We are live, and I'm thrilled to be joined by my friend Ken Harbaugh. Ken is a former naval aviator. He is the president of Valor Media. He is the producer of the number one rated Apple documentary Against All Enemies. You can find that, download it, watch it on Apple TV. Ken is a veteran's activist and advocate, a democracy advocate,
and a democracy activist. Ken is part of the great fabric of America's civil society, where he has stood up for the country, taken the oath, flown off the deck of aircraft carriers, flown into harm's way, and has come home and has entered into another type of harm, which is as a leading voice in a great battle that's taking place as we speak, all across the country between two forces that have long been in opposition in the United States, forces that oppose liberty and those that wish
to expand it. And all through our history there have been attempts and attacks against the against the Constitution of the United States. There have been no gentle periods in the American story, and so today we live in a consequential time, and so it's a great privilege to be joined by We're going to talk about some of the activities that are taking place, the large veterans protests taking place on the sixth of June in Washington, d C.
We'll talk about that. We're going to talk about all of the things that are happening, but we're going to start by talking about the Valor network. And we're going to start by talking about a subject that's of real importance, something that has gone off the rails, and we'll talk about that. I think it's in the last seven or so years, but it could be a little bit before that.
But as we begin the conversation with Ken, we're coming up on a Memorial Day, and when we think about Memorial Day, we have to think about the generation of Americans that were sent to war in the twenty first century. But before we do that, I want to talk about the generation that we remember as the Greatest Generation. And I've never liked the name because I'll tell you what, and I think it's clear in this moment that we're going to have to have another great generation of Americans.
And I think truly the greatest generation will be the one that makes it to the mountaintop that Martin Luther King saw right that completes the building of the city on a hill. The World War two generation stood up, They were measured, they were counted, They did incredible they did incredible things. You grew up when we grew up as a as a young man I was born in the nineteen seventies, there was an arc type of masculinity.
And in that arc type of masculinity has been utterly shattered in the last seven years by people who would have been roukeenly regarded by those guys as there's a word. It starts with key, right. It's the key word right, which I can't say, which is too bad, because it's an important concept right in society, and it was something as a young man you were raised not to be.
And so when you look at an Andrew Tate, he's a let's call him a pussy cat, right when you when you when you look at it, Joe Rogan, right, another pussy cat. Right. So, if you're sitting there and and you're a person who has an audience of many tens of millions, and you're sitting there and you're like, oh, you know, Hitler and Kanye West may have a point here about the Jews controlling everything or you tolerate the Nazi apologist, or you wink and nod at the racist
or the misogynist or whatever. Indecency doesn't make you tough. It generally it makes either a racist and an imbecile. And those two things typically matched together like round square, round peg. And so those guys, by and large would have been repulsed by the Andrew Caates, by the Joe Rogans, by all of these dishonest snake oil salespeople telling this fake gospel of machismo, because the real thing is collapsed. And so real men, right, are not cruel Right, real
men are fierce against cruelty. That toughness is not meanness, and that there's nothing wrong if you're a man in standing up for the little guy, and so so what these people are are classical bullies who've said to be a man is to be a bully, and that's not true.
But traditional masculinity has been casket castigated, run down, kicked into the gutter, been politicized, called toxic in the truth of the matter is is we need to raise our young men to be fierce and their patriotism and their respect for other people, for dissent for America's values, and we've done a terrible job as a generation of doing that, and so we've created a vacuum where some of the worst people you can conceivably imagine now hold themselves up
as totems of manliness, when in fact they're epic cowards, all of them. They're moral cowards, their physical cowards, and their political cowards. And you have a remedy for that, and that's Valor Media. And i'd love for you to
talk about Valor Media. I think this is a great idea, a great network, and I think it's going to be something that really reaches tens of millions of young men in this country with a competing vision about what it means to be a man, and what it means to be a man at the end of the day is to stand up with some integrity. And integrity and manliness are deeply connected, and people who have no integrity, who
are bullies and liars, have no claim to masculinity. And so I just want to get you to talk about Valor Media and your vision for it. And thank you so much for being with us today.
Well thanks for having me, Steve. It's great to talk to you. Your intro was overly generous. I'm a little embarrassed, but I think you hit the nail on the head when you described these influencers of the so called manisphere as cowards, because at the end of the day, every bully is a coward, right they are, They're projecting, they're
compensating for something. And it really gets to me, especially as we're leading up to Memorial Day, when these guys in heroism, when they do the tough guy act, right, when they talk about the need to be strong on the world stage, and somehow every single one of them, the ones we're talking about, the Andrew Tates, the Joe Rogan's, somehow managed to miss out on the longest wars in America's history, right Iraq and Afghanistan. That shows you that
they're they're all talk. On the other hand, at Valor Media, we've got a lineup of hosts that I think can reach into this toxic manisphere, this hostile information ecosystem. We've got three seals who are hosts on the network. We've got rangers, We've got an ex Delta Forces guy. We've got two Navy pilots. One of them was a top gun guy. One of them was pilot of the year in PACAPP Pacific Air Force. These are actual.
Dudes, right they.
I would love to put any one of them squared off with Joe Rogan or Andrew Tap and let people decide what real masculine it is looking at those examples, and it's what you laid out. Strength is actually found in compassion. Masculinity is found in taking care of the least among us. Being a man is not what you do for yourself, which is what is being sold, which is what Rogan and Tate and the others preach. Being
a man is what you do for others. And I think there is a political component to this as well, because in failing to address this, we are seating territory that we should rightly occupy. We gave up an entire demo of votes to Donald Trump because we didn't play in that information space. We didn't talk to them, We didn't give them a vision of what a well run country can look like and what's in it for them.
Valor media is about uplifting the real men in our communities who we think can break into those information silos and save some one of these young men who are being sucked into the to the Rogan and Andrew tape Pit of toxic masculinity.
You know, I was listening to a podcast and it was Scott Galloway, Professor Galloway and Anthony Scaramucci, and they were talking about masculinity. And I think Scott Galloway is a brilliant guy, makes a lot of a lot of great points. And one of the things he's talking about is that you really have a generation of young men that are terrified to talk to a young woman. They just can't do it right face to face. Have never
asked anyone out. You know, Anthony Scaramucci starts talking about, you know this right of passage that you know, I remember well, which is this moment of terror, right when you were trying to call a girl up on the phone and her dad might answer right, and you're trying
to sneak around the house tethered to the cord. You're fighting with your sister when it was me right, it was right at the adventity age of call waiting right, and you're you're going through these rituals, and we have young men in this country who were through COVID not
in school, miss out on this period of life. And then in the politics of the moment our young men are told that you're dangerous, you're unworthy, you're somehow bad, that in any type of interaction with with a woman, you'll you're the you're on the wrong side of that. Women don't lie. Uh, young men are bad. And so in that space, right, in this gospel of toxic masculinity, people talk about, you know, the excesses of the of the woke era, right people, young men, Right, there's really
no more boy scouts. Uh, there is a you know, absence of school. So we see the sports right fall fall apart. And in that vacuum, it's the old saying goes right nature or pores a vacuum. Right, there's fraud steers who rise up and say hey to the dispossessed, right, to the lonely, Hey follow me. And so this kid, right, and that's what we're talking about here, kid, right, is not sitting in a group right of one hundred other kids watching Andrew Kate. Right. This is not a group activity, right,
This is a lonely activity. You're sitting in your room. Right. There is no girlfriend to talk to, right, there is no friends. Right, So you have isolated, lonely boys sitting in their rooms right, sitting in their basements, who are being stoked, being provoked, being fed a bunch of lies
by these people. And it's metastasizing now in that you have a lot of these fighting clubs, a lot of these mixed martial lates arts facilities have urged with white nationalists politics and have become forums and venues for the spread all of it connected through this manosphere, which is a fundamentally dangerous mix of extremists peddling a message that says, hey, young man, Winston Churchill's the bad guy in Adolf Hitler. Well,
he's misunderstood. And so the remedy to this, right is what you're talking about, which is that in the end, that the meaning of life, of manhood is the acceptance of this idea that there are some causes, some things that are bigger than yourself. And to me, for most amongst all of those things that transcend everything is the United States. And so the United States is a project. It's two hundred and fifty years old. We're in our
two hundred and fiftieth anniversary year. Some great anniversaries. This year we had the anniversary of the United States Army, of the United States Navy, the United States Marine Corps. All this all this year, and the Republic turns two hundred and fifty next year, the birth of its independence. Thomas Payne talked about liberty, so use some things you
can't put a price on them. He's also the first person to come up with the name the United States of America, to write it down on a piece of paper, should be the name of the country. Against all enemies is a important phrase in the Constitution, in the oath that anybody takes to the cost institution a lot of ways to serve the country, not just in the in the military. A lot of people have taken that oath ready to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.
Talk about your documentary on Apple that's number one, Why you think it got to number one, And about and about specifically your use of that phrase.
Thanks Steve Well. I think it speaks to a lot of what you just laid out, which is a disinformation ecosystem that is so effective at reaching disaffected men, young men in particular. And our focus was on military veterans. I alluded to the longest wars in America's history, right, those had repercussions off the battlefield, and we welcomed home, actually two generations of soldiers back to the country, many of home, and we're looking to recapture that sense of
camaraderie and purpose that they felt downrange. The vast majority, it has to be said, do reintegrate successfully into civilian life.
But it doesn't take many.
It doesn't take a small subset of that, a small percentage who find that sense of purpose and mission through the Oathkeepers or the Proud Boys, or the three percenters. It doesn't take many of those to wreak absolute havoc. And the impetus for the film was me sitting in my driveway on January sixth, twenty twenty one, just in disbelief at what was happening in looking when I finally
got my phone out. I first was listening to it on the radio, but I was watching the coverage and seeing the organized stacks, the tactical stacks or lines of people working their way through the crowds, and realizing that's
Vets right. And it turned out that a disproportionate number of the people there on January sixth, and certainly of the leaders behind it, the Stuart Rhodeses of this movement had military backgrounds, and we wanted to understand how the heck we got to this point, and so much of it is because of this disinformation ecosystem that pumps lies
into people twenty four to seven. And if what you're hearing again and again and again, especially from the mouth of the commander in chief, is that an election was stolen, for example, and we have one hundred examples of lies just as nefarious since then, but let's just focus on that one. You hear the election was stolen. At first, you don't believe it. You hear it again and again
and again. You see Fox News playing on the wardroom, in the wardroom TV on your base right, you hear the commander in chief or the former commander in chief saying it, and it twists your mind and you begin to tell yourself, especially if you're surrounded by people who are reinforcing this, that you know what, my oath compels me to do something about it. And that, to me is one of the greatest tragedies of how we lost so many veterans to this disinformation campaign. So many of
them thought they were doing the right thing. And one of the things we try to get at in the film is the real onus of moral accountability. Sure, those who broke windows, those who broke into the Capitol deserve to be held accountable. I think the pardons are an outrage, but the real onus should lie with those who provoked, who knew better the Josh Hawley's that Ted Cruzes and we just wanted to plan a flag to set a marker for history that this is something we're not going
to ignore, We're not going to turn away from. And I think that message is what resonated. It's what catapulted it to the top of the charts on Apple TV. It's now on Amazon, pretty much anywhere you get your streaming, you're streaming films. But I think that's what the film was speaking to that struck a chord with so many Americans.
We have a generation of Americans that were sent to fight in wars. That one was started under a false pretense by the administration that I worked in. I played a senior role in the Bush administration. I was a deputy assistant to the President. Against All Enemies is the name of the film, everybody. I just saw that question Against All Enemies number one on Apple I was a deputy assistant to the President. I was counselor to the Vice president. Again, the name of the film is Against
All Enemies, Against All Enemies on Apple Television. And as a political staffer, I spent time in Iraq. Was was sent there on an assignment, you know, for a for a month or so, and got a case of the flavor of what it is like to see the American military deployed fully alongside the British military and our coalition partners. You've either witnessed that, seen it, or have or have not. I'm convinced you could be in the military for twenty years and have not seen it and not understand what
that is. An It's an incredible thing too. It's an
incredible thing to see the power of the country. But what do you think about the political leadership that lost to wars that your friends were sent to That this is what politics is, and there is a reality that Trump rose in a Republican primary so many years ago as the truth teller right about these wars in that hey this was crazy, we lost these wars, and hey, it's your fault politically, And so I understand at a psychological level that if you send the army to war,
in the Navy and the Marine Corps, in the Air Force, and in all of the contractors for twenty years, and you lose those wars, and you lose those wars with the images for example, at the end that come out of Afghanistan after twenty years. Right, that there's a moral
injury done. Right, that's profound, And I'd love to hear you just talk about that moral injury, that grievance, that resentment that takes an American soldier, airman, marine, from defender of the Constitution to the tip of the spear waging a war against it, prodded on by the exact type of person that at one point in their life they would have understood is exactly what the country's against.
Yeah, I'm so glad you brought up the term moral injury. Most people aren't familiar with it. It is distinct from PTSD or post traumatic stress, with which most people do understand.
But moral injury is an injury to the soul, and it's being increasingly researched and discovered that it can be every bit as devastating as PTSD, and it just leaves a hole in you when, for example, you are sent down range, you're told that you're defending the country, say in Afghanistan, for example, you lose buddies based on this promise, and then you come home and you don't get the support that your country promised you. This isn't a hypothetical.
It's happening right now. Look at the Packed Act, which was passed to take care of all of those soldiers down range who are exposed to burn pits. It actually goes all the way back to the Vietnam War and those exposed to Agent Orange who were never taken care of. My dad was exposed to Agent Orange. We lost them a month ago. I'm actually wearing his jacket today. I took my patches off and put them on his jacket. But the first word in the Packed Act is promise.
It's a promise to America's veterans, and it has been ripped away because the Republicans, at Donald Trump's encouragement, have taken away the seventeen billion dollars that was committed to take care of those veterans who shouldered the burden that Americans asked them to shoulder. On top of that, you have this talk of sending back afghan refugees, many of whom stood alongside US in Afghanistan risked their own lives, lost family members, interpreted translated for US, fought alongside US.
In many cases, those on TPS status in the US are in danger of losing it and being sent back to Afghanistan because Marco Rubio State Department has assessed that it's now stable. Do you know what happens to an Afghan interpreter for the Americans when he goes back to Taliban controlled Afghanistan? Take a wild guess that leaves an injury on the soul of the American troop who's life dependent on that Afghan interpreter. That is what moral injury is.
And this administration seems to have no regard for what it is doing to the American veteran.
I want everybody to understand what Ken is talking about. This is literally the plot of season six of The Handmaid's Tail. Right, it is, it is, it is, It is remarkable, and that decision, it's a bureaucratic evil that's that's being done. But I want to laser focus on something that that Ken is talking about, which is that this is not Marco Rubio who is doing this, Right, this is this is not Chris know who is who is doing this right, It's the American people who are
doing this. When Marco Rubio issues an order, when Christy No issues an order, right, that the burden of that is carried by us, because we are a government of the people, by the people, for the people. And this is what instills in this moment, right, the fierce moral urgency right to stop it, right and to say no. And so what I want everybody on here to appreciate is that Elon Musk is back in Texas, self pitying, crying,
right saying no Moss. And the truth of the matter is is that one hundred whatever days into this you know, to today is you know four months in a day, is that you have a lifetime of accountability ahead for a lot of people who have engaged in an assault, in an arson and attack against the United States, against the law across the board, in this administration. And it's going to take a very very very long time for
that for that to play out. You know, it's easier to light something on fire than to rebuild it, and that's just the reality of things. But what we're talking about here, the moral injury sustained over twenty years time. As we come into now a period where we're going to see something on June the fourteenth, which is which is I think a desecration on the anniversary of the birth of the US Army. We'll see a brigade strand
about six thousand American soldiers marching in a review. Kim John unstyle passed our maximum leader, our furer, the American fueror there Donald Trump tanks, fighter jets, helicopters deeply on American type parade. The United States Army is the greatest
force for liberation in world history. You go to the American cemeteries in Europe, what you appreciate there is what Colin Powell talked about, which is that the only territory the United States ever asked for was enough to bury our war dead on And you can see that in France, you can see that in Belgium, these beautiful cemeteries. But how do you think about this June fourteenth parade? How
should a veteran look at this? I think you have a lot of people in the country will look for the first time in their lives at a military review review, not not with pride as an American citizen with regard to the American military, but with some fear of the of the power of it. So talk about that where we're, where we're going to be seeing, and how you're going to feel about it as a as a naval officer watching this, watching this play out.
Well, I think it's absolutely shameful, and we know what it really is. It's not a celebration of the Army's birthday. The Army doesn't want this. Nobody marching in that parade. I guarantee you wants to do that. That's not what we're trained to do. We don't do passing in reviews in front of a deer leader like they do in North Korea. This is about Donald Trump puffing himself up. It happens to be on his birthday, right. I don't think that's a coincidence. He is seeing this as a
birthday party for himself. The kid who sat alone at the lunch table now right has control of the most powerful military in the world, and he's going to make them bend the knee in full public view of the entire country. Steve, I loved what you said about accountability because I think we need to be talking about that now for a couple reasons. The first is that it's just the right thing to do to record all of these outrages. Look, the parade isn't illegal, but plenty of
other things this administration is doing. Plenty of other things are illegal. The renditions al Salvador right, the threats to end habeas Corpus, the list goes on and on. I think we are lulled into complacency sometimes just because of how quickly these actions come, and we just move on to the next one. By talking about accountability, we do a couple things. We show that we're paying attention, we are watching what the administration is doing. We're not going
to forget. And it might actually serve as a deterrent. Not to President Trump himself. I think he thinks he's going to be in power forever, or at least people who will protect him will be in power forever. But maybe the slightly less diluted mid level functionaries will wonder if Democrats start running on an accountability agenda, maybe what they're doing isn't going to serve them in the long run.
Maybe bending the need to Donald Trump, pleasing the alpha in the White House, though it might feel good in the moment, and it might elevate one's stature in the moment. If there's accountability, if we're talking about actually holding people accountable for breaking the law, then I think it might be one of the safeguards we've never had to rely on before. But I think it's a Madisonian observation. Right, liberty the end of the day resides in the virtue
of men not help us. But I think we're at that point we might actually have to depend on people and their character standing up to the president instead of the actual system safeguards, uh and and guard rails built into our democracy that he is demolishing with every new executive order.
So when you think about the US military as it as an institution, and you think about Donald Trump's abuse of it, and you think about him potentially turning it loose on the American people in some type of domestic domestic capacity, do you where where do you look at the fault line being in the in the military, the trip wire that says, yeah, we're not We're we're not
going to do this. A lot of a lot of military officers say to me, well, what makes the military unique is the NCO core and the nco core of the US military is not going to is not going to allow the US military too to be turned loose against the American against the American people within the United within the United States.
And well, look, we came closer than most people realize during Trump's first term. We came much closer than most people realized to seeing the eighty second arm Airborne deployed in Washington, DC with fixed banets pointed at American protesters. The only thing that stopped that was one man in uniform, Mark Milly, saying I'm not going to transmit the order to invoke the Insurrection Act. That to me is a
is a signal of a systemic failure. It should not come down to a single military person in uniform as the final safeguard against a constitutional crisis like that. What scares me is that Donald Trump and the people around him have learned their lesson. They know not to have someone like Mark Milly in the way this time. And if you look at the people that they are putting in those positions of power that would act as a safeguard, that would act as a check in balance, I'm not
convinced they would. The reason that Donald Trump chose the new chairman. Whether the chairman actually said this, Donald Trump says he said it, and it is counting on it. General Kin said, I will kill for you, sir, according to Donald Trump, right, that's what Donald Trump thinks. The military's job is to kill for him. I'm not making that up. Go look it up. That's what Donald Trump said.
General Caine said to him wearing a maga hat. Incidentally, that part has not disputed him wearing a Maga hat. So if we don't have that layer of defense anymore, do the NCOs or that mid grade or junior officer, do they have the ability to act as the final safeguard. It would take an enormous amount of courage. I think it might be coming to this, but imagine the courage it would take to choose between you're out to the
constitution and an order from the commander in chief. That has rarely been tested in American military history, and more often than not, because we have such a bias towards following orders, the decision has gone the other way. In the military, you're conditioned to follow orders, and I worry that that conditioning will will not be conducive to disobeying the President.
Okay, So let's play this out just a just a bit, which is that if the eighty second Airborne had been deployed a fixed bayonets to Washington, DC, how long do you think that they would have stayed there.
That's a great question. But it wouldn't take long for there to be an instigating event, right, It wouldn't take long like at Kent State. I don't know how long those guardsmen were there, but it wasn't days. It was an afternoon and the day ended with four college kids dead.
Let's so the eighty second Airborne is not National Guardsmen, not a bio campus in nineteen seventy, right, So you have the United States Armies Premiere Light Infantry Division, ready to go anywhere in the world, comes to Washington, DC and full combat kit as what occupying force.
I think if you look at the executive orders, if you look at the way they are testing, militarizing the border and these other acts walking right up to the line of the inst direction Act, I think the goal is to come up with a legal rationale for martial law. Should the country rise up, should people say enough is enough? I don't know what the triggering event is going to be, but there are going to be mass protests against this administration.
We're barely one hundred days in and you're already seeing the kind of thing that took years for other administrations to provoke. I think there's going to be something like that, and I think it is the Trump administration's hedge to go to martial law and deploy the eighty second Airborne as a show of force against the resistance of you will, the protest movement that is inevitably going to rise up in response to the illegalities and unconstitutional acts of the Trump administration.
So there's an active force of about a million, and there's a reserve component of about a million on a continental country of three hundred and fifty two million million people. So the second Airborne full division, right is going to be about ten thousand, ten thousand all in. And the eighty second Airborne doesn't have enough men to occupy Washington, DC, right, let alone the eastern seaboard of the United States. So
what does that when you think about right? The military and the American military right until this moment, has not been conceived of right as a martial force to be used as the president to constrain the descent of the American people. But the American military, which is the deterned force to aggression all over all over the world. Right, if it was all brought home, right, it doesn't have enough members right to be able to occupy the country.
And we can we can see how you know, the United States did is a counter insurgent force in Iraq. But but right where there were a lot less guns and a lot less people with proficiency with weapons. But what my my, my question about this is that when you think about the avalanche like coming down that slippery slope on this right, and I think this is what's going to happen, right, It's that he's looking for pretexts. You see this with James Comy. The protests will rise
over the summer. Uh, there will be some violent ignition somewhere, and there will be an unprecedented type of crackdown uh somewhere in the country that is deeply that is deeply militarized. And I just at that point, where where does the veterans community line up shake out? Where do the people who are the valor network, Where do the mid grade
the senior military officers speak out? Because you know, for instance, the one the one the most silent and competulant group of people in this country in this moment, or the retired four star officer cop right in the United States military. I mean, they're all on hedge funds, right, They're all right, it's appalling, right, but where where? So? Just how how would something like that break? Like, how do you envision the dialogue that goes on in the country.
Well, first of all, I agree with you one hundred percent that the US military can't occupy the US, but I don't think that would be the goal. The goal would be the kind of show a force to intimidate
the opposition. You're already seeing that willing their willingness to do that with their attempts to intimidate people who speak out against them, grabbing people at the airport for having anti Trump content on their cell phones, for example, threatening I think it was Tulci Gabbert, the Director of National Intelligence, said Jim Comey should be in jail. Cash Battel and Dan Bongino are threatening to investigate them for threatening the president.
I mean that is using the levers of government power to intimidate and threaten the opposition. The military is the ultimate lever of government power, and I think what they are looking to do, They're laying the groundwork now is use the military not to occupy the country, but to provoke the kind of demonstration of force that will cow the opposition. I think between now and then, we have
to figure out an infrastructure communications policy thresholds. We have to decide which red lines are triggers for us, and then be able to communicate to the people in the military that we have their backs. Should they make that horrible decision to have to abide their oaths in opposition to an unlawful order. That's happened very few times in military history, and I think we can anticipate it, and we need to tell those that NCO if you will, that we have his back.
Do you think it's important for there to be an advertising campaign that reaches the enlisted soldier outside of Fort Bragg, outside of Fort Benning, outside of Fort Campbell, outside of Fort Hood, right, that speaks to them, as you took an oath to the Constitution, not a man. Is that illegal orders are illegal orders, and like following orders does not excuse you from accountability from an illegal order. And to start telling that telling that story is that something
that's necessary. I think we have to be finding done.
Yes, because in all of my training, and granted I was OCS guy, that's officer candidate school, I didn't go through the academy, but never once did I take a course on what to do in the event of an illegal order. I wasn't even asked to read the document that I swore allegiance to the Constitution. Now they do read it at the academy. They do read the Constitution in ROTC, but most illsted programs don't make you understand
the Constitution that you are pledging your life to. I think we need to We need to have some kind of refresher on the obligation to disobey an illegal order. I don't think most people realize that it's not just you're not just given the right to disobey an illegal order. You are bound to disobey illegal orders. But the UCMJ talks almost exclusively about obeying orders and the consequences for
not obeying orders. There is very little attention paid in military training in the UMJAY, in military law to disobey illegal orders. And we have to address that because I think that moment is coming. Do you.
Do you have faith in the military at a rank and file at a dangerous moment as they receive an illegal order from this president.
I do, but I don't think our country should depend on gestures of faith, right It is a roll of the dice At this point, I am fifty one percent confident that our military will do the right thing in a moment of crisis. Would you bet the democracy on that?
I don't.
I'm not prepared to do that. And would you bet the democracy on the generals that Trump has now surrounded himself with telling him no, I'm not willing to do that for now. I'll give the military the benefit of the doubt. But I do think we need to prepare for the worst, to prepare for the inevitability that Donald Trump is going to ask the military to do something unconstitutional.
Do you have a sense of the chaos and the pentagon right now around the Secretary's office? How bad is it? It's bad?
It's bad. I mean the very fact that his own senior advisors are either fleeing or being fired. Look, I think the best anecdote is this separate signal group he had that wasn't exposed by adding an Atlantic reporter to it. I think it had twelve people on it, including his brother and his wife. He was sharing the same highly highly classified information on that signal chat, and four people leaked it. Four people out of twelve leaked the existence
of that chat to the media. That is the side of an ill disciplined senior Pentagon apparatus in absolute disarray, with no respect for the secretary. And look, I'm chuckling because I think Pete Hegseth deserves every bit of this humiliation. But it makes America less safe, and it puts my buddies lives in danger.
So it's not funny. So I think about Project twenty twenty nine, which is good, the democracy restoration agenda, and so I think about fundamental ethics reform, and you think about the one hundred thing. I know, the first thing. So at some level, I don't think Hamas won the billion dollar gift from Qatar is ever going to fly. That being said, pretend it did, right, Let's pretend I did. And let's pretend I was the chief of staff to
the next president. Right, I at the moment of the inauguration, whatever airbase that landed at to bring Trump home would be seized. The plane it would be on a navy barge by four pm and it would be dropped by a crane off of mar A Lago to become an artificial reef. Right where the President's program for low income children to learn diving off of mar A Lago, right, Well, like would begin the next day on the reef and
we go from there right to clean up exercise. So, Mike, what do you do right in the Pentagon after four years of this of this insanity? What what do you do that now? And when you think about the military, this is this is true. This is I swear to God, this is true. There were more generals and animals in Baghdad in two thousand and seven then there were in Europe on v E Day, the day we want to work more two It was with a sixteen million person
with a sixteen million person army. Right. So when so when Pete HEADSA says, right, we gotta we gotta get rid of the generals, right, we didna get rid of like twenty percent of the generals. Right. This is not a bad idea. Right, This is like a bro clock being right twice a day. Right, Your average major general is is rolling like they're a Persian raj right from the from the seventeenth century, and so so all of these things are true, what how do you clean this up? Right?
What is the next Democratic president? So, for example, right, I would say, under no circumstances, if I was a Democratic senator, would I vote for another retired four star officer to be Defense secretary? I would not vote for the waiver? Right. Believe in civilian control, right, whether it's the passage of a bill in the Congress going back to some regular order, right, or restoration of how things are supposed to function and work right, and how important
that is. But where what do you where do you even start? Look?
I I like some of that, right. I certainly like not passing another waiver and going back to normal order. And I really support the idea of accountability, so that we can and have some reckoning for the crimes being committed now, and so that we signal to those contemplating
committing more of them that there will be consequences. What worries me most of all, though, is that this administration is acting like they'll be in power forever and that they don't have to worry about that kind of thing, and that if you look at countries that have had that democratic backslide into autocracy. That is the flashing red light. That is the real warning. To borrow the name of your show, Steve, that is what we should really be focusing on. Why do they think they're going to get
away with all this? Well, they think they're going to get away with all this because they'll never be held accountable, because either Trump or Trump's philosophy of governance will be in power forever. And that, to me, is the surest signal that something is on the verge of breaking in our democracy. I worry about that a ton. Look, we can fix the policy screw ups at the VA and the d D in good time, but if we lose
the democracy, all of those debates become moot. And that's what Valor Media is focusing on, countering the disinformation that is propping up an autocrat.
It is an amazing aspect of all this. I talked about this at length with Jake Auchincloss, who is a phenomenal member of Congress, just talked about some of the things that Democrats need to do in Time magazine. I am Jake auchenclass your run for president, and I think he'd be a top tier presidential candidate. But we talked about the self evident arrogance of all of these people who clearly do not believe that there will ever be a day where they don't hold the power that they hold,
like Christino, and it's incredible. Now, the truth is, they're deluded, and none of them appear to be particularly that bright to me. And there is an arrogance that they are drunk on drunk on power. And there will be a restoration, there will be an accounting for the breaking of American law, for the assaults on the Constitution, and.
The the.
Excesses of this, of this, of this era. I have a question. I saw somebody UH had a Navy Seal question. You're a Navy officer, you have a couple of Navy Seals on the show. If what did the Navy seal say about the Navy sealed dipshit caucus that has assembled in UH in the United States Congress. Because right if you were to judge the Navy Seals in the Congress right against against the unit, you'd say, something really broken
in the Navy Seals. What's what's what's going on? And so I think that part of part of the issue Right, that we're dealing with is we've had a lot of fetishization of the military by a civilian population that's a strange from it. Right, it's it's one percent serve. So there was a time when, for example, there were a lot of television shows like A. McHale's Navy a mash Right, because serving in the military was a common experience, and people share the absurdities of it, right at some level,
the comedic aspects of it. And right, I think you know, you go to a baseball game, right, you have the pro forma veteran brought out on the field. Everyone collapsed, Thank you for your service. Right. The first thing that I would stop right in a new administration, Right, I call the NFL commissioner. N if I was president, I say it's over. I say it will not be a fucking American service member appearing in one of your fucking
stadiums in uniform. Ever again during my presidency, there's no flyovers, there's no jump ins. Right, that jingoism is not patriotism. And these partnerships right have have been a disaster. Right, But when you look at the seals, when you look at a Ryan Zinki, when you when you look at these guys in their in their service, what are the
seals like on the valor network. There's got to be a divide obviously when you look at some of the pro Trump, some of the MAGA veterans right that have been co opted by all of this, right, and you know, all sorts of people that you know have been virtuous and physically brave, but have been moral cowards in a in a moment where political courage has been required. How do you think about that?
Yeah, well, I definitely want to tackle that because I have thoughts. But a nod to your old boss. I believe it was John McCain who called out the military buying these spots at NFL games, Uh, paying the NFL to to applaud the veteran on the field, right, That wasn't a gesture of patriotism. That was a transaction. And I am with you one hundred percent that that is not the kind of patriotism I subscribe to when it comes to the seal community. Look, I think a lot
of that is cultivated. First of all, there is division even within the teams. I'm not going to speak as a seal, but I can speak as a Navy pilot. I can speak as a vet. It's a diverse community. There are Conservatives and liberals, there are Republicans and Democrats. What the Republican Party has done really well is cultivate that Seal brand and elevate those guys into positions of
real leadership within the party. And they know they sometimes pick the worst of the worst, but Seals are nothing if not ambitious and capable, so they have an ability to rise to the top in ways others don't. I will tell you the Seals on the Valor Media network are embarrassed when these guys claim to speak for the community, when they claim to speak for the country, when they claim to speak about patriotism, because a lot of them
are out for themselves. I think your other observation is really important here that it turns out there isn't a
direct correlation between physical courage and moral courage. And in this day and age, with the tests that our country is now facing, it is the moral variety that we are in desperate short supply of, and I think we need to elevate those moral leaders like Jake Auchencloss who have the ability to speak truth to power and to stand up and fight a righteous moral cause that hopefully does not require the kind of physical courage they also demonstrated at one point in their lives.
I want to as we come to the end of the hour, I want to I want to give it to you to close out and talk about this coming Memorial Day, which is a difficult day I know for this generation of veteranto. It's a it's a day of remembered sacrifice, uh not not a not a day where
we are so far removed from. And before I do that, I just want to share this story about a great American hero, a Master sergeant named uh Roderick Emmonds Edmunds from Knoxville, Tennessee, and he was twenty seven years old prisoner of war during the Battle of the Bulge and he uh was the ranking American out of seven hundred captures.
There were no officers, UH and there were about approximately three hundred Jews in the in the form of prisoners, and the German ss Nazi colonel came out demanded that Edmunds, who was at the head of the formation, turnover the Jewish prisoners, and he refused to do so. It is the situation escalated Sergeant Edmunds made the point that they were all Americans and that he could shoot all of them. And when they asked for the Jews to identify themselves,
all the men stepped forward. And so that that story on that day is the type of story about loyalty and moral courage, and courage in uniform. Courage in life does not always manifest itself right in the in the taking of a life right or in the battle right when when life is at when life is at stake, right in that in that kinetic moment. And so these
moral choices are of of the deepest importance. That everything that's happening in the country right now, that is happening in our name right is something we have to we have to understand. I was joking around. I was joking around the other day, and I I truly I don't understand why there's not a daily news conference event that the Democrats have, UH that is able to communicate to the American people, UH, that is able to meet Trump where he is and deal with the excess and the
and the absurdity of it. But but one of the things that that if there was a news conference of that and and there was someone who was participating, I would counsel them to say, you know, for example, after playing some videos of Trump, right, I would say, one of the things that that that Donald talked about a great deal during the campaign was the most important threat facing America, which was Hannibal Lecter. And we we caught him.
We got him, and I would I would have a guy wheeled out on a dolly right on the on the strap to it, right with the with the straight jacket on and the Hannibal Lecter mask, and I'd say we got him, and I'd wheel him out, and I'd say everybody, I want everyone to understand this concept, because we got doctor Lecter, right, and he's the he's the worst.
And I want you imagine, right, he's having a threesome dinner with Corey Lewandowski and Christy Nome, Right, there's all three of them together, right, doctor Lecter and Christy Nome and Corey Lewandowski, and they're having the dinner doctor Lecter before Christy Noman can shoot him like her dog, right and appreciate that she may want to. Right, He's got to stand in front of a judge, right, because it's the United States, right, So he's got to be wheeled
in front of a judge. And I don't know how else to say it to all of you good people. Right, But that's just the way it is in America. Right, And so these things that we're talking about, right, are not up for debate. Right, does Trump have the power to suspend heybeas corpus he does not. Right, there is no civil war, There is no invasion. Venezuelan gangs are not invading the United States. Tappening in the United States as prices are going up, costs are going up, taxes
are going up, things are getting more expensive. Jobs are disappearing. There is no investment coming. It's all lies, it's all bullshit, it's all nonsense. None of it is true. There is no five trillion of investment coming from Saudi Arabia. What there's is there's a lot of suffering, a lot of pain, a lot of breaches of faith, a lot of breaches
of agreement. Right. So, the young guy who risked his life and his family's wife, the woman in Afghanistan who trusted in that American flag, right, it took the side of the United States for a better life. They're all being betrayed. Right, That sick kid in Africa the least of us right on the whole planet, rotting food on the shelves. Right, that's caused by Marco Rubio. It's caused by Elon Musk. All of that is happening. All of it is happening right now. It's all being done in
our name, every bit of it. And we have a moral obligation to stop of it, to stop it. So we have a day that we remember the sacrifices of a million Americans over the course of the history of the country who died in the uniform of the country and service to the nation, gave of what Lincoln called the last full measure of devotion. There have only ever been seven hundred million Americans since the beginning of the country.
That's less than the population of current day India and China. Right, So that's it, Right, Half of all Americans who've ever been alive are alive right now in this moment. And so we have this day where across the world, in Europe, American graves that face west back across the Atlantic that they didn't cross, those graves will be decorated with American flags and flowers. In American cemeteries that are overgrown in
places like Vicksburg, Mississippi, that are that are forgotten. The Union dead on the hillside there you know that you know aren't tended like those places in Europe. Of course, in Arlington National Cemetery, Section sixty, you know where this generation of America's war dead many are buried, but in
the small towns across the country. Your friends, how do you think about this day, in this moment when everything that you raise your hand to defend is being contested by a force that seeks to co opt those values while desecrating them. How do you process all of that? Well?
I am processing it differently this year than I ever have, because it feels different. Memorial Day this year is going to feel different in the past. I usually wake up early before the sun's up. I head to the water. I sit by the water, and I watched the sun come up. Sorry, Steve, And I think about my buddies. Memorial Day is about those who didn't come home, right. It's different than Veterans Day. Veterans Day is about us. Memorial Day is about them, and it is a somber day.
And then I try to spend the rest of the day thinking about the good moments with them.
And I'm not one of those.
I don't begrudge this at all, but I'm not one of those who bristles it the happy Memorial Day. I think most of my buddies would want me to be happy on Memorial Day because it's what they fought for, right. I don't like when it becomes a day about mattress sales and cookouts alone. That's why I spend that time in the morning thinking about them. But I do try to be happy and with my family on that day in honor of them. This Memorial Day, I'm going to
be in Ukraine. I'm going to be delivering ambulances donated not by the American government but by other governments to frontline units in Ukraine because democracy is under threat and what my buddies fought and in some case has died for is under threat, and I think the country as a whole is going to increasingly look to veterans to set the example for how you defend a democracy when the threat is from within, and that is a It is a chilling thought.
But I hope next.
Memorial Day I am back to just spending it with my family thinking about better things.
Well, Ken, I can't thank you enough Again. Against All Enemies is the number one documentary on Apple Against All Enemies. That's Ken Harbaugh. Find that Ken is the president of Valor Media and Valor Media. Everybody is important, right, It's important to connect the young men in your life to it. Listen to those guys. Not these guys. These guys are dipshits. Those guys aren't right. That's how you got to talk to the young men in your life. Keep them away
from the dip shits, the Joe Rogan's, the Andrew Kates. Right, each one of these dipshits has the potential of poison a young man who you love and is close to you. And they ought to have a Ken Harbaugh on one of their shows and see what happens. I doubt it will happen, but we ought to see what could happen if if that was but watch Ken, watch the documentary.
Subscribe to Valor Media and remember this memorial Day that the sacrifices that have been made are your burden and your obligation and your duty to preserve through good citizenship. And that's what that day is about. It's about memory, it's about gratitude, but it's also a summons and a call to the protection of the Republic. And so thank you all for taking the time in the middle of
this Wednesday in May. As we get closer to June, four months and a day into the Trump presidency, we'll have a lot more to talk about over this historic period of time of American crisis. Thank you all, and good day to you. Thank you, Steve. I'm Steve Schmidt. This is the warning. I invite you to join this community where I promise to be honest, blunt and direct about what is happening in this country. America is in crisis. Follow and subscribe to this channel and on substack. Thank you.