Full transcript: General Michael Flynn on London Real
2:32 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is General Michael Flynn, the retired army officer, national security expert, political commentator, and best-selling author. You spent over 33 years serving in the U.S. military, playing a key role in shaping U.S. counterterrorism strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq, while receiving numerous military, intelligence, and law enforcement awards for your efforts.
3:02 After your retirement in 2014, you became America’s highest-serving military intelligence officer as the director of the DIA under President Barack Obama and then served as a national security adviser to Donald Trump in 2016. You believe that America is in the midst of a long-running socialist takeover that is destroying the country, and if Washington continues to ignore domestic issues in favor of a flawed foreign policy, the country will be destroyed. Your soon-to-be-released documentary film, Flynn, tells, in your own words, the true story of your rise to the top of the U.S. military.
3:36 General Flynn, welcome to London Real. Thank you so much, Brian. What a great introduction. I really am honored to be on your show with your audience. I know you have a great audience and a great big audience, and I think that we have a lot of things to talk about.
3:50 We have a lot of things in common. We have a lot of things that people are hungry for, and I know that you, with your various hosts and guests that you have had on, have been able to bring that honesty, frankly, to the international community, and I appreciate you doing that. Thank you for those words. I appreciate it. So much to talk about today.
4:13 I guess I might have wanted to jump in and just get your immediate reaction to this kind of historic interview where Tucker went to Moscow and spoke to the leader of Russia, and look, I know in your past life, you might have been the guy that would have arranged such liaisons between high-level people, and I’m curious, through your military eye, what you saw that happened and also didn’t happen, and what was the significance of that interview, and what did it also tell us about our own current serving president and our foreign relations? So what did you see there? Yeah, I mean, first of all, I think that Tucker going to do that interview was smart. It was clearly within the realm that a guy like Tucker Carlson is able to do, especially now that he is such an independent and internationally known voice, and so I think it was very good that he did it.
5:09 From my perspective, as I watch that, and I’ve watched it a couple of times now, Brian, because I look for, you know, a leader at that level, in this case, President Putin, I look for the kinds of things that they’re saying, that they’re actually, you know, talking about, but I also look for the things that they don’t say. And what I saw in that interview was I saw, in this case, President Putin, I saw a very, very strategic leader with an objective of what I would call just national sovereignty, who was concerned more for his own country than he was, you know, where NATO will tell us, you know, NATO’s worried about Russia attacking across the plains of Europe, you know, the United States foreign policy leaders and our own White House leaders are going to talk about how Russia’s a threat to, you know, humankind.
6:04 What I saw was an individual who was very, very, he was masterful at understanding the deep history and the historical background, and I think for a lot of people that watched that interview, you know, for the first half hour or so, they were like, their eyes were rolling back on their heads and they were getting glazed over a bit, but from a guy like me, not only as a military, a senior military officer, someone who served in the intelligence community and someone who considers himself a strategist, particularly in the area of international affairs, I saw somebody who was, in this case, Putin, who was really thoughtful about how he saw and how he described his own country and the objectives that his own country needed to be able to achieve to continue to be, you know, the nation that it is, but he also talked about our country, talked about the United States of America in this case, and, you know, he said, I’m not going to try it, I mean, and these are my words, but he basically said, I’m not going to try to understand what you guys do in the United States of America, I’m not going to try to understand, you know, your Constitution, your states, your, you know, the various things that are going on in your country, you guys seem to be, you know, in his, I think in his words, confused enough about it all, and you seem to have many, many more problems at home than having to deal with all the stuff that’s going on over here,
7:29 Like why is it that America feels, you know, this necessity to stand on the foot store, you know, the doorstep of Russia? I mean, and as I have studied that a couple of times now, and I know that this will happen, the United States intelligence community and many analysts who are quote unquote, you know, the Russian, you know, that sit the Russian desks within the US intelligence community and the various agencies, they’re going to be studying that interview for quite a while, they’re going to have to do analyses of it, they’re going to have to describe what does this guy mean, what are the things that he’s not saying, you know, is this all deception? As I looked at that, and again, I’ve seen this a couple of times now, I didn’t look at that as though Putin was trying to hide anything.
8:21 I think, I saw a guy who was wide open, he was, in a way, he was driving the conversation with Tucker, particularly at the beginning, and I think Tucker saw that as time went on, and I think for your audience, people need to understand that, you know, in order to get an interview at that level, there were likely conditions for Tucker going in, like there might have been areas that Tucker was not able to talk about, you know, I’m speculating because I didn’t talk to Tucker about that, but I do know that when you go into big interviews like that, they will have certain conditions, you know, things that they want to stay away from, and I think that in general, the interview was probably one of the rare insights into the leader of, you know, in this case of Russia, and Russia is playing a preeminent role right now, and this is maybe something else we can talk to, because Russia just became, you know, there’s a board of directors, and you know this really well, there’s a board of directors called the BRICS nations, and 30, they’re up to, I think, 30 new nations are considering joining that board of directors.
9:45 Well, that board of directors’ leadership was just taken on by Russia, so the BRICS is Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and there’s, you know, there’s another 30 nations that are looking to join, my guess is that they will join, and so Putin sat there, and I think demonstrated to the world a level of control, and control not only in his ability to discuss not only history going back to the 9th century, but also the here and now and the reality that we are facing in the world today, as well as addressing some of the challenges that he did see in the United States of America, you know, from the perspective, speaking to an American journalist, and that’s Tucker Carlson, and I think that his ability to sort of transcend a variety of topics, historical, political, economic, military, diplomatic, and all the categories in between, you know, in a very long-range interview, I think it was a total of about 2 hours and 20 minutes or so, you know, to me, and I feel bad saying this, our president that’s occupying the Oval Office right now probably couldn’t have lasted 5 minutes, you know, without tripping up over, you know, I mean, his version of history is trying to remember what he ate last night for dinner, so, you know, and I don’t mean to be facetious about this, I mean to be very practical and very realistic.
11:19 When we talk about great nations and great powers globally, you know, the key ones, and there have been different ones in the history of the world, but the key ones that exist right now, of course, are, you know, the big nation states like the United States of America, Russia, of course, China, you have other nations like Great Britain, you have Canada, you have Japan, you have places still like Brazil who has a very strong economy. I think Argentina is going to be one of those great nations that’s going to rise under Malay, and so you have to deal with these great powers on a footing that puts you in a place of authority if you feel like you are going to be the dominant global superpower, and I’m now talking about the United States of America, and we have lost that shine.
12:09 We’ve lost that shine in the last couple of years, principally because we have leaders in the White House right now that are not demonstrating that level of leadership, not that level of strategic, and I would say sort of global skill that they require to be able to operate in a world that’s changing rapidly, and I do want to, you know, and I’ll stop here in a second because I do want to go back to this issue of BRICS, because I think the BRICS and what it represents and what it portends, what it means for the future, and I’m not talking about the future, you know, 2050, I’m talking about the future 2024, 2025, probably through the remainder of this decade as we transfer global economic conditions from one currency to a new currency, and I know it’s something that you have spoken about, and as well as addressing maybe in this time that we do have, addressing some of the strategic threats that we are going to face in the here and now, particularly, you know, and I’ll always speak from the position of being an American citizen with the background that I have that, as you introduced me, one of the key components of my background was leading one of the largest intel agencies in the world.
13:35 That’s the Defense Intelligence Agency. You know, I was privileged and blessed to be able to run that organization, but that, along with other components of my life as a senior officer, as a senior military officer, particularly as a senior intelligence officer, interacting at the highest levels of our government, and then, of course, becoming the national security advisor for, you know, a brief time, gave me insight into things that most Americans and certainly most humans on the planet don’t, are not privileged to be able to be part of, and I like to sort of open the kimono a little bit and share some of those insights, because I do believe that here in America, we should be, and I think, you know, in your case too, because you’re really good about this, not only on your show, but I think you as a leader, in your own right, you know, we need to be transparent with the people that we are dealing with.
14:35 We need to be much more transparent with the citizens that we have in free and open societies. If we believe that we are in free and open societies, you know, that are based on some type of rule of law, you know, we need to have a free and open discussion, and I like to be able to bring my levels of experience and my expertise to those discussions, to share with others, because I want people to understand the critical nature of the world that we are facing, and it is a world where there are two, there’s two adversaries, you know, there’s the adversarial nature of what globalism shows, and then there’s those of us that still believe in national sovereignty, you know, and again, that’s from the perspective of an American, that would be called America first, you know, I’m sure in Great Britain you have your own terms, but from an American it’s America first, and we have to protect our sovereignty first and foremost and get ourselves, you know, back into a condition of much greater health than we currently are.
15:42 So I’ll just pause there to throw it back to you to see if you have any comments or questions. Yeah, I thought it was a masterful performance by Putin. I give him a 9 out of 10, and I can see the expressions on Tucker’s face, and I’ve been in that same situation, General, where I have a high-power interview, it might be streaming live, there could be hundreds of thousands of people watching, and it doesn’t go the way you want it to go, and I can see Tucker being frustrated and the 30-minute history lesson, but Putin shows how he controls a massive landmass for the past 20 years, and he does it because he is a smart, intelligent, powerful man, and he set his own agenda, and he accomplished what he wanted to accomplish.
16:25 General, in my opinion, what he did was shatter the image that President Biden and the Democratic Party has tried to tell the world that this country is. Irrational, megalomania, etc., etc. What you saw in Putin, and I agree with you, was a guy who is looking out for his country, who doesn’t really want to invade Europe, who doesn’t want to do all these things, who actually wants something he thought he always had was control around the territories of his country that he sees as historically viable, and it was pretty impressive, and yeah, you can learn a lot from that conversation.
17:01 I was reading between the lines, I was watching a lot of his mannerisms and what he said and didn’t say, and then Tucker, he’s now said later, he just decided to let it go in the end because he just wanted to have a conversation, and I appreciate Tucker saying, look, it wasn’t about Tucker winning and Putin losing, and I hate journalism like that, General. That’s what happens in Britain, is you go on a Piers Morgan or something and there’s a winner and a loser, and nobody wins. The viewer doesn’t win because we’re not there to watch a boxing match, we’re there to learn, and so in that sense, I thought it was a success for Tucker, and we got a window into someone, and we could see that, wait a second, maybe this isn’t what we’re being told, and maybe there I want to shift to your thoughts on what’s happening right now with the White House.
17:46 I mean, they just approved another $61 billion going into this war. We’ve now got issues in the Middle East. We’ve empowered Iran, and you’ve now talked about this BRICS nation. I’m good friends with Jim Rickards. He wrote a book called Currency Wars, and he’s here on my show every three months warning us about BRICS, about these new members like Saudi and Iran, and a real danger of the dollar losing its power, and so I’m kind of curious for your thoughts there as far as BRICS and then what we see going on with these wars, with these huge amounts of spending, and your thoughts there.
18:25 Yeah, and so let’s go back to the interview briefly because one thing that you reminded me that I did not discuss was Putin’s discussion with Tucker about potentially joining NATO in the period of the 90s, right? Now, I was a mid-grade officer at the time. I was involved, though, however, in some fairly substantial planning efforts for some, I would call, operational activities, and one of those efforts was something called Partners for Peace. The Partners for Peace exercises and operations, and it was an outreach to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union by the United States government, and so tactically and operationally in the military we were involved in these Partners for Peace exercises that we were getting ourselves involved in, and there was a lot being written about the potential for Russia to join NATO, and there’s all kinds of meetings that occurred.
19:32 I think the Budapest Accords were one of them where there was some agreements made, so I think I found that little component of it very fascinating, and I don’t want to lose that on your show here, that I actually believe that had the United States, you know, with its partners, the larger partners in NATO at the time, and I think at the time it was only like 14 or 16 nations. Today it’s like 26 or 29. I think at the time had we outreached to Russia and said, we want to embrace Russia, we want to bring Russia under this peace, you know, this sort of peacekeeping umbrella, and maybe we do it over a series of years to further bring Russia into this community of nations.
20:18 I actually think Putin would have accepted that, and boy, what a different world we would be, so I found that particular topic in the discussion, and I think, and that’s one of the ones that I did go back and listen to because I wanted to make sure that I heard it right. One other aspect before I jump into the BRICS part, you know, people need to understand, because you really mentioned this giant, you know, nation, right? I mean, it’s eight time zones, eight time zones.
20:44 It is essentially a declining population, though, and Putin understands that. So Putin doesn’t have any ambition to go attack, like, you know, in my early days in the military, we used to have these return of forces to Germany exercises, we call them reforgers, where we would be postured to fight the hordes of the Soviet masses, you know, driving across the plains of Europe, you know, until we had our backs on the English Channel. I mean, we are as far from that in terms of what Russia wants to do as we have ever been, and it was made clear by Putin that that’s not something that he has any ambition to do.
21:23 He knows that he has got to beef up his own country, and one of the things that is interesting, and I know in our own country, we’ve seen some political people talk about this, we have to incentivize people to have children again. We have to incentivize families to be able to feel like that they can be, you know, that they can be part of a society again. If you don’t do that, then you don’t have a, you can’t build a society stronger. And so I know that as I looked at that particular aspect, and I’ve studied Russia quite a bit, I’ve studied Putin quite a bit, because for a long time they were one of our adversaries, I found it interesting that some of the things that he was talking about, which is really, in a way, it’s sort of Russia first, right?
22:12 It doesn’t mean that he’s not aligned to China and he’s not aligned to Iran and he’s not aligned to North Korea, and that’s jumping into where we are today, right? And so to touch on BRICS briefly, you know, the BRICS is a long-standing, principally economic consortium of nations, but it also has military ties. I mean, one of the interesting military-to-military ties is between Russia and India. Russia and India. The Russians make a lot of Indian military equipment and good equipment.
22:50 And so, you know, and then, of course, people look at China and India as having an adversarial stake, and they don’t necessarily always get along. There’s certainly a border issue that they have, but as two great nations, one with, like, I think 1.3 billion and one with 1.6 billion, you know, on a given day it could be either India or China, that’s about 20% to 25% of the world’s population. So if you throw in the five BRICS nations, that’s about 45% of the global population.
23:24 And now you add in the potential for another 30 countries to either join or partner with the BRICS consortium, with Russia as the leader, with a guy like Putin who’s clearly articulate, switched on, knows what he wants, knows the direction that at least he sees the world going, which is more toward a globalist view, but with the need to retain some level of sovereignty, we’re going to see with the advent of what’s called central bank digital currency, and I’ve heard the gentleman that you mentioned on your show a couple of times, and he’s terrific, he’s a brilliant, brilliant, you know, economist or economist that, God, he knows so much, and when I listen to him I’m like blown away, and it’s actually, you know, it’s relieving that, or refreshing that, that you, we have people like him that will talk, but it’s also scary for some of the things that he talks about, because if we move away from the US dollar or the petrodollar, let’s say, as the currency of choice for global trade and the global economics, and we move to something else, that’s going to cause a lot of nations and their banking systems to have to, to have to adjust, and it’s going to cause a lot of other aspects of societies, particularly here in the United States, to have to adjust to that.
24:58 If it happens too quickly, I’m afraid our system, our economic system would collapse overnight. So I do, I would say that it’s probably going to occur, despite what political people are saying about, well, we’re never going to accept this digital currency. I think it’s coming. People need to recognize that it’s coming. The bigger, broader issue, though, is, how does the world get along with each other?
25:23 And when you have 45% of the population that are BRIC, that are the direct members of BRICs, and then you add in these other 30 nations, now you’re upwards of about 85%, because I’ve looked at some of these nations that, and at least their population sizes, we have about 85% of the world’s population that are aligning along the lines of this BRICs consortium. That’s a big deal. That, you know, as Mao Tse Tung, I was just listening to an interview of a woman talking with Tucker, talking about the Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but as Mao used to say, quantity has a quality all of its own.
26:01 And we have got to pay attention to the quantity of nations that are now, and again, I’m speaking as an American. I’m speaking as someone who absolutely, you know, loves our country, believes in our way of life, you know, believes in the rule of law, has been persecuted by it, but as an American, as I look at the rest of the world as they’re lining up, I call it a global alliance that is forming against, you know, the West, and in this case principally the United States of America, and I would add in, Brian, certainly Great Britain, you know, and the United Kingdom, and it is no doubt, no doubt. And you have elements inside of your own system of government that I would call subversive elements, if not, you know, certainly anti what I think Great Britain has always stood for, and what they want to be, instead of this sort of globalist alignment where everybody’s going to cow-tow to some new form of global economic system, which is what we’re moving toward.
27:06 So let’s take that down to another level, and let’s talk about the Middle East. The Middle East right now, it’s really fascinating. The Middle East is being paid for almost completely. I mean, with a few bucks thrown in by, you know, by Great Britain, a few bucks maybe thrown in by some other nations, most of the bill for the entirety of the war in the Middle East is being paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
27:37 U.S. taxpayers are paying, we’re paying Israel, we’re paying Iran, Iran is paying Hamas. We actually are paying Hamas through the various organizations, the non-governmental organizations, as well as the Palestinian Liberation Organization and elements of the United Nations that sit in Gaza. We’re paying, I mean, we’re talking millions, tens of millions of dollars, in some cases billions that we’ve sent to Iran. We’re paying elements like Hezbollah.
28:06 We’re paying all of the nations of the Middle East. When you talk about Jordan and Saudi and the UAE and Qatar and Lebanon and Egypt, I mean, we give so much money. You know, so if we’re paying billions to Iran, what is Iran doing? Iran is paying a bunch of these Iranian-backed forces like the Houthi rebels down in Yemen. I mean, the flow of money, never mind the billions and billions of dollars that are going into Eastern Europe for what is a losing proposition.
28:36 It is already, it’s over. The war in Eastern Europe is over. Now it’s just a matter of somebody with some sense, mainly here in the United States of America, if we’re able to get through an election and get, you know, I’m fully behind President Donald J. Trump. If we’re able to get a leader in the White House to stop that madness, at least from our perspective, if Europe wants to get into a fistfight with Russia, be my guest at this stage.
29:05 We’ve already talked about where I think Putin’s head is at. His head is not crossing the plains of Europe. The Middle East is a place that has had constant war. And in my lifetime, I’ve been at war in the Middle East since the first time that I stepped into the 82nd Airborne Division, you know, back in the really the real early 80s, really the tail end of the 70s. And I mean, since then, and years and years of my life were engaged over in the Middle East.
29:39 I mean, I did fight communism in Central America and parts of South America in the 80s as we were still fighting back against the Soviet Union and the rise of communism in our own hemisphere. But this war in the Middle East is not going to end well. The peace accord process that’s going on I think in Paris right now is not in anyone’s favor except Iran. Iran will be sort of the big winner. These designated terrorist organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah, they will be the big winners.
30:17 Other big winners are going to be these global non-governmental organizations that plant their flags in some building, you know, that Hamas is building tunnels under or storing weapons underneath. And they’re going to continue to operate to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars on an annual basis. And when I look at all that and I say, God, you know, when will this end? If Israel backs down, so this is, now this is warfare, right? Now I’m going to get into a little bit of warfare if you don’t mind for a minute here.
30:55 If Israel operationally strategically backs down, accepts some peace accord because they want to get their hostages back and I don’t know whether you’ve seen the exchange rates for Israeli hostages, but the exchange rates for an Israeli hostage is horrific. I mean, it’s like for every Israeli citizen that’s held hostage right now by Hamas, they want like 10 or 20 people back, right? I mean, it’s just incredible. There’s nothing fair about war. And this war is as ugly as I’ve ever seen war and I’ve seen the absolute underbelly of war.
31:35 As ugly as it can get, I have seen it or experienced it. Israel will not survive. Israel as a state, the Netanyahu government, they will not survive. Now, you know, I said to somebody yesterday, Israel as a piece of geography will survive. It has been around for thousands of years.
31:55 That piece of geography will survive. If we keep going down this road though, where we are going to basically kneel to the desires of these radical Islamists, you know, and this is on both sides, right? You know, the Shiite side on the Iranian, from the Iranian perspective, and of course, on the Arab side, the Sunni or Sunni radical Islamists, I mean, they exist. There’s no doubt about it. I have faced them.
32:26 I have spoken to them. We have captured and killed them. So if there’s one thing that I understand, it’s what they will do to achieve their goals. And what they will do to achieve their goals, they will stand there and they will lie right in your face. And I don’t care whether you’re a soldier on the ground or whether you’re a king or a president of a country, they will lie to your face to achieve their ultimate goal.
32:51 And what their ultimate goal is, is the complete destruction of Israel as a state. Again, the place on the ground will be there forever. And if you look at history over, let’s just say 1,000 years, maybe 2,000 years, you can go back in time and there were many occupants of that piece of ground. You know, Rome being one of the more popular ones, right? The Roman Empire.
33:18 And there were others, right? The Persian Empire, where those places existed only as subordinates to some other entity. Even the Ottoman Empire lasted, I think, 1,400 years. So when we think about this war, the tactics are ugly because that’s what war is. Warfare is not fair.
33:43 The operational side about kind of organizing the theater of operations within the, from the Red Sea, from the Suez Canal, down to the Bandaral Bas, over to the Arabian Sea, up to Persian Gulf. I mean, people need to understand what’s the, what are the relationships there too, right? I mean, we talked about Russia, China, Iran. One of the things that people need to understand about China, because the Chinese have a lot to do with all of this. So maybe we talk a little bit about their One Belt, One Road initiative here, because I think that’s an important aspect of tying in everything that we’re talking about.
34:23 China gets about 40%, four zero, about 40% of their energy resources come through the Straits of Hormuz or the Persian Gulf. So people need to understand that. You know, why is China, who seems to stay over in China and in the Asia theater, why are they so interested in all these other places? Well, 40% of their energy resources come out of the Persian Gulf through the Straits of Hormuz. We, the United States of America, if we wanted to do anything, we could shut that down, you know, immediately.
34:57 And yet we don’t. And, you know, and again, you know, what the people in Washington, D.C., what the people in the State Department, what the people in the U.S. Military Department of Defense are thinking about or in the White House, I have no idea. But what I do watch and I pay very close attention to is a lot of the incompetency that we do see. And so, you know, let me pause and see if you have any, you know, direction, because I really do appreciate being on your show and speaking to your audience.
35:27 Now, I appreciate all these points. I think they’re super relevant. And I appreciate the explanation you gave us in the Middle East. And again, I mean, you’ve had decades and decades and decades of experience there. So when you say it, it really, it really sits well with me.
35:40 You know, you mentioned the socialist takeover in America. And I wanted to really get your perspective on that. I also want to get your thoughts on the election. And of course, I want to get a little bit about, you know, your upcoming documentary. But you’ve said there’s a socialist takeover in America.
35:55 You know, what does that actually feel like on the ground? Is there any way to change this? You just talked about this interview that Tucker had where this woman described something similar happening with Mao in China. You know, what are the ramifications of this? Will a new president, a.k.a. Trump, be able to change this?
36:13 Or is this something that’s had decades to get momentum and is it going to require a lot more to slow this down? Or is it even possible? Yeah, you know, it’s a great, great question. And another, I’ll try to give you as brief an explanation as possible. But this is something I would love to come back on your show and have a completely different discussion about.
36:37 So for your audience, in the late 60s, 1960s and early 1970s, there was a decision that the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party, we have a two-party system primarily in the United States, Democrat, Republican, that the Democrat Party was going to be taken over by what I would call this very hardcore socialist movement. There are indications that that was going to happen even as far back as when Eisenhower was the president. So among the things that they know they needed to do, was they needed to get into our school systems and our education systems, right?
37:19 And there’s a lot of evidence of that over the period of time. I mean, Jimmy Carter, President Carter in the late 70s is the one that created really the Department of Education. We had other federal entities that overlooked that kind of stuff. But when the Department of Education was created by a Democrat, it was really purposely designed to make sure that this shift in our education system would occur and things would begin to happen that would then culturalize our youth.
37:55 And I would say that it started slow and lately it’s picked up a lot more momentum. And also back then, we had organizations like, and these were led by the Democrat party were part and parcel to these organizations. And two of them were the Weather Underground. Another one was the Black Panther movement, right? The Weather Underground and Black Panther movement.
38:21 People can go back and look at those and check those out. So I’m gonna fast forward and jump a couple of decades to the here and now because to get to your question. So now in this movement, tactically, we have new organizations that have similar backgrounds or similar intentions, right? We have the Black Lives Matter, we have Antifa. Then it was Weather Underground, Black Panther Party.
38:47 Now it’s Black Lives Matter, Antifa. None of these organizations have to do with color. They don’t have to do with race. They have to do with ideology, political ideology. And the political ideology that we are experiencing in this country really has its foundations in Marxism.
39:04 So I recently wrote a fairly extensive paper, not too long ago, a couple of weeks ago, on communism in America. And I raised these issues because we are, there’s something called democratic socialism. Democratic socialism is a component and it is a hardcore component, ideologically, of the Democrat party and the Democrat party in our country. So you’re hearing from a person who was a lifelong Democrat. I grew up in a Democrat family.
39:36 We were Democrats in the early 60s when John F. Kennedy was a Democrat. John F. Kennedy, there’s no way in the world that he’d be a Democrat today, no way. His family can say whatever they want.
39:46 That guy was a very conservative pro-family, pro-business, pro-military, pro-Constitution, pro-America president. Sadly, he was assassinated. So where we are today is we have this democratic socialism infiltration into our government. There are many members of the House of Representatives and our U.S. Senate that are members of that party.
40:11 I mean, Bernie Sanders is one of the guys that comes to mind, Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar. I mean, these are people that are socialists and they believe in socialism. And there are many others. Some of them are a little bit quieter, but they all seem to vote on a party line, on one line, whereas the conservative side can’t figure out which end is up, what they’re gonna do. And we call it, I written about it called the Uniparty.
40:38 So America is going through a cultural revolution. It started decades ago. It clearly is in our education institutions. It’s in our healthcare institutions. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, remember Hillary Care back in the 90s?
40:53 Yeah. Right? Well, they could not get it into place. Barack Obama comes to the fore. They got the education system going.
41:01 They get the healthcare system going and they get control of it at the federal level. And then the next thing that you get control of in a cultural revolution is the justice system or the rule of law system. And so those three components, education, healthcare, and justice, all three of those absolutely impact every single person’s life. Nevermind the economy or the price of a gallon of gas or the price of a loaf of bread that you’re trying to put on your table.
41:32 You have those three components. Our kids go to schools. We all need healthcare of some type. And then our justice system, which is really not so much the persecution that President Trump is feeling, but it’s the rule of law in a society. And right now we clearly have two standards.
41:49 We have two standards of law in our country. Those who are conservative and sort of believe in this idea of America first and those who are sort of the progressive, I don’t say liberal because I count myself, I’m a liberally minded guy, but progressive democratic socialist component of our country. And the phrase that I like to use is 2% of the passionate will defeat 98% of the indifferent 100% of the time. And believe me, Brian, and your audience, there’s a very passionate group of leftists that run this country right now, and I mean run this country.
42:31 They run the intelligence community. They run large swaths of our justice system. They run our education system. All of these things that we’re seeing, all the school board hearings that we’re now seeing in America and people attacking these various books and these various things that they’re teaching, the whole transgender movement. So this cultural revolution is something that we are going through.
42:55 We are definitely in the midst of a cultural revolution. Is it akin to what happened in the Chinese Red Party cultural revolution? It has similarities, and there are big strategic pieces that I can point to that would say, yep, those are roughly the same. Education would be one of those things that I would point to. And the challenge for America right now, and I think for the world, because if we don’t survive, then I think the world is going to go down this path with us.
43:31 The challenge for America is that we have to get people off their rear ends to get out and participate as citizens. I use this phrase, local action equals a national impact. This is a citizens-led government. That’s our republic. That’s our form of government, or a republic form of government, and we the people, right?
43:53 And I do believe that the American people in general have been complacent. Some have been lazy for the last few decades, and we’ve just sort of let all of us just politics as usual kind of attitude, right? And we cannot have that. That’s why Donald Trump rose in 2016 to become president of the United States. I can tell you, I was with him every day campaigning our rear ends off to help him become the next president.
44:20 And what we saw was we saw this takeover by this socialist movement in this country. One last touch point on that, that before we kind of come to a conclusion today with your audience, that in 2018, Brian, the president of the United States, during a State of the Union, I think it’s a very famous one where, you know, Pelosi was ripping his speech apart, but during that State of the Union speech, which is when a United States president stands up and gives sort of a health update on where we are as a nation, he said that the United States of America will never be a socialist nation. And that’s a first.
45:07 That is a first for a president of the United States to have to even say that. Well, what I found of my interest was not that he said it. I found the reaction in the Congress, right, because he’s speaking to all the members of Congress. He’s speaking to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He’s speaking to the whole Supreme Court.
45:25 He’s speaking to a joint session of Congress, the House and the Senate. And on one side, there was great applause, standing room only applause, right? On the other side, there was a lot of sitting on their hands, right? There are a lot of people sitting on their hands and not clapping. And I found that, I found that disturbing, to say the least.
45:46 And so I want people to understand your great international audience, but those in the United States of America that hear me, that we are in a historically consequential time, not only for America, but for the entirety of the world. The world is going to change directions if the United States can’t get the right leader. And in my case, I firmly believe it’s Donald Trump back into the White House as a proven leader to give us some breathing space so we can take some corrections, so we can do some course corrections.
46:22 Maybe this train that has gone off the rails, maybe we can get one of the sides back on the rails. I’m not sure in four years we’re going to be able to fix the whole thing, but we can get some breathing space. We can get a life raft, if you will, that we can grab onto and hold onto as we go down this raging river towards a new future. And I think that’s where we are right now. And so people in America, people around the world that need to be encouraging the American people, hey, don’t give up, keep fighting.
46:58 I say fight like a flint. Get involved in your local level and it’s time to speak up. It’s time to be courageous and fearless instead of worrying about what some media outlet is going to label you as, right? Because they’re doing all these labels now about white Christian nationalists, right-wing extremists, I mean, mega cult. I mean, those are labels.
47:21 That is another element of communism and Marxism is putting labels on people. Like in the Chinese Revolution, it was the bourgeois. If you were part of the bourgeois, what they called the black party versus part of the red party, which is you were on the inside. You were part of the Mao Revolution. You were on his team.
47:40 And if you were bourgeois to the tune of about, we don’t really know, but at least 20 million, maybe as many as 40 million people were killed. That took a while, but it happened. And I think this country needs to wake up to the reality that we’re facing and we’re facing a cultural revolution, no doubt. So, John, well, tell me about the next 12 months. You know, when I had that same Jim Rickards here a couple of months ago, this is before Vermont.
48:06 This is before South Carolina. He said he’s hearing Trump wins in a landslide. I’m curious if you think that will happen. What would stop that from happening? Will you join his administration?
48:19 And then the last question is, with four years of Trump and maybe his VP continuing for four to eight, can that turn the country around? That’s a bunch of questions. But let’s start with the next 12 months. What’s in the way of Trump winning? I know there’s these legal actions.
48:34 Actually, Jim Rickards calls it lawfare, using the law as an instrument of war. What’s to stop him from getting in that White House and being sworn in in January 25? Yeah. So, first of all, I think that who Trump chooses to be his vice president, and he won’t make that decision. I mean, there’s a lot of speculation.
48:55 I don’t think he’ll make that decision until right before the conventions. You know, he may have some ideas, but whoever he chooses is going to have to think about 12 years, right? It’s four plus, I mean, as you say, you know, yeah, we have election cycles here. So that’s, you know, that’s a big, big decision. Who do you think it’s going to be?
49:13 Yeah. Who’s your choice? I don’t know. I mean, I really, really, I do not know, and we could sit here all day and spend an hour speculating. I would tell you that I know that I’ve been through that process.
49:25 So in 2016, I was one of four finalists, so to speak, four vice president, Christie, Newt Gingrich, and of course, Mike Pence eventually became the nominee. So you were close. Yeah. So I know what that process entails. I know what it means.
49:41 You know, it’s humbling. It’s very, very humbling. I do think that one of the things that, you know, the next 12 months, what do they want to do to Donald Trump? They want to bankrupt this man. They want to put him in jail.
49:54 They want to destroy every single aspect of his life. I mean, there is no doubt about it. And there is all kinds of, of entities. I mean, that are, that are out to get him in, in all accounts, though, all accounts, every single court that he is involved in with, with the maybe with the one exception of the, of the Mar-a-Lago judge, the judge that has the Mar-a-Lago case down here in Florida, all the others are just, they’re falling apart. I mean, they’re, they’re so corrupt.
50:23 I mean, look at, look at the Georgia case. I mean, this is just outrageous. Yeah. You look at the, the case in, in New York. Yeah.
50:31 And I can tell you the Jack Smith case in Washington, DC is going to collapse. It’s going to collapse like a house of cards principally because of the arrogance, the corruption, and the, frankly, the criminal behavior that, that we now are aware of. That needs to be investigated. So they’re going to do everything they can to keep Trump, you know, out. But what, what is happening, and this is the beauty of America as the British experienced, you know, a couple of hundred years ago, when people get pissed in this country, and I mean, irritated to no end, then they start to say, Hey, wait a second.
51:03 You know, we, we actually love a person who is being victimized when we know that they’re being victimized for the wrong reasons. The American psyche, what’s in the American DNA is that attitude. And that attitude is a really important attitude. And Trump certainly has tapped into that because not only is he the victim, but, and he’s the, he’s the, the example or the epitome of, of victimhood against a really unfair, corrupt criminal justice system. But we are the victims, right?
51:36 The American people are the victims because we’re feeling the pain. And this is not just, you know, people who are part of the, the make America great again, you know, diatribe it. I mean, this is, this is, this is every American, every American is feeling the, certainly the economic pain. They’re feeling the pain from this invasion of our Southern border. I mean, this is hurting everywhere.
51:58 We have a couple of hundred thousand, principally young people who have been killed by fentanyl, let us Chinese reduce Mexican cartel introduced into this country. So there’s a lot more at stake that the American people are beginning to see. And that’s why I think, I think Jim, Jim is, is right to say that this should be a landslide. It should be a landslide. So now what are the scenarios?
52:24 So scenario one is we have a, we have an election in November and, and it’s free and fair. Okay. So the likelihood of a free and fair election is not likely. Okay. But having an election is, is still potentially likely.
52:39 Scenario two is an election that’s rigged again. And if we wake up, I think it’s the dates are five November is the, is the election is the Tuesday. We wake up on six November and we have the similar result that we just had in 2020. Then I think we’ve lost. If we go back into what Jim described, it’s happening to Trump and it’s happened to all of us.
53:00 This law fair, it’s a, it’s, it’s legal actions using as though it’s warfare, right? And so I think if we go have another election and the outcome is clearly confused, chaotic, it appears like there’s more fraud that is, that occurs in these various places and we’re back into the courts. We’ve lost the country will then rapidly go down a socialist path. The third scenario, which as an intelligence officer and as somebody who has looked at, you know, most probable, most likely most dangerous courses of action, my entire military life, I absolutely have to think this way because, because there’s a reality behind it.
53:45 And that reality is that we don’t have an election. That would be scenario three, no election. So what does that mean? How do we get there? Well, that means that there’s going to have to be some type of massive national emergency.
53:57 Maybe it’s an introduction of a new disease. Maybe it’s a complete collapse of our economic system. Maybe there’s some other, something else that gets thrown in that we don’t imagine, right? They call them black swans in business and in the military. Black swan events are events that are unimaginable.
54:14 Nobody’s thought about it. They happen and when they happen, they create tectonic shifts in entire societies in some cases. So those are the three scenarios. One’s an election with a fair outcome, Trump hands down. One is an election with an unfair outcome.
54:33 You know, that’s rigged. And obviously we’re in a different place. One is no election because of some other black swan type event. And I think that we all, guys like me, I kind of, I look for these indicators and warnings to be able to advise the people that I’m speaking to. And in this case, President Donald J. Trump.
54:54 So now you asked me about, you know, so let’s assume he wins. If everything goes well, he wins. You know, and that’s a, I think that’s a great bet right now if everything is fine, right? If everything goes well, and I do know the American people are going to be paying very, very detailed, close attention to the election process as it unfolds between the time mail-in ballots start all the way to election day. So there’s going to be a lot more of this going on and people paying attention.
55:27 So, because I have been in an administration before and I have been asked, you know, like I said earlier about, you know, considering Vice President, but also considering in the case that I stepped into, the National Security Advisor, for me as a guy who has served the United States of America and certainly in the military and in politics and in the White House, it’s a very difficult question for me to say no to, especially when the President of the United States asked you. And so my DNA, my fiber is about service. That’s what I learned as a kid.
56:03 I mean, you know, we didn’t talk about my childhood any, but I grew up in a military family, service has been my life. And so I don’t mind serving. I want to be able to serve this country again in ways like I am doing right now in ways that make us stronger. It’s like, you know, you, me, you know, we spend some part of our day exercising, I hope, right? I mean, most people should, you know, even if it’s a short walk, even if it’s just going outside and doing some breathing exercises, I try to stay healthy.
56:37 Well, the United States of America is in an unhealthy position right now and needs to be exercised. It needs to be exercised by effective leaders who know what they’re doing. Not, you know, not the incompetency that we see and frankly, the deception and lying that we’re seeing coming out of our own government and this double standard of justice that we have as well as this filth that we’re teaching to our children in our schools. So can it be fixed in four years?
57:01 Absolutely not. Cannot be fixed in four years. Can we put the right leaders in place and make some changes in four years that need to put us back on a path to where we can become, you know, that shining city on a hill again? Absolutely, we can do that. And I think the American people are starving for that.
57:19 Last point, Brian, your show, me talking and all the different people that you bring on and those that are in the world of citizen journalism today, we are part of that solution. We are part of that because we’re able to speak to each other to large audiences and larger audiences in your case, you know, to people that are around the world who are looking at what is going on and going, where do I get the truth? Now, people can like me or not, they can believe me or not, but what I am telling you is what I firmly believe and that’s coming from a background and a set of experiences that I’ve been blessed and privileged to have and I don’t take them lightly and nor do I take what I say lightly.
58:02 So I appreciate coming back or coming on and maybe I self-promote my movie a little bit. Yeah, I just wanted to complete with the last piece your documentary film, Flynn, at least the teaser’s out. I’m wondering if you could tell us more about the movie, how people can watch it. We’ve actually just released our sixth feature-length documentary film. It’s called We Will Not Be Silenced.
58:24 I’ll get you a copy, but it’s hard making a documentary film. Just tell me a little bit about it and what are the release dates and what’s coming up with it. Yeah, so people can go to flinmovie.com, flinmovie.com, they can sign up for notices. The release date is going to be the first week of April. The movie has Tucker Carlson in it.
58:45 It’s got Devin Nunez in it. It’s got a couple of other people that are well-known and it has a bunch of my family. The movie is really about my military background. I spent an hour talking about that. The second hour, I talk about the persecution and the corruption and this is not just an attack on Barack Obama.
59:05 This is looking at corruption from a really deep perspective of what I face and what I know inside of the U.S. government. Then I leave the audience really with a sense of hope. I like to try to inspire and let people know that all of us go through this and if you stand your ground and you know who you are, you can rise above it. I wanted to leave people with the feeling of, okay, man, our government and what we’re doing is bad, but there’s ways to get out of this.
59:41 There’s ways that we can recover kind of what we talked about today. You’re right. Putting a documentary is my first one. Boy, is it tough. It’s been fun.
59:51 Oh, my gosh. It is, but once it’s finished, it’s just a beautiful asset that you’ll always have. General Finn, thank you so much for the time. We will definitely have you back to go deeper on some of these issues. I highly recommend everyone go check out the trailer.
1:00:03 It’s super sizzle. Great to hear that people like Tucker are in there and great to hear that you’re talking about it. Thanks for your insight. Again, you come not only with the military background, but also with the intelligence background, so you know a lot more than a lot of people as far as what really goes behind the scenes. Again, thank you, General.
1:00:22 Thank you for your service as well, and let’s continue this in the future on another episode. Absolutely great, Brian. Thank you very much, and thank you to your London Real audience. I know that they’re a terrific audience, and they’re very loyal, and they trust what you’re saying, so God bless. All right.
1:00:37 I appreciate you, sir. Thank you so much, and thank you to everybody. See you next time on London Real. Take care.
