Netanyahu Dead? Missiles hit Israel as Iran War Goes as Planned by Deep State neocons | Redacted

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Redacted News
Host: Clayton Morris
Guest: Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins
Episode: "Netanyahu Dead? Missiles hit Israel as Iran War Goes as Planned by Deep State neocons | Redacted"
Date: March 17, 2026

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Overview

This episode explores the deeper, often hidden, drivers behind the ongoing Iran war, posing penetrating questions about the real interests at stake. Host Clayton Morris and guest Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins delve into the idea of "the strategy of tension" and its implementation by transnational power players, exposing the web of financial, intelligence, and institutional forces fueling perpetual conflict for profit and control. The conversation provides a panoramic view of how war, insurance, covert operations, and agency-driven chaos serve interests far removed from public narratives.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Real Game Behind the Iran War

• Clayton sets the stage (03:10–06:16): The public is fed a narrow story about the Iran conflict, but the true dynamics revolve around financial control, insurance market manipulation, and covert geopolitical engineering.
• Central Question: Who benefits from prolonged instability? Is war just a surface narrative masking deeper financial and criminal interests?

2. The Role of Illicit Financing and Private Interests

• Colonel Watkins (06:47–13:06):
  • A massive, primarily illicit financial system underpins global conflict, thriving on war and instability.
  • Much overlooked by the public: the importance of narco-trafficking, human trafficking, and weapons sales as drivers of shadow funding.
  • The military-industrial-financial complex—exemplified by entities like the Carlyle Group—launders taxpayer money through foreign aid and invests in perpetual war for profit.
  • Quote: "It is an international crime syndicate... if you're ever going to get your hands around the actual syndicate cartel running all of this, you have to cut off the illicit funding." (Colonel Watkins, 12:50)

3. Intelligence Leaks, Sleeper Cells, and Disillusioned US Allies

• On using Kurds against Iran (13:53–15:27):
  • The Kurds have learned not to trust US promises, weary after repeated betrayals.
  • Intelligence leaks and talk of sleeper cells highlight an ongoing strategy of sowing division and tension.
  • Quote: "Their whole goal in life is to have back their country… They would not get involved in this. They are not having any part in it because they have been betrayed so many times by the players in this syndicate." (Colonel Watkins, 14:16)

4. Insurance as a Tool of Geopolitical Power

• Lloyd's of London and Risk Management (15:27–24:37):
  • For the first time, Lloyd's refuses to insure shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, breaking precedent.
  • Insurance companies function as global intelligence agencies, inserting agents worldwide and influencing crisis outcomes for both financial and strategic gain.
  • Quote: "I don't view any of these insurance companies as an insurance company. They're spy agencies." (Watkins, 57:17)
  • The UK’s refusal to support the US in the Iran conflict signals a desire to maintain Iran as a locus of managed chaos and profit.

5. The “Strategy of Tension” Explained

• Colonel Watkins’ thesis (24:00–27:11):
  • The real power brokers perpetuate chaos by leveraging false flags, ethnic tensions, and staged protests to justify regime change and further their control.
  • Quote: "It basically boils down to creating chaos so you can implement the control structure." (24:37)

6. Sleeper Cells and Postwar Intelligence Networks (Operation Gladio)

• Historical context (27:11–37:24):
  • The CIA and Western intelligence agencies have long maintained stay-behind networks: trained operatives integrated within target societies, ready for activation to destabilize or control.
  • Refugee flows into the US are sometimes used to insert trained operatives, demonstrating a known, repeated tactic.
  • Quote: "Most people don't even know that these people are trained assassins that were under the command of the CIA. Some of them remain on the payroll of the CIA for Decades." (Colonel Watkins, 27:49)

7. Covert Funding, Black Projects, and Money Laundering

• Control via private equity, banks, and phony nonprofits (41:27–56:43):
  • The CIA often bypasses congressional oversight, using illicit funds from weapons and drug trafficking routed through private equity, dummy corporations, and major philanthropic foundations.
  • Foundations like Rockefeller and Ford have long served as laundering mechanisms in tandem with major law firms and banks.
  • Discussed organizations: Chatham House, CFR, Egmont Group—all playing roles in international laundering and control, often under the mask of respectability.

8. Prospects for Iran: Endgame or Endless War?

• Colonel Watkins (46:27–49:54):
  • She foresees no prolonged US engagement if a sufficiently cooperative Iranian leader emerges—one who will eschew support for proxy militias and integrate Iran into global trade.
  • The longed-for peace is anathema to those who thrive on the strategy of tension; expect pushback from entities like Israel and the UK.
  • Quote: "It could be over tomorrow. We just need a leader." (Watkins, 48:55)

9. Balkanization and Ongoing Destabilization Attempts

• On breaking Iran apart (58:55–61:18):
  • There's a well-established playbook of dividing countries into smaller, more controllable entities—a “Balkanization” justified by manufactured or encouraged internal disputes.
  • Trump’s reported approach is to keep Iran whole, to avoid endless conflict.

10. The Toll on US and Israeli Interests

• Final thoughts (61:18–62:54):
  • Despite media narratives, sustained damage to US and Israeli interests has not fundamentally impaired their operational capacity—yet the chaos serves deeper financial and strategic aims.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On the underground financial system:
  "There has been, for the last hundred years, this massive, primarily illicit financial system that has existed that no one sees, and it feeds off of the instability that has been created from perpetual wars." (Colonel Watkins, 06:47)

• On the insurance-intelligence nexus:
  "People need to think of not the insurance company, but the insurance company actually functions as a source of intelligence for governments, especially Lloyds of London and the relationship with the Crown and MI6." (Colonel Watkins, 18:00)

• On perpetual chaos as a business strategy:
  "As long as you have Iran there, then Israel is always going to have an enemy that they can create crap crisises in the Middle east and that allows this international syndicate to control the area." (Colonel Watkins, 21:02)

• On the endgame for Iran:
  "It could be over tomorrow. We just need a leader." (Colonel Watkins, 48:55)

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Important Timestamps

• 06:47 – The origins and mechanisms of the shadowy financial system fueling war.
• 13:31 – Assange, Snowden, and internal moves to confront the US “deep state.”
• 16:24 – Shipping insurance, Lloyd’s, and the unprecedented move to deny coverage.
• 24:37 – Explanation of the “strategy of tension.”
• 32:55 – Operation Gladio and the legacy of stay-behind armies.
• 41:27 – CIA black projects, funding flows, and circumvention of government oversight.
• 57:17 – Insurance companies as intelligence fronts.

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Memorable Moments

• The insurance rabbit hole: Clayton expresses shock at the suggestion that Lloyd’s of London and insurance companies are actually major global intelligence actors and profiteers from conflict (“I’m still just blown away by the insurance thing... Maybe the biggest players in all of this.” 64:29).
• Operation Gladio revelation: Watkins’ account of the little-known, yet world-shaping, “stay-behind” army network built by Nazis, inherited and expanded by NATO and the US for ongoing domestic and foreign subversion.
• Calling out the cycle: The irony that peace, not war, is the greatest threat to entrenched interests—the international syndicate can only survive in a “permanent state of chaos.” (49:12)

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Further Resources

• Follow Colonel Watkins:
  • On X (formerly Twitter): @ColonelTowner
  • Rumble Channel: The Colonel’s Corner

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Conclusion

This episode peels away the layers of propaganda emanating from mainstream media and official narratives to reveal a machinery of perpetual war designed, above all, for the profit and power of an interconnected global syndicate. Colonel Watkins’s deep historical and operational perspective illuminates how all facets—from insurance to intelligence—are interwoven, making a strong case that true change will only occur by dismantling the systems that thrive on secrecy, division, and chaos. For listeners seeking to understand not just “what’s happening in Iran?” but why it’s happening—this episode is essential.

Transcript

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

Has the news been getting you down? I'm Megan McCardell and I'm here to help. I'm the host of a new show from Washington Post Opinion called Reasonably Optimistic. And it's an antidote to the pessimism that's riddling America right now. Every Wednesday, I'm going to talk to people who see a path forward.

[Clayton]

It does seem to me that there is some awakening of a desire to act together to solve problems where they are. You know, I am a believer in America and it's worth fighting for.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

Join me Wednesdays on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Clayton]

Welcome everybody to Redacted. Great to see all of you. You got just Clayton today. Natalie is off. So thank you guys for dialing us up here as we try to unpack and understand where this war in Iran goes. But we might be missing the larger story once we get into little sound bites on CNN or Fox News or what the president says here and there and who's responding to it. But what are the real pieces of this puzzle for Iran? Who are the real power players, the moneyed interests that are really running things? Why is the insurance industry saying they're not going to insure shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, by the way? They've never done that ever. So why are they doing it now? Why is Lloyds of London saying we're not going to insure? That's very strange, right? So what about this idea of the strategy of tension, keeping the Middle east in a permanent state of tension so almost all of these people can make trillions of dollars. That's what we're going to unpack today on the show. We're very excited to have Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins, who've done incredible, she's done incredible research on Operation Gladio, of course, and these stay behind armies and this idea of the strategy of tension, which is part of their strategy to keep us in this perpetual state of chaos and idea of Iranian sleeper cells in the US and all of those pieces. We're going to talk with her today. So thank you guys so much for being a part of our show and subscribing. And we really, really appreciate it here. So thank you guys for being here on this during this crazy, crazy news time. We're going to get to kernel in just a second here. But first, all right, I just connected to Albuquerque, New Mexico, with ExpressVPN. Honestly, I couldn't do this job every day without ExpressVPN. That's not an exaggeration. Every single Day that I do this show, I need to check websites around the world, read reports, access sources from all over the world. And the truth is, many of those websites are censored. They are blocked. Governments block them, corporations restrict them. And if you travel abroad, you're going to find that even basic sites that you rely on just don't work at all. That just happened to us when we were in the uk. We like to spend a little time in the uk and you would think that the UK would be wide open, right? No, no, no, no, not at all. Like, in the country of Scotland, try to access, like, news websites. Sorry, the government blocks them. Right, the censors that censor free speech. I couldn't even load some of the news websites that we use daily to prepare for this show. That is censorship in real time. And with ExpressVPN, you can avoid all of that. Here's how it works. ExpressVPN lets you change your online location. Instead of being stuck with the version of the Internet that your government wants you to see, you can connect through one of ExpressVPN secure servers in another country.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

You can.

[Clayton]

That means if a site is blocked in the uk, I can instantly connect through a US server and bam, it's wide open. Same thing if you want to access more shows or streaming services. You're no longer limited to what's available in your country. Maybe like certain shows on Netflix and one country decides that you shit, you can't watch those shows. It's crazy. So it's not just about censorship. It's about freedom. ExpressVPN also encrypts your Internet connection so your personal data is secure. No one, not hackers, not corporations, not even your Internet provider can track what you're doing. It's about privacy and freedom online. So don't wait until you run into a wall. Take back control of your Internet today. Find out how you can get up to four extra months for free by clicking the link in the description box below. That's expressvpn.com redacted. Well, as this war in Iran rages on, we want to pull back from the daily headlines and all the subtle nuance here and ask the bigger question. Are we looking at a war with a clear objective? Are we watching another managed crisis where the battlefield is only one layer of the story? And of course, we're all supposed to swallow a certain narrative on the mainstream media. I mean, just look, since this conflict escalated, the insurance. Insurance markets have totally moved. The shipping lanes have tightened across the, you know, the Strait of Hormuz is essentially closed to any American traffic, of course, unless you're Chinese or Russian. Washington has rushed in with new financial backstops, of course, and the flood of new billions of dollars as part of a new supplemental for the Defense Authorization act to give more money to all of this. There's already serious discussions about, well, is the United States going to use, like, Kurdish factions to try to pressure Iran from within? Iran says, don't even try it because we will protect our borders. So at the same time, all of this is happening, even US Intelligence says the Iranian state is not on the verge of collapse yet. President Trump came out there the other day and said, we've won this war. And then you have Zionists inside the America, like the Mark Levins of the world and others who are saying, Mr. President, Iran, we have not beaten Iran. So do not stop. Keep going, keep going, keep going. So if this regime is not falling, what's the real end game here? You know, it was nuclear weapons. They weren't building nuclear weapons. It's. It's regime change. Good. Good luck with that. It's unconditional surrender. We keep moving the goalpost. What exactly is it? And who really benefits from a long war of instability? Think 20 years in Afghanistan. Who benefits from that instability? We wanted to ask Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins about all of this, as she's one of our most trusted sources on this larger narrative. And I always have to sort of remind myself, Colonel, like, if I get in the weeds with things, I sort of start falling for it. I start falling for it. All it takes for me is like, one of your tweets to, like, kind of slap me in the head and remind me, no, no, no, there's a bigger game being played here. So thank you for that, and welcome back to the show.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

Sure. Thanks for having me.

[Clayton]

So there is a bigger game being played here. And of course, one of the things I think that's being totally missed, and you bring up this point, is the financial instruments. Right? The financial piece of all of this, would you say, though, maybe it's your contingent. Like, the public story is the war. It's about how they're an evil regime. But the real story is about financial control behind the scenes, getting all of us to fall in line. Sort of a Patriot Act 2.0, or am I being too simplistic?

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

So that's not what I see happening. In my research, there has been, for the last hundred years, this massive, primarily illicit financial system that has existed that no one sees, and it feeds off of the instability that has been created from perpetual wars. But we look at it from the military industrial complex and these people getting rich overtly. But most people miss the COVID element of all of this. And that's the narco trafficking, human trafficking and weapon cells. And from my research, every time we have these forever wars and we just saw it in our lifetime in Afghanistan, there was tens of billions of dollars of weapons left there. Well, where did they all go? And not only do we leave weapons in these locations, but there's a lot of the weapon systems that. Because during these engagements we leap forward in technology. But then what do we do with the weapons systems that are not the state of the art? Well, they're massively sold off to third parties. And what I have come to realize is the CIA brokers a lot of those deals and they end up in the hands of people like ISIS and Al Qaeda and whoever the next boogeyman is going to be. When you, when you look at Iran specifically and not what's currently happening, happening there, but over since 1953, when we overthrew Mossadegh, all the way up until 1979, you would have thought if the Ayatollah was the new boogeyman in Iran and we're going to ostracize him, you would have thought that he would have been treated the same way that we're currently treating Russia with everything sanctioned. And yet there's been news article after news article of hundreds of millions of dollars in investment in the west through the Ayatollah. So he owns a huge amount of real estate in London, in England and in France. So why were not any of those assets frozen? Why is he allowed to. Well, that leads me to look into the amount of trade that these European countries have been doing with Iran underneath the table through these international trade organizations. And they've been consistently trading with Iran. And I thought that wasn't supposed to be happening. So if you kind of span out to the 30,000 foot, look, there's a bunch of players out there, countries, Venezuela, Iran, that have been running off of basically covert funding through under the table oil deals and stuff like that. So there's a lot of money that is outside the purview of traditional banking as far as tracking goes. And one of the big financial pieces of this is the narcotics trafficking. And also related to this whole conversation is the goings on in Latin America right now with an actual first time ever in my lifetime war against narcotics. It's happening in Mexico, it's happening in Colombia, it's happening in Ecuador. So to me, what I see happening is a squeezing out of this illicit funding around the world and basically bringing that to a halt. Now, coinciding with all of this is all at once. You hear from New York, all of these private equity funds having problems meeting the demand of people wanting to withdraw money. Money, I don't think, not related. I think they're all related because one of the things, if you look into the Carlisle Group, which is a private equity organization that bought up in the 1990s stock in all of the military industrial complex, and then we went into war after war after war, one of their major funders or investors was the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. So if you think about this for a few seconds, we give foreign aid to Saudi Arabia for them to buy our weapons, and they're invested in the Carlyle Group, which owns much of the stock of our military industrial complex. So it's literally taking taxpayer dollars, laundering them through foreign aid, and they're using the money to buy an equity stake in Carlisle, which is a private equity group set up by George H.W. bush and Baker and a whole bunch of other nefarious players. And so there's a war in the Middle east that's gone on for the better part of 30 or 40 years, and they're making money off of that military industrial complex while also feeding money to Al Qaeda and, and isis. And so again, I think all of this is related. And I don't think you can look at any one piece of this without seeing all of the other pieces. And I feel, at least on my research, that what we're doing is basically putting a blanket over the illicit funding that is keeping what Kevin was saying was the shadow government. I call it an international syndicate because it is an international crime syndicate. And I just think they're all related and someone has to put a stop to it. If you're ever going to get your hands around the actual syndicate cartel running all of this, you have to cut off the illicit funding.

[Clayton]

I would love to find out who that person is. There's been rumblings that Tulsi Gabbard at DNI has been pushing to get Edward Snowden and Julian Assange as part of this group that's going to rat out the deep state inside of the government. I mean, I. I couldn't think of a better person, perhaps, than Julian Assange. Maybe I'm wrong about that. Are you, before we get back to all the details about the war. But are you, are you encouraged by this rumor?

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

I am

[Clayton]

yeah. To have Julian Assange in there pointing out who are the deep state rats inside the government, that would be incredible.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

So I don't think he has to physically be here to be part of it. Just keep that in mind.

[Clayton]

Right. He knows how to use the Internet.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

Yeah. I'm not so sure he's not part of it already. And I feel that they're operating on a level as far as intelligence goes, with no leaks. By the way, you mentioned about the quote, unquote, leak that came out about the Kurds. I was in northern Iraq during Desert Storm. The one thing that the Kurds have finally learned is they cannot rely on the United States. And their whole goal in life is to have back their country that they had Kurdistan prior to World War I and World War II, it got divided up between Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. And that goes back to my point of the strategy of tension. If you put these minority ethnic people in a nation state that they philosophically do not belong in, you have the strategy of tension, ability to play out against each other anytime that you want. And so I think the Kurds have finally learned. And as a matter of fact, the deputy head of the Kurdish nation, although it's not an official nation, came out and said unequivocally that they would not get involved in this. They are not having any part in it because they have been betrayed so many times by the players in this syndicate.

[Clayton]

Yeah, it'd be a suicide mission. You're going to trust the United States to do the United States bidding and cross the border. And you'd be annihilated by the Iranian military, like, what's the end game here? And by the way, then also Iraq would also attack. So they're not gonna stand for that. It's not gonna go very well. And the United States will not protect you, as we've seen throughout the Gulf states. Right now, I wanna talk about the Strait of Hormuz and the insurance piece of this puzzle. So we're trying to put all of these big money pieces together. And of course, President Trump, I think last week, or whatever it was, came out and said, you know, just take your ships through there. The United States will backstop this insurance. Now, we've seen, obviously, people never really think about, like, Lloyd's of London and, like, war risk premiums and shipping guarantees when there's bombs and missiles involved in all of this. Can you unpack the insurance piece of this story?

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

So one of the very first things three and a half years ago, I realized is the Oligarchs that sit at the big table. They all started out life owning an industry, an insurance company and a bank. That's how interlocked this world that they live in is. And the insurance companies come in to play like not to be overly simplistic, but during 911 we all heard about the asbestos issue. And you know, if you bring down those towers, you don't have to worry about the abatement issues of asbestos. They're just gone and you collect your insurance. And that has happened throughout history where they want something gone or they want the business of rebuilding something. It's kind of like the Phoenix program, just burn it all down. We have the fires out in California. Just burn it all down. And we'll be build back what we want. And the insurance companies are all there to bail them out. So along.

[Clayton]

Just to be clear, just to be clear, I mean I worked in real estate, you know, I know it very well to get asbestos removal. It's very costly. So you have to do that. Especially if the city knows about, the county knows about it. The abatement for asbestos is very costly. So to avoid having to pay that, you just tear it all down. Burn it all down.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

Correct. You have an accident.

[Clayton]

Right, okay. Sorry to interrupt you.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

Yeah, no, that's fine. That's exactly the point. So if you go back in time, you find out that the insurance company, Lloyd's of London obviously is very old. At no time in the history of Lloyd's of London ever, no matter what the war was, have they ever not extended coverage. They just upped the premium. This is the first time ever. Well, why would that be? Because in every other instance, Lloyd's of London and London and MI6, which they're just, you know, located very closely together. Lloyd's of London in their insurance empire has allowed MI6 and the intelligence agencies because they insert agents into the insurance industry because they're literally all over the world, especially a shipping one. So prior to World War II, you had a company called CB Star over in Asia. And they were basically like the Lloyds of London over there. He was part of the OSS operation during World War II. He goes on to be part of the CIA. There's CIA people working in the CB Star insurance, you know, empire over there. Well, we now know CV Star as AIG. It's the same company. And of course AIG had a big role in the whole 9 11. They were part of the office structure that was there. So people need to think of not the insurance company, but the insurance company actually functions as a source of intelligence for governments, especially Lloyds of London and the relationship with the Crown and MI6. You also notice that for the first time in my lifetime, British is not right beside America.

[Clayton]

Right.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

And yes, what does that tell you? Related.

[Clayton]

Okay, so paint the picture for us here. Why? Why did the UK stay out of this? They wouldn't even let us use their bases.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

Right. Because they don't want Iran to go away. If you go back to the history of Iran after the overthrow in 1953, the MI6, the CIA, and eventually Mossad all go in and train up the savak, which is the national police intelligence apparatus that was creating black sites and torturing people and kidnapping people. They were the state function of the terror regime under the Shah. So if you disagreed with the Shah, you would get arrested, you go to a black site, prison, you'd be tortured, blah, blah, blah. So that was the duties of the SAVAK. It was Major General Norman Schwarzkopf Senior who was hired basically by the CIA to set the system up. So in 1979, during the revolution, they didn't disband the SAVAK, they renamed it, we know it as the Republican Guard now. And there are lots of ties between the Republican Guard because from my research, they're part of this strategy of tension. As long as you have Iran there, then Israel is always going to have an enemy that they can create crap crisises in the Middle east and that allows this international syndicate to control the area. And that's what they want more than anything. They want to be able to control geographical regions. Well, what happens when Iran goes away or has a legitimate government that's not causing strife all over the world or funding Hezbollah or whatever, well, then you have peace. And then that's the worst thing that could ever happen to these people, because their power comes from the strategy of tension and people being at each other's throat all the time. You're not allowed to have coalitions, you're not allowed to have peace in a specific region that they have their strategy of tension disciples in.

[Clayton]

So then the London insurance market, I mean, remains of course, central to this Gulf shipping. But now they're saying we're not going to ensure. To your point, they've never done this before. So what does that tell us?

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

Well, it tells me that they are trying everything they can to not allow or move forward in eliminating the threat. What does it cost them as an insurance company to increase astronomically the wartime premiums, to your point, to ensure the shipping continues? Well, if they're trying to be a. A negative vote in what is going on. That's part of the strategy that they would lay in is, okay, well, we're just out. We're not going to do that. All they did in the past was triple or quadruple the premiums of the ships transiting the straits. It's not the first time that there's been problems in the Strait of Hormuz, and they have never stopped coverage ever.

[Clayton]

So they want. They want the threat to continue, and that's.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

They want the regime that's in place to continue. They want the Republican Guard to remain in place because that is their tool in their toolbox to create the instability in the region.

[Clayton]

And this strategy of tension sits at the heart of it. So for our audience that maybe isn't familiar with, when we've had you on previously, to talk about this strategy of tension, once you understand it, this, like, funnel or this, I guess, a sieve of the strategy of tension, then everything has to pour through it. And it all makes sense. It all helps us make sense of why keeping us sort of in this permanent state of chaos and is so profitable for these people. Maybe you could just explain to our audience a little bit here, then I want to take a break and I want to come back and talk about regime change and all that stuff. But maybe you could lay out for our audience the strategy of tension and why we're all being played.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

So to your point, it basically boils down to creating chaos so you can implement the control structure that. So in the past, when they needed to do regime change in a particular country, they would go in with survey teams and they would find out where the differences are. So if I was doing a regime change in Iraq, I would look at the Shia, I would look at the Ba'ath party, and I would look at the Kurds. So there's their friction point. And then I just staged false flags, dressed up as Kurdish people against the Ba'ath or the Shia people dressed up against the Kurds. And this false flag then exacerbates the strategy of tension. And I use that as an excuse to go in and throw out the current government that I no longer believe I have control over. And they did it in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, the recent coup that they had there. They looked at the marginalized people that were kind of categorized as dei, the transgender, that they were trying to morph into a much bigger presence there. And of course, that went against their religious beliefs and stuff like that. And they used that as a wedge to get people, because you don't have just those people. You have people that sympathize with, with those people as well to create your boots on the ground, the jack boots. And then they use the people that come out to quote, unquote, protest as the mechanism. They throw in a bomb supposedly from some other radical element in the country. You see it here with Antifa. They keep people in this heightened sense of being terrorized by the chaos in order to control us.

[Clayton]

It is about total control. Now, one of the pieces of course you're hearing now is also about sleeper cells. So I can't help when I hear Iranian sleeper cells in the United States. They're being activated. You need that fear at home. So I can't help when I hear these types of stories. My mind immediately goes too far. False flags, strategy of tension, keeping us in this like permanent state of chaos. And, and maybe there's some truth to it, maybe there's not. What do you make of this? Like Iranian sleeper cells in the United States part of the story.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

So I'm concerned about sleeper cells in general, not because those are basically stay behind units. So the CIA has been notorious for taking, and I'll give you an example, when you go into Vietnam and you're in Laos and you're in Cambodia, in order to effect all of that, you have people working for the CIA. Well, when the CIA has to pull back out of Vietnam, they bring with them the people that work for them. You just had the guy from Washington state go shoot two National Guard people in Washington D.C. and we find out that he worked for the CIA in Afghanistan. This happens all the time. All of the people in Cuba that worked with the CIA were brought into Miami. And what happened to that entire Cuban exile? Well, we created a military training base and deployed them down to Guatemala to overthrow the government down there. They were in Nicaragua. They were part of the Iran Contra. They destabilized the entire Latin American community out of this pool of Colombian expats. This is a known tactic of the CIA. And so we have all kinds of sleeper cells in the United States in these. Refugee. That's the word they use. But most of the refugees, and the CIA even has a cutout through the State Department of people they can vouch for. That doesn't even go through the normal vetting process of a refugee. There's a quota given to the CIA to bring these people in. Most people don't even know that these people are trained assassins that were under the command of the CIA. Some of them remain on the payroll of the CIA for Decades.

[Clayton]

Jesus. I mean, this is. And then when you hear about the destabilization in these regions, right? I mean, the mass. You know, when we bomb Somalia, then suddenly we have Somalia, you know, Somalian refugees in the United States. Like, that's how this works inside the United States. U.S. it's very convenient. What's probably about to happen in Europe as well. So am I maybe reading too much into that or how many of what happens?

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

I mean, Ilan, Omar's dad was one of the colonels that worked for the CIA. Mondami's dad was brought over from Africa on a CIA front scholarship and remained here. Obama's dad came over on one of them.

[Clayton]

All right, then. I'm not crazy, you know, because sometimes you go to, like, a dinner party or something, you start talking. People are like, that can't possibly be the case. We destabilize. These countries now are filled with these refugees in the US and suddenly all of this chaos continues to happen. Look what's happening in Chicago. Look what's happening in Minnesota.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

It's the plan.

[Clayton]

It's all part of the plan. And we're just pawns on it. I want to take a quick break, and I want to come back and talk about the sort of. What is the end game here with Iran? Is there an end game when. How does this thing maybe spiral out of control? What's. What more chaos can we expect from that? So we're going to get to that in a second with Colonel Towner Watkins. But first, you may have seen the conversations happening online lately. Censorship is back. It's happening everywhere. Plus, platforms are controlling narratives, pushing what they want us to see, and we need to fight back. I mean, just look at what's happening on X right now. Well, Rumble is the only company that has stood the test of time and deserves our support. They've been challenging big tech censorship, and they've introduced something else that protects us from the big banks shutting us down. Banks can cancel accounts, freeze cards. That's why Rumble launched Rumble Wallet, which is a wallet that no one can cancel cancel, and one that supporters can actually use to instantly tip creators like our show without any middleman taking any cut of it. So with Rumble Wallet, you control your money. Not a bank, not a government, not even a tech company, not even Rumble can touch it. It's yours. It's only yours to protect your family and your future. And you can buy and save digital assets like Bitcoin, Tether Gold, and the new usat, which is Tether's US regulated State stablecoin. So it's all in one place right there in the wallet tether Gold is real gold on the blockchain. Backed by physical gold bars. USAT helps keep your money steady against inflation with no banks needed. Rumble Wallet isn't just for buying and saving. It's also letting you support your favorite creators by tipping them with the click of a button. There's no fees when you tip our channel or any other ones. That's right. So support my show and other creators by clicking the table tip button on our Rumble channel. Or go to wallet.rumble.com, download rumble wallet today, open an account, step away from the big banks for good. That's wallet.rumble.com or search rumble Wallet in the App store.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

All right.

[Clayton]

We are back with Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins, who is of course an expert on Operation Gladio and the stay behind armies that stay in these countries for years and cause terrorist activities. I mean, just look at the bombing in Bologna, Italy, among others. I was talking to a friend just the other day who was a soldier, and I told him about Operation Gladio. He said, I don't even know anything about that. Well, that was intentional, of course. Right, because we weren't supposed to know anything about it and only learned about it, I think, through documents in the 1990s that were declassified. But these stay behind armies after World War II have been an integral part of the chaos that we've seen throughout the Middle east, throughout the world, really. Maybe you can paint a picture for us, for the audience that might not be familiar.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

So for those of you that are military, I was shocked three and a half years ago when I first came across Operation Gladio. Never in my wildest imaginations did I believe something like this could exist. With 30 years of experience and all of the different degrees I have, all of which included historical classes of information. And again, I've read over 600 books, just nonfiction, about world history as part of my career. And so when I came across it, basically what it is in a nutshell is during World War II, Reinhard Galen, Hitler, General Wolf, all of those people on the Eastern front had the idea that they did it in all German occupied territory. But they were most useful to them on the road to Russia, to the Soviet Union. And they planted these stay behinds with caches of weapons in the thought that if they get pushed back, they would have these trained civilians that blended into the local landscape or with pre positioned weapons that they could then spring up and attack from the rear. And those remained in place. And towards the end of the war, General Wolf, a Nazi general, and Reinhard Galen went to Operation Sunrise with Alan Dulles and Major General Lyman Leminsker, who they sat in Northern Italy during the war towards the end of it and made an arrangement that in exchange for all of the material that the Nazis had on the Soviet Union, they would exchange that material, they give that to the US and in return the US would basically, they also were going to turn over where the whole Stay behind network was and the caches of weapons, the gold, the communication equipment that is all buried in these locations. And in return the OSS would ensure that a list of people got ratlined out of Nazi Germany. And that's called Operation Sunrise. You can go look it up. And so we basically inherited, we as in NATO, basically inherited that whole network. And then we began putting them in other places. Danielle Ganser, the guy that wrote the book NATO Secret Armies, documented that there was actually an agreement that if you join NATO you have to have these Stay behind units so they can be activated to control your domestic population under the guise of anti communism. And they were used repeatedly throughout history in Europe and in the United States. Because I make a very strong case that the Cuban exiles were our Gladio operators. They were involved in a car bombing in Washington D.C. killing Chile, former Ambassador Ladier, they were involved in Watergate, they were involved in RFK's assassination, they were involved in JFK's assassination. And in Europe they were involved in Aldo Moro's assassination. He was the Prime Minister of Italy, the Prime Minister of Sweden, Olaf Palm, as well as train bombings, the tube bombing in Britain. They've been used extensively for domestic control. And it all got documented in 1962 in a plan Lyman limitsker, once he becomes a four star authored called Operation Northwood, where they talk about dressing up as Castro's army and bombing American cities, flying drone aircraft into buildings. He basically laid out the entire Operation Gladio as it could exist using Cuban exiles in the United States.

[Clayton]

When Jimmy Carter allowed the massive amount of Cubans to come into the United States, of course under Castro, Castro was I guess thrilled about it because he could, he could get rid of a lot of criminals and just send them to the United States. It in the disaster that unfolded in Florida in the early 1980s, was that part of this operation? I've just been curious about that as you've been talking about Cuba.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

So the majority of the Cuban exiles that I've researched came over in the aftermath of Castro's revolution in the early 1960s, the late 1950s, early 1960s. The, there was a whole bunch of things going on in the 1970s as the CIA was gearing up to. Because we're, we're getting out of Vietnam so we need another illicit supply of drugs. They were building up the cocaine industry in Latin America and there was a whole operation, I would call it infrastructure that was being set up because they were going to use the Cuban exiles as part of their drug trafficking network in, internally in the United States. Jimmy Carter is kind of like one of those very interesting four year presidencies because there was so much that happened that most people don't ever talk about. He is the only president that in the Halloween massacre, in his first year in office, fired over 800 covert agents out of the CIA. So they immediately hated him. He also made the decision not to keep Bush Senior on as the CIA director. So he really hated him. And so there was an all out affront attack on Jimmy Carter's administration by the CIA. And we see with Reagan coming in, which of course was the first president I ever voted for in 1980, he comes in and basically hires them all back. But I think what people need to understand, and that's the problem we have dealing with the CIA today. When a president and I heard Kevin Shipp talk about it in your earlier segment when the President comes into office and it is not a compliant president, they just simply go off books. They have banks, they have proprietary companies, they have proprietary airlines, they just go off books. If you look up the thing called the Safari Club that was set up in Kenya, Africa, Adon Shakogi their go to illicit weapons dealer, Saudi Arabia, uae. They all got together and basically set up a CIA outside of the CIA and they just kept doing business. I've made the argument all along the CIA does not work for the United States government. They work for this international cartel syndicate. And they do what? There's a reason why they hired their lawyers and their bankers. So if you go back to Sullivan and Cromwell, a lot of the early law firms that represented United Fruit, the Rockefeller family, the Whitneys, they basically just once the CIA was created, took their bankers and their lawyers and put them in the CIA. They were still doing the same thing. They were collecting intelligence and foreign governments, they were hiring paramilitary to overthrow the governments. When they wanted the oil or the gold or whatever, they just put it in the CIA and made us all pay for it.

[Clayton]

Yeah, having discussions with Kevin Shipp and others over the many, many weeks about the CIA's black book projects and how they're actually being funded, because very little of it, it seems to be coming from Congress at all. As you mentioned, the weapons sales, the heroin sales coming back from Vietnam, inside of body bags being sold. So the drug trade, all of this is how they're being funded. So just a piece of this really is coming from Congress, and they operate without the pleasure of the President at all. And they just basically wait out the presidents of the United States because they know they can get away with this, right?

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

Yes. So they do manipulate elections here in the United States. So there's a lot of this illicit money through private equity that goes into election interference in all of these countries. You find it. I've documented several different cases of it leading up to a coup. But sometimes their election interference isn't quite enough. Like in the case with Chile, when Salvador Allende eventually did get elected, they interfered both when he initially ran and then the second time when he was actually elected. They actually even offered thousands and thousands of dollars to the senators because they're under a parliamentary confirmation process to buy senators, not to confirm what the people's choice was, which was Salvador Allende. So when Salvador Allende takes office, and he basically nationalized the copper mines because the. The US Copper company that had the concession there was paying them like $81.86 a day to labor in the mines. They were not allowed to unionize because the CIA has a union effort that they orchestrate all kinds of terrorist activities. And so Salvador Allende was fed up with it. He nationalized it, and then they overthrew his government and killed him and installed Pinochet there for, you know, the next 20 years or however long he was. And they do exactly what they did in Iran. They set up the black site prisons, they kidnapped people, and the School of Americas, which was ran in Panama, trained all of these national police and National Guard people that the CIA set up. USAID had a company or outfit under it called the Office of Public Safety. The Office of Public Safety taught people how to kidnap and murder people.

[Clayton]

Well, it's like Mike Pompeo says, right? That's what they. At the CIA that those are. It's all about. It's all about lying and, and every. Every sort of nefarious thing you can possibly think of at the CIA. I want to get back to the Iranian war and how this. How you see this unfolding here with the Trump administration telling us that they've. We've won the war, but the Netanyahu government basically saying, no, no, no, we're not done. We want full regime change. Bombing southern Lebanon right now. They want basically a buffer zone. I was speaking to sources today in Israel that said, you know, that's the real goal with Lebanon is creating really a new demilitarized zone in this area. Is the United States on board with that, all of that? So I want to get to that in just a second. But first we want to tell you about our friends at American Financing. Because if you looked at your credit card statement lately, you're working 40, 50 hours a week just to buy groceries and gas, things that you used to be able to afford. And the credit card companies are charging you over 20% interest for that privilege. Think about that. Over 20%. It's designed basically to keep you underwater water permanently. American Financing is doing something that they hate. These credit card companies absolutely hate. They're actually helping people. They have a mortgage, they have mortgage rates in the fives right now. And they're showing homeowners how to take their hard earned equity to wipe out that high interest debt. The average savings is $800 a month. One of our friends just actually told us they're like, yeah, we, we call American Financing and did a refinance. Thanks to, thanks for, thanks for telling us about it. They were fantastic. That was one of our friends. We didn't even tell them about it. They just called them and now they're refinancing and they said they were absolutely fantastic. They were on it and they were able to do it like in a week and a half. It was that fast. So talk to a salary based mortgage consultant, no upfront fees, no obligation to see how much you can save. And if you start today, you could delay two mortgage payments. Give American Financing a call, America's Home for home loans. That's 866-890-8434 or just go to american financing.net redacted and the disclaimer, here's their NMLS number, 233 4. Or you can check it out by going into nmlsconsumeraccess.org and APR rates in the five start at 6.196% for well qualified borrowers. Again, that phone number 866-890-8433 for details. All right, we are back with Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins to talk more about the Iran war and the larger pieces at play here so that we, we don't get bogged down in the minutia of what CNN or Fox News is telling us from minute to minute. So we heard Colonel from President Trump of course, the other day, saying that we've won this war. Then we're hearing behind the scenes, of course, that the Netanyahu government was pretty furious about those statements because no, they're not done. We're not done at all with this unconditional surrender. Regime change. It was about nuclear weapons and it's not. Then it's about regime change. What sort of off ramp do you see unfolding for the United States right now? Or no off ramp at the all? Is this going to be a long term engagement?

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

I do not believe it's going to be a long term engagement. There's nothing that indicates that. I think what President Trump is trying to affect in Iran is exactly what he did in Venezuela. He will work his way down the leadership model. He does not want to disassemble the entire country like we tried to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. He wants to leave. The first person that steps up and says, I'm with you, I'm. I'm not going to fund Hezbollah anymore. I'm not going to fund these Iranian terror cells, we're just going to be Iran. We're going to come out and trade with everybody like a normal country does. So they have the option of doing that right now. If someone steps up to do that, whether it's Khomeini Jr or whatever his name is, he'll just keep packing down the order until he gets to that person. It is not going to be the Shaw Jr. As I refer to him, just like it wasn't going to be, ever going to be Makato in Venezuela because those people were controlled the Venezuelan. The Sumatra was the USAID NGO in Venezuela that was constantly attacking the Venezuelan government. That's who gave us Juan Guaido. Trump is not interested in working with any of the CIA puppets that have been intimately involved in these regimes. And so that's off the board. I do believe that that's the message. And much to people's chagrin, I do not believe that Israel is calling the shots. It's, if anything, I think what happened in Iran was preempting something that potentially that I have heard was on the table. But taking the lead in it allows for the infrastructure and the ability of that country to come out of this without a total devastation, which was what was planned by Israel to actually happen for the benefit of the Iranian people. So it could be over tomorrow. We just need a leader.

[Clayton]

Wow. And then what does that mean for really the clandestine operations and this strategy of tension? Because if now there's no tension, then how do they make their money? How do they continue to keep us in this like throttled state of chaos?

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

It's gone. And that's the reason why you see, in my opinion, Israel constantly egging on because they're part of the strategy of tension. That's the reason why you don't see the UK participating in this. They're the seat of the strategy of tension. They absolutely want to perpetuate the current state of chaos. And if you go one by one and eliminate their chaos nodes, then you basically and you cut off their funding at the same time. Because this is both happening simultaneously. You've put a nix in their plan.

[Clayton]

One of the pieces of all of this which I've been curious about is again is the weapons trafficking and the money through USAID and really the massive money laundering operations. You've talked about Chatham House, you've talked about CFR and other think tanks that would have these cache of weapons. It makes very little sense to me. But the USAID boondoggle, which has now really been configured underneath Marco Rubio's State Department, it's been realigned. And a lot of those, the monies, how are they involved in what's going on right now with Iran?

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

So in the past they were very much involved, but today, yeah, to mention the Institute of Peace with their cache of weapons, that was just mind blowing to me that they beat that. So there was basically two funding streams for the CIA, USAID and National Endowment for Democracy, which still has not been dealt with, but it is a, a sister to USAID created by the Reagan administration. They both filter money overtly, which is taxpayer dollars, while the CIA also not only has taxpayer dollars, but also has this large pot of illicit funding. And that's the vectors. But going to the larger point of these foundations, in the 1950s there was a thing called the Reese Commission that exposed the Rockefeller foundation, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace that went around the war instigating world instigating war, the Ford foundation, there's a whole litany of these. And now of course we have the Soros foundation that basically are money laundering because they all can take private donations. So if you are the CIA and you have illicit funding, you, you can donate it to these foundations. And what you find is there's a kind of a musical chair arrangement where the president of the Ford foundation will be a CIA person, like a deputy Director or an ambassador or a Foreign Service officer, and they just kind of like rotate chairs. But that's how they launder some of their money. They launder it through major banks and stuff like that. I mean, heck, in the past they've created entire banks like BCCI and Nugent Hand and Castle bank that was solely there to launder CIA money. So they have many avenues in which to launder money. Just a little tidbit. When I was researching Castle bank, that was set up by OSS Colonel Paul Helliwell in the Bahamas, I kind of was doing this at the same time I was researching the whole Jeffrey Epstein thing. And Castle bank, their largest depositor when they collapsed was the Pritzker family. And it was a CIA front bank.

[Clayton]

And Pritzker probably going to be running for President of the United States.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

So this, this club, you can just see all of the pieces. The Epstein files obviously put a lot of names to the people that are among this elite with the, the Rothschilds and stuff like that. And some of the billionaires in the United States, they all gravitate to this. But back to your point about the money laundering, probably one of the most fascinating pieces because if you think about this, Clayton, this is hundreds of billions of dollars. Some people have guesstimates now up to a trillion dollars a year in illicit funding through drug trafficking, weapons trafficking. It's a large amount of money. So my question a couple of years ago is how did they launder all of that money without supposedly anybody knowing about it, with all of these banking regulations, suspicious activity reports? Well, I was going back and doing a little bit of research on the Chatham House, which is the equivalent in the UK to the cfr, the Council of Foreign Relations in the United States. And I came across this group that's located in Canada, but. But it's really kind of a subsidiary of the imf. It's called the Egmont Group, E G M O N T. And basically what it is is a repository for all financial transactions around the world, where their counterpart in the United states treasury is FinCEN. So if Vincent is researching money laundering, they go to Egmont and they can see other countries tracking of money so that they have a worldview of illicit funding. Interestingly enough, when the Colombian President came to see Trump on this unofficial state visit, he told Trump he was bringing him a list of the US banks involved in money laundering cocaine that originated in Colombia. When he announced that he had that list in Colombia, Egmont cut off their account the next day. And so on a separate project, I'm tracking all of that stuff on a separate project. I was going back to the Fabian Society and they're getting Cecil Rhodes and them giving birth to the Royal International Institute of Affairs, which is Chatham House and CFR in the early 1900s. And I found out through a friend of mine that the Chatham House has subsidiaries in all of the NATO countries. And so I'm looking at this list he compiled and I'm, I noticed, I think it's Austria. No, Belgium. Belgium had Egmont Institute. And I'm like, this was in the same week. I'm like, wait a minute, I've never even heard the word Egmont. And now it shows up in my life two times. What's the chance that that Egmont Group in Canada is associated with the Egmont Institute? It was birthed out of the Egmont Institute, which is part of the riia. So you have the guys guarding the money laundering that are money laundering,

[Clayton]

great business, I guess, if you can get it. When you look at, like Lloyds and you look at, you know, they want this chaos so they can increase their premiums. They want Middle east shipping to continue so they can make incredible amounts of money. If we come to a peace agreement, if there is a new leader in Iran that President Trump likes and they get along and everything's back to normal, where will Lloyds come in? Where will the insurance cabal come in? Come in on all of this, do you? Because they may be cut off.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

Yeah, they make, they don't make as much money, number one. But I don't view any of these insurance companies as an insurance company. They're spy agencies. And if you don't have the turmoil and the need for the intelligence to overthrow governments, because that's not going to be allowed anymore, you all of a sudden don't have what your core business is, not what your facade is. If you go back another kind of what seemed to be anecdotal but now makes so much more sense, there was a paramilitary company created in Britain called Executive Outcomes. One of the guys, he was a former SAS paramilitary, part of the MI6 cadre that did regime changes for the UK around the world. He got one of the guys created Executive Outcomes, which is a like kind of Blackwater type organization. He got arrested for trying to overthrow a country in Africa. And after he gets out of jail, he can't maintain Executive Outcomes because now it's been outed as part of MI6 and regime change. So he starts a new company whose name I can't remember off the top of my head. But he was. The funding for his new company was Lloyds of London.

[Clayton]

You can't make this up. I mean it's like it's, they're all connected. It's so they're all connected. You know, and speaking of something that's connected right now, it's the country of Iran. But I think as you've pointed out, that there's going to be talk about trying to break Iran into maybe different pieces by these power players. Yeah. Can you talk about that?

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

So that is one of their favorite things to do is they're telling us we can't absolutely. There's no way that Russia can have the Donbass region because we never change borders. But didn't you change the borders in Yugoslavia?

[Clayton]

Right.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

Didn't you change the borders when you created and recognized Katanga out of the Congo when you wanted to get rid of Patrice Lumumba? Yes, you did that. You do that all the time when it serves you. And that's referred to now as the Balkanization of a country where you divide it up into smaller but then that allows you to have border disputes. Right. If I have three countries and I've put them in to a state of constant, it's like the ants in the can that you shake up. So if they all hate each other now I've got cross border wars and that's all the better for these people to continue their chaos. But they, they love having more of these different satellite countries because they're easier to control than one large country. And that is absolutely on the table with the nefarious players of as a matter of fact, the southern tribes in Iran has already came out and said we would love to have Pavlovi back. He can come be our leader. And of course then you've got the Kurds in the north that basically want their own country. And so these nefarious players will absolutely try to push that agenda. But that's not at all what President Trump has as an agenda. It is to leave the entire country as it is together as much as possible. So you don't have another forever war. I mean, he said that numerous times.

[Clayton]

What's your sense of how. I'll wrap it up with this. I mean, what's your sense of how bad it's been for the United States? We get the Fox News, CNN sort of bluster about how things are going. But behind the scenes, United States military bases destroyed, infrastructure destroyed. The number of war dead and wounded was kept from us. Now we about catastrophic injuries. How, you know, that number is probably much lower than they're telling us. How bad has it been for Israel

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

and the United States as far as destruction hit the damage assessment, obviously I'm getting anecdotal information. I do have a few friends that are still on active duty. What is be? It depends on what source. There are people in the mainstream media that over exaggerate the damage. There are people that underestimate the damage to the best source. Sources that I have is obviously, we have sustained damage, but not to the extent that it has impacted any mission area at all.

[Clayton]

Hmm, interesting. Well, if you had to give me a timeline on how you think this ends or wraps up, what does your gut assessment tell you?

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

As soon as they find somebody to stand up and say, I'm in charge

[Clayton]

and I'll work with Trump.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

Yes.

[Clayton]

Yeah. It's not gonna make the Israelis very happy. Certainly won't make the neocons in Washington very happy.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

And I honestly, with all of my heart, believe that's exactly why that has to happen.

[Clayton]

Yeah, I agree with you. Colonel Roxanne Tanner Watkins. Where can people learn more about your work and your research? Where is the best place for people

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

to follow all of that online at x E. Coloneltowner. I also do spaces every day on x at 4 o' clock, and I also have a rumble channel called the Colonel's Corner. We basically review historical books that I've carefully screened with the author to make sure that they're actual, factual books and not propaganda. We've actually had to go internationally. Like I had to go to Australia to buy a book because you cannot find it here in the United States. Those are the types of books that we go through and learn our real history.

[Clayton]

Oh, I love it. I love. I love it. The banned books. That's why you. You'll never get me to have my most important books digitally because they, you know, they can go in and manipulate those texts, take them away from you. It's like, you know, people are like, yeah, we're moving to an all digital future with our Kindle books and everything. No, no, no, no, no, no. They'll take it away from you in a heartbeat, that's for sure. Or they'll edit the text and you won't even know it. Colonel, great to see you as always. Thank you so much for helping us make sense of this. I always feel like I. I've just gotten a college course after I speak with you. Thank you so much.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

Thanks for having me.

[Clayton]

Wow. So, yeah, I'm not kidding when I say I always feel like. Like I've gotten a college course education when I speak to the Colonel. And I think it's Good, right, guys? I mean, like, because we get so caught up in like, the minutiae of these, like, little sound bites, and this tanker was bombed and this thing over here, but there's. We're all being played, you know, we're all being played in this simulation as puppets, basically. Yeah, I. Behind the scenes, right? I'm still just. I'm still just blown away by the insurance thing. Like, I can't get. I can't wrap my head around the, like, that connection. You know what I mean? Like, I. That's. That's just something like. Because I, you know, just kind of sit here working. But it's like, as soon as I'm done, like, I have to dive down that rabbit hole because I've never. That's never occurred to me before that that's maybe the biggest players in all of this. That just blows my mind. They. They get to skirt by. We don't even hear about the. The insurance companies. Wait a minute. They're actually, as she said, like, basically spy agencies. Makes sense. It absolutely makes sense. And it makes sense that they would want this turmoil. They would want Iran to still be a bit of a hornet's nest so that they can continue to make a lot of money. So they want to. Because, I mean, they. They get to. They get to make the initial money, and then when things blow up, they get to make the money off of rebuilding it and then reinsuring the things that just built. I mean, it's just like, it's free money. Because you think back, and I'm trying to think if. If it was Lloyd's. Was that the original, like, was that the one that. That was the insurance for, like, shipping from the old world to the new world. Perhaps you might be there. We're thinking of, like, I know, the East East India Company, the British East India Company, Right? But I. I think. Lloyd, I'm trying to think of what. Because, like I said, like, I just want to dive down this rabble rabbit hole. Hole right away. Because, like, thinking about how long that's been around doing this, it's like, Holy, man. Yeah. 1700s. I'm almost certain. I don't know the exact date they were founded, but it was, like, I don't know, 1750s, 1760s or something. I mean, it's. Yeah, it is insane. And it makes sense, right? I mean, it absolutely makes sense that they would want to. So they would. They pull up, they stop insuring. So that. That actually in many ways protects Iran, Right? Because that forces this turmoil and it forces oil prices through the roof. And for all of these other things, it. It in many ways forces this war to end more, more quickly so that Iran can still be this hornet's nest. So they can go back to charging enormous premiums for the. It's. It's crazy. It's crazy. 1688 and a coffee house quickly became a popular hub for merchants, ship captains and sailors to obtain reliable shipping news and Arrange Marine Insurance. Wow. 1680s. Yeah, I thought it was early 1700s, but wow. Geez. Anyway, fascinating, fascinating stuff. Always feel like, you know, we get educated in new ways every day here. So I'm just, I'm. I'm. I'm. I'm humbled by that, you know, to be able to do this show and to have all of you subscribed and be a part of this community, it's. It's means the world to us here at Redacted. So, hey, we have a daily newsletter. You should subscribe to it because it's totally free. We don't sell your information at all. All you do is go to redacted.inc it's not.com, it's.inc and you click on the newsletter button at the top of the page and you just say, yeah, I want to subscribe to the newsletter. Put in your email address. You will receive a welcome email from me, claytonedacted.inc you just need to confirm it. It might go to your spam folder or something like that. Just drag it over to your inbox and it'll have a link in there just to confirm that you're a real human being and just click that link. And then the next day you will receive the newsletter first thing in the morning. And we are in the process of revitalizing the newsletter. Very excited about this. Going to be doing some great new stuff with it. And so, you know, it's been around now for I think, like almost five years, really. The newsletter in its not in its original form, but we have hundreds of thousands of you that are subscribed to it. So thank you so much. So much. It's really a part of our day. I think it's a valuable part of my morning. Just kind of going over the notes from the stories. We cover four to five of the big stories of the day. So please subscribe. It's free. Redacted.inc all right, thank you guys for joining us today. We really appreciate it. We are live Monday through Thursday at 4pm Eastern time. So thank you guys so much for being here. And we will see you in the next show. Have a great night. Night, everyone.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

Has the news been getting you down? I'm Megan McCardell and I'm here to help. I'm the host of a new show from Washington Post Opinion called Reasonably Optimistic. And it's an antidote to the pessimism that's riddling America right now. Every Wednesday, I'm going to talk to people who see a path forward.

[Clayton]

It does seem to me that there is some awakening of a desire to act together to solve problems where they are. You know, I am a believer in a man and it's worth fighting for.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

Join me Wednesdays on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Clayton]

I'm here on a job site with Tim, who owns his own electrical contracting business. Three employees and two work trucks. Tim traded up to Geico Commercial Auto Insurance. We're positively here where he needs us most. They sure are. With step by step help on all his insurance needs, all for shockingly low rates. Shockingly low, huh? Just a little bit of electrician humor.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

Do you get it?

[Clayton]

I got it.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

You know, it feels like we have a real connection.

[Clayton]

All right, I'll stop. Get a commercial auto insurance quote [e-mail] and see how much you could save.

[Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins]

It feels good to Geico.