← The Kinzinger Report
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- [00:06]
A
I'm Adam Kinzinger, and you're listening to the Kinzinger Report, where I bring you top stories and analysis on current events and the growing threats to our democracy. After serving over a decade in Congress, I help you know what's true and what really matters so that we can all work to save this country that we love so much.
- [00:30]
B
Everybody, how's it going? So I wanted to do an interview with Terry Verts, good friend of mine. We've talked before. He's on substack. What's your substack, Terry is it's got
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C
down to Earth with Terry Verts.
- [00:42]
B
Down to Earth with Terry Verts. And he's a good friend of mine and ran for Congress unsuccessfully, but gave it a nice effort.
- [00:50]
A
And.
- [00:51]
B
But he is also going to be sometimes when I'm on the road filling in on the news. So I wanted to reintroduce everybody to him. So, Terry, how you doing, man? You find yourself in D.C. today. But talk about, like, where do you live now? And then I want to give your history. Just tell us where you live. And then I want to.
- [01:06]
C
Okay. Yeah. So I norm. My day, you know, residence is in Houston, Texas. I do a lot of traveling for speaking and so on. I just did a thing in New York, upstate New York last night. So I'm in D.C. visiting some family today. But I feel like I live on United Airlines more than. More than any one house. Did you ever.
- [01:23]
B
Have you ever become a Global Services guy yet?
- [01:26]
C
I have not. I don't know.
- [01:27]
B
I know I'm waiting for that every year.
- [01:29]
C
I've never been. I just went over a million miles, but I've never gotten to Global Services.
- [01:32]
B
If you're the United CEO watching this, I'm just saying, couple pilots, you want to do that. So that gets me to kind of your story. So Terry was an Air Force pilot, so that makes him cool off the bat, ended up becoming an Air Force test pilot, which is insane, but I'm glad he did it. That's really cool. And then he became an astronaut and flew the space shuttle. Tell us how many times you flew that. How many space shuttles?
- [01:58]
C
I. I flew the shuttle once as a pilot of endeavor in STS130. And then I went back with the Russians, launched on a Soyuz and ended up being the space station commander. So it's been a little over seven months in space.
- [02:11]
B
Yeah, it's really cool. And we. We just had a gathering of Terry, myself, some former agency people, former politicians, and he gave a presentation about space, and it was really cool. Just, you know, seeing the pictures that you took, talking about kind of geopolitics in that sense and, and everything else was really neat. And I also learned that Terry, because of the theory of relativity, aged 1 millisecond less than all of us while he was standing on the space station. Seven milliseconds. Yeah.
- [02:42]
C
According to NASA physicist, I'm seven milliseconds younger than I would have been had I stayed down here with you guys stuck on Earth.
- [02:50]
B
I have racked my brain. I texted you the other day. I finally kind of understood relativity, how the closer you get to the speed of light, time actually slows down for you. I never understood it, and now I do. And it's like been my obsession lately. All I see is just imagine, like, okay, riding the beam of a flashlight and then turning on a flashlight.
- [03:12]
C
Right?
- [03:13]
B
Like, what happens? So anyway, that's a. We could speak 30 minutes on that.
- [03:17]
C
If you're going down the car and you're going 50 miles an hour and you throw a baseball and you hit your buddy and you throw the baseball 20 miles an hour, he's going to get hit by a 70 mile an hour fastball, right? 50 plus 20. If you shoot a light beam at him, even though you're going fast, the light beam will still hit him at the speed of light, which makes no sense. If you're going 90 at the speed of light, it still hits him at the speed of light. So it's crazy, but Einstein figured that out a century ago.
- [03:43]
B
I know. It's crazy. Absolutely insane. So, okay. One of the other things about Terry is he's very passionate about what's going on in Ukraine. He's been to Ukraine. Let's talk about that just to kind of get started. It's going to be a fairly short interview, but I want to kind of get your take. Talk about when you were in Ukraine, what you saw just a little bit from your perspective of the Ukrainian people and kind of where you see the war right now, it obviously had a massive shift in the last six months to a year. Kind of give me your thoughts on where you see that.
- [04:15]
C
Yeah, so I did the ambulance delivery with. With a friend of mine, runs an organization called Ukraine Focus. I did that twice a couple years ago. He wants me to come back in October, so hopefully I'll be going back there.
- [04:25]
B
I love. Let me know. By the way, let me know where you go.
- [04:28]
C
Let's go.
- [04:29]
B
Yeah, I may go in September, but I'm. I'm trying to figure out if I can make that schedule work?
- [04:33]
C
Yeah. I, you know, I love Ukraine. I'm not Ukrainian. I. I don't have a Ukrainian wife. Like, I. The only connection I have there is these people are fighting for freedom, and that's. That's my passion, and I love it. And there's a lot of countries don't fight for freedom. Russia does not fight for freedom. They're happy to be slaves there. And Ukrainians are not like that. They're. Ukraine is like the Texas of Europe. Right. And I love seeing that. They're, you know, they're getting pounded every day, Adam. And, you know, this like, the. The Russians launch ballistic missiles, drones and cruise missiles or three different types of weapons every day. And just this a day, two days ago, dozens of Ukrainians got killed. It was the biggest ballistic missile attack. And the problem is the only missile that can intercept ballistic missiles is the Patriot. And A, it took us a year, took Biden a year to give them Patriots to begin with. B, we never ramped up our Patriot production to what it needs to be. And then, C, we started this insane war in Iran, and they just shot, you know, between Americans, which we need to shoot them to defend our troops. But also Saudi and uae, they're just shooting Patriots like crazy. I think they've shot three times as many Patriots during Trump's war of whim in Iran as Ukraine has shot the entire war. But, you know, dozens of people just got killed by these incoming ballistic missiles. So I love Ukraine. I admire them. And I'll just say this real quick. There's this news that General Syrsky got the. The Fedorov, the defense minister, got sacked, and then Ukrainians were out protesting, and then they switched it, and Fedorov's probably coming back. Syrsky, the army general, got sacked. And so it's working like it's democracy in action. Like, the people said, no, Zelensky, that was the wrong decision, and he switched his mind. Last year, there was this thing about this corruption panel. They said, no, this is a bad decision, and he changed his mind. And they, you know, corruption happens there, and they prosecute it. Corruption happens here, and it's like it's promoted. And so it's not a perfect country, but the people fight for freedom, and it's democracy that's actually working. I really admire that.
- [06:38]
B
Yeah. And I always remember we talk about what we have to do to fight here politically, and we use metaphors like, we gotta get in the trenches, we gotta go out and fight. They're literally doing that to defend democracy and you look in a trench in Ukraine, and you're gonna find somebody that played the piano, somebody that was a machinist and somebody that was a college professor. They probably never voted.
- [07:00]
A
Similar.
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B
Probably didn't have much in common besides the fact that maybe they spoke Ukrainian, but they're willing to put their lives on the line with each other to defend a democracy. And we sit here at home and we whine because, you know, it's rightful whining, it's not unfounded. But, you know, because the news is unfair or something's harsh. It's like the sacrifice we're being asked to make, really, is just to. To not give up hope. I mean, it's. It's pretty minor in comparison to what you see out there.
- [07:28]
C
Yeah, it's. You know, it's so frustrating when I hear about war fatigue. Like, the people in England have war fatigue, or Spain or America. Like, really, when's the last time we got bombed by a Russian ballistic missile? It's happening every day there. And I. I was there. You know, I was only there for, you know, a week. A couple times I was doing talks at the university and for some school kids. My. The talks I gave were in basements because we were getting bombed. And I was. I. I have a picture of. I'm holding up my iPhone to these Ukrainian kids, showing them pictures of that. You saw when we were in Scotland at that meeting. They really. And the thing about the fatigue they have for. It's been going on for longer than World War II, you know, and every night the alarm goes off, and you gotta go down in the basement or you don't. And you know what's interesting? And there's an app, and you get. When you go to Ukraine, you get this app, and it warns you when the ballistic missile comes in. And it's Luke Skywalker's voice. It's Mark Hamill's voice. Like, attention, you know, incoming ballistics. And then afterwards, he says, may, you know, the end of the warning. May the Force be with you. Every night this thing's going off. And, you know, they don't have that app in Russia because they don't need it because Ukrainians aren't bombing their apartments. It's a really interesting thing that just struck me the other day. A friend of mine's traveling to Moscow. They don't have that warning. Russia's getting bombed every day now because we never gave Ukraine the cruise missiles that they needed, so they just built their own. And it's being very effective. But that just hit Me the other day that you've got this app in Ukraine and the Russians don't need it because Ukrainians don't bomb schools and libraries and apartment buildings.
- [09:02]
B
And you think about it, if you're a 10 year old kid kind of coming into consciousness, you don't remember a world in which this wasn't the case because you were maybe five years old when it started, which is.
- [09:11]
C
It's been going on since 2014. Really?
- [09:14]
B
Yeah.
- [09:14]
A
Really?
- [09:14]
B
Yeah, yeah. If you take into account the actual beginning of the war and it's. This has been a 12 year thing, I mean, it's just becomes part of the lexicon and, and you think about it. So, you know, just so people that are watching are aware, a ballistic missile basically goes up into space and comes down. You don't get a whole lot of warning. Patriots can intercept that fads other things can intercept that. Cruise missile flies low, fighter jets can intercept that. And, and then of course, drones are drones. But I want to, I'm trying to. There's two other things I want to talk to you about. I'm trying to decide where to go next on this, which is I want to talk about corruption here, but let me first. Let's do this. So you obviously know air combat well, You've engaged in it. You're a fighter pilot. You were a test pilot. You know, you and I were raised in this environment that the most expensive, fastest stealthest fighter jet with the most expensive weapon could bomb a target. You know, if the United States, we could probably hit anywhere in the world with a fair notice that war is changing. And we see that in Iran, for instance, where, yeah, five years ago we could have sunk Iran's navy and air force and probably opened up the Strait of Hormuz. But it's very different now because we live in a world where there's asymmetric warfare, where very cheap drones that. And I think people need to remember when we talk about these drones, they're not the drones you fly in your backyard. They're the size of kind of Cessna aircraft that they can mass produce. You know, just basically launching one drone can close the Strait of Hormuz. We're in a different world now. I never imagined that we would find American troops being bombed and being unable to intercept with 100 capability, the ballistic missiles coming in. Do you think from what you've seen, is the United states prepared for 21st century warfare? And if not, which I assume is probably going to be what you say, what, what do we need to do to get there to understand what's happening here, how we can continue to stay on top in war.
- [11:19]
C
So we're seeing this in Iran today. I mean, soldiers are dying this week. It's tragic, unfortunately. But we've been told over and over again that we've completely destroyed and complete victory. And Iran has no air force and they're still killing our troops with their missiles and with their drones. So no, clearly we're not prepared as much as we should be. I'm actually an advisor for an air defense company that has a new technology to shoot projectiles to take down drones. Cause there's so many of these things. It's still air power. I mean we're air power guys. It's still kinetic effects from the air, but you can build lots and lots and thousands of them for probably two zeros less than the cost of a Tomahawk. You mentioned the Thaad missile. That thing is millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars of takedown one of these ballistic missiles. So the, the thing that drones do is it's proliferation. It's like mass numbers of bombs coming at you at the same time. And if you take down 90%, which the Ukrainians have gotten very good, there's, there's some interesting reasons why they've gotten really good at taking down the Shahed drones, these Iranian drones. But like I said, the ballistics are problems. So the drones just allow mass numbers of bombs to go. And I visited the Ukrainian, kind of like their mit, their air university, you know, their aerospace engineering university, that they are smart, they are innovative. And a couple years ago we wouldn't give them ATACMs or Tomahawks or Jasmine cruise missiles. Now they're building their own and all of Russia is on fire. Like the Amazon factories, if you've seen that, or there's like miles and miles of huge black smoke, like many percent of their refining capacity has been destroyed by Ukrainian drones. And Russia has great surface air missiles. You know, I mean we as Air Force pilots, we trained against SA10s and SA8s and SA whatever. They're all Russian surface air missiles. Well, they're not defending Russia right now. They're, they're, they're taking out, you know, refining capacity mostly, but they're also the, they need to take out the manufacturing capacity for these ballistic missiles because they can't defend against the missiles. They, they need to stop them before they're built. So it's an interesting, interesting change in war.
- [13:33]
B
Yeah. And it's all about saturating air defense.
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C
Right.
- [13:36]
B
If you send 500 drones, you saturate air defense, you sneak a couple cruise missiles in, maybe try to get a blue on blue at some point. And you know, and, and, and that's a big concern. The other thing I, I, I'm curious about, I wonder if you have any thoughts on this is like, I don't know how frontline warfare works anymore. Yeah, you know, Ukraine has expanded their mid range drone strike capacity to be able to, yes, you have the tactical so we can hit with a first person view drone, a dude on the front line, but also now within a couple hundred kilometers, the truck coming to resupply them or the train coming to resupply the trucks. But on front lines, I mean it really comes down to who has the most mass they can put against the other side. Even on these kind of short range drones. I don't know how frontline warfare can work anymore.
- [14:26]
C
I think it's completely different. The kill zone is something like 50 kilometers. So you know, if you get within miles or dozens of miles of the front line, you might get shot. They are killed by one of these FPV first person view drones. It's like a video game. You fly it and it instead of being radio controlled, which could be jammed, they have fiber optic cables and these cables go off for tens of kilometers. The Chinese make it, by the way, the Chinese are enabling all of this warfare from Russia. So sanctions is probably maybe the foundation of what we should be doing. Not only against Russia, of course, but against third party country sanctions like Kazakhstan and Turkey and all these, and China especially, but that's a different thing. The front line is like World War I trench warfare. Now one of the guys on the board of this company that I'm on, retired army general, he wrote, I think it's a genius paper and the title of the paper was Drones aren't the future of warfare. They're the problem that needs to be solved. And In World War I we had trench warfare, right. And everybody was like cavalry. There's no more maneuver warfare. You just need to build up a bigger trench and hold your line. And things didn't move in Europe for years. And then came the tank. And all of a sudden the tank could just, you know, the machine guns weren't killing it and maneuver warfare came back and then came air power. Right. And so right now drones are king. But imagine if you had like massive proliferation of anti drone devices that could shoot them all down. Then, then the troops could come out of the trenches and then the tanks could go. So we'll See where it goes. But right now, the front lines are stopped. And if you look at the line, you know, you've seen this. There's the front line for, like, years. It's moved less than 1% of Ukrainian territory, like a few tenths of a percentage. It just doesn't move. The Russians are taking over a thousand casualties a day. It's insane. It's insane. Over a thousand casualties every day. And this isn't just Ukrainian numbers. This is the British, my six numbers. These are like, even the American Defense Department is largely agreeing with these numbers. They're taking huge casualties.
- [16:32]
B
Unbelievable. Now, okay, so I want to kind of close on the area of corruption. And you talked about there is corruption in Ukraine, there's corruption in Russia. I would argue probably most countries have a level of corruption. Ukraine is making an effort to tamp down on corruption. When you come out of the Soviet mindset where, you know, everybody. And this is kind of the warning against communism, quite honestly, is this idea that, you know, everybody gets the same, but then one person takes a little more, and so everybody thinks they have to take a little more to get their piece, and then people are left with nothing. And then you end up with this whole wealth class that makes capitalism look like the most fairest system in comparison to how communism actually works. But, you know, Ukraine, obviously, coming out of that, they have their own issues they've dealt with. But I would argue right now that there is no country as corrupt as the United States of America. And the difference here is whether it's Latin America, whether it's Eastern Europe, Western Europe, wherever. When there is corruption, it's hidden. And it's usually when a person comes out of office that you find out that. That they stole money from the government or they had these shell corporations and. And moved money here and there. This. What this president is doing is out in the open. And it's so out in the open and so in your face that it feels overwhelming or unbelievable. I think part of what he does is it is so obviously corrupt that people have to assume it's not corrupt, because there's no way somebody would do that. So out in the open. Give me your thoughts on where we sit right now in this country, on corruption, what needs to be done to hold people accountable to this? And do you think we can ever get back to a system that, you know, actually punishes this again?
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C
Right. Remember drain the swamp? That was Trump. Like, Trump won Drain the swamp. I actually have a copy of that. That speech that he gave where he first said Drain the swap. It was in Pennsylvania. And so I started a list. I have this long Google Doc with just all the different corruption. And I want to do a series called the Daily Swamp, where you just talk about a little this one corruption issue. Because there's so much. Steve Bannon's technique of flooding the zone. It works. There's so much of it. And, you know, there's a reason why we have the most prosperous nation in human history. It's. Because we're a nation of laws. It's. We're a nation of, like, people know that they can invest their money in America and it won't be corrupt. They don't have to, like, pay off the local, whatever, you know, money to do it. And, of course, that happens every once in a while. Senator Menendez in New Jersey, the congresswoman down in Florida who was taking money from COVID government funds. It happens. It's dealt with. But.
- [19:13]
B
And it's punished.
- [19:14]
C
And it's punished. But now Trump owns the Department of Justice. Now Trump owns the Security and Exchange Commission. And Democrats and Republicans normally at least tried, for the most part, to govern properly. And, you know, they disagreed on tax rates and EPA standards, but they tried to, you know, do the right thing. All that is completely out the window. And the. The corruption, like, that's kind of the foundation. And if it feels like every day there's a sledgehammer going against the foundation of America, but, man, if we become a corrupt nation, the lettuce. I'm not sure when this is going to air, but lettuce is the issue du jour. And it just came out. I think it was on your show.
- [19:56]
B
If I.
- [19:56]
C
If I remember yesterday, the. The guy gave a million dollars, and then all of a sudden, the lettuce is not the problem or whatever. This MAGA Inc. Is a super PAC, first of all. Super PACs need to go. That was one of my. One of my things as a congressman, one of my platforms. But, you know, the east wing of the ballroom or now these trillionaires want to put money in these accounts for kids. A thousand dollars, a new baby gets in a thousand dollars thing. It's not okay when companies are paying for what the government should be paying for, because then they're going to expect to get something in return. It's like corruption in the open. And this is something I'd love to see. And we've talked about this. I'd love to see you do Project 2029. Like, what are Democrats going to do? And you've talked about this. Recently. And one of the things, Democrats can have power today if they say, hey, any country that bribes the president with a new airplane for, for example, we're going to remember that and you're going to pay a price. Any company that is sending millions of dollars to these, you know, corrupt, influencing Trump thing, we're going to remember that any of these corrupt people, if you, if you're, if you have them on your board of directors, you're not going to have business with the Pentagon. We can tell them like right now it's all fun and games. We used to say it's all fun and games until someone loses their PQ pilot qualifications. It's all fun and games until once we get in power we're going to remember this stuff. And I think Democrats, if they, if they had, you know what, they could actually start to influence this stuff because we got to stop it, man. It's the rot needs to be stopped. If you got a weed in your yard, you got to pull that weed out. If you don't, it's going to take over your whole yard. So it's time to start pulling the weeds out now.
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B
I think it is. And here's my frustration with the Democrats is with what's going on right now. I've watched, I watched their hearings with Hegseth, I watched their hearings with Blanche and look, I was a congressman. I get it. Every one of them, when they ask their questions, they want to have their YouTube moment, they want to give their speech, they want to talk about how Hegseth is doing this and their constituents, X, Y and Z. And there is no consistency. It is a separate five minute question session for each one. Why is Jon Ossoff been so effective? Not because he's a great speaker. He's been effective because he asks a question and he lets the other guy answer that because he knows he can't answer it. I've watched Democrats take, come after John Ossoff did his thing and then start with this whole new pet issue about I have a constituent in my district that tried to buy a gun, you know, and it's like you guys get your plan together and now the Democrats are faced with their own. I don't know if I'll call it a Tea Party moment or whatever where there's this very far left, I mean, Hassan Piker shows up wearing a Chairman Mao outfit the other day, literally, and talking about the brilliance, the values of communism. And it's like, guys, don't feed into the lies that the Republicans are telling about you like, this needs to be a moment at least now where Democrats can come together, have a big tent, realize that you've got to beat the Republicans or these folks will stay in power. And I'm going to be like, if they win again and Democrats don't get their act together, we have to take over the Democratic Party or do something because it's unacceptable. You, you ran for Congress as a Democrat, as a moderate Democrat. Talk about your experience in that.
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C
Yeah, it was, you know, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I'm really glad I did it.
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B
I loved it.
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C
The money sucks. A lot of the Democratic Party really came after me. It felt like anybody's attacking a virus. And I wasn't promoting anything radical. I'm a very middle class guy. My platform was the playing field has been tilted and tilted in favor of big corporations and billionaires away from the working class. Guys, guys. And so let's level the playing field. That was kind of my platform. But the what I think's going to happen, Adam, and this is a real problem. Democrats are going to win in November. They may not win the Senate, especially now with Platner. We'll see. Democrats are going to win in November and they're going to pat themselves on the back and say how great we are. Well, you're not great. Like if you look at the polls, people really don't like the Democratic Party. They really don't like the Republican Party. And I think there's more anger against them than there is us. But this is a moment like if we get back to that kind of lbj, jfk, let's be the party of work, middle class. My a strong and growing middle class. That was my like saying, if we can become that party, we would be kicking ass. We'd be winning elections 2 thirds to 1 third. But we seem to be. That's not where the vibe and the extremists is not there for sure. And that's the problem with partisan primaries. Republican, there's a lot. There are normal Republicans, the ones who vote in the primaries want Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. And the Democrats, the ones who vote in primary want, you know, not what most people between the 40 yard lines want. So we need to do the party of mom and dad taking their kids to Little League, wanting to have, you know, a better life for their kids and only require one job to raise a family, not three. And if that happens, we're going to win. But man, there's a lot of wins against it. So I hope people like you can. And the big. You said the word Big ten. For me, it was always big tent. Like the little niche Democratic clubs that you get are great. I love these people, they're wonderful. But that's not mom and dad taking their kids to Little League, Right? So we really need to have the big tent. And there are disaffectors like you and Liz Janney and me, and people who, you know, they just really can't stand what's going on with Trump. Let's welcome them in and let's grow a bigger coalition. And the kind of Democrat that wins in Houston, Texas, my district was all the refineries. We literally one of the highest output districts in the country because of all the refineries and chemical plants. This Mexican gentleman who was just murdered by ICE was in the district I ran in. You need a certain kind of Democrat to win there, win in Kansas, win in Wyoming. That's a different kind of Democrat than who's going to win in New York City and in San Francisco. And that's fine. You know, let's have a bait, let's have a wine bell curve for the Democratic Party. But my fear is that we win in November and we think we were great and then we lose in 2028. So we gotta, we need to have a debrief and we need to have, like, honesty with the American people. I, that we never had a debrief after Joe Biden lost. Democrats never said, man, everybody knows how bad Trump sucks. And we still lost. And like we, we told you, Joe Biden wasn't too old. Guess what? He was too old. We, we, we were wrong. We told you if you're against immigration, you're a racist. Well, all of South Texas voted for Donald Trump and It's a totally 90% Hispanic. You know, Latino communities, they all voted for Trump not because they're racist, because they didn't want people pouring across the border illegally. So I think the Democratic Party needs to have a honest debrief and I think they'll do very well. So we'll see, we'll see where that can go. Hopefully you can have some influence there.
- [26:57]
B
You too, man. Well, listen, Terry, it was great chatting with you. Everybody down to earth with Terry Verts on substack. He'll be sitting in. When I'm traveling and can't do the news, he'll be the news guy. And dude, it was good talking to you. I hope you have a good day, ma'.
- [27:11]
C
Am. Awesome. Thanks for having me on.
- [27:12]
B
Yep, you bet. Take care, everybody. We'll catch you next time.