The Charlie Kirk Show - March 05, 2022


You’re Being Lied to About Ukraine & Russia | The Truth—with Pedro Gonzalez


Episode Stats


Length

33 minutes

Words per minute

177.06949

Word count

5,861

Sentence count

440

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

14

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Pedro Gonzalez goes deep into the Ukraine disinformation campaign and the lies being pushed by the pro-Russia government and the media. He lays out the case for why we need to fight back against the lies and the propaganda coming out of Ukraine.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
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 .
00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.
00:00:00.000 On this advertiser-free episode, we have Pedro Gonzalez.
00:00:03.000 He goes deep into the Ukraine disinformation campaign.
00:00:08.000 Now, if you are sympathetic to the Ukrainians, you should be sympathetic to the Ukrainian people.
00:00:13.000 I'm right there with you.
00:00:14.000 But the Ukrainian government and the information being pushed up by Ukraine is something that is worth a second and third glance.
00:00:21.000 I'm by no means trying to say that Putin is in the right.
00:00:24.000 Putin is evil for what he has done.
00:00:26.000 We make that point multiple times through this podcast.
00:00:29.000 But the way you look at the Ukrainian government is also really important.
00:00:32.000 And Pedro makes that case, I think, better than anybody else in a factual, largely uninterrupted way.
00:00:38.000 I kind of just listen and take notes.
00:00:40.000 He does a tremendous job.
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00:01:23.000 Thank you guys so much.
00:01:24.000 Pedro Gonzalez is here for a comprehensive, thought-provoking, and important episode.
00:01:29.000 Here we go.
00:01:29.000 Buckle up.
00:01:30.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:01:32.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
00:01:34.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:01:37.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:01:40.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:01:41.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:01:42.000 His spirit, his love of this country.
00:01:44.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
00:01:49.000 Turning point USA. 0.65
00:01:51.000 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.
00:02:00.000 That's why we are here.
00:02:03.000 I 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.
00:02:16.000 They have been misrepresenting things intentionally.
00:02:19.000 And 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.
00:02:26.000 It's Pedro Gonzalez.
00:02:27.000 Pedro, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:02:29.000 Hey, Charlie, thanks for having me back.
00:02:31.000 Of course.
00:02:32.000 All right.
00:02:32.000 Tell us about your Twitter feed and we'll go from there.
00:02:35.000 Unfortunately, Twitter actually seems to be the best vehicle for pushing back against what I don't know how else to describe as Ukrainian propaganda. 0.81
00:02:45.000 A lot of this stuff actually comes straight from the president of Ukraine himself, Zelensky, and his officials.
00:02:53.000 I 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.
00:03:06.000 And 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.
00:03:20.000 But the purpose of them is to get the United States and NATO into a broader conflict.
00:03:27.000 And this would essentially be World War III, except between countries with nuclear weapons.
00:03:34.000 So there's a real reason and a real interest in pushing back on this.
00:03:39.000 Not pro-Russia.
00:03:40.000 I'm not pro-Ukraine.
00:03:41.000 I'm pro-America.
00:03:43.000 And anyone who threatens the American national interest, I don't care if they've been sanctified by the media.
00:03:49.000 In 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.
00:03:58.000 But anyone who threatens the American interest is going to have my full attention.
00:04:03.000 So probably one of the most viral stories that came out first was The Ghost of Kiev.
00:04:09.000 This story about a Ukrainian fighter ace who shot down a bunch of Russians and was just kind of like this living legend, right?
00:04:17.000 The story went totally viral.
00:04:18.000 It was shared by Dan Crenshaw and Adam Kinzinger.
00:04:22.000 It's fake.
00:04:23.000 There's no evidence that this guy existed.
00:04:26.000 But incredibly, you didn't just have congressmen sharing the story about this.
00:04:30.000 You had the media actually defending the fact that it was fake.
00:04:33.000 Military.com defended the myth of the ghost of Kiev.
00:04:37.000 In other words, a U.S.-based military publication defended foreign propaganda.
00:04:43.000 Another one that went really viral was the story of Snake Island.
00:04:47.000 Supposedly, Ukrainians on this military installation were killed to a man by a Russian warship.
00:04:54.000 And it was framed in a way that, on the one hand, it made the Ukrainians look like they were at the Alamo. 0.77
00:04:58.000 On the other hand, it was designed to make us want to get into it, right?
00:05:03.000 Because these inhuman savages had killed these soldiers who were essentially vulnerable and prepared to surrender.
00:05:12.000 And Zelensky himself promoted it as if it was true.
00:05:16.000 He used their funeral as a kind of propaganda item.
00:05:19.000 But it turns out that those soldiers surrendered.
00:05:23.000 They were captured.
00:05:24.000 They were given food, water.
00:05:26.000 One 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.
00:05:38.000 Another one that you may have seen was about Miss Ukraine supposedly on the front lines.
00:05:43.000 There's a picture of her that went really viral.
00:05:45.000 She's wearing body armor and has a rifle.
00:05:46.000 It's an airsoft rifle.
00:05:48.000 And the picture is old.
00:05:50.000 It's a rifle that shoots plastic BBs.
00:05:53.000 And you had verified journalists sharing it.
00:05:56.000 Again, the point of that is to get us involved.
00:05:58.000 We have to go protect women, right? 0.68
00:06:00.000 All this stuff pulls at important heartstrings.
00:06:04.000 In 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.
00:06:13.000 Because again, it was like the thermopoly moment, right?
00:06:16.000 Totally fake.
00:06:17.000 Another 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.
00:06:27.000 It showed what they claimed was video footage of a Ukrainian fighter jet shooting down Russians.
00:06:33.000 It was video game footage.
00:06:35.000 They shared video game footage as proof of the winning war efforts and they're just waiting for us to get involved, right?
00:06:43.000 And it got like a million views.
00:06:44.000 It's still online.
00:06:45.000 I checked.
00:06:46.000 It's actually still online.
00:06:46.000 I can't believe it.
00:06:49.000 Another 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.
00:06:57.000 He needs ammunition, not a ride.
00:06:58.000 Totally fake.
00:06:59.000 The pictures are from, they're from months or years ago.
00:07:02.000 People 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.
00:07:10.000 They're not from this war.
00:07:11.000 They're from before the conflict.
00:07:13.000 There's actually so many of these, it's hard to keep track of them.
00:07:16.000 And a lot of them are actually promoted by Zelensky himself.
00:07:18.000 Another really egregious one was Zelensky claimed that the Russians were deliberately shelling a Jewish memorial site.
00:07:25.000 It's an area that has been set up to commemorate the Jewish victims of the Nazis in World War II.
00:07:32.000 Well, 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.
00:07:41.000 It's not just that they didn't shell it.
00:07:43.000 Sorry, it's not just that it was kind of damaged and ruffled.
00:07:46.000 According to this journalist who was on the ground that took pictures, he said, it has literally been untouched.
00:07:51.000 According to Zelensky, it was being destroyed.
00:07:55.000 And when he tweeted about it, he basically said that this is the next Holocaust.
00:08:00.000 Again, trying to get us involved and morally blackmailing us.
00:08:04.000 If you don't get involved, you're complicit in the next Holocaust. 0.99
00:08:08.000 That is moral blackmail about something that is really important.
00:08:13.000 But 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.
00:08:24.000 I'm explaining how these narratives are set up.
00:08:26.000 He 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.
00:08:43.000 And 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. 0.60
00:08:52.000 This is what they said.
00:08:54.000 And everyone knows that a no-fly zone would be an act of war.
00:08:57.000 Either 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.
00:09:05.000 Totally fake.
00:09:07.000 Yes, there was fighting near the facility and an administrative building got hit.
00:09:12.000 And 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.
00:09:22.000 It was non-operational.
00:09:23.000 It was being worked on.
00:09:24.000 It was under renovation, not online, not a threat.
00:09:26.000 As a result of the shelling, there was a fire in there, but it was extinguished.
00:09:30.000 And this is important.
00:09:31.000 Zelensky and his officials said that radiation levels were reaching like dangerous highs, but it has been widely confirmed by people at the plant.
00:09:39.000 Radiation levels never went up.
00:09:41.000 The fires were put out.
00:09:43.000 The Russians took control of it and everything's fine. 0.97
00:09:46.000 It 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.
00:10:00.000 And the implications are obvious.
00:10:02.000 Do not share this obvious lie that could lead to catastrophic escalation of this conflict.
00:10:08.000 And 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.
00:10:18.000 There was never any threat of nuclear terrorism, but people were, it scared the life out of people.
00:10:23.000 And again, verified journalists were sharing it like it was true.
00:10:26.000 And all of this stuff is designed to get us into this conflict.
00:10:30.000 And 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.
00:10:43.000 And it's not going to be until it's too late that the science has changed.
00:10:46.000 Oh, we realize we made a lot of bad choices based on emotion and fear.
00:10:51.000 And it's not until afterwards, all of a sudden it gets not just fact-checked, but the truth comes out.
00:10:57.000 That was a really comprehensive rundown.
00:10:59.000 Pedro, you had another one.
00:11:00.000 You wanted to add to the list.
00:11:02.000 Again, there are so many, it's hard to keep track.
00:11:02.000 Right.
00:11:04.000 And I'm probably missing a whole lot.
00:11:07.000 But 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.
00:11:23.000 It was a Palestinian girl yelling at an IDF soldier in the desert.
00:11:27.000 And the video was several years old.
00:11:29.000 And people ate it up.
00:11:30.000 It's again, I've never seen anything like this.
00:11:32.000 And it's like, it's not just that they go viral.
00:11:36.000 It's that people want to believe them.
00:11:38.000 And when you prove that they're not real, people get mad at you.
00:11:42.000 Kathy 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.
00:11:54.000 Like 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.
00:12:07.000 So, Pedro, let me ask you something, and it might be a little devil's advocate for the sake of conversation.
00:12:13.000 I mean, your country's being invaded, you're being shell-shocked.
00:12:15.000 Wouldn't you push out propaganda if you're the Ukrainian government?
00:12:19.000 Or 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?
00:12:26.000 I think the latter is true.
00:12:28.000 We 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.
00:12:42.000 Yes, but this is different.
00:12:45.000 Again, I have never seen anything like this where the propaganda is, on one hand, so obviously fake.
00:12:50.000 And on the other hand, the implications of it, if we buy into it, are absolutely cat.
00:12:56.000 Like, you want to talk about civilian casualties?
00:12:59.000 What do you think World War III would do?
00:13:01.000 What do you think a nuclear world war would do?
00:13:05.000 It's unimaginable.
00:13:07.000 And 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.
00:13:20.000 I mean, what happened to all the fact-checkers, right?
00:13:22.000 What happened to the Pinocchios at Washington Post?
00:13:24.000 What happened to all these people?
00:13:26.000 They're either like they've just magically disappeared.
00:13:30.000 Some of them are still trying to do this.
00:13:32.000 Like, obviously, I've relied in some cases on the Associated Press, on Reuters.
00:13:36.000 I specifically look for reports coming from on the ground because those are probably going to be your best bet.
00:13:42.000 But like, the amount of work that I have to do to verify stuff is insane.
00:13:47.000 Another one was this building that got shelled in Kharkiv.
00:13:50.000 And the media framed it as a civilian target is being shelled indiscriminately.
00:13:56.000 What 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. 0.95
00:14:05.000 These people are really nasty.
00:14:07.000 I mean, you can be pro-Ukraine, but if you, I mean, look into Azov yourself and you'll see exactly what I mean. 0.85
00:14:13.000 Like, these people are notorious for committing war crimes.
00:14:15.000 And they actually use that building, a regional administrative building in Kharkiv, as a base of operations.
00:14:21.000 No one talked about it in the media.
00:14:23.000 It was just, you know, barbarians killing civilians indiscriminately.
00:14:27.000 Again, 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. 0.74
00:14:42.000 Well, 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. 0.86
00:14:57.000 Like, okay, well, the Zelensky government is doing exactly that.
00:15:02.000 And not only are you falling for it, okay, it's fine to fall for it.
00:15:07.000 I mean, the first time I saw the ghost to Kiev thing, I started like, okay, that's kind of cool, I guess.
00:15:10.000 Like, I didn't dive that deep into it.
00:15:12.000 I 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.
00:15:18.000 But then you promote it, you don't fact check it.
00:15:20.000 And then, Pedro, you refuse to go back and tell the audience, oh, by the way, what we just promoted wasn't true.
00:15:27.000 And these narratives build on each other, right?
00:15:30.000 I mean, I went back in the break and I had our team pull the Instagram image of the woman with the airsoft gun, right?
00:15:37.000 And I just looked through my friends on Instagram.
00:15:39.000 Hundreds of them liked it and shared it.
00:15:41.000 So, Pedro, I want to ask you the question.
00:15:43.000 Let's dive deep into the history of this Ukrainian government and all the different forces that helped Zelensky come to power.
00:15:51.000 Yeah.
00:15:53.000 Well, it's actually too much for just this segment, but I think I can give you an illustrative example.
00:15:59.000 And 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.
00:16:14.000 But I'm going to focus on one example that kind of encapsulates how Ukraine is not actually a beacon.
00:16:21.000 Surprise, it's not actually a beacon for freedom and democracy.
00:16:25.000 It's more like a haven for NGOs and oligarchs, neither of which really care a whole lot about the Ukrainian people, right?
00:16:33.000 So in 2015, the Wall Street Journal published an analysis of disclosures from the Clinton Foundation.
00:16:42.000 And 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.
00:16:58.000 And what they found was, is that the top source of these foreign individual donations was Ukraine.
00:17:03.000 And 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.
00:17:15.000 He's a Ukrainian oligarch.
00:17:17.000 He served in the Ukrainian parliament, very well-connected guy, pretty powerful.
00:17:22.000 And 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.
00:17:41.000 So how did he meet the Clintons and start donating to their charities?
00:17:46.000 Well, 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.
00:18:03.000 And 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.
00:18:20.000 And again, this is reported in the Wall Street Journal.
00:18:23.000 It's reported in the Kiev Post.
00:18:25.000 Anybody can go look at it and verify it.
00:18:28.000 And 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.
00:18:41.000 Again, all of this stuff is just in the open.
00:18:44.000 You can go.
00:18:46.000 Yeah, I'm sorry.
00:18:47.000 I want to verify that.
00:18:48.000 Doug Schoen was a registered lobbyist for Pinchook at the time that all this was happening.
00:18:52.000 And there's FARA documents that show all this, the Foreign Agent Registration Act.
00:18:55.000 It's all there.
00:18:56.000 Yeah, that's right.
00:18:57.000 Yeah, and I'm just, I think it's important to be, to take these extra steps right now, precisely because there is so much misinformation.
00:19:04.000 There's so many lies.
00:19:05.000 Yes.
00:19:06.000 And lie by omission, I think, is the worst thing that we're seeing.
00:19:09.000 People are just conveniently leaving out these connections, right?
00:19:12.000 And this is the world that Zelensky comes from.
00:19:14.000 And 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. 0.99
00:19:30.000 A lot of people credit her with organizing the coup that toppled Ukraine's democratically elected government in between 2013 and 2014.
00:19:38.000 There was a revolution.
00:19:39.000 It culminated in 2014 that resulted in a change of government, basically.
00:19:44.000 A government that was, the government that replaced it was selected, cultivated by the Obama administration.
00:19:49.000 But anyways, you can connect oligarchs between people like Victoria Noland, the Clintons, and Zelensky.
00:19:58.000 And this is not unusual at all.
00:20:00.000 This is actually just how Ukraine works.
00:20:02.000 Zelensky himself has said that he's an anti-corruption guy, that he campaigned as the anti-corruption president.
00:20:09.000 He's going to set Ukraine straight. 1.00
00:20:11.000 Totally false.
00:20:13.000 There's a report in The Guardian that was based on an analysis of Pandora papers that found that Zelensky is dirty.
00:20:19.000 He's involved in all these offshore networks, that he's just as corrupt as all of his predecessors.
00:20:25.000 And he doesn't really hide this.
00:20:27.000 He 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.
00:20:39.000 This is reported in the Kiev Post.
00:20:41.000 It's all in the open.
00:20:42.000 This is not someone who has the best interests of Ukrainian civilians in mind.
00:20:47.000 This is someone who is really just representing the interests of his donors, of his backers, of these oligarchs.
00:20:54.000 And that's just the reality of it.
00:20:55.000 And that's why I've likened him to basically the Fauci of world leaders.
00:20:59.000 He's a media creation.
00:21:01.000 He's someone that has been invented by the media.
00:21:04.000 Ironically, he's an actor, too.
00:21:05.000 He's just someone that's been invented by the media instead to us as a hero that we have to worship.
00:21:10.000 But all you have to do is just look a little bit beneath the surface.
00:21:13.000 And it turns out this guy is just a typically corrupt Ukrainian politician. 0.73
00:21:19.000 So there was a democratically elected leader of Ukraine and then Zelensky kind of pops up.
00:21:24.000 Some called it a coup.
00:21:25.000 I'm not really sure if that's right, but I guess it does beg the question, though.
00:21:29.000 Eastern Ukraine is very Russian. 0.92
00:21:32.000 Western Ukraine is separate than Eastern Ukraine.
00:21:35.000 Some called the implementation of Zelensky a color revolution.
00:21:39.000 Some allege that the CIA was involved in that.
00:21:41.000 Can you help us walk us through that?
00:21:44.000 So I'm actually publishing a story on this later today.
00:21:44.000 Yeah.
00:21:49.000 There's tons of evidence.
00:21:51.000 It'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.
00:22:02.000 But basically, in 2013, it goes further back than that, but I'll give you kind of the flashpoints.
00:22:08.000 In 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.
00:22:16.000 The EU makes him a deal.
00:22:18.000 It's a trade deal.
00:22:19.000 He mistakes it as a kind of invitation to join the EU.
00:22:23.000 But 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.
00:22:38.000 And 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.
00:22:49.000 So Russia made Ukraine a counteroffer, really an ultimatum.
00:22:52.000 Take $15 billion in aid, or I'm going to hit you with sanctions.
00:22:57.000 And so the president at the time sided with Russia on this.
00:23:02.000 But 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.
00:23:12.000 And 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.
00:23:23.000 So this guy, again, was kind of, he was kind of a neutralist that played all sides.
00:23:27.000 So in 2013, you start getting, in late 2013, you start getting these protests.
00:23:31.000 And right around the time they start, Victoria Noland is seen photographed.
00:23:36.000 She's photo.
00:23:37.000 There's an article in the Christian Science Monitor that actually has a picture of her.
00:23:40.000 She's photographed handing out cookies to protesters right after she has a talk with this soon-to-be deposed president. 0.95
00:23:47.000 And she's just, she has a bag of, I think, cookies and bread, and she's just handing them out.
00:23:51.000 Like, that's totally normal, right?
00:23:53.000 And by early 2014, he's out of office.
00:23:57.000 And there's this infamous phone call where Victoria is talking to a diplomat.
00:24:04.000 And on the one hand, they're talking about how they've selected this really weird, right?
00:24:10.000 The 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.
00:24:18.000 And 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.
00:24:28.000 That is how these people operate.
00:24:30.000 They're totally ruthless.
00:24:31.000 They're in the open.
00:24:32.000 And then, of course, when that call got leaked, it was just dismissed as like, I think the State Department said it was Russian statecraft.
00:24:41.000 This is Russian missing from a campaign to make the United States basically make this like the administrative state look bad. 0.94
00:24:48.000 They didn't even deny that it happened.
00:24:49.000 They just said, well, it was taken out of context.
00:24:51.000 And there's a lot more that actually shows that this whole thing was orchestrated.
00:24:55.000 It goes way back.
00:24:58.000 Again, 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.
00:25:07.000 And the co-founder of the NED, as it's called, when he was asked, well, what does the NED actually do?
00:25:13.000 You guys say you donate money to civil society organizations in foreign countries.
00:25:17.000 What does that actually mean?
00:25:18.000 And his name is Alan Weinstein.
00:25:20.000 It was in an article for the New York Review of Books.
00:25:23.000 He just says candidly, well, we do what we do, what the CIA used to do covertly 25 years ago.
00:25:29.000 In other words, regime change.
00:25:31.000 And 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.
00:25:42.000 No one seems to kind of want to connect these dots in the mainstream.
00:25:45.000 I mean, some people do.
00:25:46.000 But again, all this is dismissed as conspiracy.
00:25:48.000 The United States, certainly not Hillary Clinton and the neoconservatives, would ever do something like this.
00:25:55.000 Only other people, like whatever, name a government, name a corrupt government.
00:25:59.000 Only they do the argument.
00:26:00.000 Only Putin does stuff like that.
00:26:02.000 Right.
00:26:02.000 Exactly.
00:26:03.000 Well, name anybody, right?
00:26:03.000 Yeah.
00:26:04.000 But here's, I think here's the really important part.
00:26:09.000 The 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.
00:26:21.000 By the time Putin invaded this year, more than 14,000 people had already been killed.
00:26:27.000 Because what happened was the Russians in eastern Ukraine saw it as basically a coup.
00:26:32.000 Again, I'm arguing that it was.
00:26:35.000 And so they decided, well, we're separatists now.
00:26:38.000 This government does not represent us.
00:26:40.000 And so it triggered a civil war between pro-Ukrainian government forces and anti-Ukrainian government forces.
00:26:46.000 Both sides have committed war crimes against each other.
00:26:48.000 It's horrendous.
00:26:49.000 Again, more than 14,000 people have been killed to date.
00:26:52.000 That event in 2014 also made Ukraine the poorest.
00:26:55.000 It certainly didn't help.
00:26:57.000 It flattened Ukraine's economy.
00:26:59.000 Today it's the poorest country in Europe.
00:27:01.000 This is democracy, according to Victoria Nolan and Hillary Clinton and the neoconservatives, the liberal interventionists.
00:27:08.000 That is what democracy looks like to these people.
00:27:11.000 And the ones that are caught in the middle of this that suffer the most are Ukrainian civilians.
00:27:16.000 That's exactly right.
00:27:17.000 Like they're the ones that are dying.
00:27:18.000 They're the ones that are starving.
00:27:19.000 They're the ones that are fleeing.
00:27:21.000 And 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.
00:27:32.000 We're basically just treating us, we're treating symptoms.
00:27:34.000 We're not treating the cause.
00:27:35.000 Pedro, why is it that all of a sudden people went from posting pictures of themselves in masks or BLM outfits to now like Ukrainian flags?
00:27:44.000 Like, what's the psychology behind that?
00:27:46.000 I'm not quite sure.
00:27:47.000 It'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.
00:28:02.000 But I think it's important to kind of step out and see what the problem is.
00:28:05.000 We like things black and white, good versus evil.
00:28:08.000 But in this, every player on the level of state is dirty.
00:28:13.000 Yes.
00:28:14.000 But 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.
00:28:31.000 And 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.
00:28:43.000 COVID was kind of an example of this, right?
00:28:46.000 No, I mean, it's actually closer to the George Floyd thing.
00:28:48.000 I have to say, they want to invoke a response.
00:28:51.000 And I mean, it's almost closer to that, right?
00:28:53.000 Like single moment, you're either with BLM or against BLM, black and white.
00:28:57.000 But with either COVID or BLM, you still had like a healthy early resistance from conservatives.
00:29:03.000 With Ukraine, no. 0.97
00:29:06.000 Again, Ukraine, the narrative around Ukraine, around the government as a beacon of democracy, around Zelensky as a paragon.
00:29:15.000 That, I have never seen that before.
00:29:17.000 Conservatives and liberals overnight were totally united on the establishment's consensus.
00:29:23.000 And 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.
00:29:36.000 What 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.
00:29:44.000 You 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.
00:29:54.000 You 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.
00:30:11.000 You've got like verified, again, there's so many, it's hard to name them.
00:30:15.000 You've got verified people on Twitter, blue checks, talking about killing civilians in Russia.
00:30:23.000 And no one thinks this is a problem.
00:30:25.000 And when they get called out on it, they're like, well, you know, to criticize me is to, is you're like, your priorities are wrong. 0.85
00:30:32.000 You're a Putin puppet. 0.86
00:30:33.000 Like, yeah, okay.
00:30:34.000 When we get off this call, I'm actually want to do a story about this.
00:30:36.000 I 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.
00:30:42.000 You should.
00:30:43.000 Because really, I want to know, like, does your, does your university endorse this?
00:30:49.000 And one of the guys, I can't remember his name at the moment, another verified account.
00:30:53.000 He's, I think he's an ethics professor.
00:30:55.000 And he was the one that said we should tie up Russian POWs, hide them, and allow them to get run over by tanks.
00:31:01.000 An ethics professor. 1.00
00:31:03.000 These people are insane. 0.90
00:31:04.000 And it's terrifying because that we're thousands of miles removed from that. 0.89
00:31:09.000 And that's what we're talking about it.
00:31:11.000 And you've already seen instances of violence against Americans who are somehow related to Russia, whether through ancestry or through employment.
00:31:20.000 Russia House in Washington, I think in DC, I think it's a restaurant.
00:31:26.000 Sorry, a lot of I thinks here.
00:31:28.000 But the point is, is that it was smashed up.
00:31:30.000 That's right.
00:31:33.000 The police reported that there was anti-graffiti inside the building after it got smashed up.
00:31:38.000 This is in America.
00:31:39.000 Like Anastasia just got pulled.
00:31:42.000 Did you see that story?
00:31:43.000 No, I saw it.
00:31:43.000 I mean, it's, but yeah, we're not a serious country.
00:31:46.000 I mean, what's next?
00:31:47.000 Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, probably.
00:31:49.000 Like, that's where I'm going to be.
00:31:50.000 I think there was a meme about that, about how we're going to start like Oprah is going to pull those books.
00:31:57.000 Honestly, I'm not sure if it was a joke or not.
00:31:59.000 Now that Disney has actually taken action against its own, like its own films.
00:32:04.000 Yeah, the Gulag archipelago is a big threat. 0.89
00:32:06.000 Actually, it is a big threat to the regime.
00:32:08.000 But I just want to thank you for your work on this.
00:32:10.000 It's phenomenal research.
00:32:11.000 This hour has been really comprehensive and like not the typical stuff you hear on TV.
00:32:16.000 It's like deep, it's analytical, and it's important.
00:32:19.000 And I want to just make this very clear.
00:32:20.000 We're not supporting Putin, obviously.
00:32:22.000 That's not what we're saying.
00:32:23.000 We're adding nuance to a conversation that has become so unnecessarily black and white.
00:32:28.000 As Mitt Romney said, quote, we've never seen good versus evil as clearly defined as we see right now. 0.96
00:32:33.000 What a ridiculous thing to say.
00:32:35.000 And I think your work is doing a lot to enlighten people so we can make prudent decisions.
00:32:38.000 Pedro, thank you so much for joining us.
00:32:40.000 Check him out on Substack, Pedro Gonzalez, and also the Chronicles magazine.
00:32:44.000 Thank you, Pedro.
00:32:44.000 Thank you, Charlie.
00:32:45.000 Appreciate it.
00:32:48.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:32:49.000 Email us your thoughts.
00:32:50.000 As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:32:52.000 If you want to support our show, go to charliekirk.com slash support.
00:32:56.000 Make sure you're subscribed to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.
00:32:58.000 Thanks so much for listening.
00:32:59.000 God bless.
00:33:02.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.