Tucker Carlson - Erik Prince on the many failures of the U.S. military. (6:40) Erik Prince on The Liz Cheney Wing of Congress (32:45) The Main Villains of The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (40:48) Where does the Money We Send to Ukraine Really Go? (1:21:34) Why are the Climate Change Zombies
Erik Prince exposes the U.S. military’s $4M-to-take-down-$50K drone "math" and its outdated reliance on failed systems like Javelins in Ukraine, where 3D-printed explosives outmaneuver tanks. He blames a bipartisan "unit party" of defense contractors for Afghanistan’s $8B equipment loss and no accountability, while warning that CIA overreach—from Yemen drone strikes to FISA surveillance—threatens democracy. Prince’s Unplugged phone ($989) fights back against tech giants harvesting data via ads, but he cautions that China’s digital control and Wagner Group’s African gold grabs signal a collapsing U.S. global order—unless decentralized resistance revives lost civilizational strength. [Automatically generated summary]
And the Ukrainians, they've developed, they've innovated taking a cheap racing drone, like with the goggles that somebody wears, FPV drone, and you put a beer can size charge that you can 3D print the casing for it in the field with a little copper disc on the front of it.
And drive that into the back of a tank.
And for $1,500, you destroy a $2 million tank.
So that is like having a sniper rifle versus a guy with a longbow.
It's a step change in warfare.
And we're there right now.
And the longer this combat goes in Ukraine, the Russians are getting a lot better.
Ukrainians have too, but they're just trying to, you know, the battle is the ultimate cauldron of learning.
Well, no, the problem is the U.S. weapon systems aren't even that high demand because they're not that effective in that highly jammed environment.
For 20 years of global war on terror, you were fighting against a very...
Comparatively unsophisticated enemy.
Now in a big state-on-state type war, the U.S. systems are not holding up.
You know, the Javelin missile, which Raytheon sells to the taxpayers for $200,000 a shot with a $300,000 command launch unit, the Ukrainians can only use that for the first shot in an ambush because their IR detector, if they shoot the first tank, the tank is very hot.
It's burning.
If they try to shoot a second and third missile, the other missiles go for the very hot spot on the battlefield that can't even discern.
So then the Ukrainians shift from a $200,000 missile from the Americans to one that they build themselves for $29,000, and it works just as well.
Because, you know, the Houthis are using a $20,000 to $50,000 drone to attack commercial shipping or U.S. shipping in the Red Sea Gulf of Aden, and the U.S. has to shoot that down with not one, but two missiles that cost $2 million apiece.
So you're costing us $4 million to shoot down a $50,000 drone.
Even in Washington, D.C. Why wouldn't, because this is on display and the world is sort of watching, why wouldn't military planners in the United States be taking notes and adjusting accordingly?
So, I mean, I have too many questions, and I do want to circle back to your initial point that warfare is completely different to step changes, you said.
But how, on this thread, how does the U.S. Congress, how do people who claim to support our troops, back the military, strong defense, the Liz Cheney wing of the...
How do they keep sending money to an organization that's increasingly incapable of defending the country?
I spoke to a bunch of members yesterday morning in Congress, and they were at the point of despair because they're trying to restrict the money and to bring some accountability.
And they said the money is the amount of money that is sprinkled around.
The capital, by the defense contractors, by effectively the brigades worth of lobbyists, thousands of lobbyists spreading tens of millions of dollars around politicians, and they just keep the money train going.
It's really disgusting.
And the big thing, in the article I wrote recently, I'd said, you know, in Rome, like when the Romans lost a whole bunch of people at the Battle of Cannae, when their Senate met a couple weeks later, it was 40% undermanned.
Why?
Because the Roman elites actually served in the military and bore the consequences of failure.
Our elites don't serve in the military.
They have very little skin in the game or no skin.
We had 73 aircraft that we owned and operated and flew into garden spots for the U.S. It was fun.
I was just at a Blackwater reunion last weekend and we had it at the Alamo.
It was really cool standing there on hallowed ground because I didn't realize that across the street from the Alamo is the Menger Bar.
And that's actually where Teddy Roosevelt started the Rough Riders.
So there's all kinds of Rough Rider memorabilia in this bar, raising a glass to a great American.
And if I'd convinced Trump to change policy in Afghanistan to prevent the debacle, which ended up happening, I was going to call that unit the 2nd U.S. Volunteer Cavalry.
The first U.S. Volunteer Cavalry was the Rough Riders.
There would have been a small stay-behind special operations force, 6,000 contractors.
That's it.
And would have kept accountability for the tens of billions of dollars of U.S. equipment that was already there and would have kept the government upright.
And, you know, there's now every Al-Qaeda, every...
Crazy terrorist organization has set up shop there in Afghanistan.
I would argue for Taiwan, for example, facing a possible invasion or issue coming from mainland China, the best thing they could do is build a home guard because a well-armed, well-motivated people, as we showed in Afghanistan, as the Taliban showed the U.S. military, well-motivated people, even using weapons that are 70 years old, can still beat a superpower with all the techno gimmickry.
It's not the steel and the ships that make a great navy.
You know, people say the tank is dead, it's gone forever.
It will go just like chariots were the attack helicopter of 2,000 years ago.
There'll still be a role for tanks, but people are going to have to figure out how to knock down the swarms of incoming drones with hard kill and soft kill, etc.
It is always going to, you know, warfare is going to ebb and flow, but the ability to program Very sophisticated devices that fly very fast, that are very hard to kill.
You know, the first strategic offset after World War II was nuclear weapons.
We had nukes, then the Russians did, and then it was about tonnage.
Then the second offset was precision weaponry.
Now everybody has precision weaponry.
So I would argue that the third offset that the U.S. should try to pursue dominance, and we're far from it, is in an AI drone innovation application.
And I would say the most innovation that's happened has been in Ukraine and Russia right now, and we are way behind.
Because, again, Washington procurement people, the appropriate people in Congress, keep spending money in the same way on the same stupid cartel of defense contractors with the same failing results.
When at the bleeding edge of battle, actual innovation is happening by dudes in their garage in Ukraine that are fighting for their lives, and they've innovated, and we ignore that to our detriment.
You could load a face and between network surveillance and the facial recognition on that drone, find one person and fly into that person's head that fast.
So identity management, privacy will become even more Essential.
You think about how many cameras, how much data is being constantly collected everywhere from street cameras, from door knock, from doorbell cameras, from facial recognition at the airport.
Yeah, and it does seem like the purpose of politicizing the military and making it left-wing, anti-white, pro-trans, all this stuff, which I think the right just sort of says, well, that's going to be a less effective military.
I think, you know, the military was one of the most trusted institutions.
For sure.
And I saw already, even in the 80s, I mean, look, I went to the Naval Academy in 1987 and I left after a year and a half because I found the political correctness and the nonsense already then on the double standards that were pursued by the academy leadership while saying there are no double standards.
One of the things I think is most interesting about you, which I know you hate to talk about, but is the fact that you're from an affluent family, and so you didn't actually need to do any of that at all.
I mean, is it a crazy thing to consider the possibility that the government might employ this technology against its own citizens, deploy it against those citizens?
If they're putting...
People are still rotting in prison for protesting at the Capitol on January 6th.
A woman got four years in prison yesterday for protesting outside an abortion clinic.
If you care about America, why wouldn't someone say, actually, no, we're just going to pass a federal law that no law enforcement or intel agency or the U.S. military, these things cannot be used domestically against Americans, period, under any circumstances.
Look, for stopping a mass shooter or some actual terrorism event, it provides good situation awareness and it protects the cops who are trying to do an honest job.
But the leakage, in the same way that the forever wars of Iraq or Afghanistan and all those surveillance tools that the government tells us they need to protect us, the danger is certainly some of that tech on the arm side leaking back to be used domestically. the danger is certainly some of that tech on the I don't see any effort by the U.S. government to stop mass shootings.
But there's no will, obviously, in the media to get to that information.
So it's left to people on X to do it.
But, I mean, you've been in and around the government since you were 18 and shipped off to Annapolis.
So do you think it's fair for the rest of us who haven't to be skeptical of Massive increases in government power, particularly military and law enforcement power, that are justified by some threat.
Mass shooters, child molesters, human traffickers, Islamic terrorists.
I don't think the government does a good job of protecting us from any of those things, but they've certainly increased their power and their power to kill me and my family on the basis of those threats.
I don't think there's ever been a more effective military contractor in a war that I'm aware of in the United States than Blackwater, which you started and ran.
But you were subject to the policymakers as well.
And as in the Afghanistan withdrawal, not one of them, not only was not indicted or punished, but not a single one of them sort of...
Lost a step in career advancement.
They all kind of went on to the Atlantic Council or whatever.
Because it's all about the aviators and who has the best launch and recovery.
Especially the traps.
So they measure which wire you catch and everything.
So once a month, there's a thing called the Fauxhall Follies, which is the front of the ship below the flight deck where the chains come out of the belly.
And so all the air wing and the senior ship's crew would muster there.
And they'd go through all the scores, but then it would go through the most merciful, merciless roasting of anybody.
It was the most vicious humor I've ever seen in my life.
Has a personal butler and a valet and a driver and a cook and all those kind of quaint 18th century habits of staff that they surrounded military generals with.
Across the board, in generals, in staffs, and in civilians, the tooth-to-tail ratio of the military, of like how many, when you say teeth, people that put warheads on foreheads versus tail has gotten way out of whack.
We have way too much tail.
Like an alligator-sized tail with a salamander-sized bite.
It's corrupt because we just keep throwing money at it and no one ever calls bullshit.
A business that goes through a massive growth cycle, everybody can get fat and sloppy and lazy because there's always more money and we never have to tighten a belt.
And so the U.S. military has been on like a Krispy Kreme bender of donuts.
Compounding amount of donuts consumed every day.
And no one's ever tightened him up and saying, all right, today we're just PTing and we're not eating donuts.
That's across our entire government, but especially in the military, which is supposed to exist constitutionally to defend and deter.
And I don't think we're not getting the value that we're spending money on right now.
I would argue it's about for the defense contractors.
They just want to keep selling expensive weapons.
And they will keep paying politicians to keep buying the expensive weapons.
I almost feel, I don't feel sad, for the White House, as they deal with a problem like in Yemen, where the Houthis have become long-range pirates and have shut off the entire Red Sea.
Like 50% of global container traffic flowed through the Red Sea.
Now it doesn't.
Egypt is losing $800 million a month in lost toll fees from container traffic, and all those ships have to go all the way around South Africa now to make it to Europe, coming out of Asia.
It's a big problem.
And I'm sure the Navy or the DOD policymakers only provide the administration with the $50 and $100 billion solution to go beat down the Houthis to make them behave.
And in that article I wrote, I just come back to there's such a constant rejection of market-based private sector solutions.
Because the Saudis and the Israelis actually had this problem back in the 60s when there was a war in Yemen and they hired David Sterling, the founder of the SAS, and he went there with 30 guys and they kicked ass and it worked and it was cheap and simple and practical.
And this article I wrote just is a litany of those kind of rejections and that's my frustration because I provided a lot of those options even to...
Deter the Ukraine war in the first place.
My internal intel sources gave me a pretty good idea that already in December of 21, three months before the invasion, that the Russians were going to invade.
It was not a song and dance.
And so I wrote a paper proposing a combination of land lease and flying tigers to deter the war.
1940, when Britain was really in it, the U.S. gave 50 destroyers, a bunch of aircraft, guns, gave it to the Brits.
We also provided aircraft and allowed U.S. pilots to take leave and go to work for the nationalist Chinese to stop the Japanese from bombing cities, called the Flying Tigers.
Or they believed their own bullshit that their PowerPoints and their posturing would dissuade.
Look, I understand why the Russians get ornery about it, because if the Russians or the Chinese were looking to make the northern provinces of Mexico into active parts of a Chinese or Russian alliance, we'd get ornery about that.
So my question is, and this is all complex and delicate and...
You know, I understand to some extent, but what I don't understand is sending Kamala Harris to the Munich Security Conference and saying at a press briefing with cameras rolling to Zelensky, we want you to join NATO. You only say that if you want a war.
Most of that money goes to five major U.S. defense contractors to replace at five times the cost what the weapons cost that we already sent the Ukrainians.
Meaning, you know, if we send them something that was built 10 years ago, well, now it's going to cost...
Four and five times as much.
So again, it's a massive grift paid by a Pentagon that doesn't know how to buy stuff cost-effectively.
It doesn't change the outcome on the battle.
As the fields dry, it's May now, coming up on tank season.
Is there anybody who's knowledgeable on this subject who believes Ukraine can, quote, win, which is to say push Russian troops all the way back to the old Russian border?
But then you have the Secretary of State, our buffoonish.
Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, boomer parody, showing up and telling the Ukrainians during his rock concert that, you know, we're with you forever.
Like, how could you say something like that when I've never met a single person who knows anything about the region who thinks Ukrainians will achieve victory no matter how much money we send them?
If you're paying for this war, which the United States is, the U.S. Congress is, Mike Johnson is, don't you have a moral obligation to know its consequences?
How can you get up there with a Ukrainian lapel pin and talk about the brave Ukrainian people who are being killed by the hundreds of thousands and you don't even keep track of the casualties?
Like, aren't you kind of a monster for doing that?
And you look at, if you made the pictures of the modern battle space on the front a little grainy in black and white, it's indistinguishable from the Battle of the Somme or World War I. Well, that's exactly right.
Artillery, a grinding, crushing, pointless loss of humanity.
Because they'll send U.S. troops to war with a whole bunch of cockamamie...
Rules of engagement and policies, and it's just not a serious way to wage warfare.
The whole premise of GWAT was that we could, by American magic and precision, we could always just clip off the head of the snake and the whole body would die of the snake.
And that flies in the face of every kind of warfare.
When you look back to World War II, we killed off 30% of the German male population.
World War I, same.
American Civil War, same.
The Continental Wars in Europe in the 17-1800s, back to the Punic and Peloponnesian Wars.
You destroy their manpower, the logistics, and their finance.
This, cutting off the head of the snake, is a fool's errand.
And it literally looked through the guy's childhood, where he went to school, his relationship with his father, all the rest, and very consistent themes.
So, I don't want to get too far afield here, but that does seem like a pivot point in world history, where that war, you know, April 1945, Hitler kills himself, Berlin is occupied by the Russians, etc., etc.
We win in Europe.
And then we sort of like...
Kind of pivot toward the Soviet Union for a few years, until maybe the Rosenbergs or slightly before.
But I think when you look at history, the lie of socialism, communism, It's easy for elitists to love that paradigm because the right-wing Austrian school economics approach is massive decentralization, decision-making at the micro level.
A farmer knows what prices are, has a good idea what demand is going to be, decides whether he's going to plant more acres that year or not, and takes that risk himself.
The Soviet planner says, I need everyone to plant this many acres and we're going to do it at this price.
And it's the lie of individual incentive versus massive central planning to the betterment of elite thinking with the grift that goes with it.
And that's like a mind-worm disease that so many people continue, generation after generation, continue to fall for.
And when I was 25 and my wife got cancer, no, I was 26, she was 29, and she got cancer.
So I got out to sort out the home front.
And that's really why I started Blackwater, just as a way to stay connected to the SEAL teams.
I knew nothing of business, nothing of land development, nothing of government contracting, but I kind of knew what the special operations community needed.
And building that business was...
It was a really great experience.
It was family policy for my dad to not come and work in the family business after college.
You had to go do your own thing.
I didn't want anything to do with this business.
I don't think I was really suited for it.
But I was going to come and work with him after 12 years or so of being a SEAL. Starting Blackwater, building it, was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done in my life.
Because bringing together...
People with great talents that were really good that they'd gained in the military and they'd retired or gotten out.
And having it smashed the way it was really left a bad taste in my mouth.
And I'll be honest, I carry a big chip on my shoulder yet.
And I try to keep it in perspective.
So look, I had a business that was crushed and lost.
Thousands of guys lost their lives, their limbs, their mental health, their spouses over a badly run war in two theaters by Idiot Washington elites.
Same idiots that smashed my business.
So yeah, I got a chip on my shoulder to do something big and effective and spectacular again and run hard until that happens.
I would say there are lots of countries that need help organizing.
With the basics of tax collection and security assistance and border security and Police advisement because What we take for granted in America if you want to start a business in America You can call a law office in Delaware get a business in two hours for 200 bucks It's simple and you can get title to your land here and you get a bank account you get a business license you can You can do all those things that make capital formation possible.
There are so many parts of the world where that's not possible.
Judging by what little I know of your travel schedule.
Seems pretty frequent.
That's interesting.
So since you are everywhere all the time, and most Americans are, including me, sort of only dimly aware of what's happening around the world, name three places we should be paying more attention to now than we are.
The Chinese Communist Party has been very active in Mexico.
The fentanyl crisis.
Last year, fentanyl in America killed like 109,000 people.
It is funded, organized, logistically facilitated by the Chinese Communist Party to move the precursor chemicals that are actually made near Wuhan, China, shipped to Venezuela or Mexico, fabricated into fentanyl, and basically blended with other common drugs that people are taking.
And it doesn't make any sense to do so.
Because why would a drug dealer want to kill his customers?
That's what's happening.
And it is an absolute...
It's a fuck you from the CCP against the West for the opium wars of the 1840s.
The CIA. Because I think, and I know you have, rightly, very mixed feelings on the CIA. However, the mission of the CIA, if you think about the State Department can handle 5% of issues, diplomats and embassies.
You want your military over here, your conventional military.
It's a big, angry dog waiting to be let off leash that hopefully never is.
The middle of the world, those problems, you think about how the Soviet Union was really undermined in the 80s.
There was 20 covert action findings that were signed, coupled by Carter, mostly by Reagan, done to undermine the Soviet Union economically, politically, culturally, socially.
And that was done under Title 50 authorities, and that worked.
Without having to involve big military expenditure, if you want to stop, we know fentanyl is a problem.
We know the Chinese are a problem doing it.
That's specifically what the Title 50 authorities are for.
To say to six guys, go make that problem stop.
And if you have an agency that doesn't want to do their job, that's why it's not happening.
I mean, I applied to CIA. My dad worked with CIA. I was never against CIA. I thought only dumb liberals were against CIA and traitors or whatever.
So my views on CIA have evolved based on things that I have seen and personally experienced.
And my conclusion is not that everyone...
They are particularly, you know, the paramilitaries, I know a million of them seem like great guys, whatever, but on some basic level, it seems totally out of control to me.
But, yeah, look, the wrong people being in charge, the agency has also gotten hyper-bloated.
Basically the same number of case officers that there's always been for 25 years, but the place has grown tenfold of all the wrong kind of people under the decision-making of a guy like Brennan.
How does a guy vote for the head of the Communist Party in 1976 at the height of the Cold War and then pass whatever background check the agency is doing and have a security clearance?
He retains his security clearance because the last administration refused to strip him of his security clearance, despite the fact he was actively working to undermine a democratically elected president.
I'm sure they have been there advising and supporting, but I think the Ukrainians probably grew frustrated at, you know, lack of willingness to do certain things.
So I don't know where the U.S. support ends and where the Ukrainian unilateral stuff begins.
But even then, and I liked Evan a lot, but those guys are all afraid of the CIA, as you know.
They're afraid of them.
They know they're being spied on by CIA or NSA or any, you know, FBI. They know they're supposed to be in charge of overseeing these agencies, are being spied on by them.
Yeah, you wonder if we've reached a point where it's impossible for the country to act in its own interest just because of the changes due to immigration.
I read a lot of history, and I know that things have been a lot worse in certain societies, and corrective events can be shocking and traumatic to people, but it's still possible.
CIA, and not just CIA, but FBI and other agencies supposed to be enforcing the law and gathering intelligence have, this has been shown, withheld information from democratically elected presidents.
People that will follow through and wade through the bureaucratic process and exercise the authority that they're charged with doing.
When you join the military, you swear to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, we should probably do something similar for any civilian employee of the federal government that they swear to defend the Constitution.
Let me back up to where, I guess, where this started.
If you think about after 9-11, suddenly, Holy shit, all these federal agencies are waking up and how do we prevent this kind of conspiracy and attack against us again?
And so they start looking at data.
But of course, in 9-11, we didn't have smartphones.
But as smartphones become available and the technology that goes around a smartphone, because what is a smartphone?
It's basically a highly capable personal computer in your hand.
Well, an advertising ID is like a 25-digit alphanumeric code that sits on your phone.
And it enables to collect where you go, what you buy, who you call, and what you browse.
It even works with the apps sitting on your phone, which are also built with a software developer kit.
That comes from Google and they pay you more to put the Google hooks in so that those apps can also turn on the microphone on your phone or the camera or the GPS so that your phone, yes, it's a computer, but effectively becomes a mobile microphone collection listening device that fits in your pocket or sits in your nightstand and it collects Anything and everything about what you do.
And so it's almost been like a slow boiling of a frog because as smartphones become common, it becomes very convenient and it's wonderful and it becomes more and more pervasive in our lives, providing us music and news and communications and pictures and videos of our family.
Every bit of that data is collected, analyzed, Reparsed and resold advertisers.
The five leading big tech companies have a combined market cap that's like the third or fourth largest nation in the world off of that surveillance capitalism model.
So as smartphones have become available, it's slow-boiled all of us into a point of, holy shit.
And I guess for me, the oh shit moment was after the 2020 election and seeing the power that big tech had to sway that election and to then coordinate, to control who could speak, who could speak on certain platforms and zeroing out certain people.
And I actually had a tech team together at the time doing a forensics thing and in a rage phone call.
I said, fuck it.
We're going to build a phone.
And we pivoted.
And that team then started working and yeah, we built a phone as an answer because we're never going to make big tech change by whining about it.
They're way too much money and way too much power.
We have to provide a means for people to communicate freely, securely.
And most importantly, that they can control their data.
I think it's inherently American that we expect privacy as Americans.
Think about the Constitution.
The First Amendment is free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly.
And so people still close the bathroom stall when you go into the toilet.
You still close the shower curtain.
We still do lots of things that we expect to have a privacy, but yet people...
With a regular phone, put it on their nightstand, and are surprised that the microphone is listening.
I've had so many people I've talked to about...
They said, I was talking to my wife about needing a new mattress in our bedroom.
The next day, they're getting advertising for mattresses, which means the camera or the phone was listening to them in their bedroom with all the follow-on conclusions to be drawn from that.
Well, we've been doing a study following our device, a Google Mobile Services phone, any Android running Google Mobile Services, which is all of them, or an iPhone.
And at about 3 a.m., we're seeing a spike of data leaving the phone, about 50 megabytes.
That is basically that phone dialing home to the mothership, exporting.
Because every message, call, video, picture, voice note, everything that goes through there, they say, well, it's end-to-end encrypted.
Yeah, it's end-to-end until it passes through their server where it's sliced and diced and analyzed and used to push...
Used to sell advertising to that customer.
If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer, you are the product.
So if you want to get...
Well, I think people right now are used to Mark Zuckerberg listening from their nightstand every night because that's effectively what your phone signal does.
Well, exactly, but like, why are the AI ghouls, why is Mark Zuckerberg, why are they not climate criminals?
Why am I a climate criminal for having a wood stove and a Silverado, but the people who run data centers, which literally draw more power than fucking steel.
Supposed to be measuring, monitoring how you collect intelligence, communications going to foreigners.
Now FISA is really all about Americans.
I guess we're treated as foreigners by our own government.
And so the federal agencies got sick of getting beat up.
When they'd come before Congress for millions of times illegally accessing what was supposed to be FISA unauthorized communications information.
And for buying all this commercial data that's collected and held and disseminated by big tech to facilitate advertising.
And typing and measuring where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse.
Everything about you in a way that any previous intelligence boss would have salivated over.
So now the new FISA, it's not an extension, it's a massive enlargement, says that any federal agent, for any reason, without probable cause or a warrant, can compel any company that holds any of that personal data to turn it over.
Allowing A massive fishing expedition on anybody that's considered an opponent of that off-the-reservation federal agent.
It's really disgusting.
Really, if it's not a Stamp Act Tea Party 1775 moment, I don't know what is.
Well, considering that these companies hold, you know, audio of you having sex with your wife, video of you watching pornography, like, stuff that, you know, audio of you telling racial jokes or whatever, like, your most intimate moments, the ones that could be used to blackmail and destroy you, doing things you would not do in public and shouldn't do in public, like, that's just, that's the ultimate power, isn't it?
Correct, because you have to control it down to the root level of the hardware and the software so that we don't have an advertising ID and our operating system blocks.
Any attempt by any app to turn on your camera or your Wi-Fi or your microphone or your GPS or anything, we don't allow any of that leakage.
If you're using apps and some federal agency goes to that app purveyor and says, give me everything you have on Tucker that he's been using on that app.
There'll be nothing because there's no data.
Leaking from you, from your device to that app.
If you call somebody, we have our own secure messenger.
For example, you want to call and make a secure call and you call me, it takes about five seconds to connect because it's literally creating a encrypted tunnel between you and me.
And people have tried to do it with a re-skinned Google phone.
This phone is incapable of running Google mobile services.
So you're not going to get Google Maps.
We have a way to navigate that works well.
But again, so many of the freemium...
Approaches, where they've been boiling the frog of the people of the world, we provide them a digital alternative to that, where you are in control of your First Amendment rights and your Fourth Amendment rights.
Look, it emits electrons, so ultimately you can see if it's on a tower or not, but we even provide it with a SIM. With a SIM provider, a data provider, a network airtime provider that collects the minimum amount.
Basically, all they need is your zip code where you're buying it.
But the amount of data that is collected on you everywhere.
You want to buy gas?
Buy gas.
Pay cash.
Whatever.
But what we see in China where they really don't accept cash anymore and it's become the ultimate surveillance state.
That's where we're heading unless free people unite.
And resist that kind of totalitarian impulse of big government and big tech working together.
In China, you have to pay with a WeChat app.
So you do your banking through that.
You acquire tickets for a bus, an airplane, a train through that.
You pay road tolls through that.
Everything is through this app controlled by the state.
And so before they even go to a central bank digital currency, They literally have you by the balls, and they can zero you out instantly.
And so we did this because for free people to be able to live in a free society, they have to communicate, they have to be able to hold and store data, and be able to gather that data without someone else filtering it through an app store that the bad guys control, that the big government guys control.
Every federal agency in the world was coming after us.
And I paid about $2.5 million a month for two years straight in legal fees.
I paid the highest per capita fine in State Department history.
It was the only federal agency that actually Stuck us with something because we had no means to contest it because they, at that point, we were working for the State Department, doing diplomatic security, protecting Americans, something we did more than 100,000 times with no State Department or U.S. official ever killed or injured on our watch.
And sometimes the State Department would be demanding, I need 50 more men here, I need 30 more men there, go immediately.
But another part of the State Department...
The licensing department of the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls moving at the speed of peacetime would be slow rolling on the licenses, the export license for like body armor or helmets or guns used by our people working for the State Department.
And yeah, I'm not going to send a guy naked to a war zone, so we'd send stuff to do that mission for the State Department in Iraq or Afghanistan or whatever.
And so, yeah, that was what they had us over the barrel.
They look a little different because they're not blasting all the personal ads at you for using the app.
So again, it's a way for people to be in the world, digitally, but not of the world, and not have all your stuff collected, stored, and disseminated to all kinds of people that hate you.
So one of the reasons that I really passionately dislike Apple and Google is because they'll take your communications and give them to the government without telling you.
Not that I'm speaking from experience, but, you know, the people who oppose you can wind up with all your text messages, and then it's a short trip from there to say the New York Times.
With active programs by the CCP to support the most leftist candidates there in Mexico.
That's a problem.
It's become more and more of a narco state with cartels having...
Very significant influence, if not control, locally or regionally throughout the country.
And that's literally our southern border.
And the AMLO government actively promoting and cooperating with that kind of CCP nonsense.
Positive note, just a right-wing guy elected in Panama who says he's going to shut the Darien Gap.
Which is the area that moves all kinds of people.
Now, you asked for three.
I might give you a couple more than three if you've got time.
Please do.
The active spend of NGOs that the U.S. government funds, which enables mass migration into Latin America to walk north to invade across our southern border, is...
Massive and disgusting and illegal and wrong.
I remember three months ago I was contacted by an NGO in Haiti asking if I could organize an aircraft to fly from Port-au-Prince to Managua daily.
I said, why on earth would you want to do that?
They said, well, Haitians can fly to Nicaragua visa-free.
I said, ah, I know why.
It's to facilitate.
Haitians coming to Nicaragua and then walking north to facilitate illegal migration from there.
And there is a massive network of those NGOs, and some of those guys are making, the CEOs of these things are making a million dollars a year, taking U.S. taxpayer money, facilitating the maneuver,
entrance, I agree completely, but you do sort of wonder since there's no economic justification.
But just the fact that the Democrats were actively seeking to register them as voters and to make it possible to vote, you know exactly what they're doing.
But, I mean, you've been around wars your whole life.
Like, you tell me, if you've got the mass movement of young military-age males into a country, some of them with prison records, like, what are you looking at here?
And the fact is, the people that actually did the fighting and the dying and the hard combat in the last 20 years, they don't agree to that kind of nonsense because they've laid their lives and their brothers and their health On the line for America for a long time, and they're not going to sit quietly about that nonsense.
I'm not opposed to a longer-term Legionnaire-type program if someone comes here and actually serves, and with obviously very, very strict performance guidelines.
Don't hire a guy to be a truck driver.
In the army and get citizenship?
No.
But I'm not so opposed to that, but all the other stuff they want to do around voting and driver's licenses and all that stuff, there's a lot of actions that the next administration can take to make it very difficult for those illegals to remain here by debanking and deplatforming them, what the left has been doing to people like us for the last 20 years to make that difficult.
In Guyana, a country most people haven't heard about other than where Jim Jones served Kool-Aid, made the largest energy discovery in this hemisphere in the last 50 years.
So it's enormous.
And Venezuela has been now declared that 70% of Guyana's territory is theirs, dusting off a 130-year-old border dispute.
And I think you're going to see Venezuela annex or seize.
That with largely impunity in the coming months or years, certainly.
If the Democrat administration continues, they'll take it because there's no consequences for it.
So you're really seeing a complete collapse, an erasure of the Monroe Doctrine, this idea that what happens in the Western Hemisphere is America's business and not the business of Russia and China.
The collapse of credibility of France and of the United States in Africa is now really accelerating.
The jihad problem that was persistent in Mali and Burkina Faso and Niger.
And why do these countries matter?
Huge gold, huge uranium, other minerals there.
And now Chad, Sudan.
The U.S. had two big bases in Niger.
And they were just pushed out.
Cost a billion plus, easily.
Big air bases, drone bases that were trying to do CT support all across Africa, pushed out by a collapse of credibility by the U.S., by the French, and the Russians have pushed in.
And the Russians are using a Wagner capability, a hybrid private military company type capability to enable Yes.
Just different, maybe a little bit of different tech that changes how things are done, but how nations interact with each other.
I think you'll see a return to privateers and to a lot more private sector because our big bloated super state federal government has proven, well, at least now for the last 30 years, it's not very good at putting the fires out.
And I look for pockets of normalcy of however crazy things get.
People still figure out how to get on with it and carry on.
And there's certainly pockets within Europe where they still do that.
There's pockets.
In parts of the Middle East, there's even some pockets in South Africa that I would consider islands of normalcy.
And in Latin America as well.
Again, I come back to Mille.
What a spectacular man who just took on his entire political establishment and said, afuera, out, right?
So I'm still drawn and I recommend the book a lot.
It's called To Dare and to Conquer.
And a friend gave it to me years ago, and it's a history of special operations throughout history, all the way from Alexander the Great and his men that climbed Sogdian Rock to the present of a few picked men and women, very capable warriors that flew in the face of unsurmountable odds and made it happen and change world history.
So I think there's a lot of hope in that.
And big government is really dumb and quite plotting.
And I know folks that have worked in Google and Apple and they pull their hair out at how inane and stupid a lot of those things are.
And so I view them probably as dumb as the U.S. was in Afghanistan.
And an opponent that can be defeated with wily, creative, very focused, and my dad always told me, persistence and determination.
And I try to live by that.
And I come back to...
My favorite quote from Churchill.
And he said, he was speaking before the Canadian Parliament a year after the Battle of Britain said, he said, a year ago, Herr Hitler said he would wring the neck of the British people like a chicken in six weeks.
And I stand before you a year later and I say, some chicken, some neck.