Green Beret on Men, War and Masculinity - Nick Freitas

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That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com. We're at a point right now where young men are going to revolt. They're the ones that we use to fight wars. They're the ones that we use to police streets.

You don't get to alienate and attempt to emasculate them forever without them standing up and having something to say about that. You're right, they lied to you about these attributes. But you have to develop in the way that they're going to go because the only way that you're going to save this sort of society...

that you want to live in, the only way that you're going to create it is if you stand up and you actually assume that role. And it sucks that you have to do it under these conditions, but you do. That for those of us that are trying to educate young men in a way that we think will... use those traits toward a noble purpose you're making it really hard for us to do our jobs right now and again you're going to be the ones that pay the price not us nick fredis welcome to trigonometry

It's great to have you on. There's so much we want to talk to you about. But first, we used to ask people what their story is. We stopped doing that because we just want to really get into the interview. But your life story is very interesting and you've done many different things. that most people haven't done. So tell us about, you know, how are you, where you are? Sure. Well, thanks for having me on. I'm a big fan.

I graduated high school, and a couple weeks later, I was on the bus to go to the military, so I went to infantry basic training in what was then Fort Benning, Georgia. um went into airborne school right after that got to the 82nd airborne and then i married my high school sweethearts we were 19 and 20.

I didn't think I was going to make the military a career. It was a peacetime army at the time. But my wife said, well, why don't we re-enlist one more time because you can pick wherever you want to go. So we went to Hawaii. Four months after we got there, 9-11 happened. And I remember looking at her going, well, babe.

I know what I'm going to be doing for the next several years. So I volunteered for Army Special Forces, which is better known as Green Berets. We specialize in counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, counter-insurging, things like that. Did a couple of combat tours over in Iraq.

got pretty dissatisfied with the way the war was being conducted and the way things were going. A lot of frustrations there. And I remember talking to a buddy of mine who was a sergeant major, and I said, hey, I'm getting out. And he goes, why, no.

No, you stay. Why are you getting in? I said, well, I had to fill out a 42-page con-op to go do a basic operation. We're green berets. That's crap. He goes, that's, he used more colorful language. He goes, that's crap, Freitas. If you see a problem, you gain rank and you fix it. I said, Jerry, you're a sergeant major. How many of these problems have you been able to fix?

And after some more colorful language, he admitted I had a point. I said, the problem is the guy's making policy. It's guys in suits, not guys in uniform. I said, so I'm going to get involved some way to try to affect the way that we look at policy. So I got involved in politics like a moron.

the Virginia House of Delegates, and I've been serving in the House of Delegates for the last nine years. My wife and I have three kids. My oldest daughter just got married to a great guy. Didn't have to bury any bodies. I was really happy about that. But in the meantime, we've actually, through politics and everything else, we started doing a lot of work on social media.

And it wasn't something that we necessarily set out to go in the direction it has where we've talked a lot about family, a lot about masculinity, a lot about being a girl dad and raising sons and the whole deal. um but over the last several years it's it's been amazing um both what has been happening within the culture and the desire for a lot of people not just men but women too to kind of ask this question about you know what is the proper role of men in society and so

That's consumed a lot of our time. And that's a fascinating question. And it's not something I often talk about, but when I go on other people's show, they often want to talk. about it with just about anyone who's prepared to say anything about it actually and we'll talk about that but the first question is what makes an 80 year old kid want to sign up for the military so

I think a lot of things. My mom and dad divorced when I was about three. My dad lived in Southern California. He was LAPD. My mom was a nurse. My grandfather was a firefighter and had served in World War II. I was always around people that had engaged and served. and this idea of honor and serving and men do dangerous things. I kind of grew up on that.

I would say I got very, very interested in military history when I was younger as well. And so for me, there was always this idea that a man protects, a man provides, and he does that both for his family, but he also serves his country. And it was also as a young man wanting to test myself and wanting to prove something to myself and learning that that never really ends.

But that's what initially got me interested in serving. And then I always joke that my friend and I wanted to go to West Point together and he paid attention in school and I did other things. So he ended up going to West Point and I ended up enlisting. glad that's how it had happened but that was that was the why it was a combination of uh really deep-seated patriotism um and um i guess if i could sum it up in in one other just quick story

My grandfather probably between his own wood lathe and the materials about probably spent all of $12 on a couple of little Shadow boxes that he had in his hallway when I was growing up. I spent a lot of time at my grandpa's house And it was a picture of my great-grandfather in his uniform with his badges when he was California Highway Patrol. And then it was a picture of my grandfather in his uniform and his badges as a fire captain. And then my father as a police officer with his badges.

the LAPD, and I wanted one day my picture to be up there with my uniform, my accomplishments, and yeah, I'll never forget the day I got it. That's really heartwarming, man, because I think as a not-American, just looking from the outside, I do think this country was built by people who had that mindset, actually, that service and patriotism. We interviewed Colonel Richard Kemp.

released a video with him about Israel and Palestine but the first time we interviewed he was the commander of British forces in Afghanistan and when I asked him why people go into the military he basically didn't say it like this but it's basically because you want to kill people it's kind of what he said was that something that you

Have you thought about that serving in the military would likely mean that you had to do that? Well, when I went in the military, I went for infantry. And infantry doesn't have a whole lot of, let's say, relatable skill sets outside of the military. But I wanted to be, I knew that if I was going to be in the military, I wanted to do something that was combat related and I wanted to do something that a specific mission was closed with and, you know, destroy the enemy.

That's not because I had some deep-seated desire to shoot anybody. It was more of, if you're going to go into the military, then I wanted to serve in that capacity. I wanted to serve in the capacity that I thought was where there was a need.

also where you would be tested and i i hate this idea i hate this idea of something dangerous going on and somebody doing the work and me not doing it and again i think that was because of the way i was raised my my father was a police officer grandfather was a firefighter mom was a nurse it was always about

being the first in the door, so to speak. And so I wanted to prove that I could do that. I wanted to prove that I could be worthy of the other people that had served in that capacity. And Nick? we've kind of touched on masculinity and we were talking basically about male role models. What does it mean to you to be a man? So I think it's that whenever you tell someone, be a man, like if you look at somebody like, dude, be a man.

Everyone kind of intuitively understands what that means. It usually means... Racism, sexism. Oh, yeah. You're the patriarchy. You're going to oppress women. No, I think everyone... Everyone who's willing to give it an honest interpretation understands that it means you have an obligation to forego comfort, to overcome fear in order to keep your word and do your job. People depend on you and they depend on you to do your job, so suck it up and do it.

And that's always what it meant to me. And I think that for a lot of people, there's still that underlying impression that that's what it means. But I think culture is doing everything within its power to. certainly change that definition. So you're saying that, what do you mean by that? Culture is doing everything in its power to change that definition. I think there's a lot of political motivations behind it. I think when you look at, so when you look at like first wave feminism.

I think all of us can say, yeah, I completely understand wanting the vote. I completely understand wanting to be equal partners within society with respect to access to occupations, property ownership, and things like that. As you move further along the road, though, and you start to see the connections between later elements within the feminist movement, even some of the early ones as well, but especially the later ones, you definitely see a far closer connection to Marx.

You see a far closer connection to critical theory, to postmodernism, all the way up to the point where you've got people like Simone de Beauvoir, where she didn't hide the ball. She actually said in a debate once that she didn't believe that women should be able to choose to be stay-at-home wife and mothers because too many of them would choose it and that would disrupt the revolution.

But all of that impact on how do we look at women has had an impact on how we look at masculinity. And this popular narrative, especially when you look at the oppressor-oppressed dynamic, men have fit very neatly into that box for them. And it's like anything else, there's always some kernel of truth to it. I mean, obviously men have the capacity to use physical force in order to impose our will. That's not something that most women can do.

even though now we're trying to pretend like it is. We're trying to both be strong, independent, and victims at the same time, and it doesn't quite work out. So I think there's been a concerted effort for a combination of political and probably philosophical and ideological reasons to diminish the role of men within society. And I do think it ultimately ties back.

to philosophies tied to Marx critical theory and things of that nature. I think one of the major problems as well, as somebody who saw it firsthand when I was teaching, I was teaching in areas where... Most of the kids didn't have a dad. It's very difficult to become a man if you don't have a positive male role model. If all you see are women and the men in your life, they're either absent by choice or absent because they're in jail.

Yeah, yeah. And then one of the problems we have too in the United States is absence because the state intervenes in such a way as to disadvantaged fathers when it comes to custody. You know, we pay women to leave and take the kids. Now, there's certainly circumstances where that's absolutely appropriate. You know, if you have a man that's being abusive, well, then, yeah, of course, I want that woman to be able to get away from it. I want her to be able to have the resources to do so.

But to your point, Patrick Moynihan was talking about this problem in the United States with respect to fatherless homes in the 60s, and he was being called a racist then. If you look at how the trends have developed over time, almost every single demographic within the United States is now dealing with a significantly higher percentage of fatherlessness than at any point in the history since we've been keeping numbers in the United States.

The one demographic that has managed to stay far lower is generally the Asian community. The thing is that a boy is going to become a man, or they're going to become an adult. um And they're going to look around for cues on what that means. And one of the things I don't think has been properly recognized, especially by some of the people perpetrating this idea of toxic masculinity under very broad terms, is that those characteristics...

that we associate with masculinity, aggressiveness, competitiveness, capacity and capability for violence, those are morally neutral. They're going to manifest themselves in positive ways or negative ways. If you try to squash them, you don't fully do that.

um what you usually create is is a man that feels emasculated and a lot of times that ends up manifesting itself in some of the worst ways possible go look at some of the worst serial killers and and look at the the history of how they were treated when they were young and how that ended up manifesting itself

So I think it's about time that we understand that, look, we've all recognized. I mean, if we have categories of masculinity and femininity, and the reason why we have those is because we understand that there are certain traits that are generally associated to each.

real question we should be asking ourselves is what are the positive manifestations and the negative manifestations and how do we foster the positive and to try to do that without positive male role models in the life of a young man especially the father's role is incredibly difficult. It's not impossible, but it's incredibly difficult. And yet we have people, especially wealthier people, trying to glamorize this idea of, oh, girl, you can do it all yourself. You don't need a man.

Okay, how's that working out? Because one thing that I used to see a lot, so when I was teaching, you see the boy come from a single parent household, and they'd be... Not fine, but they'd be coping better. The moment they hit puberty, mum wouldn't be able to control them physically because the boy is bigger, stronger, quicker than mum is. Desperate.

desperate for male attention, especially from older boys, older men. If they're not getting it from dad, that's something that is really deep rooted within their psyche. They're going to look for it somewhere else, which is why they normally end up in a gang. Yes, because all of us at a certain age are looking for a combination of community, belonging, and purpose.

That's what having a mother and father is supposed to be there. Because the mother and the father play unique roles both for the boy and for the girl as they're growing up. And having raised two daughters and a son, I can really see that.

But if they can't find that, if there was an element missing from that, well, then yeah, a young boy is going to obviously look to who are some of the older boys that seem strong, seem confident in who they are, even if they're not, right? If they give that appearance. I had a mother once ask me, she said, do you have any advice for a mother raising young boys? I said, yeah, I do. I said, understand something, because I was predominantly raised by a single mother.

I said, the same thing that made your boy feel secure and loved when he was little makes him feel weak and vulnerable when he's older. And he doesn't want to feel that. And that's one of the reasons why having the father in the picture is so important is that he helps the boy start to understand that the world is a challenging and dangerous place. And that he's not to be scared of it, he's to be prepared for it. He's to help mold it into something that is good.

and to find positive outlets for those traits. But if you don't have that, and now Ollie's learning this from other boys that also didn't have it, then typically what ends up happening is none of them want to be vulnerable. None of them want to be hurt. None of them want to be taken advantage of. And so the way that they deal with emotions, the way they deal with threats or anything else is...

to resort to violence because it's kind of the easiest go-to in those circumstances. And it's the one that's respected among other men. It's interesting that your point about knowing the world is challenging and being prepared for it, it sparked a thought in me about a broader thing, which just, it seems to me, I don't know if you agree with this, but all the things you were talking about, do you think there's an element of this where we're just...

massive victims of our own massive success in that over the last 70 years our need for frankly guys like you to stand on the wall has gone down and down and down and so we have the luxury of pretending that all of this luxury and prosperity. It just exists without guys like you actually having to pick up a weapon and go and protect it. I was listening to someone speak the other day, and he was talking about...

the greatest generation and in the united states that usually refers to the generation that went through the depression and fought world war ii and he made a comment where he said uh they may have been the greatest generation when it came to storming the beaches in normandy that they turned into kind of crappy parents

and um and he didn't mean this like overtly disrespectfully he was just he was explaining to him he goes you know the common statement that came out of that era was i wanted to give my kids everything i didn't he goes great but you thought you forgot to give them what you did have yeah

And what you did have was grit and resilience and not an ounce of entitlement. You understand and knew what you had to fight for, and that was everything from a meal when you were going through the Great Depression to your survival and your country's survival. in World War II. And when you give the benefits of all of those attributes without teaching why the attributes were necessary to make them possible in the first place.

I think we end up with exactly what you're talking about. It's a sense of entitlement. And it is amazing to me the number of people that, first of all, think that prosperity and peace is, well of course this is just the way society is. I've known little else. But amazingly enough, despite the fact that they're living in times that by historical standards are incredibly prosperous and incredibly safe by comparison, they find trauma in everything.

And some of that is an ideological push, I think, to elevate trauma as the currency of the realm, especially within that oppressor-oppressed dynamic. But some of it, too, is I think there's something inside of us that knows. there's something admirable about overcoming difficult challenges. And when you don't have a lot or you're too lazy to seek them out or too comfortable to seek them out, then you start...

looking for situations to elevate your status. And that's why we do have a lot of people right now. demanding that they be considered stunning and brave for doing things which are neither stunning nor brave. But I do think it's in some place a result of... Again, widespread prosperity and safety by historical standards, I think does breed a certain degree of complacency.

you know again we're not supposed to do the decadence anymore but it's it's an accurate description yeah no i totally agree with that and actually something i worry about i have you've raised your kids i have a young uh toddler now and

My probably biggest worry outside of all the fears parents always have about, you know, no one told me this, but when you become a parent, like the range of emotions just widen so much, doesn't it? Because like your greatest fears were nothing before and your greatest... joys with nothing too you know but the one the one thing i often think about and i've talked about this with other people is

The more successful I am, the harder it is for me to raise him not to be a douche, basically. Do you know what I mean? Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how to work around that. Luckily, when my wife and I first got married, we started to have kids when we were 23. When we first got married in 19 and 20, I think we were making $1,200 a month.

I very distinctly remember for years going to the grocery store and especially toward the end of the month where you hand over your card and you were just sitting there praying to God that it's going to go through. I remember that. I remember having the power turned off. And so there was an element when our kids were younger, they still knew that, hey, look, mommy and daddy ain't rich.

But the other thing that we did is we instilled a couple of things in them very young. One was we told them, we don't owe you a college education. You're not owed that. That doesn't mean we want to help you if you had a unique opportunity. But don't you ever think you're entitled to that. That's something you work for. We also did things like, I don't buy you your car. You want a car? Go get a job. You can earn the money for it. And so even though we were at a point where

It wouldn't have been fancy, but we could go bottom of a car pretty easy. No. You're going to go work the night shift at McDonald's or whatnot, or you're going to go do this. And so all of our kids bought their first car. And as a result, they took excellent care of it. They also learned how to maintain it themselves. That was another thing. I remember my oldest daughter, you know, oh, the brake pads are off. How much is it to get it fixed? $1,100. How much is it to do it yourself?

about 300 she learned how to do it herself pulled up youtube and did it and what that created was a an extreme sense of confidence in herself that i can figure this stuff out And it also made them really good at budgeting and prioritizing. That teaching of delayed gratification along with, I think that was important. The other thing that we were pretty adamant with our kids on.

was dreams are great to have, but they're yours. They're not somebody else's. They're not the world's. They're not society's dreams. They're yours. So keep in mind, you got to feed yourself. because nobody owes you anything like that. You got to feed yourself. So if you have a dream, either pick a dream that feeds you or pick a job that allows you to pursue your dream.

But there was this constant drumbeat of you are responsible for your life, which is not just an onerous, overwhelming. No, it's actually a... Somewhat miraculous when you think about it through the terms of world history, being able to be responsible for your own life, being able to choose your path.

um that's important and and the more challenges the more age-appropriate challenges that they're given the more they end up seeking them out because they've developed the confidence that they can do it and they like to be able to say no i did that i i my youngest daughter loved it would be like oh your parents got you a car she's like uh-huh no uh no i worked for that they didn't give me a dime for that car um so i think that's one of the ways that you do it um another thing too is obviously

there are certain things you do want to protect your kids from. The way I tried to break it down, I tried to explain it to somebody like, how did I distinguish that? I said, I'm trying to prevent them from getting scars, not bruises. When I think it's something that's going to significantly impact their life or cause genuine trauma, not the...

fake kind that we see so much, but genuine trauma. I'm going to protect them from that. I'm going to shelter them from that because they're not emotionally, physically, spiritually ready to tackle that particular problem. But they might do other things that it's like, oh yeah, they're going to fall on their ass. I'm like, yeah, let them.

And then when they fall on their ass, we're like, that hurt, right? Yeah. Okay, let's go. And again, it builds that sense of resilience that they take on later. But if you're trying to teach all of that at 16. No, you can't. Well, my worry is, Nick, and this is what I really want to ask you, because I think just speaking... to lots of people and i think a lot of the times people make this stuff political but i i really don't think it is like so many people who support us

they're not so much concerned about like how do i teach my kid to do this because they know the stuff you're talking about this is it's great stuff but it's common sense to most people of our generation really yeah the thing i'm really concerned about is protecting my children from other people who want to put shit in their heads that doesn't belong there. Now that's what I really wonder about in the modern age. How do we deal with that? We pulled our kids out of school.

We pulled out of Kizetta and homeschooled. And the stereotypical thing, I don't know how common this is in the UK. It's gotten a lot more common in the United States, especially after COVID. You probably had maybe three to 4%. of the population homeschooling. A lot of people assume that that means they're going to be socially awkward or they're not going to interact with people.

And I always look back, I'm like, have you seen what they're teaching in the schools right now? Yes, my kids missed out on the opportunity to be communist. Oh, no. I'm so upset. One of the things I think is so important about that is that, and I do think this is tied to a larger ideology, and I don't mean to make it partisan, I just think it's ideological. Which is to say that there is a very popular political theory that says that kids should be raised and educated collectively.

That this should be done by experts. You want to do open-heart surgery on your child. Why would you trust yourself with something as complex as educating them on a variety of topics for which you can't possibly have sufficient information? And what it does is it takes... parent out of the role of being an educator. And it teaches the child to no longer see you as an educator.

But the thing is, is that in most circumstances, there's bad parents, but in most circumstances, you care about that child, their future, their hopes, wants, needs, desires, dreams, far more than anybody, any government bureaucrat, to include teachers who might even be really, really good teachers.

But public education was made for the mass production of education. It was not made for your child in mind. And you do have a very prominent ideological bias going on, especially within the credentialing institutions when it comes to education.

that they believe it is their duty to not just teach your kids how to read, write, do arithmetic, or even basic citizenry. They believe it is their job, their moral responsibility to... educate their kids and to prepare them for a certain social construct that you might not agree with and The thing I tell parents is

If you have certain values that you want to convey to your children, if you have a certain understanding of the world, and you teach them one way at home, and let's say, what do you get? You get the weekends, 30, 40 minutes dinner?

But then you send them off to a place that might not share any of those values. In fact, in some cases might be openly hostile to them. And you tell your kids, because you should, right? That's your teacher, you respect them. And they constantly get the drumbeat of, well, that's the expert. They're the educator. You're not the educator. Well, at best, they're going to get conflicting signals on who they should listen to. And you're at the bottom of the totem pole now between the teacher.

taylor swift you know and their friend group you're at the bottom of the totem pole you can take that dynamic back because the reality is is When your kids bond with you the way they're meant to, especially very early on in their development, you are their natural educator. That is both an incredible privilege, but it's also an incredible responsibility. The good news is I don't think it's ever been easier.

to be able to use resources, many of them free, in order to assist with your child's education. And this doesn't mean you can't go out and use experts. It doesn't mean you can't use those resources or... go to co-ops or tutors or whatever else it might be. But now you have significantly more control with respect to the worldview you would like to pass along to them.

And it is amazing to me the arrogance I will see from the educational establishment where it's like, who are you to decide what your child's worldview should be? We're the experts. Like, okay, I've seen what you consider to be expertise, and I'm not that impressed. But the other thing I would say, too, is that I've run into a lot of parents that, let's say, share my worldview, which...

Their kids go off to college and they get very, very frustrated. They feel like they lose their kids within two years of college. And then I'll ask them, okay, well, how did you convey those values to them? And it's heartbreaking when I got to look at a parent and be like, okay. you didn't convey values you taught an authority structure and the authority structure was i'm mom i'm dad i love you we gave you life we feed you we clothe you this is what we believe

And what they learned was as long as they regurgitated what mom and dad did under mom and dad's roof, they were rewarded. And insofar as they strayed for it, they were potentially punished. So there was some sort of disincentivization structure. I said, okay, great. But now you're not the one.

housing or feeding or clothing. You're not the primary authority figure within their life. It's a professor. And so they took the authority structure that you taught them, and you're just not the authority anymore. What you have to do if you want to foster that is you have to teach sound critical thinking. Are you teaching your kids to somebody, and you don't got to get into all the technical terms, right? But law of identity, law of excluded middle.

Law of non-contradiction? Are you teaching about inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning? When they regurgitate something that you know that they heard from you, do you challenge them on it? Why'd you say that? I used to love doing that with my kids. I still do. They'll say something that I know they heard from me. I'd be like, why do you think that? Oh, well, you know. No, no, no. I don't know. Why do you think that? I know why I think it. Why do you think it? And then I'll challenge them.

What about this? What about that? And you engage in this sparring relationship, this intellectual sparring with your child in order to develop those critical thinking skills. And then the big thing I always tell parents too is that, especially if you're, and I hope every parent is doing this, but some don't, if you're teaching your kids that there is such a thing as objective morality, well, get ready for when they find you breaking the objective morality you taught them.

And if in the moment that they catch you at it, now if they're a little rude and punks about it, sure, get them back into the proper respectful mindset. But if the moment they catch you screwing up, your attitude is, you don't tell me what to do. I run this house. Ah, once again, it's not that the truth reigned in your household. It's not that right reigned in your household. Authority did. You were the authority. You had the ability to impose your will. And so that's all it was.

But the first time you're a kid, and it's usually going to be in their teenage years, which, oh, just so dang irritating. As soon as your kid catches you doing it, I've had cases like this. I have one story I love to tell about it. But if you can look at them and be like, you know what? You were right. I'm wrong. I apologize. And I want to thank you for having the courage to respectfully call me out. Man, that sticks with them. That sticks with them.

and now when it's a different authority figure that's doing something that they believe is wrong and they have they have a conviction that this is right now not simply because they were told it but because they were taught why it was correct they were able to logically think through it it's no longer mom and dad's belief that the

It's their belief, and they're going to defend that. And all of a sudden, when that professor gets a little bit of pushback and says, well, this is my classroom, it's like, oh, okay. And it doesn't jar them anymore. They're prepared for it. But you got to do that sparring. You got to do that sparring. The holidays are here. Shopping, travel, and unfortunately, a higher risk of data theft. Hackers love this time of year because we're often rushing and using unsecured public Wi-Fi. That's why...

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It's such a good point and it takes me back to my own time as a teacher. But moving on, Nick. I'm glad you got that in. It did. I just saw so many teachers being like, I'm the teacher. And I'm like, well, you've already lost them now because you're not. actually pushing back on what they're saying. But you talk about your experiences in Iraq and whenever I've got a great empathy and a great admiration for people who serve for their country like you did.

And push back on me, because maybe I'm wrong with this, but I saw Iraq. as a betrayal in many ways betrayal for people like you betrayal for people like me who believed in what we were told and i think if we can see people's distrust of politicians, distrust of America and the way it's behaving overseas, even if its intentions are good, they obviously stem from Vietnam. But for my generation, our generation, it's Iraq that was the key moment. Yeah. Oh, no, I don't disagree. A big I remember.

If you asked me in 2001, 2002, 2003, I was like, yeah, Afghanistan, Iraq, what's next? When do we go over with Iran? Who's next on the, like, I mean, I was, you know, 20, what, 21 year old? kid like oh yeah i was gonna go fight now it's my war you attacked us on our home soil we haven't had that happen in a while um i was out for blood and um

But the more I got into, especially in my second tour in 2008, we had a very good tour. It was a very successful tour. By the same token, I'm starting to... You're very, very skeptical of what brought us over here in the first place and why are we doing it this way. What got you skeptical? Part of it was the idea that... So it wasn't even kind of like the lack of WMDs, which for a lot of people, I think that was the thing. We all expected, oh, there's the warehouses, we told you.

I was able to justify that in my own head. Oh, well, he was operating in such a way that made us think that he had it, but he's still a bad guy, and so all this is justified. It was more about looking back, and I'll never forget I was writing the SITREP. for my ODA, my Special Forces A-Team. And my captain comes in, he goes, hey, Nick, you need to put more in the SITREP before we send it up to Special Operations Task Force North.

I said, we're packing our bed. That's all we did that week. It was literally like our last two weeks in country. We were packing up and transitioning with 10th group that was coming in to take our place. And he goes, just put more in there. I'm like...

government bureaucracy, right? So I wrote and I said, okay, I got a question for all you mucky mucks up there at Special Operations Task Force North. Why are we the only country from a constitutional republic with a generally free market system that goes overseas?

um overthrows dictatorships and then sets up parliamentary democracies with centrally planned economies i put that in the sitrep now our process was i would put stuff in the sitrep he would read it take out the little snarky stuff i said and then send it up He forgot. So we got a call down and the operations officer for our task force is put Freitas on the phone. What the F is this? I'm like, oh, hey, sir, I'm sorry. I kind of put that into Raz the captain and I don't think he read it.

he sent it up but now that i have you could you answer the question um so it was this idea that here here we were attempting to nation build here we were attempting to essentially impose an approach to government and really a larger approach to just, you know, culture.

But this society never said that they particularly wanted. It wasn't organic for them. It's not like they really decided this. We were the one calling the shots. Do you want your money? Well, then you're going to have a parliament. Do you want this? Then you're going to do this. And it's the same thing in Afghanistan.

And then I started looking more. I'm like, you know, constitutionally, isn't Congress supposed to cast a vote on this? Not just a budget amendment, a vote. And so it was a combination of... Some of it was the reasoning, the initial reasoning versus what happened. Some of it was understanding a little bit more about how the world worked outside of my kind of Western mindset or American mindset.

It was the way the war was conducted. Are we in this to win? I remember them sending me home two months early for my first combat deployment because I had to go to the Advanced Non-Commissioned Officers course. Like why would you take me out of a combat? If this is so damn important, why are you taking me out of combat zone to go to a school?

They would rotate our, like, the commanders for our, this is special forces. We're not even talking like a line infantry unit. In special forces, they would take your team leader, your commander, and rotate them in with another one in the middle of your combat tour. Why? Well, it's the rotation. He needs his OER block. That's the offshore efficiency. He needs his OER block for combat as well. This is stupid. We're not even serious out here.

Oh, you can't go outside the wire unless you fill out this 42-page PowerPoint presentation explaining what you're doing. Are we serious about winning this? And so I became skeptical of the way the military was running things. I really became skeptical of the way politicians were running things. I became very, very skeptical of the military industrial complex, even though I recognize that we need an industry to create weapons systems. We need that.

And I became really, really skeptical of our complete unwillingness to follow our own constitutional process for deciding when we go to war or not. And it was another thing that I realized, like, oh. Congress likes to be on board when it's the patriotic thing to do. And then they like to blame the president when the war eventually goes south. So nobody wants to take responsibility. And we're over here getting shot at because you told us it was worth it.

I'll never forget I slipped up one day when I was telling my son a story and my wife looked at me and said what? And I was like yeah because my son's going into the military. I said, when you plan your operation, you have a certain threshold of how many people you can lose and it's still worth it.

for me i just well yeah of course that makes sense because there's a certain threshold of people that when you lose you can no longer effectively carry out your plan to to go get the bad guy what my wife is hearing is like So if three of you would have died, but you would have got that guy, that would have been worth it? It's like, well, that's the job. And it has to be that way, by the way. It has to be that way.

Mission has to... There were commanders that would have said, my mission is to bring everyone home alive. Well, you're a dumbass. If that's your mission, don't leave. Don't go to war. Guaranteed, you'll bring everyone home alive.

No, we sign up for this, and we're an all-volunteer force. We sign up for this to go do dangerous things with the understanding that some of us might not come home. We will do everything we possibly can to accomplish the mission and bring everyone home. But when we have a mission, that's the mission. But then you start to...

You start to look at it like, what was it actually? I know what my mission was on that objective. This is why I look back with so much animosity with respect to how the United States came about its decision-making process. to go to war and the way we conducted it. Because to this day, I can justify the early operations in Afghanistan. Not a lot of the follow-on, but early on. But you're looking at this going, you know...

I'm mad about that. I'm not mad about my service. I know what me and my friends did. I know what we tried to do in a difficult situation. I know the people we helped. I know some of the guys that aren't walking around anymore, and I sleep like a baby. Because they were horrible, evil men. But we destabilized the region. And then a lot of people died that probably wouldn't have.

And ultimately, we lost a lot of good people. And them and their families have every right to be proud of their service, but we also have every right to be pissed about what the overall justification for the mission was. So what do you think was a real reason why we went to war in Iraq? Because obviously they said WMDs, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I don't think it's a simple...

I'm going to say this. I don't think it's the simple explanation a lot of people give that it's just the military industrial complex or it's just Bush wanted to finish it up or Bush wanted to be a wartime president or they're all greedy because they had stock in Halliburton.

I think the truth is actually much worse. And this goes back to kind of the C.S. Lewis quote where... you know i'm going to botch it up but he said that it would be better to live under robber barons than moral busybodies because the robber baron might have their greed or lust for power satiated but the moral busybody will torment you without him because they do so with the approval of their own conscience

And I think some of these guys just have this vision for how they're going to be the one. They're going to do great things. They're going to reorder society. They're going to bring democracy to a place that has never had it. They're going to whatever. And I think I chalk it more up to moral arrogance than I do greed or a lust for power on a lot of this. Because there's a lot of easier ways to get money and power.

you've got to really truly believe that you're on some sort of incredibly noble mission to do some of the horrible things that people have done throughout history, especially in positions of high political leadership. did that war have on the surrounding regions, the Middle East, not just America, but on that entire region? So I think one of the, again, one of the things that...

Americans have gotten wrong ever since Wilson is this idea that our new manifest destiny, now that the Western portion of the continent has been conquered, is to make the world safe for democracy. No, it isn't. It's like anything else. Various cultures, various religious traditions lend themselves to particular styles of government.

I definitely think that the dictatorship in North Korea is absolutely horrible, right? I think there's other regimes. I think the communist regime in China is absolutely horrible. Does that mean it is therefore the United States' mission to go in, overthrow it, and replace it with something that we think would be more advantageous? or beneficial or equitable? No, I don't think so. I think that completely takes out any sort of understanding for how cultures develop.

And the sort of organic solutions that they come, I mean, I think Daniel Bell came up with the quote that culture is society's attempt to come up with a coherent set of answers to the existential questions we face throughout our lives.

Different cultures come up with different answers. Now, I'm not a cultural relevist. I don't think every culture has come up with the best answers to these questions. I do prefer the answers that the West, in most cases, have come up to it. But I also understand that... that has to be an organic realization. It's very difficult to impose that from the top down. Yeah, you can't bomb it into people. Yeah, right. And now people will like to point to Germany or Japan as examples of how it can work.

I think it would be incorrect to say that there's no way that you can impose it. I think it's foolish to assume that that's the natural or best way. for it to come about, especially in a way that people can actually embrace it as their own. Well, if you think about what we had to do to both Germany and Japan to achieve those objectives. Oh, devastating.

You know, my view, having read a lot about it, is that it was absolutely the right thing to do. But it was an awful thing to have had to do. It's not something that you would choose to do. unless you were in a position like the West was in at the time, wasn't quite true for America, but certainly for all of Europe and the Soviet Union, there was a war of survival. Yes.

And in that situation, you have to fight to capitulation of the other side and then make sure that they're not going to threaten you again with the same thing. And you have to make sure you don't repeat the mistakes of World War I. and how that ended. And I dare say that Japan and Germany also would not have turned out the way they did as a result of the occupation or elements within the Marshall Plan, which I'm actually something of a critic of.

if you didn't have the looming threat of the soviet union or mouse china i think those those provided sufficient threats for people to be willing to say okay that's the bigger threat not the internal divisions that we're facing right now. And I don't think a similar thing existed in Iraq or Afghanistan. I think the end result is the greatest threat in that area is Iran.

Iraq is majority Shia and has long-term relationships with the Iranian government. Now that I'm a little bit more, I guess, a little bit wiser, I can look at that now and say,

We were going into a country that was predominantly Shia, that had close relationships to Iran, that hated the Hussein regime. At the same time that... pretty much every other Arab country that we actually have fostered fairly decent relationships, whether that be, you know, Qatar or Bahrain or Saudi Arabia or UAE are terrified. of Iran wanting to be the hegemonic leader for that region. And so now we just gave Iran another base of operations, not to mention the fact that we've facilitated

you know, further destabilization in Syria, not to mention Lebanon. And so that's the sort of real politic that I think sometimes our idealism gets in the way of a scene. Well, the question I want to ask you about that, Nick, is it's really interesting because Francis talked about how there were people who believed the Republic. I didn't believe the stuff about Iraq. I was on the streets protesting about it because it was...

I mean, maybe it was naive to think I really knew what was going on, but it was obvious to me that the whole case for that war was bullshit. It was pretty clear. And therefore, I'm not traumatized in the way that I think some people are who pushed that war very aggressively, who now have said... America must never intervene in anything America mustn't do anything and I was but you know you laugh and I also laugh to be honest because I think it's a very naive worldview. I agree

You agree. So I'm curious about what your thoughts are in relation to some of the conflicts that America is currently involved in, not directly, but at least backing, obviously Ukraine and the one in the Middle East. I think if we're going to take a... So it's funny. There are some people that say they're America first when really what they are is everybody last. And I think that's two different things.

America first, for me, is a foreign policy which understands that we have interests. It's the whole idea that nations don't have friends, they have interests. I think there is an element in there where you can't have long-lasting alliances. The UK is a perfect example of this.

You can't have long-lasting alliances for which there are both interests and mutually shared values and friendship which are beneficial and which ultimately facilitate things like better trade and better overall relations and stability.

But we have to actually put everything into that column and say, okay, where does this weigh in the larger scheme of things? And I'm not someone, I am not a, I don't believe in real politic to the degree that I am just a moral relativist as soon as I get outside my borders. don't believe in that. Slavery is evil. I don't care who's doing it. It's evil, right? Genocide is evil, no matter who's doing it. I think what the American population is sick of.

is feeling like our own domestic problems take a backseat to everybody else's essentially domestic problems. And I understand that. And I'm right there with that. And I sympathize with that. I don't think that means that we just completely pull ourselves out of every single world engagement. When it comes to Ukraine, I've been really skeptical with respect to the amount of money that we've sent over.

I am very glad that we haven't sent over troops. I was getting very nervous that that was going to be the case and I did not think that was appropriate. I also tend to think, like from the very beginning of this, I was like, look, I think Putin's a bad guy and I want Ukraine to win.

that doesn't mean i think we're responsible for ukraine winning the war i also think the united states and nato has to look very very hard at some of the positions that we took initially that potentially exacerbated this

The other thing that I would say is the United States needs to learn, and Trump understood this. I was not a huge fan of Trump in 2016 when he got elected. I remembered... the Trump that believed a whole bunch of things I didn't like and then had a family life I didn't quite think was in line with what I believed.

But one of the biggest areas where he absolutely proved himself to me was the understanding that not every military engagement is a nation-building exercise. There is such a thing as a punitive expedition. Syria was a good example of this. The way that he went after the leader of the IRGC after the bombing of the embassy in Baghdad. I loved that. It was like, oh, so we're...

We're not going to bomb civilians. We're not going to invade a country and try to set up a parliamentary democracy in a place that doesn't want it. And we're not even going to blow up a legitimate military target. Which would inevitably kill a bunch of 19-year-old conscripts or a contractor that was there that day. No, no. He went after the guy that orchestrated this, who was a known terrorist, and he killed him. Soleimani. Yeah. Excellent.

Because nothing sends a message to a guy like that that you shouldn't do that than killing him or his buddies. He doesn't care how many 19-year-old conscripts he kills. Hamas doesn't care how many kids they lose. In fact, they'd like to lose more because that's the strategy they utilize in order to manipulate the West.

I'm a big fan of like how do we conduct operations as efficiently as possible both for the moral reasons of avoiding collateral damage and civilian casualties but also for the larger practical reason that we have some enemies in some cultures that

They don't care how many they lose if they know that they can use it to manipulate our Western media and academia. So I think that what I want to see U.S. foreign policy going toward is one where our goal is to expand trade with as many people as we possibly can. I think the joke was there's never been two countries with McDonald's that have gone to war with one another. That's changed now.

Yeah. I was taught that in college. It's changed now. Well, it was funny. I remember being in Iraq and on some of the bigger bases, they had like a pizza hut and a Cinnabon. And I was like, you want to know what real military force projection is? It's not that we'll park an armored division in your... you know, lobby your aircraft battle group in your harbor, it's that we'll bring fast food with us when we do it. We'll make you fat. Yeah, exactly. We're bringing the carbs, baby. But...

I think we need to properly identify when it makes sense for us to do. I think we need to come up with better rules of engagement for how we intervene. I think to the extent that we're going to get involved in major military operations, we need to follow the constitutional problem. process and Congress needs to be expected to vote on going to a declaration of war, not just funding whatever military adventures the executive branch has chosen to partake in.

And then I think that we also need to look for allies. I think we also need to look for allies that are willing to fight their own wars but are asking for support. But isn't that exactly what Ukraine is? Ukraine is closer to that. Yeah, Ukraine is closer to that. They've just been asking for support. My problem with that is that we've never had, like in the United States, like in our, like if we look at NATO.

long lasting alliance. If we look at the UK, long lasting alliance. If we look at Israel, that's a pretty long lasting partnership and mutually beneficial one in many areas. We've never had that with Ukraine. The other problem that I had, and this was something that Trump also brought up, the requirement to be a member of NATO, I think, is 3% of your GDP in defense spending. Was Germany doing that?

No, I mean, he was absolutely 100% right about it. And he got laughed out of the room for talking about it. He did. And it was also one of those things where it's like, okay, look, Germany has a bigger GDP than Russia. France has a bigger GDP than Russia. I believe the UK has a bigger GDP than Russia. And so I'm looking at all this going, you have superior military technology. You have the capability. The United States is still going to, you know.

We're not going to allow Russia to just arbitrarily launch nukes, but the UK has nukes. France has nukes. Why was NATO incapable of actually providing Ukraine all the military support? I couldn't agree. I mean, you make such good points because this is really the issue, I think.

No one talks about it in Europe, but Europeans as countries, not as people, but as countries have become incredibly... arrogant in the we've been living under the american defense umbrella for this entire time and so and at the same time sort of turning our nose up at america and like we europe should be able to defend itself and

The thing we've done with Ukraine, I think Ukraine's really got the worst of both worlds, because on the one hand, we encouraged them to make a stand. On the other hand, we didn't actually help them to the level that they needed to, to make that stand effectively.

you know the american people or the european people have a right not to want to send lots of their money over to ukraine but then we should have told them that at the beginning instead of sort of getting the pom-poms out and cheerleading i think on a On a cultural level within the United States, I remember as more and more USAID was being requested and

i was really concerned that we were going to send more special operations and then all it takes is for a couple americans to get shot or an american plane to go down and we're all in baby that's just kind of our history um my other frustration with it is that I always felt as if Europe was constantly telling us to mind our own business or European countries in general. We're always telling us to mind our own business, talking about the arrogant, hegemonic.

you know military forces the united states and why can't you guys be more diplomatic and civilized and um and yet when the russians were crossing over the border, all of a sudden it was like, hey, America, how you guys doing? Those Abrams are looking pretty cool right now.

I'm so tired of that. Yeah, you're making really good points, man. And I say this as someone who's very supportive of Ukraine's standards. I think that, you know, defending their country is very important. And I hope ultimately they get what they were fighting for. which is long-term security so that this can't happen again. But...

I guess you feel Israel is a different issue because of the long-standing alliance? I think it's a combination of long-standing alliance. I think it's also a combination of strategic positioning within the world. Now, there's some people that will say, well, yeah, our problem with that part of the world. is that we've been too close to Israel. If we just abandoned that alliance, we'd be in a much better position. I don't think that's the case.

I also think that we can't just look at the Middle East from the standpoint of oil or energy. Obviously, that's a huge component of it. But a lot of people say, yeah, but it's not a huge component of the United States. Now, again, yeah, you're right. We don't get anywhere near as significant a portion of our oil from the Middle East as Europe does or as Asia does.

But it's still a commodity traded on world markets. And so it does have an impact on overall prices. The other thing we need to take into account is that it's got, what, probably the third... Third most strategic waterway in the world. I mean, I probably own the Suez Canal I mean, obviously Israel doesn't have a Suez Canal, but it's it's very strategically located within proximity to that

The only two I would potentially put above it would be the Panama Canal and the Malacca Straits. And so I think it makes sense for cultural reasons, and I think it makes sense for strategic reasons. And again, a lot of the funding that we do get at Israel, and this was similar with Ukraine as well to your point earlier, we're not just dropping off pallets of cash in most of these circumstances. A lot of what's being dropped off is...

We have the military industrial complex, right? But from a practical standpoint, we have to have arms development. It makes sense for us, for a variety of strategic reasons, that we sell the arms. to our allies rather than having to get it from people that are not us and so you know i understand it from that standpoint as well i also think israel has always been very good about not

not requiring or requesting US troops to fight the war. So again, I think two things can be true at once. I think the United States can say, look, it is no longer our obligation to, quote, make the world safe for democracy. We will. We do have alliances which are important and strategic to our interests. Our first instinct should not be that we have to fight the war for you. I also look at Israel as an ally where...

I can look at Israel's situation and say, yes, they do need support. And they're somewhat isolated with respect to where they can get it from. I don't think Ukraine is. I really do feel like Ukraine should be a primary European responsibility.

But again, it's not like I'm against any sort of assistance. But I've been really skeptical with respect to how some of it's gone. Now, I will say this. Somebody asked me the other day, like, what do you think of Zelensky? I said, I think he's probably one of the best wartime politicians I've ever seen. And you would have thought I kicked somebody's puppy. He's corrupt and he's this and he's that. I wish Joe Biden cared about the United States as much as Zelensky cares about Ukraine.

Zelensky's job is not to be concerned about US taxpayers. Zelensky's job is to fight a war, and he's been incredibly effective in getting the resources necessary for that. Not to mention the fact that it would have been really easy for him to un-ass his country and have every excuse to do so. And I actually think he's done a really good job.

Do I think there's probably corruption going on in certain areas? Yes. Do I think there's been a misappropriation of resources and funds at some point? I'm sure there has been. But ultimately he's kept his country in the war. And more than that, he's effectively fought back.

And so, again, from a real politics standpoint, regardless of what I think about the internal workings of Ukrainian politics, the guy has done a great job by his country. The reason people get annoyed about that, I think, Nick, my observation is that... A lot of people don't want to say...

i don't want to give money to foreign countries because it sounds kind of nasty or whatever so they then say they then have to prove that ukraine is the wrong country to give money to and therefore zelensky is evil and whatever sure instead of just saying what they actually think and

You know, I don't agree with their position, but it is a valid position to say our country should focus on its own problems at a time when it has a lot of them. You know, there's a reasonable position. Well, and that is the other side of it right now, I think within.

the U.S. is that so many of our problems have reached kind of a critical stage. The worst thing the United States could do is have a sovereign debt crisis because we are the world's reserve currency and that would have... disastrous effects um and so i do think it's time that we have to start to deal with some of those internal problems but to your point if we completely I don't like to use the word retreat because I've seen a lot of neocons use it as an excuse to get us involved in everything.

How about we just be a little bit more strategic and a little bit more introspective on what our involvement should be, to what extent, and what our goals are, what our purpose is. And then let's foster what our aid looks like based off of what our purpose is. Is your purpose to just keep Ukraine in the war?

Is your purpose to help them win? Is the purpose to recapture Crimea? What's the purpose? And I realized that there are certain things, and actually this is another thing that I think Trump has been pretty good about, is not always showing his hand on what he's going to do on everything in a campaign run. So I think that would be a far more reasonable position for the United States to take, which would honor this, I think this very...

important and understandable position to say we need to reprioritize our own stuff right now, while at the same time recognizing that we still play a major role within the world. And I don't think the world gets better with our, you know.

with an isolationist style absence let me just ask one more question about israel you've served you've probably seen some urban combat i'm guessing people like us who've never been in that situation i hear You know, I have my own views on it and having sort of read and listened and whatever, but ultimately I've never been there.

People talk about what's happening in Gaza and they say, you know, it's genocide, it's this, it's that. And then other people say, well, look at the civilian to combatant death ratio. Actually, this is the most humane operation in history. What do you make of all of that? I think the people that are calling it genocide are either being intentionally dishonest or don't know what the word genocide means. I think that's very intentional on their behalf when it comes to civilian casualties.

There's a lot of people that like to do what I call Excel spreadsheet fighting. And what they do is they look at the Excel spreadsheet with Israeli military capability and Hamas military capability and say, Why do they need to do all of this? Look at how much more powerful they are. The reason why asymmetric warfare exists is when you have a weaker force that is attempting to utilize the strengths of the stronger force against them. So they're putting themselves in the best...

advantage possible. So I did a video on this. We have a program called The Why Minutes, and we talked about what is Hamas's strategy. And one of the questions that I asked when I looked at this from a strategic standpoint is, okay, so Hamas knew... when they went into israel that they weren't going to overthrow israel um when they took hostages they knew that the idf was coming for them um and yet they did both right so they knew they couldn't

defeat the IDF militarily. And they knew getting hostages would force the IDF to come after them in a big way. So why'd they do that? And how did they know that Western academia and media would almost instantly be on their side? And the reason why is because a lot of these organizations have invested very, very heavily within America academia.

I don't know the numbers for European academia, but I'm assuming it's probably significant. At the same token, they understood that the way that you manipulate Western media and Western sensibility is civilian casualties. Because even though we can look at our own histories, whether it's the firebombing of Dresden or dropping...

you know, atomic weapons on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We've certainly been able to get over our problem with civilian casualties, but we also pride ourselves on attempting to avoid them to the extent possible and reasonable. Urban warfare. makes it incredibly difficult to do that. Because the fight now is not... my smart weapon against your AK-47, the weapon is now my guys and their strategic advantage is they have aerial oversight and they have body armor and night vision.

Maybe, right? But they can buy night vision for five grand on the black market, so it's not like Hamas can't have access to that. And so now, if you're in a position where... You benefit strategically from civilian casualties. You have the perfect environment to maximize that in a way that no other military can mitigate other than giving up.

Because if I have to, like I've been in that environment where you are kicking in multiple doors to try to get to your bad guy and every other room there's women and children. And we go through an incredible level of training in order to make sure that you hit the right target. But that's a complex environment, especially when that one time women, kids moving on and then the 12-year-old picks up an AK-47 and starts shooting. Is that a civilian casualty or is that a military-age male?

Well, in that moment, that's a military-age male. You're shooting at me. That's not how it's going to be reported by Hamas to CNN, who will dutifully report X number of children killed on the objective. So what is considered... reasonable mitigation of civilian casualties. It isn't warning everybody ahead of time that I'm going to go into your neighborhood.

It certainly isn't calling them on their cell phones ahead of time and saying, hey, we're about to attack this area. It isn't doing drones where you bring stuff down going, please leave the area, we're about to attack this house. And yet the IDF is doing those things. I'm sorry, but there is no measurement that we can utilize with respect.

to how militaries engage in combat operations with a legitimate and honest attempt to mitigate civilian casualties and not come to the conclusion that, at the very least, Israeli ground forces have gone above and beyond whatever those standards might be. And so at this point, what an honest media would be asking is, why do you insist on keeping women and children in combat zones? Hamas is not confused about where Israel is going to go.

Why won't they move them out of the areas? Why do they keep them in those areas? Why do they insist that they stay? And another video we did a while back was we asked the question on why don't more Arab countries accept Palestinian refugees? The answer is they used to. And then Palestinian refugees sided with Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait. They tried to overthrow the Jordanian government. They did help destabilize Lebanon. They've caused problems within Egypt.

And so it's not that I don't, it's not that I am trying to minimize civilian casualties when they take place, but I think it's absurd. to rationally look at what is going on on the ground right there and then come to the conclusion that Israel is just saying, if Israel wanted to genocide Gaza, they could. And it wouldn't have taken them this long. They didn't.

Now let's ask the reverse question. If Hamas would have had the strength on October 7th to do everything it wanted to do, would Israel still be here? We know what they do. I visited... the music festival i visited some of the kubuts i'm not confused about what they would do with similar power And so that's the part where I get frustrated by this because, again, I understand Americans that are saying, it's Israel's war, not ours. I get that.

I get it when they say it's Ukraine's war, not ours. And I do believe that, again, we should think strategically about what our involvement is going to look like. But I also think that we shouldn't engage in this kind of moral relativism where it's just, well, it's just not our problem. Okay, not primarily.

But Hamas actively seeking, targeting, and killing women and children because they believe it's perfectly morally justified, taking hostages. I'm looking at some of the people on the right too. that are talking about this, especially some of the tough guys on the right. I'm like, if it was your kid in Israel right now,

You would not be calling ahead to see, hey, just wanted to let you know we're going to be coming in. You'd be kicking doors and beating the living piss out of people. So spare me your moral outrage when Israel wants to do the same thing. I once did the numbers. I was like, okay, if Mexico crossed into Texas, killed 40,000 people, and kidnapped another 1,500 to 2,000, and then the EU...

called for the United States to engage in discretion in a ceasefire. I can tell you how quick we tell them to go F themselves before we went down there and proceeded to demonstrate to everybody in the world that that was a really bad idea. So I don't want, look, I don't want Palestinians to die. I don't want Israelis to die. But if one side gets to continually engage in terrorist operations and start wars with...

with the rest of the world just immediately calling for a ceasefire the moment you hit back? That's absurd. And what you've actually done, what the West has taught Hamas is that the more civilian casualties you get, the more funding you get, and the more support you'll get. We've incentivized. them killing their own civilians by not demanding that they not do that.

You speak very powerfully about this and about the horrors of war. And one of the things that I notice when I'm in the United States is, on the one hand, how highly you talk about your veterans. On the other hand... I see the homelessness crisis. I was looking at stats. 40,000 veterans are homeless. Roughly around 20 veterans every day commit suicide. These are terrible statistics. Is America doing enough to help its veterans?

That's an interesting question. I was just talking to a friend of mine, Daniel Gade, who actually ran some of our veteran services here in Virginia. He'd worked in the White House. He'd actually lost his leg in Iraq as a company commander, as a tanker. And ended up staying in the service of retirement as a tenant colonel, I believe. We had a long conversation about that, and we have what is probably...

a fairly unpopular opinion with respect to the way that we are, quote, helping veterans. Because there's a lot of people that the immediate answer is like, well, of course we need more funding for Veterans Affairs.

Of course we need to eradicate these things that are going on. And in the process, what we're doing is we're turning veterans into victims. Now, do I believe that a veteran that serves and is wounded in the line of duty or is injured in the line of duty, maybe they didn't serve overseas, maybe they...

Maybe they had a bad jump and they broke their back. They are entitled to every single piece of advanced medical care that we can give them. That's a part of the contract that you sign with your country when you engage in service. What we have right now is an incredibly inefficient system that is encouraging people to game the system.

They are encouraging people to seek out 100% disability, even if 100% disability does not legitimately exist. And we've got people that are now treating this as like, well, it's free money. No, it isn't, first of all. Second of all... I get very upset when I see somebody that will say never served overseas.

And they're getting higher disability for sleep apnea and my knee hurts and I have a ringing in my ear than a guy that lost a leg overseas. There is a corrupting nature to benefits when they're not properly. distributed and when they're not properly given. And so I am very skeptical of what I see as a concerted effort by some to turn veterans into victims.

We should be taking care of our veterans. But again, the proper way to do that is to once again help them find a place, a meaning, and a purpose once they leave military service. Not just a handout. Here, take this. There was this famous line from a movie, I think it was 310 to Yuma. where the guy in it said he goes i realized that they gave me money not so i could walk away but so they could i heard a comedian once say that somebody said you support the troops

And he goes, well, he goes, our government certainly learned that it's easier to worship the troops than it is to take care of them. I don't want an elaborate welfare system for the troops. I want a system that honors their service. I want a culture that respects them for the sacrifices that they made. And I want an economic system that values the skills and the benefits and the attributes that they bring.

And insofar as we can help facilitate that so they can find meaning and purpose in the next thing that they do within life, that's the way that we should be doing it. But instead, I feel like we've created a... Like every bureaucracy, we have created a bureaucracy which has its own agenda apart from the reason why it was created. But if we see, and I take on board everything that you're saying, and

the worst thing that you can do is incentivize people to not strive, to not get better, to not work, because then you're teaching them to be victims and to be helpless. But what do you do with, you know, people who come out with severe PTSD? who are unable to function, who end up on the streets like...

40,000 of these veterans. What do we do with them? So I think it's important to distinguish that there are some people that served in the military, that got out, and are dealing with substance abuse issues and whatnot. Because if you look at homeless in the United States, Again, I don't say this to be incentive. I know that there is always going to be a subset of the population that, due to circumstances beyond their control, find themselves in bad circumstances.

Having dealt a little bit with this issue though There's a lot of other people that find themselves in this situation because this is what they choose through consistent actions and behavior And I have really good friends that have actually been involved in this as a ministry And they would tell you that, okay, you go into a homeless encampment, which you're going to find, is that you're going to find a lot of people, many of them are on the sex offender list. You're going to find others that...

are dealing with massive substance abuse and mental health issues. And then when it comes to perhaps finding more stable or steady work, they feel like they can make more panhandling in a 48-hour period than they could at a standard job.

So those are all a variety of perverse incentives. And the question is, is where is society's responsibility versus individual responsibility? And unfortunately, I think when we create an environment where we see society as being ultimately responsible as opposed to the individual. we get the worst in both worlds. So to the extent that we can, we'll isolate it to veterans. In Virginia, we have programs to ensure that any veteran

that is homeless has access to free rent, processes and services where they can get what they need. So they're there, they exist. We can always do a better job of making sure that people are aware of it. But then we also have to understand there's also a subset. They don't want to engage with it. The other thing that I would say is I think we have had a huge problem with respect to the way that we treat PTSD.

There's just like this constant focus on your trauma, focus on your trauma, focus on your trauma. Is that really healthy? Is that really the best approach? I was watching a documentary on World War I the other day. I think, I think, was it on the Somme? I think it was the Somme, where the British took 54,000 casualties in a day? Okay. I look at the 29th Infantry Division, which stormed Omaha Beach in World War II. I look at a lot of other conditions. Look, I think...

Yes, we need to do a better job of identifying how we help people deal with the trauma they've experienced. But I don't think we're doing a good job, and I don't think throwing more money at it is the solution to it.

I think it's about getting people back into having meaning and purpose. You send someone back, you give them a paycheck, and then you send them to a counseling session that is designed for them to open up and just talk about their feelings with someone that they don't feel like they can relate to.

Lo and behold, that doesn't work. I have far more hope for things that Randy Couture is doing in Vegas right now. Randy Couture was former Army veteran, UFC champion. Every Friday, he has an event where he has... Veterans, police officers, first responders, sometimes athletes that sustains injury and whatnot, they come. What do they do? They come to the gym. They roll. They fight. They contend with one another. And then they talk with other men that they respect and admire.

A lot of it is about finding purpose and new challenges. So I think it's a far better remedy than just constantly telling people to focus on their trauma. I also think that there's been a problem too that hit us because... The majority of people who are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan that were dealing with significant trauma as a result of combat were men. But we're sending them into the counseling situations that seemed like it was more geared for women.

I mean, all counseling is. Yeah, what do women generally seek? They generally seek support, the idea that they're not alone, that it's going to be okay. What do men look for? Men look for like, what's my purpose? What's my meaning? What's my mission?

I just think we need to get back to that. But again, I wonder sometimes if there isn't an ideological drive, and I don't mean to make that the boogeyman of everything, but... ideological drive to take a subsection of the population which should be some of our strongest, most experienced, most capable people and turn them into dependent victims.

Nick, it's been an absolute pleasure. Before we move over to Substack and get our supporters to ask you questions, our final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

Before Nick answers the final question, at the end of the interview, make sure you click the link in the description, head on over to our Substack to see this. How woke is the military now? Is a delay in starting a family stopping the psychological development of adults?

And this is something the right has to figure out as well. We're really good at identifying all the things that we're very frustrated about. We better start providing a vision of what we actually want to achieve. Gosh, I think, I can't say that we're not talking about it.

Because people like Douglas Murray, who you guys know very well, I think have talked very well about some of the problems going on with the West. And a good friend of ours, Rudyard Lynch from What If Alt Hist, has talked about this as well. But I will say that within... within the United States, and I think this extends to other places within the West as well.

We cannot continue to see the drift that we're seeing where young women, 29 and younger, are pulling as the most liberal and progressive they've ever been and young men are pulling as the most conservative as they've ever been. at the same time that we're dealing with the societal push for what can all be described as almost kind of this nihilistic, hedonistic view.

There's that little four cycle, right? Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times. I think it's a little bit simplistic, but not by much. We're at a point right now where young men... are going to revolt. They are going to push back against the system. And regardless of what postmodernist philosophers think about equity within society, young men are the ones that possess the capability.

to impose their will they're the ones that we use to fight wars they're the ones that we use to police streets you don't get to alienate and attempt to emasculate them forever without them standing up and having something to say about that the question is going to be Who are they going to look at as their leaders in that process? Are they going to look at someone? Because I'll tell you what, it's not going to be wokeism. It is not going to be wokeism. You're going to get...

You're going to get a version of masculinity, which takes all of those masculine traits, looks at all the people that they think have attempted to emasculate them and says, unleash it on them. F those people. You can have another group of men, older men, that are telling these young men, yeah, that sucks, it shouldn't have happened, but we need you to be strong and we need you to be noble. You're right, they lied to you about these attributes.

But you have to develop in the way that they're going to go because the only way that you're going to save this sort of society that you want to live in, the only way that you're going to create it is if you stand up and you actually assume that role. And it sucks that you have to do it under these conditions, but you do.

So let's do it. I honestly don't know which path they're going to choose. Right now, if I had to guess, it's not this one. And that is going to be very, very dangerous. Not for me. But it's going to be very, very dangerous for a lot of people to perpetuate this. And so they're going to have to wake up to the fact that for those of us that are trying to educate young men in a way that we think will use those traits toward a noble purpose.

you're making it really hard for us to do our jobs right now. And again, you're going to be the ones that pay the price, not us. So. Well said. All right, head on over to Substack to hear Nick answer your questions. you know red america splitting off from blue america and all of this what do you make of all of this talk and yeah the situation