00:00:15.000I believe I could have done a better job at the beginning talking about my personal opinion on the comparison of using the reference to 1776 repeatedly.
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00:01:49.000I'm really excited for our conversation we're about to have here for somebody I really enjoy, and I go on his show quite often.
00:01:55.000And we were thinking, we were planning out the show, and we said, we want to have some contrarian opinions on the Ukraine situation because it's such an important topic where we're spending a ton of money and somebody I have a lot of respect for, and we're definitely going to disagree on some.
00:02:09.000And I'm going to learn throughout this conversation is Dr. Sebastian Gorka.
00:02:57.000So I don't want to disappoint you, but I'm not of the Lindsey Graham, you know, let's start World War III variety of people when it comes to Ukraine.
00:03:05.000But for those who are not familiar with my background, I served as former strategist in the White House to President Trump.
00:03:11.000I am a legal immigrant to the United States, but my parents lived under a communist dictatorship.
00:03:17.000My father was actually betrayed by Kim Philby, one of the West's greatest double agents, arrested and tortured at the age of 20 and given a life sentence in a communist political prison.
00:03:28.000He was liberated by freedom-loving revolutionaries in 1956 and escaped to the West.
00:03:38.000But irrespective of that, let me be clear.
00:03:41.000Russia has not been provoked into a war.
00:03:45.000Russia hasn't been surrounded by NATO and has deployed to save ethnic Russians and destroy bioweapons labs.
00:03:54.000Russia has been doing what it has always done, whether it was under the Tsars, whether it was the Soviet Union, or under a neophyte Tsar, and that is, of course, Vladimir Putin.
00:04:06.000This is the aggrandizing territorially of the Russian Federation from a man who, by the way, is a former KGB colonel.
00:04:14.000And I remember the good old days as a child of the Cold War when all conservatives hated all KGB colonels.
00:04:21.000The idea that he is some champion for the West standing up against globalists is utterly asinine.
00:04:27.000This is a man who persecuted Christians.
00:04:30.000This is a man who is creating his own globalism, but under the fiat of the Kremlin.
00:04:54.000Vladimir Putin, since he became president, has been giving speeches.
00:04:57.000You can read in translation at the state, not only is Ukraine an illegitimate non-state, so are the Baltic states and so are Poland, which are, of course, NATO nations.
00:05:09.000This isn't about some fight against Karl Schwab and the WF.
00:05:14.000This is Vladimir Putin trying to recreate a stunted version of the Russian Empire.
00:05:19.000Not even the Soviet Union, but the Russian Empire.
00:05:22.000And as conservatives, we should be on the side that is fighting the Russian KGB colonel.
00:05:27.000By the way, that doesn't mean Kiev isn't corrupt.
00:05:30.000That doesn't mean that sending pallets of cash to Kiev is stupid.
00:05:34.000But if 1776 meant something to conservatives today, guess what?
00:05:43.000So I agree with a lot of that, but I want to challenge on that last one that I wanted to do during our last conversation, which is I think you would agree, Dr. Gorka, that there needs to be, though, a lot of work put in before a country is ready for a 1776 moment, right?
00:05:57.000For example, Roger Williams, the people need to want self-government and they need to prioritize virtue and piety.
00:06:05.000Do you get the sense that the Ukrainian government and people really have done the work that the American founders did leading into that with studying John Bloc and putting that into great thought of George Mason's Declaration of Rights and forming small governments of the colonies and then eventually having that boiling point over?
00:06:25.000I only say that because I think that all people eventually can realize the promise of 1776, but I don't think all cultures or countries are ready to immediately teleport to that moment.
00:06:36.000And I'm afraid that comparison, especially with Ukraine, is not exactly one-to-one.
00:06:41.000No, I agree it isn't one-to-one because we are the greatest nation on God's green earth and we are the only nation that was founded on the individual liberties bestowed upon us by being made in the image of our creator.
00:06:52.000There is, I mean, at that point, the analogy breaks down, but I'm not talking of the qualitative political economy or society or the volunteerism in Ukraine.
00:07:03.000I'm talking about an independent state.
00:07:04.000An independent state, by the way, that in 1995, the U.S. president, along with the British prime minister, vouched safe the independence of when we said, look, you may be now the third greatest nuclear power in the world with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but you don't need those nukes, Kiev.
00:07:21.000Why don't you give those nukes back to the Kremlin and we will make sure you are safe?
00:07:25.000That was America's promise to Ukraine.
00:07:28.000And if Ukraine had those nuclear weapons today, there never would have been an invasion.
00:07:34.000So, you know, there is also the idea that this is a nation that simply has lost its independence, irrespective of its political culture or whether they've read the Federalist Papers.
00:07:43.000No nation, we shouldn't agree to any nation being invaded rapaciously by another one and saying, well, you know what?
00:07:51.000They don't know the difference between Hamilton and Washington, therefore.
00:08:19.000Just because somebody wants their terror.
00:08:21.000If you have a neighbor who has an IQ of less than yours and hasn't gone to school and isn't mature and understands the Federalist Papers, do you get to take their house, Charlie?
00:08:33.000Well, no, no, no, that's not the argument.
00:08:34.000It's the argument is whether or not, first of all, the eastern part of Ukraine wants to be part of Russia, right?
00:08:42.000Anything that has to do with polling in eastern Ukraine is absolutely garbage.
00:08:48.000The idea that a nation that is under the control of Russian troops is going to have fair polling, especially after a million people have left that territory, you can't make those assertions.
00:08:59.000But let's go back to your prior point.
00:09:01.000Do they not have the right to self-determination as a nation that was independent?
00:09:06.000Well, no, of course they do, but the eastern part of Ukraine wants to be part of Russia.
00:09:14.000Well, was there not a peace deal in 2021 publicly put forward where Putin said we can have independent elections be part of that area, part of Russia?
00:09:25.000The idea that we take on good faith anything a former KGB colonel says is risable.
00:09:33.000I mean, this is where, you know, I have problems with people talking about we have to emphasize peace, we have to have an off-ramp, and we have to have negotiations.
00:09:43.000You have negotiations with somebody who has not kept any promise from the Cold War, whether it was SALT I, SALT II, the Chemical Weapons and Biolabs Convention of 1972.
00:09:55.000When I worked for the Defense Department, I used to tell the officers I was training, you need to know one thing about Moscow and the Kremlin, whether it's the Soviet Union, whether it's Putin today, this is an anti-status quo actor.
00:10:10.000They're not interested in nice peace treaties in Geneva or Vienna and stabilizing the situation.
00:10:17.000Why did they send 300 mercenaries to Syria when I was in the White House?
00:10:21.000Mercenaries, by the way, that President Trump had killed, and which Putin didn't even mention afterwards because he was afraid of America then, because he wished to destabilize that part of the world and reap the benefits of that destabilization.
00:10:35.000The idea that anything Putin does is done in, let's have a referendum, let's have the people vote.
00:10:41.000What, as we're bombing the maternity clinics in Mariupol, it doesn't sit well.
00:10:48.000What do you think success looks like at this point in Ukraine?
00:10:52.000Yeah, let's start with, if you're not familiar with it, my favorite international podcast are a bunch of former left-wing stand-up comics who had enough with wokeness and have created something called trigonometry.
00:11:04.000It's one of the best podcasts out there.
00:11:20.000And he was on somebody else's podcast, will remain nameless, who was lecturing him about the need for peace talks and off-ramps and stopping the war.
00:11:30.000And this guy who's been to Ukraine recently, who's half Ukraine, married to Ukrainian, who's Russian Jewish, said, you can't have peace talks if both sides want to fight.
00:11:40.000And that's the kind of razor clarity that we need right now.
00:11:44.000You can't have any off-ramp or success in the classical Klausevitsian victory terms if both sides want to fight.
00:12:11.000On the other side, you've got Vladimir Putin, who's got his reputation on the line, said that the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century was the loss of the Soviet Union.
00:12:22.000So for various reasons, he's going to fight.
00:12:25.000So right now, the best we can hope for, it's not victory, but the best we can hope for is the conflict de-escalates into what is called a frozen war, like Transdynistria, like South Ossetia, like Moldova, where the sides stop actively shelling each other every single day, but where there is no territorial gains made.
00:12:46.000Sadly, for the time being, that's the best we can hope for.
00:12:50.000Do you think us supplying weapons get us closer to that or get us more towards kinetic conflict?
00:12:57.000So when it comes to supplying weapons, this is really, this is hugely important.
00:13:02.000Right at the beginning of the war, I wrote an analytic piece.
00:13:07.000And what I said back then, 10 months ago, hasn't changed today.
00:13:11.000The idea that we should be sending, that anybody, the Germans, the Brits, or the Americans, should be sending Western weaponry to Ukraine and cash is insane.
00:13:23.000This is a former republic of the Soviet Union.
00:13:26.000What they need is Soviet-era equipment, which is standing in stockpiles in former Warsaw Pact nations like Hungary, like Poland, the Baltic states, and Romania.
00:13:50.000So they should be supplied equipment they know how to use, not Abrams tanks that nobody in Ukraine has ever driven, that have 19 different types of oil to run them, and that need a resupply chain from America.
00:14:02.000No, give them Soviet-air equipment that we don't want anyway.
00:14:08.000And lastly, just because we have a dominance in ISR in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance when it comes to military satellites, give them the target packets to hit the Russians that are on their territory where it hurts.
00:14:22.000That's the best that we should do and let them fight their 1776.
00:14:28.000No U.S. troops, no U.S. material, because it makes no strategic sense.
00:14:33.000So, but we are sending tanks and we are sending weapons and funding.
00:14:38.000And so your position is more nuanced that it should be we should try to do this prudently.
00:14:44.000But I suppose, Dr. Gorka, one of the reasons I'm so entrenched in my position that we should have no involvement, no aid, is I don't trust any of the military elite right now.
00:14:57.000When you have an overweight chairman of the Joint Chiefs who has admitted calling up his counterpart in communist China General Li when we were in the Trump administration and saying, don't worry about my boss, the president.
00:15:11.000If he does anything with China, I'll give you a heads up.
00:15:15.000That man should be in the brig in shackles, not in the highest military position in the United States.
00:15:20.000We've heard in the last 48 hours that of the balloon flights across America when we were in the White House, we weren't told either by Secretary Mattis or by Mark Milley.
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00:19:57.000And whilst I am on your show, because it's easier for me to do it, everybody out there, I don't care who you are, where you live, you need to support Turning Point USA.
00:20:06.000It is perhaps the most important organization in America that is taking back our high schools and our colleges.
00:20:30.000Maybe the lend lease to the Soviet Union and the Brits.
00:20:34.000So during World War II, we sent about $750 billion worth of weapons to the Soviet Union, which was not exactly a republic of representative democratic principles.
00:20:51.000Did it make sense to stand up to a bully back in 1940?
00:20:55.000So you're talking about empowering the Soviet Unions against Hitler?
00:21:10.000Why we do what we do today in the terms I discussed, I'm not talking about M1 Abrams and parrots of cash, but providing the means for the Ukrainians to fight for themselves.
00:21:22.000Why that is actually a national security interest of the United States is very simply because of what you remember from your childhood at school.
00:21:31.000If a bully is permitted to get away with bullying, they will proceed to keep on bullying.
00:21:38.000You can remember a bully from the playground at school.
00:21:42.000The only time a bully stopped bullying is when somebody stood up to them and gave them a bloody nose.
00:21:49.000When you have somebody who is a remnant, a relic, a dinosaur of the Cold War, who says the loss of the Soviet Union is the greatest tragedy that we have faced, invades another country and then states repeatedly that the other countries bordering that nation are illegitimate, have no right to exist.
00:22:09.000That is a state of affairs that America will not be able to stay out of, even if you believe in neo-Buchananite, Tucker-esque isolationism.
00:22:20.000If they landlock the bottom, if Mariupol is landlocked across Russian-controlled territory and there is no way to actually send the goods from Ukraine to North Africa, then there will be an absolute disaster in terms of starvation on the African continent.
00:22:40.000That will, again, be something America can't stay clear of.
00:22:43.000It's like saying it doesn't matter to us.
00:22:46.000These nations can collapse and there will be no consequences.
00:22:51.000No, just to make sure I understand, because I don't think I totally know the issue as well as I probably should.
00:22:57.000Can you just educate me on the lend lease you mentioned of who we lended weapons to and what was the context there?
00:23:04.000So when we supported, for example, when we sent, we said we're not going to get involved in war, but we sent huge amounts of equipment.
00:23:13.000Most of the trucks the Soviet Union used were from the United States.
00:23:17.000And when we sent Tommy guns to the UK before Pearl Harbor, we were providing huge amounts of armaments to nations that were five, six, seven thousand miles away to fight a threat to them.
00:24:06.000So you're saying in some sense that Vladimir Putin is similar to the Nazis and Adolf Hitler.
00:24:14.000No, I'm saying that you supply aid to those who are being intimidated, bullied, and invaded, irrespective of the quality internally of those nations governments.
00:24:29.000But didn't Lendlease didn't Lend-Lease eventually get us into the war?
00:24:34.000Well, I think Pearl Harbor got us into the war.
00:24:37.000Okay, so I think troops on the ground was when Imperial Japan killed Americans on U.S. soil.
00:24:43.000But supplying weapons and getting involved, despite multiple provocations, Hitler declaring war in America, didn't it get us closer to getting involved?
00:24:54.000Well, I think it was inevitable because when you're facing somebody who wants to have domination of the Eurasian landmass, America probably should be on a side of that that isn't supporting him.
00:25:05.000So whether we gave one Tommy gun or a million Tommy guns is irrespective.
00:25:09.000When you have a nation that says, I want to own the Eurasian landmass, if you read Spikeman, McKinder, The Rim Land, The Heartland, you know that there are certain actors whose actions will not touch upon American national interest in a way that is nuggetory.
00:25:28.000So, you know, Hitler or the Soviet Union sooner or later will be America's problem.
00:25:33.000And the last point that I'd make with regards to the Ukraine, and this is where I find it really galling that anybody who says they're a conservative says, we don't care, pull down the shutters on the Atlantic coast, pull down the shutters on the Pacific, and let the rest of the world rot in hell.
00:25:48.000What would Ronald Reagan say about the Ukrainians fighting for their freedom?
00:25:53.000If you look at his willingness to stand up to communism everywhere, you would say that Reagan wouldn't exactly call a KGB colonel a champion for, what, the West or anti-globalism?
00:26:05.000So let's remember: if we are a shining city on a hill, we need to be a shining city on a hill at all times.
00:26:12.000And also when it comes to external assistance to Ukraine, this nation, where I'm sitting right now, would still be part of the British Commonwealth.
00:26:20.000It would be a colony of the UK if France hadn't assisted us.
00:26:25.000The nascent revolutionary forces, if they hadn't been assisted by French naval blockades, 1776 never would have happened.
00:26:33.000So the idea that helping another nation fight for its own territorial integrity is by dint of history not justified, America wouldn't have existed without assistance from the outside.
00:26:45.000Do you think $100 billion has been too much?
00:27:26.000The idea there has narrowly been any debate in America is inexcusable.
00:27:33.000So I think you can understand my position, though, Dr. Ruger, not just the incompetency of the military elite or brass, but I also have this bubbling up frustration of the pace, the focus that Congress puts on this particular border crisis and not our own, which does animate, honestly, some of my rejection to just want to get further involved,
00:27:57.000which could end up being a quagmire because it seems like the foreign policy establishment wants to get involved in, let's just say, theaters of conflict that don't always have inevitable endings for profits or for whatever the reason.
00:28:12.000But I suppose I just, I do want you to, without, you know, without mentioning the Lend-Least thing, I understand, but why is it an urgent national security threat to us?
00:28:23.000And the bully argument, I got that, but why is Putin taking over Ukraine a threat to Rhode Island?
00:28:42.000And the idea that Poland doesn't have a right to exist because a former KGB colonel says so, that's not something we can ignore.
00:28:49.000Either we created NATO in 1949 as a club of Western civilization, of nations that agree together to stand together, or it was a con, it was a fraud, and we didn't mean it.
00:29:04.000But your prior point is very well taken.
00:29:06.000And I completely subscribe to the frustration that we can send hundreds of billions of dollars and it doesn't matter.
00:29:14.000And we look at the fact that we are the only nation in the world today that has no border regime.
00:29:19.000On my last Newsmax show, I did a very simple back-of-the-envelope calculation.
00:29:24.000And I went to the official statistics.
00:29:26.000Since World War II, if you add every combat fatality of the U.S. armed forces, so Korea, Vietnam, the GWAT, so every, you know, Afghanistan and Iraq, combined, every war we have fought in since 1945 has led to the deaths of 103,000 combat service men and women, 103,000 in 70 years.
00:29:50.000In the last 12 months, 110,000 have died of fentanyl poisoning in America.
00:29:56.000So yeah, I understand the frustration, but that doesn't mean Russia invading other countries on the periphery of our NATO that we helped create can be ignored.
00:30:11.000No, and I make no question of the moral sense.
00:30:15.000It's wrong for a strong country to invade a smaller country and a weaker one.
00:30:20.000However, saying that it's an urgent national security threat.
00:30:24.000And I guess the final point, though, Dr. Gorka, is if he wouldn't stop there, he's struggling to even take over Ukraine.
00:30:30.000So what's to say that he would go to Warsaw?
00:30:33.000Well, this is, you know, this is where I'm glad you said that because you had a guest on your show just a few days ago who said that Ukraine has lost already.
00:31:30.000So NATO, the NATO accession principles are very clear.
00:31:34.000Any nation that has representative government in the Eurasian region can join NATO if, if it has a functioning representative government and if the nation can contribute to the collective defense of the whole.
00:31:49.000Ukraine doesn't satisfy either of those.
00:31:52.000It doesn't have a well-functioning representative democracy and it doesn't have the capacity to substantively contribute to the collective defense of the North Atlantic Treaty area.
00:32:04.000If it did, that would be another question, but it doesn't.
00:32:07.000Dr. Sebastian Gorka, about 20 seconds.
00:33:53.000And what I was trying to communicate, and I probably could have done a better job, is saying that 1776 in our history can't just be copy-pasted to every time a country quote-unquote fights for its freedom.
00:34:07.000The reason being is 1776 was a very rare and exceptional moment in all of human history.
00:34:14.000Yes, there are some comparisons that can be used.
00:34:17.000However, the tradition that started with faith-centric colonists that experimented with all sorts of different types of government, the Pilgrims, from Roger Williams, to eventually the signers of the Declaration, not to mention the Black Robe Regiment and the First Great Awakening.
00:34:40.000So to just say that 1776 appeared as if out of the sky, which I know was not the argument by Dr. Gorka, but that is the essence at times.
00:34:58.000It ignores some of the incredible amount of work that went into developing the fertile soil that eventually allowed 1776 to happen and then wrestling with the Federalist Papers and then finally landing on the Constitution in 1787 is that the Revolutionary War was more than a physical conflict because there's been physical conflicts for thousands and thousands of years.
00:35:22.000No, it took many decades, in fact, 120, 130 years of work that I don't think Ukraine has gone through.
00:35:31.000I do not think Ukraine has labored over a religious awakening focused on virtue and piety and self-government, which is exactly why I think we should push for peace.
00:35:42.000And I think we should have Ukraine-Russia peace.
00:35:45.000We should redo the elections of the annexed regions under UN supervision.
00:35:48.000Russia leaves, if that is the will of the people.
00:35:51.000Crimea should formally be part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 until Khrushchev's mistake.
00:35:56.000The water supply to Crimea should be reassured, and Ukraine remains neutral.
00:36:02.000This is Elon Musk's framework, and I think is rather rational.
00:37:00.000It is time for them to pay a heavier price.
00:37:04.000And that was back in, I think, in 14 or 15, right on the border of Russia and Ukraine.
00:37:10.000Another argument I wanted to make, and we'll have to have another conversation, is shouldn't Russia be a strategic partner in fighting the CCP?
00:37:20.000Which I actually think plays into one of the arguments that Dr. Gorka was making about Lend-Lease.
00:37:31.000Which was supplying weapons to the Soviets so they could fight the Nazis.
00:37:36.000Shouldn't there also be a lesson from there to say that we could partner with the Russians to defeat the Chinese Communist Party, which I think is a much greater threat than Russia?
00:37:47.000I do understand the argument that says that people, that large countries should not invade smaller countries.
00:37:54.000I think you can say that with moral clarity while also saying that doesn't mean we should get involved with military equipment, arms, $100 billion.
00:38:06.000That will only further get us closer and closer to conflict.
00:38:11.000Someone said here, I don't care if it's their 1776.
00:38:18.000Yeah, and so the reason I just kind of latch onto that is I actually think repeating it's there 1776 over and over again is unfair, but also I think it's built to try to have Americans have more compassion for this cause when I don't think that our 1776 should be copy-pasted on every time a country says we want freedom.
00:38:39.000I do think the cause can be universal, but the circumstances certainly are not.
00:38:43.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:38:45.000Email me your thoughts as always freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:38:48.000Thank you so much for listening and God bless.
00:38:53.000For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.