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Welcome to the Buck Brief for this episode, Kurt Schlicker back in action with all of us. He is a twenty plus year veteran of the United States Army. He's also an author, writes great books, senior columnist at Townhall dot com. And we got some big things to jump into today. Kurt, you ready for this action?
Let's do this thing.
We have one of the most impressive People keep calling it a espionage operator. It's there's a espionage component, it's really more of a sabotage and direct action or covert action operation by It is believed to be the Israeli government against Hesbalo terrorists all over Lebanon, and I believe in Desiria as well. What's just your your first your first shot at what the heck just happened to these guys?
Well, it really is the direct action thing. It's like people who go James Bond is a famous spi. Okay, he's not really a spy, he's kind of an operator guy. And what an operation. This was holy caw. You know, the Israelis are thinking leaps and bounds ahead, and I would love to figure out and unravel how they did this. My guess is they found the pager company, create a fake subcontractor, bought a bunch of pagers from somebody else, fixed them the selves, and then sold them directly to Hezebola.
I bet you Hesbola bought them from the Israelis. I don't think they jumped on a ship and went piece by piece changing these things. And it was an impressive job. And it's you know, it's one of those things. And this is one of my pet peeves, buck, is that so many of our American operations are either fully information operations or solely kinetic operations that they rarely seem to
have a strategic component. This one's got at all. Okay, it's got the information component, messages enemies and friends alike, it's got the kinetic component, and it created damage to hesbela strategic capabilities. Hesbela cannot react right now the way it should to a an Israeli attack. And I'm sorry this wasn't part of a greater Israeli attack. The invasion should come, should have come yesterday. While they were in chaos.
I've been very curious about why the Israelis have not treated hesbel as the main threat and sideline Gaza and gone and cleaned out Lebanon. That's what I would have done on October eighth. I was sealed off Gaza, just shot at them, killed as many as I could, But my main focus would be Hesbela.
I'd wipe that out time, come out and clean out Gaza.
What do you think? What do you think Hezbla in terms of reaction to this now? First of all, they've got to be paranoid as all heck, and I think rightly so, because it wasn't just the beepers, right, it was beepers and now the radios. So they got right into their supply chain. And it's not like they've been using beepers and radios for all that long. They realize how good the Israelis are at cell phone tracking, so they had to get off the cell net entirely for
their operatives. And then the Israelis were like, you can run, but you can't hide with your little walkie talkies and your pagers, so and pagers. You know, it's not the nineties anymore. Drug dealers and doctors, like, that's not even a thing. Really, I don't even know anyone uses pagers. But Israel figured this out and pulled off a pretty incredible,
incredible operation. But do you think HESBELA does anything major in response or are they too shell shocked by this situation to really do much of anything.
I don't know what they can do at this point.
They've got to assume other coms are compromise, that their entire structure is compromised, whether directly or indirectly. I mean, you know, you know, Akhmed maybe giving information to somebody who he thinks is I don't know, a Saudi or maybe an Iranian. The guy's really Israeli. They don't know. The Israelis have really got their number. They are, I mean, at least for twenty four to forty eight hours. They are combat ineffective. Essentially, they can fire a rocket or two,
but they're not a coherent force. And frankly, I think the Israeli should have taken advantage of that by sending you know, five divisions up and killing everybody in their
path who's part of ESBLA. I do want to point out, and a lot of the scumbag loser leftists in America whining like a little bitches about blowing the testicles and faces off of as bull of guys has ball a murder two hundred and forty one Americans, primarily Marines, at the Marine barracks in at the Beayirut Airport in October of nineteen eighty three, something that we shamefully have never
gotten revenge for. So if you want to, if you have a compassion and empathy for these semi human scumbacks, you're an anti American trader, and I've got something you can kiss. If I was a hespull Of guy, it would have been blown off.
Yeah. I think people forget all too quickly on the left in this country, or rather they probably don't know, and if they did know, they don't care. Hesbel just blew up twelve kids on a soccer field a few weeks ago. Twelve Israeli kids just blew them up with artillery rounds. They knew exactly what they're doing. They don't. When I say they don't care, that's not even they're happy.
And this is one of the key differences I think in the conflict is when Israel kills civilians there's an investigation. It's regrettable, and it's clearly not the intent of the action, saying it doesn't happen. I'm it's not a tragedy, but it's not the intent of the action, and there is there are realistic efforts to try to curb that damage. That happens in any war. It's a war that's being
forced on these really people. If Hamas could kill a thousand Israeli toddlers tomorrow, not only would they do it, they would celebrate it, they would pin awards on the chests of the of the martyrs and all this other craziness. I mean, it's it's a death cult, man. I mean, Hamas is a death cult. So is Hesbela.
Well it is, and I you know, I'm getting tired of leftist Americans attempting to leverage our morality against us. I am under no moral obligation to care more about Hezbola or Hamas's children than Hesbela and Hamas are.
And I don't.
If you don't want your kids to get killed, don't start wars. If you'd want to start wars, don't hang around your kids. But you don't get a free pass. You start a war. You're gonna die, and maybe the people around you are going to die. Do with that information as you will, but his burial is going to kill you. And I only wish but that the United States had the UH, both the moral courage and the technical savvy to do things like this. I mean, I know you worked for the CIA, and he had a
positive experience. Mine was mostly dealing with semi coherent drunks. But I don't think our CIA could pull some like this off.
I just you know, I I wouldn't say I had a I wouldn't say I had a negative experience the CI. I wouldn't say I had a positive experience either, you know what I mean experience, I sort of I had an experience. I sort of did my thing, and I was like, I'm done here. Honestly. One of the big problems, you know, I was just talking to our mutual Fred ned Ryan, who's got a book out about the DC Leviathan right, I'll have you know net on the which if.
I read the first draft of by the way.
Gave them some ideas, and I I was just thinking about how, you know the problem is, when I was in the CIA, there were super impressive people who worked at the CIA when I was there, they basically all left. All of them, Yes, none of them stayed, yes, so, and some of them lasted longer than me. I was at that like six year mark. Some of them like, you know, five or six years. Some of the five
to seven is when a lot get out. But then the number of high performers who get out before year ten is like staggering, because they're like, this is I'm sick of the bull crap. I don't make enough money to make this worth my time. And it's just a giant bureaucracy that doesn't want to do anything that's worthwhile. And that's the truth of most of unfortunately, the intelligence and National security complex. That's just reality.
Yep. In the military, the military's a complete disaster. It's completely demoralized, you know, whether it's the DEI stuff, which is having a huge effect, whether it's the strategic lack of vision, or whether it's just the lack of character and the senior officer core. Yeah, I mean, I mean, how many of these guys are getting real leaved, how many of these guys are getting indicted, you know, the fat Leonard thing, for God's sake, and and how many people,
how many of them are never seriously getting punished. I mean, you know the old the old saws. If you're an e for and you lose your rifle, you know, you get the Riot Act. If you're a general and you lose a war, you get another star. Yeah, and sadly that's true.
That's true in this within the CIA too. You know, if you if you're a little nobody and you bring your cell phone into the building, they act like they've just uncovered, you know, a Soviet mole of twenty years
or something. But if you do something catastrophically stupid that results in real like operational losses are broad or something, it's like, yeah, it was a committee decision, you know what I mean, everybody was in on this one, and nobody's really you know what I mean, nobody's really responding. That's that's unfortunately the way that these bureaucracies function. Uh, they are. I've said this before and and I think
it's important to remind people of this. It's not that they don't uh engender support excellence, they're actually suspicious of it, Like excellence is a cause for suspicion, Like what why are you doing more than the other people in this office in a way that actually helps the mission, Like why are you going above and beyond some of your superiors with better ideas or better like excellence is crushed under the foot of the giant Leviathan. That's the whole point.
Well that that's because mediocre people, the kind of people who you know want to you know, socialize the blame. It's it's literally the fighter Man meme where you have five different Spider Mans pointing each other.
He's the guy who's pud it up.
And I can tell you I know the people I know who stayed in the age like stayed I should just say in the national security more broadly, because some of them moved around, you know, they go to different places. The biggest ass kissers from when I was like a young guy with that sort of cadre, now that I see who's still because some of them have gotten jobs. You know, they're the senior person at this agency, senior
person at that agency. Like they move around. The ass kissers are the ones who got ahead and the talented people. I know this sounds self serving because I'm one of them, but whatever, I mean, you know, I did pretty well for myself. Leaving the agency. The talented people all left.
I did.
Okay, So I'm just saying.
It's like the sales manager who files the high fire fires his highest performing salesman because the guy's making more money on commissions.
Send the sales managers.
Mate, Yeah, there's a lot of that. That's the got I was told told explicitly by a senior agency person. And he wasn't trying he was trying to help me. He was trying to help me. He wasn't trying to know. He said, you have to understand that your job every day is to make your immediate superior look good in this place. That was what he told me. I was like, I don't know. I thought my job was like help
track and tag in bag al Qaeda terrorists. Like That's what I thought I was signing up for, but apparently not.
Well, you know, if you know, if you have an effective team and you're going to make the leadership's intent successful, Yeah, okay, I get that, but that's not what we're saying.
Let's come back in.
I remember this because I remember as a lieutenant. It's you know, Lieutenant s Flaker, it's not what you do, it's how you look.
Oh yeah, well, this is why I have another lebel. I mean, we should do like a whole, like three hour sit down on this thing, just like tear it. In the bureaucracy, people always say to me, how did you know that Petreus was actually kind of a dirt bag? Like how did you know that fill in the blank general was not some like, you know, reincarnation of Cincinnatus and like Maximus from Gladiator or something like how do you know? And I'm like, because the media liked him.
If the media likes him, it's because he has cultivated a persona in the media of the scholar general who like blah blah blah, and that's it's like they're running a little personal pr campaign. They're politicians in a uniform, all this all the time. That's why when Petreus got caught, you know, under the desk with his biographer and all that stuff, I was like, yeah, man, no surprise. As all adds up, Let's go into another subject here, assassination
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America disaster dot com, paid for by Stansbury Research. Assassination attempt number two on Donald Trump, Kurt, they've already moved past it in the news cycle. They've said that Trump brought it on, brought it on himself. And this is the kind of thing that even when you know what they're going to do, right when they do it, you still have to just say, oh my god, what is going on here?
You know? I saw Erasmus and Poll today. That's some like twenty three percent of Democrats said you know, I'd be better if Trump was killed, and like another thirty percent said, you know, I'm not really sure. Okay, it's really hard to have a funk I would expect in a normal society. You've got a fringe of five to
ten percent weirdos. Right, Yeah, when you have a quarter of Democrats going I want Trump to be killed, you know, a quarter of a major party, and that's the ones who admit it, right, yeah.
Another quarter, think about telling somebody, Think about telling a stranger that for a second, right, Like the mentality you know, you're someone asked this question like yo, I mean like there's something deranged about these Democrats?
Why yes, I feel like exposing myself to children at the park, like you asked, I mean, what kind of degenerate? First of all, what kind of degenerate feels that way? It's second of all, what kind of degenerate tells people that but they're proud of it?
Just to be clear, that was Kurt's impression. That was Kurt's impression of a Kamala Walls voter there. That was that was you guess Kurt know that you probably saw in DC at some like March for LGBTQ, whatever they got, like the trans trans guy with the fake boobs dancing in front of little kids, the whole thing, like this is a broad daylight in Washington, d C O a lot. Unfortunately.
Look, I I I think there's a backlash coming against weirdos.
I mean, we had a.
Starting in like the sixties, seventies and continuing on, we were all kind of like live and let live as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else. And that was fine until we live and let live to the part where they tried to like, you know, molest our kids. And now I'm not so much about living and let living. I'm more like, no, no.
I don't really want weirdos.
So you're not going to you know, when I get power, you're not going to have your pervert brade.
Now it's probably a good time to bring in.
Actually walk naked down the street. If you do, you're going to jail.
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minutes here with you on Kamala Harris's campaign. I actually I don't want to jinx anything, but I don't really believe in that kind of stuff. I think. I think Kamala is it's in her campaign is in terminal decline. I don't think they can pull the I think the plane has lost both engines and is heading to the base of a mountain. That's how I feel. What do you think.
I think you're right. I think there's only downhill from here. I don't think there's gonna be another debate, so I don't see another event which has the real opportunity for her to change things in a major way. The Trump people aren't going anywhere. It's the undecided who are looking at her, going okay, well, let's see what she's about. And the more they find out about her, the less
people like her. Now, if she thought that people would flock to her by being exposed to her, she would be doing as many interviews as jd Vance at dal Trump are. She realizes that she is a normal person, repellent. Okay, every time she gets exposed to normal people, they dislike her. She only has she can only go down from here, And I mean, you look at what happened recently with the Teamsters, and the Teamsters pulled their own people, and so I'm like, fifty eight percent said, oh yeah, we're
behind Trump, fifty eight percent of Teamster union members. Of course, the union goes, well, you know, it's kind of mixed among our people. We can't really, we really can't endorse anybody. But to have that giant white working class group so overwhelmingly in favor of Trump, I think is a huge message. And it's not just white working class. It's Hispanic working class,
it's Black working class. It's people who work for a living and are tired of being screwed over, like the residents of Springfield and told shut up, you're a racist if you complain about how you're getting the short end of the stick. I think they're tired of it. I think Donald Trump's secret of success is he's always listened to people who've been told to shut up and just
take whatever they're handed. And Kamala Harris is the quintessential person telling them to shut up and take whatever you're being handed.
Have you seen all these all these clips where they've then I sort of string them together. Any question about the economy, She starts with this, I grew up in a middle class family, Like this is the this is the the the you know, the branding, the pr machinery
that they've got for is I see her. I'm like, first of all, she lives, from what I understand, in like a five or six million dollar mansion in Brentwood right now, Okay, and has for a long time this notion that she grew up in a middle class family. I mean, he's the daughter of two probably unfirable with tenure professors who you know, had a combined household income of six figures. Like, she lit a very comfortable life, by the way, I have no beef with that at all.
Like that's great. You know, I think comfortable life is great. That's my point is merely like what does that have to do with anything? You know, It's not like meanwhile, jd Vance grows up in like a dysfunctional household. There's no money, there's an alcohol abuse, he's got friends dying from fental and they're mocking him because he's done well as an adult. Like I just feel like this, there's no sense, there's no sense of reality with these people.
Well, it's because of their deep contempt for people she thinks that year, says, I grew up in a middle class home like a mantra. All the idiot roobs out there will flock to her, and I think they're tired of it. And I mean, you look at a guy like JD, and boy, heyd, how about that guy? I mean, he has turned out great.
I was a believer all along. Early on, I said JD was going to be the vice president in January of this year. Okay, I was like, it's going to be Jad.
He's been fantastic. He gets out there.
We have a whole generation of guys, national security guys, whether military or other, who are also smart on their feet, and who have who've been built up not only the crucible of national service, which makes you harder, but the crucible of defending your ideas. I mean, to be a
normal American. I don't think he was a hardcore conservative at Yale, but to be a normal American at Yale and to stand up against the kind of communist nonsense and Tom Cotton at Harvard, for instance, that makes you tougher. And I think I think a lot of these new conservatives are much tougher, much harder to pin down, much harder to mischaracterize and much more willing to confront the regime media. He's been sensational.
I love this guy.
And the thing is, he's a thinker. There's guests to what he's saying. He's start repeating slogans. He's thought this stuff through and lived through a lot of it. So I'm I'm very happy, and I think, uh, I think he's the huge asset to the ticket. I think he's gonna wash wipe the floor with Tim Walt's not that anybody's gonna really care about vice presidential debate unless Walt says something insane. But you know, to get back to the main point, I don't see how Kamala goes up
from here. I see she can only go down, and as she's by the way she's kept herself from exposure. Exposing Kamala Harris to normal people makes normal people dislike her.
Yes, absolutely, which is why every Democrat is hiding her and doing everything they can to cover for her, because otherwise, well, it's the it's the absolute peak of the election cycle. You'd want to have her out there as much as possible, to do as many interviews, talking to everybody, But we can all we can all see what's going on. Sponsor for this segment is debt relief from Done with Debt dot Com. Because you didn't vote for the recession we
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That's eight eight eight three two two ten fifty four chat with one of their debt release strategies for free or Goeta done with debt dot com. Kurt, you wrote a great book, a novel about terror attacks recently that I wanted you to plug for everybody because they should go read Colonel Kurt's book.
It's called The Attack. It's a novel because I wanted to. I wanted to explore what a massive October seventh like attack exploiting our open border would look like. It is not a you know, so, it's not a dry academic exercise. It's a bunch of stories of a bunch of characters, and I used the inplut of a lot of national security professional in it, and it scared the hell out of a lot of people. It's an entertaining read. It's frightening, and I'm very happy with it. You should read it
so that you'll be ready. I mean, people read this book and say, you know, Kurt, I talked about carrying my weapon.
I'm carrying it all the time.
There we go, Kurt, schlick you everybody. Kurt. Always great to see you, man, Thanks so much.
Hey, thanks for having me