24:11. That's where we are. Now, this is not going to happen this time. If we become embroiled in a war in the Middle East that involves Iran and other states, as I pointed out and it will, you're going to see terror acts here in the United States. You even have the director of the FBI, who I don't think very highly of, because I think he's more concerned about harming Americans than he is anything else, but he did point out you know we've got a problem. 9 million people have poured into this country. We don't know who's here. Hezbollah has a huge chapter in Mexico, so does ISIS. How many of these people are here? What could they do? What could happen to our power grid? What about our nuclear power plants? What about our military installations? What about our population? There are all sorts of terrible things that could happen. Nobody seems to be thinking about that in Washington DC. All they can think about is let's get this war with Iran started. Maybe they think it's 1991 and that we are the preeminent military power in the world. We aren't. We just demonstrated that conclusively in Ukraine. Our equipment has not performed well. Our technology has not performed well, and our advice from all of our wonderful Generals, who've delivered nothing but defeat for 20-plus years, was terrible.
WOODS, 25:35. I understand the United States has had a bellicose posture toward Russia for quite some time, but do the Europeans really believe the propaganda that the Russian bear is coming?
COLONEL, 26:02. Many do. In fact, in many cases, the Europeans are even more slavishly devoted to inhaling the lies and fiction than we are. You would think that after the Trump Administration, the riots of 2020, the elections, and so forth that Americans would question a great deal that comes out of Washington and New York City, which is the hub for all the news.
WOODS, 28:12. Is the US in fact in some way winding down its intervention or involvement in Ukraine?
MACGREGOR, 28:16. Inevitably what did we do at the end of the Vietnam. We just walk away when things don't go our way we pack up and leave for how long do people insist that we were "turning the corner." How many times did we "kill the insurgency in Iraq" before we finally left in the middle of the night? The first time we thought about leaving, we found out that everybody that we were working with in Iraq was ratting us out. In other words, so when we finally left Iraq in 2011, we didn't tell anybody. We went out in the middle of the night. That's a great victory, isn't it? But no one ever goes back and tells the truth because again these are things that happen overseas. Americans have a bad habit of dismissing what happens beyond their borders as "Okay, that's fine. It's not a big deal. We move on from here." How many strategic failures do you have to have before someone wakes up and says enough and every year we have a bigger defense budget and the bigger budget for the intelligence organizations and special ops. You're spending over a trillion dollars a year now, and roughly a trillion is what we pay to service the national sovereign debt. I mean Good Lord! This is insane. And everybody says, "That's not a problem. We'll print more money." Well, you can print until you can't, and we're rapidly approaching that point as I think people will find out the hard way this spring.
WOODS, 30:00. The America First alleges that threats to the US are overblown, and the interventions are unjustified. But they change their tune when it comes to China. They say, "China is the real threat." In what sense is China a threat to the US or otherwise?
MACGREGOR, 30:24. If you look at China today which is in a very serious economic crisis. Its shadow banking system has finally been exposed, the corruption has engulfed everyone in China. That's why Xi spends all of his time imprisoning them. That's why he's imprisoning all sorts of so-called corporate leaders. China is a mess. A lot of the people that are now pouring into our country are single young men from China, while large numbers of them were wanted by the authorities inside China for embezzling, stealing, and cheating on a whole range of topics. China has always had the problem of being too large, too big to govern. They can't barely manage themselves. Historically, the Chinese are not a great military power. Military power and the military profession are not really held in high esteem. What they want is a force that can protect them. They think they deserve that, but as far as invading somebody else's country, no. They tried that against the Vietnamese after the Vietnam War, and what happened to them? The Vietnamese crushed them. The Japanese, the Mongols, the Tartars, all of these people historically, and Europeans have crushed China mercilessly. There's no threat from China. If we leave China alone, there are enough other actors in the region that the Chinese are not going to put themselves at risk.
MACGREGOR, 32:10. Japan is an enormously powerful state that never gets any attention in the United States. The Japanese armed forces are superb. I would argue better than our own. So the bottom line is, no, there is no threat from China. However, if you are in Asia and you ask the Japanese, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the people that border China what the threat from China is, they'll say it's Chinese. If you let the Chinese into your country, they come in they colonize you. They take over your business sector. And then they bring in women, and they peddle their women to the locals, and suddenly, within a generation, you're no longer Vietnamese, Japanese, or Korean; you're just Chinese. In other words, they fear the population overwhelming them in the region. So you look at the border between North Korea and China, the Chinese want to keep the North Koreans out, but the North Koreans don't want anything to do with the Chinese. They're afraid that if the Chinese into their country again as they did during the Korean War they'll never leave they'll have millions of Chinese and they will cease to exist. The Manchus were a Mongol Turkic people. In Manchuria, they ceased to exist because they had been Sinofied. This is not a new phenomenon. This is how China has expanded. You move in and your population overwhelms the indigenous people, destroys ethnicity, destroys their culture, their identity. That's the danger that people in Asia fear. They Don't Fear the economic danger they want to be part of the Chinese market they want to do business with them they certainly don't fear the Chinese military.
WOODS, 35:50. Asked David Stockman how he felt about the Cold War. At 16 over the summer, Woods read Nixon's book, No More Vietnam, 1985. And it convinced him that Vietnam was necessary and just. He was an interventionist for several years. Where did you stand during the Cold War?
MACGREGOR, 36:39. He went to VMI, Virginia Military Institute, in 1971. His mom believed that they should support the troops in Vietnam. His maternal grandfather, who had been in the First World War and hated Woodrow Wilson, concluded early on that that war had been a total mistake. He'd turn to her and say repeatedly "Well, if you want to support the troops, get them the hell out of Vietnam and bring them home. He was right; we didn't need to fight in Vietnam. And you'll listen to people who will argue until their death, "Oh, if we hadn't done that, all of Southeast Asia would have be communist." Doubtful. I don't think so. There was this assumption about communism that it was monolithic. It never was. Stalin's famous comment on the Chinese after spending time with Mao is, "These people are red onions: they're red on the outside, and white on the inside. In other words, they act like communists, but they're really a bunch of capitalists. Of course, he was right. The Cold War is something that was very different because it began in a very different environment. Everybody runs around and talks about our great victory in the Second World War, but truthfully, by the 1950s, people realized we had not won the Second World War. We advanced to the middle of Europe and stopped. And Europe was divided. Half of Europe and all of Asia had been conquered by Soviet communism, and so people said "My God! What did we do? You know you can go back and read [George] Kennan and he talks about the fact that we moved so slowly out of France and into Germany and we took horrendous casualties while we were moving by the way so it didn't save us in terms of American lives very much. And by the time that we arrived, the game had been called. The Soviets occupied Berlin, Prague, Vienna, and Warsaw. Remember Churchill and FDR promised the Poles high in the sky you will be a free and independent democratic state; that's why we're fighting this war. Didn't work. Was a complete failure. So the aftermath of World War II was a little different from what everybody thinks today. There were lots of people that said "Gee, you know this hadn't worked out well. It could have been a lot different; could have been handled better. The aftermath of World War I was much more clear-cut because people all knew that we shouldn't have gotten into the war. We made a mess out of Europe. I urge people to do this. Warren Harding's inaugural speech [1921] is worth reading because he makes the argument for no more alliances, no more commitments to anyone, that America's future should not be hostage to another country's interest. We have no interest in becoming part of other people's Wars, well, until 1929 and the Depression struck. That was the attitude. The Depression changed everything. It suddenly propelled FDR into power, who was by standards today and neocon trying desperately to embroil us into war. He worked tirelessly through the 30s to get us into war against the Germans and refused to see the danger presented by Stalin. We could go on and on and on.
MACGREGOR, 40:13. This is 2023. Have we had enough?. How many American lives have been sacrificed how much treasure has been wasted we were talking about the thousands of hospitals that could have been built with half of the 14 trillion lost on the last 20-plus years on these interventions what kinds of things could we have done for our own country in our own population? People need to start asking those questions and they need to understand that we have one existential threat today that emanates from the southern border. Someone who says it's not an invasion has lost their minds. We are being invaded and our own government is helping it. 9 million have come in since Biden became president, but there are probably another 20 million illegals already in the country from the 1990s and during the. Bush and Obama Administrations. This is a catastrophe for us. We can't absorb these people. And thanks to President Obama who announced that there was no requirement for anyone to assimilate in order to be an American citizen, how many people are running around with American citizenship are just here because it's a ticket of admission to the great consumption machine. What's happened to our national identity, our culture? Well, that's being erased. Finally, some people are standing up. They're standing up down in Texas, thanks to Governor Abbott. Maybe this is a turning point. Maybe finally the American people . . . . That's the real danger, and, again too many people inside this country with uncertain origin and uncertain interests. We don't know what that means for the future, but it doesn't mean much good. Somebody said to me the other day, "Well, you must be a racist. You don't like Mexicans." I said "No, of course not. That's got nothing to do with it." He said, "Well then what do you think we should take from Mexico? I said I'll be happy to bring in every Mexican who speaks English and has a degree in Applied Mathematics engineering or science this guy says well that's not going to happen I said well that's what we should demand now we can be selective we don't have to take everyone.
WOODS, 42:32. Why doesn't that guy ask the Mexican Government why it's so stingy about allowing immigration. There's almost like a double standard. I want to make myself two people everybody hates. You mentioned Warren Harding. He also has a fantastic speech when [1920] he accepted the Republican nomination for president. It's interesting these presidential speeches that we're all supposed to read in school are all the terrible Messianic ones that we should ignore. But Warren Harding actually gave great speeches
