crashingthunder

Nikola Tesla ... LOST Interview ::: Visualization is the SECRET :.:.:.369

37 million tons of debris | Gaza destruction reaches horrific proportions

Originally released May 14, 2023 at DauntlessDialogue.com What is the personal cost of fame? What is the relationship between success and addiction? In ROCK BOTTOM, Adam Riva looks at the rise and fall of Bam Margera, how his life resembles the decline of contemporary culture, and the lessons we can learn from him and his family. Rather than condemning him, ROCK BOTTOM tells the story of a boy raised without discipline and exploited by the social engineers to steer an entire generation into hedonism. Like this film? There are plenty more just like it at DauntlessDialogue.com https://truthsocial.com/@dauntlessdialogue https://t.me/dauntlessdialogue https://www.bitchute.com/channel/HI5c0vtUaY0A/ https://twitter.com/dauntlessdialog https://www.instagram.com/dauntless_dialogue/ https://gab.com/DauntlessDialogue https://ugetube.com/@DauntlessDialogue

THE FAME TRAP (Dauntless Dialogue Mirror) link to Dauntless Dialogue rumble channel >> https://rumble.com/user/DauntlessDialogue link to original video here >> https://rumble.com/v4s0c25-the-fame-trap.html https://dauntlessdialogue.com/

Donald J. Trump Re-Truthed This last night 4.28.2024- 17.35.25

Owen Shroyer - Dares To Wave American Flag at Israel-Palestine Protest

The social media app Telegram has over 900 million users around the world. Its founder Pavel Durov sat down with us at his offices in Dubai for his first on-camera interview in almost a decade. READ THE TRANSCRIPT Tucker [00:00:00] Telegram is one of the fastest growing and biggest social messaging apps text apps in the world popular all around the world, including in the United States. But almost nothing or very little seems to be known about the company. It's headquartered in Dubai, where we are now. It is run and owned in. The software is design, written by Pavel Durov, who began it some years ago, who almost never does interviews. It turns out he's in a very interesting person, an extremely interesting person. We learned that the other day we were talking to him, and he has agreed to sit down and tell us about himself and his company, and we thought it'd be definitely worth hearing. And with that, thank you for joining us. Pavel Durov [00:00:40] Well, thank you for having me. Tucker [00:00:42] So, I confess, I used telegram. I didn't know anything about you or the company, and I was just kind of amazed by your story. And if you wouldn't mind just recreating it a little bit, for our audience. Where are you from? How do you start this and why? Pavel Durov [00:00:57] That will be a long story. That's okay. I was born in 1984, in the Soviet Union. So it was a funny year to be born in. And, back then, I could witness, you know, the deficiencies of the centralized system we had in the Soviet Union. When I was four years old, my family moved to Italy, where I could compare what I saw in Turin, Italy, with, what I experienced in the Soviet Union. And I thought the capitalist system, the free market system is definitely better, at least for me. And I went to school in Italy. I, became sort of a part of the, European as a result. But then when the Soviet Union collapsed, we decided to move back to Russia. In Italy, though, we, me and my brother, we had a lot of fun time. He was, shown live on Italian TV as a young prodigy kid who could solve cubic equations in real time, being just, you know, 30 years old. And that was considered to be impossible back then in Italy. Tucker [00:02:09] I don't know what a cubic equation is. So, yeah, it was difficult. Pavel Durov [00:02:13] Definitely. And, you know, when I first went to school in Italy, I didn't know how to speak Italian. I didn't know a single Italian word. And a lot of teachers said this guy, well, this kid will not going to be successful in our school by the end of the first year was second best by the end of this, next year I was the best student in our class. So it also showed me that, well, you could excel, you could compete. I like that competitive environment. And then the when we got back to Russia, it was a little bit chaotic. The only reason we got back is my father got, an offer to run. One of the departments in the Saint Petersburg State University is one of the, famous scholars and writers, dealing with ancient Roman literature. And, that experience was very different. And, I still enjoyed it because in Russia in the 90s, you had this experimental schools where, you were. Taught everything like we had six foreign languages. We had math, like very special. Tucker [00:03:21] Six foreign languages at once. Pavel Durov [00:03:22] Six foreign languages. In parallel. You would have math similar that you would have in specialized math schools. And like chemistry at the same level you would have at schools specialized in chemistry and biology. So that was really intense. My brother, he became world champion in maths in International Olympiads, in maths and programing many times in a row. Absolute best myself. I was just the best student in my school. Also did some victories in, local competitions in several areas, but we both were very passionate about coding and, designing stuff. And because we brought this IBM, PC computer from Italy back in the early 90s, we were one of the few families in Russia who could actually, teach ourselves how to program. And, we started to do that. I was, in the university. I was building websites for my fellow students. And, as a result, you know, I started, a company that became what they called the Facebook of Russia. We don't like to name it that way because, we actually managed to do a lot of things before Facebook. And that defined how the social media, industry developed in the years to come. The company's name was VK. I started it when I was 21 years old. I just graduated university, and, it eventually became the largest social network, the most popular social network in Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, Kazakhstan, and a bunch of other post-Soviet countries. That was a significant effort on my side because I, at a certain point, was the sole employee of the company. I would write the code myself. I would do the design myself. I would, manage the servers myself. It was quite intense. I even, responded to customer support requests, rarely slept. But that was, a fun time when I was 21, 22 years old. And then the company grew, like I said, to somewhere about 100 million active users, which was a lot back that it's, was, I think 2000, 12 or 2011 when we faced this, the first issues in, Russia. Because, you see, I was still a big believer in this values of free market freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. So when the Russian opposition started to use VK to organize large protests in Russia, where like almost half a million people would go and protest on the main square or some of the main squares of the city, we were requested to ban this communities on VK by the government and I refused. Tucker [00:06:37] So the government asked you to shut down communications between their opponents? Pavel Durov [00:06:43] Well, VK is a social networking platform, so they have this large public communities that anybody can join. Anybody can read what people are discussing or what the administrators are posting. They can comment, they can share. So it was a tool for this protesters to organize themselves. They were led by Navalny. It's quite a famous person now. And back then it wasn't about us, you know, siding with one side with one part of the, political, fight or the other. It was us defending the freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly, which we believed was the right thing. But that didn't go too well with with the government. And, they were not too happy about that, I would say. And, in a few years from then, in 2013, we had a similar situation where, you know, you had this protests in Ukraine where people, again, would use VK to organize themselves and go to the main square of the city and, show their disagreement with the government. Tucker [00:07:54] Yes. Pavel Durov [00:07:55] And we received a request demand from the Russian side saying, you have to give us the private data of the organizers of this protest. And our response was, wait, wait a minute. This is a different country. Well, we won't betray you. Corinthian users because you ask us to do that. We decided to refuse. And, that didn't go too well with the Russian government as well. So at the end of that year, I had to make a. Difficult decision because I was offered basically a choice between two suboptimal, options, one of which was, I would start complying to whatever the leaders of the country told me to do. The other one was, I could. So my stake in the company retire, resign as the CEO and leave the country. I chose the latter. Tucker [00:09:00] That's a it's a if I can ask you to pause. It's a little strange because I have heard people say that telegram is a part of the Russian government, and you're describing the opposite. You're saying you had to leave the country because you wouldn't bow to their demands. Pavel Durov [00:09:15] Well, exactly like you say. And people who have very limited knowledge of where telegram came from, they would make these claims. They could be encouraged by our competitors who see it as an easy way to discredit us because, you know, telegram was spreading like forest fire. 2.5 million users sign up every day, and we're sort of a threat. So I'm not surprised there's this perception because our competitors, they spent tens of billions on marketing, and they're known for using PR firms to also engage in campaigns like that. So how would. Tucker [00:09:54] You how much do you spend on marketing? Pavel Durov [00:09:56] Zero. Tucker [00:09:57] $0 in dollars? Pavel Durov [00:09:59] $0. We've never spent anything on acquiring users for marketing purposes. We never promoted telegram. You know, on other social platforms in any way. This is very different from. Other apps. You could see them being promoted here or there. Pilgrim is different. All of our growth is purely organic. And, we got to almost 900 million users, without, having to spend anything on ads to promote Tillable. Tucker [00:10:37] Amazing. I'm sorry to interrupt you. No, no, it's just it's just interesting because I have heard people say that, but it sounds like the opposite of the truth. So you decided to sell the company, resign as CEO and leave your country? Pavel Durov [00:10:50] Yes, that's what I did. It was a bit painful because obviously my first company was my baby. I created myself. There was a lot of creativity, time and effort invested in that platform. But at the same time, you know, I understood that I would rather be free. I would want to take orders from anyone. And, I left behind probably a comfortable life. But for me, it was never about, you know, becoming rich. For me, everything in my life was about becoming free. Yes. And to the extent it is possible, my mission in life was to allow other people to also become free, in a sense, and using the platforms that we created where I created, my hope was that they could express their freedom. This is the mission of telegram. And it was also, in part, the mission of my previous company, VK. Tucker [00:11:53] So you start telegram after you leave Russia. Correct? Pavel Durov [00:11:57] Yeah. So the idea for telegram came when we were still based in Russia, because at some point we had this, very stressful situation where armed policemen would come to my house, try to break in because I refused to take down this, opposition groups that I mentioned earlier. And I realized there is no secure means of communication. I realized through, I want to tell my brother what's going on, to coordinate whatever we want to do. And the every tool to communicate I could use was not really secure or not encrypted. It was not safe to use them. So I thought it could be a good idea to actually come up with, do a decently encrypted messaging app. And my brother, being the genius that he is, he was able to create this encryption standard that we're using up until this day with minor changes. But the idea came. Tucker [00:13:02] Brother wrote the encryption. Pavel Durov [00:13:03] Yes. Well, my brother like two pages and maths. Super smart. He could. You know, he's an expert in cryptography. He designed, the basic principles of the Telegram's encryption. Was more on the user interface side. The way how the app works, the features, etc.. He was responsible for it for the encryption side. Tucker [00:13:30] So where did you go when you left Russia? Pavel Durov [00:13:33] We tried several places. We first went to Berlin. We tried to set up a company in Berlin. We then tried London, Singapore, San Francisco, you name it. We've been everywhere. Tucker [00:13:46] And why didn't you stay in any of those places? Pavel Durov [00:13:50] Oh, because the bureaucratic hurdles were just too difficult to overcome. Now, I was bringing the best in class programmers in the world to this places, and I was trying to hire them. From a local company. And the response I got in places like Germany, for example, is that, no, no, no, you can't hire people from outside of the European Union because you should first run some newspaper ad in a local, magazine or whatever. And then for six months, nobody responds from the engineers that are available inside the European Union and Germany. Then you're allowed to hire outsiders. And I thought it was a crazy idea, because. Tucker [00:14:39] Why didn't you just say they were illiterate refugees? Pavel Durov [00:14:43] Well, because we didn't consider ourselves risky. We were, you know, very successful people. We could have. Gone anywhere. Tucker [00:14:51] Know, but if you told them you were illiterate refugees, they would let you stay. Yeah. So you wait. So you go from Germany to Singapore to London to San Francisco. What happened in San Francisco. Pavel Durov [00:15:05] On San Francisco? We. Really thought that would be the place for us to be in, because all the tech companies are, of course, here or around San Francisco. And, there are two things that happened that, made us, think twice. Well, one thing is pretty obvious. I was in San Francisco. I got attacked on the street after visiting, I think it was Jack Dorsey, in Twitter in the Twitter's office. And, I was walking back at 8 p.m., to my hotel, and I got attacked in the street. This is the only country where I got attacked on the street. What happened is just three big guys tried to grab my phone from my hands. I was tweeting, about the fact that I just met, the founder of Twitter. That seemed right. Like a right idea for me back then, to do. And, I get attacked. I didn't want to let them have my phone. They probably didn't expect, resistance. So I smashed my phone back. There was a short fight with the guys. There was a little bit of blood involved, but I managed to run away, and decided I should probably. Tucker [00:16:25] They probably don't mug a lot of Russians. They might have been surprised. Pavel Durov [00:16:29] Well, there were much taller than me, I must admit. And there are three of them. But, I think I put up a good fight. Tucker [00:16:36] Were you surprised that this happened in San Francisco? Completely. Yeah. Pavel Durov [00:16:40] It was. It was a shock to me because I traveled a lot. There was the first, place I got attacked, and I thought, all right, maybe we shouldn't, look at San Francisco. Maybe there are other places in America where. Tucker [00:16:56] Where you don't get attacked. Pavel Durov [00:16:57] Yeah, exactly. But, you know, there's this second part, which was probably more alarming there in the US. We get too much attention from, you know, the the FBI, the security agencies, wherever we came to the US. So to give you an example, last time I was in the US, I brought, an engineer that is working for telegram, and there was an attempt to secretly hire my engineer behind my back by cyber security officers or agents, where they. Tucker [00:17:34] I called the US government to hire your engineer. Pavel Durov [00:17:37] That's my understanding. That's what he told me. Tucker [00:17:39] To write code for them or to break into telegram. Pavel Durov [00:17:43] They were curious to learn which open source libraries are integrated to the telegram app. You know, on the client side. And they were trying to persuade him to use certain open source tools that he would then integrate into the telegram code that, in my understanding, would serve as backdoors. Tucker [00:18:06] Would allow the US government to spy on people who use telegram. Pavel Durov [00:18:10] The US government, or maybe any other government, because a backdoor is a backdoor regardless of who is using it. That's right. Tucker [00:18:18] And you're that's a little surprising to hear. Maybe it's not surprising. It's offensive. You're confident that happened? Pavel Durov [00:18:26] Yes. There is no reason for my engineer to make up the stories. Also, because I personally experienced similar pressure in the U.S whenever I would go to the U.S, I would have, two FBI agents greeting me at the airport asking questions. One time I was having my breakfast at 9 a.m. and the FBI showed up at my house that I was renting. And, that was quite surprising. And I thought, you know, we're getting too much attention here. It's probably not the best environment to run. Tucker [00:19:06] Why would they? Have you committed a crime? Pavel Durov [00:19:08] No. They were interested to learn more about telegram. They knew I, you know, left Russia. They knew what we were doing, but they wanted details. And my understanding is that they wanted to establish a relationship. So could you in a ways, control telegram better? I'm. I understand they were doing their job. It's just that for us, running a privacy focused social media platform, that probably wasn't the best environment to be in. We want to be focused on what we do, not on the government relations of that sort. Tucker [00:19:47] The government relations. So then you came to UAE, to Dubai? Pavel Durov [00:19:53] Yes. Seven years ago we, moved here. We first wanted just to try it, for half a year, see if it works out. And it turned out to be a great place. We never looked. Back, and we never wanted to change the UI for any other place after that. Tucker [00:20:13] Why? Pavel Durov [00:20:15] Well, for a number of reasons. First, the ease of doing business here is, so high. For example, you can hire people from anywhere in the world as long as you're paying them a good salary. The residence permits granted automatically. It's very different if you try to do that in Europe. In some other countries, it's very different from them. Second, it's very tax efficient. Third, the infrastructure is great. You get a lot for, the minimum amount of taxes you're paying. The other the, the roads, the airports, the hotels, everything. I think you witnessed it yourself. Yes. But I think more importantly is that it's a neutral place. It's a neutral country. It's a small country that wants to be friends with friends with everybody. It's not aligned geopolitically with, any of the big, superpowers. And I think it's, the best place for a neutral platform like ours to be in. If we want to make sure we can defend our users privacy and freedom of speech. Tucker [00:21:20] So in the time that you've been here, there have been a number of wars and threats of war. Precursors to war. Have you had any pressure from the government here? Honestly, any pressure from the government here, to reveal a back door into telegram or to ban anyone or to make any changes to your business? Zero. Pavel Durov [00:21:42] That's the best part. For all the seven years we've been here, there's been zero pressure coming from the UAE towards Telenor. They've been very supportive, very helpful and it's a big contrast from whatever we've experienced before. Tucker [00:21:59] What about what you've experienced since you moved here in those seven years? Have you come under pressure from other governments under whose jurisdiction you don't follow but to to accommodate their demands? Pavel Durov [00:22:11] Well. Of course. Well, telegram is a is a large platform. We are popular in many, many countries. And. We've we've, been, receiving a lot of requests. Demands? Some of them were legitimate. Legitimate? It's, there was a group of people was promoting violence. There was some terrorist activity that was, you know, spreading violence in some parts of the world publicly, posting, things that, any decent human being would disallow or wouldn't want to be posted would help them, or in some other cases where we thought who would be crossing the line? It wouldn't be, you know, we'd align with our values of freedom of speech and, protecting people's private correspondence. We would ignore. Tucker [00:23:07] Those. Can you give us an example of a request that you thought crossed into censorship and and spying, violating people's privacy? Well. Pavel Durov [00:23:17] This is a, I would say, very funny story related to your home country. After the events of January the 6th, we received a letter from, I believe, Congressman. Yeah, of the Democratic side. And, they requested that we would share all the data we had in relation to what they called this uprising. And we checked it with our lawyers, and they said, you better ignore it. But the letter seemed very serious. And, the letter said, you know, if you are fail to comply with this request, you will be in violation with, you know, the US Constitution or something. Tucker [00:24:08] So they wanted data on people who voted for the other guy in the election. Pavel Durov [00:24:12] But they wanted the data of people who were demonstrating in Washington or wherever you doing? They're probably right there. I'm not an expert in these politics. Yeah. What, what's funny about that is two years. Exactly two weeks after that, we got another letter, a new letter from the Republican side of, the Congress. And there we read that if we give out any data according to the previous request, we would be in violation of the US Constitution. So we got two letters that said, whatever we do, we be violating the US Constitution in a way. That was my understanding of this letter's. Tucker [00:25:07] From the same legislative body, both from the US Congress. Yes. So how do you respond to that? Pavel Durov [00:25:13] Well. The same way we respond to most such requests, we decided to ignore them because it's such a complicated matter related to internal politics in the US. We don't want to take any. Tucker [00:25:28] If you would. I believe this strongly. If you ignore your problems, most of them do go away. Pavel Durov [00:25:33] That's very true. Tucker [00:25:34] It is. It is very. No, it says it, but it's true. Oh. That's amazing. Have you ever had demands that you can't ignore? Pavel Durov [00:25:43] Well. It depends. Right. Tucker [00:25:45] Unreasonable demands. Pavel Durov [00:25:46] So I would say the largest pressure towards telegram is not coming from governments. It's coming from Apple and Google. So when it comes to freedom of speech, those two platforms, they could basically censor whatever is you can read access on your smartphone. Tucker [00:26:10] So women do run the risk of being thrown out of their stores. Pavel Durov [00:26:14] Exactly. That's what they make very clear that if we fail to comply with their guidelines. So they call it, telegram could be removed from the stores. Tucker [00:26:26] Well, that would be not a small thing for you, right? Pavel Durov [00:26:29] Well, it's not won't be a small thing for us, because obviously, a big chunk of the world's population will lose access to a valuable tool that they're using every day. But, you know, it will not also be a small thing for them. I mean, there should I believe the there must be find some compromise in such cases. But Apple and Google are not very compromising when it comes to that guideline. If they believe some content is against the rules, they will see to it that all the apps that are distributed to their stores comply with this rules. Tucker [00:27:07] Or any of those rules, or do you interpret any of those rules? Do you believe any of them to be political? In nature and. Pavel Durov [00:27:17] Some of them. But it's not the rules. It's the application of the rules. The rules themselves. They're pretty general, right? So. There must be no violence, discrimination, public, publicly available. I don't know, child abuse materials. It's hard to disagree with that. Tucker [00:27:39] Yes. Pavel Durov [00:27:40] But then when they start to apply those rules, sometimes we are not. Agreeing with, with their interpretations. And we try to, you know, get back to Apple or Google wherever it is and say, look, we think you got it wrong. We think, actually, this is a legitimate way of people expressing their opinions. And sometimes they do agree to their credit, sometimes they disagree. And we still have to take some content down, at least in the version of telegram that is distributed through their platforms. Tucker [00:28:18] So there are a bunch of a number of conflicts going on around the world right now, and that may accelerate. Yeah. So would you expect that the number of demands and the intensity of those demands, the persistence of those demands, would increase as the wars become more intense. Pavel Durov [00:28:37] Let's see. I'm really hopeful that the past is is behind us. I want to be optimistic. I think now we reached a point where, politicians and societies know what to expect from social media platforms and where there, you know, the red lines are. Yes. We also learned much more about, the requirements coming from both them and Google. Apple. So and our users get better educated as well as what what is allowed and was not allowed. So I don't necessarily believe that things are going to get worse. Tucker [00:29:21] It does seem like the red line for for governments is allowing organized opposition to the rule. That's what you saw in Russia with Navalny and the Ukraine crisis in 2014. That's what you saw from that Democratic member of Congress after January 6th, 2020. Pavel Durov [00:29:39] There's a pattern here. Telegram has been used by protesters in places like Hong Kong. Yes, Belarus, Kazakhstan, even in near Barcelona. Back in the day. Yes. So it's it's it's been a tool for the opposition to a large extent. But it doesn't really matter whether it's opposition or the ruling party that is using telegram for us. We apply the rules equally to all sides. We don't, become prejudiced in this way. It's not that we are rooting for their position where we're rooting for the ruling party. It's not that we don't care, but we think it's important to, have this platform that is neutral to all voices because we believe that, the competition of different ideas can result in the progress and the better world for everyone. Tucker [00:30:35] That's, in stark contrast to, say, Facebook, which has said in public, you know, we tip the scale in favor of this or that movement in this or that country, or far from the West and far from Western media attention. But they've said that. What do you think of that? Tech companies choosing governments. Pavel Durov [00:30:55] Well, I think that's one of the reasons why we ended up here in the UAE of all places. Right. So you you don't want to be geopolitically aligned. You don't want to select the winners in any of this, political fights. And that's why you have to be in a neutral place. But I think Facebook in particular has, a lot of, reasons apart from being based in the US for doing what they're doing. I think every app and platform plays its own role. You know, we believe that humanity does need a neutral platform like telegram, that will be respectful to people's privacy and freedoms. Tucker [00:31:42] Maybe from a political perspective, it seems like the most provocative thing telegram does is offer something called channels, which seem sort of ready made for organizing groups of people. Can you explain to viewers aren't familiar with, what a telegram channel is? Pavel Durov [00:31:59] Yeah. So telegram channel is a one to many broadcast tool that allows people to, quickly disseminate any message to millions of people. So there's a channel, people subscribe to it. It's a one way communication, meaning a channel can be used by, say, a president or a head of state. And, everybody else will not be able to send a message to the president, but the president will be able to send a message to all of the people who subscribe to his channel. Tucker [00:32:35] Yes. Pavel Durov [00:32:35] Or her channel. So the point here is, channels are so easy to use, and they're so deeply integrated in the messaging user interface that they became extremely popular. Tucker [00:32:49] So you receive it like a text. Pavel Durov [00:32:51] Exactly. So it's it's a very familiar form for a lot of people. And since we launch, watch channels eight years ago, I believe, a few other apps, popular apps fold in our footsteps and copy that feature as well, and not nearly as advanced as it was we have, but it shows that it's, really, high quality and demanded feature that the world needs. Tucker [00:33:20] I think it's and you don't have to answer any these questions if you don't want, if it's too personal, but, you're the owner. You you own it. And it's very unusual. In fact, I've never seen it. To have a large business like this owned by one person. Why didn't you take. And you could have cash in and private equity money along the way, but you didn't. Why didn't you? Pavel Durov [00:33:42] Well, that's true as of now, token was 100% owned by myself. Which is, like I said, quite, unusual. Tucker [00:33:49] I've never heard of that before. Pavel Durov [00:33:51] The the reason I tried to, you know. Yeah. Stay away from venture capital money, too, in the early stages of our development is because we wanted to be independent. We knew that our mission and our goals are not necessarily consistent with the goals of, funds that could be investing into us. And also, for me, it was never about money. Right. So I have a few hundred million dollars in my bank account or in Bitcoin since ten years ago. And, I don't do anything with it. I don't own any, like real estate jets, or yachts. I don't think those, this lifestyle is for me. I like to focus on what we are doing. Tucker [00:34:42] With telegram. You don't own anything. Like big assets. Pavel Durov [00:34:47] You don't know big assets. Tucker [00:34:49] An island in Hawaii or. No, no. Pavel Durov [00:34:51] No. No land, no real estate. Nothing. Why? Because for me, my number one priority in life is my freedom. And once you start buying things first, it will tie you down to a physical location. In my view, it's my personal view. I don't have nothing against people who are buying real estate, but in my personal view, it will be like this for me. And the second reason is I like to stay focused on what we do, I telegram. So I know that if I buy a house and buy a jet, something like that, I would be spending time trying to make it nice. Tucker [00:35:32] And yeah. Pavel Durov [00:35:33] This will require a lot of time and effort. Tucker [00:35:35] Would you go with leather seats or velvet seats? Pavel Durov [00:35:38] Exactly. Tucker [00:35:39] And you're not even gonna choose? Pavel Durov [00:35:41] Yes. For me, I would rather make decisions that would influence how people communicate, rather than choosing the color of seats in the house that only I am. My relatives from, probably a bunch of my friends will see. Tucker [00:35:58] Interesting and you didn't take because I just have to say the third time. Haven't seen this before. You obviously were famous as a young man, as a company builder and entrepreneur, and so you could have really taken a lot of money and you didn't because you didn't want to be controlled. Pavel Durov [00:36:17] I just didn't see any reason to do that. You know, I had enough money to get by. Well, to be completely fair, telegram did takes outside money. We issued bonds three years ago, so we raised debt. And that was. And before that, we had a cryptocurrency project that also raised some funds. So there were instances where we raised outside, funding. But, when it comes to company equity. Tucker [00:36:48] You didn't give up ownership. Pavel Durov [00:36:49] We didn't give anyone ownership or voting control or anything like that, because we also believe in efficiency. I think that having myself as the sole owner, director and product manager for this, extensive period of time in the company, its development allowed us to move faster. Tucker [00:37:09] How could you be the only product manager? Are you still the only product manager in the company? Pavel Durov [00:37:15] Exactly. I still come up with all most of the features. I still work directly with every engineer, every designer who is implementing these features. You know, I'm running this company because I enjoy it. I'm the only product manager because I think this is the way I can contribute. Tucker [00:37:37] How big is your HR department? Pavel Durov [00:37:39] Zero. Well, you could say it's me. And that's because the way we hire. Tucker [00:37:44] Engineer, you need a big HR department. You don't think you don't suffer with that one? Pavel Durov [00:37:50] We in a way decentralize that. We started a platform where we host contests for engineers. It's actually contest.com. We have this separate, platform for that. And we select the best of the best engineers as a result of the competitions that we organize. We hold them every month or two months. So after a series of this competitions, we select the best of the best of the best. And they then maybe could join our team, which is just about 30 engineers. So it's it's really compact. The team super efficient. It's like a Navy Seal team. And this is how we operate. We don't need a HR department to find, super talented engineers. Tucker [00:38:44] Why does everyone do this? I mean, I look at some of these tech companies or Elon Musk famously when he showed up at Twitter. I mean, there are people doing things that he didn't even know they were doing and they didn't know what they were doing. They were like there was a World Peace department and a foosball department. And why doesn't everybody run their business like you? Pavel Durov [00:39:04] Well, it's an interesting question. I think it all boils down to the question of independence, in a way. I asked this question to the predecessor of Elon. Tucker [00:39:15] Jack Dorsey. Pavel Durov [00:39:16] Jack and and his predecessor as well. And, would you say, Dick Costa whatever is his name? And, this Jack, he told me that, if I told him, look, you can run this company with 20 people. You don't need so many people here. And the response was, I agree with you, but if we start firing so many people, it will make the Wall Street scared. They will think something's very wrong with the company. And we don't want to do that. And that's why we got to keep all this, employees. Tucker [00:39:54] So to keep the stock price high, he had to run it inefficiently. I mean, that's what you're saying. Pavel Durov [00:40:02] If I understood him correctly, that's what's. But to his to his credit, Elon has to take Twitter private. Before he could do all there. Well, I mean. Tucker [00:40:15] There's I mean, there's something sort of profound in what you're saying. I mean, the whole point of a publicly traded company or one of the points so the public can participate in the ownership of the company, but also so outsiders can assess the operations of the company. And so there's transparency. So we know how the company is run because it's owned by the public. And so it would be by definition more efficient, you would think. But you're saying that it's wildly less efficient that you wind up with a foosball department when it's publicly traded, but when it's privately held, you don't. I mean, that's kind of the opposite of what you would think, right? Well, I guess. Pavel Durov [00:40:48] Most tech founders would actually agree that running a public company is, less efficient than running a private company, because you have to be accountable to much more people. There is a lot of redundancy bureaucracy involved. So from a purely like efficiency standpoint, I would argue, and I think a lot of people would agree with me, that when a public company is suboptimal, however, there are other advantages of of getting listed. And of course that is relevant when you want to acquire other companies. Well, cash. Yes, you can have access to cheap capital. You know, there is a lot of things you can do. Tucker [00:41:33] But you don't want to do any of those things. Pavel Durov [00:41:36] Well, not. Not presently. Definitely. I am enjoying running my company in the way it is. Well, who knows what the future holds. But, as of now, I think we are doing a great job with, with telegram, 900 million users will probably cross a billion, monthly active users within a year from now. I think we are doing great. Why? Why would we lose this momentum right now? Tucker [00:42:01] Can I go back to something you said at the outset? You don't have an H.R. department. You only have 30 engineers working for you. You run the products, you own the company. Such a tight organization. But how do you get new users if you spend zero money for acquisitions, if you're not advertising, if you're not paying to bring people in, how do you how do you do that? How do you get to a billion for free? Pavel Durov [00:42:26] But because people love our product. What we realized pretty early on is that people are smart. People like to use good things and they don't like to use inferior things. That's why whenever you have a person who is who started to use telegram and they're there for a while and they start to discover all the features out there, you know, the speed, the security, the problems, everything that we have. They don't want to go back, and they start inviting their friends, recommending them. You should really check this app out because it's so much better than everything else. And also because people realize that whatever, messaging apps they're using right now, they're like 5 or 6 years behind. They are copying what we did six years ago. And that's not, you know, very high quality copy that they make about features. So people love quality. That's why they move. They also love the independence. They also love the privacy. They love the freedom. There are a lot of reasons why somebody would switch to telegram from other apps. Tucker [00:43:36] So one of the things we learned when Elon Musk bought Twitter is that the intelligence is not just us, but a bunch of other countries, the usual suspects. We're all over the company. I mean, they were some of them were present working at the company. They had access to the direct messages. You can just imagine, you know, because you run one. But the wealth of data flowing through would be of great interest to to governments. Does that make you paranoid that you'll be penetrated? I mean, I assume governments would like to know what's going on. Privately on telegram. Pavel Durov [00:44:11] Well, there's definitely a lot of responsibility that we have on our shoulders. And we I wouldn't say we are paranoid, but I think it makes sense to stay prudent and, you know, not being, too accessible, not traveling to weird places. Tucker [00:44:31] You don't travel to weird places. Pavel Durov [00:44:32] I hope not, like, I travel to places where I have, confidence that, you know, those places are, consistent with what we do in our values. I don't go to any of the big geopolitical powers to the countries like China or Russia or the US. So. Tucker [00:44:55] You don't go to the US. Pavel Durov [00:44:56] I try not to. I can go, but, you know, it's, too much attention like I described before. Tucker [00:45:02] Yeah. Because at some point, if you run something like this, you're a player in world politics. I mean, whether you want to be or not, don't you think? Pavel Durov [00:45:10] We definitely don't want to be a player. We want to be a neutral platform that is impartial and, you know, doesn't take any side. But you're probably right. There's some role we have to play. Tucker [00:45:24] Well, not taking a side is the one thing you're not allowed to do, right? I mean, aren't you required to take a side in the modern world? Pavel Durov [00:45:32] I think that's a big problem, because I think that kind of, attitude can result in our world becoming a more dangerous place, because at the end of the day, we all have to try to understand each other and try to get closer to each other in terms of getting to know the positions of the other people, even though they're drastically different from our own positions. And that's how we get to some, you know, compromise and move forward. If we're strictly divided and everybody is required to take a side and we can't take a side because we are this platform that people should use to collaborate and to find common ground and hopefully to move forward. If we lose that, we can end up in a much more dangerous place. Tucker [00:46:28] How often do you intersect with the National Security Agency, NSA? And I ask that as someone whose texts were read by them. So I know that they're very active in this world. What's your experience been? Well, I think. Pavel Durov [00:46:43] The NSA is not, an agency that works with you directly, right? Yeah. Come here. Tucker [00:46:50] You're so diplomatic, I love it. You got to say, it's not an agency that works with you directly. No, that is true. It is true. Pavel Durov [00:46:59] So my knowledge of my interactions with the NSA is very limited. Yes, I could read something in the newspapers about, you know, my phone being penetrated with Pegasus or something like that. I have no idea whether it's true or not, but this is the only source of information I can have about me personally being of interest to any of, you know, the secret agencies. Tucker [00:47:27] But you've got to think, even though you haven't done an interview in seven years ish, you know, you're it's widely known by people who are interested, who you are and your role in this. I mean, you've got to think you're under crazy amounts of surveillance, wouldn't you think? Pavel Durov [00:47:42] That's probably true. You know, it would sound funny, but I assume by default that the devices I use like I compromised. Yeah, because you will still use an iPhone or an Android phone. And, now, after experiencing what I experienced in the U.S., I have very limited faith in, platforms developed in the US from a security standpoint. Tucker [00:48:10] Yes. Privacy standpoint. Pavel Durov [00:48:12] Exactly. Tucker [00:48:12] Yeah. Because in a lot of countries of ours, America included, spying is described as, quote, security. You're looking at it from the other perspective. You're assuming that security is privacy and my right not to be spied upon. But I government's described spying upon you as security. Pavel Durov [00:48:31] Thank you for this correction. Tucker [00:48:35] So last question, do you, since you've done this since you were in college and you've been at the center of it, where do you see it going? And by this I mean the free exchange, the private exchange of information between sovereign individuals, human beings, non slaves. When I was a child. That was possible. It's increasingly difficult. Are we moving toward a world where there just is no private communication? Or do you think that privacy will remain despite, say, AI or just massive increases in computing power? Pavel Durov [00:49:11] While this depends on the extent of privacy. When you say privacy will remain. Do you mean that we have absolute privacy now? Tucker [00:49:21] I don't think that we do. And I think the world is becoming less amenable. Government is becoming less tolerant of privacy. And that's clearly the trend because they have more technological power. But will they win, I guess. Will there ever be a way to preserve privacy? You know, can is there a place for it? Pavel Durov [00:49:42] I believe in that. I am an optimist. I think some new secure hardware, you know, communication devices will be created, in a similar way that now we have, hardware wallets to store your cryptocurrency. Yes. Maybe we'll have secure, communication, devices, you know, to send messages or do voice calls. It's possible. I do believe that, you know, the world develops in cycles. And, if things seem to go in one direction today doesn't seem. Doesn't mean that tomorrow they will go the same direction. I also feel that at some point, people will get tired of, what they experienced today and they would decide to, you know, move to some other direction. So it's I seen it after Covid, for example. So during Covid, do you had a lot of restrictions also on social media platforms? You on most social media platforms you were not really allowed. To express doubt in relation to lockdowns, vaccines or masks. And, at some point I could feel that the sentiment changed. People started to feel very, very tired and sometimes angry. But the fact that they were not allowed to express their opinions, particularly after the end of, the pandemic, a lot of people started to be, even more skeptical about the restrictions in their freedoms that they experienced during the pandemic. Tucker [00:51:38] What was your position as a business owner? During Covid, did you must have come under pressure to censor opinions on lockdowns, vaccines, masking. How did you respond? Pavel Durov [00:51:52] So our position is pretty straightforward. We're a neutral platform. We were helping governments to spread their message about the lockdowns and masks and vaccines. We got dozens of governments who we really help. You know, some of their information, but we also didn't want to restrict the voices that were critical of all those measures. We thought it made sense for this opposing views to collide and hopefully, you know, see some truth come out of those debates. And of course, we got criticized for that. But, looking back, I think it was the right strategy. Tucker [00:52:31] So you allowed people to voice doubts about the so-called science throughout the throughout the experience? Pavel Durov [00:52:38] Exactly. During the pandemic, we I think were one of the few or maybe the only major social media platform that didn't, take down accounts or that were skeptical, in relation to some of these measures. Tucker [00:52:57] So why are you not famous and treated as a hero in the United States? Oh. Shouldn't there be a parade in your honor? If you're the only social media platform not to take down what turned out to be true, or to some extent true, more certainly more true than the CDC guidance. I mean, what why why were you times man of the year? Why isn't your face on the nickel? Pavel Durov [00:53:26] I'm not an expert in the US politics. But to be fair, you have, now, Twitter or X. Yeah. That, seemingly becoming more pro freedom of speech. And I think it is, it's, it's, it's it's a great development. And back to our earlier discussion about how all of this is developing in cycles. Things are starting to change, it seems. Tucker [00:53:57] So. I mean, but in in some ways Elon buying Twitter. Sort of end your monopoly. But you still greet it cheerfully. You're still in favor of it. Pavel Durov [00:54:11] Definitely. We will love the fact that Elon bought Twitter. We thought it was a great development for a number of reasons. First reason is just innovation. You could see X doing trying a lot of things. Some of them. Will turn out to be mistakes. Some of them will work, but at least they're trying to innovate. That's something we didn't have outside of telegram. And if you other companies in this industry for the last ten years, what you saw from the big players, they would rather copy the proven models with features that apps like telegram launch and just scale them on a larger audience. These features would be a pale, pale blue pill, reflections of what we built. But this was the way those companies operating still operate. What X is trying to do is, in line what we are building, you know, innovation, trying different things, trying to give power to the creators, trying to get the ecosystem economy going. Those are all exciting things. And, I think we need more companies like that. I was I don't know if it's good for humanity that, like, Elon is spending so much time on Twitter making it better, but it's definitely good for the social media industry. Tucker [00:55:38] When you see the other the guys who run these other companies, like what do you do know them? And do you ever talk about freedom of speech? I mean, if you're running, you're running to not you don't have to answer, of course, if you don't want. But like if you're into Mark Zuckerberg, which I mean. Pavel Durov [00:55:52] Yeah, I, we met with Mark, more than ten years ago. I was still running VK and, I told them I told Mark and his colleagues about our, app platform. We launched an app platform, I think it was 2009 at VK. They were very interested. It was an interesting meeting. They ended up trying to copy. Not what we did, but what I told them we did. That was funny. I remember him asking me whether we were planning to, start something. Okay. On a global basis, on the global level. Level? Like go, for international expansion. I said no, and I asked him whether he was going to try to capture more of. My domestic market where I was working out, and he said no. And we both ended up doing exactly that in like 2 or 3 weeks or whatever. Tucker [00:56:58] So I'm thinking I shouldn't go into business with Mark Zuckerberg. Pavel Durov [00:57:03] Look. No comment. Tucker [00:57:08] Thank you very much. It was a great conversation. I appreciate, and we're rooting for you. Pavel Durov [00:57:13] Thank you for having me. Of course. LTOV here >>> https://tuckercarlson.com/the-tucker-carlson-interview-pavel-durov/

The Biden administration accused journalist Owen Shroyer of spreading "disinformation" about the 2020 election and sent him to federal prison on a misdemeanor charge. He just got out. Published Dec 12, 2023 LTOV here >>> https://tuckercarlson.com/uncensored-owen-shroyer/ READ THE TRANSCRIPT Tucker [00:00:00] There is major concern in Washington at this hour that if democracy is allowed to function and the candidate who is leading in all the polls for President of the United States is allowed to win in 2024, we'll get fascism. And he's going to throw his political opponents in prison. And that will change America forever. Democracy will die. We'll become an authoritarian republic, not even a republic. A junta. Well, we don't have to wait, actually, because that's already happening. And it has been happening for at least three years, certainly since January 6th, 2021, a day in which we now know there were approximately 200 undercover federal officers in the crowd. But it wasn't a setup. Don't say false flag. So what happened in the aftermath? Well, over a thousand people were arrested, well over a thousand in the largest manhunt the FBI has ever conducted. Almost every single one of them had behaved peacefully at the demonstration, but many went to prison. Some went to prison without even doing anything wrong. And one of them, at least one of them was an actual journalist, a salary taking journalist, provably a journalist. And no one even accused him of going inside the Capitol that day. He was accused, however, of spreading, quote, disinformation about the election, which is now an imprisonable offense. His name is Owen Shroyer. He spent years as an Infowars host. He just spent 47 days in federal prison for - listen carefully - a misdemeanor. Hass anyone ever gone to federal prison for a misdemeanor? We can't find anyone. By the way, he was kept in solitary confinement for most of that time. He is out of prison, still on probation. He joins us now. Owen Shroyer, thanks so much for joining us. . Owen Shroyer [00:01:47] It's an honor to be here, Tucker. Tucker [00:01:48] Well, it's an honor to have you and welcome back from prison. I adlibbed most of that intro, so I want to make sure I didn't misstate any of the facts of your case. It just almost defies imagination. Tell us, in your words, why you were sent to federal prison. Owen Shroyer [00:02:07] Well, January 6th is obviously the hook that the Department of Justice used to put me in prison, even though my charge still was a misdemeanor charge. I think it's worth laying the breadcrumbs for this, because really the persecution that I've dealt with as a journalist and a talk show host dates back to actually 2019, where you may recall the Democrats were holding their impeachment sham against Donald Trump. And I happened to stand up during Nadler's introduction of the impeachment. And I told them that it was fraudulent, that we, the people, elected Trump and Trump. Was innocent. The whole exchange lasted longer than 60 seconds. Hearing [00:03:03] (Shroyer interrupts impeachment inquiry) [00:03:07] The cops escorted me out of the building. I complied. No problems. And normally that would be that, Tucker. In fact, this is actually pretty commonplace for the Capitol. I'm sure you've seen it many times yourself. One, David Hogg has done this. We've seen people storm into Kevin McCarthy's office. We see the pro-Palestinian protesters storming into the Capitol. We've seen the pro-abortion people. I can go on and on, but for the sake of time, I'll stop with that short list. Very commonplace for people to go into the Capitol. Now, normally what happens is the Capitol Police will detain you, escort you out of the building and usually just shuffle you on their way. Well, in 2019, after I had disrupted the impeachment sham hearing, which I would still argue is a First Amendment right to redress your grievances with the government, somebody got on the walkie talkie of the Capitol police officer just as he was about to release me and said, no, not so fast. We're not going to treat Owen Shroyer like the other 99% of people that go into the Capitol and get escorted out and detained. We're going to go ahead and charge and arrest him. So that was the first time I was politically persecuted. A month later, inside that same Capitol building, there were a group of, say, 40 or 50 anti-Trump protesters having a demonstration in the Capitol. Well, I decided to just show the double standard in this country to go back to the exact same spot that 40 to 50 anti-Trump protesters are in in the Capitol. I went to the exact same spot. I put a tape over my mouth that said "censored" because I had been banned off all mainstream media, social media platforms. And I was arrested for that and spent 36 hours in a D.C. gulag for that. Eventually, when that reached the judge's docket, he just completely tossed it out. But I think it's worth building to this point, Tucker, because people need to know that this discrimination and persecution against myself, but probably more importantly, just against journalists has been going on for a long time. Owen Shroyer [00:05:12] So bring us to January 6th. As you said, I was there covering the event as a journalist. And despite the mainstream media and left wing media reports that are completely wrong, claiming that I was in violation of a probation from 2019 just by being there, that is completely inaccurate. I was not in violation of my probation and I was there that day as a journalist. Well, after everything goes down that day and myself and the team that I was with, which is in their sentencing memo, they admit we tried to stop people from going into the Capitol. We tried to discourage people from being on Capitol grounds. We even tried to work with police to stop the whole event from happening. This is all on record. The government, the Department of Justice, the judge, the prosecuting attorneys are all well aware of this. It all came up in my sentencing memo, and yet they still decided to sentence me to 60 days in jail, which you reported. I did only serve 47. They wanted to hit me with 120 days in jail. And so I'm lucky that I really only got away with 47. Unfortunately, I had to serve, as you said, the majority of that in lockdown. Owen Shroyer [00:06:25] But here's another issue. Aside from the attack on free speech, the incentive right now from the Department of Justice is not justice, Tucker. The incentive from U.S. attorneys is convictions and the incentive from the judge is imprisonment. Justice never seems to enter the equation here at all. And I'm perfectly an example of that. Everybody knows I didn't belong in prison. Even when I was indicted by the FBI, a magistrate Judge, Farooq in D.C. issued a motion to the DOJ saying, hey, wait a second, you violated the law potentially here. And they did when they indicted me as a journalist. Barack Obama signed legislation that you have to go through special protocols and procedures when you're going to charge a journalist. They didn't do any of that. What did they do with the judges memo saying that you violated the law? They said, we don't care. We're charging Shroyer anyway. We don't have to follow the rules. So I can expand in a million different ways from there, Tucker. Tucker [00:07:25] And I appreciate, thank you for that summary. It's hard to believe any of that is real. It is. It's been chronicled in detail. It is shocking, though, to hear it laid out. So a couple of questions. First. You are a journalist and that's not I mean, a lot of people claim to be a. You actually working as one and paying your health insurance. You're a journalist. Okay. So did any other journalist defend you? Did any of them, any journalism watchdog groups Pan-American or whatever they are? Did anybody in the journalism community, White House Correspondents Association, speak up on your behalf? Owen Shroyer [00:07:58] No, not that I'm aware of. In fact, The New York Times had been writing stories about censoring me and shutting me down for a long time now. There were people in, say, the alternative media that supported me and came to my defense. I remember you actually covered my story at the previous network that you worked at as well. But outside of that, it was very few and far between. Tucker [00:08:21] Unbelievable. So you said and we often say as we describe these things, they did this, they did that. But can you attach some names to the horrifying miscarriage of justice that you endured? Like who was behind this? Do you know? Like what judge would sign off on that? Who are the prosecutors like? Who are these people? Owen Shroyer [00:08:42] Well, the judge in my case was Timothy Kelly, and he has had a lot of January 6th cases, and he's been very heavy handed in some of his sentencing. And again, I'm not sure the incentive there, because it doesn't seem to be justice. And the lady that spoke, the US prosecuting attorney that spoke at my sentencing hearing was a Kimberly Pascal. And, you know, they like to come off as friendly people and they like to pretend to you that they're operating in good faith. But I have to say, it doesn't feel that way after the results. In fact, during the sentencing hearing, I thought I was hearing the Twilight Zone music behind me as Kimberly Pascal was arguing that this is not about Shroyer's speech, but here's what he said. And you can see the transcripts from that hearing. And literally, Tucker, she says this is not about Owen Shroyer speech but here's what he said. I'm not sure how many times that was said, but even in the sentencing memo that the prosecuting attorneys released, the 30 page memo, about 27 pages are about my speech, not even on January 6th, my speech from my talk show before and after. Tucker [00:09:50] So I think it's from that memo that you're accused of spreading and I'm quoting disinformation about the election. Disinformation doesn't suggest that what you said was wrong. It's not the same as incorrect or false or a lie. It just means it's inconvenient for the people in power. So how in the world could the government admit in public that they're sending you to prison for questioning an election and still pretend that this is a democracy? Owen Shroyer [00:10:18] Well, it's amazing, isn't it? Because I'm not too old but I do remember that every presidential election that Democrats have lost in the 20th century, they've questioned and they've denied. So it's odd that one side can do that and the other cannot. But, you know, to go back to the not getting a good faith negotiation with the government, I want to be very clear about something here, Tucker. There was a notion that somehow my cooperation with the federal government was me turning on Donald Trump or me turning on Alex Jones, something that was completely inaccurate. The reason why I turned over multiple cell phones and I responded to every electronic data request that the FBI made and sat down for a multiple hour session with them to cross-reference my testimony. And I'm assuming other testimonies that they had gotten as well, as well as what was in my phones and everything else they wanted was to prove my innocence and not just my innocence. Everybody's innocence. Nobody wanted that to go down. Tucker [00:11:21] Innocent of what? I mean, you weren't even accused of going inside the Capitol building on January 6th. You're not accused of setting anything on fire or committing any act of violence. So, I mean, on what grounds could they steal your cell phones and violate your most basic privacies? I don't understand that. Like, what's the crime? Owen Shroyer [00:11:42] Well, the whole notion that the US attorney was arguing is that somehow I was behind the entire event that day. That's what their whole notion is, is that somehow I led the charge for what resulted in January 6th and people going into the Capitol and everything else. And I wanted to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, look, here's all my communications. That was never anybody's plan. I had nothing to do with that. I never went in the building. And they acknowledged that. They acknowledged that. And they still decided to come down heavy handed on me. But it's worth mentioning too, Tucker. Part of the process here with me turning all of this over and cooperating, my attorney and my understanding was that they weren't going to press for jail time. That was the mutual understanding that we had here. And then they tried to hit me with 120 days. And I'm not curious if that didn't come from the minds of the U.S. attorneys, but perhaps someone higher up at the DOJ. I might even believe it's at the very top of the DOJ. Maybe Merrick Garland is the one who's trying to put me behind bars and make an example out of me. Tucker [00:12:46] Yeah, you can trust the Mafia more than you can trust the Justice Department. And I wish that weren't true, but it absolutely is true. So what was prison like? Owen Shroyer [00:12:57] Well, I will tell you, I think and this is kind of not something I would expected to have said in this interview, but it's just true. I think God wanted me to experience this for multiple reasons, Tucker. I'm a big believer in God, and I think everything that happens in our life is for a reason. And I believe God wanted me to go through this experience because not just the obvious example of speech imprisonment that I had to face, or a speech crime that is now potentially a precedent that could be used against any journalist, which puts fear in my heart, not just for me in the present day, but for future Americans, that they have to be afraid to speak and to do work, honest work as a journalist. But, you know, there was an unexpected issue that was clearly shown to me through this process, and that's that the Justice Department and the incentive behind imprisonment is wrong. [00:13:55] I mean, I can tell you the details of my stay, they're pretty much horrific, Tucker. I spent the majority of the time in lockdown. I went right out of solitary confinement into what's called a special housing unit for a phone call I made thanking people for sending me mail. People that were in jail for decades, some of the people that worked inside the prison for decades, when they saw that what's called "a shot" in the prisons, they said, I've never seen anybody get punished for this before. So I got sent to prison as a speech prisoner. And then I got sent to the prison inside the prison for my speech. And, you know, I had a couple off the record conversations with people while I was in there. And basically they were saying the same thing, like, look Owen, we don't like what's been done to you here, but these are orders coming from the very top. Your beef isn't with us here at this prison. Your beef is with the people at the top. They're the ones still coming after you, even when you're in here. And I'll leave it at that. So nobody's ever heard of a misdemeanor in a� federal prison until me. Nobody's ever heard of somebody going to the special housing unit for making a phone call, thanking people for mail until me. And so I don't know why they want to make an example of me so much, except that I just speak the truth and I'll say it right to their face if I'm given the opportunity. But we need prison reform in this country badly, Tucker. Most of the people that are in that prison, not just me, do not belong there. And there are way more political prisoners outside the realm of what you and I might think. You go after corrupt lawyers, judges, insurance companies. You go after the corruption in Medicare and Medicaid. They lock you up and throw away the key. I couldn't believe some of the stories. And while I'm in there, the Bureau of Prisons wants $2 billion. Matt Gaetz brought my name up during that hearing. The Bureau of Prisons doesn't need $2 billion more annually. They need to release $2 billion worth of prisoners because we have a prison industrial complex in this country. And we have a Justice Department that is not incentivized by justice. Tucker [00:15:59] Right. So the violent criminals stay on the street to act as militia for the ruling class and put the fear of God in everybody else, weaken the population. And the thought criminals, or the ones who challenge power, wind up in prison. I've noticed. Owen Shroyer [00:16:18] Well, and I think this is something that I hate to talk about, but it's just true. And people need to know this. Now, I'm a man of convictions and I guess I would think of myself as a brave man. But telling the truth shouldn't really consist of an act of bravery. But I have to be honest with you, Tucker. Just doing this interview. The book that I wrote while I was in there, I'm afraid now. I'm afraid that my speech is going to wind me up in jail again. That's something that sits in the back of my head now. Every day when I go on air and tell the truth, that's something that sits in the back of my head that I might go to jail for what I'm saying. Tucker [00:16:56] What's solitary like? Owen Shroyer [00:17:01] You know, my situation probably wasn't the worst as many people in solitary have where you get no interaction whatsoever. Luckily, some of the inmates that were in general population were able to at least sometimes come up to my window. But for the first 25 days, so almost the first month of my incarceration, I only got movement three days a week. Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I got 15 minutes to shower and that was it. I didn't even get access to commissary until day 35, I believe, which means I was forced to eat the prison food, which many prisoners don't eat at all because it's so bad and they just eat the commissary food. You get very little interaction. You get very little access to the outside. I was treated like a high security prisoner for a misdemeanor. And like I said, nobody could even believe that that was the case, whether it was long time prison workers or long time inmates. And so unceremoniously, I kind of got the nickname Misdemeanor because that was the big joke that somehow I'm in federal prison for a misdemeanor and nobody's ever heard of that. But, you know, that's the thing. You don't want to end up in prison. I mean, I don't have to sit here and explain why you lose all your freedoms. You have to eat unhealthy food. You're pretty much sleep deprived and starved the entire time. But now that's something that sits in the back of my head every time I speak. Doing this interview. Doing my show every day. I'm on air for three hours a day telling the truth. And every hour, I have to sit there and wonder, am I going to go to jail for something I said on my show? That's what they've done to me. And I'm afraid for future Americans that might have to face that same fear. Tucker [00:18:50] I mean, at some point, I think some people are going to say, I'm actually just not going to go to prison. Like, make me. I hope it doesn't get to that. But you could see that happening. Maybe putting you in prison, in federal prison on a misdemeanor charge for doing nothing. Maybe the whole point of that exercise, because you're a public figure, was to put the fear of God into everybody else and to get them to pause before they tell the truth. Owen Shroyer [00:19:14] Well, and it's just, the torture is beyond this. I've been under the scrutiny of the federal government since 2019, and all I've ever done is speak. That's all I've ever done. I've never hurt anybody. As far as I'm concerned. I've never broken any law. All I've done is speak. But because I speak against corruption in government and I speak against the corruption in the establishment, I am under the full scrutiny of the federal government. And, you know, people always make the joke, Tucker, but there's a bit of reality to it. I guess I should have just joined one of the leftist mobs and attacked police officers, defaced public property, tried to burn down a building, firebombed a police officer. I guess I probably wouldn't be in this situation right now. Tucker [00:19:57] Of course not. Torch Wendy's. You'd be completely fine. So last question, sort of bigger picture, picture question. I think your case is one of the most shocking, but it's not unique. There are a lot of people who went to prison for no crime after January 6th, which was obviously a setup. But the basis of the demonstration and of the conversation since has been the question of the 2020 election. Was it stolen? And do you think that any of this stuff, putting you in jail, pretending it was insurrection. Any of that. Has that convinced a single person in this country or abroad that the election wasn't stolen? I mean, you think that's actually worked as a propaganda tool? Owen Shroyer [00:20:40] Well, it's funny because in their sentencing memo, they said I wasn't remorseful for questioning it. Like I'm some, I guess I'm supposed to grovel to Joe Biden and the Department of Justice. Yeah, I'm not remorseful. But here's the thing, Tucker. They can put me in jail for a month, two months, a year, 12 years. It's not going to change the facts. It's not going to change the facts that Donald Trump was getting 40, 50,000 people at every rally. He did, sometimes 3 or 4 a day. And Joe Biden couldn't fill a broom closet. It's not going to change the fact that the recent joke Trump made, which I think is funny, Donald Trump sells millions of hats. I've never seen or heard of a Joe Biden hat. It's not going to change the fact that was well documented in the documentary 3000 Mules that these vote-by-mail drop boxes were filled with all kinds of corruption. And it's not going to change the fact that Donald Trump was leading in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, all the way through the night until 3 a.m., Michigan, and then at 3:00 and 3:30 a.m., all the sudden, hundreds of thousands of votes for Joe Biden came in just enough to put him over the edge. So they can throw me in jail forever. It's not going to change that history. And I always like to make this analogy, Tucker, because I think it's a fair analogy. I'm sure you recall the great homerun chase of 1998 when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both broke the home run record. Well, that's an anomaly. So we found out what was behind it. They were both using steroids. Or, as some people said, they were both cheating. Well, here's the thing. We just had a presidential election where both candidates broke the record. Do you really think that's organic? And do you really believe that Joe Biden got more votes than Barack Obama? Anybody who really believes that I think is lying to themselves and lying to anybody else. Tucker [00:22:30] A lot more than Barack Obama. Yeah, Joe Biden beat Black Jesus. Yeah, I agree. I agree with you 100%. Owen Shroyer, it is great to see you. I'm sure you're rattled, but you're obviously not broken. And so we're grateful that you took the time to talk to us. Thank you very much. Owen Shroyer [00:22:47] Absolutely, great to be here. And congratulations on your new network, Tucker. We're all cheering for you. Tucker [00:22:53] Thanks, man.

Heart of a Warrior by Mark Fonseca (Dark Knight Mirror) Link to DK Rumble channel here >>> https://rumble.com/c/DarkKnight * GO DIRECTLY TO DK's CHANNEL AND FOLLOW HIM NOW & THANK ME LATER LTOVideo HERE >>> https://rumble.com/v4l2zzc-mark-fonseca-heart-of-a-warrior.html

America is being invaded and destroyed with the help of our leaders. Michael Yon has spent his life covering wars, so he recognized right away what was happening. Yon joined Tucker to unveil the shadowy nonprofits that are fueling the migrant crisis currently unfolding on our southern border. originally Published Apr 23, 2024 https://tuckercarlson.com/uncensored-michael-yon-border-invasion/ READ THE TRANSCRIPT Bret Weinstein [00:01:21] Well, I, I wound up there because Michael Yon had been sending me materials, thinking that I would be interested in what was taking place in Panama. And, of course, I was utterly fascinated by what I was seeing. Now, some of your viewers may not know Michael. Michael is a former Green Beret who has refashioned himself. Well, the last time I was on your program, I talked about Goliath. And, if there's a Goliath, there's a David. And I would argue that Michael Yon is like David's eyes. He's been traversing the world trying to understand a story that as yet has no name. And that story is partially in the Darien of Panama. And it's all sorts of other places, including, in various UN installations. There's some story that is difficult to piece together. And he's been physically traveling to all of its various epicenters and showing people. Tucker [00:02:22] So a year ago, it would have been pretty hard to find an English speaker who had been to the Darien Gap. Again, it's famous this region, it's famous for being the most lawless and dangerous place on planet Earth. Michael Yon has now spent about six months in the Darien Gap shooting film, interviewing people. We're going to show you a lot of what he's found during the course of the interview you're about to see, but one piece of tape that caught our eye - kind of remarkable. A town of about 300 indigenous people, only about a dozen working toilets deep in the jungle, completely overrun by thousands of migrants from all over the world, including Africa and Asia. Watch: Soundbite [00:03:03] (Darien Gap video) Tucker [00:03:32] All moving to your country. Now it's happening. That's the end of the United States, the country that you grew up in. Irreparable. Forever. People in Washington, the people who control the Congress and the white House, seem to be in favor of this. And now they're just kind of saying it out loud. Chuck Schumer, probably the darkest member of the United States Congress, of course, the head Democrat in the Senate. He's telling us that we can't deal with any of that because Ukraine's border is too important. It's Ukraine. It's only about Ukraine. Here's Chuck Schumer: Tucker [00:04:13] Right. So if you want to know what evil looks like in 2024, you just saw it. It's Chuck Schumer, okay. The embodiment of it right now. But we did want to see more tape and hear more firsthand account from what it looks like at the other side, the Darien Gap, the beginning of the journey to our country where this invasion is beginning. And so we are grateful now to speak to Michael Yon, who spent more time there than maybe any American. Michael Yon, thanks so much for joining us. So could you just start with the with the overview? What role... And maybe I've misstated it, but what role does the Darien Gap play in the invasion underway of the United States? Michael Yon [00:04:56] It's absolutely vital. Tucker. You know, as soon as, Biden was installed, I was actually in DC for the, quote, unquote. You know, whatever it was, where they installed him. And then I flew straight within about 24 hours to El Paso, because I thought that the aliens would start flooding across the border. And they did. And so from there, I flew down to Columbia to the other side of the Darien Gap, because I thought that the Darien Gap would end up being a major pathway to the United States. And so I went into the, Darien Gap on the Colombian side. Just not not very far. Just about an hour inside. It's very dangerous over there. And I was there with Masako Ganaha, the famous Japanese journalist, and Chuck Holton, a war correspondent friend who just got strafed yesterday in Burma. But so we were out there in the Darien Gap on the on the Columbia side. We then flew over to Panama and went down into the Darien Gap on the Panama side. And so I recognized this would likely be the major invasion route of the United States. And so I just started spending a great deal of time down there. I got to know many of the Embraer Indians and Kuna Indians and others down in the jungle, and I started mapping out the pathways that they're coming in, getting to know members of the government and that sort of thing. Now, keep in mind, a lot of people have no idea who I am, but I've spent most of my life downrange overseas. I am an American, born and raised, was in the U.S. Army, that sort of thing. And, but most of my life has been downrange, for, I would say two thirds of my life has been in Middle East Asia. You know, I spent a year in and around China. I've written three books on Chinese information war that are only in Japanese, actually, because I've been working to wake up Japan for years. So, in other words, I'm not coming into this flatfooted. I'm not coming into the into this as somebody who looks at a map and thinks, hey, this might be the route. I'm looking at this as someone who has traveled in about 100 countries or lived in a, you know, in so many countries. And so I realized these would be the routes, likely the routes. So often when you see me leave Panama, I actually go to another, vital terrain, which is Netherlands. Right. And it was there with Eva Vlaardingerbroek and that sort of thing, whom you know, and, and so bottom line is there's a lot more going on here than just, the invasion. Obviously, the invasion is a killshot to the United States. Now, anybody that can get their feet anywhere into South America, which is pretty much most of the world at this point, they can get to the United States very quickly, and they can do this through the Darien Gap. Now, keep in mind, a lot of people ask, why don't they just fly to the United States? Many people do. Actually. Many people come on student visas and that sort of thing. And anybody that can actually land closer, like many of the Chinese, will actually fly to Mexico first. Some will go to Cancun and go on vacation first. And, if they can get a visa to Mexico, they'll go to like Cancun and they'll meet their what they call snakeheads and Mandarin is what we call coyote, coyotes. The Chinese call them snake heads. They'll meet up with their snake heads and in Cancun or Mexico City or Tapachula and, and then they head across up to, you know, Texas and whatnot, Yuma, all these sorts of things. And by the way, I've been across the entire U.S. border from Space X all the way to San Diego, quite a lot. And on the Mexican side also quite a lot. But I've been across the entire U.S. border. So now many of the actually Chinese will come through the northern border, as do others. But back to Darian. So they don't all go through Darien. Many actually use what's called the CBP one app. It's an application, that they can use to fill out this form and get on flights and fly straight from Bogota to the United States, or they fly from Guatemala to the United States. I was just over in Guatemala checking that out, actually. And so many people do fly in. The US is flying them in 24/7. But not everybody can do that. So now we have maybe 3,000 a day coming in. The number is constantly changing, but we know the number quarter over quarter is increasing coming through the Darien Gap because more infrastructure is being put in. So it's facilitating it. And and the main funder, by the way, is the United States. It's the United States. I hear people constantly talking about how we should punish Colombia or punish Panama or stay in Mexico. That's all nonsense. The people that are talking about stay in Mexico policy have zero idea what's going on. It's like teaching calculus to somebody who doesn't actually know how to add yet. The United States is the one that's behind most of this. The main engine is something called IOM, which is the actually, most of the Border Patrol agents I talked with, they've never heard of the Darien Gap and they've never heard of IOM. IOM is the International Organization for migration. That's the main engine that is doing this right. They are part of the United Nations. They have a they have a big office down in Panama, the City of Knowledge. It's right on the Panama Canal, actually. And there's more than more than five dozen NGOs down there, IGOs and non-profits. The main one is IOM. You can see people going through airports every day across the United States and Europe and Asia as well, with IOM tote bags and that sort of thing. But IOM actually has the probably the best office space in all of Panama. It's in building 110 at the City of Knowledge. I was just there about seven days ago and they fly their flag. The City of Knowledge in Panama City used to be Fort Clayton. All veterans of, Panama know what I'm talking about. Fort Clayton was the U.S. Army South headquarters. Right, right. That's one of the most vital pieces of terrain on planet Earth. There's almost no place on planet Earth more important than that little speck of land that overlooks the Miraflores Locks, Panama Canal, the Panama Canal Railway, and the Thatcher Ferry Bridge. The Thatcher Ferry Bridge is the bridge for highway one that goes all the way down from, well, the tip of South America, up to Colombia. And then there's that gap. That's why they call it the Darien Gap, because there's a break in the road, which they are about to hook together. And then that goes all the way that road. And Bret Weinstein talked about it on your show. Bret did excellent down there, by the way. That man loves the jungle, but that that highway goes all the way up to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and so that's a key highway. So you've got, Panama, such a vital piece of terrain. Because first of all, the Panama Canal and secondly, the Panama Canal Railway is important, believe it or not. And that road and Panama, just the location is vital. Now, we need the Panama Canal for trade, for one thing. But we also need it to get our Navy through. Right. And so we're slowly losing Panama. The NGOs that are causing these invasions like IOM, HIAS, Catholic Charities and so many more are also taking over governments. Tucker [00:11:59] Let me ask you to pause for a second. It sounds like from your reporting that the the NGOs and the UN are vital, like this wouldn't be happening without them. So let's just pause, if you don't mind and explain. You just mentioned three. You mentioned the U.N. agency for migration, the one devoted to destroying the United States. What are the second two? One was Catholic Charities. And what was the middle one? Michael Yon [00:12:23] Oh, there's at least 250. But in an city of knowledge, there's at least 62, 63. I've got somebody doing, a study on them now, but the, HIAS is one that's the Hebrew immigrant aid, society. And that's, actually, interestingly, Doug MacGregor, whom you've had on your show, told me, back when he said, you know, Mayorkas, ally Mayorkas, Homeland Security chief, was actually a board member on HIAS. So and then he moved over to the Department of Homeland Security, which, you know, recurse back to what I was just mentioning. These NGOs are working hard to take over various countries. For instance, HIAS, you know, the board member Mayorkas went to take over a Department of Homeland Security. Now, Mayorkas was down there in and I got word that he was going in 2022. So I got in front of him and I waited for him for four days in the Darien because I suspected where he might land, and he did. Four days later, he landed in front of me for Blackhawks. He went right into, San Vicente camp, which I call China Camp. And, he was there with, with the South Com Commander Laura Richardson. He was there with, also the ambassador Aponte and some others. And so basically, he was coming down there with fistfuls of money to increase the size of the camps and increase the flow through the camps. So I'll show you drone footage. Actually, I've already given it to your team. Tucker [00:13:53] Pardon my dumb questions, but why would the head of the Department of Homeland Security want to destroy the United States? Do you have any idea? Michael Yon [00:14:03] I can't read his mind, but I can read his actions. He's clearly doing it. They're clearly doing it. And. And highest is highest has an office 40 yards away from the front gate. You know, again, Brett Weinstein and Doctor Chris Martinson were down there and, and we were down in the dairy, and I said, there's HIAS right there. Of course, they hadn't heard of HIAS. I waited until we were right in front of them to explain what they were, because HIAS is right there at the camp, 40 yards away from the front gate. That's the Hebrew, Immigrant Aid Society. Usually I hit Catholic Charities and whatnot, but when I started hitting high, it highest because, because, we saw the impeachment proceedings with Mayorkas. Right. And so that's why I lifted and shifted from Catholic Charities and others and started focusing on HIAS. Of course, you know, the anti-Semitic remarks come up and whatnot. But the bottom line is he did come from, you know, as you know, Mayorkas is a migrant from, from, Cuba, right. And, and so both of his parents were, Cuban, Jews. And that's why he was a board member on HIAS, right? So this all fits together. So the bottom line is the United. That's why I say the stay in Mexico policy is absolutely irrelevant. It's ridiculous. It's not going to work. We're flying them in every day. They're coming across the Canadian border night and day. And we're the ones doing it. Tucker [00:15:23] I'm sorry to ask you to pass, but I just, this this feels important. I'll confess my ignorance right up front. I never heard of HIAS until right now. But I have heard of Catholic Charities. What's their role in this? Michael Yon [00:15:34] You know, there's many Catholic charities, by the way. They've got it distributed quite a lot. How many are in Florida? It might be. I can get back to you. It might be 18. I'm sorry, I've forgotten, but they have many different, groups even here and and all over the place, all over the United States. But Catholic Charities is, I think, Catholic in name only. Perhaps. But if you go down to the border in Texas or in Mexico, I've been to Catholic Charities in Mexico as well. You'll see them running the camps, running, you know, near McAllen, all over the place. I mean, very serious human trafficking. They bring in at least hundreds of millions of dollars. I can get you specifics as numbers, of course, change year by year. HIAS is the same. I mean, these are big players. But keep in mind, the main engine is IOM. But again- Tucker [00:16:21] These groups are working to I mean, they're working to violate federal law, which in a democracy we send our representatives to D.C. to vote on, right, reflecting our will, supposedly. And so these are obviously criminal organizations. So why is no one do anything about it? Michael Yon [00:16:39] Straight up criminal. I mean, we could go on for hours about that. And the, you know, the headquarters for IOM is actually in Geneva. Right. And, that's where Amy Pope, the American, is in charge of, HIAS, sorry IOM and Amy Pope took that position maybe five months ago or so. And, and she's bragging about it. She's got a little sign on her desk, at Geneva, boss lady, you know, she brags that the United States is the number one funder of IOM. And we are. And the number two funder is Germany. And the number three is Canada. Interestingly, I was just up in El Salvador. I was just up in Honduras and Guatemala and, where else? I mean, basically, I've been in every country in Central America. But the bottom line, is in El Salvador IOM is sharing office space or sharing a building with the, Canadian Embassy. So, in other words, again, Canada is the number three donor to IOM there and up in Honduras. IOM is sharing office space with, with the Canadian consulate there as well. So they're in the same building we physically went there. Right. So I am is literally with the Canadians in both of those countries, right. It's unbelievable the things that we see when we go on the ground. So IOM hands out rape kits. I brought some of these rape kits to some congressmen, you know, up in, Washington. Actually, we brought an Indian up there. Francisco Agapi, he's the mayor of 29 of the Embara Indian villages. He spoke with about 12 congressmen, but IOM actually hands out rape kits because so many of the women and children are raped in the jungle, that they started handing out rape kits with, male condoms, female condoms, those after, you know, rape pills, abortion pills, those sorts of things. And, yeah, I show these things extensively. And interestingly, I just got a message from the jungle. You know, there's a team out there right now. I'm looking at it right now. I'm looking at their location. But Ben Burke is out there right now with Oscar Blue, and, they got, just last night. Actually, I sent it to your team. A bunch of, people came in from different countries Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan. This was late at night, deep, deep in the jungle. They went in by helicopter. They're there right now. And, and so they were out with SENTFRONT. SENAFRONT front is sort of the Panamanian sort of Border Patrol police, slash army. Panama doesn't have an army, but they're sort of like those three things blended in. They're extremely professional. They're very fit. They're very well trained. And they're, so this team right now is out with a special forces team of SENAFRONT in the jungle. And last night they came up on, this group came up on them two groups and the SENAFRONT said another group of terrorists just came in. Right. You know, what's very interesting is Venezuela that main, most of the people coming in at this point are Venezuelan. Right. And there is a large presence of Hezbollah in Venezuela, which is quite interesting because Hezbollah is extremely dangerous. Right. So we've got Hezbollah down there who speak Spanish fluently natively, actually, actually, there's a village in Lebanon where they speak Spanish. There's a lot of bounce back, back and forth. But the but the bottom line is Iranians can fly into Venezuela, get a new passport right when they go there. Venezuela has a close relationship with China and of course, with Russia. And, I mean, Hezbollah is thick in Venezuela. In 1994, there was a Hezbollah bombing in Argentina, at a Jewish center, 385 casualties, 85 were killed, about 300 wounded. And within 24 hours there was a bombing in Panama. An airplane, blew up and killed, I think, 12 Jewish people and about 10 others. Actually, I met recently with one of the family members of three of the Jewish people that were killed. And Hezbollah did that. The mastermind of that Hezbollah bombing is now believed to live in Venezuela and has a bar. You can't make up the stuff on Margarita Island, right? So, I mean, they know who he is, they know where he lives. They know the bar that he runs. Right. And yet HIAS continues to help Hezbollah get into the United States. You can't make up this stuff. Literally, Jewish money is helping Hamas and Hezbollah get into the United States. I mean, this is Stephen King stuff. Tucker [00:21:13] So, I mean, you've just you've just given us a lot here. And I hope you'll come back. But let me ask, so you're a war correspondent? I think you spent more time embedded in Iraq than any other journalist. But you certainly know the business of journalism. How many other journalists from American news organizations are spending time trying to figure out how this invasion is happening? How many New York Times correspondents do you run into in Darien, for example? Michael Yon [00:21:42] Well, that's a funny question. I was just down there with Laura Loomer, and, and I took Epoch Times and, some others, and, and I'm doing what's called force multiplication. And Vandersteel and I have we we started something called Operation Burning Edge. In fact, we saw that you went to Colony Ridge, which. Very good, sir, which was. That's north of Houston. That's that big, you know, 200,000 strong colony that that's being built north of Houston. You are probably there derivative of our actions once we realize that Colony Ridge was that, was what it was. Todd Benjamin dialed me in. Todd Bensman and I, he's an author. He's a former intelligence, guy. He's a friend of mine. But he wrote a book called Overrun. And the last chapter of his book, he talks about Colony Ridge. So, I'm going somewhere. I'm going to answer your question, but I'm going around the block to do it. So Todd and I, we went to Colony Ridge because Todd thought that I could kind of blow that out of the water. And and so we went there with drones, and the drones wouldn't get high enough if you've been to Colony Ridge. So I said, let's go get a helicopter. We went to the airport and we got an airplane. And so we went back over that day and flew over it, and I said, this thing is massive. Let's go get a helicopter and come back with some other guy. So, so. Ann Vandersteel and I started Colony Ridge, started, we started Operation Burning Edge, and then we brought over Daily Wire. We brought over, a couple of congressmen, and we brought over quite a few people, and, and we got them up over Colony Ridge with the express intent on blowing this up so that people like you would pay attention. Now, we then went down to space, and we spent 2 or 3 weeks down there at SpaceX. We never reached out to Elon Musk. We never even emailed or message to SpaceX. We just we went there with the intent of prodding Elon to start paying attention to the border, SpaceX and Boca Chica is right on the border. So you see literally people coming across the border and onto space property. And so we got, you know, videos, photos of that. And the next thing you know, you know, you see Elon Musk, paying close attention to the border. Now, I'm saying all that to set the table for what I'm saying next. So when we go down to the Darien Gap or I go over to the Netherlands, I'm doing what's called force multiplication. Right. Ann Vandersteel and I, we've taken a lot of people down there. We've taken, a lot of journalists, we've taken a lot of Intel people. We've taken two congressmen to the Darien Gap, just a lot. And so how many people spend a lot of time down there? That would be me. And trying to understand this on a global scale. Top businessmen trying. There are a few, but Todd Bensman's not really a journalist. But he's written books about this sort of thing. But there are very few of us. But we would fit in the short bus. Now, people who study this on the larger war level, and, have done this for years all over Asia and that sort of thing. And I studied Chinese information war and that's me. Right. So, when it comes to the top level stuff and the reason I go to places like Netherlands and I'm watching all of these routes, there's more to this than just the invasion. Right? There's energy at stake, for instance. You see the Nord Stream, was destroyed, obviously. Now, long before Nord Stream was destroyed. I was warning that Nord Stream might be destroyed. And I was warning that for very specific reasons. And I went to BASF. I'm going somewhere with this. It all relates to the so-called migration, the invasions. You know, you need that natural gas to do something called the have a Haber-Bosch process. The Haber-Bosch process is one of the most important chemical processes ever invented by man. That's where you take the hydrogen off of natural gas, and you combine it with the nitrogen that we're breathing. And you make, you make, ammonia, you make ammonium nitrate. Ammonium. You make, you make these nitrogenous fertilizers. Right? That that process was first envisioned in 1903 by a German chemist named Fritz Haber. He wrote it in a book on thermodynamics, but it was very difficult to do. And in 1908, he finally made some. And then it was very difficult though. So another German chemist came in, Karl Bosch, and he started he brought it industrial, and he did that first at BASF, at Ludvig Hoff in Germany. That's the biggest chemical company in the world. I'm going somewhere very important with this. Yes, that chemical company, BASF is on the Rhine River, which is like the Mississippi River of Europe, let's say. And that dumps out at Rotterdam. Rotterdam is the biggest harbor in Europe. It's one of the top ten in the world. Just south of Rotterdam is Antwerp, in, Belgium. That's the second biggest in the world, right? And not the second biggest in the world, but second biggest in Europe. Yeah. So these are main artery in Europe, right. And so now Rotterdam is also there is a railway that goes all the way from Shanghai and other feeders in China all the way across Asia. And it dumps out at Rotterdam. Right. That's why I've been to the Shanghai side. I spent about a year running around China, out in Tibet and those sorts of things, and it goes all the way across Asia and it goes to Rotterdam. That's why Netherlands is highly targeted with this destructive migration, quote unquote. It's an invasion, right. And there and the World Economic Forum and the Chinese Communist Party, keep in mind, they are coasting, they're inseparable at this at this time, they're going to end up fighting in the future. I strongly believe the Chinese Communist Party and World Economic Forum, but they're working to make something called tri state city. Tri state city. Three state city will be most of Netherlands, part of Belgium, and part of Germany. This will then include Antwerp and Rotterdam. Right. And replacing with 30 million people they're coming in with. Right. So you see this Dutch farmers that they're knocking out. I'm out with those Dutch farmers a lot. They're doing the same to the fishermen. Anyway, we could go down that rabbit hole. Let's go back to, I'm going somewhere very important with this. Back to BASF. So I did two tours or so in and BASF before the Ukraine war. And because I thought or actually as it started because I thought, Nord Stream might get interrupted and I thought this for various reasons and because of nitrogenous fertilizers. Right. So we're in the plant. It's a huge plant. And I said I was there with Masoko going on how that famous Japanese journalist actually, and I asked the tour guide, I said, what happens if Nord Stream gets interrupted? And he said, well, BASF is dead, right? Yeah. And, then I bought an iPad, which I kept beside me for months. I'm sorry, sir, I need my water. I have a long history with water and, so I asked him, you know, what happens, if that if, if that goes. And he said BsASF is dead. So I kept an iPad right beside me. And, and I just, I bought that iPad only to keep this one website open that monitored the flows through Nord Stream. Right. And at one point it went to zero. And I said, wow, it has gone to zero. So I started calling a few people. I said, hey, yeah, something wrong with that website? Or did they just hit it? And well, it bubbled to the sea. Right. And so and everybody's like, well, we didn't expect that. And I'm like, well then you're not paying attention because that was obviously on the menu. So then, well now you can see BASF is moving to they're moving their main facilities over to China. Right. You see why I got to be ASF and why I'm watching these things now. Last March, I left Panama and I flew back to Netherlands, for the election. For the electron, sir. What, are you going to say something there? Tucker [00:29:27] Well, I again, I hate to reveal my ignorance since I try to pay attention to this, but I didn't realize BASF, obviously, because chemical company in the world, probably most single, most important company in Europe is moving to China. I didn't know that. Michael Yon [00:29:41] Not all of it. They're also opening facilities in other places or increasing presence in the United States as an example. But that hit on Nord Stream was a direct hit. Now, I also moved there, not leaving Germany. But, you know, as BASF goes, you might say Germany goes. Right. So for sure, I told that to Jordan Peterson. I had Jordan Peterson out of those, you know, a farm and, and Netherlands and that sort of thing. And I'm like, Jordan, watch, Nord Stream. I mean, you know, that was before I was gone. And so anyway, it's gone. So last March I went up to. Tucker [00:30:11] But can I ask you what the Biden administration is responsible for the destruction of Nord Stream? Okay. So- Michael Yon [00:30:20] Either that or space aliens, right. Tucker [00:30:22] Yeah. I'm betting Biden I mean they did it okay. And they've said they did it effectively. But why would the Biden administration, why would the Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, want to destroy Europe, which they've they've done? Why would they want that? Michael Yon [00:30:41] Now there's layered reasons for this. And let me let me continue to say something else. And then we'll recurse back to that because it'll help answer that question. So last March, I left the Darien Gap and I went back to Netherlands. They had elections. I was there for the elections. And, and then I went to Groningen Gas field, which is a Netherlands. That's the biggest gas field in Europe. And I was warning that I think they're going to close Groningen next. And people said, you're crazy. And I said, well, I wasn't crazy about Nord Stream, was I? And now they've closed Groningen, right? Groningen is also closed now. Right. And there was it wasn't destroyed or anything. They did it through information war. As you well know, the highest form of warfare is information war. Bottom line. Right. So it's information war that sets the table for these actions. So your your question why would they do this. Multiple questions. If the paradigm that I'm operating under is accurate and it appears to be it's highly predictive. By the way I since I was a young child, I was deeply immersed in physics. I always thought I would grow up to become a physicist, and that's all I cared about. I was basically failing school because I was just Rain Man on physics. So that's how I kind of learned my base thinking process was reading people like Richard Feynman and that sort of thing. Right. And one of the things that those very serious scientists of the day would say is, if you have a theory and it's wrong, then throw it out. You know, you may have to throw the whole thing out. So I call it the paradigm. So I over time, since I was a young teenager, actually, I've always worked on paradigms that do two things. One is they don't leave me surprised because if you feel surprised and I don't mean waking up with a snake on your face in the jungle, that's a different kind of surprise. But if you feel surprised, then your paradigm is wrong, right? So you need to either tweak it or throw it out. Never get emotionally attached to your ideas. They're not that important unless they turn out to be right. And also your your your paradigm should be predictive, right? That's why when Biden was installed, I flew straight to the El Paso border and straight down the Columbia at the Darien Gap and straight to Panama, the Darien Gap. That's why I was at Darien Gap. That's why I was, you know, thinking that they would do what they're doing now, which they're doing, which is increasing it and making it a major invasion route. That's why I've gone to BASF twice. That's why I was warning in writing in on interviews, I think something's going to happen to be at the At or to Nord Stream actually, which would cause BASF to crumble, which is as BASF goes, Germany goes. And I think that they were going to close, for instance, growing in gas fields. Now they have. Right. And it's all just based on listening to people like Feynman and running with it for the rest of my life, developing paradigms that never leave me surprised and that leave. And they're highly predictive, right. Tucker [00:33:26] So now what you're describing is a war against the west. Michael Yon [00:33:30] Under that paradigm that I'm working under, there are clearly people trying to drive us into global famines. I started warning about global famine in January of 2020. Right. It's clear that if you want to set the table for global famine, you want to knock out those nitrogenous fertilizers. That's one thing that you want to do. You want to take those off the table. Because in 1914, when the Panama Canal opened, that's actually when they also started doing then that Trojans fertilizer production at the same year, in 1914 at BASF in Germany. Right. So you see the world population starts to explode. Then it didn't just explode because we had faster ships, bigger ships and faster railways and that sort of thing, but that's part of it. It also exploded for other reasons as well, like refrigeration and electricity, but also nitrogenous fertilizers is a huge part of it. So if you're going to cost famine, what would I do? Let's see, I would and I would cause a war in Ukraine. Right. That's one thing I would do. That's why I was over in Lithuania before the war in Ukraine, warning that something may happen. I was down in Morocco. I was watching Morocco push, weaponized migration into Ceuta and Melilla. And these are two Spanish cities that are in there in Morocco. So you've got EU cities in Africa, right? So if you can get into Ceuta or Melilla, you're actually in the EU. So I was down in Morocco and watching them, you know, basically needle Spain and, and the EU with weaponize migration. By the way, I want to be very clear. I'm not talking bad about Morocco. I love Morocco, and you're the first country who recognized us. I always think Moroccans when I say, you know, Moroccans always say, yeah, no. Americans realized that Morocco was actually one of the first countries to recognize the United States when we declared independence. We have a long relationship. It's quite solid, right? But they definitely use weaponized migration against the EU and Spain. Right. So I was down in Morocco and we watched Frontex. Frontex did a report. Frontex is that is sort of the sort of the EU equivalent of Border patrol for the EU. They're basically useless. But they told us that the that the, Belarus was trying to push migrants into Poland. And Lithuania, right? So I lived in Poland for two years, and also I knew the Lithuanians quite well because I was with them in the war in Afghanistan. So I called up a senior officer in the Lithuanian Army. I said, hey, I'm down in Morocco. Why is Belarus pushing, trying to push people in that Lithuania? He said, fly up here and we'll take you to the camps. So the next day I was Vilnius, sitting in front of top members of the government. I stayed there for five weeks. They gave me complete access to the camps. I was with them in Afghanistan so that that, you know, I was they knew who I was and that sort of thing. So it was quite helpful. So I got to interview many of the aliens coming in and their roots and that sort of thing. And as you see, when I was actually in Lithuania, I started to warn, something's up. This weaponized migration didn't just come out of the blue. Right. I mean, when you're doing information war and you're doing I always watch the information wars first. But weaponized migration is often a precursor for something bigger, right? And that sometimes the weaponized migration is just. That is the main weapon. Like, for instance, when I was in Tibet. Excuse me. Hold on. Let me let me go back to China and I'll talk about weaponized migration. I love water and the, the weaponized migration is is it's an old weapon of war. It's been done in, you know, since space and time and, Tibet, you know, some of the, of the Tibetan, genocide. That's what it was. It was kinetic, of course, but a lot of it's just it's just that Han Chinese coming in and mass and then just moving in, and they're doing the same in Xinjiang right now with the Uyghurs right now. When I was in Hong Kong, I got kicked out of Hong Kong. It was sort of famously kicked out of Hong Kong. I was a bad boy, but they but one of the ways that the Chinese Communist Party took Hong Kong was they weaponized migration. They were just bringing in Han Chinese every day, 100 to 150 or so per day. Not many, just enough to keep it below the threshold of making people go crazy. And they took positions, as teachers, professors, they opened a Confucius Institute, of course. They, politicians, police, that sort of thing. Right. And so they slowly took over the cockpit until they just took Hong Kong. And, and so that's a, low level form. You know, I was just down in Honduras, and, for instance, I had dinner with a, a retired, Army, general there. He was like their chairman of the Joint Chiefs, actually, and I asked to have dinner with him. So we had dinner. It went on. And the reason I wanted to have dinner with him is because he's of Chinese descent. I think it was. His grandfather came to Honduras and in 2000, in 1923 and so he's what the Chinese Communist Party calls an overseas Chinese. Right. And so they, the Chinese Communist Party works very hard in their information game to recruit people like that. So I had specifically asked, to meet with this man because he had been invited to China. Right. And he'd been invited there to the village where they said his family came from. They had a parade for him. They always do that. They had a parade for him. They took him to the graves of his family. They always do that as well. And then they now they've had him in China seven times now, as I talked with him for 3 or 4 hours that night, over dinner in Honduras, a few months ago, he said, China is not coming to take us to to attack the world. They're coming to become the world. And I said, exactly, because, again, I've written three books on Chinese information war. I could go on for days about it. But the bottom line is, I understand how they're doing this. I was just over in San Salvador. I know you've been over there talking with President Buckley. He's done a great job cleaning that place up. There's a big library downtown with a big Chinese communist flag waving out front at seven floors. I was just in that library because I always go to libraries. I always go to museums. I always go to archeological digs because I'm tracking that that the the the trail heads of information war. And by the way, that's why I went to Honduras, because the Chinese Communist Party is doing an archeological dig there. They're trying to persuade all the Mayan Indians and others that you are actually descendants of Chinese, because you came over the land bridge, and then all these bad white Spaniards and everybody else came and took your land. So those are not called overseas Chinese. Those are called our cousins. Right. So you see, for instance, a lot of information war is all about to, go ahead, sir. Tucker [00:40:10] Well, I don't even know if I can digest any, I think we're going to have to break this into multiple parts because, you know, there's so much going on, that it's, I think I'm going to need to pause. And I've got about I've got too many questions. Michael Yon, that was an amazing conversation. Not at all what I expected, much more than I expected. And I hope we see you really soon.

Kite, Hit, Steel, Plane , Must = probably just a coincidence

No One Ever Gets Sued. Because they know they are GUILTY & Wont Fair Well in Discovery

You Tell Me What That Is

Can art reveal, transform, and inspire? What does it take to redeem a culture left in ruins? https://lubomirarsov.com KINGDOM is an audio-visual experience that serves as a template for empowerment. It models the path of awakening in the face of adversity, becoming whole, and confronting inner and outer darkness in order to transform it. The film's visual and musical arrangement imprints a more courageous way of being. With repeated viewings, this imprint strengthens and becomes available to the viewer as an inner knowing. It's against immense odds, that the brilliance of one's soul spark ignites – and it's through the unison of our sparks that the purifying inferno of Truth blazes. One flame to ignite an inferno. Et Lux in Tenebris. Written, Directed, and Animated by: Lubomir Arsov Executive Producer: Aubrey Marcus – Chakaruna Media Original Score Composed and Produced by: Daniel Dubb Born A Legend Composed by: Secession Studios Additional Music & SFX by: Kyle Steven Gollob Additional Compositing by: Salar Salahi KINGDOM was created in service of personal and collective empowerment, in this moment of need. To support the artist, please donate. https://buy.stripe.com/cN2bIU0Os7sbgL... https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted... BTC: bc1q4gmtyax6lvj8veza9t0r8q3pkh3uptspesal3w Apparel: KINGDOM & IN-SHADOW https://www.lubomirarsov.com/store Prints: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/inshadow/ lubomirarsov.com IG: / lubomirarsov X: / lubomirarsov www.aubreymarcus.com / aubreymarcus Daniel Dubb: / danieldubb Secession Studios: https://www.secessionstudios.com/ Kyle Steven Gollob: https://www.capturesmusic.com/ Contact: inshadow.movie@gmail.com https://youtu.be/MA3iscoypcY?si=8LAWPDkdLxPTFzRz

The Joe Rogan Experience #2138 - Tucker Carlson aired 4.19.24

How did a self-described conservative evangelical like Mike Johnson wind up supporting the anti-Christian policies of the Biden administration? He’s not the only one, as Megan Basham explains.

More Messed Up Than a Soup Sandwich #HardToWatch

The Tucker Carlson Encounter: Pedro Israel Orta Encounter https://tuckercarlson.com/the-tucker-carlson-encounter-pedro-israel-orta/ • Published Apr 13, 2024 READ THE TRANSCRIPT Tucker [00:00:00] If you're a middle aged person in the United States, you probably grew up thinking of American federal Intel agencies and law enforcement agencies like the FBI as basically good institutions and the people who criticize them as fundamentally anti-American. Why would you be criticizing the CIA, for example, when the CIA protects us from foreign enemies and brings vitally needed intelligence to the people who make our policies? Of course. So if you're against CIA and against FBI, you're probably against the United States. And then a lot of things happen that may have started to change your mind, maybe slowly at first. 911 the consolidation, the streamlining and the massive enlargement of these agencies because we needed to do that to protect ourselves. They became a lot more powerful than they had been before. 911 but maybe you weren't paying attention. But by the time we got to 2016, and it was very clear that the CIA, for example, was not just aimed outward at our enemies, but aimed inward at our citizens. That may have changed your mind pretty completely and forever, and for good reason. She is not a force for democracy, at this point at all. In fact, you can't have a democracy in a country where some of the biggest decisions are made by unelected federal employees in an agency whose budget you're not allowed to know in secrecy, no democracy possible in a country like that. So the CIA, well, it clearly performs services that are needed is also a force for evil in this country. There's no other way to say it, but what exactly does that mean? What does the CIA do? What does it look like if you work there, what's the vantage from inside? Well, it might be worth talking to someone who's experienced that for almost 20 years. And today we are. Pedro Israel Auta is a retired CIA officer, done a lot of other things, too. His family came here fleeing tyranny in Cuba. So he went into government service with the highest possible ideals and hopes and exited with something else. He's the author of the book The Broken Whistle A Deep State Run Amuck, and we're happy to have him with us today. Thank you so much for coming, I appreciate it. Pedro Israel Orta [00:02:02] Thank you, Tucker, for this opportunity. Tucker [00:02:04] Oh my gosh, of course. So I thought it might just be interesting to hear your story. Like how did you wind up at CIA? Where are you from? What were your assumptions going in? Pedro Israel Orta [00:02:13] I managed to finish my university studies a little late in life, early 30s, and I study international relations, political science. I've always been interested in all matters related to defense intelligence. Yes, to foreign policy. Growing up in Miami in the 70s, the 80s, you know, the Sandinistas, the contra wars. Tucker [00:02:34] Yes. Pedro Israel Orta [00:02:34] So, so forth. So when I graduated from FIU, Florida International University, while there, I was recruited by the CIA. Tucker [00:02:43] I'm sure to ask you about what were you doing before then? Why did you take till your 30s to graduate college? Pedro Israel Orta [00:02:48] I had to work my way in Miami. I mean, my family came from Cuba with basically nothing. They started from zero. So my parents didn't have the money means to send me to college. So I ended up going into the workforce, working in the Miami business field. And after so many years of work, and it was hard work being an outdoor salesperson, knocking on doors, doing perishable commodities, grocery products, I worked a lot of hours. It was. Yeah. I managed to get my Associate of Arts degree, by graduated high school 85. Got my Associate of Arts degree, 1989. But from 89 to 96, it was just a lot of hard work. So I finally I was able to do a massive change in my life. I basically said I cannot continue going down this route of outdoor sales. So I went into the indoor sales field with a job that was near the university. So I would go into work early in the morning like 7 a.m. and get out of work like 4 p.m., run to the university, take classes from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. I did that for three years. Finally got my Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude graduate, political science, international relations. And that's how it all started with CIA. Tucker [00:04:01] That's the most virtuous possible path, obviously. How were you recruited by CIA? How does that work? Pedro Israel Orta [00:04:07] They would have events at the universities. Staff officers would come down to the university, make a presentation. In this particular case, I was the director of intelligence. Yes, or intelligence analysis. So basically you hear the presentation, you sign up to be interviewed. And I went to an interview. I impressed the two individuals. And, you know, within two weeks I had basically a conditional offer to be a graduate fellow pending the background investigation. So that process took like seven months. I finally received the offer to yes, we you've been accepted. You can come in as a graduate fellow. So at that point in time, I've moved up to D.C. I'm currently going to George Washington University to study for a master of Arts and Security Policy Studies. And I same scenario. It's basically working almost full time at 1.40 hours a week, then 32 hours a week, and then back to 40 hours a week, and going basically to graduate school on a full time basis to earn my Master of Arts and Security policy studies and converted that graduate fellow into a full time CIA staff officer position. Tucker [00:05:18] So what did you do for CIA? Pedro Israel Orta [00:05:21] I started working in the analysis field as a certified career analyst, program analyst, where I was trained to do analysis, and I was basically the lead analyst doing counter drug analysis for Central America and the Caribbean. And I did that for almost four years. Tucker [00:05:36] And pardon my ignorance. What does that consist of? What's your day look like? What do you do at work? Pedro Israel Orta [00:05:42] This particular time it was right immediately after post 9/11. Can you imagine Caribbean, Central America was really not a priority? No. So, I mean, our our intelligence sources, information coming in was sparse, so I had to use a lot of my business skills networking, working with DEA, the Department of State, different offices to find additional sources of information, to supplant that with whatever we were getting from traditional sources. Yes. And it was just a lot of kind of research and investigatory type skills, trying to just find pieces of information to find out what exactly is going on with the drug trafficking in Central America and the Caribbean. And we would take all that information and turn it into a finished intelligence product to inform senior executives such as, you know, cabinet secretaries, the president himself, the president's daily brief. And it's just a daily routine of just lots of reading, lots of research, phone calls, having meetings, just constantly. Tucker [00:06:46] So you're trying to figure out how narcotics are coming in the United States, and you know who's doing this? It's how are they doing it? Pedro Israel Orta [00:06:55] Who's doing it, how they're doing it, where they're going. We're looking at, okay, what were the trafficking lines? Yeah. Where are traffickers basically going with their drugs? I mean, back back then during this particular time, from early 2000, the Pacific coast was big. So there were a lot of boats leaving the west coast of, upper South America, kind of the Colombian Pacific coast. Yes. Going up to Central American to Mexico. But at the same time, during that time, we still had some drug trafficking in the Eastern Caribbean, and also the Canada, the Caribbean side of Central America. And we were constantly just monitoring, trying to determine exactly when and where and who, what, when so forth, to be able to inform so that they can take it into, you know, actionable intelligence for, interdiction operations or for that matter, for the president and his cabinet secretaries to use to as leverage with different nations in Central America, Mexico, so forth. Tucker [00:07:55] Wow. So you do that for four years. What do you do next? Pedro Israel Orta [00:07:58] Well, what happened then was I had enough of the analysis branch. Yeah. I mean, I had worked out door sales. You know, I'm kind of I like the business, the network gain, the people contact. Yeah. Being glued on a computer screen for so long. Yes. Just like I had enough. Yeah. Especially after going to school for three years at FIU, two years at George Washington. So I volunteered to go to Iraq. I back then we had the the Iraq War, 2003, 2004. So at that point in time, it's like this is a great opportunity for me to serve my country, you know, do good. I know I can go out there and serve our interest. So I went out, once known as a short term TDY and, managed to turn that into a full time position out there. And I did two years in Iraq for two years. We did take breaks. They gave us typically three week breaks three times a year. So that kind of broke it up. But we would work 2 or 3, four months about a day off constantly 80 hours a week. Plus I was actually on call 24 seven. I went out there and I worked in in the capacity where I work with senior station leadership, working with senior military officials and other government agencies, doing a lot of liaison work, basically representing the CIA to these other entities and these other entities representing them to the CIA. A lot of deconfliction making sure we're not crossing paths, making sure that our operations are not basically overlapping each other, working on life and death issues. You know, if somebody lives is in danger, immediately call the military, get a quick response team out there to rescue people. Many different little things. Tucker [00:09:36] How big was the CIA presence in Iraq when you were there? Pedro Israel Orta [00:09:39] Well, that I can't discuss, but it was a huge footprint, that huge, huge footprint. I mean, it's significant. It was probably the largest station in the world that point. And probably not only that, but yeah, it was the largest at that point. Tucker [00:09:53] And it wasn't just gathering intelligence or conflicting with other federal agencies. It's also. Taking more active role. Correct? Pedro Israel Orta [00:10:01] Well, back back then, during the early 2000 era in Iraq, 2004 2006, you had the Shia uprising and you still had the Sunnis who were rebelling against the US invasion. So we were basically being attacked by two different sides on the West. The Sunnis were trying to destabilize and Anbar and not allow, you know, the coalition forces to establish a fully functioning democracy in Iraq and then Baghdad and other areas. You had the Shias who were trying to finally, for the first time, implant their will in the government because they had been repressed for so many years. And keep in mind you now had also the Kurds on the north. So you had a balancing act of balancing the Kurds, the Shias in the Sunnis. And it was it was a disastrous situation. Yeah. It was essentially a no win situation. And it was obvious to everyone that the Shias will win the presidential elections and even the parliament. But thankfully, the Kurds were strong enough to offer enough of a counterbalance, and all government operations in the country had to deal with all three of those counterinsurgency operations against the Sunnis. You know, counterinsurgency to a degree, against the Shias, all the political, you know, factions and the managing the Kurds, keeping the Kurds happy because the Kurds wanted to pull out and form their own country. Tucker [00:11:27] Of course they did, and they effectively did anyway. Right. But, so you were there for four years. Pedro Israel Orta [00:11:33] I was in Iraq for two years, rather. Yeah. At that point in time, after Iraq, I managed to get another assignment that would give me the Department of Operations, Operations Officer Certification course. So I went back to CIA headquarters to night and day difference between working in Baghdad and going back to CIA headquarters. I mean, it's just a bureaucracy, a monstrous ocracy. And, you know, it was a rough time for me trying to make that transition because unfortunately, I got myself into a situation where I wasn't a chosen officer to fill that position. It was because one of my former supervisors kind of forced that position on some of the decision makers, so they were trying to get me to pull out of that job, but I managed to stay and complete the training. And after that, seven, nine months back at CIA headquarters, deployed back to the field in a country that I cannot name, where in the name I name it fictitious, named Kamino. And I was basically back in the thick of things, doing a lot of the counterterrorism, counterinsurgency operations in this particular case, working with host country entities, basically targeting targeting the bad guys. Tucker [00:12:52] So what went wrong? That sounds like an interesting job. Pedro Israel Orta [00:12:57] Well, CIA is a big bureaucracy, that this started one phase of, blowing the whistle. Eventually, what happened in that station with me, that some of the managers in that station, it in order to be a little bit comical, I named them basically Moe, Larry and Curly. Yeah, because it was just that comical. It's a matter of fact. I named the station Potemkin station because, I mean, in contrast to Baghdad Station, this was an amateur division, and I had a stellar work history. By the time I got to this station, I had I had lost track had been five exceptional performance awards, four of them in Iraq, one in the counter drug work that I, I got promoted while I was I was in this country. They wanted me to extend for a fourth year, and eventually they found somebody else that they wanted to put in my position. So they were trying to get me to cancel my third year extension. And when I refused to cancel that, they started cooking up a plot to basically denigrate my character, my work, and essentially they basically forced me out. But the thing about this is that in this process, you know, I blow the whistle on abuses of authority, girls, mismanagement, significant EEO issues. And sadly, you know, I found out the hard way that the inspector general, the equal Employment opportunity, they really don't care. They're basically don't go in like the cleanup crew to cover it all up, sweep it up. And that's what happened in my case. But, you know, I, I fought in this particular case because I had a pregnant fiancee daughter yet to be born, and I was fighting for the future of my marriage and my, my daughter. So I had no choice to stand up to this tyranny. I mean, these were tyrannical tactics that they used to force me out of a job that, you know, sadly, the reality is it cost. The CIA. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more than a million to train me and deploy me and keep me there. So, I mean, there were defrauding the government of money just by kicking me out. So one man fighting against the system. Forget it. You know, I obviously lost that battle. But I was able to from there, go to Afghanistan. And I went to Afghanistan in January of 2010, which was right after the coast suicide bombing attack. Tucker [00:15:29] Yes. Pedro Israel Orta [00:15:30] And as a counterintelligence referent, it was a critical position I would have in combating additional threats to ensure that our operations would be safe from potential suicide bombers, among other threats. And I managed to do very well in that year in Afghanistan, you know, got great performance appraisals. And, I was a die analyst still on paper, despite having director of operations certifications, having done director of operations work in Iraq and in this other country named Kamino. So by the time I left Afghanistan in early 2011, I was still analyst looking to transition to director of operations. And I managed to land a job with the Information Operations Center doing technical targeting that I began in basically the spring of 2011. And this just takes off and goes at different what. Tucker [00:16:25] Is tactical targeting? Pedro Israel Orta [00:16:27] Technical targeting comprises different facets. We were doing basically looking at digital data to look for terrorist, what they were doing online in order to be able to find them so that we can interdict them. I did that countering terrorism in the Middle East. Basically the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, the Horn of Africa. Tucker [00:16:53] Wow. So how did your opinion of CIA change while you were there? Like, by this point, you realize maybe they're not helping the United States. Pedro Israel Orta [00:17:03] Well. I realized that when I worked in Baghdad in 2004, 2006, I worked for a lot of the older managers that came in and probably the 80s and the 90s. And I noticed that they had a lot of skilled and capable leaders. Some of these were former police officers, former military, former businessmen. They came into the agency with a lot of experience. Post 911. Fast forward into 2010. Now I'm beginning to work with a lot younger officers who had no life experiences. It came fresh out of college and there were remarkable differences between both generations. And it would all come to a crash in the climax further down the road. Post Afghanistan post headquarters. When I went back out to Afghanistan, when I went back out to Afghanistan in 2014, now I find myself as a deputy chief of base. Which I am entrusted with a significant position. Our number one priority is keep our officers safe. And in this particular case, we're there to fight a war. I mean, that's what we're doing in Afghanistan. Now I'm working for a new set of managers who are at the base. The chief of base. And for that matter, even some of the lower level managers at the Kabul station who really were not cut up to the job of being in Afghanistan and these kind of wars. And unfortunately, office politics, vindictiveness, abusing the position for your own gain became a prevalent issue. And in this particular case, I find myself in a very, very hard position. I'm working for a very nice lady who I respected, who had her skills and capabilities, but she was not cut out for this job. Couldn't handle the dirt, the grime, the noise, the isolation, the long hours, the rockets landing on top of you, out of nowhere at no time. And it would be basically awakened. There's a rocket, you know, inbound. Kaboom. You know, jump off your bed and go find out what's going on. She couldn't handle that. And sadly, one of the most distressing things for her is, as a mother of three, she felt, you know, like she was neglecting her sons back home. Tucker [00:19:25] Well, she was. Pedro Israel Orta [00:19:27] As she was. And unfortunately, in this particular case, her motive for being there was to make some extra money to pay for one of her son's colleges and at the same time, to be able to change her retirement plan at the CIA. If you work five years overseas. Tucker [00:19:41] That's what she was doing in a war zone. Pedro Israel Orta [00:19:42] Yeah, sadly, I saw this too often. So that this goes back to your question as far as good and bad people. Yes. It's a bureaucracy first and foremost. Tucker [00:19:53] So it's sort of like the DMV with guns that it's you're making it sound. I mean, if that doesn't, that's not the profile of the CIA operations officer, I imagine. Pedro Israel Orta [00:20:03] Well, you know, have you remember Afghanistan 2010? I, I work for a chief of base, a deputy chief of base. One of these guys was just really gung ho tip of the spear. Let's go fight this war. Let's go win. You know, let's take back the territory. And now I'm working for the Shake and Bake tour. You know, cooking and baking tours, adopting Santa tours. But the worst part about it was we were going out of the base at night for, yoga classes at a time of increased rocket attacks. Tucker [00:20:31] Yoga class? Pedro Israel Orta [00:20:32] Yeah. And on top of that, we were going out of the base during peak times of indirect fire for food without a necessity to do so. And in one of those instances, you know, on the way back, one of the routes we took ten minutes later, a rocket impacted right over the site. We drove over for food. Eventually I had to do something about this. I mean, my training, you know, years of having worked in a war zone, six plus years. By the time I've got to Afghanistan, you know, I knew what to do, what not to do. But even more importantly, from CIA headquarters, when they sent us out to the field in the war zone, they put us through a very sophisticated, detailed vetting process that includes meeting with every senior leader. And they gave us guidance on telling us exactly what to do. So she was doing everything we were told not to do. So. I knew she wouldn't get it. She wouldn't understand it. I raised it with, psychological officer. Regional psychological officer that came to the base, told them, in reality, he should have done something about it, but he didn't. He basically washed his hands up and told me, you go talk to your supervisor above her. So eventually I had to talk to him. This individual did not like at all. Everything I said, nothing was done about it except potentially tell her. So at that point in time, it kind of soured the relationship. But we were still working together. But the situation eventually just blew up, literally. Like if a rocket would have landed with an incident between a younger officer and an older officer. And that's a long story. But the short part of it is the younger officer was treated as an adopted son, spoiled and baby by the chief of base, which created the hostile environment, taking advantage of the older officer, which the chief of base really didn't care for this older officer. I mean, she basically said you'd take care of him. So they had a spat and I spoke up to her. I said, look, you know, this situation has been in the coming for a long time, which I actually warned you about a couple of weeks ago. And instead of trying to resolve things locally, I told her we can fix this here in the base. She chose to escalate and take it to Kabul, lying against this older officer, accusing him of having drawn a weapon. So now you've got this other supervisor in Kabul trying to investigate, you know, something that never happened, and the supervisor in Kabul was trying to basically coerce, manipulate me to take punitive actions against this other officer. I couldn't do that. I had to speak the truth. So I spoke to truth. And the next thing I know is I'm the one who says, this. Tucker [00:23:13] Does not sound like a very impressive organization to me. At least. You imagine in your mind that the CIA, you know, whatever its purposes or goal, it's corrupt. Obviously it's against democracy, but it's least kind of like they're swashbucklers or something. These sound like Department of Transportation lifers to me. Pedro Israel Orta [00:23:32] Well, it gets worse when they basically they at this point in time, you know, we had a three week break. I had to speed up my three week break. On my way out, I have a video teleconference with the chief of station, the deputy chief of station chief of resources, Derek Kabul, and I go over all these issues. I sent him all the materials and I sent all the materials to the Equal Employment Opportunity Officer. The last words from the chief of Station was, just go home, take your break. We'll sort this all out and we'll get back to you. I'm back home within a week. I'm called and I'm told, please come to this headquarters on such and such a date, such a such a time. You know, I never got a call from the EEO officer. Except a few hours before I'm supposed to meet headquarters. I make it to CIA headquarters, I meet with the EEO officer. Doesn't want to hear anything about what was happening in that base. He basically said, what EEO issues? Just just just completely just doesn't want to hear anything. As if he never read my materials or if he basically shredded them. Well, I go to the meeting. In the meeting with the senior officers, I'm told I would not be going back to Afghanistan, that I can apply for any job I want. And, well, I went back to see the EEO officer. The EO officer had the audacity to tell me it was a good thing you got fired. You can reinvent yourself. Yeah. Now I'm left outside. I have access to nothing. I couldn't take all the documentation that prove my claims because they were classified, and it would have had classified markings. We used, you know, fictitious names. We operational things for communications. So I had no proof, but I knew exactly where the proof could be found. So the next thing I find myself is trying to find somebody at CIA who would help. And the reality is that nobody wanted to help. They wanted to just cover it up. You know, the first line was EEO useless. I had to contact the director of National Intelligence and tell them about the situation there, EO office. And they gave me a number of the grievance officer who handles these things for the director of operations. When I finally set up a meeting with him, this guy is like, well, this is a hot potato. Just throw it away. Go talk to the EEO officer. Another EEO officer. By that time, I had reached out to the inspector general, and at that point in time, when I went to the inspector general in early April, that would have been a whistleblower allegation of reprisal by law. They were required to, within 14 days, determine whether there was a potential reprisal or not. And open an investigation that required constant collaboration between both of us where the in 90 days, they would tell me whether or not they had finished their investigation. If not, they will continue for 60 days until no more than 240 days to complete it. None of that was done. I met once with the I.G. They wanted nothing to do with it. They said this is an EEO issue and it continues to go downhill. It continues to go. Tucker [00:26:51] Worse around this time that you're wrangling with the inspector general in the, you know, office at CIA and all that. Do you start to notice a political change at CIA? What were the politics of your fellow officers? Pedro Israel Orta [00:27:06] By that time, Brennan had been the director for some time. And Brennan was John Brennan was a very strong director that brought his people in and posed his will. And it is this was CIA in 2015. I mean, by that time, you got to also understand that we're dealing with, I mean, look at the politics. United States, 93 to 2001. You had Clinton as president. Yes. Where he's putting his people in. Okay. You know, George Bush, president from 2001 to 2009, is just a small fraction of time compared to now having Obama 2009 through 2017. So you're looking at a Democratic president with Democratic operatives, you know, pretty much getting into these high level government positions. And I noticed that the Democratic operatives, in some cases were much stronger. And the Republicans, the Republicans, in my opinion, were very weak leaders. I mean, look at Porter Goss. Porter Goss didn't even last anything. The CIA pretty much kicked him out. You know, post Brennan I mean, Pompeo came in and he basically just continued Brennan's, CIA, of course. And on top of that, he picked Gina Haspel to be his deputy. Well, I. Tucker [00:28:24] Think that probably Mike Pompeo, on a deep level, agrees with John Brennan on most things. Pedro Israel Orta [00:28:32] What what I saw in part of how my story develops eventually, with all this fiasco of the IG's EO, everything failing me, I would end up blowing the whistle on the broken whistle, hence the title The Broken Whistle. Because not not only is the ability for you as an intelligence community official to blow the whistle broken it more so is they know it's broken and they don't care that it's broken and they will use the system to crush you. Yes. So I had to basically run out of CIA from just a bureaucratic beating and bullying that I took from all these different offices, and I took shelter in the office of the Inspector general for the intelligence community, in what is known as a joint duty assignment, a JDA. And I'm there and I get put on a team that does basically inter-agency type evaluations, inspections for the IG. And we start working on an evaluation on whistleblower protections, where we're evaluating the enforcement of Presidential Policy Directive 19, which was put in place by President Obama and Brennan. Clapper and every other agency had had to certify to the president that they had policies and procedures in place that followed the rules, the laws, the standards to investigate whistleblower reprisals. Well, we find out that, yeah, there's pretty ink on paper. That's about it. I mean, unenforceable not only that, the IG's really weren't following the letter of the law in some cases, didn't have any interest to follow the letter of the law. And in one instance, we had somebody basically just plotting to not even enforce these protections. So the protections that I had as a whistleblower didn't exist. And it's just not me alone. I mean, there were others around my same time that had blown the whistle on the broken whistle and on other matters, and they receive reprisals. I write about them in my book. John Reidy, Daniel P Meyer and Robert Cage, Jonathan Kaplan. Some of their stories are in the book. The point is, I had to blow the whistle on the broken whistle. So I escalated after I got sent back to CIA. When I went back to CIA, basically IG kicked me out. They said it was a conflict of interest for me to work for them, working on whistleblower evaluation when I was a whistleblower alleging reprisal when an attorney filed the lawsuit. Mind you, there were other whistleblowers inside the IG at the time. So I go back to CIA, and at that point in time, I literally landed back at CIA two years to the day when I first went back from Afghanistan. It's like if I was going back into the pit of hell, as I call it, for round two with the. Devils, and they will turn into round three with the devils, because I went back and endured the same exact thing, but actually worse at this point in time. I took it to the IG himself, Wayne Stone, the acting IG for the IG. I used the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act procedure to report a lot of these issues. As far as what I went through in Afghanistan about the whistle being broken and other matters, and they did nothing with my disclosures. Now I'm getting nowhere, not finding any jobs. I was basically blackballed. Jobs were being re advertised. I was qualified to do. I was applying for, and they wouldn't even tell me. No, I was basically left to fend for myself. Tucker [00:32:07] But were you still a federal employee at this point? Pedro Israel Orta [00:32:09] I was still a federal employee working for the CIA. You know, I had a temporary job, but I had to find a permanent job, and that required me to apply for these jobs and interview for some of these jobs. And without getting too down in the weeds, basically the process was stacked against me because you have to essentially try to find jobs that are within your career service or that are career enhancing for them to be able to potentially offer you these jobs. And I was applying for jobs I was well qualified to do, had proven I can do. And we're actually within my career field. And they were still telling me no and re advertising them. So getting nowhere I blow the whistle to Mike Pompeo's number three, his handpicked chief operations officer Brian Ballatore. At that point in time, immediately they issue an anti-harassment policy, sent out an email and they tell me, basically, go talk to the IG. The IG is investigating. We want nothing to do with this. Let the IG do their job. So basically, Mike Pompeo and his number three wash their hands of it and let the bureaucracy handle this. Tucker [00:33:19] So you're working at CIA during the Trump election. What was the view of that within the CIA? What do people think of Trump at CIA? Pedro Israel Orta [00:33:30] Well, at that time, I was actually at the office of Inspector General for the intelligence Community. Tucker [00:33:34] Yes. Pedro Israel Orta [00:33:35] Or what I found interesting was that we were in a satellite building that every government building usually has a picture of the president, the vice president. In this particular case, I don't know how many months it took him to eventually put the picture of the president, the vice president, up on the wall, as if they didn't even want to recognize him as the president or the vice president. It could be that there was no official portrait for the president of vice president. But regardless, they should have immediately tried to put a picture up there. Tucker [00:34:09] Did you ever hear people talk about Trump or the election when you worked at CIA? Pedro Israel Orta [00:34:16] Some employees liked him, some didn't like him. It was depending on who we're talking about, right? I mean, to a degree, the problem that we have with CIA is the headquarters side CIA has overseas, obviously, as everybody knows. Yeah, but the majority of the officers work in the Washington, DC area and in that Washington, DC area. Going back to the politics of, you know, all the Democratic administration has become predominantly liberal. You can look at, the voting records, for Fairfax County, Arlington County, Loudoun County. And you'll notice that, you know, up until about 2008, those counties were predominantly red, you know, very Republican. Then all of a sudden they turn into, blue, very, Democratic. Same reflection with CIA. A lot of these younger people coming in have been more, more liberal, more democratically inclined. So if a lot of people didn't like Trump, I mean, it got so bad in one of my offices that one of the leaders actually spoke out and said, look, we have to respect the chain of command. If you if you find yourself mentally distressed because Trump won the presidency, go seek some psychological help that actually did happen. Tucker [00:35:37] Why did that supervisor have to say that? Pedro Israel Orta [00:35:40] Because as federal employees. Tucker [00:35:42] Well, I understand why legally he had to say that we- Pedro Israel Orta [00:35:44] Work for the president. Tucker [00:35:46] Of course you have to. Right. Pedro Israel Orta [00:35:47] And, you know, whether we agree with the president or not, we're there to basically serve the president. Tucker [00:35:53] But we're people at the office. The Intel office getting hysterical about Trump is that. Pedro Israel Orta [00:35:58] I think some of their emotions were flared up. Tucker [00:36:01] And did you see any of that? Pedro Israel Orta [00:36:02] I personally did not witness any of that. Yeah. Yeah. But but apparently some people were really just very, upset about it. Tucker [00:36:10] So looking back, and now that we know that the CIA had a role, a big role in the 2020 election, you know, trying to hide information from voters, etc., does that support. Prize. You. Pedro Israel Orta [00:36:28] Given that the history of the Democratic Party and their operatives like Brennan and so forth. Not at all. That, I mean. Tucker [00:36:38] That's illegal. They're not allowed to do that. Pedro Israel Orta [00:36:41] It's illegal. But but this goes to a core and key critical issue. They just can't handle power. The amount of power that you can have in some of these secretive agencies is so much that some people just can't handle it, and it basically corrupts them. It gets to the point that they almost lose their conscience. I mean, when you've got so much power that you can just upend somebody's life, you have got to find a balance to be able to keep your conscience. And I have found officers or senior leaders who basically have become so desensitized through the years that it's almost as if they lose their conscience and they can no longer see right or wrong. And it's like, it's my way or the highway. Tucker [00:37:25] So you saw that? Pedro Israel Orta [00:37:26] Yeah. Tucker [00:37:28] What kind of power does the CIA have? What power are you talking about? Pedro Israel Orta [00:37:30] Well, I mean, finding war life and death decisions. Yeah. Technical targeting. I had to get it right. Or somebody could have a real bad day. Yeah. Tucker [00:37:41] This is tactical, tactical targeting of people who are going to be killed. Yeah. Pedro Israel Orta [00:37:45] Potentially. Yeah. Potentially. Yeah. No, I mean, we're talking about, you know, we're doing counterterrorism operations and we're doing things that, you know, death and life situations at hand. On top of that, you know, the personnel matters. I mean, they're like any organization metrics becomes a problem when you start getting focused on the wrong metrics. Tucker [00:38:08] Yes. Pedro Israel Orta [00:38:08] You could end up sacrificing your your conscience, your your your your morals, your ethics. You know, it's like, what are we doing here? Why are we doing something? Are we trying just to pad the numbers like we have X amount of intelligence reports? We have X amount of operations. What are we doing? Because if you're just trying to do activities so you can create a metric, you potentially could put lives in danger. I mean, in Afghanistan, there were a lot of operations out there being done, some of it driven by metrics, some of it driven by threats, like, yeah, it's legitimate operation, a legitimate target. There's something that needs to be done where in some cases, you know, somebody just wants to create a metric just to pad the numbers. Yes. I mean, sadly, it does happen everywhere, but but in the case of national security or where lives are at stake, I mean, you got to find the right balance. So it's like, wait a minute, you stop. You know, this is not about metrics. This is about human lives. Tucker [00:39:01] We don't want to kill people just to reach a target. Pedro Israel Orta [00:39:04] Yeah. Or, you know, collateral damage. Personnel resources had to CIA. Tucker [00:39:09] Did you ever to your point, which is such an interesting and wise one, I think. But the power corrupts, of course. But did you ever hear anybody say, you know, maybe we shouldn't be killing this person, or I feel bad about killing that person. Did you ever hear that? Pedro Israel Orta [00:39:24] I mean, one time I was working in one office, and somebody walked in. Hey, did we kill somebody today? I mean, some people just can handle this kind of stuff. Tucker [00:39:35] How did the person say it? Pedro Israel Orta [00:39:37] Yeah, literally just laughing. Tucker [00:39:38] Laughing? Yeah. You shouldn't laugh about killing people, though, right? Pedro Israel Orta [00:39:43] Absolutely not. I mean, absolutely not. I mean, if we're doing something that means life or death, whether employees. I mean, look, look, let's go back to Khost for a moment. What happened in Khost? They put a woman in Khost who did not have the operational experiences to handle that base or what they were doing. And this is all out in Britain and books and newspaper articles. Her father in law posts are going out there. This is clearly documented. Her motive for being out there was to get her five years overseas so she can change her, basically. Pension plan. Wrong motive again. And in the process of being in charge of that base, some decisions were made there in order to protect her because she can't answer for her actions and she's dead. You know, they basically didn't fault necessarily anybody. And they kind of just passed the blame throughout different actors. But part of it was the actual decision made on that day of allowing an unvetted contact who was not a source, who had never been really met by US intelligence to go into the base to a welcoming committee. Tucker [00:40:58] And that person was a suicide bomber. Pedro Israel Orta [00:40:59] That's a suicide bomber. So I know. Tucker [00:41:01] The woman who made that decision shouldn't have been in a position of authority in the first place. Pedro Israel Orta [00:41:06] Not that specific position. Tucker [00:41:08] Yeah. How many died do you remember in that bombing? Pedro Israel Orta [00:41:12] Seven counting hurt. And some additional people were also injured. But that was a fatal mistake through just we're getting into basically metrics die and you know office politics which sadly happens at CIA like any other organization. Tucker [00:41:31] But when you die at work when you were there. Pedro Israel Orta [00:41:33] Absolutely. I mean, look, look at this woman and the other woman at the chief of base where I was working at. I mean, they're trying to put a woman in a position just to have a woman. I'm not against women having positions. It's matter of fact, I work with a lot of women managers at CIA who were phenomenal, some of them, and actually in operations when I was in Iraq, we had a stellar woman doing some. Based management out in one of the bases. And she was outstanding. And she rose up the ranks and became a leader at the CIA. So, yes, by all means, they are qualified women. But just just to find, someone, whether a woman or a man. Well, in the case of, this other station I call Potemkin station in this country named in the book, I mean, Moe, Larry, curly. The same thing apply with men. We had basically men put in position that were not. The best qualified for those position and actually caused a lot of problems in that station. Tucker [00:42:31] Why were they put there? Pedro Israel Orta [00:42:33] Office politics. You know, basically they know somebody and somebody who knows them, you know, puts them in that position. Tucker [00:42:39] It doesn't sound like a meritocracy at all. Pedro Israel Orta [00:42:41] It it's a lot of nepotism. It's who you know. It happens in every organization. But when we're talking about CIA and death and life matters, you know, employees lives like Khost or, you know, the lives of potentially who, you know, could potentially run into problems with with whatever, you know, is done. You know, you got to make sure you have capable leaders. Tucker [00:43:04] So let me just end with a question that you probably can answer. What do you do about it? How do you CIA has all this power? You've said its budget is secret. Its activities are heavily secret. Not all, but a lot of secret. They're having all this power. It's clearly not helping the United States in the ways that it should be. What do you. How do you fix it? Pedro Israel Orta [00:43:25] Well, go back to the church. Pike committees. Yes. The Rockefeller Commission. The reality is that what we're seeing today is not new. This happened in the 50s and the 60s. 70s. What changed was the oversight mechanisms that were put in place. House permanent select committee of intelligence. Senate. Select committee of intelligence. When these commissions, we're doing oversight the CIA and a lot of abuses were reined in. But what has happened through time is these two committees have failed to do their due diligence and do oversight. It's almost as if they work for the CIA and basically do the CIA's bidding. As I found out as a whistleblower. Don't you dare go to Congress and blow the whistle. Because the reality is they're not there to defend you. They're there to defend the CIA and cover up for the CIA, which is what I have encountered. So how do we fix this? We may need another church committee, and we may need somehow to redo some of our intelligence agencies. Potentially. You know, certainly one thing that needs to be done is top down review what we're doing, what we're not doing, what should be done, what should not be done, where is there redundancy? Where are we failing in personnel matters? Where are we failing in following metrics instead of really activities we should be funneling and funding? Tucker [00:44:52] But I wonder, oh, I agree with all of that. But I wonder if Congress can't even for CIA to release the Kennedy assassination documents 61 years later, which they have not thousands of documents are still holding. Congress has not been able to do anything about that in 60 years. So maybe CIA is so much more powerful than Congress that a congressional hearing or committee won't make a difference. Pedro Israel Orta [00:45:14] Well, the reality is, you're right. CIA and many executive branch governments are actually even stronger than the president himself. Many times these agencies will obstruct presidential policies or for that matter, don't even disclose everything to presidents. So we go back to your point. What do we do here? We are going to have to do a top down review. Another church like committee with power. And we're going to need outsiders like has been done in the past with other committees, potentially get get some high profile lawyers like Alan Dershowitz, Jonathan Turley, you know, interpreters like Elon Musk and so forth. Do a real deep dive. And Congress is going to have to commit to follow those directives that are issued. Tucker [00:45:59] Do you think members of Congress, committee chairmen are being blackmailed by CIA? Pedro Israel Orta [00:46:04] Well, actually, there's one way that they do blackmail, security clearances who issue security clearances for a lot of these staffers, you know, the congressmen, senators, House of Representatives, they have a clearance. But if you're a staffer, your clearance at times will run through CIA, NSA. So for the CIA, even although Office of Personnel Management does the security clearance, they get input from these other three letter agencies so they can literally stop anyone from having a clearance if they want to. So that's one means and one way that they can actually control Congress. Tucker [00:46:41] So if you're if you're a senator but your staff can't get clearances, then really, you know, you don't have the time to read all the stuff. Pedro Israel Orta [00:46:50] You know, who does the work at Congress? It's the staffers, of course, staffers. I mean, a lot of these senators in this House of representative members do very little work. They're basically dependent upon their staffers to do all the research, and they're bidding for them. All the bills, really, to a degree, are written by all these staffers. So if the security clearance of these staffers is controlled by the CIA, the intelligence community, they certainly can manipulate Congress members to ensure that only select people get those clearances. Tucker [00:47:18] And they do. Pedro Israel Orta [00:47:19] That, and they do. Tucker [00:47:24] I mean, if members of the Intel community are breaking federal law to spy on Americans without a warrant. And, why is no one ever held accountable for that? Pedro Israel Orta [00:47:37] The oversight mechanism is Congress. And if they fail to do something about it, they will get away with it. And then we get into a vicious cycle where, oh, I got away with doing this, doing that, breaking this law. So they continue doing it and it just continues to spiral downward to a point where it can become more graver and the infractions even larger. And what happens? There's another dimension to it is the ability of people to speak up is completely diminished spiral of silence, because the cost of speaking up is too high. Tucker [00:48:12] Yes. Pedro Israel Orta [00:48:12] Where? I mean, look at the case of, Drake and Snowden. Drake blew the whistle using the disclosure mechanisms in place, and they came after him, accused him of leaking national security data, and actually tried to prosecute him. He pled guilty to some minor things, but they basically tore his life apart. Snowden comes in, and he essentially makes similar, like, disclosures publicly. Because he knew the system would crush him. He could not trust this system at all. And the point here is. Tucker [00:48:51] You worked there when Snowden did that? Pedro Israel Orta [00:48:53] Yes. Tucker [00:48:54] What was the reaction? The internal. Pedro Israel Orta [00:48:56] I mean, internally, I mean, there was six significant damage to national security was done from the perspective of some of these collection programs. Some of these collection programs are actually good for our benefit when we use them right to target, you know, terrorists and adversaries. But when people can't handle the power given to them and start abusing these powers to target political adversaries, now you got a problem. But but this gets to another point, too. How do we get here? Well, post 911, we gave these agencies vast powers. And what has happened is they have flipped a switch on these vast powers to use them against political adversaries. Yes, through the predicate of counterintelligence or counterterrorism authorities. If, for example, you or I were seen as a potential, Russian asset of some type, they can turn these authorities against us on the flip of a switch legally to, begin to investigate us and eavesdrop on us. And that's that's no secret that information is out there, and that's how it's done. Tucker [00:50:05] Amazing. Amazing. I appreciate you're spending all this time and telling us what it's like to actually work there. The broken whistle. A deep state run amuck. Pedro Israel Orta. Thank you, thank you. Pedro Israel Orta [00:50:17] Tucker. God bless you. Tucker [00:50:18] God bless.

Digital Warriors Are Ready

Stop WWIII by Dubconscious from their album Word Of Life Dubconscious — Word of Life https://dubconscious20.bandcamp.com/ Word Of Life, released May 12, 2004

Pastor Doug Wilson is the Christian nationalist they warned you about. Published Apr 15, 2024 READ THE TRANSCRIPT Tucker [00:00:00] So if you're Joe Biden standing for reelection at the age of 81, the obvious question is what exactly are you going to run on? You're not going to run on the state of the economy. You're not going to run on the state of the world, which is increasingly chaotic. You're not going to run on lengthening life expectancy, because actually life expectancy is declining in the United States under his watch. So what are you going to run on? Well, are you going to run against. And the main thing Biden is going to run against is Christianity running against Christianity. He's already put people in prison for praying. So it's not a stretch. But of course, you're not going to say I'm running against Christianity, the world's largest religion. You're going to say I'm running against something called Christian nationalism, which is a way of making traditional Christianity seem like a threat to the country rather than the principle upon which it was founded. So that is their plan. They can running at something called Christian nationalism, and in this they have the full cooperation of Hollywood and the media outlets, which are whipping up the population to a frenzy over this threat called Christian nationalism. Well, most of us, even those of us who pay some attention, aren't really sure what Christian nationalism is. Is it a product of what it sounds like, which is some branding meeting in the basement of the DNC, designed to make Christians seem really scary if they believe in God? Maybe we decided we would ask the person most closely identified with that phrase Christian nationalism. He's one of the rare American Christian pastors who is willing to engage on questions of culture and politics, and for that, he has taken a lot of grief. But we are honored to have him. His name is Doug Wilson. He's the pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. He is the author of several books, including a book called Mere Christendom: The Case for Bringing Christianity Back into Modern Culture. And Pastor Wilson joins us now. Thank you very much. Doug Wilson [00:01:42] Honored to be here. Thank you. Tucker [00:01:44] So I'm since there was not a post, I'm sincerely confused by the phrase Christian nationalism, which seems like an attack on Christianity to me. What is it to the extent you understand it? And are you a Christian nationalist? Doug Wilson [00:01:57] So I'm willing to be a Christian nationalist because. I prefer that phrase to the phrase I usually get called... Tucker [00:02:05] So what do you get? Doug Wilson [00:02:07] White supremacist. Doug Wilson [00:02:09] Slave advocate. Oh, you know, racist, you know, all the neo-fascist, so the the, the left really does hate Christianity. Yes. And, with the phrase Christian nationalism, even the part of it that's coming from the left trying to wrap that around our necks, that's something I think I can explain. I can say, yeah. Yes, but. And then explain it to inside of two minutes. Tucker [00:02:34] I mean, I stand before you and thank you for doing that. And I will listen rapidly because I really want to know. But just to clarify the terms, is that a phrase that you or people with your beliefs came up with, or was that a phrase that was leveled against you? Doug Wilson [00:02:46] Well, both. Cannon, Cannon Press, located in Moscow, Idaho, has a streaming service called Cannon Plus can can press published The case for Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolf. So that was our embrace of the term. Okay. And Stephen Wolf, he wrote a defense, a scholarly defense of the whole thing, the history of the whole thing. So we embraced it to that extent. But then on MSNBC, just a few weeks ago, there was one of the talking heads there that said, anybody who believes that rights come from God and not from Congress and not from the Supreme Court is a Christian nationalist. Right. So anybody who, you know, making Thomas Jefferson right, right. A Christian nationalist endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. So anybody who believes that on the according to the left, is a Christian nationalist and there is, a developed set of arguments in defense of that phrase that can be, I think, pointed out in short order. You can't there's no you, trying to defend other things they call you. It's like putting lipstick on a pig. It's just you're not. It's not going to be a thing. Tucker [00:03:58] No. Doug Wilson [00:03:59] All right. But this is something that people can say, oh, I love my nation, and I'm a Christian. Why can't these. Tucker [00:04:06] Well, that's how I feel about it, right? I don't know what it is. So how would you define it? Doug Wilson [00:04:10] So, it's, I think very simple. If there is no God above the society, if there's no God above the state, take got away. Yes. The state is God. Doug Wilson [00:04:22] Okay. If there is no God above the state, the state is God. The state becomes God and it assumes the prerogatives of deity. Try, you know, cameras at every, at every intersection, aping omniscience. Yes. Omnipresence. In Big Brothers, watching you. Tucker [00:04:40] Control of your mind. Doug Wilson [00:04:41] Control of your mind. They want to control absolutely everything, every keystroke. They want to control everything because they're aspiring to deity. The reason they're aspiring to deity is because they don't recognize any god above them. Okay, now this is where everybody I think I'd be with, most people would be with me. A. To that point, all conservative, believing Christian. Tucker [00:05:02] For the state is not. Doug Wilson [00:05:03] God. The state is not God. Yes. Okay. And the early Christians were persecuted not because they worship Jesus, but because they would not worship Caesar. All right. The whole issue of Christians being thrown to the lions had to do with who they wouldn't worship, not who they would. Right. Oh, okay. The Romans were more than happy to add Jesus to the pantheon. Yes, exactly. Okay. But the claims of Christ are exclusive. And Christians would not, recognize Caesar as Lord. Jesus is Lord is the fundamental Christian confession. So most Christians are with you right up to that point. But then the immediate comeback question from our antagonists would be, okay, if you want to have a God above the state, smart Alec. Which God? Okay. And that lands you right in the middle of theological debate, which is the last place in the world a lot of people want to be, for sure. Okay. The. Is it Allah? Is it Shiva, the god of destruction? Is it, the Unitarian god? Is it the Christian god? What do you. You know what God is? Tucker [00:06:05] It is that the Satan of the church of Satan? Doug Wilson [00:06:07] Right. And incidentally, if I could put here, our current rulers don't believe in God, but they do believe in the devil, right? All right. And and their belief in the devil is why they want to ascend the size of the North. They want to be be as the Most High. That was the initial temptation. In the garden. You shall be God. Okay. So our current rulers are are very ambitious, and they want to aspire to that height. We don't want to resist them in the name of Christ, because we don't want to launch another series of interminable religious wars, right? Okay. We. Because we don't want the Muslims fighting with the Jews fighting with the Christians fighting with, you know, all of that. All right. So that's that's the most reasonable question when they say which God, the Christian. And here's the answer to your question. The Christian nationalist is the one who's willing to answer that question. And speaking into the microphone, the true God, the living God, the one who exists. Yes. Not not the one, not the God on our money, you know. Now, if there's a corrective, there's God on our money used to be the Christian God, because that was put there when there was a robust Christian consensus in this country. All right. So we had an informal, informal establishment at the founding of the United States, where the religious differences that we were willing to acknowledge and work with were the differences between Baptists and Presbyterians and Anglicans. It was not the difference between Muslims and Hindus, and it wasn't the whole entire landscape because, all law and this is the next, principle. All law is imposed morality. Tucker [00:07:55] By definition. Doug Wilson [00:07:56] By definition, it's not whether but which it's not. It's not whether you're imposing morality, it's which morality you're imposing. Okay. And if someone says, well, this is going you're going to wind up imposing morality. I say, well, yeah, that's what law is, right? You can't have a structured order in society without the imposition of morality laws. Judgment. Right. But then that leads to the question at which morality, every, every moral system, arises out of the worship of a god. All right. So in Saudi Arabia you're going to get a moral system that is distinctly different than a moral system that arose out of a country with a Christian history. And yes, census. All right. So the the God you worship, this is a principle, you see all through the, through the entire Bible. And that is you become like what you worship. People begin to be conformed to the image of what they consider to be the highest good. You become like what you worship in Psalm 115. It says, they make idols. They that have eyes and see, not ears, but they hear not noses, but they smell not. And then it says, those that make them are like unto them. You become like what you worship. All right. So if you, if you worship a God who is, Allah does not reveal himself. He reveals his will. He's a God of power, coercion, force. All right. That's why Muslim societies are the way they are. Because you become like what you worship. The Christian heritage has, unlike anything else in human history, has a balance of form and freedom, structure and liberty together. Okay. That, I believe, is the unique contribution of Christian theology. We worship. We worship God who is one God. Christians are monotheists. Who is Triune father, son, and Holy Spirit. And so when you're tackling the ancient philosophical problem of the one and the many, what's what is ultimate diversity? Like Heraclitus thought, you can't step into the same river twice. History is just ten tons of confetti dumped into a tornado. Yes. That's chaos, that's Heraclitus. Then there's Parmenides. Everything's frozen. Everything's a big unit, right? Monism or chaos? World is king. If you're Heraclitus. Parmenides. Everything's frozen and stuck. And they wrestled with this for centuries. And then the Christians came along and the history of ideas. And you Christians, what is ultimate, the one or the many? And the Christian said, yes. Yes. And Christians have room, have mental space, have theological space for, ultimate unity and ultimate division. The fellowship between the three persons of the Trinity. And we become like what we worship. And so, consequently, Christians are the ones who can respect order and form and structure. We we like order, and we love liberty. Well, where does that come from? Right. There's there's a certain kind of person who loves liberty, and they just want to do whatever they want to do. And no one can tell me what to do about anything. Tucker [00:11:16] Libertine. Doug Wilson [00:11:17] Libertine. And then there's the person who wants structure. They want to live in a tyrannical North Korea type of thing where every move is dictated. Yes. Right. They want structure, structure, structure. The Christian faith provides the balance between form and freedom. And this is something that has been discussed for decades in the modern setting. Frances Schaefer, the late Frances Schaefer was really good at spelling this out. We we want form and freedom together so that when when we say Christian nationalism, there are only three ways of basic ways of organizing human society. There's tribalism, there's nationalism, and then there's globalism. I don't want globalism. I don't want to eat bugs, okay? I don't want tribalism because nobody wants to live in a failed state. Somalia with warlords? No, but no, nobody wants to live in Thunderdome. Okay. So I don't want tribalism and I don't want globalism. And we have a national structure now. Okay. So as a Christian, I would like that national structure to conform to the things that God wants and not the things that man wants. That's Christian nationalism. Tucker [00:12:29] But may I ask? Of course I yes, I agree vehemently with everything you said. Let me pose the maybe two problems that people might have hearing the phrase Christian nationalism. The first most obvious is, well, what if I'm not Christian, right? How do I fit into that? Doug Wilson [00:12:42] All right. You would probably you would fit in better then you're fitting in now. Well, okay. One of the things that a nonbeliever. Basically, I trust the Christians. This is I'm speaking historically. I trust the Christians to take better care of a secularists liberty than I trust the secularists to take care of money. Speaker 3 [00:13:05] Nicely put. Doug Wilson [00:13:07] Okay, I think we're I think we're. Tucker [00:13:08] You have the last 2000 years to to back you up on that. Doug Wilson [00:13:11] Correct. And that's not to say that there weren't warts and sins and blemishes in Christian history. There really, there really were. But you take the worst, you know, they take the worst of the worst in Christian history. Something like the Spanish Inquisition, right? Okay. Some terrible, terrible thing, which I'm not carrying water for at all. Terrible thing. But the Spanish Inquisition killed a few thousand people over a few centuries. That was Stalin on a slow afternoon. The commies have killed 100 million people in the last century or so. All right. Tens of millions of people, and and yet they go on serenely, as though their copybook is not blotted and ours is all right. How long have they been dining out on the Salem witch trials or on the the Spanish Inquisition, or this the Fourth Crusade or, you know, different things like that? Yeah, those those were horrific, evil, bad things. But the Christian, theologian, the Christian preacher has a book of God's revelation with which to condemn these things. We can say that's inconsistent. That's that's not what God wants. Yeah. And we should conform to what God wants. That's Christian nationalism. All right. So Christian nationalism doesn't mean disobeying God's will in the name of Jesus. Christian nationalism means conforming what we're doing to God's revealed will in the name of Jesus. It means obeying him, not disobeying him. Tucker [00:14:42] So Christian nationalism does not imply forced conversion. Doug Wilson [00:14:46] It does not. Tucker [00:14:46] Or a reduction in the rights of non-Christians? Doug Wilson [00:14:49] No, it's an expansion of the rights of non-Christians. Right? I believe I believe an average my my standard joke, picked up somewhere is if I were if I were president and what a glorious three days that would be, we'd get we would get a lot done in those days. But if I were in control of this, I believe the average nonbeliever would not know what to do with all the additional liberty he would have. I believe. Tucker [00:15:17] Can you give me an example of the liberties non-Christians would gain under such a structure? Doug Wilson [00:15:21] How many of our chains have we gotten used to? Right? Too many. So that one of the common things that the people who are trying to scare people with Christian nationalism, like we're going to go back to The Handmaid's Tale type of thing, are trying to spook us with that sort of thing. And they say we need to keep the government out of our bedrooms, keep the government out of the bedroom. Well, I had the privilege a number of years ago building my own house, and I know exactly how many screws the government required to be in the sheetrock in my bedroom, how big the windows had to be for egress in my bedroom, how thick the sheetrock had to be in my bedroom. The. What do you mean, keep the government out of my bedroom? I can't remove the mattress tag from the, from the mattress because the government is in my bedroom. Literally. Right. So the so one of the things that would happen is that you would have a great deal more practical liberty, as opposed to the kind of liberty that the leftists want you to have. The kind of liberties that you can exercise in a six by a prison cell. You can read porn in a prison cell. Right? You can have dope smuggled into you in a prison cell. You can get high in a prison cell. You can you can be in war. Tucker [00:16:37] But may I ask, though? I mean, there's no question that the right, as a general, broadly speaking, offers a vision of greater personal liberty than the left is totalitarian. I think that's pretty clear. But why? What about Christianity would inspire you to offer more liberty as opposed to, like, your dedication to Hayek? Okay, but why Christianity? Doug Wilson [00:17:00] I'm a biblical absolutist. Some people would call me a fundamentalist. Like, I take everything in the Bible literally, which when Jesus says, I'm the door, you don't look for a doorknob. You don't have to go lie down in green pastures to be a good Christian. So I don't take the Bible literally. I take the Bible naturally. The way it presents itself to be taken. Poetry is poetry. Vision is vision. History is history. And. But I'm a biblical absolutist. So what the Bible says, I just take to the bank and I have a very dim view of human wisdom. All right. We are a piece of work. The human race is messed up. All right. And so consequently, I only want to allow coercion, which is what this the magistrate does. I only want to allow coercion if there is black letter biblical justification for it. Okay. It's sort of like a. I don't have a problem, prosecuting rapists because I can show you in the Bible where that should be done. I don't have a problem prosecuting murderers, because I can show you in the Bible that this is something that God entrusted to the magistrate to do, to enforce, to keep order by punishing rape and and murder and that. Yes. So on. I don't I can't find anything in the Bible that allows the government to dictate the temperature of the water that comes out of showerhead in my bathroom. Consequently, the government has no business doing that. It's none of their business. They have no authorization. Right. So we have gotten, they. William F Buckley once joked that a liberal is someone who reaches into your shower and adjust the temperature for you. They they know better. Of course, Thomas Soul's great book, The Vision of the anointed, is. I think the subtitle, something like self-congratulation as the Basis of Public Policy. And that's the way it goes. They feel serenely above it all, and they want to boss everybody around. I don't want to boss anybody around unless I have authorization in the book from from the Lord. And and and you look at the Ten Commandments. If you could fit the Ten Commandments on a postcard, and then you could fit the Old Testament in one volume on the shelf, go to the local library and ask to look at the the code for your state. Shelf after shelf. Right. The Federal Register of Laws. Shelf after shelf after shelf. All right. That kind of tyranny. All right. Somebody has a website, I think, called three felonies a day. The average American is guilty of trespassing. They can always get use for something. Of course. Right. Because they've got so many rules that you're always transgressing. And then when they decide to pull the switch, they can just come scoop you up and take you off. Right. And make it happen. In a in a biblical law order, you have ten commandments, and then you have the commentary on those ten commandments, which would be the rest of the Old Testament and the New Testament. And if it's not there, right. If, if, if someone says, we need to prosecute this guy for hate crimes, right. As a and I say, oh, as opposed to the normal, ordinary love crimes. What what are you talking about? Why why are you punishing him for an attitude? Right. You have no. You have no authorization. You can. You can, hit it. Get. You can get him for taking the guy's bicycle or smashing in his windows. You can. You've got authorization biblically to punish the wrongdoer. That's Romans 13. The God gives the sword to the magistrate to reward the righteous and punish the wrong to her. But then the Bible defines what is that? Wrongdoing and certain things. People think that if it's in the Bible, it we can enforce it. Well, no. In the Bible, there's a difference between sins and crimes. Right. A crime is something that the Bible identifies as evil. And there's a civil penalty attached. But in the Ten Commandments, the 10th commandment, covetousness, there's there's no penalty attached. I don't want covetousness. Police. I don't want lust. Police. I don't want there's there's no penalty attached. I have no authorization to arrest someone for looking longingly through a catalog too long. That's a that's beyond our capacity. So we we should have nothing to do with that. And and you find that if you were strict with this, you're going to you're going to find, there's a wonderful title of a book, The Emergence of Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World. And it's a history of the Protestant Reformation and how a lot of our, practical, substantive liberties grew out of certain theological assumptions that, that were established and reaffirmed, some inherited from the Middle Ages and some, established a new and some some established at that time. So people think that, Christians are going to bring in this Handmaid's Tale hellhole sort of thing. But there was in 1892, there was a Supreme Court decision. And it was exquisitely named Holy Trinity versus the United States of America. And it was the Holy Trinity was the name of a church. And Congress had passed a law forbidding, merchants, contractors to import a bunch of foreign labor, pay for their passage and then release them into the country. So it was there was a law against paying for the passage of a foreign laborer. And that was meant for these big construction projects. Well, a church, I think, in New York named Holy Trinity, called a British minister to be their new, pastor. And they paid for his passage over. And so, of course, some zealous prosecutor. Charge you know when after them over this affront to to the laws of the United States and the case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and it was Holy Trinity versus the United States of America. The chief justice was a man named Brewer at the time. This was 1892. And in 1892 they handled the case itself in a commonsense way, deciding for the church. Look, you know, I wasn't talking about that. They did. And then Brewer said, and while we're on the subject, let's take this opportunity to remind everybody that the United States is a Christian country. Okay. And then he went through the history of the United States, the fundamental orders of Connecticut, the founding documents. Just walk through. He was historically literate. And he said definitively in this Supreme Court decision, the United States is a Christian country. Now, the thing I want is to be living in 1893. That's what that's what I want. In terms of the judicial setup, I don't want, to capture this. The the bad guys Orwellian apparatus that they're setting up and then turn it to Christian ends. I don't I don't want to butt into their lives the way they want to, but into everybody's life. Tucker [00:24:16] Well, that's for sure. And, I mean, what you're describing is a country that, as it has become less Christian, has become more authoritarian. Correct, right. And that's obvious and demonstrable. But but for saying what you just said, you will be and have already been by Russell Moore, most recently in Christianity Today, described as a theocratic. And what you just described will be called theocracy. Right. How is what you just described different from theocracy? Doug Wilson [00:24:41] Okay. What what people when people say, Russell Moore said aspiring theocratic. He didn't think I'd made it yet, but he he said that I wanted to a deep in the dark recesses of my heart. I wanted to be a theocratic. The here's the difference between this is what they're thinking of when they think of theocracy. They're thinking of ecclesia ocracy. Right. Tucker [00:25:06] They're thought by priests. Doug Wilson [00:25:07] Rule by clerics, rule by priests. Okay. And they're thinking of something like Iran, right? With a bunch of reformed, weird beards, issuing dicked, they are doing their thing. They they're thinking of a cabal of, clerics and holy men and shamans and whatever, issuing decrees on the basis of a religion that the populace doesn't accept. And, and we just jam it down their throats. Well, we don't jam things down people's throats. That's what they do. That's what they're doing now. Okay? That what they. When when ro was first established, there were most of the states had laws restricting abortion. They jammed their, ungodly dictate down everybody's throat, in the Obergefell decision. What they did is they jammed it down his throat. They said, this is what we must progress waits for. No, man. We're not. We're going to do it. Do it now. Tucker [00:26:04] Sure, California passed a referendum restricting marriage to a man and a woman, and it was overturned. So much for democracy, right? Doug Wilson [00:26:11] So, we are not wanting to, on the basis of some clerical decision, have the clerics rule and decide, like in Iran, only a Christian. We don't want the Christian ayatollahs doing that sort of thing. That's what most people think. What most people call a theocracy is actually an ecclesia ocracy. Okay. Christian. The historic Christian doctrine is when people say, well, Pastor Wilson, you need to affirm that the separation of church and state. This is sort of thing. It makes me want to dance in place because Christians invented the doctrine of separation of church and state. That's our doctrine. That's that is something that came from us. We're the ones who developed it. And separation of church and state is crucial because there are two governing institutions. The church governs men in a certain sphere, and the state governs men in a certain sphere because they're both forms of government. You can keep them separate. You can keep the apples and oranges separate into bowls on the counter because they're both fruit. Right. But what when when people say separation of church and state and they mean separation of God and state, separation of morality and state, separation of ultimate truth, claims and state? I would say stop, wait, wait just a minute. Are you really telling me that you want to live in a state that is utterly disconnected from morality? Is that what you want? Is where the you protest and your protest is a moral one. And they say, well, we we believe in the separation of morality and state. Tucker [00:27:54] But as you noted at the outset, that's that's a nonsensical proposition that has never existed and can't exist. Doug Wilson [00:27:58] I know, because all moralities arise out of a moral consensus, of course. Okay. Which is, overwhelmingly religious. So consequently, you can separate church and state, but you can't separate ultimate truth claims and state. It cannot be done. Every people needs to know who they are. They need to know what they are. They need to know where they came from. They need to know how we're supposed to behave on the way. Those are basic theological. Tucker [00:28:25] I don't think any honest, rational person would disagree with what you just said. That all laws are judgments about how people should live in their moral judgments, and that there's going to be a system for deciding what's right and wrong, because there always is. And it's going to be if it's Marxism or Christianity, one scholar, a superior. I guess the question, though, is how do you affect or bring back such a system in a country that has no working majority of anything? Doug Wilson [00:28:54] Yeah. So when you have a cacophony of, laws, it reflects the cacophony of opinions among the people. And, and this is where unbridled immigration comes into the picture. You can't just import floods and floods of people with different assumptions about everything into one spot and say, play nice children. Societies have to function on the basis of a shared moral consensus. Exactly. Okay. If there isn't a shared moral consensus, then you're what you're going to get is anarchy and disruption. . Tucker [00:29:35] Wait a second. I have read, many Episcopal bishops and Russell Moore, not to be the pun poor Russell Moore, who's living in agony already, but, say, make the claim that it is anti-Christian. If you don't let anyone who wants to move your society move here. Doug Wilson [00:29:51] Right? That's like saying to a godly, sweet Christian couple who has three foster children and they're taking good care for kids of their own. They've taken in three foster children, and they're taking good care of them. And then you show up one day with a short bus with 28 new foster children, and you say, we're depositing them here, and we wait, wait, the couple says we didn't sign up for that many. What kind of non-Christian attitude is that refusing to take these 28 new foster children? The dad who was taking care of good care of three foster children is should be able to say, look, I'm taking care three and I think I'm doing a good job taking care three but if you drop off 28 more, I'm not going to be taking good care of anybody. It's going to swamp the system, right? You can't say, we need to kick the doors open wide in the name of hospitality without the capacity to process them. You have to assimilate them, right? And it's got to be orderly. So if people say, do I object to immigration? Of course not. I object to anarchy. I object to chaos. So I object to the lawlessness that's operating on the southern border. Orderly immigration. I'm all about, all about that. And that would be wonderful. Tucker [00:31:11] I'm sorry I've sidetracked you. I had to ask you, but. But you were in the process before I interrupted you of answering the question. How do you go back to a system based on Christian assumptions in a country that's no longer Christian? Doug Wilson [00:31:24] What you do, and this is this is you invite a preacher under your show, you're going to get get some preaching. Tucker [00:31:31] Hope so. Doug Wilson [00:31:32] All right. So there's no way there's no way to do it outside of God raising up preachers who preach a hot gospel and church planting. There's there's no way to do this politically. Tucker [00:31:44] And you got to make the country Christian again. Doug Wilson [00:31:46] That's right. Basically, we're in such a mess that there is no political solution. All right. We're we're beyond hope. There is no political solution. The next election, however happy it might make us for ten minutes, is not going to fix everything. Tucker [00:32:01] That's right. Doug Wilson [00:32:01] Okay. Our disease is radical, and it's spiritual. We've got a we've got a radical leprosy. And, the United States needs to repent, of its sin, to use an old fashioned term. We need to repent of our sins, our arrogance, and turn back to God. That's what. That's what is necessary. And we need preachers who are willing to tell them to do that, to proclaim that this is what you must do and they must not do it in terms of law, like thou shalt, thou shalt, thou shalt. The law condemns, but the gospel liberates. So the law brings in judgment the law. Well, the law makes us aware of the rich young ruler. Is made aware of his lack, is made aware of his sinfulness by the law. And then you turn to Christ. And what Christ offers is full, free forgiveness. But forgiveness. With him now in charge. So forgiveness. It's not what Bonhoeffer would call cheap grace. It is a radical death, burial and resurrection. All right, so this is what the Easter season is all about. Death, burial and resurrection. And the Bible tells us that when we look to Christ, we are crucified with in in faith, we're crucified with him, we're buried with him, and we rise again from the dead with him, and we ascend into the heavenly places with him that we are. We are made participants of the virtue of Christ by by virtue of his death, burial, and resurrection. So America needs Jesus. America doesn't need to turn over a new leaf. America needs a new life. And and new life is only given on God's terms as the sheer grace of God. It's got. That's how it's got to be. And so what we need is preachers. Christian preachers who will stop being ashamed of the name of Jesus and preach the gospel and preach the gospel as though it's supposed to spread out, into the streets after the service. So too many churches are Jesus boxes where where you go in and you have your meeting with the with Jesus in your box, and then you go out and live pretty much like everybody else. You try to keep your nose a little bit cleaner than the average guy, but you still fit right in out there. But the claims of Christ are total, and the things that the thing that we try to emphasize in our, our ministry is all of Christ for all of life. I'm fond of saying theology needs to come out at your fingertips. Whatever it is you take in theologically needs to be enacted and done. And if theology comes at your fingertips, and if preachers are preaching the gospel and there's a great religious reformation and revival, then and I'm seeing some stirrings of. Tucker [00:34:49] This, I am too- Doug Wilson [00:34:50] Okay. So I'm not beyond hope, but I'm beyond political hope. There is no political solution, no political hope. But that doesn't mean that there's no hope. So in the. I can point to two. Great. The Reformation and the great Protestant Reformation would be one. And then the Evangelical awakening in the 18th century in England was another one. Yes. According to, I think prudent observers, England was headed for their own version of the French Revolution. Things were awful in the the spiritual condition of the country was, in tatters and in ruins. We sometimes think of the Victorians, 19th century Englishmen, as the, as the buttoned up tight, but the previous century that were anything but buttoned up tight. They were lewd, lascivious, immoral, oppressive. And the, they were they were headed for revolution. The the working man there was downtrodden and oppressed, and it was really, really bad. And the Wesley's and George Whitefield revival preachers, I think, were the gods instrument for saving England from their French Revolution. That's the kind of thing we need. We need God. Tucker [00:36:05] I think we're headed towards something. I would say a French Revolution. But do you think we're headed towards some sort of catastrophe? Doug Wilson [00:36:13] Yes, I believe yes. I believe that, apart from repentance, deep repentance, I believe that we're headed for real, real chaos. I think that the future is not going to be evenly catastrophic all over. Right. But I believe it's going to be bumpy, bumpy and chaotic. Chaotic and places and violent and bloody in places. I and I believe that the only thing that's going to head that off is preachers who stop being ashamed of their religion. Tucker [00:36:43] But there are only like three of them in the whole country. Like, how can that happen? Doug Wilson [00:36:46] Yeah, there are maybe maybe five. Tucker [00:36:50] Why are there so few? Doug Wilson [00:36:51] Well, there there are so few. There's two things, Elijah and a moment of despondency said I'm the only one left, and. And they're trying to kill me. And God says, well, now I've reserved 7000 who've not bowed the knee to bail. So I believe that there are thousands of faithful preachers. One of the things that happens is that, the media, which is in the tank for the devil, doesn't cover that sort of thing. There could be lots of faithful ministries. I believe there are thousands of them. But they don't get coverage and they don't get highlighted. They don't get reported. You remember the Tiananmen Square, protests? Tucker [00:37:35] Tank Man. Doug Wilson [00:37:36] Tank man. Right? But you remember all the reporting on how many thousands of baptisms happened in the square? Tucker [00:37:42] No. Doug Wilson [00:37:43] Thousands of Baptist, Christian baptisms. Christian baptisms in the square. Tiananmen square. And. And our media turned it into a great high five moment for Jeffersonian democracy. And that element was there. Okay. But there was a hard Christian element right at the center of that. Tucker [00:38:03] I've never heard that in my life. Doug Wilson [00:38:04] Okay. Thousands of baptisms in the square in Tiananmen Square. Now, the thing that, and it's that sort of thing that you could have something similar happened here. And is MSM going to report on CBS going to report on it? No, they are they are combatants. They are referees in the basketball game who are dribbling and shooting with the other team. Tucker [00:38:26] Me, I have so many questions. A couple quick ones in, in throughout the Old Testament, maybe even in the new nations are punished for their sins. Not just individuals, but nations. Corporate right? The nation. Does that still happen? Do you believe? And second, you've made reference a couple of times to America's America, not just Americans, but America as a nation. Its need to repent of it since what sins? Doug Wilson [00:38:53] Okay, so yes, God still judges nations. Nations. God still judges God test. God is the sovereign of all the earth. He still does, right? Wickedness still offends him. And, of. Tucker [00:39:06] But maybe a lot of Protestants, or maybe just me, think of that as taking place just on an individual level. Doug Wilson [00:39:13] I think that, there's a there's a good book called The Civil Wars Theological Crisis by Mark Nowell, who said that the idea that God judges corporately is an idea that for Americans died with the American Civil War because both sides were Christian, professed faith in the Christian God. Both sides were praying for victory, and both sides concluded after the war. Well, that did a lot of good. What what was the what was the meaning of that? Right? Yes. So we became, after in the aftermath of the war between the States, we became sort of agnostic on whether God ever take sides or intervenes on behalf of, righteousness or unrighteousness in a particular nation. But I believe he does. So I believe that if our nation were destroyed for our arrogance and conceit by fireballs from heaven, you know, if if God were to do that, it would be not unjust. It would be a just judgment. We we have been arrogant in the extreme, and I would say the central arrogance there's there's fruits of this arrogance downstream, the 60 million children who are aborted, the the various things that we do, the going around the world preaching at people, how to get their life together. Tucker [00:40:32] Threatening them, killing them when. Doug Wilson [00:40:33] We don't know how to live our lives. All of that. That's the fruit of the central sin. The central sin is secularism. The the secularism is that we can we can live decent, orderly lives without Christ. We don't need God in order. We don't need God in order to live. Placidly, the way we did in the Eisenhower years with black and white sitcoms where father knows best. And, you know, we can we can do that. And I'd say, yeah. Okay. How's it going? We. The grand secular experiment is now at a point where they don't know what a girl is. That's because secularism is not a biologist, right? They they can't tell you what a girl is. They can't tell you what a human being is. And if you if they can't tell you what a human being is, how can they tell you what human rights are? Well, they they can't and they and more more than that, they don't want to because because they want to move us around as though we are just, pieces on the board that they, you know, to, to, to gratify their whims and their theories. So secularism is the idea that we can establish agnosticism or atheism as the official faith of the country and govern ourselves decently without reference to God. That is radically false. We can't do. Tucker [00:41:55] It has ever been achieved anywhere in. Doug Wilson [00:41:57] History that you're aware. No. And and here's the another mistake that and you alluded to this the crossover between individuals and countries. So we all know atheist. You know, there's an atheist friend or an atheist neighbor who's a sweet guy, and you wouldn't mind him taking in your mail when you go on vacation and and you don't think his atheism is going to make him run over and burn down your house as soon as you're around the corner? Right. He. Because he's he's a nice guy. There are nice guy atheists here and there throughout, believing countries, but there has never been an atheist country that wasn't a hell. Okay. That's because man is collectively consistent. Individually, we have the capacity to be inconsistent. Tucker [00:42:47] Yes. Doug Wilson [00:42:47] Okay. Individually, someone might have been brought up and gone to Sunday school, been taught not to steal and not to attend. But then he loses his faith in college. But he keeps all the apparatus of his upbringing, right? He still wants to be a good citizen. He drives on the right side of the road. He he, you know, he does all he he does all those things because individuals have the ability to be inconsistent. But when godless types are running the show and they are making all the decisions and they don't answer to God at all, the countries that they rule are always hell holes. Always. Tucker [00:43:27] So secularism is the sin and that gives rise. You've used the word arrogance 2 or 3 times, right? We describe with that. What do you think that arrogance is? Doug Wilson [00:43:37] Yeah. The arrogance is things that like, we can come in and take your children away, but you didn't use the right pronoun. Tucker [00:43:44] But, but but but I mean, be more precise. Why does secular secular ism, do you believe, lead to arrogance? Doug Wilson [00:43:51] Yeah. Because I if I'm in charge of everybody and I believe I answer to no one, there is no judgment there. You know, just imagine there's no heaven. Yeah. No hell below us. Above us. Only sky. Just imagine that. And above Buchenwald. Only sky. Above Auschwitz only sky. The universe doesn't care. Okay. The universe doesn't care if I'm in charge, if I have political power, if I'm Mao. And I know that power grows out of the barrel of a gun. And there, there's no one above me that I'm ever going to answer to. If that's my framework, I have absolutely no reason not to do whatever I please. That's right. There's no accountability. And that's what secularism leads to. That's at least of necessity. And this is why, in the old order, in the, in the Christian order, it used to be laws against taking testimony in court from people who wouldn't take an oath in the name of God. You couldn't you couldn't testify in court if you didn't believe in a final judgment. Tucker [00:44:58] Because there will be no constraint on your lying. Doug Wilson [00:45:01] No reason to not lie. Tucker [00:45:02] So what? You know, it's possible that you've got very far out threatening views, but, that you haven't expressed yet. But. And I'll ask you if you did. Yeah, but. Doug Wilson [00:45:12] Oh, no. Everything's. I'm. I'm in the middle of the road. Extremists are to my right and left. Tucker [00:45:17] You are kind of in the middle of the road, at least in what you've said so far. From a Christian perspective, you're not. You don't convert anyone by force. You want people to have more freedom to make their own decisions about what they believe, right, and how they want to live. You're against arrogance and hurting people. I mean, these are not crazy views. So why are you so hated by so. Well, obviously by the left, but also by a lot of Christian leaders don't like you and are always attacking you. What is that? Doug Wilson [00:45:44] Well, some, the left hates what I'm talking about. I think because I'm about to touch the thing with a needle. I'm about to. I'm going for the sore spot. The sore spot is the secular. This radical disease of secularism. They want to continue to govern their affairs without any kind of accountability. Yes. Oh, yeah. They want they want to be left alone as they are running the show, and they will give the treatment to anybody who crosses them. All right. Right. You've gotten the treatment before I get the treatment. Yeah. They they know how to rough somebody up. Okay. And there are Christians who distance themselves from me because I see that. Right. Tucker [00:46:25] But. Right. But if they're if they're self-described Christians, again, I don't want to use his name once again, but the guy who edits Christianity Today is fixated on you. David French is a New York Times columnist who calls himself a Christian. And they really go out of their way to attack you. What? Why? Doug Wilson [00:46:43] Well. Tucker [00:46:44] Basically, your theology doesn't sound so different from, like, kind of conventional Christian theology, as I understand it. Right. Doug Wilson [00:46:50] Here's the this is the I think the distinction. I mean, it. Tucker [00:46:56] Okay. You know, that there's that. Doug Wilson [00:46:58] Okay. What? We ought to acknowledge God, and I mean that we really should. Right. So there's a difference between that and wanting a place at the table. Yeah. So, David, David, David French and Russell Moore and people like that, what they want to do is they want they want to operate to operate in the secular republic. And they want a place at the table. Okay? They want a place at the table. They want to be treated with respect. And in return, they say, we will treat all opposing views with respect. And what we ask is you treat us with respect and we would like a place at the table, please. Now, I, I don't I don't have any illusions about this. When we're all rounded up and taken off in cattle cars to the camps, David French and Russell Moore are going to be in the next car over there. Right. They the. Tucker [00:47:46] I think they'll be guarding you. Doug Wilson [00:47:48] Well, I think the left hates its tools. Tucker [00:47:52] Yes, well, that is true. Doug Wilson [00:47:53] Okay. And I believe that let's let's say David French and Russell Moore are to take the most charitable take on it. They would be tools. Tucker [00:48:04] Oh, they're definitely tools. Doug Wilson [00:48:05] Yeah. Okay. And and the tools, the left breaks them and throws them away when they're done with them. And right now. But the what is the use of the tool? The tool is to say, hey, we will give you we will give you respect. You're the kind of Christian who could write, get an article accepted by The Atlantic. You're the kind of Christian who could write for the New York Times. You're the kind of Christian who who does that as opposed to these extreme guys out here. But the extreme guys are saying things like, well, let's love God and love our neighbor and build a Christian community and worship God faithfully. And with that, what's what's radical about this? Well, we actually believe all of it. We believe that Christ really is Lord of everything, and we should live and pray and love as though we believe. We actually believe that and that. That takes us back to the earlier point. To confess that Jesus is Lord is to confess that Caesar isn't. Right. That's the issue. Going back to the early, Christians would not worship Caesar, and I'm not going to worship the state. Right. If the if there is no God over the state, the state becomes God and they proclaim themselves God. I'm going to be like Nebuchadnezzar. Like Daniel's three friends who refused to be Shadrach. And I've got a grandson named Shadrach. That's. So. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So, we want to pass that legacy on that, refusing to bow down. And Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego said to the king, Our God is able to deliver us. But whether he does or not, we fear him and not you. And that's the thing. That's the challenge that the secular state cannot abide. Another great Thomas Soul quote. I'll paraphrase it. He said. It's amazing how much panic can be thrown among, people by the behavior. One honest man. It's true, right? One honest man can throw people into a state of consternation and panic. Because you're willing to say, look, this is the way it is. We need to love. God hates in. Tucker [00:50:11] That's that's. Boy, that is the truest thing. So let me give you this the the the sincerity test or the ultimate test. Okay. And I'm asking this on the basis of the following assumption that people, particularly preachers, ought to have lives that reflect what they what they preach. You know, that you can judge the tree by their fruits. So how many children do you have? Doug Wilson [00:50:32] I've got three children. Tucker [00:50:33] How many grandchildren do you have? Doug Wilson [00:50:35] 18 grandchildren and two great grandchildren just lately arrived. Tucker [00:50:40] So 23 descendants, plus your wife, right? How many of those 23 are Christians? Doug Wilson [00:50:45] All of them. Tucker [00:50:46] All of them? Doug Wilson [00:50:47] All of them. Tucker [00:50:48] How often do you see them? Doug Wilson [00:50:50] On average weekly, if not more. We they all live in Moscow. Some of my grandkids are studying, right out of. Tucker [00:50:59] But they all live near you. Doug Wilson [00:51:00] They all live live in Moscow. They're all centered out of Moscow. And the ones who are studying, away are likely to wind up back in Moscow. We have a Sabbath dinner every Saturday night to kick off the Lord's Day, to prepare for worship in the morning. Family does. Our family does. The extended family. So all, all of us gather for a Sabbath dinner and then extended family, some Shirttail relatives and any company that is in town. So on a weekly basis, there's like 50 or 50. Tucker [00:51:32] Or at dinner. Doug Wilson [00:51:33] A dinner. And so we have this Sabbath dinner and we begin with prayer. I ask some catechism questions of the grandkids. We sing and then we have a meal together. So. Tucker [00:51:48] How did you do? How did you pull that off? Doug Wilson [00:51:50] Well, we didn't, the Lord has been very, very kind to us, but the in first Timothy three and in Titus one, Paul says if a man doesn't manage his family. Yes. Well, how can he manage the household of God? How can how can he, work in the household of God if his own family's not in order? Tucker [00:52:10] So that is the I mean, you just cited the verses. It's obviously part of Christian teaching theology, right? Teaching, but it also comports with common sense. It's obvious. Why do but that is not the rule in Christian churches, right? Preacher's kid is an epithet for a reason. Doug Wilson [00:52:28] Right? Picks for a reason and makes missionary kids the same. Tucker [00:52:34] SR. But why isn't that? I don't know if enforced is the word, but even acknowledged as a really important principle. If I'm going to follow you, I have to see as the leader of my congregation or my spiritual guide, then I have to see that the people in your care, your family, have respect for you and love for you and are listening to you like that seems so obvious to me. Doug Wilson [00:52:54] Do your children love God like you do? Yeah, right. And one of the reasons why. Tucker [00:52:59] Do we give up on that standard? Tucker [00:53:18] Your kids are screwed up, too. Yeah. Doug Wilson [00:53:20] Yeah. Our Johnny is not not the top of the line, but at least he's better than the preacher's kid. Or he's in the same league as the preacher's kid. So, there's a difference between Christian forgiveness and cutting slack, right? Right. So we have confused the one with the other and began cutting slack where we ought to have been forgiving. So we have, we're Presbyterian. We're, our churches, Presbyterian. We're not not lesbian. We're Presbyterian. We're the kind of Presbyterians who believe the Bible- Tucker [00:53:55] Branches. Doug Wilson [00:53:56] Are correct. So, yeah. So they're, and we're in another denomination. Crack. And we are. That means the Greek word for elder is presbyter. Us. That's where Presbyterian comes from. And we have a body of elders that govern our local church. And we have the standard, family in order for the elders of the church. And, and one of the things we ask an elder who's coming on to serve is if, one of your kids, if there's a wobble develops, will you bring it up to us so that we don't have to chase you? We have given leaves of absence, to an elder. Why don't you take a leave of absence from elder duties for six months so you can pay attention to your kids. So you can. Yes. So you can shepherd your family first? Yes. All right. So shepherd your family first. And by God's grace. That's a standard that we have been, pursuing for years now. Tucker [00:54:53] Does it work? Doug Wilson [00:54:55] Yes. We have a body of elders whose kids walk with God, whose kids love God. And if. And if, you know, a child rebelled, and walked away, that elder would resign from the elder board because we hold. That's the teaching. Tucker [00:55:14] Yeah. If your own kids don't believe you, why should I? Doug Wilson [00:55:17] Now, at the same time, I don't want to water this down. I want to say we believe that we're evaluating character, not counting rocks. Right. So let's say let's say you had an elder who had four kids of his own, and they're all walking with God. And and then his brother, who was an atheist, got killed in a car wreck, and they adopted a 12 year old girl. Tucker [00:55:38] I get it. Doug Wilson [00:55:38] Right. You say? Okay, I'm trying. Tucker [00:55:40] To assess it on the merits. Doug Wilson [00:55:41] You assess it on a case by case basis, but as a general pattern and a general rule. The, I wrote a book on this called The Neglected Qualification. Tucker [00:55:53] I didn't even know that when I asked you. Doug Wilson [00:55:55] So, yes, I think that this matters. And I believe that it's, Christianity I when I said theology flows at your fingertips, it's supposed to flow out first to the people who know you best. People in your household, the people in your family. Tucker [00:56:14] I just can't tell you how much I agree with that more than anything. Thank you for saying it. So I just want to end with your vision of where we're going, and I think you have probably disarmed your critics by saying, as you did, very clearly, I'm not calling for a political solution to this. The country itself has to change and be right. Worthy of of living the way that you hope that it does. What are the but and then you said, well, but I see signs of that happening. What are they? Doug Wilson [00:56:43] Right. So I've been talking about these things in varying to varying degrees, for 30 to 40 years, and I can see the difference between how this message resonates now versus how it resonated with Christians 30 years ago. Okay. So there are a lot of hungry Christians who were awakened, not woke, but awakened. Yes, by the Covid fiasco. And their their pastors flaked their. Tucker [00:57:20] Such a disgraceful way. Doug Wilson [00:57:22] And they the state said your services are not, essential, but shops are and abortion clinics are and pornography shops are. But church is not a- Tucker [00:57:32] Christian leaders who are afraid to die themselves. Doug Wilson [00:57:35] Yeah. It was not. Tucker [00:57:36] What was that? If you're a Christian leader and you're afraid to die, maybe you're not telling the truth about what you believe, right? There's not a whole religion about this, right? Doug Wilson [00:57:42] It was a God says. It says in Hebrews that God shakes down that God sends an earthquake. He shakes things so that that which cannot be shaken may remain. So there's a pressure test or a there was a crisis. Yes. It happened a couple of years ago and 2 to 3 years ago now. And in that crisis, it revealed the instability and the frailty of a lot of evangelical Christian leadership. Yes. And it awakened in a bunch of Christians a hunger for the kind of leadership that was now apparent. They didn't have. Right. And so we we have seen our influence, grow and explode. There's been a refugee column of sorts, a massive influx of people moving to Moscow, Idaho, for the last couple of years. And we, we've it's hard to keep up with it. There was a long stretch where every week at church, I'd meet somebody new and they say, well, we're here now. And, that people are hungry, hungry, hungry for someone to speak the word of God. This is this is what God would have us do. So the people are hungry for it in a way that I've never seen before. And I hear from friends around the country similar, similar sorts of stories. And there were a number of, men who didn't fold John MacArthur in California being the most notable, of them. And those pastors who didn't capitulate, who didn't bend, have seen explosive growth. And, and growth is not its own justification. Right? Cancer grows. Morning glory grows. But in this setting, people who love Jesus, being attracted to people who are willing to proclaim the name of Jesus, whatever the state says about it is, I think, nothing but a good sign. Tucker [00:59:39] So it sounds like you feel hopeful or, I don't. Doug Wilson [00:59:43] Know, very. I'm very hopeful. Tucker [00:59:47] I mean, what do you think? And this is my last question. Like what is going on in the world? It, it. And I know that everybody famously feels like they're in the middle of some historical reset, and it's the fall of Rome or the end of times or whatever, but this doesn't feel like a normal moment. Doug Wilson [01:00:04] No, it's not a normal moment. The one of the reasons this is a sort of a practical, pragmatic, almost carnal observation. But I'm hopeful because in the long run, stupidity never works. Tucker [01:00:16] Yeah. Doug Wilson [01:00:16] It, you can you can proclaim all you want, but you can't make the world be a you have to live in the world God actually made. You don't. You don't get to live in the world of your own imagining. You have to live in the world that God made, not the world that you want to make. And consequently, you have to obey its rules. Tucker [01:00:36] Yes. You call it natural law. Doug Wilson [01:00:38] Yeah. I saw a great T-shirt once. Gravity. It's not just a good idea. It's. It's the law. Tucker [01:00:45] I swear. Doug Wilson [01:00:46] So, so with all this, I'm hopeful because I believed the promises of Psalms, the promises of Isaiah, the promises of, given to Abraham through you, all the nations of the earth will be blessed. I believe that God's plans for this world are for good, not evil. I believe that God sent His Son to be the Savior of the world, not to not to attempt to save the world. Jesus didn't come to give saving the world the old college try. The, the most famous verse in the Bible, John 316, is followed by God did not. 317 For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. So Jesus is not only the offer to answer that will be rejected. Jesus is the answer that will be accepted. So consequently, we this is, another, rabbit rabbit trail. But, our eschatology, our view of the wild things is what's called post millennial, which is we have a very optimistic view of the future. We believe that the gospel is going to continue to grow and expand. The church is going to be victorious. The Great Commission is going to be fulfilled, and we win. We win. And then the Lord comes back. So, and that doesn't mean, we win the game, and it's got four quarters, and we're ten minutes into the first quarter. Right? And the first quarter can go badly. Well, while we're learning, learning how to play the game, learning what to do and not to. But you know, it's you can't take the microcosm and expand out from that. You might have a soldier pinned down by enemy fire on Normandy Beach, and he he knows his missions to get to the top of the next ridge, and he can't even get out from behind the sand dune. He could be mightily discouraged because of his position, while at the same moment General Eisenhower is looking at the map with satisfaction. Right. Tucker [01:02:54] Yes. All right, so we're- Doug Wilson [01:02:55] Zoom out. Zoom out. Take the long view. What's what's human history like? How how long do we have left? I don't believe the world is going to end in the next generation. I believe that, the Christian church is going to. The prophet Habakkuk says the earth will be full of the glory, the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. So we have we have great hope that the gospel in its potency is going to be proclaimed and is going to take root and flourish. So, we might lose our lives. You know, you can lose your life in a winning battle, right? A soldier on the winning side can, lose in his little segment. But that's all right, because Christ is Lord. Tucker [01:03:46] Are you afraid of anything? Ha, ha. That is the best place to start. We sit on my way. The one person I really don't trust is me. Doug Wilson [01:03:57] Yeah. Yeah, so, basically, I'm one of the one of my prayers. Don't screw up. No, don't screw up. Right. Yeah. Because basically, that's. There's a great story where, Chesterton was asked, along with a bunch of other men, to submit an essay on what's wrong with the world. You know, they were running a series in the newspaper. What's wrong with the world? And Chesterton wrote a two word essay. It was I am. Tucker [01:04:28] That is wisdom. How do you how does one get an invite to your 50 man Sabbath dinner? Doug Wilson [01:04:33] One chats with me after the show. You'd be most you'd be most welcome anytime. Tucker [01:04:39] I'm definitely going to do that. Pastor Wilson, thank you so much for spending all this time. Doug Wilson [01:04:43] Oh, happy to do it. Thank you. Appreciate it. Tucker [01:04:45] Thank you.

The Greatest Show On Earth _ #RePost For New Frens all credit goes to original poster Derek J and producer -RE-post for helping others

people are starting to notice the lies. The vibe is changing fast. Tucker Carlson Uncensored: People Are Waking Up Here’s the bright side of a dark time people are starting to notice the lies. The vibe is changing fast. TRANSCRIPT Tucker [00:00:00] The news is so grim at this point, you almost don't want to turn on your phone in the morning. It's just piece after unremitting piece, suggesting that Western civilization is crumbling and collapsing all around us. Followed by typically a summary piece confirming that in fact it is collapsing all around us. So it is against that grim landscape that we read a piece the other day that was just the opposite. It was hopeful and smart and beautifully expressed in. A couple of people sent it to us. It was written by a man called Santiago Pliego, and it's written on a Substack, and the piece is called The Vibe Shift. And the thesis essentially, is that people are starting to notice that things are a mess. And the main thing that's amiss is the gap between the reality that they observe and the version of reality presented them by the government, the media, the experts. And this is good. It is long overdue that people are starting to see glimpses of reality. Here's a paragraph from the piece that kind of sums up the idea very nicely. And we're quoting, "The vibe shift I'm talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. I'm talking about the feel you get when the walls of propaganda and bureaucracy start to move as you push. The very visible dust kicked up in the air as experts and fact checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions. The cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise and thought are exposed or toppled." As we said, so nicely expressed, beautifully written. Santiago Pliego is the venture director at New Founding, and we're honored to have him join us now. Santiago, thank you for joining us. Thank you for writing this piece, which absolutely made my morning. And it really was the one, the one bright spot in my, news consumption last week. Why did you write this piece? What moved you to do it? Santiago Pliego [00:02:02] Sure. Thanks for having me. Why I wrote it is because I think, a lot of people are noticing the life shift, and I'd been kind of keeping tabs on it with my friends and my colleagues for, you know, let's say nine months or so, a little bit over that, but especially in the last nine months. Not a day goes by that we don't have a conversation where or see something online, or read a piece or see a crossover of people that we would have never expected to see kind of together. And that that would have been sort of inconceivable five years ago, even a year and a half ago. And, my friends and I sort of started file this way in a mental folder called The Life Shift. And I think a lot of people are sensing that things are changing. Sure, the stakes are high and getting higher. I think the pressure will continue to come. And we'll not relent. But that's cost a lot of people, especially young people, young guys especially, to kind of wake up and decide that they're not going to go along with this anymore, that the world is built and designed in a certain way, and that they're ready to return to reality. Tucker [00:03:11] You said that people are coming together in unexpected ways. I see that in my own life as I send warm text to Naomi Wolf, who I love. I never thought I'd be doing that in this lifetime. But tell us what you mean when you say that. Santiago Pliego [00:03:27] Yeah. So there are there's a pressure that is applied equally to groups of people, regardless of sort of the camp or the community you might be a part of. If you are a normal family and you just want to send your kids to a school where they won't get fed, you know, ideology, or if you're building AI tools and want them to be regulated, or if you just want to, be able to speak your mind, or if you want to be able to vote, without interference or whatever, all of those people, are now facing the same pressure to kind of decelerate, stagnate, to ossify into a bureaucratic monolith. And so I think these groups what's interesting about that, but one of the interesting things about the vibe shift is that all of these groups that we're, usually not used to working together or seeing each other as co belligerents in a cultural fight are finding each other and are saying, hey, you have useful things that that we can use over here, and we have useful things and task ideas that you can use over here. And that's creating, again, this pressure, this monolithic pressure, bureaucratic pressure top down across a variety of different groups and circles, whether you're in Silicon Valley or just a normal American family or in the Midwest or in you, doesn't matter. Everybody is facing this kind of existential pressure, and that's causing a lot of these groups to look for co belligerents to look for allies. And that's creating really interesting crossovers, people that you would not think, would be working together or reading each other or boosting each other's content or, or interacting with one another are all of a sudden coming together in ways that, that are exciting. Tucker [00:05:09] So that does seem like the threat. I mean, if if I'm the head bureaucrat trying to create this new system of mediocrity and stagnation with myself at the top really is its sole beneficiary. The last thing I want is for the people I've worked so hard to divide, to find each other and unite against me. So what do I mean? Like, what's the response going to be? Santiago Pliego [00:05:32] I think the response is going to be increased pressure in some ways. But and this is why I talk about this in the piece, an important part of the life shift, maybe not its sole cause, but certainly an important piece of the enabling of the live shift was, was Elon Musk buying Twitter and turning it into X? There was it's hard to overstate without kind of signing up sounding hyperbolic, but, these groups that I'm talking about, disparate groups that are now finding themselves working together, where by design, algorithmically or otherwise unable to find each other, even, you know, as early as 18 months ago, and you couldn't you couldn't talk online, you couldn't find other people who thought like you or even wanted to ask the same questions, as you. And it made very it made it very difficult, very isolating to, to, a very sort of isolating dynamic from people to, to be online and to find co belligerence and others who share their, their mind, their values. I think that pressure will continue to escalate. But Elon has kind of taken an important piece of the puzzle, of the bureaucrats puzzle out completely topple that sort of Jenga tower and enabled for a new dynamic online for people to interact and meet each other in ways that that really does threaten that that monolithic power structure. Tucker [00:06:55] So you make it sound so simple, and maybe it is. So all you needed to do as an individual was to notice the distance between what they were telling you and what was clearly true, and then you just needed a place to talk to other people who'd notice the same thing. Santiago Pliego [00:07:10] There is something simple about it. Yes. I think it's precisely because so simple that there was so much pressure exerted on, certainly Twitter, but other tools that are still under the regime control. And I think it's, it's why Musk coming in, gutting 90% of X and restoring it kind of in, in, in a path towards truth and, and a free speech that. A relatively simple act. It was not a simple act. It was a takeover, but a relatively simple, singular act. Unlocks a mass amount of opportunity across, communities, across people to communicate, interact and organize again in ways that were just not allowed 18 months ago, algorithmically, policy wise or, for a variety of different other ways. Tucker [00:08:04] Well, and speaking of noticing things, why did you notice this or decide to focus on it when a lot of other notices out there are wholly focused on the downside and on the destruction of the civilization, etc.? But you saw you saw light instead of darkness. What, how and why? Santiago Pliego [00:08:23] The how and whys. This is my job. This is what we do, a new founding. So we, help the builders that want to build a positive alternative vision for the country. These are, people who are building new companies, new institutions who want to work with each other, who want to, got kind of craft a new path forward. And we realize that. Yes, as you as you said in the opening monologue, things are bleak, things are dark. Increasingly pressure grows. But we needed a positive vision. And people are drawn to a positive vision. It's important to know the stakes of the game. It's important to know, that, that things are challenging and difficult. But people are drawn and rally around a positive vision. And I started to notice this. My job as an investor backing, different people and companies. I started to notice that young guys in particular were done pretending. They were done pretending with, kind of the lies of liberal modernity. And they were crafting, or charting a different course. These young guys in particular, building cool companies that we wanted to invest in or we were interacting with, like, by virtue of the circles that I, that I'm in, startups and such. But there was something very distinct about this new kind of founder. If you, you know, your listeners or you if I say, imagine a startup founder in 2000, in the 2010s and Silicon Valley, what do you think of, you know, a geeky guy maybe weighs 150 pounds who was building some kind of productivity tool. He lives in the sort of neutral world where he doesn't want to rock the boat building. He thinks it's a political, an apolitical endeavor. And he wants to keep his head down because he wants to go public at some point and make, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. So why why rock the boat, right? That's not the world we live in anymore. And young guys, the young guys I'm seeing building very interesting companies, building incredible technologies, building new institutions. Our guys who are explicitly pro-america, explicitly pro-family, values Christian religious. They're the opposite, the antithesis of the again, the sort of picture of the 20 tens startup Silicon Valley founder. And that that caught my eye. I said, why is this happening? Why is it that these young guys are making, are taking very big swings their companies are building are also not just productivity software or something to make your HR overlords more productive. They're building very difficult companies, companies that, there's a friend of mine who, name is Augustus. He's building a company called Rainmaker. He sends drones up to the clouds, and he's seeding clouds in California and other places where it doesn't usually rain to make it rain where it doesn't. And, you know, we think, oh, the drought, the drought in California can't be fixed. It's just that it's just there to stay. And Augustus is thinking, no, it's not there to stay. Why can't we just will it differently? Why can we just disrupt that, world? He's a young guy. He's a Christian. He has a particular vision about the world, that he is excited to build and willing to existence. And so by virtue of spending time with these guys and, my, my job is to kind of pay attention to to where the builders are going, I started to notice. And what it gives me hope is that I think, again, as the pressure increases, as the bureaucracy gets worse, as die and east, you know, all this nonsense grows. The best people of our generation, like those who are the most competent, the most courageous, the most ready to build, are ready to opt out of those monolithic systems and build a different future, a positive, exciting future. And those are the people that I'm paying attention, and those are the people that I want to help. Tucker [00:12:13] So it sounds like you're in a good mood most days. Santiago Pliego [00:12:16] Yes, definitely in a good mood. And don't get me wrong, I know, I know how it is out there, but as I say in the piece, the vibe shift is, looking at the world around us, refusing to take the black pill and choosing to build instead. That's a that's an important piece of the life shift. And yes, it puts me in a good mood when I when I see other guys building. Great. You know, positive things. Tucker [00:12:39] Amazing. I mean, I have to say, we're talking off air. I'm on the more anti-technology Ted Kaczynski wing of things. But it was the technology that allowed me to read this. And I think you were saying you put this up on a Substack with no subscribers. Santiago Pliego [00:12:54] No subscribers? Yeah, I pitched it to another, publication, and they didn't have the bandwidth to run it. So I built a I literally just put open a new Substack, hit publish. I spent a couple of hours writing this piece. I didn't want it to go to waste. And then, you know, let it sit for, for a bit, and then, you reached out. Tucker [00:13:14] Amazing, amazing. Santiago Pliego [00:13:15] But yes, the point here with technology and how I see it being useful again, generally, I, I'm cautious. I'm, I'm very excited about technology. But I do think there's a moral component. I don't see technology or building companies as an apolitical or neutral endeavor. I think there's nothing more political than building a large company or a disruptive technology, but especially in times like this, where institutions that I mean, think about this way, Harvard has been around for, what, almost 400 years? Google, almost a $2 trillion market cap, both seemingly institutions that are here to stay permanently forever. They're never going away. Right. And yet, in the last few months, Harvard has been toppling and shaking. What's with the cladding and all the all the great work that Chris Rufo did and then Google Gemini or Google with with the recent shenanigans with Google Gemini, these again, seemingly permanent, unmovable sort of institutions are now up for grabs and the spaces they dominate, I think, are up for grabs over the next decade, if not sooner. And so the right guys, building the right companies, the right guys, building the right institutions, the right ambitious, excellent, institutions grounded in reality. The right technologies can really disrupt. There's a once in a lifetime opportunity now to disrupt the status quo. I think of technology as a non coercive lever. It's about building the future. You have a vision of the future that you want to willing to existence. You get a bunch of guys together, you raise some capital and you say, let's build a different, better future. And right now there are categories, critical categories in our society that are up for grabs. And we want the right guys, to build and disrupt those. Tucker [00:15:04] Amazing. Well, thank you for reminding us of that, particularly those of us with dark Scandinavian souls that not all is lost and that God's at work too. And good things happen as well as bad. And the future is not settled. So thank you. And your piece did all of that for me. Thanks. Santiago Pliego [00:15:20] Absolutely. Thank you for it. And great to meet you.

Ed Dowd Drops Disturbing Reality_ “The protocols in 2020 were designed to kill people...