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April 22nd, 1971, Washington DC, 800 veterans are standing on the steps of the United
States Capitol.

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Not protesters, veterans.

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Men who did the thing, who went, who came back missing pieces of themselves that don't
show up on any discharge paperwork.

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No DD-214s here.

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And one by one, we walk to a fence that's been set up in front of the building.

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They throw their metals over it, bronze stars, purple hearts, air metals, hitting the
pavement on the other side with this small, flat, metallic sound that is somehow the

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loudest thing anyone in that city had heard for years.

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John Kerry testified on the Senate foreign relations committee that same week.

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He was 27 years old, Navy veteran, actually.

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And he asked on the record in front of the cameras, how do you ask a man to be the last
man to die for a mistake?

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And nobody had a good answer.

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Here's the thing that sort of gets me when I think about this moment in history, right?

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The people who broke the Vietnam war politically were not the hippies, right?

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They were not the campus protesters.

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They weren't the guys, the hawks.

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couldn't call soft, you know, the guys you couldn't accuse of not understanding sacrifice.

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When the base turns, right.

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doesn't turn gently.

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It turns with metals hitting the concrete.

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It turns with testimony delivered under oath by someone who still has the scars, who's
still missing a limb walking with a crutch or a cane or a prosthetic.

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The machine that sells war.

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only runs on one type of fuel.

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And that's the loyalty of the people it sends to fight.

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When the loyalty runs out, a machine doesn't just slow down.

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It just starts running on fumes.

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And everyone kind of pretends not to smell it.

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Welcome back to The Overlap.

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I'm Joshua.

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If you're new here, I'm glad you found us, genuinely.

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This is a show about systems of power, who builds them, who they're built on top of, on
the backs of, and what happens when the people at the bottom finally look up and recognize

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the architecture.

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We come at it through labor history, political history, American justice, working class
issues.

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We follow the money and we follow the bodies.

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Because usually those two trails lead to the same place.

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Today, we're talking about something I've been watching build for a few years now.

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And I think we're finally at a moment where it's kind of impossible to look away from.

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The American war machine is losing its base.

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Not losing it to, you know, the left or the liberals or the demon rats.

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Not losing it to sort of

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pacifists or foreign policy, you know, doves or anyone in the defense lobby.

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can argue against losing it to the people who were almost always its most reliable
customers.

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Veterans, Military families, rural communities in the South and in the Midwest that have
been sending their children to serve for generations.

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For a hand up, for a leg up, maybe just for an opportunity that they wouldn't have sitting
around their podunk town.

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The communities that put the volunteer in volunteer military.

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And here's the number I need you to actually stop and hold on to for a second.

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The army, the Navy, the air force.

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I guess we now have to include the space force.

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And of course the Marines, who we all know as a division of the Navy.

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They all miss their recruitment targets significantly, like not by a little bit.

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And when Pentagon researchers went to actually look for why they found something that no
recruitment budget can easily fix young people from traditionally military families from

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the communities with the highest rates of prior service are declining to serve at rates
that we have not seen before.

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The people who know the military best are now the least likely to recommend it to their
children.

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That's not a marketing problem.

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That's not going to be fixed with a Facebook ad.

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That is a structural collapse of trust.

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Those are different things, right?

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One you solve with a better ad campaign or bigger expenditures.

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The other one?

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The other one you built over decades, Burn pit claims denied for 20 years while veterans
got sick and died waiting for healthcare.

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Heath Robinson of the Ohio National Guard

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Kosovo, Iraq, burn pit exposure, rare lung cancer.

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He died in 2020.

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The law named Afrim didn't pass until 2022.

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The VA backlog created by finally honoring those claims means thousands more people are
going to die in that queue.

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And now here in 2026,

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Doge linked reviews or floating 3.1 billion in VA cuts while Pete Hegseth runs the
Pentagon like it's a rebrand project.

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That promise is broken.

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And the people who believed in it most are the ones left holding the bill.

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So that's what we're getting into today.

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April 22nd, 1971 in Washington, DC, John Kerry, 27 years old, Navy veteran, two tours in
Vietnam, Silverstar.

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Bronze star, three purple hearts.

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He sat down in front of that Senate Foreign Relations Committee and says on behalf of the
veterans he represents, how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

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Now that line's been quoted a lot, not by my generation to be fair, but usually stripped
of every sort of piece of context that normally surrounds it.

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What doesn't actually get quoted is what came before it, right?

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Kerry testified for

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45 minutes.

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He described in clinical and devastating detail what veterans had told him at a gathering
called the Winter Soldier Investigation.

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Atrocities committed, not by like rogue soldiers as a matter of policy, as a result of the
specific rules of engagement and the specific command culture the Pentagon had built.

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He named the institution, not the individual bad actors.

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the entire institution, the Pentagon.

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So sit with this because this is the part that actually matters for what we're tracking
today.

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John Kerry was not the most destabilizing person on the Capitol steps that week.

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The week before John Kerry testified, April 18th through the 23rd, Operation Dewey Canyon
Three, over 800 Vietnam veterans came to Washington DC and camped on the National Mall,

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despite a Supreme Court order telling them they couldn't do it.

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And at the end of that week, they lined up one by one and they threw their medals over a
fence toward the Capitol building.

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Combat ribbons, Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars, Silver Stars.

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One man threw a distinguished flying cross.

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These weren't like protesters who had like never served and were just holding signs and
screaming.

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They were people.

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who had done exactly what the country had asked of them.

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They weren't like the defense establishment, like people the defense establishment could
miss as like, they're naive or uninformed or unpatriotic.

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They believed in the mission, who had come home and found that the belief had been built
on lies, and they were returning the proof.

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That is a completely different kind of dissent, right?

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That's the base breaking.

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And the Pentagon and the White House understood exactly how different it really was.

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Nixon's team spent...

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enormous amount of energy trying to discredit John Kerry specifically, right?

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And the VAW broadly, planting stories, running surveillance, attempting to prove the
veterans were communist infiltrated or fraudulent.

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The effort itself tells you how frightened they really were.

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You don't run a disinformation campaign against people who don't matter.

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This is kind of Streisand effect, right?

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Like if you're

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If you're addressing the problem, you're already behind it.

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What had broken the bass?

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Not the protests, right?

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Not the draft card burnings or the flat-footed orange demagogues.

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Something much more specific.

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18 months earlier, November, 1969, a journalist named Seymour Hirsch had published a story
through the dispatch news service that most major outlets had kind of passed on, right?

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The story described what happened in the village of My Lai on March 16th of 1968.

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US soldiers from the Charlie company under the command of Lieutenant William Callie had
entered a village and killed somewhere between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians, women,

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children, elderly men.

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The army had known they buried it and Hirsch found it anyway.

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Stop for a second and think about who lost faith over my lie.

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Not the people who are already against the war.

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The people who lost faith were the ones who had defended it.

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Rural conservatives, veterans, families, the communities that had been telling their kids
that service was the most honorable thing you could do.

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The military was trustworthy.

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And the government was telling them the truth about what was happening over here, over
there, right?

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My lie didn't radicalize the left.

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It devastated the right.

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Gallup polling from 1969 to 1970 shows the sharpest dropped in war support coming from
exactly those demographics.

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The credibility gap, right?

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That phrase people use for the distance between what the Pentagon said was happening and
what was

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actually happening.

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Didn't destroy support amongst people who already doubted the Pentagon.

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It destroyed support among people who had staked their entire identity on trusting the
Pentagon.

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That's the mechanism.

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Write that down.

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That matters.

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Fast forward to 1991, the Gulf War ends in a hundred hours of ground combat, massive
public support.

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Ticker tape parades, George H.W.

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Bush approval rating hits 89%, 89%.

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The military has apparently restored its credibility after Vietnam.

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The Powell doctrine works.

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We talked about that on a previous episode.

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Clear mission, overwhelming force, defined exit.

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The hawks are vindicated.

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And then the veterans start getting sick.

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By 1994, tens of thousands of Gulf War veterans were reporting a wide, wide array of
symptoms, chronic fatigue, cognitive problems, muscle pain, neurological disorders that

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had no official diagnosis or even an official explanation.

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The Pentagon's response was not

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let's investigate this, right?

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The Pentagon's response was, that didn't happen.

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That's not service related.

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Don't worry about it.

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But internal documents that later surfaced showed officials actively worked to attribute
symptoms to stress and psychological causes rather than actually investigate chemical or

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environmental exposures.

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Same veterans who'd come home as heroes whose war had supposedly redeemed American
military credibility.

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were now being told by the entire institution that they'd served that their bodies were
lying to them.

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Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans Illnesses published its report in
1996.

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It found the Department of Defense and the VA had failed veterans on multiple fronts.

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It found that stress was not a sufficient explanation.

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It found that the pattern of denial had compounded the harm.

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Here's the dark math of that, right?

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The Gulf War was the war that was supposed to prove the military had fixed itself after
Vietnam.

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And the way it treated sick veterans proved it hadn't fixed anything that actually
mattered.

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It fixed the optics, sure.

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It had not fixed the underlying rot inside of the institution.

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And I want you to notice the shape of this because it's not random, My lie to Gulf War
syndrome to

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burn pits.

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It's the exact same architecture every time.

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An institution that has every incentive to deny liability does deny liability for as long
as it possibly can while the people who are actually sick or dead or grieving absorb the

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cost of that denial.

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And the communities most likely to send their kids to serve are the communities most
directly exposed to the consequences.

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when the denial finally collapses.

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Now 2004, Pat Tillman walked away from a three year, $3.6 million NFL contract with the
Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the army after September 11th.

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That's the fact everyone knows.

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Here's the fact that matters more.

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When he was killed in Afghanistan on April 22nd of 2004 at 27 years old,

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Maybe coincidental, but the same age as John Kerry testifying before the Senate.

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The army knew within hours that he'd been killed by friendly fire.

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They knew.

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His platoon leader knew.

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The after action report documented it and the decision was made not by some low level
soldier covering for a mistake, but up the chain past General Stanley McChrystal.

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who later admitted in congressional testimony that he was aware of the friendly fire,
nature of the death, before public statements were ever made.

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The decision was made to issue a Silver Star citation describing Tillman charging toward
enemy fire.

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A completely fabricated lie.

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Typed up, signed, handed to his family at a nationally televised memorial.

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His mother, Mary Tillman,

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spent years fighting for that truth.

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She wrote a book, you can pick it up, called Boots on the Ground by Dusk by Mary Tillman.

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She testified she pushed the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held
hearings in 2007.

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No criminal charges ever resulted.

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McChrystal was later confirmed as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander.

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Think about what Pat Tillman represented to the people who were the military's base.

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He was proof that the sacrifice was real, that the mission was worthy, that the best among
us were choosing to serve.

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The Army didn't just lie to his family.

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They used his death as a recruitment tool.

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While literally lying about how he died, they manufactured a hero narrative.

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from a friendly fire tragedy and handed it to a grieving mother and called it a silver
star.

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And when the truth came out, it didn't just damage trust.

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It answered a question, the question that every military family quietly carries.

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If something happens to my kid, will they tell me the truth?

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The Tillman case answered that question with documented congressional record evidence.

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The answer was no.

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They will lie if lying serves the institution and they will decorate the lie with medals.

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That's not a scandal that stays contained to one family.

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That spreads through every VFW hall, every...

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kitchen table conversation in every military town in Georgia and Texas and rural Ohio and
Oklahoma.

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The Tillmans were not a marginal family who could be dismissed.

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They were the family and the army lied to him anyway.

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Here's what connects my lie in 1969 to Gulf War Syndrome in 1994 to Pat Tillman in 2004.

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It's not the bad things happened, right?

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Bad things happen in war.

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War sucks.

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The through line is the institutional response to bad things happening.

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Cover-ups, denials, the active effort to protect the institution's reputation at the
direct expense of the people who sacrifice the most for it every single time.

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And every single time the people most damaged by that pattern are not the critics.

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The critics were never trusting the institution in the first place.

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The people most damaged are the believers.

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The ones who staked something real, a son, a husband, a brother, their own bodies, their
own futures on the premise and the thought that the institution was worthy of staking

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their daughter, their mother's life on

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Daniel Ellsberg was a Marine, a Harvard PhD, a RAND analyst with top level security
clearance.

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He was by any measure the establishment's own man.

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He had access to the full classified record of Vietnam decision-making, all 7,000 pages of
it.

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He had access to the Pentagon's own internal history.

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And what it showed him was that the government had been lying, not just to the public, but
to its most trusted insiders for decades through multiple administrations across party

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lines.

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His leak didn't just inform the public.

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It proved that being inside the machine, being credentialed and trusted,

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00:18:00,951 --> 00:18:05,323
and given access does not protect you from being deceived.

222
00:18:05,323 --> 00:18:06,978
The deception was the point.

223
00:18:06,978 --> 00:18:10,829
He died in June, 2023 at 92 years old.

224
00:18:10,829 --> 00:18:16,029
Near the end of his life, he said he had absolutely zero regrets about the leak.

225
00:18:16,129 --> 00:18:17,809
I believe him.

226
00:18:18,029 --> 00:18:32,109
But I also think about what it costs to spend 50 years being called a traitor by people
who were protecting the lie after you'd spent the first half of your life being one of

227
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their most trusted assets.

228
00:18:34,222 --> 00:18:35,883
That's not a small thing to carry.

229
00:18:35,883 --> 00:18:39,564
The base doesn't break because of outside pressure.

230
00:18:40,004 --> 00:18:49,227
It breaks because the institution, given the opportunity to honor the people who believed
in it, chooses instead to protect itself over and over.

231
00:18:49,227 --> 00:18:51,347
Same choice, the same result.

232
00:18:51,567 --> 00:19:00,070
And now we're watching it happen again in real time with a different cast, of course, but
the same exact story, the same framework.

233
00:19:00,070 --> 00:19:01,370
And the question is,

234
00:19:01,370 --> 00:19:06,108
whether anyone in power has learned a single damn thing from any of it.

235
00:19:06,108 --> 00:19:08,452
They haven't, which is why, of course, we're here.

236
00:19:08,452 --> 00:19:10,304
Pete Hegseth has never run anything.

237
00:19:10,304 --> 00:19:14,146
I want to be concise about this because it matters.

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00:19:14,146 --> 00:19:18,688
Not a battalion, not a base, not a government agency.

239
00:19:18,868 --> 00:19:23,191
He ran a cable news segment for Fox and Friends.

240
00:19:23,191 --> 00:19:28,023
And before that, he commanded the National Guard unit, which is real service.

241
00:19:28,023 --> 00:19:29,314
Look, I'm not dismissing it, right?

242
00:19:29,314 --> 00:19:37,481
But the, the, the jump from that to secretary of defense, overseeing an 850

243
00:19:37,481 --> 00:19:47,458
B-b-b-billion dollar annual budget, the largest military bureaucracy on earth, is not a
promotion.

244
00:19:47,458 --> 00:19:49,070
That's a category error.

245
00:19:49,070 --> 00:19:56,847
And the people who know the difference between those things, the career officers, the
NCOs, the veteran service organizations, they are not quiet about it.

246
00:19:56,847 --> 00:19:58,939
But the news is not writing that story.

247
00:19:58,939 --> 00:20:00,391
Here's what's actually moving.

248
00:20:00,391 --> 00:20:11,191
The VFW and the American Legion, organizations that have historically functioned, it's
basically rubber stamps for the Republican defense policy, put out public statements in

249
00:20:11,191 --> 00:20:18,171
2025, opposing VA staffing reductions tied to the Doge bullet and budget review.

250
00:20:18,511 --> 00:20:22,471
The VFW, the American Legion, these are not radical organizations.

251
00:20:22,471 --> 00:20:26,050
These are groups that meet in church basements in...

252
00:20:26,050 --> 00:20:30,373
rural Arizona and put flags on graves every Memorial Day.

253
00:20:30,654 --> 00:20:35,669
When they break, you're not watching the left flank crumble, you're watching the
foundation crack.

254
00:20:35,669 --> 00:20:44,860
The number of veterans advocacy groups flagged 3.1 billion in proposed VA budget
reductions.

255
00:20:44,860 --> 00:20:46,171
Think about that.

256
00:20:46,171 --> 00:20:56,782
The F-35 program has a projected lifetime cost that the Government Accountability Office
now estimates at over $1.7 trillion.

257
00:20:56,782 --> 00:20:58,385
One program.

258
00:20:58,385 --> 00:21:14,045
Lockheed Martin received over $62 b-b-billion in federal contracts in fiscal year 2023
alone and spent $13.5 million lobbying to make sure that that spigot remains fully wide

259
00:21:14,045 --> 00:21:14,905
open.

260
00:21:15,205 --> 00:21:21,336
Which, if you're doing the math, is the most efficient investment in human history.

261
00:21:21,336 --> 00:21:25,696
That's not corruption in the dramatic sense, of course.

262
00:21:25,997 --> 00:21:28,268
just how the machine is calibrated.

263
00:21:28,749 --> 00:21:31,071
The money flows toward the contractor.

264
00:21:31,071 --> 00:21:33,384
The cuts flow toward the veteran.

265
00:21:33,384 --> 00:21:47,186
And nobody in the leadership structure of that system experiences any cognitive dissonance
about that because the contractor is a line item in a budget and the veteran is a person

266
00:21:47,186 --> 00:21:49,579
with a claim number and a backlog.

267
00:21:49,579 --> 00:21:52,181
That's the mechanism, not malice.

268
00:21:52,621 --> 00:21:56,332
just the slogging weight of bureaucratic gravity.

269
00:21:56,332 --> 00:22:01,423
But I wanna go somewhere specific because the PACT Act is where this becomes undeniable.

270
00:22:01,423 --> 00:22:11,983
The Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson honoring our promise to address Comprehensive
Toxics Act, that's the full name, and I read the full name on purpose.

271
00:22:11,983 --> 00:22:16,334
That was signed into law in August of 2022.

272
00:22:16,334 --> 00:22:18,343
2022, Heath Robinson.

273
00:22:18,343 --> 00:22:22,685
was an Ohio National Guard soldier who served in Kosovo and Iraq.

274
00:22:22,685 --> 00:22:34,909
He was exposed to burn pits, the open air trash fires that the military used to dispose of
everything from medical waste to ammunition on forward operating bases because truth is

275
00:22:34,909 --> 00:22:38,910
it's just cheaper than real disposal infrastructure.

276
00:22:39,070 --> 00:22:42,161
He developed a rare lung disease than cancer.

277
00:22:42,164 --> 00:22:52,140
He spent years fighting the VA for recognition that his illness was connected to his
service, because that's what you have to prove in order to receive benefits for that.

278
00:22:52,340 --> 00:22:57,914
And the VA spent years telling him that it wasn't service related and he died in 2020.

279
00:22:58,043 --> 00:23:00,465
He never saw that bill pass.

280
00:23:00,465 --> 00:23:02,577
It passed two years after he passed away.

281
00:23:02,577 --> 00:23:07,559
The VA has been denying Burn Pit claims systemically for over a decade.

282
00:23:07,989 --> 00:23:14,636
The estimated number of veterans exposed to burn pits by VA data is 3.5 million people.

283
00:23:14,636 --> 00:23:23,133
Three and a half million people who served, breathed that smoke, came home sick, filed
claims, and were told, there's no proven connection.

284
00:23:23,133 --> 00:23:25,874
The same script the VA ran on Agent Orange.

285
00:23:26,015 --> 00:23:28,316
The same script they ran on Gulf War Syndrome.

286
00:23:28,316 --> 00:23:31,068
Different chemicals, different wars.

287
00:23:31,120 --> 00:23:33,428
Identical institutional response.

288
00:23:33,428 --> 00:23:36,741
Deny, delay, wait for them to die.

289
00:23:36,741 --> 00:23:39,332
John Stewart had to go to Congress again.

290
00:23:39,332 --> 00:23:46,047
Yes, that John Stewart who spent years dragging senators in front of cameras over the
September 11th First Responders Fund.

291
00:23:46,047 --> 00:23:58,373
He had to do the exact same thing for burn pit veterans because the mechanism that denied
first responders claims and the mechanism that denied burn pit claims is the exact same

292
00:23:58,373 --> 00:23:59,414
mechanism.

293
00:23:59,654 --> 00:24:01,054
Nobody fixed it.

294
00:24:01,255 --> 00:24:03,427
They just moved it on to a new population.

295
00:24:03,427 --> 00:24:04,838
Here's what you need to understand about that.

296
00:24:04,838 --> 00:24:14,371
The PACT Act costs an estimated $280 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional
Budget Office.

297
00:24:14,632 --> 00:24:17,813
Now that's real money and it should be spent, right?

298
00:24:17,833 --> 00:24:32,291
But when you compare it to the F35's 1.7 trillion, the program that doesn't work, that has
chronic readiness failure, that's been in development since the 1990s,

299
00:24:32,291 --> 00:24:39,465
that the Government Accountability Office has flagged repeatedly, that program is
untouchable.

300
00:24:39,465 --> 00:24:46,720
The benefit that honors the people who actually went and breathed the smoke and came home
with tumors.

301
00:24:46,720 --> 00:24:50,862
Sorry, every time I see that word, I still want to go, Thomas.

302
00:24:50,862 --> 00:24:52,823
That's where the budget hawks show up.

303
00:24:52,823 --> 00:24:54,783
That's where that line gets drawn.

304
00:24:55,243 --> 00:24:58,224
And look, that's asymmetrical, but it's not accidental.

305
00:24:58,224 --> 00:24:59,324
That's the policy.

306
00:24:59,324 --> 00:25:04,656
And right now, 2026 cuts to VA staffing.

307
00:25:04,656 --> 00:25:12,388
At the same time that the PACT Act implementation is generating a massive surge in new
claims, the VA is already behind.

308
00:25:12,388 --> 00:25:14,094
They have never gotten ahead.

309
00:25:14,094 --> 00:25:15,734
The backlog is already real.

310
00:25:15,734 --> 00:25:23,754
Veterans who claimed claims under the new law of 2022, mind you, this is four years into
it, are already waiting.

311
00:25:23,754 --> 00:25:34,045
And the response from the administration that wrapped itself in the flag harder than any
administration in recent memory is to cut the staff processing those claims.

312
00:25:34,045 --> 00:25:40,856
Republican lawmakers from military heavy districts are breaking publicly over this, not
Democrats, Republicans.

313
00:25:40,856 --> 00:25:51,034
The political coalition that has sustained the military expansionism since the devil
himself, Ronald Reagan, depends on a specific transaction.

314
00:25:51,455 --> 00:25:53,016
We ask you to serve, you serve.

315
00:25:53,016 --> 00:25:55,378
We honor that service when you come home.

316
00:25:55,559 --> 00:26:08,388
When the government visibly refuses to honor that handshake transaction, not in theory,
not in some think tank somewhere, but in the form of a claims processor who no longer has

317
00:26:08,388 --> 00:26:09,290
a job.

318
00:26:09,290 --> 00:26:11,465
The coalition doesn't just weaken, right?

319
00:26:11,465 --> 00:26:16,107
It starts asking what it was ever actually for.

320
00:26:16,107 --> 00:26:18,747
This is the recruiting crisis in its true form, right?

321
00:26:18,747 --> 00:26:21,847
The Pentagon and the army have been covering the surface story.

322
00:26:21,847 --> 00:26:28,607
The army, Navy and Air Force all missed recruitment targets by significant margins, 2023,
2024, 2025.

323
00:26:28,607 --> 00:26:35,738
Now they're letting people up to 42 years old in good health join the army, right?

324
00:26:35,738 --> 00:26:44,869
And now you have companies like Palantir talking about a new draft that should be
mandatory service for 18 year olds.

325
00:26:44,869 --> 00:26:48,269
And up until now, the official response is throw money at it, right?

326
00:26:48,269 --> 00:26:54,540
$50 million in new recruiting initiatives for the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.

327
00:26:54,540 --> 00:27:00,550
But internal Pentagon research found something that a $50 million ad campaign can't fix.

328
00:27:00,550 --> 00:27:08,301
Declining propensity to serve is concentrated in communities with the highest rates of
prior military service.

329
00:27:08,301 --> 00:27:09,152
The South.

330
00:27:09,152 --> 00:27:14,582
the rural Midwest, that's Kansas, that's Minnesota, that's Oklahoma, that's Nebraska.

331
00:27:14,582 --> 00:27:26,566
The places where military service is not just a career option, but a family tradition, a
cultural identity, a thing that fathers and grandfathers did and passed down like it was

332
00:27:26,566 --> 00:27:31,459
some sort of trade, those communities are just not sending their kids to war anymore.

333
00:27:31,459 --> 00:27:39,612
It's not because of progressive politics, not because of anything MAGA media can blame on
the left, because the people who know the military best

334
00:27:39,612 --> 00:27:49,687
who have a family member who served, who watched what the VA did to their uncle with Gulf
War Syndrome, who knows someone waiting on a burn pit claim, those are the ones saying,

335
00:27:49,687 --> 00:27:50,589
not my kid.

336
00:27:50,589 --> 00:27:52,670
That's not a messaging problem.

337
00:27:52,670 --> 00:27:53,862
That's information.

338
00:27:53,862 --> 00:28:00,085
Daniel Ellsberg transformation from trusted insider to establishment's most dangerous
critic took years.

339
00:28:00,309 --> 00:28:05,420
of accumulating evidence that the institution he served was systemically lying to protect
itself.

340
00:28:05,420 --> 00:28:11,040
The people pulling their kids out of the recruiting pipeline are not making an ideological
statement.

341
00:28:11,040 --> 00:28:12,780
They've just done the same math.

342
00:28:12,780 --> 00:28:23,640
And the difference is that in 1971, when veterans threw their medals at the Capitol steps,
there were at least a visible politics to the dissent, right?

343
00:28:23,640 --> 00:28:28,882
800 veterans in Washington in public saying, served

344
00:28:28,882 --> 00:28:32,373
and we are telling you this war is wrong.

345
00:28:32,614 --> 00:28:33,394
It had a shape.

346
00:28:33,394 --> 00:28:34,406
It had a face.

347
00:28:34,406 --> 00:28:40,319
What's happening now is quieter and, I think, more structurally damaging.

348
00:28:40,319 --> 00:28:42,990
Because it's not really a protest.

349
00:28:42,990 --> 00:28:52,125
There are plenty of people protesting, and if that's your way of showing your dissent,
that's perfectly valid and it's covered by the Constitution regardless of what the current

350
00:28:52,125 --> 00:28:53,166
administration says.

351
00:28:53,166 --> 00:28:54,527
That's withdrawal.

352
00:28:54,527 --> 00:28:55,699
Nobody's marching.

353
00:28:55,699 --> 00:28:58,500
They're just not showing up to the recruiter's offices.

354
00:28:58,541 --> 00:29:04,275
And a machine that runs on volunteers cannot run without the volunteers.

355
00:29:04,275 --> 00:29:07,087
And there's no draft coming, at least not yet.

356
00:29:07,468 --> 00:29:09,500
But they're floating it out there in the world.

357
00:29:09,500 --> 00:29:16,446
And there's no political will for a draft yet, even though they're floating it out there
into the world.

358
00:29:16,446 --> 00:29:29,673
So what you get instead of a slow structural hollowing, lower standards, more economic
conscription, targeting communities with fewer options, a military that increasingly

359
00:29:29,673 --> 00:29:35,797
reflects not the nation's patriotic traditions, but desperation.

360
00:29:35,797 --> 00:29:38,438
Lockheed Martin will still get his contracts, right?

361
00:29:38,438 --> 00:29:43,682
The F-35 will still fly some of the time when it's operational, which is...

362
00:29:43,796 --> 00:29:44,527
Not always.

363
00:29:44,527 --> 00:29:49,139
The $13.5 million in lobbying will still produce its return.

364
00:29:49,139 --> 00:29:53,981
The machine that makes the weapons is insulated from all of this.

365
00:29:54,381 --> 00:29:58,013
The machine that takes care of the people who use them is not.

366
00:29:58,013 --> 00:30:02,045
I said earlier that the base doesn't just break from outside pressure, right?

367
00:30:02,045 --> 00:30:08,488
I said it breaks because the institution chooses to protect itself instead of the people
who believed in it.

368
00:30:08,488 --> 00:30:11,140
Here's the 2026 version of that sentence.

369
00:30:11,340 --> 00:30:21,188
Pete Hegseth is on television defending budget decisions that veteran service
organizations, the VFW, the American Legion, the institutional voice of the base are

370
00:30:21,188 --> 00:30:23,269
publicly opposing.

371
00:30:23,409 --> 00:30:29,185
And the MAGA media apparatus has spent years performing reverence for troops.

372
00:30:29,185 --> 00:30:30,685
They can't sell this.

373
00:30:31,026 --> 00:30:32,246
They've tried.

374
00:30:32,247 --> 00:30:34,298
That content is not landing.

375
00:30:34,432 --> 00:30:44,815
because the audience for that content includes a non-trivial number of veterans and
military families who know what a VA claims backlog looks like from the inside.

376
00:30:45,115 --> 00:30:54,358
And no amount of flag graphics and Nazi tattoos and solemn music resolves the gap between
the performance and the reality.

377
00:30:54,358 --> 00:30:55,798
That's the fracture.

378
00:30:56,098 --> 00:31:02,520
Not some sudden break, it's a gap that keeps widening between what the machine says it is

379
00:31:02,890 --> 00:31:06,202
and what the people closest to that machine know it is.

380
00:31:06,202 --> 00:31:09,954
Keith Robinson died in 2020, the law bearing his name passed in 2022.

381
00:31:09,954 --> 00:31:22,583
The VA is now in 2026 being asked to process an enormous surge of claims from 3.5 million
burn pit veterans with a workforce that the same administration is trying to cut.

382
00:31:22,643 --> 00:31:34,552
While the F-35 program, which has never worked as promised, which has cost more than the
GDP of almost every country, except for the top five, remains fully funded

383
00:31:34,552 --> 00:31:37,914
and fully lobbied and fully protected.

384
00:31:38,075 --> 00:31:39,667
That's not just irony.

385
00:31:39,667 --> 00:31:41,389
That's not a talking point.

386
00:31:41,389 --> 00:31:46,413
That is the way it was built, running exactly as it was designed.

387
00:31:46,413 --> 00:31:57,702
And the only people surprised by it are the ones who were told the design was something
else, who were told the machine was for them, and who are now slowly in the way that trust

388
00:31:57,702 --> 00:32:02,742
actually erodes, which is not all at once, but in the accumulation of specific moments

389
00:32:02,742 --> 00:32:06,974
where the institution had a choice and made the same choice every time.

390
00:32:06,974 --> 00:32:09,935
They have aid, now they're figuring it out.

391
00:32:10,235 --> 00:32:11,406
That's what that means, right?

392
00:32:11,406 --> 00:32:13,757
Figure around, figure out.

393
00:32:13,757 --> 00:32:19,449
And the machine, you know, for all of its $850 billion has zero answers for that.

394
00:32:19,449 --> 00:32:20,059
Let me slow down.

395
00:32:20,059 --> 00:32:23,041
Because we just spent time on the architecture.

396
00:32:23,041 --> 00:32:29,066
the lobbying numbers, the budget lines, the political fracture, and all of that's But
architecture doesn't bleed.

397
00:32:29,066 --> 00:32:33,307
So I wanna stay with three specific people for a few minutes.

398
00:32:33,327 --> 00:32:41,761
Three documented cases, and I'm gonna ask you to stay with me, because the temptation when
you hear these stories is to immediately reach for what they mean, what they prove, what

399
00:32:41,761 --> 00:32:42,891
argument they support.

400
00:32:42,891 --> 00:32:44,492
Just resist that for a second.

401
00:32:44,492 --> 00:32:46,694
Just let each person be a person right now.

402
00:32:46,694 --> 00:32:49,417
Heath Robinson was 39 years old when he died.

403
00:32:49,417 --> 00:32:51,859
He was an Ohio National Guard soldier.

404
00:32:51,859 --> 00:32:53,120
He served in Kosovo.

405
00:32:53,120 --> 00:32:54,701
He served in Iraq.

406
00:32:54,882 --> 00:32:59,285
And at some point during those deployments, he breathed in the smoke from burn pits.

407
00:32:59,666 --> 00:33:07,212
The open air fires the military used to dispose of waste, including medical waste,
ammunition, chemicals, human waste.

408
00:33:07,533 --> 00:33:13,716
Fires that burned at temperatures that produce toxic compounds the military knows are
dangerous.

409
00:33:13,716 --> 00:33:18,939
and used anyway because it was cheaper and faster than alternative disposal methods.

410
00:33:18,939 --> 00:33:29,864
Heath Robinson came home, he got sick, a rare lung disease, cancer, the kind of
constellation of symptoms that shows up in thousands of veterans who served in those

411
00:33:29,864 --> 00:33:33,076
theaters, in that smoke, in those years.

412
00:33:33,076 --> 00:33:36,979
His family fought for VA recognition for his illness for the better part of a decade.

413
00:33:36,979 --> 00:33:48,103
Not recognition in the abstract, recognition in the specific bureaucratic form-filling
monotonous sense that would have meant his care was covered, his claims were honored, his

414
00:33:48,103 --> 00:33:53,845
sacrifice was acknowledged in the only material way a government can acknowledge
sacrifice.

415
00:33:53,845 --> 00:33:56,485
And the VA denied the connection for years.

416
00:33:56,905 --> 00:34:03,738
The position was we can't establish a service-connected link, which is a sentence that
means we know you're sick, we know you served.

417
00:34:03,996 --> 00:34:08,499
But we are choosing not to connect those two facts in any way that's going to actually
cost us money.

418
00:34:08,499 --> 00:34:10,019
And he died in May of 2020.

419
00:34:10,019 --> 00:34:24,105
The PACT Act, Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson honoring our promise to address
Comprehensive Toxics Act was signed into law in August of 2022 by President Biden on the

420
00:34:24,105 --> 00:34:27,107
White House lawn with Heath Robinson's family standing there.

421
00:34:27,107 --> 00:34:30,229
John Stewart, who spent years dragging Congress toward the moments.

422
00:34:30,229 --> 00:34:33,910
The same way he dragged him toward 9-11 First Responders Fund was there.

423
00:34:34,011 --> 00:34:39,184
It was described as the largest expansion of veterans' benefits in decades.

424
00:34:39,184 --> 00:34:40,695
Heath Robinson didn't see it.

425
00:34:40,695 --> 00:34:43,645
There are 3.5 million veterans with burn pit exposure.

426
00:34:43,645 --> 00:34:45,777
The VA is now processing their claims.

427
00:34:45,777 --> 00:34:54,705
And the same administration that has Pete Hegsath running the Pentagon, the same
Doge-adjacent budget review that veterans service organizations are publicly fighting,

428
00:34:54,705 --> 00:34:58,476
is now cutting the VA workforce responsible for processing those claims.

429
00:34:58,476 --> 00:35:03,736
The CBO scored the PACT Act at $280 billion over 10 years.

430
00:35:03,736 --> 00:35:13,487
The F-35 program, one program, one plane that does not reliably work has a projected
lifetime cost at the GAO that puts it above $1.7 trillion.

431
00:35:13,487 --> 00:35:14,708
I'm not asking you to do the math.

432
00:35:14,708 --> 00:35:20,691
I'm telling you that these numbers exist and the people making the decisions know them and
they keep making the same decisions.

433
00:35:20,691 --> 00:35:31,356
Heath Robinson's name is on a law he never saw pass being implemented by a bureaucracy
being deliberately starved to serve 3.5 million people who breathe the same smoke he

434
00:35:31,356 --> 00:35:31,916
breathed.

435
00:35:31,916 --> 00:35:33,237
And that's not a metaphor.

436
00:35:33,237 --> 00:35:34,397
It's a file.

437
00:35:34,397 --> 00:35:37,090
It's a documented record, congressional record.

438
00:35:37,090 --> 00:35:40,705
It's the White House signing ceremony, August 10th, 2022.

439
00:35:40,705 --> 00:35:43,634
Columbus Dispatch, John Stewart, Congressional Testimony.

440
00:35:43,634 --> 00:35:46,435
Pat Tillman was 27 years old when he died.

441
00:35:46,435 --> 00:35:52,276
He walked away from a three year, $3.6 million NFL contract with the Cardinals after
September 11th.

442
00:35:52,276 --> 00:35:56,618
He enlisted, became a Ranger, deployed to Iraq and then Afghanistan.

443
00:35:56,978 --> 00:36:08,741
On April 22nd, in the Sparra district of Afghanistan, he was killed by his own unit,
Friendly Fire, shot three times in the forehead at close range, which the Army's own

444
00:36:08,741 --> 00:36:12,201
subsequent investigation would note was inconsistent.

445
00:36:12,201 --> 00:36:13,784
with long range enemy fire.

446
00:36:13,784 --> 00:36:15,276
And the army knew this immediately.

447
00:36:15,276 --> 00:36:18,199
What the army did not do immediately was tell his family.

448
00:36:18,500 --> 00:36:26,999
What the army did instead was write a Silver Star citation describing Pat Dillman dying
while maneuvering on the enemy, leading his men under fire, conducting himself with

449
00:36:26,999 --> 00:36:27,931
distinction.

450
00:36:27,931 --> 00:36:30,184
The citation was fabricated.

451
00:36:30,184 --> 00:36:31,865
It was even used as his memorial service.

452
00:36:31,865 --> 00:36:41,399
His family watched it read aloud at his funeral while the people who wrote it knew exactly
that it did not happen as described.

453
00:36:41,720 --> 00:36:45,161
General Stanley McChrystal, who later would command the U.S.

454
00:36:45,161 --> 00:36:52,345
forces in Afghanistan, was among the senior officers who reviewed the documents,
accurately describing the friendly fire nature of the death before public statements were

455
00:36:52,345 --> 00:36:55,367
made attributing it to enemy action.

456
00:36:55,367 --> 00:37:01,699
That's from the house committee on oversight and government reform hearings from 2007 and
the army inspector general report from 2005.

457
00:37:01,699 --> 00:37:11,101
Pat Tillman's mother, Mary spent years, years fighting to get the documented truth of her
son's death in a public record, not to punish anyone, though punishment would have been

458
00:37:11,101 --> 00:37:24,375
appropriate to correct a lie, to insist that her son's actual death, which was not a
heroic charge into the enemy fire, but a chaotic, tragic accident of war to be

459
00:37:24,375 --> 00:37:25,255
acknowledged.

460
00:37:25,255 --> 00:37:26,425
for what it was.

461
00:37:26,606 --> 00:37:27,797
No criminal charges.

462
00:37:27,797 --> 00:37:30,858
All of the officers involved continued their careers.

463
00:37:31,059 --> 00:37:33,760
Think about what Mary Tillman was navigating.

464
00:37:33,760 --> 00:37:38,903
Her son had made the most visible patriotic sacrifice imaginable.

465
00:37:38,903 --> 00:37:43,026
He gave up wealth and comfort and safety because he believed.

466
00:37:43,306 --> 00:37:52,502
The institution he believed in, the institution he died serving, used his death as a
recruitment narrative, used the fabricated story of his death, knowing it was a lie,

467
00:37:52,502 --> 00:37:58,856
and then spent years in active legal and bureaucratic resistance to her attempts to
establish what actually happened.

468
00:37:58,856 --> 00:38:04,779
That House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held hearings in 2007, and Mary
Tillman was there and testified.

469
00:38:05,040 --> 00:38:16,336
She was precise, documented everything, exhausted in the way that someone is exhausted
when they have been fighting for years against an institution with infinite resources and

470
00:38:16,336 --> 00:38:18,138
no personal accountability.

471
00:38:18,138 --> 00:38:20,940
The committee found that the army had violated its own regulations.

472
00:38:20,940 --> 00:38:27,113
Senior officers had been aware of the true circumstances and that the Silver Star citation
was unsupported by the facts.

473
00:38:27,113 --> 00:38:30,486
And then largely the institution moved on.

474
00:38:30,486 --> 00:38:37,351
Pat Tillman's case matters here, not because of its celebrity, though the celebrity is
part of it, but because the army is willing to lie through its teeth.

475
00:38:37,351 --> 00:38:48,905
about the most visible military death of the post-911 era, the one with the most public
scrutiny, the one with a family that had resources and connections and a platform.

476
00:38:49,146 --> 00:38:53,701
If they were willing to lie about that one, what does that tell you about the ones that
nobody's watching?

477
00:38:53,701 --> 00:38:56,944
Daniel Ellsberg was not from a working class background.

478
00:38:56,944 --> 00:38:58,566
And I want to be clear about that.

479
00:38:58,566 --> 00:39:03,630
He was a Marine, a Harvard PhD, Rand Corporation analyst with top level security
clearance.

480
00:39:03,630 --> 00:39:13,788
He was by any measure the establishment's man, a hawk, someone who had spent years inside
the architecture of American military decision-making, who believed in the mission, who

481
00:39:13,788 --> 00:39:19,734
had access to the information that almost no one outside the highest levels of government
had ever seen.

482
00:39:19,734 --> 00:39:21,520
What he saw was the Pentagon Papers.

483
00:39:21,520 --> 00:39:32,128
7,000 pages of classified Defense Department, I guess now it's Department of War, history
documenting that the United States government had systemically deceived the public in

484
00:39:32,128 --> 00:39:35,301
Congress and itself about the Vietnam War.

485
00:39:35,301 --> 00:39:45,678
That administration from Truman through Johnson had known internally that the war was
probably unwinnable, that casualty estimates were manipulated, that the strategic

486
00:39:45,678 --> 00:39:46,900
rationale was weaker.

487
00:39:46,900 --> 00:39:49,862
And what was being stated publicly, the deception wasn't a side effect.

488
00:39:49,862 --> 00:39:50,883
It was operational.

489
00:39:50,883 --> 00:39:53,065
It's how the policy was sustained.

490
00:39:53,265 --> 00:39:56,137
Ellsberg spent two years deciding on what to do with that knowledge.

491
00:39:56,137 --> 00:39:59,190
He tried to get senators to release the documents through official channels.

492
00:39:59,190 --> 00:40:00,611
He tried the formal route.

493
00:40:00,611 --> 00:40:01,906
The formal route led nowhere.

494
00:40:01,906 --> 00:40:05,446
In 1971, he gave the papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post.

495
00:40:05,446 --> 00:40:08,809
The Nixon administration prosecuted him under the Espionage Act.

496
00:40:08,809 --> 00:40:15,714
That case collapsed in 1973, and not because the courts vindicated him, but because the
government's own misconduct, including

497
00:40:16,048 --> 00:40:22,676
The plumber's unit breaking into his psychiatrist's office made prosecution impossible to
continue.

498
00:40:22,676 --> 00:40:26,211
The charges were dismissed, no vindication, just a quiet implosion.

499
00:40:26,211 --> 00:40:27,871
Here's the thing with Ellsberg.

500
00:40:28,111 --> 00:40:29,211
He wasn't a protester.

501
00:40:29,211 --> 00:40:30,911
He wasn't an outside agitator.

502
00:40:30,911 --> 00:40:39,722
He was the system's own flesh and blood trained by it, trusted by it, cleared by it to see
the most sensitive things.

503
00:40:39,722 --> 00:40:47,622
And what the systems documents showed him was the system had been lying to everyone,
including its most loyal insiders for decades.

504
00:40:47,622 --> 00:40:49,462
He died in June of 2023.

505
00:40:49,462 --> 00:40:50,713
He was 92.

506
00:40:50,713 --> 00:40:51,464
Three people.

507
00:40:51,464 --> 00:40:56,315
Ohio National Guard soldier who died before the law, bearing his name was passed.

508
00:40:56,315 --> 00:41:01,817
A football player whose mother had to sue the army to get the true account of his death
into the public record.

509
00:41:02,157 --> 00:41:11,320
A Harvard educated Marine who read everything the government actually knew about Vietnam
and concluded that the only honest thing left to do was let the public read it too.

510
00:41:11,320 --> 00:41:12,920
None of these cases are obscure.

511
00:41:12,920 --> 00:41:14,011
All of them are documented.

512
00:41:14,011 --> 00:41:15,771
All of them are on the official record.

513
00:41:15,873 --> 00:41:19,716
Congressional hearings, court filing, signed legislation, inspector general reports.

514
00:41:19,716 --> 00:41:23,898
The machine had 42 years to learn something different from each of them and it hasn't.

515
00:41:23,979 --> 00:41:32,444
And the people who know that most specifically, not from editorials, not from podcasts
like this one, but from their own claims paperwork, their own family's experience, their

516
00:41:32,444 --> 00:41:35,286
own body, those people are still there.

517
00:41:35,286 --> 00:41:41,480
They're still in the base, still being asked to perform loyalty to an institution that is
made in each of these cases.

518
00:41:41,480 --> 00:41:44,232
When it had a choice, the same choice.

519
00:41:44,392 --> 00:41:45,703
That's what's breaking.

520
00:41:45,889 --> 00:41:48,067
not the politics, it's the belief.

521
00:41:48,067 --> 00:41:49,312
So here's where we actually are.

522
00:41:49,312 --> 00:41:52,093
The belief is breaking, not the politics.

523
00:41:52,273 --> 00:41:57,725
And that distinction matters more than almost anything else I've said tonight because
politics can be managed.

524
00:41:57,725 --> 00:42:01,376
But belief, once it goes, is a different kind of structural failure.

525
00:42:01,376 --> 00:42:02,696
You don't patch it with a press release.

526
00:42:02,696 --> 00:42:05,687
You don't reverse it with a recruiting budget.

527
00:42:05,687 --> 00:42:14,279
When the people who know the institution from the inside, who have the claims paperwork,
who watch their family member die waiting for VA decision, who wore the uniform and came

528
00:42:14,279 --> 00:42:16,231
home to find the compact was conditional.

529
00:42:16,231 --> 00:42:22,468
When those people stop transmitting the faith to the next generation, you have a problem
that compounds silently until it doesn't.

530
00:42:22,468 --> 00:42:25,091
The military recruiting crisis is the number.

531
00:42:25,091 --> 00:42:29,926
Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, Marines, all miss their targets.

532
00:42:29,926 --> 00:42:32,580
But the number that stays with me is the qualitative one.

533
00:42:32,580 --> 00:42:38,845
Declining propensity to serve is sharpest in communities with the highest rates of prior
military service.

534
00:42:38,845 --> 00:42:43,080
The people who know the most are recommending it the least.

535
00:42:43,080 --> 00:42:43,872
That's a verdict.

536
00:42:43,872 --> 00:42:49,081
So before I tell you what to do with any of this, actually, let me push on that.

537
00:42:49,081 --> 00:42:53,808
Do you feel the weight of what it means for who ends up serving instead?

538
00:42:53,808 --> 00:43:02,000
Because when the traditional base just kind of opts out, right, the volunteer force
doesn't shrink proportionally.

539
00:43:02,000 --> 00:43:03,121
It shifts.

540
00:43:03,462 --> 00:43:15,043
It recruits harder from communities where military service is one of the only economically
viable paths available to escape their current situation.

541
00:43:15,043 --> 00:43:17,005
The sacrifice doesn't disappear.

542
00:43:17,005 --> 00:43:20,330
It redistributes downward by class.

543
00:43:20,330 --> 00:43:30,330
While the contractor class that pulls in $62 billion a year in federal contracts, while
the lobbying apparatus that spent $13.5 million in a single year to protect an F-35

544
00:43:30,330 --> 00:43:38,790
program with a $1.7 trillion lifetime cost, those people bear exactly none of it.

545
00:43:38,790 --> 00:43:45,221
Not one body, not one claim denied, not one mother suing the army for the true account of
her son's death.

546
00:43:45,221 --> 00:43:47,961
And that asymmetry is the machine.

547
00:43:48,441 --> 00:43:49,316
But.

548
00:43:49,316 --> 00:43:50,948
The machine is losing its fans.

549
00:43:50,948 --> 00:43:52,148
So what do you do?

550
00:43:52,389 --> 00:44:02,143
First thing, if you know a veteran or military family member who has burn pit exposure and
hasn't filed the PACDAC claim, tell them to go to the va.gov slash packed right now,

551
00:44:02,143 --> 00:44:02,995
P-A-C-T.

552
00:44:02,995 --> 00:44:08,597
The claims backlog is real and it is moving slowly, which means the earlier the claim is
filed, the better.

553
00:44:08,597 --> 00:44:12,279
People are dying on wait lists for decisions that could have been made years ago.

554
00:44:12,539 --> 00:44:14,608
Heath Robinson died in 2020.

555
00:44:14,608 --> 00:44:22,988
The law bearing his name passed in 2022, the gap right between the harm and the
recognition is exactly where bureaucratic delay does its quiet killing.

556
00:44:23,068 --> 00:44:28,719
Filing early doesn't guarantee speed, but not filing guarantees nothing.

557
00:44:28,719 --> 00:44:36,219
Second, the VFW and American Legion both issued public statements in 2025 pushing back
against the VA staffing and budget reductions.

558
00:44:36,479 --> 00:44:37,359
That's not nothing.

559
00:44:37,359 --> 00:44:42,359
These organizations have historically been cautious about breaking with the GOP
administration.

560
00:44:42,815 --> 00:44:54,346
Go to vfw.org and legion.org, find the advocacy and legislation action pages and sign on
to what they're pushing that you agree with or meets the need for the cause.

561
00:44:54,346 --> 00:44:59,110
I know those organizations have really complicated histories, but just do it anyway,
right?

562
00:44:59,110 --> 00:45:08,728
When the political coalition that's sustained military expansionism starts fracturing from
the inside, you want pressure coming from every direction, including the institutionally

563
00:45:08,728 --> 00:45:09,649
creditable ones.

564
00:45:09,649 --> 00:45:10,469
Third.

565
00:45:10,890 --> 00:45:13,152
And this one requires something from you.

566
00:45:13,152 --> 00:45:19,115
Find out who represents you on your House or Senate Veterans Affairs committees, not your
general representative, specifically those committees.

567
00:45:19,115 --> 00:45:22,628
Go to veterans.house.gov or veterans.senate.gov.

568
00:45:22,628 --> 00:45:24,019
Find the member list.

569
00:45:24,019 --> 00:45:27,881
Contact the office of whoever sits on that committee from your state or district.

570
00:45:28,161 --> 00:45:30,062
Ask this for them specifically.

571
00:45:30,062 --> 00:45:35,866
Ask them in writing what their position is on the 2025 VA workforce reduction proposals.

572
00:45:35,866 --> 00:45:39,348
Not a form letter, an actual question that requires an actual answer.

573
00:45:39,348 --> 00:45:40,859
Make them go on record.

574
00:45:40,955 --> 00:45:45,426
Staff track constituents' contacts by issue.

575
00:45:45,426 --> 00:45:52,948
So 100 people asking the same question about the same specific policy is different from a
thousand people sending a generic email about supporting veterans.

576
00:45:53,228 --> 00:46:02,941
Fourth, and this is the uncomfortable one, if you work in media, if you have a platform,
if you write anything that anyone reads, stop treating the defense budget like a third

577
00:46:02,941 --> 00:46:03,292
rail.

578
00:46:03,292 --> 00:46:09,804
The F-35 program costs more over its lifetime than the entire GDP of China.

579
00:46:10,194 --> 00:46:10,795
That's not true.

580
00:46:10,795 --> 00:46:17,120
But it's more than most countries outside of China, the United States, Russia, and the
European Union.

581
00:46:17,120 --> 00:46:20,623
I think Canada is actually below that threshold as well.

582
00:46:20,623 --> 00:46:22,514
That is a fact from the GAO, right?

583
00:46:22,514 --> 00:46:24,746
Not some sort of activist pamphlet.

584
00:46:24,746 --> 00:46:32,200
Lockheed Martin spent $13.5 million lobbying in a single year to protect that program from
accountability.

585
00:46:32,320 --> 00:46:36,513
writing about that, saying that out loud, naming the number is not anti-military.

586
00:46:36,513 --> 00:46:41,107
That's the thing that people who actually care about the people who serve should be the
most angry about.

587
00:46:41,107 --> 00:46:50,394
The money that goes to protect a contractor's stock price is money that's not going to a
claims processor working through a backlog of three and a half million burn pit exposure

588
00:46:50,394 --> 00:46:50,774
cases.

589
00:46:50,774 --> 00:46:52,106
They are connected.

590
00:46:52,106 --> 00:46:52,757
Say so.

591
00:46:52,757 --> 00:46:56,518
I don't know if this bends, any of this bends the machine, right?

592
00:46:56,518 --> 00:46:57,691
I'll be honest about that.

593
00:46:57,691 --> 00:47:02,413
Ellsberg leaked 7,000 pages of classified documents and the machine kept running.

594
00:47:02,653 --> 00:47:06,255
The Tillman family got congressional hearings and no criminal charges.

595
00:47:06,255 --> 00:47:09,568
Heath Robinson got a law named after him after he was already dead.

596
00:47:09,568 --> 00:47:10,798
The pattern is documented.

597
00:47:10,798 --> 00:47:12,839
The pattern is in the official record.

598
00:47:12,839 --> 00:47:14,790
The pattern keeps repeating.

599
00:47:15,151 --> 00:47:18,273
But the base is cracking.

600
00:47:18,427 --> 00:47:19,497
And it's over Iran.

601
00:47:19,497 --> 00:47:21,269
It's over this new war in Iran.

602
00:47:21,269 --> 00:47:23,841
So we're going to have more people come out of this.

603
00:47:23,841 --> 00:47:31,218
are, we're already seeing, you know, sailors on Navy ships that are being fed gray meat
and slabs of this disgusting stuff.

604
00:47:31,218 --> 00:47:33,450
And you could say, sure, they signed up for it.

605
00:47:33,450 --> 00:47:40,455
Yes, they signed up for it, but nobody that, that is trying their best to serve our
country deserves that.

606
00:47:40,455 --> 00:47:44,188
And what we know is when the base starts cracking, it's these people.

607
00:47:44,188 --> 00:47:47,742
who make the most difference because they're typically the most loyal.

608
00:47:47,742 --> 00:47:51,125
And it will crack, and it is cracking, you just have to know where to push.

609
00:47:51,125 --> 00:47:52,347
And then the cracks spread.

610
00:47:52,347 --> 00:47:58,354
So I'm gonna tell you what I thought about most when I went into the deep research here.

611
00:47:58,354 --> 00:48:01,591
I think it's kind of the military recruiting crisis.

612
00:48:01,591 --> 00:48:02,472
Like I knew it was bad.

613
00:48:02,472 --> 00:48:03,964
They're raising the age for the army.

614
00:48:03,964 --> 00:48:10,619
The CEO of Palantir is talking about instituting a federal mandatory service, those sorts
of things.

615
00:48:10,619 --> 00:48:13,551
But I didn't know where.

616
00:48:13,707 --> 00:48:14,538
It was bad, right?

617
00:48:14,538 --> 00:48:21,852
The Pentagon's own internal data shows that the sharpest decline in propensity to serve is
happening in the South and the rural Midwest, right?

618
00:48:21,852 --> 00:48:27,497
The communities with the highest rates of prior military service, not the places where,
you know, that were always skeptical.

619
00:48:27,497 --> 00:48:35,362
I didn't expect a whole lot of Californians, you know, to be signing up for the military
or a whole lot of New Yorkers or people from New Jersey, right?

620
00:48:35,362 --> 00:48:41,356
I knew, I didn't expect the people from, from Texas to be, be not

621
00:48:41,356 --> 00:48:52,010
making their recruiting categories of people from Louisiana, from Mississippi, the ones
that are strategically poor and don't really have much of uh a GDP to speak of and are

622
00:48:52,071 --> 00:49:00,853
take more in government benefits and government entitlement programs than they actually
provide into those programs.

623
00:49:00,853 --> 00:49:04,554
The places that sent their kids generation after generation, right?

624
00:49:04,554 --> 00:49:07,235
That put the yellow ribbon magnets on their trucks.

625
00:49:07,237 --> 00:49:09,268
that made the volunteer force possible.

626
00:49:09,268 --> 00:49:12,921
Those communities are looking at what happened in the burn pit scenario.

627
00:49:12,921 --> 00:49:18,680
They're looking at what's happening currently in Iran that happened to the Tillmans, the
Heath Robinson guy.

628
00:49:18,680 --> 00:49:23,075
They're quietly telling their kids, maybe not, right?

629
00:49:23,075 --> 00:49:27,317
Maybe, and that's not an activist position, right?

630
00:49:27,317 --> 00:49:28,718
That's, excuse me.

631
00:49:28,958 --> 00:49:29,939
That is,

632
00:49:30,128 --> 00:49:35,289
The Heritage Foundation even, their own military index, index of military strength, right?

633
00:49:35,289 --> 00:49:44,953
The institution's most loyal constituency is breaking from generational transmission of
military culture and they're doing it with not even a whisper.

634
00:49:45,333 --> 00:49:55,235
That's the kind of fact that should keep defense contractors and Pentagon budget hawks up
at night for more than any protest at a recruiting office or protests in the streets

635
00:49:55,235 --> 00:49:59,088
talking about the Iran war and trying to violate our free speech rights to do it.

636
00:49:59,088 --> 00:50:00,488
sorry, Will couldn't join me.

637
00:50:00,488 --> 00:50:03,131
Will was occupied with other things tonight.

638
00:50:03,131 --> 00:50:07,132
And so I decided to go ahead and record this podcast myself.

639
00:50:07,433 --> 00:50:08,673
If you like it, right?

640
00:50:08,673 --> 00:50:13,496
And you were hearing it in a place other than our website, you can check out our website
at fof.foundation.

641
00:50:13,496 --> 00:50:16,174
We use Castapod, which is a federated,

642
00:50:16,174 --> 00:50:18,485
application that runs our website for the podcast.

643
00:50:18,485 --> 00:50:21,756
We also are available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

644
00:50:21,756 --> 00:50:27,260
So share it with someone who still thinks, you know, criticism of the defense budget means
you hate soldiers.

645
00:50:27,260 --> 00:50:33,834
Because that confusion is doing a lot of work for a lot of people who are cashing very,
very, very large checks.

646
00:50:33,834 --> 00:50:35,365
I want to leave you with this.

647
00:50:35,365 --> 00:50:41,065
800 veterans threw their medals at the Capitol in 1971, right?

648
00:50:41,065 --> 00:50:43,945
The war ran for four more years after that.

649
00:50:44,165 --> 00:50:47,445
I'm not going to tell you that awareness is enough because it's not.

650
00:50:47,445 --> 00:50:56,376
And that's one of the things that I've really come to notice and really come to understand
through this podcast really is that awareness is not enough.

651
00:50:56,376 --> 00:51:06,970
The people who benefit most from your silence are the ones who named a building after
Heath Robinson and then tried to cut the staff who processed the veterans' claims, right?

652
00:51:06,970 --> 00:51:10,390
And that's not irony, that's policy.

653
00:51:10,511 --> 00:51:13,354
So let's take care of each other, please.

654
00:51:13,354 --> 00:51:14,365
That's the overlap.

655
00:51:14,365 --> 00:51:15,106
See you next week.

656
00:51:15,106 --> 00:51:16,073
Bye.