00:00:02.000Also, what's going on with religious freedom across the world?
00:00:05.000Johnny Moore and Joshua Phillip join us for a very thought-provoking, important episode about geopolitics and international affairs.
00:00:11.000You can email me your thoughts as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.
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00:01:46.000So you're kind of an expert on international religious freedom, and you also have been following what's happening in Vienna right now with the Iran deal, where the Russians are kind of like the intermediaries.
00:01:58.000Yeah, I don't think Americans really realize what's going on in Vienna.
00:02:00.000I mean, stop to think that while all of this is happening in Ukraine, the deputy foreign minister of Russia has been negotiating what they say is going back into the Iran deal.
00:02:12.000It's actually a whole different deal altogether.
00:02:13.000But it's not even a negotiation, Charlie.
00:02:15.000The Americans haven't even met with the Iranians.
00:02:28.000People don't really realize how catastrophic this is.
00:02:30.000So the first Iran deal was really bad.
00:02:33.000They said it tried to the way that the Obama regime spinned it, spun it, whatever, was that they were saying that this prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but we know that wasn't true.
00:02:47.000Yeah, and what the Biden administration said, because by the way, the deal wouldn't have even gotten a vote in the Democrat-controlled Congress.
00:03:19.000The White House is ignoring all of it.
00:03:21.000Yeah, and what we understand about this deal is that it relieves, they've been relieving a lot of sanctions on Iran, but they basically relieve the rest of them.
00:03:30.000They take sanctions off of all these terrorists, including the people responsible for the bombing of the Jewish community 30 years ago in Argentina.
00:03:39.000They actually may even take the Revolutionary Guard off the terrorist list.
00:04:11.000You said it doesn't have to go through Senate approval because this was something that Senator Alexander tried to force the hand of, if I remember correctly, back during Obama, and it ended up not mattering at all.
00:04:29.000The Iranians want it to be a treaty because they're telling the Biden administration, we want a guarantee that the Americans can't break this deal anymore.
00:04:37.000But right now, one of the biggest critics of the Iran deal in Congress is Bob Menendez from New Jersey.
00:05:09.000And, you know, this is a really, it's a really awful, awful situation.
00:05:15.000Yes, but one of the things that the Iranians say, who I don't trust the Iranian regime at all, is they just want it for nuclear power.
00:05:21.000Just kind of walk us through how preposterous that is.
00:05:24.000Well, I mean, this deal, what the Iranians have been doing is they've been sort of like extending the negotiation so they could accelerate the enrichment of Iranians.
00:05:41.000They're working really, really hard to do this.
00:05:42.000And they're running circles around the Biden administration.
00:05:44.000I mean, you can negotiate a deal with Iran, but you have to do it with strength.
00:05:50.000And just like in the Russia-Ukraine situation, you know, what the spark that could ignite a third world war is not a MIG plane from Poland and Ukraine.
00:06:02.000The United States isn't a weak country.
00:06:05.000We're the wealthiest, strongest country in the world, but we're projecting an enormous amount of weakness.
00:06:10.000And the Iranians are running circles around us at the negotiating table, if you can even call it that, as Americans sit in a hotel down the road with the Russian deputy foreign minister shuffling back and forth between them.
00:06:21.000So let me ask you, Johnny, as we look at the international state of affairs with Iran and Russia and Ukraine, it seems like all these things are very tied together, right?
00:06:39.000Well, look, I mean, I think there are lots of reasons for it.
00:06:45.000The primary reason why people aren't paying attention to it is there's so many fires around the world, you know, as it is.
00:06:52.000But, you know, the reporting was from Vienna because the deputy foreign minister of Iran spoke to the Iranian press, bragging in English, I might say, about how the Iranians had out-negotiated everyone else at the table.
00:07:07.000They'd fought for every comma, every period, and quote, got far more than even he imagined that they would get.
00:07:17.000So in the middle of this Ukraine-Russia crisis, the administration has been trying to potentially get Iranian oil back on the market.
00:07:28.000It was widely reported that they sent negotiators to Maduro in Venezuela.
00:07:34.000It would be very hard to get Venezuelan oil back on the market.
00:07:36.000The whole thing is so decimated to take a year to do it.
00:07:40.000But in this upside-down world, we have people sitting in Washington, D.C. saying, look, we have to stop Russian oil, but why don't we replace it with Iranian oil and Venezuelan oil, which is, you know, if you're for clean energy, it's like far dirtier than American energy.
00:07:54.000And we're going to replace like one of the world's worst human rights violators with two that are even worse, worse than that.
00:08:00.000Like the whole thing is absolutely upside down.
00:08:03.000So you're the author of the book, Upcoming Look, The Next Jihad, about Christians in Nigeria.
00:08:09.000Yeah, I mean, in one level, I feel like someone put me in a time machine and took me back to 2014, watching all of these fires all around the world.
00:08:18.000But the single most neglected issue in the world is we have this raging fire of a new potential caliphate in Western Africa committing human rights atrocities that are incomprehensible.
00:08:31.000More Christians have died, for instance, at the hands of terrorists in Nigeria alone than at the height of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and not just Christians.
00:08:41.000They're intent on killing every single Muslim that stands above.
00:09:11.000But in actual effect, all of that is also true.
00:09:15.000But these terrorists are going into village after village after village on a jihad, finding the Christians and killing them.
00:09:23.000And it's, and one of the great things the Trump administration did is they actually put Nigeria on a list among the worst violators of religious freedom in the world.
00:09:33.000There's something called the Countries of Particular Concern.
00:09:35.000Unfortunately, you know, the Biden administration took them off the list.
00:09:40.000Nigeria is an amazing country, an incredible partner of the United States of America, a national security partner.
00:09:45.000But it seems like we're easy on everyone we should be hard on and hard on everyone that we should be easy on.
00:09:54.000But I'm just telling you, if something doesn't happen to Western Africa two years from now, what's happening on that side of that great continent is going to make what we saw with ISIS in Iraq and Syria look small in comparison.
00:10:20.000It's a beautiful document, and so do I.
00:10:22.000And it's the same with Hillsdale College, the best liberal arts college in America.
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00:11:36.000Late last evening, the House of Representatives passed one of the largest spending bills in our nation's history.
00:11:42.000And most people aren't talking about it and most people don't care.
00:11:46.000It's a massive spending bill that would fund the federal government through September and also will provide $13.6 billion in aid to Ukraine.
00:12:50.000The IRS is going to see the largest increase in their budget, if this passes and gets signed into law, since 2001.
00:12:58.000They are getting $675 million new dollars on top of what they already get.
00:13:04.000The Internal Revenue Service is going to get a funding boost, an unprecedented 20, once-in-a-20-year funding boost to help improve its customer service.
00:13:23.000I'm going to re-emphasize this: increase enforcement.
00:13:26.000The Internal Revenue Service is getting the largest increase in their budget in 20 years to help go after disagreeable political opponents to audit them to make sure that you guys stay obedient and stay in line.
00:13:38.000Provide a special funding transfer authority for the Internal Revenue Service to direct higher authority to help the agency deal with a massive backlog of returns and correspondence.
00:13:48.000So, according to the regime in Washington, D.C., our border is wide open.
00:13:53.000They're doing nothing to address that.
00:13:55.000We have an opioid epidemic of over 100,000 drug overdoses.
00:13:59.000To make sure there are more internal revenue service agents to go audit you and extort more money from you while you have double-digit inflation and while gas prices are going up.
00:14:09.000Here's an interesting part of the omnibus bill, which I would love to hear Nancy Pelosi or someone explain.
00:14:14.000It provides $75 million in election security grants, huh, to bolster state efforts to improve the security and integrity of elections for federal office.
00:14:33.000Aren't they trying to indict people for even saying that the election might have problems with it?
00:14:38.000The next category is schools and financial aid boost.
00:14:41.000The bill would provide $17.5 billion of new funding, largest in more of a decade, towards public schools exclusively.
00:14:50.000They're expanding the maximum Pell cramp by $400.
00:14:54.000Pell grants are generally awarded to undergraduate students with exceptional financial needs.
00:14:58.000Now, this will go primarily to the college cartel that has done nothing to lower costs, went through Zoom school, and this is going to be a further bailout from the federal government.
00:15:10.000There's a part here of this new omnibus bill that we mentioned, $13.6 billion in Ukrainian aid.
00:15:17.000But the question is: where's that money going to go?
00:15:22.000Here's the question: why is our government not spending $13.6 billion to secure our border, but they're sending $13.6 billion to send to Ukraine to go fight for their border?
00:15:32.000Where's the $13.6 billion in suicide prevention for our young people that have the highest suicide rate in history?
00:15:38.000Where's the $13.6 billion to go help with drug rehabilitation for the 100,000 plus drug overdoses?
00:15:44.000Seems like some of our lawmakers have their priorities backward.
00:15:48.000$13.6 billion that will say it is going to provide humanitarian security and economic assistance for Ukraine.
00:15:58.000Also, spending on defense and national security will make up more than half the bill.
00:16:03.000The measure calls for an increase in funding for military personnel, operations, and research of ground vehicles, aircraft ships, munitions, and other equipment.
00:16:09.000For those of you keeping track at home, we nearly have a $30 trillion debt right now, and this will only expand our debt and our deficit to about $2 trillion.
00:16:23.000We will borrow this year, is what we will say.
00:16:25.000Not a single spending cut is found in this entire bill.
00:16:29.000Now, most of you don't even know that this is happening.
00:16:30.000It's increased, by the way, across the board.
00:16:32.000It's also a mandatory 6% increase just across the board, that every federal agency is just getting a 6% increase across the board, according to an increase in annual appropriations, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
00:16:47.000Inflation's at 7.9%, so they say that they need to continue to increase government alongside inflation, which of course makes no sense.
00:16:58.000If the truckers have taught us anything, it's that we are infinitely more powerful when we stick together.
00:17:03.000The same goes for supporting businesses that we believe in this country and your right to live free.
00:17:08.000That's why I'm proud to partner with Patriot Mobile, America's only Christian conservative cell phone provider.
00:17:13.000They offer broad nationwide coverage because they use the same towers as the major carriers, get the same great service without funding the major carriers who donate to these leftist crazy causes.
00:17:22.000Patriot Mobile, I know their whole team, Glenn and their CEO, they're amazing.
00:17:25.000They have plans to fit any budget, and their U.S.-based customer support team provides exceptional customer service.
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00:19:10.000Well, you know, Charlie, that started off as an investigation more into the COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
00:19:16.000And people saying, yeah, whistleblower stepping forward.
00:19:18.000I interviewed a couple of them saying that the military has been discriminating against them on how they're giving the exemptions because they're giving administrative exemptions.
00:19:28.000But for some reason, for a long time, they were giving no religious exemptions.
00:19:32.000They've broken that wall a little bit now, but there's some kind of nuances to it that suggests that there's still some funny play going on.
00:19:39.000But we actually found it goes beyond COVID-19.
00:19:41.000There's an anti-religious agenda, it appears, within the Pentagon.
00:19:45.000And this includes policies like what they call pluralism, where if you're a chaplain, you can't name your God.
00:19:51.000If you're a Christian, you can't say and go public and say, you know, in Jesus' name, amen, publicly without getting in trouble.
00:19:58.000You can't suggest that your religion is like the right religion publicly, or you'll get in trouble.
00:20:04.000If you do it, you might never get actually promoted.
00:20:09.000And by doing this, essentially, the Pentagon has been destroying religion.
00:20:13.000And other things, too, like them labeling evangelical Christians domestic extremists, even putting them alongside ISIS and al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
00:22:11.000I called them up, got some comments, and here's what they told me.
00:22:14.000And actually, their comments, I think, made it even worse, to be honest.
00:22:18.000I called the Pentagon, and the Pentagon spokesperson told me that, well, it's a branch-by-branch decision in terms of how they define this and how they decide this.
00:22:28.000But they said that what they're going by on whether or not they recognize the religious beliefs when it comes to vaccines of individual service members is this.
00:22:37.000They said they look at what they said when they first enlisted.
00:22:41.000If they first enlisted and they said, it's against my religion, it's against my sincerely held belief, which is how they describe it, how they define it.
00:22:48.000It's against my sincerely held belief to get vaccinations.
00:22:52.000They claim that if they said that when they first enlisted, then it's recognized.
00:22:56.000But if they did not say it, they do not recognize it.
00:23:20.000In fact, I just saw news that one of our major warships can't deploy because the commanding officer doesn't want to get the vaccine and not letting him deploy.
00:23:29.000We talked to their lawyer representing them.
00:23:31.000They were giving us some indirect statements through the lawyer.
00:23:33.000They're saying they're being punished.
00:23:35.000Not only them, but even their family members.
00:23:36.000They have to go and get medical treatment for different things.
00:23:39.000They were not allowed to travel to get medical treatment, and their family members were not allowed to travel to get medical treatment because of these policies.
00:23:46.000So some people want us to go to war with Russia, and they don't even want our military to be as prepared as it possibly can.
00:23:53.000They want to fire our officers and fire some of the most experienced people we have because of this.
00:25:03.000I mean, I don't know because I can't see Russia doing this intentionally and basically throwing themselves in the fire.
00:25:09.000But what this has done, because the Western world has sanctioned Russia and they pushed Russia to the Chinese banking system.
00:25:15.000And any country that wants to work with Russia now, because let's face it, Russia controls natural gas.
00:25:20.000They control a lot of the energy industry.
00:25:22.000They control fertilizer in the fertilizer industry, which we already had a shortage of going to Brazil, which is the breadbasket of China.
00:25:29.000They control grain between them and Ukraine.
00:25:32.000The world, many countries in the world, almost all the Arab countries, they cannot do without Russian grain.
00:25:37.000Europe cannot do without Russian energy.
00:25:40.000And most of Latin America can't do without Russian fertilizer.
00:25:43.000And China cannot do without any of those.
00:25:45.000That means that any country that now wants to purchase that has to go through the Chinese banking system.
00:25:49.000That means the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency is at risk.
00:25:53.000And that means that U.S. sanctions and our ability to sanction countries, unless we want to go to war with them every time we do something, that means that the tax Americanas at the United States.
00:26:01.000I guess sort of, I mean, if China invades Taiwan, we're just going to say you can't do it.
00:26:04.000It would crash their economy overnight.
00:26:06.000If we sanctioned China like we sanctioned Russia, China would not exist.
00:27:16.000But, and I'm not saying it's going to be one way or the other for sure, right?
00:27:20.000But if the world does not strongly enough stand behind these sanctions, if they let some things slip through, which they're starting to, that means that China now has the opportunity to also do what they want to do.
00:27:32.000If China can actually push up its banking system as a world reserve currency, which is going to be hard, but if you have enough countries being willing to trade in it, they can actually really do a whole lot.
00:27:43.000And that means that the ability of the U.S. to even sanction China is really, I think, seriously a risk.
00:27:48.000Yeah, I mean, but I suppose it just all, it's a matter, I guess, of our own willingness.
00:27:52.000If we told China we're not trading with you, the CCP collapses in a month.
00:27:57.000So I was, if people were watching my show, I've been saying for a long time, like, so during the beginning of COVID, I was saying that basically the Chinese economy looks like it's about to collapse.
00:29:01.000I mean, that's a real wild card, and it's something I think the CCP itself would have to really consider.
00:29:06.000I think that's what they're contemplating, though.
00:29:07.000I think they're watching the Russian situation right now, and they're watching the response to it.
00:29:11.000And they're going to watch as well whether countries start to change these policies as it goes forward as well.
00:29:15.000But I also, and I want to take KeyPeople one more segment, but an invasion of Taiwan, I think, is much more sophisticated and more, it's amphibious.
00:29:24.000And they could blockade the entire country, unlike Ukraine.
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00:31:04.000They're absolutely weaker than they put on.
00:31:06.000And I've been saying this for a long time.
00:31:07.000The Chinese Communist Party, frankly, I think if Western finance hadn't bailed them out at the beginning of the CCP virus outbreak, they probably would have collapsed.
00:31:17.000Really, it's Western finance and the CCP's ability to even lobby our government through Western businesses that is really keeping them afloat right now.
00:31:26.000Internally within the CCP, you have major, major infighting.
00:31:30.000And I'd say in Russia as well, actually, which is important.
00:31:33.000There's major infighting, which could tear it apart from the inside.
00:31:37.000You have huge, really, I think, public discontent in the Communist Party, which is why they have to have such incredibly intense forms of social control in place.
00:31:46.000Because really, the people will overthrow it in a heartbeat if they can, I think.
00:33:30.000It looks like it was really bad planning.
00:33:31.000It looks like basically Putin didn't communicate it.
00:33:33.000He went through the FSB, their intelligence bureau.
00:33:36.000They made their plans thinking it was just like a hypothetical exercise.
00:33:39.000You're not going to be an FSB employee for very long if you say Russia's going to lose if you try to invade because we're weaker than Ukraine.
00:34:45.000Victory for him is going to look like throwing everything he's got at it because he cannot back down.
00:34:50.000If he backs down, his life is at risk.
00:34:52.000If he doesn't win this, his life is at risk.
00:34:55.000Do you think he's legitimately paranoid and nervous right now?
00:34:58.000I'd say legitimately and observably because he's basically in isolation.
00:35:03.000You can watch when he's giving these talks with the other Russian leaders.
00:35:06.000He's sitting at one end of a 30-foot table and he has him at the other end.
00:35:11.000It's very similar, though, to Hitler's last days, though.
00:35:14.000I've heard a lot of people compare this.
00:35:16.000And actually, speaking of that, he would be able to look back at the Ukrainian underground resistance and know that the Ukrainian underground, they gave hell to the Nazis.
00:35:24.000Yeah, so I mean, look, you conquer a country, but then what?
00:35:41.000Yeah, and so the world has a short memory as long as there's some other interest tied into it.
00:35:47.000I think his goal was to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table as rapidly as possible, roll in there, take a few provinces, roll in as fast as you can, take a few provinces, negotiate, and maybe keep a couple of those areas.