Transcript
Colonel Roxanne Towner Watkins (0:00)
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 (0:16)
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 (0:26)
Join me Wednesdays on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
Clayton (0:31)
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.
