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March 11, 2022 - The Charlie Kirk Show
36:22
Will China Take Taiwan Next?
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Strength in Negotiating with Iran 00:10:26
Hey, everybody.
Will China take Taiwan next?
Also, what's going on with religious freedom across the world?
Johnny Moore and Joshua Phillip join us for a very thought-provoking, important episode about geopolitics and international affairs.
You can email me your thoughts as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.
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Johnny Moore from Kairos PR, Public Relations, that right?
Just right?
Yep.
Kairos means action in the Bible, right?
It's a time moment of action of time.
It's a Greek word.
It means the intersection of time and opportunity.
It's all throughout Mark.
There's that word.
Through the whole line.
Kairos.
So, Johnny, thank you for joining us.
So you're kind of an expert on international religious freedom, and you also have been following what's happening in Vienna right now with the Iran deal, where the Russians are kind of like the intermediaries.
Is that right?
Yeah, I don't think Americans really realize what's going on in Vienna.
I mean, stop to think that while all of this is happening in Ukraine, the deputy foreign minister of Russia has been negotiating what they say is going back into the Iran deal.
It's actually a whole different deal altogether.
But it's not even a negotiation, Charlie.
The Americans haven't even met with the Iranians.
They meet with the Russians.
The Russians go talk to the Chinese and the Iranians.
They go back to the Americans.
They tell the Americans back and forth.
It's a gigantic charade.
It's a disaster.
People don't really realize how catastrophic this is.
So the first Iran deal was really bad.
They said it tried to the way that the Obama regime spinned it, spun it, whatever, was that they were saying that this prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but we know that wasn't true.
Trump canceled it.
What is this deal?
Yeah, and what the Biden administration said, because by the way, the deal wouldn't have even gotten a vote in the Democrat-controlled Congress.
It was so, so unpopular.
So in order to get this moving, President Biden said, well, look, we'll go into the old deal and we'll have a longer, stronger deal.
Congress, Democrat-controlled Congress didn't even believe the president.
So in the last year, they passed a bill that requires that the negotiating team submit what they're talking about to Congress.
Biden's ignoring all of it.
The White House is ignoring all of it.
Yeah, and what we understand about this deal is that it relieves, they've been relieving a lot of sanctions on Iran, but they basically relieve the rest of them.
They take sanctions off of all these terrorists, including the people responsible for the bombing of the Jewish community 30 years ago in Argentina.
They actually may even take the Revolutionary Guard off the terrorist list.
The IRG, right?
The IRGC, you know, that was led by Silamani.
And so what will happen, okay, if this deal passes, we're going to see more terrorism from Iran.
We're going to see Iran kidnap more Americans.
Going to see the Middle East at the first moment where we actually have peace in a generation inflamed again with Iranian terrorism.
It's unbelievable.
Yeah, that's very logical way to look at it.
Of course, we don't have logical, rational people running the country.
So let me ask you something.
You said it doesn't have to go through Senate approval because this was something that Senator Alexander tried to force the hand of, if I remember correctly, back during Obama, and it ended up not mattering at all.
Is that correct?
Or well, but the treaties are supposed to be ratified by the Senate.
That's in the Constitution.
Technically, it's not a treaty.
The Iranians want it to be a treaty because they're telling the Biden administration, we want a guarantee that the Americans can't break this deal anymore.
But right now, one of the biggest critics of the Iran deal in Congress is Bob Menendez from New Jersey.
Yeah, it's not just Ted Cruz.
It's Bob.
Well, how about Schumer?
Schumer came out against the Iran deal, but that was a horse trading vote way back, right?
Is that correct?
Yeah, yes.
I mean, no, he was vocally against the Iran deal.
And this is, you know, Menendez is quite loud.
Schumer's totally, totally quiet on it, which is really, which isn't matter.
They can do it.
Since it's not a treaty, what is it?
An agreement?
Is that what it's like?
It's an agreement.
I mean, this is why President Trump could cancel it when he did cancel it.
And, you know, this is a really, it's a really awful, awful situation.
Yes, but one of the things that the Iranians say, who I don't trust the Iranian regime at all, is they just want it for nuclear power.
Just kind of walk us through how preposterous that is.
Well, I mean, this deal, what the Iranians have been doing is they've been sort of like extending the negotiation so they could accelerate the enrichment of Iranians.
So they're really good negotiators.
The Iranians are brilliant negotiators.
They run a hard bargain.
They're working really, really hard to do this.
And they're running circles around the Biden administration.
I mean, you can negotiate a deal with Iran, but you have to do it with strength.
And just like in the Russia-Ukraine situation, you know, what the spark that could ignite a third world war is not a MIG plane from Poland and Ukraine.
It's American weakness.
The United States isn't a weak country.
We're the wealthiest, strongest country in the world, but we're projecting an enormous amount of weakness.
And the Iranians are running circles around us at the negotiating table, if you can even call it that, as Americans sit in a hotel down the road with the Russian deputy foreign minister shuffling back and forth between them.
Right.
So let me ask you, Johnny, as we look at the international state of affairs with Iran and Russia and Ukraine, it seems like all these things are very tied together, right?
It seems as if one could impact the other significantly.
And yet I'm not seeing a lot of media coverage of the Iran deal at all, this new Iranian deal.
Why is that?
Well, look, I mean, I think there are lots of reasons for it.
The primary reason why people aren't paying attention to it is there's so many fires around the world, you know, as it is.
But, you know, the reporting was from Vienna because the deputy foreign minister of Iran spoke to the Iranian press, bragging in English, I might say, about how the Iranians had out-negotiated everyone else at the table.
They'd fought for every comma, every period, and quote, got far more than even he imagined that they would get.
So in the middle of this Ukraine-Russia crisis, the administration has been trying to potentially get Iranian oil back on the market.
It was widely reported that they sent negotiators to Maduro in Venezuela.
It would be very hard to get Venezuelan oil back on the market.
The whole thing is so decimated to take a year to do it.
But in this upside-down world, we have people sitting in Washington, D.C. saying, look, we have to stop Russian oil, but why don't we replace it with Iranian oil and Venezuelan oil, which is, you know, if you're for clean energy, it's like far dirtier than American energy.
And we're going to replace like one of the world's worst human rights violators with two that are even worse, worse than that.
Like the whole thing is absolutely upside down.
So you're the author of the book, Upcoming Look, The Next Jihad, about Christians in Nigeria.
Tell us about that.
Yeah, I mean, in one level, I feel like someone put me in a time machine and took me back to 2014, watching all of these fires all around the world.
But the single most neglected issue in the world is we have this raging fire of a new potential caliphate in Western Africa committing human rights atrocities that are incomprehensible.
More Christians have died, for instance, at the hands of terrorists in Nigeria alone than at the height of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and not just Christians.
They're intent on killing every single Muslim that stands above.
I don't know.
It's one of the great mysteries to me.
Right before COVID, I traveled over there.
I interviewed Nigeria's depopulated country in Africa.
Nigeria is the biggest economy in Africa.
It's one of the most populated countries in the world.
It's basically half Christian and half Muslim.
The sort of like foreign policy experts say this has nothing to do with religion.
It's a competition over resources and all of this stuff.
They're a resource-rich country.
But in actual effect, all of that is also true.
But these terrorists are going into village after village after village on a jihad, finding the Christians and killing them.
And it's, and one of the great things the Trump administration did is they actually put Nigeria on a list among the worst violators of religious freedom in the world.
There's something called the Countries of Particular Concern.
Unfortunately, you know, the Biden administration took them off the list.
Nigeria is an amazing country, an incredible partner of the United States of America, a national security partner.
But it seems like we're easy on everyone we should be hard on and hard on everyone that we should be easy on.
And I just don't get it.
But I'm just telling you, if something doesn't happen to Western Africa two years from now, what's happening on that side of that great continent is going to make what we saw with ISIS in Iraq and Syria look small in comparison.
It's the next jihad.
You don't hear about that a lot.
So it's very important.
So Johnny, thank you so much for joining us, my friends.
Thanks, Charlie, for shining a light on these persecuted people.
Yeah, of course.
Thank you.
Look, everybody, I know you love freedom and you want to defend it.
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Late last evening, the House of Representatives passed one of the largest spending bills in our nation's history.
And most people aren't talking about it and most people don't care.
It's a massive spending bill that would fund the federal government through September and also will provide $13.6 billion in aid to Ukraine.
We'll get to that in just a second.
The spending bill, known as an omnibus, would fund the government through the fiscal year 2022, which started in October.
Lawmakers have begun negotiating it over its session.
It's a 2,741-page bill, 2,741 pages, and that was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in the middle of the night at 1 a.m.
It might have to go through some other procedural loopholes, but it looks like this is going to go to the Senate next.
The Hill.com writes: quote, the lawmakers feast on pork and omnibus.
After an 11-year drought, congressional earmarks are back with a vengeance.
So, here's some of the things that you can expect out of this new omnibus bill if it passes through the Senate.
Number one, who's the winner?
Well, not small business owners, not entrepreneurs, not churches.
No, no, no.
The IRS.
The IRS is going to see the largest increase in their budget, if this passes and gets signed into law, since 2001.
They are getting $675 million new dollars on top of what they already get.
The Internal Revenue Service is going to get a funding boost, an unprecedented 20, once-in-a-20-year funding boost to help improve its customer service.
Yeah, right.
But also increase enforcement, modernize internal revenue service technology, and improve its web application.
I'm reading from CNN.com.
They're being very understated here.
I'm going to re-emphasize this: increase enforcement.
The Internal Revenue Service is getting the largest increase in their budget in 20 years to help go after disagreeable political opponents to audit them to make sure that you guys stay obedient and stay in line.
Provide a special funding transfer authority for the Internal Revenue Service to direct higher authority to help the agency deal with a massive backlog of returns and correspondence.
So, according to the regime in Washington, D.C., our border is wide open.
They're doing nothing to address that.
We have an opioid epidemic of over 100,000 drug overdoses.
You know where their priorities are?
To make sure there are more internal revenue service agents to go audit you and extort more money from you while you have double-digit inflation and while gas prices are going up.
Here's an interesting part of the omnibus bill, which I would love to hear Nancy Pelosi or someone explain.
It provides $75 million in election security grants, huh, to bolster state efforts to improve the security and integrity of elections for federal office.
I thought our elections were perfect.
If our elections are perfect, why do they need $75 million to go secure them?
Where is that money going to go?
I thought that's the big lie.
Aren't they trying to indict people for even saying that the election might have problems with it?
The next category is schools and financial aid boost.
The bill would provide $17.5 billion of new funding, largest in more of a decade, towards public schools exclusively.
They're expanding the maximum Pell cramp by $400.
Pell grants are generally awarded to undergraduate students with exceptional financial needs.
Now, this will go primarily to the college cartel that has done nothing to lower costs, went through Zoom school, and this is going to be a further bailout from the federal government.
There's a part here of this new omnibus bill that we mentioned, $13.6 billion in Ukrainian aid.
But the question is: where's that money going to go?
Is it going to go to bio labs?
$13.6 billion is a lot of money.
Here's the question: why is our government not spending $13.6 billion to secure our border, but they're sending $13.6 billion to send to Ukraine to go fight for their border?
Where's the $13.6 billion in suicide prevention for our young people that have the highest suicide rate in history?
Where's the $13.6 billion to go help with drug rehabilitation for the 100,000 plus drug overdoses?
Seems like some of our lawmakers have their priorities backward.
$13.6 billion that will say it is going to provide humanitarian security and economic assistance for Ukraine.
Interesting.
Also, spending on defense and national security will make up more than half the bill.
The measure calls for an increase in funding for military personnel, operations, and research of ground vehicles, aircraft ships, munitions, and other equipment.
For those of you keeping track at home, we nearly have a $30 trillion debt right now, and this will only expand our debt and our deficit to about $2 trillion.
We will borrow this year, is what we will say.
Not a single spending cut is found in this entire bill.
Now, most of you don't even know that this is happening.
It's increased, by the way, across the board.
It's also a mandatory 6% increase just across the board, that every federal agency is just getting a 6% increase across the board, according to an increase in annual appropriations, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Inflation's at 7.9%, so they say that they need to continue to increase government alongside inflation, which of course makes no sense.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
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Pentagon Beliefs and Exemptions 00:05:56
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We're here with Joshua Phillips.
So Joshua, welcome to the program.
Hey, Charlie, real pleasure being here.
I got to ask you, and you'll sort this out once and for all.
Is it epic or epoch times?
So it's actually both.
We just like to confuse everybody.
It's both.
Yeah, yeah, it's both.
How can it be both?
So if you want to speak the Queen's English, British or Canadian, it's Epoch.
Okay.
And if you're an American, it's Epic.
So it's EPOCHTimes.com.
Is that right?
That's right.
I have more people send links to me from what you guys are doing than I think anything.
I mean, it's really a fast-growing site.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah, that's the goal.
You know, that's the goal.
You work very hard.
I'm trying to grow it faster.
So Epoch Epic, you guys name it, E-P-O-C-H-Times.com.
Really good investigative work.
I want to ask you a little bit about this report you're doing.
Then I want to get into China because you have some very unique commentary.
Oh, yeah.
And the Epoch Times, I think, does more China coverage than almost any other news outlet.
Because you have some really good dissonance sources.
We've been on it for a long time.
And it's one of your main kind of missions, right?
So you have a new report here.
It says, investigative report.
Whistleblowers reveal how the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, has actively discriminated against religion with vaccine mandates.
Tell us about it.
Well, you know, Charlie, that started off as an investigation more into the COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
And people saying, yeah, whistleblower stepping forward.
I interviewed a couple of them saying that the military has been discriminating against them on how they're giving the exemptions because they're giving administrative exemptions.
They're giving medical exemptions.
But for some reason, for a long time, they were giving no religious exemptions.
They've broken that wall a little bit now, but there's some kind of nuances to it that suggests that there's still some funny play going on.
But we actually found it goes beyond COVID-19.
There's an anti-religious agenda, it appears, within the Pentagon.
And this includes policies like what they call pluralism, where if you're a chaplain, you can't name your God.
If you're a Christian, you can't say and go public and say, you know, in Jesus' name, amen, publicly without getting in trouble.
You can't suggest that your religion is like the right religion publicly, or you'll get in trouble.
If you do it, you might never get actually promoted.
And so they call that pluralism.
You have to blend all religions.
And by doing this, essentially, the Pentagon has been destroying religion.
And other things, too, like them labeling evangelical Christians domestic extremists, even putting them alongside ISIS and al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
So, I mean, this is not getting out.
Tell us about how you learned about this, some of your sources.
Well, so I had two individuals step forward.
One of them was a lieutenant colonel, Air Force Reserve.
The other one was a major Air Force Reserve.
And they had really incredible stories.
They were saying that basically they, you know, the COVID-19 vaccine mandates rolled out.
They were told they could apply for an exemption.
As soon as they said, okay, I'm going to apply for religious exemption, their superiors told them in word, not on paper.
I don't know if you can do that.
I don't think that's going to be okay.
And the first reaction is like, what do you mean it's not going to be okay?
You just told me I can apply.
You just told me I can apply.
Why is it not okay?
And they're like, oh, well, it's a mission readiness issue.
Fair enough.
Mission readiness, right?
But under the Pentagon's actual doctrine, you're not allowed to do that.
The Pentagon's definition of what would constitute a religious belief is a sincerely held belief.
They can't say that a religion is defined as this, that, and this, right?
You can't say that if you're a Christian, you believe in like certain things and nothing outside of that.
The foundation of America and religious freedom in America is Protestantism.
It's people reading the Bible and interpreting it themselves.
And that is also the foundation of how the military defines it.
You can make up your own religion in America, and that is your religion, and you can hold it, and that is the freedom of belief we have.
And the military, by doing this, is restricting that.
And so I suppose, where is the U.S. Senate on this?
Or is anyone else looking into this?
I mean, this seems to be a pretty simple oversight issue.
They've called them out.
And in fact, I think after I published this, I did see some different senators calling them out even more, asking for a comment on it.
But again, you know, what we found is some interesting stuff.
So again, it goes into pluralism.
It goes into the idea of how they're restricting this.
I actually talked to the Pentagon.
I called them up, got some comments, and here's what they told me.
And actually, their comments, I think, made it even worse, to be honest.
I called the Pentagon, and the Pentagon spokesperson told me that, well, it's a branch-by-branch decision in terms of how they define this and how they decide this.
But they said that what they're going by on whether or not they recognize the religious beliefs when it comes to vaccines of individual service members is this.
They said they look at what they said when they first enlisted.
If they first enlisted and they said, it's against my religion, it's against my sincerely held belief, which is how they describe it, how they define it.
It's against my sincerely held belief to get vaccinations.
They claim that if they said that when they first enlisted, then it's recognized.
But if they did not say it, they do not recognize it.
But what does that mean?
It means that after you join the military, if you become a Christian, conversion is a very important thing.
Sanctions, Stamps, and Strategic Shifts 00:07:59
Exactly.
If you convert to a religion, if your beliefs change over the course of your entire 20, 30 years...
Your beliefs can't change.
They don't recognize it.
Wow.
And by doing that, they are regulating religious beliefs.
Do you think this is impacting military preparedness?
It is.
In fact, I just saw news that one of our major warships can't deploy because the commanding officer doesn't want to get the vaccine and not letting him deploy.
I had Navy SEALs step forward.
We talked to their lawyer representing them.
They were giving us some indirect statements through the lawyer.
They're saying they're being punished.
Not only them, but even their family members.
They have to go and get medical treatment for different things.
They were not allowed to travel to get medical treatment, and their family members were not allowed to travel to get medical treatment because of these policies.
So some people want us to go to war with Russia, and they don't even want our military to be as prepared as it possibly can.
They want to fire our officers and fire some of the most experienced people we have because of this.
It's unbelievable.
Okay, I want to ask you about China.
Do you think China is more or less likely to now invade Taiwan given what's happened in Russia and Ukraine?
I would say it's actually a bit deeper than just whether or not they're going to invade Taiwan.
On a couple points, depending on how the Russian military performs, that's going to be the determining factor.
How the Western world responds and how the Russian military performs.
The Chinese military is not that strong.
Let's be honest about it.
They're less powerful than the Russian military.
They buy their engines from Russia in terms of training and protocols.
We can get into some of the weaknesses in that, but they're less powerful than Russia.
They have a lot of people, though.
They have a lot of people, but throwing a lot of people at a whole lot of missiles doesn't get you very far.
You know what I mean?
But in terms of military capabilities, they're less powerful.
So depending on how Russia performs, that will be the determining factor in how China goes.
Although they might take lessons from it and try to change things around.
The bigger side is this.
The bigger side is the Chinese financial system.
Because, and honestly, I'm watching this show and I'm like, are they doing this intentionally?
Is this the real goal?
I mean, I don't know because I can't see Russia doing this intentionally and basically throwing themselves in the fire.
But what this has done, because the Western world has sanctioned Russia and they pushed Russia to the Chinese banking system.
And any country that wants to work with Russia now, because let's face it, Russia controls natural gas.
They control a lot of the energy industry.
They control fertilizer in the fertilizer industry, which we already had a shortage of going to Brazil, which is the breadbasket of China.
They control grain between them and Ukraine.
The world, many countries in the world, almost all the Arab countries, they cannot do without Russian grain.
Europe cannot do without Russian energy.
And most of Latin America can't do without Russian fertilizer.
And China cannot do without any of those.
That means that any country that now wants to purchase that has to go through the Chinese banking system.
That means the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency is at risk.
And that means that U.S. sanctions and our ability to sanction countries, unless we want to go to war with them every time we do something, that means that the tax Americanas at the United States.
I guess sort of, I mean, if China invades Taiwan, we're just going to say you can't do it.
It would crash their economy overnight.
If we sanctioned China like we sanctioned Russia, China would not exist.
If the world goes along with it.
That's going to be the big question.
Mostly America, right?
So let's go to the bottom.
If we cut off the NBA and Hollywood and all of our manufacturing plants, if we did it, which wouldn't happen, of course.
But isn't China a little uneasy about going to Taiwan?
Well, let's put it this way.
If the world stood behind the U.S. in supporting the sanctions, which they are currently not on Russia, let's make that clear.
The world is not?
A lot of them are not.
Brazil, for example, is already...
It's a small country.
I mean, Germany is.
I mean, Adidas is.
Germany is somewhat.
Some European.
Super...
Well, they are.
They are.
But the bigger picture is, again, that they have to buy their fertilizers.
They have to buy different things from them that they can't get around.
I guess.
And again, and again, when it comes to world production of food, that is an important part.
There are ways to get around sanctions.
It's not that hard.
You create shell companies and you have like a partial ownership at a shell company.
You have your billionaire and, you know, let's say Belize somewhere, start a company, a shell company.
You do a 30% investment.
You get around the sanctions.
You can do it.
Other countries do it.
North Korea does it.
Yeah, but it still restricts a lot of economic.
It restricts a lot.
But, and I'm not saying it's going to be one way or the other for sure, right?
But if the world does not strongly enough stand behind these sanctions, if they let some things slip through, which they're starting to, that means that China now has the opportunity to also do what they want to do.
If China can actually push up its banking system as a world reserve currency, which is going to be hard, but if you have enough countries being willing to trade in it, they can actually really do a whole lot.
And that means that the ability of the U.S. to even sanction China is really, I think, seriously a risk.
Yeah, I mean, but I suppose it just all, it's a matter, I guess, of our own willingness.
If we told China we're not trading with you, the CCP collapses in a month.
This is partly true.
So I was, if people were watching my show, I've been saying for a long time, like, so during the beginning of COVID, I was saying that basically the Chinese economy looks like it's about to collapse.
At every turn.
It did not collapse because Western finance bailed it out.
That's exactly right.
Western investors poured money in China.
They bailed it out.
And it's true, Charlie, that, you know, okay, fair enough.
If that were to stop.
Yeah, like, for example, like McDonald's saying they're not going to do Russia, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I could list all these companies that say they don't want to do Russia.
If we did that with China, it would crush the CCP.
I mean, it could crush them.
It could crush them if we took a strong enough stance.
No, I'm not saying it's going to happen.
I'm not.
But if they invade Taiwan, I mean, it would be very, the argument would be there, right?
Yeah, it would be.
I mean, honestly, what you're saying right now would be the ideal situation.
The world would, I wonder if they'd do it, to be honest, because you have too many people with too much money tied up in China.
Oh, I totally agree.
I mean, that is going to be the question, right?
I mean, if they invade Taiwan, will we have the sort of moral outrage that we've seen against Russia?
And that would be the big question.
I wonder if we would.
I mean, that's a real wild card, and it's something I think the CCP itself would have to really consider.
I think that's what they're contemplating, though.
I think they're watching the Russian situation right now, and they're watching the response to it.
And they're going to watch as well whether countries start to change these policies as it goes forward as well.
But I also, and I want to take KeyPeople one more segment, but an invasion of Taiwan, I think, is much more sophisticated and more, it's amphibious.
And they could blockade the entire country, unlike Ukraine.
That's right as well.
And also, I mean, there are some Chinese sympathizers in Taiwan, but they have their own language.
That's very interesting.
It's complicated because also we watch what they did to Hong Kong with very little international pushback.
Yes.
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I think the CCP and Xi Juping are a little bit weaker than they put on, is that right?
Absolutely.
Putin's Oligarchs and War Risks 00:05:17
They're absolutely weaker than they put on.
And I've been saying this for a long time.
The Chinese Communist Party, frankly, I think if Western finance hadn't bailed them out at the beginning of the CCP virus outbreak, they probably would have collapsed.
Really, it's Western finance and the CCP's ability to even lobby our government through Western businesses that is really keeping them afloat right now.
Internally within the CCP, you have major, major infighting.
And I'd say in Russia as well, actually, which is important.
There's major infighting, which could tear it apart from the inside.
You have huge, really, I think, public discontent in the Communist Party, which is why they have to have such incredibly intense forms of social control in place.
Because really, the people will overthrow it in a heartbeat if they can, I think.
A lot of them would.
Yeah, so we're seeing this in Russia.
The oligarchs are getting pretty upset at Putin.
Is that right?
That is absolutely right.
Let's be clear about the state of Russia.
Russia.
And people might hate me for saying this, they work like a mafia.
Why would they hate you to say that it's true?
I could hate Mel.
It's a mob state.
I could hate them.
I mean, Ukraine is kind of a mob state, too.
And so, you know, just being fair, you got mob states in a few different places right now.
But the way the mob works in Russia is basically the main powers are the oligarchs.
Putin is beholden to the oligarchs.
And what is the power?
How does that whole thing work?
Basically, the oligarchs have two interests.
One is their own personal finances.
You're the mafia, you make money, right?
Two, it's you want to look you want to live a happy life.
You want to be good.
You don't want to get people attacking you.
Those two things are falling apart.
Western countries are seizing the yachts of the oligarchs.
They're taking down the businesses of the oligarchs.
They're making them look like Nazis on the world stage.
They're humiliating them everywhere.
The interests of the oligarchs, the interest of the mafia is getting destroyed.
And so what's their course of action?
Are they going to go against Putin or are he taking them out?
Well, here's the other big thing.
If you're a mafia, what's the other big thing you have to do?
You have to maintain an image of strength.
Because as soon as you look weak, your adversaries are going to come in and they're going to kill you.
Now, Putin has made the fault of all three of these.
Putin has destroyed their financial interests.
He's ruined their reputations and he's made them look weak.
The Russian military is like the laughing stock of the military community right now.
People are laughing at them.
Look how many tanks they're abandoning.
Some people say that Russia's not sending their best equipment.
They could do this easily.
They're doing it methodically.
Is that right?
It was bad planning, it looks like.
It looks like it was really bad planning.
It looks like basically Putin didn't communicate it.
He went through the FSB, their intelligence bureau.
They made their plans thinking it was just like a hypothetical exercise.
You're not going to be an FSB employee for very long if you say Russia's going to lose if you try to invade because we're weaker than Ukraine.
You know what I mean?
You're going to get fired real quick and maybe who knows what else.
You can't say that they live in a fantasy land.
I mean, it's a sea of lies.
We're hearing that there's 5,000 to 7,000 dead Russian soldiers.
I mean, that's a lot, but in the Russian worldview, that's not a lot.
It's not a lot for Russia, right?
Because they're just used to just sending people to the slaughter.
This is how they fight, man.
It's ham-fisted, throw everything you got at the fire.
You get a gun, you do not, comrade.
You know, run toward the machine gun until you take it over.
So this is not unusual.
I mean, it's kind of built into their history, right?
It is.
It's slow, arduous.
They don't really do the shock and off thing.
It is.
And this is why, actually, well, if realistically, strategically, if they wanted to win this, they should have gone stronger.
They should have used air support.
They should have hit harder.
It's very hard for them to do that now because the whole like...
Why do you think now?
Do you think Putin actually thinks he's going to run this country?
I mean, he's going to run Ukraine?
No, they don't have the ability to.
They know they can't run a protracted war.
What does victory look like for him?
Victory for him is going to look like throwing everything he's got at it because he cannot back down.
If he backs down, his life is at risk.
If he doesn't win this, his life is at risk.
Do you think he's legitimately paranoid and nervous right now?
I'd say legitimately and observably because he's basically in isolation.
You can watch when he's giving these talks with the other Russian leaders.
He's sitting at one end of a 30-foot table and he has him at the other end.
It's very similar, though, to Hitler's last days, though.
I've heard a lot of people compare this.
And actually, speaking of that, he would be able to look back at the Ukrainian underground resistance and know that the Ukrainian underground, they gave hell to the Nazis.
Yeah, so I mean, look, you conquer a country, but then what?
That's what I'm not understanding.
What is victory?
What does he mean?
You control the capital, you still have 20 million people that hate you, right?
Well, that's where it's going to be going, basically.
I think he's observing what happened in Hong Kong.
People hated the CCP when they took over Hong Kong.
That blew over, unfortunately.
Yeah, and so the world has a short memory as long as there's some other interest tied into it.
I think his goal was to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table as rapidly as possible, roll in there, take a few provinces, roll in as fast as you can, take a few provinces, negotiate, and maybe keep a couple of those areas.
It's going to be a big mess.
It's not good for humanity.
Okay, Joshua Phillips from Epoch Times.
Thank you so much.
Good to have you back on the bank.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts as always: freedom at charliekirk.com.
And subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.
Thanks so much.
Talk to you soon.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk dot com.
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