April 7, 2023 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
24:31
EPISODE 439: WHY IS THE US FUNDING THE UKRAINE WAR? W/ CHARLIE KIRK
On today's episode of Human Events Daily, Jack Posobiec is joined by Charlie Kirk, Founder and CEO of Turning Point USA for a Human Events Special: Defund the War. Jack and Charlie dive deep into the reasons behind the US funding the war in Ukraine and the implications of this policy while examining the effectiveness of the US involvement in the conflict and whether it is in the best interest of American citizens to continue funding the conflict. The Defund the War campaign, led by Turning Po...
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard today's edition of Human Events Daily.
Today is Good Friday.
It is April 7th, 2023, Anno Domini.
Today, on this auspicious day, we will be conducting the Human Events Daily Defund the War special, and we are going to be joined by Charlie Kirk to talk all about the new Defund the War effort that Turning Point is launching, and also an explanation of why it's so important.
To talk about this today.
Ladies and gentlemen, all this and more ahead, Human Events Daily.
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In the past two months, Russia launched its brutal attack and has moved weapons and equipment to Ukraine at...
We've moved weapons and equipment to Ukraine at record speed.
Thanks to the aid we provided, Russian forces have been forced to retreat from Kiev.
Doesn't mean they're not going to try to come back, but they've retreated thus far.
We've sent thousands of anti-armor, anti-missiles, helicopters, drones, grenade launchers, machine guns, rifles, radar systems, More than 50 million rounds of ammunition.
The United States alone has provided 10 anti-armor systems for every Russian tank that is in Ukraine.
10 to 1.
We're providing Ukraine significant, timely intelligence to help them defend themselves against the Russian onslaught.
And we're facilitating a significant flow of weapons and systems to Ukraine from our allies and partners around the world, including tanks, artillery, and other weapons.
That support is moving with unprecedented speed.
Much of the new equipment we've announced in the past two weeks has already gotten to Ukraine, where it can be put to direct use on the battlefield.
However, we've almost exhausted what we call the fancy phrase, the drawdown authority that Congress authorized for Ukraine in a bipartisan spending bill last month.
Basically, we're out of money.
And so that's why today, In order to sustain Ukraine as it continues to fight, I'm sending Congress a supplemental budget request.
It's going to keep weapons and ammunition flowing without interruption to the brave Ukrainian fighters and continue delivering economic and humanitarian assistance to the Ukrainian people.
To support Ukraine today, the Biden-Harris administration is announcing two critical new packages of security assistance that include significant new air defense capabilities, more ammunition for US-provided HIMARS, and anti-armor and motor systems, as well as rockets, artillery, and tank ammunition that Ukraine is using to defend itself.
It is the 35th time the administration has authorized the use of presidential drawdown authorities to send much needed assistance to Ukraine to meet its immediate battlefield needs.
And we are also providing equipment throughout Ukraine's security assistance initiative to help Ukraine with its longer term security assistance requirements.
All right, we're very excited to be here with Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of Turning Point USA.
Charlie, what can you tell us about this new effort that Turning Point is launching, Defund the War, defundthewar.com?
Yeah, I mean, we actually want to try to broker peace.
What a concept, right?
I know, right?
We've been asking some very, I think, important questions throughout this entire proxy war of what does success look like?
Why are we doing this?
Do we really want to try to get us closer to a nuclear armed conflict?
For what purpose exactly?
And our heart and our kind of goal and our mission should be for peace as Americans and our government is currently not doing that.
The current regime is getting us closer and closer towards an escalated conflict.
And for what?
I mean, there are people that are suffering.
There's massive amounts of refugees.
Not to mention, America has spent literally probably over $200 billion, but at least $113 billion on this war.
And so we need to defund it.
And we need to say that we need to try to broker peace.
We need to get closer to a place of reconciliation and resolution.
That Vladimir Putin and Ukraine should be able to be able to make a deal if America actually wanted a deal to happen.
But our current government does not want that.
Instead they want something completely different.
It seems they want war or carnage or a lot of all that nonsense.
And we need to try to stop it.
And so we're trying to get people to sign the petition.
Get engaged.
Get involved.
Have this be a citizen people-led movement.
And we hope our leaders will listen.
Well, I think it's amazing, too, because, you know, Turning Point USA, the the conservative, you know, student, initially student focused organization, is now the face of the anti-war movement.
Apparently, you know, this is kind of like, you know, like the hippies of Woodstock and Jimi Hendrix and everything that we remember from, you know, the 60s and 70s is the anti-war movement was the position of the left.
In fact, it was the core of the left.
For an entire generation, and yet somehow along the line and along the way, it's just been completely abandoned as a position.
And here we are, you know, quote unquote, on the right or whatever you want to call it, you know, that we are saying, but we're not really saying it from necessarily a position of that, you know, America should be weak.
We're saying it from a position of we should seek alternate means to expand our influence throughout the world, and also that we should reconstitute our republic By focusing on what matters at home rather than seeking these adventures abroad.
Yeah, and then just what is the best case scenario here?
I'd love to have one of these lawmakers come on my program, your program, and say, OK, let's game this out.
I mean, how does this end?
And the new stated position, the national security state is the total reclamation of Ukraine.
And say, OK, well, what is Ukraine?
Does that include Crimea?
And some will say yes.
I'll say, well, that's really stupid.
That's a really dumb take.
And they'll say, oh, no, we got to go back to pre-2014 annexation.
And Jack, you know the geography even better than I do.
But they all have different answers.
And so there needs to be a prudent and let's just say moderate reconciliation or resolution where the eastern part of Ukraine especially, which are majority Russian speaking, they want to be part of the Russian Federation.
They can have their own elections and they have had their own elections.
Be part of the Russian Federation.
There needs to be a ceasefire that is brokered and the war is ended.
Why is this so controversial?
And by the way, it's not even a matter of being a dove or a hawk.
My love is of America.
The longer this war goes on, the worse it is for our country, the worse it is for the West.
The idea of the destabilization of the dollar, actually all roads go back to Eastern Ukraine.
I mean, if this war never happened, we would not even be having conversations about the dollar losing its world reserve status and currency status.
And so, it's all interconnected in that sense.
We should be focused on the Chinese Communist Party and what they're trying to do, not the Russian Federation.
I go as far to say that Russia should be an ally of the United States against the CCP.
I'm not pro-Russian.
I'm not pro-Putin.
I don't think highly of their government, obviously.
They have a completely set of different structure of government than we do.
But also, you must be willing sometimes to do deals with less than desirable actors if it benefits your own country.
And it's just remarkable to see, Jack, Every country except America right now is acting in their own interest across the world.
We are the only player that continually acts against our own interest at every single corner and turn.
So we're doing this effort to try to get you to have your voice heard.
When you confront lawmakers on this, they get skittish.
They know they're in the wrong.
I've had senators on my program.
I've asked them direct questions.
What does success look like?
How much money is too much money?
Why are you sending the equivalent of two North Dakotas as their GDP to Ukraine?
And it's just kind of a lot of abstractions.
We need concrete answers.
We need to have citizens lead this.
And I'm hopeful because the American people are increasingly upset and not supportive of this proxy war in eastern Ukraine.
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Well, it's exactly right, Charlie.
And to your point, as we sit here today and we look around the world, we see the rise of the BRICS nations.
We see the fall of the petrodollar.
Mexico, our southern neighbor, which by right, as a member of the US-Mexico trade deal, a former member of of NAFTA, you'd think that we would never allow Mexico to go seeking deals with our competitors.
Correct.
And yet that's what they're going into.
This is a this represent and nobody's even talking about this.
We talked about the show yesterday that this is one of the most massive failures of the entire U.S. foreign policy, not just Biden or Blinken or or Victoria.
No, this is insane.
The idea that our neighbor, that should be our economic, our closest economic trade partner after Canada, should be Mexico just by rights.
And if we are a great power, we should be able to prevent them from doing this.
Completely mismanaged that relationship to the point where our greatest competitor is now coming up right onto and even increasing across our own border.
And Charlie, to your point, The fact that we've been reduced and so bogged down in this proxy war, what's going on the Taiwan Strait right now?
What's going on is that Taiwan, excuse me, China is already enacting a soft blockade of Taiwan saying that we're going to be inspecting cargo, inspecting maritime cargo with who?
The People's Liberation Army Navy.
You've got an aircraft carrier, the Chinese aircraft carrier off the coast of Taiwan, the U.S.
Nimitz off the coast of Taiwan.
All of this is happening at the same time.
What are we going to do?
We're going to have two wars at the same time and two globes, two proxy wars.
It doesn't make any sense.
And to your point earlier about what our policy should be with Russia, Prince Clemens von Metternich, the Australian diplomat, this is around World War II, he was, or excuse me, World War I, he was making this point.
He said, in a world of three, be one.
In a world of three, be one.
Have you, Have your allies and then target and isolate the people who are your competitors.
Why would we make all of our competitors join up against us?
It makes no sense.
The United States in World War II was able to work with the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany.
Did that mean we liked the Soviet Union?
Did that mean that we were buddy-buddy, that we co-opted at the end and gave moral justification to everything that the Soviet Union was doing?
Of course not.
but it meant that we joined together and were able to do so because of that.
Go to the flip side of that.
Kissinger, Nixon, what did they do in the 1970s?
They went to China in order to box in the Soviet Union.
It's such an obvious move.
The United States has used it multiple times in the past.
But for some reason now, we're told, no, the United States should pursue this global hegemony, pursue this global regime that we believed in Fukuyama's end of history that happened with the fall of the Soviet Union, and that the United States would be the big dog forever.
Well, it turns out that history didn't end, unfortunately, and we find ourselves in a situation where we're spending ourselves into insanity.
And just to put it in real terms for everybody, we've committed and we've crunched the numbers and you can go to defundthewar.com.
I think they're going to get the numbers up if they're not there now.
And people can go see this when they sign the petition to defundthewar.com.
$112 billion just last year.
And I actually looked this up before we came on, Charlie.
It would cost $20 billion, $20 billion to man armed security and create safe schools across the entire country right now, here in the United States.
And that's an issue where, by the way, I think conservatives haven't been great on in terms of the way they respond to school shootings.
Here in Nashville at the Christian school there, we say, well, we need to keep our guns.
We need to keep our guns.
And OK, I get that.
But that's not what parents are feeling right now.
Parents are feeling how are you keeping the kids safe?
Yeah, you should have armed guards in every school.
I mean, and then somehow the other complaint that we have, and the other issue is, so we care about the sovereignty of Ukraine while 5,000 people are coming into our country every single day?
I mean, $5 billion could secure our border, and yet we're sending hundreds of billions of dollars abroad, and we have politicians in both political parties that are supportive of it.
It's an outrage, and so we should try to demand our leaders broker peace.
Why are we not talking about peace deals?
Why is there not an active, relentless effort to try to bring the parties together and say, stop killing each other, stop killing women and children, and get to a place of peace?
Charlie, is there a financial element, possibly, do you think, for some of our political leaders to keeping the war going?
I mean, I couldn't imagine that people could be making money off of such a thing.
Not to mention, I mean, this is some speculation, but Not too much speculation.
We know the Biden family made a lot of money off of business relationships with Ukraine, with Burisma and Hunter Biden.
We don't know the extent.
We do not know the severity.
But it seems as if all roads lead to Ukraine.
And Jack, you've talked about this before.
In the first impeachment, it was all about Ukraine.
It was all about Ukraine.
And so Ukraine just seems to be kind of the intersection of so much of the national security, deep state interests of the corrupt foreign actors and money laundering activities.
And so, yeah, of course, I mean, there's a financial advantage to this, but you end Afghanistan and six months later, you get a much higher stakes Potentially even more expensive war.
And for what?
Why are we fighting Vladimir Putin?
Like, why are we doing this?
And, I mean, I asked the guy in the show, I said, so why is Russia a threat to the United States?
He's like, oh well, their values are not ours because they put their political dissidents in prison.
Yeah, okay, well, we do that too.
I mean, so, okay, why else do we hate them?
Like, I'm not a fan of their, I think they're a bunch of thugs.
But, like, why are they a direct threat?
There's a lot of countries I don't like that I don't think we should go to war against.
A lot of countries that are not exactly the form of government that I... We've had relations with Saudi Arabia for... No, let's just use a more immediate example.
I think Canada is, like, really totalitarian and awful.
I don't think we should go to war against Canada.
I think that would be a mistake, right?
I mean, yes... Well, you know...
I'm just saying, but like, Saudi Arabia is like an easy example, but Canada's easier, right?
It's right on our border, they're super totalitarian, and they're the worst on the trans stuff.
Okay, I'm not calling for an invasion of Canada or to fund some sort of proxy war against them.
And they say, oh, it's not the same because Cold War.
Exactly.
You cannot defend it.
And so the other argument that my friend and Salem colleague Sebastian Gorka would make is he says, well, it's their 1776 moment.
No, it isn't, okay?
No, it isn't.
Okay?
First of all, 1776 moments are rare.
And yes, the promise of 1776 is universal, but if you do not have, in my opinion, the decades of work that go and led to 1776, you are not ready for self-government.
All people deserve self-government and everybody's ready for it.
But even if it was their 1776 moment, But it makes no sense if they already had a sovereign country before.
So wait, they're they're defending against an invasion and that's their 1776 moment?
Well, I mean, I just it's not even a good comparison.
I can I can even tease that out a little bit, because, OK, so I guess if you're going to use that comparison, you would say that, you know, basically the U.S.
is like the French.
That's correct.
So that is that is the analogy that is, you know, supporting the freedom fighters.
But If you remember in the Revolutionary War, you know, you just mentioned Canada, there was an attempted invasion of Canada because at one point the Continental Army was trying to take all of the British colonies, which included the colonies of which later became Canada.
This, by the way, was led by none other than infamously by Benedict Arnold, General Benedict Arnold, who later, you know, basically flipped sides.
He turned his code.
He said that the Continental Army didn't give him support, etc, etc.
My point is, there was territory that was lost in that war that didn't make it into the new nation.
There was eventually a peace deal that was signed.
Eventually it became, what, too expensive for the country that was all the way across the ocean that was funding the army.
So part of this, by the way, When you look at the money flow of it, and you just look at the simple geography of what's going on, we also kind of share some of the cognates with the British Empire, if you're going to go back to 1776 as well.
Yeah, that's correct.
It's just, it's not a good comparison, and I think, and I mean this as respectfully as possible to people that believe this, like my colleague and friend Sebastian Gorka, I think it's I think it's preying on people's love and admiration of 1776 in America to have them fund a war that is not the same thing, right?
I think that's exactly right.
It's a misrepresentation of the core narrative of America.
It's part of our, it's our origin story, right?
Yes, that's right.
That's correct.
Our founding origin story, our founding mythos, if you will.
Yes.
And using that to say, therefore, right?
I mean, you love this, therefore, and if not, you're against our founding.
You're against our origin story.
That's exactly right.
You're against our origin story.
You're like, no, actually I'm for America.
Okay.
By the way, that wasn't the first person to make this argument, if I remember correctly, was Thomas Jefferson when he supported the French Revolution.
Yeah, the French Revolution was a masterclass in what happens when you try to recreate nature in your image.
should also be supporting the French Revolution, which, if I remember correctly, worked out really, really well for France.
Yeah, the French Revolution was a masterclass in what happens when you try to recreate nature in your image.
There's a lot of lessons there.
But yeah, to kind of summarize this all together, we're doing this for a reason.
First of all, I do not see other organizations, other groups on the right or the left trying to call for a ceasefire.
AOC, Ilhan Omar, they want this war.
They don't dare speak out against it.
This has been such a frustrating moment, Jack, of just how cowardly and how weak both sides are on this.
It's just, it's unaccountable.
unacceptable.
I mean, Bernie Sanders forever has been against war and all this, and he's for this thing.
It's just, there's something about Putin that just makes them go absolutely nuts.
And again, I'm not a fan of Putin.
I don't think he's a good person.
I don't think he's someone that we should admire or someone that we should lift up.
I don't think it's someone that we should revere, but I also don't want to go to war against him.
I also think he could be helpful and that you, Both those things can be true simultaneously.
That is what a mature people does, right?
So therefore, you ask yourself the question, what is best for America?
Oh, the best thing should be to secure our own border.
Okay, that's pretty simple.
And then what's the best for America and eastern Ukraine?
End the war.
It is in the benefit of the West and all free people to end the war.
The only people that benefit from the war continuing Are military defense, military defense contractors, power hungry politicians.
And that's about it.
I mean, I don't even think Zelensky is benefiting from the war, right?
I don't know why he's I think Zelensky just does whatever the CIA tells him to do.
But this should be an overwhelming call to end this, because where this is headed, Jack, is going to be a five to 10 year you know, war where you have like a month of heavy fighting and then a month off and a month of heavy fighting and, you know, and Putin can grind this down and we want that to happen.
No, get involved in the sense of we're not going to supply weapons.
This has been fun, folks.
It's over.
Why are we not bringing the Russian ambassador and the Ukrainian team in a room and hammering out a deal, at least trying to do that?
And don't send that little, you know, elevated teenager, Emmanuel Macron, like that's not going to work.
Okay.
Send the French to do anything consequential.
It's going to get messed up.
He was just left out of Beijing.
No, I mean, it's just a joke, right?
Emmanuel Macron is sitting on like a 40 foot table with Vladimir Putin, you know, for social distancing, trying to, as soon as that happened, I said, Putin's invading like this, this whole thing's a farce, right?
Um, Um, it's going to take an American, right?
Not Biden.
Um, and I mean, it could be, could be Trump.
Actually, there's precedent for a former president actually help an active president when Eisenhower came into the white house to help JFK with the Cuban missile crisis.
Interesting side of history that people don't know.
Uh, but that's not going to happen because of politics.
This really is Charlie.
This is, this shows the difference between sort of the, the global outlook type of politics versus an America first outlook on politics.
It's not us saying that we're gonna impose our values on the world and we're gonna make the world look like us or make it look like the way we want it to.
It's us saying what's good for the American people first.
Trust me, you can go around the world and find all sorts of problems.
Yes, I mean, go to Yemen.
I mean, Yemen's not exactly a darling of democracy.
I mean, just go to Southeast Asia.
Go to Indonesia.
Like, they don't exactly have religious freedom the way we would like it there.
I mean, go to Central America.
They got cartels running their countries, right?
And so, I mean, yeah, there's a lot of problems in the world.
We're a broken being, the human being.
We have original sin.
And so, it is not good what's happening in eastern Ukraine.
I don't want Russia to win.
I don't want, you know, them to be successful.
That's not the point.
The point is, I want America to win.
I want us to win.
We are not winning in this current situation, and our leaders are so corrupt and so weak, and they're so in this kind of octogenarian mindset.
Wow, Russia!
Soviet Union!
Cold War!
Yeah, actually, that's not how things are.
Charlie, we've got about one minute left.
Where can people go?
Why should they go and sign this up?
I think it's defundthewar.com.
Is that right, guys?
Defundthewar.com, right?
Yeah, defundthewar.com, sign the petition.
We're going to keep on making noise about this.
Any politician, any leader in any party is welcome on our program.
The Mission and Turning Point USA is always educational.
I hope we can educate people on this and to get people to want to do something about it.
I'm deeply troubled and worried about how much money we've spent, how much we've screwed up that region, how we are getting closer to a permanent conflict, and how our leaders have just completely turned their back on You know, what is best for America?
So I hope we can do something to change that.
That's exactly right.
Charlie Kirk, everyone, the founder, president of Turning Point USA.
Charlie, before I go, gotta say, by the way, man, Happy Easter.
Happy Easter.
He is risen.
God bless you, Jack.
Thank you.
He is risen indeed.
God bless.
Ladies and gentlemen, the website is defundthewar.com.
