0:00
[MUSIC]
0:18
This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
0:21
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
0:22
Let's get into it.
0:23
I guys today I've got a special guest on the podcast.
0:25
His name is Ephra Mattoson, if that name sounds familiar.
0:28
It's probably because you've been listening to the show for
0:29
a while because he is a podcast alum.
0:31
He appeared on episode 197.
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So guys, if you have not checked that out, that link will be in the show notes.
0:36
You should definitely check that out because a lot of his story and
0:39
a lot of his thoughts on some very important things and his books and all that.
0:42
We talked about that episode, so we're not going to deal with that on this one.
0:44
But if you need an introduction to whoever Mattos is, he is a retired Navy SEAL.
0:49
He's also the founder of stronghold rescue and relief.
0:52
So this is a humanitarian organization that protects and
0:54
cares for families in conflict zones.
0:56
They do incredible, incredible work and they're able to do this with small teams
1:00
of kind of highly and specially skilled former special ops members.
1:04
And what they do is they administer emergency aid when necessary.
1:07
They will actually work with local authorities to perform these high risk
1:11
lifesaving rescue operations.
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They do a lot of great work.
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And we're going to get into some of that work here in this podcast.
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He's also the author of the book city of death, humanitarian warriors in the battle
1:20
of Mosul.
1:20
And that was one that we talked about a lot in episode 197.
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Guys, this episode is really, really good because it's always good to talk to my buddy
1:27
F from, but we're going to talk about, you know, the Kyle Rittenhouse situation in
1:30
Kenosha, because he's actually from Kenosha.
1:32
We're going to talk about his thoughts on Afghanistan.
1:34
I wanted to talk to him about Afghanistan, you know, whenever we were pulling out and
1:38
he just really wanted to gather his thoughts.
1:39
So he finally is, he's kind of done that and he's kind of coalesced it all into a
1:43
narrative that that he likes in terms of what's going on in, in what's going on in
1:46
Afghanistan and what happened when we pulled out.
1:48
We're going to be talking about what's going on in Burma.
1:50
We're going to be talking about what's going on in Haiti right now.
1:53
So if you're curious about what's going on with these 17 Christian missionaries
1:56
that were kidnapped in Haiti, what's going on with them, he's got an inside look
2:00
on all those things.
2:00
But guys, I'm not going to keep him from you any longer.
2:02
So without further ado, let's get into it.
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Ephraimatos, welcome back to Undaunted Life of Man's podcast.
2:08
Hey, brother.
2:09
Thanks for having me back.
2:10
I appreciate it.
2:11
I'm glad to talk to you.
2:12
We have a lot of ground that we're going to cover today, but we were just
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talking off air about the situation going on in Waukesha.
2:18
I mean, this is right in the middle.
2:19
And guys, if you're listening to this, we're recording this on Monday.
2:22
And so this just really happened within the last 24 hours.
2:25
We don't have all the details.
2:26
So by the time you're listening to this, the details may have changed.
2:29
But I didn't know this, but you're actually in Waukesha right now.
2:33
So I mean, it's not like you're there on the ground, helping investigate it or
2:36
anything like that.
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But kind of take us through that.
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I mean, what are you doing there and kind of what's the vibe there right now in the city?
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Yeah.
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So I'm actually, I'm actually here in Waukesha County visiting family for Thanksgiving.
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And yeah, I saw last night, right, right as I was going to bed, that, you know,
2:50
some, some maniac had driven his vehicle through a crowd of people in Waukesha,
2:56
which is, you know, maybe a mile and a half up the road from where I'm sitting
2:59
right now, recording this.
3:01
You know, I think that, you know, Wisconsin, that the people of Wisconsin, you know,
3:06
we just, we just went through the, the Jacob Blake thing and then the written
3:10
house thing and now this thing.
3:13
And it's, you know, it's, it's pretty unfortunate that, you know, a lot of this
3:17
stuff, it's very close to home in like the middle of kind of rural Wisconsin.
3:20
This isn't, you know, this is not, this is not a heavily populated, you know,
3:25
place, this is just regular, regular suburban people, you know, having to deal
3:30
with these, with these, with these incidents.
3:33
And it's just, it's, it's heartbreaking and it's, it's awful.
3:35
And yeah, man, you know, it's, it's, it's rough.
3:39
Obviously we still don't know exactly who, who the guy was or what his motives were.
3:44
I believe they have, they have a suspect in custody, but, you know, we don't have
3:47
enough details yet to know why he did what he did.
3:50
All that we know at this point was that he was out on bail for $500 for a
3:55
bail that the, that the judge had originally set at $10,000.
3:59
So there was clearly some, some, some failings in our, in our, in our justice
4:04
system.
4:05
But, you know, we'll wait for more, for more information to come out.
4:08
Like I said, I'm not involved at all in the, in the investigation or anything like
4:11
that. I'm just, I'm just here visiting, visiting my folks.
4:14
Well, even just to ask you about something that's related to this, and this gets
4:17
into criminal justice reform and all these different things.
4:19
But the person they have in custody, which is for all intents and purposes,
4:22
that the person that did this, we don't know why, but this person has a rap sheet,
4:26
a mile long, I mean, this person has constantly been in trouble in felony trouble
4:31
and all these other aggravated assaults and different things.
4:33
If you look at this person's Facebook account, which I guess has been taken down
4:36
now, this person was like a rapper as well.
4:38
And so a lot of their lyrical content was going into a lot of the Black Lives Matter
4:42
territory.
4:43
This person expressed a tremendous disdain over, you know, what happened to
4:47
Jacob Blake and what's happening with Kyle Rittenhouse and all those different
4:50
things and just kind of the racial undertones of what's happening in the country.
4:54
It seems like to me, again, painting with a broad brush because we don't know enough.
4:57
I'm just painting with a broad brush here for anyone that's going to clip this
4:59
and make, you know, get mad at me later.
5:01
It seems like almost if you have someone that has a predisposition in their brain
5:05
for violent crimes, that they can be radicalized, radicalized pretty easily
5:10
with this narrative in this country where if you were born and you look a certain
5:15
way that this country is not for you and the country is actively trying to hurt you
5:19
or be against you.
5:20
Do you feel like that's something that's going to continue as we move forward?
5:24
Do you feel like the pendulum is going to swing back at all?
5:26
Well, you know, it's very interesting to kind of to kind of look at the situation
5:31
because, you know, you are absolutely correct.
5:33
Unfortunately, there's the there are these ideologies that are being that are being
5:37
taught to people that, you know, we're supposed to judge each other based on the
5:41
color of your skin and I know last night when we found out about this about this
5:46
tragedy in Waukesha as a family, we were going, you know, we were sitting around
5:49
talking about it and we were like, okay, is it a we're, you know, debating?
5:52
Is it a is it a white supremacist, you know, like what happened in Virginia?
5:56
You know, the guy who drove his drove his vehicle into a crowd of BLM folks or, you
6:01
know, is this a is this a BLM person who's mad about the written house trial?
6:05
Or is it just, you know, a crazy person?
6:06
But the fact that that that we even considered or even had to talk about the,
6:12
you know, what's the what's the race or the motivation of the person really goes
6:16
to show kind of where we're at as a nation.
6:18
It's it's it's horrible and it's sad that we're, you know, we're we're we're
6:24
starting to look at things in terms of race and whatnot when we should when we
6:27
absolutely should not be, but that's sort of what's been thrust upon us by the by
6:31
the media and by, you know, recent events and everything. I think that people
6:37
are becoming aware of it, but I think that people are also sick of it, right?
6:40
So, you know, my family, I come from a, you know, it's just suburban, lower middle
6:45
class family, everybody's blue collar.
6:48
We just we just work and that's that's that's what that's what my that's what my
6:53
family does, right?
6:54
Just normal people don't want to bother anybody else.
6:57
Also want to be left alone. And I so I say all that because I think that, you
7:02
know, are my family in the neighborhood that I'm from in Waukesha, like we're
7:06
sort of a microcosm, I think of the country in a way where people are tired
7:14
of making everything racialized. We're all tired of making it racialized.
7:17
It doesn't need to be racialized.
7:18
You know, we definitely need to look at and there are there are repercussions
7:23
from past sins in the in the history of our nation, of course, nobody's denying
7:28
that, but to sit there and make that the focal point of everything that we're
7:31
doing, I think is now counterproductive at this point.
7:33
So to answer your question, will the pendulum swing?
7:35
I think that the, you know, the results of the of the elections in New Jersey,
7:41
where we were a conservative almost one.
7:45
And then in Virginia, where a conservative did win, you know, that's, you know,
7:51
that's a that's that's a good sign.
7:54
I think that that people are tired of the of racializing everything.
7:59
And this doesn't have to be Democrat versus Republican.
8:02
I don't think that to be very clear, most of the people I think who are who
8:06
are Democrats, I don't think that they follow this crazy ideology.
8:08
I think it's just the far left.
8:10
It's like these far left racial radicals who are causing these problems
8:14
and have sort of hijacked the Democrat Party, unfortunately.
8:18
And are sort of given everybody a bad name when I think, I think the
8:21
majority, I think probably 95% of people in the Democrat Party, for example,
8:25
and on the left are not, you know, they don't support all this.
8:29
And that's that's the optimistic side of me.
8:31
And I think that, you know, the midterm elections here in about a year will will
8:37
be a very interesting litmus test in sort of the direction that the country
8:42
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9:13
Yeah, I think it'll be very telling.
9:14
And I think a lot of people as well, they don't like being
9:16
called something that they're not.
9:17
And to accuse someone of racism without any evidence, right?
9:22
Without any evidentiary basis for that.
9:24
That's one of the most horrific things that you could claim about a person,
9:26
except for maybe that they're a pedophile or that they've raped someone or
9:29
something like that.
9:29
That is such a horrific accusation to make.
9:32
And when everything's racist, nothing is racist.
9:35
And so I feel like we're getting into a lot of that.
9:36
So the midterm elections will be a little bit of an idea as to kind of what
9:39
that looks like, because obviously people are very concerned about what's
9:42
going on in the school systems with critical race theory.
9:44
People in the left are saying, what are you talking about?
9:46
There's no class called critical race theory 101.
9:49
Obviously they're playing some semantic gains, but especially for parents.
9:52
When their little kid, their seven or eight year old comes home and says,
9:54
mommy, why am I bad?
9:56
Well, what do you mean, sweetheart?
9:57
Because I was born white.
9:58
We were talking about how I was born white and just to be real here.
10:02
Like I'm a parent of a one and a half year old.
10:04
You know, we're thinking about what is this education going to look like.
10:06
We have another baby boy on the way.
10:07
The thing about these kids is a good parent will let them know about the past
10:12
sins perpetrated by this country, but they will also give them a very good idea
10:16
as to kind of what's going on on the ground.
10:18
Now, you have these people immediately after which we're going to get into
10:21
Kyle Rittenhouse situation here in just a second.
10:23
I'm kind of getting ahead of myself, but they immediately the narrative
10:26
whenever he was acquitted on all charges was that, well, if he had been
10:29
black or brown, that this would have never happened.
10:31
This couldn't possibly have happened if it had been that way.
10:33
But to describe that and talk about this vagary, which is systemic racism
10:38
and not give any evidence for it, not give me a single law on the books today.
10:42
That is racist and intent, not just racist and outcome or something like that.
10:45
People don't really want to go there anymore.
10:47
And we are seeing people kind of push back.
10:49
But again, if you push back against that narrative, you are inherently a racist.
10:53
So I'm encouraging parents all over the place to be like, let them call you a racist.
10:57
They're only calling you a racist because they're scared of your opinion.
11:00
Just go ahead and move forward, do its best for you and for your family.
11:03
But let's go ahead and get into the Kyle Rittenhouse situation.
11:05
Cause I didn't know this until about a week ago that you grew up in Kenosha.
11:09
I mean, this is, this is your area.
11:11
This is your hometown.
11:12
And that situation has hit that community very, very hard.
11:15
It started with Jacob Blake.
11:17
It started with a guy who had allegedly digitally raped his, his girlfriend or
11:21
ex wife or whatever that he was getting into a car with her children.
11:24
He had a restraining order that he had violated.
11:26
The police begged him to stop what he was doing so they could take him to custody
11:29
and get him away from this woman.
11:31
He doesn't do so.
11:32
He reaches into a car again with kids inside of it.
11:34
He's grabbing for a knife and then he's shot by police.
11:36
He wasn't killed, which is everyone just assumes this guy was killed because that
11:40
fits the narrative of black man shot by white police officers and killed, but
11:44
it doesn't really fit that.
11:45
So obviously just the situation with Jacob Blake was enough to rock that
11:49
community and you have Kyle Rittenhouse who was going.
11:52
And, you know, if you wanted to debate whether or not he should have been there,
11:54
that wasn't what he was on trial for, but he goes there and there's a lot that's
11:57
been made about what happened on the ground with Kyle Rittenhouse.
12:00
You know, he shoots three people in self defense, killing two of them.
12:03
And it's a lot, it's a lot to take in for any city, but especially a small city.
12:08
So I teed it up about as best as I could for you.
12:10
Cause I want you to be able to just kind of flow in whatever direction you want to
12:14
about Jacob Blake, Kyle Rittenhouse or Kenosha writ large.
12:16
So just go and give me your thoughts on that whole situation.
12:18
Yeah, absolutely.
12:19
So before I jump into that, I want to kind of respond to one of the things you were
12:22
talking about, you know, where if you push back against some of these, these crazy
12:26
leftist ideologies, you're considered a racist.
12:28
Um, you know, what, what I, what I tell people whenever they're, you know, when I
12:32
have a conversation, one on one with somebody's, I say, listen, like, I literally
12:35
have a, there's a, there's a video of me getting shot, uh, helping to rescue
12:40
a, uh, an Arab, foreign, female, um, waslam, uh, you know, child.
12:48
And, you know, people still call me racist even after that.
12:51
So my point is there's nothing that you can do.
12:53
And, you know, to, to, to, to make them sort of change their opinion about you,
12:58
because it doesn't matter.
12:59
Like my entire life, um, you know, I run strong hold rescue and relief where, you
13:03
know, an NGO, we go around the world and help people.
13:06
Um, and we bring in veterans and we go to, we go to all kinds of places and we
13:10
help these folks overseas.
13:11
And, you know, there's, there's, it doesn't really matter what you do.
13:14
They're still going to call you a racist simply because you disagree with them.
13:18
And so, um, I guess, I just want to throw that out there to anybody who's
13:22
afraid of being called a racist, like they call me a racist and I have my entire
13:27
life has been dedicated to helping people of all colors and religions and
13:31
all that kind of stuff, right? Um, so if they're, if they're going to attack me about
13:36
it, they're still, they're going to attack you about it.
13:37
So don't, um, so don't let that stop you from doing the right thing.
13:40
Um, that was just, I wanted to throw that little caveat out there.
13:43
Um, now, yeah, with Kenosha.
13:45
So I, I grew up in Kenosha, um, and for the first few years that I was in elementary
13:51
school and that I lived, most of my child was in, was in Milwaukee proper.
13:55
Um, but yeah, my first memories of life are in Kenosha.
13:58
It's a, um, it's a nice little, um, town right on Lake Michigan.
14:02
And, you know, I remember a year ago when, when the, when the riots were breaking
14:09
out after, um, Jacob Blake was shot after he was, you know, attempting to get into
14:15
a vehicle and, you know, to all the stuff that you had, that you had mentioned.
14:18
You know, I just remember, um, I, I, I, I messaged some of my friends and my
14:22
childhood friends who still live there.
14:23
One of them in particular, um, she has, uh, she has two kids.
14:28
And, uh, I think your husband was at work or something, but I was saying, Hey,
14:31
like, are you guys fine?
14:32
Are you okay?
14:33
Are you safe?
14:33
Do you need me to come down there and like get you guys out of there?
14:36
Do you need a safe place to stay?
14:37
You can come up here, um, you know, no issues, but she was, she said, like,
14:41
Hey, we're fine, but she's like, we are inside, uh, inside the house with our
14:45
doors locked sort of in the internal part of the house.
14:48
We're not in the outer rooms.
14:49
And I just remember, and they're just in a residential area, right?
14:52
And so I remember thinking, you know, when, when there's a peaceful protest,
14:55
when there's actually a truly a peaceful protest, right?
14:58
Uh, people go out on their porch and they watch, whether they agree or disagree,
15:01
right?
15:01
People go out on your porch and you watch, that's what you do.
15:03
It's like when there's a parade going down the street, you go outside and you
15:06
take pictures and you're like, Oh, that's interesting.
15:08
Um, and, you know, so, but the fact that people are cowering in their homes,
15:12
uh, frayed, protecting their children, uh, that says everything that you need to
15:16
know about, about what that, what that whole situation was.
15:19
And so, you know, in the middle of that, you had, you know, Cal written house,
15:23
he shows up and, and for me, I think there's absolutely no, no issue with him
15:27
being there, right?
15:28
I think there's a, I think there's a difference between like legality and
15:32
morality sometimes.
15:33
And I think that right now our, our system is starting to, um, you know,
15:39
make things that are moral, it's starting to make them illegal, right?
15:42
Um, so for example, is there anything morally wrong in the eyes of God, uh,
15:47
for a 17 year old, uh, young man to carry a, carry a rifle and a medical kit and go
15:54
into harm's way to try to help people and protect them and protect businesses?
16:00
Is there, does, does God have any problem with that?
16:02
No, absolutely.
16:04
So at that point, I really don't care too much about if there was technically
16:08
some little dung law, like, oh, you cross state lines or, you know, whatever, I,
16:12
who I honestly, I honestly couldn't care less at that point, um, because he
16:16
was doing the right thing.
16:17
He was there to protect people.
16:18
There's video of him earlier in the night, um, that, that clip's been played
16:22
ad nauseum where he says, Hey, I'm here to, to, um, to provide medical care.
16:27
And we're here to prevent these prevent these, um, these businesses from being
16:30
destroyed.
16:31
And so I look at that and I go, you know, like there's, there's not much of a
16:36
difference or let me, let me reword that there's, um, imagine for two seconds,
16:42
imagine for two seconds that a group of, you know, angry, angry Arab Muslims went
16:48
through Kenosha and just started burning all the cars, uh, I started, uh,
16:53
burning down people's businesses, went to car lots and destroyed millions of
16:57
dollars worth of property all while screaming Allah who Akbar, right?
17:02
We would every single one of us, we would look at that and we'll go, that's
17:05
terrorism, terrorism, plain and simple, done end of story.
17:08
That's, that's an act of terrorism.
17:10
We would have the FBI HRT teams out there.
17:13
We'd have ATF, we'd have DEA, we'd have everybody who could possibly get
17:16
involved with, we'd be hunting these people down and preventing them from
17:20
destroying cities.
17:21
You don't get to destroy cities.
17:22
That's not a thing, right?
17:23
So what's the difference between, you know, an 18 year old, you know, soldier going
17:29
to Iraq to protect people versus a 17 year old guy from Indiana or Illinois who
17:36
went up to Kenosha to protect people, you know, for me, I don't, I don't see
17:40
there being much of a difference whatsoever on a moral level.
17:42
I understand legally and, you know, I understand, but on a moral level, I don't
17:48
think that he didn't do anything wrong.
17:49
And, you know, having watched the, having watched a lot of the trial and
17:55
have, again, having friends that are in, in Kenosha and, you know, my first
18:00
memories of life are in Kenosha.
18:02
Having watched all that and then the verdict being read out and, you know, he
18:08
was acquitted of all five charges, which is good, you know, and then I started
18:13
hearing a lot of people say, oh, justice was done.
18:15
Justice was served because, you know, he was acquitted of all five charges.
18:18
And my, my, my honest thought is, no, justice was not served.
18:23
Justice, if justice had been done, he never would have been brought to trial
18:27
in the first place, the prosecutor, whoever brought that trial, whoever brought
18:31
that case to a trial, to a, to a jury trial, you know, that, that should have
18:36
never even happened in the first place.
18:38
And the fact that that was, that that kid was even on trial for protecting
18:43
himself and there's, there's, you know, dozens of different videos showing that
18:48
he did absolutely nothing wrong.
18:49
The fact that he was even brought to trial in the first place to potentially
18:53
go to prison for the rest of his life with robbers and murderers and rapists
18:56
and gangsters, you know, that is, is not justice.
19:00
So until that prosecutor is fired, until that entire system is cleaned up,
19:05
until we no longer have people being tried for crimes that they obviously
19:09
did not commit, then justice hasn't been done.
19:11
Um, that kid, you know, should have gone to the police, you know, or right now,
19:15
she's all that should have happened is he should have made his statement.
19:18
They probably should have met with him two or three different times, confirming
19:21
his statements, gathering, whatever evidence they needed to from all the
19:24
videos.
19:24
And then I said, Hey, kid, you didn't do anything wrong.
19:26
And the prosecutor should have, you know, sat down, had a conversation with
19:29
them and been like, Hey, you didn't, you didn't, you didn't do anything.
19:31
Um, you know, go, go live your life in peace.
19:35
Um, but that's not what happened.
19:36
This kid was dragged out, uh, on, on national TV, um, called a, called a racist,
19:42
called a terrorist called a vigilante called all these things.
19:46
And he did absolutely nothing wrong.
19:48
He did absolutely nothing wrong morally.
19:50
Now, again, I'm not sure if there's some technical little legal thing he
19:53
may have done or not done.
19:54
Um, but as far as morally, he didn't do anything wrong.
19:57
And I think it's, it's pretty, it's pretty terrifying to look at that and go, man,
20:03
like I don't, you know, like, if, if I'm in a situation where someone's
20:06
trying to kill me, you know, like, dude, I don't even know, like, if I defend myself,
20:11
am I, am I going to go to prison?
20:12
Am I going to go to prison?
20:13
And from that, that's what it seemed to be more so on trial here.
20:16
And that's what had a lot of people worried.
20:18
A lot of people like me worried, which is can somebody defend themselves?
20:21
Can they stand their ground and defend themselves?
20:23
Cause that's what was essentially on trial here.
20:25
And the thing about a lot of the people that are like, well, he shouldn't have been
20:28
there.
20:28
Those people don't want to answer the question.
20:31
Should the rioters have been there?
20:32
Cause then it's like, whoa, why are you calling them writers?
20:34
Because they were burning things and breaking things.
20:37
Kind of like.
20:37
Protecting children.
20:40
Yeah.
20:41
Like, definitely that's what these people were.
20:43
But I feel like Ephraim.
20:44
I feel like the media is doing a tremendous amount of gaslighting right now.
20:48
And it's working with a lot of the people because the amount of messages that I saw
20:52
people put out on Facebook or on Twitter about, you know, had, you know, this person
20:56
had kind of written house been black or brown, how he wouldn't, you know, he would
21:00
be going down right now.
21:01
Or the police would have just shot him as he was walking up to them.
21:04
If he had been of a different color, all these different things.
21:06
But I felt like the media's behavior here was absolutely egregious with this
21:10
situation.
21:11
And I believe that Kyle Rittenhouse is going to be a very, very rich man
21:15
in short order because of that.
21:16
Another Covington had a kid got like a quarter of a billion dollars.
21:19
All he did was wear a hat and smile in the face of a guy that was basically
21:23
verbally accosting him.
21:24
And, you know, this is way different for Kyle Rittenhouse.
21:27
He could be the first billionaire.
21:28
Uh, you know, he could be a billionaire before he's 20 years old.
21:30
But the thing that I feel like is happening, what I want to ask you about in
21:33
terms of the situation before we move on to all the other stuff is it seems like
21:37
it's narrative versus truth.
21:38
And one side wants to maintain the narrative and one side is looking for truth
21:43
because the dominant force inside of media is left wing liberal media.
21:47
The, the minority of force is right wing media.
21:50
So if right wing media says something wrong, the entire weight of mainstream media,
21:56
the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, Vox, BuzzFeed, whatever,
21:59
they're going to come down on those conservative voices.
22:02
Right.
22:03
So it's like they have to value and put a premium on truth.
22:06
Whereas if you're MSNBC, you can immediately come out and just trumpet the
22:10
narrative.
22:11
The judge was a racist, Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist.
22:14
This entire situation is about race, even though the only people involved are
22:17
four white people, Kyle Rittenhouse and the three white people that he shot.
22:21
It's like, oh, is he racist, adjacent?
22:24
Because he shot people that support Black Lives Matter.
22:26
But talk to me a little bit about the behavior of the media and kind of what
22:31
that's done to even further divide the country that's already so divided.
22:34
Yeah, the, the media narrative and them just jumping to conclusions is, is so,
22:42
it's just so wrong.
22:43
And the fact that they are allowed to just lie or blatantly lie about stuff that
22:50
again, like you use the word, you use the term gaslighting.
22:52
There's, there's no other word for it.
22:53
You know, it is gaslighting.
22:55
You're, you're saying something that is obviously not true and you're calling
22:58
everybody else crazy when they, when they call out the fact that you're lying.
23:01
You know, and I think, I think that, um, you know, people just have to, people
23:07
have to stop being so emotional about things and taking the time to wait for
23:13
wait for the facts to come out and be interested in the truth, right?
23:16
It's like that old, uh, the, the biblical adage, you know, the truth will make you
23:20
free, right?
23:21
When we find truth, you find freedom and right now are, we are refusing to see
23:26
truth as a society and therefore our liberties are slowly but surely being
23:31
corroded away.
23:32
And, um, I think that I think that, you know, this is, this, this battle is just
23:37
now beginning and I don't mean physical battle.
23:40
I just mean, uh, a battle of battle of ideologies.
23:42
We've, we've only, um, you know, this, this book is not even close to being
23:47
finished, right? This is just the opening crescendo of what's going to be, uh,
23:51
really the, the battle for the soul of the nation really over the next, you know,
23:55
10, 15 years, um, and right now, uh, on, you know, people who are, people who are
24:00
moral and logical, um, and, you know, sort of middle class, just folks,
24:04
unfortunately we're losing because, you know, the reality is like, we don't want
24:07
to fight this war, like, right?
24:08
You know, I mean, like, I, I don't want to spend my time arguing about like racism.
24:12
Like what are you talking about?
24:14
Like, I want to spend my life being constructive.
24:17
You know, there's, you know, middle class folks here in Waukesha, Wisconsin, right?
24:20
They are, um, you know, they're, they're focused on putting food on the table and
24:25
they're focused on, you know, working hard and, you know, the, the folks that
24:29
were out at the, at that parade, they're doing a Christmas parade and that's just
24:33
what they're, they're just trying to live their lives and, you know, all of this
24:37
stuff becoming racialized and, and, and becoming so polarizing.
24:42
I think, I think people are fed up with it, but, but I think, I think we don't,
24:45
we don't necessarily want to jump into the middle of it because it's like,
24:48
just leave us alone, right?
24:49
But eventually I kind of look at it like this.
24:51
It's kind of like the US in the 1930s, right?
24:54
It's the United States of America in the 1930s.
24:56
We see all this crazy stuff going on.
24:58
We see Europe falling.
24:59
We see all the, the, the wars going on between China and Japan.
25:05
We want nothing to do with it.
25:06
We're like, hey, let's just, because we're the good guys.
25:09
We're like, no, I don't want to fight.
25:10
I don't want to go kill anybody.
25:11
I don't want to take any territory.
25:12
I have no aspirations for that.
25:14
I just want to be left alone.
25:15
And live my life, right?
25:16
And that's, that's what America was doing.
25:18
But eventually we got dragged into it.
25:19
And when we, and then when that happened, when we got dragged into it,
25:22
it's like, OK, cool.
25:23
All gears ahead.
25:25
And we're going to go ahead and we're going to wipe these people out.
25:27
We're going to wipe out the Nazis and we're going to wipe out the
25:29
Japanese army and all that stuff, right?
25:31
And I think that something I hope, I think, and I hope that something similar
25:36
will happen with, with, with our country now internally.
25:40
All this crazy stuff is going on.
25:43
You know, the fact, again, the fact that Britain House was even brought to trial,
25:46
all the riots and the looting.
25:48
And then think about all of the secondary and tertiary effects of the fact
25:52
that the police had to stop policing the community and had to go guard, you know,
25:56
the, like the Capitol buildings of all the different, of all the different
26:01
cities that were under attack, right?
26:02
Think about all the rapes and murders and robbing and looting and all the other
26:06
things that happened that the police simply were not even able to respond to, right?
26:09
So all this stuff is going on and it seems all chaotic and crazy.
26:13
And we find ourselves on the sidelines as, you know, as conservatives.
26:18
And I think what will eventually happen is sort of, I don't know what it,
26:23
I don't know what it is or what it will be.
26:25
And I hope it, I hope this never happens.
26:26
But it's like, we'll probably have some sort of a Pearl Harbor moment where
26:29
we're going like, all right, enough is enough.
26:31
And I hope that COVID and watching all these authoritarian lockdowns and all
26:38
this nonsensical crap that's coming from the federal government, I hope that this
26:42
is waking people up.
26:43
I hope this was our Pearl Harbor moment where we're like, hey, okay, Roger that.
26:48
We're in this fight, we're in it to the end.
26:50
We're going to win and we're going to take our country back.
26:52
And that's, that's what I think is happening right now.
26:55
I think Virginia was a good litmus test of that.
26:58
And I think we're going to see a lot more in 2022, especially in these upcoming primaries.
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Now let's get back into it.
29:41
Right.
29:42
When you said Pearl Harbor moment reminded me of a moment when I was talking to our, you
29:47
know, mutual buddy, Mike Ritaland about the situation that was happening.
29:51
And he and I were talking about Afghanistan, which I'll ask you about here in a second.
29:53
You know, I straight up asked him, I said, let's say there is another 9/11.
29:57
I think this is what I used, but it could be 9/11 or Pearl Harbor.
30:00
Do you think that the world would come together or the Americans would come together like
30:04
we did on 9/12 of 2001.
30:06
He said, absolutely.
30:07
Yes.
30:08
And I just got to say, since that moment I've disagreed with him and I've said it, I don't
30:13
know that that's what's going to happen because we are so divided in.
30:16
It's kind of overwrought.
30:17
Everyone's like, we're more divided than we've ever been.
30:19
We're not having a civil war.
30:20
Let's pretend as if that's way more divided where you are willing to shoot, you know,
30:24
a little ball bullet at your brother who's happening, who happens to fight for the other
30:29
side in this war.
30:30
We're not more divided than ever, but it does seem that way.
30:34
Social media is doing that to us.
30:35
And I think, you know, this is when you kind of get into conspiracy theory land or just
30:39
it could be legitimate.
30:40
Who knows?
30:41
But, you know, you have the United States of America, we have two enormous oceans on
30:44
either side of us.
30:45
It's going to be really hard for our people that hate us to attack us.
30:48
And so why not they, why don't they just try to rot us from the inside out?
30:51
And so you talk about people, you know, with the Soviets old Soviet area, even, but current
30:56
people within Iran or China or Russia, they're trying to foment this discontent with all the
31:01
people inside the country because you don't need to shoot bullets at us if we're going
31:05
to shoot each other anyway.
31:06
So it's like, hey, we're just going to basically spark the fire and let you guys deal with
31:10
the flames.
31:11
And the problem is, is most people are buying right into whatever narrative they're buying
31:14
went into whatever rage is on their side, and it's not getting any better.
31:18
But we can sit here and wax poetic about that all day long, but I'm really anxious to actually
31:22
get your thoughts on the situation going on in Afghanistan because you were one of the
31:26
first people that I reached out to during that week, whenever the United States pulled
31:30
out and the Taliban basically marched right in.
31:33
And it's a major issue, right?
31:37
It's an issue that unfortunately was on Americans minds for about a week and a half, and then
31:41
they moved on with their regularly scheduled programming and got outraged about something,
31:46
you know, Trump said in a, in a media interview or outraged about this out or the other thing
31:50
or their Netflix account got locked out for 20 minutes.
31:52
They couldn't watch their favorite show.
31:54
No one's talking about Afghanistan anymore, which is egregious.
31:57
But I want to go right back to your initial thoughts.
31:59
I did that series called botching Afghanistan.
32:01
I talked to a lot of people and got their initial thoughts on the pullout and kind of what
32:04
you thought was happening.
32:05
But I just want to kind of give you some space right now to describe what you think about
32:09
our actions as a country pulling out of the country when we did.
32:12
But also let's go ahead and get into some of the things that you've done, the things
32:15
that you are able to talk about to help get some of those people out that were left in
32:20
the crossfire literally once the United States pulled out and created the vacuum.
32:24
Yeah.
32:25
So, you know, my personal experience in Afghanistan was there in summer of 2014.
32:31
It was actually the same summer that ISIS was sweeping across Iraq.
32:37
And I was in Afghanistan right during the middle of retrograde.
32:42
So instead of having a six month deployment, we had a four month deployment because literally
32:46
in the middle of the deployment, that was when, you know, the powers that be decided
32:51
to send everybody home.
32:53
I was gone to sort of backfill some of the guys that had bumped into Iraq to call in
33:00
the airstrikes on ISIS, but when my platoon left the base that they were at, they literally
33:08
just hopped in helicopters in the middle of the night, set stuff on fire and just flew
33:12
out without any warning and left the Afghans there.
33:16
This is back in 2014.
33:17
And of course the Afghans were not even remotely capable of truly being able to defend themselves
33:23
without any kind of American support.
33:26
So that entire area fell.
33:27
So this has been slowly happening, the dam has slowly been breaking over the last, you
33:34
know, five, six, seven years.
33:37
And you know, this precipitous pull out was the final, the dam finally broken everything
33:41
and all the water rushed through, right, the Taliban just took over the entire country.
33:45
But it's been a long time in the making.
33:48
But yeah, but during when that whole thing kicked off, yeah, I was immediately, of course,
33:54
my phone immediately started blowing up and I don't know anybody in Afghanistan.
33:57
I was there, like I said, for three months in 2014.
34:01
And yes, we got to do a bunch of fighting and whatnot.
34:04
But I wasn't like an intel guy at the time, so I didn't really know anybody.
34:09
I was just a shooter.
34:11
But with Stronghold Rescue and Relief, the NGO that I run, we of course started getting
34:16
a lot of people asking us for help.
34:17
So I just immediately started pulling all of my contacts and luckily we have the resources
34:21
and we have the personnel now to really be able to kind of get into those places and
34:26
make stuff happen.
34:28
So while all this stuff was falling apart, so I kind of watched the airport.
34:34
So I was actually aware of what was going on in Afghanistan and heavily involved in it
34:38
before it ever hit the news.
34:39
It was probably about a week, week and a half prior to it all actually being on the news.
34:44
I was already on the phone like 16 hours a day, texting and calling and talking to 17
34:50
people at once and people trying to get extracted and all kinds of stuff.
34:55
And you know, so while all that was going on and I saw that eventually we gave up the
35:02
entire country except for Kabul airport, which is a very small, relatively small space.
35:07
I immediately, I immediately looked at that and I thought, you want to know what, like
35:10
this place is A, either going to get overrun or B, we're going to be gone in about 10 days
35:15
and then there's nobody, like tons of people are going to get left behind, right?
35:18
So there's nobody to help.
35:20
So what we immediately started doing me and my guys with Stronghold, we immediately started
35:24
looking for routes out of the country.
35:26
We started looking for ways to start smuggling people into border countries without just basically
35:33
just to get the heck out of it while we could.
35:36
And so what we did was we actually created sort of an Intel network of people, people
35:42
who are on our payroll, Afghans who are now on our payroll and we set up safe houses and
35:47
drivers and passwords and all this stuff, it means very ad hoc, kind of thrown together.
35:55
But basically we set up these rat lines so we can smuggle families out of the country
35:59
who really, really need to get out of the country.
36:01
And the type of stuff that we that we do, we're not moving thousands of people, we're
36:06
not moving, you know, airplane loads of people, it's not buses full of people, it's one family
36:12
at a time and it's people who are no kidding going to get a bullet in the head if they're
36:17
not out of there.
36:18
So we've actually kind of slowed down the amount of people that we're moving out because
36:22
it's also very expensive, we've got a lot of people on the ground that need to get paid
36:25
and making sure that we're able to fuel in vehicles.
36:30
There's a lot of stuff that goes into it.
36:33
It's not just a simple get on the phone and get people out.
36:39
So yeah, so basically we have several routes out of the country and right now we're still
36:43
on occasion, we'll get, you know, one family here, one family there, specific cases.
36:50
But the situation right now is actually kind of interesting.
36:54
It seems to be, how do I word this?
36:59
I'm trying to word this properly.
37:01
It doesn't seem like the Taliban is going door to door killing everybody.
37:05
It seems to be that they, I think that that will happen.
37:08
I think that that's going to come.
37:10
But I think right now they're actually being relatively restrained, and I'm not sure why
37:14
that is.
37:15
I'm still, obviously I don't trust them for two seconds, but it's very interesting to
37:20
kind of watch observing sort of what their tactics are, what they're doing, because again,
37:27
like I'm in direct contact with people who are on the ground in the country and on the
37:31
border regions and everything, and they're reporting everything that they're seeing directly
37:35
firsthand to me.
37:36
And I'm kind of looking at the situation, and it's kind of interesting, the Taliban
37:41
aren't, they're not ISIS, right?
37:43
So when we think of terrorists, we think of ISIS, and it's not ISIS.
37:47
In fact, the Taliban and ISIS are like fighting.
37:49
There's been a bunch of killings and a bunch of bombs that have gone off.
37:52
Most of the violence that's going on is actually between the Taliban and ISIS-K at the moment.
37:57
But it's still extremely dangerous.
37:58
They are, I think, I think what the Taliban right now is doing, I think they are looking
38:03
for very high profile, high level people, that's who they're looking to arrest.
38:07
I don't think that right now they're really going after anybody who had like sold food
38:12
on an American base or something like that.
38:14
They're looking for Afghan army generals, they're looking for government officials and
38:18
things like that.
38:19
So those are the types of people in those situations, those are the ones who we are able
38:25
to escort and extract out of the country using a variety of means and undercover rat lines.
38:36
So that's our work there.
38:37
But it's a drop in the bucket of what needs to be done there, and I think that the bigger
38:43
issue and the bigger root percussion, I think that we're seeing now, but we're going to
38:47
see a lot more of in the future, was the strategic value of Afghanistan.
38:54
If you look at history, so many armies, most notably Alexander the Great had to go through
39:00
Afghanistan to basically get to Asia.
39:06
And it's a rough place, it is a tough place to operate.
39:10
But the fact that we invested so much money into having bases there, I think we could
39:15
have, and I know we could have kept maybe Bagram in one or two smaller bases, and we
39:21
could have maintained that strategic location and perpetuity.
39:25
Just like after World War II, we've still got bases on Okinawa, we've still got multiple
39:29
bases in Germany, and World War II was 67 years ago, it was a long time ago, actually,
39:38
yeah, 60, 70, 80 years ago, it was a long time ago.
39:42
And we still have bases there, because it helps us to stabilize those regions and prevent
39:46
the next war.
39:47
So the fact that we weren't willing to just keep one or two bases in Afghanistan, which
39:52
is a hotbed for terrorism, is a terrorist breeding ground where you still have obviously
39:56
the Taliban, you've got ISIS-K, you've got al-Qaeda sympathizers there, and whatever
40:00
other version of terrorists, Islamic terrorists that you can imagine, they're all going to
40:06
be back in there.
40:08
But more importantly than that, I think that we're going to see the Russians in there, or
40:12
the Chinese, probably the Chinese would be my guess.
40:15
The Chinese are going to go back there, they're going to open up their minds in the mountains
40:18
again, so they'll start feeding the Chinese economy.
40:22
Not to mention, the royalties or however that'll work that they'll pay to the Taliban will
40:26
start providing billions of dollars of passive income to the Taliban every single year.
40:34
Not to mention the drug trade and the poppy fields and all that kind of stuff.
40:37
And then I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese just went and helped in maybe
40:43
manned a Bagram Air Base.
40:45
I think they're definitely going to bring in a bunch of anti-air defenses to make sure
40:48
we can never, ever, ever go back into that country.
40:51
And I think we just handed over not just a country, not just a base, but a strategic
40:57
regional, we just lost control of an entire region.
41:02
The ability to strike at these regions, I know the current administration is saying
41:06
that we still have over the horizon capabilities.
41:09
Well, sure, we can launch a drone that'll fly for 11 hours or however long strike a target
41:15
and fly back.
41:17
But that only gives it a small amount of time to actually be over the target to try to get
41:20
actual information.
41:22
That's one.
41:23
So our air assets are not able to be overhead long enough to really strike these places
41:28
with accuracy.
41:29
That's one.
41:30
But more importantly, the second point is that we no longer have human intelligence.
41:33
We no longer have people on the ground that we can talk to that can confirm the information.
41:38
We saw that with the drone strike right outside Kabul airport that killed a family that had
41:44
worked with interpreters that had worked with NGOs and killed a whole bunch of kids.
41:48
And you're like, wait, who gave us that intel?
41:50
Who gave us that intel?
41:52
The only people who we still have on the ground out there, any of our allies, they're rushing
41:58
toward the airport.
41:59
So who are we talking to outside of the airport?
42:01
We're talking to the Taliban or ISIS.
42:03
That's who we're talking to.
42:04
So that information we're getting from is not coming from vetted sources who know what
42:09
the heck they're talking about.
42:10
It's coming from actual terrorist groups.
42:13
That's just my personal opinion.
42:14
I don't know that for a fact.
42:16
But looking at the situation, I would be willing to bet everything that that's what happened.
42:20
We got information from the bad guys and they told us who to strike.
42:24
So the bigger point here is elections have consequences.
42:29
And I think one of the most interesting things when you look at the American government system,
42:35
we have tons of checks and balances.
42:37
We've got the three different branches of government.
42:40
And then within the three different branches of government, we've got all the different
42:42
levels of courts.
42:43
Then we've got all the different levels of Congress.
42:45
And then we've got all these different people vying for power just to make the most simple
42:49
decision.
42:50
Well, the president doesn't answer to Congress for his foreign policy.
42:56
Like think about that.
42:57
You are allowed to make these, besides declaring war, you are allowed to make these huge, sweeping
43:03
decisions with zero oversight, zero checks and balances.
43:09
And I think that, I'm not really sure what the solution is, but I almost think that US
43:14
foreign policy at this point should also start being under Congress.
43:21
I think that's just kind of my opinion at this point, because who the heck are you?
43:26
You're one dude sitting in an office, making a decision that's going to completely destroy
43:31
every, it's going to completely destabilize an entire region.
43:35
It's going to cause a lot of small wars.
43:37
Thousands of people have already dead because of it.
43:39
Hundreds of thousands over the course of the next probably 10, 15 years easily, you
43:43
know, and that sets up our enemies to attack us more and to take more space.
43:48
And, you know, so all these different reasons, right?
43:50
Everybody knows that that's a horrible decision.
43:52
It was a horrible decision to pull out of Afghanistan.
43:54
Everybody knows this, right?
43:57
But yet you're still able to do it?
43:58
You know, that to me is just really, really bizarre.
44:02
And I think that that's a huge flaw in our governmental system.
44:06
I think that, you know, the major foreign policy issues like that should have to get
44:12
some sort of approval from Congress, because, you know, you have one guy playing God and
44:18
it's like Rome, right?
44:20
One guy is playing God, he's the emperor, and just causes all these problems.
44:25
Just because, again, one guy, you know, makes a bad decision.
44:29
So, yeah, obviously I'm not too happy about the Afghanistan decision.
44:34
I think we should have stayed.
44:35
I think we should have kept a small footprint there.
44:36
Just keep bobbering, keep a, you know, keep a special operations task force there, keep
44:41
some attack helicopters and a couple of AC-130 gunships, and make sure that those guys make
44:46
sure that entire region is secured for a very small investment, we could have secured that
44:52
entire region.
44:53
Yeah.
44:54
We have troops literally all over the globe in more countries than people realize until
44:58
they actually look into it.
44:59
But I do not think that history is going to be very kind to Joe Biden.
45:04
And I think Joe Biden is obsessed with how history is going to view him and view his presidency.
45:08
That's why he's trying to force through all these enormous bills, trying to fundamentally
45:11
change what the United States of America is.
45:13
But I think when we look back, because that's the one thing that's hard to do is when you're
45:16
sitting in the middle of the news cycle, it's hard to kind of hover over the news cycle
45:19
for a little bit and be like, what are things going to look like three months from now,
45:22
you know, three years from now, 30 years from now?
45:24
And I think when we look out, you know, decades from now, we're going to look at the fact
45:28
that we screwed all of our allies, the people that literally risked their lives in limbs
45:32
and their families lives in limbs in order to just help us to just point out where the
45:36
bad guy was or to be an interpreter for us or to be an informant or whatever.
45:40
When you screw all those people over and the ones that have survived, they're going to
45:44
remember those things and they're going to tell their children about those things and
45:46
they're going to tell their nieces and nephews about those things and their grandchildren
45:49
about those things.
45:50
And the rest of the world is watching it happen.
45:52
They're watching it happen.
45:53
And it's like you can't trust the Americans, but I think the strategic blunder of giving
45:56
up Bagram, you're absolutely right because Bagram was so close to Iran, to Russia, to
46:02
China, to all these areas that are incredibly important to what we're trying to do as we
46:07
move forward.
46:08
And again, you can get into all the conspiracy theories like maybe this was a plan from the
46:12
beginning, maybe Joe Biden just thought the, you know, we've get, you know, swallowed
46:15
up by the news cycle because here's the other thing that we're going to see by next November
46:18
and from no one's going to be talking about Afghanistan next November when we're doing
46:22
midterms.
46:23
No one's talking about that.
46:24
You know who's going to be on everybody's minds Trump because Trump's already said he's
46:26
not going to announce whether he's running in 2024 until after the midterms.
46:30
But the narrative will be, I promise you it's going to be that remember I said that is you
46:34
don't want to give him how the house, you don't want to give him the Congress, right?
46:38
Because let's say he does run in 2024 and the orange racist could get back in the White
46:42
House.
46:43
You don't want to give him the sin in the house.
46:44
Do you?
46:45
That's going to be the narrative.
46:46
It's not going to be about the blunders that happen with Afghanistan.
46:47
It's not going to be about the price of gas.
46:49
It's not going to be about any of those other things.
46:50
It's going to be about all these other nefarious things that they can go on.
46:53
But I did have one other quick question on Afghanistan before we move on to some other
46:56
stuff.
46:57
And as a quick aside guys, when you give money to organizations like stronghold rescue and
47:00
relief, you know, legit organizations that it's in the show notes here, this is the type
47:05
of stuff that you're going to get, you're going to get people that are literally trying
47:08
to get people out that are on the ground that are, that are suffering under at the hands
47:12
of these horrible people.
47:13
That's what organizations like this are about.
47:14
So we highly suggest that you go and support them.
47:17
But the thing that I'm hearing a lot about, because I still follow Holly McKay and the
47:20
stuff that she's saying, you know, I listen to her podcast and read her stuff every week
47:23
to kind of figure out what's going on over there.
47:25
The sense I'm getting from from her stuff and from some other reporting is that there
47:29
could be an impending starvation crisis going on in Afghanistan that the issues with not
47:34
not only supply lines, but the the funding coming in through the government, which right
47:38
now the Taliban runs the government.
47:40
That's part of the reason why I think they're not just chopping people's heads off left
47:43
and right is because they want some substantiation by the international community to continue
47:47
to give them money.
47:48
You know, other countries, not just China, not just Russia, eventually, you know, but
47:52
is, is there true to that from what you're, what you're hearing, because it makes sense
47:56
that potentially over the winter, there could be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands
48:00
of Afghanistan's that are Afghanis that are going to be, you know, potentially starving
48:06
to death, or at least having crazy amounts amount of malnutrition.
48:09
Is that what you're seeing or hearing on the ground there?
48:12
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm hearing.
48:14
You know, we're about to go into it's already winter time and, you know, in Afghanistan,
48:18
a lot of people think of it as desert, well, in reality, Afghanistan's a very, very cold
48:22
country.
48:23
I think it's like average height is like it's average altitude above sea level thing is
48:28
like 5000 or 6000 feet, it's a really, really high city, it's sort of like, like Denver,
48:34
Colorado, right on the edge of the mountains there.
48:36
So it's extremely cold during the winter time, everything shuts down.
48:41
And yeah, so now you have, you know, you have a government.
48:43
So that's the interesting thing about the, about the Taliban to understand as well is
48:46
the Taliban, they're not interested in world domination, the Taliban, like they might support
48:50
organizations who are into that, but the Taliban themselves, they just want to control Afghanistan.
48:55
They are a basically a political party that wants to control and govern Afghanistan as,
49:00
you know, under Sharia law as an Islamic emirate.
49:04
So they are trying to govern, they just want, they want to get that stuff up and running.
49:08
So I, they absolutely do want help from the international community on, on all these different
49:12
things that what you're saying, what you're talking about as far as the starvation and,
49:16
and there's, you know, I'm good friends with Holly as well.
49:20
And she was telling me about the, the, these awards were like, there's orphaned children
49:25
and they're just starving to death because they had, they literally do not have enough
49:28
food to keep these newborn infants alive and hundreds of them.
49:32
It's not like it's one or two.
49:34
It's hundreds of them.
49:35
It's a, it's a massive, massive issue.
49:37
Yeah.
49:38
I think that that is going to be a problem.
49:39
The other issue that's, that's going on there too.
49:41
So obviously we're, we're a nonprofit, you know, humanitarian organizations.
49:46
So we were actually going to try to help, you know, individual extreme cases as much as
49:51
we could.
49:52
And I was actually trying to send money to some folks who were there in, in Afghanistan
49:57
through, through Western Union, relatively small amounts of money.
50:01
And they couldn't pick anything up.
50:02
So they would go to the Western Union.
50:04
They would try to pick up, you know, again, relatively small amounts of money.
50:09
And they weren't able to pick it up because there's no cash on hand.
50:11
So even if you did have the cash, you know, there's not necessarily a place where you
50:14
can go and buy, we can go and buy food.
50:16
So it's a situation where you literally have NGOs that are willing to help to one level
50:22
or another.
50:24
And they're not able to.
50:25
There's absolutely nothing that you can do.
50:27
So this, this is something that I'm, I'm looking at very closely and I'm watching and we're
50:34
still trying to figure out, you know, if there's ways that we can help, you know, individual
50:37
families.
50:38
Again, we're, we're a medium sized organization so we can have a huge impact in small communities.
50:44
But, you know, we're not, we're not UNICEF or USAID or anything like that.
50:49
But yeah, it's, it's, it's horrific.
50:51
And I think that that's one of the things people don't really look at.
50:54
They, they're, they're only looking, people only look at the sort of flashy, crazy, ISIS
51:00
style videos where they're burning people alive and things like that, right?
51:03
That's, that's what they focus on.
51:04
And that's, that's sort of the, the thing that we, our attention is drawn to, right?
51:10
But the reality is most of the death, then most of the carnage that's going to happen
51:13
is going to be coming from starvation.
51:14
It's same thing as like Venezuela, right?
51:16
You don't see videos of beheadings coming out of Venezuela all the time.
51:20
But I think it was a year or two ago, I was, I was talking with, with a journalist and
51:24
I was like, listen, what's going on in Venezuela is a genocide.
51:27
It's a genocide of children because they, these kids are starving.
51:31
They're dying from malnutrition from very simple, easily treatable, easily preventable diseases,
51:37
kids have like worms in their stomach and there's all these different issues.
51:40
That can be, that can be, their life can be saved by a simple $5 medicine, not even $5.
51:45
Like a $2 medicine, a $2 dose of medicine can kill these worms, can kill these bacteria
51:50
and the, and these different, and these different things that are killing people on mass.
51:53
But nobody hears those numbers, nobody sees those numbers.
51:56
But in reality, poor governance is another form of genocide.
52:01
And I think that you are absolutely correct.
52:02
We are going to see that happening in Afghanistan and how much of that will be reported, you
52:07
know, is difficult to, is, is difficult to know because again, they don't have a free
52:11
press and there's not a lot of journalists on the ground there.
52:14
Yeah.
52:15
Part of the reason why I've been following Holly McKay and the reporting she's doing is
52:17
just to remind myself, and to remind myself of how I felt when things were falling apart
52:22
in seeing the video from people at the airport and the people holding on to the planes and
52:26
the people falling from the wheels and all those different things because as Americans,
52:30
we love to forget these horrible things.
52:32
We love to forget how we felt and what it made us feel like in those moments and I just
52:35
don't want us to get there.
52:37
Another thing that I wanted to talk to you about because you're intimately involved
52:39
in kind of what's going on is the hostage situation over in Haiti.
52:43
So over a month ago, 17 Christians of Christian missionaries rather were kidnapped in Haiti.
52:49
And then we didn't hear anything else, right?
52:51
Every now and then on Twitter, I'll be scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, it'll be something about,
52:55
you know, some football games, something about something happening in politics.
52:58
Oh, yeah, here the Christian missionaries are still not have not been found yet.
53:02
And so give us an update as to kind of what's going on.
53:05
And as I understand it, I don't know how much you can talk about.
53:07
I think you were just there.
53:08
I think you're, you're kind of in the situation of trying to help these people help kind of
53:13
figure out where they're at.
53:14
My thing sitting here, again, not knowing much about how these things work and knowing
53:17
how you work is wouldn't be that hard for Joe Biden to send a group of used to be used
53:24
a group of seals or different spec ops guys into Haiti to find these people.
53:28
Is that not the way that people do these things anymore?
53:31
Just kind of give us an update on the entire situation because my listeners have asked
53:35
me about it.
53:36
And I've got nothing to tell them.
53:37
So help me out.
53:38
Yeah, absolutely.
53:39
So first off, I'm going to stay, stay, stay up front.
53:43
We are not myself personally and my guys on my team.
53:47
We are not at all intentionally and we are intentionally avoiding getting involved in
53:52
any way, shape or form with the hostage situation.
53:55
Our people, we are in contact with the US personnel on the ground who are the proper
54:01
authorities who are who are dealing with this.
54:02
I want to be extremely clear up front.
54:05
By no means are we running around down there trying to get involved in that situation at
54:09
all.
54:10
It's simply that is a US foreign policy decision and that's not something that we're able
54:14
to affect.
54:16
If we were asked for help or something like that, we would of course do everything we
54:20
could to help get these Americans home.
54:23
But to what extent we have been asked to help or not help, I don't want to get into
54:27
those details at all.
54:28
I'm going to be very clear up front, we are not in any way, shape or form, sort of needing
54:32
that charge to try to find them.
54:34
That's not what we do.
54:35
That's for the US government.
54:37
So with that being said, so Haiti, man, Haiti is a rough place.
54:41
Haiti is a really, really rough place.
54:42
I just got back a few days ago from there.
54:46
My team and I, we were down there.
54:47
So really, what's going on right now is Haiti is a term we would use as a failed state.
54:56
The government no longer properly functions and there's a lot of reasons for that.
55:02
The biggest just sort of surface level issue that is causing the government to no longer
55:08
be effective and the police to no longer be effective is basically, there's a series
55:12
of gangs.
55:14
There's dozens and dozens of gangs in Haiti, but there are several very, very large ones.
55:18
The biggest gang that's down there in Haiti is a gang that's called G9.
55:22
And G9 stands, the nine stands for nine different gangs, different smaller gangs who all united
55:29
into one big gang under a guy who calls himself barbecue.
55:36
That's like his gang leader name.
55:39
And if you look up barbecue, his last name is Cherizier.
55:43
So you can just like, you can easily Google him and find more information about him and
55:47
like what he's got going on.
55:49
So basically this guy barbecue, he controls and G9, they control the ports of Haiti.
55:57
So when you go to Haiti and you look at the city of Port of Prince, there's, you know,
56:03
Haiti's obviously an island nation.
56:05
So they're all of their resources have to be imported at the moment.
56:11
They have other resources that they can take advantage of, but they don't have the infrastructure
56:16
to do that yet because this situation is unstable.
56:18
So they have to get everything from outside of the country.
56:20
Well, everything coming from outside of the country has to go to the one deep water port,
56:24
the primary deep water port, which is in Port of Prince and some of the other surrounding
56:28
areas, there's several ports there.
56:30
So this gang controls that area.
56:32
And basically what they've done is they control, they now control the flow of oil and fuel
56:37
into the country.
56:39
And so what this gang has done is they've choked it off and they only allow what fuel
56:45
they want to go through to go through.
56:48
And so what they're trying to do is they're trying to get the different political leaders
56:53
in the Haitian government, the gang is trying to get them to resign and trying to get them
56:57
to give up and trying to turn the people against the government.
57:01
And so what the gang is doing is they're saying, listen, if this guy just resigns, we'll let
57:06
the oil through.
57:07
Like everything will be great if you just, if you just, you know, if these elected officials
57:12
just resign, right?
57:14
So they're trying to basically prop themselves up as the government.
57:19
And there's been several different things that these gangs have done to sort of pretend
57:26
like they are the government.
57:28
For example, there was a situation a couple weeks ago where the president or, excuse me,
57:33
the prime minister of Haiti was going to go lay a wreath.
57:36
It's like the leader of Haiti goes and lays this wreath for some sort of memorial, a national
57:42
memorial thing.
57:43
So the gang showed up because they knew that the prime minister was going to be there and
57:46
they just started shooting.
57:47
And so the prime minister and everybody was evacuated.
57:50
And so then we'll guess who shows up an hour later, barbecue, barbecue shows up in a nice
57:55
suit and tie and he lays the wreath, which is supposed to be the job of the national
58:00
leader.
58:01
So they're doing symbolic things like that to basically try to take the country over.
58:06
So that's, that's sort of the setting and because of this, there's, there's poverty and
58:09
power outages and it's, it's a disaster, it's a really, really rough, it's a really,
58:14
really rough place to be.
58:17
So that's, that's sort of the general setting.
58:19
Now, one of the, now, no, one of the other situations, right?
58:23
So we'll talk about the, we'll talk about these hostages.
58:25
So I was actually down in Haiti a few weeks ago, maybe a month or so ago and right after
58:32
I got on a plane, I came back here and I got the news, oh, hey, 17 Americans, you know,
58:38
16 Americans in a Canadian were taken hostage.
58:41
So they were taken hostage by a group, or by a gang called the 400 Milozo.
58:46
And there's different, there's different translations for the word Milozo.
58:50
It's like anything from like losers to like vagabonds to like, you know, crazy guys.
58:56
There's, there's several different translations for it, but it's basically the 400 crazy guys,
59:02
right?
59:03
Well, the in reality, they don't actually have 400.
59:05
I think they have maybe 150 to 200 guys that are actually in this gang.
59:10
So what happened was there was a group from Christian aid ministries, Cam, for short,
59:15
who are mostly Mennonites, I actually believe that they're all Mennonites.
59:21
And they were, they visited an orphanage of some sort there in Haiti and the outskirts
59:26
of the town, not in Port-au-Prince itself, but sort of outside.
59:30
And then this gang, you know, just basically showed up, kidnapped them and they're demanding
59:34
a million dollars per person.
59:36
Now when you look at this situation, you have basically, you have three, you have three
59:41
things you can do.
59:42
One is you just ignore it, right?
59:43
Which isn't really much of an option.
59:45
Two is you send in a rescue mission to go kill all the bad guys and rescue the hostages,
59:50
right?
59:51
Which is what we all want to have happen.
59:54
But it's not that simple.
59:55
It's a, it's a complicated place.
59:56
And I can get into some of those details here in a second.
59:59
But the third option is to pay the ransom.
1:00:01
So let's start with paying ransom for a second.
1:00:05
As a general rule, you never, never want to pay.
1:00:08
You never, ever, ever want to pay the ransom to get somebody back.
1:00:13
Now this is cold-hearted and it sucks.
1:00:16
And especially if you're a family member of the person who has been kidnapped, you're
1:00:20
like, hey, just pay the ransom and get them back, right?
1:00:22
The issue though, as soon as you pay a ransom, you now have put a price tag on the head of
1:00:27
everybody else who is around there.
1:00:30
So if you pay a million dollars for each one of these Americans, you have now just told
1:00:35
all the gangs that every single white person and European person who is there is now worth
1:00:41
a million dollars.
1:00:42
And you're talking about people who make basically nothing.
1:00:45
They live in an abject poverty, right?
1:00:47
So I can, I can go kidnap that guy and make a million dollars or I cannot kidnap that
1:00:52
guy and live in squalor, right?
1:00:54
Well, you're probably going to go kid, you're probably going to go do the kidnapping.
1:00:57
The problem is that because Haiti is such a failed state, but besides the immorality
1:01:02
and danger of kidnapping people, right?
1:01:05
Looking at it on a national level, the people who run the hospitals, it's all NGOs.
1:01:11
It's all people from, you know, doctors without borders and other NGOs that are similar.
1:01:15
They're the doctors who run, who run the hospitals.
1:01:19
They're the ones who, you know, provide education and all these, and all these other things,
1:01:25
all these, all the sort of government infrastructure things that we have here in America.
1:01:29
Think about that.
1:01:30
Everything that the federal government does here in America, whether it's education and
1:01:34
hospitals and roads and all that other stuff, it's private nonprofit organizations that
1:01:39
pretty much do everything in Haiti because it's such a disaster.
1:01:42
So as soon as you start kidnapping people like this, as soon as you start kidnapping foreigners,
1:01:49
the problem is, well, now your doctors are leaving and now you're, now your school teachers
1:01:53
are leaving and everybody else who's sort of keeping this place running is now leaving.
1:01:58
And, you know, so that just exacerbates the problem.
1:02:00
It makes things so much worse and people are more desperate and, you know, so it's this
1:02:04
vicious circle.
1:02:06
So let's talk about rescue.
1:02:10
The situation with a rescue, it's sort of like that show the first 48, right?
1:02:16
Ideally, if you can locate somebody within the first 48 hours, that's really the sweet
1:02:20
time to attack and to try to get somebody back, right?
1:02:25
And the same thing in the tactical world, it's you want to try to get them as quickly
1:02:29
as possible as soon as you can get the information.
1:02:32
Don't let be because as time goes on, A, the hostage takers start getting more desperate.
1:02:40
The hostages start dealing with health issues and also the hostage takers then have time
1:02:48
to kind of look at their situation, look at their tactical situation and maybe start spreading
1:02:53
people out, maybe start, you know, really thinking about what they're doing and making
1:02:58
it as difficult as as possible to find the hostages.
1:03:02
And I think that we miss that golden opportunity, the golden window right at the beginning to
1:03:07
go in and make something happen.
1:03:10
I think we've lost that, I think we lost that weeks ago.
1:03:13
So now what's going on is the hostage takers, without a doubt, they're in contact probably
1:03:19
with the FBI or some variation, some variation or a department within the FBI or some State
1:03:26
Department official, I don't know, but they're almost guaranteed they're having some sort
1:03:31
of a dialogue where they're talking with these, where they're talking and trying to negotiate
1:03:35
a price and all that kind of stuff.
1:03:39
So the issue though is a lot of these hostages now after several days or after several weeks,
1:03:46
excuse me, their health situation, I promise you is deteriorating really, really bad.
1:03:51
So they're not going to have any kind of proper medical care.
1:03:56
They're probably going to be drinking dirty or even if it's, you know, air quotes filtered
1:04:01
water, Americans and Westerners like our gut biome cannot handle even local filtered water.
1:04:07
Like you need bottled water, period done end of story, like you don't drink the regular
1:04:11
water there because you can't physically handle it.
1:04:14
So the hostages right now, they're definitely in a situation where their health is deteriorating,
1:04:20
they probably are dehydrated from vomiting, diarrhea, they're probably not getting really
1:04:25
enough food.
1:04:27
And so their health situation is deteriorating.
1:04:28
I know that's, I know at least one of the, there was like an eight month old kid who's
1:04:32
probably nine months now, that's a really, really rough situation and you're dealing
1:04:37
with one of the worst gangs in the world.
1:04:40
So without a doubt, the women are being abused, all kinds of just horrible, horrible stuff.
1:04:44
And they've probably split the group up into multiple places around the countries, most
1:04:48
likely what's happened at this point.
1:04:50
So in order to make a rescue happen is ideally you want to find, you want to be able to locate
1:04:56
all of those locations, locate where all the hostages are and try to get them all out
1:05:01
at the same time.
1:05:03
That's going to be extremely difficult to do if you're not willing to take any casualties.
1:05:07
If you're not willing, if you, if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're criteria for
1:05:13
launching the mission is, hey, we are, you know, we are 75% certain that we can get 100%
1:05:18
of these, 100% of the hostages out with no casualties, you know, if that's your criteria
1:05:23
to go to get the green light for the mission, it's probably not going to happen at this
1:05:28
point because it's, there's just no way to be that certain.
1:05:32
And so I guarantee you what one thing I can guarantee you is that JSOC, the Joint Special
1:05:36
Operations Command, the generals and the admirals from, you know, SEAL Team Six and Delta Force
1:05:42
and all their supporting units and the 160th and all the different air assets and everything
1:05:47
that we have, I guarantee you they either know exactly where or are very close to finding
1:05:52
exactly where all of these hostages are.
1:05:55
And they already have a plan in place.
1:05:57
I guarantee you the president's already been briefed on it and I guarantee you that it's
1:06:01
just a matter of sort of a thumbs up or thumbs down at this point coming from the president.
1:06:05
Now keep in mind, our current president, he is the only one, he is the only one who spoke
1:06:12
up and didn't want the bin Laden raid to happen.
1:06:16
Like think about that.
1:06:17
Like wrap your brain around that for a second.
1:06:18
If you're listening to this.
1:06:19
Like the only guy who said, no, let's not go kill bin Laden, who, who, who advised against
1:06:26
doing that raid, which it was a courageous decision on Barack Obama's part to, to make
1:06:33
that decision to go after bin Laden, because you're going into a sovereign nation and
1:06:36
you know, it's going to be an international incident.
1:06:38
If you're wrong, they weren't a thousand percent sure that bin Laden was there.
1:06:41
So it was a courageous decision.
1:06:44
But even Obama and Hillary Clinton and all of their in that entire cabinet, they were
1:06:49
like, hell yeah, let's go kill bin Laden, right?
1:06:52
The only person who was like, no, let's not do that was the person who was now the president
1:06:56
of the United States, and who was now in a position to make, to give the green light
1:07:00
of the red light to any kind of mission that would happen down there.
1:07:05
And so whether it's cowardice or maybe they don't have the information they need, I don't
1:07:09
really know, but kind of going back to what we were talking about earlier at the beginning
1:07:13
of this conversation, you know, if you look at the, if you're thinking like a politician,
1:07:18
especially a leftist politician, what would it look like?
1:07:22
If you send a bunch of predominantly white commandos down into Haiti that kill a whole
1:07:30
bunch of black people and save the white people and get them home, right?
1:07:33
Because if you go in there, all you're going to be doing is you're only going to be fighting
1:07:36
black people, right?
1:07:38
And so what's that going to look like, you know, politically, right?
1:07:41
So that might be what's going on in the, you know, on the political part of the president's
1:07:48
brain.
1:07:49
I don't know.
1:07:50
You know, there's a lot, there's a lot to, you know, look at and consider when it, when
1:07:53
it comes, when it comes to this stuff.
1:07:55
But I think honestly, the decision should have been made a while ago to launch a mission.
1:08:01
One other thing I will say as far as a rescue mission that does make it a little bit more
1:08:04
complicated.
1:08:05
This mission to go get the hostages, it's 17 people.
1:08:09
Like that is a lot of people, you have to figure, you know, at least half of these people
1:08:14
are not going to be able to pretend you need to be prepared to move at least half of these
1:08:18
people with stretchers and, you know, being able to drag them out of there because they're
1:08:22
might might be sick.
1:08:23
They might not be able to move on their own.
1:08:27
And that takes a lot of space in a helicopter to get that.
1:08:30
So that's a minimum you need like a Chinook helicopter to land there, right?
1:08:35
Also if you're hitting multiple places, this would not be a simple, a relatively simple
1:08:41
bin Laden style raid, right?
1:08:42
If you watch the movie Zero Dark Thirty, they sent in a couple of helicopters.
1:08:45
Yes, they had the 75th Ranger Regiment, you know, holding, you know, holding out in case
1:08:51
they needed to bring in reinforcements.
1:08:53
But it was a relatively simple thing, two helicopters land.
1:08:55
You go inside, you kill bin Laden, you grab his body, you leave, right?
1:08:58
Relatively simple.
1:09:00
But with this, it's much more complicated and the area where the hostages are at, you
1:09:05
would basically have to send in the entire 75th Ranger Regiment and, you know, multiple
1:09:10
strike teams.
1:09:11
You have a Delta four strike team, a Devruh strike team to hit the multiple locations
1:09:16
of where these guys are at and then basically have the entire 75th Ranger Regiment there
1:09:20
to support and hold off the hundreds of gang members who are in the area.
1:09:27
So it would be a much larger operation that would probably take several days.
1:09:31
It wouldn't be just as simple in and out in a couple of hours type of mission.
1:09:36
If, you know, that that's just sort of me sort of playing armchair armchair general, if you
1:09:41
will, kind of looking at appreciation, I appreciate you getting into all the details in terms
1:09:46
of that.
1:09:47
And to be honest with you, I hadn't even thought about the fact that Joe Biden is the one that
1:09:51
could potentially give the thumbs up on this mission because it's been well documented
1:09:54
at this point that he's been wrong about basically every foreign policy issue possible.
1:09:58
And that was, you know, pretty, pretty well known.
1:10:01
And then at this point, you know, we have a guy that this is a more complicated situation
1:10:05
than the bin Laden raid.
1:10:06
And that was a raid that he was the only one that was like, no, I don't think we should
1:10:08
do that.
1:10:09
And then whatever else he didn't think probably crapped his pants.
1:10:12
But I guess the just to put a bow on this before we move on to Burma, I do want to talk
1:10:16
about Burma before we get out of here.
1:10:19
If you had to give us a percentage chance right now that these people are going to come
1:10:25
back that we're going to get our 17 Christian missionaries back.
1:10:27
Like, and I know that we're this might be a foolish thing to even ask you and you can
1:10:31
tell me so you can tell me to stick it.
1:10:33
Like, what do you, what do you think the chances are now that this is being drawn out even
1:10:37
further?
1:10:38
Well, like, what do you, how do you handicap it at this point?
1:10:40
And that's, that's a really, really good question.
1:10:43
And that's something I've actually that's ironic that you asked me that because I've
1:10:46
actually been sort of, you know, towing around with that same exact thought in my own head.
1:10:50
And the honest answer is I don't know.
1:10:53
The, the, some of the factors you kind of have to look at here, a is okay, a rescue mission
1:11:00
or they going to launch a rescue mission, just look, looking at the political factors,
1:11:03
but then also the tactical factors, which we could do it.
1:11:06
We wouldn't be able to get 100% of the hostages.
1:11:08
We might be able to get half of them or, you know, hopefully 75% of them, you know, you're
1:11:12
going to lose people.
1:11:13
Like, they're going to be shot.
1:11:14
It's going to be violent and you're not going to be able to get all of them, right?
1:11:16
The fact that the idea that we would actually, or that, that the president would would authorize
1:11:21
that kind of a decision, I don't see that happening.
1:11:23
I think that is basically a 1% chance of that happening.
1:11:27
As far as paying off the hostages, or paying off the hostage takers to get the hostages
1:11:32
back, I think the chances of that are a lot higher.
1:11:37
They're probably negotiating.
1:11:38
They're probably trying to get a lower number.
1:11:40
They're probably trying to get everybody back for a smaller amount of money.
1:11:44
But, you know, I wouldn't even begin to speculate on like what, what that negotiation process
1:11:49
even looks like.
1:11:50
You know, did they even have proof of life for all the hostages, you know, like, all,
1:11:55
all that kind of stuff.
1:11:56
I, I personally, if I had, if I had just had to bet, I think we'll probably go with the
1:12:01
first option that I'd mentioned earlier of the three options.
1:12:04
They'll probably just kind of, over time, they'll probably just kind of ignore it.
1:12:08
We have, look at, look at, look at all the, look at all the people that we have in, in
1:12:13
Kabul and all around Afghanistan.
1:12:16
And we've basically given the middle finger too.
1:12:18
That doesn't include all of the people who fled Afghanistan, for example, and have gotten
1:12:22
into Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and Pakistan and have maybe moved into other countries
1:12:27
as well.
1:12:28
And I can tell you, from, from personal knowledge, from people who are on the ground, that there's
1:12:35
no support for those people, right?
1:12:37
So I think the foreign policy at this point is just going to be to kind of ignore it and
1:12:41
pretend like it's not happening.
1:12:42
I think that's why we're not seeing it in the news, is because they're just kind of
1:12:45
not talking about it.
1:12:47
And I, again, I, I hope, I hope, I truly hope and pray that I'm wrong.
1:12:50
I hope that I wake up tomorrow morning and find out, hey, you know, they got the hostages
1:12:55
out.
1:12:56
I hope I'm wrong.
1:12:57
But I don't think that I am.
1:12:58
I think that, I think that the hostages, until we have a, until we have a new president,
1:13:04
I think that they're kind of, kind of screwed.
1:13:07
The only other last little caveat I'll throw out there is maybe, and again, I'm just hoping,
1:13:12
you know, maybe they're waiting for the correct, the correct, like political timing, maybe,
1:13:17
you know, the night prior to Thanksgiving, the mission happens, you know what I mean?
1:13:21
So everybody wakes up in the morning on Thanksgiving and they can talk about this rescue mission
1:13:25
that happened.
1:13:26
And, you know, maybe they're doing that for the time it politically or something.
1:13:29
I don't know.
1:13:30
I, that's, you know, the, the eternal optimist part of my brain is going like, well, maybe
1:13:35
that's what's going on.
1:13:36
Maybe they're, maybe they're just waiting for the right political moment.
1:13:39
So it can be a great, you know, time for the country to come together or something.
1:13:42
But, yeah, long story short, I don't think the, I don't think they have much of a change.
1:13:47
At this point.
1:13:48
Well, that's horrible to hear.
1:13:49
And I've thought about the same thing as well as you were describing the situation.
1:13:52
Like maybe they're waiting for, you know, a political football that they can easily catch
1:13:56
and run across across the goal line.
1:13:57
But at this point, as ridiculous as it sounds, I don't think the majority of the American
1:14:02
population knows that 17 missionaries have been kidnapped and Haiti.
1:14:06
I mean, it's kind of a fringe thing, even in Christian communities.
1:14:09
I don't think a whole lot of people know that that's happening because the news cycle is
1:14:13
so crazy, because the Biden administration is so inept.
1:14:16
But we're not going to, we can spend the rest of the day talking about that.
1:14:18
But before we let you go, because I know we got to wrap up here soon, I want to talk
1:14:21
to you a little bit about what's going on in Burma right now.
1:14:23
We talked about that a little bit on the last podcast.
1:14:25
That's obviously something that you're doing with stronghold rescue and relief.
1:14:28
You're trying to, you know, help people on the ground there.
1:14:31
So just give us a little primer on kind of what's going on there and what you guys are
1:14:34
doing.
1:14:35
Yeah, absolutely.
1:14:36
So sorry, right before I answer that question, I, there was one little thing I needed to
1:14:39
mention about the, the missionaries.
1:14:41
So, and this, I wouldn't be doing it justice.
1:14:43
So the Christian aid ministries, they're really, really good people.
1:14:48
When I, when I was in 2017, when, when I was shot during the rescue mission to get that
1:14:53
little girl out, you know, I was taken back, I was driven back to a, a bombed out mosque,
1:14:59
which was the first AIDS, which was the sort of the field aid station.
1:15:02
Well, the guy who drove the ambulance, this armored ambulance, you know, 150 feet away
1:15:07
from ISIS guys, you know, dragging me out of there, driving me out of there was somebody
1:15:12
from cam, from somebody from Christian aid ministries, a guy named Darryl.
1:15:16
And so I'm extremely grateful to him.
1:15:19
And then also too, when I got back to this bombed out mosque, which was a, a makeshift
1:15:24
sort of field hospital, one of the ladies who helped wrap and bandage my leg, her name
1:15:30
was Rhonda.
1:15:31
And she is also from Christian aid ministries.
1:15:33
These are men and night, these are men and night pacifists who refuse to carry weapons.
1:15:38
And normally I would kind of turn my nose up at that.
1:15:41
But these people were out there in true danger, not armed, because they truly believed in
1:15:46
helping other people and in helping, you know, people in dangerous places.
1:15:50
So I just have to give them a shout out.
1:15:52
Like I truly appreciate them and I'm grateful for the medical treatment they gave me and
1:15:58
also happy ending to that story, Darryl, the ambulance driver and Rhonda, the nurse, they
1:16:04
got married.
1:16:05
So okay.
1:16:06
So thank you to them, the, so Burma.
1:16:11
So basically what's going on in Burma right now is the central government is basically
1:16:16
committing genocide against the ethnic minorities.
1:16:20
The government of Burma is the military.
1:16:21
So imagine if an American general stood up and said, I am now, I am, you know, I am the
1:16:28
captain now, right?
1:16:29
He's like, Hey, I am, I am now the president of the United States.
1:16:33
And he used the military to, to basically enslave the American population.
1:16:39
And then the American military started going after any ethnic minority that they didn't
1:16:44
like, right?
1:16:45
They started going after the Native Americans.
1:16:47
They started going after, you know, Latinos or start going after white people or whatever,
1:16:51
you know, they started targeting people because of their ethnic and religious beliefs.
1:16:55
That's what's going on in Burma.
1:16:56
The military controls the country and they're going after everybody that they don't like,
1:17:01
which is primarily ethnically driven as opposed to religious religion driven.
1:17:08
So there's basically two seasons in Burma.
1:17:13
There's the rainy season like monsoon seasons where there's these, you know, insane amounts
1:17:18
of rain happen.
1:17:19
It's usually from the end of May up until the end of October and sometimes into November.
1:17:25
And so, and then the rest of the year is they call it the dry season.
1:17:28
And usually in December, January timeframe, once all the dirt roads have sort of hardened
1:17:35
in the sun and passages through, you know, past roads and passages through the mountains
1:17:42
and stuff are clear.
1:17:44
That's when the fighting kicks off because the Burma army then launches attacks to these
1:17:49
different tribal areas where they have to get through on roads.
1:17:53
So they're going to land they'll rape and murder everybody if you've watched the movie
1:17:59
Rambo 4 with Sylvester Stallone.
1:18:03
That takes place in Burma and, you know, it's sort of a, it's a Hollywoodized, but it's
1:18:08
fairly accurate as far as the atrocities and such that they will, that they will commit
1:18:12
against the different ethnic minorities.
1:18:14
So fighting season is about to kick off.
1:18:17
And there's already fighting that's been going on all summer and it's still going on.
1:18:21
And we have rescue teams of locals that we've trained up to, that we mentor to help them.
1:18:28
So they can basically protect their own people even when we're not there.
1:18:31
So we send in guys who wreck seals and rangers and such and we teach them how to protect
1:18:36
their families, how to conduct evacuations, how to, you know, get people out.
1:18:42
And so what we'll be doing over the next, you know, six, seven months until the end of
1:18:48
May is we're going to be bringing in a lot of emergency food and medical rations because
1:18:52
what happens is these people who live in, you know, who live in bamboo huts, they, these
1:18:59
villages will get attacked so people will run into the jungle, run into the mountains
1:19:04
to try to hide and they'll just take whatever they can carry on their back and they'll run
1:19:07
into the jungle to get away from the Burma army who's shooting mortars at them, who sends
1:19:11
in troops on the ground to kill them, who puts land mines in there, the Burma army will
1:19:15
put land mines in villages that they've cleared, even though they burned all the buildings
1:19:20
down is very easy to rebuild them because they're just bamboo, they'll put land mines
1:19:23
everywhere.
1:19:24
So anybody who comes back and tries to, you know, rebuild the village, people are losing
1:19:30
limbs and things like that.
1:19:31
So we send in again, ex special ops guys, such as myself, I'll be there and we basically
1:19:36
help, we help with medical, with medical care, emergency food, and then we also help protect
1:19:42
refugees and people who are running, another thing we also do is we're bringing in, we've
1:19:48
actually already brought in radios like handheld, like really high quality handheld radios and
1:19:54
solar panels, and we're putting these radios in the villages that are closest to the fighting.
1:20:01
There's about 20 different villages in one particular area that every single time fighting
1:20:05
season kicks off, they have to run at some point.
1:20:09
So what we've done is we've got, we're basically building a communications network there so
1:20:14
that these villagers and the village leaders and they can hop on the radio and they can
1:20:18
call over to the next village over and they can say, hey, the Burma army's coming at us
1:20:23
here, you know, don't go into this valley or hey, you need to retreat to this area or
1:20:28
hey, we're under attack, which way should we go, you know, and then they can call the
1:20:31
other person's like, hey, we're under attack too.
1:20:33
So don't come here.
1:20:34
You know, that kind of thing.
1:20:35
They coordinate their efforts and this stuff will actively and has already actively prevents
1:20:41
rape, prevents genocide, it prevents murder, it prevents death from starvation and from
1:20:47
malnutrition and disease and all that kind of stuff.
1:20:49
And so we have, like I said, we have teams that go in and help and we'll be continuing
1:20:55
to do that.
1:20:56
So that's sort of roughly the situation on the ground in Burma.
1:21:00
But what's beautiful about it too is I know we've talked about a lot of, you know, a lot
1:21:04
of sort of deep, sort of rough topics, everything from Afghanistan to Burma to Haiti, right?
1:21:11
But what's beautiful in these dark areas and in these dark places is it's amazing to see
1:21:18
and I'm privileged in my life to have always been part of a group both during as a seal
1:21:25
and then afterwards, I've always been a part of a group of people who are willing to go
1:21:29
in and are willing to lay down their lives to help their fellow man.
1:21:34
And it's not always warriors.
1:21:36
Sometimes it's an old lady who's willing to, you know, carry something for somebody
1:21:40
or who's willing to carry a child over a mountain or whatever it might be.
1:21:45
I'm grateful that in my life, I have been able to see heroes of all shapes and sizes
1:21:52
and colors from all different places, people who come together and in the worst of times,
1:21:58
they're like, "You want to know what?
1:21:59
We're going to stand up.
1:22:00
We're going to do the right thing no matter what it costs us."
1:22:03
And I think that, and I want listeners who, you know, we've talked about all these problems
1:22:07
here in America, it's like you can be that hero.
1:22:11
You can stand up.
1:22:12
You can do the right thing.
1:22:13
And your act of heroism might be just standing up for yourself when somebody calls you a
1:22:20
racist and you're like, "Hey, like, no, absolutely not.
1:22:22
Like you don't get to say that to me.
1:22:23
Like don't you dare accuse me of being that.
1:22:25
I'm not a Nazi.
1:22:26
What are you talking about?"
1:22:27
You know, that might be the act of courage that you need to do.
1:22:30
It might be to also to listen to somebody, right?
1:22:33
As much as we don't want to listen to people who have different points of view, another
1:22:37
heroic thing you can do is like, "Listen, like, hey, why are you protesting?
1:22:40
What are you so mad about?"
1:22:43
Clearly you're upset about something.
1:22:44
Try to understand where they're coming from, even if they're wrong.
1:22:47
Understand where they're coming from.
1:22:48
Just see what their thought process is.
1:22:50
And then at a minimum, you can understand how to engage with them.
1:22:55
You can understand how to have that dialogue with them.
1:22:57
And that's not going to work for everybody.
1:22:59
But we have to, as a society, start being heroes in our own lives.
1:23:08
And that's the only way that we're going to get our country back.
1:23:10
And I see people all over the world in much, much, much worse circumstances.
1:23:15
You had said earlier, "Hey, this isn't the most divided we've ever been, right?
1:23:18
We're not running around killing each other."
1:23:20
And that's so true.
1:23:21
I go to places actively where that is happening, and I can tell you that we need to avoid that
1:23:28
at all costs, and we can avoid that by talking to each other, by working together.
1:23:33
I know it sounds all fluffy and frilly and political, but no, it's true.
1:23:37
It really, really is true.
1:23:39
And it's your choice.
1:23:41
You get to make the choice of which side you want to be on, and I'm not talking about
1:23:45
left or right.
1:23:46
I'm talking about a listener or a talker, a doer or a complainer.
1:23:50
I guess what I'm trying to say is just be involved, do what you can in your own life
1:23:57
and in your own community to make your world a better place.
1:24:02
Well, I talked about this a few weeks ago.
1:24:04
I did an episode called The Modern Bystander Effect, and I was talking about how this almost
1:24:08
raped on a train outside of Philadelphia for like 27 stops or something like that, and
1:24:12
nobody interceded about this woman that was physically assaulted, and people were taking
1:24:17
video of it, her in a train car or a subway car in New York City.
1:24:21
And that's what we get to do, especially as Christians, that's the Amago day.
1:24:24
Someone has the image of God written on them right now, and it's being violated, and what
1:24:28
are you going to do?
1:24:29
Are you going to pull out your phone and video it, or are you going to intercede?
1:24:31
But I just got to tell you, every time we talk, I'm excited to talk to you whether it's on
1:24:34
the show or off the show, but I'm always depressed after.
1:24:37
I'm like, dang it, the world's so crappy and so ugly, but I'm glad there are guys like
1:24:42
you and guys like you, the ones you described and the people that are on your team that are
1:24:45
there to push back darkness exactly where the source of the darkness is, but as of right
1:24:49
now, that's all for me.
1:24:50
Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?
1:24:52
I know that is all man.
1:24:53
I really appreciate it.
1:24:54
And if people want to help support what we do at stronghold rescue and relief, just go
1:24:57
ahead.
1:24:58
Just go over to strongholdrescue.org, and if you want to support, great.
1:25:02
If not, you just want to kind of learn more about what we do or the different situations
1:25:06
that we're involved in, you know, feel free to read up on it.
1:25:09
Yeah, I highly recommend you guys do that.
1:25:10
You can also go to the website.
1:25:11
It will be in the show notes to get hooked up to the newsletter to make sure you're up
1:25:14
on everything that's going on with that organization.
1:25:17
But Ephraim Matos, thank you for coming back on Undaunted Life of Man's podcast.
1:25:21
Thanks so much for having me.
1:25:22
I appreciate it.
1:25:23
There you go, guys.
1:25:24
I hope you enjoyed the return appearance of Ephraim Matos, an Undaunted Life of Man's
1:25:27
podcast.
1:25:28
But before we let you go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost at Undaunted Life.
1:25:31
Our mission is equipping men to push back darkness specifically with content like this
1:25:34
podcast that helps you forge spiritual, mental and physical resilience.
1:25:37
So I'll go over some of the links for you.
1:25:39
I've got a link to the stronghold rescue and relief website.
1:25:41
That's where you can go to sign up for their newsletter.
1:25:43
That's where you can go to donate to keep all of their amazing work going.
1:25:45
I've also got a link to his book City of Death.
1:25:47
There's a couple of video links to some things that he's done overseas.
1:25:50
And then also I've got a linked episode 197 of our podcast that was Ephraim Matos' first
1:25:54
appearance.
1:25:55
And also for those of you that are interested in those Stevenson knives, that link is here
1:25:59
at the end of the podcast.
1:26:00
And again, that phone number is 863-528-9633.
1:26:04
Just make sure that you mention Undaunted Life to get 10% off your order.
1:26:07
All right, guys.
1:26:08
Thanks so much for listening to the show.
1:26:09
We do appreciate it.
1:26:10
Wherever you're listening to this, please subscribe, rate and review.
1:26:13
If you want to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, you shoot me an email
1:26:16
to info@undontan.life.
1:26:18
That's I-N-F-O @undontan.life.
1:26:20
Follow us on Instagram and TikTok and like us on Facebook.
1:26:23
Check out our website for everything else, including how to donate to keep more content
1:26:25
like this coming your way.
1:26:27
Just go to www.undontan.life.
1:26:29
And we want to also thank the band August Burns Red for allowing us to use their music
1:26:33
for our content.
1:26:34
The music on this podcast is our song, "Cutting the Ties," which is off their 10th anniversary
1:26:37
re-recording of their album, "Leveler."
1:26:39
The links are in the description.
1:26:41
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.
1:26:43
Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual, mental, and physical resilience.
1:26:50
Keep seeking the Lion of Judah.
1:27:11
[music]