Ukraine Is Selling American Weapons to Mexican Drug Cartels. Col. Daniel Davis on How to Stop It.

The Ukrainian military is selling American weapons systems on the black market, including to drug cartels. This war is killing the United States. Col. Daniel Davis on how Donald Trump can end it. (00:00) Why Crimea Is So Pivotal to the Ukraine/Russia War (13:17) Ukraine Is Powerless Without the US (34:16) Ukraine Selling American Weapons to Cartels (50:02) DEI in Our Military (56:20) Drone Warfare Paid partnerships with: ExpressVPN: Get 4 extra months free at https://ExpressVPN.com/Tucker Policygenius: Get your free life insurance quotes today at https://Policygenius.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tucker Carlson?

  Trump gets elected, not exclusively, but heavily on the promise, no more of these nonsense wars that are draining the treasury, getting Americans killed, making America weaker globally. There's no upside at all, particularly the war in Ukraine. Donald Trump says, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna bring it to a close in like the first hours after becoming president. I think he says that. And the question to you, who actually knows the answer, is how do you do that?

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, how you bring the war to an end? This has been on the table since before the war started. And Trump is gonna have a much more difficult position now to bring that to fruition because of the horrific decisions made by the outgoing administration.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  This war could easily have been avoided before it happened. The Minsk agreements, I know a lot in the West like to say bad things about them, but the fact is that we now know Angela Merkel, Hollande of France have both admitted that that was never supposed to be implemented. They just wanted to, quote, "stop Russia's invasion of the Donbass area." That's what they said that it was for.

• 1:19Tucker Carlson?

  Eastern Ukraine.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  To buy them time, the Ukraine side time, so that they could defend against it. It wasn't to implement. And you know that's true because one of the central provisions that was agreed to by the Russians and the French and Germany and the Ukrainians was that the Ukrainians would change their constitution to have political autonomy and protections for the Russian-speaking people in the east. That was one of the absolute central figures, features of that Minsk agreement.

• 1:44Tucker Carlson?

  In the Belarus, in the Minsk.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  In the Minsk agreements, yeah, in 2015. And it was never done, ever. So the Ukraine side didn't implement the most important provision of it. They were also supposed to move back heavy weapons and all this kind of stuff, some of which happened. And then both sides had minor incursions over the time with artillery that was going back and forth because the Russians are going, all right, we're not gonna implement our part of this all fully until you get that central part. So they just talked about it all this time. And all we had to do is say, okay, Minsk agreements had no NATO in it. There was no NATO for Ukraine inside there. It was just resolve this situation peacefully. It didn't. So it definitely didn't say that they were on the table. It didn't talk about it. So since 2008, that had been talked about by the West that they were going to come in.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  But the Minsk agreement would have ended all the, the conflict that was on the line of contact for essentially an eight year civil war before this one broke out. All they had to do was just implement those. And then now then Russia has no need to, to intervene because the whole issue has always been protection of the rights of the Russian people and the ethnic Russians living in eastern Ukraine and the protection on their border not to have NATO in it. So if you get that off the table, now then there's plenty of room. But then by 2021, which very few Westerners are even aware of, is in March of 2021, Zelensky signs this law that says they're going to now take back all of the temporarily occupied

• 3:08Speaker 01

  areas, especially Crimea, which is a no-go red line for the Russians and by force if necessary.

• 3:15Tucker Carlson?

  And then can you possibly describe why? And lots of Biden administration officials talked about taking back Crimea. You say it's a no-go, it's not even worth discussing. Why is that? What is Crimea?

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Historically Crimea has, has, was in Russia too. I think it was, I can't remember the exact year that it was, it was given to Ukraine by, I want to say Nikita Khrushchev.

• 3:35Tucker Carlson?

  That's correct.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  So he, he gave that to them, but it's historically, I mean, for centuries been Russian. The vast majority of people.

• 3:41Tucker Carlson?

  Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine when Khrushchev controlled Ukraine.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:44Tucker Carlson?

  When he was part of the Soviet Union.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it was just like, you know, moving things left and right within his controlling and holdings. But the people in it were still ethnic Russians primarily. And when they had this plebiscite, like 95% of the people voted to go into Russia when, after the, you know, the coup that happened that unseated the legally elected government in Ukraine that Victoria Nuland and all these other people supported. Then Putin said, well, I'm certainly not going to have a NATO country around Sevastopol where I have my Black Sea fleet. So he said, we're going to annex this thing. The people voted for it and that's what he claimed. Now you can disagree that that was legitimate, but that's how they voted and that's why.

• 4:24Tucker Carlson?

  Anyone argue that you? The Crimea, the Crimeans, the residents of Crimea, if allowed to vote on it again, would vote to join Ukraine? Does anybody think that? Anyone argue that?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  No, no, no one argues that because they know it wouldn't be the case. And life has improved for the Crimean population since Russia annexed it. It's gotten a lot better and it's gotten even better since the 2022 invasion because they got water back. It's one of the big things there.

• 4:49Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  So, none of them would ever want to go back into the Ukraine side.

• 4:53Tucker Carlson?

  So, if you cared about democracy, you wouldn't try and steal Crimea from its people and give it to another government that they didn't want to join, right?

• 5:00Speaker 01

  No, especially if you care about people getting to make their own decisions, which we claim to in other parts of the world, that yes, the will of the people should rule, unless, of course, it's somebody we don't like, which goes back to the whole thing that happened in February 2021, I'm sorry, 2014, when we

• 5:17Tucker Carlson?

  Encouraged a coup.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Encouraged a coup and then supported the overthrow of the legally elected government because we didn't like what they were doing. And we helped the actual occup, the other people who were going against it. So, everything that violated what we claimed to believe, we were supportive of at that time. And that's not democracy in any way, shape, or form.

• 5:35Tucker Carlson?

  No, of course not.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  But, but still, that's the problem, that we could have ended this war by doing the Minsk agreements, then in 20, late 2021, and we know this for a fact because Jen Stoltenberg has admitted this stuff very publicly, that Putin said, hey, if we don't get a deal here, we're going to use force. Jen Stoltenberg said for sure, yes.

• 5:56Tucker Carlson?

  And who was Stoltenberg?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  He was the former Secretary General of NATO.

• 6:01Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  And so, he has led this, the NATO up until just very recently when Mark Ruda took over. But he said, yes, Putin told us that, but of course, we didn't sign that. We're not going to agree with that because no one can tell us who's going to join NATO. So, understand at that point, we, and of course, the United States was in complete agreement with this, that war could have been avoided by simply saying what we all knew, NATO is never going to accept Ukraine. There's no way we would ever do that. But instead of saying that, we said the opposite. They're going to come in. And so Putin says, then you've made my decision for me. I'm going to, we're going to take military action, which he said on December 20 22nd, 2021. He said, "We will take military specific measures if this continues on." And it certainly, we know what happened on February 22nd. So we could have stopped

• 6:45Speaker 01

  the war from happening before. And then, two months in, we could have stopped it again. It is the Istanbul. People certainly know a lot about that. Putin mentioned that when you interviewed him about a year ago. I think Sergei Lavrov even mentioned it when you talked to him about that, too. They always say, "We're willing to talk." Everybody has said it all the way through.

• 7:02Tucker Carlson?

  And that was shut down by Boris Johnson, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, acting on behalf of the Biden administration.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  That is, that is, that is what we understand. And Johnson has almost never, he's, he's kind of waffled with it, but he has said, "You can't talk to Putin. You can't have a negotiated settlement with him." So whether he actually did at all, or was with Biden, we don't know, but we know for sure.

• 7:23Tucker Carlson?

  I tried to ask him directly, and he demanded a million dollars for the interview. And I'm seeing him at the end of the month, and I hope I'll be able to interview him then.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Wow, I'll be watching that one with great interest.

• 7:33Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, well, I, I don't have a million dollars in my checking account right now to pay Boris Johnson, but.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, but what he has said makes it very clear. That, that was his position. No, no matter who it was, though, that did happen. So just think about it. How many Ukrainians, allegedly around a million are dead? And, and probably double that, or maybe even triple that wounded. It's a staggering number. None of them should have died. All we had to do was just say, what we already know, NATO's never going to invite Ukraine in, and the war would have been avoided. Absolutely. There's, because then there's no reason for Russia to ever have invaded in the first place.

• 8:10Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Just like if, if Russia was talking about, I mean, I'm hypothetically here, wanting to have missiles, say, on Cuba or so. We had a negotiation. If they had kept the missiles there, we probably would have gone to war. But we had a negotiation, and they moved them off. So if we had said, "No NATO coming into Ukraine at that time," then Russia had no need to do anything. They also would have backed off, because it's in their interest to do so. But we didn't. So when we're talking about now, when we say, no, we've democracy and and this, you know, unprovoked aggression, which we know wasn't true because we've admitted that it wasn't true. Now then we have what we have here. And so all of these opportunities, and by the way, there was one more in November. This is one of the worst ones in my view.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  In November of 2022, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said, hey, by the way, if you want to negotiate a settlement, now is the time to do it. Because remember, that was the one year where there were two big successes for the Ukraine army. They drove Russia out of Kherson City, and they drove them out of a huge swath of Kharkiv area in the north.

• 9:11Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  At that time, Russia was at its weakest point. They had forced mobilized 300,000 people. They were scrambling just to get uniforms, you know, much less trained, et cetera, to stop the gap, to stop the bleeding up there. And the Ukraine side had every advantage. And Mark Milley publicly said, if you want to negotiate a settlement, now would be a good time. Russia's at its weakest, Ukraine's at its strongest. He goes, I'm just saying, if you wanted it, now's the time. He knew that they did. He knew that Russia, as bad as it had been battered, was still Russia. They still had all the natural resources that they could ever need. They had the militant industrial capacity, which was already starting to gin up.

• 9:48Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  And they had the manpower.

• 9:49Tucker Carlson?

  The population, exactly.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Everything that you need. And the mentality, because they view this as an existential fight. It's not like Vietnam was for us. This is on their front door, and it is an existential fight. So they will recover, and he knew that. And so if you want to negotiate from a position of strength, which he said, Milley at the time, now is the time. But no, we didn't. Zelensky was now, I think, drunk with power because he's like, we beat them here, we'll keep beating them. But militarily, Tucker, this is one of the things that's so important. Militarily, it was evident at the time that Ukraine couldn't win. Because Russia then, they had, they withdrew from Kherson City, and it was talked about a humiliation for Russia at the time. But militarily, that was the wisest decision they could have made.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Because it would have been hard to hold on to Kherson City because of the river behind them. So they moved 40,000 guys across the river, blew all the bridges so that now Ukraine can't follow that up. And so they preserved all of that manpower and all of the experience that they had. And then they ended up using them elsewhere to to build a fortified defensive series of about five different periods. And Russia was really good at defensives. So there was every reason to think.

• 10:57Tucker Carlson?

  They've had some practice.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  They have had practice. And then even when I was serving during the Cold War, we we studied the Russian tactics and we knew how hard it would be. I was in an armored unit. So I knew how hard it would be to try to do an offensive against a dug-in Russian defensive line. And so when I heard in 2023 that the Ukraine was going to have this big combined arms operation going into the Russian lines, I said, there's no way that they're going to do that. I I've conducted operations like that before in Desert Storm with Doug McGregor and an armored cav regiment. I knew what it was like to go into prepared enemy defenses. And that was against a not very good unit. But to go against the Russians when they had six months to prepare was suicide. Our leaders should have recognized that. Our Secretary of Defense should have recognized that.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  But instead, they said, no, we're going to succeed. We we've trained them up. We've given them all these thousands of military vehicles, millions of rounds of ammunition, training, intelligence support, you know, I think it was High Mars at that time that we've given them already, Stingers, all kinds of stuff. And I said, look, and I wrote about this ahead of time. So this is not revisionist history. I wrote ahead of time, this will fail and here's why. You have no air force. Effectively, there's no Ukrainian air force. You don't have enough air defense and you don't have enough engineering support to penetrate these minefields. And the most important one is you don't have the trained manpower. It doesn't matter how many people they mobilize. I know from armored cav how hard it is to maneuver in coordinated fashion across a broad front.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  It's extremely difficult and they had this much experience in doing that. And you can't train that up in a two or three months. It just can't be done. Our leaders should have known that, but instead they encouraged it. And then you had, I'll never forget this one. David Patrice, at the end of May 2023, went on the BBC and said, I think that, that the Ukraine side is going to do this combined arms operation. And he listed all the reasons why they're going to, and the tanks and the Bradleys and all this stuff. I think that they're going to penetrate the Russian lines. The defensive lines will crumble, crack, and maybe even collapse, and they'll go to the Azov coast. That's what he said on the eve of this thing. And of course, it worked out the way any rational analysis would have said, was a complete disaster. It never even penetrated the first lot of defense.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  So all of 2023 went to a predictable failure. And so now then, that was the next chance we had to end the suffering and say.

• 13:17Tucker Carlson?

  May I just ask you, you're describing the war as really a war between the United States and Russia. You're saying that these are decisions that our military leadership made or should have made. Is that?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  That is what I'm saying. Because the Ukrainian leadership and military, they don't have the historical experience to. They only existed for 30 years. We've got all of this stuff going all the way back to World War II, World War I. I mean, we've had all kinds of institutional knowledge. And without us, nothing happens. Doesn't matter what Ukraine wants to do, without our willingness to give the information, the ammunition, the weapon systems, all of it, and to apparently help with some of the plans, they can't do anything.

• 13:57Tucker Carlson?

  Okay, so I just don't think, I mean, thank you. Everything you're saying makes sense. I think it's obvious once you think about it, but too few do think about it. And I think a lot of people have been lulled into this idea that, you know, there's this valiant, they may be valiant, but you know, Ukrainian military that's fighting this war against a foreign aggressor, Russia, and sort of leaving out the key point, which is that the strategy and the munitions come from the United States. So this is a failure on the part of our military leadership as well.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  100%.

• 14:26Tucker Carlson?

  Thank you.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  It's avoid, it was such an avoidable situation, we knew better.

• 14:30Tucker Carlson?

  So when Ukraine loses, you can look at the Pentagon and say, nice job, guys, yet again.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  That is exactly what I say, and very quantifiable reasons why that is. Though I will say, it's not, it's not exclusively us, because Zelensky deserves. Specific credit, uh, uh, arguments and, and criticism because he continued to take these operations and actions, however much, who actually made the decisions is, is unclear, but he actually has a lot of the say over what they did, especially over how they employ them. And so he sent his troops to do operations that really had no chance of success. And especially, and he deserves, uh, uh, people claim that he's, you know, like this modern day, uh, Winston Churchill kind of thing, right? I mean, he got all this publicity in the first. Well, Winston Churchill made some huge mistakes in early in his career and because of that.

• 15:19Tucker Carlson?

  I was just thinking about Gallipoli.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. He had his.

• 15:24Tucker Carlson?

  I guess he is like Churchill, right?

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Well, he was back then. Yeah, he's that version of Churchill. Good point. But he learned from those mistakes and so he did a, a bunch of things right in second world war because he learned from his mistakes in most parts. Italy is a separate issue. That wasn't so, but Italy, but, but he eventually did help with that. Well, Zelensky doesn't have any of that experience at all. And so he fought in this place called Severodonetsk, uh, Lisi Chansk and even Mariupol early in the war. And in every case, he stayed too long. So when his forces started, when it was clear that the Russian forces had moved in and into the outskirts of the city, they should have withdrawn to the next defensive line. They should have been building subsequent defensive lines, knowing that the Russians were going to eventually get there. Make it as expensive as you can on every go back. And then you'll have like, all right, well, back here, we're not going to allow penetration

• 16:10Speaker 01

  or we have to bring the war to an end. But instead he just stayed there and, and almost like Hitler in the end of world war two, not one inch. So instead of pulling his forces back, he kept them in there and they were methodically destroyed. Now then you have to have new guys for the next city and then they're destroyed. And you see what happens Tucker is that you destroy the ability to have a coherent offensive or defensive because the guys who know how to fight, who've learned, die. So now then you have to bring in new guys and it's starting from scratch again. Bakhmut was the worst because they lost probably 10,000 people to defend the city that gave them no value. They should have moved back to another area because here's the key. So like Bakhmut is here and it's tough to move into, but if you had moved back here where there's a lot of open land.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  And to the next defensive position, which high ground, then it would cost the Russians a lot more to move across this territory and they could have defended themselves better. But instead, they stayed there, then they lost thousands of men. Avdeevka, the same thing. They keep repeating the same mistake over and over. They've done it now in Turetsk, in Chasiv Yar, and they're doing the same thing, head up on Pokrovsk in the area down there. The, let's see, the one in the south there in the, not the Kupyansk area, the one in the south was one of the worst too, because the Ukraine side held out in that town for a year and a half in Vuhledar. But then the Russians learned a lot, and so now that instead of going head on, they start flanking it, and it becomes evident you're going to lose it. But again, they would not give the order to receive.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  So they keep losing thousands upon thousands of trained people. So now then they're talking about lowering the age to 18, so that they can bring more people in.

• 17:48Tucker Carlson?

  They're talking about it. Actually, our incoming national security advisor is talking about it on television, whom I like, so I'm not, it's not a personal attack. But here, US policymakers have completely destroyed Ukraine. They pushed this war, they started this war. I think it's, I think it's very obvious that that's what happened, you just described how. And, you know, Ukraine has been devastated. They, the Ukrainian parliament made it legal for outsiders, non-citizens, to buy their lands, so they're going to lose their country physically, and a whole generation's been destroyed. And now, US policymakers are saying it's your fault, you need to lower conscription age to 18? I mean, I don't, she's a Christian, I'm infuriated and repelled by that. Like, what is that? I think it's one of the most disgusting things I've ever heard.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  I'll tell you what I hope is really at play here.

• 18:34Tucker Carlson?

  No, I know what you're going to say.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  What?

• 18:36Tucker Carlson?

  That this is tactical, this is like trying to strike a tough pose to put the incoming administration in a better spot for negotiations?

• 18:42Speaker 01

  No, I think that, I think, I think that it is the incoming administrations to put Zelensky in a position.

• 18:49Tucker Carlson?

  Right, yeah.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  That's to say, look, if you want to do this, you have to go and put these people in here. But you can't, because it's so, it's, this has been, been talked about for probably close to a year in, in Ukraine. Keeps getting pushed back for the reasons that you just illuminated there.

• 19:04Tucker Carlson?

  They're gonna wreck the country, they're gonna kill more young people?

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Right, why would you take another generation and sacrifice them for nothing? And so it's, it's, uh, people are violently against that. Well, so he's putting them in a position, I think, I hope.

• 19:16Tucker Carlson?

  No, you're right, but.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  So that Zelensky will realize then you, now you have to have a negotiating.

• 19:19Tucker Carlson?

  How about we don't talk that way? Because it's repulsive.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Okay, I agree with you.

• 19:23Tucker Carlson?

  Human sacrifice is immoral.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  I, I agree with you. I, it is, it's anguishing for me to hear. Even if it is a negotiating position, I hope it works. If that gets the war over, then okay. But I fear that they may say, okay.

• 19:34Tucker Carlson?

  Why don't you just say, look, I mean, why even include the Ukrainian leadership in these conversations? I don't understand. I mean, I do think we should apologize for what the Biden administration just did to Ukraine. I think that is our fault or their fault. But I don't know why going forward you would even, why would you have Zelensky? The, you know, Mr. Play the Piano With His Dick Guy. What does he have to, no, I'm serious. Like, why, why, he's unelected. He's not the democratically elected leader of Ukraine. There has been no, he, his term expired. He has no moral right to run that country.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Well, see, then there's more truth to that than, than a lot of people may realize. Because Putin last month reiterated that point.

• 20:13Tucker Carlson?

  It's a fact.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  We're willing to talk, but we can't sign any deal with Zelensky because he's a, he's a not a legitimate leader.

• 20:19Tucker Carlson?

  He's not the president of the country.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  He's not legally the president of the country. That's right. So he said, until somebody gets in there, then we can sign a deal, but we can talk to the United States right now. And so I think Trump's coming in, Trump's not going to be tied to what Zelensky does, like, like Biden apparently was. I don't, I don't, I can't imagine he's going to.

• 20:36Tucker Carlson?

  Who cares what he thinks?

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Because we call all the cards and Russia says, yes, America has to. I think Sergei Levroff in the, in the interview you had with him, said the same thing. We'll talk, we're open to talk with, with the Trump administration. We're willing to do that. And the Biden administration could have done it at any point and they refused to do it. And, and now we have the wreckage that we have.

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• 22:10Speaker 02

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• 23:10Tucker Carlson?

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• 24:37Tucker Carlson?

  So you just described why it's a very tough position for the incoming president. How do you, how do you end this? Well, and I didn't describe the worst part of it yet. Because of everything that we have done, and by the way, we set as an objective, Biden did on the first day of the war in his speech to the United States and the Secretary of Defense, Austin, did so in April, was to weaken Russia. That's what we said. Ukraine must prevail, Russia must fail. I think that was the exact phrase that Biden used and Austin said that we have to weaken Russia. That was our objective. Instead- Why would we want to weaken Russia? Just to make it impossible for them to secure their nuclear arsenal and to make sure that like some- Right. -violent Muslim separatist group takes control of parts of the country?

• 25:21Tucker Carlson?

  Like what, I don't, why would we want that? Because we don't like them. Just because we don't like Russia. There's too many people in power still today in Washington that grew up in the Cold War and, and were mourning the loss of the, of the Soviet Union and the enemy. We should have ended NATO. I didn't like Muammar Gaddafi, but has Libya improved since he was murdered? Oh Lord, yeah. They have slave markets in Tripoli. So how's that a win for anyone? Like what, who's, who are these people? Like, how could people that stupid be in charge of anything?

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Because they replicate themselves. They're the ones that are in charge, and so they don't let anybody else rise up, even to the lower and the middle levels unless they give in to the way people think they're. If you're not like me, forget it. If you're talking about doing something that makes sense, that doesn't mean more war, you're gonna get rid of. Look at Tulsi Gabbard. They are terrified of having somebody of her quality in that position at DNI, because they know she'll actually tell the truth. She'll actually faithfully tell what the intelligence is, as opposed to just slanting it so that the president gets wrong information, or slanted information that makes him think, yeah, you should go and use more military force, whatever it is. So, that's why these people are still in

• 26:32Speaker 01

  power today. But, yeah, you're right. There was no reason to want to weaken Russia. We should have wanted to end the war. And if we cared about the Ukrainian people, that's what we would have done. We would have prevented it, or at least ended it when it came in. But instead, we wanted to weaken Russia, so why not keep the war going? Because the Ukrainian people are willing to do it. Zelensky is willing to keep them going in there, even though any rational explanation could have shown the opposite. Okay, so we achieved the opposite. Russia is now much stronger than it was in February 2022. The Ukraine side is much weaker than it was. We're much weaker than we were. Just imagine, just fundamentally, how many thousands of armored vehicles have we sent to the Ukraine side? How many interceptor

• 27:15Speaker 01

  missiles have we sent? Almost all of our ATACMS missiles have been sent to Ukraine. We don't even have a handful left. What if we get into a war with somebody? God forbid, it should be China, or North Korea, or, you know, even more, God forbid, if it should be Russia. What if we have to defend ourselves? We have now just eaten into our capacity to even wage war. And now then, you have, the Russian side has gone to the opposite side, because they have now mobilized their industry, they've now expanded their army by 50% from where it started. They do have a lot of people that have gotten experience in this army and lived, and so now then their institution is growing even more capable. So that's why this is so hard for Trump, because Putin is coming in saying he's willing to

• 27:59Speaker 01

  He's willing to have negotiations, but he sets some pretty high standards. I think when you talked to Putin in February of last year, when you asked him what his terms were, he kind of went back. He said, well, we've already talked about this in Istanbul, so maybe something like that. Well, because we didn't take it and then we allowed long-range weapons to be used by Americans into Russia. Putin said that deal's now off the table. Now, on June 14th, he listed a new set of deal, which is all for the oblast, all of it, even the territory that Ukraine still owns. So now it's not going to be that deal before because that would have been just the Donbass area, just the Luhansk and Donetsk. Now it's going to be bigger. But then Biden didn't accept that either. And so now then with all the price that Russia has paid there and the strength,

• 28:43Speaker 01

  they don't have to negotiate. This is so important to understand. Ukraine has to negotiate to survive. We have to negotiate to get the war over. Putin doesn't. If he doesn't get the deal he wants, he'll just keep rolling until he does. And I believe that the likelihood is that they would take all the way up to the Dnipro River, even if it took another six, nine months of fighting. I don't see any way that they're going to stop fighting here. And they've said so. They've said, we're not, Lavrov about three weeks ago, said, no kind of ceasefire. We're not going to do a pause because that would just help the other side there. We're going to keep fighting and we'll negotiate, we'll talk, but we're not going to stop fighting. So there's no ceasefire that's going to be involved because that would help the Ukraine side. So to the river, which is a considerable distance from where they are.

• 29:28Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  But see, here's the, it's.

• 29:30Tucker Carlson?

  So how far does that put them from the capital city?

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Well, the Dnipro goes into Kiev.

• 29:36Tucker Carlson?

  I'm aware. That's why I'm asking that.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  So I think that the likelihood is that Odessa and Kharkiv cities are probably not going to remain on the western side if Trump doesn't come in and give Putin everything he wants on the first day. And I perceive, and I certainly don't know this, no, I haven't talked to Putin, so I don't know, but I perceive that he's set these lines here on the 14 June lines, which were all of those four oblasts, because there's large swaths that Ukraine still owns. It would be so hard, maybe even impossible politically domestically for Trump to to give away areas that Ukraine hasn't lost in the war and agree to that. And so if Putin, if Trump, you know,

• 30:19Speaker 01

  with the Kellogg Plan or whatever they try to say they want NATO put off, or, you know, they want the current line of contact to be the dividing line, then Russia will just say, okay, we tried to negotiate with you, we didn't, and they'll just keep going until they get to the Dnieper River, because we can't stop them. If if if Trump says, okay, well, I'm gonna get tough and I'll give more stuff to you than you've than Biden did. Well, first, we don't have it. But second, it doesn't matter because they don't have the manpower to use it.

• 30:46Tucker Carlson?

  We literally don't have it.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  We don't. And Tucker, if if Trump said, all right, well, I'm gonna go in big. I'm gonna take the first armored division, first infantry division, first Cav division, all of that equipment, the whole set, and just give it powerful divisions that we have there, and just hand it to the Ukrainians. They don't have the manpower to use it. They would still lose just as much.

• 31:04Tucker Carlson?

  But then you also have a problem, which is this. Donald Trump just ran for office on the promise, no more, you know, counterproductive wars. And so if his first act in, you know, as president in office is to arm Ukraine, like, I don't, I don't see how that works, honestly.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  It's, I can see where he would have that temptation, and I know that he's gonna have that suggestion from many of his supporters, because I've been reading about him already, because they say, we gotta show him he's tough.

• 31:36Tucker Carlson?

  Well, not his supporters, his, the, you know, the neocons in Washington, you know.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Fair point, yes.

• 31:42Tucker Carlson?

  I don't know how many Trump voters are for that, like, right around zero, probably.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're, they're definitely not, because they know, they can see what we're talking about here. It's, it's nothing but a losing prospect. Why pay more to lose?

• 31:53Tucker Carlson?

  Also, why is it our, how do we get involved in this?

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Because of the bad hand.

• 31:57Tucker Carlson?

  Two guys get in a fight down the street and I like bankrupt my family and put their lives at risk to like what?

• 32:02Speaker 01

  That that is exactly what we're talking about here. And it's it's much worse because that and also we're bankrupting ourselves while we're enabling that family to die even more.

• 32:10Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  More of them. So it's immoral and irrational in my view. So but but here's the problem that Trump's political enemies here and and I've already seen it Biden has absolutely set this up. He just said last week that I have created all this great situation here where my our enemies are weaker and our friends are stronger and I'm handing this over to Trump. You had Secretary Blinken say, you know what?

• 32:33Tucker Carlson?

  Secretary Blinken is a criminal by the way, and if he retains his security clearance after January 20th, I'm I'm gonna every single day raise the alarm. I mean, there's no way that Tony Blinken should have a security clearance after Trump is inaugurated. But I know he's gonna what? It's super simple. Just pull Tony Blinken's security. Tony Blinken is a, you know, I think was running the US government, hurting this country more than maybe any other single person in the in my lifetime. And

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:01Tucker Carlson?

  That man deserves to I should be held to account for what he did.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  100% agree and and and his his exit interview showed why he actually told that interviewer last week that we have put Ukraine in a stronger position militarily, economically and domestically.

• 33:18Tucker Carlson?

  Are you serious?

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. He says straight up and we have them on a sustained path to continue improving. And then he said, but if if Trump, you know, comes in and they negotiate an end, that's up to them.

• 33:28Tucker Carlson?

  Those are lies. He's a liar.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  100%.

• 33:30Tucker Carlson?

  And I know because I travel a lot. And, you know, last weekend I had a meeting at, you know, in a ski resort in the Alps, which is probably the most expensive town in the world. I was not there to ski for the record. But the whole town is Ukrainian, you know, all the visitors Ukrainian and they're rolling into air mazes and dropping a million dollars in an afternoon. Okay, so it's all through Europe. You see this, the richest people are the Ukrainians. That money is ours. It belongs to me and you and every other American taxpayer. That's where it's going. Second fact, fact, not guess, fact is Ukrainian military is selling a huge percentage, up to half of the arms that we send them, half. And I'm not guessing about this. I know that for a fact, a fact, okay? Not speculation. And they're selling it. And a lot of us winding up with the drug cartels on our border.

• 34:14Tucker Carlson?

  So this is the, this, this is a crime, what's happening. Our intel agencies are fully aware of this. You tell me they're not profiting from this. Of course, you think CIA is not profiting from this? Yes, they are. I can't prove that, but I believe that. What? They don't know this? I know this, but they don't know this? They know this. And no one is saying it. Like, no American seems aware of this. We're sending these arms to Ukraine, billions of, hundreds of billions of dollars, and it's being stolen and sold to our actual enemies. Like, what the? I'm trying not to swear. What is this?

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the reason why is because you have Zelensky, uh, it was about three weeks ago, I think, was specifically asked this question. So he went at some length in one of his interviews to say, "Oh, no, absolutely not. There's no truth to that at all. We've implemented all these things." I know that, but the media just reporting what he said.

• 34:59Tucker Carlson?

  The New York Times could get on the web and order Ukrainian weapons. That's a fact. I'm not guessing. It's a fact. They could do that today. Like, everyone who wants to know what's going on knows. And yet they're telling me, "Oh, 70,000 Ukrainians have died." 70,000? Really? You think that's the number? Everything about this is a lie. And Tony Blinken, of course, because he's running the US government, knows that it's all a lie. And so for him to say that out loud is evil. Like, that's truly deceptive, I think.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Oh, 100%, it is, because it is in a direct contradiction to reality on the ground.

• 35:32Tucker Carlson?

  They're selling weapons to the drug cartels? Are you kidding? This is a nightmare. I don't understand. Why is nobody reporting? How come I know that?

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's one of the bigger questions.

• 35:42Tucker Carlson?

  So the New York Times doesn't know that?

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. You haven't seen that report, yeah. I mean, how could they not? I mean, this, the stuff is all over the place. And this has been an open secret for almost the duration of this.

• 35:52Tucker Carlson?

  Yes!

• 35:52Speaker 01

  And sometimes they put a, a little caveat headline and then move on to whatever's next. And they don't, no one says the implication of, "Wait, this stuff could come back to bite us on our own border."

• 36:01Tucker Carlson?

  Well, yeah, we saw that, we saw that in the 80s with the Majidine, of course. How are you gonna have commercial air travel around the world? By the way, if their missile systems, you know, handheld, you know, you can, you can shoot down a commercial airline there pretty easily with a lot of this stuff. That's what it's designed to do. And if it's in the hands of separatist groups, terror groups, drug cartels, which it is now, how do you have a civilization? How do you have global air travel? I don't, I don't get it.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, I pray that remains a potential and not something that actually gets manifest, but it's out of our hands and that's the problem.

• 36:32Tucker Carlson?

  But how can you send hundreds of billions of dollars of aid and weapons to a country and then not keep track of what happens to it?

• 36:39Speaker 01

  I can only speculate that they just don't care about that. If it ends up, if some of it ends up hurting Russia, then cool. And I think that's the extent of it.

• 36:48Tucker Carlson?

  Terror attacks inside Russia, a lot of them.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:51Tucker Carlson?

  So, since when does the US government sponsor terror attacks? Like, this is our government.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Well, of course, we just put a different tag on it. Well, no, we're just helping the Ukrainian side fight its war against the Russian aggressor.

• 37:02Tucker Carlson?

  They're assassinating people.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  That's, that's, yeah, I mean, and as I think you've talked about before, Dugan's daughter, who was caught up in that.

• 37:08Tucker Carlson?

  A lot of other people.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, certainly.

• 37:10Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, a general, not.

• 37:12Tucker Carlson?

  Again, not speculating about this at all. I know firsthand. So, anyway, sorry to get upset. Uh, it's that, the Blinken stuff is like, it's beyond.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then Austin did the same thing, about six days ago, to be specific, where he says, "We have given Ukraine everything we can and we still..." He's saying this still, at this point, "We can't let Ukraine lose the war."

• 37:35Tucker Carlson?

  That liar, that liar.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  The war is already lost.

• 37:38Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I know.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Past tense. There is no possibility to even maintain anything. For him to say that, to get, to continue the fiction that they have, so that, and here's why I think all this is happening, so that when Trump comes in and whatever he ends up negotiating, it's Trump's fault. We had Ukraine set up, we were doing everything we could, and then Trump comes in and hands it back to Putin. That's why I think it's going to be so hard for, for Trump to do what makes sense and what's rational, because he's going to come under withering attack from the political left. I mean, it's just going to happen.

• 38:08Tucker Carlson?

  I think, you know, you're effective, you can exercise power to the extent that you're willing to exercise that power and to the extent that you're willing to ignore, you know, your...

• 38:20Tucker Carlson?

  Faithless critics, like who actually cares what they say? Who cares? Do you know what I mean?

• 38:24Speaker 01

  And that's what I hope Trump does. I hope he says, yeah, y'all are the ones that set all the stage for this. I hope he's clarified on what he can do.

• 38:32Tucker Carlson?

  He's committed genocide in Eastern Europe. Like, shut up.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:34Tucker Carlson?

  You know, who cares what you think?

• 38:35Speaker 01

  A million people. We're talking World War I. We lost in World War I and World War II combined, about a half a million people.

• 38:43Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  That is two world wars, and they have doubled that in all probability. And now then, oh, we're not even talking about how many have lost limbs, how many have severe PTSD that will take the rest of their lives to recover. They've lost generations of people. I think like 22 million people have fled the country. That's what we produced, Tucker. That's what we built, and that's how prideful it is for America to say what we generated. That is condemning. It's horrible.

• 39:09Tucker Carlson?

  Which is why I was so distressed when I heard the incoming National Security Advisor, who I really like personally, he's a good man actually, but use the term democracy to describe what's happening in Ukraine or our motives in Ukraine. I mean, that is so dishonest. That is so false. I don't know, maybe he believes it, but that is just not true.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:28Tucker Carlson?

  And I don't think there's any evidence that it's true at all. The opposite is true.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:30Tucker Carlson?

  It's a tyranny that's banned forms of Christianity.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:34Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Political opponents, any opposition media, everything. This jailed all these people.

• 39:40Tucker Carlson?

  Murdering, murdering people, a lot of people too. Again, not guessing. So, okay, sorry, my rant. So, okay, so what should, thank you for being patient, um, what's, so given everything you've described, what should the incoming administration do?

• 39:54Speaker 01

  I think that Trump should come in and try to get this resolved as fast as possible and rationally understand that the June 15 line that Putin laid out is the best that he can possibly get. And just, and he's gonna have to put a good face on it. He can't just come in and literally say, okay, whatever you want is fine, we'll just sign here. But there are some other, there's some leverage we can do elsewhere that's like, hey, look, we can even remove some of these sanctions on Russia as long as we get this in return for it. You know, some increase, some security guarantees that Russia's not gonna do anything beyond this, etc., which is gonna be hard because they have the capacity should they want to go further than that. The Dnepa River, but I think that he should just say, hey, this is the best we're going to get right here. I'm going to end this war as soon as we can on these lines right

• 40:38Speaker 01

  here because it would, all we're going to do is get more Ukrainians killed if we, if we keep delaying this. So we're going to get this done here. We're going to start the process of letting the Ukraine side recover and just to help them rebuild. Europe needs to handle the lion's share of that, not the United States, but we can help diplomacy, you know, build that with diplomacy. You're the, especially the Eastern Europeans, let them build up their own national security and defense, get bigger on there, not the United States, not put more money in NATO, but the Europeans need to handle that. That's, that's one of the big things here. And then the other thing is that we just have to acknowledge this is where the lines are going to be because that's already a reality on the ground. If

• 41:19Speaker 01

  you get that over with now, then we can start the next hard thing, which is to rebuild relations with Russia going forward. And I know many don't want to do that, but Russia is going to exist into the perpetual into the future.

• 41:30Tucker Carlson?

  Why are we supposed to hate Russia exactly?

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Um, because these people can't escape the Cold War that we won in 1990.

• 41:37Tucker Carlson?

  But like, why, as long as Bill Kristol is chirping his vile little lies in your head, like, you're never going to get anything done. Like, why don't you just ignore them? Like, Russia should not be our enemy. There's no reason.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  And you showed that, and so graphically with, with both the Lavrov and the Putin interviews, they're very reasonable. They're, they're not doing things that are, they're not asking us to.

• 41:56Tucker Carlson?

  Civilized country, and now it's aligned with China in a larger, much larger military and economic bloc than NATO. So, by the way, we just destroyed the European economy by blowing up Nord Stream. No one's ever been held accountable for that. I don't know how the Europeans are going to pay for Ukraine reconstruction when we wreck their economy by blowing up their natural gas pipeline, but whatever. You don't want, we have lost.

• 42:22Tucker Carlson?

  Our preeminence because of this.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:24Tucker Carlson?

  Now Russia is aligned with China like that's, you know, big picture.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  China.

• 42:28Tucker Carlson?

  That's the headline.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  An actual military alliance with North Korea.

• 42:30Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  And the cooperation with Iran as well. All those things and the BRICS, like you say, that is the wreckage of this outgoing administration. That's what they have produced. None of those things existed prior to October 22. When we started making Russia weaker, we have made them stronger in every capacity.

• 42:47Tucker Carlson?

  If you stayed in the United States for the past four years, you didn't leave and you didn't read any non-American, non-US media, you have no idea, no clue.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:55Tucker Carlson?

  No idea that any of this happened. You would think that it was 1997 and this was, you know, we had a unipolar world and we're in charge of everything and the blue passport's a big deal and all this stuff. You'd have no idea. And that freaks me out.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:07Tucker Carlson?

  If people don't know, they should know. If they did know, I mean, you know, they'd be upset at the damage, pointless damage done to this country.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  They need to be upset and I hope that's, that's why I'm so grateful for your show here that you separated from the mainstream media because now then you're putting it to millions of people that get this information that they aren't getting in any of these other places.

• 43:25Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I love America. I live here, I am American. My ancestors came here a long time ago and they're all buried here. I'm not going anywhere. I love the United States and so to see a bunch of people who have no interest in the United States whatsoever destroy it, it's like it drives me crazy. I don't know why, what, I don't know. That's my only motive. Oh, you love Putin. Oh, fuck off.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  I, I, right.

• 43:45Tucker Carlson?

  Love Putin.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Right, right. There's no reason to antagonize a nuclear superpower when they're happy to just cooperate with us and actually help us in the Western European countries with cheap energy so that they can develop their economies. Why do you want to harm that?

• 44:00Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it's also like, it's a Christian country and so why wouldn't, why wouldn't we be allies with them? Why would we drive them into a permanent alliance? Lavrov told me it's a permanent alliance with China. Game over. Game over. Look at a map, get a map someday and like, look at it. You know, you want to move Russia west and it's, of course, it's not a fully Western country and the Mongols invaded it. It's like a complicated country, but it is in some deep sense, Western because it's Christian, mostly Christian. So why wouldn't they be on our side? Because certain people in the US government hate that idea and they hate Russia because it is Christian. They loved it when it was atheist. They loved it. They defended it. Their ancestors, you know, were agents for it. You know what I mean? And the entire American left was working on behalf of Stalin at one point. But now they hate it? What's the difference?

• 44:45Tucker Carlson?

  Because it's

• 44:46Speaker 01

  I don't know, but it's to our harm and that's

• 44:47Tucker Carlson?

  Because it's a Christian country now, not an atheist country. Yes. That's my view, whatever. I mean, anyway, excuse me. So do you think that Trump can do that? And like, what would this settlement look like? What settlement do you think the Russians would accept? What do you think the new administration can actually pull off? Given the enormous political pressure on them from its enemies?

• 45:09Speaker 01

  If Trump takes your advice there and just says, "I don't care what anybody else thinks. This is what I'm gonna do. This is what's good for America. This is what I was elected to do." Then he's gonna say, "All right, we're gonna acknowledge the June 15th line, and it's gonna be those four regions there. And that's where the Ukraine side will pull back to those lines, etc. We will declare no NATO. We're never gonna go in there. We were never going to go in there. So we'll just acknowledge reality. Bottom line here, no NATO, and that's not gonna happen on the border here. And then let's start seeing how we can rebuild relations to our advantage. And like you said, this stuff with China and this other stuff, that's irreparable. We can't fix that, but we can. And again, back to your interview with Lavrov,

• 45:54Speaker 01

  he still desires that. He even called us a great country. I listened to that again earlier today from your interview. He called America a great country. We're demonizing them, and he still is calling us a great country that they want to have relations with. So Trump can exploit that and say, "We're gonna start repairing that to our advantage and to our benefit, because there is still advantages to have." And instead of going down any other path. I don't know if he'll do it, but he can do it by just because he's the president. He gets to call the shots. So we'll see what he does.

• 46:22Tucker Carlson?

  Of all the New Year's resolutions you're likely to put off, the one you're most likely to put off and keep putting off is buying life insurance. And you should have life insurance. It's kind of crazy not to, because the future is unknown. You gotta have life insurance. But you may not have life insurance, because it's a huge hassle, and it can be a huge ripoff. But there is an answer, PolicyGenius. It makes it very easy and much cheaper. You can find life insurance policies to start at just 292 bucks per year for a million dollars of coverage. And some options, and this is the best part, are 100% online and lets you avoid unnecessary medical exams, the guy with the gloves.

• 47:03Tucker Carlson?

  You don't want that if you can avoid it, and you may be able to avoid it. Forty percent of people wind up looking back and wishing they'd had better life insurance, or any life insurance. It could have helped their families enormously. PolicyGenius can fix that for you. Peace of mind, that's what they're really selling. The address? PolicyGenius.com/Tucker, or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much money you could save and how much hassle you could save. PolicyGenius.com/Tucker. Yeah, I mean, I think it would, you know, take every member of Congress, 535 House and Senate, and send them for a week to Moscow, then send them to Beijing, then send them

• 47:47Tucker Carlson?

  to Delhi, and ask them, which of these cities would you live in? Which has a population that, you know, has more in common with Americans? And it's not even close, actually. It's not even close. And so your alliances should be built on shared interests, but also shared attitudes and history and shared goals. And they're a natural ally of ours. And, you know, the East is not. It's just a fact. And they fundamentally like us, the people like us. Putin and Lavrov are the most pro-Western Russian leaders we'll see in my lifetime, actually. The people who will replace them will not have those same attitudes. And this is just self-harm, what we're hurting ourselves. Yeah, and, you know, to those people who, and I saw a lot of them complaining against

• 48:30Tucker Carlson?

  you after you, especially if you went to Putin, and they're saying it's Putin apologists and this, and I would say to them, you show me a map of the last three years, physically and also calendar-wise, and you show me where we're better off today because we followed the path that you said. We did turn them into an enemy, and how have we improved because of that? A million people are dead here, we've lost all this energy here, our economy has been severely constrained, all because you won't acknowledge reality. Is Tony Blinken mad at Russia or something?

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:00Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. Um, no.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  So I get angry when I hear that.

• 49:03Tucker Carlson?

  By people who hate America, obvious, I mean, obvious.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Even if they don't hate, maybe they, maybe they think they like America, but they're harming us. They're worse than the Russians are. That's the perversion of this. They are harming American interests left and right, making our own military weaker. We are weaker today. We have to fight than we were in February 2022.

• 49:21Tucker Carlson?

  Okay, so this is an area in which you have deep expertise. I don't have any expertise. Where are we right now? Um, from a standpoint of military readiness?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  What we are, we have made ourselves substantially less good than we used to be. So, and I fought in an armored warfare in 1991 and we were at our preeminent power because we'd been training for a potential Cold War clash all this time. And so we had the force structure, we had the training, we had the institutionalized training. We had all the different levels, everything you can ever want, we had it at that time. Well, then all of a sudden we win the Cold War and then after nine 11, we, we completely get rid of all that institutional knowledge we had and now we're starting to fight, uh, you know, Arabs in the Middle East. And so you had the Iraq war, you had the Afghan war, which dragged on for one in two decades each and we're doing counter insurgency stuff. And now we have these stupid bases all over the place.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Every time you send a guy there, that means he's not training for our core requirement to defend America. That's why I'm hopeful that probably the new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hexeth, he said he's focused on national defense, on our borders and our skies and to rebuild the military to make them lethal warfighters, which is what we need to get back to.

• 50:32Tucker Carlson?

  It's all women now, right? I mean, I just keep reading all these stories about how they couldn't meet recruitment goals, so we're just having women fight our wars?

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Well, it's not, it's not all women.

• 50:39Tucker Carlson?

  I guess we're supposed to all think this is great, but I don't think this is great.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  The problem is what is true is that in, in, when in this DEI stuff, whatever, and they wanted to give women opportunity, they gave the women opportunity everywhere, even when they weren't physically capable of doing so, so they lowered the standards.

• 50:52Tucker Carlson?

  But it's not just physical. There's like women, I'm sure are better drone operators than men. I have no trouble believing that. I mean, I have. Mostly female staff. I think they're smarter and more capable than I am. That's why I've hired them. You know, I'm not against women at all.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 51:06Tucker Carlson?

  I think it's a moral problem. You have a home invasion. You're lying in bed with your wife. Do you say to your wife, hey, you get this one?

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:14Tucker Carlson?

  No, no, the point of war, the point of having a military is to defend your women and children. There's no other reason. I don't understand. So you have women fight your wars for you? You're disgusting. I think that. I know everyone's like, oh, shut up. You hate women. Actually, I love women. And I hate anyone who would put a woman in combat.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  But in this, in this day and age, you can't.

• 51:32Tucker Carlson?

  Who gives a shit what the feminists think?

• 51:33Speaker 01

  You can't say, yeah.

• 51:34Tucker Carlson?

  They've wrecked our society. Like, at some point, if you start the Iraq war, or you start feminism, you start something that's like, or the transgender brain virus, something that's so clearly hurt a lot of people. The Ukraine war. Don't you, aren't you disqualified from weighing in on like future issues?

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, no.

• 51:50Tucker Carlson?

  You know, Iraq war guy, shut up. Hey, Gloria Steinem, you know, dying alone, unmarried and childless. I think you kind of proved it doesn't work, right? Just by your own life. Shut up. Like, I don't understand why, why people with a, a long track record of failure, like, get to talk about, you know, what we do next.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Do you have to go any further than David Petraeus, former CIA director, the, the architect of the disaster in Afghanistan? To this day is still putting a mic in his face. Ben Hodges, the worst analyst I've ever seen, still to this day, and I'm talking like two or three days ago, is still saying Ukraine can win and eventually get back Crimea. It's totally attached to reality, but they keep putting the mic in front of them. That's what needs to change. Recognize the failure and don't put your mic in front of that guy.

• 52:36Tucker Carlson?

  I do think that's the central problem in the United States, is that we do not punish, uh, anything, really. We, we only punish disobedience to the regime, but nothing else is ever punished. So you can be like, you know, the worst fire captain in the Western United States and let your city burn. And it's like, you go, girl, or whatever. But I just do think there's, there's something repulsive about sending women to go defend your country. Where are the men? That's your job, is to defend and provide. That is your job. And that's not my opinion. That's nature. And there's never been a society, a functional society, in which men weren't required to defend and sustain, you know? Work to protect the women and children. That's the whole point. This is less than the Titanic.

• 53:21Tucker Carlson?

  That's Western civilization in a sentence. And we've just inverted it and like, hey ladies, go, go defend us while we stay home and game and get high or whatever. Like I just find it repulsive. There's nothing.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Well, you know, and one of the reasons for that is the because that we have lowered the standard so much that a lot of the good guys. They don't want to come in like some of your staff members I talked to, those are the good guys, right? But a lot of those kind of people, now they don't want to come into this force. Because it's like your standards are low and I see you're not serious about it.

• 53:49Tucker Carlson?

  Saying the guys who won the second world war are somehow too immoral to serve in the military now. And that the fat guy who runs the military, I can't even remember, was Milley, Mark Milley? You know, with the chest full of medals, that guy's like, oh, white rage, white men are bad. Really? Who won the second world war? So do you have Google? Look up the, look at the pictures. I think it was white men, actually. They're the ones who beat Hitler. So why don't you shut up, Tubby?

• 54:09Speaker 01

  So, and so if you can't recruit enough men like that, then you have to recruit something. So that's, that's why we're lowering the standards.

• 54:16Tucker Carlson?

  Like I love women. That's why, but I just think it's, I mean, just think about it for a second. What is the point of having an army? It's so people don't show up and rape your wife, carry off your daughters, murder your children. Like that's the only point, actually.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  See, here's, that hasn't been exposed yet though. And, and I fear that one day we will have to fight a peer or a near peer. And we haven't since, really, you can say Korea, maybe Vietnam, but none since then where we fought anybody who was any good. So you can have anybody, honestly, you know, even our base is so good that we can beat, you know, the Taliban. Well, we can tactically beat the Taliban in any engagement with our military. So there's nobody in Iraq that could have beat us, et cetera. But if we had to fight, I'm just telling you, if we had to fight the Russian army right now, like war broke out tomorrow and all of a sudden we have to send in our divisions. I think we would probably get hammered.

• 55:07Tucker Carlson?

  Well, obviously.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, not even just because of the stuff that you're talking about there, which will also be exposed. But because we don't have the combat experience that they do. And we're still locked in like the 1991 or 2003 Iraq war as, and the Russians have gone way beyond that and we're way behind on that. But all these things would be exposed and then until then, they're not. Exposed and still then we still are the greatest military power on earth and who's to say differently?

• 55:32Tucker Carlson?

  Graphically. So the Ukrainians took out a bunch of Russian bombers, long range bombers on an airfield with drones early in the war. And I thought to myself, wow, you know, then this war, which I don't know, are we studying this like carefully? I mean, I guess we're running it, but are we taking its lessons? Shows that, you know, drone technology has got to change our calculations about where we spend our money. Right? So how many aircraft carriers do you need in a world with drones? I don't, I don't know the answer to these questions, but is anyone smart thinking about this?

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think about it a lot. And in fact, I saw whatever we're building two new aircraft carriers right now. And they're already naming them what they're going to be. And I'm like, did y'all not watch what happened to the Black Sea? Fleet, the Russian Black Sea Fleet because of naval drones? I mean, dude, they were sent to the bottom of the ocean. We would, we would get hammered if we had to fight. That's, that's World War Two level. We're not at World War Two anymore. And look to your point there.

• 56:27Tucker Carlson?

  They're already named, one's called the George Bush, I think.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And Clinton, Bill Clinton is the other one. I'm not making that up. That's, that's what's being reported.

• 56:34Tucker Carlson?

  Bill Clinton, the draft dodger as an aircraft carrier.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Unbelievable.

• 56:37Tucker Carlson?

  We've reached like peak parity.

• 56:40Tucker Carlson?

  But why are we building aircraft? I mean, I, look, I, you know, you're the retired Colonel, but it does seem like we should pause and ask like, what, you know, what are we learning from what's happening in Ukraine?

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that's where I was going to say, I, I was a little surprised that Russia didn't start off on a higher level tactically than it did in February 22. They, they, they were behind the curve for a long period of time because Armenia and Azerbaijan had a war in 2020, where all of this stuff was put on full display for the first time in a large scale. The Armenian armor was hammered from the Azerbaijanis because they used the long range drones. They had missiles that had drones. Um, and then they were able to bring them in and vector in other targets. So, uh, it's not that Doug McGregor wrote about in 1997. They employed for the first time. And I thought when I saw that, okay, this is now changed warfare. No one's going to fight the old one anymore because you see how powerful drones are and the Russians didn't.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Well, here's the problem. We still haven't. And now they're not just the 2020, and it was a really short. We've had now three years and we're tinkering around the edges with stuff. There have been some changes, but it's like about this much when you need this much. See, if we had to fight Russia today, even everything we've observed for the last three years, we are not up to the standard. We are way behind the ball and we would die and I think large numbers.

• 57:54Tucker Carlson?

  So, I mean, this is like a, what we're watching does seem to have like lots of precedent in history, but the most obvious is the British army that spends the entire 19th century fighting all these colonial wars against the Pashtuns and the mutant, you know, the mutinous forces in India and, you know, every, the Zulus. And they win most of those engagements and then they have this peer to peer war in the First World War and it commences with like British cavalry charges into machine gun fire. And, you know, it destroyed Britain. It's never been a great power really since then. It's pretended to be, but it's not. It's wrecked the country forever and destroyed the British Empire, that war, First World War.

• 58:35Tucker Carlson?

  And everyone makes fun of them for that. Like you didn't keep track of what real war was as you were like killing all the villagers around the world.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  And let me tell you, 25 years later, it was the French army's turn. They were the preeminent power on the European continent and then they just, they were destroyed in a month.

• 58:52Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I know.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  It, it, when the Germans came in using modern technology, modern tactics and new doctrine that they were, and everyone knew, the Germans knew that they were better, but they had to go fight anyway. But because they were still in the not in the World War One mentality, that's what happened to them. So you have, yeah, British from World War One, French from World War Two. Are we going to be the next in line?

• 59:13Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I mean, cause it is, the parallels are pretty obvious. I mean, you know, whatever. You don't want to be mean or anything, but the truth is fighting, you know, third world nations is different from fighting, you know, technologically advanced, you know, nations that have satellite stations and stuff. And, um, so, yeah, I'm, I'm really worried. Did you think?

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Cause Russia's talked openly about it. If they get into conflict with us, our satellites are the first thing coming down. They've said that recently, I'm talking about, and I'm telling you, we don't even know how to fight without all of our connectivity. Uh, and the Russians do because they've learned how to, and that's another factor that if we get into a fight, I think that we're going to get hammered.

• 59:54Tucker Carlson?

  Do you think, so the real question is, do smart people at the Pentagon, like, are they throw away all the procurement stuff, the defense contractor pressure and all that, which is like, seems determinative in a lot of the, a lot of the time. But like, is anyone just thinking about this? Is, can, does anyone have the power to change the way the US military

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Now, I retired in 2015, so I can't speak of anything beyond that, but I can tell you that a lot of my experience prior to that, when I was in the Future Combat Systems program at Fort Bliss, Texas in the early 2000s, you had the senior leaders that were totally disconnected from reality. All these exercises and tests that they claim were showing how this new, modern force is going to be fantastic. It was all video and fake, because the tests were lied. All the guys, I was a major at the time, all of the, like, the major and below, the guys who were physically doing this stuff, we knew it was absurd, and so we told people. But to my context earlier in this conversation, those guys don't get promoted. The guys that get promoted who signed off on this fake test results here.

• 1:00:55Tucker Carlson?

  I know it's your Colonel Davis, not General Davis.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  Indeed. I'm probably lucky to get Colonel, but that's a separate issue.

• 1:01:01Tucker Carlson?

  So what is, I mean, I just know from living, I know very little about the military, but I've been around it a lot. And I know from living in Washington, you do run into tons of smart majors and Colonels, but like, Flag Officer, no. Like, what is that? What is that? What, the leap from Colonel to General, what does it require? And how do they manage to weed out all the smart, free-thinking people?

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Because in order to become a General, you have to have the approval of the Generals. That's how, technically, the President designates these people. But in reality, they just, the President signs off on whatever, and then the Senate signs off on whoever the Generals approve of. So they don't approve of anyone that doesn't already play the game. That is one of the big things that I think needs to be reformed, because you, that's why I say they replicate each other. So nobody gets up into that upper echelon. And I just got to say, and I hate to use this example, but H.R. McMaster, who was the former National Security Advisor, I fought under him in Desert Storm. He was my direct commander at the time, and he was fantastic under firearms, brilliant, and I had the highest respect for him. For 20 years, we were close friends all the way through until we both went to Afghanistan

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  in 2011, 2010, 2011 at the same time. And then all of a sudden, he gets promoted by David Petraeus. After he had not been promoted several times before that, Petraeus gets him promoted. And now he becomes general. And almost overnight, he starts sounding like Petraeus. And stuff that he and I had talked about before, that's like, you know, there's so much, this is unreal, untrue, this is not going to work. All of a sudden, now he's saying it. He was put in charge during that time of the anti-corruption process for the Afghan government. And he claimed over and over how they were making progress and all this stuff. And as we talked about earlier in this show, that never happened. But then since that time, now that he's going on and saying all kinds of stuff like, yes, he needs to, you know, is anti-Russian and all this. He became like them, and so now he's just another one of them. He got absorbed.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  And all the stuff that happened before that, when he was the one who was talking on the outside, I don't understand.

• 1:02:58Tucker Carlson?

  He was, I mean, even I knew who he was. And again, I don't follow this that closely, but he was famous for his, well, intellectual horsepower, but also curiosity, honesty, like, he was a well-known guy.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, the Battle of 73 Easting that he was in command of was, I mean, they still study it today in West Point. And for good reason, because he was, it was tremendous. But something happened to him after he got promoted from Colonel to Brigadier General.

• 1:03:25Tucker Carlson?

  What, just like swimming in a, in the filthy pool of power politics? Or what, what do you think?

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  I can, I really, because we literally never spoke after that time.

• 1:03:36Tucker Carlson?

  What?

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  It was really sad. We, we had a good friendship up until that time, but then we broke and since 2011, never spoke again. So I don't have any idea what may or may not be the case. I just see him on TV all the time, so I don't know.

• 1:03:48Tucker Carlson?

  Wow. How do you feel about the national security team?

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  I am a huge fan of Tulsi Gabbard. I think I had recommended and sent, I mean, I don't have a lot of influence, but to people who have the knowledge, I suggested she would have been a better Secretary of State, maybe even Secretary of Defense, because I think her mind is brilliant and her focus on America and keeping America safe. You look at everything she's done and said consistently through her career is always focused on what's going to benefit America, and she's smart and knows how to do it. I hope that Pete Hexeth does what he said he was going to do in his opening statement, that he revitalizes the national security, the Defense Department, and picks up the warfighting ethos, mentality, holds

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  people accountable, passes and I hope he does all those things. If he does, then I think we're going to be in a lot better shape. And Mike Walz, I've also been concerned by some of the statements he has made, but if President Trump is calling the shots, I think he'll do what President Trump tells him. We'll just have to hope and see with that. Those are the main ones in there. And so some of the, oh, Bridge Colby is another really good, good situation there, a good person there. So I think that's right. Having him in a position right now is going to be very good. So there's a number of people right now, then the Trump team here that he's going to start with, that was a huge anchor that he didn't have in 2016. So I'm hopeful that he can move forward.

• 1:05:17Tucker Carlson?

  How hard is it to reform the Pentagon?

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  It's enormously difficult. I don't want to underestimate how that is because it is absolutely built on no change. It wants to perpetuate. So because all those generals I just talked about, who have been replicated, are still in control of that. So it's going to be really hard. I tell you what I would love to see. I would love to see Trump come in and do what he did, or what President Roosevelt did just before World War II, where he had the Army Chief of Staff come in and say, you know what, we're going to review everybody here, and anybody who's not pulling their weight or is not modernized, they're going to get low. They're going to get rid of them. And I think it was like hundreds of senior colonels and generals were retired from the service, and then they elevated new people who could get the job done, who were smart, etc.

• 1:06:02Tucker Carlson?

  Stalin did that with With gunfire, but.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Well, I don't want that path, but I do want the George Marshall path.

• 1:06:09Tucker Carlson?

  No, but I mean, look, what did the winning side do in both in both cases in the US and in the Soviet Union, they they got new leadership.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, because guys who aren't performing need to get out of the way.

• 1:06:20Tucker Carlson?

  No, I agree. And by the way, I'm not calling for a purge of the US military by force or anything like that, but I think it needs a peaceful purge.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  It does. I strongly so because because these guys all have an incentive to maintain the status quo and they will, I think, push against anything Hecet does if they're all left in power. So I kind of think that he does need.

• 1:06:37Tucker Carlson?

  So really, it comes down to what it always comes down to, which is how the information is presented to the public through the media, who are working, you know, every day assiduously with their allies and paymasters in the federal bureaucracy. And if you care what they think, you will achieve nothing. They will control you. And if you don't care what they think, then you have a chance at eliminating corruption and writing the country.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  Because you you look at what history is going to say, Biden did all the things you mentioned. He got along with everybody. Everybody loved him. But history will condemn him and all his leaders. Trump will face heat up at the front. But if he does these things, then history will love him if it improves our country. And that's what I hope we see.

• 1:07:18Tucker Carlson?

  Colin Davis, thank you very much. That was great.