Best of the Program | Guest: Jack Carr | 5/4/22
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Great show today.
Really good show.
We talk about all the important issues, including that whole thing apparently that happened in the Supreme Court on abortion.
Stu and I would both like to know.
I mean, this is really putting women out to, you know, to travel to another state.
I mean, you might have to take a 45-minute airplane ride to kill your child.
We're just wondering, how many abortions does the average person get?
I mean, because, I mean, being put out once, you know,
maybe not that big of a problem.
Anyway, we'll get into that and so much more, including our special guest, Jack Carr, who wargames
Russia, America, and the Ukraine, all on today's podcast.
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You're listening to the best of the Blend Beck Program.
Oh my goodness.
Could we just play a couple of...
Holy cow, here's CNN on the slippery slope.
And I cannot believe that I'm sitting here, Jim, in the year of 2022, a right that I was born into a society that had, that my mother had, that my grandmother had, that my great-grandmothers in her lifetime had, that with a stroke of a pen, someone can simply say a fundamental right that is within a zone of privacy that the court has said should be hands-off for the government.
Can you stop for just a second?
I am sitting here.
I can't believe I'm sitting here in 1865,
you know, and a right that I had to own property.
In fact, my grandfather had, my great-grandfather had.
I mean, we've owned these slaves slaves for generations.
They've been part of our family's wealth, let's put it that way.
And it's one thing in the 1860s, 1870s.
Imagine a 1915,
right?
It's been, you know, I mean, gosh, that's 50 years after.
I don't know.
Maybe that's, if it was wrong, well, then you would overturn it.
If it's not, then you don't 50 years after.
That's kind of the way this works.
You know, I can't believe that I live in a country where
we've had separate, you know, movie theaters and drinking fountains.
We've had them say, you know, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, and now
we're just going to change that.
I can't believe that right to separate but equal.
is going away.
And I remember all of these people on the left back in the 70s saying, you know, this law had been this way all this time.
States could manage their own access to abortion for the entire country's history until 1973.
And all of a sudden, now we're going to change it.
That's crazy.
It's crazy.
This is crazy.
It's such a dumb argument.
Okay, so she goes on to say, what's next?
Can be taken away.
There are a lot of things now on the chopping block.
And Steve, you spoke about an earthquake.
Well, a familiar phrase, the slippery slope in the Supreme Court.
That which you do in one area could extend to others.
Well, fundamental rights include interstate travel, include the idea of.
Interstate travel.
Yeah, anytime, at any moment.
At any moment.
I was thinking just the other day, I don't know if we're going to be able to go from Texas to Oklahoma.
Can we do that?
Will they just put barriers up on all of the interstates?
And, you know, look, interstate travel has been a really divisive 50-50 political issue forever.
Forever.
You know, people like the Republicans don't want you to cross lines of state.
I mean, a Democratic number of people are going to say no interstate travel.
And that's, I mean, I'm telling you, that and the
divorce that has been wanted by Clarence Thomas to get out of his marriage with his white wife,
that he's going to overturn.
He just doesn't want to tell Jimmy.
He doesn't.
He's been looking to.
Well, she's white.
You know what?
White people.
That'll be white people.
White people are bad.
I don't know if you know this.
I know.
And so obviously, that's the way he's going to try to get out of it.
He doesn't want to tell her he doesn't want to be married anymore.
He's going to rule in the Supreme Court to make it illegal.
So now, the slippery slope, it's coming.
And, you know, this was from a boob on CNN.
This one is the boob in the White House.
Listen to Joe Biden.
Radical decisions.
If this decision holds, it's really quite a radical decision.
And again, the underlying premise, and again, I've not had a chance to thoroughly go into the report,
the decision.
So definitely comment on it anyway.
Basically,
all the decisions to be made into your private life,
who you marry,
decide to conceive a child or not, whether or not you can't.
So even children.
Stop.
I can't take it.
Well, a lot of people are against birth.
Those people that were overturning the abortion rights do not want children to be be born, right?
Or something.
How many times have you walked into a church where they're like, You come to us if you're thinking about having a child?
We'll tell you whether you can have a child or not.
It's just like those religious people.
Every Sunday.
Every Sunday.
Every Sunday, that's that.
That's how the message starts.
I don't know about you.
I mean, look, at my church, they spend about half the service telling us we have to get a hall pass from them to have children.
That's the way it works at church.
All the time.
Now,
he said here,
he didn't read
the decision, which probably he should have before
he talked about it.
Because in it, it says this only applies to this particular thing, Roe versus Wade.
It only applies to this.
So the slippery slope idea, whoops,
that's out there.
By the way, I love this idea
that
just five people are going to make the decision for the rest of us.
Five people are going to make the decision for the rest of us.
You know, if those five people are following the Constitution, which is, have you ever played Monopoly?
And somebody's like, no, the person who goes second, when they go around each time, they get $700 when they pass go.
And you're like, no, that's not what the rules say.
Rules, those are outdated.
Those were made in 1900.
That's what they say.
What?
Don't listen to the manufacturer of Monopoly.
What do they know?
They couldn't have foreseen our game.
Okay?
As long as we're all playing by the same rules, when those five people or nine people,
when they speak,
we may not like it, but that is law.
Now, they can make bad laws.
I mean, not actually, sorry, they should not make any laws.
They can say this one's constitutional or this one is not, and then they can change that if it's based on bad law.
But you have to have the argument.
And if you didn't read the first draft, which I don't even know if it's going to become law,
if that first draft stands, it all logically is put out.
And it is also, they use the words of liberal icons
who have said, this law doesn't work because of this, this, and this.
You have to do it the right way.
Okay, that's all this law is.
And by the way, I can't believe majority.
Hang on just a second.
What this law did in the first place,
30 states said no abortion.
Now, other states were moving towards liberalizing their laws on abortion, but what did they do?
These nine people decided they're going to take away
all of the discussion.
They're going to force people to do what they say has to be done.
Okay?
Because why?
Because why?
Because they're all talking about the majority.
No, see, this is a representative republic.
We hire people.
This is the way it should work.
We hire people with our votes to go and represent us.
In a world where this works, they actually listen to the people and they enact the things that the people want.
That's Congress.
Then the Senate is supposed to pay attention to their states, which they don't anymore because progressives destroyed it.
But they're supposed to say, no, wait a minute, hang on.
That might be good for New York, but that's not good for Texas.
Or that may be great in Texas, but that's not right for California.
That is supposed to be a speed bump.
Then the president has the ability to veto something, not because it's popular or unpopular.
He has a right to veto things according to our monopoly rule book.
He can veto if he finds it unconstitutional.
If he says, this is unconstitutional, no, I'm not signing this.
Then what happens?
It goes to the Supreme Court.
And the Supreme Court is made entirely for one reason.
What is that reason?
Why do we have a Supreme Court?
It's not to make laws.
In fact, its number one job, its main purpose, is to make sure that any laws that are enacted by the majority
do not inflict damage on the minority.
So what their job is, see, the Bill of Rights is not majority rules.
That's what the Supreme Court is supposed to do.
Their main job is make sure that the Bill of Rights is not violated.
And they have failed us many times, i.e.
slavery.
Yeah, I mean, like, you know, they talk about this with speech all the time, where like the most popular, most important speech to protect is the unpopular speech.
No one's going to stop you from saying something that 80% of people agree with.
It's the thing that 1% of people agree with.
Correct.
And it's the same thing with the court as its basic function.
It's easy to get things through when 60 and 70 and 80 percent of people agree with it.
It's that thing that is still constitutional, is still a right protected by
our founding documents and our country.
That's the thing that they need to stand up for.
You look at this.
First Amendment.
Why does the First Amendment exist?
Because people are going to say things that other people don't like.
And it is only through opposition and debate that we can actually come to any consensus.
The press, they knew the press would take on the government.
It should take on the government and ask questions the powerful don't want to answer.
That's why it's protected.
Your right to petition and assemble with people, to question the powerful.
Are you noticing things?
The right for religion
because the state
in other countries said this is the official religion, and so that had all the power, and it put all other religions out.
So, the First Amendment, what is that about?
That is making sure that the minority or the smaller power is on equal footing, and the government and the majority power cannot take these people out.
The Second Amendment, got news for you.
It's not for hunting.
Otherwise, maybe there would have been croquet.
Yeah, we have the right to to a croquet set.
It's not about hunting.
It's not about sports.
It's about the minority being able to have enough power to be able to keep in check the powerful.
If they are violating rights and violating the Declaration of Independence, its proposal of what we are and the rules and laws in our little Constitution monopoly game,
it's so you, the little guy, has the power over the king.
Same thing with all of it.
It is for minority protection.
That's what makes us different.
That's why you don't want
a democracy.
Because a democracy will fall into the hands of a bunch of right-wing extremists, left-wing extremists.
And once they have power, they can do things like set up a board for speech to be able to say which speech is acceptable, which questions are acceptable, who's acceptable, what behavior is acceptable.
What the Supreme Court did yesterday was very clear.
It did not ban abortion.
It didn't.
What it did was return the power to the people.
These five people, what did this say?
That these five people, these nine people, this is what it said.
These people, us,
should not be making the decision on something so personal
that is not in the Constitution.
That is up to the people themselves to decide.
It was empowering for the average person.
It's amazing how dumb Americans have become because of our teachers' unions and because of our media and quite honestly because of our political parties.
America,
you're an idiot.
Now, do you want to stop being an idiot?
Then maybe you should educate yourself before before you go on as president of the United States and say, I didn't read it.
So maybe gay people can't get married anymore.
Oh, what a moron.
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
All right, Chelsea Manning.
Isn't Chelsea Manning, if I have it right?
Chelsea is, I can't remember his name before he claimed he was a woman.
Peyton.
Peyton.
No, not Peyton Manning.
I know enough to know that's not right.
You almost got it.
Darn it.
What was his name?
Anyway, I can't remember.
Chelsea.
He's now chiming in because he claims to be a woman.
Bradley Manning.
Bradley Manning.
That name would, that one seems like fake to me.
That one seems like, no, that's not his name.
Oh, no, it's not.
Eli.
It was Eli.
Anyway.
Archie?
Archie.
Chelsea Manning is now speaking out about abortion and the potential of the Supreme Court ruling.
And
he tweets yesterday, for those of you who are just catching up, If you're able to afford it and it's safe for you to do so, you should consider arming yourselves, then finding others to train with in teams.
Learn how to defend your community.
We may need these skills in the very near future.
Huh.
Now,
I don't know why
this
person that cannot have a baby, they cannot carry a child, because
she's a he.
It's a dude, dude.
So I don't know what right this white male
has to chime in on abortion rights,
but I really want to focus on,
is this allowed on Twitter to be able to say, hey, get ready for a civil war and arm yourselves and start training?
And then the replies are, is the implication here that overturning Roe versus Wade would incur civil war?
If so, does does someone have a broad brushstroke sense of how that chain of event might unfold?
Yeah, somebody does.
Roe goes, then the power of the 14th Amendment goes.
The 14th goes, so do several other human rights.
Civil unrest follows.
Wow.
Okay.
I mean, I've been to the secret meetings of all the white people.
We get together 7.30 Tuesdays on Denny's at Denny's.
And
I've been to those meetings.
I have not heard the 14th Amendment abolishment plan spoken out loud.
Yeah, they're not going to say that out loud.
No, I'm not going to say it out loud.
They're going to order a grand slam.
Yeah.
And then they're going to exist.
And when they say grand slam, they mean 14th Amendment.
It's a dog whistle.
It's a dog whistle.
Then Carrie Lee writes in, I used to be opposed to the idea of owning firearms with no small part of it being how much I felt I would be at risk of self-harm self-harm from the depression I had before transitioning.
Wow, that is, that's really sad.
But now it doesn't seem like an extreme message, which is terrifying.
Yeah, yeah.
Think it, think it, I think it probably is.
Now the left is online, on Twitter, talking about arming themselves for a civil war.
Interesting, because it's happening on Twitter
before Elon Musk has said, hey,
you should arm yourself and we should have a race riot.
So apparently the algorithm is okay with violence on Twitter.
Yet the media cannot handle Elon Musk buying Twitter at all.
Elon Musk, I guess he, you know, he misses the old South Africa in the 80s.
He wants that back.
Reminds me of old Bond movies where, you know, Dr.
Evil and guys like that or Goldfinger were going to take over the media.
I just, my tummy meter says there's something just not tummy about this if you get invited to something where there are no rules where there is total freedom for everybody do you actually want to go to that party
or um yeah i i go to those parties all the time
almost every party i go to does not send me a list of rules really yeah i go to parties and they're like well i mean there is one rule My wife gives it to me.
Don't make anybody cry or want to kill themselves.
Okay.
And you never live up to that.
And I never live up to that.
I break that every time.
But do you want to go to a party without rules?
Yeah, most people do.
Most people do because we have common ethics.
Now, do I want to go to a party with anarchists?
Well,
depends on who the anarchist is.
You know?
Pendillette says he's an anarchist.
Michael Malice is an anarchist.
I don't mind going to a
parties.
They'd be fun at parties.
And I wouldn't feel in danger at all.
So
this, of course, Mr.
Potato Head.
I'm sorry.
Ms.
is making, once again, just a stupid analogy.
How dumb?
are their viewers?
How dumb are the voters of the left?
Because do they, I mean, they actually have to believe this stuff, right?
I don't even think you're making a judgment there.
You're making a judgment based on the way they talk to their voters.
They must know they're idiots.
I don't even have to look at the voters and say, okay, they must be idiots.
No.
The way the left media speaks to their own voters shows you they must know they're idiots.
You know, I can't tell you how many interviews I did with people in the media,
that never got printed.
And they would ask,
why the success?
How did this happen?
And I'm like, well, I've been doing it for 30 years.
Nobody in the media noticed because I wasn't doing it in New York.
There's number one.
Two, I don't treat my audience like they're imbeciles.
When I first got into television, they all said, you can't know.
That's too complex.
You can't do that.
People won't pay attention.
Really?
Because I think they will.
I think they will.
I think people are starving for the truth and starving for somebody to tell them what it really means, somebody to explain big principles.
Nobody wants to walk around like a dummy all the time.
And what is this society doing?
First, they treated you like an imbecile.
Now they're insisting on you being an imbecile.
You're not being taught math.
If you're in school, you're not being taught math.
You're not being taught history.
You're not being taught how to think.
You're not being taught how to question.
You're not being taught any of that stuff.
You are being taught to be somebody who marches in the streets.
For what?
For anything your leader tells you to do.
Don't think it through, because if you think it through, you might disagree with it.
And if you disagree with it, you're out.
This is, this is
everything the left does, they accuse the right of doing.
Listen to this.
Some of the most high-profile liberal figures have joined together to encourage advertisers to boycott Twitter if Elon Musk brings his promised policy of unfettered free speech.
This in America.
26 NGOs and advocacy groups have signed the letter expressing concern about the world's richest man's plan.
You know that they don't ever really make a big deal out of Bezos
and how much he controls?
Ah, Bill Gates.
Well, this crazy idea, Clinton, that a rich person could buy something that influences our politics.
What could possibly, there's no precedent of a rich person owning a media company.
Now, by the way, I got that information from Bloomberg, so I know it's got to be true.
This is insanity.
Musk himself responded to the letter asking who funds this group.
The answer being an assortment of dark money groups like George Soros's Open Society Foundation, NGOs founded by former Clinton and Obama administration staffers, wealthy white Democratic donors and their family foundations.
So his takeover of Twitter is going to toxify our information.
And it's a direct threat to public safety, especially among those already most vulnerable and marginalized.
Who's the most vulnerable?
Who is the most vulnerable?
The most vulnerable are the people who can't read, who have a limited education, who have been sucked in onto the teat of the government, who has gone through government-funded schools and listened to the lies that are being taught by the teachers unions.
They're the people that are
are out of sight, out of mind, that just watch whatever drivel spills out of TikTok.
And they're the ones that Kamala Harris can step in front of and say,
big country, bad, little country, good,
or anything else that the potato on CNN or anybody says.
Those are the most vulnerable.
Those who have an education, even and more importantly, if it's an education they earned, they actually did it themselves.
They did it because they were curious, not because they wanted a piece of paper.
Those are not the most vulnerable.
Your ad dollars can either fund Musk's vanity project or hold him to account.
We call on you to demand Musk uphold these basic standards of community trust and safety and pull your advertising spending from Twitter if they are not.
Okay, so who is this?
Well,
the usual suspects,
policy spokesman for Hillary Clinton's campaign, nephew of David Axelrod, former senior advisor of Barack Obama, Media Matters.
We know who they are,
David Brock, and
George Soros and Hillary Clinton's money.
Ultraviolet, who are these people?
Well, they founded the group on the principle that with a combination of organizing, technology, creative campaigning, and people power, we can win.
Oh, wow.
They're backed by several unions, among them the American Federation of Labor, Congress of Industrial Organizations, AFL-CIO, and the American Federation of Teachers.
Isn't that weird?
By the way, the other group, Media Matters.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Did you know that they were
taking donations from the National Education Association, America's largest union representing teachers?
Seems like the teachers' unions, man, they are all over this.
And then other backers like Chicago-based billionaires, members of one of America's richest family who made their money through the Hyatt hotel chain,
Nicholas Pritzker.
He's 76 years old.
He started the Libra Foundation.
That's an organization that supports frontline organizations building a world where communities of color thrive.
This is fantastic.
You've got foreign entities that are involved in funding these organizations.
That's who's doing it.
By the way, that isn't just for Twitter.
That email has gone out
saying you've got to boycott.
This is ESG.
You watch.
Twitter.
You have to understand if you advertise for Twitter that there's some reputational risk to your company.
But you choose, whatever.
That letter has also gone out about abortion.
You've got to stand for abortion and your company has to publicly back it.
Otherwise, there's some reputational risk.
America, you're going to be held hostage?
You're going to do it?
Are you going to keep paying them?
The mob is at your door.
And they're offering you protection.
You know, you just have to pay this little fee.
How odd is it for you?
Get off of Twitter.
Stop advertising.
You know, I'm just asking you.
You know, you're either with us or you're against us.
And, you know, maybe bad things happen to businesses that don't play the game.
You know what I'm saying?
You know, there's a reputational risk.
Your building might burn down in the middle of the night.
Just play along.
Nobody gets hurt.
Go ahead.
That is who you're dealing with, America.
What's your choice?
Freedom
or in bed with the mob?
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
All right, Jack Carr is with us.
Hello, Jack.
How are you?
Great.
Thank you for having me on, sir.
I sincerely appreciate it.
Oh, you bet.
You bet.
I can't wait.
How excited are you for
Terminalist to come out with Pratt?
Well, I am fired up.
It's, you know, you never know when you go into these things.
There's a lot of trust involved because they can really take your material and do anything they want with it, which is why they usually like to get rid of the author right away.
You're not yelling, you ruined my vision.
Yeah.
But they had me involved from the get-go, and Amazon was so supportive.
And I think we managed to get all of that what people, you know, talk about being woke, all of that out of there.
So I think it's going to be very refreshing for people that are between New York and Los Angeles.
I think we crushed it.
And Chris certainly did play in Navy SEAL sniper, James Reese.
Antoine Foucault is the director.
I mean, everybody came together, and it is dark.
It is gritty.
It is violent.
It is authentic.
And I think we knocked it out of the park.
What an endorsement.
It's dark.
It's gritty.
It's violent.
You're going to love it.
All right.
So, Jack, I wanted to have you on because
something feels wrong with this Russia-Ukraine situation.
And
it seems like everybody is prepared.
If I were a fiction writer,
I would
be looking at all of these things that are happening and I would say, yeah,
I'm doing a little foreshadowing.
They're starting to build up for war.
They're letting people know.
I'm letting the reader know.
It just seems like we're going places that
I don't think would be a good place to go.
As a fiction writer and somebody who lives in this world, and I love talking to fiction writers, especially about geopolitical things, because
you can't write things that don't make sense because nobody would believe it.
So you have to be based in reality.
As a fiction writer, where do you think we're going?
Well,
if I'd written what is actually happening in the world today, whether it's Russia, Ukraine, it's the withdrawal from Afghanistan, whether it's our own country right here, if I'd written these things 10 years ago, it wouldn't be a political thriller.
It would go in the dystopian thriller category, perhaps even the science fiction type of category.
I don't think people would.
10 years ago,
I think if you would have written what's happening today 10 years ago,
you would have been laughed at.
I mean, nobody would buy the book, and I think people would go, that's ridiculous.
It would never happen.
Exactly.
This could never happen in this country.
This is too
unrealistic.
That's what the reviews on Amazon would say.
But these things are happening.
And in fact, when we look just at Ukraine and Russia, it didn't take, you didn't have to be a genius.
You didn't have to be a geopolitical strategist to look at it, apply some common sense to NATO, Ukraine, and Russia, and predict what was going to happen.
In fact, my second book, True Believer, I have a black flag type, false flag type of an operation to get Russia to invade Ukraine as part of the storyline.
And I just studied the situation and needed to figure out how to make that happen.
And lo and behold, that has now happened.
But in the research that I did, that really was, you could see that coming because of the decline of the ethnic Russian population since the end of the Cold War.
And really, they could only field an army up to about 2022.
And then they were going to either have, they were going to have to invade Ukraine because that has the largest population of ethnic Russians outside of Russia.
So for our senior level leaders not to come to that same conclusion after looking at it with a little bit of common sense is shock.
It shouldn't be shocking, but it is because we rely on those leaders to make those good strategic decisions and they have proven time and time again that they're incapable of doing so.
So wait a minute.
So
you say that the reason why they're having a hard time is
they can't get more troops.
And you're saying that that's one of the reasons why you think they invaded Ukraine so they could have ethnic Russians to fight?
That's right.
So it's just looking at those numbers.
And that's, you really have about two generations of ethnic Russians being
a population that can sustain a military.
But in much smaller numbers, past 2022.
So in 2014, Peter Zihan wrote a book called The Accidental Superpower, which looks at geography, looks at demographics in world history when it comes to nation states and world powers.
And that's the conclusion that he came to in that book, which is one of the things that I used in that second novel.
But there, of course, are supporting factors, but that's a big one.
And that also ties into the nuclear question, because if you have someone who believes that their population, their country, is not going to be around in two generations and they can't even field an army past right about now,
well, it makes using maybe a tactical nuclear weapon, at least threatening to do so, but maybe even using it a little more likely because they're an animal in a corner and it's fight or flight and it's survival.
It's not, they don't look at it as an option as, hey,
if we do do this, we don't do this.
Well, hey, if we don't do this, we're dead anyway.
So we have to look, put ourselves in the enemy's shoes and to anticipate what they're going to do.
And we continually do not do that in this country for whatever reason.
I got to tell you that's some of the best commentary I've heard on what's happening in Ukraine already, and we've been talking just a couple of minutes.
I didn't hear, I haven't heard any of that.
I've heard about the lack of military,
but I had no idea that we knew this from the get-go.
So when you have this situation and you have Putin, I'm sure you've done enough research just for your own novels on Putin and how things work over there,
a couple of questions.
First, they think he's sick,
may have cancer.
They're saying that maybe he's going under the knife
and will be
under, and they don't know how long he will be incapacitated.
If I'm Putin, I'm wondering if I'm going to be safe when they put me out or if they might accidentally turn that knob up a little bit.
Oh, yes.
And this was something during the Cold War that was at the forefront of senior-level Russian officials' minds when they had to go under the knife, when they had to be put under, and they had security in those rooms, not just because of an assassination or something along those lines by a doctor that might be on the CIA payroll or just a arrival in the political or military space, but because coming out of that anesthesia.
So when they're coming out of that, there's a certain time period where you're not really very lucid.
And for those who have been under the knife, know what that feels like.
And you're coming out of that.
And, well, maybe a doctor on the CIA payroll can ask you a few questions at that point in time and filter that back to the CIA.
So that was something during the Cold War that
was at the forefront when any of those guys would have to go under the knife for a medical procedure.
So I am sure that Putin is thinking about that.
And of course, he knows his history much better than we do, history of coups in Russia.
It's not infrequent when we look at world history.
So I'm sure that he's thinking about that and surrounding himself with people he thinks are trustworthy to ensure that either he's not killed during that timeframe or is not asked.
questions during that time frame about his strategy vis-a-vis Ukraine or the rest of the world or
his intent to use or not use nuclear weapons.
Do you have any idea who would replace him?
Let's say he dies on the table.
Do you have any idea?
I do not.
There's always a military leader waiting in the wings, it seems, when we look at,
but who that is, I am not sure.
And
in these situations, or just when you're looking at authoritarian dictatorships or
countries like that,
senior level leaders oftentimes are not getting the best information because it is not healthy to bring that bad news to a dictator because oftentimes it's off of your head or off to the gulag.
So it's a strange position to be in.
Obviously, we saw that with our war in Iraq,
where Saddam thought he actually did have a capability that he did not.
And Putin is probably in that same position.
What do you make of the story?
It came out, I think, yesterday.
Pictures of what they call the flying Kremlin.
It is a plane that they haven't seen it in the air, I think, since 2010 or 2011.
And
it's been flying around Russia,
and it is the nuclear plane.
If something needs to go on, you know, we have Air Force One, that everything can be run from that plane in case of a nuclear war.
Do you think that's just
telling the...
Go ahead.
Well, yeah, yeah, that's it.
It seems interesting.
I didn't see that story, but oftentimes these things are done to just send a message.
And they might just to say, hey, we have this capability and to get us to take or not take
a certain action.
So for Putin to say he's moving nuclear weapons into a certain position, well, they're probably already there.
Or if this plane is flying around, if the Russian military,
if their capabilities are what we've seen in Ukraine thus far, then we overestimated, as did a lot lot of those senior-level generals, probably because they didn't want to get their head lopped off by saying they weren't as capable as they had been projecting or advertising.
But flying a plane like that probably is
the same thing as saying, hey, we're moving nuclear weapons into a certain position just in case we need to use them so that it sends a message to the West to discontinue support of Ukraine or get us to take a certain action.
So how serious do you think this nuke thing is?
We've all grown up
without this fear of nukes.
I grew up in the time, you might have too, where
we feared what Russia might do, and then it went away.
And now
are we really that close to
some sort of a nuclear explosion on Earth?
I mean, the first question is, and I did grow up during that time as well.
And we thought with the end of the Cold War that, hey, our main threat now is the proliferation of some of these weapons going to uh uh rogue nation states or super empowered individuals or terrorist organizations or that sort of a thing but now we're back with a uh state on state nation on nation uh do you think it's serious
well first the question would have to be hey do they have the capability And the answer to that question is yes.
They have about 6,000 both tactical and strategic nuclear weapons.
Strategic, meaning they're gigantic and fly towards us.
Tactical, meaning you use them on the battlefield, a lot smaller, but still huge when compared to something like Hiroshima or Nagasaki, something like that.
But
we have a lot less, but with nuclear weapons, it doesn't really matter
1,000 here, 1,000 there.
But when we add all of NATO's nuclear weapons and Russia's, it's about the same, give or take.
It's just shy of 6,000 when we add all of NATO nuclear weapons to Russia's.
But in this case, it's interesting in that if they did do something like that, we have this China, we have that that that side so it would make it a lot harder for china to support russia if russia uses even a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield so that's an interesting um
uh kind of connection here because china is right now russia's greatest ally uh militarily trade-wise um and they have a they have there's a lot of incentives from this to stay connected and using a nuclear weapon would make that a lot more difficult so i i just want to war game one more thing with you and that is uh china China.
You know, I was just reading something, I can't remember where I read it this morning,
but some analysis that the American dollar is going to lose its reserve currency status, you know, in the in the coming days, months, years, whenever.
And China is making a move to
basically have
a multi- or bipolar-powered world.
If we Japan looks like it's falling apart economically, we're not doing so great.
Europe's not doing so great.
There's a war going on.
If this thing spirals out of control, what's to stop China from taking Taiwan and then just gobbling the world?
Right.
So they were obviously looking very closely at what was going to happen with Ukraine and Russia.
That didn't happen as fast as most of our strategic level thinkers, leaders, talking heads anticipated, which was about three, four days.
Russia's going to roll through Ukraine.
And a lot of that is due to Suzelinski.
And I still am curious as to why Russia did not decapitate that government ahead of time.
Take out the leader first.
And I think it's because they thought, oh, this is just an actor,
kind of like Ronald Reagan as he first started into politics.
And they just discounted how he could galvanize both his country and the world against Russia.
So I think that was a strategic level mistake and they should have anticipated that one.
And even we thought the same thing.
We offered him refuge.
We said, we'll take you out of the country.
And the way that was asked and the way that was talked about was so casual.
It seemed as though we just thought, oh, for sure, the leader of the country is going to pick up and go.
And Russia probably thought the same thing.
But that did not happen.
And now we have the situation that we have now, essentially a war of attrition.
And we'll see how that
ends up.
But China and currency,
that is a major play here and a major component of this that no one is talking about.
So I'm glad you are.
And China can look at things, obviously.
They look in decades.
They look in centuries.
We look at things in four-year election cycles, maybe eight years for the real deep thinkers among us.
China can take a breath and they can see what happened in Ukraine.
They can take a breath on Taiwan and
they can look at this long term.
And that is the the advantage that they have over us.
They have their problems too.
They have population problems, the one-child policy and all that coming to fruition.
There are lockdowns, their mandates.
They have a lot of issues to deal with as well internally.
But they can deal with those issues and take a breath on the strategic front because we're doing a pretty good job of destroying ourselves from the inside right now.
So a little strategic patience on their part really plays into their hand.
Talking to Jack Carr, the author of In the Blood and the terminal list, which is coming out on Netflix soon.
I own the Paramount Studios here in Dallas.
It was an old movie lot back in the 80s.
And
I have an old ship
that was used in a miniseries back in the 80s.
And it was Winds of War.
You're really, yeah, you're really now in
the best time to be a writer because now these movies can be made in episodes and they don't bastardize the book usually.
Wow, that's amazing that
you have that.
And I've been there on Chad Fraser's show, so
I've been in the back rooms there and seeing the things that you have.
And it was amazing.
Let me know next time you're here.
I'll take you on a tour and show you some of the cool stuff we have.
Thank you.
You have a lot of amazing things.
And Winds of War, that's an incredible book.
And if more people read that and Warren Remembrance, and that was their gateway into nonfiction, studying history to hopefully apply those lessons going forward in wisdom, we'd all be in a better place.
Jack Carr,
In the Blood, is out right now and coming soon, the terminal list to Netflix.
Please, Jack, let me know next time you're in town.
I'd love to take you on a quick tour.
God bless you.