The Charlie Kirk Show - March 18, 2022


The One Man Who Could Change My Mind on Ukraine

Topics
Turning Point USA Victoria Davis hansen no-fly zones
Hosted by
Charlie Kirk
Mentioned
Victor Davis Hanson Joe Biden Lindsey Graham Angela Merkel Donald Trump Zelensky Turning Point USA Jennifer Granholm Qasem Soleimani Listener Square Adam Kinzinger Pedro Gonzalez Rush Limbaugh Mike Lindell John McCain Xi Jinping Larry Arnn Kalishnikov Stalingrad Aristotle and 5 more
Should America Intervene? — In-Depth with Speaker Newt Gingrich The Most Prophetic Man in Congress | In-Depth with Ron Paul

Episode Stats


Length

32 minutes

Words per minute

162.24

Word count

5,208

Sentence count

348

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

30

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Victor Davis Hansen is a military historian, philosopher, and writer. He has written for the New York Times, CNN, CBS, NPR, and many other publications. He is one of America s most gifted minds, and I am so lucky to call him a friend.

Transcript

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Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, the one man who could convince me to think differently about Ukraine.
00:00:05.000 This hour, we go through the great Victor Davis Hansen's piece on Ukraine, one of America's most gifted minds.
00:00:14.000 Email me directly, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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00:00:57.000 Buckle up, everybody, here.
00:00:59.000 We go.
00:01:00.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:01:01.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
00:01:03.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:01:07.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:01:10.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:01:11.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:01:12.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:21.000 We 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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00:01:44.000 My pledge has always been to follow the truth and follow the facts no matter where it takes us or leads us.
00:01:50.000 Nothing bothers me more than people that are stuck in dogmatic positions, especially when it comes to foreign policy.
00:01:57.000 Foreign policy is the most complicated of all the decisions that could be made because there are so many different incentives.
00:02:05.000 There's philosophical arguments that could be made on both sides.
00:02:08.000 There's arguments of prudence, circumstance, motivations, actors.
00:02:14.000 There's a chess game to be played.
00:02:16.000 Foreign policy can be very, very complex.
00:02:19.000 It is not cut and dry, despite what the people on television try to tell you.
00:02:23.000 Now, there's a lot of, let's say, uninformed people on television that are clamoring to try to get us into a no-fly zone or war, if you will, in Russia and Ukraine.
00:02:37.000 We've obviously pushed back against that.
00:02:40.000 There are very few people that I respect when it comes to writing about these issues and thinking deeply about what's happening on the geopolitical stage.
00:02:50.000 One of those people, though, the only person that could probably make me stop, I shouldn't say only person, but one of the only people that could make me stop what I'm doing, drop whatever I'm reading, and take every word that is published seriously.
00:03:06.000 There's one person that when he speaks about an issue of current affairs or foreign affairs, I say before I read it, I say he knows far more than I do, and I'm going to respect exactly where he's coming from.
00:03:20.000 This person is someone that you've read and you've probably seen him on television.
00:03:25.000 You see, he was not a political commentator for most of his life.
00:03:28.000 In fact, he still isn't.
00:03:30.000 He's a philosopher.
00:03:31.000 He's a classicist.
00:03:33.000 You see, he spent the first 30 to 40 years of his life studying things that were ancient and beautiful and true.
00:03:42.000 He is one of the most fluent experts when it comes to ancient warfare, Sparta v. Athens, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the ancient Greek and Roman experiments in government.
00:03:55.000 I'm of course talking about Victor Davis Hansen.
00:03:59.000 Victor Davis Hansen is a military historian.
00:04:02.000 He has become an almost, let's say, outsourced teacher of mine.
00:04:06.000 He's not personally taught me anything as far as one-on-one, but I have taken many of his courses brought to you by Hillsdale College, including his citizenship course, which should be a required project for every single student in America.
00:04:22.000 I have read many of his books, including The Dying Citizen.
00:04:27.000 He wrote one of the most effective arguments in favor of Donald Trump.
00:04:31.000 I listen to his podcasts.
00:04:33.000 Victor Davis Hansen is not ideological, instead, he is philosophically rooted in things that are beautiful and true and eternal.
00:04:43.000 His understanding of American history, his observation of human nature, his fairness when it comes to looking at current events is something that should make us all take pause and say, what is VDH saying about this?
00:04:58.000 Now, the man who really discovered Victor Davis Hansen on the public stage was, of course, the great Rush Limbaugh.
00:05:05.000 You can go back in the archives of the Rush Limbaugh program back in 2002, 2003, and he was like, who is this Victor Davis Hansen guy?
00:05:11.000 He is spot on.
00:05:13.000 Simultaneously, Dr. Larry Arn from Hillsdale College also had given him some positions at Hillsdale before anyone had heard of Victor Davis Hansen.
00:05:24.000 Victor Davis Hansen coined the phrase muscular class.
00:05:28.000 He is very focused on revitalizing the American citizen.
00:05:34.000 So much of the kind of nomenclature that is used on the conservative political commentary side stems from Victor Davis Hansen.
00:05:42.000 And the reason is that for 30 to 40 years, Victor Davis Hansen did not care about the popularity of his columns.
00:05:49.000 He did not care about the perspective of what people thought of him.
00:05:54.000 He was studying ancient history, military movements.
00:05:59.000 His class on the Second World Wars at Hillsdale is phenomenal.
00:06:02.000 So all of that lead up for this, which is when Victor Davis Hansen recently published a series of articles on Ukraine, I had to stop what I was doing, put my phone down and say, all right, I'm going to just look at this at a blank slate.
00:06:16.000 I have so much respect for this man that no matter what he says in here, I'm going to entertain with an open mind, and I better have a good counter argument to what he says, because he has far more wisdom than the combined intelligence of the cable news, quote-unquote, intelligentsia.
00:06:34.000 So I rarely do this, but I want to go through this article by Victor Davis Hansen, 10 Realities of Ukraine.
00:06:42.000 We're going to go through piece by piece.
00:06:43.000 And I'm also going to weave in some of the other articles he has written about this and an analogy that Victor Davis Hansen wrote about Vladimir Putin being like a caged animal.
00:06:54.000 I think it's a phenomenal analogy.
00:06:57.000 But we're going to go through this because we always try to keep an open mind.
00:07:00.000 We want to get a better grasp of what is happening, and you should too.
00:07:03.000 If you have a position that says we need a no-fly zone over Ukraine, or if you have a position that said we should not get involved in Ukraine at all, no matter what in life, you should always be open to the better argument.
00:07:15.000 Now, you could entertain it for 30 seconds to be like, that's a bad argument.
00:07:18.000 I'm not going to accept that.
00:07:20.000 This is what a mature society does.
00:07:23.000 That is the philosophical and moral basis of the First Amendment and freedom of speech, which is better ideas need an opportunity to be spread and to be spoken.
00:07:33.000 Ideas need an opportunity to come up against one another.
00:07:37.000 Victor Davis Hansen, 10 Realities of Ukraine.
00:07:40.000 One, Victor writes, reassuring an enemy.
00:07:44.000 What one will not do ensures that the enemy will do just that and more.
00:07:49.000 Unpredictability and occasional enigmatic silence bolsters deterrence.
00:07:55.000 But Joe Biden's predictable reassurance to Vladimir Putin that he will show restraint means Putin likely will not.
00:08:04.000 Totally agree with that.
00:08:06.000 Number two.
00:08:07.000 Now, this is an interesting one for the neoconservatives.
00:08:11.000 This is one for all the people that are clamoring for a no-fly zone.
00:08:15.000 And I encourage Adam Kinzinger to all the people that are calling for a no-fly zone: why don't you go have a one-on-one conversation with Victor Davis Hansen?
00:08:23.000 He knows a lot more about this than you ever will.
00:08:27.000 Quote: No-fly zones don't work in a big power, symmetrical standoff.
00:08:34.000 In a cost-benefit analysis, they are not worth the risk of shooting down the planes of a nuclear power.
00:08:41.000 Professor Hansen writes, quote, they usually do little to stop planes outside of such zones shooting missiles into them. 0.71
00:08:48.000 Sending long-range, high-altitude anti-aircraft batteries to Ukraine to deny Russian air superiority is a far better way of regaining air parity.
00:08:59.000 So that's Victor Davis Hanson basically, quote unquote, get it shooting down the argument that Zelensky made in front of Congress, which is, please give us a no-fly zone. 0.77
00:09:10.000 Please give us the ability to be able to control our skies.
00:09:14.000 Victor Davis Hansen says, quote, no-fly zones don't work in a big power, symmetrical standoff.
00:09:21.000 In a cost-benefit analysis, they're not worth the risk of shooting down planes of a nuclear power.
00:09:25.000 That's someone who has studied more military battles and teaches about those military battles.
00:09:29.000 Why don't we hear this on television?
00:09:31.000 Why is the sobering analysis of Victor Davis Hanson when it comes to the no-fly zones not contributed to the conversation or the narrative?
00:09:38.000 Or is it just kind of like this outsourced video game?
00:09:41.000 Like, it feels good, we're going to do it.
00:09:43.000 Well, Professor Hansen says, you better stop short before implementing a no-fly zone.
00:09:48.000 We're going to go through these 10 pieces of the master historian himself, the American patriot who understands history with wisdom and prudence and wants what's best for the American people.
00:09:59.000 They're now saying it's Putin's gas price hike, which will be felt by the muscular class, the middle class, disproportionately.
00:10:07.000 Play cut 85.
00:10:08.000 Make no mistake, the current spike in gas prices is largely the fault of Vladimir Putin.
00:10:15.000 It has nothing to do with the American rescue plan.
00:10:17.000 Well, we've seen the price of gas go up at least 75 cents since President Putin lined up troops on the border of Ukraine.
00:10:25.000 Make no mistake, inflation is largely the fault of Putin.
00:10:28.000 Through the facts, Democrats didn't cause this problem.
00:10:32.000 Vladimir Putin did.
00:10:34.000 People already, already feeling Putin's price hikes at the pump.
00:10:38.000 So I decided to do some digging.
00:10:40.000 I decided to go back into the archives and wonder what was the message that the Biden regime and Europe was sending to Vladimir Putin when it comes to energy.
00:10:52.000 I actually found this on Victor Davis Hansen's website that was written about one of his colleagues.
00:10:56.000 Quote, in June, Joe Biden and German leader Angela Merkel agreed that the United States would not enforce its sanctions against Nord Stream II under sea gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.
00:11:10.000 Biden and Merkel presented this as a way to repair German-United States relations.
00:11:15.000 Although the pipeline is an existential issue for Ukraine, which will lose security leverage now, that vast Russian gas deliveries will now circumvent Ukraine.
00:11:23.000 This is back in September, this was written.
00:11:25.000 President Zelensky learned of the German-American agreement through the press.
00:11:29.000 Similarly, Biden's one-on-one meeting in Geneva with Putin in June was received as a potential sellout of Ukraine.
00:11:35.000 So that's really interesting.
00:11:37.000 And that really wasn't covered very much, was it?
00:11:39.000 Which is that there is a meeting between Biden and Merkel back in June where basically it was broadcast to Vladimir Putin, hey, you're going to get your pipeline.
00:11:49.000 So what does that mean for the calculation of the sinister Vladimir Putin?
00:11:53.000 He's like, all right, I got leverage.
00:11:56.000 I have cards in the game.
00:11:57.000 Europe can only go so far.
00:12:00.000 Europe can only keep the lights on thanks to our regime. 0.62
00:12:04.000 What a perfect time to go invade.
00:12:07.000 And that's number three of Victor Davis Hansen's point. 0.77
00:12:10.000 Europe and NATO members and Germany in particular have de facto admitted that their past decades of shutting down nuclear plants and coal mines and oil and gas fields have left Europe at the mercy of Russia.
00:12:20.000 That is primarily because of the environmentalists and the climate change cultists. 0.54
00:12:27.000 They are promising to rearm and meet their promised military contributions.
00:12:31.000 By their actions, they're admitting that their critics, the United States in particular, were right and they were dangerously wrong in empowering Putin.
00:12:36.000 In a headline that just came out in the last couple of days, Germany is now thinking of rebuilding coal-powered coal-fire power plants.
00:12:46.000 The dirtiest of all the fossil fuels.
00:12:51.000 Germany wants to get back to cheap energy immediately.
00:12:54.000 If they only would have embraced an LNG strategy, liquefied natural gas, if they only would have partnered with the United States, maybe they wouldn't have had this geopolitical tiger in the cage that was created, which of course is Vladimir Putin.
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00:14:09.000 Number four, on Victor Davis Hansen's article here, China is now pro-Russian.
00:14:14.000 Beijing wants Russian natural resources at a discount, and Russia will pay for overpriced access to Chinese finance, commerce, and markets.
00:14:22.000 Yet if Russia loses the Ukraine war, goes broke, and is ostracized at an international pariah, then China will likely cut the smelly Russian albatross from its neck in fear of a new Western financial, cultural, and commercial clout. 0.61
00:14:37.000 So this is an interesting point, which is that China is now seeing more benefit in being aligned with Russia than with the West. 0.80
00:14:47.000 Now, that's a dangerous dance, I have to say.
00:14:50.000 And China, there's a lot of paranoia right now in Beijing.
00:14:56.000 There's a lot of disagreement, I'm sure, happening in Beijing, and they're looking at this very carefully.
00:15:00.000 First of all, they're looking at the cost, the human cost, the financial cost of what it would require to go take Taiwan, a land that you think is yours.
00:15:10.000 Okay.
00:15:10.000 Well, the entire world could shut you off financially.
00:15:13.000 You could lose thousands of people.
00:15:14.000 Your morale could go down.
00:15:16.000 Xi Jinping wants to keep his grip on power.
00:15:19.000 And look, I'm going to say something about the differences of cultures. 0.96
00:15:22.000 The Russian culture is a fighting culture. 0.91
00:15:26.000 War is built into the history of Russia. 0.79
00:15:31.000 The current Chinese regime is not a fighting culture.
00:15:35.000 It's not.
00:15:36.000 They were conquered by the Japanese.
00:15:38.000 They were a poor nation for the last couple hundred years.
00:15:40.000 Now, you could go back into dynasties prior, and they were a fighting culture, but that has not been the case for quite a while.
00:15:47.000 China became a peasant nation as the rest of the world industrialized.
00:15:53.000 Mainland Manchuria was far from a military powerhouse.
00:15:57.000 In fact, there is a psychological issue between the Chinese people and the Japanese, where there are still people in the Chinese nation that fear the samurai culture and fear the Japanese dominance of mainland China, which happened all throughout the 1920s, mainly 30s and 40s, which led up to World War II.
00:16:22.000 Japan basically dominated China.
00:16:24.000 They did whatever they want. 0.96
00:16:25.000 And by the way, it was brutal.
00:16:26.000 It was probably genocidal.
00:16:28.000 We don't even know all the details to it because there really was not a lot of cataloging, a lot of its first-hand testimony.
00:16:34.000 But based on all the evidence we have, Imperial Japan probably committed genocide against the people of mainland China.
00:16:41.000 And they only wanted to occupy China for its access to its fertile lands, primarily in the West.
00:16:47.000 And they just rolled over Manchuria, China.
00:16:50.000 Those wounds are still felt in China. 0.91
00:16:53.000 You better believe that.
00:16:55.000 So the Russian fighting culture, where they famously defeated the invasion of Napoleon in 1812, where Catherine the Great before that expanded her lands and her territory, where the Russian people were just about, I think it was like 35 kilometers from the Nazis taking over Moscow.
00:17:15.000 And you could almost see the lights of Moscow in the distance at the furthest kind of panzer tank division and were stopped.
00:17:28.000 And the Luftwaffe was doing bombing campaigns outside of the suburbs of Moscow.
00:17:32.000 And the Russian people have great pride in the story of almost losing Stalingrad in a street brawl and turning the entire war back towards eventually the Western Front, finding the Nazis in Ukraine and pushing them all the way back to Berlin.
00:17:48.000 There's a massive amount of intergenerational pride there.
00:17:52.000 So you're dealing with two different cultures there. 0.95
00:17:55.000 Now, I'm not saying the Chinese are not one to be taken seriously, but from a militaristic standpoint, from an etho standpoint, from a morale standpoint, the Russians are far superior. 0.92
00:18:08.000 And if they're struggling in Ukraine, you better believe the Chinese military officials are saying, oh my goodness, I hope we don't have to fight anytime soon. 0.96
00:18:16.000 Because we don't know what our people will do.
00:18:18.000 They have not seen serious combat in multiple generations.
00:18:21.000 Let me say that again.
00:18:22.000 The Chinese nation has not seen serious combat. 0.61
00:18:25.000 The only examples would be intervening in North Vietnam on behalf of the Viet Cong or intervening, just throwing millions of bodies against the United States in the Korean War to help out the communist cause, which then created now known as North Korea.
00:18:44.000 So something to keep in mind there, the differences between the Russian culture and the Chinese culture.
00:18:49.000 Number five from Victor Davis Hansen.
00:18:51.000 Americans are finally digesting just how destructive the humiliating flight from Afghanistan was.
00:18:58.000 The catastrophe signaled to Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran that Western deterrence had died.
00:19:03.000 Now, I'll be very honest, we said this at the time, but it just kind of became this like program talking point on the right that I don't think we explored deep enough on this program where we said, listen, what happened in Kabul, what happened with the closure of Bagram Air Base, what happened with the Taliban taking over Afghanistan, that's going to send a message to China, send a message to Russia, do whatever they want.
00:19:23.000 And we kind of said this time and time again, but it was not just true.
00:19:27.000 It was instructive.
00:19:30.000 Victor Davis Hansen writes, There's no surprise that Russia then sent missiles into a Ukrainian base near the Polish-NATO border.
00:19:37.000 North Korea in January launched more missiles than in any month in its history, and Iran sent missiles into Kurdistan.
00:19:43.000 China announces daily that it's just a matter of time until it absorbs Taiwan.
00:19:47.000 The tens of billions of dollars of sophisticated weaponry sent to Ukraine by the West are still far less of the U.S. military handed over to the terrorist Taliban.
00:19:56.000 I'm going to play some tape here. 0.60
00:19:57.000 I want us to go back and just remember how humiliating this actually was and how the Afghanistan withdrawal really set the baseline.
00:20:08.000 It set the conditions for what we are now experiencing all across the world. 0.51
00:20:15.000 Okay, let's go to Cut 108.
00:20:16.000 Afghanistan cannot be used as a terrorist base that Afghanistan has become a Disneyland for terrorists to be planned for every contingency. 0.54
00:20:24.000 Total chaos.
00:20:25.000 It is heartbreaking.
00:20:27.000 It is depressing.
00:20:28.000 It's a failure.
00:20:29.000 And he needs to own that failure.
00:20:31.000 Bear responsibility for all that's happened.
00:20:33.000 He did not admit any mistakes.
00:20:34.000 He did not offer any change, of course.
00:20:37.000 He says we're going to continue forward.
00:20:38.000 He really isn't taking responsibility.
00:20:40.000 Mr. Biden, you did this. 0.92
00:20:43.000 You made the deal with the Taliban. 0.66
00:20:45.000 This is the consequences of it. 1.00
00:20:46.000 Go to hell, Biden. 0.97
00:20:48.000 That was a 24-7 infomercial that our adversaries, Putin, China, saw, internalized, and they started to game plan. 0.98
00:20:57.000 They started to see what happened there, and they said, we smell blood in the water.
00:21:03.000 Number six, this is very obvious.
00:21:06.000 The Ukrainian war, Russian war against Ukraine, did not cause inflation and record gas prices.
00:21:12.000 Prior to Putin's invasion, Biden was quite publicly blamed, greedy corporations.
00:21:16.000 We've gone into that.
00:21:17.000 I could play some more tapes here of just their new talking point.
00:21:20.000 I think it's actually helpful, as they continue to try to say this is all on Putin, this is all on Putin.
00:21:28.000 Let's go to Cut 76.
00:21:30.000 Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm says Americans should see Biden's outreach to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to get them to produce more oil as, quote, something that helps them.
00:21:40.000 No mention of American energy production, no LNG exploration, no one powering the Permian, no one powering the Balkan, no empowering the Marcella Shale.
00:21:49.000 Play Cut 76.
00:21:51.000 The administration's reaching out to Saudi Arabia and to Venezuela, I think folks that many Americans might consider unsavory characters in this search for energy to kind of fill this Russian energy void.
00:22:04.000 How should Americans view this?
00:22:08.000 I think Americans should see the administration calling right now for an increase in supply as something that helps them.
00:22:16.000 And that's what it's increased supply at home and increased supply around the world so that we can reduce the cost at the pump.
00:22:23.000 That's your energy secretary who is captured by the green energy environmentalists.
00:22:27.000 Number seven, Victor Davis Hansen writes, Putin did not invade during the Trump tenure.
00:22:32.000 Although he had been more aggressive under previous American leadership with his attacks in Georgia, Ukraine, and Crimea, Russia stayed still when oil prices were low and fuel supplies in the West were plentiful and the United States was confident.
00:22:46.000 Putin took note of increased NATO and U.S. defense spending.
00:22:49.000 He feared low global oil prices and record oil and gas production on the American side.
00:22:55.000 He was wary after unpredictable American strikes against enemies like ISIS, Abdul al-Baghdadi, and Iranian general Qassam Soleimani.
00:23:03.000 The unpredictability, the inability to be able to know what Trump was going to do next, kept Putin in a passive posture, not an active posture.
00:23:15.000 Not only is Biden weak, which is bad, but Biden is predictably weak.
00:23:22.000 It's one thing to be weak.
00:23:23.000 It's another thing to broadcast your weakness and tell people you are going to be weak before you're actually weak.
00:23:32.000 Now, number eight, this is why I always keep an open mind.
00:23:34.000 And I got to tell you, now that Victor writes this, I take this very, very seriously.
00:23:40.000 It's something that we have been very skeptical of, something that we have pushed back against, and we've been asking questions.
00:23:46.000 But this is Victor.
00:23:48.000 Quote: It is not escalation to send arms to Ukraine.
00:23:53.000 The Russians far more aggressively supplied the North Koreans and North Vietnamese in their wars against America without spreading the war globally.
00:24:01.000 Pakistan, Syria, and Iran sent deadly weapons, many in turn supplied to them by Russia, North Korea, and China to kill thousands of Americans during the Afghan and Iraq wars.
00:24:11.000 And I have to say, Victor brings up a really good point here.
00:24:15.000 You know, we have a couple Marines serving on our security team here.
00:24:18.000 And I asked him, I said, what was the most common weapon that you guys had to fight back against?
00:24:22.000 They said it at AK-47, obviously, Kalishnikov.
00:24:25.000 And so even though Russia might not have been directly involved with troops on the ground in military strikes in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, obviously we've been against the Iraq war, but I want us to win.
00:24:36.000 I want America to win no matter what war we're in because we're patriots.
00:24:40.000 I would never cheer for our defeat ever.
00:24:42.000 But you think about it, if the Russians were generously funding weapon transfers against our troops in the Middle East, and that didn't quote unquote escalate their involvement, Victor brings up a good point that I really haven't thought to see a counterpoint to, then why wouldn't we also do the same in a conflict of theater that they're in?
00:25:01.000 Something to think about.
00:25:04.000 Nine, Putin may never fully absorb Ukraine as long as it can be supplied across its borders by four NATO countries.
00:25:11.000 The United States deadlocked in the Korean War.
00:25:14.000 We lost the Vietnam War and was stalled in Iraq and fled Afghanistan in part because its enemies were easily supplied by border friends on the assumptions the United States could not strike such a better.
00:25:25.000 So basically, VDH is saying, look, it's going to be hard to conquer Ukraine because of the neighbors, because you can have an inside-out relationship with troops and movements and intelligence and weapons.
00:25:37.000 You can fight, go back to Poland.
00:25:39.000 Fight, go back to Poland. 0.93
00:25:40.000 It's exactly what the Taliban did and the Islamic fundamentalists did that we were fighting Afghanistan. 0.97
00:25:45.000 They'd fight a bunch of American Marines in fighting season, go back to Pakistan. 0.95
00:25:49.000 Fight, go back to Pakistan. 0.95
00:25:51.000 And since we are not at war with Pakistan and we have this very bizarre relationship with Pakistan, to put it mildly, it gave the Taliban an advantage. 0.96
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00:27:05.000 Victor Davis Hansen finishes the piece by saying, quote, it is not un-American to point out that prior American appeasement under Obama and Biden explains why Putin wished to go into Ukraine.
00:27:16.000 Explains not why Putin wished to go into Ukraine, but felt he could.
00:27:20.000 It is not treasonous to say Ukraine and the United States previously should have stayed out of others' domestic affairs and politics.
00:27:27.000 Let me stop right there.
00:27:28.000 If you guys are interested at all in the lead up to what happened in Ukraine, I encourage you to check out the Charlie Kirk Show podcast and our conversation with Pedro Gonzalez.
00:27:42.000 So you guys have got to check that out.
00:27:44.000 So, but let me read this also from a similar VDH piece, which, again, this is a pretty amazing argument.
00:27:50.000 So, Victor Davis Hansen compares Vladimir Putin to a caged animal.
00:27:58.000 He says, quote, when a zoo tiger tears a human being apart who is an incautious visitor, we assume the big cat is a natural killer that is always hungry and looking for food, yet needs some sort of opening to spring free.
00:28:13.000 If he kills and swallows a bit of an unfortunate gawker, we usually assume the tiger is capable of such savagery anytime he is empowered.
00:28:21.000 But again, he must be aided and abetted to act on the innate nature.
00:28:25.000 So we don't necessarily blame only the tiger for being a carnivore and prompting the tragedy.
00:28:32.000 Given his predictable predatory nature, we also turn our attention to who or what allowed the killer to satisfy his hunger.
00:28:41.000 Does the culpable include the incautious visitor that got too close to the guardrails, the lax zoo that poorly managed the big cat enclosure, or even the zoo architect whose originally poorly designed exhibit helps to allow such an eventful catastrophe?
00:28:57.000 So what is Victor Davis Hansen saying here? 0.96
00:29:00.000 He's saying that, oh yeah, Putin is a savage animal. 0.94
00:29:04.000 He's a savage tiger, and he has at his core a desire to eat and to prey on anything that comes into his cage. 0.91
00:29:14.000 But he's also saying, what about the numbskull that gets too close to the carnivore?
00:29:19.000 What about the numbskull that starts poking the tiger?
00:29:22.000 Don't we factor that into our calculus?
00:29:25.000 Now, why would Victor Davis Hansen be mentioning that?
00:29:28.000 Well, he's mentioning the Lindsey Graham and John McCain types who said it's time to go play offense.
00:29:34.000 Do we have that tape of Lindsey Graham?
00:29:36.000 It's a perfect time to play that if we can.
00:29:39.000 If we can get that queued up.
00:29:41.000 Where when Victor Davis Hansen talks about quote-unquote poking the bear, when Victor Davis Hansen talks about we need to play offense, that's the same thing, that we need to try to irritate the tiger in the cage.
00:29:58.000 And so when we look at the Ukrainian-Russian situation, this is Putin's war.
00:30:05.000 This is Putin's savagery.
00:30:07.000 These are Putin's war crimes.
00:30:10.000 What prompted him to do it?
00:30:13.000 What provoked the tiger to let loose?
00:30:17.000 Did the United States and NATO open the cage by giving false hopes to Ukraine that they would join NATO?
00:30:24.000 Did the United States poke the tiger in the cage by saying we're going to put nuclear weapons on the border of Russia?
00:30:33.000 How would you feel if you live in Houston, Texas, and the KGB, the Russian government, would overtake the Mexican government, displace the Mexican leader with a Russian sympathetic leader, and put nuclear weapons on the Texas border?
00:30:53.000 How would you react to such an action?
00:30:56.000 Play Lindsey Graham, please, but play it only for 30 seconds. 0.98
00:30:59.000 Play it.
00:31:00.000 Your fight is our fight.
00:31:04.000 2017 will be the year of offense.
00:31:10.000 All of us will go back to Washington and we will push the case against Russia.
00:31:23.000 Enough of a Russian aggression.
00:31:27.000 It is time for them to pay a heavier price. 0.99
00:31:30.000 It is the year of playing offense.
00:31:31.000 They have to play a heavier price. 0.71
00:31:33.000 Imagine a Russian politician going to Mexico City or Ottawa, taking over the government, displacing it through a pseudo-color revolution, and saying it's time to play offense against America. 0.58
00:31:44.000 It would be wrong if we invaded Mexico, but you would have to say what would be the conditions and the poking of the tiger that might have led to that.
00:31:54.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:31:55.000 Email us your thoughts.
00:31:55.000 It's always freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
00:31:58.000 Thanks so much.
00:31:58.000 Talk to you soon.
00:32:02.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.