Will Pete Hegseth and Trump Keep Us Out of War? w/ Sgt Dan McKnight
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Well, we have a great guest returning to the show today, and we used to do this every week live on radio. Now we're doing it on Zoom video, and hopefully we'll do a lot more because times are changing, and we've got to have the feedback, the insight from our guest, Sergeant Dan McKnight. How are you doing? I'm doing well, David. Thanks for having me on. It's been a minute, but it's good to be back. Yeah, it's great having you. So, you know, I wanted to have you on because defend the guard was something that we have always done,

highlighted through the years, and you guys were the ones that put this together. Tell us what it's about and where it's headed into this new year that we're approaching. Yeah, defend the guard is very simple. It's state-based legislation using the power of the 10th Amendment that says that the National Guard from the states of Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Idaho, wherever, shall not be deployed into foreign war unless Congress has first declared war, which, as you know, they haven't done since 1942 against Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania.

So if they're not willing to put their names on the line, then the National Guard shouldn't be putting their boots on the ground. And if you look right now, the National Guard is 58% of the active duty military troops in Syria today are from the National Guard of the various states. And that's our bill. It's very simple. It's very clean. It's only like 117 words. Even the dumbest of the dummies in Congress can read every word of it and understand it.

Now, where has this bill been introduced so far, and what is the story behind the process of getting passed? Sure. We're in over 30 states, and so I'll back up to the origins first because it's kind of a great story. We went to Washington, D.C., and you were there with us in 2019. Brand new veterans organization called Bring Our Troops Home, and we wanted to advocate for ending these endless wars and never sending troops into combat unless Congress declares war first.

And we went to all of our members of Congress, all 100 members, all 100 veterans that were there went to their members of Congress. And one visit in particular stood out. We went to Liz Cheney and asked what conditions on the ground in Afghanistan must be met for us to be able to come home from this 20 year war. And she said, as long as I'm here in Washington, D.C., we will never come home from Afghanistan.

And we realized right then, you know, veterans, we're not the engineers of the world. We're not the smartest guys in the world, but we know how to fight from ideal ground. And we knew that Washington, D.C. and the swamp wasn't the best place for us to fight after that meeting. So first thing we did, we went back to Wyoming and went to every county in Wyoming and got Liz Cheney censured and then beat her in the election two years ago.

And that took care of problem number one. And then we went to the states around the country and decided it was time to push this legislation called defend the guard at the state level and protect half of the fighting force of the United States military, half the national guard.

to keep them from going to these foreign wars unless Congress is willing to do their job first. And we started in Idaho. That was the first place that we presented the bill, even though it had started in West Virginia a few years before with the great delegate Pat McGeehan, who, by the way, is now the Speaker of the House in West Virginia and maybe one of the most powerful voices in West Virginia. And we've pushed the bill. He's a brilliant guy. He's brilliant. Modern-day philosopher. He understands Socrates and Thomas Aquinas better than most people.

He understands natural law. Brilliant, brilliant man. If you've ever interviewed him, I'm sure you have, but if you haven't, he's amazing.

And so we got the bill introduced in 30 states. We've passed the Idaho Senate last year. We passed the Arizona Senate with the great Wendy Rogers two years in a row. We passed the largest legislative body in the Western Hemisphere in the New Hampshire House with 300 plus members last year. It hasn't passed in any state yet, but we feel confident it's going to pass in Idaho and Arizona this year. We got it on the ballot in Texas last year for the Republican voters to vote on in the 2024 primary election.

And it got 1.869 million votes. 83% of the electorate supported defend the guard. It even outperformed Donald Trump in Texas. We've now got it into seven state GOP party platforms as an official plank of the Republican Party platform. And we're going to make change and we are going to take half of the fighting force away from the war machine and make them declare war before they can have access to our men and women.

That's fantastic. So it currently hasn't been signed into law in any state, but it's looking like it's going to be this year, you're saying? It is. This year it will be on Cartel Katie Hobbs' desk in Arizona, and it will be on Brad Little's desk in Idaho. And we don't know which way either one of them are going to go, but it doesn't really matter at this point. The fight is when it gets on their desk, and now we have a national stage to continue this effort. And we will get it passed.

And we know the incoming administration has people that have endorsed and supported the bill. We know that it's in line with Trump's America First policy. And the Republican Party of my dad's generation and my grandfather's generation, it's changing. We are openly rejecting these endless wars and this empire building around the world in favor of an America First policy.

Yeah, I wanted to get into that. But first, I wanted to see, you know, you saw I recently interviewed Ron Paul and did the thing with Elon, and that blew up into this master amazing alliance between Ron Paul and Elon and Vivek and so forth with the Doge.

But a lot of people say, well, you know, it's anachronistic. And the reason why I bring up Ron Paul is he used to always say we got to declare war and you can't just go into undeclared wars under the War Powers Act. But there's debate in that. So I wanted to get your take on that because there's some people that say even that they agree with us.

They still say, well, the War Powers Act under Nixon or whatever, that gives you sufficient power to be able to start a conflict. You don't need to go back to a full declaration of war like what your bill suggests. Now, how does that work for you? Sure, absolutely. So Ron Paul is one of the greatest politicians and statesmen of my life.

He understands the power of the Constitution. He understands the fallacies of war. And in 2003, when we were debating going into Iraq to deal with Al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction and all the other lies that Bush sold us,

Ron Paul said, I'm going to vote against this, but I'm going to be the sponsor. I'm going to bring the declaration of war to the floor of Congress, and we're going to do it the right way. If we have to go to war, we are going to declare it because that's our responsibility in Congress. And they laughed him out of the room, laughed him out of the room. They wouldn't even consider it. They wouldn't allow it to the floor. Congress does not want the authority to declare war because if it's an unpopular war, they have to go home and justify it to their constituents.

And so instead of doing their job, they've handed off their job and told the president and his cronies and unelected bureaucrats, you make the decision and we'll live with it and write the checks. And what's happened is we've been – we were in a 21-year war in Afghanistan, a 20-year war in Iraq. We're now in a 14-year war in Syria.

unconstitutional undeclared wars in Yemen. The National Guard is fighting in 17 countries around the world as we speak at this moment. And so by Congress advocating the responsibility, we've put American men and women in uniform and harm's way for no purpose. I mean, I'm sure the cocoa beans in the Congo are really important, but I don't think they bring a national threat to the United States of America. Wow.

Are we in Congo? We are in Congo, but you won't find it on any DOD documents. I can only find it through newspaper articles announcing that the troops of some National Guard in some state are deployed to the Congo. So leave it to the fair and free press to be the true arbiters of justice and openness in America. Did they say why we're going over there? Remember those movies about Congo? I remember that. I mean...

No, the mission is always to win the war on terror. That's always the mission. And what their justification is, the 2001 and 2003 AUMFs, and they allow us to chase terrorists anywhere for any purpose, for any length of time, for any amount of money, right? That's the blanket authorization. And so we've developed this lily pad strategy across the continent of Africa where we set up these remote outposts and we chase bad guy number one all the way across the continent until we find him setting up bases along the way.

And what we're doing is just colonialization and empire building on the back of a false authorization from Congress.

It seems like there's such a disconnect between the general consensus of veterans like yourself about how much we should be involved with and what for and why, than there is the politicians and people who speak as if they're the ones that have moral authority for their advocacy of war. I don't understand what it's going to take to actually have real change. But, of course, with the new administration, there's always an opportunity to do something significant.

The nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has a lot of people excited. People are pushing back on different fronts. What is your take? And if he could get in there, what do you think we could see with the secretary of defense and the Department of Defense? Yeah, so Pete Hegseth, great man. I've had many conversations with him about Defend the Guard specifically.

He supports it. He endorsed it on Fox and Friends back in January when we passed the New Hampshire House. He loves the concept. But more importantly, Pete is like myself. I may be a little more anti-war than Pete is, but I also understand that I'm not so naive as to believe that war isn't sometimes necessary.

But him and I both agree on this completely to the core that if war is necessary, then Congress should take the time to deliberately debate, discuss and fight over the necessity to go and then put their name on the line and declare war.

The conversation we had just recently was about that very concept. And as Secretary of Defense, that's not really his purview. However, his job is to create a military that is so lethal that we can win any conflict in any place at any time and then return home.

Right. That's the that's the goal of his goal in the Department of Defense is that we go and win America's wars when called upon and then return home to train and rearm and reequip for the next war. He is not in favor of these nation building, empire building, police keeping, peacekeeping missions all across the world. And he certainly, certainly does not support regime change wars like we see what's going on in Syria right now. Yeah, I recently talked with another friend that we probably share in common, Colonel Douglas McGregor.

And he has a brilliant paper that I was able to read called Taming the Warfare State, which is his plan to help get the Department of Defense a much more streamlined, modern, more lethal force, which is more equipped to actually defend our interests and our people rather than the endless nation building World War II era model that we still seem to have.

I have hoped that maybe Elon Musk and the Doge Group could take a look at Colonel McGregor's paper and ideas and bring him into the conversation. But I do think, you know, he is a paradigm shifting thinker himself. I do think folks like that need to be brought in and there needs to be a serious assessment of the budget. I mean, we're at a trillion dollars budget a year budget.

His model, he said, just by streamlining things and rearranging things, he could shave $500 billion off the budget and have a more effective fighting force, which is more veteran-oriented in terms of what people who actually have to bear the cost of war actually want.

In terms of a military, what's your take on this? No, absolutely. Colonel McGregor is one of the great thinkers of our generation, maybe one of the greatest military men that we have. And for someone from the Cold War era who was a tank commander, an M1 Abrams tank commander, to say that we need to streamline and modernize our military is actually a very bold statement because tankers tend to support tankers.

But we saw in Afghanistan and in Ukraine that the M1A1 Abrams tank was obsolete on day one because we now live in an era of drone technology and Elon Musk and his satellite internet communications

A tank is nothing more than just a slow target that shoots big bullets anymore. And so when he says that we can modernize the military, that's something we should listen to. Instead of building F-35s that cost over a billion dollars apiece, we could probably build 10,000 drones that are more effective, right? That also include no human bodies to occupy them when they fly into enemy territory.

And so Colonel McGregor, he is, like you said, a paradigm shifter. He makes us think uncomfortably out of the box and not by changing the way we believe that America's place in the world is, but by changing the value we put on the human lives of the servicemen and women who put on the uniform. And that's why I really appreciate everything that he writes and says and does. But he is right. We should be modernizing the military and

and focusing on actual threats to our homeland and our interests and our citizens.

So, you know, you talked about bring our troops home, your group. I wanted to ask you, what should folks expect from your group? We've talked about defend the guard. What are you hoping to push, or what would you like the public to be pushing or to make these big changes happen? I mean, a lot of this stuff is actually happening right now during this transition period. That's where everybody's kind of asleep right now because it's Christmas, but this is when the real stuff is really starting to get, you know, the concrete is starting to get dry.

in this period before, you know, January 20. You don't want to start then. That's when, you know how that is with the state legislatures. You've seen that many times. All the activists get sleepy when there's a transition and then they want to get active once they see that whoever's in is in now. They don't realize that all that stuff's already been settled about what bills are going to be brought forth and who's going to be on what committee. What do you want to see, you know, just your personal opinion or if you want to speak about bring our troops home in general, what do you guys think?

Yeah, so bring our troops home. We are incredibly active at the grassroots level in every state where we have a sponsor of legislation.

So we don't take the year off. Once the legislature adjourns for the year, we don't stop. We actually recruit and train and build an army of activists. And we teach them the number one principle, that you have to tie legislative season to election season. You do what we want or we get rid of you. And we have a wall that we have built with all the hides that we've taken off these legislators that refuse to do the things that we want.

And this year, like I said, we took away six people in the Idaho Transportation and Defense Department who – I'm sorry, the Idaho Transportation and Defense Committee, excuse me, who opposed our bill. We took them out of office. And so we're doing all the work behind the scenes. What we need people to do that aren't engaged in the fight –

is to join the effort by lending their name. And there's a couple ways you can do that. Right now, the big fight is obviously to get Pete and Tulsi and Kash Patel and RFK and Pam Bondi and all these folks through Senate appointments.

And there's four senators that are obstructing that are Republicans right now. And so we've developed this petition. It's at a website called www.confirmteamtrump.com. If you go there and sign the petition, we're going to hand deliver those petitions to all of the senators who are obstructing Trump's appointments. We got to get the people in office that will deliver on the agenda that 78 million of us voted for with Donald J. Trump.

So that's obviously priority number one. But our organization is state-based. We believe in the fight of the states because we think the states, we know the states based on our reading of history, give the federal government the authority that they have. And so our biggest efforts are in the states that have defend the guard legislation. We have over 30 states sponsoring this year. We want to get to 50. So we encourage people to go to defendtheguard.us.

And there will be a pop-up that will show up that says, enlist in the movement, sign your name and provide your email address and let us communicate with you. Because if you live in Kentucky and we have a bill in Kentucky that's about to be heard, we need people that support this effort to be able to show up, to testify, to make phone calls, to do the hard work of grassroots activism. And right now we have an amazing ground operator led by Diego Rivera out of Austin, Texas, who puts together phone banks,

and calling trees and all kinds of things to line up people to help support our champions. If you ask a legislator to push your bill, you should be willing to put an army behind them and help them do it. Yeah, very good. Well, you guys are always doing the Lord's work with a lot of your efforts, and I'm looking forward to, you know, catching up with you again soon. Maybe I'll have to head over to Idaho and help you straighten out some of those remaining

neocons or little critters that are getting in the way of all the great things happening over there. You're always welcome in my home, David. All right. Well, thanks again, Sergeant Dan McKnight for coming on. And again, just tell us where those websites or anything else you'd like to mention for us. Yeah, follow us on Twitter at Troops Home U.S. Bring Our Troops Home. Our organization is bringourtroopshome.us. Defend the Guard is defendtheguard.us and confirmteamtrump.com.

Well, thanks again for coming on. And again, you can follow us at hello at a neighbor's choice.com. And we will talk again soon because I'm excited now that there's the winds of change. We're going to go and collect some more victories like we've never had before. So let's do it. Huh? Thanks, David. Yeah.

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