America, it's time for a redeclaration of independence. We're amid a hostile takeover. The globalists and their political henchmen are seeking control of you and America. A group of patriots inspired by Tucker Carlson's famous call to bravery, have written a redeclaration of independence, demanding that our representatives go to Washington and begin dismantling the Washington political empire. Go to Redeclaration.org that's Redeclaration.org Ready, sign. And forward. We declare your independence today. So this is a tweet from me. I don't normally read people's tweets, but in standing with Ukraine, the Biden Harris administration convinced them Ukraine to abandon a peace deal that would have ceded only half of the territory that Russia now occupies. And for that opportunity to lose twice as much of their homeland, they paid with tens of thousands of innocent lives. We did this to control the 11 trillion of minerals under the Donbas. We did it to grind down the Russian war machine on the grist of Ukrainian teenagers. We did it to hand out hundreds of billions of dollars to US Hedge funds who are, as we speak, carving up rights to Ukraine's fertile soil and vast mineral resources. The truth is the United States has never stood with the people of Ukraine.

That is simply a jingle, an ad campaign broadcast to those who have never been there, designed to sell taxpayers on the appeal of prolonging war for profit. We have cost Ukraine her territory. We have cost Ukraine her children. The war hawks and the bankers are no friends to Ukraine.

Whoa.

I was applauding as I read that alone in my truck. Welcome to the Tucker Carlson Show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else. And they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers. We are honest brokers here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly. Check out all of our content attucker Carl Carlson.com. here's the episode.

I mean, it's a horror. It's a horror. And we are. We just allocated another hundred billion. I mean, it's. And where is the end game?

But how did you get here? How did you get. I mean, I. You're. We're from, you know, the same city, basically, and you were a CIA officer and you're just from a world in which that is an extremely unpopular, never uttered sentiment. How did you get to that?

Well, part of it is pattern recognition, right? I mean, yes, we have done this before, and it's just. How many times can you wade through years and years of A war with absolutely no stated endgame and dwindling public support and mounting civilian casualties and disintegrating homeland. Because all of your money is being spent, you know, fueling weaponry to blow up over foreign skies and continue to print more money to pay for it. And the answer the last time around was 20 years, and I want to make sure it's not again, because, you know, here we are at $33 trillion worth of debt, and we're now paying more on those interest payments every year than we are on defense. Completely unsustainable. And most importantly, are the human lives.

Yes.

Tens of thousands of people who won't, you know, proverbially dance at their children's wedding.

That's right.

And see the sunrise and drink a cup of coffee. And it's just that part of it is completely lost. And when you. When you hear our generals and our political leaders saying, don't you understand this is a great thing? We are achieving this strategic aim of diminishing Russian military reserves, and we don't even have to put a person on the ground. You know, what they are saying is that those Ukrainian children and now, you know, old men and anyone else that they can put up against the front line are lesser children of God than our own that we would send over there. And, you know, that doesn't fly with.

Me, so it's repugnant.

Yeah.

And I know you don't want to talk about yourself, but I'm. Because I do. I think I understand your background pretty well. I just. I'm fascinated by the fact that you are saying this and that no one, Very few people in the world, from which, honestly, we both come, are saying anything like this. And so how did you reach this conclusion? Of course it's pattern recognition, you're saying. It's common sense. Like, how could you not reach this conclusion? I agree with you, but how is it that almost no one else in Washington is saying anything like this?

Yeah, I mean, I wish they would, and I think some of them are seeing it, you know, in the privacy of their own conversations. But I came to it, you know, after 9, 11, there was kind of a suspension of opposition to war in our country that. Yes, you know, maybe has. Has never let up. I mean, there's some recognition now that poor choices were made there. But in the moment when, you know, France was objecting and we decided to call French fries freedom fries, and, you know, that there was a real hunger for war.

And I remember gleefully participating in that to my shame. Yes.

It was a Collective psychosis, maybe a grieving process or, you know, and for me, I'd just 911 happened as I was going into my last year at university and I went to Oxford overseas and it started in October, so I was home for it. My mom lived in D.C. at the time and I had a whole plan. I was going to go to Thailand after graduation and do human rights journalism. And I sort of had a background there on the Tai Burmese border before school. And everything changed, as it did for so many in our generation, I think, on September 11th. And for me, I had lost one of my best friends in third grade on the flight that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland. And it brought a lot of that back. And I think hearing the war drums beating for me, I hadn't, oddly enough heard much about the intelligence world. I mean, I didn't know many of the things that I know now. I don't think I probably would have gone into it if I had. But I liked the idea of a kind of a secret diplomatic service. I like the idea that rather than conduct an incredibly expensive kinetic war, expensive both in terms of lives and treasure, that you could find out about something before it happened and prevent the attack from happening in the first place.

Which admittedly was a kind of naive early 20s understanding of, of the intelligence business. But at its best, you know, that is what it does or what it intends to do. I think where they get into tremendous trouble is, I'm tempted to say mission creep, but actually it was kind of built in to the entire OSSA history. But is when rather than going in and actually reporting what is happening in every corner of the world, they are making it happen.

Yes. So it's not really intelligence gathering, it's a kind of secret military.

Right. I mean, rather than reporting that a coup is about to take place, you know, for absolute sure it's about to take place.

Right.

And that has not worked out in 100% of cases as far as I can tell. And yet again, we never learn our lesson. I mean, you look at what's happening in the Middle east now, you know, what, 70 years on post Mosaddegh, and oh, if only we had a democratically elected leader in Iran. We did. And people may or may not agree with each of these governments, but they are for the people of each country to work through. We had our own revolution in this country. It was a very important stealing of our national values. And I think you have to go through that yourself. And I worry in Iran that we're hearing the beginnings of that again, with this kind of royalist sentiment, monarchist sentiment, of, you know, well, the human rights abuses there are so egregious that anything would be justified. And it just, it does no one any favors.

So, I mean, what you're describing is conceptual corruption, like a corruption of first principles. If the point of your foreign policy is to spread democracy, you can't end democracy in the name of, I mean, you just, that's, that's insane. And no one says that.

Yeah, unless you're the Democratic Party in the United States these days who seem to be, have cut their teeth on ending democracy to save it overseas and now are practicing the same theory here in the United States where they've told us for the last two years Donald Trump is such a threat to democracy that we must stage a palace coup, replace our candidate with someone who hasn't received a single vote, undermine every other candidate of our own party and every other party in the courts, censor American citizens, undermine the Constitution, all in order to save democracy. So I think what we, what we reap overseas, we sow, or what we sow overseas, we reap at home. And we're in the midst of that.

Does seem like our foreign policy drives our domestic policy or that there isn't actually much of a domestic policy. There's not a great concern about what happens in the United States in Washington. I have noticed, I came to this over 40 years of watching, but that maybe was inevitable if you start overthrowing democratically elected governments abroad. Why wouldn't over time, you think that's acceptable in your own country?

Acceptable, maybe even noble. I mean, the lies people tell themselves in order to persist with what is ultimately an incredibly profitable business model. But also, if your end is stability and you tell yourself that stability requires control, you know, and that there need to be small, short term sacrifices. And I think we really are seeing that bear out in our domestic politics, where increasingly I'm seeing the First Amendment is an obstacle. Does the Constitution, you know, actually serve us? These kinds of questions and articles coming out in the media and Democratic leaders, and I think it really is a symptom of what we have been spreading around the world. And the results are plain to see. I mean, we had more Americans slip into poverty over the last two years than I think any year in the last 50. Our nuclear clock, we've ticked closer to midnight than at any time since its creation in 1947. More people died around the world in the first two years of Biden Harris from war and violence than in all four years of Donald Trump, which I think people don't really recognize, and not even just because of Ukraine, even if you take Ukraine out of it.

And so I think that the insecurity that we see there and then the fact that at home we have more children living in poverty than any rich nation except for Romania, our life expectancy sits right above Algeria's. In the 1990s, if you were born in the United States, you could expect to live as long as in any other pure nation. And now you die six years earlier. You know, six years of hanging out with your grandchildren and watching the sunrise on your porch has just been robbed through absolute, utter lack of leadership on domestic health priorities. And it's really time for a shakeup.

Everything you said is so nicely put and true. I wonder because, you know, a lot of the people operating our current foreign policy, and you worked at one of the agencies prosecuting that foreign policy, did you detect these attitudes when you worked there, when you worked at CIA, did you get the sense that people felt it would be okay to interfere in domestic politics in the US.

Well, they were sure keen on doing it in other countries and used a lot of the same tactics. I never witnessed any tendency to do it in the US at all. But it also, you know, I was working very specifically around, I worked a UK liaison and then worked operationally on non proliferation, but specifically within the context of non state actors. So very focused overseas. Watch the exact same playbook of going in, finding underfunded newspapers and radio stations and TV shows. You know, a benefactor would arrive with funding and all of a sudden that mouthpiece is presenting stories in a light that aligns with U.S. foreign policy or the preferences of whatever leader is in power here. And I think that we are seeing that across the board in media, except for new media like this. And that's been a godsend to politics.

Think that we're seeing federal agencies, intel agencies influencing American media surreptitiously?

Absolutely. I don't think that it's in as, I mean, I doubt they're actually investors. There are layers of this. Right? I mean, you see, at the most basic level it's, you run this story for me and I'll give you the best tip the next time that I have a leak. Right. Which is the oldest exchange in the world. Well, maybe the second oldest and seen it and it goes on, you know, every day. But there's no doubt that there are also actual formal sources throughout the media and always have been.

You know, what does that mean, a formal source in the media?

I Mean, you know, an asset, somebody that would be paid by intelligence organizations to. To work on their behalf, play stories on their behalf. And, of course, that happens, you know, all across the world, but when it.

Happens in the United States, then it's the end of democracy, of course.

Well, look, I mean, we have CISA operating basically a JIRA ticketing system for any tweet that the White House chooses to. That they would like to see deleted. Even if it's in jest, even if it's satire, they just put it in the ticketing.

Can you explain what CISA is?

Yeah. Well, what's interesting about CISA is that it, you know, it's a part of the Department of Homeland Security, but it's supposed to protect our. Our nation's infrastructure from terror attacks. And at the beginning of the Biden administration, a decision was made that information is infrastructure.

Oh, it is now, is it?

Which has, you know, an Orwellian ting to it. And as a result, in order to secure it, CISA was quietly empowered with the ability, sometimes directly and sometimes through NGO cutouts, to present to all the social media companies and Wikipedia and Amazon, any content that was flagged as concerning BOLO alerts went out. Be on the lookout. They held weekly meetings and said here, put an enormous amount of financial pressure on these companies, saying that their legal protections from liability would be withdrawn if they didn't cooperate, naming and shaming them if they took, you know, longer than a week to respond on something from the podium in the White House. And Mark Zuckerberg has, you know, spoken publicly and written about the degree of pressure that he felt to censor American people. And we're now seeing UK's Labor Party doing the exact same thing here in our own country, which is, you know, in some ways more egregious. And in other ways, you know, what do you mean? So uk, the Labor Party, which is currently in power in the UK, has a series of NGOs that it funds and directs that have waged war on free speech, especially what they call Twitter under Musk or Musk's Twitter, that they have gone into multiple offices, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, and said that they want to participate in and provide support for destroying Musk's Twitter.

And this is.

Wait, they would be the dreaded foreign actor interfering in our democracy. Correct. That we're always hearing so much about it turns out to be the Brits.

It turns out to be the Brits, you know, and many others. Right. But there is. Nobody's fighting them, because labor has just sent, you know, I think 30 people over to campaign for Kamala Harris.

Is that legal? That seems like foreign interference in our.

Evidently, their. Their approach is that as long as you're not donating money, as if you're out on the. If you're out on the campaign trail volunteering, that it's legal. But, you know, certainly unwise in my opinion, because, you know, if President Trump wins this election, which he's looking very likely to do right now, you know, it's an improper way to conduct foreign relations. Right. You don't go to another country and campaign for a particular candidate for office.

Yeah. Or try and shut down their most basic rights.

I mean, the First Amendment, as everybody always says, it's first for a reason. The Constitution was written a decade later, but largely in response to our secession from Great Britain to come and to meddle with that constitution in our own country. And of course, this follows suit with some of the challenges that we're seeing free speech face in the United Kingdom, where people are being thrown in prison for 10 months, for two years and so forth, for social media posts, for talking.

You're half English. You were educated heavily in England.

I love England. And by the way, that does not reflect England or Great Britain. It is a very small group of leaders there who have aligned themselves with a very small group of leaders here in the same way that censorship and undermining the Constitution does not reflect the American people, and yet our leaders persist in doing it.

Are you surprised as you look across and see what's happening there?

I am. I have a law degree from Oxford in English law. And it was always clear that it's not a written constitution. It's much more based in precedent, but that there is a deep and abiding respect going back to the Magna Carta for civil liberties and the idea that a flood of immigration, which we must take a measure of accountability for because largely our going into Iraq was what began that entire shift in the demographics of Europe would have such an impact.

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Can I ask you to pause Our going into Iraq is what set off the demographic shift in Europe. Yeah, I, that's of course true, beyond debate, but I think it's underappreciated.

Oh yeah, we broke the world for, I used to say we broke the world for 20 years, but here we are and I think, you know, the ramifications we're continuing to deal with and they, you know, they compound because as a result of that, you know, we have Brexit, we have many of the pressures that have led to the Ukraine war. And as a result of that, we're facing, I think really unprecedented dangers in this country that are also greatly underappreciated and we will respond to if they happen. And I think that escalatory cycle is what keeps us trapped in the bad decision making. And you know, I remember at the time in Iraq, it was, you know, six months we'll be out, they'll greet us as heroes. And the same thing was said in Ukraine. And we find ourselves in these quagmires without realizing that yes, there's a body count and by the way, that is generally largely lied about and hidden.

Oh, for sure.

But then there's this vastly higher body Counter of those whose lives have been uprooted and who have either died early as a result of migration or deaths of despair. This is the same with lockdowns. And those numbers are incredibly hard to ever even peg down. And when you look at the millions and millions displaced, I mean, Brown University pegs the global war on terrorism as having killed or led to the deaths of 800,000 civilians. And that goes so far beyond what the US will speak to. And then those that were forced to migrate are in the many millions. And when you take homogeneous, you know, Europe is Balkanized, but each element there is accustomed to being very homogenous.

And those are the indigenous populations of the continent.

Right. And when, you know, when I was in. When I was at Georgetown at. I did my master's at the School of Foreign Service there, and the. The focus of my thesis was trying to get very quantitative about predicting terrorism. Because at the time it was a very squishy subject. It was post 9 11, and it was mostly qualitative the way people were describing it. And one of the closest corollaries that I could find to being predictive was the ratio between hookah bars and madrasas. But not just the ratio, the rate at which it changed. And that is, I think, deeply underappreciated. It's not that they don't necessarily plan to at some point have their demographics look different.

Right.

But when it's forced so quickly that nobody can absorb, the pace of change matters. It matters.

We can't metabolize it. People are not designed for this pace of change at all.

It really, really matters. Whatever, you know, that's that madrasa bars and hookah bars are in the Middle Eastern context. But when you look at what we're experiencing in the US where you have kids who've just come back from a pandemic, then being sent home again to do zoom school so that their classrooms can be used to house migrants or hotels all being shut for the same purpose while veterans sleep under bridges on the streets. The scale of it and the deluge is what makes it impossible for any society to absorb. And that doesn't make it, you know, that doesn't make it racist. It doesn't make it wrong. It. It's human nature to need time and, and the nature of economies and societies to need time to be able to expand and adapt. And I think our going into Iraq, Afghanistan a little bit, though, in the early days, that was actually pretty well managed before it sprawled. But 2003, I think, was really the beginning of this era. Where we were shifting, we were talking about a rules based order and breaking every single rule in that rules based order. And then having utter disregard for the social chaos that was resulting.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. And people's need, which is inherent for order and predictability and continuity in their lives and their communities. We always talk about communities. Nobody actually cares about communities. They'll blow them up in a heartbeat. So can I just ask you, there's so many threads, but just to get back to what drew you into this kind of amazing life that you've lived, which was 9 11. I don't understand. I sincerely don't understand. Maybe you do. Why 23 years later, when every regime in place in 2001 is now different, including the Saudi government, why we would have so many classified documents from that time? What's the excuse for that? I don't get that at all.

I mean, why do we still have classified documents from the 60s?

Oh, I completely agree, but because 911 was, you know, was the world changing event of our lifetimes, I think it's fair to say in retrospect, I don't understand the justification for that. And I don't know why nobody demands, like, why not declassify it? Like, why shouldn't? It's our country, all these people died. We should know.

Right? And I agree entirely. And I agree. I mean, the same applies for the 60s. I think ultimately, you know, when most Americans go to work for a third of their working week, they are working for the government. They're working, they are taking that money, having spent the day away from their family, sacrificing, whatever they would prefer to be doing. And they don't get to keep any of it. They turn it all over to the government. The government works for the people directly. I mean, they are directly paid by the people. And if your boss asks what you've been doing and you know, you say, sorry, I can't tell you, it's classified, it doesn't cut it, you know, and you know, are there, are there moments where, you know, the actual identity of a source who's, you know, preventing nuclear war with the Russians is at stake. Sure. But they're actually quite few and far between. And you know, I think there is a bureaucratic inertia here. Some of it is, some of it is cya, and some of it is, you know, probably more nefarious than that, but there is also a lot of bureaucratic inertia.

And it's one of the reasons I'm excited about the prospect of Elon getting in There but to do some surgery on, on some of that bureaucracy. But you know, CIA 101, when you start, you have this one week, you know, fill out your tax forms, get the same as you would with any other job. Like nothing sexy about it at all there. It's just, here's the insurance program and the person who's going to work in, you know, the coffee shop is sitting next to someone who's about to go down to the farm. It's just everybody goes through it. And the email client that you use there looks a lot like Gmail. I mean, it's provided by Google and it has all the normal fields and then an additional field that's for classification and it's a dropdown menu and when it first drops down, it's all checkboxes with their own subsets and it's hundreds of different classifications, all different numbers and codes and you can hover over them and they say when to use them. But, but there are a lot. And we were told in that first day, you know, in that first course, you know, just to make it easy on yourself, pick HCS 404 checkbox.

It hit Save as Favorites. It'll come up every time and then you don't have to worry about it. Well, that's, you know, human compartmented sensitive information. It's usually reserved for, you know, the actual identity, address or identifying details of a source that, whose life could be in danger for what they're doing. And yet here it's being used for, you know, I'll meet you at 4:30 at Dunkin Donuts. And everything in between, good and bad, nefarious and not. And the problem with that is that it is completely exempt from any declassification threshold ever. And as a result of this kind of administrative tweak, which is either just to save people time or maybe to reduce the number of things that will ever eventually be published. Now you have class after class after class of CIA officers that, you know, just chronically make sure that every single email they ever write will never see the light of day. And I think that is being done across government.

So literally the default is secrecy from the public.

Yeah, the default is you will never know. You never know how much money was spent, what it was spent on, whether it was legal, you know, whether you spent that Tuesday away from your family, working to pay taxes and those taxes went to kill someone or went to save someone's life. There's no, no accountability and there's no way to know and there's no way to Know, and there could be. Right. I have a lot of respect for, for the role of intelligence agencies in saving lives and in preventing conflict and attacks. I think they are actually far more valuable in that than many people realize because they have so sullied their name by getting into all kinds of other business that, that they shouldn't be doing. But there is a very valuable role for them. And in that there are some things that do, you know, need to remain secret. But 20 years later, 40 years later, 60 years later, you know that then it becomes about quote, unquote, preserving trust in our institutions. Right. Continuing to lie to you, you know, code for if you knew what we did then you would shut us down.

Now, you know, and I assume that's the motive behind continuing to classify documents from 1963 in the Kennedy.

Well, it's sure not sources and methods, right. I mean if it is, then you know, we've got, we need to update.

Our sources and methods.

Yeah, we need to update our sources and methods. But it's not, I mean from time to time they will say this is about protecting allies. Of course I think we would all want to know if there were allies or any other nation states involved in what happened in the 60s or what happened in 9, 11. So protecting anyone above the American people who you work for doesn't really make a lot of sense.

They'll actually say it's to protect allies.

Well, not about a specific operation but as a reason for long term classification when pushed.

Yeah, that's pretty outrageous that they would admit that.

I mean, so the interests of a.

Foreign country are more important than the interests of the American people.

I think they're, I think they're kind of argument would be if I were to steel man it eventually the American people will be protected by something that we need from that ally, some kind of, you know, security, collaboration or whatever we might need down the road. And therefore, you know, we must keep that relationship strong. And again, if it is the identity of somebody who's working with you, whose family is going to be in danger. That is absolutely true. And maybe that's still true 40 years later. It's possible that it is in certain circumstances.

How about 61 years later?

Yeah, I mean less and less likely.

What do you think that's about?

The assassinations of the 60s?

Yes.

Oh, I could talk to you about that all day.

I bet you've intersected with it on various levels.

I have, yeah. And I feel something of a responsibility to get to the bottom of that at least in my lifetime. For my children, you know, I mean, my. My daughter Bobcat is Bobby iv. So her great grandfather was rfk. And I don't. I want to be able to look at her and for her to know whether or not her own government was involved in these assassinations, and if so, what's been done about it to make sure that that never, ever happens again, that there's never a coup like that in this country again. And I think when you look at the collaboration that was going on in those days between the intelligence community and organized crime and the mobile, there were very blurry boundaries. And I worry that today the cartels have kind of taken the mob's role in that world.

Meaning the Latin American drug cartels.

Yeah.

Do you think that the US Government is working with the cartels?

I mean, working with is broad. Right. I mean, the intelligence community's job is to protect the American people. And sometimes they interpret that as requiring collaboration with criminal elements, with terror organizations, ostensibly as part of COVID to, you know, to complete an operation that will save American lives or provide information that would be helpful to American leaders. Clearly, in the 60s, that ended up being manipulated into a broader collaboration that allowed US Government elements to undertake activities that they could not directly undertake by law. And I think we've seen that even with liaison partnerships, it's clear that Five Eyes has been used intelligence liaison partners have been used to surveil leaders in our own government when our intelligence agencies could not do it directly because there's no prohibition on sharing intelligence.

Right. So you get a foreign intel service to do the work for you, and then you get the information.

Right. And similarly, you get an NGO or a contractor to censor the American people, or you get a criminal organization to undertake a criminal act that, you know, you might not be so savory for your own officers to do and that, you know, I never worked in Latin America, so it's not. It's not something that I have directly witnessed, but I certainly have direct, you know, knowledge of it happening, of the.

US Government collaborating or having some relationship that's not purely antagonistic with the Mexican and. Or other drug cartels.

Sure. And I. And. And I think, you know, again, the steel man would be. This is for the benefit of the American people.

Well, it's always for your own good, for sure.

And look, there. Is there an argument for having penetrations in the top of the cartels in the same way that you do at the top of, you know, the Iranian or Russian or any other adversarial government? Sure. These, I Mean, many of them are as powerful and threatening as, as a, as a nation state.

The problem though is money, right? And there's just so much money spinning off of these enterprises, these, the cartels that, I mean, you could just see corruption happening very easily. And I, I know one person who was involved in that, who, who I trust. I can't prove it, but who worked for CIA, is a contractor moving over, as so many do, from the military. And you know, he's told me at great length about the money that CIA was getting from, from drug cartels in Latin America, in South America. In his case, I can't prove that, but I was shocked to hear that. You don't seem shocked to hear that.

I mean, look at Iran Contra, you know, I mean look at Air America and Vietnam. Like these are, it's not, this is not a new pattern for intelligence. And when you look at black budgets, you know, I mean, Congress was stunned that there were operations happening in Niger and obviously they control the purse strings. So who's funding that? Right? And so that pattern has gone back a long way where the narcotics trade has, has funded off book activities or that, you know, that was obviously what happened with the Contras and has happened before and since.

Given how many Americans are dying or whose lives are being destroyed, families wrecked, entire parts of the country just devastated by drugs, it's a little much. I mean that's like kind of at this point like Nazi collaboration level immoral, I would say.

No, it is, it's pouring over the border and along with it, you know, humans and children. And I think we really are seeing the devastation that that reaps, as you say. I mean, just the sheer scale and the sum of the revenue involved makes it a real challenge.

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I mean, look at Chuck Schumer's comment. They have six ways to Sunday to get back at you. Remember when he said that to Rachel Maddow?

Vividly. Yeah.

And she didn't look too surprised. I think it's a known quantity. Obviously it goes back to Hoover. That was very well known within Intel. People say, oh yeah, that guy has a Hoover file on him, meaning this or that. Policymaker. Something is known that means that.

So that's real.

Oh, yeah, Yeah.

I mean, I look at the speaker of the House whose views on everything kind of changed instantly on the foreign policy questions. And I think, what are the. I mean, there's never been a more obedient speaker to the will and whims of the intel community than Mike Johnson. And you sort of wonder like, what is that?

Well, I mean, I don't know the answer, but you look at, you know, the legislation that has come up through the House on multiple things, on election integrity, on EMP preparedness. Both are two completely different things. Both of them, actually. The SHIELD act in both cases, but several other iterations that passed the House with real bipartisan support and then just got completely gummed up in the Senate. And these are things that seem so unassailable and supported across the board by regular American voters and the base across both parties that you have to ask what Hoover files are involved, and if not a Hoover file, then a, you know, a second house, wherever. But I think so corrupt.

It's hard even to believe.

It is. It is, but it's harder to believe that we're not going to do anything to root it out, you know, and I think you have to name a problem and really recognize it before you can fix it. And it's something that I admire about what, you know, Matt Taibbi and Schellenberger did with the Twitter files was for Elon to go in and say, you know, before I even touch anything on day one, please document for posterity all of the abuses that have been happening here so that, A, we can fix them and B, the American people know this was happening and can prevent it from happening again. And, you know, if that hadn't happened, we wouldn't know what CISA had been up to. Which also oversees election integrity, by the way, and how important that it oversees election integrity. Yeah, yeah, those are its two. It's two. Outside of, you know, bridges and ports and regular infrastructure, those are its two big focuses are censorship of social media and election integrity.

Of course, you can't have integrity with censorship because censorship is itself an interference in the democratic process.

Certainly. I mean, when you look at the Hunter Biden laptop story and, you know, it's been so successfully kind of sidelined that it's hard to even bring up, honestly, we would kind of roll their eyes. Not the Hunter Biden laptop story again. But what I find really astounding about that is that it was Tony Blinken as a campaign official, for now, President Biden who rang up the CIA and said, we have a debate next week and we need to be able to rebut this. And can you write this letter? And in it, I mean, it's just such clear politicization of our security services, which is foundationally against everything that I was taught when, I mean, when I started there, I was told that if you had a partisan pin in the felt of your cubicle wall, you could be fired. And here we have, you know, that's for the rank and file, but the seventh floor are writing false intelligence estimates to get a presidential candidate out of hot water for his son's documentation of business deals that frankly, look pretty corrupt and that the voter should get to make up their own mind about.

And maybe you're somebody who would look at the correspondence in that laptop and not be bothered by it, but you should get to make that decision before you cast your vote. And having a Government agency where, you know, the CIA can come in and say this is Russian disinformation when it flat out was not, was completely authentic. And then CISA can actually get to work for the coming four years while that person is president. Memory holing that, because every single post about it is then flagged as misinformation is truly a violation of election integrity if ever there was one. I mean, all of the studies around that, the polling around it say that it would have changed a. Sufficient enough votes to have an impact on the election. And if having your security services step in to lie about a foreign adversary's involvement in the election in order to conceal from voters correspondence of your own corrupt dealings with other foreign adversaries and have it change the outcome of the election is not interference. It's hard to know what it's.

So nicely put. Were you shocked by that when you saw it?

I was shocked by it when I realized that it was intentionally manufactured in that way. I mean, I think when I first heard it, you know, it seemed unlikely to me, but I hadn't really fully caught on at that point how manufactured the entire, you know, laptop story was like it, it seemed like too audacious an intrusion into domestic political life. I felt like they wouldn't have gone that far that publicly to just out and out lie about it. And you know, and they did. And not only did they, but then the person who orchestrated it is now our Secretary of State going and preaching democracy all around the world.

It's pretty dark. It must be bewildering for you who were once part of the machine. Yeah, I mean, to.

Yeah, I mean, I can walk around that building in my, you know, with my eyes closed and say, you know, that door goes to this office and I go. And nowhere in any of those offices was the like, overthrow governments and meddle with domestic politics office. Right. So, you know, I was never exposed to it. And it could be because in the early days I definitely threw up the flag on a few things and said, hey, this, you know, they were using a lot of honorifics in the early days after 9 11, where kind of in English it would be like Mr. Doctor, you know, but after 9 11, everybody was sending in Arabic language threat reporting or they were getting Arabic language threat reporting from their sources and they were not Arabic speakers. And so there were these huge files for people like Haji Al Yemeni, which is like someone who's completed the Hajj and comes from Yemen, which is, you know, many, many people, to put it mildly. And so Picking one person up and you know, rendering them to another country because they fit that description when it's not a name and it's not an identifier was, you know, a human rights nightmare.

Did that happen?

Different name. But I remember raising my hand around that because I was taking like Arabic 101 at, in my last year of grad school at Georgetown and I had a wonderful Egyptian professor and he had just done a class on honorifics at the beginning to kind of like warm people up and teach them pronunciation. And I was literally that far and I mean so, so brand new and if that hadn't happened I wouldn't have recognized it. But. And it ended up, you know, actually being right. I mean they, they, they was the wrong person and by the time that was recognized they'd, you know, force fed him through his nose and you know, just whole human rights.

I'm sorry.

Yeah. So horrible, so, so horrible as to not be.

They force fed him through his.

Well, I'm, I'm sharing what was in public. Just, just to be clear, I'm sharing what was in the public account. So I, you know, I, I don't want to get, go beyond that, but it was the first time that I said, you know, this is, who do I talk to about this? This shouldn't, you know, this shouldn't be happening. And I think from that moment on my senses that I was kind of put in the pile of like this is a person who will make, she's not going to just go along, right? Like she'll, she, she will make trouble. I think I got filtered out of the go ferment coups in foreign country recruitment program, thank God, but I never witnessed any of that there. It was actually really once I left that in some ways I feel like my education on the intelligence world began and I knew a lot of really great people there, intellectually curious, smart, good hearted, many theologians, many poets, like really interesting, unique group of people who argued a lot about where we should be and what we should be doing and the morality of things. I didn't find it to be an evil place at all.

But I also am aware that I never came across any of the kinds of operations that you know, now are being uncovered. And so I think I was working, you know, the keep keeping nuclear precursors out of the hands of terror suspects is like a fairly easy moral choice. Right. And so I never was exposed to any of that. And it was deeply distressing after leaving to watch all of the subsequent declassifications of what was being done at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere and, you know, cat's eye in Thailand and I hadn't been aware of any of that. And then to see it weaponized domestically was the. Because of course, that's the end of that story when you really think about it.

Yeah.

You know, there's no. In the end, the way that we treat other people is how we treat ourselves. The way that we treat people outside ends up in our home. You know, it's just the natural way of things. And I think it's no surprise when we've subjugated the world into kind of us versus them thinking and control being our kind of benevolent. Benevolent control being our love language globally as a nation that, you know, our leaders end up doing the same thing at home and feeling like it's noble.

So again, nicely put. You made reference a moment ago to changes under, in the first years of the Biden administration, first months, to our EMP preparedness. Can you explain what an EMP is and what changed?

Yeah, I mean, this is increasingly relevant now and it's, it's a great credit to President Trump that he prepared us for it and then unfortunately to President Biden that he revoked it. So let me sort of explain a little about what it is. Do you remember over the last couple of weeks, there have been solar storms and we've gotten to see the northern lights much farther south, which is beautiful. And maybe people were warned there might be slight disruptions to electronics, but for the most part it's been, it's been beautiful and uneventful. Those solar storms can be far more powerful than that naturally. So before even getting into human weaponizing of that, there have been lots of examples, but the Carrington event is probably the best known. Right. In 1859 and was. So, I mean, it set, you know, telegraph operators on fire, set, set forest fires. It damaged the, the transatlantic cable miles beneath the ocean. And NASA says that were it to happen again now, given the interconnected electrical grid that didn't exist then, that, you know, we'd be looking at darkness around most of the globe possibly for years, up to seven years is what they have said.

And that these, that these electromagnetic ejections happen from the sun every 100 to 150 years of that, of that magnitude. Of course, that was, you know, in 1850. So we're coming up due for one. Their current estimate is about 12% chance per decade. So not a non zero chance. Fairly likely that in our lifetime or our kids lifetime, we will experience another one of these Carrington events. In fact, there was one in 2012 that came extremely close to us that would have been absolutely catastrophic, but didn't. Didn't hit.

And then that would mean no electricity for years.

Right. And that, you know, that sounds inconvenient, and, you know, maybe people can see how it would be. You know, it would cause some loss of life. But I think there's part of us, when we hear that, that thinks, like, I could use a break from Twitter. You know, like, it might be kind of nice. The thing is that what. What people don't realize is that the world is no longer what it was in the 19th century. That, that almost everything at this point involves what they call SCADA systems, which are these small computers that use sensors to move valves or whether it's how much natural gas can move through a pipeline, when to turn on the coolers in a nuclear power plant to make sure that there's not a meltdown, when to allow water to go over the Hoover Dam to prevent flooding, you know, air traffic control, traffic lights and so on, all operated by SCADA systems now. And those are all susceptible to this exact same kind of attack. Or in the early days, you know, what we were just talking about was in the case of a solar flare. But humans being what they are, they've learned to weaponize this, right?

And we know this because we have done it. Starfish prime was the first test in 62 where the US realized that this could be used as a weapon and did the test above the Pacific. And it knocked out, you know, capabilities in Hawaii and farther beyond. And so there was that recognition. We now know that the. The Soviets figured it out even earlier. They told us, during the kind of detente in the 90s, that they had already done seven tests at that point over Kazakhstan and wiped the entire power grid of Kazakhstan. Actually created a lot of suffering in the process. But they saw it as having huge potential as a weapon because of that, and began developing out what they called a super emp, which is very specifically tuned not for yield, but for electromagnetic pulse. And these are detonated 30 km or so above a country. So you're not actually destroying anybody with the explosion. It is with using the EMPs to kill the grid, what is now by many of our adversaries, mentioned in their military manuals as no contact wars. So this is win World War three without ever having to have contact with the adversary.

And when you look at the delivery mechanisms that are available here and the way that we're seeing EMPs discussed in China and Iran, And Russia, North Korea. There are a wide variety of them. I mean, North Korea in 2013 ran the exact optimal orbit with its KSM3 satellite over New York and Washington D.C. that would be the optimal delivery for this kind of a weapon. And on the very same day in April of 2013 sent military special forces essentially that have never been identified in to break into substation, PGE substation near San Jose in California. And North Korean, well thought to be North Korean, never actually identified or apprehended exactly the same day on the west coast that they did the satellite run on the East Coast.

What'd they do at the PGE substation? Pacific Gas and Electric, by the way. Yes, for our east coast viewers.

They were assessed to be extremely professional by the SEAL trainers who came in later to look at the site. They knew about an underground comms tunnel that they went in and cut communications and used sniper fire to damage but not take offline 17 transformers in the United States? In the United States, yep.

We had, we had a North Korean team of saboteurs or saboteurs sent by.

North Korean, certainly professional special forces of some variety thought to be North Korean. Just outside San Jose in Coyote, California.

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No, it was very, very downplayed as vandalism. And two months later, July we had or a few months later, in July, they found two SA2 nuclear capable missiles in the bay of a tanker in the Gulf of Mexico. And this was all really as the North Korean tensions were mounting, which President Trump gets far too little credit, in my opinion, for that resolution. Or Dayton. And now under Biden Harris, we have North Korean troops being pulled by Putin into the war in Ukraine. So that escalation is back in play again. But those are three distinct ways to attack our electrical grid that were all mounted within a handful of months. And as a result, in 2014, NORAD announced that they were fully moving and investing hundreds of millions of dollars into further rad hardening Cheyenne Mountain. So they've taken it very seriously for their own force protection, which is good, but not for the rest of us.

And can you just give us the Cliff notes on what that means? Hardening Cheyenne Mountain?

Okay, so it's actually very easy. If you put your phone in the microwave, it is safe from this kind of electromagnetic radiation. And so the question is, when you look at something as complex as our entire national grid, what are the nodes that are most vulnerable to this kind of attack. And really there are sort of two categories that are highest consequence. One are the Escada systems that would allow for the resulting forest fires and nuclear meltdowns and floods and plane crashes and hospital failures and traffic crashes and so forth. If they fail. And they are as easy to protect as, you know, putting them in a metal shed instead of a wooden shed, or taking the wooden sheds that exist and covering them with, you know, metal mesh to the, to the point that, you know, you could put that out for people in each community with specs, and I'm sure that they would get together on a Sunday and do it, you know, but regulation in our country doesn't allow us to do that. That. So the SCADA systems protecting those and then the extra high voltage transformers are a huge issue and sticking point for our grid.

They only make about 200 of them a year and they're incredibly expensive, hundreds of tons, you know, to move. And the coils are done mostly by hand, amazingly. I mean, they're custom made and they were invented here in the US Tesla invented them here, but we don't make them anymore. And most of the ones for export are made in Germany or South Korea. And they're designed custom for each spot. So it's very hard to have extras for each one on hand. And they need to be in Faraday cages, which sounds fancy, but it's basically just a wire mesh cage. Yeah, a wire mesh cage. And the benefit of this, despite, in addition to protecting against this kind of attack, is that there are a lot of other grid vulnerabilities that are maybe lower damage when they happen, but higher likelihood. An EMP attack or a solar flare are low probability, high catastrophe events. But weather related damage is the opposite, or sometimes catastrophic in its impact, as we've seen recently, right in North Carolina and elsewhere. And a lot of the same guards around, especially around protecting from cascading SCADA failures, where the charge can be, the surges can be prevented, is really important to the EMP safety, but also would help prevent in those kinds of storm environments.

And then you look at sabotage and vandalism, which is another really big issue that they have to protect against. And a Faraday cage, depending on its construction, can also, you know, prevent people from seeing where it is that they're, that they're letting off small arms fire or that they're targeting, which we see. I mean, you know, when I drove in here, when you first arrive in your town, on the left there's a little substation and it has a chain like fence around it, you know, no cameras. And that's the same all over the country. And everyone just sees those, you know, they see the little coils and don't really think much of it.

But I've, I've been here 50 years and never noticed it was there.

That's right. I mean, and that's true. Our eye just, you know, we're so accustomed to, to filtering these things out. But the entire basis of our life and our community and our country and our national security and our health care, our financial system all relies on them. And it's not just, you know, detonating a nuclear weapon above the United States. Obviously there's a deterrent effect. There would be a response because Cheyenne Mountain and other parts are completely red heartened. So even if the entire country were out, the United States would be able to respond and subs overseas and so on. But you can achieve pretty much the same impact with commercially available EMP suitcases that you can buy for industrial reasons with no, you know, no special license or anything like that. And, you know, if you pick the right nine substations to put that suitcase next to, you have achieved the exact same thing. And as you can see, you know, with the, the San Jose attack, those people were never actually seen on camera and they were never, I mean, you can see them as figures, but they were never identified.

So there's vandalism, there are natural weather events, including the solar flares, the storms that you mentioned, and then there's emp. So the threats to the grid and to the lives of 350 million Americans are completely real and in some sense imminent. Like, we know this is going to happen at some point. So the federal response hardening the grid changed when Biden got elected.

Yeah, and this is what is really hard to accept. And it's very similar actually to what happened with the border wall, which is here. You have two policies. The EMP executive order that President Trump was the first president to ever direct all parts of government to work together to be sure that the American people were protected from intentional EMP attack. After decades of knowing that our primary adversaries were all considering it, training for it, had weapons programs designed to do this. And by the way, I mean, before we get to Biden, you know, the primary delivery mechanism in all of those tests was a high altitude balloon. You know, when we then have China, a primary adversary, who we know have talked in their training sessions and their training manuals about using high altitude balloons to deliver this kind of an EMP device and have done tests where it's the same exact payload as the high altitude balloons that were recovered. And then you have Russia, what I'm sure you remember last year, Washington worked itself into quite a justified, in my opinion state about, you know, the quote unquote space nuke, right. Putting a nuclear weapon into orbit on a satellite.

And at the time the media made it out like this was maybe a danger. And even if it was a danger, it was only a danger to other satellites. Right. And would, it would get in the way of your car's GPS and you know, maybe it would be problematic for the military and so we should pay attention to it. But they definitely downplayed its impact on anyone on the ground. Right. And yet we know from past Russian trials and the, the SA3 satellite that, that the North Koreans sent over that this kind of delivery is the exact same setup as an anti satellite weapon. You put a nuclear weapon on a satellite headed up from the south where we have virtually no detection set up and you don't even get the 22 minutes that you would get with a solar flare. It just comes completely out of the blue and there's no preparation whatsoever. And in general, in the military theory of these adversaries, it's a multi pronged attack, right? That's the initial you take out, you send everybody into chaos and you take out their ability to communicate with one another and then it's followed by whatever comes next.

And for us to know, to have seen that in, you know, war games in at least two of our largest adversaries, both Iran and Russia have included in their training simulations. It's in three of their manuals. China, Russia and Iran. Russia we know is putting a nuclear weapon in orbit. China's sending the space balloons, I mean the high altitude balloons have already come across our own territory, North Korea, three way attack simulation that all three were successful. Clearly this is on the minds of our adversaries and it's an imminent danger, certainly the vulnerability, the area in which we are most vulnerable for maximum casualties and impact. And yet President Trump was the first president to say, across different parts of government who sometimes have a hard time talking to one another, I want you to work together to make sure that the American people are protected from this. And by the way, it's not even that expensive in the big scheme of government spending to do it really well, cost estimate was $2 billion, which you know, we've just sent another 100 billion to Ukraine. So then Biden takes office and frankly my mind just Inconceivably revokes that.

And in the same way that he says with the wall, you know, both of those to my mind are initiatives that are already underway that are designed to protect the American people's security and homeland. And he reversed for, you know, with no, with no replacement plan in place.

But you know, with the border wall you could. And I think that's a more complex topic than we appreciate. Like what is the point of what they just did? I don't know. But at least there was a perceived political constituency in favor of mass immigration. Okay. They thought it would make it a one party state. That's why they're for it. Got it. What could possibly be the motive for not defending yourself in a sensible way from an EMP attack? Like I don't get that at all.

Support from the electrical industry.

Oh really?

Yeah, there's a huge amount of pushback. So it gets a little bit in the weeds and boring. But there are these two things, the NURK and the ferc and they are supposed to regulate one another basically. Or one FERC is supposed to regulate nerc. And unsurprisingly in that kind of a cozy relationship, it doesn't work. And they do have some self imposed EMP standards, but they are for a reasonably light solar storm and would not come anywhere close to being able to withstand any kind of nuclear fallout and really push back on the costs that would be involved and the difficulty it could be passed on to consumers at $0.20 per consumer per year, which I think most consumers, when they really understand that this is. This would, you know, keep their power on not just in those extreme circumstances, but also help in storms and with vandalism and with these other.

And keep millions from starving to death.

Right. Billions potentially. I mean these, these are global. I mean in our, in our country not. But, but these certainly will be global issues and there will be global competition for the very slow to build transformers that would fix them. Right. And so it's really important to recognize that everybody else will be going through the same thing at the same time. It's not like you can find a way to walk to outside of that area so that you can get order something and bring it back in. Right. In terms of rebuilding your grid. So potentially catastrophic, non zero chance of it happening. I mean 12% per decade is. And I should say that the EMP committee that Congress put in place and unfortunately was disbanded under President Obama, but prior, prior to that included really the intelligence community's best analysts based on all of the testing that they'd seen hostile countries to their estimate was eight to nine out of every ten Americans could lose their life by the end of the first year, which is a staggering and almost impossible to believe estimate until you realize that, you know, within, obviously at the outset, you have half a million people in the air at any given time on a thousand flights, Right?

So that's lost right away.

And then everyone on an airplane does.

Right. So that's half a million people at any moment, any given moment. And then you have, you know, obviously traffic and everything that happens in that immediate chaos. But very quickly after that, the SCADA systems begin to fail, and you have fire, you have flood within 72 hours, you have meltdown at all nuclear facilities, and then refrigeration has gone out at supermarkets and other regional food warehouses, so the food supply ends. There's no, you know, there's no access to ATMs or money or financial structure of any type. No access to your prescription medications, you know, no access to law enforcement and no clean water and no food. So unless, you know, you have your Berkey that you can put lake water in and, you know, a year's worth of food and a way to protect yourself, you know, you. Which the vast majority of Americans don't have, you are in an incredibly vulnerable position that there's absolutely no reason to risk putting our own people.

And if you're. And that's just for people who are outside the cities, but if you're in the middle of a tightly packed metro area, you're just done.

Yeah.

And this. The. I mean, I can't even imagine people's be having, you know, covered chaos in Baghdad and.

Right.

Hurricane Katrina. You know, anyone who's ever seen the, you know, disappearance of authority knows that, like, within hours, people start going crazy and hurting each other.

And you have, you know, you have your kids in your apartment, and how do you get them out and how do you get them to safety and where do you take them? And, you know, the prospect of even rolling any kind of dice to put our own people in that situation while then glibly taking the money that we could spend doing that and instead send it to arm Ukraine when sending ballistic missiles into Russia using American satellite, you know, puts us in a direct hot war with Russia for the first time ever, you know, that that actually puts us at a higher risk of this kind of attack than ever in our history. And at a moment where instead of spending our money to protect ourselves from that attack, we're actually spending our money to provoke that Attack.

We did a live tour last month, one of the funnest things we've ever done. Coast to coast, 16 different cities speaking. Well, next week, our grand finale, Halloween, Oct. 31, 2024, in Glendale, Arizona. Our special guest that night, days before the presidential election, Donald Trump. All proceeds donated to hurricane relief. We're proud to do it. Hope to see you there. So I don't know that one in a million Americans has ever heard any really anything you just said or certainly not heard it fleshed out in the way that you just did. And yet when you hear it, it makes sense and it's clearly true. So that raises the question about our information, you know, the integrity of our information sources. And why aren't we hearing this from the press, from the media? I don't understand that.

Well, you know, I think there's a party line right now in the media, if you haven't noticed. And this, I think, does not support the security states thesis about, about how safe the current administration has made us in the world. Right. And you know, when you look at, when you look at the economy versus stability that, you know, four years ago and now, it is just absolutely clear that we should be talking about the fact that the world has been set on fire over the last four years. And yet it's really not front and center in our news at all with, you know, with the exception of the Middle east, which, you know, gets I think, pretty slanted coverage. So. Oh, you think, you know, having come through two years of the RFK campaign, I will tell you, it is, I mean, it's truly amazing to me how to what degree a media blackout really can be coordinated and be successful.

What was your, tell us, what was your experience?

I mean, it was clear to me pretty early on that, you know, you were, if you were someone who had heard from Bobby, then you were someone who was at least considering voting for him. And many of those people were very clear that he should be the next President of the United States. So you're either somebody who had heard from Bobby or you were somebody who had heard about Bobby from your cable news source or from your newspaper and so on. And you begin to realize when you're on the inside of the receiving end of all of that, is that every place, anything that you know about this election, you know about it because you have read, heard or seen it on a platform that has a commercial interest in the outcome of the election. Right? I mean, you look at Google, hundreds of millions of dollars in pharmaceutical ad revenue, billions of dollars in pharmaceutical Ad revenue that Bobby said in his very first speech when he announced for president that he would bring us in line with the rest of the world by banning pharmaceutical advertising on tv. What business do you know that is going to give fair coverage to somebody that could cost them billions of dollars a year in their business model?

It's not in their fiduciary interest. And it's the same, we see it with certainly all the cable news channels who are also reliant on pharmaceutical advertising. And then, you know, the reliance. I mean, Bobby's determination to cut excess military funding when so many of these media companies have board entanglements or common ownership with defense contractors or are themselves. I mean, you look at Amazon Web Services and the Washington Post and you know, GE and NBC and so forth. I mean, there's a long, long history of that.

And how much does Boeing spend on Politico every year? I mean, but so that is kind of the. I didn't understand this actually until Bobby explained it to me, having spent my entire life in the media, in television, not realizing that the point of the pharmaceutical ads was not to sell the drugs to consumers who can't prescribe the drugs to themselves. Of course, it never made sense to me. And I didn't get the obvious point, which is it's protection money.

Yep, that's exactly how I never got that. I mean, sometimes you even see the Boeing ad or, you know, the Northrop ads, and it's like impossible as a consumer, you, there's, it's, you actually can't. There's no way to buy their product.

No.

This is like completely naked bribery.

But I never thought of that. Yeah, I'm like, why?

You're like, why are you Northrop the advertising in Politico?

Like, what is.

You're gonna go buy a bomber?

It's to keep its reporters from criticizing.

That's right. It is their entire defense expenditures, it's their salary and they know it. And you know, a free market is a free market. Fine. But when voters are so steeped in a media environment, and especially with algorithmic things where, you know, they're seeing their Google News feed and every single time they see Bobby's name, he's like a psychopathic crazy dog eating, you know, joke, Right? And that was their approach was either to absolutely not cover him whatsoever. I mean, he would give these extraordinary speech, this peace speech that he did in New Hampshire in the, at the outset of the campaign, and the America's strong speech about building a unity government based on Lincoln's team Of rivals were two of the most incredible speeches of the campaign. And neither of them, they were all attended by 30, 40 reporters with cameras, obviously waiting for him to say some terrible thing so they could play that one clip. And then none of them ran any of it because they, you know, because they were such strong speeches. And so we, we were up against that throughout.

And did you know how the America. I mean, obviously you've been around, you worked at BBC, you've been around the American media for your whole life, but did you appreciate how this works before you started running this campaign?

Not nearly to the degree that, you know, the, the degree of politicization was surprising to me. And I think I had not really come to understand the kind of deep commercial drivers behind editorial lines and I guess had a little bit of idealism still from the old Edward R. Moreau, there must be some journalists still out there kind of thing, and they've been very few and far between. I mean, I really, I'm hard pressed to even come up with an example. I'm glad to be sitting across from you. But I will say thank God for Elon Musk.

Yes, I agree with that.

I mean, I really believe that every American should include him and his family in their prayers every day because, you know, he is holding our Constitution together right now. And, you know, even the Internet Archive is offline now. It's. There's nothing left. There's no other way to know. And sure. Are there things on there that turn out not to be true? Absolutely. Are there things on there that you're going to disagree with or find offensive? Absolutely. And, you know, such is the nature of free speech, and it's audacious and bold and beautiful and sometimes infuriating, but that's what we've built our entire country on. And when it, I mean, I remember recently explaining this to my daughter, and she was, you know, she's five, and she was asking me why I'm always traveling, I'm working in the moment. And I was explaining about the importance of free speech and how I wanted her to have it when she was older. And she said, so are there countries where if you criticize the leader, you know, they'll put you in jail? And I said, yes, there are. There are a lot of those countries they, that used to be all the countries, basically.

And when you, when you go back and you look at the, at the audacity of what that idea was at the beginning and the fact that it wasn't happening anywhere else, and then hundreds, you know, of Other countries now have followed suit and that we're just going to give that up for the short sighted gain of one political party in one election cycle or one blob for, you know, five to 10 election cycles while, you know, their lust for power continues. And that as a result, because no government is ever going to cede power given to it in an emergency. So even once that runs its course, it still means that my kids, kids will not have the freedom of speech that, you know, that they, that is their birthright given to them by our country's founders. And I just can't, I can't abide that. I can't let it happen. And to see Elon, who wasn't even born in this country, step up and defy the commercial interests. You know, I don't know his finances, but it seems to me that he has taken a serious financial hit. Oh, serious to protect.

He's not a money worshiper.

Right.

Unlike so many billionaires, just to be blunt. They're money worshipers. That's why they're billionaires.

Right.

He's not.

No. And I think he is genuinely driven by the desire to see human freedom endure. And I don't know why more of us are not. Because there's nothing more important and it's ours to lose. You know, and it's bewildering to me when I hear people say, well, you know, our government can be trusted with those like they can make the judgment of what I should be able to say and what I shouldn't. The idea that. But what about the next leader? Every government is it Federalist51, the one where Madison talks about if men were angels, we wouldn't need government and if government were angels, it wouldn't need to be regulated. But we are making, the challenge is making a government of men over men. And, and yet they took on that challenge and achieved it so beautifully. And I remember Mr. Saar at NCS, my last two years of high school in D.C. when I came back to the United States, telling us about Skokie versus Illinois and just being incredibly moved by the courage that it takes as a society to defend such abhorrent speech. Because you know, that, you know, it's, it's not a sliding scale.

It's just you either have it or you don't. I think it's Salman Rushdie who says the minute somebody says I believe in free speech, except you know, stop them right there because they don't need to finish the sentence.

But I get, I just refer back to my first Question, which is, since I'm so familiar with, you know, all the schools you went to, the credentials you have, you know, the world that you're from, I mean, you've got to BE in the 1/10 of 1% of people, you know, who've taken this position. You took such an unpopular position. And I know, you know, you're married into the family and all that, but still you became Bobby Kennedy's campaign manager and now Bobby Kennedy's endorsed Trump.

Yeah.

And I just don't think you could hoist a bigger middle finger in the face of the world that you're from. I mean, I just know that because I know that world. So did you even hesitate before doing that? What was your thinking? And I'm sure none of your classmates did anything like that. Why did you do that?

I think that if you gave them the choice, if they came down from Mars and you put the exact what is happening right now in front of them without the names of the parties or the names of the participants, and said, you know, you have one four year stint where no new wars are started, where, you know, bread costs half of what it costs now, gas a third, you know, et cetera, et cetera, you know, rises in standard of living across the country, lower suicide rates, lower depression, you know, lower homelessness, lower incarceration, lower immigration that is, you know, illegal and results in children being lost around the country. And then you compare it with four years of another government that is endorsed, by the way, by Dick Cheney now and a host of neocons that involves two new wars, you know, printing $8 trillion of additional debt that is a tax on the poor and on future generations in order to pay for more war, more children going into poverty, more, you know, that we have a real unemployment rate of 25% in this country, a quarter. When you take into account people who want a full time job and don't have one, or people who have a full time job but don't make $25,000 a year, which is not a living wage, if you take that into account, we have 24.9% true unemployment rate.

So I think that you asked about people in my world, I think if you put any of that to them, and then on top of that said, you know, and this, this leader that has plunged people into poverty and unemployment and had two additional wars started on his watch is censoring speech on social media, weaponizing the courts to take people of his own party and every single other party off of the ballot. I mean, literally, Dean Phillips, Marianne Williamson, Robert Kennedy Jr. Obviously, President Trump. No labels. Jill Stein, everybody. There's nobody that, as far as I know, that didn't face some kind of a lawsuit to try to challenge their actual ballot access, the ability for an American to turn up and exercise their own sacred individual sovereignty of thought and choose whether or not to vote for them. Every single one of them was attacked in court to get their name off of a ballot. It's like, we believe in democracy. You can vote for anyone as long as it's me. And I believe that anyone who I knew growing up, and hopefully any American that I didn't know growing up, when they see it with the in group out, group coding stripped away, would all choose the same outcome here.

I think the challenge is that we are evolutionarily designed to retain the approval of our group. When you're walking across the early Savannah and your. Your group shuns you, you know you're out of luck, right? It's a lot harder to survive. And I. There's. There's a study that DARPA did around news, you know, reading news, where they. They expected the frontal lobe to light up because you were assessing the logic of what you were reading. And actually it lights up second after this area over the ear, which is if you hold up a shirt and think about whether your friends would make fun of you if you wore it. So, you know, you are using your analytical mind, but only after you've already decided whether you're using it to poke holes or, you know, to reinforce. And I think that, honestly, my friends who don't support President Trump, I think that's why I think, you know, of course it is.

I guess everything you've said is true and for the third time. Nicely put. But I also have a little more difficulty giving that group a pass because that's our. That's our leadership class raised and to some extent, to be brutally honest, bred to rule. And every society has that class. And that's fine with me. I think it's inevitable. It's part of the human ordering. But that class should be able to think critically and rationally. That's their job. And they're not. And I just don't understand how this happened. A total breakdown in the sort of mental faculties of the people who run everything. Like, what the hell?

Yeah. I mean, part of it, I think, is this intentional, addictive, hypnotic quality of media and social media that has really intentionally been designed that way. You know, Cali means talks about how the tobacco companies bought the food companies and sent over their chemists and made them intentionally addictive. And that is horrifying and true. I feel that the same has really been done to our information ecosystem. And part of it is for corporate profit, and part of it is for political control. And as. As that media environment has also become more global and these partnerships with, you know, other parties in other countries assist in censorship, it's. I think it's difficult to. To think critically without a single input telling you that you're living in the Truman Show.

That's right.

You know, and I mean, the agency, they used to have this. These things called red teams, right, where they would. In the 80s, they started putting people in analysts in kind of a bunker for three months or six months that looked for all the world like you were living in the Soviet Union. And all of the books that you had available were all the things that you would be reading if you were military or leadership class there. And you're listening to live radio broadcasts in, you know, Russian and just living the life of a Soviet leader in the bunker. And every day you're writing what you would do. You know, today I would push on the Berlin Wall, et cetera. And that is actually one of the things that came out of it was when was the time, a suggestion of the timing for when Reagan should. Should push on, bringing down the Wall. But it allowed people to really channel their adversary to such a degree that they were viewed with a lot of suspicion when they came out. It was like, well, now you've gone native now, maybe you're the enemy now. And after 9, 11, they started ramping these things back up around Islamic extremism and reading, you know, all of the old academic writings of, you know, some of the more violent jihad leaders and so on.

And that suspicion remained as the better you performed in there in terms of really being able to get into somebody's mind, the more suspicious people were of you when you left. And you were generally put on some kind of like a teaching assignment or some, you know, somewhere you couldn't really do any harm. And I tell that story because it's very interesting to me that it's like a tacit acknowledgement that you are what you read or you are what you're immersed in, right? And you can have been, you know, this 1980s Cold Warrior, so much so that you're working, you know, as an analyst in Russia, house at CIA, presumably. You're like, pretty dyed in the wool, you know, blue team. And then you do this three months or you do this six months. And it is so convincing. This immersion in the thoughts and radio and books and, you know, beliefs of your adversary that you might just be lost forever when you come out. Right. Like you might have just had a full conversion experience. I think that is what's happening. I mean, I think that media approach is now the experiment that's running all around us all the time.

Yes, I agree with that. To such terrifying effect. I wish we had more time.

There's always more time, all in God's time. But this was so nice to stop and actually talk about some, some of the real challenges that, you know, I think sometimes in the final weeks of the campaign, everything becomes about, you know, the day's polls or, you know, whatever the media opportunity of the day was. And in the end, this is what's at stake. I mean, we're talking about decisions over the very constitutional ideals of this country was built on the physical safety of our communities, of our families. I mean, you are putting, it's really one of the only times that as a parent, you are putting the lives of your children in the hands of someone who frankly is a stranger to you. And you know, when you look at these EMP scenarios and then you look at these censorship scenarios, you know, the well being of our Constitution, of our children and of human freedom is at stake here. And you know, if it weren't, I wouldn't be fighting for it so hard. But thank you for taking the time to really dig in to those issues rather than, you know, the latest photo op of the day.

You're welcome back anytime. Thank you. Amarlis Kennedy.

Thanks, Tucker.

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