Former Vice President Joe Biden joins Tucker on The Charlie Kirk Show to talk about his time in the Marine Corps, his views on the Iraq War, and why he doesn t think women should be sent to fight in our wars. He also talks about why he thinks women should not be allowed to serve in our military and why we should not send them to fight for our country. He also discusses why he does not believe that women should serve in the military, and what it means to be a woman in a military that does not respect women and their rights and respect for the rights of their husbands and wives, as well as the importance of women in serving in our armed forces and the need to respect the rights and dignity of our women and children. Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com. That is where I buy all of my gold. That is Noble Gold Investing Investments is the official gold sponsor of The Charlie Kirch Show, a company that specializes in gold and physical delivery of precious metals. Go there right now! Listen to this episode of my conversation with Tucker Carlson. If you want to hear more of his conversation with me, it is the place to support this program. Get behind what we re doing, it s the place I ve been supporting this program by becoming a Member of the Memberscharliekirk. You ll get a signed copy of the show and a signed hat! You can listen to all of our episodes, and also get a chance to listen to exclusive interviews as they happen and also listen to the entire episode of The Tucker Carlson Show on the entire series, "Tucker Carlson's "My Conversation With Tucker Carlson's Show." and much more! Subscribe to the show! Click here to get exclusive interviews with Tucker's entire conversation with the host of the Tucker Carlson on His new show "The Tucker Carlson Podcast, "The Charlie Kirk Podcast" on His show. and more. Get a signed autographed copy of Tucker's book "The New York Times bestselling book, "My Confessions and more! Click here. Subscribe here to learn more about Tucker's new book, My Conversation with Tucker s new book "My Conversations with Tucker on His New Book " "My Book, My Conversations With Tucker's New Book, " " " and more on His book " " His new book " " Outtro on Outtro's " " and other things like that.
00:01:09.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:15.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:02:05.000And then that was the beginning of kind of your eyes opening.
00:02:08.000Yeah, I mean, like, look, I'm not an intellectual or particularly Wise person but I try to operate on the level of animal instinct to the extent that I can because I think it's probably a clearer guide to right and wrong than most and I remember just having a gut level revulsion as this
00:02:30.000He may have been a full colonel, actually.
00:02:32.000But anyway, he was an officer and I think the commanding officer at the time, where I was.
00:02:38.000But I remember feeling this revulsion as he told me about this woman, this mother, who'd
00:02:43.000had her legs blown off and then died that day in outside Baghdad.
00:02:48.000And he was saying that this was just such a beautiful sacrifice for freedom or for America
00:03:11.000And then I thought, wait a second, I thought we had a military and a police force, for that matter, in order to protect our women and children.
00:04:39.000And I've never kind of gotten over it, but it's informed how I feel about a lot of things.
00:04:42.000Before the Iraq War, did you have any other moments where you started to think that the ruling class, the regime, the people that run the country are not up to the task?
00:04:51.000Or was the Iraq War really the beginning of your questioning of the management of our country?
00:05:16.000And I had grown up in affluent circumstances, but I didn't have any money.
00:05:20.000So, you know, that's difficult right there.
00:05:23.000Anyway, whatever, I had a lot on my mind, and I'd also grown up, like, right in the middle of all of this stuff.
00:05:27.000And so, you know, you don't question the things that you grew up around quite as quickly as you question things you've never seen before.
00:05:34.000And my dad worked for the government and was involved in all kinds of stuff, and I just never really thought about it.
00:05:43.000I'll tell you this, just having lived in Washington and Georgetown as a kid and just being there really my whole life, I was never that impressed.
00:05:51.000I mean, I thought there were smart, interesting people who'd lived in various countries and had a sophisticated view of the world, but I didn't think anyone was like a super genius.
00:05:58.000It never occurred to me to be impressed by a college degree.
00:06:02.000Part of the problem with Washington is you get a lot of people moving in from the provinces who are like head of...
00:06:07.000elected a boy's state to something or did, you know, model UN and they're all sort of,
00:06:12.000you know, the hyper first row in the classroom achievers and they get there and they're all
00:06:16.000very impressed by credentials. Very impressed. And they show up and there's, you know, David
00:06:20.000Ignatius at the Washington Post and like he knows how the Intel, the IC really operates.
00:06:32.000Or the Speaker of the House, who's like some probably sort of well-meaning, not very smart guy from Louisiana, all of a sudden becomes Speaker, and they pull him into the Sit Room, and he's texting, I'm in the Sit Room!
00:06:44.000Like, he's so impressed by all this stuff.
00:06:47.000And because he's impressed, he's so easily led and manipulated.
00:06:51.000And so really the only advantage that I had was, I've just been around it, so it's like I'm not that impressed, you know, at all.
00:06:56.000But it definitely was the Iraq War that got me thinking, A, this is not the kind of left-right divide that I thought it was, because I grew up during the Cold War, so it really was just left-right.
00:08:02.000And they've just declared war on Christianity in Ukraine.
00:08:05.000They're putting priests and nuns in jail.
00:08:07.000And so, actually, they just banned the Christian denomination, and we're paying for that.
00:08:11.000So, I mean, that's kind of the clearest example of it.
00:08:14.000But, you know, once you see it, you see it everywhere.
00:08:18.000And I grieve for what I see because, you know, I grew up in such a different country with such different assumptions, and it's still not clear how many of my assumptions were just stupid—probably a lot of them.
00:08:28.000And, you know, how much things have actually changed, I don't know, but I'm aware of it.
00:08:32.000And, yeah, we're exporting attacks on Christianity.
00:08:37.000And that's, of course, why, you know, the U.S.
00:08:40.000government is so opposed to Hungary and Russia.
00:08:44.000I mean, that's the main... You know, probably lots of things... You think, and I agree, the Ukraine-Russian war is deeper than just what they say it is.
00:08:50.000It's actually... Well, it has nothing to do with what... I mean, they claim it's a war of liberation designed to help the Ukrainians... Or stop the new Hitler.
00:08:59.000And sure, if you wanted to help Ukraine, you probably wouldn't kill 600,000 Ukrainian men, would you?
00:09:05.000You wouldn't change the law in Ukraine to allow foreign companies to buy their farmland, which Zelensky has done with the help of the US government.
00:09:14.000And so no, Ukraine as it existed three years ago is gone.
00:09:18.000In 10 years, Ukraine will not be owned by Ukrainians, and there won't be Ukrainians living there.
00:09:22.000It'll be populated by people from outside Ukraine.
00:09:24.000So historic Ukraine is over, destroyed by the United States.
00:10:04.000But anyway, during the course of these sort of endless negotiations, which are still ongoing to get this interview, I had dinner maybe six weeks ago with a Zelensky ally who came to an American city.
00:11:41.000So you can lecture me for hours about your motives or your intent, but at a certain point I get to judge the effects of what you've done.
00:11:50.000You can say you're a great dad, but if all your kids are in prison or rehab, I'm saying you're not a great dad, actually, because I judge the tree by its fruits.
00:11:57.000And so Mike Johnson and the rest of them, all the completely corrupted Republican committee chairs, the entire Democratic Party, and the American business community have destroyed Ukraine.
00:12:50.000Any reasonable person acknowledges that.
00:12:53.000And there's no reason to have Ukraine in NATO.
00:12:55.000There's no reason to have NATO in the first place.
00:12:58.000NATO is very bad for the United States, it's very bad for the rest of the world, it's not a force for good at all, and we all have to pretend that it is.
00:13:26.000And so the whole structure was designed to keep the West in America's sphere of influence, and I supported that unthinkingly really up until 2016 when I was forced to think about it, when Trump started talking about it, and I'd never thought about it ever.
00:13:42.000And then you have to ask questions like, well, okay, so the Soviet Union hasn't existed since the summer of 1991, so what is the point of NATO now?
00:14:08.000What would they do with Poland, right?
00:14:09.000So it's also silly, but we're told these lies because the people who benefit from the existence of NATO want to keep NATO going, which is very expensive.
00:14:19.000And it's also kind of productive to our, I would say, to our prosperity and our freedom here in the United States.
00:14:24.000But what NATO actually is, is a way to project American cultural values across Eastern Europe.
00:14:29.000And Eastern Europe is a huge problem because it's Christian and it's anti-communist.
00:14:33.000Having spent 40 years under the Soviet jackboot, they're like against a lot of the priorities of Washington's permanent class, you know?
00:14:41.000And they're very Christian in a way that the rest of Europe is not.
00:14:45.000And so if that's a threat to you for whatever reason, if you hate Christianity, which they do above all, then you're gonna use NATO as a way to influence the domestic policies of those Eastern European countries, particularly Romania.
00:15:22.000That's like absurd, and how stupid do you think I am?
00:15:25.000If you distill it down, you go to Brookings, Hudson, any one of these neoconservative think tanks, and you get them, they've been in this space for 50 years, PhDs, they will all eventually, if you distill them down, well, what are you going to do if Putin rolls tanks through Paris?
00:15:41.000And that's where it goes, like immediately.
00:15:44.000But you're like a child if you're saying that, or more to the point, you think I'm a child if you think I would believe something like that, because it's absurd.
00:15:52.000And by the way, the rest of the world laughs, actually.
00:15:55.000So the main problem of the Soviet Union, from my perspective, you know, it was anti-markets, it was anti-Christian.
00:16:16.000And so anybody who is spreading chaos in any sphere, including within the home, it doesn't matter.
00:16:22.000Like if I'm spreading chaos in my house, wherever, I am acting on behalf of evil.
00:16:27.000So that's just like the clearest sign of it.
00:16:28.000And the Soviets, boy, they specialized in exporting chaos from the earliest days post-revolution with the Comintern, whose whole sort of mission was to spread revolution First in Germany and then throughout the world were not
00:16:41.000successful, but they certainly destabilized a ton of countries.
00:16:44.000The poorer the country, the longer it remained destabilized.
00:16:47.000Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, like they, you know, there are many, many, many countries
00:17:23.000The thing that turned my view, really, was seeing the fact that the United States had defeated the Iraqi army, but there was no order there.
00:17:32.000I got there in December of 2003, the day Saddam was captured.
00:18:58.000I am not a boomer, but I am boomer adjacent.
00:19:02.000I was born five years after the end of the baby boom.
00:19:05.000But you know, some of their attitudes I sort of grew up with, and one of them is the United States is a force for good in the world, and we're a better place than other places.
00:19:34.000But that's one thing I've learned, is the rest of the world sees the United States in its current form as a force for chaos, a destabilizing force.
00:19:41.000And there's nothing more unpopular than that.
00:19:43.000There's nothing more resented than that, and there's nothing more destructive than that.
00:19:46.000And the other thing I would, in one sentence, say, the thing that Americans don't understand is that our foreign policy does not exist in a separate sphere from our domestic policy.
00:20:39.000And they've been elected from some district, and I think most of them kind of want to do the right thing, and they sort of know why they were elected.
00:20:44.000And they get there, and they realize, I can't do any of this.
00:24:15.000Like, meaningless, meaningless, all that is meaningless.
00:24:18.000It's Ecclesiastes 1, and you're like, what is this?
00:24:21.000You've probably read it like 10 times and understand its deeper meaning.
00:24:24.000It actually gets better because he says, with God, there actually is meaning.
00:24:27.000No, that's right, and I've read it precisely one time sitting at home.
00:24:31.000And in the context, Solomon had all the women he wanted, all the trappings, all the splendor, and he's like, it's all meaningless.
00:24:36.000But that is kind of, that is exactly, that is the one thing that I, not that I have all the women and all the money or whatever, but like you do reach an age in life where you're like, okay, you know, I've achieved all my dumb little goals that I set out for myself.
00:24:46.000And they're all very small bore, because they always are.
00:26:45.000And they've shifted all of that energy overseas, and because they have, their foreign policy aims absolutely dictate their domestic policy.
00:26:55.000That's the most profound point of the whole thing.
00:26:58.000That the IC, the intelligence community, all that, that determines what happens domestically.
00:27:04.000DC is far more focused about the abstractions abroad than the immediate concerns.
00:28:14.000And in the long run, it corrupts the person who does it completely.
00:28:18.000And it has corrupted our leadership class.
00:28:20.000The things they've done abroad have changed the way they feel about the United States, its citizens, and have changed the rules for what they can do to us.
00:28:29.000I think you're pinpointing, you've said this before but it's worth repeating, they hate Trump because of his foreign policy far more than his domestic policy.
00:28:45.000But it's just, because I worked for him for so long and I knew him so well, I do think he's sort of a gauge of how permanent Washington feels about things.
00:28:55.000And Christo was saying in public, right up until that famous debate in South Carolina about Trump, you know, he's kind of a buffoon, but he could be our buffoon, and maybe we can ride this to power again in Washington over Hillary.
00:29:11.000This has been much noted by people smarter than I, but the second Trump went after the Iraq war, on a core level, like that was not a good idea from day one.
00:29:20.000And yeah, foreign policy is what they really care about.
00:29:24.000And it's just a tragedy, but it is the end result of really kind of 80 years of corruption that all of us, very much including me, should have noticed at the time and called out at the time.
00:29:38.000And again, this is like something to remember about life.
00:29:40.000It's like you can get so focused on what you're fighting against that you fail to honestly assess what you're fighting for and the way that you're fighting for it.
00:29:49.000And I think it's very important to be honest about our own behavior and to take, you know, relentlessly clear-eyed stock of ourselves.
00:31:13.000Really nice man and a very moderate man.
00:31:15.000I had dinner with him the night before for like five hours and just talked about history and all.
00:31:19.000Not that much about the Second World War, actually, but other things.
00:31:22.000My read on him was he's not a hater, that's for sure, and he's like a reasonable guy, and maybe you disagree with him, but... okay, you know?
00:32:10.000So, but whatever conclusions you reach... I was amazed in the last 24 hours, you know, you platform... I had Seth Dillon from the Babylon Bee, who's like some anti-woke guy, I guess, text me, I can't believe you platformed him!
00:32:37.000I'm frequently upset about differences of opinion.
00:32:39.000But I can't help but detect in the hysteria over all of this, trying to turn Daryl Cooper, maybe he's got eccentric views or not, but into some sort of a Nazi?
00:32:53.000I detect in that something much bigger, which is a kind of Desperate, hysterical attempt to hold on to certain ideas or founding myths, some of which may be worth holding on to or not or whatever, I'm agnostic.
00:33:07.000And mythologies can be important, as astutely pointed.
00:34:27.000And his point was, look, there was this regional conflict underway.
00:34:31.000Germany was pissed about the concessions that it was forced to make under the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War, and they wanted their land back and their population, German-speaking, ethnic German population in all these different countries.
00:34:42.000And so it was a regional conflict, and you can take either side of that, or no side, or whatever, but it was effectively a regional conflict, and Churchill forced it into what it became, which was a global war in which tens of millions of people died.
00:35:19.000But also, it doesn't get me screaming, right?
00:35:21.000So I guess I would ask, which is more dangerous, living in a society where people have all kinds of views, heterodox views about a historical event, or living in a society in which you're not allowed to have?
00:35:35.000Heterodox views on an event, an 80-year-old event.
00:35:37.000I mean, you know, it's not a close call for me.
00:35:40.000You want to live in a free society where inquiry, free inquiry is encouraged.
00:35:46.000But anyway, but the point is, why the hysteria?
00:35:49.000And I think if you take three steps back, I think this is right.
00:35:53.000What you're looking at is like, is a huge, is it the end of an 80-year cycle?
00:35:57.000And the end of a certain way of thinking about the world, the end of a certain way of administering the world, institutions which have run the West, and to some extent the East, since 1945.
00:36:07.000That's all kind of going away very fast, actually.
00:36:11.000Economic power, political power, cultural powers, all moving East.
00:36:16.000And that's tough for me as an American to accept.
00:36:50.000The reason they're upset is because if people start questioning the myth, then it's like, well, but wait, then what's the justification for all of this?
00:36:57.000And then we need to accept that we are at the end of a stage of history.
00:38:03.000I'd kind of like to go just bird hunting with my dogs and not worry about stuff.
00:38:07.000But I'm not in charge, none of us is in charge individually of history and we're sort of captives of it and this really is a historical pivot point.
00:38:15.000I don't think that's grandiose or overstating the case at all.
00:38:18.000I think it's absolutely true and everyone can feel it and it makes them jumpy and to some extent hysterical.
00:38:26.000People are coming at me last night by text message And I was sort of confused about it at first because I was maybe being like too autistic about it or too literal or like, no, Daryl Cooper is, you know, a really good and moderate and non-hating person, which is all true, by the way.
00:39:36.000But more of the point, I guess the only point I'm making is, like, if people are behaving in a way that you disagree with or despise, you know, or think is disgusting, I do think before pushing back, or maybe in the midst of pushing back, it's worth asking, like, what is this?
00:39:58.000And I do think it's about the sense that all of us have all of us have That things are now really changing really changing fast and people are afraid of what's next me included absolutely And if you start to question
00:40:14.000the myths that underpin the current order, that you are really playing with fire and
00:40:48.000You said Trump was vulgar, but he was right.
00:40:50.000And you talk about how you insulted his hair, and he called you, and he's like, you're right, you have better hair than I do, but I get more... Ladies than you do.
00:40:57.000I'm using the nice... Using... He used a cloak wheel term I will not repeat, but... But it was a great piece, and basically I have the quote here.
00:41:03.000It says, he exists because you failed.
00:41:11.000I mean, Trump has not done a lot of things that I wish he had done, but the main thing that he has done is revealed, you know, the depth of the corruption at the heart of the enterprise, but it hasn't been corrected.
00:42:44.000But the point is, this is all changing super, super fast, and I do think that the one thing that we should keep in mind is that we don't know what happens next.
00:42:56.000And there's this really interesting phenomenon that I've just noticed as I've gotten older, that Almost always.
00:43:04.000The things that you think are victories turn out to be disappointing at best and very often failures.
00:43:10.000And the things that you think are failures are actually victories.
00:43:25.000So it's, you know, of course it's a theological truth as revealed by Jesus in the New Testament, but it's also a kind of unerring commentary on the way life really is.
00:43:35.000And that's true in our lives, and very often—not very often—in my life, a hundred percent of the time, the things that I think are true tragedies are actually, you know, the beginning of rebirth and growth and of joy, the root of my joy.
00:43:49.000are the bad things that have happened to me.
00:44:03.000I haven't had many bad things happen to me.
00:44:04.000I've had an incredibly easy and happy life.
00:44:07.000But, you know, like the little dramas that have happened in my life, which didn't seem little to me when they were happening, have turned out to be like, you know, the foundation of my joy.
00:44:17.000That's something to remember in the context of American politics.
00:44:19.000Like, you think, well, we elect this person and all of our problems will be solved, and it might actually turn out the opposite from what you think or expect.
00:44:27.000Or if we elect this person, we're going down this path, we're going to be Soviet America, which is clearly where we're moving very quickly right now.
00:44:38.000But what I do know for a fact is that we're not God and we can't know, and so you should always be alive to the possibility that you're completely wrong.
00:44:46.000That the inverse, that there'll be a sort of paradox baked in, as there is almost invariably in life.
00:45:06.000How many people do I know who had something really bad happen to them and they realized, wow, you know, that was like the greatest blessing they could have had.
00:46:22.000It's not the kind of tent revival that you imagine from You know, 1923, it's something else, it's a different manifestation of the same thing.
00:46:32.000And I see it everywhere, and by everywhere I mean in the conversations that I have with people I'm talking to, where people who've lived totally secular lives, as I have, I've lived a very secular life, are all of a sudden referring to God or some power beyond themselves in a way that would have been really striking five years ago.
00:46:53.000No one I knew, I mean you're from a different world, a world that's much more in touch with the spiritual, with the transcendent, but I'm not.
00:47:01.000I'm from a world that's in touch with like what is happening today.
00:47:30.000That's exactly the conclusion that I have come to.
00:47:35.000And it didn't make any sense to me because I was looking at politics through the lens of you know, what I thought was accurate 20 years ago.
00:47:43.000We're having a debate over how to improve people's lives, and now, of course, there's no reference to improving people's lives.
00:47:49.000In fact, the explicit intent is to crush people's lives.