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At Ease: Marcus Luttrell and other special ops soldiers sound off

April 01, 2015
Staff

WRITER

The Glenn Beck program aired a unique special last night featuring four former spec op soldiers, some lawn chairs, a bucket of beer and some microphones. This is simply something you don’t get to see every day - elite American soldiers sounding off on the VA, ISIS and more.

Watch a preview below - TheBlaze TV subscribers can watch the full episode on demand HERE.

Pete: How do you guys feel about Iraq right now? I mean, we all fought there. We all lost friends there. How do you feel about watching basically everything we fought for just—?

Marcus: Is it still there?

Paul: You’ve got to go get an x-ray. If you x-ray it off of your body, does that count that you have it?

Chad: I asked him if I could do a hostage picture with a newspaper behind the missing leg. Here’s the date, the leg’s gone.

Marcus: I didn’t lose it. It’s not like I misplaced my leg.

Chad: Anybody that served in Iraq called it. I mean, why do you have all these brilliant military minds that you’ve chosen to promote to four-star general and admiral and all that stuff, and then you discount everything that they tell you about how to fight a war? So, you decide to pull out early so that you can make political gains, and this is what you’re going to get.

Paul: No, the colonels were telling everybody, and then they got out. Then the people that went lockstep with them for the majority, the guys that went lockstep in that mentality of just whatever, those are the ones that are the four-star admirals and generals.

Marcus: That is a bit baffling. I mean, you don’t join the military and get elected or appointed straight to general or admiral.

Chad: Everybody called this.

Paul: You know, it’s hard to even care. If no one else does, then just don’t put our troops there.

Chad: Look at two of the top commanders in ISIS, they were former Republican Guard Colonels for Saddam, you know? So, now you’ve got these guys who actually were trained at some point in time in the United States leading the biggest terrorist organization in the history of the modern world.

Paul: I think it would be a lot easier for me to care about it, and maybe you guys feel different, but it would be a lot easier for me to care about it if when you watch 70 guys that are crossing across to go fight ISIS and 700 military-age men are cheering them on, I’d stop and be like, “Hey, man, get in.” When they care, then maybe we should care a little more. That was the disconnect when we were over there going FID and everything else.

Marcus: Look, here’s the deal, man. They’re not stupid. So, every time they do something and we talk about it like hey, we’re discussing this, we disagree with what you’re doing. You disagree with somebody getting strung up, heads cut off and burned. I’m sure they really care about the fact that we disagree with them over here. That means absolutely nothing. I mean, the only way you handle a terrorist, and it should go for over here as well—we’re not talking about a criminal. Somebody breaks the law, yeah, you put them through the justice system, and then you put them in prison and let them do their time. We’re talking about a terrorist, somebody who is trying to eradicate or destroy and kill multiple people. You kill them right there. It’s right there.

Pete: Lawrence of Arabia, what he said, you know, an opinion can be argued with, but a conviction is best shot.

Marcus: What are they afraid of? Why would they be afraid of us?

Paul: President Obama.

Pete: They’re afraid of the six [indiscernible] a day. I mean, that’s just a devastating show of force.

Chad: I mean, if you want to talk about a leader, look at King Abdullah. You’re going to burn my guy, let me put on my flight suit. I’m about to get in my Cobra.

Paul: That’s his lineage. That’s where he came from. I wouldn’t expect any of our politicians, but at least let the guys that would jock up and go over there and hand somebody their…you know, let them do it.

Marcus: That female prisoner there, the terrorist, you better get your prayers in, because it’s going to be ending tomorrow.

Chad: Yeah, but instead we’re alienating the only ally, the true ally that we’ve had for, you know, the Israelis, you know? I mean, you want to go down that road.

Pete: I mean, at what point, you guys watched the whole Arab Spring go, rolled right across northern Africa into Syria. At what point do you just have to stop and go, “Are we intentionally aiding?” Are we letting this happen for a reason? I mean, because we’ve done absolutely nothing, and we’ve watched all of—and you knew what was going to happen in Egypt. It wasn’t like…they were like, “Oh, there’s going to be democracy and democratic elections.” You have the Muslim Brotherhood stepping up across the board.

Marcus: I get the perspective from what a lot of those people are saying that they don’t want to put boots. I get it, man. Why are you going to send us over there? The America soldiers, why are you going to send them over there? Why? To die. It’s going to happen. Soldiers die. We get paid. It’s a part of it, man. We get it. That’s not a problem with us. The issue is not a problem of us wanting to go. We’ll go, but why? So, it’s to secure what, nothing? Okay. You’ve got to have a reason.

People are dying. Yeah, people are dying, man. People die all the time. People have been dying over there for thousands of years, man. I mean, if you’re going to give a reason and have all the American public sign off on it and say yeah, it’s worth my boy going over there to die in a foreign land against a foreign land kind of deal, right?

Pete: I’m just saying an action across the board, not just military action. I’m not just saying military action, but look across action, any kind of action, sanctions. I mean, let’s just take it from a bigger picture. What did we really do? It’s like football. You build momentum, right? They have momentum right now. How do you take care? I mean, there’s one side of it where you say okay, if you walk into your kitchen, you turn on the lights, and there’s a bunch of cockroaches, do you walk in the next day, turn on the lights, and kill a couple cockroaches or do you turn the lights down, let all the cockroaches show up and then kill them in the dark?

Paul: They don’t scatter when you turn the light on. These cockroaches stay right there, and they “Here we are.” You’re right in one sense, Marcus, I think, but what do we stand for? I don’t know if I could walk into any military anywhere and say, “What does America right now in the world stand for?”

Chad: What was the statistic you gave earlier, the 27% or something?

Paul : In the Military Times, I think it was right before or right after Hagel was fired or quit or whatever happened there, they did a poll of the senior leadership, the junior people in the military. When you say senior leadership, I would presume that’s the O-6 and above level, and when they polled, they probably polled the E-5 and below, the E-5 Mafia down. They asked them, they said well, “Do you have confidence in your senior leadership?” Twenty-seven percent confidence. What’s Congress at? If you’re parallel with Congress, you’re in trouble.

Pete: Number one priority at Naval Academy, what would you imagine it would be just common sense? Like creating officers to fight and win a war?

Paul: Social engineering.

Pete: No, their number one priority is diversity above everything else at the Naval Academy. I don’t care how well you could lead. If we’re diverse, then we’re winning.

Marcus: Never had to question why I was doing something. It was because you were there. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m here. If everybody leaves, okay, I’ll go too, man, but if you’re going, I’m going—you jump, I jump kind of deal. Maybe an ignorant mentality, but it’s what keeps us alive.

Paul: But with phones and media and all the things and breakdown of leadership and unlawful command influence that happens constantly, which is, you know, it’s a horrible thing that when senior commanders are telling like the guy that had the counterterrorism—I hate to just throw it out, but the guy that was at West Point that taught the counterterrorism course that mentioned radical Islam and all that and then the secretary or the chief of staff of the army ended up getting involved. You remember all this? He ended up getting involved in this. Basically he’s a light colonel or a full-bird colonel, and they trashed his career because all the pressure from above, and you can’t say Islam when you’re talking about terrorism.

Marcus: Islam is the last thing you need to worry about me calling you.

Pau;: Yeah, right?

Marcus: I just say it how it is, man. That’s straight up.

Pete: But don’t you think it’s kind of scary that we’re not even acknowledging that it’s radical Islam, that it’s just extremism? Because to me that scares me domestically, because then, okay, if we’re going to battle extremists, well then you can make anybody an extremist. You’re a right-wing extremist. That to me scares me coming back, like we’re just battling extremists, so now hey, there you go.

Marcus: You know how hard that is for these younger kids, not us, not what we were in, these younger kids having to fight an ideologue? They’re not fighting a uniform. If I look at somebody, I can’t tell if he’s extremist or not.

Chad: It’s lack of knowledge. It’s lack of experience. Everybody sitting here has seen that airplane land in a combat zone and congressmen and senators and representatives get off, and they’re surrounded by PSD.

Pete: The 30th of the month, and then they stay until like the first or the second so they get two months tax-free.

Chad: They get two months tax-free, and then they stay for 45 minutes to an hour. They get back on the plane, and they leave. Then the first thing they do when they get home is they say I just returned from a war zone. It’s like no, you didn’t. You want to go to a war zone? Get in this truck with me. Hop in the truck. Jump in this truck and let me see what your pucker factor does.

Pete: Take your bloody cammies off. Put your nice cammies on.

Marcus: You spent all those months growing that beard out, and oh, you need to shave for the day. What?

Paul: Have you seen this?

The double standard behind the White House outrage

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

Presidents have altered the White House for decades, yet only Donald Trump is treated as a vandal for privately funding the East Wing’s restoration.

Every time a president so much as changes the color of the White House drapes, the press clutches its pearls. Unless the name on the stationery is Barack Obama’s, even routine restoration becomes a national outrage.

President Donald Trump’s decision to privately fund upgrades to the White House — including a new state ballroom — has been met with the usual chorus of gasps and sneers. You’d think he bulldozed Monticello.

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s ‘visionary.’

The irony is that presidents have altered and expanded the White House for more than a century. President Franklin D. Roosevelt added the East and West Wings in the middle of the Great Depression. Newspapers accused him of building a palace while Americans stood in breadlines. History now calls it “vision.”

First lady Nancy Reagan faced the same hysteria. Headlines accused her of spending taxpayer money on new china “while Americans starved.” In truth, she raised private funds after learning that the White House didn’t have enough matching plates for state dinners. She took the ridicule and refused to pass blame.

“I’m a big girl,” she told her staff. “This comes with the job.” That was dignity — something the press no longer recognizes.

A restoration, not a renovation

Trump’s project is different in every way that should matter. It costs taxpayers nothing. Not a cent. The president and a few friends privately fund the work. There’s no private pool or tennis court, no personal perks. The additions won’t even be completed until after he leaves office.

What’s being built is not indulgence — it’s stewardship. A restoration of aging rooms, worn fixtures, and century-old bathrooms that no longer function properly in the people’s house. Trump has paid for cast brass doorknobs engraved with the presidential seal, restored the carpets and moldings, and ensured that the architecture remains faithful to history.

The media’s response was mockery and accusations of vanity. They call it “grotesque excess,” while celebrating billion-dollar “climate art” projects and funneling hundreds of millions into activist causes like the No Kings movement. They lecture America on restraint while living off the largesse of billionaires.

The selective guardians of history

Where was this sudden reverence for history when rioters torched St. John’s Church — the same church where every president since James Madison has worshipped? The press called it an “expression of grief.”

Where was that reverence when mobs toppled statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant? Or when first lady Melania Trump replaced the Rose Garden’s lawn with a patio but otherwise followed Jackie Kennedy’s original 1962 plans in the garden’s restoration? They called that “desecration.”

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s “visionary.”

The real desecration

The people shrieking about “historic preservation” care nothing for history. They hate the idea that something lasting and beautiful might be built by hands they despise. They mock craftsmanship because it exposes their own cultural decay.

The White House ballroom is not a scandal — it’s a mirror. And what it reflects is the media’s own pettiness. The ruling class that ridicules restoration is the same class that cheered as America’s monuments fell. Its members sneer at permanence because permanence condemns them.

Julia Beverly / Contributor | Getty Images

Trump’s improvements are an act of faith — in the nation’s symbols, its endurance, and its worth. The outrage over a privately funded renovation says less about him than it does about the journalists who mistake destruction for progress.

The real desecration isn’t happening in the East Wing. It’s happening in the newsrooms that long ago tore up their own foundation — truth — and never bothered to rebuild it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A new Monroe Doctrine? Trump quietly redraws the Western map

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

The president’s moves in Venezuela, Guyana, and Colombia aren’t about drugs. They’re about re-establishing America’s sovereignty across the Western Hemisphere.

For decades, we’ve been told America’s wars are about drugs, democracy, or “defending freedom.” But look closer at what’s unfolding off the coast of Venezuela, and you’ll see something far more strategic taking shape. Donald Trump’s so-called drug war isn’t about fentanyl or cocaine. It’s about control — and a rebirth of American sovereignty.

The aim of Trump’s ‘drug war’ is to keep the hemisphere’s oil, minerals, and manufacturing within the Western family and out of Beijing’s hands.

The president understands something the foreign policy class forgot long ago: The world doesn’t respect apologies. It respects strength.

While the global elites in Davos tout the Great Reset, Trump is building something entirely different — a new architecture of power based on regional independence, not global dependence. His quiet campaign in the Western Hemisphere may one day be remembered as the second Monroe Doctrine.

Venezuela sits at the center of it all. It holds the world’s largest crude oil reserves — oil perfectly suited for America’s Gulf refineries. For years, China and Russia have treated Venezuela like a pawn on their chessboard, offering predatory loans in exchange for control of those resources. The result has been a corrupt, communist state sitting in our own back yard. For too long, Washington shrugged. Not any more.The naval exercises in the Caribbean, the sanctions, the patrols — they’re not about drug smugglers. They’re about evicting China from our hemisphere.

Trump is using the old “drug war” playbook to wage a new kind of war — an economic and strategic one — without firing a shot at our actual enemies. The goal is simple: Keep the hemisphere’s oil, minerals, and manufacturing within the Western family and out of Beijing’s hands.

Beyond Venezuela

Just east of Venezuela lies Guyana, a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map a year ago. Then ExxonMobil struck oil, and suddenly Guyana became the newest front in a quiet geopolitical contest. Washington is helping defend those offshore platforms, build radar systems, and secure undersea cables — not for charity, but for strategy. Control energy, data, and shipping lanes, and you control the future.

Moreover, Colombia — a country once defined by cartels — is now positioned as the hinge between two oceans and two continents. It guards the Panama Canal and sits atop rare-earth minerals every modern economy needs. Decades of American presence there weren’t just about cocaine interdiction; they were about maintaining leverage over the arteries of global trade. Trump sees that clearly.

PEDRO MATTEY / Contributor | Getty Images

All of these recent news items — from the military drills in the Caribbean to the trade negotiations — reflect a new vision of American power. Not global policing. Not endless nation-building. It’s about strategic sovereignty.

It’s the same philosophy driving Trump’s approach to NATO, the Middle East, and Asia. We’ll stand with you — but you’ll stand on your own two feet. The days of American taxpayers funding global security while our own borders collapse are over.

Trump’s Monroe Doctrine

Critics will call it “isolationism.” It isn’t. It’s realism. It’s recognizing that America’s strength comes not from fighting other people’s wars but from securing our own energy, our own supply lines, our own hemisphere. The first Monroe Doctrine warned foreign powers to stay out of the Americas. The second one — Trump’s — says we’ll defend them, but we’ll no longer be their bank or their babysitter.

Historians may one day mark this moment as the start of a new era — when America stopped apologizing for its own interests and started rebuilding its sovereignty, one barrel, one chip, and one border at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Antifa isn’t “leaderless” — It’s an organized machine of violence

Jeff J Mitchell / Staff | Getty Images

The mob rises where men of courage fall silent. The lesson from Portland, Chicago, and other blue cities is simple: Appeasing radicals doesn’t buy peace — it only rents humiliation.

Parts of America, like Portland and Chicago, now resemble occupied territory. Progressive city governments have surrendered control to street militias, leaving citizens, journalists, and even federal officers to face violent anarchists without protection.

Take Portland, where Antifa has terrorized the city for more than 100 consecutive nights. Federal officers trying to keep order face nightly assaults while local officials do nothing. Independent journalists, such as Nick Sortor, have even been arrested for documenting the chaos. Sortor and Blaze News reporter Julio Rosas later testified at the White House about Antifa’s violence — testimony that corporate media outlets buried.

Antifa is organized, funded, and emboldened.

Chicago offers the same grim picture. Federal agents have been stalked, ambushed, and denied backup from local police while under siege from mobs. Calls for help went unanswered, putting lives in danger. This is more than disorder; it is open defiance of federal authority and a violation of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

A history of violence

For years, the legacy media and left-wing think tanks have portrayed Antifa as “decentralized” and “leaderless.” The opposite is true. Antifa is organized, disciplined, and well-funded. Groups like Rose City Antifa in Oregon, the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club in Texas, and Jane’s Revenge operate as coordinated street militias. Legal fronts such as the National Lawyers Guild provide protection, while crowdfunding networks and international supporters funnel money directly to the movement.

The claim that Antifa lacks structure is a convenient myth — one that’s cost Americans dearly.

History reminds us what happens when mobs go unchecked. The French Revolution, Weimar Germany, Mao’s Red Guards — every one began with chaos on the streets. But it wasn’t random. Today’s radicals follow the same playbook: Exploit disorder, intimidate opponents, and seize moral power while the state looks away.

Dismember the dragon

The Trump administration’s decision to designate Antifa a domestic terrorist organization was long overdue. The label finally acknowledged what citizens already knew: Antifa functions as a militant enterprise, recruiting and radicalizing youth for coordinated violence nationwide.

But naming the threat isn’t enough. The movement’s financiers, organizers, and enablers must also face justice. Every dollar that funds Antifa’s destruction should be traced, seized, and exposed.

AFP Contributor / Contributor | Getty Images

This fight transcends party lines. It’s not about left versus right; it’s about civilization versus anarchy. When politicians and judges excuse or ignore mob violence, they imperil the republic itself. Americans must reject silence and cowardice while street militias operate with impunity.

Antifa is organized, funded, and emboldened. The violence in Portland and Chicago is deliberate, not spontaneous. If America fails to confront it decisively, the price won’t just be broken cities — it will be the erosion of the republic itself.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

URGENT: Supreme Court case could redefine religious liberty

Drew Angerer / Staff | Getty Images

The state is effectively silencing professionals who dare speak truths about gender and sexuality, redefining faith-guided speech as illegal.

This week, free speech is once again on the line before the U.S. Supreme Court. At stake is whether Americans still have the right to talk about faith, morality, and truth in their private practice without the government’s permission.

The case comes out of Colorado, where lawmakers in 2019 passed a ban on what they call “conversion therapy.” The law prohibits licensed counselors from trying to change a minor’s gender identity or sexual orientation, including their behaviors or gender expression. The law specifically targets Christian counselors who serve clients attempting to overcome gender dysphoria and not fall prey to the transgender ideology.

The root of this case isn’t about therapy. It’s about erasing a worldview.

The law does include one convenient exception. Counselors are free to “assist” a person who wants to transition genders but not someone who wants to affirm their biological sex. In other words, you can help a child move in one direction — one that is in line with the state’s progressive ideology — but not the other.

Think about that for a moment. The state is saying that a counselor can’t even discuss changing behavior with a client. Isn’t that the whole point of counseling?

One‑sided freedom

Kaley Chiles, a licensed professional counselor in Colorado Springs, has been one of the victims of this blatant attack on the First Amendment. Chiles has dedicated her practice to helping clients dealing with addiction, trauma, sexuality struggles, and gender dysphoria. She’s also a Christian who serves patients seeking guidance rooted in biblical teaching.

Before 2019, she could counsel minors according to her faith. She could talk about biblical morality, identity, and the path to wholeness. When the state outlawed that speech, she stopped. She followed the law — and then she sued.

Her case, Chiles v. Salazar, is now before the Supreme Court. Justices heard oral arguments on Tuesday. The question: Is counseling a form of speech or merely a government‑regulated service?

If the court rules the wrong way, it won’t just silence therapists. It could muzzle pastors, teachers, parents — anyone who believes in truth grounded in something higher than the state.

Censored belief

I believe marriage between a man and a woman is ordained by God. I believe that family — mother, father, child — is central to His design for humanity.

I believe that men and women are created in God’s image, with divine purpose and eternal worth. Gender isn’t an accessory; it’s part of who we are.

I believe the command to “be fruitful and multiply” still stands, that the power to create life is sacred, and that it belongs within marriage between a man and a woman.

And I believe that when we abandon these principles — when we treat sex as recreation, when we dissolve families, when we forget our vows — society fractures.

Are those statements controversial now? Maybe. But if this case goes against Chiles, those statements and others could soon be illegal to say aloud in public.

Faith on trial

In Colorado today, a counselor cannot sit down with a 15‑year‑old who’s struggling with gender identity and say, “You were made in God’s image, and He does not make mistakes.” That is now considered hate speech.

That’s the “freedom” the modern left is offering — freedom to affirm, but never to question. Freedom to comply, but never to dissent. The same movement that claims to champion tolerance now demands silence from anyone who disagrees. The root of this case isn’t about therapy. It’s about erasing a worldview.

The real test

No matter what happens at the Supreme Court, we cannot stop speaking the truth. These beliefs aren’t political slogans. For me, they are the product of years of wrestling, searching, and learning through pain and grace what actually leads to peace. For us, they are the fundamental principles that lead to a flourishing life. We cannot balk at standing for truth.

Maybe that’s why God allows these moments — moments when believers are pushed to the wall. They force us to ask hard questions: What is true? What is worth standing for? What is worth dying for — and living for?

If we answer those questions honestly, we’ll find not just truth, but freedom.

The state doesn’t grant real freedom — and it certainly isn’t defined by Colorado legislators. Real freedom comes from God. And the day we forget that, the First Amendment will mean nothing at all.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.