The Team House - Putin Gets Exactly What He Wants w/ Jack Murphy & Marc Polymeropoulos | EYES ON

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

Today we're joined by Marc Polymeropoulos & Jack Murphy to talk fall out of the Trump administrations new stance on the war in Ukraine with Russia.Marc Polymer ⬇️https://x.com/mpolymer?lang=enhttps://web-cdn.bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4hfd6gooiddj6aelubt7jlrzAll things Jack Murphy:⬇️https://x.com/JackMurphyRGR?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5EauthorWe Defyhttps://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1NThe High Sidehttps://thehighside.substack.com/New merch, patches, and stickers! ⬇️https://theteamhouse-shop.fourthwall.comSupport the show on Patreon:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseFind Andy Milburn here: ⬇️https://twitter.com/i/flow/login?redirect_after_login=%2Fandymilburn8https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmilburn2023https://amilburn.substack.com/https://www.amazon.com/When-Tempest-Gathers-Mogadishu-Operationshttps://bsky.app/profile/andy-milburn.bsky.socialhttps://open.substack.com/pub/amilburn/p/journal-of-a-plague-year?utm_source=app-post-stats-page&r=emo6q&utm_medium=iosFind Mick Mulroy here: ⬇️https://fogbow.com/https://www.loboinstitute.org/https://x.com/MickMulroy?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthorhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-patrick-mulroy-31198b52/https://bsky.app/profile/mickmulroy.bsky.socialFind Jason Lyons here: ⬇️https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-lyons-666873316?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_apphttps://bsky.app/profile/bgsilverback73.bsky.sociBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

And then comes Ukraine. And it's a classic David versus Goliath story. And I think for a lot of us, it was appealing because this was right versus wrong. There's no gray. There's no murder. Yeah, yeah. And then what I think about is the same thing I thought about about Afghans, who we betrayed and Kurds we betrayed. But the betrayal of the Ukrainians, imagine if you're one of the members of SOF right now in Europe.

I don't think they're in Ukraine, but in Europe, you know, train in Ukraine as you're a CIA officer at Kev Station. How do you look at your partners in the eye this morning? All right, hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Eyeson, very special one today. We have Jack Murphy and Mark Polymeropolis, the no Marines, thank God. Lock cooking. I want to thank Mark, of course, Mark, former senior CIA officer, current national security analyst and expert. Jack Murphy, of course, our dear leader, host of the team house and writer of the team house.

and writer of the high side. Guys, how's it going? What's happening in the world? Mark, how are you? You start because I know you're red hot. No, so it's good. So I just got back, you know, I have a little home gym that we built during COVID. So I was just lifted.

And I was listening to French heavy metal, Go Jira. So I'm all fucking jazzed up now. But I wanted to say something because every time I come on, I love coming on the show. I've done this for years. But I was just out at the University of Colorado at their ROTC program. talking to the cadets about leadership. They're, they're, a couple of the army guys invited me out just because they had, they had heard me where on the fucking team house?

Literally, I get a phone call and said, hey, I heard you in the team house. I loved your leadership stuff when you come out and talk to the cadets. So I went out there and you all have a huge following, even amongst the kind of youngsters coming up. And so, and I want to tell you one thing, if you ever go to Colorado, University of Colorado and Boulder, oh my God, what a place. That's cool. that's exactly the type of audience, you know, that I hope we reach out to young people who are interested in, you know, serving their country in some shape or form. And not to not to really persuade them one way or the other, but to, you know, if you're interested in this, here's a lot of more information. You can listen to someone like Mark talk about, you know, in depth about the agency for in his career there. And that can help them make their decision. So yeah, those are exactly the type of people you hope you reach to. And one of those things is that they also, what the cadets, uh, uh, uh, told us. Uh, uh, uh, uh, told us.

I mean, also there was a couple of, Jack, a couple Army Rangers who run the program there. But they said they loved how, you know, you bring on folks and this probably won't apply today, but who are apolitical. So, you know, because you have in kind of the vet bro world, kind of, you know, people who kind of go crazy on the right. But you all don't do that. And you bring on people who serve their country and tell some unique stories. And you try to keep it apolitical. One of my favorite things is whenever I listen to Team House and you see one of your guests go down a certain. road and how you and Dave kind of madly scramble to try to get that back on track.

Yeah, yeah. We're not necessarily trying to go down that road. But yeah, I mean, I think had a conversation with Doug Wise a while back where he said something like that. He's like, this is one of the few nonpartisan spaces where people from this profession can talk. He's like, there's not very many of them. So amen. Amen to you guys.

So happy to be on, as always. and just an editor's note by design that's by design we do that on purpose and i'll be and jack talk about this offline all the time that it hinders and has hindered our growth oh for sure we're going to keep it like that even if it means less money in our pockets clear you know what i mean like we're never going to just cowtow so yeah i mean this is like a little aside a little like anecdote that maybe means nothing to anyone at this point. But, you know, many years ago, I fell into the circle of Ginny Thomas, the Supreme Court Justice's wife, who was quite a sort of an activist. Not that I ever met her or anything like that, but she was emailing me and trying to get me to testify in front of Congress,

trying to get me to talk to 60 minutes and all these other people. Not that I'm having a problem talking to Congress or journalists, but I realized at that point, I was like, if I do this, I'm allowing myself to become a political tool. And the entire rest of my life is going to be different. And I was probably like, I was still young. I mean, I was like 30 or something like that. And I was just like, this isn't the road I want to go down. You know, one of the interesting things is I obviously as denoted, I, you know, I do some media commentary and I have a contract with MSNBC. So, you know, take it, whatever you want to take it in terms of political ideology. But if people actually watched my my hits during the Afghan withdrawal. I was savage against the Biden administration

for how they hose this up. And so I think, you know, one of the things that I try to do is, you know, call it like I see it. And that's what I think you all do as well. And so that's just, that's just kind of a smart place to be that if you find yourselves being hated by everybody, it can be loved by everybody too. But if you, if you, if you annoyed both the right and the left, Jack, I think you've probably done your job. That's the guy. place to be. But I will say, though, you know, all of that said, I also have felt in the, you know, over the last month or so that maybe it's more important, not necessarily to get partisan, but like I'm seeing things that I think are pretty messed up. And I think it's important

that we say they're messed up. Like, this isn't cool. This isn't okay. And it had, and I don't think it's necessarily a left or a right issue. Like we'll talk about Ukraine in a little bit. Like, it's not necessarily a left or right issue. It's just like, this is stupid. Well, right. I mean, I have to, you know, half of my friends are Republicans. And I spend half of my day on signal chats saying, really, this is really what you signed up for, you know, with Trump siding with Putin or, you know, threatening to fire the probationary officers at the CIA or, or the special agents at the FBI. I mean, these are actually not conservative principles. and what's happening right now. So I'm very comfortable. The question is, what are, what are you trying to conserve?

Because it doesn't seem like they're trying to conserve the United States government or constitution at this moment. Look, government, you know, government sucks until, you know, planes start falling out of this guy and terrorist attacks happen in the United States. And your VA checks don't get to you. And then there's a freaking measles or burr flu epidemic. And, you know, your kids are sick. And so, you know, this kind of, you know, war on government, I find ludicrous. We want to reform government. Everybody. does. If you actually worked, you know, you're in the military, I was in the CIA. I could spend five hours telling you all the reforms that are needed. You probably could do the same thing. We could have a whole podcast in the Pentagon procurement process, which is, you know, do we need giant aircraft carriers? I mean, look at Ukraine and, you know, the explosion in indigenously produced drones that are having effects on the battlefield. So, you know, reform is really good. But this is, this is kind of the, you know, I call it the wet dream of the Chinese

or Russian intelligence services. It looks like a covert action. plan to like destroy the U.S. government. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. If you had infiltrated your people into the United States government, you know, like Jay Edgar Hoover suspected, this is exactly what they would be doing. They'd be flipping all the switches off, unplugging things, firing people, just like jamming up the works so that nothing can happen. Let me say that the, you know, I have lots of friends in the FBI who all believe in the need

for reform. But the idea that you're going to take, it's 6,000 FBI person who worked on. on personnel who worked on January 6 cases, 900 special agents. The lists of them went down to this kind of weird OMB, Elon Musk thing, which we don't really know is secure or not. And then to DOJ, but one thing that I don't know if the American people realize is that the agents involved in the January 6 cases were taken from the Joint Terrorism Task Forces because they considered it domestic terrorism. They were taken from all over, Mark. I mean, like that sucked up like a third of the, of the Bureau. But if you end up getting rid of these people, you know, that's gutting the JTFs around the country.

It's also doing two other things. One is their existing caseload, what happens to it. But number two, and I don't think this has been talked enough about do you really want, and, you know, think about things we did overseas when we're trying to advise reform of security services. Here's what you don't do. You don't throw, you know, 6,000 FBI personnel or 2,000 CIA officers out in the streets overnight or angry. That's a counterintelligence disaster. I'm not talking about civil, you know, civil unrest.

Yeah, yeah. People without, with mortgages to pay, with top secret clearances who need health care, and who when they get hit up on LinkedIn by a consulting firm located in Dubai that wants their, you know, their services, it's the Chinese intelligence organizations who are going to hit them up. So there's so many second order effects of just a lot of these really ill-thought-out moves. And, but again, I don't see a whole lot of pushback from, from the Republicans. And I guess the American people think it's okay. The CBS News poll from last week said Trump had a 53% approval rating, which means this shit's going to keep going until something bad happens.

Yeah, I mean, maybe, maybe I'm the one that's out of touch, right? Like, you start to wonder this, you know, you'd mentioned earlier, like, maybe America isn't the country that we thought it was. It's actually something different. It seems like we're in this point, this error right now where people who are intimidated by complexity, where I think the information environment has become so overwhelming that everyone wants to distill it down and, you know, quote unquote, common sense. And, you know, you can, that complexity in that information environment makes people feel uncomfortable. but when you start trying to eliminate it, I mean, the way the globalized world works today, I mean, we can't go back to the Stone Age.

Like, it's not possible at this point. I mean, not without, you know, catastrophe and apocalypse happening. Right, right. And so, you know, so we're left with a time in which we are kind of battling for the truth. I mean, you know, I, I mean, you know, I think Dee follows me on Twitter probably more than you do. But I threw a fit and kind of said I wouldn't go on Twitter anymore a couple months ago. back on in full court. Jack's been good. He's out. He's not on Twitter. And look, trust me, I get more hate mail and death threats on Twitter. Some of them are funny. I think I might

have told you guys. Someone called me an Islamist communist one time and that I should have. But I don't really know what an Islamist communist actually is because it kind of doesn't exist. I mean, people, people are so brainwashed. I mean, we will do an interview with, you know, a woman who served in the army and you get a bunch of comments like, oh, this is the DEI podcast. I was like, you're just a water buffalo. Like, you can't think for yourself at all. You're just regurgitating propaganda like a communist. One of the things that I've done is I talk to, I do a lot of talks to college students

who are interested in national security careers. And I had a line in this and I kept it. I was brave. I was, you know, it was just at the University of Colorado recently. And I say, you know, I actually say diversity, you know, is our superpower. That, of course, is exactly what Pete Hexeth, new secretary, defense said in his hearing, he said we should never say that again. And I disagree. And I just, I tell the students why is because on the streets of places like Moscow and Damascus, the most sensitive

assets are often handled by female case officers. If you serve and, you know, work and serve in the Middle East and you're a CIA officer, and you guys know, for the audience, if you go out in what's called a surveillance detection route, it's the idea of, you know, making sure you don't take surveillance, the bad guys, to your agent meeting. If you have a female officer in a a full of biah, guess what they're not going to do? They're not going to get caught. We need to have female officers. We need to have people who don't look like the three of us on this program. I remember, you know, so many instances in which we had this ethnically diverse station, in which they spoke different languages. And one of the reasons why we didn't get caught was

good tradecraft, but also is because we could look differently on the street. That's the best athlete approach. And that's where diversity is great. But when you hear things like the Pentagon is not going to these, there's just a news article that they're not going to this, I guess it was an engineering conference or event at a historically black college or something in which used to be a very good kind of recruiting tool for the military. Well, they can't go anymore because of the anti-woke, you know, anti-D-I stuff. That's insane. You know, we're going to end up, and some of your listeners are going to go crazy when I say this, we're going to end up with an all-white intelligence and military if we kind of go down these paths of, you know,

we can't celebrate, you know, black history month. You know, you can't have a woman's counsel. And even, you know, at the agency, when I go into these colleges and I talk to folks, and a female officer, a female candidate would come up and say, is CIA a comfortable place for women? And I said, you know, it's gotten better. We've had sexual harassment scandals. But here's why, because we really can, you know, female officers have kind of a tremendous advantage in some places. But also, you know what, there's a women's counsel at the CIA. You will have a group outside of work where you can talk to people. That doesn't exist anymore.

That's crazy. So, you know, is the DEI stuff annoying sometimes? Sure it is. I went through all this stuff. I was told in a three-day seminar that I was a racist. It was annoying. Did it stop me from spying? No.

And so the pendulum is swung so wildly, you know, in which we blame plane crashes on DEI stuff. This is crazy. Was it annoying? Should it be reformed? Yes. You know, now it's like the, it explains all of our ills of society. Yeah, blaming women and black people. like punching down like that is about the most pathetic thing that I can possibly imagine.

It's kind of sad that there are these dudes that are just so intimidated by, you know, a country that is changing that, you know, we're seeing like a backlash. There's snowflake. Are you, I mean, are you such a, yeah, they're melting down? You want to be this badass motherfucker in special forces or in the CIA? And you can't take a two-day class on DEI and that's going to cause you to quit. I mean, this is crazy. It's annoying.

Reform it. I mean, a couple, I talked to one person who worked for, let's just say, protective detail at the State Department. Right. And he's in he thought DEI was stupid, but it was also just a block on his evaluation. Yes, that's it. And it said something about like, are you inclusive with your team members and bringing them into the fold or something like that? He's like, it's dumb, but it didn't affect his job in any way. Yes.

Or up at Special Operations Command, they had a office with a DEI office with nine employees working in it, run by a PhD. They all got fired. And I mean, I don't really have a problem with that either because no one I've spoken to knows what the hell these nine people did up there. So, I mean, I don't think DEI is something that's going to be missed as it goes away. there's going to be some other things, you know, like I should point out, the equal opportunity rep is still up there at Socom. So, I mean, that's, and that was always separate from DEI. So, I mean, yeah, absolutely. I think it's important that we recruit, you know, from a diverse population. But yeah, DEI, I mean, it's like you said, I don't think it was like destroying or

helping America. It was more like something that was like kind of annoying. So fix it. You know, But the idea of this, you know, you know, Musk's kind of preoccupation with this anti-woke stuff and that, or that Pete Higgs thinks that this is actually what, you know, has affected military readiness is insane. Let me just, you know, my friends who have served, you know, in the U.S. Navy who just got back, these are some young folks who were, you know, driving a ship in the, you know, in the, you know, in the, you know, in the Pacific somewhere says, you know, our fucking ships are falling apart. I'm sorry. That's not because of DEI. you know there's there's something fundamentally uh the fundamental reform that that certainly uh needs um to take place in that within within but it goes back to what i said about people being intimidated by complexity like right it's hard yes morning the navy is a big complicated expensive endeavor um it's a lot

easier to just blame transsexuals and be like hey the transsexuals they they destroyed the navy i you know the one of the i was out west a while ago and someone was railing to me about you you know, trans athletes in high school sports. And I said, I said, do you realize in Utah there's four of them? Like literally this, this might have decided the presidential election. Yeah. You remember the Super Bowl ad that everyone went down? That ad was incredible.

And so the Republicans ran this ad. But I mean, this is like 5,000 on the list of important things in America. Yeah, it's not a national issue. Oh, come on. Yeah. Let's get us back on track. Let's talk. Yeah.

So yesterday, um, The U.S. delegation included Mark Rubio and Lavarov met in Saudi Arabia with, was MBS at the meeting? I don't think so. Oh, no, no, no, they met before it with him. Okay. So, and they had a four and a half hour meeting and they came out. I mean, if you're a supporter of Ukraine, I wouldn't say it was a pro-Ukrainian meeting.

I think that's fair to say. you know, they came out saying that Ukraine needs to have made concessions and stuff like that. It looked like a hostage video with Marco Rubio with the Russian delegates. Yeah, so that's where we're at there. There's some word that Putin and Trump are going to meet within the month again. I don't know where. It came out very pro-Russia. I mean, and I told Jack this before the meeting.

Like, they're going to go into that meeting and come out with a different set of, a new set of talking points. and it's going to get disseminated out, and these are going to be the new talking points of what Zelensky is going to have to do without Ukraine and without European representation at these meetings. So that's where we're at. Mark?

So let me just start off this off again, because I think Jack made a good point that we have to criticize things that we see are wrong, but you almost make this on a nonpartisan basis. So I'll say that, you know, if you were Ronald Reagan or John McCain, you'd be horrified at what was the betrayal of Ukraine and the resuscitation, the rehabilitation of a war criminal. It's Vladimir Putin. Yesterday was kind of

the culmination of a shocking week in which the U.S. policy, foreign policy, changed dramatically. You know, we were the ally of the Ukrainians. We spent $60 billion to a trip the Ukrainian military 50 percent. Not a single U.S. soldier was killed. Russia is our enemy. Everything from, of course, their invasion of Ukraine to, you know, sabotage and assassination operations across Europe, too, by the way, and you all, I think, have talked about it, you know, paying bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers. Yet now we are at best a neutral party, and perhaps now we're actually siding with Putin because it wasn't only the results of the Riyadh meeting. It was then President Trump's comments in a press conference in which he essentially blamed Ukraine for being invaded. And so, you know, there was a former British intelligence officer made a comment yesterday that I'd certainly heard and picked up on.

He said, U.S. flushed 80 years of leadership down the toilet. And so I think this is a really a profound moment for the United States. Friends of mine, probably for you all as well, who have worked on and in Ukraine are horrified. But ultimately, you know, well, there's two things. Do the American people care? I don't know. But where are the GOP national security set, who actually many have been in favor of helping Ukrainians? because yesterday and really the week was not a proud one for the United States.

You do wonder, and I know the way my friends in Europe are saying now, are we the good guys anymore? Yeah. No, that is the question, isn't it? What do you think, Jack? I mean, I don't think that a country changes overnight, but I mean, from like a political policy point of view, I mean, we're, you know, siding with the evil empire here. You know, Russia was up against, they're on the ropes. Their economy is shit. They lost like 800,000 soldiers during the conflict. Why in the world are we appeasing this dictator?

It doesn't make any sense to me other than to be, you know, it's, it really is like these people cooked their minds on Twitter. And they want to be like edgy contrarians like, oh, let's go side with this, you know, dictator, this strong man. It's kind of bizarre to me. Jack, let me give you kind of my thoughts on this. And I think you'll identify with it because both of us were practitioners. So I look at everything differently. I know you guys were very kind to say I'm a national security analyst, blah, blah, blah. But actually, I always look at it from the guy or the gal on the ground.

And so, you know, we went through the 20 years of the GWAT. And I spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria. And so we trained indigenous forces. And sometimes we obviously stayed in places too far. And you leave with the whole kind of, I think maybe I don't, want to speak for you but you know you're like hey i'm proud of my service but yeah it's things are a little murky like some of my friends really fucked up like i'm not so sure how great you know god bless me we we had to respond after 9-11 but iraq wmd like you know proud of the service there anyway so you'll

leave with like and then comes ukraine and it's a classic david versus goliath story and and and i think for a lot of us it was appealing because this was right versus wrong there's no gray there's no Merck. Yeah, yeah. And then what I think about is the same thing I thought about about Afghans who we betrayed and Kurds we betrayed. But the betrayal of the Ukrainians, imagine if you're one of the members of SOF right now in Europe. I don't think they're in Ukraine, but in Europe, you know, train in Ukraine as you're a CIA officer in at Keith Station. How do you look at your partners in the eye this morning after what Trump said? Not only after what happened in Riyadh, but after what Trump said, I mean, these are people you broke bread with. You spent a year plus with them. You know their families. Maybe people in their units have been killed. We were committed to assisting them. You know, so I think of the guy or the gal on the ground and what it's like to look at your Ukrainian partner in the eye and see their, as they're looking at you. And hey, Jack, man, I love you. But holy shit, you guys are betraying us now, aren't you? What do you say back? Hey, guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment about how you can

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Thank you. Yeah. No, exactly. What would you say? I mean, it's one of those things where, like, yeah, as the person on the ground, do you have to be, like, diplomatic about it and be like, yeah, support the policies of the United States government, but, you know, we're still committed to this relationship. You know, I've spoken a little bit about it before.

Really? You would say that? I mean, what else are you going to say? Big, this is fucked up. I know. I'm sorry. Well, maybe, like, at a bar over a beer, you might tell them that. I'm not talking about officially at like a conference room.

But here's where you've got to be careful on this because if I was sitting across my Ukrainian-cranian partner and I said, hey, man, like, this is totally fucked up. This is wrong. And our president is, this is crazy what we're doing. What if this guy goes back, tell us his, you know, his unit commanders and say, hey, you know, the agency guys here think this is really screwed up. And that gets back, back to the White House and back to Washington. You were an impossible situation. You know, does that mean you, you, you, well, if you're in the military, you can't, but the agency, do you resign? I mean, if you're in the State Department, do you write a dissent channel? I mean, I don't know what the answer is because I've not, I can't imagine a time in which we have switched policies almost overnight. Now, we saw this coming. This all kind of emanates from Helsinki, you know, years ago and Trump won when he sided with Putin in the, and when Putin said, you know, I didn't interfere in your elections. Jonathan Lemire of MSNBC.

ask him a question, who do you believe? And he basically said, I believe Putin over the intelligence services. So you can think of it starting from then. But this right now, this policy flip, I mean, it's pretty wild. And so again, for practitioners on the ground, I mean, I don't know how you serve in a U.S. Embassy in Kiev now. What do you say? Mark, what do you make of it from a policy standpoint? I mean, I think none of us can or should at all assume that there is some sort of grand strategy behind this because I don't think there is. But, but, still, I mean, why do you think that we did this abrupt, is it just a case of like, well, Biden did this so it's bad? You know, just like during the first Trump administration, anything

that Obama did was bad. So we got to reverse that and turn it around. I mean, is it just contrarianism or is there something else going on here? Jack, that's a, that's a great question. So a couple things just to kind of, but to to prep for the answer to that, let me say there is no function in this government now. So ordinarily policy. changes, policy discussions take place to the National Security Council, where you have, and this is, I'm going to get a migraine thinking about this because I participated in them. You know, you have low-level policy meetings at the NSC amongst the interagency. And then it eventually goes up to what's called the deputies committee, the D.C.

That's the deputies of cabinet agencies. Then it goes to the principals committee chaired by the national security advisor. Then the president will come in. So there's a policy process and saying, hey, we're going to do something different. I don't think this shit's going on right now. because if you look what happened in Munich, Pete Hegseth stepped on his crank. I'm sorry. This is someone who is wildly unqualified for the job. And he goes out there and he gives this speech, which all of my information is, was not coordinated with anybody and basically says, Ukraine will never be in NATO, just giving away one of our negotiating positions. Yeah, it's wild.

Everyone goes crazy. Then J.D. Vance comes and gives this lecture to Europe saying, actually, Russia is not your biggest enemy. actually the European War free speeches and people's minds are blown. And then Trump says something else. And by the way, General Kellogg, former Green Beret, where the fuck is he? And so he was supposed to be the envoy. So we have no voice in any of this. And the only thing that matters. And one of the things I've been saying, you know, on my TV hits is that Trump is the only one who matters in this. And again, you look at, you know, you know, Trump and Elon, right. Don't you think Mike Walt's a former Green Beret or Marker Rubio, a longtime member of the Senate, now Secretary of State. Don't you think they know better?

What do you make at that press conference they gave yesterday where Mike Waltz and Rubio, they looked like they just had their lunch eaten by the Russians? Because they did. They have no experience in negotiations. They have no experience in dealing with people like Sergey Lavrov. The foreign minister has been there for two decades. You know, God bless Mike Walts and what he did for our country. And Marco Rubio has actually been a voice against autocracy and for human rights.

And they're sitting there like, you know, Saddam-esque parroting the great leader of Trump. But let me go back to why does this all occur. And, you know, one of the things that CIA did really well, we fucked a lot of things up, but we would do these leadership profiles of foreign heads of state. So can you imagine the leadership profile that the British or the French or the Germans or anyone else has done of Trump when it comes to Ukraine? Because I think he actually detests Ukraine. he thinks this was one of the reasons why he was originally impeached. And he particularly hates Zelensky.

And so for him, it's all personal. So what I'm trying to say is there's no way we are ever going to support Ukraine or Zelensky. It's just not going to happen because that's just baked into Trump's DNA. And it doesn't matter if everybody around Trump, not everybody, but people like Waltz and Rubio want to support the Ukrainians, it's not going to happen. Yeah. So there's from the New York Times. Trump sees Putin as a compatriot and a strong player who was a genius for bullying Ukraine. And that's from the New York Times.

Zelensky said sometime in the last 24 hours that Trump is living in a Russian manufactured disinformation environment. I mean, it is good that like, you know, because Zelensky was saying all the right things the last couple of months, you know, the election happened as a transition is going on, saying what he needs to say to try and keep Trump on side. And now you do see him kind of. bucking a little bit. Yeah. Well, the lead up to that is that agreement they tried to hand him at Munich. Right. Where, you know, apparently the Trump administration wanted him to turn over like 50%

of the natural resources of Ukraine over. Right. In exchange for what? I'm not even clear on that. And exchange for previous support, not even new support. So, so do you know how gross this is? I mean, think about the United States and, you know, don't laugh at me when I say this because I believed it. And I still, you know, and I still want to, but, you know, we're supposed to be the good guys. You know, America stands for economic and political freedom. And we don't always live up to this, but there is the notion of the bright, shining city on the hill. And I'll tell you, if you go to any U.S. Embassy consulate section overseas anywhere, there's a line around the corner because people want to come to America for a reason. And we, you know, values do matter.

Again, Pete Higgs-eth in his speech in Europe said actually values don't matter. Only military might matter. And, you know, my head blew off again because that's, you know, that's a just not who what America is about it doesn't even make sense it right it doesn't make any sense but now we are a transactional government you know this is this is the age of kings and queens again yeah we're going to do we're only going to do anything that is you know has direct financial interest for the united states like this idea of trading minerals i mean i think it's i understand why the ukrainians would go along with it because they're like we'll do anything at this point but it's gross. Again, the American ideal means something.

Well, I was thinking about the other day, and I've talked about this, we've had great conversations on the team house about, you know, how do we recruit agents? And, you know, there's that old acronym mice. And so we end up gaining someone else's trust, you know, an Iranian government official, it's Russian, Chinese, based on their vulnerabilities. But it's based on this acronym mice, which is money, ideology, coercion, which we really don't do, and ego. And that's, you know, that's what you're trying to plug into. Some people are financially vulnerable. Some people have, you know, have been screwed at work so you can go for their ego.

But a huge amount of people we recruit is based on ideology because we're the good guys. I mean, and that's the idea of political and economic freedom. And are we actually going to take that off the table? And so I was, that's what I was thinking about the other day, just because to me, it was just this transactional foreign policy is just gross. Well, it's interesting. You mentioned that, you know, we're go, you feel like we're going back to the age of kings and queens and that's exactly what i've been reading about in nick land's writings which uh apparently nick land was and is influential on uh the thinking of Elon Musk and the people around him and the nick land specifically talks about how liberalism has failed democracy has failed america is a

failed experiment um he uses this term the cathedral to describe like our institute that it is just this sort of self-replicating zombie and that what we need instead is a monarch, a monarch CEO. And he goes into like, it really is going to be like a government of high status males, basically all just corncob in each other, I guess. And you have this monarch CEO at the top that just says like, this is how it's going to be. You know, there's, there's, so that seems like exactly what's happening. So good on you to be reading that. I got to pick that book up.

Yeah. And I should I should point out too that like behind like all the like kind of like cool branding that this looks like it's something new or kind of hip, it's really just boilerplate fascism. There's nothing really new about it. It's just fascism with some clever branding around it. And I think that that should go to kind of this existential question on, you know, who are we right now? And one of the things that I think that is going to be very telling, you know, will the American people then at some. point say, hey, this is really not what we signed up for. We elected Donald Trump because there was inflation. The price of eggs were high. Now, let alone you can't find any goddamn eggs anywhere. I want some eggs. There's no eggs in whole foods. This is driving me crazy in Vienna, Virginia. But, but who, are we okay with this? And so, you know, we're going to see over the next several

months and years and maybe the next to the midterm elections, but are the American people okay, which, you know, Ann Applebaum is a writer who I love, you know, all of her kind of a kind of analysis. And there's a piece she wrote for the Atlantic this last week or two where she actually called what's happening as regime change in America. Yeah. Because it's not only foreign policy that's changing, but just fundamentally inside the United States, this theory of the unitary executive, this all-powerful presidency. No set, you know, there's no. Well, maybe even a little bit worse than that, though, Mark, is I mean, when I listen to President Trump, I mean, it just sounds like old man babble to me. It doesn't even make sense what he's saying. It seems like Elon is actually.

actually running the show. And J.D. Vance as well. And J.D. Vance has some very extreme views on this. So I actually, I agree with you. And so, you know, are we okay with, you know, dismantling the entire, you know, firing 30 or 40% of the U.S. government. You know, if the American people are okay with that and there's a bird flu epidemic or there's a measle epidemic in Texas and people are going to die, okay, well, you know, maybe we deserve what we're going to get. but I'm not so sure that's that's the case. And, you know, I mean, just the stories of the last couple of days, you know, the Republican Party is supposed to be the party of national security, you know, to support the military or back the blue. Is that what firing FBI agents is all about? Is that what, you know, there's been, you know, with all these cuts or these, you know, terminations, reductions in force of these probationary employees, that's military spouses who are getting fired. You know, none of this makes sense. The VA, I mean, does the VA need reform? Oh, my God, of course it does. But it just, I guess my question is, is the American people, are the American people going to be okay with this when the real effects of some of these changes?

Yeah, exactly. Coming back, because it is radical. And I don't think any, I mean, they said they were going to do it, sort of. I don't think they realized that Elon Musk would be the co-president. But ultimately, it's pretty dramatic what's happening. And for people, you know, I think it's so lazy intellectually when people see, yeah, fuck the government. You see a lot of conservatives say that. That's okay. Good. The federal government's too big. Okay. So, you know, when the FAA doesn't have

controllers in the control tower, is that what government too big means? This is just not being done smartly or with any kind of, you know, direction. It's like how Elon Musk's, you know, when he took over Twitter, he fired everybody and then kind of rebuilt it. You don't do that with government. One of the interpretations of like, you know, the people have advanced of like, what is Donald Trump? What does that represent? What, you know, this sort of like end of an error in the beginning of a next. And I mean, one of the probably like easiest to understand takes on it is that Trump is a wrecking ball that the voters, that the constituents sent to Washington to destroy the place because they're so fucking angry. Right. So fed up. And some of those, some of those issues,

those anger issues with like we talked about DEI, they're hyped up, you know, it's grievance politics. But there are real issues that Americans are sick and tired. And they're, fed up and they're tired of being fed bullshit all the time. And I think many people, rightly or wrongly, they see Donald Trump is like the guy that's going to cut through that. So you're 100% right. And I think we also don't have a party in opposition, you know, the Democratic Party. Yeah.

Not absolute pussies. Excuse me from being so brass. And so, you know, there's there's certainly as a whole kind of, you know, AAR going on, you know, forensic analysis of how in the world did this happen? Did Donald Trump get elected? because of this of this disruption, you know, were the Democrats that dysfunctional? And I think, you know, you can make a very strong case

that the answer is yes. You know, there's, you know, so what do we need? I mean, now we're getting into some weirder territory. One of the things, I talked to a friend of mine the other day said, you know, we need an oligarch in the center, like a Mark Cuban to come in and be the cat. I don't know, kind of makes some sense, I sort of, I guess. But, you know, because one of the things that you have,

going back to something Jack, you said earlier, is, you know, I love your podcast. I'm on your podcast. But some podcasts in the United States have done tremendous harm in spreading, you know, misinformation and disinformation. And so when you look at the, and I'm sure, deep, you know, scours the lists of, of, you know, podcasts, what do well and what don't. You know, Tucker Call us in or Joe Rogan, there's a lot of nonsense that's spewed on there. And that's how Americans are getting their information right now. So, you know, so how do you counter that? How do you how do you counter it? I mean, you just have to tell the truth. Because so there's so much crap on on these kind of, uh, podcast that have gazillions of viewers.

I don't know that the truth can necessarily compete, though, with people's emotions and that they, they get emotionally triggered by certain outrageous things. Um, and I feel like that the, the algorithms that these companies are using, that they're actually encouraging. And I know for a fact that they encourage you to put out outrageous content all the time. And D and I have had many conversations about this. And it's interesting to see how the algorithm itself is sort of like barfing up this new ideology in the last few years that combines right-wing politics, the military, Christianity, but also like UFOs.

Yeah, conspiracy theories. Earthquake weapons. You know, what's going on here? And I think it really is an algorithm that all ideologies are filled with inconsistent, dumb ideas. But I think you're seeing a new one start to coales because of this arbitrary algorithm. And then people have this incredible distrust, you know, particularly of government. I mean, one of my buddies, he's actually a cop. He was down at, you know, the FBI, Quantico runs these annual conferences for, you know,

kind of local police officers. I actually went and I did a leadership talk a couple years at it, but he was wearing an FBI polo shirt around Quantico, just going to the local 7-11 or whatever, getting his gas at sheets or I don't know, whatever it was. And someone came up and said something like derogatory against the bureau. Like, I don't trust you guys. And you're like, you live in Quantico. Like the whole, this town is fundamentally based on FBI, D.I and the Marine Corps, you know, base being here. And it's just to me that was, and he was shocked.

he's a big city he's a big city east coast you know cop so he doesn't see this kind of that kind of I mean he sees he's he sees an anti-police bias probably from other people on streets but but he was shocked at this this is regular old kind of person of pickup truck saying something nasty to him because he's wearing an FBI shirt I mean that that that there's so again there's something wrong with that and so and so but one thing I kind of I wanted to kind of throw out there just in terms as you know of course this is a national security podcast it has to do with kind of the pending reductions, both the State Department, CIA, and FBI, and maybe even lead off with kind of U.S. AID. But, you know, my view of working alongside AID foreign service officers over the years is

that's a tremendous, you know, kind of value added for us in terms of soft power. I mean, there's multiple military officials, U.S. military folks I've met over the years who actually said AID was indispensable to the United States national security. What's your thought on that? and essentially gutting foreign aid entirely. Yeah, I mean, it's, again, it's one of those things where some voters think that half of our GDP goes to foreign aid. Right. I mean, they seriously believe that. Yeah.

When it's, I don't know what the actual percent is. It's for sure less than 1%. It's probably closer to like 0.01%. That's correct. And, you know, that foreign aid, it develops our soft power. And, you know, what people don't really understand about that is it's not like just to be nice. It's like we're also looking for something in return. There's some leverage we're hoping to develop through foreign aid.

You know, sometimes it's in goodwill. Like, hey, you're an ally. You just got pounded by an earthquake. We want to help you guys out. And there's not like strings attached to it or anything. But like foreign military sales and USAID and all that kind of stuff, there is a sort of like giving take to all of that that I don't think a lot of people acknowledge or want to acknowledge. And Jack, who do you think when we stop doing that? Who do you think takes our place?

Yeah, Russia, China, Iran. Right. China. I mean, it's unbelievable. I mean, we're just eating soft power to China for a tiny kind of fraction of investment, you know, on top of the notion that I think what there's some figure that was thrown around 20, we've saved 20 million people with kind of the HIV prevention. Yeah, which is, which is, which is, objectively a good thing. It's a conservative program too. I mean, you know, conservatives love this program. So it's just, this to me is insanity. And then you go to the notion of the probationary officer issue. And that's where the U.S. government is firing the probationary staff of the U.S.

I mean, sorry, the administration. Again, sorry to interrupt, Mark, but just to point out, there are a lot of people out there who think probationary officers are people who are on probation because they're in trouble because they did something wrong. You're you. You want to tell them what it really means? It's officers within one to four years of experience. I think the intelligence community has a higher number. It's several years, maybe three years into your, four years into your career, but for others a year.

And so what we're doing, you know, so all federal agencies had to give lists to OMB about their probationary staff because it's easier to fire them. If you are on your probationary period, you don't have the same amount of rights. This is insane. You know, again, as I said, I'm going to talk in the colleges all the time. I got a text message from a kid I mentored at the Citadel who is a Republican who then joined the national security state and was just fired and he is despondent because this is this is Gen Z. This is the next generation of security practice. It's who you and I and D in this podcast

are trying to pass the torch to to get them excited about this. We've just fired these people. That's insane. There's, you know, it also makes no sense. So, for example, if you say, you know, the new directors, the CI, John Rackleff, wants to beef up our spying capability. He said that, you know, because the agency is too woke, so we got to get better against China. You just fired your staff who's going to go serve in Beijing. It's nuts. And I think the, you know, it also seems misguided. If you were, you want to as you know as as you know i don't know if they have the right legally but if you want to say look i'm going to replace the c-suits of the fbi and cia fine do it what are you doing going after the junior staff um this is not the woke ideologues of the biden administration these are kids right out of college who wanted to serve their country and the rest of their fucking classmates are making a shitload more money i just don't get it i mean it's just like a real business it's a businessman

thinking, right? Like, what's your first move when you don't have a good quarter? Yeah, it's Jack Welch just like trim the fat. Yeah, it's just lay people a bunch of people. And like I'll make a guess that like when they go to DOD, they're going to cut people too. And we'll see how that. Yeah, like what people were saying like, oh, they're going to look at the procurement process. Like, no, they're not.

They're not going to look at the primes and the money that the like defense contractors are making. Let's be honest here. The first movie is to scalp. They want scalps. So the economist just had a great article this week talking about the need for reform at DOD and exactly that, you know, how how everything is jacked up. But that is nothing to do with the idea of going in and firing your probationary staff. One of the interesting things now is because, you know, there's so much pork barrel politics, there's so much congressional interest, individual congressmen and women have their pet projects. and have people at military bases.

So these DOD cuts, I don't know if you're a Republican congressman, you're going to hear it this week when people start getting fired. But what they're worried about is if a Republican congressman comes out and says something against Trump, that Elon's going to primary. I know. $30 million on a primary appointment. Yeah. I mean, the lack of courage amongst the Republican kind of national security set is incredible

to me. And again, half my friends are. And all of these corporations, too, isn't it interesting that they went from unwavering support for DEI to totally bowing down like immediately. Yeah. And I've, I've railed against this for years, you know, that these companies use this crass advertising, you know, that we have like BLM ice cream and gay pride Oreos. And it's, it's just a way corporations try to sell a shit that we don't need.

And it, but it's still, you know, disconcerting to see like, yeah, if we did have like a fascist or a communist government, these same corporations would be selling us products. covered with a hammer and sickle or a swastika. But they are. Everyone's bowing to the knee. I mean, the people can't rush to the White House. These CEOs can't rush fast enough. One of the things also that I wanted to raise, again, for folks who are interested

in the intelligence community, you know, when you're, I mean, this literally, I'm going to tell you something that 100% happens. So as you get promoted up through the agency or the IC or a state department, I'm sure, FBI, you know, there's always going to be the flavor of the day. So at one point, it was, okay, you need a little more kind of. DEI experience. And so you, Mark, case officer Mark, after serving overseas and getting shot at at war zones and all this stuff, we need you to go do a rotation in some kind of, you know, recruitment office where there's some little DEI flavor in order to get promoted. Okay. And you know what you say? You say, all right, I got to check the box. I mean, Jack, you're in the military. This shit happens all the time. You got to go checking the box. So I'm going to go check the box. And all of a sudden, Trump's elected. And what they did is they then fired anybody in a DEI. position. These are rotational positions. It's a regular case officer, a senior manager who was told to get promoted. He or she had to go to this position. They're there and they are now out of a job.

And one of the things I saw an article yesterday, I was actually happy of this, is that there was 11 such officers at the agency and a judge has kind of frozen their dismissal. Because this is like, the lawyer, Kevin Carroll, former agency officer, was like, these are people who were told to take this job. Their case officers or analysts. Like, what do you do? doing firing them. But that was that was this blanket thing like anyone who ever touched DEI is going to get fired again. That's just again, I mean, these are common sense stuff that I think the American people should agree was nuts, but we'll see if it kind of sticks or not. The one other thing I wanted to, you know, ask you about her to put our finger on a little bit here

regarding USAID, but also all the other stuff going on with like the IRS and the Treasury Department and so on. And I think it's important to point out that Elon Musk is lying about what's going on in these organizations describing congressionally approved expenditures as being quote unquote fraud. That these are lies. This is a liar who is telling bold-faced lies to the American public about their government. He admitted it, Jack, in that bizarre press conference where in the Oval Office where his kid was picking his nose. Yeah. Which was,

I actually thought that was incredibly funny. Yeah, but that was on purpose, Mark. The nose picking? No, the kid being in the shop.

No, I like the nose picking part of it. I know. It's hilarious and cute, but that's like to distract. And Trump looked like a hostage there too. Yeah,

he did. Yeah. But Elon Musk said something really interesting because someone said, hey, by the way, this charge that we spent

$50 million for condoms in Hamas actually is not true. And Elon Musk said, yeah, sometimes we're going to get things wrong. Yet, yet Fox News blurts out this $50 million condoms in Gaza bullshit nonstop and gets everybody kind of all hyped up that the idea is this, you know, is now a terrorist supporting entity. I mean, I don't know. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, what is it? It's pro-choice, pro-birth

control terrorist sympathizers. I mean, it's freaking madness. But Elon Musk lied. And he said, yeah, sometimes we're going to get it wrong and we'll get corrected. And then, you know, the damage is done already. And so, you know, I think the thing that's, there's a couple things that to me are really chilling about these those, these Doge folks access into kind of the, kind of the secret world. I don't know who these individuals are. I don't know if they have security clearances. The idea that they have access to the Treasury system is, or the IRS is as terrifying as an American citizen, because that's your personal data. And the question is, why the fuck did they need access to what they need data for government

inefficiency. Like why? For an administration, that looks like there is going to be a campaign of retribution against Trump's political enemies. I mean, this should scare the crap out of every conservative. Like, this is why my head is going to explode. This is, conservatives should be outraged. This is massive government overreach into privacy. And then the other part is, you know, when you talk about these people poking around in the Treasury or the national security institutions, is there's a huge counterintelligence issue. And, you know, there was a story, and I don't know if it's true or not, it's been reported quite often. I imagine it's true that somehow the agency sent down the first name and last initial of the entire probationary cadre, 2,500 officers down to OMB in an

unsecured manner. We just then, in essence, compromised the entire covert status of our next generation. Yeah, we spoke about that in a previous episode. Yeah. Again, insane. And an own goal by the agency, but I think they're probably just obviously trying to comply. There should be an investigation on how that even... I mean, that's that gets into the other interesting thing about like compliance. Like if you're working at the CIA and they tell you to send a email with all these names over an unsecured net, I mean, isn't your answer going to be no, I'm not doing that because it's illegal? Which is what, you know, that's why the acting director of the FBI, you know, former HRT guy, you know, was considered a hero down at the bureau because he's

actually resisting some of this stuff. He's probably, I would imagine, not going to be there. It baffles me a little bit because like if some 19 year old pimple-faced kid shows up in my office at VA, IRS, Treasury, FBI, and starts telling me he needs to look at the computers and this is how it's going to be, I get old school on that ass and show him right out the door. I'd turn that dude right around. But it seems like nobody's willing to do that. The two AID security chiefs were fired after they said no. I mean, how many inspector generals were fired? They're all gone, right.

Yeah. So again, this is, but who is the architect of the IG and of whistleblower stuff? These are people like Chuck Grassley, a very conservative Republican. And so the Republican Party is dead on these issues. They've been good on this stuff. They believe, you know, whistleblowers are critical. The inspector general staff absolutely critical because what does it do? It uncovers government malfeasanceanceance.

that's a conservative principle that so many in Congress seem to have forgotten. That's what I don't understand. Like why fire inspector generals if you're trying to trim the fat and make these agencies more efficient? Because it's a cult. Because it's a cult.

It's right. It's the power of the unitary. All that matters is one person. One person that matters. If you're a true conservative, I don't see how you're supportive of this stuff. And, you know, so we'll see if anyone has kind of power or strength. I think you're going to see this week the probable nomination going through of Cash Patel.

Crazy. Same thing what happened. That's like me going to the FBI and being the director. But I mean, you know, so whether it's Patel or Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed, R.F.K. Jr. was confirmed. I mean, these are, Hegset was confirmed. When you talk to Republicans, you know, I live in D.C. on the side, none of these people are qualified. And so, but they see it in a much different fashion. This is based on political survival.

If they voted against these individuals, they would get primaried. And again, to me, that goes against, you know, your principles when you take an oath to the Constitution to do the right thing. They did not. I would much rather, you know, be out of a job than to have on my record that I voted for some of these people. Yeah. That's me. Oh, God. I don't feel well good about this conversation at all.

I mean, I don't know. What's something good to look forward to? I'm trying to think. Baseball season's coming up. I got some great concert tickets. I'm going to go, oh, Jack, you're going to love this. Come on. Next Thursday, I'm going to go see Dropkick Murphys in D.C.

You're the tiny little place of 5,000 people in the stands. That's cool. That's some old school, punk. Come on. Yeah, yeah. Another bit of news, Kellogg arrived in Kiev today. I saw a video of him. He took some questions.

He looked, I mean, what does a guy like that do when he shows up in Kiev after a day before what like what happened yesterday during that meeting and the after math with trump uh basically just siding with russia more or less like what does a guy like keelog go through he's going to meet everybody right in kev like what does he tell these people i matt i uh uh comp fly you know i mean i i i would imagine um there's going to be some damage control i mean you know uh which is often the case um i mean i mean you know uh i mean I mean, Rubio has come out and said, no, the Ukrainian is going to be at the table. Again, it's a dysfunctional government.

Nobody knows what we're talking about. I mean, you know, my friends who were at the Munich Security Conference came back and said it was just, it was incredible to see the whiplash. And our European partners are horrified. And again, what, you know, for those who think that Europe doesn't matter, and I think there's probably a lot of people on the right who are very dismissive of Europe, they shouldn't be because a thousand NATO members were killed in Afghanistan defending the United States. United States. Even the Ukrainians. Think about the scenes at HKIA at Hamid Karzai Airport with the chaotic withdrawal. You saw some people outside. Of course, the U.S. military was there very bravely. You saw a lot of people in tiger stripes, which is kind of maybe some intelligence community paramilitary forces, Afghans, and you saw the Ukrainian special forces who were there after the U.S. left.

We are not going to have any friends or allies if we treat people like shit. If we turn into this kind of imperialism bully. You know, another 9-11, no one's coming to our aid. 158 Canadians were killed in Afghanistan. And yet we're, you know, we're beating the shit out of Canada every day. I mean, you know, for those of us who kind of work with partner forces, worked on liaison relationships, you know, this stuff matters. And I think we're kind of going south.

I don't know. You know, Kellogg will do some damage control. I mean, they're going to try to, I mean, right now the personal relationship between Trump and Zelensky is now gone right under the top. toilet. So how you repair that? I'm not sure. Um, so yeah, uh, Zelensky, like probably an hour ago, I've begun discussions with European leaders and I believe they would step up and fund the Ukrainian armed forces if the U.S. does not. EU has agreed on new sanctions on package on Russia, financial times. Um, and I was, I read some article that there was talks of like the EU package

for Ukraine being like upwards of like 800, 900 billion euros. Good, I hope so. I mean, they have it. I mean, Europe's got to get a chip together. They need leadership. Europeans certainly have the capacity to do this. The question is, you know, any kind of, so there's one is kind of, you know, sustainability. If you talk to people, and I'm going to box this, of course. I'm not a military analyst. But, you know, you know, certainly Europe needs stuff. I mean, sorry, Ukraine needs stuff. But this is actually turned into this kind of drone war. And so, and Ukraine is producing, there's a lot of indigenous productions. So I think Europe certainly can step up and lead. There can be some kind of Europe security force there. But again, this is going away from U.S. leadership, certainly any kind of U.S. role. And, you know, perhaps that's ultimately what Trump wants to kind of walk away from all this. The other point on this, too, is that under NATO, there's an issue of what's called Article 5,

which is attack on one NATO member, other people will come to aid. That's why a thousand NATO members were killed in Afghanistan. I think that whole notion of Article 5 is dead. I mean, the only time it was ever invoked was 9-11. Yep, yep. And a thousand NATO members were killed. Right. Which is why I think so much of this kind of Europe bashing is so insulting.

Just why, you know, same thing. Again, 159 Canadian troops. You know, there were 49 Danish troops who died in Afghanistan, which is a hell of a lot of people for a small country like that. Yeah, we want to invade Greenland. It's like I said, it's not a left or right issue. it's just dumb. Like it just doesn't make sense. What are we doing? We're going to have no friends. You know, and Jack, you know, from your former unit and certainly stuff that I did, you know, a lot of the time was done training with other countries, militaries or intelligence services. That's going to go away. We're going to have no friends. And so we're going to have a short term win. You know, so the president of Panama says something about this whole mess with the Panama Canal, which makes my head hurt. But ultimately, you know, are we going to have a short term?

anyone come to our, come to our assistance in our time of need. And I don't know the answer to that. Yeah, it seems like, yeah, they want short-term wins so it's a little feather in the hat of the administration, but like with destroying everything around it, you know? I mean, you know, again, are we the good guys? You look like an asshole. You know, I mean, I, you know, my time goes back to, so what would it like, what would it be like, let's play a game here at a diplomatic reception? In the past, you go, you hang out with the Brits because they're fun and they're like to drink. You go to the fun. You go over the fun. French because they probably have some good wine going on. And, you know, maybe there's, they,

they, you know, they're talking about a new restaurant they went to and so you're checking out around town. I mean, who do we hang out with now? You know, it's not Europe anymore. I mean, it's going to be like, you know, like the Pakistani dat, the defense that day. I don't know, like, who are our friends, you know, is it going to be the authoritarian who come by and kind of give a little, you know, wink? Hey, like, you're one of us now. Like, I don't know what it's like to be an American diplomat with this kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, I guess just like, close off some of my thoughts on it. You know, I have been kind of like dismayed.

I mean, we've talked a little bit about like the failure of like the media, the Democrats, the Republicans to confront some of these issues. Talk about academia for a moment. Like I was reading the last issue of foreign affairs, which was written between the time that Trump was elected and inauguration. So he wasn't yet in office when that article, that issue was published. But all of these scholars, political scholars, and damn near every single one of them was like,

well, you know, the Trump administration may prove to be surprisingly nuanced in some ways that you didn't quite expect. And, you know, it's not going to be as bad as you think it's going to be because the resiliency of the global system is like completely out to lunch, like completely detached from reality. I call it wishful thinking. I was, and I quit. I was a member of a signal chat where there was some really esteemed kind of historical.

involved and that's what I heard from them. It was this wishful thinking. Yeah. It's not going to be so bad. And of course, I go through my daily catastrophizing. So maybe it's a ding on me, you know. You know, I get criticized on social media on Twitter. Doom scrolling.

Well, part of the whole Peter Thiel stuff. Part of the whole Peter Thiel, like, thought process about that guy, Nick Lennon, it's like they attack academics, too. Like academics are in the crossairs. So I think they're doing the same thing as like the Republicans. Yeah, Republic. and Congress people or the big corporate CEOs is like they're trying to hedge their bets and do the right thing so they don't get fucking targeted. But I rejoined this chat. I was invited back in because

I was I was being an asshole and railing against everybody. And some of the historians, these are like former deans of major universities said to me, you were right. It's actually worse than what you predicted. So I think that in academia, it's changing a little bit too. Because again, it's now my argument would be, well, he said he was going to do all this, read Project 2025. Yeah. He's coming through on all of his promises. There ain't nothing new in this stuff.

I mean, there's a playbook. They are following it to the T. But Jack, I think you're a thousand percent right. There's so much wishful thinking. There's the, it's quote, it's not this bad. Or, you know, you know, and I think that there's people are going to regret some of these articles. It reminds me, I mean, just this just came on my place. It's like when, you know, Jake Sullivan wrote and was it foreign affairs or foreign policy,

just before Gaza. October 7th. Hey, the Middle East is peaceful. This is great. Yeah, he was like, we fixed Palestine, Israel. Yeah. Not so much. And we didn't even talk about the Middle East.

Right. Now advocating, you know, ethnic cleansing in Gaza, which as a Middle East hand, that is my expertise. My head blew off with that. I mean, again, are we the good guys? Are we actually advocating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza? Well, I mean, that one's on Biden and Trump just solidified it and put it on paper, kind of. I mean, come on, what are we doing?

So anyhow, I could talk to you guys all day. It's fun. And I can't wait to see some of it. You'll get some positive responses. You'll get some hate mail. No, people are going to freak the fuck out. Let them. Jack, one last question.

How's your book doing? Good, really good. Yeah, We Defy is done really well. And I'm working on a novel right now that I have been hired to write. Oh, very good. Hey, see, DC. playing producer now. I'm playing like, like, MC here. I love it.

Plug in his book. Thank you. So Jack Murphy, of course, we defy. Great job, Mark on that. You can check it out. The link will be in the description. All the other guy stuff, the links will be in the description. Mick Mulroy doing incredible work with Fogbo and Longbow. Mark P. MSNBC analyst, National Security analysts.

Where else can people find Twitter? Remember the deep state? Of course. Deep, yeah, hardcore. When is the new podcast? Are you going to come out with a new podcast? What's your own like? There's some exciting news, but not to be announced yet.

Okay. Podcasts from across the pond. Cool. That'll be a member of and then. So yeah. So something's cooking. So stay tuned for that. Yeah.

Right. And Patreon.com slash a team house. Please don't leave it. If you got upset, join it, please. Also our merch store. All the links will be in the description. Patreon.com slash team house. Thanks, guys.

All right. Thank you.