Former CIA Officer Amaryllis Kennedy: Iraq, JFK, and Everything Else Our Intel Agencies Lied About

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Equipment tax and other fees extra and subject to change. So this is a tweet from you.
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 Donbass. 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 U.S. 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.

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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 endgame? How did you get here? How did you get, I mean, we're from the same city, basically, and you were a CI 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, we have done this before.
And, you know, 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.
Tens of thousands of people who won't, you know, proverbially dance at their children's wedding.'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 the 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 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 um i just i'm fascinated by the fact that you are saying this and that no one uh very few people in the world from which honestly 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. 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, you know, maybe 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 9-11 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 Thai Burmese border before school. and everything changed as it did for so many in our generation, I think, um, 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 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 liked 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 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 OSSCA 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-Mosedeck, and every, oh, if only we had a democratically elected leader in Iran.
We did. you know and people may or may not agree with 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, you know, stealing of our national values.
And I think you have to go through that yourself. And I worry in Iran that we're, you know, 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 democracy. I mean, you just, 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, you know, 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, you know, Donald Trump is such a threat to democracy that we must stage a palace coup, you know, 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 reap overseas, we sow it 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, you know, the lies people tell themselves in order to persist with what is ultimately an incredibly profitable business model.
but also

you know

if your end is

stability with what is ultimately an incredibly profitable business model. But also, you know, 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 as 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.
You know, 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, you know, 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 for more 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.
You know, 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 ca did you get the sense that people felt it would be okay to interfere in domestic politics in the u.s well they were sure keen on doing it in other countries um and used a lot of the same tactics.
I never witnessed any tendency to do it in the U.S. 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, watched 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, you know, that mouthpiece is presenting stories in a light that, you know, 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 our domestic politics.

Do you 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 I've 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, i mean you know an asset somebody that would be paid by intelligence organizations to uh to work on their behalf play stories on their behalf and of course that happens you know all across the world um 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 that they would like to see deleted, even if it's ingest, even if it's satire. They just put it in the ticketing system.
Can you explain what CISA is? Yeah. Well, what's interesting about SISA is that it's a part of the Department of Homeland Security, but it's supposed to protect 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 tang to it. And as a result, in order to secure it, you know, 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.
And, you know, BOLO alerts when I'd be on the lookout. And they held weekly meetings and said, you know, here, put an enormous amount of financial pressure on these companies saying, you know, 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 Labour 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 Labour 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, you know, that they want to participate in and provide support for destroying Musk's Twitter. And, you know, 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.
Turns out to be the Brits. You know, and many others, right? But 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 approach is that as long as you're not donating money, 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, you know, 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. Yeah.
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.
So are you are you surprised as you look across and see what's happening there? I am. I mean, I have a law degree from Oxford on, you know, in English law, and it was always clear that, you know, 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. It's fall in the Northeast and that means grouse season.

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That's 1-800-780-8888 or visit tnusa.com that's 1-800-780-8888 can i ask you to pause are going into iraq is what set off the demographic shift in Europe. Yeah.
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 count of those whose lives have been uprooted and who have either died early as a result of migration or deaths of despair.
It's 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 homogenous, you know, Europe is balkanized, but each element there is accustomed to being very homogenous.

Those are the indigenous populations of the continent.

Right. And when, you know, when I was in, when I was at Georgetown, I did my master's at the School of Foreign Service there, and the focus of my thesis was trying to get very quantitative about predicting terrorism because at the time it was a very squishy subject was post 9-11 and it was mostly qualitative the way people were describing it and one of the 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.
Yes, 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 it. That madrasa bars and hookah bars are in the Middle Eastern context.
But when you look at what we're experiencing in the U.S., 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 racist. It doesn't make it wrong.
It's human nature to need time 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 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, you know, we're 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 9-11 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 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 um it doesn't cut it you know and you know are there are there moments where you where the actual identity of a source who's preventing nuclear war with the Russians is at stake? Sure. But there are actually quite few and far between.
and you know i think there is um 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 here. Some of it is CYA and some of it is 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 some of that bureaucracy. But CIA 101, when you start, you have this one week, fill out your tax forms, get the same as you would with any other job, like nothing sexy about it at all.
There'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 drop-down 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 there are a lot.
And we were told in that first day, in that first course, 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 CA officers

that 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

Thank you. 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 accountability.
And there's no way to know. And there's no way to know.
And there could be, right. I, I have a lot of respect for, um, for the role of intelligence agencies in saving lives and in preventing conflict and attacks.
I think they're 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 they shouldn't be doing. But there is a very valuable role for them.
And in that, there are some things that do 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. I assume that's the motive behind continuing to classify documents from 1963 in the Kennedy Assembly.
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. But it's not.
I time to time they will say this is about protecting allies of course i think we would all want to know if 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 their 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 security collaboration or whatever we might need down the road. And therefore, 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, 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 um 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.
My daughter Bobcat is Bobby IV, so her great-grandfather was RFK. And 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 mob, You know, there were very blurry boundaries.
And I worry that today the cartels have kind of taken the mob's role in that

world.

The cartel,

meaning the Latin American drug cartels.

Do you,

you think that the U S government is working with the cartels?

I,

I mean, working with is a, 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 cover 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 U.S. government elements to undertake activities that they could not directly undertake by law.
and you you know, I think we've seen that even with liaison partnerships.

You know, it's clear that Five Eyes has been used,

you know, 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 might not be so savory for your own officers to do.

And I never worked in Latin America, so it's not something that I have directly witnessed, but I certainly have direct, you know, knowledge of it happening. Of the U.S.
government collaborating or having some relationship that's not purely antagonistic with the Mexican and or other drug cartels. Sure.
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, 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. I mean, many of them are as powerful and threatening as a nation state.
The problem, though, is money. Right.
And there's just so much money spinning off of these enterprises, the cartels, that you could just see corruption happening very easily. And I know one person who was involved in that, who I trust, I can't prove it, but who worked for CIA as a contractor moving over as so many do from the military.
And he's told me at great length about the money that CIA was getting from drug cartels in Latin America and 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. Well, 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 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 uh a long way where um where the narcotics trade has funded off-book activities or that is 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 um it's 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 uh it's pouring over the border um 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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or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. So what about congressional oversight? I mean, you wonder about the committee chairman in the House, a couple republicans who i know who seem to me as an outsider sort of outsider completely controlled by the intel agencies is that your perception i mean look at chuck schumer's comment yes they have six ways to sunday to get back at you remember when he said that to rachel Maddow? Vividly, yeah.
And, you know, 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, you know, that guy has a Hoover file on him 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 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, what is that?

I don't know the answer, but. You look at, you know, the legislation that has come up through the House on multiple things, you know, on election integrity, on EMP preparedness.
Both are two, you know, 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, you know, regular American voters in the base across both parties, that you have to ask what Hoover files are involved. And if not a Hoover file, then a second house wherever.
But I think between- That's 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, um, you know, Matt Taibbi and, um, 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 sissa 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 of 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 election 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, you know, it was Tony Blinken as a campaign official for now President Biden, who rang up the CIA and said, you know, 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 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, you know, 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. 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 vote 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 is.

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, 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 seemed like too audacious an intrusion into domestic political life.

I felt... it seemed like too audacious an intrusion into domestic political life.

I felt like they wouldn't,

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,

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 that goes. And nowhere in any of those offices was the like overthrow governments and metal 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?

Thank you. 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 um 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 it was the wrong person and by the time that was recognized they had you know, actually being right.
I mean, it was the wrong person. And by the time that was recognized, they had, you know, force fed him through his nose and, you know, just a whole human rights nightmare.
I'm sorry to laugh. That's just so horrible.
It's so, so horrible as to not be- They force fed him through his nose? Well, 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 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 have 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 i think i i got filtered out of the go foment coups and 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 a 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, 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 control, being our love language globally as a nation, that 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 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 um

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's been, there've been solar storms and we've gotten to see the northern lights much you know farther south which is beautiful um 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 um those solar storms can be far more powerful than that naturally.

So before even getting into human weaponizing of that, there've been lots of examples, but the Carrington event is probably the best known, right, in 1859.

And was so, I mean, it set, you knowgraph uh operators uh on fire set set forest fires you damage the um the transatlantic cable miles beneath the ocean and nasa says that were it to happen uh again now given the interconnected electrical grid that didn't exist then, that, you know, we'd be looking at, 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 hundred to 150 years of that magnitude.
Of course, that was in 1850, so we're coming up due for one. Their current estimate is about 12% chance per decade.
So 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 hit. And that would mean no electricity for years.
Right. And that sounds inconvenient and maybe people can see how it would be, 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. It might be kind of nice.
The thing is that what people don't realize is that the world is no longer what it was in the 19th century, that almost everything at this point involves what they call SCADA systems, which are these small computers that use sensors to move valves or, you know, 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 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. And 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, you know, what they called a super EMP, which is very specifically tuned not for yield, but for electromagnetic pulse. And these are, you know, these are detonated 30 kilometers 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, you know, win World War III 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 KSM-3 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 to break into a substation pg&e 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 um what'd they do at the pg and e substation they gas and electric by the way yes for our east coast viewers um they were assessed to be extremely professional by the the seal trainers who came in later to look at the site they 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 a North Korean

team of saboteurs, or

saboteurs sent by North Korea. Certainly professional special forces of some variety thought to be North Korean.
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I was, you know, I was an adult in 2013. Obama was president.
I was reading the news.

I don't remember reading about this.

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 SA-2 nuclear-capable missiles in the bay of a tanker in the Gulf of Mexico. and this was all really as the as the north korean tensions were mounting you know which

president trump gets far too little credit, in my opinion, for that resolution or detente. And now, you know, 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-heartening Cheyenneenne 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, 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's sort of two categories that are highest consequence.
One are these SCADA 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 they are as easy to protect as putting them in a metal shed instead of a wooden shed or taking the wooden sheds that exist and covering them with metal mesh to the point that 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. 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 to move.
And the coils are done mostly by hand, amazingly. I mean, they're custom made.
And they were invented here in theS. 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 is, you know, sounds fancy, but it's basically just a...

Wire mesh cage.

Yeah, a wire mesh cage. And, you know, the benefit of this, despite, you know, 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 you know the charge it 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 prevent people from seeing where it is that they're letting off small arms fire or that they're targeting, which we see.
I mean, 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, 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. 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 filtering these things out. But the entire basis of our life and our community and our country and our national security and our healthcare, 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 rat-hardened. So even if the entire

country were out, the United States would be able to respond and has had 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 special license or anything like that. And 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 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 is only 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 it would get in the way of your car's GPS. And 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 SA-3 satellite 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 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 Hyl-2 balloons,

they've already come across our own territory.

North Korea, three-way attack uh simulation that all three were successful clearly this is on the minds of our adversaries and it's an imminent danger certainly the the vulnerability the you know 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, you know, government spending. To do it really well, the cost estimate was $2 billion, which, you know, we've just sent another $100 billion to Ukraine.
So then Bideniden takes office and frankly in 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 are already underway, that are designed to protect the American people's security and homeland. And he reversed for, you know, with no replacement plan in place.
But with the border wall, you could, and I think that's a more complex topic than we appreciate. 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. 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.
Ooh, 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 firk yeah yeah and they uh are supposed to regulate one another basically or one you know firk is supposed to regulate her um 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, you know, it could be passed on to consumers at 20 cents 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 are global i mean in our in our country not but uh 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 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, um, put in place and unfortunately

was disbanded under president Obama, but prior, prior to that, um, included really the intelligence

community's best analysts based on all of the testing that they'd seen hostile countries do.

Their estimate was eight to nine out of every 10 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 at the 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, 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, I mean, I can't even imagine people's having, you know, covered chaos in Baghdad and 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 satellites, you know, puts us in a direct hot war with Russia for the first time ever.

You know, 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, October 31st, 2024 in Glendale, Arizona.
Our special guest that night, days before the presidential election, Donald Trump. All proceeds donated to Hurricane Relief.
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It's the Smucker's Uncrustables podcast with your host Uncrustables. Okay, today's guest is rough around the edges.
Please welcome Crust. Thanks for having me.

Today's topic, he's round with soft pillowy bread.

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Filled with delicious PB&J.

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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 state's thesis about how safe the current administration has made us in the world right and you know when you look at um 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, 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 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 and many of those people you know were very clear he was, 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, right?

From your cable news source or from your newspaper and so on.

And you begin to realize when you're on the inside of, you know, the receiving end of all of that is that every place, you know, 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, 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 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.
How much does Boeing spend on Politico? Yeah, 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 that's exactly how i never got that i mean sometimes you even see the boeing at 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 no they're just like completely naked bribery but i never thought of that yeah i'm like why you're like why are you advertising in politico like what is he gonna go buy a bomber um it's to keep its reporters from criticizing that's right it is their entire 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 i've 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 things 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. Did you know how the American, 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 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, you know, I guess had a little bit of idealism still from the old, like Edward R.
Moreau,

like, you know, 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. I mean, I really

believe that every American should include him and his family in their prayers every day, because

I'm sorry. I will say, thank God for Elon Musk.
Yes, I agree with you. I mean, I really believe that every American should include him and his family

in their prayers every day

because he is holding our constitution together right now.

And even the internet archive is offline now.

So 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 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, and she was, you know, she's five and she was asking me why, why I'm always traveling. I'm working in the moment.
And, and I was explaining about the importance of free speech and, 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 either a lot of those countries 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 ten 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 is their 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 uh 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 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 ours to lose you know and um 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 and you just the the idea that but what about the next leader you know every government is it is it federalist 51 the one that where madison talks about you know if angel if men were angels we wouldn't need government enough government were angels it wouldn't need to be regulated but we are making you know the challenge is making a government of of men over men and um and yet they took on that challenge and achieved it so beautifully and i remember mr sar at ncs tell at um my last two years of high school in dc when i came back to the united states telling uh telling us about skokie versus illinois and i just and just being incredibly moved by the courage that it takes as a society to defend such abhorrent speech yes 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 I believe in free speech, except, you know, stop them right there because they don't need to finish the sentence.
But 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 one tenth of one percent 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 adores Trump. 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? You know, I think that if you gave them the choice, I mean, if they came down from Mars and you put the exact, you know, 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, results in in uh 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, and 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 maryan williamson robert kennedy jr uh 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 the 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 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 savanna and your group sh you know, you're out of luck, right? It's a lot harder to survive. And there's a study that DARPA did around news, you know, reading news where 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, um, 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 leadership class.
Raised and to some extent, to be brutally honest, bred to rule. And every society has that class and it'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, it i think is this intentional uh addictive hypnotic quality of of media and social media that has really intentionally been designed that way you know cali means talks about how the tobacco companies bought you know the food companies and sent over their chemists and made them you know 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 you know for for corporate profit and part of it is for political control and as uh as that media environment has also become more global and these partnerships with other parties in other countries assist in censorship, I think it's difficult 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, at 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 Soviet 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 uh push on the Berlin Wall uh etc and and that is actually one of the things that came out of it was when it was the time a suggestion of the timing for when Reagan should should push on on um 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. You know, now like you, 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 the more violent jihad leaders and so on and there 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 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've 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.

It's 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 of the real challenges that 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 that this country

was built on the physical

safety I mean, we're talking about decisions over the very constitutional ideals that 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 you you when you look at these emp scenarios and then you look at these censorship scenarios you know the 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, Amarillo's Kennedy.

Thanks, Tucker.

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