Join us as we discuss the latest in the ongoing crisis between the West and Russia regarding Ukraine. We have a special guest, Nick Freitas, who served 7 years in the U.S. Military and is currently serving in the Virginia House of Delegates.
00:00:08.000We now have reports that Russia has threatened military and political consequences, serious military and political consequences, if Finland and Sweden try joining NATO.
00:00:18.000Finland and Sweden are already having discussions with NATO.
00:00:20.000They're actually involved in the NATO meetings over the defense of, or I should say, the response to the Russian invasion in Ukraine.
00:00:28.000And while there are some people who are saying, well, that's not explicitly threatening war or military action, If you actually look at what's been going on for the past several weeks, it is.
00:00:37.000There's been unidentified drones flying over nuclear plants in Sweden.
00:00:41.000There has been Russian activity from Kaliningrad into the Baltic Sea.
00:00:45.000So very much so, Sweden has been on high alert for some time.
00:00:48.000This statement is basically saying there is going to be some kind of action against you if you go out against us.
00:00:54.000Not only that, We already heard Vladimir Putin say anyone who interferes in their operation in Ukraine will face consequences never before seen in history.
00:01:03.000So I think it's fair to say obviously everyone's going to try and play some game of how they're describing things to win PR points, but this is It's a veiled threat at the very least.
00:01:14.000But I think it's, in my opinion, it's outright overt to say military consequences.
00:01:19.000So things are absolutely starting to heat up.
00:02:31.000I'm currently serving the Virginia House of Delegates.
00:02:33.000But yeah, it's kind of an interesting topic because my whole role in the military was unconventional warfare and counterinsurgency.
00:02:39.000And so watching this kind of unfold is amazing.
00:02:43.000But yeah, I've been serving the last seven years in the Virginia House of Delegates, representing the 30th district, so thanks for having me on.
00:02:50.000I think it's perfectly pertinent, I suppose, with your military experience, but also you had a viral video recently condemning, you know, like critical race theory in schools and things like that.
00:02:58.000And so I think, you know, before we even went live, you were giving it all away, talking about school choice and what's going on in these schools.
00:03:04.000And I'm like, well, you know, it's fine.
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00:06:14.000Let's read that first story from the hill.
00:06:17.000Russia threatens military and political consequences if Finland or Sweden tries joining NATO.
00:06:23.000Russian's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova warned against other countries attempting to join NATO after Russia started a war with Ukraine Thursday.
00:06:32.000Finland and Sweden should not base their security on damaging the security of other countries, and their accession to NATO can have detrimental consequences and face some military and political consequences, Zakharova said in a viral clip of a press conference.
00:06:47.000The ministry later posted the same threat on its Twitter.
00:06:50.000Finland and Sweden have given significant military and humanitarian support to Ukraine since Russia invaded.
00:06:55.000One pretext Russia has given for attacking Ukraine is that NATO would not give any assurances that Ukraine would not be allowed to join the Intergovernmental Military Alliance.
00:07:03.000See, I'm gonna pause real quick and say a few things.
00:07:07.000It's hard to believe any of the stuff that's coming out.
00:07:09.000You know, I mean, this stuff is on Twitter, these videos and these statements, but a lot of the videos, a lot of the claims, a lot of the propaganda just seems that it seems like attempts to manipulate the public.
00:08:15.000But I've also thought he was a fairly calculating guy.
00:08:17.000I mean, the guy has managed to stay in power this long within Russia, within an environment where it's fairly unstable from a political perspective with a bunch of oligarchs running around.
00:08:29.000I'm not convinced that he's at a point where he's just kind of lost his mind.
00:08:34.000I think he's pushing to see how far he can get away with what he's doing.
00:08:38.000I think he knows he's got a fairly short time to be able to act in order to consolidate gains.
00:08:43.000And then it's all a question of what are you bringing, right?
00:08:47.000When inevitably we get to the negotiating table, what does that look like and what do you transform in order to get what you want?
00:08:52.000So I don't really understand why he brings Sweden and Finland into this, but again, I don't see him as being an unstable guy.
00:09:01.000What are your thoughts on, I mean, you were talking about unconventional warfare, that's where you specialized in when you were in the military?
00:09:52.000So this isn't about them having to fight a war for years.
00:09:55.000This is about how quickly can they get their gains, consolidate those gains, and then put themselves in a good position on the negotiating table.
00:10:02.000And so from Ukraine's perspective, they had to know that you're not going to go toe-to-toe, especially with the geography of Ukraine.
00:10:09.000It's not like you can go fighting in the mountains for 10 years like they did in Afghanistan, right?
00:10:13.000It is built for tank warfare, and the Russians know a little something about tank warfare.
00:10:19.000There's a lot of historical battles there.
00:10:21.000But what a lot of people don't understand about this is immediately following World War II, the Ukrainians fought like a 10-year insurgency against the Soviets.
00:10:31.000So there is a history of them fighting over that area.
00:10:34.000The borders of Ukraine are a little bit weird from an ethnic standpoint.
00:10:40.000So, at this point, this is a question of using the natural geography that you have, right, around the Dinapur and whatnot, in order to slow, like, the major advance.
00:10:47.000And then, it's largely going to be urban battles.
00:10:50.000If you can be in an urban environment, and you can make them pay, because that's where asymmetric warfare works really well for the defender, for the person that doesn't have the technology.
00:11:00.000But if you're sitting in a city right now and you've got an AT4, an RPG, or if you've got really something good like the U.S.
00:11:16.000And so if they fight the insurgency point in the urban areas, which are kind of behind the lines of the Russian advance, and then they use their military in order to kind of stop them at some of these main geographical areas, rivers being one of the best, They can drag this out and they can make Russia pay a much higher price for it, and that's what I don't think Russia can afford.
00:11:34.000I want to pull up this Google map real quick of the, you know, Eastern European region.
00:11:39.000You have Moscow, you got Russia, you've got Ukraine here, you can see it.
00:11:43.000When Vladimir Putin says he wants assurances that Ukraine won't be joining NATO, I think Tulsi Gabbard came out and she was like, just give them assurances Ukraine won't join NATO.
00:11:52.000It's like, have y'all looked, I'm a fan of Tulsi, but have you looked at a map?
00:12:03.000And then if you go up and you look, it's Sweden, which, you know, look, Russia's got St.
00:12:06.000Petersburg, they've got Kaliningrad in the Baltic Sea.
00:12:09.000Sweden, not NATO, but now obviously Russia's threatening Finland, not NATO, but also Russia's basically threatening them.
00:12:18.000They're both in these same meetings with NATO.
00:12:21.000So when Moscow was like, oh, we don't want NATO on our borders, like they've been there, dude.
00:12:25.000I mean, I know Sweden and Finland, but to act like this is the line for him now, perhaps it's fair to say, I'm not saying he's spiraling out of control like a madman, but he's desperate.
00:12:56.000So he's like, I'll go out with a bang, I suppose.
00:12:57.000Oh no, I think he's someone that wants to believe in the greatness of Russia, that would love to see the Russian Empire once again on a global stage as something that's respected as opposed to kind of a second-rate power.
00:13:10.000And again, you're growing up, he was once a KGB officer.
00:13:14.000This was a guy that believed in the greatness of Russia, regardless of whether or not he was a communist.
00:13:19.000And I think he sees, again, these countries that used to be in the Russian sphere of influence.
00:13:43.000Look, I don't think any of us are shocked by the fact That there are plenty of times when, throughout history, when a domestic leader had problems at home, a war abroad was a great way to, you know, kickstart your nation and get them focused on something.
00:13:57.000You know, again, the greatness of whatever it was.
00:14:00.000And look, our nation hasn't been beyond that sort of enticement in the past.
00:14:06.000But so yeah, I don't buy that it was Ukraine potentially joining.
00:14:29.000And so the only real response they have, because the first thing I started seeing from these activists was that, oh, thank heavens Trump wasn't president when this happened, because we'd be worse off.
00:14:39.000And I was like, for four years, Putin backed off.
00:14:54.000No, no, this is the part where, and the other night I was just kind of pissed off, and I said, you know, I said, I can't remember how far along we were for a bunch of European countries to, you know, ask the United States to intervene in the Ukraine, only to turn around six months later from now and bitch about the United States intervening in Ukraine, right?
00:15:13.000Because they're always willing to fight to the last drop of American blood to sustain their welfare states.
00:15:17.000So this idea that when Trump came in and basically told NATO, hey, look, a treaty is an agreement, it's a legal agreement, and you're not living up to your part of it, that lit a fire under their ass.
00:15:29.000And the other thing was, is that Putin also understood that Trump didn't draw, and look, there was things about Trump's policy I didn't necessarily agree with, but Trump didn't do this thing that Obama did, where it's, we're going to draw a fake line in the sand, and then when you cross it, we're going to draw a different line in the sand.
00:15:46.000Putin expected that if Trump said, you do this, we're going to do this, that he would do it.
00:15:51.000And that's a big part of when foreign leaders cannot calculate what you're going to do, And you have the ability to actually make good on your threats.
00:16:02.000That's a far different dynamic than Joe Biden ripping everyone out of Afghanistan.
00:16:06.000Which again, I wanted the troops to come home from Afghanistan.
00:16:08.000But ripping everyone out the way that he did?
00:16:41.000But the guys advising him certainly did.
00:16:43.000Now, this is the part where I do think we've seen this trend within politics and some of the rhetoric and the direction the left is going.
00:16:52.000And I'm not talking about everyone that might be a Democrat or a liberal.
00:16:55.000I'm talking about the hardcore progressive left.
00:16:58.000They honestly believe some of this crap where it's like, oh, we're just going to pull everybody out by September 11th in 2021.
00:17:05.000And that's going to be that's going to be our market.
00:17:07.000It's going to show that we're dedicated to peace.
00:17:08.000I honestly think Biden is someone that is making a political calculation based off of photo ops and honestly had no idea it was going to go this badly, even though, again, to your point, anybody should have been able to look at that like you cannot pull out this way.
00:17:22.000But Putin is watching things like that.
00:17:25.000Let's talk about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
00:17:27.000We have this story from the New York Post.
00:17:29.000Trump talks about Putin mocking Merkel and more at Mar-a-Lago.
00:17:33.000Boy, did they bury the lead on this one.
00:17:36.000The story is about Donald Trump threatening to hit the capitals of Russia and China.
00:17:42.000This is, I mean, these are bold statements.
00:17:46.000Why is it that Vladimir Putin did not invade Ukraine under Trump?
00:17:50.000There are these, there's this, there's this top post on Reddit where they're like, because, you know, Russia put bounties on soldiers in Afghanistan and Trump didn't even do anything about it.
00:18:04.000There are several other stories making the rounds too, and they are even more provocative.
00:18:09.000One has it that Trump, noting that Putin seized land from Georgia when George W. Bush was president, and seized the Crimean peninsula when Barack Obama was president, warned Putin against a land grab on his watch.
00:18:21.000If you move against Ukraine while I'm president, I will hit Moscow.
00:19:49.000Well, and nobody thinks, I mean, again, this is also, some people think that diplomacy works with everybody because they honestly believe that, well, if we all just sat around the room and we talked and we understood one another, like, I can't remember who it was that said that, you know, Israel and Gaza understand each other.
00:20:09.000So this idea that if we just had a better conversation, I don't think we'd be fine.
00:20:12.000No, when you're dealing with people, that are either dictatorial or quasi-authoritarian or
00:20:18.000whatnot, what they respect is strength.
00:20:20.000And that strength has to be backed up with the, first of all, the capability to do it.
00:20:25.000Could you actually make good on these promises? They all know we could.
00:20:28.000And then it's the idea of, would he actually do this?
00:20:32.000And even if they don't think he would, the bottom line is that there's a part of him like, damn, he might actually do it.
00:20:39.000That is the sort of stuff that can stop a war from ever taking place in the first place and can check aggression.
00:20:44.000You have to have the capability and the willingness, and you have to be able to negotiate in a way that your enemies don't know what you're gonna do, but know that the wildest crap is still on the table.
00:21:18.000And I beat a guy who had ace king, you know, it was just it was it was a good hand.
00:21:22.000And he ended up losing thinking you can't have anything but like I got ace king and I think he ended up with like, I don't know, I don't think he had anything.
00:21:29.000But I ended up winning and he got angry.
00:21:43.000But anyway, the point is, with Donald Trump, Putin's like, I don't think he'll bomb Moscow, but I also don't know if he knows what he's doing either.
00:21:55.000What Sun Tzu said, win the war before, you know, before you actually start it.
00:22:01.000How could you plan against a man like Trump?
00:22:04.000He was like, look, we're going to wait a few years because I don't know what this guy's doing.
00:22:07.000Well, and he was the other thing, too, that I think shocked a lot of people.
00:22:10.000And one of the things that impressed me most about Trump is that is how reserved he actually was in foreign policy when it came to actually deploying people into harm's way to get shot at.
00:22:38.000Again, he was actually a lot more reserved.
00:22:40.000When that whole thing happened in Iran and it was, no, we're not going to do this because I'm not going to... One, it's immoral to kill a bunch of people that had nothing to do with any of this.
00:22:47.000Two, it doesn't make sense on a practical level to create a bunch of enemies off of killing civilians.
00:22:54.000But when it came to Syria and then there was a legitimate thing to strike, like he struck, he struck hard.
00:23:00.000He didn't have any, you know, aspirations to like remake Syria.
00:23:04.000It was just, this is the weirdest thing about the whole, the whole argument about Trump and you know, what he, what, you know, why Putin didn't attack.
00:23:13.000Because they're acting like Trump was favorable to Russia.
00:23:16.000I guess in some ways you can argue Trump's disdain for NATO, but Trump's disdain for NATO, there's a video going around of Trump sitting at a meeting table with them saying, why are we paying for your defense against Russia, and then you're negotiating billion-dollar gas deals making you dependent on Russia?
00:24:02.000Well, and he also, again, it's this idea.
00:24:06.000It's incredible to me that there's this honest belief that anybody's capable of sitting down at the table.
00:24:11.000No, you have completely different objectives.
00:24:13.000You have completely different worldviews.
00:24:14.000You have completely different capabilities, interests, et cetera.
00:24:19.000Now, that's not to say that you still can't have a productive conversation with someone engaged in effective diplomacy.
00:24:24.000But effective diplomacy only takes place when people actually believe that there will be consequences for their actions that they go against you.
00:24:31.000I think, you know, I wonder about Vladimir Putin's term of mind, but I do know we talk a lot about Strassau generational theory.
00:24:57.000And so his idea is, look, we go to war.
00:25:00.000We are more willing, have less to lose than these Western nations, and it will harden up our people a little bit.
00:25:08.000In the long run, maybe he thinks he's planting some seeds.
00:25:11.000What I don't understand, maybe I'm playing Dev's Advocate, America took Iraq, Russia takes Ukraine, China takes Taiwan, then we're done with it.
00:25:18.000Can we just be done with it and move on?
00:26:13.000Okay, so this is what I think is interesting.
00:26:15.000I was talking to a buddy of mine, Christian, who works with us, really good historian, and he's done a lot of research on what's going on in the Ukraine.
00:26:22.000And we were talking about, okay, what are some of the possible angles here, right?
00:26:25.000Because the most obvious one is, all right, Crimea used to be part of Russia.
00:26:29.000It actually got worked into the border with Ukraine after Nikita Khrushchev shut down the insurgency that the Ukrainians had launched against the Soviet Union, right?
00:26:40.000Crimea went from the Russian SSR over to the Ukrainian SSR.
00:26:43.000It was like, well, it's not a big deal.
00:26:45.000Well, when you have the breakaway republics, now all of a sudden you have these areas which ethnically, culturally, you could even argue historically are more Russian that are now not part of that.
00:26:54.000So, OK, again, if you're looking for Cossus Bela, you could say maybe he was he's interested in getting back parts of Russia that he thinks always belong to Russia and want to be Russian anyways.
00:27:03.000But as I look at the Black Sea, and as I look at the Belt and Road Initiative by China, and I look at what they're trying to do with respect to their overland trade, I have a feeling that the more access you have to the Caspian Sea, the more access you have to the Black Sea, the more important that that's going to be from a trade and economic perspective.
00:27:23.000Not to mention the fact that if he gets away with doing this in Ukraine, who the hell is gonna stop him when it comes to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan?
00:27:30.000And now we're talking about minerals, we're talking about, you know, overland routes, we're talking about natural gas.
00:28:35.000And when it's funny too, you would think the same left, that whenever, when Trump said, make America great again, and they all came out with their little hat, we'll make America good again.
00:28:44.000So you get that there's a difference, right, between the two.
00:28:48.000And then when he comes out and says, yeah, this was a genius move on his part for these reasons, it could be genius at that.
00:28:53.000What was he referencing when he said it was genius?
00:28:56.000So Vladimir Putin says, oh, look, these regions are independent.
00:29:00.000I'm going to send in a peacekeeping force to keep the peace.
00:29:03.000And Trump was actually being sarcastic.
00:29:04.000It was like, oh, yeah, peacekeeping force.
00:29:43.000Let me pull up this image from Defiant Elves.
00:29:46.000Occupy Democrats first tweeted, no civilian needs an AR-15 regardless of whatever mental gymnastics you do.
00:29:54.000You are a very special breed of stupid.
00:29:56.000And they then, you know, about six years later, breaking, Ukraine's interior minister announces that 10,000 automatic rifles have been handed out to the civilians of Kiev as they prepare to fight tooth and nail to defend their homes against Putin's invasion.
00:30:10.000RT if you stand with the brave people of Ukraine.
00:30:12.000Now hold on, hold on, hold on everybody.
00:30:46.000I mean, while you're handing them out regarding this guy's first tweet, he's talking to the air and then he says, you're stupid.
00:30:52.000This is something I think people should avoid.
00:30:54.000This is a little off topic when you're, when you're using social media and you're like complaining towards someone and you, they start insulting them.
00:31:00.000If you do it on social media, a lot of people that are unintendedly reading it are going to feel like you're insulting them.
00:32:08.000That's what they're getting at the whole time.
00:32:11.000But let's talk about the asymmetrical warfare, though, because this is the reality.
00:32:16.000When you try to invade someone else, The big challenge for Vladimir Putin is going to be demoralized Russian soldiers, a finite amount of them, versus the entirety of Ukraine civilians who have remained, who are going to be like, I'm going to fight you.
00:32:32.000There's a number, I think a lot of people, and I think Putin thought this would be something where, hey, as soon as the armored divisions go rolling across the border, you know, presidents leaving the country, you know, uh, nope.
00:33:23.000So yeah, in Vietnam, the Viet Cong launched a massive attack all throughout the country during Tet, which was supposed to be a ceasefire within the Vietnamese calendar.
00:34:11.000The propaganda campaign that went along with it made it look like, one, the military or the government was lying to the people, which is certainly not hard to believe.
00:34:19.000And then the other two was that this never would have happened if we were actually in the good shape that we were.
00:34:24.000And as Thomas Sowell likes to say, when a democracy decides you've lost the war, you've lost it.
00:34:30.000But again, if you look at something like this, the propaganda component for an asymmetric force is critical.
00:34:35.000Psychology is one of the most important things in a war.
00:34:38.000It's why we're seeing so much propaganda, because making people feel like we can win, we should win, and we have to win is important to keeping people in the fight.
00:34:47.000So there's a video of Poroshenko, you know, throwing a strap over.
00:35:08.000And when you see your leader on the battlefield with you, they're going to be like... It's like my favorite movie, The Patriot, with Mel Gibson, I often say.
00:35:48.000They believe that if you are not given a proper burial, you're forced to haunt wherever it was you died.
00:35:55.000So in the forestry, the jungle or whatever, they're playing in these loudspeakers, wailing Vietcong voices, saying, flee while you still can or you'll be trapped like me.
00:36:06.000It was so effective, the South Vietnamese fled as well, and so they had to stop doing it.
00:36:09.000I don't know if it's true, it sounds amazing.
00:37:15.000I'll tell you what'll be interesting on this, though, is that, and this is the part where, okay, again, how does Ukraine stall Russia?
00:37:22.000How does Ukraine, like, capture the press and the media and the propaganda and all of this?
00:37:27.000And this is going to be interesting because it's the first war we've seen like this, where literally everybody has got access to the world to some degree from their phone.
00:37:35.000So you imagine partisans out there doing this sort of stuff and then making a TikTok about it, right?
00:37:42.000That's going to be a fascinating thing to potentially watch, not just from a propaganda perspective, but a sharing information perspective.
00:37:50.000Because if you don't think terrorist organizations already use social media in order to coordinate their activities, Regardless of what ends up happening here, there's going to be a lot of research and study going into how social media influenced it from a propaganda, from a coordination standpoint, because there's good ways for partisans to fight, and there's really stupid ways for partisans to fight, and partisans should not be taking on a T-90 with their AK-47, right?
00:39:26.000I do think that there's something to be said.
00:39:27.000And this is the part where I'll probably get a little bit amped up.
00:39:34.000Because again, I've lost friends overseas fighting wars that I'm not so sure were the best decision on America's part.
00:39:43.000But one of the things that has maintained the level of peace that we've seen since World War II, and obviously there's been horrible conflicts in Vietnam, in Korea, and other places that we've been involved in and that we haven't been involved in, but nothing like the massive bloodshed we saw in World War I and World War II.
00:40:02.000And the reason why we have that, and the reason why for the last 30 years we haven't even imagined a conflict like that, the reason why this is surprising the living piss out of everybody, is because of US military dominance.
00:40:14.000The same thing that a lot of our allies are constantly bitching about, and coming to the United States and talking about, oh, you know, they're always throwing their weight around, they're always going...
00:40:23.000Yeah, and because we have, and because people know we can, it has kept people at bay, and no one's going to convince me otherwise.
00:40:32.000And so now we're at a point where you do, you have a war-weary United States, you have a global pandemic that took place, we have a country that we have no legal obligation to defend, and I think that kind of the world order Post-Cold War is being challenged right now by Putin, and he's probably picked the best possible time to do it.
00:40:56.000The same countries that will want the United States to intervene to do the heavy lifting for them, if we decide to do it, will be bitching about us six months from now.
00:41:08.000Now, does that mean we pull out of things like NATO?
00:41:11.000I think there's value with the United States being the preeminent military power.
00:41:17.000And I think that does do something to preventing other nations from getting a little bit froggy when they shouldn't.
00:41:24.000But one of the things, again, that I appreciated about how Trump handled this was he went back to NATO and he made it a very real possibility that you might not be able to rely on us because you're not pulling your weight.
00:41:33.000And that's not the same for allies that we have in like South Korea or Taiwan.
00:41:40.000They do recognize their responsibility to hold back the threat.
00:41:43.000And yes, they depend on the United States for support, but they don't have this expectation that they don't got to do the fighting because we got this.
00:41:51.000And so I think one of the positive things that could come out of this is a lot of these countries that it's become real popular to trash the United States.
00:43:01.000I mean, we didn't do that in the Philippines, but... Right, we didn't do that in the Philippines, or in Wake Island, or in Midway.
00:43:06.000This is not me suggesting that the United States military has not had our own little brush with empire where we've done things that we shouldn't have done.
00:43:12.000I mean, go look at what Lincoln was saying about the Mexican-American War.
00:43:16.000Go look at what Grant was saying about the Mexican-American War.
00:43:18.000About how we kind of picked a fight with a country we knew we could kick the crap out of and then got a lot of territory from it.
00:43:23.000So again, I'm not saying we're perfect, but if you look at the situation in the world, the level of peace and security that has existed in certain parts of the world, especially in Western Europe, has been as a direct result of U.S.
00:43:48.000But that was his... Yeah, I'm not a huge Kissinger fan.
00:43:51.000And I think it's... I don't like to call it the proxy war idea that like, okay, if we just get involved in a bunch of little wars, we'll stop big ones.
00:43:57.000I do think there's an argument to say that there is such a thing as the Sudetenland moment, right?
00:44:03.000Where there was a point where the French military, the British military, if they had intervened in Sudetenland, or if they'd intervened when, you know, the Nazis were going into Czechoslovakia and just carving it up because they could.
00:44:15.000Would that whole scene turn out a lot differently than if they waited all the way till Poland?
00:44:20.000And I think there's an argument to be made there.
00:44:23.000I think there's an argument to be made that you identify when someone has larger aspirations, when they have the military and capability to do it, and you intervene at a point where they realize that, okay, we're not going to get away with this.
00:44:34.000You don't let them build up a certain significant amount of power to where they now can potentially get away with it.
00:44:38.000That's kind of what we've been doing in Iran.
00:44:40.000Well, like I've heard the Stuxnet, we blew up infrastructure.
00:44:42.000I think they targeted them with weapons, blew up weapons depots and stuff.
00:44:47.000The Stuxnet was obviously, you know, fairly significant and they've also tried to manage their growth through sanctions.
00:44:53.000So we could have done that to Germany.
00:44:54.000Looking back in retrospect, we could have tried to somehow disrupt their rise to power, but it was internal.
00:45:01.000It was like, how could we get involved and stop the military machine from creating itself?
00:45:04.000No, I think it's more of, and again, I am very, I tend to, I always side with non-interventionists, and then you need to explain why something is so significant that United States men and women need to bleed for it, right?
00:45:18.000Now, when you're talking about something like Germany, again, when you have internal issues, I tend to say, look, you stay out of those, those are internal issues, piece of Westophilia, right?
00:45:26.000But once you start seeing naked aggression, like you did with the Sudetenland with Germany, or like you did with Czechoslovakia, Then I think there is some argument to say like, okay, is it appropriate at this point to intervene on some level?
00:47:45.000This is like when Hitler went into Poland to reconquer part of Poland that had been stripped away after the First World War and give it back, because apparently he said there was a genocide of German expats in Poland that they were committing.
00:49:04.000But we can't be like, well, Russia gets to take a sovereign country because the United States did it too.
00:49:10.000And even then, the thing that I go back to is that with Iraq and Afghanistan, there was no point where Iraq became the 51st state or Afghanistan became a territory.
00:49:20.000Now, again, I think there was huge problems with the way we did a lot of it.
00:49:24.000Now, I don't think it was wrong to go after the Taliban.
00:49:26.000I don't think it was wrong to go after terrorism.
00:49:29.000I think there was something significantly wrong with this idea that we're going to come in here, completely devastate whatever current government is in charge, and then we're going to go ahead and recreate you on our image.
00:49:38.000But I think it was Ron Paul who said that when it came to the Taliban after 9-11, we should have issued letters of mark and reprisal, specifically targeting the group, not the country, not going after Taliban.
00:49:48.000They would have cannibalized each other.
00:50:04.000It means when we go into a country, we work by, through, and with local allies, the indigenous population.
00:50:09.000You look at the opening days of Afghanistan, we're talking about, you had agency in there, you had, you know, Several hundred green berets working with the Northern Alliance and within what a couple of months like they had kicked the Taliban out of like Kandahar and It was all by through and with the local population and what would have been fascinating to watch And and and who knows what would have happened would have fascinated watches What sort of organic solutions people would have come up to and I'm sure it would have been you know ugly and I'm sure it would have been brutal at times everything else but
00:50:43.000It wouldn't have been the United States saying, no, no, no, we're not just going to fight the Taliban.
00:50:46.000We're going to take over the entire country.
00:50:48.000We're going to take over the entire war.
00:51:06.000And so this time was, well, we're not going to repeat that mistake.
00:51:08.000We'll just double down and take over the whole damn thing.
00:51:10.000Okay, no, you're trying to impose certain cultural, political, social changes on a culture that is not necessarily interested in the social changes that you're trying to affect.
00:51:20.000It doesn't matter whether or not you think it's more moral than what they currently have.
00:51:23.000If you don't have buy-in there, then don't expect to be able to do it unless you're willing to stay there for a hundred years.
00:51:39.000I don't know where that idea comes from, but it's like locked down by the United States or whoever's there.
00:51:45.000Is it American weapons in the Iraqi puppets' hands?
00:51:50.000It's a large nation that has been well defended by the United States for two decades.
00:51:55.000Oh, we've been, we have not been a significant military force on the ground in Iraq for, gosh dang, we're probably, I mean, trying to think of the actual, I was last over there in 08.
00:52:07.000I think by 2013, we were really drawing down significantly.
00:52:11.000Um, so no, I mean, we have not had a significant military presence in Iraq for, I mean, it's getting close to, you know.
00:52:17.000Yeah, I think under Obama, he, he, he pulled all troops out of Iraq, put them into Afghanistan.
00:52:22.000He moved a lot down there, then he reinforced in Afghanistan by the time Trump was in there.
00:52:26.000I mean, we have a huge embassy over there.
00:52:28.000There was some military presence, but that was one of the big complaints, right?
00:52:31.000Is that the reason why ISIL was able to come in and do so much was because we didn't have a significant U.S.
00:53:59.000So, uh, the crowns would issue letters of marque, which basically would commission a private warship to attack enemies during a time of war, and they could then capture it, bring it in, and get a reward for it.
00:54:09.000It was a simple way of being like, we don't gotta pay for your repairs, we don't gotta pay for the ship, you find your own crew, you bring a ship, we'll pay you for it, we'll make it worth your while.
00:54:18.000So governments would effectively commission pirates, corsairs, to go and, you know, stage these acts.
00:54:25.000Then the other country would be like, your ships are taking us.
00:54:53.000These are the people who just want to rip you off and steal what they can.
00:54:56.000You got gray hat hackers, activists, politically motivated, and white hat, corporate security types.
00:55:02.000The government can go to these black hats, effectively pirates.
00:55:06.000Heck, some of them are probably pirating software online, literally.
00:55:09.000And they'll be like, anything you steal from Russia, you will not be prosecuted for.
00:55:13.000Any information you rip off, any databases, I'm willing to bet these people are being given carte blanche by the US government.
00:55:19.000So you think they're getting paid through the dark web or something?
00:55:21.000Not necessarily paid, but I'm willing to bet you've got like FBI going to this black hat hacker and being like, you know, we got that case against you.
00:55:30.000We're gonna drop it if you can hit these Russian targets.
00:55:32.000Okay, I think that's what they did with Jack Ruby with the Kennedy thing.
00:55:35.000He was like a mobster and they gave him, he got off.
00:55:40.000I think it's as simple as, you know, we know who you are, we know you're good, why don't you use your skills to help the United States and we'll look the other way.
00:55:49.000So they're blackmailing criminal hackers in part in addition to maybe other things?
00:55:54.000Blackmail, they're like, we're gonna let you have carte blanche to steal whatever you want and we want no repercussions?
00:55:58.000We'll punish you unless you steal whatever you want, and then we'll turn it off.
00:56:03.000And again, there's not a lot of people talking about this because when people talk about, we've just gotten so used to, oh, the president wants to go to war, I guess we'll go do that now.
00:56:12.000But there are constitutional ways to deal with certain threats.
00:56:16.000When is the declaration of war, which is supposed to be done by Congress?
00:56:21.000That's a fairly laborious process. The other thing that the president has as a tool, now again,
00:56:27.000if you're going to engage in major action, you're still supposed to get approval from Congress to
00:56:30.000do this. It's not like they can do it. But the whole idea of letters of mark and reprisal and
00:56:34.000kind of the last president I think we had that issued one was Madison. Wow.
00:56:40.000And it was, and again, don't quote me on that, but I think, and again, part of that was going after the, you know, the Barbary Pirate Wars and the United States didn't have a, you know, a huge Navy or anything like that.
00:58:30.000Yeah, but like when we're talking about- I'm not saying anything cringy!
00:58:33.000There's a meme on the front page of Reddit, and it's Megamind, and he's got, it says like the size of the hero's balls, and then it says ball size, and it says mega, and I'm like, that's the stupidest thing, like, what is this a cultural reference to?
00:59:19.000And it turns out, I believe it's true because we did this reporting advice, that the person who was actually running the Syrian Electronic Army was in Moscow.
00:59:27.000So this is somebody who hacked Twitter and then tweeted that Obama had been injured in some kind of attack on the White House.
01:00:13.000And then you just, uh, you just translate it.
01:00:16.000It works in English, but I'm getting this message that it says checking your browser while loading RT.
01:00:20.000You think that there's, they're logging everyone that's going to RT now?
01:00:23.000No, I don't know, but what I will say is, when I heard that Anonymous shut down RT, and I'm like, that does sound like a lot of what Anonymous is.
01:00:32.000And I will also stress this point, there is no hacktivist collective called Anonymous.
01:00:37.000That's just, it's a propaganda, it's manipulation, it's always been.
01:00:41.000If you ask someone who's a hacker, what does it mean when Anonymous hacks something?
01:00:47.000They'll just look at you and be like, it literally means Anonymous hacked it.
01:01:21.000And there was only a few of them who are prominent and actually had the skills.
01:01:24.000And then once it got popular press, all of a sudden you started getting all of these videos popping up on YouTube, where it was like anonymous declares.
01:01:32.000And the initial concept was if you have a thousand anonymous individuals and people propose things randomly, whatever is popular rises to the top.
01:01:41.000So a lot of the actions that were being taken by anonymous was like someone said, you know, operation this, let's do it.
01:01:48.000And people would be like, that's stupid.
01:01:50.000And then someone would be like, operation ABC.
01:01:56.000So you still have attempts at, you know, making these videos, but for the most part, the movement or whatever of like this kind of meritocratic, hacktivist operation just doesn't exist anymore.
01:02:09.000Cause I think if you get, I mean, not to say that I know a lot of hackers, but the people that I do know, let's say that possess a skillset.
01:02:17.000I don't know that you could get five of them to agree on anything.
01:02:21.000Yeah, the one thing I will say is that the hacker community has gone full cult for the most part.
01:02:26.000So I used to hang out, I'd go to Defcon, Blackhat, hang out at hacker spaces, and they were free speech, anti-establishment, anti-government.
01:02:35.000And then the last time I went to Defcon, which is the biggest hacker convention, it's like a civilian hacker convention, because they have Blackhat, which is the corporate one.
01:02:45.000There was a guy, I think he was from the NSA or something, and he was giving a presentation, and he mentioned how they try and stop Russia, and everyone started clapping and cheering.
01:02:54.000And then he stops and he goes, wow, an applause from DEF CON for a spook.
01:02:59.000I'm really surprised things are changing.
01:03:02.000It was because the media had been running the narrative of Russia, And I mentioned there was like this semi-open event there, and I had mentioned that RT had offered to pay me money for some of my footage out of Sweden, which I said no to.
01:03:16.000I said no because I was like, my footage is on YouTube for free.
01:03:44.000It was a weird shift that happened where, like, the corporate press said Putin bad, and everyone just went, you got it, we're gonna march in lockstep.
01:04:53.000The reason it doesn't surprise me is because there's a lot of people that I know, again, I always make a distinction between liberal and the left, but there's a lot of people on the left that I know that any other country in the world is better than our own.
01:05:04.000We are uniquely evil in some capacity for which we must pay, I don't know, We just need to be sorry all the time, and so the idea that you would ask them, should we protect our border or Ukraine's?
01:05:17.000Of course it would be Ukraine's, because the only way we would protect our border is if, you know, we're all a bunch of racists.
01:07:15.000I do think there's a realm for, like, you know, sacrifice when the times call for it.
01:07:21.000But, like, as I look at, like, all the things that are kind of under assault and the way things are acting, there is a huge realm right now.
01:07:29.000One of the reasons why we are in the situation we are in right now is because we didn't fight for the cultural space.
01:07:36.000Um, we, we, you know, we might fight for the political space.
01:07:39.000We didn't fight for the cultural space, which is why it is dominated by, by a certain perspective or viewpoint.
01:07:44.000And I, I tell parents this all the time when they're at, well, how are we going to fix our schools or how are we going to like, well, if you think you're going to fix your schools with one election cycle.
01:07:53.000Because your child is now going to a school, which in many cases is pushing a particular worldview or propaganda that might not coincide with your own beliefs about your country or faith or whatever.
01:08:04.000Then they come home and they watch Netflix, right?
01:08:08.000And chances are whatever they're watching there is going to be pushing a particular worldview.
01:08:12.000Then they turn on a song, which is pushing a worldview.
01:08:14.000Then they look at the media, which is pushing a worldview.
01:08:15.000And then they go to their college professor, which is pushing a worldview.
01:08:22.000And so any sort of activity I see which is pushing into that cultural space, which is so critical, because everything political is downstream from culture.
01:08:32.000is absolutely necessary and one of the most important fronts that we're in right now.
01:08:36.000But there's two good things to say here, some optimism.
01:08:39.000One is, you've got The Daily Wire ramping up production of cultural content, they're buying movies, they absolutely see your point and they're working towards it.
01:08:49.000But then I would say that when you say we haven't gotten involved in the culture, or I forgot exactly how you said it, Well, Ian and I did not come into this as conservatives.
01:09:01.000So there's a lot of people who were working in some kind of entertainment, some kind of media or cultural space, and now find themselves in agreement on many core issues of freedom in the United States and our Constitution with conservatives, and that's giving a big cultural boon.
01:09:50.000I grew up making videos with my friends.
01:09:53.000And now what the left has kind of screwed up is that they're constantly pushing people They're making authoritarian demands of people to give in to their politics and their views or else.
01:10:05.000And a lot of people are saying, or else, and they're walking away.
01:10:08.000So now there's an opportunity here for conservatives to get back in the game and push back on the left.
01:10:12.000And I think in the long run, the left will lose the culture.
01:10:15.000I was in Hollywood acting 2006, 7, 8, kind of.
01:10:18.000And I was like, I'm going to change the world.
01:10:19.000I'm going to become a famous actor and then be able to give the speech at the Oscars that changes everyone.
01:11:06.000Incursion, it's terrifying, but beautiful weather, that's for sure.
01:11:09.000Because of the valley, the mountains, and it's like, you got snow-capped peaks to the north an hour, you got the desert to the east in an hour, you got the ocean to the west in an hour, you got the hills just 20 minutes north of you, the beautiful valley, it's an incredible city.
01:11:22.000They called it the City of the Angels for a reason.
01:11:25.000Actually, it says Los Angeles has a really weird long name.
01:11:59.000Oh, so I call it the, and I did this once, and I think it was like, I don't know, Occupy Democrats or Blue Virginia, or someone got, like, fears, like, I can't believe they called us locusts.
01:12:58.000It was with One of these one of these guys that was predicting in the 70s that we would be engaged in a series of world famines and like all of our natural resources.
01:13:17.000And so this other economist came in and I think he told him he's like pick five natural resources and I'll bet that in 20 years they're all cheaper than they are today.
01:13:29.000Because it's this idea that no, human beings have this amazing capacity to adapt if they're not being controlled by, oh, I don't know, an authoritarian central government that's trying to control their lives or treating them like they're a virus.
01:14:23.000Again, I was talking with Tim about this.
01:14:24.000What do we think is the worst case scenario?
01:14:27.000And what we were talking about was like, okay, he takes Ukraine, he uses that as kind of like a trial balloon, right?
01:14:32.000Takes Ukraine, doesn't really suffer any major consequences for it, and then you start to look at incursions into places like Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, where we're talking about, again, the Belt and Road Initiative, and now you start to see this block, this Russian-Chinese block, where you have a massive amount of natural resources, you've solved some of the population issues that Russia's having with expansion, and then you have just these major spheres of influence.
01:14:56.000And then it becomes almost kind of like a remake of the Cold War on some level.
01:14:59.000Now again, I'm not saying this is going to happen, but I'm saying it's not science fiction to look at this and be like, okay, yeah, I can look at a map, and I can look at what he's doing, and I can look at where resources are at, and I can see where spheres of influence would potentially engage, and then where do we go from there?
01:15:16.000And to your point, back when it was the West and the Soviet Union, you had people coming off of World War II, you had generations that were familiar with sacrifice, familiar with fighting, that they had a strong sense of patriotism, they had a strong sense of moral responsibility to themselves, their family, their country, etc.
01:15:32.000And now you're talking about a world where I don't think anybody believes that we have that same sense as widespread throughout the population.
01:15:40.000Given some of the things that we're complaining about right now and some of the things that people honestly believe are really key issues.
01:15:49.000And so it's weird to look at where the power dynamic is going to be from a cultural standpoint at that level.
01:15:55.000I think moving forward, if we look back at home and we can see what's going on culturally, I'm not so convinced the U.S.
01:16:03.000is going to be a major player in international conflict the same way they are now.
01:16:08.000I think it's obvious that that influence is waning.
01:16:10.000But let's bring it back home and wrap it back to the cultural issues.
01:16:15.000We were talking about schools and school choice early on, so I really want to talk to you about this and get your thoughts on what's going on with Youngkin.
01:16:25.000Education played a huge role in a Republican victory in Virginia.
01:16:29.000So I'm wondering if you can just bring us up to speed on what's been going on, how you got involved, and where do you think people are in this critical race theory stuff?
01:16:38.000So I think for the first time I can remember in my lifetime, Republicans won an election in what has been increasingly a blue state on the issue of education.
01:16:54.000That's always been, like, a Democrat issue.
01:16:56.000They always come off as the ones that are more, you know, well, what happened was, and I got to kind of set the scene here, Democrats took control of, you know, the House of Delegates, the Virginia Senate, and the governor for the first time in, like, over 20 years in Virginia.
01:17:11.000And there was one Democrat, Delegate Lopez, who represents, I think it's Arlington.
01:17:16.000And he had told people at this one campaign stop, he goes, if you give us everything, we will accomplish a lifetime's worth of work in an afternoon.
01:17:23.000And keep in mind, for 20 years, they hadn't had this sort of power.
01:17:27.000So they got to run on a lot of like aspirational things like, oh, we're going to equality and social justice and equity.
01:18:45.000And what this did is it set up this process whereby teachers in Virginia, in order to get their license or renew their license, had to go through cultural competency training.
01:18:53.000Well, when you go onto the Roadmap to Equity in Virginia Education website, that's where you found out that, oh, wow, there's Ibram X. Kendi, there's Robin DiAngelo, there's Southern Poverty Law Center.
01:19:05.000Now, what happened was his parents were starting to see this stuff arrive in their classrooms.
01:19:10.000Their kids are coming home and they're making comments about it.
01:19:12.000At the same time, Democrats had removed like reporting requirements for principals for certain like criminal acts happening on within a school.
01:19:24.000Especially in Northern Virginia, Loudoun County was like the hotspot for this.
01:19:28.000Where students are coming home and talking about what's going on and the parents aren't liking it.
01:19:33.000And then you had certain like equity restrictions that were taking place where now certain students that would have qualified before are not making it into certain schools or certain programs.
01:19:42.000Then you have a case where now you have a... I don't even know if it was a transgender female.
01:19:49.000It was a biological male that was wearing a dress, right?
01:19:58.000The news was reporting that it was a transgender student, but if you actually read the details, it was just a student who wore a dress and was going in the girl's bathroom.
01:20:06.000It was a male student, not transgender.
01:20:08.000So the big part that kind of blew up was you had a father that went to a school board meeting, and they were mad about a lot of things.
01:20:55.000And then that student, right, that student was quietly transferred to a different school.
01:20:59.000So they did call the police, the parents were notified, but that student was transferred to a different school where that student then re-offended.
01:21:55.000This is you have now told you have now told an Indian immigrant family that they're racist because they're concerned about what's going on in their kid's school.
01:22:04.000And real quick, these school boards are like white progressives telling minorities they're the racists.
01:22:45.000He was, he was arrested at that school-born meeting.
01:22:47.000And it was funny because that was one of the events that the department, the, that the school board association, right?
01:22:52.000The national school board association wrote a letter to.
01:22:56.000The Department of Justice, and that's where they were trying to use counterterrorism law in order to crack down on these meetings and school board meetings.
01:23:03.000And it wasn't until a reporter, I think with the Daily Wire, actually bothered to go to the man, right?
01:23:09.000Go to the father and say, so why'd you do this?
01:23:11.000And he goes, because my daughter was raped in a Loudoun school bathroom.
01:23:14.000And they lied about it and they covered it up and they transferred the kid?
01:24:05.000I mean, there were Republicans too, but it wasn't just... If it had been just Republicans, we wouldn't have seen the election results we did.
01:24:11.000I just mean to say that, like, the narrative of the only people who are complaining are Republicans.
01:24:16.000This was regular suburbanite families.
01:28:14.000Yeah, so there's no way you can get—so even though you—if you make a good enough argument— It's like internal gerrymandering.
01:28:19.000If you make a good enough argument, you might be able to get something out of a Republican-controlled House committee, because we only got a majority of two.
01:28:27.000On the Senate side, they will stack those committees, and even if you could get enough votes on the floor of the Senate, They will make sure it goes to a committee where it will never see the light of day.
01:28:35.000Do you think that they intentionally have senators pick the committees so that there isn't a democratic voice because of the compounding effect of democracy that mob rule can take over?
01:28:47.000No, it's just part of this is whoever the controlling party is in a particular legislative body, they want to be able to control the outcome for what legislation makes it to the floor and what gets sent over to the other body.
01:29:00.000But the thing is, is what we did in Virginia on the House of Delegates side, what we said is like, look, there needs to be proportional representation on these committees because it's a more accurate reflection of what the people actually elected.
01:29:12.000But you can manipulate that committee process pretty bad.
01:29:14.000And again, it's not every committee, but it's been frustrating.
01:29:17.000I think it should be like... I talked with Thomas Massey about this.
01:29:19.000We've got to do that in the federal government as well.
01:29:21.000It's ridiculous that the Democrats win by 51% and then they pick all the committee chairs because that one... And they make sure the ones that matter the most, they have the majority on.
01:30:06.000Again, because we have proportional representation, it's like, okay, you're going to have this many Republicans, this many Democrats, blah, blah, blah.
01:30:12.000Do you see people change party affiliation on paper so that they can get into a committee when they're actually still the same person?
01:31:12.000Some of the pushback I've heard on school choice is that if everyone has the opportunity to send their kid to whatever school they want in the surrounding area that a lot of people will go to the good school first and all these other schools that need students for money are going to go out of business or get worse.
01:31:26.000This is why you should fund students and not a particular building.
01:31:30.000And again, we've gotten so used to the way education has been monopolized and run by the government that it's hard to imagine another way to do it.
01:31:37.000But think about, again, think about the way you buy anything else, right?
01:31:42.000You don't have a government store you go to in order to buy something, right?
01:31:46.000Let's hear that story about the grocery store story.
01:31:48.000So the way I've described this before is we all agree education is important.
01:31:54.000So, let's imagine that the government at some point said, you know what, eating is so important that here's how we're going to do this.
01:32:00.000We're going to set up thousands of government grocery stores all over the country and then you're going to be assigned a government grocery store based off of your address.
01:32:07.000Now, when you show up to the government grocery store, you're not going to actually shop for your groceries.
01:32:11.000Your groceries will be decided for you based off of a government board and the caloric intake or the nutritional necessities of your particular family.
01:32:19.000Now, if you don't like something in the grocery bag, not a big deal.
01:32:22.000All you have to do is show up to a bunch of board meetings or go and lobby your state legislature in order to get a different product into your grocery bag or out of your grocery bag.
01:32:31.000Oh, by the way, none of the employees working at this government grocery store will be rewarded based off of creativity, ingenuity, or work ethic.
01:32:38.000They will only be rewarded based off of seniority.
01:32:42.000Does anybody think that is a grocery store you would want?
01:32:46.000Would you want that to be your grocery store option?
01:33:02.000I go back and I say, okay, But what I just described is exactly what we did with public education.
01:33:06.000You are assigned a government school based off of your address.
01:33:09.000When you show up to the government school, you don't have any say over the curriculum, over the class, or a very, very limited say over what you can do.
01:33:15.000If you have a problem with what's being taught or with what's not being taught, great!
01:33:19.000Try to re-elect your school board or maybe go to the state legislature and try to get something changed there.
01:33:23.000And by the way, none of your teachers are rewarded based off of how good a job they do.
01:33:27.000They're just rewarded off of seniority.
01:33:29.000Not to mention the fact, now again, everyone can then see in that example that, okay, maybe there is a better way to run education.
01:33:38.000And the thing I say is, okay, well, are you happy with the grocery store options you have?
01:33:43.000Yeah, are you happy with the options that you have to buy a smartphone?
01:33:46.000Are you happy with the options you have to go and do other educational opportunities?
01:33:51.000Yeah, okay, well then, maybe that's because when you as the customer of the product or service have the power The rest of the world is trying to get you to be their customer.
01:34:17.000I don't even know if they, they want education.
01:34:19.000I think primarily they want them to understand how to learn.
01:34:22.000They want them to understand how to learn, and then really what they want is they want them to be able to learn the basic social and economic skills they're gonna need to be an independent adult, right?
01:34:39.000But the oversight restriction is, no, I as a customer want the best for my child, and now I have the ability to go find what that looks like.
01:34:49.000On the supply side, Now all of a sudden you have this huge world where schooling is no longer based off of a government building you go to.
01:34:58.000Jordan Peterson, if you could divvy up your $18,000 a year stipend amongst the great creators and educators of our time that are on the internet, that'd be so great.
01:35:07.000Did you get to meet Matt Walsh when he came down?
01:37:31.000And if they see the polls, clearly the CDC is now announcing, oh, we're gonna pull back on the masks and everything.
01:37:36.000Yeah, because they know they're spiraling.
01:37:38.000Yeah, I thought it was funny that it wasn't the medical science that changed on masks.
01:37:43.000It was the political science with respect to the polling that caused them to finally wake up to the fact that maybe this is not a good idea.
01:37:49.000Hey, we're gonna lose an election, huh?
01:37:52.000Gunn Griffin says, for Nick, in Vietnam, we weren't prepared for insurgency warfare with General Westmoreland attempting a conventional war.
01:37:59.000After 60 years of regular warfare, are we prepared to return to conventional?
01:38:03.000That's a great, that is a great question, because he's absolutely right.
01:38:07.000We, for the last 20 years, we built a military around the idea of counterinsurgency and, you know, initially a little bit was was U-Dub, but mainly it was counterinsurgency.
01:38:16.000Now it's getting back into the realm of actually trying to fight a large conventional conflict.
01:38:21.000And we can see the potential for something like that happening with Russia.
01:38:24.000I think we can recognize the potential for something like that happening with China as well.
01:38:28.000So I will say that I know it was a concern that was being addressed, but I mean, let's face it, the United States military has a track record for fighting the strategy of the previous war.
01:38:38.000And so there's always going to be a learning curve that takes place when you have an officer corps or an NCO corps that has grown up in kind of one style of fighting and then you move into a different style.
01:38:49.000The one thing I will say is that while the United States military has not always been the best at predicting the next sort of tactics that will be necessary for the next conflict, it does have a track record of adapting usually very quickly in order to overcome.
01:40:26.000I can tell you this, with RT going down, you better believe in the West, they're going to try and restrict information coming out of Russia, and you better believe Russia is going to try and manipulate you into believing they're being victimized.
01:40:37.000I think, yeah, both of those statements are absolutely true.
01:40:40.000The one thing I would question is, I don't know what it gets Ukraine to be the initial aggressor with Russia.
01:41:04.000I love the history of Russia and the United States is great because it was like we were enemies, but we worked together to defeat a common enemy.
01:41:11.000And that's what we should be doing today.
01:42:32.000CJ says when Trump took office, ISIS was the top foreign policy issue.
01:42:36.000He set aside our differences with Russia to solve that problem, and the deep state hated it.
01:42:40.000Meanwhile, the Minsk agreement stewed.
01:42:42.000Yeah, because I think, I think the U.S.
01:42:45.000was hoping that ISIS would destabilize Syria so that we could get a more favorable regime in, and then we could build our pipeline through Syria.
01:42:53.000But Trump getting rid of ISIS, while the right thing.
01:42:57.000Yeah, I think the bureaucrats, the military industrial complex were upset.
01:43:03.000Weird stuff went down with ISIS and the Syrian rebels.
01:43:41.000Guys, guys, the UN Security Council resolution concerning condemning, sorry I can't read, Russia for the invasion of Ukraine has failed due to the Russian vote and China has abstained.
01:43:52.000So the UN is doing great stuff over there.
01:43:58.000Not only have they done great work there, but they have done great work for the parking situation in New York City.
01:46:36.000So yeah, go to youtube.com slash castcastle if you want to see what it's like inside the Cast Castle operation, how we make all of the, what is it?
01:47:08.000Mitch Marco says, I don't know what's more annoying, Ian claiming to love the art of movies despite not seeing a movie made in the last 20 years or getting caught up on words that have nothing to do with the route word.
01:49:44.000Especially something like this where it's very fast moving, you're gonna have a lot of, again, As the Russian lines move forward and you have, like, pockets of troops that are in urban areas as they hand out, like, you know, weapons to their civilian population to be able to fight back, you're gonna have a lot of people running around and playing clothes and whatnot just because it's the nature of warfare.
01:50:03.000So if you're running around and playing clothes, sorry, dude.
01:50:10.000Or just, like, a speedo and nothing else because... No, they're not gonna know.
01:50:14.000If they see a guy who looks like a weirdo, Okay, so in that area of the world, running around in a Speedo, nothing else in the winter, it's pretty normal, I'm pretty sure.
01:50:32.000Because you could be somebody who's armed, you could be part of the conflict, and they don't know, and no one wants to take the chance.
01:50:38.000If they don't know you, and you're not from their neighborhood, don't expect to be able to walk through there.
01:50:43.000If you can't speak the language either, I mean, that's a huge problem.
01:50:46.000I was in Maidan during the protests that started in 2013 and in 2014, and they eventually got to the point where they built these massive barricades around Independence Square, or whatever they call it.
01:51:00.000And I was walking around with my British producers from Vice.
01:51:04.000We walked out, When we came to walk back in, we got surrounded by like 15 Ukrainian guys who were yelling at us in Ukrainian.
01:51:12.000And the only thing I had to do was say like, American, speak English, sorry.
01:51:17.000And then someone came in and started speaking Ukrainian and backed them off.
01:51:20.000And they were like American journalists.
01:51:22.000And they were like, please, please, please come in, come in.
01:51:23.000But the guy's with me, I'm like, they're British, they're not American.
01:51:31.000But when you go into an area, you don't speak the language and they're all yelling at you.
01:51:34.000Let me tell you man, I was in Turkey and we went to this neighborhood, they call it like the last anarchist neighborhood of Istanbul.
01:51:40.000There was a street where the anarchists were throwing molotovs at cops and the cops were, you know, holding the line and firing less lethals.
01:51:49.000So we went around and went on a side street to try and go in, and we've got, it's me and a guy with a camera and another producer, when all of a sudden a whole bunch of Turkish dudes run up to us holding molotovs, screaming at us in Turkish, and one guy holds a molotov cocktail right up to the side of my face.
01:52:05.000And my response, I put my hands up, I said nothing, and I just nodded, and I slowly turned and started to walk away.
01:52:13.000The guys I was with were, like, kind of more excited.
01:52:16.000And I was just like, as we walked, I was like, guys, guys, don't try and speak English in an excited way to somebody who doesn't speak English or is not speaking English to you.
01:52:26.000Because the only thing they hear is you going, back at them, and they might think you're aggressive.
01:52:32.000So just, you know, put your hands up, nod, and then just walk in the direction they point.
01:52:38.000I would just say, man, Vice sent me on some... Vice had sent me out a couple times into conflict with producers who had no conflict experience.
01:52:49.000And I just want to say, it is... It's exciting.
01:52:53.000Maybe the most stressful thing I've ever experienced is knowing that I'm responsible for the life of someone because... That doesn't know what they're doing.
01:53:59.000You know what's kind of an aside to that?
01:54:02.000It's because a lot of people, again, one of the benefits of especially growing up in the United States is most people, not everyone, most people have grown up in an environment where they really haven't had to experience any sort of conflict or deprivation.
01:54:55.000Alright, let's grab some more Super Chats.
01:54:58.000V Rise says the ghost of Kiev has been proven to be fake, yet many leftist communities online acknowledge and blatantly say they don't care that it's fake, they are still going to believe it.
01:55:33.000Churchill was like, it was all about morale, uh, more like mentality, propaganda and keeping people sane, like giving them, giving them motivation.
01:55:42.000He would like, he had no idea if they were going to win or lose, but he would tell them they were going to win.
01:56:16.000Okay, I was thinking of this earlier, if the hackers are the modern day... I didn't realize the Civil War, but that's a good... Yeah, I thought it was Madison was the last one.
01:56:24.000If the hackers are the modern day pirates being hired with letters of marque, then what about the people that are controlling the algorithms at the top of the companies that are being paid to change the algorithms?
01:56:48.000The analogy here is just, that's the media.
01:56:50.000In the United States, the media was completely on board with the war effort, and the government would go to them and be like, don't report these things.
01:57:00.000You're talking about aggressive action toward, like, I mean, there's a long time relationship between governments and media where they'll essentially say, you know, restrict certain information, or they'll classify it a certain way so they can't report it, or they'll just voluntarily self-censor.
01:57:12.000But the letters are marked. That's more, it's like, I'm going to take this hacker,
01:57:15.000and I want this organization tracked. And the way you're going to do it is,
01:57:18.000and again, I want you to hack all their bank accounts. And if you hack their bank accounts,
01:57:22.000you can keep some or whatever. Or not even that, be like, here are the targets we want hit,
01:57:26.000and we won't come after you for hitting them. Yeah. What about like, we want you to show this
01:57:30.000algorithm here and this algorithm here. But you're talking about massive
01:57:34.000corporations that work with government.
01:58:05.000You have a group of three dudes hanging out in an apartment in Moscow, and the government is just like, oh, won't someone rid me of this priest?
01:59:02.000It's interesting because mercenary has like an actual definition and then it also has kind of like a colloquial understanding or like a popular understanding of it.
01:59:09.000So there was like a lot of what we think of when we think of mercenaries is like literally like the Swiss Guards or something like that where you have an element of soldiers or troops that will essentially fight for the highest bidder or whatnot.
01:59:24.000Um, then you have people that are paid to provide, you know, military services, but it's, it's not as if they're just going to the higher bid.
01:59:31.000It's not like you just go to whoever, it's not like one day we're working for the U.S.
01:59:34.000government and the next day, the cartels, who knows?
02:00:51.000You know what I don't like about aggression and defense is that you can have a country that is meddling other places with like technology and not sending a troop.
02:00:58.000And then you're basically the aggressor at that point, even though you haven't moved a troop.
02:01:03.000And so if you get attacked, you can't claim that you're defending yourself.
02:01:07.000If you were out there screwing with people and now they're retaliating.
02:01:10.000I don't think Ukraine was invading Russia.
02:01:14.000has been meddling and I think it's like a proxy.
02:01:16.000Yeah, but as much as I think Joe Biden's crooked with, you know, the deals he's worked and the illegal quid pro quo and all that stuff, trying to buy favors and influence with cash, Vladimir Putin had every opportunity to do the exact same.
02:01:29.000He could have gone to the president of Ukraine, I think it was Poroshenko, he could have gone to any one of these people and said, the US has offered you a billion dollars in loans, I'll give you a billion dollars in loans as well.
02:01:40.000The problem was, my understanding, you know, having been on the ground in Ukraine and talked to some of the people, and I still am in regular communication with a friend of mine who's there, is that they don't like Russia.
02:01:53.000These people are like, the Soviet Union staged a genocide and it was, it was primarily Russia staging a genocide over the Ukrainian people.
02:02:02.000You're, it's exactly, you're not, you're, it's going to be hard-pressed to get popular support across the board.
02:02:07.000And so what was happening was the US was playing their influence games, Russia was playing their influence games, but a lot of people in the country were still like, we'd rather be in the EU.
02:02:14.000Not to mention, for a lot of people in Ukraine, they were hoping that getting into the EU meant they could migrate out of the country and go get jobs in higher paying countries.
02:02:23.000So, when you look at what happened with the EU, people from Poland, where the GDP was lower, moved to the UK, where the GDP was higher, and were making more money now.
02:02:30.000People in Ukraine were hoping for the same thing.
02:02:32.000That getting in the EU would raise up, you know, all of their wages and bring in more money.
02:02:37.000And Russia wanted them to join the Trade Federation.
02:02:48.000You know what is... I don't know about that.
02:02:50.000Something tells me their government structure doesn't work quite the same as ours.
02:02:54.000Yeah, he just keeps bouncing back and forth.
02:02:55.000I've been kind of defending, like, hey, Russia's a federation of states, but, like, dude, if the dude seized control of the government, it's a dictatorship now.
02:03:02.000He's supposedly the richest guy on the planet.
02:03:05.000Well, my friends, if you haven't already, smash that like button, subscribe to this channel, share the show with your friends, and go to TimCast.com and become a member.
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02:03:31.000We've got a couple programs that we've been working on.
02:03:33.000One is Making the Argument with Nick Freitas.
02:03:35.000One of the things that we do on there is we actually try to equip people to be able to make better arguments for free markets, for individual liberty.
02:03:42.000One of the things that we do that's kind of unique on that, we actually highlight bad conservative arguments.
02:03:47.000Because that's one thing that drives me nuts is watching my own side make really bad arguments.
02:03:51.000And then we've got another program we do called the Why Minutes where we take, you know, actually one of the issues that we were talking about recently on there is, you know, we talk about the environmental policy and stuff like that.
02:03:59.000And it's always this idea that if only the government intervened more, we'd have better environmental policy.
02:04:03.000So we like to talk about things like the Aral Sea and how, wow, centralized government power was actually not better for the environment, along with all the other things it's not good for.
02:04:11.000But if you're interested in individual liberty, free markets, all that good stuff, making the argument with Nick Freitas, the Why Minutes, Also, you are Nick for VA on Twitter.
02:04:33.000And then all of a sudden, bam, nothing goes to the For You page anymore.
02:04:36.000But it is still kind of funny because I like to be able to tell my teenage daughters, hey, how do you feel about the fact that your 42-year-old father has a bigger TikTok account than you?