In this episode, I talk about the growing feud between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the Walt Disney Corporation, and my interview with Matthew Tiermond, a journalist who has been covering the Putin ambitions, Poland s take, and Ukraine s take for quite some time.
00:04:21.000Capabilities would be the aircraft, the tanks, the air defense systems that they try to help Venezuela maintain in Venezuela that's close to our homeland.
00:04:32.000And so if Russia wanted to marshal all of their South American capabilities to do as much damage to the United States as they possibly could, what would they do?
00:04:41.000I think that they would provide parts to these capabilities that are in Venezuela.
00:04:47.000As we know, the deputy foreign minister probably about three or four weeks ago talked about not taking off the table about increasing infrastructure capacity within the region.
00:05:00.000Right now, the Biden administration is working to potentially purchase oil from Venezuela.
00:05:05.000If Venezuela saw a mass infusion of cash, what do you assess they would do with the money?
00:05:11.000I don't know what Venezuela would do with the money, but...
00:05:18.000If we're making policy choices that could move a lot of resources into Venezuela, if your biggest worry about Venezuela is Russian military cooperation, isn't it possible that if Venezuela all of a sudden ended up with a lot more cash, that they would use it to buy Russian military equipment?
00:05:35.000They could. They also have quite a big humanitarian crisis on their hands as well.
00:05:40.000Yes. Humanitarian issues have never really been as important to Maduro as military activity, right?
00:05:48.000In the same hearing, Congressman Austin Scott of Georgia gave an ominous preview about how the circumstances in Russia could destabilize food supply and thus governments themselves.
00:06:02.000Twelve months from now, I think we're going to be talking about the issue of hunger and the disruption of democracies in the Western Hemisphere because of the lack of food supply.
00:06:15.000This is a direct result of Russia's incursion into the Ukraine.
00:06:18.000It is going to come from the loss of the ability to put fertilizer on a lot of crops around the world.
00:06:26.000My understanding is that the Russians have now said they're going to withhold fertilizer from the rest of the world, including countries like Brazil, who produce a tremendous amount of food supply.
00:06:36.000Russia and the Ukraine are responsible for about 12 percent of the calorie supply inside the United States, is my understanding.
00:06:43.000If the Ukrainians are not able to plant their crops over the next couple of months, and it certainly does not look like they will be able to, there's going to be a tremendous disruption in the food supply.
00:06:51.000And if the fertilizer is not able to come out of the Black Sea region and it does not look like it's going to be able to, there's going to be a significant reduction in the global food supply.
00:07:02.000Russia is a revisionist power run by a gangster government which steals from its own people, rapes the environment, and deposits its ill-gotten gains through its oligarchs in Swiss bank accounts and mansions in the Hamptons.
00:07:17.000Russia wants to redraw the map of Europe.
00:07:20.000In these and other dastardly endeavors, it's not alone.
00:07:22.000There are many other gangster governments throughout the world, and many sit atop natural resources we require.
00:07:29.000There are few good guys in Eastern Europe.
00:07:33.000Ukraine is the third most corrupt country in the world, the most corrupt country in Europe.
00:07:38.000Everyone is working for an angle, and none of them are thinking of America first, nor apparently are our own policy leaders.
00:07:47.000Driving Asia's largest energy producer into the arms of Asia's largest energy consumer would create a Russia-China alliance that would endanger Americans far more than Russia's brutal belligerence in Ukraine.
00:08:01.000We already see more and more that Russia and China are working together to our peril, and China is our pacing challenge, not Russia.
00:08:49.000They're a nuclear power, and these sanctions likely increase the possibility of nuclear war.
00:08:55.000My neighbors will go fight that war just as they would fight any war, just as they always have, and just as they always will.
00:09:03.000But far better solutions are available.
00:09:06.000We can hunt down the assets of Putin and his oligarch cronies, wherever they may be, and sell those assets off and hold the funds in abeyance until such a point as the Russian people actually force their government to behave.
00:09:20.000We can disrupt Russian espionage in the West with the latest technology, tools which the Russians and Chinese are deploying against us to hurt Americans.
00:09:31.000It amazes me that we are more interested in kicking Russia out of Ukraine than, say, our own neighborhood, South America, the Caribbean, where their influence continues to grow and where their actions are malign.
00:09:45.000We can increase American investment in the rare earths that are designed to build the future and ensure that we have the battery capability to not necessarily need so much Russian oil long-term.
00:09:57.000But we can make the decisions now to enhance those investments.
00:10:01.000Sadly, sanctions, the strategy we're using, they rarely play out as their architects hope.
00:10:07.000They mostly enrich the elites in bad countries and harm the vulnerable.
00:10:11.000I haven't seen Maduro losing any weight over the sanctions in Venezuela.
00:10:15.000And if sanctions worked as intended, Cuba would be a Caribbean Garden of Eden.
00:11:26.000Well, you know, I think that both sides can agree without dispute that Russia invaded Ukraine.
00:11:32.000I hope that that's at least, you know, a single point of fact that all can agree on.
00:11:37.000All the reasonings behind that, obviously, there's a lot more that's disputed and a lot of politics that finds its way into this conversation.
00:11:47.000They had already controlled two breakaway regions in the east and Crimea, which was isolated.
00:11:53.000And I believe that's the main motive that Putin made this invasion, especially at this moment with Western weakness and fecklessness, both out of the EU, the U.S. and D.C., obviously, and NATO, because he needs a Crimean land bridge.
00:12:08.000Right now, the destabilization that has occurred post that invasion is he's gone deeper into the country beyond those regions and he's surrounding cities, blockading them.
00:12:19.000And he's trying to do this to get pawn concession pieces that he can trade later to secure the territorial gains that are firmly his.
00:12:28.000And the realpolitik is they are firmly his. There is a good chunk of Ukraine that no matter how this outcome, how this plays out, will be Russian territory.
00:12:37.000Even if Putin gets a bullet to the back of the head in coming weeks, for whatever reason, there are regions that will be gone from Ukraine and part of Russia.
00:12:45.000So already the the Eurasian geopolitical chessboard has changed incontrovertibly.
00:12:51.000Do you think they get that in Brussels? Do you think there's an appreciation that for for this war to end, there is going to be a redrawing in the map of Europe?
00:13:00.000Or is there is there an impression that Putin can be put back in his original box?
00:13:05.000I think they do get that because for all intents and purposes, for the last eight years since 2014, when Putin took these these breakaway republics in Donbass and Luhansk and Crimea, there is limited will or fight to re litigate that there were referendum.
00:13:20.000There was a referendum held in Crimea after Ukrainians were pushed out and the Russian side won an overwhelming mandate because there were no Ukrainians to vote against it.
00:13:30.000Many of them went to Mariupol, a city between Russia and Crimea that is now under siege because that's a important part of the chessboard for him to connect all of these taken regions.
00:13:40.000But the Luhansk and Donbass, a huge city, Donetsk, they've controlled that with little green men, his mercenaries, his supplied fighting force on the ground there for eight years.
00:13:50.000There haven't been many Ukrainians there. They fled.
00:13:52.000There was already a Ukrainian refugee crisis in 14 and 15, where two million Ukrainians went to Poland, another million or so scattered to other parts of central Europe.
00:14:01.000Obviously, the current refugee crisis dwarfs that.
00:14:04.000You know, estimates are that's about four million. And probably if this persists, there'll be another four million.
00:14:09.000And that's the largest migration of people out of one region in Europe into others, especially Poland.
00:14:15.000But it will have impact across the European Union and the entire continent based on the scale of it.
00:14:20.000And how are leaders in Warsaw thinking about this refugee crisis?
00:14:24.000Well, they the first, you know, part of the puzzle for them is to manage the people coming across just something something as simple as that.
00:14:32.000And it's not simple. This is the most organized, I think, any time in modern history that there's been a refugee crisis of this scale.
00:14:41.000If you look back just a few years to the migrant crisis, economic migrants from the Third World, North Africa, the Middle East, Syria and, you know,
00:14:48.000a dozen Third World countries that were fleeing into Europe across the Mediterranean via destabilized Libya, going to Italy, going to Hungary and trying to get to Germany and France.
00:14:58.000That was incredibly disorganized. It was also mostly able bodied young men versus here.
00:15:04.000You have women and children. I was at the border and it is women and children.
00:15:07.000Men are mandated between the ages of 18 and 60 to remain in Ukraine under a martial law like diktat to keep them defending their homeland.
00:15:15.000They don't need much push on this. To give you an example, in Warsaw, all these Eastern Ukrainians that I was talking about that were pushed out of Donbass in the East.
00:15:23.000They all went to Poland, big cities, became Uber drivers, worked in restaurants.
00:15:27.000And for instance, an Uber, you'd be able to get an Uber driven by Ukrainian for next to nothing.
00:15:32.000Supply went up and price went way down.
00:15:35.000And when I got to Warsaw a couple of weeks ago, you couldn't find a Ukrainian Uber driver.
00:15:39.000And an Uber, instead of taking less than a minute, took 10 to 15 minutes.
00:15:42.000And it cost three times the price because the Ukrainians who came to Poland five, seven years ago all went back to Ukraine to defend their homeland, which is kind of interesting.
00:15:51.000You don't see that very often. So it's women and children coming through.
00:15:54.000The men, a lot of men escort them to the border and then they go back to the cities and to the regions where there's fighting and they join the fight.
00:16:01.000And so how's it going to end, Matthew? I mean, how's it going to end?
00:16:04.000Yeah. I mean, some say we're headed for a six to eight month insurgency here after these cities are leveled.
00:16:11.000You think that there could be a resolution quicker?
00:16:13.000Yeah, I think it's going to be quicker. I don't think Putin's military is up to this.
00:16:17.000They expected to roll over these cities in two or three days, take the regions they wanted with ease, surround Kiev to put pressure on the political class,
00:16:25.000possibly kill a few leading politicians and then have all of the upper hand in negotiating their their withdrawal.
00:16:32.000Now they're kind of quagmired. Fifty percent of their hardware capacity is stuck in mud.
00:16:37.000It doesn't work. I mean, this is I don't know for the viewers who've seen Chernobyl.
00:16:40.000This is the kind of military military advice he was getting in a communist system.
00:16:45.000You just tell the the autocrat what he wants to hear. Otherwise, you're going to the Gulag before.
00:16:49.000Now many will go to the Gulag for the failure of this operation.
00:16:52.000And he's going to see further destabilization when you're recruiting Syrians and Central African Republic citizens to come and fight for you.
00:17:01.000You're not winning. And so he does not have much wherewithal to continue this for that much longer.
00:17:07.000If you see right now, there are two aggressive moves he's going to make.
00:17:10.000There's one he made about two, three days ago when he started coming from Belarus in the north with his vassal state, Lukashenko, the head of Belarus.
00:17:18.000He sent troops in and they went after a small city called Lutsk, which is very close to the NATO and Poland peripheral border.
00:17:25.000That is an act of aggression of symbolism of saying we're getting close to your border.
00:17:28.000But the two big moves he has to make now, one is he's now bringing his Navy into play to shell Odessa, which is the third largest city after Kharkiv, Kiev, Kharkiv and Odessa.
00:17:39.000And in Odessa, it's a very Ukrainian city. They will defend it.
00:17:43.000He won't get it. But it is strategically important because it's right next to Moldova, which would be his hope for a revanchist next move.
00:17:50.000I don't think he'd be able to make that move.
00:17:52.000Originally, I thought I think he thought he could and get up against the Romanian NATO peripheral border, which is a much weaker one than the Polish one, given that the amount of military spend Poland has has put into upgrading their defense and offensive systems last 10 years.
00:18:06.000By that theory, then Odessa becomes the key city to deprive Putin of a Black Sea strategy, because if you look at how he wants to connect these areas of eastern Ukraine that he's recognized as independent republics to Crimea and then down toward Moldova, it would seem that the Odessa front is one of the most critical in the next 72 hours.
00:18:29.000Yeah, no, it's important if he can get it, it strengthens his position.
00:18:33.000I don't think he can. He can probably shell the city pretty well and put it in a defensive posture.
00:18:38.000But it ultimately what he needs and what he wants, and this is where it's going to be, shock and awe, is Mariupol.
00:18:43.000Mariupol is the 10th largest city. It's halfway between the entry point to the Crimean Peninsula and where the Russian border starts on the Don River, Rostovon Don being the city.
00:18:53.000And a lot of the Ukrainian Crimeans fled there when he took over Crimea itself and they went to Mariupol.
00:19:00.000So they're holding out really well. He needs the city to fall.
00:19:03.000And I think because of the desperation of his weakened military state at this point, he is going to need to go full Grozny.
00:19:11.000Grozny was the capital of Chechnya that he absolutely leveled 10, 12 years ago when Chechnya was threatening to assert its independence and become a breakaway state within Russia.
00:19:22.000And he violently quelled that, killed tens of thousands. And now Chechnya is a is a lapdog.
00:19:28.000He's got his puppet installed there and he uses Chechen mercenaries even in Ukraine.
00:19:33.000They were some of the more savage fighters that he was using to go after the politicians in Kiev.
00:19:38.000The Ukrainian government smoked them, which was kind of interesting to see how quick that happened.
00:19:42.000But Mariupol, he's going to shell it like Grozny is my guess, because this is his whole reason for doing this right now is to create this Crimean land bridge.
00:19:51.000Crimea is a peninsula, but it might as well be an island. And he's had to feed it and supply it for eight years by waterway.
00:19:58.000He needs an overland route. All the rest of the regions that he has control of are lost leaders.
00:20:03.000Now they redraw the maps. He has to pay those pensioners pensions. And that's not something he's economically even before these sanctions able to do.
00:20:10.000He had a very good chaotic situation there where he supplied them with weaponry to defend the contact line and maintain control.
00:20:16.000But Mariupol is the absolute key. It is why he did this whole exercise.
00:20:21.000And this is why this moment was now the weak West. And he went shock and awe, trying to get to Kiev, trying to take over as much of the country as he could to negotiate that firm settlement that he'd maintain this Crimean land bridge.
00:20:34.000So it's going to get ugly in Mariupol today. They're the first corridor, humanitarian corridor where they let 20,000 people out.
00:20:41.000But this is a city of half a million. We don't know how many people are there, but you've got to figure it's three, four hundred thousand still.
00:20:46.000So so what are the contours of the deal then that you think would bring this to an end?
00:20:51.000A referendum in Donbass. So the two breakaway republics, Donbass and Luhans, which have no Ukrainians, it's all Russian.
00:20:58.000So much like Crimea, he'd win that referendum for full ascension into the into the Russian state, the Crimean land bridge.
00:21:05.000And we'll see what the will of the world is, depending on how violent he has to get in destroying the city to take over this territory.
00:21:13.000But that is the number one most imperative for him. And then he will also want some guarantee of no NATO ascension for Ukraine, which is a far cry from where it was 20 years ago.
00:21:22.00020 years ago, he was saying if Ukraine wants to join NATO, that's going to be a decision for Ukraine, NATO, the EU and all those those powers that be.
00:21:30.000It doesn't have anything to do with me in 2004 with the start of the color revolutions that changed and he cannot have EU Ukraine ascend to the EU.
00:21:39.000Not that I think that is a realistic outcome given Ukraine's state and structure of governance.
00:21:45.000It just could not fit into the EU despite some of the posturing of EU.
00:21:48.000Well, we heard that from no less than Zelensky. Quite recently, Zelensky came out and said, look, it is not as if we are, you know, in a position to be accepted into NATO right now.
00:21:58.000And we already have seen Germany and the Netherlands object to any EU membership.
00:22:02.000And so I guess the question would be, what is Ukraine giving up other than the obvious territory that you just described?
00:22:08.000But what do they give up geopolitically in a deal like that?
00:22:12.000Well, they certainly you know, we've already been and there is a fair argument that the right makes that we were moving into what Putin declared was his near abroad.
00:22:21.000And he drew his lines in the sand. And unlike Obama, he stood by them. Our movement with NATO. Kamala Harris at the Munich.
00:22:28.000Kamala Harris at the Munich. Wait a second. Wait a second, Matthew. Does that mean that NATO expansion in the Baltics was a bad idea?
00:22:35.000No, I think that the that they were much more well equipped to join NATO because of their governments, because of their commitments to collective defense.
00:22:44.000Estonia was paying the two percent back when there was only the UK, the US, Poland, Greece and Estonia.
00:22:52.000Now, Lithuania and Latvia have been paying into the collective defense.
00:22:55.000They are more into the Scandinavian sphere. Ukraine is the ultimate buffer because geography is destiny and there's no mountains.
00:23:04.000There is a flat plane, the Eurasian plane that puts Russia at incredible risk for hundreds of years.
00:23:10.000It's why these regions have been disputed. But Ukraine will certainly be giving up a lot of territory, economic potency.
00:23:18.000I mean, it's going to need a Marshall Plan. Cities are absolutely leveled.
00:23:22.000It's the farming sector, which is a huge, huge economic driver for the whole region and supplies wheat to much of the third world.
00:23:31.000That is all going to be offline. There'll be no planting of grain this season.
00:23:35.000That's going to throw the regional economics and global food supply into into disarray.
00:23:40.000Ukraine is going to be a much weaker state. The governance is still very, say, early stage democracy.
00:23:48.000The legislature is much more democratically elected.
00:23:51.000But a lot of the attacks on Zelensky and the people around Zelensky are accurate.
00:23:55.000Ukraine, the government, the governance structure was so corrupt.
00:23:58.000There's a reason why it was ground zero for Hunter Biden's activity, which Schweitzer and I did a lot of work on and many other globalist left wing elite laundering money through Ukraine.
00:24:07.000And that the ability for that to continue to occur in the weekend post Ukrainian state is probably going to be a lot less so, which, you know, maybe that's a good thing.
00:24:17.000How these deals come together will obviously be a feature of what happens over the next several days on the ground.
00:24:24.000One of the big, I think, moments of buffoonery for the Biden administration involved Poland and these MiGs.
00:24:30.000From my standpoint, there would have been a willing receiver of those MiGs in Ukraine.
00:24:35.000There would have been a willing provider in Poland.
00:24:38.000But when Jake Sullivan went on the Sunday shows and ran his mouth about it, when we got our in the south, we'd say we got our ass up over our elbows a little bit.
00:24:49.000You know, what would be the perspective on how all this played out in Warsaw, do you think?
00:24:55.000Well, their asses are certainly chapped.
00:24:59.000You know, there was a lot of miscommunication.
00:25:01.000And I personally think that these levels of miscommunication are a feature, not a bug.
00:25:08.000These are supposedly the greatest geopolitical strategists we have who have advanced fellowships from Johns Hopkins and SAIS and the Atlantic Council.
00:25:16.000So they they know that these levels of communication, if you do not hold your word, if you miscommunicate, misdirect, it creates ripple effects that are very adverse.
00:25:25.000I think that they were happy to weaken Poland, much like they would be Hungary if Hungary was in a similar position, because just frankly, they don't like this government.
00:25:33.000It's a conservative government. So if it was a Donald Tusk led government, the former head of state who was the European head of the European Union as well, after he was turfed out of Polish politics, then they would have been probably a lot more pliant working hand in hand, hand in glove, and would have gone through and followed through with their word.
00:25:52.000This was a really ludicrous leaving Poland hanging. And I know Poland's not happy about it.
00:25:57.000Polish Prime Minister Morwiewski is in Kiev today with Kaczynski, the head of the party in DPM with the prime minister.
00:26:03.000But it could have been done, right, Matthew? It could have been done.
00:26:06.000It was just that that so much discussion about it publicly created risks that Poland wasn't willing to shoulder in terms of potential retaliation.
00:26:15.000And, you know, I can understand the frustration.
00:26:18.000Poland was not going to be the direct giver for the simple reason that being on the NATO peripheral border and within cannon fire of Russian forces in Ukraine, they did not want to be the sort of escalating tipping point.
00:26:31.000And the U.S. doing it has a lot more optical commitment for, you know, NATO and American involvement that might have been it.
00:26:39.000I think it was escalatory, but it would have been a lot safer a move where Putin would have had to think about what his next move was versus just making Poland the target of his next sort of breach of state.
00:26:51.000So Poland was justly apprehensive. They thought they had guidance from the U.S. that we came out with a really good workaround.
00:26:57.000And then the U.S. bailed. You know, the reports say that Biden just said it would be too escalatory.
00:27:02.000Well, that kind of ship sailed. They probably shouldn't have went out and started selling this idea publicly, you know, and then pull the plug on it.
00:27:09.000I think that just made everyone continually look more feckless. Final question.
00:27:14.000One of the things that Donald Trump maintained in his relationship with Vladimir Putin was strategic ambiguity, not always forecasting every move, not always describing every every specific feature of every red line.
00:27:28.000Do you think that strategic ambiguity is going to have to be part of our new the new matrix of our dynamic with Vladimir Putin in Russia?
00:27:37.000Yeah, I mean, it should be in theory, but we're not dealing with those who are playing 4D chess and are good negotiators.
00:27:44.000These people have political agendas. You know, right now, the White House is probably more concerned about how do they get the Iran deal back online and maybe they'll come to an agreement with Putin over that.
00:27:53.000So that way we'll have multiple allies, including our NATO allies, weakened from the outcome.
00:27:58.000The outcome. This is not a strong U.S. This is not Reagan. This is not Trump.
00:28:01.000I mean, Trump, as you know, we've widely saw and I've been hearing the story for a while, as he said, you know, you invade Ukraine on my watch.
00:28:07.000And, you know, Moscow is not going to be around for much longer.
00:28:09.000And as he said, even if it was five, five percent, 10 percent taken seriously, that, as you call strategic ambiguity, was enough.
00:28:16.000You know, Teddy Roosevelt speaks softly and carry a big stick while Trump speak loudly and he might have a really big stick.
00:28:22.000So that's right. At least tweet meanly when necessary.
00:28:25.000Matthew, where can people follow up on your reporting as you go back into the region and continue to get these these very important insights?
00:28:33.000So just right now, getter and just all the different conversations I'm having with, you know, good looking guys like you.
00:28:39.000So Matthew Terman, T-Y-R-M-A-N-D on getter. Twitter is just so dead. It's just what's the point.
00:28:45.000And just all social media. So, you know, when they kick Trump at MTG off, it just wasn't any fun anymore.
00:28:50.000I'm with you. My wife likes getter better, too. So, you know what?
00:28:54.000And listen to her. She she is one of the best things about you.
00:28:57.000So if not the best, thanks for joining me on Firebrand, Matthew. Thanks for your insights. Look forward to your continued updates.
00:29:06.000For quite some time in the state of Florida, if the Walt Disney Corporation opposed a piece of legislation in the state capitol, it was deemed to have a fatal rodent problem.
00:29:17.000And it was unlikely to become law. Disney had enormous power in Florida legislative politics, in part because they employed an army of lobbyists to dole out millions of dollars in political donations.
00:29:29.000I'm talking about millions of dollars. And in exchange, they expected favorable treatment from lawmakers.
00:29:36.000Maybe a little more than their fair share. The lobbyists were there to enforce the implicit deal.
00:29:42.000I mean, look at what Florida did to bend over backwards for Disney over the years.
00:29:46.000Florida created a state agency out of nothing, largely to subsidize Disney's vast marketing budget through an entity called Visit Florida.
00:30:53.000He should know that things don't usually work out for those who, like, grovel at the feet of the Woketopians.
00:31:00.000But apparently this Disney CEO is taking it personally that Florida passed legislation to keep schooling about schooling, not about wokeness.
00:31:09.000They call it the don't say gay bill, but that's a misnomer.
00:31:13.000It's really just legislation that keeps instructors within the guardrails of academic instruction.
00:31:19.000At a time when Americans are falling behind the rest of the world in math and science, you'd think we'd want to focus more on those things.
00:31:26.000Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a supporter of this legislation.
00:31:29.000He replied to Disney with this statement.
00:31:32.000When you have companies that have made a fortune off being family friendly and catering to families and young kids,
00:31:39.000you know, they should understand that parents of young kids do not want this injected into their kids kindergarten classroom.
00:31:48.000They do not want their first graders to go and being told that they can choose an opposite gender.
00:31:54.000That is not appropriate for those kids.
00:31:56.000And so if you're family friendly, understand the parents who are actually raising families want to have their rights respected.
00:32:04.000And I also think that if you have companies like a Disney that are going to say and criticize parents' rights,
00:32:11.000they're going to criticize the fact that we don't want transgenderism in kindergarten and first grade classrooms.
00:32:17.000And so in Florida, our policy is going to be based on the best interest of Florida citizens,