The Charlie Kirk Show - You’re Being Lied to About Ukraine & Russia | The Truth—with Pedro Gonzalez
Aired: 2022-03-05
Duration: 33:06


=== Ukraine Government Disinformation (02:15) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey, everybody.
[00:00:00]  On this advertiser-free episode, we have Pedro Gonzalez.
[00:00:03]  He goes deep into the Ukraine disinformation campaign.
[00:00:08]  Now, if you are sympathetic to the Ukrainians, you should be sympathetic to the Ukrainian people.
[00:00:13]  I'm right there with you.
[00:00:14]  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]  I'm by no means trying to say that Putin is in the right.
[00:00:24]  Putin is evil for what he has done.
[00:00:26]  We make that point multiple times through this podcast.
[00:00:29]  But the way you look at the Ukrainian government is also really important.
[00:00:32]  And Pedro makes that case, I think, better than anybody else in a factual, largely uninterrupted way.
[00:00:38]  I kind of just listen and take notes.
[00:00:40]  He does a tremendous job.
[00:00:41]  Get involved with TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com.
[00:00:44]  That's tpusa.com.
[00:00:45]  Start a high school or college chapter today at tpusa.com.
[00:00:50]  At Turning Point USA, we have our hundreds of staff people every single day that are helping save the country through high school chapters, college chapters, through digital media productions, through everything that we are doing.
[00:00:59]  You guys can help us out at tpusa.com.
[00:01:02]  CharlieKirk.com/slash support is where you can support our program.
[00:01:05]  We have no advertisers on this program.
[00:01:07]  So get behind us if you can.
[00:01:08]  I want to thank some of our supporters.
[00:01:10]  No pressure, of course, but if you've been blessed by this episode or by this program, help us out.
[00:01:15]  Kenneth from New York, thank you.
[00:01:16]  Joshua from California, thank you.
[00:01:18]  Shelly from Massachusetts, thank you.
[00:01:19]  Sam from Idaho, thank you.
[00:01:20]  Deborah from Washington and Susan Lynn from Montana.
[00:01:23]  Thank you guys so much.
[00:01:24]  Pedro Gonzalez is here for a comprehensive, thought-provoking, and important episode.
[00:01:29]  Buckle up.
[00:01:29]  Here we go.
[00:01:30]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:01:32]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:01:34]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:01:37]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:01:40]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:01:41]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:01:42]  His spirit, his love of this country.
[00:01:44]  He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
[00:01:49]  Turning point USA.
[00:01:51]  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]  That's why we are here.
[00:02:03]  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.

=== Viral Propanda and Truth (13:21) ===

[00:02:16]  They have been misrepresenting things intentionally.
[00:02:19]  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]  It's Pedro Gonzalez.
[00:02:27]  Pedro, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:02:29]  Hey, Charlie, thanks for having me back.
[00:02:31]  Of course.
[00:02:32]  All right.
[00:02:32]  Tell us about your Twitter feed and we'll go from there.
[00:02:35]  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.
[00:02:45]  A lot of this stuff actually comes straight from the president of Ukraine himself, Zelensky, and his officials.
[00:02:53]  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]  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]  But the purpose of them is to get the United States and NATO into a broader conflict.
[00:03:27]  And this would essentially be World War III, except between countries with nuclear weapons.
[00:03:34]  So there's a real reason and a real interest in pushing back on this.
[00:03:39]  Not pro-Russia.
[00:03:40]  I'm not pro-Ukraine.
[00:03:41]  I'm pro-America.
[00:03:43]  And anyone who threatens the American national interest, I don't care if they've been sanctified by the media.
[00:03:49]  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]  But anyone who threatens the American interest is going to have my full attention.
[00:04:03]  So probably one of the most viral stories that came out first was The Ghost of Kiev.
[00:04:09]  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]  The story went totally viral.
[00:04:18]  It was shared by Dan Crenshaw and Adam Kinzinger.
[00:04:22]  It's fake.
[00:04:23]  There's no evidence that this guy existed.
[00:04:26]  But incredibly, you didn't just have congressmen sharing the story about this.
[00:04:30]  You had the media actually defending the fact that it was fake.
[00:04:33]  Military.com defended the myth of the ghost of Kiev.
[00:04:37]  In other words, a U.S.-based military publication defended foreign propaganda.
[00:04:43]  Another one that went really viral was the story of Snake Island.
[00:04:47]  Supposedly, Ukrainians on this military installation were killed to a man by a Russian warship.
[00:04:54]  And it was framed in a way that, on the one hand, it made the Ukrainians look like they were at the Alamo.
[00:04:58]  On the other hand, it was designed to make us want to get into it, right?
[00:05:03]  Because these inhuman savages had killed these soldiers who were essentially vulnerable and prepared to surrender.
[00:05:12]  And Zelensky himself promoted it as if it was true.
[00:05:16]  He used their funeral as a kind of propaganda item.
[00:05:19]  But it turns out that those soldiers surrendered.
[00:05:23]  They were captured.
[00:05:24]  They were given food, water.
[00:05:26]  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]  Another one that you may have seen was about Miss Ukraine supposedly on the front lines.
[00:05:43]  There's a picture of her that went really viral.
[00:05:45]  She's wearing body armor and has a rifle.
[00:05:46]  It's an airsoft rifle.
[00:05:48]  And the picture is old.
[00:05:50]  It's a rifle that shoots plastic BBs.
[00:05:53]  And you had verified journalists sharing it.
[00:05:56]  Again, the point of that is to get us involved.
[00:05:58]  We have to go protect women, right?
[00:06:00]  All this stuff pulls at important heartstrings.
[00:06:04]  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]  Because again, it was like the thermopoly moment, right?
[00:06:16]  Totally fake.
[00:06:17]  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]  It showed what they claimed was video footage of a Ukrainian fighter jet shooting down Russians.
[00:06:33]  It was video game footage.
[00:06:35]  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]  And it got like a million views.
[00:06:44]  It's still online.
[00:06:45]  I checked.
[00:06:46]  I can't believe it.
[00:06:46]  It's actually still online.
[00:06:49]  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]  He needs ammunition, not a ride.
[00:06:58]  Totally fake.
[00:06:59]  The pictures are from, they're from months or years ago.
[00:07:02]  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]  They're not from this war.
[00:07:11]  They're from before the conflict.
[00:07:13]  There's actually so many of these, it's hard to keep track of them.
[00:07:16]  And a lot of them are actually promoted by Zelensky himself.
[00:07:18]  Another really egregious one was Zelensky claimed that the Russians were deliberately shelling a Jewish memorial site.
[00:07:25]  It's an area that has been set up to commemorate the Jewish victims of the Nazis in World War II.
[00:07:32]  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]  It's not just that they didn't shell it.
[00:07:43]  Sorry, it's not just that it was kind of damaged and ruffled.
[00:07:46]  According to this journalist who was on the ground that took pictures, he said, it has literally been untouched.
[00:07:51]  According to Zelensky, it was being destroyed.
[00:07:55]  And when he tweeted about it, he basically said that this is the next Holocaust.
[00:08:00]  Again, trying to get us involved and morally blackmailing us.
[00:08:04]  If you don't get involved, you're complicit in the next Holocaust.
[00:08:08]  That is moral blackmail about something that is really important.
[00:08:13]  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]  I'm explaining how these narratives are set up.
[00:08:26]  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]  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.
[00:08:52]  This is what they said.
[00:08:54]  And everyone knows that a no-fly zone would be an act of war.
[00:08:57]  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]  Totally fake.
[00:09:07]  Yes, there was fighting near the facility and an administrative building got hit.
[00:09:12]  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]  It was non-operational.
[00:09:23]  It was being worked on.
[00:09:24]  It was under renovation, not online, not a threat.
[00:09:26]  As a result of the shelling, there was a fire in there, but it was extinguished.
[00:09:30]  And this is important.
[00:09:31]  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]  Radiation levels never went up.
[00:09:41]  The fires were put out.
[00:09:43]  The Russians took control of it and everything's fine.
[00:09:46]  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]  And the implications are obvious.
[00:10:02]  Do not share this obvious lie that could lead to catastrophic escalation of this conflict.
[00:10:08]  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]  There was never any threat of nuclear terrorism, but people were, it scared the life out of people.
[00:10:23]  And again, verified journalists were sharing it like it was true.
[00:10:26]  And all of this stuff is designed to get us into this conflict.
[00:10:30]  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]  And it's not going to be until it's too late that the science has changed.
[00:10:46]  Oh, we realize we made a lot of bad choices based on emotion and fear.
[00:10:51]  And it's not until afterwards, all of a sudden it gets not just fact-checked, but the truth comes out.
[00:10:57]  That was a really comprehensive rundown.
[00:10:59]  Pedro, you had another one.
[00:11:00]  You wanted to add to the list.
[00:11:02]  Right.
[00:11:02]  Again, there are so many, it's hard to keep track.
[00:11:04]  And I'm probably missing a whole lot.
[00:11:07]  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]  It was a Palestinian girl yelling at an IDF soldier in the desert.
[00:11:27]  And the video was several years old.
[00:11:29]  And people ate it up.
[00:11:30]  It's again, I've never seen anything like this.
[00:11:32]  And it's like, it's not just that they go viral.
[00:11:36]  It's that people want to believe them.
[00:11:38]  And when you prove that they're not real, people get mad at you.
[00:11:42]  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]  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]  So, Pedro, let me ask you something, and it might be a little devil's advocate for the sake of conversation.
[00:12:13]  I mean, your country's being invaded, you're being shell-shocked.
[00:12:15]  Wouldn't you push out propaganda if you're the Ukrainian government?
[00:12:19]  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]  I think the latter is true.
[00:12:28]  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]  Yes, but this is different.
[00:12:45]  Again, I have never seen anything like this where the propaganda is, on one hand, so obviously fake.
[00:12:50]  And on the other hand, the implications of it, if we buy into it, are absolutely cat.
[00:12:56]  Like, you want to talk about civilian casualties?
[00:12:59]  What do you think World War III would do?
[00:13:01]  What do you think a nuclear world war would do?
[00:13:05]  It's unimaginable.
[00:13:07]  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]  I mean, what happened to all the fact-checkers, right?
[00:13:22]  What happened to the Pinocchios at Washington Post?
[00:13:24]  What happened to all these people?
[00:13:26]  They're either like they've just magically disappeared.
[00:13:30]  Some of them are still trying to do this.
[00:13:32]  Like, obviously, I've relied in some cases on the Associated Press, on Reuters.
[00:13:36]  I specifically look for reports coming from on the ground because those are probably going to be your best bet.
[00:13:42]  But like, the amount of work that I have to do to verify stuff is insane.
[00:13:47]  Another one was this building that got shelled in Kharkiv.
[00:13:50]  And the media framed it as a civilian target is being shelled indiscriminately.
[00:13:56]  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.
[00:14:05]  These people are really nasty.
[00:14:07]  I mean, you can be pro-Ukraine, but if you, I mean, look into Azov yourself and you'll see exactly what I mean.
[00:14:13]  Like, these people are notorious for committing war crimes.
[00:14:15]  And they actually use that building, a regional administrative building in Kharkiv, as a base of operations.
[00:14:21]  No one talked about it in the media.
[00:14:23]  It was just, you know, barbarians killing civilians indiscriminately.
[00:14:27]  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.
[00:14:42]  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.
[00:14:57]  Like, okay, well, the Zelensky government is doing exactly that.
[00:15:02]  And not only are you falling for it, okay, it's fine to fall for it.
[00:15:07]  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]  Like, I didn't dive that deep into it.
[00:15:12]  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]  But then you promote it, you don't fact check it.
[00:15:20]  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]  And these narratives build on each other, right?
[00:15:30]  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?

=== The Clinton-Pinchuk Connection (14:45) ===

[00:15:37]  And I just looked through my friends on Instagram.
[00:15:39]  Hundreds of them liked it and shared it.
[00:15:41]  So, Pedro, I want to ask you the question.
[00:15:43]  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]  Yeah.
[00:15:53]  Well, it's actually too much for just this segment, but I think I can give you an illustrative example.
[00:15:59]  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]  But I'm going to focus on one example that kind of encapsulates how Ukraine is not actually a beacon.
[00:16:21]  Surprise, it's not actually a beacon for freedom and democracy.
[00:16:25]  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]  So in 2015, the Wall Street Journal published an analysis of disclosures from the Clinton Foundation.
[00:16:42]  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]  And what they found was, is that the top source of these foreign individual donations was Ukraine.
[00:17:03]  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]  He's a Ukrainian oligarch.
[00:17:17]  He served in the Ukrainian parliament, very well-connected guy, pretty powerful.
[00:17:22]  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]  So how did he meet the Clintons and start donating to their charities?
[00:17:46]  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]  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]  And again, this is reported in the Wall Street Journal.
[00:18:23]  It's reported in the Kiev Post.
[00:18:25]  Anybody can go look at it and verify it.
[00:18:28]  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]  Again, all of this stuff is just in the open.
[00:18:44]  You can go.
[00:18:46]  Yeah, I'm sorry.
[00:18:47]  I want to verify that.
[00:18:48]  Doug Schoen was a registered lobbyist for Pinchook at the time that all this was happening.
[00:18:52]  And there's FARA documents that show all this, the Foreign Agent Registration Act.
[00:18:55]  It's all there.
[00:18:56]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:18:57]  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]  There's so many lies.
[00:19:05]  Yes.
[00:19:06]  And lie by omission, I think, is the worst thing that we're seeing.
[00:19:09]  People are just conveniently leaving out these connections, right?
[00:19:12]  And this is the world that Zelensky comes from.
[00:19:14]  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.
[00:19:30]  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]  There was a revolution.
[00:19:39]  It culminated in 2014 that resulted in a change of government, basically.
[00:19:44]  A government that was, the government that replaced it was selected, cultivated by the Obama administration.
[00:19:49]  But anyways, you can connect oligarchs between people like Victoria Noland, the Clintons, and Zelensky.
[00:19:58]  And this is not unusual at all.
[00:20:00]  This is actually just how Ukraine works.
[00:20:02]  Zelensky himself has said that he's an anti-corruption guy, that he campaigned as the anti-corruption president.
[00:20:09]  He's going to set Ukraine straight.
[00:20:11]  Totally false.
[00:20:13]  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]  He's involved in all these offshore networks, that he's just as corrupt as all of his predecessors.
[00:20:25]  And he doesn't really hide this.
[00:20:27]  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]  This is reported in the Kiev Post.
[00:20:41]  It's all in the open.
[00:20:42]  This is not someone who has the best interests of Ukrainian civilians in mind.
[00:20:47]  This is someone who is really just representing the interests of his donors, of his backers, of these oligarchs.
[00:20:54]  And that's just the reality of it.
[00:20:55]  And that's why I've likened him to basically the Fauci of world leaders.
[00:20:59]  He's a media creation.
[00:21:01]  He's someone that has been invented by the media.
[00:21:04]  Ironically, he's an actor, too.
[00:21:05]  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]  But all you have to do is just look a little bit beneath the surface.
[00:21:13]  And it turns out this guy is just a typically corrupt Ukrainian politician.
[00:21:19]  So there was a democratically elected leader of Ukraine and then Zelensky kind of pops up.
[00:21:24]  Some called it a coup.
[00:21:25]  I'm not really sure if that's right, but I guess it does beg the question, though.
[00:21:29]  Eastern Ukraine is very Russian.
[00:21:32]  Western Ukraine is separate than Eastern Ukraine.
[00:21:35]  Some called the implementation of Zelensky a color revolution.
[00:21:39]  Some allege that the CIA was involved in that.
[00:21:41]  Can you help us walk us through that?
[00:21:44]  Yeah.
[00:21:44]  So I'm actually publishing a story on this later today.
[00:21:49]  There's tons of evidence.
[00:21:51]  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]  But basically, in 2013, it goes further back than that, but I'll give you kind of the flashpoints.
[00:22:08]  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]  The EU makes him a deal.
[00:22:18]  It's a trade deal.
[00:22:19]  He mistakes it as a kind of invitation to join the EU.
[00:22:23]  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]  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]  So Russia made Ukraine a counteroffer, really an ultimatum.
[00:22:52]  Take $15 billion in aid, or I'm going to hit you with sanctions.
[00:22:57]  And so the president at the time sided with Russia on this.
[00:23:02]  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]  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]  So this guy, again, was kind of, he was kind of a neutralist that played all sides.
[00:23:27]  So in 2013, you start getting, in late 2013, you start getting these protests.
[00:23:31]  And right around the time they start, Victoria Noland is seen photographed.
[00:23:36]  She's photo.
[00:23:37]  There's an article in the Christian Science Monitor that actually has a picture of her.
[00:23:40]  She's photographed handing out cookies to protesters right after she has a talk with this soon-to-be deposed president.
[00:23:47]  And she's just, she has a bag of, I think, cookies and bread, and she's just handing them out.
[00:23:51]  Like, that's totally normal, right?
[00:23:53]  And by early 2014, he's out of office.
[00:23:57]  And there's this infamous phone call where Victoria is talking to a diplomat.
[00:24:04]  And on the one hand, they're talking about how they've selected this really weird, right?
[00:24:10]  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]  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]  That is how these people operate.
[00:24:30]  They're totally ruthless.
[00:24:31]  They're in the open.
[00:24:32]  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]  This is Russian missing from a campaign to make the United States basically make this like the administrative state look bad.
[00:24:48]  They didn't even deny that it happened.
[00:24:49]  They just said, well, it was taken out of context.
[00:24:51]  And there's a lot more that actually shows that this whole thing was orchestrated.
[00:24:55]  It goes way back.
[00:24:58]  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]  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]  You guys say you donate money to civil society organizations in foreign countries.
[00:25:17]  What does that actually mean?
[00:25:18]  And his name is Alan Weinstein.
[00:25:20]  It was in an article for the New York Review of Books.
[00:25:23]  He just says candidly, well, we do what we do, what the CIA used to do covertly 25 years ago.
[00:25:29]  In other words, regime change.
[00:25:31]  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]  No one seems to kind of want to connect these dots in the mainstream.
[00:25:45]  I mean, some people do.
[00:25:46]  But again, all this is dismissed as conspiracy.
[00:25:48]  The United States, certainly not Hillary Clinton and the neoconservatives, would ever do something like this.
[00:25:55]  Only other people, like whatever, name a government, name a corrupt government.
[00:25:59]  Only they do the argument.
[00:26:00]  Only Putin does stuff like that.
[00:26:02]  Right.
[00:26:02]  Exactly.
[00:26:03]  Yeah.
[00:26:03]  Well, name anybody, right?
[00:26:04]  But here's, I think here's the really important part.
[00:26:09]  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]  By the time Putin invaded this year, more than 14,000 people had already been killed.
[00:26:27]  Because what happened was the Russians in eastern Ukraine saw it as basically a coup.
[00:26:32]  Again, I'm arguing that it was.
[00:26:35]  And so they decided, well, we're separatists now.
[00:26:38]  This government does not represent us.
[00:26:40]  And so it triggered a civil war between pro-Ukrainian government forces and anti-Ukrainian government forces.
[00:26:46]  Both sides have committed war crimes against each other.
[00:26:48]  It's horrendous.
[00:26:49]  Again, more than 14,000 people have been killed to date.
[00:26:52]  That event in 2014 also made Ukraine the poorest.
[00:26:55]  It certainly didn't help.
[00:26:57]  It flattened Ukraine's economy.
[00:26:59]  Today it's the poorest country in Europe.
[00:27:01]  This is democracy, according to Victoria Nolan and Hillary Clinton and the neoconservatives, the liberal interventionists.
[00:27:08]  That is what democracy looks like to these people.
[00:27:11]  And the ones that are caught in the middle of this that suffer the most are Ukrainian civilians.
[00:27:16]  That's exactly right.
[00:27:17]  Like they're the ones that are dying.
[00:27:18]  They're the ones that are starving.
[00:27:19]  They're the ones that are fleeing.
[00:27:21]  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]  We're basically just treating us, we're treating symptoms.
[00:27:34]  We're not treating the cause.
[00:27:35]  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]  Like, what's the psychology behind that?
[00:27:46]  I'm not quite sure.
[00:27:47]  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]  But I think it's important to kind of step out and see what the problem is.
[00:28:05]  We like things black and white, good versus evil.
[00:28:08]  But in this, every player on the level of state is dirty.
[00:28:13]  Yes.
[00:28:14]  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]  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]  COVID was kind of an example of this, right?
[00:28:46]  No, I mean, it's actually closer to the George Floyd thing.
[00:28:48]  I have to say, they want to invoke a response.
[00:28:51]  And I mean, it's almost closer to that, right?
[00:28:53]  Like single moment, you're either with BLM or against BLM, black and white.
[00:28:57]  But with either COVID or BLM, you still had like a healthy early resistance from conservatives.
[00:29:03]  With Ukraine, no.
[00:29:06]  Again, Ukraine, the narrative around Ukraine, around the government as a beacon of democracy, around Zelensky as a paragon.
[00:29:15]  That, I have never seen that before.
[00:29:17]  Conservatives and liberals overnight were totally united on the establishment's consensus.
[00:29:23]  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]  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]  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]  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]  You've got like verified, again, there's so many, it's hard to name them.
[00:30:15]  You've got verified people on Twitter, blue checks, talking about killing civilians in Russia.

=== Calling Out Mass Murder (02:43) ===

[00:30:23]  And no one thinks this is a problem.
[00:30:25]  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.
[00:30:32]  You're a Putin puppet.
[00:30:33]  Like, yeah, okay.
[00:30:34]  When we get off this call, I'm actually want to do a story about this.
[00:30:36]  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]  You should.
[00:30:43]  Because really, I want to know, like, does your, does your university endorse this?
[00:30:49]  And one of the guys, I can't remember his name at the moment, another verified account.
[00:30:53]  He's, I think he's an ethics professor.
[00:30:55]  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]  An ethics professor.
[00:31:03]  These people are insane.
[00:31:04]  And it's terrifying because that we're thousands of miles removed from that.
[00:31:09]  And that's what we're talking about it.
[00:31:11]  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]  Russia House in Washington, I think in DC, I think it's a restaurant.
[00:31:26]  Sorry, a lot of I thinks here.
[00:31:28]  But the point is, is that it was smashed up.
[00:31:30]  That's right.
[00:31:33]  The police reported that there was anti-graffiti inside the building after it got smashed up.
[00:31:38]  This is in America.
[00:31:39]  Like Anastasia just got pulled.
[00:31:42]  Did you see that story?
[00:31:43]  No, I saw it.
[00:31:43]  I mean, it's, but yeah, we're not a serious country.
[00:31:46]  I mean, what's next?
[00:31:47]  Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, probably.
[00:31:49]  Like, that's where I'm going to be.
[00:31:50]  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]  Honestly, I'm not sure if it was a joke or not.
[00:31:59]  Now that Disney has actually taken action against its own, like its own films.
[00:32:04]  Yeah, the Gulag archipelago is a big threat.
[00:32:06]  Actually, it is a big threat to the regime.
[00:32:08]  But I just want to thank you for your work on this.
[00:32:10]  It's phenomenal research.
[00:32:11]  This hour has been really comprehensive and like not the typical stuff you hear on TV.
[00:32:16]  It's like deep, it's analytical, and it's important.
[00:32:19]  And I want to just make this very clear.
[00:32:20]  We're not supporting Putin, obviously.
[00:32:22]  That's not what we're saying.
[00:32:23]  We're adding nuance to a conversation that has become so unnecessarily black and white.
[00:32:28]  As Mitt Romney said, quote, we've never seen good versus evil as clearly defined as we see right now.
[00:32:33]  What a ridiculous thing to say.
[00:32:35]  And I think your work is doing a lot to enlighten people so we can make prudent decisions.
[00:32:38]  Pedro, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:32:40]  Check him out on Substack, Pedro Gonzalez, and also the Chronicles magazine.
[00:32:44]  Thank you, Pedro.
[00:32:44]  Thank you, Charlie.
[00:32:45]  Appreciate it.
[00:32:48]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:32:49]  Email us your thoughts.
[00:32:50]  As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:32:52]  If you want to support our show, go to charliekirk.com slash support.
[00:32:56]  Make sure you're subscribed to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.
[00:32:58]  Thanks so much for listening.
[00:32:59]  God bless.
[00:33:02]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.