What You're Missing About Hormuz And Epstein | Col. Rob Maness

The best summer pieces are the ones you wear over and over. Super comfy and more right than wrong for almost every occasion. That's why I love Quince. They make elevated essentials using premium materials like European linen, organic cotton, and washable silk without the traditional retail markup. Quince's 100% European linen pants, dresses, and tops are pieces you will reach for all summer long. They're lightweight, effortless to style and start at just $32. Their denim is soft and comfortable and their organics cotton sweaters are just perfect for those evening cool downs during the summer. Also, Quince's beautiful 14 karat gold jewelry adds a subtle finishing touch. Simple hoops and delicate chains make even the most effortless outfit feel intentional. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80 percent less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. So you're paying for exceptional quality, not brand markup. I personally find myself grabbing the same lightweight quince sweater to wear during the summer evenings. It's just perfect but it's not just apparel. Quince also offers elevated essentials for your home from bedding and bath to kitchen essentials and furniture. Make your summer wardrobe feel easier. Go to quince.com slash business game for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's quince.com slash business game for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash business game. One of the most time consuming parts of running a business is finding the right people. I've spent countless hours sorting through resumes looking for that needle in a haystack. Well, the future of hiring looks brighter because ZipRecruiter's latest tools and features help speed up that process of finding the right people for your roles. And now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash business game. With ZipRecruiter's new advances, you can easily find and connect with qualified candidates in minutes. Over 320,000 new resumes are added to ZipRecruiter monthly, which means you can reach more potential hires and fill roles sooner. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Use ZipRecruiter and save time hiring. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a qualified candidate within the first day. And if you go to ZipRecruiter.com slash business game right now, you can try it for free. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash business game. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Puts China in a very strategically weak position, which is where we need them to be because they're outpacing us in building military stuff and those kind of things. And we've got to get our manufacturing base back under our feet. And hopefully this president still got enough time to start on that by the time he leaves office. That can't be reversed. But but that's a big thing. Welcome to Business Game Changers. I'm Sarah Westall. I have Colonel Rob Maness coming to the program. We are going to talk about world geopolitics and also the moral decay of this country that we live in. He has a new book out called What You Can Do About It, Taking Real Action Against Corruption, Radicalism, and Moral Decay to Save America. And we are going to talk about all the moral decay. We're going to talk about the Epstein criminal class. I mean, if that's not a sign of moral decay and what that means behind it, that's much bigger than just Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. It represents all the people behind it. If it was an intelligence operations, then who and how did it work? And this is a thing. They don't want us to know and dismantle how it actually worked because that's going to show how other operations work. And we talk about that. But the really interesting thing is the Strait of Hormuz and what he believes, and this made sense to me, what the alternative agendas are behind the Strait of Hormuz closing and what those pressure points are. And that it's maybe not as incompetent as you think it is because there are other reasons why closing it could be a strategic move. He actually advocated for closing it for a while. So you've got to listen to that one. And I will have a link where you can get his book below. He also has a show, the Rob Manus show, which you can watch as well. So I'll give you links to all those below. Before we get into that, I have to have it before we get into that, because that's how I support my show is by sharing affiliates and the work that I do. I want to share Masterpiece. Masterpiece helps you detox. It gently helps you detox. And it's a binder, but it also has sea minerals that is highly nutritious. and the zeolite is extremely small natural zeolite there's like 46 different types of zeolite and so you got to make sure you get one that actually works that's smaller it's not all equivalent the sizing so people think it's cheaper online just to get the zeolite it's not they're not all equivalent you have to look at the size of it you have to look at how small it is and how it's been manufactured now masterpiece is able to take out graphene oxide they're able to take out these stupid nanobots. These nanobots are being found in every single human being. Are they being sprayed? I mean, they make these nanobots. You can get a million of them on the pin of a head, right? And somehow they're getting into every human being when tested. And this helps get those nanobots out of your body. And it also gets out the heavy metals and the forever plastics. And it's such a great thing to do and you can use it in a gently it's a very gentle everyday thing and i get a box every time i buy it for so i can share it with my family and it it also gives you all the great minerals the sea minerals so you can also get a hair test if you want if before you start it you can get a hair test see where you're at take it for a few months and then get tested again they actually uh sell those as well so i mean they stand i don't know anybody that stands behind what they do by doing all these ongoing tests. So I highly recommend that you look into it. I have a link below where you can buy it yourself. So look for the link below or go to sarawessalt.com under shop. Before we get into this, also please subscribe. Whatever platform you're on, please help my channels grow. Subscribe below, give it a thumbs up and give me a review if the platform does a review like on apple okay let's get into this uh this you know he's we're going to talk about i go there i push back he pushes back it's great i love when we push back i'm not going to agree with everything somebody says but if we don't have these discussions where are we going to go as a country so i hope you enjoy this lively discussion it's a conversation in a lot of ways and um that's how i have them so i talk a lot when i have conversations so So people who stick around appreciate that. And thank you for doing that because I appreciate you for sticking around. Okay, here's Colonel Rob Maness. Hi, Rob. Welcome to the program. Hi, Sarah. Thanks for having me on. Well, we're going to talk about the, we have a criminal class that's running this country. And we have to take care of that. I mean, you can't really solve your problems when criminals are running things. How do we deal with that? You're so right. You know, how we deal with that is look in the mirror at ourselves, not as people like the colonel or the president or the show host, but as Americans. You know, and we fall back on the foundations of what we believe in. I think most Americans still believe in the Declaration of Independence. I think it's great that we're celebrating it the way we are this year, and I hope that every family sits down and reads it and talks about it because those are the folks that I like to talk to. I've been doing that since I was in the military as a young enlisted airman, as a commander three times in the military, as a political leader, as a civilian in the corporate world as a corporate executive is just talking to people that are regular old American citizens that work hard, that want to have families, that want to be able to afford nice things. Just the average person. Yeah, they want their grandchildren to be as free and prosperous as they were. Okay, so the average person, left, right, middle, whatever, not the loonies, but the average middle America, this is what we want. But we have this criminal class that are running things. And so there are louder and louder voices that because of this criminal class, the Epstein class and whoever else, the Epstein class really kind of defines what we're dealing with. I mean, so bad. People, there's a louder chorus of voices. And some of this might be social media um a lot of it probably is social media man of magnification but there's and foreign influence however there's more and more people saying we just need the whole system to collapse because of these criminal this criminal class and and that we're in a dangerous time because everybody who has any kind of brain or heart does want to get rid of a criminal class that abuses and rapes children, right? I mean, it feels, the fact that we're in that, it feels suffocating and overwhelming to most people to even think about it, that these are the type of people that are leading our country. But the same standpoint, we don't want to collapse it and get rid of the Declaration of Independence. We just need to reclaim what made us, what makes us a free people. Otherwise, we can slide into extreme tyranny. Oh, you're absolutely right. Absolutely right. Look, look, the thing that made President Trump acceptable to the American people that we're talking about wasn't that he was a wealthy man. It wasn't that that he is one of the most elite in the elite class or any of that. It was that it was that when he talked about his ideas, he was talking about from the perspective of the people we're talking about. I ran on those ideas a year before he won for the U.S. Senate. We were highly successful. We didn't get there. Bill Cassidy got elected instead. He just got kicked out of office, by the way. Really? With a little help from my team. You're like, I told you so. I tried to tell you guys. Yeah. But the message was going directly to the American people that are just hardworking. They want their kids and grandkids to be successful. They want their country to be free. They don't want overreaching government. They don't want the big corporations to control every single second and aspect of their lives. Well, that's why they're destroying technological means and everything. That's why they're destroying all the cameras. They don't want people surveilling them. They don't want all this bullshit. And it's coming in from both sides. Okay, now listen to this. The Epstein situation, when Democrats were in power, the Republicans were railing on them about Epstein, right? It was what a lot of people ran on. It was what you were hearing from all the pundits. And then they got into office and then they stopped. They pretty much dropped the ball on it. Now the Democrats are railing on it. They did a congressional hearing and not a single Republican showed up. I mean, what is going on there that whoever is in power is the one that gets railed on and then they stop promoting it? It starts to look like you can't trust either party when that kind of stuff happens. Yeah, that's a tough situation. You know, I think the President Trump being who he is when he came out so forcefully and said, hey, this is over. Don't buy into the Democrat hoax. I think he was talking from one perspective that the Democrats are going to play this up and try to try to, you know, smear me or my family or my supporters with it. Don't buy into it. But when he said that his voice is so powerful now, all the politicians are like running for the corners in the darkness. The Republican politicians. That's what I observed happened there. And that's unfortunate because really it backfired the whole thing. Number one, it backfired. But number two, the perpetrators are not being held accountable. There's all kinds of evidence about Trump and what he did to get Epstein arrested in the first place and kicked out of his club and those kind of things. But that's not the point. Epstein is gone. Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison. But those two are not the point. The point is the perpetrators that were powerful men and women are still out there, and they got away with it. And I don't care whether you're a regular Democrat or a regular Republican or an independent. I don't care what you are. If you're an American that believes in the Declaration of Independence, you believe that those people, of all the people in society, have to be held accountable for this. You can't rape children. It's the most heinous crime that you can commit even beyond mass murder. Harming children in this way systematically for decades and decades and getting away with it up to the highest levels of both American and foreign governments is incredulous. incredulous. And beyond that, if it really is a combined intelligence honeypot operation designed to get politicians and leaders under control so they'll do what you want, that's even more egregious. And the government people, especially American government people that agreed to that operation and designed that operation and ran that operation, if that in fact turns out to be a fact, it has to be held accountable and all vestiges of them removed from the government. And this is just one area of things where very dangerous mindsets are embedded in our government at every single level in our society. It's a tip of the iceberg, but it's such a powerful, symbolic tip of the iceberg. That's why it's so bothersome, because if you can't take care of the most obvious thing, the elephant in the room how can we trust you to take care of anything I mean that where people are at and people see that as in a real israeli joint operation and and now they want to do joint military with the israel they literally want to merge the militaries with this epstein scandal being people think it was an israeli operation i mean people are told and then we're seeing how what happened in gaza now separating out the um the jewish thing i hate the fact that they i'm going to say the word hate because i really hate the fact i have people that i care about who are jewish and the fact that you a state says that being jewish and being and what the state of israel decides from a political standpoint is the same thing is absolutely absurd so separating that out you know where people lose me is when i start hearing comments like well the jews are controlling it the jews are this the jews have that and all that i just i just say you're full of bullshit uh if you want to talk about the israeli government and its policies or its military operations i'm all for it i have my uh my pluses and minuses on that you know uh like the intelligence piece of this on the epstein thing i have long thought that it's an allied intelligence operation it's not but that includes massad uh in the israeli Yeah. But but but I believe it's a CIA core operation. It could be. Yeah. But it includes the five eyes intelligence agencies like MI6 from the UK and Mossad. I mean, we're all allies. For sure. I think it's a Western alliance. So I believe it's a joint intelligence operation. If it's an intelligence operation at all, it's got to be a joint one because there's too many aspects of it. like Prince Andrew, you know, he would never have been pushed into it and tried to get involved in it if the British intelligence agencies hadn't been behind that and been able to see that, hey, this guy's vulnerable. We could capture him and get him to do what we want. Those are the kinds of indicators to me that tells me it's a combined operation, which includes the Israeli intelligence agency. Of course it does. But we as an American people, if we have any kind of rights anymore, have the right to say, no, we don't want a joint military with a foreign state. What the heck is going on? The National Defense Authorization Act has a section in it. I think it's 219 or something. Yeah, section 219. That wants to automate digitally, combine military efforts with the Israeli Defense Forces and the American Department of War. and anytime we have seen where we've tried to do that Five Eyes, the nickname Five Eyes for the Allied Intelligence Program, like the Western Allies, like the UK, et cetera, Australia, that is not something that I've been very happy with at all. I've been deep into the intelligence side and operational and command and control side of this effort, and to put something on autopilot like that is very dangerous Because, look, especially when you're talking about the Israeli government and the U.S. government, military forces and intelligence agencies. And here's why. The Israelis and the Americans all have vital national interests. And not all of those vital national interests align. They just do not. That is a fact of life. It's a fact of the way nations work. We're different countries. And I don't care who you are, whether you're Jewish or Christian or black, white, whatever. For a man, woman, it doesn't matter. At some point, one of us is going to double-cross the other if we go ahead and do that. And that's why if you're going to share intelligence, if you're going to do combined military operations, that's fine to be closely aligned like that. Like what we're doing with the Iranian military operation is almost a textbook, what's called a combined military, allied military operation, where we come together for planning, for intelligence preparation of the battlefield, planning the operation and executing the operation so everybody's safe. The targets are struck well. Now, they've made mistakes, and we've made mistakes in the targeting. They've made some serious mistakes in the Iran thing. But that's warfare. Don't go war. If you don't want the unexpected, don't make the decision to go war. What happened is that they used AI to do a target and we ended up hitting school. Well, I'm not convinced that that's true. Okay, that's fair. I've looked at the data and I've looked at the weapons videos and the still pictures of the weapon, and it looks like an Iranian cruise missile. So that's a Russian-based cruise missile to me. And I've been doing weapons since I was about 17 years old. Okay, that's good input. That's another good data point. But even if we did do it, we didn't intentionally target a school. That's fair. That's right. That is the problem with warfare. That's why you've got to be slow to enter it and unemotional and have good objectives and a good strategic plan and know when it's time to have it set down, when it's time to end the conflict and withdraw. And if you don't do that, then you end up in these forever wars. And that's something that I'm totally against. Well, when criminals run the place, the Epstein class runs the place, can you trust them to make decisions on when we go to war? And I mean, that's the problem is you can't have people like that with that kind of low morals who are that disgusting, making decisions on whether we go to war or not. Right. Yeah. And remember, let's go back to the intelligence discussion about that. If that if it is an intelligence operation and it had the Epstein case has all the hallmarks of a Western intelligence operation of multiple countries. If it is, those same agencies are giving decision-making intelligence to the leaders of the countries that got into that. Whatever war it is, if it's a war in Europe or if it's a war against China, it doesn't matter. The intelligence that's being crafted is being done by those same agencies that are responsible for the Epstein case. That's why it's so important for us to get to the bottom of the Epstein thing and not just hold the perpetrators accountable, but get to the bottom of it and find out what was really happening. Because I don't believe for a second it was Jeffrey Epstein alone because he came from nowhere with nothing. And he all of a sudden became a wealthy guy. J.P. Morgan, I mean, you have all these powerful business people, bankers, you have all these powerful business people, you have all these powerful politicians and people. These people are still the ones, movers and shakers, making decisions. and they were engaged in horrific behaviors. What the heck is going on? And it's just the tip of the iceberg. We cannot allow people who have these kind of morals to be making decisions on when we go to war and put our entire country at risk. You're absolutely right. Why it's so important to get to the bottom of it. And I'm not ever going to let it go. Well, good. Well, okay, so I'm not a particularly fan of the Iran disaster because of Hormuz. And, you know, I have more of a business background. So I looked at that and I said, what the hell? I mean, what is going on there? Didn't you know, I put out a thing right away. They should have known that this was going to be a disaster in the strait and it's going to impact business everywhere. I think they made major mistakes when it came to the trade route. And they underestimated how much it was going. Or they knew. I mean, if they knew, then we're talking the criminal class again. And there was some other agenda there. So they were either incompetent and underestimated it, or they knew and there's some other horrible reason they did it. Well, there's a couple of things going on with that. on the Strait of Hormuz itself, a lot of Americans still think that because of all the propaganda the United States has done since Desert Storm and before, that it's a vital waterway for us. We can't survive without it. But all of that has changed. Because of who? Donald Trump and fracking and those kind of things. We're the biggest producer of oil and gas on the planet now. We are an exporter. I think we're back again to being the number one exporter of oil and gas today. So really, from our perspective, militarily, the reason why it doesn't seem important to the military planners, maybe the military leadership, even the political leadership of our country, is because it's not that important to us from that perspective. That makes sense. The fertilizer might be. Well, we can get to that. But the main problem is the Iranians are such nut jobs. It's the only country. I mean, we even let the North Koreans get nuclear weapons. And they're pretty crazy, but they're kind of crazy that can keep them in the bucket, so to speak. The Iranians are like crazy crabs crawling out of the bucket from a nuclear perspective. And we've stated our objective that it's not going to be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. That's the big problem for the United States there, because they have missiles capable of reaching in the middle of Europe right now, and they're working on capabilities to shoot them into our own country. Well, here's my problem, because we have a criminal class, and I don't trust the politicians. I don't know if I believe that argument anymore, because this is the same argument they've been using since the early 90s, keeping them from getting nuclear weapons. We can't let them. So when they have that same argument for 35 years, you start to quite, I mean, I don't, I don't know. I, I, I feels like propaganda to me instead of the real deal and there's something else going on. But even so, let's talk about the straight. The straight was, was, is impacting the West and Europe in particular, because they do rely on the straight for oil and it does impact that region. So was it a strategic decision to impact Europe? I mean, because that, you know, I mean, maybe there's something else going on strategically, because you have to know that by doing this, you're going to weaken the European allies, and maybe they're not our allies anymore. And maybe that's the point. Well, you got a couple of things in there that we can unpack. One is the Europeans ought to be the ones all over the Strait of Hormuz want to keep it open, and they're not. That's strange, isn't it? It is strange, yes. The Europeans are all over wanting Ukraine to roll into Russia and have this big East European conflagration, and the Europeans are constantly saying Russia's going to roll over the western part of the continent and we need the United States to get in this fight and those kind of things. But they still buy natural gas and oil from Russia through various ways. 15% of the diesel fuel For the Ukrainians Is Russian It goes through India It gets refined And they buy it from India And they know that There's a lot going on here And then there's the China piece of it The two big strategic implements For us completely closing the straight If we chose to do that Are China And then the Western European allies It's less so the Western European allies, more to use it as leverage to them to get them to do what they need to do, which is take care of their own defense so that America can go back and start doing things for America again instead of taking care of their people. Because they're using their extra money to pay for their welfare states. You know, their people don't even work five days a week. They don't work. They don't work 12, you know, 11 months out of the year. They get paid vacations and all kinds of stuff. And it's on our dime. So that's part of the issue there. But the big thing with Iran and the strait itself and the blockade and the impact of that is on China. Just like the Venezuelan operation, the impact was on China and its ability to get oil, those kinds of things. And it has strategically put China in a weaker position than the United States. That, I think, is intentional for sure. Well, that might be the real deal. The Western European side may be just a consequence of what's going on. But that for sure on the Chinese piece, as a matter of fact, I advocated early on that the president should just close the Strait of Hormones because from an American perspective, it bumped our gas up a little bit. But as you could see, he was able to finagle things around and be able to keep it down to reasonable. And it's starting to drop now even more. I don't know what's going to happen at this point. Things change every minute over there right now. But the important thing is, from a strategic perspective, the impact on the Chinese and weakening them both in the Western Hemisphere through the Venezuelan operation and the Panama operations that we first took on when the president first took office. And now they get 20 percent of their oil from Iran. And blocking that up puts China in a very strategically weak position, which is where we need them to be because they're outpacing us in building military stuff and those kind of things. And we've got to get our manufacturing base back under our feet. And hopefully this president still got enough time to start on that by the time he leaves office. That can't be reversed. But but that's a big thing. Well, that makes sense to me that because that they went in because otherwise nothing made sense to me. They knew the strait was going to be shut down. You made an argument. You should shut it down anyways. That's how we weaken China. And maybe they knew that it was going to weaken the Western allies, too, but they aren't really our allies and get them to wake up. So we so from the their perspective, the United States was already independent and strong enough that we were OK with that. even though the propaganda for years was the straight was super important, but okay, we knew we were okay with the straight being closed, but we were going to suffer a little bit, but we wanted China and maybe the Western allies to wake up and to suffer a bit. That would make sense from a strategic standpoint. The other stuff doesn't. That's why, now that makes sense. Yeah, and I've been looking at the Iranians' nuclear program for a very, very long time. weapons and nuclear are deep in my background. As I said, I started doing this stuff when I was about 17 years old. So we have done various things over the decades to slow them down and those kind of things. And that has happened. And we've done it both kinetically, you know, using kinetic force, like you seen in Epic Fury and those kind of things The Israelis have done it kinetically but we also done it through software means where we physically destroyed a lot of their you know the centrifuges that enrich uranium and those kind of things and slowed them down So for it to be for this this long drawn out discussion to be happening doesn't really surprise me. Similar thing happened with the North Koreans. But the difference is based on where we're at with Iran right now, I'm a little bit different. I think that they probably got between 8 and 11 nuclear warheads or close to nuclear warheads. Yeah, I think they already had them. That would make more sense because they're an advanced society. They're not that incompetent. They were in the final stages of perfecting mating it to missiles. Mating them to missiles. This is my educated guess after observing from the inside the Korean breakout and then observing these guys over a long period of time. That's what I think is really happening. A lot of people don't agree with me. But look, you know, they're building all the non-nuclear parts of the warhead package for years and years and years and studying how to put it on missiles. And they're buying missiles from North Korea and designing their own and modifying them as you go. it takes a lot of time and effort testing and those kinds of things to get the missile right, uh, too. And then you've got to mate the packages together. So I think they were right there, uh, either mating or getting ready to mate, uh, warheads onto delivery capability that could reach into Europe or worse. Uh, and, uh, that's why it was imperative that this, when he got the intelligence to do this, but again, it goes back to that question on the Epstein thing. People, people like to push the Epstein thing aside and look, I don't think it's a, I don't think from a political party perspective that it's that important, but it's important from a societal perspective and the way our government is operating on the whole. Everything from this war all the way back to our programs to take care of people and those kind of things. If you have all this lack of morality, then it explains why all the fraud is you're able to implement the fraud and keep it in place. That explains all of that. So if we could get down into the heart of that and figure out what it was, hold people accountable, we would really be helping our kids in the future to give them a better world and a better country to live in. Well, yeah. I mean, if we have a blackmail system and is there another one that replaced it just because Epstein is gone? what are they doing now? If that's their mode of operation, is that their mode of operation? That's what I've been hearing. What replaced it? What else are they doing? And I heard it's just the tip of the iceberg from people who are inside experts at it and that there's a lot more going on. There's never only one operation. Thank you. There isn't. And that this is just one. And what they don't want people to see is what you were exactly getting to. They don't want people to see how this operation really worked, who was all involved, and what they were doing with it, because that will expose a lot of their other operations. You're absolutely right. I mean, I mean, everything, look, we like to see, especially Americans, we like to see ourselves as people, as people that consistently come on, come down on the side of being right, being on the right side, you know, the correct side. Being a good person. Not right or left, but, but yeah, Being good people. We want to be a good country. We don't want to be an empire. That's why you see all the military guys and gals like me that went through the forever wars of the last three and a half decades saying this is wrong. Yeah, because we don't you know, we got we had people that were put on the ground in Afghanistan where the culture, the Middle East culture and the Muslim culture is, you know, women are for having children, but boys are for fun. That's a quote. That is a quote from men in that world. And our people got put on the ground there, and actually some were punished for identifying that it was happening and trying to stop it. That is crazy. The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan was a documentary that was out there that shows you how they used the boys for fun. It's really awful. So if we're on the side of right, and going into Afghanistan, Look, I was in the Pentagon on 9-11. I talk about it in the book. My after-action report from that day is in the book. It's an appendix and everything. And I helped identify who did this to us. And I helped put the war plan together and advised the commander-in-chief and the secretary of defense. I worked for the guys that did that directly. So the response to Afghanistan was a righteous response to defend ourselves and crush whatever that capability was to send people in like they did and do the thing they did. we didn't go far enough because the Saudi government at some level was involved in that, and we still haven't held that accountable from that perspective. But the response was right. But after we defeated them, we should have come home, and we didn't do that. Our politicians and our generals and admirals, and I take great exception to the generals and admirals I've written about this, that didn't stand up and say, no, we should not go into nation building. They basically did it starting in about 2005 or 2006. We should not go into nation building. We should go home. The mission's complete. We're done. It's time to withdraw and bring our men and women home. They didn't do that. They stayed there for 25 years. And where did it end? The same place Vietnam ended. Fortunately, not with 70,000 American casualties total, but it was the same place. helicopters on roofs of embassies, people hanging on their airplanes and falling off after they take off, and a complete, utter debacle. Americans left behind, our friends left behind that helped us to be hunted down like dogs and executed in the streets, and all of that has happened. It was a killing field after that. Because we did the wrong thing again. Yeah, and people I know that were there were saying it was a killing field. It was awful. They were trying to get their relatives out of there. But we were putting in like people who just graduated from college who knew really very little about how to run whole operations in charge of whole divisions in Iraq. I mean, it was kind of like, really? That person should be an intern for a while or a starting, you know, and they were in charge of everything. We did things out. I don't agree with that. Look, I know I was a major and lieutenant colonel at the beginning of all this. But this wasn't military stuff. This was like government divisions and things helping them. On the State Department side and those kind of things. Yes. Yes. You're right. In some cases, probably. I know quite a few people that were working those issues as civilians, men and women. The civilian State Department side, they put in people without the proper qualifications and experience. And that kind of stuff really harmed. Well, it demoralizes the local people. And then it makes the United States look horrible. True. And the military leaders that knew better did not stand up and push back on this. And look, it's our role in the military to follow the orders of the civilian control, which is the president of the United States and his political appointed team and those kind of folks and everything. But it's a key part of our role when we know better to push back in the right way so that the president and his team are making better decisions or making the right decision. In some cases, you might even convince them to make the right decision instead of the wrong decision and to continue to report that as things go, whether they go well or whether they go poorly and report it honestly. And that's my beef with the military side is I don't think that was done well. I think we went through 25 years or almost 30 years of generals and admirals saying, hey, everything's fine. We just need to do a little more here and a little more there. While there are lower level commanders like me, my last combat deployment ended in mid 2005. My out brief with my two star general was, sir, we don't have a strategy here in Afghanistan. It's time to go home. We have already won. and it was after that that the leadership decided to do nation building and democracy making and all this other mess that resulted in August of 2022. That was terrible. Okay, so what I understand, yeah, so the colonels and down are still, because in the military, you are on the front line. You're going to die if you're not good, right? So that, whenever you're held to a standard of you die or do it right, you end up being pretty good at things, right, when that's what you have to deal with. But my understanding is that the generals and the higher level people in the military have been co-opted and that that has been strategically done so they could get people in there who they can manipulate politically. And there were still really good people from the colonels on down who could actually implement operations. But at the political levels, they've been co-opted. And that's why we're seeing the BS that we've been seeing. What you just said would have been mostly true before the Biden administration and the Obama administrations happened. OK, but the part that that is not in what you just said is that all of the lower levels have been indoctrinated with the EI Marxism, diversity, equity, inclusion, wokeism. So it's Marxism. They've been screwed up. They've decided to screwed. They decided to not only screw up the top part, but they've screwed it up all the way down. And it's not just in the personnel ranks and everything. It's in the civilians. It's embedded throughout the institution. Every piece of the Department of War institution needs to be looked at through a microscope, all the personnel, because the personnel that aggressively implemented that, many of them are still in positions of power and responsibility inside the Department of War. Right now, as I speak to you today, even though that Secretary Hegseth and President Trump have issued orders and they've done a good job of cleaning the stuff out that you can see, like off of websites, out of policy and those kind of things. But if the people that aggressively implemented it are still embedded in your institution, they're there like sleeper cells to reawaken and reactivate once things change. And that's got to be looked at and removed and people held accountable for that. Because Marxism is communism. The president's finally called it out. And it is antithetical to our constitutional form of government and all those values in the Declaration of Independence. And we have got to figure out how to handle that at every institution. And the military one is the most important. But but let's let's unpack because I don't even like the word to use the word communism, because when you look at the Soviet Union and how they implemented some of their military operations, they were absolutely ruthless. right they didn't screw around and so i don't think they did that so and so i think you could have a communist regime who isn't that dumb and how they're doing stuff they decided to dismantle the mindset of the military and they use this to do it and because if if you're not going if you're going to die if you're not competent then and and you can actually dismantle that core principle That's a pretty powerful, I mean, what the hell is wrong with people? It's pretty powerful. And look, it's so indoctrinated. An Air Force major just a few days ago actually put his dress uniform on, went to the national capital, participated in a highly partisan leftist demonstration in the national capital, committing crimes according to military law all along the way. Not just civilian crimes, but military crimes intentionally doing it. because he's been indoctrinated with this Marxist ideology. And the Marxist ideology is called critical theory. It's where they set up the oppressed versus the oppressor, and that can never change. It comes right out of Khrushchev and the Soviet Union. He said, we don't have to conquer you. All we have to do is get a couple of generations of school children, and then we can win. This is right out of Soviet communism. And the indicator that things are really bad is that this was an Air Force major who was a graduate of the Air Force Academy, one of our five service academies, which graduate the elite officers that primarily are going to be the generals and admirals in the United States military. Okay, is where that that those people come from, that small core of graduates that come out of those five service academies. And he did it anyway. that is the nature of the problem and it's not going to be initially coming in with force and all that it's to convince you that we're right the American way is wrong and you're going to have to stand up and fight for it and here are the things you can do but eventually watch New York City when Mondami ends up with full control you will start to see the force being used it always ends that way with communism And this is where I was talking about where people are going to be yearning for that, you know, to get out of their issues and to have someone come and save them. We're in a dangerous time. But I would push back against everyone when it comes to this bias stuff, because if we're really about merit, then we've we historically and we've been changing it. We came a long way there. We have historically had bias against truly people who had more merit. You know, when when we would turn when we wouldn't treat people fairly who really truly were better or we wouldn't give them like in a great example of this. I know it's orchestra, but the orchestra had they finally started people putting people behind a black screen so that all you did is listen to the music they played. And people were saying that it was discriminatory and discriminatory against everybody. And only certain type of people were always chosen. Right. We don't have to use the words, but it was true. It wasn't always, but it was a higher percentage. They put people behind a black screen and then it magically evened out, not evened out totally equally. It evened out to what the percentages of the people who were trying out. Right. Merit suddenly truly did become the core focus. and it was suddenly very much merit-based and the biases went away and the merit went up. So I push back on everybody, but that's a truly merit-based system. And we did have biases and we do have biases and we do believe that certain people are inferior to others. That needs to go away if you truly want a merit-based thing. But the other extreme, the DEI, where they just force it doesn work either Of course it doesn work It abject failure When you try to control the outcome look you heard of General C Brown He's the black African-American Air Force officer that was first chief of staff of the Air Force and then under Biden was his last chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And Hexeth asked him to retire. And he did rightly by that because as chief of staff of the Air Force, This man designed and got the secretary of the Air Force and the chief of operations of the Space Force at the time and the undersecretary of the Air Force to sign a memo with actual percentages in it. Because, and I'll quote him, there are too many white pilots, white male pilots in the United States Air Force. And he laid out a memo of all the percentages of all the races and all the ethnic backgrounds of what they should be. And they weren't even lined up with the normal demographics numbers that we knew. But he wanted it to be his way, and he was still confirmed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. See, if the percentages were a lot higher than what the actual demographics were, then that's BS. Well, what's BS about it, though, Sarah, is that that memo is taken as an order. I don't care if he caveats it or nuances it, but when it gets into the personnel systems, the computers are all adjusted. Here's what we're shooting for. They set up councils at every level of command and staff. How many women have we hired into this job? How many black people? How many black men? How many black women? How many white men? How many white women? How many Asians? All of that, when you start driving that way, you lose your merit. That's what gets destroyed is merit because you start driving toward demographic numbers. When if you want to reach and get more black men and women to join the Air Force and be fighter pilots, you got to go talk to them in elementary school and intercept it there. And maybe maybe even step away from the civilian policies since LBJ and earlier that have destroyed the black American family since the 1950s. Maybe do that and then you might get closer. But this way is the absolute wrong way because it destroys the merit-based processes that result in the best war fighters for America pulling that trigger, shooting that missile, and not dying and making the enemy die for their country. That's the whole point of the United States Armed Forces, and that should apply in every institution in the U.S. government. If you want truly merit-based, you can't be publishing numbers like that and putting them in memos as directing your personnel systems to fix it or putting DEI in at every level like I've seen every single level with a DEI council that's tracking on how many of this and how many of that and all that. Well, that's destroying the capability of wherever you're putting those people. If you're trying to get the best faculty in the world, hiring a certain number of women, black men, Asian women, black women, white men and white women hasn't got anything to do with putting together the best airman, the best soldier, the best sailor, Coast Guardsman, Marine, faculty, you name it. It hasn't anything to do with that. It destroys it. And that's the problem. If there was too many white men and you were bypassing people who truly had merit, which happened in the past, right? Let's not be delusional. That did happen. If that was happening, you need to figure out a path to do it. But what they did, I think, was, as you just described, it wasn't what they were actually. And if there is a skill gap, why is there a skill gap? because, you know, I mean, these kinds of things, but the bias, the bias really has, you know, I'm, I'm a systems engineer by training. And so I, I was always around a lot of men and I didn't have any issue with that, but I saw bias in that environment, right? I did see that there is bias in that environment. I don't know if anymore, I think there's depending where it might be the other direction in some ways where people are getting away with things that they shouldn't be getting away with simply because they are the wrong, you know, they want to appease them. And that's sexist too. Come on, just because they're the same way. Here's an example that doesn't have anything to do with race or sex. And that is, I'm a navigator. My aeronautical rating is as a navigator. And I have six years of enlisted time before I got commissioned. And there is a definite bias against navigators versus pilots in the United States Air Force getting into top positions like command position and being the director of operations, those kind of things. And then when you add that I'm prior enlisted on it, there is a there is a documented bias against promoting senior officers with prior enlisted time into the general and admiral officer ranks. It's there. You can see it. It happens all the time because the system was designed to root that out. That part is a systemic bias that was built into it because of something called the Go Water Nichols Act. They're looking for all the right experiences to get into their full colonels and their lieutenant colonels and Navy captains before they become what we call flag officers, admirals and generals. And you've got to get that set of experiences. So you run out of time if you have six or seven years of enlisted time. But it's an inherent bias built into the system. And it's not based on what? Merit. My view is nobody should know in a promotion record, when you're looking at promotion records on a board, the way the Air Force does it is a bunch of senior officers come together that are commanders and they look at everybody's record and all the most recent recommendations and they score them. But nobody should be able to tell if you're a man, woman, black, white, Asian, or whatever, all of that should be masked. As a matter of fact, the system shouldn't even track that. Yeah. Yeah. The black, the, the version of the black screen, the system shouldn't even acknowledge it anymore. Uh, that's why we took photograph. We officers used to have to have a photograph. We took them out of their folders, uh, because we wanted to put the black screen up and mask that. So people wouldn't have these biases. But then on the second part of that is secretaries of the Air Force and the politicians shouldn't be able to come in and say, you need to pick, you know, 3% more black men or black women or women on this promotion board like they can do. It's called a board charge. They can do that. And I've seen it done before. That shouldn't happen either. We should pick the best of the best, especially in our military. We want the best of the best. I don't care if it's a man or a woman. I don't care. As a matter of fact, I was involved in picking the first gay woman squadron commander in one of the units that I was a senior leader in. And I had no idea. Fortunately, I had no idea. I didn't care. I looked at the performance record. I looked at the performance record. And that's why you'll hear military people say it all the time. Look, we don't care if you're green. Do the best job you can and you're capable of and you will rise to the top and you'll be one of the leaders for America. That's what's important. That is what's important. And I like your example because bias can happen anywhere against any type of people. And so everybody gets to experience it. Not everybody, but a lot of people do in different aspects. And we just need to be better. Stop. Stop. But I still get back to the criminal class that we have to deal with. Because without dealing with this, without dealing with the fraud, without dealing with the criminal behaviors, without dealing with that, how do you, I remember back in the day when I got out of high school, or college, I mean, when I got out of college, I read Newt Gingrich's book, right? I don't read a lot of political books, especially back then. It was like, no. One of the things that, yeah, I don't know why I read it. I just felt like reading it. And I don't, it was probably like the only political book I read. and it said you can't just make blanket decisions you have to get involved and you have to get involved at the detail level to make sure that that we don't make bad decisions and it's kind of like what we're dealing with now you have to have good people and you have to get it for a for a people driven government to work you have to get involved at the grassroots level at and really dive in and make sure at an individual case-by-case basis solving these problems. And when you have a criminal class running the federal government where they want control over everything, take the power away from the people, we're going to be screwed. No, actually you're not. Actually you're not. I disagree with you. We're not screwed because we're Americans. We have to take that back. My book is titled What You Can Do About It because it answers the question of, well, sir, what can I do about it? Every meeting I've ever been in where I've been the leader and standing in front of American men and women and talking about contentious issues, especially that question comes up. Yeah, but but sir, what can I individually do about it? That's what this book tries to help people answer on their own. I use stories from my background and other people that I've come across and learned about in my lifetime on what I have learned on how to get stuff done. And you know, you said it, it starts always at the ground level, the grassroots level. I think that's an overused term, grassroots. I use it too much myself. But at the ground level, look, you know, I grew up in a part of America where a congressman named David Crockett was in Congress twice, two different terms twice. And he was a man that took it upon himself to do things. He didn't have an education. He was a, I know he was the king of the wild frontiers, how I first learned about him from Disney. But my uncle told me about his speech on the courthouse steps when he was defeated from Congress a second time. And he said, he told his voters, y'all can all go to hell. I'm going to Texas. And he, and, and the Alamo in Texas, uh, the establishment of the Republic of Texas is a vital part of American history. And he was just one guy with some friends that decided he was going to do something about it. And that's an example. All of our founders were like that. The 56 that signed the Declaration of Independence, that was the result of decades and decades of discussion, debate, trying to work through the system and work with the government of Britain to resolve our differences and secure our liberties and those kind of things. But finally, in the end, those 56 had to decide, and the states behind them had to decide, what can we do about this? and it ultimately culminated in the creation of the United States of America because that's in the DNA of Americans. You talked about the flock cameras at the beginning of the show, right? And people are cutting them down. That's because those Americans have looked themselves in the mirror and said the cavalry is not coming. I'm the cavalry. I'm going to have to do something. And here's what I can do. The lady, I don't know if you saw the report over the last few days about the woman that was accused by an investigator at her front door. I've got you on film. Your truck's in these neighborhoods. You stole this package. And she fought back. She fought back with her own cameras and said, no, here's my truck. You're wrong. I go through those neighborhoods all the time. That's why you have me on camera. But you're telling a lie. And our official intelligence system has created a fabricated story that says, I did the stealing of the package. And here's the real person that did it. That is what we do as Americans is we identify a problem and we set out starting usually alone to see what we can do about it to get it fixed. And then we've learned to organize and we need to get better as regular Americans. We need to get better at organizing and resourcing and acting than the left is in this country. because those folks have their billionaires that support them, and they can create signs and protests within hours in a lot of cases, minutes in some cases. Because they're pre-made. Yeah, exactly, because they've learned how to organize. Well, they wait for the event to occur that these signs can be used for. But they've already organized previous to that, and they're connected digitally. They've got teams that have been resourced by their billionaires to do that so that when the time it comes to act, they're outacting us. And on the American side is what I call it, the regular American side, yeah, we'll get amped up and ramped up and do a battle and win it. But then everybody just says, well, it's time to go home. We're done. But no, our founders told us that, and Ronald Reagan said it best, you know, America's freedom is only one generation away from being lost every time because this is a continuous fight. As Americans at the ground level, we have to be in that fight as adults, and we have to raise our children to identify what the fight is and how to be in that fight their entire lives, or we will lose this freedom. where do people i like that where and i'm glad you you pushed back and said you're not screwed because that's not what i meant but i'm glad that you pushed back on that because this is exactly a point so where can people uh get your book and you have a show just give us a spiel where they can follow you where they can buy the book okay go to robmanis.com forward slash bonus chapter there's a banner ad on there click on it it takes you to amazon you can buy the kindle the paperback or the hard copy of the book. And there'll be an audio copy. I just haven't had time to do the recordings yet because it'll be in my voice. So that'll be coming in the next year. And then you can get the bonus chapter. Just sign up there. Give us your email and you can download the bonus chapter for free at robmanus.com forward slash bonus chapter. My show is the Rob Manus Show. It's live four days a week, Monday through Thursday, unless I'm called off to do something else. And then we show a best of that day. but it's from 3 to 4 p.m. Eastern live and we do an X Spaces simulcast with that show. So if you want to participate and be in the live audience, you can come in and listen to that. And I do take questions from folks during the show for my guests. I usually have one guest per show because I like to deep dive into things and we cover everything from war policy to culture. Awesome. Because that's what America is all about. Well, thank you so much for coming on the program. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Thank you.