Americans for Intelligence Reform

Brad Johnson, President, and retired CIA Senior Officer and Chief of Staff. Insight into current events from an intelligence angle.

Information Operation with host L Todd Wood & guest Rich Higgins of ‘The Memo’

(Originally aired 21 Nov 2020) Who “invaded Omaha Beach in a lawn chair and a cooler?” Former NSA Senior Officer, Rich Higgins, who was a a Senior Fellow for Americans for Intelligence Reform until his death in Feb 2022, reveals the answer during this. L Todd Wood interview. Bringing his extensive experience and acute insight, Rich covers several domestic and global trends and events.

In 2016 and part of the White House, Rich was summarily fired for a memo sent to President Trump. Later, he authored “The Memo” detailing what he saw and what happened. He was Vice President of Intelligence & National Security for RED, LLC, a company that develops, tests and evaluates new combat capabilities for special operations, intelligence and irregular warfare missions. Rich was an expert on the nexus between theological doctrines and information age unconventional warfare and spent 20 years combating terrorism.

His book, “The Memo” is available on Amazon.

Consider supporting the family Rich left behind including a wife and four children. https://www.gofundme.com/f/richard-higgins-memorial-fund?qid=37267bfd599a20f9010befcba5c2e04b
Please subscribe and share – independent media like ours needs your support.

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[Music]
00:09
it is necessary to investigate
00:11
before legislating but the line between
00:14
investigating
00:15
and persecuting is a very fine one now a
00:17
man is seen
00:18
walking towards the officer’s suv where
00:20
the deputy’s suv investigators tell us
00:22
it seems the suspect was going to pass
00:24
them
00:24
then turned and fired multiple shots
00:26
while the two were parked
00:30
[Music]
00:39
one of multiple locations that have been
00:41
burning in kenosha wisconsin madam
00:44
speaker
00:45
my colleagues my fellow americans
00:48
i rise to support the impeachment of
00:50
president donald j
00:51
trump
00:57
as far as the allegations of cia hacking
01:00
the senate computers
01:12
[Music]
01:20
pain could be volatile and i’m about to
01:23
talk to him about
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allegations that he was involved with
01:26
prostitutes in moscow
01:28
that the russians taped it and have
01:30
leverage over him
01:32
[Music]
01:38
and now here’s cd media’s host of
01:40
information operation
01:42
l todd wood and george eliason
01:45
welcome to the information operation
01:47
while we where we try to tell the
01:48
american people really what’s happening
01:50
uh with this
01:51
massive military-grade psyop that’s
01:53
going on
01:54
against the population today we have
01:56
rich higgins who has a
01:57
multi-decade career as an army officer
02:01
in the pentagon and then a defense
02:02
contractor and then finally with the
02:04
national security council where he was
02:06
an adviser to president trump
02:08
he was fired uh a few years into that uh
02:10
for writing a memo where he outlined the
02:12
sedition and
02:13
the coup that was going on against the
02:15
president here’s the book by the way the
02:17
memo
02:17
we’ll get into that a lot welcome rich
02:20
thanks for coming on the show
02:22
hey thank you for having me i appreciate
02:24
it no worries
02:25
so i you know i i found your book
02:29
you know as a somewhat similar
02:31
background very concise and it’s it kind
02:33
of really told in a
02:34
in a quick read what we all have been
02:36
feeling for a long time what’s been
02:38
happening
02:39
inside and outside of of government the
02:41
media
02:42
you know education etc i i feel like
02:44
it’s all coordinated and
02:46
and really an infinite information
02:48
operation is why we
02:49
started this show but if you could give
02:51
us kind of an overview of your career
02:53
and
02:53
and what you what got you to this point
02:55
and you do a good job of it in the book
02:57
but
02:58
maybe it’ll entice our readers to to go
03:00
pick it up
03:01
uh yeah look um i really appreciate you
03:04
bringing me here today
03:05
and uh you know the this is my first
03:07
time ever writing a book
03:08
you know i i’m i’m probably like
03:10
yourself you know it’s
03:11
there’s kind of an adjustment period of
03:13
becoming kind of more public
03:14
with our experiences right it’s it’s
03:16
true i’m i’m still getting used to that
03:18
so if i i’m if i’m reluctant in some
03:21
areas you understand why
03:22
but uh yeah in a nutshell uh i was an
03:25
army eod officer
03:27
actually a non-commissioned officer when
03:29
i first first
03:30
served ended up leaving the army in 2000
03:33
went to work for the justice department
03:35
all this is laid out inside the book
03:37
uh ended up responding to the 9 11
03:40
attacks
03:41
in new york city the day after wanted to
03:44
get back into the fight
03:45
ended up in the defense department
03:46
working inside the counterterrorism
03:48
tech black ops world for about 10 years
03:52
and uh you know the the thing i i’m
03:54
trying to tell in the book is
03:56
uh you know and i titled it the memo
03:58
because you know having supported
04:00
trump in the 2016 campaign uh
04:03
i wanted to uh i wanted to give people
04:06
um a picture how somebody who kind of
04:08
comes from the national security
04:10
community
04:11
uh of the deep state if you will yeah
04:13
how does somebody
04:14
how does somebody that comes from that
04:15
community come to support a donald trump
04:18
right and uh what was it about donald
04:20
trump that
04:21
that spoke to something that i’d seen
04:23
that i’d experienced and candidly uh you
04:25
know
04:26
you get down into the ranks of the
04:27
military there’s a lot of people that
04:29
support the man
04:30
and i i was trying to i was trying to
04:32
give voice to some of that
04:33
um and so you know and
04:37
when you’re reading the book i think
04:38
what i want people to to take away from
04:40
it isn’t
04:40
it isn’t a look what i did book at all
04:44
uh the book was really a labor of love
04:46
because i think
04:47
i wanted to use my story to tell all of
04:50
our story
04:50
you know why would a veteran who’s a
04:52
maga guy yeah um
04:55
back this donald trump this businessman
04:57
from queens right
04:58
right and uh i think that yeah the blue
05:01
collar billionaire and you see the
05:03
you know i could have written a really
05:04
technical book about
05:06
you know special operations and black
05:08
ops it’s not that
05:10
i wrote it purposely in a way that i
05:12
hope is accessible not just the veterans
05:14
although
05:15
veterans and police officers i’m sure
05:16
will enjoy it it’s written for the
05:18
general public
05:19
and for people who are trying to
05:20
understand what is going on in our
05:21
country today
05:24
yeah as i said it’s i
05:27
i know i have and a lot of my friends
05:29
have had just this feeling for some time
05:32
that something is happening and it’s
05:34
really only come
05:35
i guess to fruition in the last six
05:37
months to a year where you really see
05:38
all the pieces
05:39
put together where you where you have
05:41
you know what’s been happening in the
05:43
fbi
05:43
the our intelligence agencies uh the
05:46
media education in government the state
05:48
department you know we’ve done a lot in
05:50
ukraine and what’s been going on in
05:51
there
05:52
with the state department as far as
05:53
supporting soros and elsewhere and that
05:55
agenda
05:56
is just fascinating and frightening but
05:58
um
05:59
so can you tell us what happened to
06:03
you in the white house um you know you
06:05
started
06:06
seeing what was going on i know you
06:07
write in the book that you felt that
06:09
some people needed to be
06:10
to be removed were you successful at
06:13
that at all and
06:15
you know how did that process play out
06:17
well i was successful at getting myself
06:19
removed so
06:21
i think i think you have uh i think yeah
06:23
you take the wins where you can get them
06:25
uh i think you’ll see that the
06:28
i think the best way to explain what
06:30
happened to the white house the white
06:31
house was kind of the culmination
06:32
you know the book begins with this story
06:34
right and it kind of cycles back to it
06:36
right but i think um having supported
06:39
the president through the campaign
06:40
um and you know i was one of his
06:42
counterterrorism advisors i was one of
06:44
his surrogates at the republican
06:45
national convention
06:46
a lot of politics and drama involved
06:48
there where i thought things really
06:50
started to come off the rails i mean we
06:51
you know we saw the rush hack the
06:52
election the hillary nonsense throughout
06:54
the campaign
06:55
but where it became alarming was right
06:57
after uh the election you know november
06:59
9th if you will
07:00
sure um you would expect in normal times
07:03
those sort of campaign
07:05
shenanigans to recede right and to go
07:08
away
07:08
yeah where this time we saw it
07:10
escalating
07:12
so the transition period is really where
07:14
i think i
07:15
kind of queued on something is wrong
07:17
here a lot of that was
07:18
planned obviously the women’s march and
07:20
all that stuff that happened
07:21
right so it’s it’s what we saw was this
07:24
coordinated
07:25
massive and you know you’re pretty sure
07:27
it’s perfectly named an information
07:29
operation a counterintelligence
07:31
information operation that instead of uh
07:34
receding and kind of backing off
07:35
you know accelerated and and magnified
07:39
you know as the as the preparations
07:41
began for him to assume office in
07:42
january and so
07:44
you know i was throwing red star
07:46
clusters up where i could
07:47
uh and warning you know various people
07:50
around the campaign but i think there
07:51
was no context for them to understand
07:53
this this just wasn’t the way things
07:55
were done
07:55
i remember a very specific conversation
07:57
i had with jeff sessions about this
07:59
and i said to him sir you know the fbi
08:01
is up to some stuff
08:03
you know we’ve got these concerns these
08:04
people have gone inside the transition
08:06
he said oh rich don’t worry about that
08:07
i’m sure the fbi is all over it
08:09
and you know looking back
08:15
so january 20th comes around and uh he
08:18
takes office
08:19
and you remember in the first couple of
08:21
weeks there you saw you know the
08:22
telephone call with the mexican
08:24
president
08:24
the telephone call with the australian
08:26
president and you’re saying yourself
08:28
what is going on here and
08:29
you know i’m harkening back to 2002 2003
08:32
this is the stuff we would do to saddam
08:34
hussein right right we would make
08:36
telephone calls from his generals
08:37
showing they were plotting to overthrow
08:39
him whether it was true or not i mean
08:40
this is just you know classic deception
08:42
type stuff right
08:43
right and so we we sat there
08:46
and and um you have to get past that
08:49
initial
08:50
shock of what’s going on around you and
08:54
uh finally once we kind of got past that
08:57
initial shock you know by
08:58
by mid-february general flynn’s gone uh
09:02
you know ezra cohen as you’ll see in the
09:03
the new movie that’s out ezra cohen
09:05
finds out about all these unmasking
09:07
abuses that had transpired it really we
09:08
really at that point dug in
09:10
we knew we were in a real fight that the
09:12
presidency itself was at risk
09:14
and uh i didn’t feel like the political
09:16
leadership in the national security
09:18
council could be trusted particularly
09:19
h.r mcmaster i thought he was a terrible
09:21
choice as the national security adviser
09:23
he represented everything that the
09:24
president ran against um
09:27
and i think uh you know we knew we
09:29
couldn’t go to him with this
09:30
so what i what i had done and the reason
09:32
the book is titled the memos i wrote
09:34
this
09:34
uh memorable warning the president about
09:36
the you know the
09:38
i’ll call them the forces arrayed
09:39
against them and the structure
09:41
of of of um they’ll call it the order of
09:44
battle of what those forces were trying
09:46
to accomplish who was behind it why they
09:48
were behind it
09:49
and i tried to do it in a short and
09:50
concise way as possible
09:52
um you know general mcmaster got a hold
09:54
of that memo
09:55
at some point and i was you know i tell
09:57
people all the time my feet didn’t hit
09:59
the ground you know i was
10:00
i was swooshed off that finally happened
10:03
in july when they figured out it was me
10:05
um yeah but but part of the battle that
10:08
went on inside the national security
10:10
council was one where
10:11
we had uh you know in normal times i
10:14
think you would see this
10:15
you would have a kind of a peaceful
10:17
transition within the national security
10:18
community itself but foreign policy had
10:20
been at the absolute forefront
10:22
of of the president’s campaign in 2016
10:25
where
10:26
you know we were going into year 15 in
10:28
afghanistan you know where
10:30
you know these endless war against isis
10:32
that just goes on and on and on in syria
10:35
um you know a uh uh
10:38
ostrich strategy of dealing with the the
10:40
chinese in terms of their informational
10:42
warfare and
10:43
uh their non-kinetic warfare right yeah
10:46
and so
10:46
the president was he was battling these
10:49
institutional norms
10:51
and what i saw happening and this isn’t
10:54
necessarily uh uh
10:55
you know i’m not trying to knock on h.r
10:57
mcmaster and the same is true for uh
10:59
john bolton
11:00
they thought their job was to tell the
11:03
president what these institutions
11:05
would do all right we see that now with
11:07
general milley
11:09
and my understanding of the national
11:11
security council and general keith
11:13
kellogg said this often remember you
11:14
staff the president
11:16
he is your boss right right and your job
11:20
exactly he is he is there our job is to
11:24
tell the institutions
11:25
what he wants to do exactly not the
11:28
other way around
11:29
so the communications pathway had been
11:31
inverted through this quote-unquote
11:33
interagency process uh and everybody
11:36
talks about the process you know talk
11:38
about a statist
11:39
term right the process it sounds like
11:41
something right out of 1984 moscow
11:43
you will follow the process comrade
11:45
right and so here here
11:47
here we are um you know with um overt
11:51
uh subversion taking place uh files
11:54
going missing meetings being
11:56
subverted uh documents missing telephone
11:59
calls leaking
12:00
clearly uh we had you know we had
12:02
crossed the rubicon
12:04
yeah definitely so you you talk in the
12:06
book about how mcmaster was really
12:08
pushing this islamic
12:10
is a religion of peace issue um can you
12:14
talk about that a little bit it wasn’t
12:15
just him obviously but it’s
12:16
it’s permeated the whole the military i
12:18
know for sure in the state department as
12:20
well
12:21
yeah i’m gonna i’m gonna say if i’ll
12:24
tell you flat out this
12:25
this and this really bothers me okay and
12:27
it’s it goes to the immaturity
12:29
um there’s an immaturity that that comes
12:32
with these leftist multiculturalist
12:34
ideas
12:35
right i have a lot of muslim friends i
12:37
have a lot of muslim friends in iraq and
12:39
afghanistan and other places
12:41
and one of the things they like about me
12:43
is that i actually take the time to
12:44
learn the rules
12:46
right because once you know the rules in
12:47
their world view they can speak more
12:49
candidly to you
12:51
what are they supposed to be saying not
12:52
saying when are they breaking their
12:53
rules when are they not breaking the
12:54
rules right when
12:55
are you gonna are you gonna uh betray
12:57
their confidences
12:59
right and so our ignorance of islam
13:02
uh it shows i mean there are there are
13:04
1400 years of islamic history to study
13:07
okay much of it in conflict with the
13:09
west and western civilization
13:11
my point was always inside the community
13:13
just don’t go blindly into this
13:16
right and you know you look back and and
13:18
the colonial countries
13:20
especially france uh which had uh you
13:23
know a tremendous amount of experience
13:24
in dealing with the middle east right
13:25
with the ottomans dealing with north
13:27
africa
13:28
um you know shirai isharak was warning
13:31
us back in 2003. you’re going to go
13:32
there and turn it into a democracy you
13:34
do realize it’s an islamic country right
13:36
and we just you know we made fun of them
13:38
and we said freedom fries and
13:40
you know some of our great fingers all
13:42
that stuff yeah exactly
13:43
and then so then you had like great
13:45
american scholars from places like
13:47
harvard samuel huntington
13:49
i mean this guy was a you know a genius
13:51
in many respects
13:53
he was immediately dismissed and taken
13:54
off the board because he didn’t comport
13:56
with the politically correct narrative
13:58
now h.r mcmaster just fell right into
14:01
that same old
14:02
rubric right yeah for whatever reason i
14:04
don’t want to assess his motives but
14:05
when you are
14:07
when you are willing to strategically
14:08
blind yourself like that
14:11
um you deserve what happens well it’s
14:13
kind of an intellectual dishonesty i
14:15
mean that’s the way i put it
14:16
when i talk to people on the left i mean
14:18
it’s will willful
14:20
of course um but tell me about sessions
14:23
i mean what what do you think his
14:24
motivations were you were close to him
14:26
at that point
14:27
a lot of people think he was a bad actor
14:30
others think he was just
14:31
you know not smart enough i mean where
14:33
do you put him in that whole
14:35
that whole charade as far as i think he
14:38
was a great
14:38
yeah go ahead oh i think i think i’m a
14:42
little bit more um
14:44
i’m a little bit more defensive of him
14:46
only in so far as he was one of the
14:48
first people that brought me into the
14:49
campaign
14:50
and his staff and um
14:54
my read on him is that he wasn’t a bad
14:56
guy he was a good senator
14:58
he he invaded omaha beach
15:02
with a lawn chair and a cooler okay he
15:05
had no
15:06
idea what he was going into um in normal
15:10
times he
15:11
in in normal times he would have had a
15:13
difficult time
15:14
bringing the bureaucracy bearing the
15:16
bureaucracy to heal he just
15:17
had no experience managing a you know a
15:20
bureaucracy with tens of thousands of
15:22
people
15:23
and massive institutional interests and
15:25
tremendous power
15:26
right yeah um so he in normal times
15:29
would have had a hard time in this
15:31
you know he he had his bud light and his
15:34
lawn chair and his umbrella
15:36
walking up omaha breech beach into an
15:38
mg-42 nest right and then
15:40
i mean yeah it’s just abs absolutely and
15:44
yeah i think all and candidly in his
15:46
defense
15:47
and uh general flynn i think as well and
15:49
in all of us
15:50
we were all in over our head yeah none
15:52
of us anticipated what we walked into
15:54
it took a while for everybody to figure
15:56
it out i think candidly i told i told
15:58
the president this and i’ll tell you
16:00
this
16:00
um his decision to fire comey was
16:02
decisive it’s the only thing that saved
16:05
his presidency in my opinion
16:06
and people will say oh no that’s how the
16:08
special the special counsel would have
16:10
the special console was a contingency
16:12
operation for them right
16:13
they never wanted to have to do it it
16:14
forced their hand
16:16
and they all got in the boat because
16:18
they still thought they were going to
16:19
pull it out
16:19
which is why weissman was really running
16:21
the show i think
16:22
um history is going to be really unkind
16:25
to these people
16:26
uh i i think these these cousters i like
16:28
to call them the koosters but you know
16:30
team coup
16:31
if you will uh history is going to turn
16:33
them to stone
16:34
for what they did i think you’re right
16:38
and i agreed with another thing in your
16:39
book where you said that
16:41
trump’s hiring process was his one
16:43
achilles hill that really
16:45
hurt him for the first three four years
16:46
of the first
16:49
i term you see that changing now as we
16:52
absolutely has changed
16:53
you know absolutely it’s changed johnny
16:55
mackenzie is uh
16:57
people people ding on him because he’s
16:59
young but he’s a hundred percent maga
17:02
he understands the issues of the past
17:04
he’s still learning kind of some of the
17:06
institutional nuances
17:08
but he has uh he has figured out i think
17:11
the vetting process by which you can
17:13
assess someone’s
17:15
not not necessarily fidelity to the
17:18
president
17:18
okay fidelity to the constitution the
17:21
rule of law
17:22
doing the right thing getting the
17:23
mission right i i think the the media
17:25
the media likes to
17:27
to castigate manga people as sort of
17:29
trump sycophants or something
17:31
but that’s not actually the case most of
17:33
us just want to do the right thing do
17:34
the mission get the job done
17:36
you know self-reliance independence all
17:38
those american kind of principles
17:39
believe in the agenda
17:41
yeah johnny reflects that what i thought
17:43
what i think happened initially is
17:45
you know the president’s a businessman a
17:46
real estate guy from queens
17:48
okay he is um he is
17:52
walking into an organization i mean what
17:54
are there three and a half million
17:55
employees of the federal government
17:57
worldwide i mean it’s just mind-boggling
17:59
yeah and the scale of it he was really
18:02
dependent upon finding help but the guy
18:04
i mean
18:04
and um the guy i think who nailed it
18:07
right off the bat was
18:08
uh steve bannon uh yeah it’s pack in
18:10
2017 where he said
18:12
the stat you know the staffing and the
18:14
decision to rely on the republican
18:16
national committee
18:17
to help staff the administration was the
18:19
original sin
18:20
of the administration it affected
18:22
everything else
18:24
and i think um he has learned that
18:26
lesson
18:27
uh but politics is what it is i mean
18:29
it’s it’s contact sport you know
18:31
here he is a businessman he thinks okay
18:33
i’m the president now i can go be the
18:34
president
18:35
look you’re the president you get to
18:36
celebrate your reelection for about 10
18:38
minutes
18:39
your election for 10 minutes and then
18:41
you’re right back into the political
18:42
fight
18:43
right i don’t think he fully
18:45
comprehended just how hard of a contact
18:47
sport it really is
18:49
but you think he’s there now oh
18:52
absolutely he’s there now
18:53
yeah okay you know both of us were
18:57
former military officers
18:59
i take offense to what i see happening
19:02
in the u.s military you know you still
19:04
have a lot of this
19:05
critical race theory being taught you
19:08
have a lot of the generals
19:10
during the obama administration were
19:12
actually purged
19:14
you know uh general ham in africa after
19:17
the benghazi incident was one example
19:20
and now you see secretary of defense
19:23
esper and general
19:24
milley the joint chief jon chairman
19:26
openly defined the president
19:28
just recently multiple times in a row uh
19:32
what are your thoughts about that it’s
19:34
shocking to me and offensive
19:38
uh i think that we’ve reached a point
19:41
you know
19:41
where um
19:44
much like we have to ask ourselves you
19:47
know when the fbi was spying on the
19:49
president-elect and then the president
19:51
you know trying to remove
19:52
him from office on whose behalf were
19:54
they working
19:55
right um this is where i’m at with esper
19:58
and millie
19:58
right whose behalf are they actually
20:00
working right yeah i mean the american
20:02
people put this president in office for
20:04
a reason
20:05
one of them was to get us out of
20:06
afghanistan pretty clearly was one of
20:09
them
20:09
and yet here we are uh four years into
20:12
his administration
20:13
and uh he’s still struggling to get that
20:15
done and and
20:16
in the world you and i occupied the
20:18
commander-in-chief said it happened
20:20
it happened period instantly right
20:23
yeah and uh it’s a it’s just i think it
20:26
goes to
20:27
um the very deep state culture i hate
20:30
that term by the way it’s so
20:31
conspiratorial right just sounds
20:33
conspirate the deep state it’s just
20:35
but it really is just it’s the
20:38
bureaucracy
20:39
operating without a rudder i mean that’s
20:41
that’s what you’re trying just does what
20:42
it wants it floats around
20:44
this potion of self-interest right and
20:46
and so
20:47
my my question is who is millie going to
20:50
general millie
20:51
general millie how is he how and who is
20:54
he going to be going to work for
20:55
when he resigns okay and the same thing
20:58
for esper
20:59
i mean what what is the post service
21:02
motivation that drives these individuals
21:05
and i think if you look there you’ll
21:06
find out what’s really
21:08
what’s really feeding this beast
21:10
interesting i think trump’s made it
21:11
clear
21:12
esper doesn’t have long to go i haven’t
21:14
heard him really
21:15
discuss millie specifically but i just
21:18
find it shocking but i think he hit it
21:20
right on the point there
21:22
who is there anyone else that you think
21:24
in the administration you may not want
21:25
to say it that needs to
21:27
be gone if you will does anyone else
21:30
obviously i can
21:33
i can avoid the political uh landmine by
21:35
just saying i think they need to do a
21:37
complete institutional reset
21:39
yeah i would ask for everybody’s
21:41
resignation
21:42
uh this is i mean this is not uncommon
21:44
right it’s just a courtesy
21:46
we want a courtesy resignation from
21:47
everybody and then we’re going to
21:49
reassess
21:50
right i would really like to see the
21:52
president take
21:53
um you know i’ll call it institutional
21:56
restoration
21:57
and make that one of his flagship
22:00
efforts for a second term
22:02
um there are some institutions that
22:04
probably need to be
22:05
either completely reset or just to go
22:07
away and be rebuilt
22:09
and then there are other institutions
22:11
that i think are easily salvageable
22:12
provided to correct change in leadership
22:14
i put the defense department in that
22:16
category
22:17
uh it needs to be reincentivized the
22:18
good thing about the defense department
22:20
is
22:20
you fire a couple guys for the you know
22:22
for for a reason everybody else gets the
22:24
message real quick
22:24
very quickly and i think that we you
22:27
know
22:28
we can start there and build out but the
22:30
idea and one of the things that scares
22:31
me more than anything else that we see
22:32
going on right now is there’s this
22:34
institutional
22:36
um i’ll call it indifference uh it may
22:38
be more
22:39
devious than that or hostile than that
22:42
but i’ll call an institutional
22:43
indifference to the fact
22:44
that you have these marxist ideologies
22:47
just yes
22:48
just seeping their way into these
22:50
institutions and they have been for 25
22:52
30 years in many respects but those
22:54
things are now come to a head and
22:56
uh they’ve been they’ve been just so uh
22:58
deleterious to our
23:00
overall capability what you see is what
23:02
i would call the citadels of western
23:04
civilization the citadels of the
23:06
republic the cia
23:08
the fbi the defense department i mean if
23:11
these
23:12
institutions aren’t safe none of us
23:15
are yeah yeah i mean it’s really crazy
23:20
so uh you know i i have been in the
23:23
of the opinion over the last year that
23:25
it was very obvious
23:27
uh you know late last year after
23:29
impeachment you had a roaring economy
23:31
the president was
23:33
on his way to re-election unemployment
23:35
for you know minorities was at record
23:37
lows
23:38
incomes were rising uh people were very
23:41
optimistic
23:42
and then we had this uh pandemic i don’t
23:45
believe in coincidences and i just feel
23:47
that that was
23:48
too big of a coincidence and then we
23:50
have yesterday two virus
23:53
manufacturers halt their you know their
23:55
trials
23:56
three weeks before the election on the
23:58
same day i i find all this fascinating
24:00
and
24:01
and to me i just don’t buy it i mean
24:02
what are your thoughts i think china was
24:04
involved i think they released it on
24:05
purpose
24:08
i’ll talk a little bit about china i
24:09
think
24:12
in may many people don’t know this in
24:14
may of 2019
24:16
china declared people’s war against the
24:19
united states
24:20
and um most of our you know most of our
24:23
strategists because they don’t underst
24:25
you know
24:26
we all in the west learn clap sweats
24:29
right
24:30
klaus which is like you know for
24:31
anybody’s ever been in the military they
24:32
can quote clause what’s left and right
24:33
we’ve all read on war
24:35
um but we don’t read mao
24:38
in the same way um and
24:42
mao is ten times the strategist klaus
24:44
which was i mean
24:45
the guy unified china okay but
24:48
he understands warfare is the continuum
24:50
of politics
24:52
but he has actually done it all right
24:54
and
24:55
i think when when i look at china um
24:58
what i saw happening in the bush years
25:00
and the obama years was this kind of
25:02
collective indifference to the potential
25:03
threat that they represented right
25:05
napoleon used to
25:06
say when china awakens the world will
25:08
tremble
25:09
and beginning in 2001 with the you know
25:12
the
25:12
reintegration of china into the global
25:14
economy you’re giving them five nation
25:16
status
25:17
we saw the chinese took advantage of
25:19
that and they authored several plans
25:20
china 2025
25:22
china 2049 and then most importantly the
25:25
one belt one road
25:26
effort and this one belt one road effort
25:29
is
25:29
um you know it’s the it’s the uh the
25:32
sync went on it’s the raison d’etre it
25:34
so it explains so much of what we see
25:36
going on in the world today because the
25:38
international bankers the central
25:40
bankers have decided that the
25:41
unification of the eurasian land mass is
25:44
central to their emergent markets
25:46
right and we saw this in the trump in
25:48
the trent the uh excuse me in the obama
25:50
years
25:51
they would talk about this concept of
25:53
managed decline right it was the managed
25:55
decline it was the age of china was
25:57
coming
25:58
well trump was elected to stop that
26:01
right
26:01
and so manage decline came off the table
26:05
and what took its place how about just
26:07
decline
26:08
so once they stopped being able to make
26:10
money off of us because the president
26:12
was implementing
26:13
smarter trade policies they became
26:15
overtly hostile
26:17
and what scares me is that the chinese
26:19
communist ideology
26:21
is aligned it has aligned itself with
26:23
the islamist ideology because they
26:25
recognize that we are
26:27
a blind b the democratic party has
26:29
embraced both of those hostile
26:31
ideologies
26:32
and see the money is behind them
26:35
right the money is backing their side we
26:37
we can’t even have the republican
26:39
congress uh or the the republican senate
26:43
uh you know put forward a referendum
26:44
condemning antifa and tifa still doesn’t
26:47
even designate a terrorist
26:51
must be behind the organization to
26:52
prevent that from happening not to
26:54
mention the fact that many of these
26:55
democrat politicians children
26:57
are members of antifa to include tim
26:58
kaine okay i mean that’s where we’re at
27:01
um and so when i think about china that
27:04
may 2019 declaration you had the
27:06
impeachment beginning we know that
27:08
they allowed travel out of wuhan
27:10
intentionally
27:12
one of the other things that’s always
27:13
kind of come to mind and i’ve questioned
27:14
openly on twitter in the past is
27:17
if you are going to do a bio this is the
27:19
problem for the chinese red is to
27:21
explain this away if you were going to
27:22
do a bio-weapon attack against the
27:24
united states
27:25
our policy of a bio-weapon attack
27:27
retaliation was nuclear
27:28
that was our deterrence policy so you’d
27:31
have to make it look like an accident
27:33
wmd sure right you’d have to make it
27:36
look like an accident in order to
27:37
release it
27:38
yeah so this is the great conundrum that
27:39
the chinese really ought to open their
27:41
books on right i mean this
27:42
this is the the danger of that sort of a
27:44
deterrence policy in the first place and
27:46
then you know we all know that and
27:47
for those of you who are interested in
27:49
the national security side you can go
27:50
and do some research on this
27:51
lieberman the guy who was doing the
27:53
research at harvard uh that was working
27:55
with the chinese and the two chinese
27:57
who were arrested at boston’s logan
27:58
airport they were looking at
28:00
the development of nano payloads for
28:02
embedding inside of coronaviruses
28:04
as a tailored weapon system uh or as a
28:07
delivery system for payloads that could
28:09
be
28:09
virally distributed inside the body
28:11
perhaps even targeting individual organs
28:14
this is the stuff of nightmares okay and
28:17
um our national security community has
28:20
really kind of played
28:21
you know again kind of short shift on
28:22
that stuff we we need to reinvigorate
28:26
uh that particular part of our defense
28:28
portfolio to you know because the you
28:30
know a threat
28:30
of the threat has changed they’re
28:32
willing to and
28:34
absolutely and i’m not saying that this
28:37
was for sure a bio weapon attack i’m
28:39
saying the possibility even today
28:41
remains
28:41
yeah and so um going forward i think
28:45
you know when you think about when you
28:47
think about these ideological threats
28:49
confronting us
28:50
i’m a big believer in the you know and
28:51
you’re a military guy i’m a big believer
28:53
in the strategic defensive
28:55
sure i think we need to focus on our own
28:57
house
28:58
and getting it in order and um
29:02
failing to do that right a failing to do
29:04
that everything else
29:05
doesn’t really matter yeah um and i’d
29:08
really like to see the president and
29:10
his because he is going to be re-elected
29:13
his new administration uh really focus
29:16
on the
29:17
getting the domestic part right and
29:18
beginning to to rest the country away
29:21
from these
29:22
you know these communist uh idiots
29:24
who’ve you know taken over the
29:25
democratic
29:26
party and they’re infecting our you know
29:28
our children
29:29
well they have to be confronted i i
29:31
happen to think that uh
29:32
their economy is not as strong as they
29:34
think it is you know i was
29:36
an on trader for a couple decades and
29:38
and i feel that
29:40
their debt is massive and that’s one
29:42
reason they were
29:43
incentivized to do something like this
29:45
to because they knew if trump was
29:47
re-elected
29:48
you know and the tariffs would continue
29:50
that they’re in real trouble they can’t
29:51
build cities fast enough to keep their
29:53
people working i mean it’s just
29:55
it’s it’s a house of cards uh so
29:58
speaking of the election and the reason
30:01
i started this show is
30:02
is there is obviously some type of
30:04
coordinated information operation
30:06
as we’ve talked about
30:10
how does the right go after this machine
30:12
this cabal this
30:15
uh people have to go to jail obviously i
30:16
think your point of uh consequences for
30:19
behavior
30:20
needs to happen and what’s coming out of
30:21
doj is not real
30:23
you know it doesn’t give you warm and
30:25
fuzzies on on that happening actually
30:28
yeah look i i think i’m i’m not a uh
30:32
i’m not a bar durham naysayer uh i just
30:35
you know i as somebody who’s worked
30:37
inside the community for a long time
30:38
you know mainly on the counter-terrorism
30:40
side i recognize these things are slow
30:42
yeah like just brutally slow like doing
30:44
good indictments takes time
30:46
and the scale of what durham has been
30:48
asked to investigate
30:49
is massive the reason i still believe it
30:52
is yeah
30:53
right right the but the scale of it is
30:55
is i mean it touches all the
30:56
intelligence agencies it touches the
30:58
defense department
30:59
it touches political politicians i mean
31:01
it’s just big
31:03
um if there were ever a case for a
31:05
special counsel this was probably one of
31:07
them
31:07
but we’ve had you know we had special
31:09
counsel fatigue by this point
31:10
right right and uh i think what you’re
31:13
going to see is
31:14
we won’t get everything we want you know
31:17
we’re
31:18
we’re not going to see everything that
31:19
we want i think we’re going to see
31:20
enough to know that you know people will
31:22
have paid
31:23
you know at some degree for what they
31:25
did they’re already paying in the public
31:27
sphere
31:28
certainly right oh and and i think i
31:31
think you know
31:32
i’m a i’m i’m i’m a believer
31:35
i think that history though is going to
31:37
really judge these characters right
31:39
um they’re going to be they’re going to
31:42
be fro you know andrew mccabe will be
31:44
frozen in history right there along
31:46
benedict arnold right right there next
31:47
to benedict arnold i mean it’s that it’s
31:49
that level of betrayal
31:51
and what’s amazing to me is they’re so
31:54
tone deaf um as to their own
31:58
malfeasance and corruption that that
32:00
they still are in this act of uh
32:02
disgusting self-justification that makes
32:04
it hard to watch them
32:05
right you know yeah
32:09
it’s it’s amazing to see true i mean i
32:11
agree
32:12
yeah it’s
32:15
so to wrap up um
32:18
i have one more point i i’m really
32:20
concerned also about our service
32:22
academies and i i keep telling myself
32:24
the term we can try to deal with this
32:26
but still today this
32:28
critical race theory social justice
32:30
cultural marxism
32:32
destroying the institutions you know
32:34
reducing the level of hardship
32:36
so that you don’t produce really you
32:38
know people who can
32:39
get through tough times i’m hopeful that
32:42
in the second term
32:43
that trump has the bandwidth to deal
32:45
with that or someone in dod
32:48
i mean do you feel that’s something that
32:49
can be addressed
32:51
or it’s it’s a little bit tough because
32:54
it’s education but
32:57
i think it’s imperative that it get
32:59
addressed um it’s not
33:00
unique to the service academies it’s
33:02
throughout the joint professional
33:03
military education environment
33:05
um you know i mean we remember a couple
33:06
years ago where you had the guy at west
33:08
point
33:09
caught you know he was wearing the chase
33:10
shirt right he wasn’t the only one
33:13
yeah and the professors knew and the
33:15
senior officers knew
33:17
and again it go the military is probably
33:19
the easiest to fix because the cultural
33:22
accountability model there is very quick
33:24
acting right you fire a couple leaders
33:26
for doing the wrong thing everybody else
33:27
gets the message real quick
33:29
and um you know this administration’s
33:31
moved to kind of address the threat of
33:33
communism we’re gonna
33:34
we have a massive educational mission to
33:36
kind of you know get people familiar
33:38
with the precepts again i was very lucky
33:40
i came into the military right about the
33:42
time that the cold war guys were
33:43
retiring
33:44
and i took the time to just sit and
33:46
listen to them
33:47
uh read the books they passed me read
33:49
the token archives read the sword and
33:50
the shield you know read read the books
33:52
about the cold war to understand it
33:54
and to get into the ideology not that
33:56
i’m an expert on it but i know
33:58
i know when i hear truth and um
34:02
that’s really what it requires i think
34:03
as far as the service academies go
34:05
you know we i think the na i think the
34:07
naval academy west point
34:09
i know you’re an air force academy grad
34:10
i think you know one of the things that
34:12
the maybe the president
34:14
needs to tell his post espersek def
34:17
is i want you to make a concerted effort
34:19
to give me an officer corps that’s
34:21
worthy of the republic
34:22
yeah and and that starts with
34:24
understanding this two things
34:25
number one is they need to understand
34:27
that the constitution
34:30
is simply the legal means but the actual
34:33
strategic idea the idea we’re defending
34:35
ism
34:36
is embodied in that declaration and you
34:39
need to understand the strategic nature
34:41
of your oath
34:42
and that is something so many of our
34:44
officers have lost sight of
34:46
well put rich thank you so again this is
34:49
the memo
34:50
uh rich where’s the best place to get
34:52
the book uh can they get signed
34:54
you can get it you can get it at rich
34:56
higgins
34:57
you can get it rich against the memo.com
34:59
if you want to sign copy just throw in a
35:00
request there i’m happy to do it
35:02
uh if uh you’re partial to spending
35:04
money with jeff bezos you can get it on
35:06
amazon barnes and noble the usual
35:07
suspects
35:08
please follow me on twitter at rich
35:11
higgins underscore dc
35:13
at rich higgins underscore dc uh you
35:16
know i’m
35:17
pretty active on there lately sometimes
35:19
more than others but
35:20
uh going into this election cycle and
35:23
everything we’re expecting to see i’m
35:24
gonna be out there throwing some
35:25
insights
35:26
from a political warfare special warfare
35:28
prism
35:29
and i hope people can pick something up
35:30
there what can we expect to
35:32
see of you in the future uh
35:36
wait god knows
35:40
all right rich uh thanks for joining us
35:41
on information operation and maybe we
35:43
can have you back on down the road
35:45
thanks for ha
[/expander_maker]

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