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Joe Rogan Talks to Kash Patel, Director of the FBI

Editorial — Barry MacDonald

Alongside talk radio and Substack, an army of podcasters has risen to challenge and counter the preeminence of the mainstream media. Ordinary Americans who thirst for a more balanced and trustworthy presentation of events may turn to a multitude of informed and patriotic podcasters for daily commentary.

A most highly rated podcaster is Joe Rogan. In the Joe Rogan Experience, #2334 Episode, he interviewed Kash Patel, the current Director of the FBI. The following are bullet points taken from their conversation. A full video of their discussion is available on YouTube.

• Kash Patel cites U.S. government statistics. He says that in previous years 100,000 people were dying of drug overdoses a year — one every seven minutes. A child was being raped every six and a half minutes in America. There were two homicides an hour.
• The precursors for the production of fentanyl comes from the Communist Chinese Party. There are hundreds of companies “standing up” in mainland China that ship the precursors throughout the world. The Chinese claim that they don’t make fentanyl, but they manufacture the ingredients and move them to Mexico. Patel’s FBI has organized a massive enterprise to go after the fentanyl precursor companies in mainland China. The Chinese are shipping precursors to India and Canada as well as Mexico to have the drugs assembled. Because the Trump Administration closed the southern border, the ingredients are flown to Vancouver, manufactured there, and smuggled into America from the North.
• There aren’t deaths from fentanyl in China, India, England, Australia, New Zealand, or Canada. Patel asserts that the Chinese view America as an adversary. The Chinese long-term game is to “kneecap” the U.S., to take out generations of young men and women who would grow up to be soldiers, police, or teachers. There is not much profit in the fentanyl business for the Chinese. Their goal is to kill Americans.
• The Trump Administration is taking an “all-of-government” approach to fentanyl. The FBI is working with the Secretary of the Treasury to apply sanctions to the production companies. The FBI is cooperating with Five Eyes partners, the English-speaking countries of Canada, America, England, New Zealand, and Australia. The U.S. shares intelligence with them. Patel reminds U.S. partners that “The CCP just hasn’t directed it at you yet.” Fentanyl isn’t being deployed in their countries, but it is being manufactured there. Patel wants those factories shut down. There has not been a reduction in the amount of fentanyl precursors that China makes, but the Trump administration is crushing fentanyl trafficking. China is adapting. They seek other ways into American besides the southern border. Patel promises that “we will not have kids dying of fentanyl overdoses in our streets. . . . Just give me a little bit more time.”
• In Patel’s own words: “They [the manufacturers] are so demonic in their ways. . . . Once they get the precursors from the CCP, they take their pill presses and they make fake oxycodone. . . . make tens of thousands of pills of fake oxycodone and we bust them for it. And in that fake pill is fentanyl. It’s laced with fentanyl that kills people. . . . Then the drug trafficking organizations make it appealing for the youth, shape this illicit narcotic in the form of candy and gummy bears. So you have kids in New York who just have a trace amount, touch it, and are also dying from it. . . . So, they have absolutely no rules or boundaries whatsoever when it comes to how they deploy fentanyl to get into our population. It could be through another drug. It could be through a synthetic. It could be through a fake drug . . . . Thousands of pounds of material that looks like candy. . . . It just looks appealing to kids, right? So inner-city youth, they put a pill down on the table, put a gummy bear down on the table. You know, a younger person’s going to be like, oh, that’s cool. Let me try that. I mean, I can tell you stories from now until the entire show. About high school kids on the verge of graduating. And they went out and took a pill that they thought was, you know, an upper. But it happened to be laced with fentanyl. They died. Their parents are calling. They’re destroyed. And people are like, well, we got to go after the drug traffickers. I’m like, we do, and we are. But my job is to educate the American public on the root cause of the fentanyl that is destroying our society.
• “I literally just got off the phone with the Indian government. I said, I need your help. This stuff’s coming into your country, and then they’re moving it from your country because India is not consuming fentanyl. They’re not. No one’s dying over there from fentanyl. But I need you and your help. So, my FBI is over there working with the heads of their government law enforcement authorities to say, we’re going to find these companies that buy it. And we’re going to shut them down. We’re going to sanction them. We’re going to arrest them where we can. We’re going to indict them in America if we can. We’re going to indict them in India if we can. Start indicting them in places like Canada and the UK and England and Australia. This is a global problem. And the reason it’s gotten so bad is because nobody did anything for four years. You know, people are like, how do they stand this up? Well, if you give the CCP [time], that has an endless amount of money to deploy in human capital, that’s what happens. It metastasizes.
• “Look, to me, I’m a National Security guy. And anything that kills 100,000 people a year is a National Security crisis, right? It’s what we call a tier one threat. And the last administration did not classify the drug trafficking enterprise as a prime threat against the American people. [the Biden Administration reoriented] the system of intelligence collection operations. . . . I’m not making this up. They said climate change is our biggest priority. DEI is our biggest priority. You guys have heard this, and you’ve had guests on that say it. But these are the ramifications in real life. I only have X amount of people that can target something, right? Same with the CIA, same with the DOD. But if the United States government and Uncle Sam and your commander in chief say, hey, I need your X amount of people looking here, I can’t clone that army to look back at fentanyl. Plus, we have to follow the chain of command.
• “So, I’ll give you a better example. So, I was in the end of the last Trump administration. I was Chief of Staff of the Department of Defense. One of the greatest jobs. At the time, I thought the greatest job I’d ever have. And when we left, we said [to the Biden Administration], hey, you know, Iran’s a huge threat. Never let up on the counterterrorism mission. We still have hostages out there we got to find and bring home. And the narcotics mission is a big priority. We handed off our playbook and we said, look, this is not a political issue. This is protecting the American people and our allies. So, we hope you guys continue this effort. So, the DOD has this thing called CONOPS, concept of operations. The Department of Defense has three million employees. And a CONOP is how you move the machine of the Department of Defense. Hey, we have a threat in [some part of the world]. How many carrier groups are we sending down there? We got a threat with government X. What are we doing operationally, kinetically? What are we doing for intelligence collection? That’s a CONOP. The first concept of operation that the Biden administration launched at the Department of Defense was on climate change.”
• [Rogan asks]: “What do you think that’s all about? As an outsider. . . I just don’t understand. Where’s the profit in this? . . . . What’s the motive? What would incentivize all these people to get on board with it without someone logically stepping in and saying, hey, this is not our top priority?”
• “So that was something I tried to answer when I was out of government for the last four years before I took this job. And the answer lay in the first Trump term. We were doing things so effectively on national security that hadn’t been done before. In such speed and volume that the media hated us for it because the other party had tried to do it and failed. So, when it comes to, okay, hostages, I could talk about that forever too. It used to be counterterrorism was a big portfolio. I ran it for the White House and National Security Council in the first Trump administration. . . . People don’t know this, President Trump in his first term brought home and rescued over 50 hostages and detainees from around the world. That’s more than every president before him combined.
• “Did you hear about the successes of reuniting families with lost loved ones from Africa and the Middle East, or these operations that the president was courageous enough to greenlight to go into places like Afghanistan, and do these hostage rescue ops and use SEAL Team 6 and Delta, or take out guys like Baghdadi and Soleimani? President Trump’s directive was simple. We are going to protect the homeland. We’re not going to endanger the lives of our armed forces and our intelligence community. But their job is to protect the homeland. And he said go. And we went. And I think there was such a resounding success that the media had such a hatred for President Trump and his administration. They just said, one, we’re not going to give you the credit, two, we’re going to put out a ton of disinformation, which we can get into. And three, [the Biden Administration] just said, and this is my opinion, we’re not going to do any of the stuff that worked because then we’ll have to attribute it to Trump’s policies. So, we’re going to go off on our end. And I keep asking people to prove me wrong.
• . . . . You had the Secretary of Defense in the Biden administration . . . go to a hospital, MIA, literally AWOL, and didn’t tell the commander in chief, and broke the National Command Authority. . . . And I was a guy responsible for the nuclear football for a part of my time at the White House. . . . There is an unbroken chain of command between President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, and the National Command Authority at all times because shit happens. And what if it had happened in that one or two weeks the guy was in the hospital, and maybe something did, and we don’t even know. Right. But no one, including the president, didn’t know the Secretary of Defense was in the hospital. I can’t tell you how big of a cataclysmic failure for the national security mission that is. And what I tell people when they’re like, that’s all right, it’s not that big of a deal. What if Hegseth [Secretary of DOD] took a week out and said, I’m going to the hospital, I’m not telling anyone. What do you think the media would do to that guy and Trump if that were to happen now? There’s a plan in place. Deputy Secretary of Defense comes in. You know, every time a senior goes out, there is a continuity of government plan in place. Oh, you’re out for a weekend treatment. No problem.”

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Alert Americans who paid attention to the mismanagement of the country surely suspected that the Biden Administration’s priorities were badly misplaced. To care more about climate change and DEI than the 100,000 Americans dying each year of fentanyl is a monstrous indictment. The spiteful hatred on the part of the Biden Administration and the media not to give the Trump Administration due credit for his national security accomplishments is another catastrophic moral failing. That Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, would go AWOL for two weeks is a black mark of fecklessness. The Democratic Party has sunk to a low, disreputable form of politics. It is difficult to see how they may regain their integrity with their present leaders.      *