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March 14, 2022 - The Charlie Kirk Show
36:13
Warhawks and Wisdom—Where 'The New Right' Should Stand on Foreign War
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Forgotten War and American Strength 00:14:39
Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk Show, we dive into the latest Ukraine news.
We talk about this from a moderate, nuanced, and prudent perspective.
What is the history of United States intervention in conflicts like Ukraine?
Should we get involved?
We've made the argument that we should not.
But what is the other side?
And why is it that the intensity of this conversation is reaching such a level of nastiness and antagonism?
It's worth exploring.
Email me your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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Buckle up, everybody, here.
We go.
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I've been watching some of the news this last weekend, and we have intentionally on this program not done the play-by-play of what's happening on the ground in Ukraine.
It can be very murky, very confusing.
And also, if you want kind of the play-by-play for that, there's other networks that have people on the ground that are doing that.
By play-by-play, I mean individual troop movements, bombings, rumors, all those sorts of things.
Instead, we're going to take a bigger picture and ask the question, how does it impact America?
Geopolitics, what are the philosophical implications behind all of this?
Now, last week, I made an argument that there is a rational and reasonable case that we should be careful intervening in Ukraine.
It was not a moral argument.
I, like many of you, am getting increasingly frustrated and upset that Putin's illegal and immoral invasion of a sovereign country of Ukraine is something that good and decent people should stand opposed and against.
I don't like seeing bullies.
I don't like seeing tyrants going into lands far away to go try and crush weak people.
Strong people have a moral obligation not to crush the weak.
However, we're seeing the exact opposite occur.
Now, I will say that America is war-weary, that we are a nation that spent 20 years in Afghanistan.
We couldn't even successfully pull out from there.
I made an argument last week that I will continue to make that our ruling class, the military elite that you don't trust, Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, approving funding to go to Ukraine very quickly only makes the very people that you don't trust more powerful and the risk of a confrontation that could go wrong in the wrong direction.
I'm not hearing a lot of people make this argument.
I'll be very honest.
The argument is either do we get involved or do we not get involved from a moral standpoint.
However, the question needs to be deeper than that, which is can we successfully pull it off?
When have there been successful military interventions to be able to deter people like Vladimir Putin?
The only example I can think of, there's two examples I can think of that were successful military interventions, but one of them came at a great cost, and one of them was not against like someone like Vladimir Putin.
So people more in the neoconservative camp, they would say, hey, look at the Persian Gulf War.
What a great example of a war where we came in and defended a smaller country against a bigger country.
Of course, this is when President George H.W. Bush was in office, when Saddam Hussein was running Iraq, and he wanted Kuwait.
He crossed the border into Kuwait, and America made the decision to come in and deter Iraqi forces, successfully bringing them back to the Iraq border and stopping the invasion of Kuwait.
Now, Americans did lose their lives, and we should never forget the Americans that lost their lives in the Persian Gulf War.
However, the amount of people that lost their lives in the Persian Gulf War is much smaller, let's just say, than that of other examples I will use.
Another war of deterrence where people will point to, say, look at how wonderful this was, was the Korean War.
The Korean War was a war against the philosophy of domino theory.
Of course, with Harry Truman as president and the march of the communists to the Korean peninsula, America got involved to try to prevent the continual spread of communism throughout the Asian, not just the Asian area, but across the entire continent.
We pushed back the Koreans all the way, the communist Koreans, I should say, and Russian and Soviet forces, all the way to the Chinese border, only to be counterattacked and pushed all the way to what is now the DMZ and the creation of North and South Korea.
Now, that is called the Forgotten War.
It's the forgotten war because it kind of blurs between the Vietnam War and World War II.
Now, the Forgotten War shouldn't be forgotten.
There were tens of thousands of Americans that, I believe it was tens of thousands.
You can get the exact number, Connor, of casualties and fatalities.
Persian Gulf War, there were 219 U.S. casualties.
154 were killed in battle and 65 died from non-battle causes.
That's a big cost, 200-plus people.
And the Korean War, I believe, was in the tens of thousands.
We'll get that fact-checked.
Now, those two wars are commonly looked at by neoconservatives and interventionists to say, look at how American leadership can deter Soviet forces or deter Iraqi forces.
Now, of course, there's a big difference, and let's use the Iraq example.
Iraq and Saddam Hussein is far weaker than Vladimir Putin.
Iraq did not have nuclear weapons.
And there was not the ramifications of getting all of NATO involved.
In the Korean War, 36,516 people were killed.
Over 100,000 people were wounded in what was called the Forgotten War.
Now, for every example of successful U.S. deterrence, there are 100 examples of unsuccessful United States intervention.
Long, meandering wars where the definition of success is undefined, such as the Vietnam War, the war in Iraq, or some of our interventions in Syria, or the displacement of dictators in Libya.
When America gets involved and we intervene, we have a track record of messing it up more than getting it right.
That is not an indictment of our amazing military service members at all.
They deserve credit.
In fact, they deserve so much credit.
They deserve so much praise.
They deserve so much honor that we should not haphazardly send them into combat zones without a clearly defined plan and agenda for success.
So as this Ukrainian situation has popped up, there is an ever-growing community of people on the right that are demanding United States involvement in Ukraine.
However, many of them do stop short.
And I found this very interesting because the framework, the window that we are operating from, the Overton window that this entire discussion comes from, is something that I think is worthy of pause and reflection.
And I've said this many times on this program.
We are not isolationists.
We are not interventionists.
We're Americans.
We believe at times American strength needs to be exhibited abroad.
But we think most times America needs to put our own house in order and foreign endless wars destroy a civilization.
We are not ideological on this program when it comes to foreign policy.
We want what's best for our people first and foremost.
What I find very interesting is I was listening on the radio yesterday of Trey Gowdy's program on Fox News.
And Trey Gowdy had some congressmen.
And I can try to, I'm trying to think of who it was.
We can get the guest lineup.
from last night.
And the congressman was going on and on about how we need to stand with the Ukrainian government and how the Ukrainian people are a freedom-loving people and the Ukrainian government is a freedom-focused government.
Now, that is a misrepresentation.
However, I understand the kind of impulse to want to frame the Ukrainian government as the good guys because Vladimir Putin is so bad.
I get the impulse.
But it was very interesting by listening to his commentary and even the commentary of Adam Kinzinger and even the commentary of Liz Cheney is the Overton window that we are operating on is they all say, of course, we're not going to send U.S. troops.
And I say, huh, that's interesting.
So you want to intervene, but you actually don't want to intervene.
Why is that?
Well, it's because it's unpopular.
That's why.
It's because even the most hawkish commentator or politician, even if even Lindsey Graham, who is calling for the assassination of Vladimir Putin, and of course, dictator displacement and regime change and messing it up is something the American foreign policy establishment specializes in.
Even the most willing person to intervene, which I'm open-minded to all sorts of ideas, we are not dogmatic on this program.
They say, but no U.S. troops.
And that is the argument that we made two months ago when we were trying to warn against war in Ukraine.
We're trying to warn against getting involved with Russia, which is if you're not willing to see it through, don't get involved.
If you think half-measures are the way to do war, that's how all of a sudden you get things like Qaddafi and the Syrian civil war.
Because even the most hawkish impulses of the American security establishment know that if you send a U.S. troop into Ukraine, they know what will unravel.
So the question is, what are we really dealing with here?
Is it half-measures?
Is it virtue signaling?
Because if you're not willing to go all the way through and see it through, then what exactly is the agenda here?
That's something worth exploring, isn't it?
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One of the reasons why I don't trust our government is that they're either captured by a corrupt deal they've made or influence or by ideology.
It's either they have to A favor to some unspecified group of people, or they believe in something so abstract that the country will be harmed by their decision-making.
For example, Joe Biden's continual focus on trying to get us off of fossil fuels has made the world a more dangerous place.
We traded energy independence and peace for inflation and war.
That was the big bargain.
You see, when you destabilize the world's superpower when it comes to energy dominance, don't be surprised when other bad actors try to fill the void.
Joe Biden in cut four continues, this is just a short snippet of the times he said energy transition.
He looks at himself as the bridge presidency to abolish our reliance on fossil fuels.
The problem is the bridge might also mean the sovereign, the invasion of a sovereign nation like Ukraine.
Play cut four.
Transition from the oil industry, yes.
The rise in gas prices over the long term makes an even stronger case for doubling down our investment and our focus on clean energy options.
It should motivate us to accelerate the transition of clean energy.
We're working through an energy transition.
And the reality is we have to take some time to get off of oil and gas.
So the people from rural to suburban to urban communities can all benefit from the gas savings of driving an EV.
So that woman that runs the energy department, you know, I think her name is Granholm, right?
Jennifer Granholm.
Not only is she captured by ideology, but she also has ties to green energy companies.
So the point is that almost every single person in charge of our government either believes something that is never going to happen, therefore they don't deal with prudence and they don't deal with real world wisdom, or they're captured by a foreign adversary.
Joe Biden and the Biden regime is controlled by both.
The Biden regime is held hostage by people that have made private deals for years with China and Burisma and also by the young revolutionaries that went to Brown, Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard to try and create America to turn America into some sort of utopian experiment.
Now, the Energy Secretary Granholm, did you know she still owns millions of dollars of stocks in electric companies pushed by Biden?
Now, I'm told that she has divested by now, but she was confirmed by the United States Senate with the baggage of owning millions in energy investments.
So that's awfully corrupt.
So you're running the energy department.
You are waging a war on fossil fuels.
You're doing everything you possibly can to try to break the back of America's energy independence while owning millions of dollars of energy stocks in green energy companies.
Energy Corruption and Fossil Fuel Wars 00:03:32
This is one of the reasons why Donald Trump was so good on the world stage, is he did not believe in some sort of impossible, unrealistic, ideological agenda.
And he also was not, let's say, paid off by other countries.
But they tried to make it seem that way, which was so fascinating, is that the president that was actually independent of foreign influence, they went as hard as they possibly could to try to make it seem as if he was a Russian agent.
And of course, they it was the opposite of actually being able to prove it.
He was exonerated through that entire process.
And so when you hear even the most aggressive people pushing for intervention in Ukraine, you have to ask yourself the question, do they believe in an ideology that will never come to fruition?
And I'll tell you what some of the neoconservatives believe and what that ideology is, or are they being bought off?
Or do they actually believe this?
And are they dealing on team reality?
So, what is the agenda of someone that would want to intervene in Ukraine?
For example, what is the agenda of Lindsey Graham?
Is he corrupt?
Is he bought off?
I mean, maybe he gets money from the defense contractors, but I don't think that's the driving force.
I don't.
I think Lindsey Graham and the people like Lindsey Graham are driven by a different worldview, a worldview that actually is thousands of years old.
Lindsey Graham believes in a very specific ideological pursuit.
Lindsey Graham is an imperialist.
Lindsey Graham believes that neoliberal values can be exported to every corner of every country through force, missiles, tomahawk strikes, drone reconnaissance.
We're going to make you love democracy.
If you don't, we're going to bomb your villages.
Now, I believe that deep down every human being has the right, the natural right to live freely.
But it's not realistic to say as if you are going to export a constitutional government into every single country.
We saw what happened in Iraq.
We saw what happened in Afghanistan.
They don't want to be free right now.
It's going to take a lot of work.
You don't go from the 13th century to enlightenment values just because you give them a bunch of money and bomb their bridges.
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Biden Benefits from Peace Delays 00:07:01
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We're going to continue to dive into this story here, which I find to be very interesting because there's a lot of criticism happening on the kind of commentary of the right of people accusing anyone that doesn't want to go full-fledged into Ukraine with weapons and assistance and further escalation as being sympathetic to Vladimir Putin, which of course is not right.
I mean, that's a silly kind of left-wing style of argumentation.
But then on the other side, when there is a public opportunity to just kind of have, hey, the floor is yours, okay?
You don't like the way we're talking about it.
You don't like the way Biden is handling it.
What would you do?
What is the specific course of action?
What does success look like?
And at that moment, there's a very revealing set of, let's say, a revealing sequence of statements.
One of those being, hey, look, we're not going to do troops on the ground, which of course I agree with.
But then that doesn't really mean you're willing to see this all the way through.
So then the other argument is, well, Charlie, weapons should be just enough.
Weapons should be enough for Ukraine to hold the line.
So let me ask a very rational question.
If Ukraine were to receive more sophisticated Western weaponry, does that mean that more people are going to die in Ukraine or less people are going to die in Ukraine?
Do you think it's realistic that Ukraine can beat the Russians at this point?
Maybe it is.
Maybe it isn't.
There's military experts, which we don't really trust the experts very much on this program, that are split on that opinion.
Now, what is not being reported is that there is a drumbeat of peace talks that are happening.
There's a drumbeat right now of the potential of a peace deal being brokered.
And what's interesting is that none of the media companies are even mentioning this.
You see, foreign war, especially one as brutal and as shocking as Putin's war in Ukraine, it's a ratings boost for the floundering news organizations that were not seeing the record numbers they wanted when they were just covering the January 6th Commission and Donald Trump's golf game.
Peace talks are not getting any of the mainstream headlines.
The Russian-Ukrainian talks are continuing.
And what's really interesting is how almost none of the major organizations are covering it.
And it seems as if they are getting closer and closer to a deal.
Now, maybe it's not true.
Maybe it's all propaganda, but we should want peace, shouldn't we?
Oh, wait, but supplying $15 billion to the people of Ukraine or the government of Ukraine, that probably doesn't make us closer to getting to peace.
Now, I don't pretend to understand Russian military tactics at all.
Russia strikes near Poland border.
Someone explain to me what they're thinking with that.
Because if that missile goes 10 more miles into Poland, you might get drafted.
So Moscow hits military base near Poland, not Poland, 10 miles from Poland.
So how far will Putin go?
We don't know.
What is his end game?
We don't know.
So there is a question, though.
Who benefits by downplaying and perhaps undermining peace efforts?
Who benefits by this war continuing?
Here are some possible answers to that.
The TV ratings, obviously.
Television ratings are up for every single major floundering news organization.
The Chinese Communist Party benefits from this continuing.
Keeps the eye off them as they continue their plunder and their deceit of all decent people in the Western world.
Who else benefits by this war continuing?
Oil prices increase and it benefits oil-producing nations.
You see, one of the reasons why Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates aren't returning Joe Biden's phone call is they want to get a couple more weeks of the action here.
They're like, wait a second, $120 oil?
Woo!
We couldn't have dreamed of that.
Let's just keep this like Ukrainian conflict going for a couple more weeks.
Who else benefits from this?
And now this is going to sound very cynical, but I don't care.
Joe Biden is benefiting from this.
He's received a five-point boost in the polls.
Joe Biden is seeing a political uptick despite double-digit inflation, gas prices, and domestic strife here, urban crime increasing, small businesses struggling, entrepreneurship rates are going down, people are struggling to make ends meet because everything is so expensive.
It's kind of a sluggish moment in America right now.
It's also a very frustrating moment.
And this is just kind of a sidebar, which again, you can't blame Joe Biden directly for this, but his policies absolutely play into it.
Good luck navigating successfully through an airport, an inner city, getting a reservation at most restaurants and boom cities.
There is almost a kind of an infrastructure problem, not just from roads and bridges, but it's as if certain areas have grown so quickly, so overwhelmingly, it's as if the kind of peaceful, easily transfer from one activity to the other, that kind of quality of life, has been very much disrupted.
I could tell you that is absolutely the case in South Florida.
You have to get a dinner reservation like a year and a half ahead of time.
So TV channels and news organizations benefit by undermining the peace talks.
The Chinese Communist Party benefits by not having peace be brokered.
Oil-producing countries benefit.
And Biden has a distraction, a scapegoat for his failed policies.
And also, the Great Reset benefits from this, the World Economic Forum.
The World Economic Forum is now able to have a proxy conflict in a nation to be able to further make the case that a borderless, private property-less society will bring about and broker peace.
Yellow Journalism and Emotional Manipulation 00:10:59
It really is modern-day yellow journalism.
The newspapers benefit, they increase circulation.
There's more web traffic around this.
Now, yellow journalism, for those that don't know, is a style of newspaper reporting that emphasized sensationalism over facts.
It is now the standard of journalism in America.
During the height of yellow journalism, I think in the late 19th century, right?
Many of the factors, it was one of many of the factors that pushed the United States and Spain into war in Cuba and the Philippines, leading to the acquisition of many new territories by the United States.
Yellow journalism has five basic characteristics.
Do you think we're living through yellow journalism right now?
Number one, scare headlines in huge print and often in minor news.
Number two, the lavish use of pictures or imaginary drawings.
Number three, use of faked interviews and misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts.
Number four, emphasis on full-color Sunday supplements, usually with comic strips.
I know that one's not as applicable, but I'm sure there's a kind of a, I mean, I think, actually, let's think about it.
What would the equivalent be?
The equivalent would be like a CNN special on Sunday for a couple hours on just Ukraine.
That would be the equivalent because this was written in 1900.
And dramatic sympathy with the underdog against the system, of course, being the Ukrainian government.
So let's just use the example.
Here's the New York Times.
Is this yellow journalism or not?
For those of you on radio, these are pretty emotional imagery, isn't it?
So let's go to number one: scare headlines in huge print.
Moscow hits military base near Poland.
Whoa.
Lavish use of pictures.
There you go.
Use of fake interviews.
Now, I'm not going to go that far.
I will say, though, that whether it be Snake Island or the Ghost of Kiev, all of that was made up.
It was war propaganda.
Emphasis on full color Sunday supplements went to that one.
And dramatic sympathy with the underdog against the system.
Sure feels that way.
Some would call it emotional manipulation.
Okay, this is a minute.
This is the clip.
I know both these people, Trey Gowdy, and I know Congressman Brian Mast.
I get along very well with Brian Mast, and he's a good friend.
I know some of his relatives as well.
And so this is not an attack on Brian Mast in any way.
I just see things differently in Ukraine.
But I find this clip interesting.
This is the clip, right?
Where he just kind of puts this little sentence in, this little crumb, where he's very hawkish on Ukraine.
He's like, no, no, no, no troops.
Be careful wanting to get involved in something when you openly broadcast that you're not willing to see it all the way through to victory.
Half measures result in total failures.
PlayCut 16.
I mean, it is hard to watch those images and not want to do something more.
I mean, is it really as simple as whether the missile lands on this side of Polish boundary line or that side of the Polish boundary line?
I don't think it can be.
I don't think that's who we are as a nation that we say, well, we could see 10,000 or far more Ukrainians indiscriminately killed and we won't do a thing.
But if the hair on the head of one NATO member gets touched, we're all in, all NATO members.
That's not who we are.
And that's not good for the security of the globe.
We need to go out there and say, these are the borders.
These are the parameters.
These are the, you know, not look at this the way that Biden, they called it a gaffe in the beginning when they said Biden was looking at this in terms of whether it was a major or a minor incursion.
I think what we really know is they were planning, trying to predict that this would be a minor incursion and they could brush it off without having to do anything.
No, we need to control the things that we can control and be strong in the face of all of this.
None of it is acceptable.
None of it is proportional.
None of it is rational.
And if we try to rationalize any of it, then Putin has already succeeded.
So that is not the clip, but it's close.
It was actually really helpful.
But in the conversation, he does say, look, we hear no troops on the ground.
And so I think Trey Gowdy said something very interesting, though, isn't it?
He said, we look at these images and it's hard not to want to do something.
I agree.
I think Trey Gowdy is exactly right.
It is hard not to want to get involved in every single fight.
But a mature nation that also knows that it's in a cycle of decline is very careful what they get involved in.
A mature nation that knows that we're being led by corrupt, ideological, arrogant, dumb people is extremely careful what they get involved in.
That's called prudence.
Maybe the imagery that you are seeing repeatedly on television is trying to persuade you to want to do something.
George Orwell said, quote, all the war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
George Orwell.
We can agree that Joe Biden led us into this.
That is something I think the right can agree on.
We can all agree on bad energy policies that have stumbled us into this conflict.
But there is disagreement on how to proceed.
I mean, I'm highly critical of this idea of rushing $14 billion into Ukraine.
And I just want to continue to make this argument, which is: okay, were you thrilled with our exit in Afghanistan?
Were you ecstatic with the people that were climbing onto airplanes as we took off from Kabul?
Did you like the 13 dead Marines because of an IED because of the lack of leadership from Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin?
How about the recapturing of the Bagram air base or the Taliban retaking Afghanistan in a couple days?
Or how about Joe Biden randomly drone striking a family that ended up just being just a suburban family getting some groceries and Joe Biden just drone striked them?
If you were worried about Afghanistan, you should be hesitant to want to supply a bullet in Ukraine.
And yes.
My argument hinges on the lack of credibility and competency of the people running our military.
And that's something I think that's very interesting, isn't it?
Because a lot of the conservatives that are calling, and they are conservatives, they're calling for further intervention in Ukraine, and they have some very good arguments.
I really do.
I think Vladimir Putin bombing maternity awards, if it's true, and it looks to be true, by the way, verified by other journalists, is a disgusting thing.
It's a war crime.
It should want you to be involved.
However, what you should want to do is not always the right thing to do.
It's also not the thing that we're capable of doing.
Those are two things, should you and capable of.
The military was unable to, after 20 years, pull off a successful exit from Ukraine.
I mean, successful exit from Afghanistan.
Excuse me.
But now all of a sudden, like in the last couple months, they got their act together.
And the stakes are much higher.
These are not child molesting goat herders from the 13th century in the hills of the Kandahar Valley.
These are Russians in winter in a country they actually want to take over.
And also the binary, look, the more you dive into it, there really is only one good group of people in this whole thing.
And it is the Ukrainian people.
They are victims of this entire thing.
They are.
They are legitimate victims.
Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and tied into the worst influences of the West.
Vladimir Putin, evil scumbag through and through, as we've said.
And I would love, here's just an open invite for any person that wants to get further involved in Ukraine, whether it be calling for the assassination of Vladimir Putin or a no-fly zone over Ukraine or any of the senators that voted for the bill.
You're welcome to come on our program and I will let you tell me what a success looked like.
I know what I think success should look like.
Peace.
The end of a kinetic conflict.
Now, some people will say, well, Charlie, you're not going to get peace unless you're the stronger man.
All they understand is power.
Glad you mentioned that.
Do we have anyone in our administration that you think is going to project strength right now?
If not, don't get involved.
And the counterargo said, well, Charlie, our military can handle it.
Can they?
We gave $85 billion to the Taliban.
Who exactly do you trust?
I want names.
For the Republicans, they're like, we got to get involved.
Tell me who you think is going to be pulling this off exactly.
And tell me what they've done recently to give you all this confidence that they can do it.
We messed up Libya.
We couldn't keep Syria straight.
Afghanistan was a complete and total debacle.
We are having more training exercise incidents than in any recent memory in our military.
We are having critical race theory and wokeism taught in our military right now.
Again, this is not an indictment of the amazing heroes on the front lines.
Not the point.
It's the point of, and this is a funny argument.
Someone said, Charlie's just supplying weapons to them.
We couldn't get our own weapons out of Afghanistan.
How are we supposed to supply weapons to them?
We can't get $85 billion of Black Hawk helicopters and night vision goggles and missiles out of Afghanistan, but we can somehow get them into an active war zone against a nuclear power with Russians in mud season of winter.
Exactly how's that going to work?
I'm open to be corrected in this, but if you think I'm cynical, you're right.
I'm the mayor of the cynical town when it comes to foreign intervention right now.
I have zero confidence in the ability or the capacity for the American ruling class, yes, in the Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin, all the way down to our senators and from our White House to be able to pull off complicated and complex things.
In fact, I think it's inevitable they'll make it worse.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast and hit subscribe by hitting the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner.
Thank you so much for listening.
God bless.
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