
President of the United States, Joe Biden!
Ho, ho, ho!
No, not ho-ho-ho.
This is not a ho-ho-ho situation.
And however permissive and progressive our times have become, you, Joe Biden, are not a dubile young black woman.
I remember as a Catholic kid growing up in an area where we didn't like, Catholics didn't get along.
That young black woman can't get elected?
the state of Delaware when I was a kid. Well you know I was I looked at John
Kennedy and said well he, God, he got elected why can't I get elected?
That young black woman can't get elected why can't I?
By the way I'm proud to be as I said the first vice president
first black woman served with a black... Look how sort of eagerly there are these
sort of broadcaster goes mm-hmm that's good that I'm proud to be the first black woman in the Supreme Court.
There's just so much that we can do because together we, there's nothing, look, this is United States of America.
Yes, United States of America, we better get some insights.
Quick, smart, bettin' we, bettin' we get some.
Listen, Colonel Douglas McGregor's coming up.
He was a military advisor under the Trump administration, and he will help us to understand the bigger picture.
What exactly is it that this current apparent president and the new marionettes in our nation are leading us into when it comes to the ongoing conflict?
With Russia.
It's a fantastic conversation.
I love Douglas MacGregor and you're going to love this conversation as well.
Before we get into that, have you ever thought of deepening your spiritual practice?
Have you ever thought of getting to know the Lord a little better?
Have you looked at everything we've discussed today and thought, I need Jesus Christ now in my phone all around me?
Here's a quick message from our sponsors, then Douglas MacGregor.
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See you over there.
I'm joined by Colonel Douglas MacGregor, the man that I turn to when I want the truth about the complexities of geopolitics.
Let's start with the news.
Well, let's start by welcoming you.
Welcome, Colonel.
It's so lovely to see you.
Great to see you too.
I sense that even though you're a vital and I'd even venture rather macho man, there is estrogen in the air around you.
I just sense it.
Well, we've just cleared the room of the estrogen.
It's too distracting.
Clear, clear.
Colonel, I want to know that this is the fundamental question.
Most people around the world, I'm sure, are celebrating, perhaps with some caveats, the release of Julian Assange.
But the counter-argument, the argument under which Assange was detained one way or another for what amounts to 12 years, was that the information that he revealed placed American service personnel at risk.
I've heard elsewhere that not a single American service person has been put at risk, certainly hasn't died as a result of WikiLeaks revelations, whereas 22 American service personnel or former service personnel take their own lives every day.
Who is it that's really putting the American military at risk?
Julian Assange or the policies of the neoliberal establishment.
But first, perhaps if you could start with whether or not WikiLeaks ever put American service personnel at risk.
Yeah, I know.
I listened to that too, Russell.
I was never convinced that there was any danger involved in most of the information that was released.
But the biggest problem for Julian Assange was that he embarrassed people in power, revealed all sorts of things that we now know to be true.
That no one wanted released to the public.
That's his biggest problem.
And as far as danger is concerned, there's more danger of being vaccinated with the wrong vaccine than there is from anything that Assange ever released.
Yes, I have the same sense.
So that Julian Assange was really always a political prisoner held without trial, humiliated, tortured, and now his release suggests what?
A kind of mea culpa?
A change in attitudes?
A return to free speech?
New obligations among the press to report openly and honestly even if their reporting places the establishment in an embarrassing position?
You know, how many Rs are there in fat chance?
I don't think any of that is in the offing, unfortunately, although we strongly believe that free speech is the antidote to tyranny.
And for that reason, we have always supported Julian Assange, and we're very glad that he's out.
God bless him.
I'm glad he survived.
And I hope that he will continue to speak the truth.
The truth is what will ultimately save us if we can get it out to people.
And people have to want it.
That's another problem.
Every time I talk to audiences, they're looking for threats.
Americans are conditioned to believe that there are threats all over the world.
And in reality, there really aren't.
The biggest threat to America right now, I think, is incompetence and corruption in Washington, D.C.
Yes.
Plainly.
Thank you, Colonel.
Just for a moment to touch on British politics.
It's not something I would usually inflict on an American military expert, but something happened that was really intriguing, at least to me, recently.
The populist British leader, Nigel Farage, who's about as close a thing as we have to Donald Trump, certainly he's You know he's Britain first, he's anti-immigration, he's openly patriotic and in fact historically I've had a number of struggles and even contretemps with Nigel Farage.
But one thing he said publicly while campaigning for the Reform Party in the UK, sort of like a British Tea Party type movement I suppose, he said that And indeed there is footage of him saying that he warned while a member of the European Parliament that the continual provocation of Russia and the attempt to turn Ukraine into a vassal state and make Ukraine a NATO member
meant that it would be likely that Putin would eventually invade.
I've heard elsewhere people say that, you know, that we started reporting on the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the third act after numerous provocations.
Both Kyostarma and The Prime Minister Assumptive of our sort of centralist, globalist Labour Party.
Authoritarian, I should add to that.
And Rishi Sunak, the sort of current, former hedge fund investor and part of a hedge fund that invested 500 million dollars in Moderna.
Both of them condemned Farage's comments, saying that it's outrageous to claim that Putin was in any way provoked.
What is your opinion on that condemnation and on what Farage asserts?
I think brother Farage has stated a self-evident truth.
It's something we call a tautology for those who are interested out there.
It's absolutely true.
And we knew it back in the 1990s, early on, If we expanded NATO to incorporate more and more countries closer and closer to Russia, eventually there would be confrontation and conflict.
George Kennan pointed to it.
Virtually everyone with experience in the region and anyone with any knowledge at all of history knows that.
I think the worst part of it is that President Bush, and I'm talking about the senior Bush, made it very clear that we would not exploit the vacuum created by the withdrawal of Russian military power.
I don't know what Starmer thinks.
Of course, he may not be thinking at all.
He seems to be reading from the same playbook as Sunak and the rest.
It's all nonsense.
If we want this crisis that could lead to a real war between us and Russia, To end, it's very simple.
You simply suspend all aid to Ukraine until further notice, although you should send humanitarian assistance, and make it clear that we're withdrawing all personnel from all NATO countries from Ukraine, and get down to some sort of negotiated outcome.
Who wants enemies on their borders?
If the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians or anybody else came into Mexico and set up missile batteries aimed at the United States, what would we do?
Well, I can tell you what we would do.
We'd send the Air Force in right away, and then the Army would invade.
There would be no question of it.
So the Russians exercised extraordinary patience and put up with a lot of nonsense.
Their cause has always been just.
That's the truth, Russell.
Your background is as a military advisor to a former Trump Secretary of Defense, and of course you're a combat veteran.
I wonder how your perspective has changed on the way that the media reports on military activity, and I suppose specifically wars and hostility between nations, now that you work in this type of media.
The reason I'm asking that question is because when you say something like Russia have been incredibly patient, I've seen people that have said comparable things, anything that's sort of sympathetic towards Russia or Putin, in the most literal sense I suppose it's true, being called Russian sympathizers, even being called appeasers.
There's an ongoing media attempt to portray Putin as a kind of quasi-Hitler.
And Russia as expansionist and imperialist.
But under the kind of analysis you've offered us, that simply just doesn't hold up.
And even to the common sense of the layman, it don't make much sense.
Excuse me.
How has your understanding of the media's role in presenting to the public forthcoming conflicts and ongoing conflicts changed from when you were within the military?
When you were within the military, did you see it as necessary to ensure that the public were broadly supportive of a foreign campaign?
Do you think that this problem has exacerbated, become more deceptive?
What's changed, Colonel?
Well, I can give you a couple of quick examples because For what it's worth, when I was in the desert in 1990 and 1991, miraculously, the BBC was the most accurate source of information and news about what was really happening in the Middle East.
And we would routinely turn to listen to the BBC because their comments were very measured.
There was no exaggeration, just statements of fact.
And when they did invite people to comment, the people that came on to comment were very balanced.
And straightforward.
Even then, I thought that the American media saw the whole opportunity as a time to expand and exaggerate to the point where it became entertainment.
So we were showing people photographs of munitions landing on the enemy and celebrating the arrival of all these rockets and missiles and artillery rounds as though something good was happening.
In other words, the American media, even in 1990 and 1991, missed the point that it was a war and people were being killed.
And when you kill people, there are consequences.
At least at that point, I thought the BBC did a good job.
Now, if you fast forward to 2003, as soon as we went into Iraq, the lies just began spreading and multiplying.
One star, a brigadier general in the U.S.
Army who was involved in the public affairs of what was happening on the ground in Iraq at the time, was telling people things that were just blatantly untrue.
We had this young woman, I can't remember her exact name, I wish I could, I think it was Jessica something, but she was about five foot four, five foot five, All of 110, 120 pounds, and she was trying to drive a truck with some ammunition in it.
The truck got lost.
The convoy was lost in a sandstorm.
She was captured, brutalized by the Iraqis that captured her, then dropped off in a hospital where an Iraqi doctor saved her life.
And then the Iraqi doctor actually contacted us so that we could come and get the woman.
Well, all of this was turned into some sort of heroic fight where she fired her M16 until she went down, which never happened.
And then the special operations went in to rescue her, which never happened.
So the lies were really taking off with great rapidity in 2003.
And from that point forward, it became clear to me, and I was still on active duty in 2003, that anything you heard from the media Was probably not accurate, probably not true.
And that you had to immediately assume it was nonsense.
What did you feel about being involved in the Iraq war at that time?
And has that opinion changed?
Well, at the time when I was approached in 2000, actually, I was approached in 2001 in October.
And it was made clear to me that this opportunity to exploit 9-11 would be used to justify intervention in Iraq.
I said, well, there's three things.
First of all, I understand because we did not finish the job in 1991.
They were trying to kill Saddam left and right.
They never seemed to get him.
And then they claimed that the whole operation was exclusively for the purpose of driving out the Republican Guard.
They didn't understand the Arab world.
They didn't understand Iraq.
And it would have been much easier to simply remove Saddam and replace him with a new government.
Preferably of military men that could then call in the UN and handle elections or whatever.
But we were fixated on this notion of occupation.
But in October of 2001, when they approached me, they said, well, how much would it take to unseat Saddam to remove his government?
I said, probably not very much.
And tried to explain that the average person in Iraq was not prepared or even remotely interested in dying in a war to defend Saddam Hussein with their last breath.
People didn't seem to understand it.
You know, you're British.
You know who drew the borders and the various lines that created all these countries that were formerly just tribes living inside the Ottoman Empire.
And they're not terribly meaningful, frankly.
But it's amazing that they lasted as long as they have.
But there was no sense of the fluidity of the people.
They didn't seem to understand that in that part of the world, you know, loyalty to your family, to your clan, to your tribe, Yes, that those concepts and constructs were convenient for us as we attempted to carve up the resources of that region, but hadn't become glommed on to the consciousness of the indigenous people of that region.
And I wonder, How this expansionist and exploitative mentality has continued to affect that region.
I want to mention to you a time that I saw a speech by Colonel Gaddafi after the execution of Saddam Hussein, where he said, like, to some kind of Arab council, I'm sure you know what it would have been, like, hold on a minute, Saddam Hussein's been executed.
Guys, our region's under considerable threat.
Now, you know, Gaddafi was indeed next to go.
There have been some pretty dubious actions inside Syria, it looks like.
You know, sort of arming militia, destabilizing that nation.
In the 1970s, what went on in Iran was pretty peculiar and extraordinary.
And what happens in the Middle East to this day seems to require an ongoing relationships with the United States and the United States military.
I wonder, Colonel, how you feel about American resources and American lives continually being deployed to sustain, exploit, and advance wars within that region that, unless you have a partisan connection to it, seem pretty brutal, nihilistic, and unnecessary.
Unnecessary is a bit reductive, but, you know, bloody hell, it's not helping, is it?
No, look, you're absolutely right, and it's very obvious to anyone who's served for any length of time in the region that the social structures are very fragile.
In other words, everything does revolve around family, clan, tribe, the local area, and it doesn't take very much to disrupt the lives of those people.
And we continue to impute to the region the things which we take for granted.
We're national political integration is a good example that we are integrated states, integrated governments with powerful bureaucracies and so forth.
These kinds of things really didn't exist 25, 20 years ago.
And so it was very easy to go in and disrupt these societies.
The problem for us, Russell, and I think this is also true for Great Britain, because we are in many ways very similar to the British historically.
We are primarily a maritime and aerospace power.
What do I mean by that?
Well, we too are an island.
We have the North American continent.
We're surrounded by water.
Yes, we have a common border with Mexico, and we have a border with Canada, but there are very few people in both of those countries compared with us, and we have historically avoided conflict with those two groups of people as much as possible.
So we've focused on everything beyond our borders over the seas.
The problem is with us is we sail in or fly into a particular area and we stay for a period of time ostensibly to do good things, to build liberal democracy, to create utopias where everyone can live happily ever after.
And no one is interested in being converted to this utopia.
And we disrupt the place.
We damage the place.
We destroy the place.
We kill large numbers of people, either deliberately or accidentally.
And then when we've had enough, we simply sail away or fly away.
In other words, wherever we go, we are temporary.
And I think what you're seeing today with the Russians in Ukraine, you see it in the Middle East with the Arab states, the Iranians, the Turks, you see it in Asia with China, and all the countries, their attitude is, wait a minute, we live here, you don't.
Let us decide what has to happen.
In other words, let us tend to our own affairs.
We don't need or want your intervention.
And this is the problem with this constant pursuit since 1991 of what I would call American political, military, economic, financial hegemony.
We Americans don't really need the hegemony.
No one in the United States is interested in it.
It's only a small group of people in Washington who have essentially gotten on board the locomotive and have taken this train down a track that nobody in the United States, if they had been asked, would have ever opted for.
And we don't need hegemony, and the world doesn't want our hegemony.
That's really the big message that's coming back to us.
And unfortunately, Washington takes this and uses the media to persuade everyone that the rejection of our hegemony means instantaneous hostility to us, which in turn then justifies the use of military power all over the world to beat back anyone who doesn't want to live with our hegemony.
It's an endless doo-loop that leads to catastrophe.
Increasingly, words like, you know, democracy and freedom, when used to fuel these campaigns, seem, if not euphemistic, downright dishonest.
And when we think of the last of 50 years and American PSYOP and deep state operations backed by perhaps special forces or outright military action in Central America, South America and in particular in the Middle East.
So there are obviously examples in Africa as well.
It seems that this ability to impose hegemony Was, um, facilitated by the fact that it was, that the projects were being, uh, imposed upon regions, peoples, and in particular, I suppose, military forces that were easy, relatively speaking, to subjugate, and perhaps the information
Uh, sphere wasn't so recalcitrant and immediate in its ability to offer counter-narratives and immediate reporting even though there's plenty of information available on what the CIA was doing in Nicaragua or Venezuela even and certainly Somalia, Syria, list goes on.
And, and what struck me as outright absurd was that the kind of mentality that had been Somewhat deployed in Afghanistan or Vietnam or wherever you want to say it was being imposed on a country like Russia that has its own history, that has its own sovereignty.
I'm not suggesting those countries don't but you know Russia is a military superpower and a nuclear superpower and in spite of whatever weakening took place with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire they remain a significant uh nation and it just the playbook didn't make sense to even a lay person like me and now we're starting to see that an individual's intuitive response is closer to an accurate appraisal than the oddly new newly framed bombast and jingoism that you find coming out of a neoliberal Biden administration.
That uses similar tropes and terms and says that if you are interested in bringing about diplomacy and peace, that you are an apologist.
So how is it, from a military perspective, that, you know, that... It seems like, because I've got so many questions for you.
Like one, like, I wonder when the American appetite for this kind of expansionism expired.
I wonder when manifest destiny was no longer...
Appealing.
I wonder when, you know, nation-first movements like seems to be happening across Europe and certainly in your country took a true hold and what isolationism means and how much it's connected to the end of the sort of American Manifest Destiny project.
But I suppose to start us off, I wonder, Colonel, Why it was assumed, and can it have been assumed, that a playbook that would work in those countries to the south of your nation or the Middle Eastern countries would in any way be effective in a country like Russia?
Well, if you embark upon policies or policy directions without any strategic analysis, I suppose everything is possible.
Remember that the people that you're dealing with in Washington today, in sharp contrast to the people that founded the country and governed us for most of our history, at least up until World War I, these people are ideologues.
Ideology is a secular variant of religion.
So you're dealing with people who are fanatics, who absolutely fervently believe that they have captured a monopoly on truth.
They're very similar to the Crazed Bolsheviks of 1918, 1919, 1920, who believed that they had the answer.
And of course, their answer, collectivization, nationalization of everything, state ownership of everything, produced tens of millions of dead inside the Soviet Union long before World War II broke out.
Well, we're dealing with people that have the same attitude.
You cannot have a useful discussion or debate with them because their position is, from the very beginning, that one size fits all.
They have the answer.
Liberal democracy, in their terms, has to exist everywhere, and when it does, there will be peace.
In reality, the answer that George Washington and Hamilton and Madison and all the people that framed the Constitution and founded the country believed in was something very different.
Their attitude was, The best thing we can do is to stay out of other people's affairs.
And if we are successful and we build ourselves up financially, economically, defend our country, certainly, but build ourselves up and we become prosperous and successful, then others will want to emulate us.
In other words, we're not interested in exporting what we do and how we live to anyone at gunpoint.
That's a waste of time.
It doesn't work.
And then we went through World War II, and you know we occupied Japan, we occupied Germany, and a great deal of mythology emerged as a result of those occupations.
People believed that somehow or another we had rescued the poor, benighted Germans and Japanese from ignorance and squalor and stupidity and fascism.
In reality, all we did in both countries was get these countries back on the track that historically they had followed before the war.
So you still had a Japanese emperor, You now had a parliament, and all of these institutions in Japan worked, the same institutions in Germany sprung up and they worked, and the people themselves, culturally, were already predisposed to follow the same line that we're discussing right now.
It wasn't exactly the way we govern ourselves, it was different, but it was quite similar.
We thought, well, this model, what we've done in Germany and Japan, we can do the same thing in Afghanistan.
We can do the same thing in Iraq.
We can do the same thing in Syria.
And we forgot that the secret of success in both Germany and Japan was our fervent admiration and respect for the cultures and the histories of the people that we occupied.
We actually respected the Germans and the Japanese.
We didn't impose anything on them.
We helped them get back on their feet.
They did the work.
That's why we remain friends.
We at least understood that when the war ended, we wanted to be on good terms with people.
We've thrown all of that out.
We simply say we have the answer and everyone in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya has to become like us, which is absurd.
Makes no sense at all.
It appears, and certainly I've heard the discourse to the effect that Ukraine is a convenient
Vassal state has certain resources, but it's strategically incredibly valuable.
And when I see Zelensky panhandling for support from, you know, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, explicit deals done with BlackRock, and I know BlackRock is enormous and in some ways a diffuse organization, but nevertheless, To make post-war, if such a thing is possible, Ukraine into a kind of a digital utopia, which I sense in a way, Colonel, might be a pilot scheme for the rest of the world.
There seems to be a sort of a globalist agenda to use technology to maximize power and citizen management and to exploit fissures where possible.
To make the claim that these technologies are only being used to help people to protect people either from a pandemic or from a war or to facilitate safety or convenience.
I wonder how that maps on to any potential post-war relationships economically with Germany or Japan.
and even at the risk of not complicating but certainly expanding this conversation,
I wonder what the significance was of American intervention in the First World War, if you
consider the Second World War to be an epochal moment in America's confidence in ideological
expansionism that became sort of deracinated from its original idea of protecting, or at least
respecting, the heritage of the nations it was intervening on behalf of, and how that became
colonialism of a more traditional hue. Well, you're touching on an area where
there are lots of theories and lots of different explanations.
World War I in particular, which I think is the first and greatest tragedy in the history of Western civilization, Tells us a number of things about the United States and Europe.
And one of the things that we learned is about the banking system.
And clearly, we had extended great credits to the French and the British.
We said we were neutral and that the Germans could also come and utilize our credit markets.
But of course, it's very difficult for the Germans to reach the United States and involve themselves in your credit markets when the British Navy is blockading the continent.
So we were always lopsided in the sense that we were on one side more than the other.
And inevitably, I think it became clear that if we did not intervene in the war, that frankly, Germany and Austria-Hungary would win.
And people did not want that to happen.
They saw that as a potentially devastating outcome economically in terms of finance for the United States.
And then again, you also have this undercurrent of the United States wanting to participate in this great imperial experiment.
Remember, we had gone into the Spanish-American War quite unnecessarily, frankly.
The Spaniards agreed to virtually all the terms that we laid down for them, and we still invaded Cuba.
We decided to keep Puerto Rico.
We made the decision to stay in the Philippines and all the Filipinos wanted was independence and freedom from the Spaniards.
We said we were going to stay there and install liberal democracy, make them Anglo-Saxon Democrats.
And so we killed a quarter of a million Filipinos to make them Anglo-Saxon Democrats.
Of course, that's all nonsense.
And today we can look back on that and see the stupidity and frankly, the criminality in all of it.
But today we're bound up with exactly what you're describing.
You've got people now who are looking at what can be taken from Ukraine.
They were looking at what could be taken from Russia.
Russia is resource rich.
Eastern Ukraine certainly has resources in it, but that's not what Putin was interested in, because Russia has enough resources on its own, as we've certainly discovered.
Remember, we were told Russia is weak, it's backward, it can't stand the sanctions for more than a few months.
All of that turned out to be wrong.
Russia is very strong, has very strong social cohesion, has resources, has a strong economic foundation.
They can outproduce us today in their manufacturing base with regard to military equipment.
So there was no strategic analysis that was ever performed.
It was all ideology and the belief that we could use our military power once again to bully people into accepting a status quo that they didn't want.
And now I think we're on the verge of losing everything.
If you look at the BRICS, which started out being a relatively small number of countries, everyone wants to join.
We think there are going to be 84 countries joining this BRICS organization, currently led this year by Moscow, before the end of the year.
Everybody wants to join it because they want to get out from under our financial system, out from under the Swiss system.
This is why people are de-dollarizing.
In other words, everyone is walking away from us or running away from us as fast as they can because they don't want to be bullied anymore.
Many people believe, Colonel, that the economic collapse of America is in fact fait accompli due to many matters related to debt and mathematics so abstract to me that I'd sooner try to understand the mysteries of the Quantum well, but nevertheless America remains a though by some margin the world's most significant military power and what we're watching are the tectonic shifts towards militarism when it comes to the other potential threats to a unipolar world China and Russia and the
That is the aim, that whilst you say it's driven by ideology rather than strategy, and I'm very sympathetic to that idea and fascinated by it, the idea of secular fanaticism and what fanaticism looks like if you extract the idea of the divine but maybe outside of semantics, If you believe you're right, that ultimately acts as a kind of divine access.
If you believe you're right, i.e.
you are a representative of God, and your way is God's way, inverted commas God in that instance, Then, you know, the whole idea of secularism starts to, well, be exposed, actually, I suppose is what it does.
But I feel that, in a way, you can't have a nation without isolationism.
In a sense, one needs harmony, but the whole point of a nation is this is a territory that governs itself.
And it's, of course, obvious that that, over time and due to circumstance, could lead to conflicts, but historically, other than the Spanish, you know, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Spanish War that you described.
America doesn't face any threat.
There are not Chinese military bases encircling the United States.
There are not, you know, Russian powers on the border of America.
The United States of America, at least in terms of this sort of resurgent, what is usually referred to as populism, or sometimes referred to as the alt-right, or I don't know, the nation-first politics, or Trumpism, the hundreds of different things, seems to be a kind of a reawakening to the idea that America could just get on with being America.
Protecting America, American manufacturing, American jobs, allowing constitutional rights to flourish religiously and ontologically and not be continually distracted by these crazed and destructive wars that benefit interests that can't even really be called American with a moment's scrutiny.
They're kind of global interests and perhaps always have been. Is that what
we're experiencing? A kind of an awakening to the, um, to the, an awakening to the, um, to
the impossibility of ongoing expansionism given America's current economic position and condition?
Well, it's important to understand that something else has happened over the last several years
that we have not directly confronted over the previous decades,
and that is this process of denationalization.
The same people who are anxious to keep us engaged in conflict and crises all over the globe are also apparently committed to erasing our national identity.
And this is a very strange phenomenon.
And again, I go back to 1918, 1919, 1920 with the Bolsheviks.
When they founded this thing called the Soviet Union, it was an internationalist state.
In other words, they were going to create a new identity.
They called the new identity Soviet.
They would erase the identities of Russians and Ukrainians and Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Mongols, Tartars, whatever.
And everyone would become the new Soviet man.
Well, that failed miserably, as we all know.
The joke in Moscow was suddenly overnight, everything fell apart.
Everyone looked around and said, well, where is the Soviet man?
There were no Soviet men anywhere.
What did you find?
You found Ukrainians and Russians and everyone else.
So we're going through something like that here in the United States.
We have people in Washington who've decided that all people are just fungible commodities.
They're just material to be exploited, to be utilized.
Human capital, per se, has no value in and of itself.
Of course, everyone in the private sector knows that's not true.
And when you talk about immigration, the first question that comes up is, well, why do we have so much immigration?
Why is it unrestricted?
Why aren't we asking whether or not the person that wants to come into the country and live here doesn't already speak English, doesn't already have an education, doesn't already have skills that they can contribute?
Why are we taking in vast numbers of people who don't fall into that category?
In other words, this is not 1815 or 1900 or 1925.
1815 or 1900 or 1925.
This is today, 2024.
We're no longer obliged just to take in whomever wants to come in.
But this is part of the denationalization.
If you can flood the country with enough people who are fundamentally different from you, then your identity is at risk.
The core population is overwhelmed.
And if you can overwhelm that core population, the theory here I think in Washington is, then you just have this vast amorphous mass of consumers and they can be directed in
whatever direction Washington wants to move them because after all, they're fungible. They're
just material to be shaped and exploited.
I think that's where we are right now and we're fighting against it here because we really believe
there is such an animal called an American. We think there is a core American population,
people that actually believe and love this country. So I don't know what the answer is,
but I think we have to continue to fight against this tendency to treat us as though we're nothing,
as though we're fungible.
And so they tear down monuments, they destroy traditions, they destroy customs.
Anything that reawakens a sense of identity has to be removed.
I think you've gone through something similar over in Great Britain, have you not?
Customs and traditions are undoubtedly beautiful when you encounter them anywhere.
There's a sort of an allure, a beauty. This is what a culture does together.
That's the joy of travel, or even across one nation continent such as yours.
You experience the differences between Nebraska and Nevada, and the differences between Florida
and Texas. In Europe, the more localised, the more topographical and particular the cultures,
faiths, totems and symbols are, the more joyous it is.
is.
I completely agree with that and the idea of a centralised entity bleaching that into ruin simply to create a malleable and plastic set of tools for their own power disgusts me deeply and I see above all else the godlessness of the Project Kernel.
A few things though... Absolutely.
I want to offer these things for conversation, if I may.
One is, at some level, the United States, because it's a 200-odd-year-old country, we know it's a construct.
So to believe in the United States of America is a deliberate act of faith.
We have to say, this is what this is.
We agree with these principles.
We agree with these ideas.
We agree with these symbols.
I'm not saying that makes it a fiction, but it does make it a construal.
It does make it a concept.
Right, so I wanted to offer that because, like, you know, it's an act of faith, it's an act of collective faith, which is actually in itself a very beautiful thing, particularly if there is something collegiate and communal at its core, and something, I would suppose, altruistic, if there is service in it, if it love is probably the word I'm looking for, love, if there's love in it.
This is a different, somewhat tangential, but I bet it'll make sense in some way.
I feel that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, whilst what it led to, no doubt in the form of Maoism and Stalinism, you know, the numbers are in, the results are in, the gulags were evident and experienced, But what they've, I'm sure, at least what I've read and understood, felt they were doing was liberating Russia from a corrupt establishment elite under czarism and the trying to empower a serf class that had no power.
And the project of the industrialization of Russia was sort of a kind of miracle.
But the collapsing of all of those various identities, you're right, that is a kind of a Because I'm trying to actually think of what the real equivalency is.
Because when, like, years ago, Jordan Peterson would say, this is, you know, communist, like, you know, what's happening in the USA now.
I'd be like, well, how is it communist when it's so plainly read by corporate- led by corporatism, economics, globalism?
What do you mean communist?
Because it's sort of, but I now haven't understood, you know, I don't know if this is what he meant, but I do see that what's being created is a centralised authority that, in the way that you described, is eviscerating and castrating the entire population and making them bewildered and malleable.
But I wonder whether you feel that the impetus for revolution in Russia, whether or not it was co-opted and subsequently corrupted, is one thing, you know, ...had behind it, at least, the same sort of urge and requirement for freedom that probably America is founded upon.
That people want to be free.
People actually want to be left alone.
Unless there is, you know, at what point is an intervention required?
And, you know, what we're witnessing now is the removal of universals.
Whether that's around natural taxonomies or epistemological taxonomies.
Is there right and wrong?
Is there man and woman?
Oh, well, this is as good as that.
You know, it's very difficult, I think, to sort of decentralize.
You know, the idea that there would be, that power should be with the individual, power should be with the family, family should be, the power should be with the community.
That's totally what I believe in.
But I just wonder if you'll address, firstly, the idea that Being an American is an act of faith, you know, the same as being... Whereas England is actual and real!
And, you know, behind the Bolshevik revolution was the same urge for freedom, certainly probably in the hearts of its participants, one might assume, if there is a common humanity for us to refer to.
I wonder if you can see any connections there in those two ideas?
I think Americans are more than just an act of faith.
I think there is such a thing as an American.
You know, we forget that a large portion of our population is descended from people who came here quite early and established themselves as Americans.
Our national identity seems to be rooted, at least in part, historically in the French and Indian War, and then subsequently what we call the Great Awakening.
in the 1770s, which was really another Protestant revolution, if you will.
That's one of the reasons that Parliamentarian Edmund Burke called the United States, said that this is not what you think it is.
This is nothing but a Scottish-Irish Presbyterian rebellion against the Church of England.
Well, that was an oversimplification, but it also wasn't completely inaccurate.
These things made us who and what we are.
And what we decided to do, starting in the 1960s and 65, when I say we, people in the Senate, was to open the doors to others from various parts of the world that had never come to the United States previously.
Now, some of that has been successful, but some of it hasn't.
And I think what was discovered on the left first, and now collectively in Washington, is that if you can bring in enough people who are fundamentally different from the core American population that speaks English, that shares in these values and traditions and history, then you can destroy it.
And literally, I think they've set out to destroy us, destroy our national consciousness.
In the same way that I saw when I was in Great Britain 10 years ago, I remember talking to Englishmen who were upset over the fact that they were told to take down the St.
George cross, the flag, the old original flag, white background, red cross.
And I said, why?
They said, oh, well, we're not supposed to celebrate the fact that we're Englishmen.
And I thought that was a very odd thing.
In Scotland, you know, you always had the St.
Andrew's cross and so forth.
You have the red dragon on the Welsh flag.
These things were symbols of identity.
They were never seen as evil or as propagating bad things.
They were seen as something around which people could unite and celebrate.
We're going through something like that right now.
We have people that say the American flag itself needs to be changed.
All of this is very foreign to us, and I think what's happening in the United States is that Americans who historically have been, contrary to popular belief, remarkably tolerant.
are now saying, wait a minute, perhaps our tolerance has gone too far.
It's one thing to tolerate someone who's a little different, who has a somewhat different idea, but should we tolerate people who are actively opposed to us, who hate us, who hate what we are, and proselytize against us right here at home within our borders?
You know, I like to say we're, you know, here in Orlando, we're pretty grounded in our country, our choice, even though we're a A very short distance from Disney World.
And some people say, well, how can you be so well grounded and be so close to Disney World?
I said, well, if you really want to visit Fantasy Island, you've got to go to Washington, D.C.
We're grounded here.
We know who we are and what we are.
And I think if you go around the United States, most people, most of the time, you ask them, what are you?
I'm an American.
Well, what does that mean?
Well, to an American, it's exactly what you said.
I live here because my family lives here.
We go to school here.
We work here.
We build businesses here.
And most Americans are quite contented to live in that kind of freedom.
What's happened to us is without our, without consulting us, Without discussing it, we have been signed on for all of these expansionist overseas military operations.
And they've been destructive.
They've harmed us.
They've ruined our armed forces.
People are exhausted and people no longer want to serve.
And at the same time, the decision to open our borders, to just let millions of people come into the country.
You know, right now we estimate that there are at least 52 million people inside the United States who were not born here.
Now, does that mean they're bad?
No, but it says something about our society.
How strong are we as a society?
If we have 340 million people or 50 million people in the country, that's an enormous amount of human beings that have no connection to us whatsoever.
They never were here before.
Now they're here, and they came here, frankly, illegally, because, once again, no one asked us.
There was never a referendum.
No one went to the voting booth and said, yes, I vote for open borders.
Bring tens of millions of people into the country.
This is the problem.
It's not going to work.
And that's why people are talking about this pot boiling over, you know, the old boiling frog analogy.
Well, the frog is cooked and the frog is not going to sit in the hot water anymore.
The frog is coming out.
I don't think the frog is dead, but I think the hope in Washington was that the frog would simply die.
Remember there was um this other part of my question, Roy get that ironically frog out of your throat, is the uh the possibility is the the sort of the origins your backdrop, oh good thank god your back your background went for a moment Colonel, I'm glad that's back, um like We can stay on me while I ask this question, and guys, I know that we've got to wrap up, but I just wanted to ask this.
The other part of my question, Colonel, was do you feel that the Bolshevik revolutionaries had the same fervour for freedom, even if that ultimately mutated into centralism in the same way that American power or American democracy seems to be morphing into a kind of centralised autocracy.
It's interesting that there seems to be some sort of imprint, some magnetism that makes power centralised and it requires constant redress.
I know there's a famous sort of Franklin quote to the effect that there has to be continual redress to assure it.
I also identify or acknowledge your remarks about national identity.
There's been too much time spent dehumanizing, demonizing, attacking and vilifying
patriots that a century or half a century ago were required to fight wars precisely because we were told our nations
were real and worth dying for and are now being told that our nations are not real.
And I like the way that you seem to acknowledge that there is an explicit relationship between the subject of immigration and expansionism, and imperial expansionism.
So would you just touch upon that Soviet thing, like, you know, everyone wants to be free, surely, question mark, even those revolutionaries, you know, the Bolsheviks.
And also, were the American expansionism and imperialism to be reduced, does that mean that the American military would be reduced in size?
Or do you imagine that the Pentagon wouldn't give half its budget to Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, etc., and some of it would go towards making sure the American service people had homes and the veterans were looked after and weren't killing themselves?
Well, no, these are all good points.
I think the first thing to keep in mind is that there are clearly people, individuals, who have enriched themselves as a result of these overseas interventions and misadventures.
There's no question about that.
And it's happened because Americans are somewhat complacent.
As long as their lives go forward without much interruption, as long as they have food on the table, As long as they can buy the case of beer, watch cable television, and see the game on Monday night.
In most cases, Americans are satisfied.
They're not very demanding.
They become enraged when the government intervenes in their personal lives and starts dictating to them.
Now, you talked about democracy and the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union was convinced, or the people that founded it were convinced, That they represented true democracy in the same way that the people in Washington are telling us all the time about democracy.
But it wasn't.
They had what they called the dictatorship of the proletariat, the notion that a few enlightened individuals were going to lead the masses to liberation and freedom.
Well, we all know how that turned out.
It went nowhere.
And the reason you had this vast concentration camp system that develops Early on in the 1920s, it houses millions of people, as Solzhenitsyn told us, is because the system didn't work.
Now, we seem to be on a similar path right now with a dictatorship in Washington, a group of people who've decided they know best for us what's good for us, better than we do, which was never part of the Constitution and certainly not our notion of democratic Republican rule.
And so now we have a situation in which people elected to office are essentially bought up by very wealthy billionaire oligarchs.
What do you do with them?
They're never going to vote in the interest of their constituents, although they'll convince themselves that's what they're doing.
They're voting in their own interests.
They want to stay in office.
How do you stay in office?
You take contributions that help maintain your position.
Because if you don't take the contributions, those contributions will go to your potential opponent and you can be replaced.
In other words, what started out as a very effective Republican form of government is now completely corrupted.
And there is no interest whatsoever in what the average American is concerned about.
Oh, they'll throw the average American a bone now and again.
Keep him happy, throw him this, throw him that, send him some free money, more food stamps, go away and just ignore us.
We're here in Washington doing what's really important.
And they thought they could get away with this because the military no longer relies on the citizenry.
The military is a professionalized, if you will, a small body of people that can go and use high technology to bully people overseas in ways that enrich us.
All of this is falling apart, Russell.
It's going down hard.
We are already over the cliff, headed down into the abyss.
We're going to hit rock bottom at some point, and then we're going to turn around, and we're going to go into a new world.
A new world in which we are one of many great powers.
A world in which we are not THE superpower, but we are still going to remain powerful.
But I think what's most important is that we're going to emerge from all of this with the understanding That we have to live with the rest of the world and that we have to have a sense of mutual respect with the rest of the world, instead of showing up and saying, here, I have the answer.
Here's the unvarnished truth.
You need to do the following.
We're going to show up and say, we really want to do business, but how you govern yourselves, how you treat each other in your country is ultimately your affair.
I think we're headed to that point, but it's still going to be a fight because the people that are in Washington right now will not change.
They will not adapt.
That's the simple truth.
So they've got to be thrown out of office.
I would prefer that that happen peacefully.
I wonder, Colonel, I have to wrap it up because I'm supposed to do something else, but I wonder
sometimes I wonder what's the point of elections if there isn't one party that says
once we are in office or in administration We will no longer accept donations.
We will end the profession of lobbying.
We will decentralize and federalize wherever possible and stay out of your lives except for in these areas and be continually vigilant about how principles and institutions such as the judiciary and democracy can themselves be inverted into tools for tyranny.
Well, I think you've just described our country, our choice.
And that's really what we're about.
We're looking for a different way forward, because we've concluded that the two parties, frankly, Russell, are not very different from each other.
And in fact, you can make an argument for what we call the uniparty.
Everyone can get together and agree on things, and the things they can agree about line their pockets, make them wealthy and make them rich.
So they're not really too concerned about the levels of criminality in our large cities.
They're not terribly concerned about who's coming into the country on any given day.
Those things can be managed, remember?
They understand the critical task for them is to sedate us.
You sedate us by providing us with free things.
And a good standard of living.
Well, the problem right now is where we're headed.
That standard of living is going to drop, Russell.
And as I tell people all the time, there were big problems in France long before 1789, but there was no revolution.
And then people ask me, well, what caused the French Revolution?
Ultimately, the revolution broke out when the people of Paris could no longer afford to buy bread.
At some point, there will be a trigger here, and that's going to change everything.
Thank you.
Colonel, thank you very much for your time and thanks for that beautiful military and history lesson and also for sort of my sense that there is a kind of pathway forwards that comes down to rather basic values that you might find in Christianity or you might find in the Constitution and I'm sure there are various ways to discover those values because they seem to be about respect, seems to be one of the words that's sort of come up a lot.
And I really appreciate your time in explaining those values.
Thank you.
Well, you know, Russell, I'm glad this is over because we can disperse these crowds of women who've all showed up because you are interviewing me.
It's really tiresome.
I got to tell you, we can't manage this in the future.
We're gonna have to find some sort of mutually amenable solution to this challenge.
I'm very much looking forward to joining you on ourcountryourchoice.com, which is where your content can be found, and I'm looking forward to... I'm sure there were points when I was all listening to you... Yes, I was listening to you, but I was also thinking, what on earth will Colonel Douglas MacGregor ask me when I'm on his show?
I can't imagine...
How you're gonna wrestle your attention into... So, when you were making Forgetting Sarah Marshall, what did you think about Jason?
Hey, that's one of my favorite films.
I love that.
You know, so you can bet 100% I will definitely ask you about that film, especially some of your unusual physical moves that you made during that film.
Well, I'll be able to.
I'll be happy to talk you through some of my pincer movements and various flanking motions.
Thank you very much, Colonel.
It's a pleasure to be in your company as always.
See you soon.
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