Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) joins Dr. Jordan Peterson to discuss the situation in Ukraine, and why he thinks the West should go to war with Russia. Dr. Peterson and Sen. Lee discuss the pros and cons of going to war, what the risks are, and what the benefits might be in the event of a conflict with Russia, and how to deal with the chaos that could ensue if Putin is deposed. Jordan Peterson's new series, "Depression and Anxiety: A Guide to Recovery from Depression and Depression," is available now on Daily Wire Plus. Go to Dailywire.plus/DepressionandAnxiety to join the FREE Masterclass on Depression and Anxiety, which is available on all major medias, as well as some special limited-edition hardcover books and hardcover audio books. Join the Masterclass and get a free Masterclass copy of his new book, "Decompress: How to Overcome Depression and Overcome Anxiety: The 7 Simple Steps to a Better Life." Masterclass is available in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, Hardcover, and Audio Book format. You can also get a copy of the book for free on Amazon Prime and Audible. If you're struggling with depression and anxiety, go to my website and sign up for my free 7-day trial. I'm looking for a $10 discount on the course? Click here to receive $5 and receive $25 off your first month, and a discount on my second month only when you book is available for 7 days of the course begins! You can get my second year, $50 and third year, and I'll get a discount when you get the course starting with my discount starts in six months get $99, and get an ad discount, and two years get a VIP membership starts get $24, VIP access, and they get my discount, $24 and VIP access gets 4 months get a course, and you get my VIP trial, and my other two months get VIP access? I'll also get $25, VIP membership and two weeks get $4 VIP access to the course starts, $4, and $8 VIP access and $5, VIP discount, and a VIP access is also receive $19, VIP is that starts and $13, VIP gets $38 and VIP is $4 and VIP gets all of these things get $19 and $16, and I will also receive a discount and $24
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00:00:57.420Hello, everyone. I have the pleasure today of speaking with Senator Mike Lee from Utah.
00:01:13.100Mike and I have spoken before on my podcast.
00:01:16.400We've got to know each other a little bit as a consequence of being involved in various endeavors.
00:01:21.400And I thought he would be an excellent person to help me think through, well, what I'm interested in, not least today,
00:01:32.260is how to understand the situation in relationship to Russia and Ukraine, because I don't understand it.
00:01:39.620So, Mike, I'm going to ask you some questions about that situation.
00:01:43.820What's been disturbing me most particularly, I would say, is that I don't understand what it is that the West is aiming at precisely.
00:01:54.520You know, when you're aiming at victory, because that's hypothetically the aim here,
00:01:59.480you need to specify what a victory would look like.
00:02:03.700And so I've been trying to game that in my imagination.
00:02:06.200It's like if we got what we wanted, whatever that might be, what would that look like in any realistic sense?
00:02:14.540And so what I see being emitted from the Biden administration and for the people who are beating the pro-war drum hard,
00:02:22.660and that would include my idiot government in Canada, is a very banal form of dimwit flag waving,
00:02:30.400which is, well, the Ukrainians are great Democrats, and we're supporting democracy, and we're on the side of freedom.
00:02:38.300And I heard a fair bit of that about Afghanistan, and I heard a fair bit about that relationship to Iraq,
00:02:44.860and it isn't obvious to me that that worked out particularly well.
00:02:48.740And I don't buy the shallow, moralizing flag waving.
00:02:53.720And Ukraine is a country that is so corrupt that it's almost beyond comprehension.
00:02:58.540And so the idea that there's an easy pathway to democracy there is utterly preposterous,
00:03:04.300which isn't to say that, no, I'm without my qualms, let's say, on the Russian side.
00:03:11.260Russia's been a very troublesome country for a good 150 years and probably before that.
00:03:17.560And so it's not like the situation is straightforward.
00:03:20.780But here's what I've been walking through in my imagination.
00:03:22.840And you can help me maybe clarify where my thinking is inappropriate.
00:03:28.160So the hawks that I've talked to on the American side have basically laid out the most reasonable case for war for me, I suppose,
00:03:37.920and have claimed, for example, that it's in our best interest in the West to keep Russia relatively weak militarily,
00:03:47.140to minimize the threat they might pose now and in the future.
00:03:51.420And this war gives us an opportunity to do just that, to cull their conventional forces and to keep Russia back on its heels,
00:04:00.960which is a different proposition than expanding democracy in Ukraine.
00:04:04.880And so I have some problems with that approach, conceptually, because I think that's what the Allies did to Germany after World War I.
00:04:15.900We attempted to weaken it and then to keep it weak.
00:10:57.360Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport,
00:11:01.640you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:11:06.660And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:11:09.540With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:11:17.300Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:12:19.500The first thing, we might want to make these numbers reasonable, realistic for people.
00:12:25.080So $113 billion is $1,200 per four-person family in the U.S.
00:12:31.760So that's what every family in the U.S. is now spending $100 a month on the Ukraine war.
00:12:37.420Now, there's an additional problem with that, too, because Ukraine, by everyone's standards, including such reliable sources, let's say it has the New York Times.
00:12:48.560Everyone knew perfectly well before we started flag-waving how corrupt Ukraine was.
00:12:53.480And now $113 billion has been dumped into that economy with what I presume has been an extraordinary lack of oversight.
00:13:04.620And so my sense is strong that God only knows what proportion of that money has been funneled into truly reprehensible criminal enterprises.
00:13:13.600And if you think it's none of it, then you're naive beyond comprehension.
00:13:17.360And so when the government spends money like a drunken sailor, which is what it's doing in Ukraine, you can be bloody sure that most of that money isn't ending up where it's supposed to.
00:13:27.540It certainly didn't on the COVID front, for example.
00:13:30.740I think 40% of COVID government claims for subsidy were fraudulent, something like 40%.
00:13:37.400And if it's only 40% of what we're spending in Ukraine that's going to criminals, that would be a bloody miracle.
00:13:59.080Something late 50s, early 60s, pointing out that that emergent collusion at the upper echelons between, let's say, defense contractors and government was what he believed would pose the most signal threat to the stability of, well, American democracy, certainly, but also the world in the decades moving forward.
00:14:20.780And so some people are making an awful lot of money off this war, and they might consider that extraordinarily advantageous in the short term.
00:14:30.160But we're facilitating criminal enterprises on a scale pretty much unheard of in the past.
00:14:36.460And we have no idea exactly what our money is being spent on in relationship to the furtherance of the military-industrial complex.
00:14:45.840And so that's also a negative consequence of the war, that this false, you know, democracy flag-waving masks.
00:14:56.480And that strikes me as additionally naive over and above the fact that we're flirting with, like, as far as I'm concerned, we're already in World War III.
00:15:07.300The issue is how far we're going to take it.
00:15:10.020The notion that this is a war between Russia and Ukraine, it's like, is there anybody who believes that?
00:15:15.980And then you also pointed out something that people should be jumping up and down and screaming about in the United States, which is that, well, there's no declaration of war here.
00:15:32.360Well, we're pretending it's not a war.
00:15:34.160Well, I don't know if that's sufficient reason to bypass the constitutionally, is it constitutionally mandated requirement that war is declared by Congress?
00:15:44.220It's one of the things that changed in our form of government after we left the United Kingdom.
00:15:50.940One of the things that we made sure was that the people's elected representatives in Congress and not the chief executive would have the power to take us to war.
00:15:59.800Now, to be clear, Congress did appropriate this money.
00:16:03.160So, it's not as if Congress were bypassed and deciding to send money to Ukraine.
00:16:08.740My point is not that it happened entirely by the executive.
00:16:12.720It is rather that what we're doing is tantamount to war.
00:16:16.360It has many of the same consequences as war.
00:16:18.720And so, I fear that we're not adequately debating and discussing, as Congress funds these endeavors, the fact that this puts us in a de facto position of war.
00:16:28.400And then, to your point about the corruption, the possibility of waste, fraud, abuse, and other corrupt developments with this money, just last weekend, Zelensky was quoted.
00:16:41.960I don't speak Ukrainian, so I'm relying on interpreters.
00:16:44.940But he was quoted as suggesting it was somehow dangerous for Americans to question how that $113 billion was being spent in Ukraine.
00:17:51.940Yeah, so it's outlined in the legislation.
00:17:54.680We don't know the particulars of exactly where it's going.
00:17:57.580But the generalities of it are laid out in the three or four pieces of legislation that have been passed in order to keep the funding going.
00:18:07.760In some instances, the money goes to the U.S. military in order to acquire weapons so that they can send weapons over to Ukraine.
00:18:18.600And in other instances, it goes to other U.S. agencies that are providing some form of relief or another to the Ukrainian people.
00:18:59.060So if you had to make a strong case for the kind of NATO involvement, because it's obviously not just the U.S., although the U.S. is the primary mover here, probably followed by the U.K., I would say.
00:19:14.800If you had to make a strong case for what NATO is doing, what would the case be?
00:19:20.420I mean, we talked about the necessity of deterring Russian aggression, especially in relationship to Ukraine.
00:19:27.280Do you believe that it's reasonable to assume that Russia presents a credible threat to the integrity of the NATO alliance or the West outside the specific case of Ukraine?
00:19:41.180And I mean, we should point out that Ukraine and Russia have been integrally tied together for the entire history of both countries.
00:19:49.800There's less separation there than there is between Canada and the U.S.
00:19:55.740And we're two countries that are very tightly tied together.
00:19:58.460So the relationship between Russia and Ukraine is not of thoroughly independent, sovereign states with an immense history of political and cultural difference.
00:20:09.980So the involvement of Russia in Ukraine is unbelievably complex and vice versa.
00:20:18.360But we might say, well, Russia is an expansionist state in the style of the Soviet Union and therefore poses a potential threat to the integrity of Eastern and Western Europe.
00:20:28.920And of course, the Russians made all sorts of incursions into Eastern Europe.
00:20:31.760So there's some historical precedent for that.
00:20:34.160But and so we could say, well, you can make a case for keeping that threat at bay.
00:20:39.520Is there another case that can be made for our involvement in this war?
00:20:46.120So, look, the mindset of the objectives of NATO here.
00:20:51.240There has been a legitimate viewpoint that suggests that if Putin moves into Ukraine, if he takes over some or eventually all of Ukraine or even just part of it, that this could reflect the fact that he's hellbent somehow on expansionist ambition and that that expansionist ambition is going to spill over into other NATO countries.
00:21:19.460So Ukraine isn't in NATO, but it is, as some describe it, NATO adjacent.
00:21:24.680And so there is concern that this could spill over into those countries.
00:21:40.900And as you point out, there is a lot more history between Russia and Ukraine, especially parts of Ukraine.
00:21:47.420A lot more of a cultural, historical connection, in some cases a linguistic connection between Russia and Ukraine than there is a lot of these other countries.
00:21:58.200But secondly, we could just as easily, it seems to me, be bringing about the very thing we're trying to avoid.
00:22:06.040Now, I don't count myself as an expert in this area by any means.
00:22:10.340I'm just trying to outline the two viewpoints because the other viewpoint is also valid, which is that if we get involved in this, if we fund a proxy war against that same adversary, Russia, we could be inviting more of the same.
00:22:24.840Especially if, as I suspect, I don't know that the United States has the intestinal fortitude to go into a full-blown war with Russia.
00:22:38.480Have we provoked Russia to become even more expansionist?
00:22:41.460Could that undermine the security of our NATO allies even more than just staying out altogether would have done?
00:22:47.400I don't know the answer to these questions, but the fact that they're not being seriously asked and debated and discussed in the halls of Congress is deeply troubling to me.
00:22:56.720As is the fact that whenever anybody, including me, raises questions like this, we're immediately tagged on Twitter, for example, as Putin lovers, which is absurd and preposterous.
00:23:09.420I have a distinct loathing for the man.
00:23:12.140I think he's awful, but it's because he's awful, not in spite of it, that I've got real concerns about our involvement here.
00:23:21.140I'm not sure it's going to do anything like what those advocating it believe it will do for us, or our allies for that matter.
00:23:31.020So Putin as well, this is an additional complication.
00:23:35.520Putin is actually quite popular among Russians as far as anybody can tell.
00:23:39.240And part of the reason for that, and I've read a lot of his speeches over the last 10 years trying to understand how he thinks, because my sense of people generally is that they do what they say they're going to do.
00:23:50.780It's very hard to generate a facade of continual lies for decades to say one thing publicly and even privately in speeches, and then to go off and conjure up an entire new theory of the world and operate within those confines.
00:24:05.700Putin is popular partly because he's been presenting this war against Ukraine as a defense of the traditional values, not only of Russia, but also of the West.
00:24:16.320And because Putin is no fan of, let's say, the woke idiocy that's gripped the West.
00:24:22.700And that's a sentiment that's echoed quite profoundly among the Eastern Europeans who would otherwise be our staunch allies and who generally are.
00:24:31.120And so that's the drum he's been able to beat to keep himself popular in Russia.
00:24:36.980And you can be cynical and say that that's merely maneuvering, propagandistic maneuvering on Putin's part.
00:24:43.880But I think the simpler explanation is that he actually believes that the West have become untrustworthy on that front and he isn't interested in the incursion of that kind of ideology into the Russian sphere.
00:24:58.260And so I'm not exactly sure what to make of that.
00:25:03.360And then the notion that we're enabling the very conflict that we're trying to avoid brings me back to the problem I had at the beginning of our discussion, which is I can't figure out what the hell constitutes our victory here.
00:25:18.780It's like, even if we do win, what in the world does that mean?
00:25:23.540We want a permanently weakened Russia on the Eastern front and do we want them so weak that they start to lose their integrity as an economy?
00:25:32.340And then what do we do on the energy front, for example, or on the fertilizer or food front?
00:25:36.980And I don't see, as you just said, I don't see anybody talking about these things with any degree of seriousness.
00:25:42.520It's actually quite jaw-dropping to me that what we are getting is something like governance by single pixel tweet.
00:25:54.280You know, we're in it with the freedom-loving Ukrainians.
00:25:58.100And like, as far as I can tell, there aren't a hell of a lot of those, by the way.
00:26:02.180We're in it with the freedom-loving Ukrainians till the end.
00:26:06.040It's like, well, what do you mean the end here?
00:26:07.740I don't understand what a Russian loss would look like.
00:26:13.240I mean, if the Americans were on the other side, there's no damn way, there's no way you guys would lose.
00:26:19.360Like, you might not win, and maybe no one will win, but you certainly wouldn't lose.
00:26:24.060So am I missing something here, or is this discussion as shallow as it appears?
00:26:30.000Your comment that whenever you say anything that questions the story that's being laid forth about the war,
00:26:37.600you get immediately labeled, you know, as a satanic Putin worshiper, so to speak.
00:26:43.220All that is, to me, is evidence that this debate is being handled at a very juvenile level.
00:26:49.480That's what happened in World War I, by the way.
00:26:51.660I mean, people reacted incredibly stupidly as World War I unfolded and got their arm caught in the bandsaw, let's say,
00:27:00.440and tore the entire continent apart for four years for basically no gain whatsoever.