00:01:23.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:30.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:03:06.000Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:03:08.000Back by Popular Demand, one of the most popular episodes we've done in the last year was our conversation with Pedro Gonzalez from Chronicles, and he broke down some thought crimes you could say about Ukraine and the kind of non-stop push to try to get us involved in Ukraine.
00:03:28.000Hey, Charlie, thanks for having me back.
00:03:29.000So, Pedro, I think it would be helpful for our audience to know how we got here, the background of United States involvement in Ukraine from New Lind to all the different kind of bipartisan uniparty experiments in Ukraine.
00:03:48.000Yeah, and cut me off at any time because I'll go back as far as I can without getting into the weeds.
00:03:54.000But it's important to understand two things.
00:03:57.000Yes, Russia invaded Ukraine in February and triggered the current crisis, but war doesn't happen in a vacuum ever.
00:04:08.000There are always things that lead up to that flashpoint.
00:04:11.000There's something, believe it or not, that happened before last month that got us into the situation.
00:04:18.000And it's important to understand that for a lot of reasons, in particular, that if we don't learn from our mistakes, by our, I mean our elite, if we don't learn from those mistakes, we're doomed to repeat them.
00:04:30.000I mean, there are so many parallels that you can draw with history right now that just you're just kind of shocked that we're sleepwalking back into basically Iraq, except the nuclear war edition of that, right?
00:04:44.000So we go back all the way to 1989 to 2004, when NATO starts integrating major countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, and the Baltic states.
00:04:57.000Russia more or less swallows those admissions, just kind of watches them happen, right?
00:05:02.000Which is interesting because we've been told in recent times that Russia is bent on global domination.
00:05:18.000For Russia, the hard line was always Georgia and Ukraine.
00:05:22.000And they repeatedly warned for decades, do not attempt to turn Georgia and Ukraine against us.
00:05:28.000That is basically Russia's Monroe doctrine.
00:05:30.000That's how geopolitical theorist John Mearsheimer has described it.
00:05:34.000John Mearsheimer is probably the most brilliant realist political thinker alive.
00:05:37.000And he said plainly, like, look, we would never tolerate Canada and Mexico making a military alliance with Russia and Russia putting nukes in Tijuana aimed at DC.
00:06:17.000So a pivotal point in all this is the Bucharest summit in 2008.
00:06:23.000Right before the summit, Vladimir Putin tells William Burns, who at the time is in the State Department under George W. Bush, today he's a director of the CIA.
00:06:32.000He tells him before the summit, look, again, Georgia and Ukraine is the hard line.
00:06:38.000Do not attempt to integrate those two countries into NATO.
00:06:48.000We know that it would be a huge provocation to do that.
00:06:50.000So that's kind of off the table for countries like France and Germany, but not for the Bush administration.
00:06:55.000And at the behest of the Bush administration, of people like Noland, who's worked in the Clinton administration, the George W. administration, the Obama administration, and also the Biden administration, at the behest of people like her under George W, they push NATO to declare, they don't extend a formal invitation, but they declare an affirmation of Georgia and Ukraine's NATO aspirations.
00:07:22.000Putin calls that the statement, a direct threat to Russian national security.
00:08:02.000It's ridiculous to even to think that, right?
00:08:04.000And this is what George Kennan was saying.
00:08:06.000In 1998, George Kennan, the premier advocate of Soviet containment policy, not a guy who's soft on commies, right?
00:08:14.000George Kennan in 1998 said, look, if you treat Russia like it's still the Soviet Union and it wants to kill all of us, that's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
00:08:24.000Unless we help them kind of steward out from the fall of the Soviet Union, unless we help them climb out of that, we're just going to turn them into the enemy that we insist that they are.
00:08:38.000That's, again, these are questions that you're just not allowed to ask on CNN or, frankly, a lot of conservative media right now.
00:08:44.000And it's insane because if you don't ask those questions, you're doomed to continue repeating these mistakes that brought us to exactly where we are.
00:08:52.000So from that point, from 2008, it's kind of like, okay, the collision course is set.
00:08:59.000The United States is pumping billions of dollars into Ukraine to promote civil society, which is a euphemism that the CIA likes to use for basically setting the stage for regime change.
00:09:10.000Between 1991 and 2013 alone, we pumped more than $5 billion into Ukraine.
00:09:17.000That's a lot of money for what, right?
00:09:21.000It's because of, again, these ideologues, these liberal interventionists who think that their hegemony, basically DC's way, is worth everything, including nuclear war.
00:09:35.000So in 2013, we arrive at another flashpoint.
00:09:41.000The EU makes a trade deal offer to Ukraine's soon-to-be-deposed president, Viktor Yanukovych.
00:09:50.000And on the surface, it looks like a groovy, plain old trade deal, you know, nothing wrong with it, but it's actually economic warfare disguised as a trade deal.
00:09:59.000And what it would entail would be flooding the Ukrainian market with European goods, and by extension, because of its relationship with Russia, the Russian market with European goods.
00:10:08.000And in theory, this would have destabilized Russia's economy, resulting in unrest and then a so-called democratic revolution overthrowing their government.
00:10:18.000And then we get one that's DC friendly.
00:10:22.000The Russian government saw it for what it was.
00:10:47.000The economist described him as a guy that milked both the EU and Russia for what he thought would work best for a country like Ukraine that's basically in the sad state of being a buffer, a buffer country.
00:11:02.000So Yanukovych reneged on the trade deal in 2013.
00:11:06.000And in late 2013, you start to have the beginnings of these democratic protests.
00:11:15.000By December, Victoria Noland, who's, again, this career swamp creature, appears in Kiev, handing out cookies and treats to the Democratic protesters that her and her friends at the State Department.
00:11:30.000And I mean, there's a whole other discussion here of actually the role of Facebook and Google and Microsoft actually had to play in kind of setting the stage for this.
00:11:42.000But anyways, Victoria Nolan is literally on the ground, you know, celebrating with the protesters because she knows what's going to happen.
00:11:49.000She knows that this is going to these democratic protests, which by the way, did not have the support of the entire country.
00:11:55.000It was split basically like down the middle.
00:11:58.000The strongest support to surprise, like this is not a surprise at all, the strongest support for regime change was in Kiev, in western Ukraine.
00:12:08.000But it's not like anyone who says, Well, they wanted democratic revolution, they wanted regime change.
00:12:15.000This was a deeply polarizing issue, and for good reason.
00:12:20.000So, again, the protests start in 2013.
00:12:23.000You know, Noland and her friends are working behind the scenes, or literally in this case, on the ground handing out cookies.
00:12:30.000And as these protests are getting more and more violent, this is another important thing that we can get into.
00:12:37.000Noland makes a call in late January 2014 to the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
00:12:44.000So, the protests start in late November and they're rolling into January at this point.
00:12:49.000And in January, Victoria Noland, who there's a lot of background here, but what you need to know is that because of her role in creating the crisis in Ukraine today, she's been dubbed the architect of DC's influence in Ukraine.
00:13:09.000This is a very bad woman for the United States.
00:13:12.000So, in January 2014, she makes a phone call to the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and they're talking about the next government.
00:13:22.000If you just think about this, it's kind of funny, right?
00:13:24.000We're a democratic country, democratic revolution.
00:13:28.000And yet, here you have Victoria Nolan talking with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine about who the Obama administration has selected to be the next prime minister, or we should say, approved of to be the next prime minister of Ukraine, a guy named Arseni Yatsenyuk.
00:13:43.000And to give you an idea of how this woman thinks, when the question comes up of what the EU's role is going to be in mediating this, whether they'll mediate with the new coalition that DC has chosen to be part of the new government, when the ambassador raises that question, like, well, is the EU going to going to mediate for us?
00:14:43.000But I mean, it gives you an insight into how these people feel entitled.
00:14:47.000Basically, it's not democracy unless DC approves of it.
00:14:51.000And handpicks, you know, who's going to lead your next administration.
00:14:56.000And this gets into another aspect of the whole Ukraine Western perception question, which is that right before, and so I should say that Yitzenyuk ends up being ousted on February 22nd, 2014.
00:15:15.000Protesters basically threaten him with violence.
00:15:18.000At that point, several people have been killed.
00:15:20.000Police officers and protesters have been killed by snipers, among other things.
00:15:25.000And this is, we're going to get into that.
00:15:28.000And so these militants basically threaten Yanukovych with violence.
00:15:33.000If you don't step down, it's going to get really bad for you.
00:15:38.000And the new government led by Yitzenyuk is installed, I think, by February 27th, late February.
00:15:46.000On February 26th, there is a call between two European politicians, a Brit named Catherine Ashton and an Estonian minister named Urmus Pate.
00:15:59.000They're trying to figure out, you know, who is behind the violence.
00:16:03.000And Ashton assumes that it's the incumbent Ukrainian government led by Yanukovych, and she assumes that he had been ordering police to kill protesters.
00:16:14.000Because this is just what they were, they had assumed, because there's this whole like image of Yanukovych as a Kremlin stooge who's just like a kind of a ruthless tyrant.
00:16:24.000But Pate, who had been on the ground and had been gathering intelligence about what happened, surprises Ashton and he says, based on the intelligence that I've gathered here, what I'm hearing is that the sniper killings were orchestrated by someone or some group that is part of the new coalition, which is referring to the coalition that had been cultivated by the West and specifically DC, these opposition leaders,
00:16:51.000these political outsiders that we had chosen to be kind of like, the leaders of the new government, that Pite's intelligence suggested that it was someone who was part of this new coalition that had been orchestrating these, these killings uh, and making it in.
00:17:08.000In other words, this group, one group had been shooting both cops and protesters in order to fan the flames of violence.
00:17:17.000And an American scholar named Gordon Hahn analyzed uh the, the violence that happened during the they're called the, the Maidan protests or the Maidan uprising, and it culminates in the so-called Revolution Of Dignity.
00:17:29.000It's all this, it's all basically the same thing, and so this American scholar sat down and looked at it and what he found was that the the majority of the pivotal moments of escalation that resulted in violence, it was on the protesters, not the police like yes, the police shot people, but it was because protesters were doing stuff like setting fires to buildings intentionally to provoke, like a reaction from the security that would get people killed.
00:17:53.000And what this inquiry by these European politicians found was that uh, the killings were again.
00:18:01.000One group was shooting both cops and protesters in order to intensify uh, the violence.
00:18:06.000And Ashton was you could hear on the call that she's like, well, that's not what I was expecting.
00:18:10.000And then she kind of changes the subject and the inquiry is dropped.
00:18:13.000Nothing ever comes of it uh, but when the call got intercepted and leaked again uh, the the Estonian ministry didn't even deny the call's authenticity.
00:18:21.000They just said again, it was taken out of context it's, it's.
00:18:24.000I think the Guardian ran a story on it and the headline was like, intercepted call fans conspiracy theories about what really happened during the maiden.
00:18:32.000So the call gets intercepted and it leaves this question in the air that has remained unanswered, who was really behind the violence that happened during the Mydan protests?
00:18:44.000Uh, again there, the police, security forces did actually kill protesters, but it seems like there was a third party that was basically playing the bad actor, intentionally setting people up to get killed and again the media dismissed.
00:18:58.000This is a conspiracy theory, although they didn't deny the fact that this inquiry existed.
00:19:02.000But you had guys like Paul Craig Roberts, who served under Reagan at the Treasury.
00:19:07.000And in 2014, watching these protests unfold, Paul Craig Roberts wrote in a column, like, yeah, this is a Western-backed CIA op.
00:19:18.000Like, it's incredible because you can find that article, you know, right now.
00:19:21.000You can find Paul Craig Roberts, former government official who served under Reagan, just talking about this just very candidly, like, yeah, no, this is, we had a hand in this.
00:19:30.000And at the same time that that's happening, the head of the Ukrainian security service, which is kind of like the successor force of the old Ukrainian KGB, the guy who was running it during the coup, and right afterwards, he is fired and he disappears and he re-emerges in Russia.
00:19:52.000But he was running, it's called the SBU, the security service at the time that this happened.
00:19:57.000And when he reappears after this coup happens, he says that basically the Ukrainian government, elements of the Ukrainian government, have been working with Western intelligence.
00:20:11.000And more damningly, that the so-called democratic activists had been trained by the West.
00:20:18.000And it's dismissed because, you know, again, he reappears in Russia.
00:20:22.000So it's easy to kind of dismiss him because you can say, well, he's, you know, he's obviously sympathetic to Russia.
00:20:27.000And therefore, although he was the head of the security service, he doesn't know what he's talking about, or it's a lie.
00:20:31.000But then you also have Polish politicians and Polish journalists who are saying that we helped the West train these activists in Poland.
00:20:41.000Because if you know anything about Poland, you know that Poland and the CIA are super, are really, really close.
00:20:45.000They work together on a lot of things.
00:20:47.000And there's an intimate relationship between that country and Western intelligence.
00:20:53.000And so you have Polish politicians and journalists who are saying that our government was complicit in the Maidan because we were part of the process of training and preparing these people.
00:21:06.000And I mean, like, there's actually a lot of this going on around that time and afterwards and ever since that people are saying like that this was very much a Western operation.
00:21:17.000It was not necessarily a democratic revolution because the country was polarized on this issue.
00:21:23.000And the BBC does a report, an investigative report on this.
00:21:26.000And they also find that they're like these militants, the ones that were really kind of the, I mean, yeah, there was a lot of journalists and like NGO trained activists, but ultimately it's the militants that are really driving the protests.
00:21:40.000And, you know, they're the ones that are really the spearhead of this whole thing.
00:21:43.000And the BBC's coverage notes that these people were really highly coordinated, that they had like a sophisticated logistical infrastructure.
00:21:51.000And a German outlet called the Frankfurt Algemeiner Zeit does their own reporting.
00:21:58.000And they interview one of the protesters who he doesn't say who, but he says, yeah, I showed up and I was given high-velocity ammunition and a choice between a shotgun and basically a long rifle.
00:22:11.000That there was this kind of system in place to arm these people with whatever they needed.
00:22:17.000And that guy in particular seemed kind of uncomfortable with the whole thing.
00:22:20.000And he said, I was shooting at people's feet, is what this guy said.
00:22:24.000But scholars like Gordon Hahn, the American who looked at the violence, noted that a lot of these snipers seemed to be well trained and they were specifically aiming for the heart, the lungs, and the neck, shooting to kill.
00:22:37.000There are all these open questions, right?
00:22:39.000And this is important because basically all of the red flags around this contribute to parts of eastern Ukraine basically saying, like, this is BS.
00:22:53.000Like, We don't acknowledge the legitimacy of this government.
00:22:59.000And that triggers a civil war that's basically been raging for nearly a decade now.
00:23:04.000And it's the instability that happens around this time that contributes to Putin moving to annex Crimea, which, by the way, has tons of pro-Russian sympathy.
00:23:13.000I mean, you don't hear about this in Western media, or it's dismissed.
00:23:36.000When you're a high-ranking official talking about diplomatic efforts in Ukraine, the last thing you want to do is drop your guard.
00:23:44.000So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and have the UN help glue it and, you know, the EU.
00:23:51.000But that is exactly what reportedly happened between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Jeffrey Piatt.
00:24:01.000So that was exactly what you were talking about in that particular clip.
00:24:04.000So just to make sure I understand this and our listenership understands, is that Western intelligence, Victoria Newland, all of this, we were heavily involved in these, allegedly, in these Maidan protests in 2014, which then displaced a leader that was pro-Russian with one that was more pro-Western or pro-CIA or pro-DC.
00:24:27.000And that really started the unraveling of the events of what we're seeing right now.
00:24:35.000And I think it's important to go back to that Viktor Yanukovych point and say, like, yeah, he pro-Russia in the sense that he was willing to work with Russia and he didn't hate Russia, as opposed to the regimes that followed after that, where they're just rapidly, like Zelensky, rapidly anti-Russian, which again, you know, that might sound good to those of us who have like residual, you know, anti-Russian feelings, but when we're talking about geopolitics and things like war, that has consequences for civilian populations,
00:25:07.000And so, okay, what is the result of this crisis in eastern Ukraine, apart from the civil war?
00:25:17.000Well, it results in what's called the Minsk agreements.
00:25:20.000There are two of these, 2014 and 2015.
00:25:22.000Basically, these are ceasefire agreements that the point of them was to affect a ceasefire on the one hand between Russian for pro-Russian side and the pro-Ukrainian side in Ukraine and to protect Ukraine's sovereignty, because obviously that's an important consideration.
00:25:40.000Because there is a fear that Russia would just continue driving West.
00:25:44.000So the point of the Minsk agreements was just to satisfy both sides.
00:25:55.000The second Minsk agreement is signed in 2015.
00:25:58.000By 2016, you have John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Amy Klobuchar in Ukraine on video standing next to former Ukrainian president Viktor Poroshenko at a military base saying, we will go back to DC and tell them to basically arm you.
00:26:19.000And like, again, you can find the video.
00:26:27.000He says, quote, time to play offense is what he says.
00:26:31.000So let me ask you, Pedro, you know, we've talked a lot about Iran on our program of how our government was involved in displacing Mossaghde and re-implementing the Shah, which led to the Iranian revolution.
00:26:44.000Is that a similar sort of kind of like, we got involved and then something bad happened afterwards type deal?
00:26:51.000I'm going to do something that journalists don't usually do, and that's to say I don't.
00:26:55.000Uh, that's that I don't know enough to comment on that.
00:26:59.000Okay, I know it's shocking, right, that I would admit that, but no, I just uh, unfortunately, this is this is the this is taking up all of my interest right now.
00:27:09.000So, well, we need more of that in journalism, frankly.
00:27:11.000But I guess the argument I'm making is it sounds like we get involved, there's a color revolution, yes, you know, and then there is some form of a you know kind of vacuum, and then other things start to unravel as a result of the West's hyper involvement.
00:27:28.000Yeah, no, that's that's basically, I mean, this is it's not, by the way, it's not anti-American to say that, it's actually very pro-American.
00:27:34.000I agree, it's DC that you're indicting DC.
00:27:51.000I mean, that's actually a great way to think about this, and that's precisely what we're talking about here.
00:27:56.000And again, something that gets left out from the whole discussion of like, why did Putin wake up in February on the wrong side of the bed and invade Ukraine?
00:28:04.000Well, what we don't talk about is the fact that there was unrest in Kazakhstan and Belarus just recently.
00:28:13.000And Putin specifically said that these were attempted color revolutions.
00:28:18.000And the point of these is to further destabilize Russia.
00:28:22.000And he said, we will not tolerate the boat being rocked.
00:28:26.000And so it's an open question if Noland and her friends in the public and private sector were involved in these seemingly democratic protests, right?
00:29:12.000This is what John Mearsheimer has been saying.
00:29:14.000It's what every person with sense has been saying for decades that if you treat a country like this with this kind of history and this kind of identity, if you treat them like an enemy, they're going to become your worst enemy.
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00:33:56.000Yeah, I'm just saying that we have to acknowledge that that seedy element is there.
00:34:01.000But when we talk about ideology and what kind of ideology drives people like Victoria Nolan and her husband, Robert Kagan, who's one of the leading liberal internationalists and a hardcore neoconservative, Robert Kagan is a lunatic.
00:34:14.000And of course, Victoria is married to a lunatic.
00:34:16.000He's a Washington Post columnist, if I'm not mistaken.
00:34:55.000And what he meant by that is that these are people that think with just enough application of will and force that you can just shape the world in the way that you want it to be.
00:35:09.000And I mean, that sounds maybe kind of cool to some people, like, you know, just the fact that you could just kind of will the world to be the way that you want it to be.
00:35:19.000But the reality is a lot of bloodshed.
00:35:21.000It means failed democratic projects from Iraq to Afghanistan and all the blood that that entails.
00:35:30.000And that was why Francis Fukuyama said, like, these people are freaking lunatics.
00:35:34.000Bolsheviks tried this and it gave us the Soviet Union and all the mass murder that that had, you know, that entailed.
00:35:40.000And neocons are basically the, I think he said it, that it, he, he invoked Marx, if I recall correctly, that neocons are like the farcical version of Bolsheviks.
00:35:53.000And obviously they've emerged in the United States.
00:35:56.000Yeah, I just want to, really quick, Pedro, I just want to build out what we mean by neoconservative, right?
00:36:00.000So we're talking about the Lindsey Graham types, right?
00:36:03.000And one of the things that I've been struck by kind of learning how they see the world is that they have very little appreciation from the American sense of how unique the American culture was and is in creating what is a self-government experiment, right?
00:36:19.000So they look at the Constitution and the Declaration and they say, aha, all we have to do is bring those words and translate them into Farsi.
00:36:28.000And then immediately there will be like this transcendent thing and everyone will kind of go away from their 13th century goat herding, child molesting, you know, ways.
00:36:38.000When you and I will say, well, hold on a second.
00:36:41.000There were hundreds of years of literature and of learning and of kind of civilizational building that even brought us to a point where Western self-government could be possible.
00:36:54.000Can you kind of riff on that for a second?
00:36:59.000They're people that think that you can just basically put American ideas or what they refer to as American ideas into basically a happy meal and then use McDonald's to export Americanism.
00:37:13.000And just there's no, like they don't see the problem with that.
00:37:16.000The only problem is that we're not willing to commit enough blood and treasure to the project.
00:37:23.000And the important point is, is that anyone who's not willing to accept that, they end up on the wrong side of neocons.
00:37:29.000And I mean, these people are, ironically, they very rarely fight the wars that they think that we should.
00:37:38.000Yeah, I mean, John Potter famously said that a problem with our wars in the Middle East was that we were not willing to kill enough men between the ages of 15 and 35.
00:37:50.000And that allowed insurgencies to continue renewing over years.
00:37:54.000In other words, we didn't genocide entire populations.
00:37:57.000That was, you know, that's the real problem with our foreign policy.
00:38:01.000And what's important to know is that what empires do abroad, what neoconservatives are willing to do abroad, they're willing to do it here.
00:38:09.000And that's why you have guys like Bill Crystal who just hate, hate Middle America.
00:38:13.000Like Bill Crystal has literally talked about replacing Americans that he doesn't like through an open borders policy.
00:38:18.000These people hate you as much as they hate Iraqis who don't get along with the program or Afghans who don't get along with the program.
00:39:41.000We're going to, we're the problem is we just have to go flat in another village.
00:39:44.000And yeah, there's, there's a refusal to accept that there are alternatives to the to the liberal interventionist program to which neoconservatives and neoliberals subscribe.
00:40:14.000They created a power, like the neoconservative agenda created a power vacuum that helped usher in one of the most murderous militaries in modern history.
00:40:45.000So not only does it displace the current country, but then you have a demographic kind of pressure on Europe where all of a sudden we're just going to bring in millions of people.
00:40:53.000And that's also part of the neoconservative belief, right?
00:40:56.000Which is not only can we believe bring values anywhere, but we can bring anybody here.
00:41:04.000I mean, and this is precisely why people like Bill Crystal think that, you know, we could just replace Americans we don't like with immigrants because humans or beings are just, they're basically just widgets.
00:41:15.000If you don't like them, you can switch them out like Legos.
00:41:17.000Like that, that is, again, these people are ideologues.
00:41:21.000And like I said, the issue is that they wed their ideas to American exceptionalism, which maybe sounds nice rhetorically, but in practice, it actually results in a kind of dehumanization where people who are not on board with your program, you can basically do whatever you want to them.
00:41:38.000You can be as cruel as you want to them because they become like an absolute enemy because they don't share your values.
00:41:45.000Therefore, you're justified in doing whatever you want to them.
00:41:47.000Well, let's go through a little level deeper, Pedro.
00:41:50.000I know that I don't know if you're pressed for time or not, but let's talk about what the regime actually thinks is American exceptionalism versus what you and I would think is American exceptionalism, right?
00:41:59.000But the regime is like our American exceptionalism is that we have gay pride flags on our embassies, right?
00:42:04.000Like that's that's what Victoria Newland is fighting.
00:42:25.000Again, going back to Bill Crystal, because he's like a case study in this stuff.
00:42:28.000He recently did a podcast with someone where he kind of defended being woke.
00:42:32.000He said, well, you know, maybe there's a good reason to be woke.
00:42:34.000And people like me are learning that we have to evolve.
00:42:37.000It's funny, their hawkish foreign policy never changes.
00:42:41.000They want to invade the world and invite the world, but they're willing to move on the social issues.
00:42:48.000This has been actually a trait of neoconservatives for the longest time.
00:42:52.000They're super hawkish on foreign policy, and on domestic issues, they're squishy, and they always will be.
00:42:59.000But I think it's important here to remember that the Ukrainian civilians, Ukrainian nationalists, they're not fighting for pride parades and BLM and, you know, for men to be swimmers in the NCAA.
00:43:40.000And our elites project that onto Ukraine.
00:43:43.000And so the media frames it as there was an article in the Boston Review, and I think the headline was like, Putin's anti-gay war in Ukraine.
00:44:43.000This is an important point because so much of what liberal internationalists do is projection.
00:44:49.000You know, the reason that Putin invaded Ukraine in February is because it's a democracy and he hates democracies.
00:44:57.000You can literally make the same argument against our establishment that we feel like we have to meddle in the affairs of every country that doesn't get on board with the program.
00:45:07.000And again, you can break that down into ideologues who really do believe that, who believe that we need to export this stuff, and also cynics who like to use buzzwords like democracy to justify just basically making foreign governments more compliant with what we want or with what our elite wants.
00:45:24.000I think those things often work in tandem.
00:45:26.000But yeah, I mean, the DC establishment is guilty of the same thing, of meddling in the affairs of other countries, often with catastrophic consequences for the very people they claim to care about.
00:45:50.000I'm sure he has some defense contractor donors and that stuff.
00:45:53.000But I really do think at the core, both McCain and Lindsey Graham are legitimate philosophical internationalists, that they think that the values of the liberal world order, of kind of like social liberalism, not only can be, but they're on a moral quest to send it to every corner of the planet.
00:47:30.000He's like, okay, Russia, we're going to go play offense.
00:47:33.000I mean, that's, I, what, do they think that like we can reshape all these countries to become like Manhattan?
00:47:41.000I, I mean, walk us through, I mean, walk us through.
00:47:43.000I think, I mean, again, setting aside any cynical motivations, yeah, that's a different time.
00:47:49.000I'm more interested in the ideology because that is a big part of it.
00:47:53.000I mean, this is what John Mearsheimer said: that basically NATO expansionism is the manifestation of 21st-century thinking, which is to say unipolar thinking, that only we have, only we, as in DC, has legitimate interests.
00:48:09.000All other interests that conflict with ours are illegitimate.
00:48:13.000And Mearsheimer has described figures like Putin as 19th-century thinkers.
00:48:18.000In other words, they believe in the balance of power, which acknowledges that other countries, other nations have their own security interests.
00:48:27.000And to avoid conflict, these interests have to be balanced, right?
00:48:32.000You can't just have one superpower that's just kind of running roughshot all the other ones and expecting them to take it.
00:48:39.000And what Mearsheimer's point is that this is actually the philosophy that drives NATO expansionism.
00:48:46.000Yeah, we can actually drive nuclear weapons right up to the border with Russia and aim them at the Kremlin.
00:49:30.000I mean, a great example of this right now is like you see, I don't believe the polls, but I mean, you see this in polls and also in experts, like people like psychos at the Atlantic who will never fight in a war, right?
00:49:42.000They will never go to the front lines.
00:49:56.000I think, I mean, we got so involved there from CIA, you know, disclosed CIA documents.
00:50:02.000And what we got was far worse, far worse, right?
00:50:05.000You got a theocratic Islamic dictatorship, and you had a secular government that just wanted to nationalize the oil, but our CIA got involved in it.
00:50:14.000And it is the question of a great society and a strong society.
00:50:18.000Are you willing, are you able to let other countries survive without having to meddle into them?
00:50:28.000Closing thought is to listen to your guts.
00:50:31.000And when you hear people like Lindsey Graham calling for no fly zones, when you hear liberal and conservative media all sounding the same overnight, you should be deeply suspicious and you should not allow yourself to be morally blackmailed into going along with this because like this is a crime.
00:50:50.000What neoconservatives, what liberal interventionists want is a crime against humanity and we cannot be complicit in it.
00:50:58.000I say this to a conservative the other day.
00:51:01.000He said, I want to spread American values across the world.
00:51:19.000He said, I never thought of it that way.
00:51:20.000I said, so your idea of American values is great and I appreciate that.
00:51:25.000But understand, they are laundering that term for what are actually anti-American values because they know that it can win and swing districts and get them the money they need to go further socially liberalize the world and have men be women and women be men.