Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman dissect the true motivations behind Vladimir Putin's desire to invade Ukraine, complete with the historical context of the proxy wars we've seen over and over. There are not many good options for Biden and the US, and Putin knows this.
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Why is it disloyal to side with Russia but loyal to side with Ukraine?
They're both foreign countries that don't care anything about the United States.
Kind of strange.
The opportunity comes from a perception of the fact that the U.S.
is weak and distracted.
But weak because of the hyperpolarization within the U.S.
society.
And that is being driven by President Trump.
I have every confidence that if we did not have A insurrection on January 6th, if we did not have an attack on the Capitol, I don't think that Vladimir Putin would see the same kinds of weaknesses.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Monk Creek Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates.
I'm here with Nick Halsman.
We're glad you could join us.
Nick, you know, we talk about so many things.
We take so many different threads in American culture and history and politics.
We get into some of the dangers that we are facing.
We get into some of the ideas that are lurking out there in the distance and some of the issues that we've seen.
Unfortunately, today, as we're taping, we're on a war footing with Russia over a possible invasion of Ukraine.
It is a It's an anxious type of thing.
A lot of the things that we've been focusing on talking about investigating and discussing are coming into play.
And we got to talk about that.
We got to talk about what's what's happening here, all the different threads.
But before we do, what are your initial thoughts?
This sucks.
The whole thing just sucks.
It does suck because it's so unknown and uncertain.
And I think this is what Putin wants.
But we can't ignore that there are parallels in history to what happened with Afghanistan.
And how Russia or assuming the Soviet Union tried to invade Afghanistan is it sunk them into you know Years and years of fighting and then you want to remind us all what happened when they were ended up when they're done and lost that battle Graveyard of empires, baby.
Yeah graveyard of empires Yeah, and you know, you're exactly right when you say this is this is what Vladimir Putin wants and in order to really get into this because I Again, our media is really bad at this stuff.
They lack the knowledge, the expertise, or the willingness to really get into what is going.
The last few years of American history, they've been heading in this direction for a while.
And we don't even have to get into conspiracy theories in order to do it.
We don't even have to talk about, you know, pee tapes.
All kinds of stuff like that.
We can talk about actual material conditions, geopolitical goals, capitalism, all of it.
So what we're going to do is we're going to dive pretty deep into this situation, talk about what is happening and what it seems like what is happening.
I'll go ahead and hit the reset on this to make sure that we're all on the same page.
Uh, Russia is currently gesturing as if it wants to invade Ukraine.
Uh, it considers Ukraine to be rightful territory of the old Soviet Russian empire, which of course is one of the main goals of Putin is to reassert dominance of the old historical reaches of those empires.
The United States through NATO has now said, you know, this goes back to Joe Biden's press conference the other day in which he said he thought Putin was going to do it, which.
Would probably mean war or could mean war, particularly through NATO.
We now stand today.
It's becoming more and more clear that this is a possibility.
There are 8,000 8,500 troops that are on high alert for the possibility of war.
We've got warships going into the region.
Meanwhile, other individuals are pushing for tens of thousands of troops to basically meet this as a war.
Mitch McConnell, who represents the old Republican wing of the Republican Party, which we'll have to get deeper into why that's not totally representative of what's going on, is pushing for lethal weapons inside of Ukraine in order to meet this possible invasion.
And the American political world, which Nick has been systematically hollowed out, twisted around, shaken up like an etch-a-sketch, and moved around like toy soldiers, is currently completely and utterly ready to take this situation, to take advantage of it, and is already bristling and trying to get America to somehow or another twist and contort itself around to work with Putin.
Did I miss anything there?
Is that – I mean, I don't know if you missed anything, but then we have to add on another hundred things to that list of exactly what this means, which is the problem here.
This gets very complicated very quickly.
To me, it's actually a two-pronged attack here, because obviously Putin is threatened by the notion of Ukraine joining NATO.
Because, you know, and Putin doesn't consider Ukraine a country, by the way.
He's made, he said it publicly that I think he thinks it's just some sort of territory that is sort of independent and that could be taken over by whoever, you know, who wants, whoever wants it.
Obviously, the fear for him is that if it becomes part of NATO, then they have to invoke the clause, if you attack one, you attack all of us.
I don't think he wants to deal with 7-on-1 or 10-on-whatever-it-is now.
That would be a problem.
It was already a problem, for instance, when the Soviet Union was 1-on-1 against Afghanistan.
Although, in the background, we had American armaments funding certain people that became famous later on in Afghanistan.
So, obviously it would be a pseudo-proxy war because we would be arming Ukrainians against direct Russian military.
It's all, there's more to this and it's all not great because the one piece I want to just mention before I turn it back over to you is that this isn't necessarily even about Ukraine.
Putin's overall objective is to make the United States crumble.
He wants to destroy the government in the way we know it.
In a very similar way to what happened in Afghanistan when they lost in Afghanistan and the Soviet Union crumbled.
It didn't just disappear and become nothing.
It becomes a zombie version of Russia, which by the way has done very well for Putin.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And when you put it like that, it sounds bad.
Yeah.
And I want to say, you know, this is something that we've sort of been talking about in different starts and stops.
Soviet Union in the late 80s and early 90s.
And so that's really what's going on here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And when you put it like that, it sounds bad.
Yeah.
And I want to say, you know, this is something that we've sort of been talking about in different starts and stops.
You know, I think a lot of Americans, particularly because they were either born in America or benefited from America or found a lot of pleasures and luxuries within America because the American mythology worked for them.
They really truly wanted to believe that American hegemony was going to exist forever.
That America won the Cold War, which is an absolute absurdity.
The idea that anybody can actually win a Cold War outside of the people who profit off of it as opposed to the countries which Bleed from it because capitalism made them bleed the idea that America would go and challenge that nobody was going to ever invade another territory.
And you'll notice that's kind of what's happening here is that the neoliberal world order post Cold War was basically a freeze.
Right.
It was like everything is as it is and it's not going to change unless, I don't know, some dastardly dictator has weapons of mass destruction and we have to go in and, you know, clean it out.
And that, of course, allows us to go in, gain territory, gain markets, such and such.
Here we have a situation where Vladimir Putin, who has incredible power, incredible wealth, and also, you know, sort of has America over a barrel in this situation, like We have been absolutely destroyed by the pandemic.
Our internal political conflicts and economic conflicts have just, you know, stripped us bare at this point.
We also have a movement in this country, a right-wing, theocratic, authoritarian movement, which we talk about all the time.
We've been warning about all the time.
This is a group that looks at Vladimir Putin.
First of all, the Republican Party prefers Vladimir Putin to every Democratic president.
That's a fact.
And that wasn't on accident.
You know what I mean?
Like that didn't just occur.
And on part, it had to do with Russian propaganda and misinformation campaigns.
But there's also a synchronicity that's going on here, which is a conservative, reactionary, illiberal thing.
This is why they're going to Hungary.
This is why they love Putin.
They want to get rid of democracy.
You know, they're fine having elections if they're show elections and they turn out the way that they want them to.
They want a theocratic religious state in which, you know, it's like you can ban people from being gay or you can ban people from getting abortions.
They also want it to be a white supremacist state that like talks about culture and stuff, which is part of the big giant plan.
We already see that Republicans are calling their representatives and saying, why aren't we supporting Russia in this situation?
This is part of a long ongoing process that you brought up and put so succinctly, which is this has been an absolute job that has been done on us.
And that has used our divisions, used our problems against us.
And now as we look at Ukraine, we don't have any good moves.
None.
There's no good move to not do anything.
If he invades, uh, that's pretty weak and terrible and awful.
And you got to feel bad for the Ukrainians.
If you do go to war, well, my God, all of a sudden militarism is going to spike and God knows what's going to happen with that.
There's also a possibility that Putin is sort of faking this thing to see what we would do to see if we would blink and have a moral victory, or maybe he wants to go to war.
I'm not sitting here telling you there's an easy answer, but I'm telling you that a lot of the things that we've been talking about are now heating up and are being put into kinetic motion.
The potential for this moment has been created over the years, and now we're watching a lot of these pieces start to come together on a board that just, it sucks, man.
It's a terrible game board. - Well, what fascinates me is how, you know, and this goes back to even to like Michael Flynn stuff right when Trump got elected, was that there weren't any kind of remnants in the addled brains of the GOP or people that follow the GOP of hatred towards the Soviet Union.
You would have thought after decades and decades of a Cold War, you'd have some sort of remnants where you remember, oh yeah, Russia bad, we shouldn't like them, they're the enemy.
But in fact, they very quickly became this notion, I think obviously Trump was the guy that kind of introduced, what would be wrong with being closer to Russia?
Wouldn't that be a good thing?
And it kind of was disarming in the rationale, it sounded right.
You see these t-shirts and you see them at all the conventions, I'd rather be a Russian than a Democrat, like you just mentioned.
That was a kind of a scary moment there when you can say to yourself, how is it possible that Americans would rather be a member of a foreign hostile country than, you know, another fellow American and support another fellow American?
That was really, really, really troubling to me.
So what's interesting is that normally you'd say, okay, we go in And you'd imagine we'd have some, it wouldn't be unilateral, there'd be other countries involved to go in against Russia and get them out.
That would normally be a big bump for Biden, right?
The military bump that everyone gets.
But I think the calculation, like you said, is Putin is very smart.
He realizes that there isn't a really great win for the Americans either way on this one.
It's probably right where you'd give fodder to the right-wing media to rip Biden, because listen, let's just say it doesn't go well.
Right.
That's a problem.
And if it goes well, maybe they're killing innocent people.
And, you know, and maybe we they bombed the hospital and they shouldn't have those kind of things.
And so it opens up Biden and the Democrats for a lot of stuff and then also puts the Democrats in that in that terrible position where they don't want to appear weak.
Right.
And so they want to maybe go overboard with what the response will be.
It's a real problem that we're going to have to continue talking about because it gets bigger and bigger.
Yeah, and real fast, just to put something into reference and context here, this is not the first time in which American movements have sided with outside authoritarians.
Leading up to World War II, before Pearl Harbor, and this is one of the problems we have in which the story we tell about World War II, we pretend that everybody was on board with it and then Pearl Harbor happened and we leapt into action.
That's not what occurred.
As Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party started invading countries in Europe, right?
You had a lot of right-wing authoritarians within the United States who were like, this is great.
He's absolutely right.
The white race should be doing these things.
And all he's doing is taking back territories that they have lost.
All of a sudden you started having fascistic, authoritarian, Nazi-style parties around the United States.
People forget that, that the American Nazi Party held a rally at Madison Square Garden and had like 25,000 people with swastikas and pictures of George Washington.
Charles Lindbergh, one of the most famous Americans of the era, was making giant speeches about how Jews controlled the media and we should join with Germany and form the ramparts of white supremacy.
Well, guess what happens?
Roosevelt is able to give aid to people in order to tamp down radicalization among young men, particularly young white men, which keeps them from going out and joining a brown shirts or, you know, black shirts or whatever color they wanted to be.
There were silver shirts too, by the way, they looked ridiculous.
And then they, they, we had Pearl Harbor and all of a sudden everybody forgot about this fascistic thing, right?
Because all of a sudden you have a pretext for, oh, we're in the fight now.
Well, this situation, That's not what this is.
You have had years in this country, including a president of the United States, whose main meetings with other world leaders were dictators and autocrats who went and hung out with the dictator of North Korea, who went and hung out with Vladimir Putin and sided with Putin against intelligence agencies. who went and hung out with Vladimir Putin and sided He fell in love with the leader of North Korea.
Don't forget.
He fell in love.
They sent each other love letters.
There is a prepared movement in this country.
And you're exactly right.
They're not going to support anything that we do against Russia, first and foremost, right?
There's no winning there.
They're not going to start waving the flags.
The Republican Party is not the Republican Party that we're used to.
Mitch McConnell is not representative of these people.
They hate Mitch McConnell.
They hate neoliberals like Mitch McConnell.
They are part of what we're now calling national conservativism.
They believe in authoritarianism and anti-democracy and white supremacy and theocratic control.
They want what Putin has.
They've worked with him.
They've met with him.
They've talked with all the people around him.
This is not a good situation.
It's what I would say.
It's it's it's it's basically looking up and realizing that you hadn't been paying attention to a chess game that you thought was checkers.
And that's and we've been trying to tell people warn people what was occurring.
And now It's starting to reveal itself, what this is.
And it's also not just about Putin wanting to have the Americans, the United States, feel the pain of a government crumbling at their feet.
It's also about money, right?
Why do they want Ukraine so badly in terms of, you know, any other former Soviet Union satellite they could have attacked and taken over?
And a lot of it has to do with it has a big border along the Black Sea, which is a huge thing about ports.
This is why they took Crimea to begin with.
I actually studied the map because I think a lot of people in America, you know, we don't study this kind of this area very much besides maybe the fourth grade, you know, those big maps you'd make with the gumdrops to do the cities.
I never did.
Gumdrops.
I've heard about the gumdrop maps, but I've never made... We did it, and then it would actually get, like, warped because you'd use paint on, like, the thinner, you know, poster board, and... Anyway, but the reason why they wanted Crimea was because, yeah, it's, like, surrounded by water on the bottom, the southern edge of Ukraine, so it's a really strategic port for money to be able to, you know, for shipping and stuff, and obviously that's another reason why they want Ukraine, because it's even more area to get through the Black Sea.
And we know that the Russians are poor and their economy isn't going very well and Putin has been suffering.
The one area you can actually hurt Putin is with like the sanctions that Obama put on him after going into Crimea.
And so that is the one, the other overriding factor here is simply about greed and how he can enrich himself more and the oligarchy that is the Russian government.
Well, and real fast, I want to go back so we can go forward, because that's one of the important things we need to do here.
When you did have the fall of the Soviet Union, as you've already brought up, what occurred in the Soviet Union was as the, and it wasn't really socialism at that point, it was more of a socialist capitalist country, sound familiar?
So it falls, all of a sudden neoliberalism rushes in, you know, and basically it takes away any and all services, it sells them off to the highest bidder, In this case, it just ended up in the hands of a bunch of kleptocratic, oligarchial gangsters, basically.
And it becomes a klepto state, right?
And that's perfect for Putin and all the people that it represents.
They love it.
It's great.
And a matter of fact, it's pretty good for neoliberalism too, right?
It allows things to move around.
It creates discipline among the people.
But here's the thing about neoliberalism and capitalism.
Neoliberalism thought that it was going to create a stable economy for the world, right?
It thought it was going to create the thing that would last forever, the end of history, right?
Guess what?
Capitalism doesn't like stability.
It likes it in order to make workers show up and punch in the clock and not take very much money.
It loves that.
But it likes to overheat and it likes to destroy and it likes to eat up things like locusts.
I was talking to you before we started recording.
It's a lot like Walmart.
Walmart will show up in your small town, right?
Because the Walmart algorithm says that town can have a Walmart, right?
It shows up.
All of a sudden, it eats up everything in that town.
It shuts down every single business in the town, gets rid of every single grocery store.
Suddenly, everybody in the town has to work at Walmart, more or less, right?
That's really the only job that you can have.
All of a sudden, the algorithm goes, I don't think this town needs a Walmart anymore.
Right?
Like, it's run its purpose.
It doesn't need a McDonald's anymore.
It's gone.
Neoliberalism, right now, is a supposed static world system.
Capitalism doesn't want that.
It wants to move things.
It wants to break things.
That's why we have wars.
That's why we have crises.
So it can move around and find new places.
We were talking before this started.
The market is eating shit right now.
And Jim Cramer and all of his bevy of assholes who spend all day talking about this and it made ungodly fortunes.
They don't know what's going on.
And they're like, oh, my God, all this money is being pulled out.
We don't know where it's coming from.
The question that we have to face is.
All of these countries, including Russia, China, all of these wealthy people from around the world and in America, they've been putting money in the American market because that's the safest place to make money.
Because America is the capital of capitalism at this point.
Guess what?
Go and ask Britain if empires last.
Ask Britain if capitalism is loyal to your country.
Because guess what?
They hopped on a freighter ship and they came right over here.
Absolutely.
right after the war had destabilized everything they were like no i think america looks good let's make it the superpower when is capitalism done with us and what will that turn into what is the aftermath of that and so if capitalism is deserting us i gotta tell you our lives look pretty different from what they do now absolutely i mean it feels to me like one of the
actually it's a good metaphor or a good example of you know you mentioned that neoliberalism uh...
how it felt about itself after Russia or the Soviet Union fell, it was actually, I think it was good for neoliberalism because they felt like it proved that it worked.
Look, we instituted neoliberalism and then the Soviet Union fell as if like, you know, that was it.
We did it.
Yeah.
We did it.
Yes, guys!
We did it!
And it's almost like, you know, it's kind of like, you know, is it like Caddyshack when he hits the putt and it doesn't go in and then all the bad guys are cheering.
This is an amazing way to end the day.
Keep looking at the ball and then eventually the ball does roll in and go.
It's sort of like, or underneath, it's like that movie where the ground starts shaking and you're like, wait a minute, what is that?
And it's a whole other, you unleashed a whole other series of problems.
We thought we won the Cold War.
Yeah.
We did!
We thought we won it but but it's like we got it like if it was a fistfight it's like it's like you you beat the other guy up but you sustained internal bleeding.
Yeah.
I mean you didn't realize it until later.
Did anyone think to ask uh the Soviet Union after they fell or the Russia like oh hey what about all those thousands of nuclear warheads heads that you might not have secure around the world.
Can we maybe help you with that or something?
And, you know, no.
And who knows what happened to us?
I mean, all I can tell you is I guess they will not be used as a terrorist attack because it's been long enough.
But like, I don't know, that was a legitimate fear for me for a long time that they didn't secure nearly any of their of those arms.
Well, yeah.
And the idea, by the way, from the nuclear deterrent and neoliberals love this explanation.
And neoliberals for years and years and years, they said, hey, countries with free markets will never go to war against each other.
War's over.
War's done.
And on top of that, like, maybe you'll have a skirmish, but nuclear weapons could never be brought into the equation again.
Wait, did you say countries with democracy or countries with capitalism?
Oh, democracies with free markets.
Capitalism.
Because in my mind, they would always say democracies won't fight against each other, but that's not what they were really saying.
No, when they said democracies, they were talking about free markets.
Yeah.
Is what they were talking about.
Because if you actually listen to the lectures and if you actually read the literature, democracy becomes free markets, right?
Because that's what they believe.
Because why would you go and destroy another country that's buying your goods or that you have trade with, right?
So in this situation, all it takes, and here's the problem, if you have a system that where like certain people are on top, capitalism starts to whisper in people's ear, right?
And it says, hey, Vladimir Putin, I think there's an opportunity to capitalize on this.
Oh, oh, I guess maybe there's an opportunity to capitalize on this.
And then all of a sudden you start having these tensions.
All it takes is somebody to be brave or to be brash enough to do something like this.
And I have to tell you, man, and I don't know how you feel about it or how you're looking at it.
The idea that this would just be, I think a proxy war is the best possible way to imagine what this conflict could become.
I mean, you start looking at people who all of a sudden think that the American geopolitical dominance is endangered or could be shifted.
There are a lot of people who have been sharing a lot of resources and a lot of information and a lot of stuff that that's a, as I believe George Washington said, that's a spicier meatball is what that is.
How did we do in Vietnam?
Not great.
Not great.
How do we do in Afghanistan?
Well, I mean, listen, we were there for 20 years and we walked out with a lot to show for it.
I'll just say that.
So, you know, let's just say we, and by the way, I'm not sure if we can call it a proxy war because it's directly, Russia is certainly one of the people and then we'd be like, you know, arming the others.
But either way, if it went poorly, which it could, although I do want to say this, I do seem to understand that Ukrainians are similar to the Mujahideen in the sense that they are very nationalist and will go down fighting.
In that same notion like Chechnyans who are insane, crazy, you know, people.
And Ukrainians are also, you know, well equipped.
They're well, they're well trained.
Like, I don't think it would go so well for Putin, which is probably why maybe he won't actually do it because he might be afraid that it could devolve into something like that we saw in Afghanistan for them anyway.
And we don't know.
I mean, and I will say in the midst of all of this, and this is something we have to be very careful about.
We're having a geopolitical conversation right now, right?
Geopolitical conversations and geopolitical ideas are based on game theory.
They're based on two sides looking at each other and trying to imagine what the other side is going to do.
And anybody who follows this stuff, like a game theory called Prisoner's Dilemma, which is the basis of the Cold War and a lot of geopolitical politics, the only thing you can assume is bad faith.
Right.
That the other side is trying to screw you.
So you should screw the other side, which always leads to escalations and escalations.
I mean, Henry Kissinger could not be reached for comment in this conversation.
Right.
But I will say we have to pause and say, I feel so bad for the Ukrainians.
The Ukrainians have been put through so much shit.
for so long, and they've always been a pawn on a chessboard, and their lives have been absolutely disposable for years and years and years.
While we're having these conversations, we're talking about the United States, big U.S., we're talking about Russia, big R. Those are nation states.
You and I are individuals.
The people listening to this are individuals.
We shouldn't have to deal with this shit.
These power mad games by power mad people.
It's horseshit.
And I feel bad for the Ukrainians.
And I feel bad for the fact that we have to sit here and talk about this thing while lives hang in the balance.
You know what I mean?
Like the freeing of capital, capital freeing itself through causing these crises, it kills so many people.
It ruins lives.
And it's an artificial idea.
This sort of parasitic organism that is like a specter that just kills so many people.
Well, it also opens the door for authoritarianism, right?
Absolutely.
Like, eventually.
It might not be right away, and certainly in our case it's taken a couple hundred years, but, you know, it seems to have directly connected to the GOP's very strange desire for authoritarianism.
And they'll even say it out loud, which makes me... The big question I think I have out of all of this Is that considering who we had in the White House before Biden, it doesn't make sense to me necessarily why Putin wouldn't have this gun in Ukraine then when he knew he wouldn't have any resistance.
And if there were, he would know that Trump was going to give him a call and say, hey, we're going to bomb Kiev right now so you can make sure you know how many, you know, troops nearby and so nobody gets hurt.
I suppose the answer could be That that is the point, is that he can't inflict enough emotional damage to the country unless there is a Democrat in the White House, which would then cause more pain, you know, out of this whole dilemma if he does invade now.
But what are your thoughts on that and why he didn't go in the last five years or from five years ago or four years ago?
I think most of the time the answer when there is unscrutable motives is usually going to be material or economics, right?
I think that the pandemic has opened a door wide open.
Like there's a possibility that maybe capitalism did not, maybe capitalism said there's a couple more years to squeeze out of this old, you know, fruit, right?
There's a little bit more juice to get out of America here.
And all of a sudden, people looked up and they were like, oh no, it's not.
Because what happened, of course, with Trump, and again, when you look at Donald Trump, Donald Trump had no loyalty to America whatsoever.
I say that in past tense.
He still has no loyalty to America.
He recognized that Russia wanted to help him.
And that was awesome, right?
It's like an international corporation, much like how corporations don't actually have national loyalties.
Meanwhile, he pushed the Republican Party further and further right.
And I'm not talking about your Mitch McConnells.
I'm not talking about those people who were like, wow, this is useful for passing, you know, tax rebates.
And stealing the Supreme Court.
I'm talking about ideologues, right?
I'm talking about people who are authoritarian, right?
The people that we've been trying to warn people about.
It is such a circumstance at this point.
And I think January 6th, by the way, really made things obvious, right?
That things were bad.
And that whatever had been created here and whatever had been fostered here, both here and from outside, both, I think that that made it obvious that, oh, a lot of things are in place now.
A lot of things are ready to go.
I think the market wants it to happen.
I think that the powers want it to happen.
And you're right.
I mean, it doesn't hurt that there's a Democratic, you know, president at the moment in a no-win situation.
So I don't know.
But I will say, Nick, we've been talking about this for a few months now.
We've talked about how dangerous this would this entire authoritarian movement would be the moment militarism got brought into it.
The moment that we started talking about why America has lost its luster, why it's lost its power, why it loses wars, why it is as militaristic as it is, doesn't this feel like That window has just not even been opened.
It's just been, like, shattered.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny.
We don't hear a lot about, you know, January 6th doesn't seem to have a lot of Russian influence and, you know, interference on social media like the 2016 election did.
Probably because they did all the work already.
They had Sony.
They got it done.
Yeah.
And so, you know, the other reason, the other thing about this is Putin seems to relish the idea of like pulling back the curtain and finally exposing, you know, how a sausage is made.
And the fact that like maybe, just maybe, the United States isn't quite what you thought it was, right?
This is sort of the other, probably the biggest macro version we can look at this is that he wants to pull out that band-aid and make sure Americans understand that like these institutions that you trusted for years and years and years maybe aren't as effective as you thought.
I mean when we get to the point where the CDC is now being dismissed as a entity because who knows if they're telling the truth anymore.
The WHO has been smeared by Trump and now has lost its luster.
Like so many institutions that are vital to a democracy have been our voting, the actual voting that we do that is was proven to be safe and fair.
There's such a distinct lack of trust in that, that those are the seeds that you plant That eventually destroy from within the democracy.
And I think this is, again, this is what Putin is trying to do.
And I guess the only way to combat that, and by the way, the other thing is Putin is trying to get America out of Europe altogether.
I think he's going to try, he can leverage this and say, OK, I won't go in, but you've got to get those bases out of, you know, Germany and out of Italy and all the other places around us.
There is even talk, have you seen the reports that like they might do another Cuban Missile Crisis?
They might actually arm Cuba with supersonic or hypersonic missiles, and we'd be right back where we were in 1962.
I mean, can you believe?
I can, I guess.
But it's hard to imagine that we'd be right back where we were 50, 60 years ago.
Well, and we'd be right back.
And also, like, the presidency doesn't even hold the power that it has anymore.
You wouldn't even have calls between a Biden and a Putin.
And Khrushchev, by the way, like, did not want nuclear war.
You had two people on two sides of a phone who had no interest in that thing escalating beyond where it was.
Do you think that phone, does that line still exist, do you think, between?
No, I doubt it.
I really do.
I doubt it.
I guarantee it probably doesn't.
And so you more or less, in this situation, And I mean, man, everything you just said is exactly right.
It has destroyed our faith in experts.
It's destroyed reality.
It's destroyed faith.
And I have to tell you, the only thing that can replace that is new faith, new experts, new ideas, right?
And some sort of either a rejuvenation or a replacement.
I have spent, God, Nick, I've spent months now reading this guy, Alexander Dugan.
Alexander Dugin is this Russian philosopher, madman, neo-fascist.
I mean literally a neo-fascist, right?
And he created this idea for Putin and all of their military of this new geopolitical idea and the new geopolitical order.
And tell me if you've heard this joke before, man.
It should start by making people in the United States and in Great Britain lose faith in one another and lose faith in science and undermine their democracy and turn them against each other based on their worst prejudices and their paranoias and their class divisions and all of that.
In America and Great Britain, hopefully, based on Dugan's strategy, they would each become, you know, very, very much isolated.
They wouldn't be interested in geopolitics anymore.
And then you would have spheres of influence of which Russia would establish theirs by, let me check my notes, Nick, invading Ukraine.
So I mean, a lot of what we're talking about is part of a larger game.
And I want to be clear about something while we're doing this.
I don't think Donald Trump was elected just because of Russia.
I think there was rot in this country.
There's racism and sexism and authoritarianism that was ready to have Donald Trump.
But I have to tell you, they helped push him over the line.
They have pushed these things in so many different ways.
And what we're watching right now, it's not a coincidence.
All of these things don't come together along a path that they've been talking about for decades now without This type of planning and this type of concentrated effort is what's been happening.
It's much too easy to be able to exploit those differences as well.
Especially when our own politicians are helping that cause and realizing how well that works.
So it's like you got a foreign power who is seeding all these doubts and mistrust of everybody.
You have politicians here doing the same, echoing the same talking points as well for whatever reason, Ron Johnson.
Like, we don't know what's going on with all these different guys.
Remember, don't you remember, I'm old enough to remember when Kevin McCarthy, of all people, had gotten caught on tape saying Dana Rohrabacher and Trump were working for Trump.
Like they as almost like a little joke, but like they probably weren't joking when they said that.
Oh, for Russia.
Yeah, they're working for Russia.
So it's like these guys are doing all the work for Russia now like that.
That's what's so frustrating about this, right?
So many of the GOP politicians have just full tilt taken on the mantle and Russia doesn't even have to do that work to sell that distrust anymore.
It's not even about Russia.
That's the damnedest thing.
It could be Russia.
It could be Hungary.
It could be Brazil.
It's wherever this authoritarian project is happening.
All these people are on the same page.
It just so happens that Putin has been the most aggressive about this stuff, right?
And that he has constantly... And by the way, whenever we're talking about Putin, we're not just talking about Putin.
We're not just talking about a man who gets up in the morning and puts on his pants.
He's not some sort of... And that's a problem that we have to... He's the focus of it.
Yeah, he's the figurehead for a much, much larger project of a bunch of oligarchs, neoliberals, a bunch of people who love this stuff.
And so that has been the main representation that has been there.
Now, you don't have to be in their pockets to realize that you have common cause, right?
Which is, you know what?
These Republicans are really turned on by the idea, and this is what is going on in Russia.
Tell me if it sounds familiar.
They believe in a global elite that is manipulating their world, a new world order, right?
That it is under attack, that Christian values are under attack, that reverse racism is one of the biggest problems in the world, and the only thing that we can do, Nick, is go backwards and make ourselves great again.
It's the same thing.
It's the same plots that are taking place here.
It's the same narratives and same strategies.
Well, those same people think, you know, they want to go back to eating, getting horny from eating green M&Ms.
Oh, God.
Tucker Carlson, by the way.
Oh, dude, I could talk about the M&M situation for so long.
Well, wait, before we do that, one thing I want to make a point of is, you know, we're making this really big deal about Ukraine and it's been years of focusing on Ukraine was part of the when they impeached Trump a second time.
Well, if we're really going to be the police for democracy or for freedom across the world, which we kind of haven't done very well for a long, long time.
And we're going to keep talking about going into Ukraine.
You have to imagine there are countries like in Africa who are who are looking around going like, what the fuck, man?
What about us?
Why don't you help us as these authoritarians keep coming in and taking over and causing all sorts of havoc and killing people?
That's another one of those things where it's like, okay, why does it get to be Ukraine is the one where the United States is going to step in there and be the heroes and ignore all the other atrocities in Central America and Africa that are going on.
It's crazy.
Well, and that's because this is where global seeds of power are being harvested, right?
Like those places, and you've got to remember that neoliberalism has created a three-tier structure.
And this isn't, you know, to disrespect the so-called second and third world.
It's just the way that neoliberal globalists actually see the world, right?
There are the first world countries.
Those are the countries, like the United States of America, that manage the system.
Right?
We work in the corporations that make sure that like products get delivered and that they get made.
Meanwhile, second and third world countries, they go in and work for quarters on the dollar or pennies on the dollar or slave labor in the case of Mars and their M&Ms, right?
Those people are expendable.
Those people are the ones who give us the resources and give us the labor and then it's shipped to us where we buy it and we live in luxury.
Those people are expendable in that system.
Right?
Their lives don't matter much more.
Their numbers on a page.
When we start talking about who is trying to take the big cup, right?
Like, it's almost like playoffs.
It's almost like a championship series.
It's when the first world nations start buttressing against each other over who's going to take control of the system, which, don't get me wrong, that's what this is about.
It's who's going to be number one on the first world power rankings.
And we talked about this before we started recording.
If America loses its perch, and this is what neoliberalism wants, it wants us going to work for cents on a dollar.
It wants us to start living a second or a third world existence, because that's what happens when it starts to go down and under.
It needs us to start doing that.
The question is among the major powers, and this is why the wars and the crises are much more likely, which one of us is going to do it?
Which one of us is going to go and supply that labor?
And that's a lot of what this argument is about.
Yeah.
It kind of also makes me think about what's the solutions here?
Because obviously we know what the goal is on Putin's end and what he wants to do to America.
And we've always talked about what can we do to combat that?
I mean, I think the biggest way that we need, we kind of need another JFK.
Right?
We need another bunch of them.
A bunch of young people who truly believe in the country and who want to actually do the right thing and who can speak in a way that can get everybody motivated to believe them.
Right?
Like, that's what we're missing right now.
I don't know if we can ever get that back.
But it seems like, you know, when you see those kind of speeches that JFK gave and what he was saying, just kind of, it was hitting me.
It's like, that's what we're missing, I think.
in this country right now.
And part of the reason is because it's such an awful world to be in, politics, that nobody wants to do.
Like, this is what we're getting left.
This is the people who are going to actually do it, the people who, you know, shouldn't be doing this, who never would have gotten elected back in the day anyway.
We need some fresh ideas and fresh people to come in here and inspire us to believe again that, you know, capitalism can work alongside democracy, and then people can be benevolent in there with their power.
I I just don't know how that happens, but it seems like that would be the way the movie version would be, how we get out of this and feel a lot better about ourselves.
Well, you know, I think when the far right, you know, when you're Dugans, when you're Bannons, when they start diagnosing this thing, they're right to an extent.
They say, you know, capitalism, particularly in the neoliberal variety, has taken out meaning, right?
That there's no purpose to it beyond accumulation, and it's just sort of bloodless and awful.
I think they're right.
And I also think that neoliberal globalism has hollowed out what we would call nationalism.
Right?
Which is the faith in a country because look at what this country has done.
It's been co-opted by wealth, right?
It won't help you.
It won't do anything.
If you're, by the way, if your city gets hit by a fucking hurricane, best of luck.
Take care, right?
The best example of nationalism we've had this year is January, or last year was January 6th.
That's what I'm saying.
The idea is what is it going to look like?
The far right already understands that something has to shift.
Right.
But the far right is very interested in it being militaristic, authoritarian nationalism.
Right.
That idea that I was talking about with Dugan, you withdraw back to your borders and you become isolationist.
The question is, can there be an alternative?
And you're exactly right.
There has to be an alternative.
Everybody who is on this ship, who benefits from it, doesn't want to admit that the ship's in trouble.
Everybody, everybody who's profiting from it, they want to continue to pretend like this crisis isn't coming because they benefit from it.
We have to come up with the alternative.
And I think that we can.
That's why I remain hopeful.
But I got to tell you, we've been telling people now, I don't know when we started.
We told them that the economy was going to have a moment like this.
We told them there were possibilities of war and crises that are going to rear their heads.
This is what capitalism wants.
This is what it loves!
I mean, it's happier than a pig in shit with this.
This is exactly what it needs, what it desires, and where it always leads.
And we have to be very careful about the notion of, like, these big swings in the market, for instance, where normally we would see what we, you know, recently we've seen this big drops, and then relatively quickly it builds, you know, a slow march back up, and then we go, you know, on nice little prosperous runs.
It's possible that you pile up enough things and enough unrest in the country and those markets don't come back for a long long I mean decades perhaps Imagine the effect of that on on wealth of people who you know relied on the retirements and things for this stuff And we're not about rich people talking about even you know middle class and lower class people who have you know 401ks or whatever You know and then you throw on the climate change on top of that And it does make the future
Very uncertain and very concerning because the entire existence of how our country functions is the market, right?
It's a market kind of going up over enough time.
If it doesn't do that over enough time, then I really worry that that's the fall of the United States.
There are probably a lot of 40 and 50 year old listeners to the program right now who are just thinking about how much wealth of theirs and how many opportunities of theirs got wiped out by the 2008 financial crisis.
Right.
They've seen this basically.
And again, this goes back to the idea that America has been important because it is the capital of capital.
This market is where you put your money in order to make more money, in which it circulates.
It's basically like, it's almost like the heart, right?
It's almost the way that the money circulates and goes through and it gets oxygenated and then it goes back through.
Well, we have our pensions in there, our 401ks, we have like so much stuff in there because it's been, you know, not stable because these markets aren't stable, right?
But it's the most trustworthy pursuit.
In this case, You're looking at the possibility that it's not that anymore, right?
And what happens?
All of a sudden, your pensions, your retirements, your 401ks, all that stuff, it gets wiped out as that gets sucked out, and the heart moves elsewhere at that point.
Right.
The heart and your home.
Everything moves elsewhere.
So, it's interesting because, you know, what I'm describing as well would be something like the Great Depression.
So we had, in not our lifetimes exactly, but relatively recently, we've had, let's see, what time was it?
28 and then only until the war is when we kind of started to get out of it.
So, you know, we had a decade worth of that and that was terrible.
And I would think it would be 10 times worse now with the way the global economy works.
To experience any kind of bear market for that long would be, I don't know if we recover from that.
So we'll have to find out.
That's when the competencies becomes really important.
And that's even just the faith that the government has competency.
It might not have it.
And we might realize in little bits and pieces like, oh my god, that doesn't work.
And look how ridiculous and wasteful this is.
But when we believe that it works, it really does go a long way to helping democracy continue in some sort of meaningful way that would represent and make things.
Remember, it's not about equality, right, as much as fairness, in my mind.
And as long as it makes it fair to people is what we need the focus on.
Because the GOP, well, the right-wingers will end up making equality sound like a four-letter word.
But it's fairness is really, I think, what we have to focus on.
You know, J.D.
Pence is a terrible, terrible harbinger of this.
He's being bankrolled by a billionaire tech guy who's totally interested in destroying, you know, democracy in the United States of America.
But what he has rolled out is a preview of national conservatism, which is, we're going to bring back the factories, right?
By the way, we're going to roll back.
And they will.
That's the thing here is they actually will.
And they're like, We'll make sure that your wives can stay at home, which is going to roll back all of the progress of the last few generations.
And what happens whenever you have that Great Depression, Nick?
What happens whenever the market crashes?
You're willing to go to work for cents on the dollar.
You're willing to go work in dangerous environments.
As a matter of fact, if it helps, you'll get your 10-year-old in there to do it, too.
The entire point is that national conservatism, as we're looking at it, as playing out in front of this background, right, this militaristic American authoritarianism, they'll come in and they'll put you to work.
They'll make the factories come back and they'll make America start taking on a different role in the world economy.
That's Unfortunately where this thing is heading.
Yeah, and I guess because to me the factories are never coming back But maybe they could do that and say well, you know if we're gonna build this factory Then we can't have any of those damn unions here, right?
Like we're gonna have to get rid of all that and then and you know If it's the conditions are bad enough people would say, okay, please just give me a job.
Yeah, it's fine Oh, wait, do you want to bring an Amazon distribution center?
I mean, we won't charge you taxes for 75 years.
Absolutely, please, just bring in jobs.
I got to tell you, I think that all of those stars are somehow or another coming to a line.
All right, everybody.
That's going to do it here.
And again, I just want to state again, I remain hopeful, but I got to tell you, the things that we keep talking about and the things we keep warning about, they are coming together.
We hope you're good.
We hope you're safe.
We'll be back with The Weekender episode on Friday.
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