The article discusses a recent plane crash involving a military helicopter near Reagan National Airport. The speaker, Colonel Douglas McGregor, expresses concern about the decision to conduct night training in such a busy area. He also discusses other recent military aircraft accidents, but doesn’t believe they’re connected to this incident. Lastly, he mentions the appointment of Pete Hegseth as defense head, but doesn’t provide a clear opinion on it.
The speaker believes that the military needs a complete overhaul for the 21st century, rather than just reconstructing the existing system. They argue that the focus should be on creating new forces with new capabilities and leadership. They also express skepticism about the current administration’s ability to bring about these changes. The speaker also discusses the potential of drone warfare and AI technology, but emphasizes that technology alone cannot bring about the necessary changes.
Before World War II, military officers were demoted to two stars upon retirement, but this changed over time with some officers being promoted upon retirement as a reward for their service. The author criticizes the current Department of Defense for incompetence and arrogance, using the withdrawal from Afghanistan as an example. The author also discusses the challenges faced when fighting enemies with air defenses, citing the wars with Saddam Hussein and the Serbs as examples. Lastly, the author criticizes the idea of a national “Iron Dome” missile defense system, arguing that it’s not attainable and would only serve to funnel money into the private sector.
The speaker discusses various topics, including the impracticality of blanket missile defense systems, the strategic importance of Greenland, and the ongoing conflict between Israel and Gaza. He dismisses the idea of a perfect missile defense system, citing technical limitations. He also asserts that the U.S. already has significant control over the Arctic region, making the invasion of Greenland unnecessary. Lastly, he expresses skepticism about the possibility of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, suggesting that any agreement would be unlikely to last.
The speaker discusses various political issues, including the influence of donors on political decisions, the need for dialogue with perceived enemies, and the importance of focusing on domestic issues like immigration. He criticizes the current political climate, suggesting it lacks understanding and is filled with hate. He also mentions the need for a new political platform that encourages free speech and focuses on local governance. Lastly, he expresses concern about the future of the Republic and emphasizes the need for change.
Republic is a platform that allows citizens to directly communicate with their local and state officials, like sheriffs, governors, and congressmen, about their concerns. It’s a tool for accountability, letting politicians know that their actions can affect whether they get voted for again. Links to this platform will be shared in the YouTube description and related articles.

The only way you’re going to get these kinds of profound changes is to go in there, thank everybody for their interest in national defense, and start retiring people. Now that’s different from what Trump talked about. I’m going to have a board. And these DEI proponents, they’re bad. We’re going to get them. Come on. DEI is a, is an executive order gone. Get rid of affirmative action gone. Those things are not earth shaking. Remember that most of the people you deal with in Washington, in and out of uniform, are windsocks. These are not great men of character and decision.

In other words, they see the wind blow and go, oh, wait a minute, winds changed. Okay, yes, Mr. President, we’re with you. You know, that’s the kind of thing you’re dealing with. So let’s just start retiring large numbers of these senior officers. But that’s not enough. You need a new structure. Hello, my name is Edmond demarche. I’m the editor of the Trends Journal. It’s my great Honor to introduce Colonel Douglas McGregor, the CEO of our country. OurChoice.com Colonel McGregor, thank you for joining me. Sure. We’ll start with what happened in Washington last night. Everyone is now knows that there was a plane that collided with a military helicopter.

Routine annual retraining of night flights on a standard corridor for a continuity of government mission. The military does dangerous things. It does routine things on the regular basis. Tragically, last night a mistake was made. I think the President is right. There was some, some sort of an elevation issue that we have immediately begun investigating at the DoD and Army level. Army CID is on the ground investigating top tier aviation assets inside the DOD are investigating, sir, to get to the bottom of it. What was your initial reaction when you saw the crash? What did you think? Well, I was horrified.

I commanded army aviation when I was lieutenant colonel, work closely with them as a major much of my career. And these aviators have specific tasks that they must train to during hours of darkness. So that’s not unusual. That’s fairly straightforward. The only thing that I found strange about all of this is that this was done specifically in and around Reagan National Airport. We know that’s a very, very small airport that is, you know, from the standpoint of most commercial airliners, it’s a postage stamp. You have to land on it very carefully, quickly move out of the way so somebody else could take off.

I was surprised that they would conduct that night training there. I was unaware of that. And when we conducted night training, at least when I was in command, the OH58s and the gunships would go out to an area where it was not necessarily unpopulated, but was certainly clear of any obstacles that might come into view. In other words, we wanted to avoid overhead wires, overhead electric lines, but more important, we didn’t want to encounter other aircraft while we were doing it, obviously. So I don’t know if this was standard. This has been going on for some time.

I would think someone will now say we need to re examine that. And if we’re going to do this training, we’re not going to do it in and around Reagan National Airport. Now, keep something else in mind. The, uh 60 is arguably the best aircraft that we have ever purchased. Best helicopter. It’s, it’s brilliant. It’s a wonderful platform. That’s another story. I wish that we had gone ahead and militarized it and used it as a gunship. It’s a great piece of equipment, has the finest safety record, I think, of any helicopter in the world. But you could be the best pilot and you can have the best aircraft and you can still have accidents in an area like that.

And we don’t know the details. And I’m sure Secretary Hagseth is not going to say anything more than he did. And we know that this sort of thing is dangerous. Nobody needs to be told that. But one does wonder what the hell were they doing at night in and around Reagan National Airport? How high would that error go, potentially? Is that something that maybe the pilot, of course, is all speculation, but who would, who would approve that to be so close to an airport like that? Well, the senior aviation officer in this case would probably be the aviation brigade commander.

So he would have to sign off on the training, the locations, the hours and so forth. Remember, these people are briefed before they go out. They’re always sent out with the most current information. So I think he’s. He’s the one that obviously knew where they were going and what they were doing. Now it may be that this is something they’ve done for years. I have no way of knowing. The other thing is I don’t know who his superior officer is who may have had to review the flight records. We go through these reviews in aviation periodically to see whether or not what we’re doing makes sense.

At least they did when I was in command. And they’re very confident. Our aviators are really very good. The army aviators are some of the best in the world. So again, I go back to my initial concern. What are we doing at night in and around Reagan National Airport? Given The. The density of traffic in the air, that strikes me as being odd. But if you come into command, you look at something like that, and you may ask, well, how long have we been doing this? And they may say 10 years, and we’ve never had an incident.

At that point, then the senior officer has to make a decision, the aviator in charge. All right, then we’ll continue to do it, or I’m uncomfortable. What are the alternatives? Could this be more of a larger issue than just this one collision? Because if you saw just recently there was an F20 in Alaska that crashed and the pilot had to eject, and then during the campaign in the Red Sea, there was an. I think it was an F18 Hornet that crashed. Could this be a wider issue than just one crash? Or do you suspect that this is something that was a pilot error or a control tower error? Do you think this could be a wider issue? I don’t know.

But I suspect, if anything, the control tower may have lost track or the pilots may not have known where they were, or they did, and they thought they were one place and were still instead another. But I would not connect the problems with the F22 or the F18s with this black Hawk helicopter in the army at all. You got to look at the records and the performance levels of the aviators in the Army. I stand again by this. The aviators are brilliant. This is not a routine problem by any stretch of the imagination. The V22 is another aircraft that has a terrible safety record.

I think the F22 is, you know, is a great aircraft, and I don’t know what happened with it. I thought. I thought that the aircraft that had crashed was actually an F35. I’m sorry, it was an F35. You’re right. Yes. The F22 is another brilliant aircraft, and we haven’t had very much difficulties with those. They were worked out. The F35 has not performed to expectation. Very, very expensive. It’s been hazardous. We’ve had loss of life in it. Again, that’s a different matter entirely. Now you’re over the Red Sea, and I don’t know if that incident with the F18s occurred at night or occurred during the daylight.

But keep in mind that you’re maintaining large numbers of surface combatants at sea for long periods of time. Cutting squares in the ocean, as we say, that’s tiresome. It’s exhausting. The heat is unbelievable in that part of the world. At the same time, you’re trying to stay frosty, stay ready to fight. You Are, I assume, conducting training as you go. But this goes on for months. It’s surprising, given the length of time that our ships have been over there and the burden on the seamen to keep this business going in perpetuity, that we have not had more problems.

But I wouldn’t point to the F18 as the issue or necessarily even the pilots. Again, people get tired, people are hot, they’re overwhelmed, they’re under tremendous strain. You never know what’s coming in your direction in that zone because you don’t know who’s shooting at you and when. So I tend to be much more forgiving about what happened in the red sea. The F35 business, that’s another matter. I really wish legislation, or I should say Congress, which isn’t very helpful in most cases on anything, would take a look into the F35. But we all know the F35 means a lot of money to a lot of people on the Hill.

So that, that leads me to my next. I’d like to just circle back to Pete Hegseth as the role of defense head. Is that something that surprised you that Trump would pick Hegseth? Do you have any concerns that he might not be up to the challenge based on his history or his resume? Is that something that concerns you or do you think that he’s the shot that the military may need to reconstruct itself? Well, the answer is yes. I was surprised. Along with countless others, I was even more surprised when President Trump indicated, well, I used to see Pete on Fox News and he was always interested in the military and was very energetic and very concerned.

Okay. I don’t see anything in his background or record that would qualify him to do anything in the military at all. And we have a lot of people in the National Guard, the reserves that for brief periods have been overseas and conducted patrols within the broader framework of our occupation forces. I’m not sure that qualifies you to do much. Maybe it helps you out if you want to become a policeman in a big city. So, you know, I’m, I, I’m really shocked, really surprised. Now, on the other hand, the fact that he is not part of the revolving door, in other words, another defense contractor or wannabe contractor, or worse yet, some retired narcissistic four star who thinks he’s God’s gift to mankind, that’s all good news.

So, you know, I’m not gonna criticize Hagseth until he’s been there for a while and see what he does. But, you know, you said something’s very Important, you said, is he the right man to reconstruct the military? See, I am opposed to reconstructing any of it. We need a new, brand new military establishment for the 21st century. We’ve needed that since the 90s. A lot of the problems that we’ve identified with warfare, in other words, problems, let’s not say problems as much as advances were abundantly clear in the aftermath of 1991 and Desert Storm. But instead of looking at these tremendous advances with technology and recognizing that we needed to make profound organizational change, change the way we acquire equipment and how we do it, the need for genuine experimentation, all that was thrown out.

And instead each of the services congratulated themselves with a great victory and said it all happened because of us. And the way we’re organized is just perfect. And so nothing changed. This is the sort of thing that goes on in too many great powers with too many military establishments. We don’t need to rebuild anything. We need to build a new force, new forces with new capabilities under new leadership within a new war fighting paradigm. I don’t think we’re going to see any of that happen under President Trump. Sadly, Elon Musk, he’s taken to social media and he’s been really endorsing the drone warfare, the AI using technology during wars.

And you see Elon Musk onto something with these posts which you just mentioned are one offs things, technologies, all right, technologies. Any one technology in and of itself does not change everything. That’s the problem with the focus right now on quote unquote drones. Do you know when the first we call them drones now we used to call them unmanned aerial vehicles, which I much preferred because a drone used to be something stupid that you shot at on a range. It would either move or sit still and you shot it. Unmanned aerial vehicles were first used by the Israeli Defense Force in the bekaa Valley in 1982.

I saw it and we were all electrified by what went on. These, these were designed to fly ahead of advancing Israeli forces and to inform the Israeli forces advancing of what was in front of them, where the enemy was, what the enemy was doing and identify, protect prospective targets for long range strike as well as short range artillery. In other words, at that point it was all intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, which is fine, but that’s when we saw it. What did we do in the interim since 1982? I talked to a four star on active duty in the army in the Pentagon in 2002 and I urged him, I was, I was asked to come in and talk to Him, I did, and I urged him to invest in a battery of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Only these were weaponized, what we now call kamikaze drones. You know, any, any drone that’s carrying a bomb doesn’t come back to you unless you’re very stupid. So they’re all kamikazes. Right. But the point is, I said this is a battery. It’s built by the Germans. It’s excellent. It has two plus hours laser time. It carries a 25 kilogram warhead. It can fly day or night. We should buy a battery of these and then these should be employed ahead of our advancing forces. And he said, well, you can’t bring this back and land. And I said, no.

Well, if you don’t find a target, you fly it into the ground. But chances are, if you’re advancing into Iraq and this thing flies an hour ahead of you or more, you’re very likely to find plenty of targets of opportunity. And you should have a list of things that you would be looking for. And that picture should be available to his commanders, not just the two star general, but all the way down to a company commander who needs to know what’s out there and if you can disseminate it even further, that’s better. What happened? Nothing. Now I’m relating this because this is the problem.

You’ve got to go in a great man, somebody I like very much. He became the Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, and he said, what we need is an, is an axe murderer in the halls of the Pentagon. He was right. You know, you could shoot down 40 or 50 senior officers without the loss of any efficiency or effectiveness at all. I’m not advocating that we do that, but I’m just trying to make the point. We have not done that. I see no evidence that that will happen under this regime because it’s not enough for just one man who happens to be Secretary of Defense to do something.

Forgive me if I, if I go on a little bit, but this is important stuff that you’ve raised and I’ve spent my entire life focus on it. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, a very brilliant Navy admiral who became CNO in the, in the early 70s and was responsible for a lot of good things in the Navy. Although he was very unpopular at the time, he said if you’re going to change anything based on his experience, and he said he failed. He tried to change things profoundly and he was not successful. He said, you have to have three things.

You have to have people at the top working their way down to promote this. People at the bottom who are excited and share the vision. And then externally, the House, the Senate and the President, people on the Hill that say this is important. If you can’t bring those three together, you’re probably not going to get very far. He was correct. Right now we have a Congress that is totally disinterested in any change that might disrupt the money flow. And the first thing that, well, not the first thing, but one of the first things that the Secretary of Defense is going to encounter are all these so called programs of record.

These are multi million dollar weapons programs, ship programs, aircraft programs, whatever, armored fighting vehicle programs. And their inception goes back, in some cases 30 plus years. In other words, the original requirement was formulated 20, 30 years ago. They said, well, we update the requirement. No, they don’t. Once it becomes a program of record, they say, yes, we’re going to build X number of these. Congress signs off. Then everybody works hard to keep it going forever because it’s a permanent feeding program. Everybody makes money, keeps assembly lines going, subsidizes constituents, makes donors happy. People on the Hill get rich.

Their stock goes up on and on and on. That’s a huge problem. And I’ve seen other service secretaries that have come in there, far more qualified than Hegseth at the service level, try to do something about it. And it took them almost their entire time because they didn’t have much support and they had to fight with the Hill and fight with the service bureaucracies. You know, why do you have to have six or seven four stars inside one service? Well, that’s lunacy. In 1939, 40, 41, at the beginning of World War II, we had one four star inside each service.

Gosh, you know, and I saw that Hegseth actually used some of my material where I had talked about the fact that we have 44 four stars. And he said, well, we won the whole war with just seven. No, that’s not really true. What is true is this, that until the last six months of the war, we only had seven four stars. Then in the last six months of the warS, we began promoting people to four stars and ultimately five stars. Those were honorifics. They were not tied to a structural position of any kind. Tires. He’s gone.

He’s gone. But he retains the five stars for the rest of his life. Is it a better retirement package or something? No, no, no. Those, those things came much later. In the old days, those things didn’t exist. Every general that retired, it used to be true. In The Navy, I think, as well. But before World War II, when you retired, if you were a four star, you were immediately reduced to two stars in retirement. All promotions above the rank of two stars were by definition temporary. This goes back to the Civil War and Beyond. So Douglas MacArthur, who’d been chief of Staff of the army, when he finally retired from active duty, he was reduced to two stars.

Then he was brought back on later on in 1941, 42, because of the coming war, to four stars. And then before the war ends, they gave him five stars for the reason they gave Eisenhower five stars and Arnold five stars and Nimitz five stars. These people had fought and won the wars, so they were rewarded with that. And then there were other cases of people who had been three stars. They said, well, he was a great person. We want to give him a four star on his way out. So he feels good about everything he’s done and he’s rewarded.

As for the lucrative, you know, compensation packages, those come much later. And you, you were simply retired as a two star with whatever went with a two star at the time. Those are things we got to get back to. We need to build some humility. You know, remember the people we’re talking about that were raised to four and five stars, they actually won. They did good things. They weren’t perfect, but they led victorious forces in the air, on the ground, at sea. They deserved it. What are we dealing with? Catastrophe. All you had to do was look at the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

That was a metaphor for the utter incompetence, stupidity, ignorance, and arrogance that characterizes the Department of Defense at high levels. I got to be. Frankly, it’s awful. That’s where the blame lies. People wanted to hang Lloyd Austin. Well, Lloyd Austin should have known better, but he never really knew much when he was on active duty. Anyway, that’s another story. But the truth is, Milley, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, should have stuck his nose into that and recognized these plans make no sense. What they’re doing is wrong. Then you start to look at McKenzie, who was the CENTCOM commander.

Where the hell was he? Did you. Did you see the planning for this general? Did you oversee it? Did you supervise it? I think what you find out is they just punted and kicked it to the 82nd Airborne Division Commander who was put in charge of it. And he didn’t know what he was doing. And it turns out that he’d spend most of his time in Special ops with Delta Force. Delta Force does not prepare you for high command in Fact, we don’t have anything right now. You would think it would. Because of all the training.

You would think it. You would think Delta Force, because of the training, the strategies on the strategy at any level. But below the president and Secretary of Defense, they don’t study strategy. They wouldn’t know it if they fell over. They’re very narrowly focused. They don’t even conduct an operation unless they’re reasonably confident that they can get in and get out alive. In other words, if you’re in the conventional army and they say, all right, Warden Jones, whoever you are, you’re in command. We want you to attack this objective. You don’t stand there and say, well, I’m sorry, I don’t think I have enough forces, and until I know more about the enemy, I’m not going.

Doesn’t work that way. But in Special ops, it’s very different. We spend a lot of money on them, and they have very, very sophisticated gear and exotic capabilities, but they’re also very fragile. They’re easily killed. They’re easily wiped out with a very small force. So they need stealth, they need surprise, they need protection on the way in, protection on the way out, all these things. What I’m saying is that that’s what he’s been doing. Well, that doesn’t prepare you for the kind of mission that he was asked to perform in Kabul. Now, my whole point is this whole thing should have been blown wide open on the hill.

Nobody did. Why not? Well, does anybody really care? No. And this is. This is where we are. This is the sort of thing that went on during the British Empire, and that’s essentially what we become, is a modern equivalent of the British Empire. We’re organized, trained, and equipped to suppress people who really can’t fight back. How many enemies have we defeated that had air defenses? When was the last time we had a war with an enemy that had air defenses? I don’t think. I don’t recall having that. Oh, no. We. We had to fight two groups of people that had air defenses.

First was Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein. A very, very extensive air defense network. Fortunately for us, the French who helped build it also sabotaged a large part of it so that we were able to get through it and destroy most of it before it could do much damage to us. The second time was against the Serbs during the air campaign. We never degraded the Serbian air defenses below 83%. They performed brilliantly. We did not. And they shot down lots of aircraft. But those aircraft usually had holes in their engines, and the pilot would Come up and say, engine failure.

I’m bailing out. And the plane went down in the Adriatic. Well, if you have a hole in the engine, it’s probably not going to run very well. How did the hole in the engine get there? Serbian air defense, they also shot down large numbers of cruise missiles. What I’m trying to tell you is we haven’t had the whole enchilada presented to us. In other words, an enemy that’s got all the capabilities and is in a position to equal or overmatch you. That’s what you have in Ukraine right now. The Russian military overmatches us. We’ve thrown everything we could at the Russians via the Ukrainians.

And the Ukrainians have done, in my judgment, as best as could have ever been expected. Not perfect, but good. And we failed. And there are a million dead Ukrainians as a result, about 90 to 100,000 dead Russians. Russia is stronger than it’s ever been. Its economy is better than it’s ever been. Its leadership is solid. The society is cohesive. The Ukrainian nation is dying. Did you hear about. It was just released yesterday. The White House said this is just to get off the. This time. Well, it’s about the Defense Department, but the White House said yesterday that it wants an iron dome of some type.

They didn’t get very specific with the details, but they want some kind of a missile protection shield for the US And I heard one representative, I forget his name, he said that it’s because Russia has submarines near the coasts and it’s important that we have these missile systems. So my question to you is, in your view, do you think that the. The risks that the US Faces for attack is higher than it’s been in decades, that we need to look at something like this, that. Let’s not tie the two together. I would say that the probability of a major war with someone today is higher than it’s been in my lifetime.

That’s separate and distinct from the second part. Do we need something like this? And there’s another question. Do we need something like this and is it attainable? See, it’s not attainable. This looks like another Star wars feeding program that will essentially transfer billions of dollars into the private sector to various defense companies, organizations, and their leadership. I don’t want to do that now. Why won’t this work? Well, first of all, Iron Dome was designed for basically tactical defense. You pick an area, a neighborhood, you pick an airfield or something. You implement Iron Dome. You try to stop projectiles coming in.

It has never been as Effective as the Israelis advertised. They simply don’t tell the truth. Well, then show me anybody out there that does when they’re trying to sell a weapon system, right? It may be 50% of the time, maybe more, but doubtful. Now we’re dealing with missiles hyper, hyper velocity hypersonic missiles that are beyond anything we’ve ever faced, that cannot be stopped. Now, is this entirely new? No. All of your intercontinental ballistic missiles are hypersonic. That’s why we can’t shoot any of them down. So to get back to the original point, how long have we had intercontinental ballistic missiles aimed at us? And how long have we had Russian submarines cruising off our coasts? 40 years.

And now suddenly we need a national Iron Dome. This is crap. First of all, we haven’t broken the laws of physics. Laws of physics, matter, words. The only way you’re going to get the kind of serious defense over the entire continent that would protect our civilization from all of this would be if you could finally relate light, gravity and magnetism and break the laws of fractal mathematics. Now you’re flying with Star Trek. Are we there? No, we’re not there. And we’re not going to get there anytime soon. Now something is going to happen at some point.

There will be breakthroughs, but we’re a long way from that now. I suppose we should consider the possibility that some aliens that have been talking to us supposedly all these years will turn something over to us. I don’t know. But my point is, right now, this is a stupid thing to say. We can protect point targets. We can protect Washington D.C. and the Capitol and the White House. We can protect other areas like that, but that’s about it. You cannot provide this blanket coverage, which is what Iron Dome implies, right? Well, it’s an iron dough. It’s sort of like the Star wars bubble that was drawn by a little girl with a crayon.

And it comes. The missile doesn’t get. You know, I would. I, you know, I was there when Teller gave a speech at West Point, when I was teaching up there, because I told the President this is doable. And I had a classmate who was a physicist and I’m. Obviously I’m not. I, I was so happy when I escaped all that crap, I can’t even begin to tell you. But he was a brilliant physicist. He sat next to me, he said, doug, this is a lot of nonsense. I don’t care if he’s got the Nobel Prize. It’s not doable.

It can’t be done. For the same reasons I’m telling You. He was right, Teller was wrong. But billions and billions and billions disappeared. I’d love to see an audit of where all of that went. You know, we’ve also had the problems with lasers over the years. Oh, we’re close to laser weapons. No, we aren’t. You know, the problem is that in this atmosphere, when you try to use a laser, it dissipates as far as it goes out from the cannon that fires it. This laser beam, if you want to call it that, you might get a mile’s worth, maybe a miles and a half, half worth out of it in terms of concentrated enough to do some damage, but that’s about it.

And then you have atmospherics. You know, what if it’s raining? What if it’s cloudy? What if it’s this? What is that? And any shiny surface will deflect it. Which means, if you’re flying an aircraft, has a nice shiny surface, the light goes. There are big problems with all this stuff. People don’t know. People on the Hill don’t know, and a lot of them don’t care. So they just sign off. The markup goes in, and the money flows, and everybody’s happy. This has got to stop. I wanted to. I know we’re running a little bit short on time, so I just.

While I have you, I wanted to just run to. To a few more topics. They’re very important. How important strategically, is Greenland for the United States as we move closer to that potential Arctic battle between the great powers? But if you could answer those two questions, I’d love to hear your opinion on that. Well, I’m sure the king of Denmark and his prime minister are both sitting there saying, damn, where are all these Vikings when you need them? We forget that Harold hadrude, back in 1066, launched the biggest Viking fleet in history to conquer England. Didn’t work.

But nevertheless, that was a different era. That’s gone now. They probably wish they had it. Greenland. Let’s understand something. Since 1945, since 1945, the end of the Second World War, the United States has effectively controlled all of our own Arctic coastline. In other words, in the North Pole, but also Canada and Greenland and Iceland and Norway and Great Britain. In other words, militarily, we already control it. Nothing’s going to happen up there without our involvement. So there’s no requirement to invade Greenland. We already have a base there, and I’m sure that they would allow for that base to be expanded as necessary.

No question about it. Now, are there rare earth minerals that people are talking about, probably the Norwegians just found one of the largest deposits of rare earths in the world just offshore at about 3, 4 or 500ft of water. And that’s very convenient. You could literally just take out a boat, drop down your shovel and start bringing it back, and that’s what’s going to happen. That may be the case in Greenland too, but we can make arrangements to do that that doesn’t require threats. You don’t have to bully anybody into it. And again, everybody that I just mentioned, the Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, Canadians, everybody shares our interest in protecting themselves against the possibility that they could run into trouble with the Russians.

That doesn’t mean they expect it. But, you know, it’s prudent to take measures now. The Finns build more nuclear powered. I think it’s. The Finns build more nuclear powered icebreakers than anybody else. I know the Russians have something like 90 of them. We don’t have anything like that. We’re not equipped because we haven’t taken the Arctic very seriously. We need to do that. But that doesn’t mean you got to go to war. It doesn’t mean you have to intervene militarily on the ground, in Greenland or anywhere else. By the way, I would not volunteer to go to Greenland.

Forget it. But do you think, is this just Trump bluffing here? Like, do you really think that he’s considering, do they have, like, designs for potential military action for Greenland? President Trump is a marketing genius. No one knows how to manipulate the press better than he does. So he periodically steps out there and throws red meat out to the press here, go chew on this. And I’m sure he walks off stage. He goes, you know, fools, they’ll, they’ll divert attention to this and to that and everything else. I, you know, he’s, he’s an interesting man. He’s very mercurial and, but I just think he’s good at what he does when it comes to the press and marketing things.

But no, I don’t think it’s serious. There’s also no reason to go into Panama. The Chinese are at either end of the canal conducting repairs and harbor improvements. Reason they’re doing that is because the Panamanian government hired them. The reason the Panamanian government hired them is because our firms in the United States declined to do the work. So if you really don’t want the Chinese down there on that canal in any way, shape or form, pick up the phone, call Beijing and said, we’ll buy out your contracts and then we’ll Send our contractors down there. We got to get out of this business of assuming, oh, there’s a danger there to us and so forth, nonsense.

And then I, and again, we’re on time constraints. So I just wanted to touch base with you on the state of the Israel conflict with Gaza. I saw you on Judge Napolitano show last night and you mentioned about Trump’s comments on moving Gazans to neighboring countries like Egypt and Jordan. Do you think Trump, as crazy as it sounds, do you think he has a chance of being a person who brings about a two state solution for Palestine and Israel to coexist? I cannot imagine any set of circumstances, and I know the Israeli place under which they would accept a Palestinian state that borders their country.

I just can’t imagine it from their vantage point. Anything that the Arabs set up will be an organized crime state that threatens them. So I, I have, I have, I’m not, I don’t think it’s a question of Donald Trump. The real question for Donald Trump is a little different. What he essentially asked cece in Egypt and King Abdullah in Jordan to do was to help the Israelis liquidate the Palestinian problem. Now, the Israelis have been trying to liquidate it and not haven’t managed it quite yet. They, they admit to killing, I think something 47, 50,000 people, but I think much more is the case.

Hundreds of thousands wounded and, you know, God knows how many people have lost their homes. You heard what Trump called it. He said, looks like a demolition zone. Well, that’s because the Israelis have destroyed it. Now, he’s not going to get any cooperation from any of the Muslim countries on any of this and they’ll be polite to him, but it’s absolutely impossible. They will be killed. They will be removed from power and killed if they signed on for something like that. A million Palestinian Arabs in Jordan, just as within the last 24 hours, have mobilized in Amman to demonstrate their support for the Arabs that are being killed inside Israel.

In Gaza and the west bank. We haven’t even touched on southern Lebanon, which is another demolition zone for the most part. Now, how long will this ceasefire last? Trump knows it’s temporary. He said that to everybody. It’s temporary. So what are we going to see happen? I think as the hostages are released and they get most of them or all of them back, I think there will be a resumption of destructive bombing. The campaign will continue. So the only way to stop that is for President Trump to say, you know, I love Israel and I support you, but I can’t Support what you’re doing.

And so if you’re going to do this, you’re on your own from here on out. That’s probably a very low. That probably has a very low level of likeliness to happen, right? That probably will not. If you look at the people that put him into the presidency, the people that funded him, supported him and silenced opposition on the left against him, they are all Israel’s supporters and agents of Netanyahu supporters and agents in the United States. He’s got to deal with them. How does he do that? How does he turn around and say, you know, things have changed.

I promised Miriam Adelson that I would tolerate the annexation of the west bank, the elimination of the Arabs there and their expulsion. What do you do? You come back and say, well, I guess I can’t. I don’t know how that would work for him. The other thing that he can say with absolute certainty is the complexion of the region has changed dramatically. Israel is now forever a pariah state. I see no hope for Israel in the future to survive and cooperate with and develop with its neighbors. You can’t call everybody an animal and subhuman and then expect everybody to throw in the towel and say, we really love you after all.

I don’t see that occurring. He wants, I know, to avoid a war with Iran, and I think he’s working on that. Whether or not that will happen is unclear. If it were only up to President Trump and to Iran and the leadership, I think he could get a good agreement. But, you know, in his own inner circle, in his government and in Israel and on the Hill, enormous opposition, which is why I think you may yet see a war break out between Israel and Iran. And that’s the one thing we want to avoid, because that will bring in Russia.

And I see no evidence that he has a way forward with the Russians. He’s already said stupid things that signal to them he doesn’t know what he’s talking about in Eastern Europe and in Ukraine now, they’re not going to take offense at it because it’s just stupid. They’re just going to laugh and move on. Having said that, though, the Russians want an end to this thing. We can help that happen quicker or we can simply stand aside. It’s up to us, but we can’t stop it. The Russians are the victors in this and they will ultimately determine the outcome.

Europeans, all those governments are about to be overthrown. Right wing nationalists are coming to power now. What does that mean? These people aren’t Nazis. That’s nonsense. These people, whether they’re Germans or Slovaks, Hungarians, Croatians, whatever they are, French, British, doesn’t matter. They love their countries. They want their countries to survive. They want their language, their culture, their history to survive. They want them to survive. They want to throw out the Muslims that have come into their country illegally. And that’s going to happen, and we’re going to be horrified, I’m sure. But we’re the ones that helped create this mess.

It should never have happened to begin with. What you think would happen to 100,000 Christians pushed into any number of Muslim countries? They’d be killed. So the point is, we need to understand that we’re no longer in control of events. And making a lot of the remarks and statements that he has made reflects a complete ignorance of the facts. A failure to understand Russia and its interests, a failure to recognize their legitimate interests. Because Washington is set up to the point where if you talk to that man, you’re evil, you’re a traitor. What kind of nonsense is this? We talked to Stalin.

He made Hitler look like a piker. He killed millions more long before the Second World War broke out. Nobody ever brings that up. The entire camp system was in existence long before Adolf Hitler put anything together in 1940 and 41. So we don’t touch on that because it was convenient for us to support the Soviets. Okay? When you’re in realistic, politics demands that you do business with the people that have something you want. We have an interest in both, I would say, peace and cooperation with Russia. Russia is not some sort of incurably mandacious state bent on the destruction of the United States.

Absurd. Neither is China. We live in the 21st century now. This is not the mid 20th or earlier. We got to come out of the. Come out of the darkness, get into the light. We’re living in Plato’s cave. Even if the light hurts our eyes, we got to come out and see the world as it is. I don’t think we’ve done that yet. I don’t think we want to. Just listen to the show trials, these Stalinist show trials. Tulsi Gabbard, RFK junior And now Cash Patel. I mean, you’d think these people were, you know, vicious criminals that should be jailed immediately in a high, you know, high security federal prison.

You know, they’re not treating these people like American citizens who are obviously allowed to have an opinion, allowed to think, allowed to exercise judgment. No. If you don’t agree with me, you’re a criminal. You’re evil. You’re bad. This is the nonsense. And when did it become our modus operandi? When. By not talking to our enemies or people that we disagree with. I mean, at least Trump back in, I think 2016, met with Kim Jong Un or around that time, and he took some heat for that. So maybe that’s like a hopeful sign that his administration will be more willing.

I think he mentioned that he’d be willing to speak with Putin, although nothing’s been set up yet. I don’t think so. Maybe he shows some signs of doing those things. Listen, I’ve long said I happen to like President Trump. I think he has good instincts. If he is ruled by his better instincts, things will be fine. The problem is what I explained earlier. You know, you had donors, you have people that help you reach the office of the presidency. They have expectations. You’ve. You’ve obviously made some promises. How are you going to handle that? In other words, he has to come to terms with reality that he is not a free and independent actor.

Now, in truth, if he wants to be, he can be okay. I mean, you say, thank you very much, appreciate all that you’ve done. Now go home. But I don’t see any evidence for that happening. So I think it’s a. It’s going to be a tough road ahead. We haven’t even talked about the border. And that’s the one existential threat to us that exists. That’s these open borders, uncontrolled immigration, illegal immigration, rising criminality. All of these things had to be dealt with first. That’s why I always end by trying to get people to understand there is nothing more important overseas than what is happening here in the United States.

Here is the priority. If we lose the war for the Republic, and I think the Republic’s in trouble. All I have to do is look at these hearings, listen to this poisonous rhetoric, the hate that spews out. Our Republic is in a lot of trouble. We may not make it. So where do we need to focus our attention here at home? On the Republic. Let’s protect our people. Let’s defend the Western Hemisphere. Let’s defend our continent. Let’s straighten ourselves out. Stop talking about bullying everybody that you don’t agree with. That’s not a good plan. It’s not going to work anymore.

You’re not going to tariff anybody into submission. That’s over. The world has moved on. We have to live in that new world whether we like it or not. Well, on that note, Colonel Douglas McGregor, we went a little over time, and I appreciate your patience and again, describing and explaining everything for our viewers. Well, thanks very much and give Gerald my best. I’m sorry, I didn’t see him. I hope he’s well because he’s a great man doing good things for the country. But if you’re interested in what I’m doing, really go to our country, our choice dot com.

You’ll see a lot of things there. And we have a new platform called Republic that our country, Our Choice is utilizing. It’s a free speech platform, media platform. No one is thrown off for expressing an opinion whether whether it’s popular or not. We will throw you off if you’re vulgar. We will throw you off if you threaten to overturn the United States government and otherwise. You know, Nancy Pelosi is welcome on that. Dick Durbin’s welcome to come on. And we want this. It starts at the lowest level. We’re trying to get people interested in who is running their affairs at the county, town, state levels because a lot of people don’t pay enough attention to those elections.

And then they’re shocked when they go to school boards and find out what you’ve been seeing over the last few years. You got to pay attention to those people. You got to win back the country, town by town, city by city, state by state. That’s what we want to do. But we are composed of people who have discovered it doesn’t make any difference who you vote for, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats, you get the same bad outcome. So we want to build a foundation for a different way ahead, a third choice. We’ve got a long way to go, takes a lot of money, a lot of people.

We’re getting a lot of support, a lot of good Americans out there. We’ve got new action plans that we’re setting up. So look at our country, our choice, and then go on and look at this platform called Republic. I think you’ll eventually want to join it because it gives you, the citizen, an opportunity to, to essentially go from where you’re sitting in your living room on your laptop looking at what’s going on in your county or state. And you can go straight to the sheriff with a note, with a message. You can go straight to the governor, you can go straight to your congressman, to your state senator, whoever it is, and say, wait a minute, are you aware of what’s happening? I didn’t vote for this.

What are you going to do about it? It’s all about accountability. And the quickest way to scare the hell out of politicians is to say to them, if you do these things, I will never vote for you again. We will share all those links in our description for this on, on YouTube and and the stories that we write. So everyone could check that out after this right below. Colonel McGregor, thank you so much once again. Thank you. I appreciate it. Give my way to J. Bye Bye. Okay, thanks. Thank.
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