STARRS Podcast
STARRS Podcasts includes the series STARRS & Stripes which interviews military veterans, talks about their careers and military service, and their concerns about what is happening in today's military. See our website, starrs.us, for more information.
STARRS Podcast
Mike Rose: Fighting for Justice and Integrity in the Military and Service Academies
In this episode of STARRS & Stripes, prepare to engage with a riveting conversation on the intricate landscape of justice and military integrity with our esteemed guest, Michael T. Rose. His journey from rural Kentucky to a distinguished career as an attorney, state senator, and now Executive Vice President of STARRS reveals a passion for upholding the American values of justice, ethics and integrity.
Mike shares his experiences at the Air Force Academy, NYU School of Law, and Harvard Business School, alongside his commitment to combatting injustice in the military. He discusses his game-changing law paper, "A Prayer for Relief" regarding the honor and ethics system in the service academies, which he further explained in a 60 Minutes interview. Mike talks about the pressures faced by those who challenge unethical practices, the pushback and the landmark court case regarding the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Through personal anecdotes, including sharing his story of growing up in rural America among people who had a distrust of entrenched elites and valued merit over pedigree, Mike discusses his journey from aspiring Air Force officer to a determined lawyer, driven by the desire to tackle legal injustices.
As a South Carolina state senator, Michael's legislative triumphs come to life in this episode, where we explore his efforts to reshape governance structures and abolish unethical programs. His stories of overcoming obstacles and championing change, all the way to present day where he has worked on reforming the academy's Board of Visitors, and helping cadets who were wrongly mistreated over not taking the Covid vaccine, reveal a dedication to addressing and overturning detrimental policies so that military recruitment, retention and readiness can be strengthened.
60 Minutes Interview:
https://starrs.us/captain-rose-versus-the-system/
Prayer for Relief paper:
https://www.usafa.edu/app/uploads/A-Prayer-For-Relief-Final-5.16.11.pdf
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For more information about STARRS, go to our website: https://starrs.us which monitors and exposes the CRT/DEI/Woke agenda in the Dept. of Defense and advocates a return to Merit, Equality and Integrity in the military.
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Welcome America. This is Al Palmer, your host for Stars and Stripes, a production of Stars, which is a nonprofit organization which seeks to talk about preserving our nation's military and making sure that they're able to do their job every day to save you, the American public. Well, I'm happy to have a special edition today and we're gonna talk a little bit about one of the most important things in our society In fact, the one thing that makes us most important in the world these days and that is the law. Our justice system and the way we pursue it is the one thing that separates American ideals and values from everything else probably in the world. If we don't have the justice system to stand up for the people, then we really don't have a free country. So that's going to be the subject today, and here to help me with that is a very distinguished guest and a part of our STARS family, michael T. Rose, who's an attorney, a very prominent attorney, who serves as the Executive Vice President and Corporate Counsel for STARRS.
Al Palmer:Mike has a gerastate degree from New York University School of Law, where he was an editor of the Law Review, and he holds a master's degree in business administration from Harvard Business School. He was awarded the highest professional rating of AV, which is on the bar register of preeminent lawyers from Martindale Hubbell. Mike was an associate attorney at a major law firm and has founded and led multiple businesses. In his career Mike was the winner and plaintiff in a landmark US Supreme Court decision about the Freedom of Information Act, FOIA and we'll talk about that some more. He served four terms as a Republican state senator in South Carolina and has lectured at various universities, college, professional organizations, and he's been on television a lot, particularly lately, and that includes a stint that he did on CBS 60 Minutes. So it's a real pleasure to welcome Mike to our show tonight. Mike, it's off to you. Sir, how are you doing today?
Mike Rose:I'm doing great, a=l. Thanks for having me today. It's a pleasure to be here. Let me start by it's a pleasure to be here. Let me start by identifying myself the way I would. As Al said, I am an attorney. I live in Somerville, south Carolina, about 20 miles from Charleston. I live with my wife Vivian in a house built in the 1890s. My daughter lives next door. Our three grandchildren grew up next door and her husband, so we have a safe, comfortable, wonderful life here, within walking distance of our town. But I practice law out of my home office.
Mike Rose:As you can see here, I am a graduate of the Air Force Academy, ew York University School of Law and Harvard Business School. I spent 10 years going to full-time college in my early years, all living in dormitories. I did serve 13 years as a South Carolina state senator. I've started four private businesses and I now am doing what I consider my most important endeavor in my life, which is to serve as Executive Vice President and General Counsel of STARS. Stars stands for Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services Inc website starsus S-T-A-R-R-Sus two Rs. And this is important and sort of a culmination of all my experience in the past, which really was four-faceted military, political, legal and business because I view the future of our country as in jeopardy and that's in no small part due to the deterioration of the military, impeding its readiness and ability to defend our country. So I now devote virtually a full-time effort, as I have in the last four years. To start, the key to understanding what I've done in my life and in my law practice in particular which I think is substantial is to understand my early childhood.
Mike Rose:My father was the youngest of 12 children on a Kentucky hillbilly subsistence farm. He joined the Navy the day he turned 17 during World War II. He met my mother one Saturday night at the Englewood California USO at a dance. At the end of the war they got married, hitchhiked across the United States he took her to the hills of Kentucky. So he went from, she went from Los Angeles movies and so forth to no indoor plumbing in Kentucky. Having three children of four years, I'm the oldest, so my earliest memories are Navy housing projects, quonset huts on the east or west coast where my father is a Navy enlisted man was stationed. But due to my family circumstance I wound up. My brother, sister and I live in with my grandparents in the hills of Kentucky. So we left both parents when I was seven. Now that environment going from Norfolk, virginia, to Kentucky might as well have been another planet no indoor plumbing.
Mike Rose:I ate entire meals of cornbread crumbled up in milk, standing barefooted at a table while flies, wasps and dirt garbage flew around. I went to a one room schoolhouse with one teacher taught eight grades. Big pot, billy stove in the middle. The teacher had one leg and literally uh, wrote a mule to school, so he put a mule in the barn and then get his way over to the school. I skipped two grades in that school in five years. I took five. Two grades in that school in five years. I took five grades in three years.
Mike Rose:My dad died, my mother remarried an Air Force enlistment man at Charleston, so we moved to Charleston and I was allowed to keep my grade that I had turned in Kentucky. So I graduated from high school at 16. I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy. I did three term papers in high school about the Air Force Academy, so but I was too young. You have to be 17 or 16. So I went where the Air Force Academy recommended that I prepare for a year. I went for a year, my first year of college at Marion Military Institute, Marion, Alabama, 30 miles from Selma, Alabama, during the year of the Selma crisis. I did get an appointment to the Air Force Academy. After that I graduated in 1969.
Mike Rose:After a year of active duty at Lowry Air Force Base, Denver, I went to New York University School of Law on a leave of absence, meaning the Air Force allowed me to go but didn't pay my way. But then I was to be a lawyer in the Air Force afterwards and so in law school I understand I'm arriving in New York City and I don't know a soul there. All the four colleges I went to I didn't know anybody in the state and was totally self-sufficient. Even when I went to the Air Force Academy, to me it was like I distinctly recall heaven on earth, even though it was hell on earth. But it really was heaven to me because I saw all this food I can't eat it yet, but uh, as much as I want, but the, the beautiful room. So actually I was lucky. From the day I entered the air force academy I never really had to worry about money like I did uh before. Anyway, uh I, when I went to New York City city, didn't know what LaGuardia Airport was, I didn't even know what a subway was.
Mike Rose:And the reason I'm telling you this is that my going to these schools was a socioeconomic development of me, not just academic. But I had the insight to pursue the academics and my perception is that I've gone from one end of the socioeconomic spectrum to the other, basically going from the hills of Kentucky to Harvard Business School, and it was a growth experience for me every step of the way, which I'm very grateful for. But in return I feel an obligation to give back and that's what I've done, primarily in my law practice. Now I would just say this is that a evidence of, I guess I would say, my impact in law is that when I attended Harvard Business School my second year, I took a course called Power and Influence. So the 90 students in the class studied how, historically, certain people had acquired and used power and influence. And one day we studied patent. This is by the case method, so you read a case about patent and then we discuss it for 90 minutes, 90 students. And then another day we discussed Mary Kate, and one day, while I'm in the class, it was the Mike Rose case. So now the 90 students are discussing what I had done in my life as of age 32. So what are some of the things that I did in my law practice?
Mike Rose:Let's start with as a law student, on the law review, I had to write about something. I didn't know what law review was, but then I got on it. And now I got to write about something and I decided to write about the Air Force Academy's honor code because there was no civilian literature had been written about it, so the public really didn't know how it operated and it was to me just going to be a description of how it worked. But I expanded it into a two and a half year $18,000 by by then those days dollars project comparing the conduct, honor and ethics systems of all five service academies. And there's a picture of it right there, this book. It's 190 plus pages long, over 1100 footnotes. It took two and a half years to do and when it was published within a week, I mean it immediately got national publicity and within a week I was on 60 Minutes regarding this, and a link to that 60 Minutes segment also is at the bottom of my bio on the starsus website.
Mike Rose:But I just want to talk about this for a minute. Understand my perspective is I grew up in Kentucky, just at the right age of seven to nine, where I could absorb what was going on. And these farmers, many of them, were in one war or another World War I, World War II, Korean War and they had enlisted and they quickly became NCOs because they were leaders, they were rugged individualists, they knew how to fight and when the battle of bulbs started they didn't need officers to tell them how to fight back, they just did it. But they were never officers because they didn't have the education required. But I heard these farmers I'm internalizing this bragging about reverently, about west point naval academy graduates, and I remember one uncle actually telling me that the naval academy was so hard that as a freshman you had to stay into attention while the upper class took tweezers and pulled your whiskers out one by one and for some reason I said that's for me. So to me it was the epitome of achievement to aspire to and I was already being lauded for skipping grades and being smart. So anyway, when I moved to South Carolina Charleston, , like I said, let me keep my brain I graduated at 16.
Mike Rose:But my point is, these farmers had an attitude my grandfather certainly did, of disdain for what they call the pretty people. The pretty people were people that were wealthy and powerful, and this may have come from, like the 1700s, where the wealthy people on the the bi-coastal elites, or it was one coast elite at that time would wear their costumes and wigs and so forth. The people in Kentucky judge people by merit. What they could do not pedigree, and so they had a contemptuous disdain for people that they thought they called pretty people that were wealthy and powerful. They thought because basic instead of them, because they didn't like cheating and stealing like the people that were wealthy and powerful. So I had a frame of reference when I got in the military of how people who were enlisted were affected by their leaders and what happened. So when I got into, when I researched this Law Review article, I showed that West Point and the Air Force Academy had an honor system conducted in a certain way that was radically different than the Naval Coast Guard Merchant Marine Academy and, as of that time, all the cheating scams were happening at West Point Air Force Academy. So I basically advocated that West Point Air Force Academy changed what the three safe service academies were doing, which is what wound up happening, which is what wound up happening. But also I identified things at the academies that I concluded were illegal, and I'll just give an example of this At West Point.
Mike Rose:West Point had a practice called the silence the silence Now the origin of the silence. The silence, now the origin of the silence had to do with racial discrimination. I interviewed, by writing this paper, Benjamin O Davis Jr, west Point graduate, class 36, who was the commander of the Tuskegee Airmen, and he confirmed to me what was referenced in his yearbook, west Point yearbook, that he was silenced his entire four years at West Point solely for being black. That means no one spoke to him for four years. That means that he sat at a table for three meals a day, at a table by himself with no one sitting with him and nobody roomed with him. He told me this was 99% effective.
Mike Rose:It started the second day. I asked him why was? He didn't appear to be bitter about this, why? Why? Because I'm and he was then some kind of undersecretary of Department of Transportation, retired three star general, and he said, no, he wasn't bitter because you got to understand that's how things were back then that the riots that were occurring at the time that I was interviewing him was because of with TV, within people, the have-nots were able to see the economic disparities, and it made them angry and so forth. These are my words, not his, but that's what I understood him to say. Angry and so forth these are my words, not his, but that's what I understood him to say. So I went to West Point authorities with the proof that this was an illegal. This silence was illegal.
Mike Rose:The regulations at West Point said that if a cadet was found guilty of violating the honor code, then he was entitled because it was only he's then to appeal to a board of officers. And if he won his appeal, then he used to be returned to the Corps quote in good standing. Quote return to the Corps in good standing. That's what a regulation said. Well, you're not being returned to the Corps in good standing if you're going to be silenced.
Mike Rose:And cadets didn't come up with the silence on their own. They were taught that by West Point authorities as they entered West Point. And furthermore, there was regulation prohibiting conspiracies among cadets against other cadets, which is exactly what they were doing. And I found two cadets being silenced cadets which is exactly what they were doing. And I found two cadets being silenced and one of them wound up in that 60 Minutes film that I was interviewed in 1974 at Morrie Safer, which again the link's at the bottom of my bio.
Mike Rose:And so I was stunned that wait a minute. We were taught to obey the law in the Constitution at the Academy. I've gone to five years of military college and now I'm showing West Point authorities what they're doing is illegal and they don't care, they're not going to change it and what I showed is four out of five academies a cadet accused of violating the Honor Code could not be present. That includes West Point Could not be present while the evidence was presented to the honor committee. Well, if you want to get the truth of the matter, the most fundamental procedure that's required that's one of the cadets being silent is to allow the accused to be present while the evidence is presented so they can respond to it.
Mike Rose:So I thought that was illegal and at the Air Force Academy there was a cheating scandal in the early 70s where cadets were pulled out of bed in the middle of the night, stood in the brace, screamed at threat and the court martial didn't confess and they had honor hearings. Around the clock 2 am was your honor hearing. You went to it at 4 o'clock. You would have thought this was the plague they had to get rid of, but there was no due process. And I might add that one of the key leaders of stars was a subject of this interrogation process and he didn't have an honor hearing.
Mike Rose:But I mean, this is not by imagination. This was in an article in our alumni magazine that I received by mail while I'm researching this Law Review article, and I can give multiple other examples. But think about it. The highest general cannot interrogate the lowest enlisted man in a coercive manner, like pulling them out of bed in the middle of the night and screaming at a threatening court monitor if they don't confess, when what they're being questioned about they could be prosecuted for under the UCMJ. So why were we at the Air Force Academy teaching future military commanders that when they thought honor was involved, that's the way to do an interrogation? So it was not just illegal, it was bad policy in my opinion. So when military officials would not change these things, I'm in my dorm room, I'm doing this pretty much alone and my thought process is that two of my roommates at the Air Force Academy have been killed in Vietnam during the last two or three years. I don't know why God put me in this position, that I have these insights, but if I don't publicize it it's never gonna change.
Mike Rose:So I did and when the book came out I was invited to be on 60 Minutes. I swear I never heard of 60 Minutes. I'm in a dorm room laboring on this paper, so much that even when the NYU students went home for Christmas, I didn't go home for Christmas. I stayed all over Christmas to finish this paper before I had to go back on active duty. So, as you can see, I did appear on 60 Minutes on a Monday morning at McGuire Air Force Base in my uniform. I had not seen 60 Minutes until the night before I left the Gettysburg Battlefield on a tour to go to a motel to see what 60 Minutes was like, and I knew the format. So what you see on that 60 Minutes film is unrehearsed and authentic in the sense that that's what I thought and believed at the time.
Mike Rose:But I was actually angry because I saw hypocrisy in professing to adhere to the Constitution, obey the law and even be honorable. I mean like pulling people out of the bed in the middle of the night, the superintendent of the Air Force Academy held a press conference and wrote an article in our alumni magazine saying I was not correct. What do you mean? It's not correct. So I wound up concluding well, not only are they not obeying the law, they're lying, and they know better than this because they taught us not to do it. And as a young man, this is very. You talk about cognitive dissonance, it's like so.
Mike Rose:Anyway, there are other well things that I've done with the law. For example, I'm the named plaintiff on the landmark US Supreme Court decision in the Freedom of Information Act in 1975. And when the Air Force Academy would not give me a copy of the one or two page summaries of honor cases with the names redacted, I didn't want names, but I wanted to be able to show in this law review article what people have been thrown out for, because I didn't think the public would believe some of the things that people have been thrown out for that at the Navy Coast Guard Merchant Academy they would not have probably been thrown out for. So I had to make a decision and I sued under the Freedom of Information Act. It went to get a copy of the documents the Air Force Academy did not provide and the decision favorable to us at the Supreme Court required Air Force Academy to provide the documents and it didn't hurt a thing. But what it established was as a precedent with the new Freedom of Information Act is redaction, which means the government cannot withhold a document just because somebody's name is in the document. Instead they've got to redact it or blacken it or razor plate it out, and that's called the Roe's process in the federal government, or at least it was. I don't know if it is now or not.
Mike Rose:So I have sued or filed complaints successfully against state and local governments many times. And I filed another lawsuit against the Air Force which it settled on terms I considered favorable but which I can't reveal for violations of the Privacy Act. So, as our complaint showed, there was an officer at the Air Force Academy who was keeping 15 years or so of records of my activities my First Amendment activities in violation of the Privacy Act and this would spill over to hurt me in various ways. In other words, I was being canceled. And when we did discovery and got the evidence, like I said, the case was settled. I didn't really want to sue anybody. But I came down to if we don't press, then our government's not going to be accountable and it would be almost immoral for me to overlook all this when I had the means of doing something about it.
Mike Rose:Now, with regard to STARS, today we discovered that the DOD suspended the boards of visitors of West Point, the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy. So I reasoned well, yeah, well, congress created the boards of visitors as oversight boards, so how can the executive branch cancel or suspend or stop the operation of a congressionally created oversight board? So we filed a lawsuit challenging that About 11 days later, the boards of visitors were unsuspended. So that just tells me the Justice Department lawyers must have read the lawsuit and agreed that that was illegal. But then in order. But then President Biden fired all the Trump appointees. First time in history, any presidents fired the already existing members of the Board of Visitors and we are challenging that and replace them the Trump appointees. So we have in our lawsuit still pending now before the US Supreme Court on a petition for writ of certiorari, we have in our lawsuit challenging the firing of the Trump appointees because Congress created staggered terms and these boards of visitors are supposed to be balanced politically, not just skewed politically based on the latest election.
Mike Rose:And there's a third thing of packing on subcommittees, non-members of the board of visitors, as another technique to what? Neutralize the Boards of Visitors so they can't provide oversight. So what? So that DEI can be put into the academies without it being scrutinized? So that's something we challenge.
Mike Rose:Now we filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the COVID vaccine mandate in the military. Don't assume just because the military mandates taking a vaccine that it's legal. In fact a federal judge court stopped and joined the anthrax vaccine mandate as being illegal years ago. So now we've got a COVID vaccine mandate and the military has thrown out thousands, at least 8500 people, military members, for not taking a COVID vaccine, who had religious objections that even the military agreed were sincere. So objections that even the military agreed were sincere. So eight federal courts have ruled that the military's denial of those religious exemption requests and punishing people for not taking the COVID vaccine despite the religious exemption request violated the Federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a federal statute. Now I'm just mystified as to how military officers who take the oath to support and defend the Constitution can and do, in my view, violate the law. Eight federal courts said they were violating the law and they're punishing people for upholding their rights.
Al Palmer:Well, Mike, let me just go back real quickly. The Board of Visitors for our viewers are individuals who are appointed to advise the president on activities of the military academies. But the president doesn't appoint all those people, does he? He has a couple of people, as I recall, about six, that I think he picks. Then there are others that are picked by Congress and people at large, but the president of the United States doesn't have the authority, does he, to fire all of them or any of them that he just doesn't like?
Mike Rose:Well, let me say this about that First of all, the statute doesn't just require that the Board of Visitors report to the President, it requires that it report to the Congress, specifically to the Senate Armed Services Committee and the House Armed Services Committee. So this oversight board could have been created just as a 100 percent congressional report only to Congress. But they chose OK, we're going to let the executive branch in on it too. But this is not. This is not created by the executive branch, it was created by Congress, and so the there had never been a firing by a president of the already existing members of a board of visitors, and we believe it's illegal. But the Biden administration claims that it is legal. I mean, the Biden administration claims that forgiving student loans is legal too, but courts overrule it. Hardly a week goes by without the court overruling something. That's what my administration is doing. So I actually rewrote the legislation for the boards of visitors and Congress of Walz introduced it in the NDAA it and the NDAA law which passed the House that would eliminate the executive branch from making an appointment. So the way the law is right now, congress makes some of the appointments and the President makes some of the appointments, and it's supposed to be balanced and balanced through staggered terms and balanced politically. But the legislation I wrote that passed the House would delete the executive branch, the president, from any appointments. So the president wants to create oversight committees for the academies. Go ahead and create all you want, but since you're interfering in three fundamental ways neutering the congressionally created boards of visitors, we'll just delete the presidential appointees altogether and we won't have the problem anymore and Congress can do its inspector general type oversight.
Mike Rose:But there's just many examples of this on an ongoing basis. I've represented maybe over a thousand, certainly hundreds of military people in my career probably a hundred just regarding the COVID vaccine itself including at all five academies and at all levels of the chain of command. There are injustices. It's not just injustice. I look at the law violation. I can honestly, please say I've never represented anybody, especially in the military, that I didn't think was morally right in addition to being legally right. But my theory is if you're on a sale one to 10, with 10 being the most elitist and, let's say, wealthy and influential and zero one being the most impoverished if you start out as an eight, then you won't have an internal appreciation of the effect of political decisions on the people that are two, three or four or lower that you would have if you grew up a one, two, three or four yourself. And that's why I question even the all-volunteer.
Al Palmer:Well, it sounds like that adequately describes your case, I think, mike, growing up the way you did, Well, that's right, and that's why I question the all-volunteer military, which was done out of political expediency.
Mike Rose:But I question it because I would like the decision-makers at the top to have their children and grandchildren invested or affected by the decisions they make. So if President Biden, for example, can send the military to war, but Hunter doesn't have to go to war, and and this was happening even in Vietnam, when it wasn't all well, even with the draft. I mean, I'm at NYU Law School, surrounded by people that had one maneuver after another to get out of the draft. And even in the Civil War, there were literally riots that the American army had to put down in New York City because for $300 you could get out of the draft. The poor people did not tolerate. They rioted because they weren't wanting to be drafted to die in a war that the people that were wealthier and more powerful weren't invested in. So, in any event, um, my motivation uh, which I didn't start out, I was going to be an air force jack. That's what I thought.
Mike Rose:I was going to be an air force officer and from being an eagle scout and boy scouts and me, uh, in char Charleston, living near a Naval base, being surrounded by military people, my family being military. I had a reverence, respect for the military. My minister at my church advocated I become a minister. In fact, at 14 years old he had me give a sermon to the congregation. I don't know any 14 year olds in retrospect gives a sermon to the congregation. I don't know any 14 year olds in retrospect that gives a sermon to the congregation. But my calling was to be a military officer in my mind.
Mike Rose:And it wasn't until my third year at the Air Force Academy, when I took three law courses and got around lawyers for the first time, that I changed my perspective, that I no longer wanted to be a pilot, I wanted to be a lawyer and I figured well, I could do more to help. I'm fascinated by the law. If I just learn these rules and I have the personality to apply them, then I can help control my own life but influence and help other people with their problems and their lives. So it's sort of like being a minister, except it's not in church, it's applying the law, and that turned out to be very true. Also, if I were a pilot, I would have to at that time, retire at 60 and maybe earlier if my health went out. But if I'm a lawyer, I could be 77 years old, like him right now, and still practicing law doing what I love. So that was my reasoning where I went to law school instead of pilot training.
Al Palmer:And you wouldn't have had to deal with the FAA either.
Mike Rose:I wouldn't have had to deal with that.
Al Palmer:either. The FAA is a pilot.
Mike Rose:Yeah, that's always a governmental restriction on what you do, you don't have nearly as much problem as an attorney. I guess, so it sounds like.
Al Palmer:Also that religion sounds like religion was a very big part of your life too. How did your faith shape your decision-making during your career?
Mike Rose:Well, I grew up I went to a rural Baptist church my grandfather in Kentucky, but in South Carolina. When I moved there, I was going to church three times a week. I'm around conservative people In our high school. In our school we would say the Pledge of Allegiance and have a devotion every morning. That was my psychic frame of reference. So I believed in God, I believed in. So I believed in God. I believed in our Constitution, our country, our freedom.
Mike Rose:And it wasn't until more recent years that I started hearing claims of being a Christian nationalist, and the things that we thought were good are really supposedly the opposite. But I will say look, I have grandchildren who went to college and say they're 100 miles away and if they forgot their notebook, they call their mom and their mom meets them halfway and delivers it to them. Well, when I went to four years, four different colleges in four different states I didn't know a soul and whatever I arrived with I was uh, that was it. So, yeah, I was alone and writing this law review article, I was alone. Well, I wasn't alone. I had people around me that supported it. I had people in the military supported. But what I'm saying is this isn't like being a member of STARS, where we got a like-minded group. So what would keep me going to that? I had to have faith that I identified a noble, positive motivation for what I was doing and that I should hang in there and have faith that it will all turn out okay. You know, when I filed that lawsuit in the Freedom of Information Act, I had no way of knowing whether we would win. Look at it from the Air Force's standpoint. I'm on a leave of absence as a captain in the Air Force, going to law school, and now I'm investigating them, I'm writing about them and now I'm suing them. So I can understand how there were people very upset about it. Certainly the Air Force Academy was, but I just had the attitude that I've thought about it, I've searched, I've researched, I've discussed it. This is for their own good, and when smoke clears away it'll be better. And it was so. There were certain changes made. Redaction the Freedom of Information Act is positive. The precedent for our country. Probably all 50 states have adopted Freedom of Information Act. They have redaction as their policy. Every time you hear redaction, redaction, redaction on the TV news it comes from that case, and so on and so on.
Mike Rose:And so General Bishop, rod Bishop, the Chairman of the Board of STARS, and I helped get reinstated to the Coast Guard Academy. Five cadets had been thrown out for not taking the COVID vaccine. To my surprise, the only one of the five academies that threw any cadets out for not taking a COVID vaccine was the Coast Guard Academy and they were very mean-spirited, in my opinion, in the way they did it. They didn't have to do it the way they did it at all. But five returned and General Bishop and I went to the graduation of two of them. We helped get a cadet now at the Air Force Academy reinstated who had been she's thrown out for failing a drug, a urine analysis test. Out for failing a drug, a urine analysis test, and then five months later all branches of the service have a written announcement they're no longer using the test because it's defective, because poppy seeds will cause a false positive. Well, this cadet had shown she had taken poppy seeds in a muffin the day before, so she lost. So this is just another example of don't assume that things are right just because they're legal, just because it's being done.
Mike Rose:Get is enough education and enough exposure to, let's say, the I don't know if I'd say the elite, but to people who enough exposure to the rest of the world that I could independently evaluate the facts myself and not be dependent upon the propaganda or spin or gaslighting of somebody else or something else. And I think I achieved that exact objective. But when I graduated Harvard Business School, basically there was nothing else to go to. It's like that to me was the pinnacle of education. And I'd started four businesses, I'd done four businesses, I'd done this, I'd done that. So now I just had to live my life and came to South Carolina to visit and wound up staying. Now I have. I became a South Carolina state senator. I had no idea whatsoever of running for office until 1986. So I'm going to tell you how that happened because I think it's an interesting story.
Mike Rose:As of 1986, I had done four things in my life independently in different parts of the country that had generated national publicity. So I had a knack for promotion, or some would say self-promotion. And I can't sing and I can't run. There's a lot of things I can't do. But I can communicate, I can write, I can speak.
Mike Rose:And so in 1986 in the summer I saw on ABC News an Iowa farmer. There was a big drought in South Carolina so farmers were having to sell their cows. The cows were dying. So I saw on ABC News an Iowa farmer offer free hay to a South Carolina farmer if he could get it here in South Carolina. So the next day I started working as a volunteer on my initiative with the Commissioner of Agriculture of South Carolina and I created a program called FARM, f-a-r-m Farmers Assistance Relief Commission. So we raised money for farmers to bring hay to South Carolina and I created a program called the Adopt-A-Cow program. The Adopt-A-Cow program. So we told people at a press conference that if you'll give us $140, which is roughly the duration, the cost of hay during the duration of the drought effects they're over eight months If you'll give us $140, we'll give you a certificate signed by the governor of South Carolina, showing you've officially adopted a genuine South Carolina cow. Well, we got checks from 38 states. In 60 days, an army battalion in Germany adopted a cow, elementary schools adopted a cow. The mayor of Anchorage, alaska, adopted a cow. I have an office next to the commission agriculture.
Mike Rose:The phone rings and I hear Mr Rose, we think your Adopt-a-Cow program is very moving, or we think what you're doing is utterly fantastic and I'd say, well, we're going to milk it for all it's worth. Well, this got in USA Today, wall Street Journal, every newspaper in the side of South Carolina, and state politicians started coming over to me that I didn't know, to see what this is all about. But here's what I'm leading up to. So I'm standing in a room sort of like this, with the Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina next to me and the Commissioner of Agriculture to my right and understand, I've created this program out of thin air, just total thin air. And the Lieutenant Governor says to me Mike, do you have any idea how we can find out what federal programs are available for our farmers? And I said, yeah, there's two ways to do it. You call Thurman and Hollings office, the senators, and ask them to research it. But the other way is why don't you call President of America Rick Ross? Mike Rose was an hurricane of mail bl. Much like Mississippi 1969.
Mike Rose:I worked for the red cross in the afternoon and evening and I could tell you that red cross has got this disaster stuff down pat. Why don't you call the president? American red cross Lieutenant governor then said to me Mike, do you mind if I speak to the president American red cross? No, you're the lieutenant governor. I want you to just stand there. So I walk over the phone, dial the 202 information operator in Washington. Get the number for the Red Cross. I dial the number for the Red Cross. I asked switchboard operator. I said the Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina would like to speak to the President of the American Red Cross. President of the American Red Cross gets on the phone. I hand the phone to the Lieutenant Governor and they talk for 45 minutes.
Mike Rose:That whole time I stood there stunned and I told myself wait a minute, I can do that. For 15 years I've been going to the local officials trying to get things done and now they're asking me how to do it. And now I'm doing it for them. What do I need them for? I didn't get married until I was 38 years old and I had just been married. So I walked out and I called my new wife and I said Vivian, I don't know what political party I'm in, but I'm joining a party Because I just had the mystique of being an elected official disappeared.
Mike Rose:In that meeting I realized, wait a minute, I got the skills, I can do this. So what happened is I wound up interviewing the people who were head in my county of the Republican and Democrat Party and I'd say, well, what do you stand for? And I basically got gobbledygook. So then I looked it up and they both sounded both parties sounded good, but what I realized is I really couldn't join the Democrat Party. What they stood for was keeping their jobs in the courthouse and they were the majority and they didn't need my help and they didn't want my help. Now the Republicans were on the outside looking in and they would take whatever they could get and they started having monthly meetings. So I started going there, I ran for state senator and I won. And so and even, how do I do that? I went to the College of Charleston or maybe it was Citadel and checked out seven books on how to run campaign and read them, and so it was like starting a business, except this was a campaign.
Mike Rose:So now I remember I don't really visibly cry much, but when I left our Senate my first two sessions and drove 100 miles back to my home, I had tears coming down thinking about the impact I realized I could have as a state senator, far more than just a lawyer whose maneuvering ability was limited when you think about it. I didn't get rid of the silence because of the law. I mean, I had the law as a basis. I got a front page article in the New York Times in June of 1974 about the silence and then it wound up on 60 Minutes with me and two months later, in August, out of embarrassment, at West Point I held a press conference. So what I concluded is the only way to get these changes made is embarrassment or fear of embarrassment.
Mike Rose:But as a state senator, you know, I wrote to every agency in the state before I had my first session saying I'm new, could you have somebody in your department meet with me because I've got a vote on your budget. I'd like to know more about how the Department of Transportation operates, or whatever it is. Well, every one of them had a department head meet with me, they weren't going to have some underling. I just didn't realize how significant South Carolina being a state senator was. And significant South Carolina being a state senator was, and what I discovered is that I could solve two types of problems macro and micro. So micro was cutting through the bureaucracy to help people get the government to serve them, and there was just a myriad, myriad of ways in myriad of ways, but the value I was able to add that most other senators couldn't or didn't is structural. Macro, and I'm going to give a couple examples of that.
Mike Rose:But what I did is I studied what other states did. If I read an article about some state was doing something and it sounded like a good idea in South Carolina, I made it my business to import this stuff to South Carolina. I introduced more legislation each of my 13 years than any legislator, any senator, except one, and he was a committee chairman. And even if I thought something would not pass like I thought we should have the initiative and the referendum and I researched. There were three types and we weren't going to have the California type but we could have the more conservative type. And even if I knew it wouldn't pass. I created for a permanent public record how to do it and what I discovered is South Carolina has, for example, the strongest legislative branch of any of the 50 states and the weakest executive branch the weakest governor. Montana has the opposite strongest governor weakest legislative branch.
Mike Rose:I would go to the state Senate clerk in Texas and do a two-hour tape recording interview asking how is it that the Texas Senate, which meets only every other year and you're a bigger and more complex state than South Carolina how is it that your state in Texas gets more done meeting every other year than my state of South Carolina gets done meeting once a year and each once a year? We're meeting longer than you meet every other year and I found it was because of culture and rules Rules, and what I mean by that. Well, in South Carolina any senator could introduce 100 amendments and filibuster every one of them so effectively they could block almost anything and unless you got a real super majority to override it, you'd never get away with that in Texas. In Texas and in Texas, the most powerful politician I'd learned was the Lieutenant Governor. He was head of the Senate and had a written agenda at the beginning of each term every other year, but he could appoint a committee chairman. If you can appoint a committee chairman, you can get a lot of legislation passed. Now I got a lot of legislation passed. At the end of my second year as a senator, I went on stage in Boston and got an award as one of the three best legislators in the US by the American Legislative Exchange Council before a group of legislators, bipartisan, both parties, in all 50 states. And that's because in my first two years I'd introduced eight bills that got passed in the law, which they said was more than most legislators did in their lifetime. But I want to illustrate just how backward some of the stuff in our state was and how I personally was able to improve it.
Mike Rose:Now I represented three towns Hanahan, goose Creek and Somerville and the Senator determined who the governor was going to appoint as magistrates. Magistrates were judges and they had a lot of power, but none of the magistrates in those three cities were lawyers not one. So I figured if you're going to apply the law, that you need to have a lawyer in there anyway. So I got a lawyer appointed to all three towns. Well, you would have thought I was a member of the Taliban. There were people that didn't. So what I discovered is, with a general population, this isn't like the military. By definition, the average person is average, which means half of them are below average in terms of intellect, drive, ambition, a character, whatever it is. So they don't necessarily understand or connect the dots. So why are you putting a lawyer in there? So now I'll tell you why I'm putting a lawyer in there. I am absolutely not exaggerating this.
Mike Rose:One of the managers, goose creek, put a rotating blue light and siren in his car and would stop and arrest people for speeding stuff like that. Well, that's not what a judge is supposed to do. So when I heard it, I confronted him. He produced an 1832 law in South Carolina that said magistrates are required to arrest anybody committing a crime in their presence. So I got that law repealed and I got rid of that magistrate.
Mike Rose:And I mean the magistrate stops at night a couple with two children for littering and has the wife and two children standing there while the husband's going down the road to pick the trash up. That's how screwed up this guy is. Now let me tell you this second practice. You're going to really laugh when you hear this. The sheriff in my county had the diet program. The diet program, literally, the county council gave the sheriff money to pay for prisoner food and whatever he didn't spend he got to keep his personal income. Let me repeat that the sheriff had the financial incentive to shortchange the prisoners food and he called it the diet program. So I introduced the bill to the mandate.
Mike Rose:I can see why. No, no, no, the Sheriff's Association comes out of the woodwork opposing it, because you're going to decrease the income of this sheriff. And it turns out another county in the state was doing the same thing. Now, when I asked our local sheriff how much money he was making due to the diet program, he said oh no, I'm not really making anything. Okay, well then you don't mind me banishing it. Oh no, no, no, I'm going to lose a lot of income if you banish it. So I, to get this to pass, I had to put in the bill that the county would determine how much money the sheriff made from the diet program over the previous three years. Take the average and increase permanently the salary of the sheriff by that amount.
Mike Rose:See, what I did is I had probably thousands of instances where I'd read the legislation, stand before a Senate and say I know what you're trying to do, but this language doesn't do it. So, and not only that, it creates this other problem. So I reworded it this way and I gained a reputation where people trusted me and I was able to have. I gained a reputation where people trusted me and I was able to have, I think, an inordinate amount of influence, especially as a junior senator, because in our legislature, in our Senate, it was all the seniority system, so the people who have been around 30, 40 years are the ones that were the committee chairman. My wife and I were driving from Reno to Las Vegas, nevada. Every dinky little town I came to there was an arrow that said Senior Citizen Center, pointing somewhere to it. So I wondered well, why does Goose Creek have a Senior Citizen Center, but my town of Somerville doesn't? And what I found out is that senior citizens in Nevada were financed by casino money, which we don't have in South Carolina. But I got legislation passed allowing the local town or county to have a referendum on whether people wanted to tax themselves to get a senior citizen center and as a result, somerville now has a very good senior citizen center.
Mike Rose:And I want to give you one last example, because I can give many, many, many more examples. But this is the most significant structural change, not only that I made, but the most significant structural change, I think, in South Carolina's government since Reconstruction. Reconstruction I discovered when I became a senator that South Carolina has a peculiar form of government called the delegation system, the county legislative delegation system and it turns out Alabama and Georgia have the same thing. Now here's how this works. In 47 states there are four layers of government federal state, county city, federal state, county city. Well, in Alabama, georgia, south Carolina, there are five levels of government federal state, county city and county legislative delegation. Now here's how this works If any state senator or state house member represents any other geographic area of a county, like my county, that they're deemed to be on, this committee called the county legislative delegation and they have enormous powers to allocate money, replace members of the school board who resign and this sort of thing. Not in our constitution, but all by statute. There's not a word in our constitution about county legislative delegation.
Mike Rose:Now the problem with this is that every member of the delegation, that is, every Senator and every House member, represented a different amount of population within the county but had the same one vote. So I said now let me get this straight. I'm new here. There's seven people on my Dorchester County delegation. I'm one of them and you're two of them and I live in the county and I represent 100,000 people, but you don't live in the county. You live in an adjoining county, and a little territory in Dorchester County represents an uninhabited swamp land. So you two have one vote each, or two, and you don't live here, you don't represent anybody and I've got one only vote. And I live here and I represent 100,000 people. Well, yeah, that's the system.
Mike Rose:And then they gerrymandered it. The Democrats did to make sure that the Democrats dominated the county delegation and the money and the appointment. So I advocated that almost all the powers of the delegation need to be transferred to the city and the county councils. Why? Well, all those members live in the counties, they live in their towns and they represent equal population because they've got single member districts. So why have somebody? You understand that three counties converge where I live. So now I'm on three county delegation Instead of working on just statewide problems.
Mike Rose:I got to go 20 miles from Charleston, south Carolina, to sit in a meeting on who's going to be appointed to the Charleston County Veterans Board Commission, where we have attendees from Beaufort, georgetown, moncks, corner and Somerville, which are many miles away, and it's sometimes not even in the county, and it was a ridiculous waste of time. So when I couldn't get the politically this changed, I filed a lawsuit in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals I mean in federal court and on behalf of plaintiffs from three counties. Anyway, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Constitution required weighted voting, that every delegation member's vote was going to count only in proportion to the amount of total population in the county they represented. So if they represented nobody, they got 0%. If they represented one-tenth of 1%, they got one-tenth of 1% vote. Well, suddenly it wasn't fun to be on a delegation anymore if you didn't have much power. Now, this is the important thing. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the origin of this delegation system was racial discrimination during the Reconstruction, that the white folks were so afraid of a black governor that they created number one. They created over 100 commissions to diffuse the power. They created a weak governor and a strong legislature, but in the and they created this delegation system to further diffuse the power.
Mike Rose:Now, one of the first laws I got passed was to repeal a law, still in our books, prohibiting blacks and whites from riding the school bus together. That was still on the South Carolina's books in 1990. Another law I got passed was repealing the law, still on books, prohibiting blacks and whites from going to public school together. A footnote saying Brown versus the Board over Roda. Well then, why do we have it still in our law?
Mike Rose:I will say also my first two years as a senator, there was an FBI sting called Operation Lost Trust. You can Google Operation Lost Trust and see within two years about 20% of our legislature was in jail in jail for participating in bribery. And so I'm now going from the high standards of the Air Force Academy to being among colleagues who were indicted and going to jail and you may laugh when you hear this because I'm just all over the place, but I hope this is interesting at least. I stood before a state senate three times and I said I have a problem here, and I know you have a problem, but I'm going to tell you what it is. During my form of development stage as a teenager, I went to the Air Force Academy and, as scribes in our class ring and I hold it up is our class motto SAere, sa, non videre, sa, non videre means to be, not to seem, to be, not to seem. My problem is, ever since I got into legislature, it's that the motto were the opposite to seem, not to be. It's a 180 degree culture question In the Air Force.
Mike Rose:It's very concrete. You either had enough fuel to go home or you didn't. You either dropped the bomb at the right place or at the right time. You didn't. But here in the legislature we say you see that black wall over there? It's really not a wall, it just looks like one. And even if it were a wall, it's not black. So every day I'm hearing obfuscations, distortions, exaggerations and downright lies, and I know you know what you're saying is lying. That's like taking a fork and scraping it across the blackboard. To me, that is my problem. There's operationalized trust, don't you think?
Al Palmer:now that. But now that we've got, and particularly now in an election cycle, there's kind of a paucity of substance and a lot of talk and hot air about what people want to do or don't want to do. But you're exactly right of talk and hot air about what people want to do or don't want to do. But but you're exactly right it's the doers that have the ability to identify problems and find solutions and, as you say and you're so good at it, being innovative in doing it anybody can go along to get along. Anybody can sit at their desk all day long and let the rules and regulations and instructions play out. It's very few people who can be good and creative enough, I think, to solve problems, and I think that's what you're pointing out, mike, and you've done a great job with that, and we try to do that here at STARS, I think, and we're making some progress on it, because ours is an educational mission, as you know.
Al Palmer:We try to get the ideas and substance to people about what's happening, particularly with the military right now. But I would also suggest that it's a larger problem with our society, as you've pointed out, where people get into little fiefdoms and they forget about law, they forget about honor and duty and country, and that's what Star Wars is about. So we're kind of getting close to the end, I think, here, mike. But I'd offer can you kind of wrap this up a little bit from the standpoint of law and order and what we do, even with politics, which is not to say that we all can't talk about it, but it is something that's real to all of us. We live in it and those are real problems with solutions today. Any thoughts on military, for instance?
Mike Rose:I do. Now our culture of traditional values, our constitution, is under attack, and deliberate attack. This all started in Russia, Germany, migrated to the US through Columbia University and academia but, as the law, march to the institutions and now these leftist ideologies have been infused into the military. And when I entered the air force, uh was it didn't matter what your background was, we're all on the same team and we're going to be judged by our character and merit and our competence and we have the ability to compete for advancement. The ability to compete for advancement and for people of humble beginnings, that was about as good an opportunity that existed anywhere. But that's been transformed now to judge people not by their character, as Martin Luther King would say, but by their skin color or their gender, and to subordinate merit to external characteristics like skin color and gender, and that has caused dramatically lower recruitment retention, lower morale, lower effectiveness. The standards had to be lowered to accommodate the people that couldn't meet the standards that were brought into the military uh factors other than merit. So, uh, I understand from a um, my original background was sort of like just like a jd vance, except I would say, in terms of uh, poverty, with the nearest town 10 miles away, the nearest paved road two miles away. That I'm sort of more JD Vance story than he is. The point is, though, is that, if you see the opportunity for advancement, even these people enlisted in the military. This was a great opportunity for them to see the world and get a gainful employment and opportunity to advance in a retirement and serve their country.
Mike Rose:But what happens is, if people don't believe in the system anymore, if they don't believe in their leaders, they don't have confidence, they don't have the reverence for academy graduates that my Kentucky relatives did. They don't trust their competence and look, this whole thing is like Bud Light. There's going to be a rural rebellion in this election. A rural rebellion. I read that term this week and I think it's very appropriate. Those people in western North Carolina who are not getting government assistance have been wiped out by Hurricane Colleen. Those people in those mountain hollows are just like Kentucky and Tennessee and West Virginia, and they're rugged individuals. They have a mentality. It's like when Cornwallis sent an army during the Revolutionary War to go conquer the rural people in those areas. Unless they paid homage to King George and Cornwallis, these Kentucky, these mountain people, mobilized themselves and surrounded the British Army at Battle Kings Mountain and wiped them out and then he went home. They weren't fighting for independence, they were fighting because they were insulted and they were attacked verbally. So these proud people aren't into transgenderism, they aren't into having some of these parties that they consider decadent and the military is facing now what Bud Light did, that the Bud Light New Marketeers catered to a minority leftist population, thereby alienating their big base. And that's precisely what's happening in the military is that people like me joined the military because our relatives recommended it or spoke highly of it and we thought there was a noble purpose to support and defend our Constitution, have the rule of law, have freedom, have all these things that we enjoy, the Bill of Rights. And if the ideology, the changes to the left so that people are taught to believe that the military is bad and our country is bad and our country is bad, our constitution is bad, needs to be transformed and replaced. I'll give you an example.
Mike Rose:Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Lohmeyer wrote his book Irresistible Revolution and he describes how, as a squad commander, now he's one of the top, if not the top, lieutenant colonel in the Air Force or Space Force. At that time he had been the aide-de-camp, if there's only one of them to a four-star general who became head of the Space Force. So he was destined undoubtedly to be a general. But he has expertise on China and he recognized as a squadron commander in Colorado that when he interviewed people getting out of the Air Force the white people said he'd say why are you leaving? I'm leaving because I'm tired of being called racist and as he describes in his book. And then the black people would say basically, well, I wanted to serve my country but I didn't realize how racist and bad it was until I got in the Air Force and they taught me that. So I'm saying if you change the brand, look, people didn't smoke Marlboro cigarettes because they liked the cigarettes as much as they liked the image of the Marlboro man. So if you change the image and you change to drag shows and these kinds of things, I assure you that these rural people in the Southeast who have traditionally enlisted aren't gonna have military service recommended to them and they're not gonna join and they're gonna get out of their earliest opportunity and it's weakened.
Mike Rose:Heritage Foundation says the military is weak, the Air Force is the weakest. There's just lots of data, even the Wall Street Journal. I saw this morning an article dated yesterday about the severe shortages in recruitment and retention in the military and performance. We have 17 Navy ships, I read, that can't be used because we don't have enough Navy man, sailor manpower to man them. We have Air Force wings that aren't functioning at standards. Look, our country will not have our freedoms and its opportunities and its way of life unless our military is strong. If that is defeated, then we'll transform to socialism, communism and these standards, just like in the last four years the standards of the masses, of the middle class, have declined. Well, they'll decline precipitously anymore, and this is why I understand this enough until I consider what I'm doing with STARS to be the most, not just skilled people of great character, but noble and talented. And what's the word I'm looking for?
Al Palmer:Productive maybe.
Mike Rose:Well productive is part of it. But what I'm saying is I worked for four years as a volunteer in this organization because I understand. Look, if I could just be a sheep and just grazing and let a shepherd take care of me within, that'd be one thing. But that's not the case. I see a clear and present imminent danger in this election. Now I'm speaking. All everything I've said here is not stars, uh, officially for stars, even though I'm an officer in stars. It's my personal opinion.
Mike Rose:But we have a fork in the road here. Are we going to right the ship with President Trump or are we going to go further left? And if we do go further left for the next four years, if Kamala is elected, then I doubt that we can resuscitate what we had, which is what they want. But what President Trump will do I think should do is to reinstate if he becomes elected on day one. Reinstate his executive order that he had previously, that Biden rescinded, but now reinstate it, banning DEI throughout the federal government.
Mike Rose:And secondly, matthew Lohmeyer appeared a couple weeks or so ago in a press conference with President Trump and got to ask him a question, along with six other veterans, and when it's Matthew's turn, he asked President Trump, if he became president again, would he fire the generals who are imposing DEI, this onerous thing on the military? President Trump interrupted him and said they're gone. They're gone. And then he said and would you create in the Pentagon an entity of some kind that will monitor the getting rid of the onerous DEI throughout the military on an ongoing basis? And President Trump's response is that he was going to appoint you, matthew Lohmeyer, the first person to that committee. Yes, I'll create that committee and you're going to be appointed to it, and I understand his staff have followed up to prepare Matthew Bollmeyer to be able to do that.
Mike Rose:So this is what is needed and to how to and look, they're going to have to reassign what Obama did when he transformed, tried to transform our country, including our military, is he basically purged the top generals that weren't leftists this is my perception and retained and installed people that would get with their DEI program. So President Trump's going to have to do the opposite. And now, whether he fires anybody or not, I don't know, but you can always transfer them and put them wherever you want. You got to get people in positions of authority and power that get rid of this DEI.
Al Palmer:Yeah, Diego Garcia might be a good place to start with some reassignments.
Mike Rose:Or maybe ADAC.
Al Palmer:Alaska. Well, mike, listen, we've probably solved some of the problems of the world here today, but I want to tell you how grateful we here at STARS are for having you as our general counsel Not only that, as another one of our leaders who've gone through the crucible of the academies, learned about integrity and honor and duty and I know you're still practicing it, as I tried to, but we've got a lot of work that can be done to straighten the country out, and now it's time for people to do that. So to our audience, we're only a few days away from the election. If you have not gone out to vote yet, please do it. And if you want a little bit more information about Mike and his career and what we're doing here at STARS, go to starsus, our website, and you can see what we're doing. You can also see our archive of podcasts that we've done in the past here.
Al Palmer:I'm going to say thank you, mike, for being with us tonight, and thank you to the audience for being with us again on a very special edition of Stars and Stripes, and we'll see you next week.
Mike Rose:Al.
Al Palmer:Good night.
Mike Rose:Al. I'd like to say something else if I could. Sure, I just don't want to leave this out. I checked my notes. Here's a couple of the things that should happen if President Trump is reelected. My notes here's a couple of the things that should happen if President Trump is reelected, if Congress becomes the Republican majority. In particular, congress should pass a law banning DEI, which is even stronger than an executive order, and the Constitution, article I, section A, clause 14, states that Congress has the power to make rules for the regulation of the military. Also, there could be some very quick, tangible fixes to show there's a new sheriff in town, like getting rid of the purple cords by cadets at the academies.
Mike Rose:And these people that have been thrown out, these people that have been thrown out for not taking a COVID vaccine illegally, according to eight federal courts. There could be reinstatement, back pay. President Ford, at the end of Vietnam, created by executive order a commission to evaluate requests for a pardon for the crime of avoiding the draft, and he gave many pardons, President Trump. A President Trump could create such a board process, all these requests for back pay, reinstatement and so forth, and get this done. So I just checked my notes a moment ago. I just at the end here. I wanted to plant the seed in this podcast for some of those ideas.
Al Palmer:Thank you, Well, Mike, listen, I think this is exactly what we need to do Finding solutions and finding good, sensible procedures for what we do, rather than people sitting on their hands waiting for something to happen and then. Thanks again, Mike, for being with us to our audience. We'll see you again later. Good night.
Mike Rose:Thank you.