38 Minutes: The Trailer
https://open.substack.com/pub/scottritter
38 Minutes: The Trailer
38 Minutes is a documentary film which highlight’s the danger of nuclear war, and the need to take proactive measures to prevent nuclear conflict by promoting arms control and disarmament.
(https://scottritter.substack.com/p/38-minutes-the-trailer?r=1vhv3f&triedRedirect=true)
Transkripzioa:
Rusty wire that holds the cork that keeps the anger in Give us weight and suddenly it’s dead
you
oooooo
Ritter’s Rant 027: Consistency
Ritter’s Rant 027: Consistency
(https://scottritter.substack.com/p/ritters-rant-027-consistency?r=1vhv3f&triedRedirect=true)
Transkripzioa:
Hello and welcome to this edition of Ritter’s Rant. Today we’ll be focusing on the word consistency. It’s an important word primarily because it’s become more relevant in my life. I just turned 64. That’s a lot of rotations around the sun. And, you know, reflecting on this, there’s some people that say, you know, the older you get,
the wiser you get. And then there’s other people that conflate wisdom with intelligence. That means that you’re smarter. That’s not necessarily the case. Generally, you accumulate wisdom not because your brain functions better, but because you’ve experienced things. Over time, you’ve learned through the school of hard knocks what works and what doesn’t work.
You’ve seen people try things a number of times and they fail. And so it’s not intelligence that says, hey, I think if they try it again, they’re going to fail. It’s wisdom. You say, I’ve seen this before. It ain’t going to work. And so I consider myself not to be smarter, but wiser.
And I’m wiser because of consistency over time. When things work consistently over time, it means they’re probably going to continue to work. Now, why am I picking on this word? Well, let’s transition now to the crux of the issue here. It’s not about me turning 64. It’s about the policies of Donald J. Trump,
the president of the United States in the Middle East, in particular, his policies regarding Syria, Lebanon, the Levant. These policies are being pursued by one man in particular, Thomas Barack. Thomas Barack. Tom is… Surprise, surprise, not a career diplomat. Tom is a businessman, a personal friend of Donald Trump. Now,
it’s not unusual for the friends of a successful president to be rewarded for fundraising or for their support, organizational skills, etc. during the campaign to be rewarded with an ambassadorship. um their job is to go there and represent they are after all the personal envoy of
the president so when people meet with them they feel as if they are meeting an extension of the president but the the issues of diplomacy then are left in the hands of the professionals professional diplomats in this case the charge the affairs the number two a man who
usually has extensive experience uh in the area of the world where this political appointee has been thrust upon the state department um but this isn’t the case with thomas barack he um he’s the ambassador to turkey but it’s not just turkey he’s dealing with he’s been given title of special envoy for Syria and Lebanon, the Levant.
This isn’t holding a cocktail party or going to an event. This is diplomacy. This is the hard work of diplomacy. Now it’s been carried out by a man who has no experience in the hard work of diplomacy, a man whose resume says businessman, friend of Donald Trump, fundraiser,
somebody who has the ear of the leaders of the Emirates, the United Emirates, Saudi Arabia, But he’s not somebody who knows what works consistently over time, and it’s manifested in the policies that he seems to be pursuing. You see, he has taken X to social media and made a number of posts that are very disturbing.
He speaks about the pressure that’s being placed on Lebanon and the possibility that unless the Lebanese change their policies towards Hezbollah, Lebanon could see itself disappear. They could see themselves become basically… you know, the beach-going place of the Syrian people. He’s talking about the erasure of Lebanon from the map or redrawing of the map.
These are things that haven’t been done in decades. In fact, the Middle East map hasn’t been redrawn in this way since Sykes-Picot, the 1916 secret agreement between the Brits and the France to, you know, carve up the ottoman empire in the aftermath of the first world war and indeed we
saw new nations emerge from uh from the collapse of the ottoman empire nations like syria lebanon iraq palestine these these nations happened because lines were drawn on a map but then at the end of the second world war a decision was made by the international community that we weren’t going to
start redrawing lines on a map well they did a little bit the creation of israel but syria is the syrian nation you don’t mess with that lebanon is the lebanese nation you don’t mess with that the lines are manifest but no it comes thomas barack and basically he’s threatening the lebanese government that if you don’t get
rid of hezbo and not just as a resistance movement but as a political party that the United States doesn’t see a distinction between the two, that Lebanon could cease to exist. And who’s going to take over Lebanon? Syria. But Syria is a basket case. It’s not Tom Barack’s fault that Bashar al-Assad fell.
That happened during the time of Joe Biden. But he’s the guy that is in there cutting the deals and telling Donald Trump that it’s a good idea to stand shoulder to shoulder with a terrorist who just a few months ago had a $10 million bounty on his head. That’s Jolani, the president of Syria.
It’s a good idea to stand next to him, shake his hand, say he’s a good guy. He’s not a good guy. He’s a murderer. He’s killed Americans. Barack, this isn’t a good idea. But no, that’s what he keeps telling the president, that this is what we’re going to do. Meanwhile, you have the Syrian president, this terrorist, Jolani,
starting to say, hey, I’ll cut some deals. If Israel gives me one of the Golan Heights, you know, I’ll exchange the rest of the Golan Heights. If you let me take the city of Tripoli, that’s in northern Lebanon, to go in and redraw the maps. And now Tom Barak is saying, this could be a good idea.
No, it’s not a good idea. It’s a horrible idea. But this goes hand in hand with the idea of recognizing the terrorist as the legitimate leader of Syria. Not a good idea. A horrible idea. Because a terrorist, at the end of the day, is a terrorist. Jolani will always be a terrorist.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a CIA-trained terrorist, a British-trained terrorist, or an Israeli-trained terrorist. All of which may be true. He’s still a terrorist. A man who cut off the heads of Americans for a living. And now he’s the president of Syria. I don’t know what…
Tom Barack told Donald Trump about what he thought he could accomplish by eliminating the status of terrorists, by recognizing this government, by lifting sanctions. Because whatever he said was going to happen isn’t happening. Barack has been in there cutting deals now between the Syrian government and the Kurdish forces.
The Americans have been supporting Kurds in the northeastern part of Syria for some time now. The Syrian Democratic Forces have been trained and backed by the United States. And yet Barack is trying to cut a deal where he says, hey, the Kurds will now rule their military force, which is giving them security, into the overarching
organizational structure of the syrian army and deals have been cut to that regard but then the small print comes in now jelani the terrorist uh who’s been fighting by the way the syrians for some time now uh says no they’re not going to roll in as
complete units we’re going to break them up and disperse them around why would you do that why would you break up that which gives you strength and and disperse your strength into the hands of the terrorists meanwhile jelani is actively incorporating foreign terrorists into the Syrian army. When I say foreign, I mean we’re talking people from Uzbekistan,
from Chechnya, from Turkmenistan, from China. People have no relation whatsoever with Syria or Syria’s peripheral neighbors, but people who have come to Syria to fight a jihad, a holy war against the Takfiri, against the Christians, against the Druze, against the Shia, against the Alawites. And now they’re officially part of the Syrian army.
And terrorists are going to do what terrorists are going to do. So they go around and they burn Christian villages. They slaughter the Alawite population. They hunt down the Shia. They destroy shrines. And just the other day, they went after the Druze. That was their mistake, you see, because the Druze are allied with the state of Israel.
And the Israelis have responded decisively. striking the Syrian Ministry of Defense, annihilating it, striking Syrian army units as they move towards villages where the Druze are under attack. They’ve struck Syria so hard that the man that stood side by side with Donald J. Trump, Jolani, had to flee.
And he apparently has gone back to where he came from, Idlib. where the terrorists created their base he’s run back to a sanctuary driven out of damascus Why? It looks like Israel is going to make a play on southern Lebanon or southern Syria right now. The lines are being redrawn. The maps are being changed.
And is this part of the grand plan? No. It’s what you get when you stop relying on consistent policy over the time and you start making things up, which is what Tom Barak has been doing. Just making it up is going on. Everything’s a transaction. Everything’s a business deal. Well, that’s not how it works.
wisdom tom wisdom over time you see what works and what doesn’t work and going in and redrawing lines on maps and giving terrorists the ability to run nation states is not what works a wise man would have said don’t do it but tom barack’s not a
wise man when it comes to diplomacy he’s a businessman a friend of donald trump so what you get is what you get I just want to leave with this. It’s not just Syria that Tom Barak’s sticking his fingers into. He’s now been given the Armenian Azerbaijan portfolio.
This is another one of those complex problems where lines are being drawn on the map, redrawn on the map. And one of the sticking points to a peace treaty between the Armenians and Azerbaijanis is what they call the Zungazar Corridor, basically a 36-kilometer-long highway that’s supposed to connect the… this part of Azerbaijan, the Naqshiman, it’s not enclave,
exclave, with the mainland of Azerbaijan. It’s right through southern Armenia. And the Azerbaijani government says, we have to have this corridor. It has to provide us the connectivity so that Turkey can then connect through Azerbaijan into Central Asia, and it’s a wonderful thing. But the Armenians are saying, that’s our territory.
We’re not going to just give it up. So it’s a hard negotiation. Well, inter… You know what his solution is? Just lease America the corridor. Lease America. It’s a business deal. It’s a transaction. Lease us the highway. We’ll manage it for 100 years and everything will be hunky-dory.
No, the Armenians have already said they’re not going to do it. That’s a violation of our sovereignty. But this is the issue here. Consistency over time. That’s what you need when it comes to diplomacy. But what has the Trump administration done? They fired over 1,300 career State Department employees.
Many of them were engaged in the business of doing the very evaluations we’re talking about. whether it be with the Middle East or it be with Russia and Ukraine. These are the experts, the intelligence people, and they’ve been fired because Donald Trump’s not looking for intelligence. He’s not looking for people who understand diplomacy consistently over time.
Donald Trump wants to hand everything off to his business partners, to his friends, to his allies, people like Tom Barack, who are destroying America’s reputation in the Middle East. Donald Trump has about three and a half years left to go as president of the United States.
At some point in time, he will stop being the president of the United States. And the key question here right now is how much damage can he do in the next three and a half years? How much damage can Tom Barack do? And I’m afraid that the answer is a whole lot.
I don’t know this to be the case. But I’m wise enough to know that over time, certain things will succeed and certain things will fail. And Donald Trump’s policies are a recipe for disaster. This has been my rant. Thanks for tuning in. Next time a thought crosses my mind, I’ll be sure to let you know.
oooooo
Ritter’s Rant 027: Consistency
(https://scottritter.substack.com/p/ritters-rant-027-consistency?r=1vhv3f&triedRedirect=true)
Wisdom comes with experience. Experience is gained through consistent application of sound principles over time. Donald Trump’s Syria policy is neither consistent nor wise.
Transkripzioa:
Hello and welcome to this edition of Ritter’s Rant. Today we’ll be focusing on the word consistency. It’s an important word primarily because it’s become more relevant in my life. I just turned 64. That’s a lot of rotations around the sun. And, you know, reflecting on this, there’s some people that say, you know, the older you get,
the wiser you get. And then there’s other people that conflate wisdom with intelligence. That means that you’re smarter. That’s not necessarily the case. Generally, you accumulate wisdom not because your brain functions better, but because you’ve experienced things. Over time, you’ve learned through the school of hard knocks what works and what doesn’t work.
You’ve seen people try things a number of times and they fail. And so it’s not intelligence that says, hey, I think if they try it again, they’re going to fail. It’s wisdom. You say, I’ve seen this before. It ain’t going to work. And so I consider myself not to be smarter, but wiser.
And I’m wiser because of consistency over time. When things work consistently over time, it means they’re probably going to continue to work. Now, why am I picking on this word? Well, let’s transition now to the crux of the issue here. It’s not about me turning 64. It’s about the policies of Donald J. Trump,
the president of the United States in the Middle East, in particular, his policies regarding Syria, Lebanon, the Levant. These policies are being pursued by one man in particular, Thomas Barack. Thomas Barack. Tom is… Surprise, surprise, not a career diplomat. Tom is a businessman, a personal friend of Donald Trump. Now,
it’s not unusual for the friends of a successful president to be rewarded for fundraising or for their support, organizational skills, etc. during the campaign to be rewarded with an ambassadorship. um their job is to go there and represent they are after all the personal envoy of
the president so when people meet with them they feel as if they are meeting an extension of the president but the the issues of diplomacy then are left in the hands of the professionals professional diplomats in this case the charge the affairs the number two a man who
usually has extensive experience uh in the area of the world where this political appointee has been thrust upon the state department um but this isn’t the case with thomas barack he um he’s the ambassador to turkey but it’s not just turkey he’s dealing with he’s been given title of special envoy for Syria and Lebanon, the Levant.
This isn’t holding a cocktail party or going to an event. This is diplomacy. This is the hard work of diplomacy. Now it’s been carried out by a man who has no experience in the hard work of diplomacy, a man whose resume says businessman, friend of Donald Trump, fundraiser,
somebody who has the ear of the leaders of the Emirates, the United Emirates, Saudi Arabia, But he’s not somebody who knows what works consistently over time, and it’s manifested in the policies that he seems to be pursuing. You see, he has taken X to social media and made a number of posts that are very disturbing.
He speaks about the pressure that’s being placed on Lebanon and the possibility that unless the Lebanese change their policies towards Hezbollah, Lebanon could see itself disappear. They could see themselves become basically… you know, the beach-going place of the Syrian people. He’s talking about the erasure of Lebanon from the map or redrawing of the map.
These are things that haven’t been done in decades. In fact, the Middle East map hasn’t been redrawn in this way since Sykes-Picot, the 1916 secret agreement between the Brits and the France to, you know, carve up the ottoman empire in the aftermath of the first world war and indeed we
saw new nations emerge from uh from the collapse of the ottoman empire nations like syria lebanon iraq palestine these these nations happened because lines were drawn on a map but then at the end of the second world war a decision was made by the international community that we weren’t going to
start redrawing lines on a map well they did a little bit the creation of israel but syria is the syrian nation you don’t mess with that lebanon is the lebanese nation you don’t mess with that the lines are manifest but no it comes thomas barack and basically he’s threatening the lebanese government that if you don’t get
rid of hezbo and not just as a resistance movement but as a political party that the United States doesn’t see a distinction between the two, that Lebanon could cease to exist. And who’s going to take over Lebanon? Syria. But Syria is a basket case. It’s not Tom Barack’s fault that Bashar al-Assad fell.
That happened during the time of Joe Biden. But he’s the guy that is in there cutting the deals and telling Donald Trump that it’s a good idea to stand shoulder to shoulder with a terrorist who just a few months ago had a $10 million bounty on his head. That’s Jolani, the president of Syria.
It’s a good idea to stand next to him, shake his hand, say he’s a good guy. He’s not a good guy. He’s a murderer. He’s killed Americans. Barack, this isn’t a good idea. But no, that’s what he keeps telling the president, that this is what we’re going to do. Meanwhile, you have the Syrian president, this terrorist, Jolani,
starting to say, hey, I’ll cut some deals. If Israel gives me one of the Golan Heights, you know, I’ll exchange the rest of the Golan Heights. If you let me take the city of Tripoli, that’s in northern Lebanon, to go in and redraw the maps. And now Tom Barak is saying, this could be a good idea.
No, it’s not a good idea. It’s a horrible idea. But this goes hand in hand with the idea of recognizing the terrorist as the legitimate leader of Syria. Not a good idea. A horrible idea. Because a terrorist, at the end of the day, is a terrorist. Jolani will always be a terrorist.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a CIA-trained terrorist, a British-trained terrorist, or an Israeli-trained terrorist. All of which may be true. He’s still a terrorist. A man who cut off the heads of Americans for a living. And now he’s the president of Syria. I don’t know what…
Tom Barack told Donald Trump about what he thought he could accomplish by eliminating the status of terrorists, by recognizing this government, by lifting sanctions. Because whatever he said was going to happen isn’t happening. Barack has been in there cutting deals now between the Syrian government and the Kurdish forces.
The Americans have been supporting Kurds in the northeastern part of Syria for some time now. The Syrian Democratic Forces have been trained and backed by the United States. And yet Barack is trying to cut a deal where he says, hey, the Kurds will now rule their military force, which is giving them security, into the overarching
organizational structure of the syrian army and deals have been cut to that regard but then the small print comes in now jelani the terrorist uh who’s been fighting by the way the syrians for some time now uh says no they’re not going to roll in as
complete units we’re going to break them up and disperse them around why would you do that why would you break up that which gives you strength and and disperse your strength into the hands of the terrorists meanwhile jelani is actively incorporating foreign terrorists into the Syrian army. When I say foreign, I mean we’re talking people from Uzbekistan,
from Chechnya, from Turkmenistan, from China. People have no relation whatsoever with Syria or Syria’s peripheral neighbors, but people who have come to Syria to fight a jihad, a holy war against the Takfiri, against the Christians, against the Druze, against the Shia, against the Alawites. And now they’re officially part of the Syrian army.
And terrorists are going to do what terrorists are going to do. So they go around and they burn Christian villages. They slaughter the Alawite population. They hunt down the Shia. They destroy shrines. And just the other day, they went after the Druze. That was their mistake, you see, because the Druze are allied with the state of Israel.
And the Israelis have responded decisively. striking the Syrian Ministry of Defense, annihilating it, striking Syrian army units as they move towards villages where the Druze are under attack. They’ve struck Syria so hard that the man that stood side by side with Donald J. Trump, Jolani, had to flee.
And he apparently has gone back to where he came from, Idlib. where the terrorists created their base he’s run back to a sanctuary driven out of damascus Why? It looks like Israel is going to make a play on southern Lebanon or southern Syria right now. The lines are being redrawn. The maps are being changed.
And is this part of the grand plan? No. It’s what you get when you stop relying on consistent policy over the time and you start making things up, which is what Tom Barak has been doing. Just making it up is going on. Everything’s a transaction. Everything’s a business deal. Well, that’s not how it works.
wisdom tom wisdom over time you see what works and what doesn’t work and going in and redrawing lines on maps and giving terrorists the ability to run nation states is not what works a wise man would have said don’t do it but tom barack’s not a
wise man when it comes to diplomacy he’s a businessman a friend of donald trump so what you get is what you get I just want to leave with this. It’s not just Syria that Tom Barak’s sticking his fingers into. He’s now been given the Armenian Azerbaijan portfolio.
This is another one of those complex problems where lines are being drawn on the map, redrawn on the map. And one of the sticking points to a peace treaty between the Armenians and Azerbaijanis is what they call the Zungazar Corridor, basically a 36-kilometer-long highway that’s supposed to connect the… this part of Azerbaijan, the Naqshiman, it’s not enclave,
exclave, with the mainland of Azerbaijan. It’s right through southern Armenia. And the Azerbaijani government says, we have to have this corridor. It has to provide us the connectivity so that Turkey can then connect through Azerbaijan into Central Asia, and it’s a wonderful thing. But the Armenians are saying, that’s our territory.
We’re not going to just give it up. So it’s a hard negotiation. Well, inter… You know what his solution is? Just lease America the corridor. Lease America. It’s a business deal. It’s a transaction. Lease us the highway. We’ll manage it for 100 years and everything will be hunky-dory.
No, the Armenians have already said they’re not going to do it. That’s a violation of our sovereignty. But this is the issue here. Consistency over time. That’s what you need when it comes to diplomacy. But what has the Trump administration done? They fired over 1,300 career State Department employees.
Many of them were engaged in the business of doing the very evaluations we’re talking about. whether it be with the Middle East or it be with Russia and Ukraine. These are the experts, the intelligence people, and they’ve been fired because Donald Trump’s not looking for intelligence. He’s not looking for people who understand diplomacy consistently over time.
Donald Trump wants to hand everything off to his business partners, to his friends, to his allies, people like Tom Barack, who are destroying America’s reputation in the Middle East. Donald Trump has about three and a half years left to go as president of the United States.
At some point in time, he will stop being the president of the United States. And the key question here right now is how much damage can he do in the next three and a half years? How much damage can Tom Barack do? And I’m afraid that the answer is a whole lot.
I don’t know this to be the case. But I’m wise enough to know that over time, certain things will succeed and certain things will fail. And Donald Trump’s policies are a recipe for disaster. This has been my rant. Thanks for tuning in. Next time a thought crosses my mind, I’ll be sure to let you know.
ooooo
@tobararbulu # mmt@tobararbulu
Ritter’s Rant 028: The 51st Day
Senator Graham has threatened Russian President Putin with unspoken consequences of “Day 51” following Trump’s 50 day deadline for Russian policy change in Ukraine.
Transkripzioa:
Introduction
0:01
[Music]
0:11
Hello and welcome to this episode of
0:13
Ritter’s Rant. Today we’re going to be
0:16
discussing the 51st day. Now sometimes
0:20
when you hear um you know calendars
0:23
expressed in this way it seems like a
0:25
biblical reference and uh God said it
0:27
will rain on the 51st day or God will
0:31
smite you on the 51st day but it’s not
0:33
God speaking. No, it’s Lindsey Graham.
0:36
Now Lindsey Graham, the Republican
0:38
senator from the state of South Carolina
0:40
sometimes behaves if as if he were God.
0:43
uh as if his words matter, as if what he
0:46
thought said and did had any real
0:49
relevance in this world. And of course
0:52
it does. He is a senior senator. Uh he
0:55
sits on some very influential uh
0:58
committees. Um and he’s somebody who’s
1:01
been in politics long enough to have
1:04
assembled um what passes for political
1:07
power. uh whether that’s um you know
1:11
just simply having been around so long
1:12
that he’s the only one who knows
1:14
anything. Maybe he knows things about
1:15
other people that he holds over them.
1:17
Who knows what it is that makes Lindsey
1:20
Graham what he is? But he’s not God. And
1:23
therefore we need to be careful when too
1:26
much credence is given to words coming
1:28
out of Lindsey Graham’s mouth. Uh
1:32
President Trump has recently announced
1:34
that he is um giving Russia 50 days. 50
1:38
days to get its act together. He’s tired
1:41
of speaking on the phone with Russian
1:42
President Vladimir Putin and having nice
1:44
conversations only to find out that
1:47
after they hang up Putin went out and
1:49
bombed Ukraine again. I mean, it’s so
1:51
bad. Uh Trump apparently turns to his
1:53
wife Melania and says, you know, I had a
1:55
nice conversation with old Vladimir
1:56
Putin. And Melania says he bombed Kiev
1:59
tonight. And that apparently changed
2:01
everything. It’s curious that Melania
2:03
didn’t say uh he bombed Kiev tonight
2:05
because the Ukrainians launched a drone
2:07
attack against Russian strategic nuclear
2:09
forces or that Ukraine launches hundreds
2:12
of drone attacks against Russian
2:14
civilian targets ranging throughout the
2:16
the the depth of Russia. No, nobody
2:18
talks about the Ukrainian actions. They
2:20
simply discuss the Russian reactions.
2:23
And somehow people are surprised that
2:25
the Russian reactions would be decisive.
2:27
that the Russian reactions would be
2:29
designed to create a condition that
2:31
would compel the Ukrainians to stop
2:33
launching drone attacks against R uh
2:35
Russia as opposed to continue them. And
2:38
then people are surprised when the
2:39
Russians further rev up the pressure
2:42
being put on Ukraine by additional drone
2:44
attacks. Uh I read somewhere that the
2:47
Russians are about to surpass the 1,000
2:51
uh guranium drone a day production mark.
2:54
That means that for every day they’re
2:56
producing a thousand of these and that
2:58
means at some point in time they perhaps
3:00
plan on launching up to a thousand
3:02
drones a day backed up by caliber
3:05
missiles, Iscander missiles and other
3:08
missiles. Um this is unmatched firepower
3:11
that Ukraine will never be able to you
3:13
know meet regardless of the amount of
3:15
assistance they’re provided by the
3:16
Germans, the French, the Italians, the
3:18
Americans, the Dutch, the collective
3:20
west. No, 50 days isn’t going to do a
3:24
damn thing on the battlefield except
3:26
make the Russians even more angry than
3:28
they are. Um
3:30
the the Russian general staff isn’t uh I
3:33
believe knocking on Vladimir Putin’s
3:35
door saying, “Boss, we got to stop the
3:36
war in 50 days. Lindsey Graham is
3:39
promising something awful on the 51st
3:40
day.” What is Lindsey Graham suggesting
3:43
on the 51st day? Well, he said ask the
3:46
Ayatollah. Now, I’m assuming he means
3:48
Ayatollah Ali Ham and he’s making a
3:51
reference to uh the 12-day conflict and
3:54
what happened uh during that conflict
3:56
that the Iranian capital of Thrron was
3:59
attacked by the Israelis that the United
4:02
States dropped bombs on three empty
4:04
sites inside Iran. Um is this what he’s
4:07
doing? Is Lindsey Graham threatening
4:09
Russia and the president of Russia with
4:12
an American military response?
4:16
Well, the good news is Lindsey Graham’s
4:18
in no position to
4:20
make his words reality. He’s not in the
4:23
chain of command. He has no command
4:24
authority over the American armed forces
4:26
and he doesn’t get to make that
4:28
decision. But the bad news is Lindsey
4:30
Graham is a voice that the president
4:32
listens to and the media listens to and
4:34
people pick up on it. I can’t think of
4:36
something more insulting to the Russian
4:38
leadership than an American senator
4:40
suggesting that Russia somehow bow its
4:44
head, come to its knees before the
4:45
United States because Lindsey Graham
4:48
suggests Russia might come under an
4:49
American attack.
4:51
I would remind Lindsey Graham that
4:53
Russia has promugated a nuclear doctrine
4:57
and that nuclear doctrine makes it quite
4:59
clear that if a nuclear armed power
5:02
carries out a conventional strike
5:03
against Russia in a manner that
5:06
threatens the existential survival of
5:08
Russia, then Russia will respond with
5:10
the full weight of its nuclear arsenal.
5:13
The 51st day could have biblical
5:16
consequences because it conjures up the
5:18
imagery of Armageddon. No, Lindsey
5:20
Graham, your 51st day doesn’t scare
5:22
anybody. Fact is, I don’t think we’ll
5:25
get to the 51st day because I don’t
5:27
think Donald Trump will allow this thing
5:28
to go to 50 days. Why 50? 50 is a very
5:30
arbitrary time. Um, I mean, does he have
5:33
a plan? No, the reality is Donald Trump
5:35
doesn’t have a plan. That’s why he
5:37
picked 50 days. This isn’t about putting
5:39
pressure on Russia to change uh its
5:42
attitude regarding Ukraine. This is to
5:44
buy time for the United States to come
5:46
up with a plan, something that could
5:48
work. Now, Donald Trump knows that he
5:52
can’t allow a plan to be uh formulated
5:55
in a vacuum. So, he has to create the
5:58
impression that he’s putting pressure on
5:59
Russia. And he does that with 50 days.
6:02
50 days to what? Not the bombing. Donald
6:04
Trump hasn’t threatened this time around
6:06
to bomb Iran. We or to Russia. We know.
6:09
We know in 2024 Donald Trump spoke to
6:11
his imaginary friend Vladimir Putin and
6:14
said that if you invade Kiev, I will
6:16
bomb the out of Moscow. But we know
6:18
that that resides somewhere in Donald
6:19
Trump’s brain, but it’s not a real
6:21
statement. It didn’t happen and he’s not
6:23
about to make a real threat against the
6:24
Russian president who is, you know, at
6:27
the command of the world’s most advanced
6:28
strategic nuclear forces. Um, so it
6:31
wasn’t a military threat. What Donald
6:33
Trump did do is threaten secondary
6:35
sanctions. Now,
6:37
secondary sanctions are important
6:38
because the concept of threatening
6:40
Russia with sanctions is almost
6:42
laughable. It’s it’s become a political
6:44
meme. Um because apparently the more we
6:47
sanction Russia, the stronger the
6:48
Russian economy gets. Now, I’m not going
6:50
to sit here and pretend that everything
6:51
in Russia is roses and sunshine and
6:54
unicorns and happy puppy dogs. Um I’m
6:57
sure Russia has as many problems um
7:00
facing, you know, them as as Americans
7:02
do. Life isn’t perfect. Life is always a
7:05
struggle wherever you’re at. But the
7:07
idea that the Russian economy is
7:08
collapsing, that Russian society is
7:10
deteriorating, is laughable. The
7:12
Russians, like the Americans, like
7:14
everybody else in the world, get up in
7:15
the morning, go to work, and you work.
7:17
They work to earn money, and they use
7:19
that money to pay bills, and then to
7:21
live their lives. And the lives that the
7:23
Russian people are living aren’t bad
7:24
lives. In fact, one could make the case
7:27
that their lives have improved since
7:29
2022 and the new economic reality
7:32
brought on by Russia’s response to the
7:34
sanctions of the West against the
7:36
Russian economy.
7:39
Maybe many Russians would thank the
7:40
United States to put even more sanctions
7:42
on Russia because apparently the more
7:44
Russia gets sanctioned, the better the
7:46
Russian economy performs. But this isn’t
7:49
about sanctioning Russia. This is about
7:51
sanctioning those nations who have
7:53
enabled the Russian economy to perform
7:56
as well as it does. Nations like China,
7:59
Brazil, India. You see, the president
8:02
has said that u if after 50 days, Russia
8:05
hasn’t changed its response to um
8:08
Ukraine and to American demands that
8:11
we’re going to slap I think it’s 100%
8:14
sanctions on or tariffs on uh on on
8:16
trade with these three nations.
8:19
Now, how has that gone over? Well, the
8:22
Chinese have said that they’re going to
8:23
ignore that. And everybody expects that
8:26
if these sanctions are ever imposed on
8:27
China, China will respond with similar
8:30
even harsher sanctions against the
8:31
United States.
8:33
President Lula of Brazil has said that
8:36
uh if the United States doesn’t want to
8:37
trade with Brazil, then Brazil won’t
8:39
trade with the United States. So there
8:40
goes any concept of you know pressure
8:43
put on Brazil. India is on the fence as
8:47
they have been uh for some time now. But
8:49
at some point in time, the Indians have
8:51
to wake up to the reality that you know
8:53
to continue to yield to the United
8:55
States is to continue to allow their
8:57
sovereignty to be called into question.
8:59
And um I think this time around India is
9:02
starting to see the light and recognize
9:04
that no, they’re not going to kneel to
9:07
the United States. they have uh the
9:09
ability to interact in a responsible
9:11
manner with the rest of the world uh
9:13
through the Shanghai Cooperation
9:15
Organization through bricks uh through
9:17
the G20 and they’re not going to throw
9:20
it away by yielding to Donald Trump’s
9:22
you know childish rant. So I think the
9:25
reality is that as we get closer to 50
9:27
days you’re not going to be seeing a
9:29
change in the policies of either Russia,
9:32
uh India, China or Brazil. you’re going
9:34
to see the Trump come up with a new
9:38
approach
9:40
in which they will re-engage uh with
9:42
Russia because ultimately the best thing
9:45
that can happen to the United States
9:46
right now is normal relations with
9:48
Russia, normal relations with Russia
9:50
that bring an end to this horrific
9:52
conflict in Ukraine, but on terms that
9:55
will be acceptable to Russia. Um, so
9:58
that’s where we’re headed, the 51st day.
10:00
Now, what will happen to Lindsey Graham
10:02
on the 51st day? I mean, he has promised
10:05
fire and brimstone, the skies to open
10:07
up. Ask the Ayatollah. Lindsey Graham
10:10
will continue to be the perfume princess
10:12
that he is. This
10:15
elderly,
10:17
effeminite,
10:19
fat nobody who words have no meaning
10:23
whatsoever. I mean, literally, the world
10:26
is not quaking in fear because of what
10:27
Lindsey Graham says. And on the 51st
10:29
day, the world will realize that Lindsey
10:32
Graham is as relevant to international
10:35
peace and security and geopolitical
10:37
reality is my little pinky.
10:41
That’s my rant. 51 days. Thanks for
10:44
tuning in and next time a thought
10:45
crosses my mind, I’ll be sure to let you
10:47
know about it.
oooooo
Ritter’s Rant 029: Deterrence
Ritter’s Rant 029: Deterrence
(https://scottritter.substack.com/p/ritters-rant-029-deterrence?r=1vhv3f&triedRedirect=true)
General Christopher Donahue thinks he can deter Russia by threatening Russia. History suggests this will not work.
Transkripzioa:
Hello and welcome to this episode of Ritter’s Rant. The word today is deterrence, or more specifically how the term deterrence is applied into a concept known as the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line. What is the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line? It’s come into public purview through a conference that was just held in Wiesbaden, Germany,
sponsored by the United States Army, in which the principal speaker was General Christopher Donahue, the newly appointed commander of American or European forces, NATO forces in Europe. Donahue speaks of the eastern flank deterrence line as if it’s a reality. He says that the Baltic nations, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Finland, Sweden,
They’re collectively concerned about the threat posed by Russia, especially given the performance that Russia is putting on in Ukraine. It’s not just a war-winning performance there, but it’s one that has shown the ability to defeat the best that NATO has. Well, according to Christopher Donahue,
Russia is not up against the best that NATO has because the best that NATO has is coming together in this eastern flank deterrence line. What is it? Well, it’s a concept that involves mobilizing not just brigades, that’s military forces, boots on the ground, not just squadrons, those are the airplanes, but things like the cloud.
I mean, people who know anything about the computer world, the cloud is… where information is stored and accessed. And apparently Christopher Donahue now knows how to weaponize the cloud. He’s brought in Palantir, that military industrial complex entity that deals with data, artificial intelligence,
to apply its skill set to the data that’s used by NATO in support of this eastern flank deterrence line. He talks about things like nodes and the ability to shut down nodes. And then he applies it to Russia and specifically the Kaliningrad Enclave, that part of the Russian Federation that’s separated from the Russian mainland by
the Baltic states, neighbors with Poland. He says that, you know, Kaliningrad’s just 47 kilometers long. or 47 miles long, and that NATO now has the ability to shut it down that quick. I mean, bam, it’s gone. And he says this is the deterrence, that if Russia wants a fight, we can eliminate Kaliningrad overnight.
That’s the eastern flank deterrence line, a threat against Russia made by an American general. Not just any American general. I mean, Christopher Donahue has a history. Christopher Donahue is a man of some capabilities. He’s probably perhaps most famously known as the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, 18th Airborne Corps. When in Afghanistan in August of 2021,
he was the commander on the ground who oversaw the evacuation of americans out of afghanistan out of kabul and there was a iconic photograph of him being the last american to leave he’s walking behind one of the c-17 transports it’s a photograph taken by a night vision camera and it shows him stepping on
striding on to the aircraft m16 in hand the last man to leave afghanistan He’s also a man that has a distinguished military career. This man has served in a variety of capacities, both in the conventional U.S. military, but also in the Special Operations Forces, the Joint Special Operations Forces. He served in the Ranger Battalion.
He served in the Ranger Regiment. He served in Delta Force, both as a troop commander, a squadron commander. And later on, and after doing a number of staff positions, He’s commanded Delta Force commandos in Iraq and in Afghanistan and has participated and commanded and led a number of high-profile missions. Now, why the emphasis?
Why am I talking about this? Delta Force is a very specialized unit. The people in Delta Force are literally alpha types. They believe they can do anything because they’ve proven they’re pretty much capable of doing just about anything. There’s no such thing as a mission impossible for them. It’s all mission possible.
Things that would make other people take pause, Delta Force says, yeah, we can get this thing done. And Christopher Donahue, as a commander in Delta Force, got a lot of these missions done. But now he’s back in the conventional military. And this aggressive mindset, this can-do mindset, this mission-possible mindset,
I think has prompted him to lean forward a little too far. Hey, Chris, don’t threaten Russia. You’re not going to get anywhere from it. Kaliningrad is 47 miles long, but it’s full of a Russian corps. That’s around 12,000 Russian soldiers, supported by a 1,500-strong naval infantry brigade. These forces have been in place.
They’ve been preparing for a conflict with NATO longer than you’ve been preparing for a conflict with Russia. Don’t let your experience as the 18th Corps Airborne Corps commander where you worked with the Ukrainians to provide weaponry to them cloud your judgment. In fact, reflect on what you learned as the point of contact for Friday and American support
to the Ukrainians, especially in the timeframe associated with the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023, and come to the realization that Russia is a world-class military that is fully capable of defeating NATO in a stand-up conflict. Now, I know you have to generate confidence among the people you lead.
And maybe the eastern flank deterrence line is something that you can sell to your European allies. But please don’t think that you can go to war against Russia because the ignorance that you manifest in seeking out to isolate simply Kaliningrad from the rest of the Russian military reality borders on stupidity. The moment you strike Kaliningrad,
the totality of Russian military power will be brought down on your head. I don’t know where you think you’ll be, what, in Wiesbaden, in Ramstein, in some command post in West Germany. You’ll be dead. The Oreshnik will get you, and you’ve got no defense against the Oreshnik.
And any forces you bring up against the Kaliningrad enclave will be destroyed, not only by the Kaliningrad defenders, but by weapons that will be deployed by Russia, caliber missiles, Iskander missiles, more Oreshniks perhaps, and other military capacity that the Russians have. You don’t live in a vacuum.
You don’t get to have your land euro conference as if the only power that matters is that of the United States and Europe. Look at the military forces available to you, Christopher. You don’t have the capacity to wage a war against Russia as things currently stand. At best, you could be defensive,
and that’s all you really need to focus on, is defending against an attack from Russia that will never come because Russia poses no threat to you whatsoever. Why don’t you take a lesson from the pages of history? Nazi Germany attacked Russia on June 22nd, 1941, attacked Russia. The Russians absorbed that attack and then counterattacked, destroyed Nazi Germany.
Hey, Chris, if you or NATO ever tried to attack Russia in Kaliningrad, let me just read you in on what’s going to happen. The Russians will absorb that attack and then they’ll counterattack and you and whatever forces you deployed will be destroyed. There is no Eastern flank deterrence line if you’re trying to deter is Russian aggression.
There is no Russian aggression. If your deterrence is actually a cover for NATO aggression, you might as well just take a suicide pill because you’ll get the same result. That’s my rant for today. Next time a thought crosses my mind, I’ll let you know. Thanks.
oooooo
@tobararbulu # mmt@tobararbulu
Ritter’s Rant 030: Our Journey
Ritter’s Rant 030: Our Journey
(https://scottritter.substack.com/p/ritters-rant-030-our-journey?r=1vhv3f&triedRedirect=true)
I officially kicked off the Project 38 campaign with a fundraiser held at the Quaker Friend’s Meeting House in Albany, NY. It is the first step of a longer journey to extend the New START treaty.
Transkripzioa:
Hello and welcome to this episode of Ritter’s Rant. Today’s theme, word, um, motivator is journey. Um, my journey, our journey, the journey, um, The journey I’m talking about, of course, is what I call Project 38. Project 38 is a campaign that’s designed to prevent a nuclear arms race by seeking
the extension of the last remaining arms control vehicle between the United States and Russia, that being the New Star Treaty, which expires in February of next year. As things stand, there’s no effort underway either in Washington, D.C. or in Moscow to try and extend this treaty. The inspection processes have been put on hold.
The treaty exists in name only. One of the more important aspects of this treaty is that it caps the respective deployed nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia at 1,550 warheads each. If this treaty expires, immediately thousands of warheads that are currently stored in reserve will
in a non-deployed fashion, will be brought out of storage and deployed. And we’ll see, you know, almost within a month, the number of deployed warheads rise from 1,550 to 4,000, 5,000,
And then the arms race begins. And the next thing you know, we’ll be looking at arsenals that come close to matching what existed at the height of the Cold War, when each side had around 30,000 nuclear warheads. And when you have this many nuclear warheads in an environment where the United States and Russia operate,
and this is according to Senator Marco Rubio, who is currently the Secretary of State, who has acknowledged that the United States is engaged in a proxy war with Russia, using Ukraine as the proxy. But in short, the United States is at war with Russia. and you have the United States and Russia in a war, proxy or otherwise,
in concurrent with this, you have a nuclear arms race. It’s a recipe for disaster, an absolute recipe for disaster. So Project 38 seeks to bring the need for treaty extension to the intent of the Trump administration. Just like back in 2024, Operation Don wanted to raise the danger of you know, having long range systems,
weapon systems provided to Ukraine that could strike Russia in a way that trigger a Russian nuclear retaliation to try and change that policy. We were successful with Operation Don and we, I believe, helped prevent a nuclear war that some people believe had a greater than 50 percent chance of happening last fall.
I’d like to believe that we can have a better than 50% chance of getting the New START Treaty extended, but we can’t do that unless we do something. And that something is Project 38. Project 38 takes its name from 38 minutes, the 38 minutes of terror that the citizens of Hawaii felt on January 13th, 2018,
when they were notified that a ballistic missile was inbound to their islands. They needed to take shelter immediately, that this was not a drill. And for 38 minutes, people thought they were going to die. Project 38 wants to capture that sense of helplessness and then ask people if they could go back in time six months,
what would they be willing to do to prevent that missile from flying? And then ask them, why aren’t they doing that now? and then provide them with what they can do, which is to support Project 38. Project 38 consists of the production of a documentary movie called 38 Minutes.
Again, that’s the vehicle that captures the terror felt by the citizens of Hawaii. It will bring together a team B of policy experts, people that have a track record of working in previous presidential administrations at the highest level, dealing with nuclear war fighting, arms control, and just basically the whole concept of how to brief,
how to pitch a president in the United States. And then… Getting Team B to Washington, D.C. to have an impact on policymakers. Our goal is to bring this issue before the president of the United States sometime in December so that by February of 2026, the president can implement policy that extends the New START Treaty.
This is what you get by supporting Project 38. And today we had a fundraiser in Albany at the Friends House, the Quaker House. Cynthia Pooler, a wonderful lady who interviews me often on her YouTube channel, helped put it together. And we began the journey. We began the Project 38 journey.
It’s a journey that I can’t do by myself. It’s a journey that has to be coordinated. It’s a journey that has to be completed. But it’s also a journey that has to start. And that’s what this video is about, announcing the start of Project 38.
You can find out about Project 38 by going to my Substack page, skywriter.com. We’ll take you there. You’ll find an article that details it. You’ll also find out how you can support Project 38 through donations, which, again, are essential. Without donations, we can’t do Project 38. We can’t do the work that’s necessary. We can’t make the film.
We can’t underwrite the travel, the funding, et cetera. And this is a team effort. And the other thing I’d like to announce is that As part of this, anybody who donates more than $500 will make sure that their name gets put on the credits of the movie,
and that way the whole world will know that you played an important role in making 38 Minutes, the movie, a possibility. Anyways, that’s my word of the day, the journey, journey, my journey, our journey, perhaps one of the most necessary journeys of our time. Thanks for listening.
Next time a thought crosses my mind, I’ll be sure to let you know.
oooooo
@tobararbulu # mmt@tobararbulu
Ritter’s Rant 031: Accountability
Ritter’s Rant 031: Accountability
(https://scottritter.substack.com/p/ritters-rant-031-accountability?r=1vhv3f&triedRedirect=true)
Tulsi Gabbard has evidence that President Obama interfered in the 2016 election by falsely claiming Russia sought to tip the electoral scales in Donald Trump’s favor. If true, Obama should go to jail.
Transkripzioa:
0:01
[Music]
0:10
Hello and welcome to this episode of
0:13
Ritter’s Rant. Today we’ll be talking
0:15
about accountability. Um, otherwise this
0:19
program could be called I Told You So.
0:23
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national
0:26
intelligence, has released the receipts
0:30
uh the proof that the Obama
0:35
administration. No, President Obama
0:37
himself
0:40
manipulated
0:42
intelligence,
0:43
manipulated
0:45
not just information but the system, the
0:50
the intelligence system, the
0:52
bureaucracy, the methodologies
0:54
that we as a nation rely upon to gather
0:59
insights about threats to our collective
1:02
national security. This isn’t politics
1:05
as usual. Uh we are talking about, you
1:08
know, an essential element of the
1:11
national security of the United States
1:13
of America. Intelligence, the processes
1:16
of intelligence, the professionals uh
1:19
that carry this out who are supposed to
1:21
be apolitical. Intelligence is not about
1:24
politics. As a former intelligence
1:26
officer, I can tell you that uh my job
1:29
was never to tell my boss what he or she
1:32
wanted to hear. It was to tell them the
1:34
hard truth, fact-based truth, and then
1:37
their job was to take this hard truth
1:39
and do something with it. And what they
1:41
did with it was their business. That’s
1:43
the politics of it. But you don’t lie.
1:46
You don’t manipulate. The other um adage
1:49
went in the intelligence business. If
1:51
you know, if you lie, they die. they
1:54
being um the the the the soldiers, the
1:57
uh the other professionals out there who
1:59
were dependent upon decisions made based
2:02
upon the intelligence information you
2:04
provided. And what we’re finding out
2:06
from Tulsa Gabbard is that President
2:09
Obama himself
2:12
manipulated the intelligence process. He
2:15
gave orders to senior intelligence
2:18
officials to ignore u the sound
2:23
fact-based assessments of the analytical
2:26
professionals that worked for their
2:28
respective agencies and instead to
2:31
doctor uh information to manufacture
2:35
information that made it look like the
2:37
Russian government put their thumb on
2:40
the scale of the 2016 election.
2:44
They did this in the leadup to the
2:46
election. That means that they were
2:47
actively trying to manipulate the vote
2:50
of the American people. And they did it
2:52
after the election. Meaning once the
2:55
American people spoke and said, “We the
2:57
people of the United States choose
2:59
Donald J. Trump to be our president.
3:03
President Obama and his team
3:06
disrespected that and instead tried to
3:09
create the conditions that could lead to
3:12
the discrediting of the president-elect
3:15
and once he became president, the
3:18
unseing of this president through
3:20
impeachment processes and other um
3:23
events that could lead to the president
3:26
losing the trust and faith of the
3:27
American people.
3:29
This is literally the definition of
3:31
treason. Literally the definition of
3:34
treason.
3:35
And the evidence is there, right there.
3:38
December 8th,
3:40
a briefing was provided to the
3:42
president, United States that said
3:43
without any equivocation, Russia did not
3:47
interfere with the 2016 election in a
3:50
manner that manipulated the voter, had a
3:53
discernable outcome. On December 9th,
3:56
the president threw that out and ordered
3:58
the intelligence community to come up
4:00
with a product that said the exact
4:02
opposite. And then they moved forward
4:04
with this product to make it appear as
4:06
if it was real. So Tulsa Gabbard’s doing
4:10
the right thing. She’s making sure that
4:13
the adage that no person is above the
4:16
law is truly applicable here in the
4:19
United States. And if President Obama
4:22
and his CIA director and his FBI
4:24
director and anybody else in the
4:26
intelligence community knowingly and
4:29
willingly manipulated intelligence
4:31
information information, manufactured
4:33
facts in an effort to interfere with the
4:37
democratic processes of the 2016
4:41
presidential election, or in the
4:43
aftermath to try and create the
4:45
conditions that would undermine the
4:47
authority and legitimacy of a sitting
4:49
president. This is treason of the
4:52
highest order, but it shouldn’t take
4:54
anybody by surprise.
4:56
You know, I’m a old intelligence hand
4:59
myself and I understand how the
5:00
intelligence world works and there were
5:03
red flags from the start. We knew going
5:06
in uh that the
5:09
whole story of the Russian hacking of
5:11
the Democratic National Committee, the
5:14
DNC, was a manufactured event,
5:16
manufactured by the Democrats themselves
5:19
with the assistance of the FBI. We know
5:22
that the Steel Dossier, uh, Christopher
5:25
Steel, the former MI6 intelligence
5:27
operative who was a paid informant of
5:30
the FBI, the Steel Dossier was itself a
5:33
manufactured
5:35
piece of data. It was manufactured for
5:38
the purpose of undermining the
5:40
president. We knew this. I wrote about
5:42
it extensively. This was not something
5:44
that was impossible to put the pieces
5:46
together. Uh but the mainstream media
5:49
was colluding with the president because
5:52
they had made a decision that the will
5:54
of the American people didn’t matter.
5:57
They the political elite of the United
5:59
States decided that Donald Trump
6:01
couldn’t be president. And so they
6:04
worked with the intelligence community
6:05
and the Democrats to manufacture a case
6:08
that they thought would convince the
6:10
American people not to make him
6:12
president. But this wasn’t enough.
6:15
Brennan, the CIA director, invented a
6:18
source. Well, the source was there.
6:20
There was a Russian defector in place
6:22
who was providing human intelligence.
6:25
But everybody knew that he was a double
6:28
agent. That he had been turned by the
6:30
Russians. No checks and balances had
6:32
been done. He wasn’t polygraphed. He
6:33
wasn’t uh they didn’t check uh you know
6:36
his his data. They just Brennan pushed
6:39
the naysayers aside. the people from
6:41
people from counter intelligence who
6:43
normally say don’t trust this source.
6:45
Instead, Brennan took this, wrapped it
6:47
around himself, ran to the president,
6:49
and the president used this information
6:51
to help facilitate a lie. This was
6:54
knowable, known at the time, but the
6:58
media ignored it. The media ignored it.
7:01
And then the Biden administration came
7:03
in and they continued to promulgate this
7:06
this lie, this notion that somehow the
7:09
Russian government had co-opted
7:12
President Donald Trump. Now, you can be
7:14
against Trump’s policies. That’s okay.
7:16
That’s normal in America. But what you
7:19
can’t do is accuse a sitting president
7:21
of betraying his country without
7:24
evidence. And you can’t allow the
7:27
intelligence communities to be
7:29
politicized to the point where they are
7:31
targeting this president. This is
7:34
literally undermining the trust and
7:36
confidence in the American system. The
7:38
very thing the Obama administration was
7:42
accusing Donald Trump of doing of Donald
7:46
Trump working with the Russians to
7:47
accomplish, they themselves did.
7:51
undermine confidence in the American
7:53
election by telling a lie about Russian
7:57
collusion. It wasn’t the Russians that
7:59
were undermining American democracy. It
8:01
was President Barack Obama. It was the
8:04
Democrats. It was the Obama
8:06
administration.
8:08
And so here we are. Tulsi Gabbard with
8:10
the receipts calling them out. She’s
8:12
made a reference to the Department of
8:14
Justice for criminal prosecution of
8:16
those involved, including President
8:18
Barack Obama. And I certainly hope that
8:21
the Department of Justice will go
8:22
through uh with this investigation and
8:25
if the facts warrant it, crimes have
8:27
been committed with the prosecution of
8:29
these individuals, including the
8:31
president of the United States, the
8:32
former president, because that’s the
8:34
only way that you restore trust and
8:35
confidence in the system by
8:38
demonstrating that those who betray the
8:40
trust and confidence of the American
8:42
people will be held accountable. You
8:45
know, the the the key aspect of crime
8:47
prevention is the concept of deterrence.
8:49
meaning that, you know, there are laws
8:51
in place and people out there who may
8:54
think that they might want to consider
8:56
breaking a law have to reflect on the
8:59
the price they could pay if caught. And
9:02
generally speaking, the price is so
9:05
severe that most people would say, “I
9:07
don’t want to do that. I prefer to be a
9:08
law-abiding citizen.” Right now, we have
9:11
politicians who act as if they are above
9:13
the law, as if the law doesn’t matter to
9:16
them, including Donald J. Trump today.
9:20
The law does matter and it’s imperative
9:23
that we ensure that there is a deterrent
9:26
factor in place for these politicians of
9:30
any political uh flavor, Democrat,
9:33
Republican, it doesn’t matter. If you
9:35
betray the trust and confidence of the
9:37
American people, you must go to jail. If
9:41
you can’t do the time, don’t do the
9:44
crime. And my advice to American
9:47
politicians is don’t do the crime, but
9:49
no one’s going to believe it until there
9:51
are consequences demonstrated. So that’s
9:54
the next step, the actual arrest and
9:56
prosecution of former President Barack
9:59
Obama, the former director of the CIA
10:02
Brennan, the former director of the FBI,
10:05
Comey, and all the others who played a
10:08
role in betraying the trust and
10:10
confidence of the American people by
10:12
committing actual acts of treason
10:14
against the United States of America.
10:17
That’s my rant. Next time a thought
10:19
crosses my mind, I’ll make sure you know
10:21
about it. Thanks.
oooooo
@tobararbulu # mmt@tobararbulu
Project 38 Kickoff Event
Project 38 Kickoff Event
(https://scottritter.substack.com/p/project-38-kickoff-event?r=1vhv3f&triedRedirect=true)
I announce the commencement of the Project 38 campaign at an event organized by Cynthia Pooler and hosted by The Friends Meeting House of Albany, New York.
Transkripzioa:
I want to thank Cynthia Cooler for putting this on. I want to thank one of your friends’ house for hosting this. What’s happening here today is an extension of something that I’ve been doing for the next year, and that’s Operation Dawn. Operation Dawn was a plan of action I took together last year to
So to answer the question of what would you do to prevent a nuclear war, what would you be willing to do to prevent a nuclear war, I turned that around to a challenge because last year it was an election year. What would you be willing to do to save democracy, to save America,
Be on the ballot. And we reached out to the different campaigns. We got no response for the Democrats whatsoever. Diane… Sayer. No. The Independent.
Jill Stein. Not Diane Stein, but Jill Stein. She agreed to… to come on record, and then she backed off. Apparently, this was too controversial in addition for her. Surprisingly, the one campaign that did respond was the Trump campaign. They responded in the form of Donald Trump Jr.
and RFK Jr., who, after having a conversation, I actually sent RFK Jr. a proposal. I said, I’d really like to speak to somebody close to Trump to see if you can commit to the following policy points. The next thing I know, RFK Jr. took the first half of my letter, worked it in some other things.
They published an article in The Hill. And this is a big deal, because Donald Trump Jr. supports the son of Donald Trump. RFK Jr. was campaigning as part of the Trump campaign. And they wouldn’t be able to commit to the statements they made unless it had been run through campaign.
So the Trump campaign committed to trying to stop the war in Ukraine and working to improve relations with Russia in order to prevent World War III. So that’s really all we wanted someone to say. And then we put that, we said, look, Trump’s down here committed to this. Couldn’t get the Biden administration to nibble at all.
Couldn’t get Kamala Harris to nibble. Couldn’t get Jill Stein to nibble. So it was just the Trump team that did this. The thing about Operation Dawn is I told people, the idea is to get it on the ballot. But even once it’s on the ballot and the vote’s been cast, you have to hold people to account.
And September 13, right before we kicked off Operation Dawn in Kingston, some of you may have been at that rally in Kingston with Gerald Salante. His peace rally, that’s when we kicked off Operation Don. There was, on September 13th, Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, was flying to the United States to meet with Joe Biden,
meeting in the White House. Keir Starmer brought his nice little official red British documents case, and in there were the documents of an agreement between the British and French United States, to allow long-range weapons systems provided by the British and French United States to Ukraine to be used to strike targets into the depth of Russia,
including strategic targets. Now, the Russians had said, if you do this, it will trigger our nuclear document, meaning if you strike us strategically, we have the right and the duty and responsibility to respond with nuclear weapons, because we can’t allow you to carry this out. A lot of people thought the Russians were bluffing at that time.
I actually was going to the Russian embassy on that day, September 13, for a function. And the Russian ambassador, Avatol Yatsanov, who I’ve met several times, was ashen-faced and literally totally out of it compared to his normal, jovial self. And what I found out later was that he had to make a phone call that day.
to American officials, not directly involved in the White House because there was no connectivity between the White House and the Russians, but the people who were connected to the White House. And the phone call went something like this. If you sign that document and missile strike Russia, the Russian retaliation will not be limited to Ukraine.
It will not be limited to Europe. It will include striking Washington, D.C. Joe Biden didn’t sign the documents. They backed down. Joe Biden was very angry at that point in time. Let’s fast forward to after the election now, in November. And a couple of things are happening. We have a conference in Washington, DC.
I think it was the Center for Strategic International Security Studies, CSIS. But they had the Director of Plans of Strategic Command, which is the nuclear war fighting command of the United States. And he was making a presentation, and he was answering questions. And in it,
he said that the United States is prepared right now for a nuclear exchange with Russia, and we expect to be able to win, to prevail. It’s like, wait a minute. Normally, we say we want to avoid nuclear war. And what he’s saying, as the director of plans, is we are ready, right now,
prepared for the inevitability of the nuclear exchange with Russia that we plan on winning. Now, let’s take this a little further in perspective, because now the Biden administration is talking about coming back and reconsidering their decision about allowing the US to provide a tactical dismissal for long-range strength. And the Russians are saying,
We just redid our nuclear doctrine. It’s a red line. If you cross it, we’re going to hit you. I don’t know what part of we’re going to hit you, you don’t understand. As part of Operation Don, we went to Washington, D.C. We actually rented out the National Press Club, and we had a seminar.
I brought in people like Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff of Colin Powell, undersecretary of state. Theodore Postal, the MIT professor, who’s an expert anti-ballistic missile warfare, nuclear warfare planning, Dennis Kucinich, former congressman. And we had a panel where we discussed the danger of nuclear war and the threat of nuclear war.
And then we went to Congress and did the lobby. I’m not a big fan of it, because sometimes I think it’s very futile, but this actually turned out to be one of the more effective things that I’ve ever done. because people were listening. There wasn’t much Congress could do at that time.
It was sort of a lame duck Congress. Congress, when the President gets sworn in in January 17, I guess, Congress actually flipped right after the new year. And so here we are in December, and Congress was saying, everybody’s already leaving. We can’t challenge this.
We did get them to put out a new bill asking or demanding that Biden not do this. congressional representatives, one a Republican and the other a Democrat. The Republican, we said, look, what we need is a statement from Donald Trump. We need Donald Trump to commit to not continuing the policy of Joe Biden so that we
can send a statement to the Russians that if you just ride the stupidity out, the new president will stop this policy and we don’t have to go to a nuclear war. And this person said, we may not be able to get it to the president. It’s tough to do right now. We can get it to J.D. Vance.
I said, please do that. And so they did. Back to that in a second. Then I met with a senior Democrat. And I said, I just have a question to ask you. You can’t get into classified information and such, but did you receive the CIA briefing about Russia’s nuclear doctrine? He said, yes, I was in that room.
I said, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal are all saying that the Russians are blood. Is that really what the CIA believes, that the Russians are blood? And he said, no. Actually, the CIA said the exact opposite. The Russians aren’t blood. He said, but that wasn’t the scariest part of the briefing.
So the scariest part of the briefing was that the Biden administration, senior decision makers in the room at that briefing, were OK with that, then committed to going to nuclear war with Russia if Russia responded with its nuclear weapons. I don’t know how many people realize how close we all came to dying last year.
Because had Biden authorized the long-range weapons, had the Russians responded with a limited nuclear response, It would have inevitably led to a general nuclear exchange. It would all be dead. And this was a state in effect. Now I go back to the briefing that was held by the director of plans.
They were ready right then to go to war. There was a greater than 50% chance in their mind that we’re going to have a nuclear war before years in. And the United States government was ready to do this. They weren’t saying, what can we do to prevent this?
They were saying, if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. One of the interesting things that this Admiral Buchanan was his name did say is, if we’re going to do this, maybe we need to be more honest with the American people about what the consequences of winning a nuclear war means.
Because he said, life as you know it will never exist again. By winning, You will not have electricity, running water. You won’t have civil society. Your entire life will change. And he said, we should be honest with the American people about what this means. Because people are under the perception that if we win a war,
that means life stays the way it is. You can’t win a nuclear war. And if you survive a nuclear war, the old saying is you sort of want to wish that you didn’t survive. The Biden administration was ready to go to nuclear war last fall. 100% ready, guaranteed. This is not made-up stuff.
This is straight from the horse’s mouth. Now we come back to the conversation I had with the senior Republican who said he would talk to J.D. Vance. It was absolutely essential, I said, that the president come out, the president-elect come out and say that, forget about Biden. Ride it out.
Write the insanity out, when I become president, I will not continue this policy. And the Russians were basically sitting there saying, tell the Biden, if you do this, you know what we’re going to do. They even gave us a hint. They fired a Reshnyk missile at a Ukrainian factory in Dnipro. The Reshnyk is an intermediate-ranked strategic rocket.
It’s not a tactical missile. It’s a strategic weapon that happened not to have nuclear weapons, but for the first time in history, rocket, a strategic missile, in combat. And it was a signal to the United States that if you want to pursue this policy, we will kill you.
Because as Vladimir Putin said, we’re good Orthodox Christians. We’ll go to heaven. You start this war, you’ll go to hell. And a half later, Time Magazine ran an interview with Donald Trump. And one of the major points that Donald Trump made in this interview was that he
was not going to further the Biden administration’s policy on attack of his missiles, that when he became president, he was going to stop this policy and stop the provocation. And the Russians immediately responded and said, OK, then we’re backing off and we’ll wait for you.
So when people ask, Scott, why do you do Operation Dawn or things like that? Because I don’t want to die. I don’t want a nuclear war. They said, well, do you think you could have a chance of success? I just told you. Operation Dawn stopped a nuclear war.
If it weren’t for Operation Dawn, the pieces would have been connected. Decisions would have been made. They could have been made. I’m not saying that they were. But we were part of this. You were part of it. People who supported Operation Dawn helped make this happen because it doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
It’s a campaign that requires people, and the people, in order to mobilize, require resources. And there were so many people who were kind enough to donate money and time and effort into making Operation Dawn a reality. But we can’t rest on our laurels. Because even though we avoided nuclear war last fall,
today we find a situation where we are literally on what I call a highway to hell. In fact, I’ve just published a new book called Highway to Hell. And it outlines the danger of nuclear war. And it does it chronologically. I call it the Armageddon Chronicles from 2014 until 2025, or 2024, 2015 to 2024.
But I outline how we got to where we are. insanity. And the reason why I bring that up is that it’s going back 10 years. And there’s always people that say, Scott, you know, 10 years ago you told us there was a danger, but we’re still alive. Are you sure there’s a danger, Scott?
Are you sure you’re not exaggerating the danger? Well, I’m like, well, if we didn’t do Operation Diamond, you’d be dead, so we’d have the answer, but it wouldn’t matter, would it? I don’t want to find the answer. But The thing is, I was struck by, how do I get people to wake up?
Because the battle of mind is, every morning you wake up and say, Scott Reader’s talked about nuclear risks. It’s just hot air, blah, blah, blah. Forget about it. We’ll go on with our life. January 13, 2018, in the state of Hawaii, at 8.07 in the morning,
An emergency broadcast announcement went out over all the cell phones in Hawaii. And basically it said, a missile is inbound. Seek shelter immediately. This is not a drill. And the people of Hawaii looked at their phone and went, what, what, what? What are you talking about? Nope. And you just talk, you listen to their stories.
They started crying. They felt helpless. Jim Carrey, the famous comedian, was in Maui at the time. He gets a phone call from his producer. She says, did you see this? We’re going to be dead. Do you want to meet? He said, I don’t want to spend the last 10 minutes of my life in a car panic.
He said, I’m going to go to the beach. I’m just going to look out and think good thoughts and wait for it. But other people didn’t. They were stuffing their children into sewer holes. They were running, but they didn’t know where to run. They were making phone calls to people saying goodbye.
For 38 minutes, the people of Hawaii thought they were going to die. Now, it turns out it was a false alarm, a mistake, all that. But that doesn’t matter. The point is, for 38 minutes, these people thought life was over. In the middle of that, if I could show up with a time machine and say,
I can take you back six months, what would you be willing to do to stop that risk of being launched, knowing that if you don’t do it, it’s going to be launched, you’re going to die, you’re going to be feeling the same thing again.
And then before they can answer, I’m going to shut them up and say, why aren’t you doing it now? Why aren’t you doing it now? Ladies and gentlemen, that’s Project 38. Project 38 is to designed to capture that urgency, the urgency felt by the citizens of Hawaii on that January day.
We’re going to do it by making a documentary film called 38 Minutes. And it’s a 38-minute long film. I’m not talking about an hour and a half. 38 minutes of terror. We’re going to go and interview these people. We’re going to capture the sense. I’m going to talk to people about what a nuclear explosion would look like,
what it would do to you, what the consequences are. In 38 minutes, we’re going to capture that emotion. I’m going to ask that question. If you go back in time, what would you do to stop that missile from launching? And why aren’t you doing it now? And when people say, well, what can we do? Support Project 38.
Why? Because it’s part of Operation Dunn, and you’re here because Operation Dunn already stopped the nuclear war. We want to stop another one. And what makes this even more urgent? You know those missiles that I’m talking about? The last arms control treaty between the United States and Russia expires on February of 2026.
When it expires, there will be nothing containing the nuclear articles of each side. We will enter into a nuclear arms race that will rapidly spin out of control. And given the incentive to what’s going on in Ukraine and elsewhere, we will have a nuclear war. It’s a 100% guarantee mapped out of my book called Highway to Hell.
How do we stop this? Project 38 is a plan to stop it. Anybody who’s been around a long time knows in the 1970s there was something put together by the administration of Gerald Ford called Team B. You might have heard of Team B. Team B was these outside experts who were brought in to challenge a CIA national
intelligence estimate about Soviet ballistic missiles. Now, Team B back then weren’t the good guys. But the point about Team B is that they were challenging the official dogma. They brought in outsiders to challenge the official dogma. Right now we have a president who is a prisoner of official dogma that says arms control doesn’t matter.
We don’t need arms control because we’re going to build a perfect golden dome shield, missile shield. It’s going to be beautiful, big and beautiful and wonderful and it’s going to work and nothing will get through and it won’t work. Federal Postal, the MIT professor I’ve already talked to you about, has already proven that it won’t work.
And it’s not going to cost $175 million. It’s going to cost $4 trillion, and it still won’t work. It will never work. But it doesn’t matter, because the second this treaty ends, we jump from 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons to over 4,000 within a month, because we bring warheads out of storage,
get the Minuteman III from one warhead to three warheads, get our tried and something more warheads, we’re going to triple the size of our deployed warheads, and then we’re going to refurbish the other stock, build new missiles, and we’re going to go from 1,550 to around 4,500 to around 12,000 to 15,000 within two years.
And you think the Russians are going to sit there and let that happen? Now, the Russians have some of the most advanced weapon systems known to man. They’ve modernized their nuclear arsenal. They have the Sarmat missile, a super heavy missile that doesn’t come in over the Arctic like most missiles.
No, it comes in the other direction, which we have no defenses for whatsoever. They have other missiles that are called fractional orbit bombardment systems. Normally a ballistic missile launches, comes in, detects, and you try and shoot it down and hits. move, move, move, move, release a warhead, they maneuver in,
and then they hit their targets within 50 meters of their intended designation. If we can’t shoot them down, we never will be able to shoot them down. What we need to do is control their numbers. What we need to do is agree that 1,550 is too many. The right answer is zero,
but until we can get to the political point where we can have zero, we need to cap it at 1550 and go down. But that doesn’t happen if the treaty expires. Project 38 seeks of experts, people who have served in the highest level of government on the, you know, talking about the very issues,
former Chiefs of Staff of Secretary of State, people who have advised the Director of the Navy on nuclear issues, people who have done strategic war planning, people who briefed the President, you know, of the United States presidency. This is a Team B that we’re bringing together.
We want 38 minutes with the President or 38 minutes with people and his staff. put pressure on them to agree that we need to extend the New START treaty. We cannot allow this treaty to die. If we extend the New START treaty, it buys us time for rational policy to be formulated, to sit down with the Russians,
to try and prevent this arms race from ever happening. That’s the goal. That’s the objective of Project 38. And we have a plan. This plan’s getting more ambitious by the moment.
I’ll give a little news flash. It’ll go out on YouTube, I guess, today. Let’s talk about the Highway to Health for a second, that book. I was writing this book.
It’s a book that I started conceiving in the early summer of 2024. And I had a draft book already on my computer. polishing enough to get ready to send to my publisher when I was visited on August 7th by our friendly local FBI field office. And about 30 guys, heavily armed, SWAT members,
came in and paid a nice little visit to my house. This is after, I’ll even back up a little bit further. Before Operation Dawn was a project called Waging Peace. Waging Peace was a program that I had put together to try and counter Russophobia. sort of the infection of anti-Russian sentiment that exists in the United States of
America today. And what it involved was me going to Russia, meeting with Russians, seeing Russia, capturing that experience and bringing it back to the United States and sharing with an American audience. I went in April and May of 2023. I was accompanied by my daughter Victoria. We toured 12 cities. We had fantastic meetings, a great experience.
I brought that back. It was so good that we went ahead and repeated it in December of 2023, January 2024, and went back to Russia. Patricia joined me on this trip. Another fantastic experience, high-level meetings, capturing the reality of it. And from that, we were preparing the grand tour of grand tours. U.S.-Russian Citizens Summit, writ large.
We were going to go to Moscow, go to Russia, start off at St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which is the largest, sort of the real Delos. It’s not the fake Delos, it’s the real Delos for the world where the movers and shakers get together and they talk about the economy that isn’t controlled by the United States.
Speak at St. Peter Green and then we get a 44-day tour of Russia, basically from the Pacific Ocean to the Baltic Sea and everything in between. We start Kamchatka, we finish Kaliningrad, and we do 16 cities in the middle. We were scheduled to do a citizen summit connecting Russian citizens with American citizens.
We had sister cities picked out throughout the United States. So we were going to make this thing happen. It was very ambitious. And I got to the airport on June 3rd. And I got in line to board my aircraft to Istanbul, that it would take me on to St. Petersburg. And right before I got on the aircraft,
I got pulled off by three armed Customs and Border Patrol agents who seized my passport. I asked for a receipt, they wouldn’t give me a receipt. I asked for an explanation, they wouldn’t give me an explanation. I said, am I under arrest? I said, no, you’re free to go. You just can’t pick for that airplane.
And I’ve spent a lot of time writing letters to the State Department asking, why did you take my passport? At first, they just wouldn’t respond. Then their response was, what passport? We didn’t tip anything. We don’t have a record of anything happening. What are you talking about?
You have to apply to us to ask what happened to your passport. I said, you know what happened to it? You took it. Well, we don’t know that. Where’s your receipt? You didn’t give anyone this. I mean, this is the game that was going on and on and on.
And that was a precursor to what happened on August 7th when the FBI came to my house. But the FBI took my computers, took my phones, even went down in the basement, and even though the search warrant didn’t allow them, they took my entire archive of about 20-some odd boxes of archival materials in my
time as a weapons inspector in Iraq. You might know that I cut my teeth on challenging the U.S. government’s position on WMD in Iraq. saying that there were none. And one of the reasons why the U.S. government couldn’t contradict me wasn’t just that I was the person that ran that operation for seven years,
but I had all the receipts. I had all the documents, the minutes of every meeting, all the record of what we did, and I could not be contradicted at all because not only did I live it, but I had to prove that I lived it. Not anymore. The FBI came in and took that out, too.
And that was nonsense. But when they took the computer, they took my book, my draft book. Now, I know some of you guys are going to say, why don’t you back it up? Because I’m a Marine. I barely know how to turn a computer on, and you want them to back it up.
Plus, who thinks they’re going to come in and steal your computer? I mean, who thinks? You wake up in the morning. I’m going to take my computer. Well, now every morning I wake up and back stuff up, because it’s no longer hypothetical. They did it. So I took my computer. So now I’m left with a quandary.
What do I do about this book? How many people here write? I know you write. You write. Have you ever had a situation where even an article Even a letter, I don’t know, a newsletter or something like that. And he got it 99% done. You’re like, oh baby, I’m going to hit sit.
And then power goes out or something goes out and it’s gone. And you’re like, oh geez, what did I do? And now you can’t recover. Maybe you could if you were clever, but I’m not clever. I can’t recover. And then you have to rewrite it. And it’s never as because when you first wrote it, you were passionate.
The second time you write, you’re angry, and you’re not motivated, and it’s just not as good. And I’m looking at the book, and I’m going, God, I don’t want to rewrite this. I’ve already written it. I don’t have the motivation, but it’s such an important issue.
But then I realized that the sources I was using for the book were primarily articles that I’ve written over time. I said, wait a minute. The book’s already written, in a way. Why don’t I just capture these articles, put them in chronological order, and tell the story from 2014 to 2024, which I did.
And that’s what this book is. So this book, though, is not just about talking about the dangers. This book is a challenge to free speech. This is a book that the FBI didn’t want to be published. Why? Because a number of the articles that are in this book were published in Russia Today. They were published in Sputnik.
And the reason why the FBI said they came to my house was because I was a Russian agent, because I wrote articles for Russia Today and Sputnik. But in this book that I published, I also wrote articles for Huffington Post, Truth Day, American Conservative, Washington Spectator, Energy Intelligence, and a number of other outlets.
So this book shows that the United States government doesn’t get to define what journalism is. They don’t get to define what constitutes Valid thought and invalid thought. This book is also a book written to defend free speech and to defend those people who practice free speech. And so I wrote this book. I published this book.
This book is out there. But this book was also a marker on the table telling the FBI, I will not go away. I said that the day they came in. I went straight out to the TV station. They said, you guys picked the wrong Marines. Because I don’t quit. I don’t surrender.
If you want to shut me up, you’ve got to put the cuffs on me, put me in jail, and even then I’m going to get my voice heard. But they don’t have a crime. I haven’t committed a crime. This is purely intimidation, pure intimidation. They didn’t want me to go to Russia.
They didn’t want that US-Russian citizen summit to take place. They didn’t want this process that would continue with Operation Don, because they had a plan. That plan was to have a nuclear war with Russia. We frustrated that plan, but we still had work to do. Project 38 is going to incorporate a trip to Russia.
That trip is going to take place next month. You say, Scott, how can you go? You don’t have your passport. I got my passport back. So I will be going to Russia next month. I’ve declared it to the United States government. I’m not hiding anything. I’m not there to betray my country. I’m there to promote
peaceful relations between the United States and Russia to promote the concept of arms control. I’m seeking out interviews with senior Russian officials to talk to them about arms control and what it would take for us to extend the New START treaty so I could capture this experience, bring it back to the United States,
expose it to the Team B, get it before the President of the United States, and try and get this treaty extended so that we won’t have to worry about a nuclear arms race next year. We can all wonder how we’re going to spend our summer vacations as opposed to wondering whether or not we’ll have a summer vacation.
So that’s Project 38 in a nutshell. It can’t happen without support. I mean, I wish I was independently wealthy. I got an interesting email from somebody the other day. I said, are you? Ritter, are you related to that chocolate, that German, you know, Ritter sport chocolate? I said, I wish I was.
Because then we wouldn’t be able to worry about anything. I know how to spend that money. But this is why, again, I’m grateful for Cynthia and for friends Alex for bringing this together. You know, every journey begins with the first step. Today’s the first step of the Project 38 journey. We’re kicking it off.
There’s a long way to go, but it has to start somewhere. And I want to thank everybody for coming out today and providing your support. And share this message with as many people as you can. Get the message heard wide and far. Because we’re not talking about theory. We’re talking about reality. This is Operation Dawn 2.0.
This is a continuation of what was started last year. Last year, we had a good year because we finished the year by preventing a nuclear war. I want to have a good year this year as well by extending an arms control treaty that will prevent a nuclear war.
And you all are what is needed to make this happen. To give you a rough idea of the timeline, I appreciate it. Your donations are going to help fund a trip to Russia. Again, it’s an essential part to get the Russian perspective to come back so that you’re not speaking in the vacuum.
Because I know one of the questions that appears about it, well, what do the Russians think? Now we have an answer. Two, we have to go to Hawaii. I know that sounds like rough duty. But how else do you capture the terror of the people who had that experience without going there?
We’re not going to spend a week in Hawaii. We’re going to go ahead and line the interviews up. And over the course of three days, We’re going to knock off the interviews and come back. We have to assemble Team B. I’ve already assembled them, but we’re going to spend a long weekend together, coming together. And basically,
it’s going to be equivalent to Bob Dylan and the band, the basement tapes, where they came together and sort of cranked out great music. We’re going to crank out great policy. And we’re going to capture that on film. And then I have a video editing team that’s going to come together, and we’re going to
Make this move in 38 minutes. And then we begin to go to war. We’re going to take this film, and we’re going to take it to different markets and get advocacy out there. We’re going to get it to Congress. We’re going to go back to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
We’re going to show the film there. We’re going to lobby Congress. And my goal is to finish off with a giant LED screen in Lafayette Park pointed at the mobile office playing this movie for the president of the United States. And then we’re not going to leave Washington, D.C. until we get an audience with somebody.
And our goal is to have that audience sometime in the middle of December to give this administration about two months to figure out how they’re going to extend the new start treaty which expires in early February of 2026. So that’s what you’re getting when you invest in Project 38. It’s not frivolous.
But this time, I hope you understand, we really do have to go to Hawaii. The 38 minutes of terror took place in Hawaii, and we have to capture the experience of the people who experienced it. I wish it was, you know, my not North Dakota, people would call it Hardship Tour, and it might be more sympathetic,
but Hawaii it is. But, you know, other than that, it’s a lot of work, a whole lot of work, but I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the rest of my summer, by fall and early winter than working on something that has a readily identifiable outcome. We know what the deliverable is.
Success or failure is easy to define. If the treaty is extended, touchdown. If the treaty isn’t extended, Then we’ve got to find a plan B. And the plan B is to say, OK, if you didn’t extend it, can you at least keep a moratorium on it while you find a way to a new tree?
But we have to get arms control back into the political mix. Thank you very much. I’ll tell you, any questions? Anybody have?
All right. If you go to scottritter.com, I’ve made it as easy as possible. scottritter.com. page there’s a list of buttons at the top and sort of on the right hand side is a button called donate if you click the donate button it’ll list out project 38 is it
tell you what it is and you can donate right there any donations they look they all add up when people say well i can only donate x thank you because if enough people donate x Then we have x times that, and next thing you know,
I can buy an airplane and take it for my camera person to come to Hawaii and capture this thing. Or I can fly to Russia and get that meeting with Sergey Lavrov. But these things, they don’t happen for free. They don’t happen out of the blue. And every donation counts. Any other questions? When does the treaty expire?
I believe it expires in early February of 2026, first week of February. And when are you going to Washington to try to show you your movie? Well, we’re going to go to Washington in early December. We hope to have the film done by the end of September. Yes, sir?
Scott. So let’s say this is a tremendously successful project. First of all, if the US does enter into a continuation of the treaty, we know the United States unilaterally withdraws from treaties, whatever it feels like. So I don’t know. I mean, I think it’s a great step. I’m all for treaties, especially in nuclear weapons.
I’m all for that. people to go out and do something, which is what I spend my whole life trying to get, by the way. What do you want the people to do to put pressure on their commerce people, to do a treaty, to protest, to stop work, to stop going to school?
What do you want people to do, and how do you organize that? Because it kind of doesn’t just happen.
I don’t want to be Gary. I’m often accused of being arrogant. But one of the reasons why I’m picking Project 38 is that I’m going to do the work for you. I don’t need a million people to go to Washington, D.C. and put pressure on them. That’s why I’m building TV.
The White House isn’t going to listen to a million people. The White House may listen to the five experts that we’re going to assemble. And if people can help us build a movie that captures this sentiment, help us by writing letters to your congressmen so that when we knock on the door, they go, yeah,
we’ve heard about Project 38. We need them to be immersed in. So once we make this movie, we’re going to be doing a huge PR campaign to get a focus on the Congress, because we are going to go to Congress. walk the lobbies, knock on the doors,
and get the phone calls made from Congress to the White House like we did last time so that we can get an audience with somebody in the White House. We have some connectivity with the Trump administration. You never burn your bridges by going public, but we have some connectivity that I am hopeful will
this 38-minute project in front of them and hopefully in front of the president. That’s all I’m asking for, because I’m on your side on that. It’s very difficult to do mass mobilizations. It’s very difficult to, plus it’s an expenditure of resources, time, money, effort. And so what I’m trying to do for Project 38 is create a
sort of a laser beam of focus of what we want to happen at the tip of the sphere, as opposed to coming out with a broad stint and going weak down. I’m just going straight to the heart. Because we don’t have that much time. This is a very ambitious timeline that we’re talking about here.
But it’s not one that I’ve, I’m not manufacturing this timeline. It’s the reality. The reality is the treaty expires in February of 2026. And if they don’t extend it, we’re in a lot of trouble. And I know I share your concern about treaties. I cut my teeth out. They’re forced to treat. I mean,
I’m the first weapons inspector of the nuclear age, literally the first weapons inspector of nuclear age. I was on the ground in the Soviet Union on July 1st, 1988, when the implementation phase of the INF Treaty began. All the other inspectors were in Germany flying in, and the Russians were flying in.
I was the advance party there, so when the clock took over, I was in the first inspector. Very proud of that. Very proud of the work we did. We got rid of an entire class of nuclear missiles in Europe that could have threatened the world with nuclear annihilation.
But the president of the United States, this president, withdrew from that treaty in 2018. You’re right. We have a tendency to withdraw from treaties. We also have a tendency to negotiate with bad faith. One of the big obstacles we’re going to be facing is to get the Russians to say, why would we talk to the Americans?
We can’t trust you. My answer is simple math. 1,550 versus 12,000. If you’re the Russians, do you want to deal with an American that has 1,550 nuclear weapons, or do you want to deal with an American that has 12,000 nuclear weapons? Because as an American, I can tell you,
I want to deal with a Russian that has 1,550 nuclear weapons. And then work together to go down. So even though you can’t trust us, at some point in time, we’re going to have to learn how to cooperate and work together. Because the alternative is an arms race that will spin out of control that quick.
Because we have a military industrial complex that’s ready to rock and roll on this. They’ve already plugged in their heavy metal music, and they’re going to, you know, they’re just going to build nuclear weapons and make videos and have airplanes flying. It’s all going to look great. And the Russians are the same way.
They have their own version of a military industrial complex that’s ready to kick into high gear and go to sea of production for these weapons and such. They don’t like us. We’ve lied to them. We’re at war with them right now in Ukraine, a proxy war. You know, so as difficult as it is to get
Joe, you’d have believed in treaties. Imagine how hard it is to get the Russians to believe in that treaty with the United States. That’s why I have to go to Russia. That’s why it’s imperative that we have these conversations, to begin this dialogue, to plant the seeds.
Because if we don’t work through these complexities, I mean, the end is predictable. It doesn’t take a Hollywood screenwriter to figure out what happens when you have a nuclear arms race on hyperdrive in a time of open household. Marco Rubio, our Secretary of State, has said,
he’s acknowledged that we are in a state of proxy war with Russia. We, the United States, are in a proxy war with Russia. I’ll say that one more time just so the people here and the people on YouTube understand. The United States of America is at war with Russia as we speak.
So if you think it doesn’t, you know, well, we’ll never go to war. We are at war with Russia. And if we continue to do stupid things, we will find ourselves at a nuclear war with Russia, one that the Biden administration was ready to fight last fall. So we have no choice but to work through these things.
And sometimes you just got to take history and put it aside for the moment. and say, I know you’ve got problems, but we’ve got to put that to the side. We’ve got to focus on the here and now. And once we stop the bleeding, maybe we can go back and address these other issues,
which we have to be addressed if we never have trusted confidence. But I need to stop the bleeding. And I think we all need to stop the bleeding. So that’s what we’re trying to do to Project 30.
So do I. But, you know, you never know until you try. So, you know, you got to do what you got to do.
I applied for it. Okay. After they told me that they didn’t know what happened to it, I declared it stolen. And I provided the documentation that said the United States government stole it. And they gave me my passport, which is a defect of recognition that they stole it. Did you take down their badge numbers?
I took down their badge numbers and their names, but it doesn’t matter. They didn’t issue a receipt. And without a receipt, because that was the thing. They came back and they said, well, we’d like to investigate this further, but we have no record of your passport being taken. I said, I was on videotapes.
Well, like Epstein’s cameras, they weren’t working that day. The fact is, they didn’t issue a receipt. Without a receipt, they can’t investigate. So I was in this literal catch-22 situation. And the only way out of it, I was told, was to reapply. But I said, how do I reapply?
Because the only options I have were reported lost, which it wasn’t, were stolen. So I reported it stolen. And they gave me a new passport, which means they acknowledged they stole my passport. Yes, ma’am.
All right, two or three questions actually. The first is, do you have a website for this, apart from your sub stack, which people can direct other people to?
Give me the stack. What I have here is a postcard. Yeah. This is my attempt at hot technology. This is Project 38. 38 minutes. So right here, where it says Project 38, if you use your phone, QR code, hit the button. It takes you to an article on the Substack page called Project 38 that outlines out
Project 38 in great detail. In the middle is 38 minutes. This is the trailer. So if you click on this, you will get the movie trailer that we’ve produced about the movie. So you’ll see that here. And then here on the donate, that’s the most important one.
If you think that these are good projects and you want to support that, then the donate button, you can go to the donate page and donate. Okay. So I can… You can pass these out. I’ve also emailed these. I sent an email, but I can also send you the JPEG online. That’d be great. All right.
How do you consider tying up with other organizations and people? For example, I’m sorry to have forgotten her name, but the author of Nuclear War, which was quite an amazing book, spelled it out. Might be interesting. I think that book was very well received in a lot of circles. And also from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the survivors,
they would be interested in what you’re doing. And they’re probably countless organizations that I don’t even know about. But in order to, the ripple effect is what I’m really talking about, is to key in with these organizations.
Well, the answer is yes. The author of that book, whose name escapes me right now, but I have her book and I read it. I’ve reached out a couple times to interview her, and she’s not taking interviews. We’re trying to get her to be part of an advisor to the TV process to bring her in.
She’s not responsive. So, you know, I mean, I can only do what I can do. Once we have the movie made, we are going to be reaching out to all these other groups for the ripple effect they can talk about. We need a product.
But also in terms of donations, there are lots of anti-war organisations who might want to support you. There are a lot of anti-NATO organisations who would like to support you.
Well, I’ve fired out, I have connectivity with all these organizations, and I’ve fired out the fundraising email, and because I’m an idiot, I will continue to fire it out. Yeah, so I’ll keep doing that. What I’ll do, though, once I have a product, That’s why we’re such an emphasis on getting the movie done.
Once you have a product, we can use that. For instance, I can say, hey, I can fly out. Let’s say there’s a California peace action. I can fly out to California, show the movie, have a conversation, do the face-to-face kind of thing. But I really need a product that serves as the hook.
No, no, no. I mean, no. I’m just hypothetically throwing something out right now. No, no, you’re talking about the author? No, it’s, um… What a great book called?
Yeah, that sounds pretty good. Oh, yeah. I think that’s her name. Yes, sir. Whatever happened to Helen Caldaca? Yeah. She’s in Australia, isn’t she? No.
Well, that’s the one I wrote. She emails me on occasion. Yeah, I was just talking. And I’m also in communication with a fantastic group of people who won, I guess they co-won the Nobel Peace Prize back in the 80s. And she always comes to the things that They feel forgotten, because at one point in time,
they were embraced as great nuclear warriors. And today, nobody’s calling them. And so I will be talking to them, and I will be bringing them in. But again, I have to have something to bring them in, too. Yeah. Yeah.
No, no, I mean, you know, a lot of us belong to lots of different organisations who can, you know, start with this effect anyway with the information you’ve already provided us with. So I’m sure that, you know, we’ve got to… It’s just things… marketing overhang thing.
If you’re ever in business and you’ve got a product and you need to sell it, the first thing you do is start marketing it before you’ve even got a product. So you start telling people about it, what it’s going to do, and how amazing. And so when the product is ready, you’re actually hit the ground running.
Yeah, I have a question, Scott. So in the peace movement, . And we know progress by how many senators you’ve got signed up for some . And that’s heralded as progress. And you need quite a few senators and representatives signed up. So when that happens, it changes the dynamics of the peace movement remarkably,
because the local groups can then say, ah, my senator hasn’t signed up, and you can target him. And that becomes kind of a focus. And we can challenge them and also support them. Are you planning to have a clearinghouse where we can get in touch with you and
find out what Josh Riley is thinking about nuclear war and where he’s going? And therefore, we can hammer him or raise him, however it be.
Right now, will I hammer him? What needs to happen is we have to get somebody in Congress who will submit a bill. It’ll be a bill seeking the extension of the New Star Treaty. And that’ll be the congressional action on that.
And once we get a sponsor of the bill out there, we can get a bill in writing. Then now we begin getting people out there. So we’re in that process right now to find a sponsor in Congress. who will write a bill that needs to be written. It’s a very simple bill.
You know, we got too late in the game last year. Thank God we were able to get Donald Trump to say what he said. But we were too late to get Congress. We did get a bill written. It was a perfect bill on stopping the attack. It was missiles from being sent and all that.
But it came too late in the game. There was no way that bill was going to make it through Congress because by the time that bill was put out there was already, you know, the end of the first week of December, and Christmas and Congress is going away, and it’s never going to happen. We’ve got a,
I don’t want to put anybody on the spot, so I’m not going to do that, but we have people in Washington, D.C., who are very good at this sort of thing, and we’re working on finding a sponsor for that kind of bill. And once we get that bill out there, then we do what we say.
You know, that bill’s there. Now you get in the shotgun out. Ask people to call the congressman to support, you know, HR resolution, da, da, da, da, da, da. And you begin that process of building that momentum so that when we start knocking on the doors of Congress, people know what we’re talking about.
Is there a level of anxiety should we have between what the heck is going on in Israel slash Tehran?
I don’t have an answer on the media question on that, except to say that I don’t believe anything the mainstream media tells you. Of course you have a right to be anxious about what’s going on in God. It’s a genocide. I don’t mean to insult anybody. That’s my personal opinion. But I view what’s happening. You’re unadulterated genocide.
And the United States is complicit with genocide. So let’s just be really honest right now. If you turned off your TV and you woke up in the morning, the genocide is not attacking you. Your life’s going to go on. And that’s the problem. The only way we get people to care about it is to care about it.
But even then, it’s not as though you know, the 147 Palestinian civilians that would be killed today by American bombs dropped by the Israelis is changing our lives in any noticeable way. That’s one of the more difficult things to get across is how do we motivate people?
Thank goodness we have a nation full of people who have conscience. We’re going to look at the dead bodies and realize that this cannot be allowed to happen in our name. We’re doing the right thing. But it’s a hard, it’s a very hard thing to do because How do I scare people about that?
You need to have conscience. And we have to awaken the conscience. Iran’s a different thing. Iran is a next level conflict that has the potential of becoming very serious very fast. Even then, our worst case with Iran is not global. It’s a regional disaster.
It may cost us a couple thousand lives, but it’s not going to impact us here at home directly. There will be the indirect impact of potential economic consequences of energy collapses. We’ll show you how straight over moves and all that kind of stuff. And this is where I run into difficulty, because the problems you just laid out,
I run into this, you know, Everybody here should be familiar with him. He’s a great man. He’s the founder of Trends Journal, wears his heart on his sleeve. He’s just out there fighting for these good causes all the time. And Gerald, when I talk to him, I say, Gerald,
I need to be laser-focused on stopping a nuclear war. No, we have to talk about Gaza. I say, Gerald, you can talk about Gaza. I can’t. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to talk about Gaza. It doesn’t mean that Gaza is important to talk about. It just means that I only have 24 hours a day.
And if I start diluting myself by getting involved, I mean, people want me to fly to Iran. I want to fly to Iran. I want to see their Iranians. I want to speak to the Iranian leaders. I want to organize an Iranian-American citizen. And it’s important, and it should be done.
But if I do this, I can’t do the other thing. And this is what kills me. Because my god, there’s no greater moral imperative out there than stopping the genocide that’s going on in Gaza today. There really isn’t. Where you stand on this issue, I believe, defines who you are as a person.
The Iranian thing was just as bad. We’re making all the same mistakes with Iran that we made with Iraq, but the consequences were even more far-reaching, the lies, extortions, et cetera. And we should be. heavily engaged in that. But if I do that, New START doesn’t get extended.
Well, the thing about it, though, Scott, they are related. First of all, Israel has nuclear weapons. And they’re not a member of the nuclear nonproliferation treatment. Nobody even expects those at all. And that’s OK, it seems, for the rest of the world. But it is something that should be spoken about.
Because if there’s a nuclear weapon used, perhaps the most likely place it So I think it is something to think about. The other piece about it is, you’re right, that Americans and other people around the world, even more than Americans, in my opinion, have a conscience. And they look at what’s going on in Gaza and say,
West Europe, the United States, no longer has the moral high ground. They are the bad guys. And that flips a switch, I believe, inside people’s heads to say, well, I can start moving against my own government. I can say there’s something wrong with my government, which I was reluctant to say before.
And I think that builds a movement. I think it’s one of the reasons why Palestine has been an issue that has brought more people out
anything you’re saying. I’m here to say that on February 7th, if I haven’t extended the treaty, none of that fricking matters. That’s all I’m saying. What I’m saying is that regardless of what happened in Gaza, if we didn’t get President Trump to make the statement he made in December about blocking the attack on his policies,
we wouldn’t be here because there would be a nuclear war. And the greatest threat of nuclear war isn’t from Israel and Iran. The greatest threat is the United States and Russia because we almost had a nuclear war last fall. That’s what I’m saying. I’m not opposed to you, Joe. My frustration isn’t with you. It’s with me.
Because I have to swallow the anger that I feel about what’s going on in Gaza. I have to suppress that so that I stay focused on this Project 38. Because otherwise, I just use the name Hind Rajab, and I start to get furious. Furious. And then I get distracted.
The next thing I know, I’m on a week-long tirade against Israel and all that. And meanwhile, I haven’t done what I need to do to get a resolution prepared in Congress and all that. I’m not encouraging anybody to stop caring about Israel, Gaza, Iran. I think that this is why you asked the question about building broad coalitions.
I think because of the complexities of the situation and the moral impairments attached to each that My role right now is to be laser focused on this one issue so that everybody else can be doing the other things that have to be done. I’m not asking anybody to stop doing anything.
All I’m asking for is support me so that I can do what I’m trying to do while you do what you’re doing. That’s great. Anything else? If not, I want to thank you very much for coming here today. And like I said, this is the first step of observing I look forward to seeing you soon.
oooooo
