As Vladimir Putin prepares to invade Ukraine, it s more important than ever to show our enemies around the world that the West is strong, united, and ready to fight for our position of global leadership. Michael Knowles explains why.
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00:00:37.580As Vladimir Putin prepares to invade Ukraine, it's more important than ever to show our enemies around the world
00:00:44.260that the West is strong, united, and ready to fight for our position of global leadership.
00:00:51.260Yes, it was embarrassing when a bunch of illiterate goat herders stole all our military gear and chased us out of Afghanistan last year.
00:01:00.320And yes, it's not a great look that neither American political party reliably trusts the results of our elections.
00:01:09.040And okay, fine, it is unfortunate that we no longer have a functioning national border and that violent crime is surging from coast to coast
00:01:16.940and that our population is literally dying through drugs and suicide and sterility with no end in sight.
00:01:24.600But, but, Putin should not mistake any of those problems for Western weakness.
00:01:31.940No, sir, just look at our next generation of leaders.
00:01:36.780I'm talking about the Ivy League, where over the weekend, a young swimmer performed dazzling, record-breaking, historic feats of athleticism
00:01:47.000at the Women's Swimming and Diving Championships.
00:01:51.340There, a young woman whose birth certificate reads Will Thomas won the 100-yard freestyle, the 200-yard freestyle,
00:02:01.160and the 500-yard freestyle, setting five individual records and pushing all the other gals on Penn's 400 relay team to set a pool record.
00:02:12.540Yes, just one look at Will Thomas' maidenly Adam's apple shimmering as she glided toward the finish line
00:02:22.280should send a shiver down Vladimir Putin's spine.
00:02:25.380The way that her hulking, feminine shoulders plowed through the water, easily overtaking the other young ladies,
00:02:33.380should strike fear in the heart of Russia's leader.
00:09:07.720Vladimir Putin wants to recreate something akin to historical Russia.
00:09:11.860Whether you call that the Soviet Union, whether you call that the Tsarist Russian Empire, whatever.
00:09:16.560He wants Russia to be bigger and more powerful than it is today.
00:09:21.420Vladimir Putin famously said that the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the greatest geopolitical tragedy, catastrophe of the 20th century.
00:09:32.940So he wants to make Russia bigger and more powerful.
00:10:08.840For those of you who remember your 8th or 9th grade history class, George Kennan wrote the X telegram, the long telegram in which he called out the Soviet Union, warned of the threats of the Soviet Union.
00:10:20.420He's the author of the strategy of containment, the main strategy of the Cold War.
00:10:25.560And George Kennan had this to say about what happens to NATO after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
00:10:33.960The view is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.
00:10:42.720Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western, and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion,
00:10:50.100to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy, to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations,
00:10:56.980and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.
00:11:01.640And last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma's ratification of the START II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry.
00:11:11.540He's saying if you expand NATO, some hawks in America think that they're going to put the West in a much better position vis-a-vis Russia.
00:11:19.560Actually, it will have the opposite effect.
00:11:21.240Actually, Russia's going to view that as a major aggression, and they're going to get much more militaristic in response.
00:11:33.180Why would Russia expect, okay, sure, George Kennan and some other, Pat Moynihan, lots of other strong voices on the Cold War,
00:11:41.060they were saying don't expand NATO, but why should Russia expect that that's going to be the national policy?
00:11:45.540Well, Der Spiegel, the German newspaper, just dug this up.
00:11:48.620Der Spiegel just dug up a document from 1991 in which the West promised Russia that they would not expand NATO eastward.
00:11:56.340So, this was, if not official policy, this was the understanding at the collapse of the Soviet Union.
00:12:04.740All of which is to say, the complication here, the situation here rather, is much more complicated than anybody is really giving it credit for.
00:12:15.300Certainly Putin, who's just making his case for war, and even the West.
00:12:19.020And not every single historical event is Hitler invading Czechoslovakia.
00:12:25.100Not every single world leader that we don't like is Adolf Hitler.
00:12:28.520Not every single epoch that we can live through is 1930s or 1940s Germany, okay?
00:12:35.160You think about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
00:12:36.700Part of the reason we got a Cuban Missile Crisis is because the United States botched their policy vis-Ã -vis the Soviet Union in Cuba and in Turkey, putting missiles there.
00:12:46.100So, for those who do want to preserve the peace, it's going to take a lot more than just bang, bang, bang, Putin bad, NATO good, expand, expand, expand.
00:12:53.700You're going to have to recognize some of the legitimate questions that our enemies have and try to answer those with incentives rather than merely saying, rah, rah, let's go to war in Ukraine.
00:13:05.000Now, when you want complicated views of all sorts of questions, I would strongly recommend you tune into the Jordan Harbinger Show.
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00:13:41.580Without fail, he pulls out tactical bits of wisdom in each episode, all with the intent to make you a more informed, critical thinker to better operate in today's world.
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00:14:17.880Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelical preacher Billy Graham, got into a lot of trouble.
00:14:25.160He got into a lot of trouble over this Putin-Russia issue for one tweet.
00:14:30.460He said, pray for President Putin today. This may sound like a strange request, but we need to pray that God would work in his heart so that war could be avoided at all cost.
00:14:40.500May God give wisdom to the leaders involved in these talks and negotiations as well as those advising them.
00:14:48.140And what do you think happened? It was the same old thing.
00:14:49.960Same old thing we've heard from the left for five years now.
00:14:52.980He, the right wing in America, they're Russia files, they're Putin stooges.
00:14:59.040Can you believe this Christian preacher is telling his congregation to pray for their enemies?
00:15:08.740He probably got it out of a KGB handbook or he got it out of the Holy Gospel, right?
00:15:13.120That's where these people, these people criticizing Franklin Graham and American conservatives and Christians generally are demonstrating that they do not know the first thing, even the most basic thing about Christianity.
00:15:33.760One of the most basic aspects of Christianity is that we pray for our enemies.
00:15:44.120This is, we get this from the mouth of Christ himself.
00:15:48.480But our critics, our opponents, our enemies even, they don't get it.
00:15:56.220I guess this is the theme that I'm seeing when I look at the Ivy League and that hulking dude setting all these new women's records and I look at the situation in Ukraine right now and I look at domestic politics in the United States and the battle between the left and the right.
00:16:10.860My main takeaway is, man, when did we get this dumb?
00:16:15.320I don't mean it as a perennial throw your hands in the air.
00:18:04.220There's a reason why Vladimir Putin did not go and invade any other countries when Trump was president.
00:18:09.660It's because he didn't know what Trump would do, and he had an inkling that Trump, especially because Trump had cultivated this unpredictable kind of foreign policy.
00:18:18.860Vladimir Putin said, you know, I don't think, maybe I'm not going to do that.
00:18:21.880With Obama, he knew that Obama was going to let him take the countries.
00:18:27.120He was caught on a hot mic speaking to Vladimir Putin's number two, Dmitry Medvedev.
00:18:32.380He was caught on an open mic at a public conference in which he said, listen, I'm going to have a little bit more flexibility after my next election.
00:18:41.240I'm going to have a little more flexibility after that.
00:18:43.100And Dmitry Medvedev, like a cartoon villain, Boris and Natasha out of Rocky and Bullwinkle, he says, I will transmit this information to Vladimir.
00:21:29.580When we're not, we atrophy and we go crazy.
00:21:32.140But this is the freedom that the left is promising you.
00:21:35.040Sometimes the American right simplifies things too much.
00:21:38.340We say that the difference between the way the left talks about freedom and the way the right talks about freedom is that the right talks about freedom from things.
00:21:47.160Freedom from coercion, freedom from tyranny, freedom from this, from that.
00:21:51.780And the left talks about positive freedoms.
00:21:54.060They talk about freedom to healthcare, freedom to Obama phones, freedom to crack pipes if you're in the Biden administration, right?
00:22:22.640It gets down to this fundamental misunderstanding of freedom that we've been talking about on this show since I came out with my book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which became a number one national bestseller because of all of you buying it, which I appreciate.
00:22:32.580The issue here is that the left thinks that freedom means just doing whatever you want whenever you want to do it.
00:22:40.840The left thinks that freedom is kids getting to go play Xbox when they get home instead of having to cultivate their minds and be productive.
00:22:51.580The crack pipes from the Biden administration proved this a couple weeks ago.
00:22:55.380So sitting around smoking crack, sitting around just indulging your own appetites, indulging your basest appetites, and not cultivating your higher, more rational will, that's not freedom.
00:23:31.500This isn't some radical point of view.
00:23:33.460Everyone agreed on this until about 50 years ago, and then our culture got really, really stupid.
00:23:38.680Leftist radicals took over the institutions of power.
00:23:41.980They specifically went after education, and they hollowed it out.
00:23:45.320They hollowed out the education that you are getting today, whether you're talking about elementary school, high school, university, certainly.
00:23:53.020The education is not comparable to what people got 50, 60 years ago.
00:24:00.200You don't know a damn thing about philosophy.
00:24:01.880We don't even treat philosophy like it's real anymore, like it's the best way of living, like it's something that can tell you what's true and false and good and bad.
00:24:08.740We just treat it as some weird historical fact.
00:24:16.700But instead of that, instead of being given a true, rigorous, philosophical, liberal education, you're being taught that white people are evil because of the color of their skin, and that men are actually women.
00:24:26.120And we're dumb, and it's weakening us, and it's no surprise that our enemies are taking advantage.
00:24:32.780It's enough to get your blood flowing, get you really, really tense.
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00:26:13.740That's why we are exposing just who is destroying American institutions and why.
00:26:17.540There are a lot of answers to this question.
00:26:18.920One of them in particular will be shown on this Daily Wire series, The Enemy Within.
00:26:22.980It began streaming exclusively at the Daily Wire last week and features acclaimed journalist and expert in national threats, Lee Smith, as he uncovers a political coup orchestrated by America's ruling elites to generate their own wealth and power at the expense of the American people's safety and freedom.
00:26:57.560However, the most significant threat comes from within.
00:27:01.400You're trying to obscure responsibility for four million people dying around the world.
00:27:06.360Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about.
00:27:09.620We've already seen evidence of how the elites want to run the United States.
00:27:15.240They're modeling themselves after Chinese autocracy.
00:27:18.480For over a decade, the People's Republic of China has stood publicly accused of acts of cruelty and wickedness that match the cruelty and wickedness of many evil torturers and executioners.
00:27:36.060Diane Feinstein had a Chinese spy as her driver for 20 years.
00:27:42.740We're not talking about one person infiltrating senior levels at the CIA or the White House.
00:27:49.280We're talking about an entire elite class throughout the political, corporate, academic, cultural, and media establishment.