Full transcript: Colonel Douglas Macgregor on London Real
3:04 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Colonel Douglas McGregor, the decorated combat veteran, author, and foreign policy expert. You are widely recognized as one of the preeminent military strategists of your time and spent over 28 years working at the highest levels of the U.S. military.
3:29 You’ve been a regular commentator on CNN, the BBC, and Fox News, most notably on the Tucker Carlson show. And in 2020, Donald Trump appointed you as senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense. You believe the greatest threat to America comes from within Washington, D.C. and that the $34 trillion national sovereign debt will inevitably collapse the economy. You’ve also said that the open border policy continues, American will lose their culture and their sense of national identity.
3:56 And you believe Israel’s war with Hamas has developed into a campaign of depopulation, something that could force the U.S. into a showdown with the entire Islamic world, and potentially Russia and China. Colonel McGregor, welcome back to London Real.
4:08 Douglas Macgregor: Thank you. I think you’ve answered all the questions.
4:11 I’m not sure we have much to talk about.
4:13 Brian Rose: You know, I actually wanted to jump into a topic that I’ve heard you comment on, but we haven’t talked about before, before we get into a lot of the foreign policy and the national events happening there in the States. And that is your comments on Bitcoin. I kind of find that fascinating because, again, we haven’t talked about it before, and a lot of people wouldn’t expect you to bring something like that up. We have been kind of deep into this blockchain space for the last three years, so we’re familiar with it.
4:38 We’re seeing Bitcoin coming back to some of its all-time highs. But I’m curious, what are your thoughts on Bitcoin, and why have you been vocal about it lately?
4:48 Douglas Macgregor: Well, I don’t know that I’ve been all that vocal. I was asked a question, and I answered honestly. You have someone in your midst whom I hold in very high esteem.
4:59 His name is Alistair MacLeod. And Alistair has a lot to say about the financial warfare that is being waged right now. And what Mr. Putin is doing, along with his colleagues in China and India, to lead a substantial portion of the world, if not most of it, towards a gold-backed currency. And I think Alistair MacLeod is absolutely correct.
5:23 The question is, what do we in the West do? And I have a great deal of difficulty believing that we can adopt a gold-backed approach to finance. So I think that the digital currency that is not controlled by the central banks, by the way, in other words, independent like Bitcoin, does have a future. And it’s a store of value. It’s not imaginary.
5:46 It’s quite real. And I think we may end up seeing that kind of digital currency replace what we today call fiat currency. Now, when will that happen? Now, soon? I don’t know.
5:57 But I’m sort of got one foot in two camps. One foot is in the camp with Nassim Taleb. The other foot is in the camp with Alistair MacLeod. And in the middle, I see Bitcoin as a third way forward.
6:09 Brian Rose: Wow, that’s fascinating.
6:11 And again, it’s a credit to you, Colonel, that you’re open-minded enough to consider something like that because a lot of people just kind of dismiss it with kind of the usual rhetoric about it. But, you know, the spot ETF has been approved and now billions are flowing into it. And it’s now considered a legitimate, diversified financial asset. But more so than that, it’s something that’s kind of independent. There have been people that said we wouldn’t be in these wars.
6:35 If we didn’t have this fiat currency, we could inflate it will and throw money around to these causes that don’t have a lot to do with domestic sovereignty. I’m curious if you think that might be the case of when politicians are allowed to just print money willy-nilly that they oftentimes throw it to the wrong places.
6:56 Douglas Macgregor: Well, it all begins with central banking. And, you know, we’ve had this Federal Reserve since 1913. And every president up until Woodrow Wilson resisted it.
7:06 Ultimately, Woodrow Wilson later apologized to the American people for signing it into law. And I think the central banking system that dominates the West is one of the reasons that we are in a position of hostility towards Russia. Russia wants to be out from under it. China doesn’t want to be suppressed or dominated by it. I think we can go back and look at the two world wars and make a very good case that central banking led to those.
7:31 So, yes, I’m a critic of central banking. But in the meantime, you know, I don’t expect to lead any rebellions or revolutions to remove it. And so the one way that you can go forward in a different direction and avoid it is digital currency, Bitcoin.
7:47 Brian Rose: Fascinating. All right, that’s great to get your perspective on that, to be continued probably in a future conversation.
7:55 I wanted to jump in and get your thoughts on a very fascinating, I would call geopolitical event, which happened a couple of weeks ago. And that was Tucker Carlson traveling to Moscow to interview the leader of Russia, Vladimir Putin, who hadn’t really been interviewed by anyone in the West for I think five or seven years. And I’d love to get your thoughts because you have been an outspoken critic of this war between Ukraine and Russia. And you have said that all the media we’re seeing here in the UK and in the US is telling us the wrong story.
8:27 They’ve been demonizing Putin and making him out to be X, Y, and Z. And you’ve been saying, wait a second, that’s not true. Actually, Putin wants this, this, and this. And it was fascinating for me to watch that interview almost through the McGregor lens of what you’ve been saying. And I must say, Colonel, you know, most of what you said seemed to be true as my feeling of what Putin is all about.
8:50 But I’ll pass it over to you. What did you see there? And what did you make of this historic event?
8:56 Douglas Macgregor: Well, I think President Putin was emphasizing certain things that we in the West don’t really pay enough attention to. First of all, he was emphasizing strategic interests in the broad sense.
9:07 We tend to personalize everything. And that’s ridiculous. It doesn’t make any difference whether the leader of the United States or Great Britain or any other sovereign state and the leader of Russia love each other or hate each other. What counts are interests, strategic interests. We’ve gotten away from that because, frankly, we, I’m talking about the United States, we’re not pursuing our strategic interests.
9:31 We have no strategic interest in Eastern Ukraine. In fact, one can make the argument that the only real strategic interests we have are in prosperity, peace, and stability, all of which are inextricably intertwined. We are preeminently a commercial power. People talk about the American Empire. Well, it’s much like the British Empire in the sense that we are a commercial empire.
9:53 Now, if we’re failing, it’s because we’ve lost sight of the commercial purposes of our outreach. We’ve substituted military power for economic influence and investment. We’ve substituted military power for cultural and political understanding and cooperation. So I think that’s part of why Tucker did what he did. Let’s face it.
10:16 We’ve been listening to all sorts of terrible things about this man, Putin, and people eagerly inhale all this nonsense instead of listening to the man who is currently the Russian head of state. And what’s his principal message? We have been here since 932. We are not going anywhere. We will continue to exist.
10:39 Understand that. We want to live with you. We want you to live with us. We are not the same. But our interests and your interests do not necessarily conflict.
10:51 We have no interest in Eastern Europe. We’re not interested in a war in Eastern Europe. And, of course, as you and I have talked before, all you had to do is look at the initial stage of this Russian special military operation. When they went in, they went in with a very small force. Only 90,000 combat troops.
11:10 There were 200,000 involved, but only 90,000 who actually do any fighting. And they were very anxious to have a settlement. And they were very close to reaching a settlement. And then Boris Johnson at the behest of the United States government flew in to effectively destroy the agreement, which he did, and ensured that the war would continue. And he made a number of statements in private to Zelensky, which were wrong and fundamentally false.
11:36 And those statements are the things we tell ourselves. Russia is weak. The Russian economy is weak. The Russian people don’t support the government. They will not withstand the might of the United States and its allies.
11:50 We have more economic power, more influence in the support of the people. All of that, of course, has ended up on the ash heap of history. Russia is enormously powerful. Why? They have an abundance of resources that they can draw upon.
12:04 They have a population that loves the country. They’re Russians. They believe in themselves. They believe in their religion. They believe in their country and their leadership.
12:15 Does that mean that they all love Putin? Certainly not. But they believe in what they are and they’re willing to fight for it. So we set up Ukraine for failure and we’ve destroyed that nation. We’ve killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians needlessly.
12:30 We’ve driven half the population out of the country, probably a million-plus wounded on top of the more than half a million dead. It’s a catastrophe. And you know what? At some point, the United States will do what it has always done. Leave.
12:47 We just leave. We are preeminently a maritime power and an aerospace power. When things don’t go our way, we pack up and we go home. We are only a land power in the Western Hemisphere. And so that’s one of the reasons we’ve tried to fight this war against Russia on the cheap at the expense of the Ukrainian people.
13:09 And I would argue at the expense of the Europeans, whose economies are in ruins. So in some, I have not much more to say except that this is what’s going to happen in the future. We will just leave. And then the Europeans are going to have to sort out whatever remains. And I don’t know what that’ll be.
13:29 I can’t predict that with certainty because if you sat down with Putin today, and this should have been very clear from that interview, and said, look, we want to put an end to this. You could say to Putin, you draw the line that you think is commensurate with your strategic interests. And then we’ll draw our line and we’ll come to some sort of agreement. And no one’s willing to do that. But that’s the quickest and easiest way to end the war.
13:54 Because we’re not going to attract any positive investment into Ukraine to restore any measure of civilization there until this is over.
14:02 Brian Rose: You know, I had General Flynn on the show two days ago, and he heard Putin talking about his interest to join NATO and how they were continually rebuffed administration after administration. And he corroborated that. He said, yeah, that is what I understood happening as well. And so, again, for the first time ever, we almost got a lens into Putin.
14:24 And like you said, he’s not this kind of big bad wolf that everyone kind of inhaled the story there. You could actually, I believed him that he was rebuffed by various U.S. administrations when he was actually trying to find some way to settle so he could move forward as well. So I found that very interesting as well.
14:45 Douglas Macgregor: Well, you know, one of the things that we ought to keep in mind, both you and the British and the other Europeans and Americans is that this man, Putin, is by far the most Western friendly leader that you’re going to see in Russia.
15:00 He’s someone who’s lived outside the country, traveled extensively. You know, he’s personally familiar with other long-standing, successful leaders like Modi in India or Xi in China. He understands the geopolitical environment very well. He understands economics very well, which is why I mentioned Alistair McLeod earlier, who really understands what Putin is doing in financial terms. But he’s friendly to the West.
15:28 He wants to live with the West. If he vanishes and someone else takes his place, the probability of a successor being far more difficult to deal with and less informed about the West is very high. We should take that into consideration.
15:44 Brian Rose: Yeah, I agree. And I think we could see that quite plainly in that conversation.
15:49 And so I’m so glad that that happened. Just moving to other topics because these are important things. Where are we at right now in the Middle East? We’re now how many months in, almost five months into this campaign at this point? What do you see happening and what are these potential dangerous ramifications?
16:09 Douglas Macgregor: Well, what began as a response to the horrific attack of 7 October was transformed very quickly into an operation designed to either expel or kill the Arabs living in Gaza. I think we need to come to terms with that reality. That’s the truth. And when Prime Minister Netanyahu talked to the Israeli population and described the people there in Gaza as animals, that was widely embraced by the Israeli population. People frequently say, well, if Netanyahu goes, everything will change.
16:48 And I keep trying to persuade people that they don’t understand the level of support inside Israel for what is happening in Gaza. It’s real. Whether you like it or not is another matter. It’s just a fact. I don’t particularly like it, and I think it’s a mistake for the Israelis to do what they’re doing, but that’s where we are.
17:06 I see no evidence that that mentality is going to change anytime soon. So where do we stand? Well, one of the things that’s happened recently that we should have paid a lot of attention to but got very little coverage here in the West was Mr. Erdogan’s visit to Egypt. Remember, it’s been 13 years since Erdogan and the Egyptians had sat down to talk about anything.
17:29 There was a lot of bad blood on the street because of the removal of Morsi, who was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Remember that Mr. Erdogan leads the Muslim Brotherhood in the region? By the way, he also leads it in North America. And he went to essentially bury the hatchet, as we say, with Egypt, with Sisi.
17:49 And also at Sisi’s invitation, because General Sisi’s in a lot of trouble. He has to renegotiate his debt, which is considerable, and he needs our help and assistance with that. But he’s also got a problem with his own population. So the discussions that went on, yes, they addressed the oil and gas resources offshore. They addressed the issues in Libya.
18:12 But then they turned to Gaza and the security implications for Egypt. Egypt is a nation of 100 million. They’re probably living on infrastructure designed for 40 million. None of the ruling elites in the Arab world anywhere won a war with anyone, least of all Israel. The problem is that the population in Egypt is very enraged about what is happening in Gaza.
18:39 Now, they haven’t marched into the streets in great numbers yet to demand the removal of General Sisi for his failure to act. But I think by the time Ramadan is over, we’re going to see tremendous movement on the part of both Turkey and Egypt, as well as in Jordan and Syria and elsewhere, among the Arabs and Northern Iraq, to coalesce into some sort of arrangement directed at Israel and potentially against us. I’m talking about the United States, because we are seen as unconditionally supporting, which is true at the moment, whatever the Israelis want to do.
19:19 And that’s your first decisive step in the direction of a regional war. We haven’t even talked about the very high probability of an Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon designed to push Hezbollah north of the Latani River and apparently to pulverize Lebanon, in general, into submission. I think that’s coming, because having gone as far as Mr. Netanyahu has, he really can only escalate. If you do anything other than escalate, you’re seen as backing down, as retreating.
19:51 So he believes he has a strategic advantage. His strategic advantage is control of the United States and its armed forces. As long as he can guarantee that backstop, he’s comfortable taking on other opponents in the region, most important right up front, Hezbollah. But once Hezbollah becomes engaged, it’s not only Egypt and Jordan and the Peninsular Arabs and the Turks, who are discontented and unhappy with what’s happened in Gaza and are increasingly willing to act in some way, now you bring Iran into the equation.
20:26 The Israelis have always wanted desperately for us to destroy, quote-unquote, Iran for them. We have refused repeatedly. We have walked away from it. Donald Trump in 2019 was presented with a fait accompli. One of the reasons that that global hawk was flown on the edge of the air defense identification zone was to invite the Iranians to shoot it down.
20:53 They did. And in a court of international law, they have every right to shoot down an unidentified reconnaissance, intelligence, surveillance aircraft on the edge of their air defense identification zone. Mr. Trump declined the opportunity to go to war, even though, at the time, the United States Air Force and other forces inside the Pentagon had already put together plans for these strikes. And he asked the question, a very important one, if I do this, what happens?
21:29 Yes. This is the thing we never asked when we went into Iraq. We never asked it when we went to Vietnam. In other words, we always said, wait a minute, do you want me to go over there and do this? What do you want me to do?
21:39 How do you want me to do it? And what do you want it to look like when it’s over? He asked, what happens next? It wasn’t just five or six or seven or 800 people might be killed. It was obvious we don’t know, but there’s a very high probability we’ll be at war.
21:57 Today, we are infinitely less prepared to wage a regional war than we were in 2019. Our army is in ruins. If you turn to the British army, it’s down to, what, 72,000 men. They can’t recruit. The army is a shadow its former self.
22:17 You have a similar situation. In France, it’s a bit larger. All the armies, if you will, in Europe are boutique forces. They’re really designed to fight people who really can’t fight back very well. All of a sudden, people are talking about, well, let’s think about using them against Russia.
22:37 Well, that went away very quickly if you paid attention to what happened over the last few days. The NATO members all rose up as one and said, thank you, President Macron. You know, go back to where you belong. Stop talking this nonsense. We’re not going there.
22:52 Well, now we have a similar situation in the Middle East, only it involves Israel and the United States. Perhaps the United Kingdom has interest in joining this. I don’t know. But the point is that we are not going to engage with anything other than air and naval power. And the history of warfare suggests that if you use only air and naval power, things will look pretty much like they did before you started when you’re finished.
23:23 And then the real question is, if you begin to take losses, and I think we will, because if you look at what’s happening right now in Iran, northern Iraq, parts of Syria, northern Lebanon, there is a major air and missile defense network emerging with new technologies and equipment coming in from Russia. Those air to air and missile defense weapons systems are effective. They will shoot down American military aircraft. Now, how many? I don’t know.
23:53 But it’s been a long time since anybody shot us down. And if you go back to World War II, which I like to remind people of periodically when they ask questions, we and the Royal Air Force together lost 18,000 bombers trying to penetrate German air defenses. Today, people can’t even begin to wrap their heads around it. If you go into a regional war with Iran, and potentially the other states that I mentioned, I would not exclude Turkey by any means, you’re going to lose considerable forces.
24:27 How much have you got to lose before you’re out of business? Do we have the scientific industrial base for mass production of aircraft and missiles and ships and everything else? And the answer is I don’t think we do. So we’re really not prepared for this. And it looks as though this is a plausible outcome if things escalate and the Israeli Defense Force moves into southern Lebanon.
24:52 Then they have three fronts, southern Lebanon, the West Bank of Palestine, and Gaza. Nothing is settled. Everything is still open. And just because nothing has happened yet does not mean that things won’t happen in the future. And that’s a huge mistake people make.
25:12 Things take time to develop. Somebody said to me the other day, don’t you think we’re in a World War I scenario? He said, no, I don’t think so. And he said, why not? I said, you had existing alliances, existing arrangements.
25:25 And as Prince, the man that shot the Archduke said, even if I hadn’t done what I did, there would have been a war at some point. He was right. They were essentially loaded. The triggers were half-cocked. They were ready to fire.
25:41 That’s not true right now in the Middle East. People were not planning on an existential war for survival against Israel. Today they are. But it takes time. And you have a different set of populations, a different set of leaders.
25:55 So it may not make any difference what the leaders in the House of Islam, in the Middle East, want. It’ll be a function of what the populations that live there demand. And increasingly they’re demanding ferocious action against Israel and I would say the United States.
26:15 Brian Rose: Wow. You alluded earlier that the U.S.
26:18 Has always been a commercial power. It’s the one thing that we do better. And that in itself can be a weapon. And it seems like you said we’ve kind of lost that perspective when it comes to the actions in Ukraine. And when you talk about how Trump refused to go into that war with Iran, I see a businessman who’s potentially running that country that is a commercial power.
26:41 And again, typically people thought of the Republicans as being the hawks of war. But in fact, he seems to be making those decisions that are back to the commercial interests of the U.S. And that is not start these wars that seem to do only one thing, ruin commerce and drain the nation. I’m curious what you think of this upcoming election as we’re, I think, nine months out. You have said to me last year that you don’t even know if we’re actually going to get to that election and I think you game-planned a few scenarios.
27:14 We’re in March now. I’m curious what your perspective is now as we go down this road to November. I guess it’s eight months until election. Then, of course, we have two more months, which could be the more interesting months before we have someone sworn in. So what is your perspective right now on this race?
27:32 Douglas Macgregor: There’s a lot of water to go under the bridge before we get to November. So let’s keep that in mind. What could happen between now and November? We could face a serious fiscal crisis. We now are servicing our sovereign national debt of roughly $1 trillion a year, which is essentially what we’re spending on defense and the intelligence apparatus.
27:56 How long can this go on? I mean, the central bankers, we talked about them at the beginning, are happy to tell you it can go on in perpetuity. I’m not sure. And I think if you consult most financial analysts, they’ll say no. Are we prepared to cut any spending to demonstrate to our creditors that we are serious about dealing decisively with the debt?
28:19 No, we aren’t. So what could precipitate? What sort of events could happen? Well, some people think we’re already on the road now to a major banking crisis. That may be the case here inside the country.
28:33 We’ve now admitted 10 million people to the point where we probably have 30, 35 million illegals inside the United States. Our economy is not robust. We are not the nation of 1939, 40, 41. People say, well, what about the depression? We came out of that.
28:52 Even if we have problems, we’ll still come out. So we have to understand that at the time of the depression, we still had a very large skilled workforce ready to go to work. Secondly, we had a huge manufacturing base. All we had to do is get it running again and put people to work. And then three, our creditors from the First World War, the people that owed us money.
29:15 They were paying us from Britain and France and other countries in gold. We had a huge supply of it. What’s happening now? Well, we don’t have that manufacturing base that we once had. What about this skilled workforce?
29:31 That’s mixed. And worst of all, we now have tens of millions of people in the country that we really can’t afford to maintain. And they’re receiving free health care. They’re receiving free transportation. They’re receiving free housing.
29:46 And the criminality is rising across the country in all the major cities. How anyone can look at this picture and not reach the conclusion that anything can happen between now and November is wrong. We haven’t even talked about the exogenous events. Let’s assume I’m wrong, that someone is stupid in Europe and provokes the Russians. I guess it’s possible.
30:11 Even though the Europeans are now making it clear they don’t want to go over there and fight, I don’t know what could happen that might precipitate a collision with the Russians. That could be devastating, because unlike us, they’re ready. They’re fully mobilized. They’re prepared to put another 800,000 people into uniform. Their general staff is looking at it.
30:30 I don’t think that’ll happen, but I don’t know the answer there. I don’t want to foreclose that option. Then you have the Middle East. What’s happening in the Middle East? We’re on this progression to regional conflict.
30:43 If that should blow up suddenly in April, May, June timeframe, involving countries like Iran and Turkey, as well as other Muslim states in the region, even North Africa, what impact is that going to have? I mean, you know about this as well as I do. What happens to your supply chains when you can’t get through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal? What happens to your supply chains if you can’t get in and out of the straits or moose? I mean, we could talk for hours, but none of it is good.
31:13 Everything is fragile. It wouldn’t take very much. Once again, go back to the treasury bonds or the bond market. Go back to, you call them gilts. Yeah.
31:25 Gilts. They’re rising. The 10-year, which I always look at, most people look at carefully, is once again rising. This is bad news.
31:35 Brian Rose: How do you deal with all of this?
31:38 Douglas Macgregor: So I think it’s sort of a giant house of cards, and we just don’t know which card is going to be kicked out underneath and then cause a collapse. But I think we’re headed in some kind of direction like that.
31:52 Brian Rose: You know, you mentioned the border, and both President Trump and President Biden are on the border, I think today or yesterday or this week, and Trump just kind of gave a speech on the Texas border where the Texas governor is vehemently opposed to everything that’s happening from the White House.
32:11 And Trump got up, and he said this, and it kind of fascinated me, Colonel. He said, I actually cannot get anyone to explain to me why the Democratic White House would allow this influx of what you’re saying is 30, 35 million people. He said, I actually can’t find any reasonable motive to that. Now, some people say these people are going to vote Democrat in the future, but Trump doesn’t really buy that as a reason. He can’t actually come to a reason of why this would be allowed.
32:41 And I’m curious if you know of a reason or why you think this is happening and then what the implications of it are.
32:48 Douglas Macgregor: Well, first of all, let me correct you on one point. I didn’t say 35 million people came up. I’m saying 10 to 12, and when you bring them in, you add them to the totals of illegals who are already here. Ah, yes.
33:02 You come up with a 30 to 35 million number. And I got that number from people working in Homeland Security, from my orcas. And incidentally, everyone in the Department of Homeland Security utterly hates and despises the man because they know he’s working tirelessly to destroy us. Now, why do I say that? Go back and look at the reasons why we shut down immigration after World War I.
33:27 We shut it down completely in 1924. And one of the principal reasons that people gave for shutting it down was we’re not getting the people we want. The great myth of American history is that everybody who came to the United States was poor and stupid. No. In fact, de Tocqueville, the brilliant French historian who came and visited us in the 1840s, he absolutely got it right.
33:55 By the way, so did Max Weber, the German sociologist who came later and reached the same conclusions. He said, the United States is the creature of the middle class. The people that showed up were not all indentured servants, not by a long shot. They came later on. The people that came and created the foundations were middle class.
34:17 And if you want to understand the American Revolution and what happens and everything attending to it, you’ve got to understand the Puritan Revolution and the English Civil Wars and Cromwell. Cromwell is as much a founder of the United States as anybody. You draw a straight line from Cromwell to George Washington from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln. All right. That’s the country we were.
34:39 Suddenly in the 1880s and 90s, the Democrats in particular saw virtue in bringing in large numbers of Europeans from southern Europe and eastern Europe that they could then repurpose as future Democratic voters. And so these people came in, and they were not all middle class. They were not all arriving in a state of pristine education. We were the leader in the world for literacy in 1900, but it wasn’t because of a public school system. We had none.
35:09 It’s because the people coming were already educated. Bismarck was furious. He had to shut down immigration coming out of Germany because he said, we’re losing all the talent. Everybody who has any talent and ambition and imagination is going to America. And then somebody said to him, well, don’t worry, Chancellor.
35:28 They’re Germans. Then we’ll have friends in America. He said, you’re an idiot. Absolutely not. The Germans become Americans, you fool.
35:35 Don’t you get it? Well, Bismarck was right. So we were doing very, very well until we got this new influx. And then we had this thing called Kosanostra, mafia, criminality. And on top of that, we started noticing that large numbers of people coming in were communists who were trying to organize against the very government that was admitting them.
35:57 And so people said, we’ve got to shut this down. So we shut it down in 1924. It didn’t really reopen until after World War II, but we had legislation on the books that said, you can emigrate from Country X based on the proportion of people from Country X that already exist, because we had a balance. We were comfortable with that balance. We had very low crime rates.
36:21 We had a very successful industrial base. We had a thriving economy. In 1965, all of that was overturned by two senators. One was named Javits from New York City, and the other was Kennedy. And they opened the floodgates, as they put it, to, quote unquote, the developing world.
36:39 Now, that didn’t have an immediate impact, but over time it did. And by the time you get to Ronald Reagan, he decides the solution is amnesty. And so millions of people who had come up from Mexico simply received amnesty and said, everybody said, well, see, it’s over now. It got much worse. That was an incentive for everyone, everywhere to come to the United States.
37:00 And so all that Mayorkas and Biden and everyone in the administration have done is take a, you know, page out of Reagan’s book. Let’s just open it up, let everybody in, and tell everybody that it’ll eventually exhaust itself. Well, it hasn’t, and it won’t. But once again, we’re bringing in huge numbers of people that we have no chance to ever assimilate. But there are people in Washington that are happy with that, because they think that one of two things can happen.
37:28 First of all, the core population of people who call themselves Americans, just Americans, they are not hyphenated. They will be swamped, diluted, overwhelmed. And they’re the problem. That’s the problem. They’re the problem.
37:44 And then we’ll have all these other people, and they can set up their own cultural centers and their own bodies, and we can play them off against each other and rule them in perpetuity. And there’s a lot of money behind that. And Americans are beginning to wake up. I think it’s almost too late. We will see.
38:03 And it’s not going to be a pretty picture once people figure it out. And the thing that I worry most about is what happens when the abundance becomes scarcity. And that’s where we’re headed right now. We have people having trouble feeding their families as it is. Go to any state you want.
38:19 You can see the traffic jams of people lining up to go to food centers, you know, where the food is free, and picking up everything they can because they just can’t afford to feed their own families anymore. It’s not a pretty situation, and it’s not going to improve quickly. But if the things that you and I are discussing, these exogenous events overseas, and the continued mismanagement of the economy here, and the continued influx of people into the country that we can’t possibly absorb, and the criminality that’s rising as a result, we’re in a lot of trouble.
38:58 Brian Rose: You know, Tucker Carlson recently talked about what happens after Election Day in November this year, and he talked about a couple different scenarios. One, maybe there’s a clear winner, and then it’s kind of over. But if there’s an unclear winner, and it looks like there was some funny business going on, then we could descend into something very, very scary. If people, maybe even Trump supporters, feel that something was done to thwart that, it becomes maybe a scary place to be.
39:31 Now, you’re on the ground. Have you game planned that in your head, and have you thought about what that looks like, and how far that could go, and who is involved? Does the National Guard get involved, or what does that even look like? And also, what’s your perspective with your military mind?
39:49 Douglas Macgregor: Well, you’re talking about election integrity.
39:52 Yeah. Growing up in Philadelphia, one of the largest cities in the country, I can tell you there is none. So there is no election integrity in the major cities, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles. These places are large, and millions of people, and the majority of the population that lives in those places is accustomed to one-party rule. And that one-party rule is from the left, the Democrats.
40:19 And everyone is sort of on the patronage system. So I don’t expect this election coming up to be any different from what it’s been in the past. If you start putting into this business of online voting and absentee ballots and stuffing ballot boxes full of things and voter rolls that don’t make any sense, that contain all sorts of people that have long since departed the Earth, one wonders what an election will produce. Oh, yes. I think you could have real discontent in the country because I think there’s an expectation that there will be change in November.
40:55 And if there isn’t, all hell could break loose over time. Will it be immediate? Probably not, but it will happen. And the other thing is there’s still a lot of people that are increasingly convinced to have looked at the data that the last election wasn’t honest, certainly not on the scale that it should have been. You know, if you’re dependent upon these elections as we are, this is a very dangerous set of circumstances.
41:23 So again, as I said at the end of my last diatribe, anything is possible. And it’s a sliding scale. No one can predict with certainty the outcome at this point, but it could be ugly.
41:34 Brian Rose: You know, I ran to be mayor of London in 2021 and I’m running again this year. And one thing that people constantly came up to me in the streets afterwards, they said, you know, Brian, you spent seven months campaigning.
41:48 You drove a bus 5,000 miles to every borough in London. And the number of votes you got just doesn’t make sense. Now, at the time, I tried to move on, but you just listed these urban environments that have been dominated by Democrats or left-wing politics for decades, if not centuries. You know, I might throw London on that list as well. And it’s something I’m going to just be a little more aware of going forward.
42:14 Brian Rose: Jim Rickard says it’s Trump in a landslide. And he said that a couple months ago before the results in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Do you think that might be true at this point? And does that also make a difference or not?
42:28 Douglas Macgregor: Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?
42:30 It could be true. In fact, it may well be the case. Will it make a difference? That’s unclear. That’s the critical question.
42:38 Because these hard points don’t change very much. I’m originally from Pennsylvania. My British ancestors settled there in 1681. So I’m somewhat familiar with Pennsylvania. And Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are fortresses of the so-called left.
42:58 And because of their population size, they swing elections. Now, what exists between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh? That’s a totally different America. Those people normally come out and they vote for the right. I’m sure they will again.
43:17 Now, could they come out in sufficient numbers? Well, Pennsylvania is one of those states that has historically supplied high numbers of men to the United States Armed Forces. We have 750,000 veterans in Pennsylvania. 489,000 of them are married, most with children. If they all come out and vote for President Trump, regardless of where they are, he could win Pennsylvania.
43:47 But you’ve got to get everybody out. And that’s always been a challenge. And remember, the last time he was successful in 2016, it was because people came out in great numbers. And they hadn’t figured out how to defeat that yet on the left. They had grossly underestimated him.
44:05 So they subsequently adjusted algorithms, changed laws, and made it possible to defeat him. That could happen again. And that’s the point. If it does, I don’t know how you contain the anger that will erupt. I think it’s impossible.
44:24 And again, I’ve heard people talking about civil war in America for a year or 24 months. And obviously, I grew up there. And I could never get my head around that concept. But if you clearly show evidence of some type of tampering to those hardcore Trump supporters throughout the nation, they will not sit silently, I do not think. Well, remember that historically, the people that vote for the right abide by the law.
44:53 Right. And it’s going to be very difficult for that population of Americans to overcome their distaste for breaking the law. So again, I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion. But it’s certainly going to be a very hard moment if it turns out as you describe, but it may. So I think James Ricards is right strategically, but operationally and tactically, it’s a different picture.
45:23 Brian Rose: You know, another thing that Jim told me in our last conversation is he coined this term called lawfare, which is using the laws as a means of warfare. And again, Jim is an attorney in addition to his other accolades. And we’re obviously seeing this with Trump in these various indictments, and including the one in New York City recently where he’s been issued a $450 million fine. We’ve seen many, many business leaders now say they will no longer do business in the state of New York because they can no longer trust the judicial system.
45:55 How far do you think this continues to go using the justice system, you know, as lawfare? Is this a trend that will get worse in the future?
46:06 Douglas Macgregor: I think it’ll get worse. The question is whether or not it ultimately is self-defeating and people rise up against it and it no longer has an impact. During the 2020 election, you would go to a voting place, a polling place in Philadelphia or New York or any number of places in Georgia.
46:27 There would be 50 attorneys representing the left, and it would be nobody there from the right. And then when someone said, well, you know, we have the right to have a certain number of people involved in counting votes and so forth who are Republicans, they were dismissed out of hand. Essentially, the doors were closed. I would expect that to happen again. And there are 50 attorneys to defend them.
46:54 Who defends us? Who defends the American people? And you have what I call the Western oligarchs. We talk about oligarchs in the east, oligarchs in Russia and Ukraine. I talk about the oligarchs in the west who have billions of dollars.
47:10 And they’re willing to pour that money into the victory over us, over the Americans, who don’t share their views. We don’t want to fight their wars. We want the borders closed and protected. We want the Coast Guard, the United States Coast Guard, which is currently sailing around the South China Sea to protect us, our ports, our coastal waters. We want our borders policed and we want the people that are here illegally removed.
47:40 We’ll be happy to take down their names and if they willfully leave, you will consider them for admission at a later point in time when our economy is more robust. But right now, they’ve got to go home. And if they won’t leave, we’ve got to push them out. Now, that’s what Americans want. But that’s not what the left wants.
48:00 That’s not what the people that govern Washington want. And remember, you’ve got to be careful that you don’t say, well, it’s this type of person or that type of person who wants it. This cuts across many, many areas of the private sector. There are different entities out there for different reasons who support bad policies. And that’s why I usually tell people that the frustration building in the United States is very similar to Oliver Cromwell’s expression of frustration when he dissolved parliament.
48:34 And I urge Americans all the time, read Oliver Cromwell’s speech. I tell my friends in Great Britain, Scott, Welsh, English, Irish, read that. And he tells the truth. And he ends up by saying, in the name of God, for God’s sakes, for all that you’ve done, go, go. And he was right.
48:56 He was absolutely right at the time. We face a similar situation today with Washington, D.C. We talk about draining the swamp. That’s a big swamp, needs to be drained. But I haven’t seen any evidence of anybody who’s got a plan to do it yet.
49:12 Brian Rose: I just want to close on China, which you mentioned. What is China thinking right now? I’m reminded of that famous Napoleon quote, Colonel, where he says, when your enemy is making a mistake, don’t interrupt them. Do you think China is just sitting back and just allowing America to basically destroy itself and will just allow that to happen, as it can come in later and pick up the pieces?
49:38 Douglas Macgregor: Well, you know, I have these conversations with people that say, we need to go to war with China to stop this fentanyl from coming into America.
49:47 One hundred and ten thousand Americans die every year from fentanyl poisoning. And the numbers continue to rise. And I say, well, the solution is not war with China. The solution is to get control of your borders, to enforce the laws, to punish the people that are breaking your laws. Don’t find another country to attack.
50:08 The drug cartels will purchase the ingredients for drugs from whomever is out there and is willing to sell it to them. And I also try to tell people that every morning, President Xi wakes up and he is very concerned about holding together a nation of 1.2 to 1.4 billion people. The Chinese economy is faltering badly. Their shadow banking system is gone under. The existing banking structure is in shambles.
50:42 There are hundreds of millions of people looking for work. People are returning to the countryside because they can no longer find work in the urban areas. China is in a lot of trouble. But you’d never know it when you listen to people outside of China talk about China. The last thing the Chinese want is a confrontation with us.
51:02 They don’t want it. Everybody’s like, well, they want to replace us. They don’t want to replace us. They need our markets. They’re not trying to destroy us.
51:09 We’re doing that to ourselves. So on that point, you’re 100% right. All we have to do to discover what’s wrong with us is look into the mirror. And the people most responsible for the problems are our elites, the people ruling us. Get rid of them.
51:28 Put new people into power. That’s vital and essential. Is that so revolutionary? That’s not a new solution. That’s what needs to happen.
51:37 Don’t continue to draw poison from the poison well. And that’s the problem in Washington. You go from administration to administration to administration. You see the same faces sort of pop up. It’s just a revolving door.
51:50 Well, it’s your turn for four years. Now it’s your turn for four years. We’ve got to get rid of them. They’re not the answer. They’re just going to sustain the disaster.
51:58 It’s time to change everything. Andrew Jackson did that. And he’s admired in American history for having done it. He made a few mistakes. Everybody does.
52:08 But the one thing he knew he had to do is replace everybody who was there or nothing would change. That’s where we are. And I think that may be where Britain is.
52:17 Brian Rose: I’m going to encourage everybody to take your advice and go read that speech by Oliver Cromwell. I’m going to post the speech in the notes below this episode.
52:26 Colonel, it’s always fascinating talking to you. I honestly don’t know where you draw this knowledge from. But I’m always on the edge of my seat when we have these conversations. So I appreciate you speaking openly and bravely about these real issues. And I hope that we see some change.
52:42 I hope people pay attention. And I hope people stay informed, because this is going to be a very interesting year. And I really appreciate your perspective.
52:52 Douglas Macgregor: Sure. Thank you very much, Brian.
52:54 Brian Rose: All right. Until next time. Thank you, Colonel. And thank you for watching London Real. We will see you soon.
