Retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor is sounding an alarm that cuts across party lines, accusing Washington of engineering a half‑century “crime scene” against the American middle class by severing money from reality and weaponizing the dollar for war, bureaucracy and corporate cronyism.

In a viral video titled “The Great Betrayal,” followed by a fiery appearance on Ron Paul’s Liberty Report, Macgregor argues that the 1971 abandonment of the gold standard “changed the rules” so politicians could silently steal Americans’ work, savings and future. He urges people to stop waiting for a presidential savior and instead build parallel structures of independence—silver, skills, gardens and local communities—outside the reach of the money printer.

‘This Is Not Economics. This Is a Crime Scene.’

Macgregor begins his video with a poignant tale of a forgotten American worker who dedicated 31 years to the same company. This individual believed that by simply showing up, performing his job, and keeping his promises, the leaders in Washington would reciprocate the integrity. Back in 1971, this worker earned an annual salary of $11,000, which was ample enough to afford a house, a car, and provide for a family where the wife could stay at home to raise children.

Fast forward to today, the same position now offers $50,000 a year. While this might initially appear to be progress, the reality is starkly different. The cost of a house has increased by 15 times, and a car by 20 times. The notion of a spouse remaining at home has become an unattainable dream. Macgregor questions whether Americans have become lazier, less intelligent, or less capable, only to conclude that the real issue is a theft orchestrated by men in suits who altered the rules while the public trusted their country.

For Macgregor, a pivotal moment in this narrative is August 15, 1971. On this day, President Richard Nixon announced the “temporary suspension” of the gold standard. Prior to this, a dollar represented a tangible claim on gold, backed by reality. Post-1971, the dollar transformed into a mere fiction—an empty promise reliant solely on faith in a government that, according to Macgregor, has misled the public into wars for the last fifty years.

Without the gold standard, Washington’s spending was limited by taxation. Post-1971, the ability to print money meant that the government could inflate away the public’s savings, income, and heritage. This financial maneuvering, Macgregor argues, represents an unprecedented scale of theft.

To illustrate this, Macgregor employs what he dubs “Jesus math.” He invites viewers to imagine standing in Bethlehem at the time of Christ’s birth with $1 million in hand, spending $1 million every day through the rise and fall of empires up until the present morning. By this point, one would have expended approximately $740 billion, not even reaching the trillion-dollar threshold. Meanwhile, Washington is currently adding $1 trillion to the national debt every three months.

Reaching today’s staggering $38 trillion national debt would require spending $1 million daily for 100,000 years. Macgregor concludes by asserting that this scenario is less about economics and more akin to a crime scene.

Printing Press: Mother of War, Bureaucracy, Immigration and Outsourcing

Macgregor then links endless money to endless war. “The printing press is the mother of endless war,” he says, noting that the U.S. spent “$2 trillion in Afghanistan over 20 years… we replaced the Taliban with the Taliban.” If the government had to directly tax Americans “to bomb countries most Americans couldn’t find on a map,” he insists, “you would revolt. But because they print, the war is invisible.”

He calls the printing press “the mother of endless bureaucracy,” explaining that when money is infinite “you can hire armies of bureaucrats.” Federal code ballooned from “70,000 pages… [to] 200,000,” creating “a maze designed to strangle the small businessmen and protect the corporate giant.”

He blasts mass immigration as an economic weapon, not compassion: “Why pay an American a living wage when you can import a replacement for half the price?” The result, he says, is “millions of people flood into the United States and drive down the cost of American labor, while Washington prints money to drive up the price of their assets… It’s not a border crisis. It’s an economic weapon deployed against us, the American people.”

Outsourcing rounds out the attack. “Printed money allowed them to ship your factories overseas. Behind those closed doors lie rusted towns, broken families, and an opioid epidemic that is killing more Americans than the Vietnam War ever did.” This isn’t free markets, he says, but rigged cronyism: “You were told this is capitalism. This is the free market. It was not capitalism… In this system, when big business fails, Washington prints money to bail out its donors… If you do not [have the right friends], you are foreclosed.”

He illustrates the theft with a simple comparison: “Your grandfather earned a dollar in 1971. He put it in a box… That dollar bought ten loaves of bread. Today you open that box… now it buys one slice. The paper did not change. Washington drained the life out of it… That box is not an inheritance. It is evidence for theft.”

The real cost, he says, is stolen time. The average American works 2,000 hours a year and “thanks to taxes and inflation, the government takes half. 1,000 hours stolen every year… Over a 40‑year career, that’s four and a half years of your life… gone.”

Three “Plantations” and the Rigged Uni‑Party

Macgregor describes Americans as trapped on “three plantations” run by different masters. The “digital plantation” is run by Silicon Valley, where “you are the product” and tech giants “harvest your attention, your data, your anxiety” while censoring you

“if you step out of line.” The “debt plantation” belongs to Wall Street, where “student debt before you can buy a beer” and 30‑year mortgages ensure “a man in debt is a man who is afraid… He won’t speak up. He won’t rock the boat. That is the point. Both parties serve Wall Street. Check the donor lists.”

The “tax plantation” is run by Washington, where “you work half the year for the government” and your labor is sent to “countries that hate us, corporations that replace you, and bureaucrats who despise you.”

He names the political class as a single machine: “Republicans, Democrats, what’s the difference? Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Trump, Obama. Different faces of the same machine, with the same hand on the printing press.” From the inside, he says, “the machine is not broken. It’s actually working as designed to extract wealth from the productive and transfer it to the connected.”

On Ron Paul’s Liberty Report, Macgregor carries the same theme into foreign policy, warning that “constant warfare that drains the treasury” and immigration “weaponized against Americans” are two sides of the same betrayal.

He tells Paul and co‑host Daniel McAdams that the “middle class has been largely destroyed,” and notes that his “Great Betrayal” video “wasn’t really designed” as a response to Donald Trump’s boasts but makes clear that even Trump has “behaved in very much the same manner” as his predecessors on spending and war. Paul underscores the point, asking how anyone can “divide” economic policy from foreign policy when the two are welded by the printing press.

‘The Savior Is Not Coming’: Build Parallel America

Unlike many critics, Macgregor doesn’t end with despair. He gives a battle plan. “If you are waiting for a savior to show up in the White House, stop. The savior is not coming,” he says. “When the system fails, do not beg to be rescued. Build a parallel structure. Build a lifeboat.” Washington “can print a dollar,” he says, “but Washington cannot print an ounce of silver. Buy a silver coin. Hold it in your hand. Feel its weight.” Real money like that “implies no liability to anyone else… They cannot debase it. They cannot hack it.”

He urges viewers to plant “a backyard garden… a localized food source” and to “learn to repair, learn to build. The ability to fix your own world is the ultimate rebellion against a disposable society.” Real community is another shield: “They cannot print a community, barter, or trade. If you have eggs and your neighbor has firewood, you can trade. That is a transaction Washington cannot tax, cannot track, and cannot control.”

Macgregor frames his nonprofit National Conversation as part of this “parallel structure,” a “movement, a network of Americans who are determined not only to survive, but to prevail,” built around town halls where regular citizens, not consultants, speak their minds. He calls on supporters to “sign up, bring one person… who knows something is wrong, but may not have the words to describe it. Give them the words.” At the personal level, he asks Americans this holiday season to “find a combat veteran in your town… invite them into your home, break bread… That is where the resistance begins, not in a ballot box, but at the dinner table.”

Macgregor closes with a stark choice: “The empire of lies is dying. Let it die. We will build the real America on the other side… We do not need the government’s permission to be free. The nonsense ends when we say it ends.”

For a political class addicted to the printing press and permanent war, that is the real threat: a country that stops begging Washington to save it and starts rebuilding the republic from the ground up, one silver coin, one backyard garden and one dinner‑table alliance at a time.