You're Being Lied to About Ukraine & Russia —PART 2 — The Truth with Pedro Gonzalez
Back by popular demand, Charlie welcomes back to the show Pedro Gonzalez, Associate Editor of Chronicles Magazine, for a second, in-depth talk about the truth regarding Ukraine, America's involvement in the country, and how our own nation shares, at least in part, for how Ukraine arrived at this fateful moment in history. Who exactly is Victoria Nuland? How was the US State Department involved in the Maidan Protests and subsequent violent and killing that ultimately resulted in the removal of a democratically elected president? Was the CIA involved in the so-called "Revolution of Dignity" in Ukraine? What role did neocons like John McCain and Lindsay Graham play in provoking Russia's current, evil aggression? As the drums of war continue beating louder than ever, it is more critical than ever that the TRUE history of America's involvement in Eastern Europe is heard by the majority of Americans. A follow up to one of The Charlie Kirk Show's most popular episodes, please share this episode with all of your war hawk and neocon friends. Please support Pedro Gonzalez's Substack: https://contra.substack.comSupport the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Good Ranchers Meat Delivery00:02:59
Hey, everybody, it's Anna Charlie Kirk Show.
Pedro Gonzalez walks us through the West's history with Ukraine.
I think it's really interesting.
We believe Vladimir Putin is a war criminal.
We believe he's satanically inspired.
Go through the whole checklist.
We stand by that.
But what did the West do to bring us to this point?
It's important you know.
And I think it might surprise you.
Then we also talk about the philosophy of neoconservatives.
We all want a strong America, but when the elites say they want to bring American values to Ukraine, what do they really mean by that?
That's a very interesting topic.
I think you'll be blessed to hear kind of how we explore that together.
Pedro makes some phenomenal points.
Really got me thinking.
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Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
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Russia's Monroe Doctrine Explained00:15:44
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Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
Back by Popular Demand, one of the most popular episodes we've done in the last year was our conversation with Pedro Gonzalez from Chronicles, and he broke down some thought crimes you could say about Ukraine and the kind of non-stop push to try to get us involved in Ukraine.
Pedro, welcome back to the program.
Hey, Charlie, thanks for having me back.
So, Pedro, I think it would be helpful for our audience to know how we got here, the background of United States involvement in Ukraine from New Lind to all the different kind of bipartisan uniparty experiments in Ukraine.
Floor is yours.
Walk us through it.
Yeah, and cut me off at any time because I'll go back as far as I can without getting into the weeds.
But it's important to understand two things.
Yes, Russia invaded Ukraine in February and triggered the current crisis, but war doesn't happen in a vacuum ever.
There are always things that lead up to that flashpoint.
There's something, believe it or not, that happened before last month that got us into the situation.
And it's important to understand that for a lot of reasons, in particular, that if we don't learn from our mistakes, by our, I mean our elite, if we don't learn from those mistakes, we're doomed to repeat them.
It's incredible.
I mean, there are so many parallels that you can draw with history right now that just you're just kind of shocked that we're sleepwalking back into basically Iraq, except the nuclear war edition of that, right?
So we go back all the way to 1989 to 2004, when NATO starts integrating major countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, and the Baltic states.
Russia more or less swallows those admissions, just kind of watches them happen, right?
Which is interesting because we've been told in recent times that Russia is bent on global domination.
It's still the USSR.
You know, they want to murder us at any chance they get.
And that's basically the only line that you're allowed to have.
That's not really true at all.
For Russia, the hard line was always Georgia and Ukraine.
And they repeatedly warned for decades, do not attempt to turn Georgia and Ukraine against us.
That is basically Russia's Monroe doctrine.
That's how geopolitical theorist John Mearsheimer has described it.
John Mearsheimer is probably the most brilliant realist political thinker alive.
And he said plainly, like, look, we would never tolerate Canada and Mexico making a military alliance with Russia and Russia putting nukes in Tijuana aimed at DC.
We would just never tolerate that.
And for Mearsheimer, it's common sense that that's how Russia feels about Georgia and Ukraine.
But there are people in DC like Victoria Noland and her neoconservative allies who they don't care.
They think that we can drive all the way up to Russia's border, put nukes on it, and then they just have to accept it.
And if they don't like it, well, it's nuclear war.
And that's the price they're willing to let you pay for it.
I can keep going if you'd like.
Please keep going.
Okay.
So a pivotal point in all this is the Bucharest summit in 2008.
Right before the summit, Vladimir Putin tells William Burns, who at the time is in the State Department under George W. Bush, today he's a director of the CIA.
He tells him before the summit, look, again, Georgia and Ukraine is the hard line.
Do not attempt to integrate those two countries into NATO.
Well, what happens at the summit?
European countries are actually, they understand this.
There's a balance of power.
We don't want to upset it.
We know that it would be a huge provocation to do that.
So that's kind of off the table for countries like France and Germany, but not for the Bush administration.
And at the behest of the Bush administration, of people like Noland, who's worked in the Clinton administration, the George W. administration, the Obama administration, and also the Biden administration, at the behest of people like her under George W, they push NATO to declare, they don't extend a formal invitation, but they declare an affirmation of Georgia and Ukraine's NATO aspirations.
Putin calls that the statement, a direct threat to Russian national security.
Big surprise, right?
But it's not just Putin.
And it's important to understand this.
You're not a Russia apologist for pointing this out.
And if it makes you a Russia apologist, then so is Robert Gates.
Robert Gates was a director of the CIA.
He worked in the agency for decades.
He was Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush and Obama.
And in his memoir, Robert Gates confessed that attempting to integrate Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was, quote, truly overreaching.
He called it a monumental provocation at Russia.
Is Robert Gates like a subversive?
Is he pro-Putin?
Is he pro-Kremlin?
This former director of the CIA?
It's ridiculous to even to think that, right?
And this is what George Kennan was saying.
In 1998, George Kennan, the premier advocate of Soviet containment policy, not a guy who's soft on commies, right?
George Kennan in 1998 said, look, if you treat Russia like it's still the Soviet Union and it wants to kill all of us, that's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Unless we help them kind of steward out from the fall of the Soviet Union, unless we help them climb out of that, we're just going to turn them into the enemy that we insist that they are.
Was George Kennan right?
Was Robert Gates right?
That's, again, these are questions that you're just not allowed to ask on CNN or, frankly, a lot of conservative media right now.
And it's insane because if you don't ask those questions, you're doomed to continue repeating these mistakes that brought us to exactly where we are.
So from that point, from 2008, it's kind of like, okay, the collision course is set.
The United States is pumping billions of dollars into Ukraine to promote civil society, which is a euphemism that the CIA likes to use for basically setting the stage for regime change.
Between 1991 and 2013 alone, we pumped more than $5 billion into Ukraine.
That's a lot of money for what, right?
Why do we care so much about Ukraine?
It's because of, again, these ideologues, these liberal interventionists who think that their hegemony, basically DC's way, is worth everything, including nuclear war.
So in 2013, we arrive at another flashpoint.
The EU makes a trade deal offer to Ukraine's soon-to-be-deposed president, Viktor Yanukovych.
And on the surface, it looks like a groovy, plain old trade deal, you know, nothing wrong with it, but it's actually economic warfare disguised as a trade deal.
And what it would entail would be flooding the Ukrainian market with European goods, and by extension, because of its relationship with Russia, the Russian market with European goods.
And in theory, this would have destabilized Russia's economy, resulting in unrest and then a so-called democratic revolution overthrowing their government.
And then we get one that's DC friendly.
The Russian government saw it for what it was.
Like, this is not a trade deal.
This is a gun pointed at our heads.
And so they make Yanukovych counteroffer.
We'll give you billions of dollars in aid, economic aid, or we'll hit you with sanctions.
It's your call.
And so Yanukovych renegs on the EU trade deal.
And by the way, The Economist, because you'll hear people today say, well, he was just a Putin stooge.
Like he did whatever Russian wanted him to do.
That's not true.
The economist described him as a guy that milked both the EU and Russia for what he thought would work best for a country like Ukraine that's basically in the sad state of being a buffer, a buffer country.
So Yanukovych reneged on the trade deal in 2013.
And in late 2013, you start to have the beginnings of these democratic protests.
And they start in November.
By December, Victoria Noland, who's, again, this career swamp creature, appears in Kiev, handing out cookies and treats to the Democratic protesters that her and her friends at the State Department.
And I mean, there's a whole other discussion here of actually the role of Facebook and Google and Microsoft actually had to play in kind of setting the stage for this.
But that's for a different story.
But anyways, Victoria Nolan is literally on the ground, you know, celebrating with the protesters because she knows what's going to happen.
She knows that this is going to these democratic protests, which by the way, did not have the support of the entire country.
It was split basically like down the middle.
The strongest support to surprise, like this is not a surprise at all, the strongest support for regime change was in Kiev, in western Ukraine.
But it's not like anyone who says, Well, they wanted democratic revolution, they wanted regime change.
That's not true.
The country was split.
This was a deeply polarizing issue, and for good reason.
So, again, the protests start in 2013.
You know, Noland and her friends are working behind the scenes, or literally in this case, on the ground handing out cookies.
And as these protests are getting more and more violent, this is another important thing that we can get into.
Noland makes a call in late January 2014 to the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
So, the protests start in late November and they're rolling into January at this point.
And in January, Victoria Noland, who there's a lot of background here, but what you need to know is that because of her role in creating the crisis in Ukraine today, she's been dubbed the architect of DC's influence in Ukraine.
This is a very bad woman for the United States.
So, in January 2014, she makes a phone call to the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and they're talking about the next government.
If you just think about this, it's kind of funny, right?
We're a democratic country, democratic revolution.
We have no hand in this.
And yet, here you have Victoria Nolan talking with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine about who the Obama administration has selected to be the next prime minister, or we should say, approved of to be the next prime minister of Ukraine, a guy named Arseni Yatsenyuk.
And to give you an idea of how this woman thinks, when the question comes up of what the EU's role is going to be in mediating this, whether they'll mediate with the new coalition that DC has chosen to be part of the new government, when the ambassador raises that question, like, well, is the EU going to going to mediate for us?
Nolan just says, F the EU.
When the call gets leaked, I think the Russians actually intercepted the call and they leak it to the press.
And I mean, it's funny because we didn't even deny that this was like an actual conversation that happened.
We just complained by we, I mean, Western media, just complained that, well, this is a new low in Russian trade craft spying on our calls.
Isn't that funny?
Like, the United States government complaining about people listening.
We never spy on anything, obviously.
Right.
We would never do that.
No.
And so, yeah, so they don't even deny the authenticity of the call.
They just complain that it was a low blow by the Russians to do that.
And take it out of context, right?
Context matters.
But I mean, it gives you an insight into how these people feel entitled.
Basically, it's not democracy unless DC approves of it.
And handpicks, you know, who's going to lead your next administration.
And this gets into another aspect of the whole Ukraine Western perception question, which is that right before, and so I should say that Yitzenyuk ends up being ousted on February 22nd, 2014.
Protesters basically threaten him with violence.
At that point, several people have been killed.
Police officers and protesters have been killed by snipers, among other things.
And this is, we're going to get into that.
And so these militants basically threaten Yanukovych with violence.
If you don't step down, it's going to get really bad for you.
And so he steps down.
And the new government led by Yitzenyuk is installed, I think, by February 27th, late February.
On February 26th, there is a call between two European politicians, a Brit named Catherine Ashton and an Estonian minister named Urmus Pate.
And the call is part of an inquiry.
They're trying to figure out, you know, who is behind the violence.
And Ashton assumes that it's the incumbent Ukrainian government led by Yanukovych, and she assumes that he had been ordering police to kill protesters.
Because this is just what they were, they had assumed, because there's this whole like image of Yanukovych as a Kremlin stooge who's just like a kind of a ruthless tyrant.
But Pate, who had been on the ground and had been gathering intelligence about what happened, surprises Ashton and he says, based on the intelligence that I've gathered here, what I'm hearing is that the sniper killings were orchestrated by someone or some group that is part of the new coalition, which is referring to the coalition that had been cultivated by the West and specifically DC, these opposition leaders,
these political outsiders that we had chosen to be kind of like, the leaders of the new government, that Pite's intelligence suggested that it was someone who was part of this new coalition that had been orchestrating these, these killings uh, and making it in.
In other words, this group, one group had been shooting both cops and protesters in order to fan the flames of violence.
And an American scholar named Gordon Hahn analyzed uh the, the violence that happened during the they're called the, the Maidan protests or the Maidan uprising, and it culminates in the so-called Revolution Of Dignity.
It's all this, it's all basically the same thing, and so this American scholar sat down and looked at it and what he found was that the the majority of the pivotal moments of escalation that resulted in violence, it was on the protesters, not the police like yes, the police shot people, but it was because protesters were doing stuff like setting fires to buildings intentionally to provoke, like a reaction from the security that would get people killed.
And what this inquiry by these European politicians found was that uh, the killings were again.
One group was shooting both cops and protesters in order to intensify uh, the violence.
And Ashton was you could hear on the call that she's like, well, that's not what I was expecting.
And then she kind of changes the subject and the inquiry is dropped.
Nothing ever comes of it uh, but when the call got intercepted and leaked again uh, the the Estonian ministry didn't even deny the call's authenticity.
They just said again, it was taken out of context it's, it's.
It's a part of.
I think the Guardian ran a story on it and the headline was like, intercepted call fans conspiracy theories about what really happened during the maiden.
So the call gets intercepted and it leaves this question in the air that has remained unanswered, who was really behind the violence that happened during the Mydan protests?
Western Intelligence in Maidan00:07:41
Uh, again there, the police, security forces did actually kill protesters, but it seems like there was a third party that was basically playing the bad actor, intentionally setting people up to get killed and again the media dismissed.
This is a conspiracy theory, although they didn't deny the fact that this inquiry existed.
But you had guys like Paul Craig Roberts, who served under Reagan at the Treasury.
And in 2014, watching these protests unfold, Paul Craig Roberts wrote in a column, like, yeah, this is a Western-backed CIA op.
Like, we have a hand in this.
Like, it's incredible because you can find that article, you know, right now.
You can find Paul Craig Roberts, former government official who served under Reagan, just talking about this just very candidly, like, yeah, no, this is, we had a hand in this.
And at the same time that that's happening, the head of the Ukrainian security service, which is kind of like the successor force of the old Ukrainian KGB, the guy who was running it during the coup, and right afterwards, he is fired and he disappears and he re-emerges in Russia.
But he was running, it's called the SBU, the security service at the time that this happened.
And when he reappears after this coup happens, he says that basically the Ukrainian government, elements of the Ukrainian government, have been working with Western intelligence.
And more damningly, that the so-called democratic activists had been trained by the West.
And it's dismissed because, you know, again, he reappears in Russia.
So it's easy to kind of dismiss him because you can say, well, he's, you know, he's obviously sympathetic to Russia.
And therefore, although he was the head of the security service, he doesn't know what he's talking about, or it's a lie.
Okay.
But then you also have Polish politicians and Polish journalists who are saying that we helped the West train these activists in Poland.
Because if you know anything about Poland, you know that Poland and the CIA are super, are really, really close.
They work together on a lot of things.
And there's an intimate relationship between that country and Western intelligence.
And so you have Polish politicians and journalists who are saying that our government was complicit in the Maidan because we were part of the process of training and preparing these people.
And I mean, like, there's actually a lot of this going on around that time and afterwards and ever since that people are saying like that this was very much a Western operation.
It was not necessarily a democratic revolution because the country was polarized on this issue.
And the BBC does a report, an investigative report on this.
And they also find that they're like these militants, the ones that were really kind of the, I mean, yeah, there was a lot of journalists and like NGO trained activists, but ultimately it's the militants that are really driving the protests.
And, you know, they're the ones that are really the spearhead of this whole thing.
And the BBC's coverage notes that these people were really highly coordinated, that they had like a sophisticated logistical infrastructure.
And a German outlet called the Frankfurt Algemeiner Zeit does their own reporting.
And they interview one of the protesters who he doesn't say who, but he says, yeah, I showed up and I was given high-velocity ammunition and a choice between a shotgun and basically a long rifle.
Like, doesn't that seem odd?
That there was this kind of system in place to arm these people with whatever they needed.
And that guy in particular seemed kind of uncomfortable with the whole thing.
And he said, I was shooting at people's feet, is what this guy said.
But scholars like Gordon Hahn, the American who looked at the violence, noted that a lot of these snipers seemed to be well trained and they were specifically aiming for the heart, the lungs, and the neck, shooting to kill.
There are all these open questions, right?
And this is important because basically all of the red flags around this contribute to parts of eastern Ukraine basically saying, like, this is BS.
Like, We don't acknowledge the legitimacy of this government.
And so we're now separatists.
And that triggers a civil war that's basically been raging for nearly a decade now.
And it's the instability that happens around this time that contributes to Putin moving to annex Crimea, which, by the way, has tons of pro-Russian sympathy.
I mean, you don't hear about this in Western media, or it's dismissed.
It's just misinformation, right?
But there are a lot of, there is a ton of pro-Russia sentiment in Eastern Ukraine and specifically Crimea.
They also speak Russian in those parts.
So let me ask you, Pedro, really quick.
I want to play some tape here of Victoria Newland.
Let's play Cut 97 just as some supporting tape of what you're talking about here.
Sure.
When you're a high-ranking official talking about diplomatic efforts in Ukraine, the last thing you want to do is drop your guard.
So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and have the UN help glue it and, you know, the EU.
But that is exactly what reportedly happened between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Jeffrey Piatt.
So that was exactly what you were talking about in that particular clip.
So just to make sure I understand this and our listenership understands, is that Western intelligence, Victoria Newland, all of this, we were heavily involved in these, allegedly, in these Maidan protests in 2014, which then displaced a leader that was pro-Russian with one that was more pro-Western or pro-CIA or pro-DC.
And that really started the unraveling of the events of what we're seeing right now.
Is that correct?
Yes.
And but there's even more.
And I think it's important to go back to that Viktor Yanukovych point and say, like, yeah, he pro-Russia in the sense that he was willing to work with Russia and he didn't hate Russia, as opposed to the regimes that followed after that, where they're just rapidly, like Zelensky, rapidly anti-Russian, which again, you know, that might sound good to those of us who have like residual, you know, anti-Russian feelings, but when we're talking about geopolitics and things like war, that has consequences for civilian populations,
like you're seeing right now.
And so, okay, what is the result of this crisis in eastern Ukraine, apart from the civil war?
Well, it results in what's called the Minsk agreements.
There are two of these, 2014 and 2015.
Basically, these are ceasefire agreements that the point of them was to affect a ceasefire on the one hand between Russian for pro-Russian side and the pro-Ukrainian side in Ukraine and to protect Ukraine's sovereignty, because obviously that's an important consideration.
Because there is a fear that Russia would just continue driving West.
So the point of the Minsk agreements was just to satisfy both sides.
But the Minsk agreements fail.
They fail in part because of DC.
The second Minsk agreement is signed in 2015.
By 2016, you have John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Amy Klobuchar in Ukraine on video standing next to former Ukrainian president Viktor Poroshenko at a military base saying, we will go back to DC and tell them to basically arm you.
And like, again, you can find the video.
No, we have the clip.
I mean, it's Lindsey Graham basically being like, we're going to do it.
Minsk Agreements Fail DC00:03:56
We're going to send a message.
He says, quote, time to play offense is what he says.
So let me ask you, Pedro, you know, we've talked a lot about Iran on our program of how our government was involved in displacing Mossaghde and re-implementing the Shah, which led to the Iranian revolution.
Is that a similar sort of kind of like, we got involved and then something bad happened afterwards type deal?
I'm going to do something that journalists don't usually do, and that's to say I don't.
Uh, that's that I don't know enough to comment on that.
Okay, I know it's shocking, right, that I would admit that, but no, I just uh, unfortunately, this is this is the this is taking up all of my interest right now.
So, well, we need more of that in journalism, frankly.
But I guess the argument I'm making is it sounds like we get involved, there's a color revolution, yes, you know, and then there is some form of a you know kind of vacuum, and then other things start to unravel as a result of the West's hyper involvement.
Yeah, no, that's that's basically, I mean, this is it's not, by the way, it's not anti-American to say that, it's actually very pro-American.
No, I agree.
I agree, it's DC that you're indicting DC.
You're careful with your language here.
It's not the welder in Missouri who's at fault here, it's this Newland character.
If the United States government won't mind its business in your life, why would it mind its business in other countries?
That's right.
I mean, that's actually a great way to think about this, and that's precisely what we're talking about here.
And again, something that gets left out from the whole discussion of like, why did Putin wake up in February on the wrong side of the bed and invade Ukraine?
Well, what we don't talk about is the fact that there was unrest in Kazakhstan and Belarus just recently.
That's right.
And Putin specifically said that these were attempted color revolutions.
And the point of these is to further destabilize Russia.
And he said, we will not tolerate the boat being rocked.
And so it's an open question if Noland and her friends in the public and private sector were involved in these seemingly democratic protests, right?
Once again, and they're also recent.
These are these are recent things.
I remember the Belarus story.
Yeah, there were a lot of people that said this doesn't look organic.
It looks manufactured.
But we forgot about that.
Or it's not, or it's not related at all.
That has nothing to do with it.
It's just paranoia on the side of people like us and on the side of Russia, right?
But these things matter.
Look, you can't poke the bear, the nuclear-armed bear, every single day of the year and then not expect it to get angry.
And again, this is not a Kremlin talking point.
This is what George Kennan has been saying.
This is what Robert Gates said.
This is what John Mearsheimer has been saying.
It's what every person with sense has been saying for decades that if you treat a country like this with this kind of history and this kind of identity, if you treat them like an enemy, they're going to become your worst enemy.
And that's not naive to say that.
It doesn't make you like a pacifist to say that.
It just, it's common sense, right?
You keep jabbing at someone.
You keep demonizing someone.
Eventually, they're going to do something back.
But the problem is that civilians get caught in the middle, obviously.
That's what you're saying.
Yeah, I mean, look, I've called Putin all the worst things you can call somebody, and I'll do that again.
And I want to just play this out, though, because you make a really smart point.
I want you to imagine the KGB or the Chinese intelligence agency displacing the president of Mexico.
And then Mexico all of a sudden becomes this really antagonistic, like pro-Chinese, pro-Russian neighbor.
And then let's just say like Russian politicians started to show up to Mexico City and saying, we're going to play offense.
We're going to go to El Paso.
We're going to send a message to DC.
Zimmermann Telegram Context00:02:36
Like, yeah, we probably wouldn't think too kindly about that, right?
We didn't like with how do we react to Cuba?
I mean, we wall them off completely, right?
Well, it was actually, I mean, one thing that comes to mind is the Zimmermann telegram.
Germany made an appeal to Mexico during World War II.
Wow, that's exactly right.
And that actually helped us get into the war because we were like, no, no, no, you're not making it.
You're not coming into our hemisphere.
It's not going to happen, right?
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American Exceptionism Costs00:12:26
Pedro, I want to kind of go through what does Lindsey Graham think his role is in history?
I know we can make jokes about it.
I mean, we should.
Obviously, we should mock it.
But let's talk about this.
What is the impulse to want to get involved in restructuring the government of Ukraine?
Why is it that at every turn, there's almost a hyper-focus from the Klobuchars to the McCains to like we can reformulate other countries?
What is it in the philosophy itself that drives them, that motivates them that they're convinced they can do this?
Well, I should start by saying that I don't usually say that there is one reason for everything.
I think everything is just the result of competing forces.
And obviously, some forces went out over others.
So setting by which I mean cynicism is also a factor here.
There are people that just view Ukraine as a kind of source of plunder.
And it's just a haven for oligarchs and NGOs.
But there's a worldview thing too, mixed up.
There is.
Yeah, I'm just saying that we have to acknowledge that that seedy element is there.
But when we talk about ideology and what kind of ideology drives people like Victoria Nolan and her husband, Robert Kagan, who's one of the leading liberal internationalists and a hardcore neoconservative, Robert Kagan is a lunatic.
And of course, Victoria is married to a lunatic.
He's a Washington Post columnist, if I'm not mistaken.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
And so what drives people like that?
Well, Francis Fukuyama, who wrote The End of History, right?
Yeah, wrote The End of History.
And at one point, he actually denounced neoconservatives, the movement of which he was part.
And I think that contributed to him starting a publication called The American Interest.
I don't even know if it still exists, but there was a national interest.
Then Francis Fukuyama starts the American interest.
And I think he has another one now called The American Prospect.
But the point is, is that he denounced neocons and he described them as Bolsheviks.
That's the term he used.
And what he meant by that is that these are people that think with just enough application of will and force that you can just shape the world in the way that you want it to be.
Your image, right?
Yeah.
And I mean, that sounds maybe kind of cool to some people, like, you know, just the fact that you could just kind of will the world to be the way that you want it to be.
But the reality is a lot of bloodshed.
It means failed democratic projects from Iraq to Afghanistan and all the blood that that entails.
And that was why Francis Fukuyama said, like, these people are freaking lunatics.
Bolsheviks tried this and it gave us the Soviet Union and all the mass murder that that had, you know, that entailed.
And neocons are basically the, I think he said it, that it, he, he invoked Marx, if I recall correctly, that neocons are like the farcical version of Bolsheviks.
And obviously they've emerged in the United States.
Yeah, I just want to, really quick, Pedro, I just want to build out what we mean by neoconservative, right?
So we're talking about the Lindsey Graham types, right?
We're talking about Bill Crystals.
And one of the things that I've been struck by kind of learning how they see the world is that they have very little appreciation from the American sense of how unique the American culture was and is in creating what is a self-government experiment, right?
So they look at the Constitution and the Declaration and they say, aha, all we have to do is bring those words and translate them into Farsi.
And then immediately there will be like this transcendent thing and everyone will kind of go away from their 13th century goat herding, child molesting, you know, ways.
When you and I will say, well, hold on a second.
There were hundreds of years of literature and of learning and of kind of civilizational building that even brought us to a point where Western self-government could be possible.
Can you kind of riff on that for a second?
Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
They're people that think that you can just basically put American ideas or what they refer to as American ideas into basically a happy meal and then use McDonald's to export Americanism.
And just there's no, like they don't see the problem with that.
The only problem is that we're not willing to commit enough blood and treasure to the project.
And the important point is, is that anyone who's not willing to accept that, they end up on the wrong side of neocons.
And I mean, these people are, ironically, they very rarely fight the wars that they think that we should.
They're domestically vicious.
Yeah, I mean, John Potter famously said that a problem with our wars in the Middle East was that we were not willing to kill enough men between the ages of 15 and 35.
And that allowed insurgencies to continue renewing over years.
In other words, we didn't genocide entire populations.
That was, you know, that's the real problem with our foreign policy.
These people are insane.
And what's important to know is that what empires do abroad, what neoconservatives are willing to do abroad, they're willing to do it here.
And that's why you have guys like Bill Crystal who just hate, hate Middle America.
Like Bill Crystal has literally talked about replacing Americans that he doesn't like through an open borders policy.
These people hate you as much as they hate Iraqis who don't get along with the program or Afghans who don't get along with the program.
They're ideologues.
They're lunatics.
They're dangerous.
No one should listen to them.
They have blood on their hands and yet they're back in full force and they're good at reinventing themselves.
I'll give them that, especially with younger faces, like people like Elise Stefanik.
It's important to understand that neoconservatives are successful because they've wed themselves to the notion of American exceptionalism.
And for that reason, their ideas are, they can be kind of alluring.
I just want to, I just want to chime in, though.
We do believe America is exceptional, but we have a proper view of why we're exceptional.
And it's more than just the eternal principles that are articulated in the Declaration of the Constitution.
We believe that you need to have a certain moral framework to be able to participate in self-government.
That yes, all men are created equal, absolutely, but not all cultures are created equal, not at all.
And not all cultures are either able, and then the other part, Pedro, which is important, willing to accept Western values, right?
Look at the Middle East.
A lot of them are like, yeah, we don't want this.
Like, we want to live under kind of like Islamic rule.
And we don't want, but there's almost this like impositional, almost an empiric, like an imperialist mindset, isn't there?
Like, no, you're going to like it.
We're going to, we're the problem is we just have to go flat in another village.
And yeah, there's, there's a refusal to accept that there are alternatives to the to the liberal interventionist program to which neoconservatives and neoliberals subscribe.
So what does that mean?
It is unacceptable for someone like Gaddafi or Hussein to be in power.
Yes, those are bad men, but some parts of the world need bad men to maintain a semblance of stability.
What did the neoconservative agenda get out of Iraq?
ISIS.
They created a power, like the neoconservative agenda created a power vacuum that helped usher in one of the most murderous militaries in modern history.
Is Gaddafi's world better off now?
Is Libya better off now after we've intervened?
No, it's not.
I mean, there are people that literally are saying, like, we wish Gaddafi was back, but neoconservatives won't accept that.
They refuse to accept that anything else other than their vision is acceptable.
Well, it's not just that.
Is Europe better off?
Look at the refugee crisis, right?
So not only does it displace the current country, but then you have a demographic kind of pressure on Europe where all of a sudden we're just going to bring in millions of people.
And that's also part of the neoconservative belief, right?
Which is not only can we believe bring values anywhere, but we can bring anybody here.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, there's no reason.
I mean, and this is precisely why people like Bill Crystal think that, you know, we could just replace Americans we don't like with immigrants because humans or beings are just, they're basically just widgets.
If you don't like them, you can switch them out like Legos.
Like that, that is, again, these people are ideologues.
And like I said, the issue is that they wed their ideas to American exceptionalism, which maybe sounds nice rhetorically, but in practice, it actually results in a kind of dehumanization where people who are not on board with your program, you can basically do whatever you want to them.
You can be as cruel as you want to them because they become like an absolute enemy because they don't share your values.
Therefore, you're justified in doing whatever you want to them.
Well, let's go through a little level deeper, Pedro.
I know that I don't know if you're pressed for time or not, but let's talk about what the regime actually thinks is American exceptionalism versus what you and I would think is American exceptionalism, right?
But the regime is like our American exceptionalism is that we have gay pride flags on our embassies, right?
Like that's that's what Victoria Newland is fighting.
Am I wrong by saying that?
No, I think that there's certainly a belief that all, I mean, like the woke stuff is kind of like the new bizarre American exceptionalism.
Yes.
That's how neocons see it.
Again, going back to Bill Crystal, because he's like a case study in this stuff.
He recently did a podcast with someone where he kind of defended being woke.
He said, well, you know, maybe there's a good reason to be woke.
And people like me are learning that we have to evolve.
It's funny, their hawkish foreign policy never changes.
They want to invade the world and invite the world, but they're willing to move on the social issues.
This has been actually a trait of neoconservatives for the longest time.
They're super hawkish on foreign policy, and on domestic issues, they're squishy, and they always will be.
But I think it's important here to remember that the Ukrainian civilians, Ukrainian nationalists, they're not fighting for pride parades and BLM and, you know, for men to be swimmers in the NCAA.
They're not fighting for that, right?
There is a real nationalism in Ukraine that I respect and I'm deeply sympathetic to.
I'm inspired by the resistance that these people are putting up.
But that's not the same.
They're not fighting for the neoconservative or liberal international.
They're not fighting for NATO that tweets out a woman with a gay pride flag being like, this is what you have waiting for you, Ukraine.
Yeah, that's right.
And our elites project that onto Ukraine.
And so the media frames it as there was an article in the Boston Review, and I think the headline was like, Putin's anti-gay war in Ukraine.
And like, it's insane.
We basically reframe everything through the lens of these bizarre culture war issues.
The whole world, according to our elites, is basically like a big culture war.
Yes.
And if any country is like not sufficiently woke or sufficiently in that direction, then we might have to invade you.
I know that sounds like insane, but like, isn't that kind of one of the through lines of all this?
Is that it's less about self-government or checks and balances because we don't even have that in our own country in a lot of ways, right?
But it's more about like, do you, are, are you like 10 out of 10 on the checklist of kind of the orthodoxy of this secular religion?
Yeah, no, that's right.
And again, this is important.
This is an important point because so much of what liberal internationalists do is projection.
You know, the reason that Putin invaded Ukraine in February is because it's a democracy and he hates democracies.
You can literally make the same argument against our establishment that we feel like we have to meddle in the affairs of every country that doesn't get on board with the program.
And again, you can break that down into ideologues who really do believe that, who believe that we need to export this stuff, and also cynics who like to use buzzwords like democracy to justify just basically making foreign governments more compliant with what we want or with what our elite wants.
NATO Expansion Unipolar Mindset00:05:34
I think those things often work in tandem.
But yeah, I mean, the DC establishment is guilty of the same thing, of meddling in the affairs of other countries, often with catastrophic consequences for the very people they claim to care about.
I want to play Cut 98.
This was Lindsey Graham and John McCain in Ukraine.
And so, look, it's hard to pinpoint the intentions.
I don't know if Lindsey Graham's getting richer or powerful off of this stuff.
I don't know.
I'm sure he has some defense contractor donors and that stuff.
But I really do think at the core, both McCain and Lindsey Graham are legitimate philosophical internationalists, that they think that the values of the liberal world order, of kind of like social liberalism, not only can be, but they're on a moral quest to send it to every corner of the planet.
Play Cut 98.
Your fight is our fight.
2017 will be the year of offense.
All of us will go back to Washington and we will push the case against Russia.
Enough of a Russian aggression.
It is time for them to pay a heavier price.
I believe you will win.
I am convinced you will win, and we will do everything we can to provide you with what you need to win.
So that was cut up.
I thought our team did actually a really good job of that.
But let's think about that's in 16.
He's like, okay, Russia, we're going to go play offense.
I mean, that's, I, what, do they think that like we can reshape all these countries to become like Manhattan?
I, I mean, walk us through, I mean, walk us through.
I think, I mean, again, setting aside any cynical motivations, yeah, that's a different time.
I'm more interested in the ideology because that is a big part of it.
I mean, this is what John Mearsheimer said: that basically NATO expansionism is the manifestation of 21st-century thinking, which is to say unipolar thinking, that only we have, only we, as in DC, has legitimate interests.
All other interests that conflict with ours are illegitimate.
And Mearsheimer has described figures like Putin as 19th-century thinkers.
In other words, they believe in the balance of power, which acknowledges that other countries, other nations have their own security interests.
And to avoid conflict, these interests have to be balanced, right?
You can't just have one superpower that's just kind of running roughshot all the other ones and expecting them to take it.
And what Mearsheimer's point is that this is actually the philosophy that drives NATO expansionism.
Yeah, we can actually drive nuclear weapons right up to the border with Russia and aim them at the Kremlin.
And they have to just like it.
They can't, they have no right to complain about it.
Absolutely.
Ukraine is just our military base, and we are going to use it to destabilize.
That's actually the goal.
The goal is not to stop at Ukraine.
It's actually to destabilize Russia's government and replace it with one that is compliant with DC.
Like, yes, absolutely, they believe that.
And again, guys like Mearsheimer, who's extremely critical of Russia as well, has said, like, this is lunatic.
This guarantees war.
And war resolves, obviously, in civilian casualty.
Like, we lose innocent lives over this.
Well, yeah.
But the ideologues don't care.
I mean, a great example of this right now is like you see, I don't believe the polls, but I mean, you see this in polls and also in experts, like people like psychos at the Atlantic who will never fight in a war, right?
They will never go to the front lines.
And what are they saying right now?
Nuclear war is worth the risk of democracy in Ukraine.
So to answer your question, yes.
I mean, and to go a step further, I mean, again, I'll use the Iran example.
It is perfect.
I think, I mean, we got so involved there from CIA, you know, disclosed CIA documents.
And what we got was far worse, far worse, right?
You got a theocratic Islamic dictatorship, and you had a secular government that just wanted to nationalize the oil, but our CIA got involved in it.
And it is the question of a great society and a strong society.
Are you willing, are you able to let other countries survive without having to meddle into them?
And so far, we failed that test.
Any closing thoughts here, Pedro?
Closing thought is to listen to your guts.
And when you hear people like Lindsey Graham calling for no fly zones, when you hear liberal and conservative media all sounding the same overnight, you should be deeply suspicious and you should not allow yourself to be morally blackmailed into going along with this because like this is a crime.
What neoconservatives, what liberal interventionists want is a crime against humanity and we cannot be complicit in it.
Listen to Your Guts00:01:21
I say this to a conservative the other day.
He said, I want to spread American values across the world.
I said, I can hear you.
I know your heart.
You want the values of Burke and you want the values of Madison and Jefferson.
But when you say that and you hear some numbskull in D.C., that's Nicole Hanna-Jones that's going to be exported into Ukraine.
Yes, that's right.
It's going to be Mark Milley.
He said, I never thought of it that way.
I said, so your idea of American values is great and I appreciate that.
But understand, they are laundering that term for what are actually anti-American values because they know that it can win and swing districts and get them the money they need to go further socially liberalize the world and have men be women and women be men.
They would love nothing more.
The regime would love nothing more than in the 2045 Ukrainian NCAA equivalent swim competition to have transgender men or women compete.
That would be like a huge win.
They're like, see, we did it.
We destroyed women's sports in Ukraine.
All right, Pedro, Chronicles Magazine.
Very smart.
Thanks so much.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
Email me directly, freedom at charliekirk.com and support our show at charliekirk.com/slash support.
Thanks so much for listening.
God bless.
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