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00:02:03.000I was really moved by a friend of mine's Twitter feed this morning about how Ukraine and their government, not the people of Ukraine, we need to make that distinction.
00:02:16.000They have been misrepresenting things intentionally.
00:02:19.000And he's a very smart man, and he seems to be always ahead of the curve about what's happening in our country and the world.
00:02:32.000Tell us about your Twitter feed and we'll go from there.
00:02:35.000Unfortunately, Twitter actually seems to be the best vehicle for pushing back against what I don't know how else to describe as Ukrainian propaganda.
00:02:45.000A lot of this stuff actually comes straight from the president of Ukraine himself, Zelensky, and his officials.
00:02:53.000I try not to use Twitter excessively because I think it rots your brain, but I have never seen so many stories that are completely fake go viral at the rate that they are right now.
00:03:06.000And so I've, like I said, unfortunately, been spending a lot of time on Twitter trying to push back on this stuff because the purpose of all of these different lies, sometimes it's subtle, sometimes it's not so subtle, and we'll get into that.
00:03:20.000But the purpose of them is to get the United States and NATO into a broader conflict.
00:03:27.000And this would essentially be World War III, except between countries with nuclear weapons.
00:03:34.000So there's a real reason and a real interest in pushing back on this.
00:03:43.000And anyone who threatens the American national interest, I don't care if they've been sanctified by the media.
00:03:49.000In this case, Zelensky and his government, again, not the Ukrainian civilians, who I feel deeply sorry for because they're caught in the middle of this.
00:03:58.000But anyone who threatens the American interest is going to have my full attention.
00:04:03.000So probably one of the most viral stories that came out first was The Ghost of Kiev.
00:04:09.000This story about a Ukrainian fighter ace who shot down a bunch of Russians and was just kind of like this living legend, right?
00:05:26.000One of them was even interviewed by the media, and he reacted with confusion when he found out that he was killed in action and that Zelensky had used his funeral as, again, to gin up support for getting other countries into this war.
00:05:38.000Another one that you may have seen was about Miss Ukraine supposedly on the front lines.
00:05:43.000There's a picture of her that went really viral.
00:05:45.000She's wearing body armor and has a rifle.
00:06:00.000All this stuff pulls at important heartstrings.
00:06:04.000In the Snake Island one, I forgot to mention this, it got picked up especially by American pro-gun websites and pro-gun social media accounts.
00:06:13.000Because again, it was like the thermopoly moment, right?
00:06:17.000Another one was shared by an account called NextA, which has almost a million followers on Twitter, claims to be the largest source of Eastern European media.
00:06:27.000It showed what they claimed was video footage of a Ukrainian fighter jet shooting down Russians.
00:06:49.000Another one that you may have seen is Zelensky in body armor on the front lines in Kit, supposedly, you know, shooting at Russians, just waiting for us to come, give him backup.
00:06:59.000The pictures are from, they're from months or years ago.
00:07:02.000People have like several people have already verified that these, the most viral ones where he's kind of grinning and stuff and has his helmet in his hand.
00:07:13.000There's actually so many of these, it's hard to keep track of them.
00:07:16.000And a lot of them are actually promoted by Zelensky himself.
00:07:18.000Another really egregious one was Zelensky claimed that the Russians were deliberately shelling a Jewish memorial site.
00:07:25.000It's an area that has been set up to commemorate the Jewish victims of the Nazis in World War II.
00:07:32.000Well, no one cared to actually confirm if that was true until a journalist went there and reported on the ground and said, the site is undamaged.
00:07:41.000It's not just that they didn't shell it.
00:07:43.000Sorry, it's not just that it was kind of damaged and ruffled.
00:07:46.000According to this journalist who was on the ground that took pictures, he said, it has literally been untouched.
00:07:51.000According to Zelensky, it was being destroyed.
00:07:55.000And when he tweeted about it, he basically said that this is the next Holocaust.
00:08:00.000Again, trying to get us involved and morally blackmailing us.
00:08:04.000If you don't get involved, you're complicit in the next Holocaust.
00:08:08.000That is moral blackmail about something that is really important.
00:08:13.000But I think the icing on this really messed up cake was what happened last night, where Zelensky and his officials claimed that Russians, and again, I'm not defending Russians.
00:08:24.000I'm explaining how these narratives are set up.
00:08:26.000He claimed that Russians were committing an act of nuclear terrorism, that they were trying to destroy one of the biggest, I think it's actually the biggest power plant in Europe, which is in Ukraine, that they were laying siege to it with the express purpose of blowing it up, nuclear terrorism.
00:08:43.000And so Zelenskyy's officials said that the only answer, the only way to stop the nuclear holocaust was to establish a no-fly zone and get the entire world involved.
00:08:54.000And everyone knows that a no-fly zone would be an act of war.
00:08:57.000Either of these things, any kind of escalation that Zelenskyy's officials called for, if we would go through with it, you get World War III between nuclear-armed countries.
00:09:07.000Yes, there was fighting near the facility and an administrative building got hit.
00:09:12.000And I think because of the shelling that was happening in the vicinity, a part of the facility that was offline, I think it was an area with a nuclear reactor.
00:09:31.000Zelensky and his officials said that radiation levels were reaching like dangerous highs, but it has been widely confirmed by people at the plant.
00:09:43.000The Russians took control of it and everything's fine.
00:09:46.000It was the lie was so egregious that the United States State Department told its U.S. embassies in Europe to not retweet a tweet that came out of the U.S. embassy in Kiev, Ukraine's capital, to not retweet it.
00:10:02.000Do not share this obvious lie that could lead to catastrophic escalation of this conflict.
00:10:08.000And by today, by this morning, there is like, again, there's no evidence that apart from the fact that there was fighting there, nothing that Zelensky and officials said was true.
00:10:18.000There was never any threat of nuclear terrorism, but people were, it scared the life out of people.
00:10:23.000And again, verified journalists were sharing it like it was true.
00:10:26.000And all of this stuff is designed to get us into this conflict.
00:10:30.000And the point that I've been hammering is, is we need to get ahead of these narratives right now, or this is going to be like COVID, where we make decisions based out of fear and emotion that have permanent, irreversible consequences for society.
00:10:43.000And it's not going to be until it's too late that the science has changed.
00:10:46.000Oh, we realize we made a lot of bad choices based on emotion and fear.
00:10:51.000And it's not until afterwards, all of a sudden it gets not just fact-checked, but the truth comes out.
00:10:57.000That was a really comprehensive rundown.
00:11:07.000But a really, really bad one, bad in the sense that it was just so obviously fake, was a video that went viral that supposedly showed a Ukrainian girl, a little Ukrainian, a brave little Ukrainian girl yelling at a horrible Russian invader.
00:11:23.000It was a Palestinian girl yelling at an IDF soldier in the desert.
00:11:30.000It's again, I've never seen anything like this.
00:11:32.000And it's like, it's not just that they go viral.
00:11:36.000It's that people want to believe them.
00:11:38.000And when you prove that they're not real, people get mad at you.
00:11:42.000Kathy Young and Charlie Sykes, these two journalists, both of the bulwark, have actually aggressively pushed back on people that attempt to disprove what is essentially Ukrainian propaganda.
00:11:54.000Like I said, often from the government itself, they've compared it to basically carrying water for Putin to point out that this stuff is fake and most importantly, that it's designed to get us into a broader conflict.
00:12:07.000So, Pedro, let me ask you something, and it might be a little devil's advocate for the sake of conversation.
00:12:13.000I mean, your country's being invaded, you're being shell-shocked.
00:12:15.000Wouldn't you push out propaganda if you're the Ukrainian government?
00:12:19.000Or is it more about we should expect that, but the West needs to have more maturity in how we process it and talk about it?
00:12:28.000We should expect propaganda, but we should also be able to approach these things in an impassioned way to discern what is true and what is false, because propaganda is a fact of war.
00:13:07.000And I guess the third aspect of this is, again, the fact that so many people are using their credentials as journalists, as reporters, to lie to the public and to not.
00:13:20.000I mean, what happened to all the fact-checkers, right?
00:13:22.000What happened to the Pinocchios at Washington Post?
00:13:26.000They're either like they've just magically disappeared.
00:13:30.000Some of them are still trying to do this.
00:13:32.000Like, obviously, I've relied in some cases on the Associated Press, on Reuters.
00:13:36.000I specifically look for reports coming from on the ground because those are probably going to be your best bet.
00:13:42.000But like, the amount of work that I have to do to verify stuff is insane.
00:13:47.000Another one was this building that got shelled in Kharkiv.
00:13:50.000And the media framed it as a civilian target is being shelled indiscriminately.
00:13:56.000What I didn't see anybody talk about this in the mainstream is that that building is a known base for a notorious militia called the Azov Battalion.
00:14:23.000It was just, you know, barbarians killing civilians indiscriminately.
00:14:27.000Again, I'm not defending what the Russians are doing, but when you consider that the purpose of that stuff is to trigger your emotional response, your reptilian brain, and make you want to go over there and get into a fight, they would invariably cause more casualties.
00:14:42.000Well, what I find so interesting is that we're always lectured by these low-IQ sociopaths about disinformation and about not, you know, consuming information from Russia who's trying to manipulate our democracy or whatever.
00:14:57.000Like, okay, well, the Zelensky government is doing exactly that.
00:15:02.000And not only are you falling for it, okay, it's fine to fall for it.
00:15:07.000I mean, the first time I saw the ghost to Kiev thing, I started like, okay, that's kind of cool, I guess.
00:15:10.000Like, I didn't dive that deep into it.
00:15:12.000I mean, I guess it's conceivable that there's some sort of Tom Cruise type, right, that is flying around and shooting down, like, whatever.
00:15:18.000But then you promote it, you don't fact check it.
00:15:20.000And then, Pedro, you refuse to go back and tell the audience, oh, by the way, what we just promoted wasn't true.
00:15:27.000And these narratives build on each other, right?
00:15:30.000I mean, I went back in the break and I had our team pull the Instagram image of the woman with the airsoft gun, right?
00:15:37.000And I just looked through my friends on Instagram.
00:15:39.000Hundreds of them liked it and shared it.
00:15:41.000So, Pedro, I want to ask you the question.
00:15:43.000Let's dive deep into the history of this Ukrainian government and all the different forces that helped Zelensky come to power.
00:15:53.000Well, it's actually too much for just this segment, but I think I can give you an illustrative example.
00:15:59.000And for recommended reading, I cannot tell people enough to go to Tablet magazine and read an article by Lee Smith called Ukraine's Deadly Gamble that really lays out this process or this problem in a much broader picture.
00:16:14.000But I'm going to focus on one example that kind of encapsulates how Ukraine is not actually a beacon.
00:16:21.000Surprise, it's not actually a beacon for freedom and democracy.
00:16:25.000It's more like a haven for NGOs and oligarchs, neither of which really care a whole lot about the Ukrainian people, right?
00:16:33.000So in 2015, the Wall Street Journal published an analysis of disclosures from the Clinton Foundation.
00:16:42.000And they looked at donations, individual donations given to the Clinton Foundation from foreigners between the years of 1991 and 2014, individual donations of $50,000 or more.
00:16:58.000And what they found was, is that the top source of these foreign individual donations was Ukraine.
00:17:03.000And a key figure here who, again, illustrates the incestuous relationship between NGOs, the United States governments, and Ukrainian oligarchs is a man named Victor Pinchuk.
00:17:17.000He served in the Ukrainian parliament, very well-connected guy, pretty powerful.
00:17:22.000And what the journal and the Kiev Post reported was that between the years of 2009 and 2013, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State under Obama, Pinchuk donated nearly $10 million to the Clinton Foundation.
00:17:41.000So how did he meet the Clintons and start donating to their charities?
00:17:46.000Well, the journal reported that in 2006, a pollster named Doug Schoen, who worked for both the former president and his wife, had introduced Bill Clinton to Pinchuk in 2006.
00:18:03.000And after Clinton, after Bill Clinton spoke at a conference hosted by Pinchuk in 2007, Pinchuk donated a few more million, 2007 or 2008, excuse me, Pinchuk donated another lump sum of, I think, $5 million.
00:18:20.000And again, this is reported in the Wall Street Journal.
00:18:25.000Anybody can go look at it and verify it.
00:18:28.000And that relationship right there between, oh, and by the way, at the time that Shoan was kind of being the middleman between the Clintons and Pinchuk, he was a registered lobbyist for Pinchuk.
00:18:41.000Again, all of this stuff is just in the open.
00:19:06.000And lie by omission, I think, is the worst thing that we're seeing.
00:19:09.000People are just conveniently leaving out these connections, right?
00:19:12.000And this is the world that Zelensky comes from.
00:19:14.000And you can connect other oligarchs in Ukraine who have this kind of web of ties between people like Victoria Noland, who served in several presidential administrations, has been called the architect of American influence, basically the deep states influence in Ukraine.
00:19:30.000A lot of people credit her with organizing the coup that toppled Ukraine's democratically elected government in between 2013 and 2014.
00:20:27.000He announced at Davos, I think in the last two years or so, at a Davos summit, that he wanted to make Ukraine basically a haven for World Economic Forum investors.
00:21:51.000It's actually, again, this is one of the things that's really remarkable that there's all of this evidence that you can find statements from government officials that point in this direction.
00:22:02.000But basically, in 2013, it goes further back than that, but I'll give you kind of the flashpoints.
00:22:08.000In 2013, the EU makes a deal to the incumbent president who's kind of like milking both the EU and Russia, not really committed to either side.
00:22:19.000He mistakes it as a kind of invitation to join the EU.
00:22:23.000But Russia, when they look at this deal, they see basically economic warfare because the deal would entail flooding, the Ukrainian market with European goods and by extension, the Russian economy with European goods, which would in theory destabilize the Russian economy.
00:22:38.000And Russia basically viewed it as a way to destabilize their political system, which would ideally for the West result in a kind of revolution, a color revolution, organic or not.
00:22:49.000So Russia made Ukraine a counteroffer, really an ultimatum.
00:22:52.000Take $15 billion in aid, or I'm going to hit you with sanctions.
00:22:57.000And so the president at the time sided with Russia on this.
00:23:02.000But his government also proposed basically a three-way kind of system, a commission that would mediate between the EU, Ukraine, and Russia on trade deals.
00:23:12.000And he even suggested right before the protests started against him that this was a hiccup, but basically the future of Ukraine was integration, that no matter what, Ukraine was going to end up in the West.
00:23:23.000So this guy, again, was kind of, he was kind of a neutralist that played all sides.
00:23:27.000So in 2013, you start getting, in late 2013, you start getting these protests.
00:23:31.000And right around the time they start, Victoria Noland is seen photographed.
00:23:53.000And by early 2014, he's out of office.
00:23:57.000And there's this infamous phone call where Victoria is talking to a diplomat.
00:24:04.000And on the one hand, they're talking about how they've selected this really weird, right?
00:24:10.000The Obama administration, the State Department, is talking about what the next government of Ukraine is going to look like and who they've chosen for the post of prime minister.
00:24:18.000And when the question comes up about the EU's role in mediating the process and whether or not the EU will or will or won't mediate, Victoria Nolan just says, F the EU.
00:24:32.000And then, of course, when that call got leaked, it was just dismissed as like, I think the State Department said it was Russian statecraft.
00:24:41.000This is Russian missing from a campaign to make the United States basically make this like the administrative state look bad.
00:24:48.000They didn't even deny that it happened.
00:24:49.000They just said, well, it was taken out of context.
00:24:51.000And there's a lot more that actually shows that this whole thing was orchestrated.
00:24:58.000Again, I don't know how much time we have, but you can look at the National Endowment for Democracy, which is this government-funded NGO in the United States set up under Ronald Reagan.
00:25:07.000And the co-founder of the NED, as it's called, when he was asked, well, what does the NED actually do?
00:25:13.000You guys say you donate money to civil society organizations in foreign countries.
00:25:31.000And the other founder, Carl Gersham, just in just in 2013, right around the time you get this coup, he just openly says, Ukraine is the prize.
00:25:42.000No one seems to kind of want to connect these dots in the mainstream.
00:26:04.000But here's, I think here's the really important part.
00:26:09.000The result of that destabilizing event that culminated in 2014 was that it triggered a civil war in eastern Ukraine, in the Donbass region, that has raged for nearly a decade.
00:26:21.000By the time Putin invaded this year, more than 14,000 people had already been killed.
00:26:27.000Because what happened was the Russians in eastern Ukraine saw it as basically a coup.
00:27:21.000And this is my fear: if we don't talk about this stuff, if we don't push back against both our own corrupt government and Zelensky's corrupt government, when this is over, no one will be held accountable.
00:27:32.000We're basically just treating us, we're treating symptoms.
00:27:47.000It's a, on the one hand, Ukraine is like the worst, Ukraine-Russia is like the worst conflict for Americans to be involved in because it's when we're talking about countries instead of individual people, Americans like things like black, I'm an American.
00:28:02.000But I think it's important to kind of step out and see what the problem is.
00:28:05.000We like things black and white, good versus evil.
00:28:08.000But in this, every player on the level of state is dirty.
00:28:14.000But the media has, again, I've never seen, we saw this with COVID, but what's remarkable about this is that through the use of Star Wars and Marvel movie analogies, people have been convinced that it's with us or against us all over again.
00:28:31.000And the level of moral manipulation, emotional blackmail that has happened throughout this conflict is, I think it's, again, I don't know what to compare it to.
00:28:43.000COVID was kind of an example of this, right?
00:28:46.000No, I mean, it's actually closer to the George Floyd thing.
00:28:48.000I have to say, they want to invoke a response.
00:28:51.000And I mean, it's almost closer to that, right?
00:28:53.000Like single moment, you're either with BLM or against BLM, black and white.
00:28:57.000But with either COVID or BLM, you still had like a healthy early resistance from conservatives.
00:29:17.000Conservatives and liberals overnight were totally united on the establishment's consensus.
00:29:23.000And that was actually, for me, kind of horrifying because people got programmed, you know, leaving aside the funny part about how people literally did compare this to the Avengers and Star Wars and stuff like that.
00:29:36.000What was terrifying was the fact that with us or against us made a full comeback to the point where we're talking about murdering civilians now.
00:29:44.000You have Michael McFall, a professor at Stanford, I think, talking about how there are no good Russians because the Russians gave us Putin, therefore they're all guilty.
00:29:54.000You have people talk like have people talking about like Looney Tune fantasies about torturing Russian soldiers, tying them up, hiding them under debris, and having like basically setting them up to get run over by tanks by their own forces.
00:30:11.000You've got like verified, again, there's so many, it's hard to name them.
00:30:15.000You've got verified people on Twitter, blue checks, talking about killing civilians in Russia.
00:30:34.000When we get off this call, I'm actually want to do a story about this.
00:30:36.000I think I'm going to call some institutions and ask them what they think about people like Michael McFall calling for the mass murder of civilians.
00:31:04.000And it's terrifying because that we're thousands of miles removed from that.
00:31:09.000And that's what we're talking about it.
00:31:11.000And you've already seen instances of violence against Americans who are somehow related to Russia, whether through ancestry or through employment.
00:31:20.000Russia House in Washington, I think in DC, I think it's a restaurant.