Dave Smith and Jay Smith of "Part Of The Problem" dismantle Operator Starsky's critique, defending their anti-war stance against accusations of Russian propaganda. They debate the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act versus Gorbachev's claims on non-expansion, refute the "genetically modified birds" conspiracy, and analyze the 2014 Ukrainian revolution as a popular movement rather than a Soros-funded coup. Ultimately, the episode argues that Western interventions risk nuclear war while dismissing conspiracy theories as weak substitutes for substantive geopolitical engagement. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Russia's Donbass Autonomy Problem00:12:38
Fill her up!
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
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You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, Jay Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am back home.
I am rolling solo for this episode.
Thank you to everybody who came out to Vegas for the best comedy festival in the world, known as Skank Fest.
It's a really great time.
It's just really, really awesome.
I hope if you've never been, make sure you come out next year because it's just the best comedy festival in the world.
All right.
So for today's episode, I wanted to do a response to a response to me on Rogan that was put out on YouTube last week.
I saw this piece and thought it was probably worth responding to based on how many people have viewed it.
It's got a couple hundred thousand views up on YouTube right now.
But I was away the last few days.
So I figured I'd wait until I came back to do it.
All right.
So this is posted by a YouTuber named Operator Starsky.
And it is a response to my piece on Joe Rogan talking about the history of the conflict and the war between Ukraine and Russia going on right now.
So let's jump into it and see what we got.
There's this crazy Russian dish called shi.
And basically this looks exactly the way it tastes or sounds.
And in my opinion, she is a perfect way of calling Russian propaganda.
Good day, my friends.
Operator Starsky here.
And the other day I saw this crazy video with Joe Rogan interviewing the gentleman, Dave Smith, on the war in Ukraine.
I'm sorry, I'm not very familiar with American celebrities, but I am familiar with the topic a bit.
And I decided to break down him breaking down the reasons why Putin attacked.
The reason why I'm doing it on the first place is that because almost 4.5 million people watched this crazy shit and gave it 140,000 likes, which is a lot.
So let's hear those amazing facts presented by Mr. Smith.
So first off, I will, so we can start with a point of agreement.
This Russian dish that I was unfamiliar with called sh does look terrible.
I will certainly agree with that.
That looks gross.
And I certainly wouldn't want to be that.
So, uh-oh, we better look into this.
I hope I'm not as gross as that Russian dish looks.
And look, I'll like I'm making a response to his response, and I'm basically doing it for the same reasons.
By the way, the video with Rogan is up to, I think, close to 6 million views at this point and probably got about 15 million people who viewed it on the actual podcast episode.
And then it's been shared around a ton.
So he's right.
A lot of people have seen that video, probably more than any other video I've ever made.
I think that's probably the thing that's gotten the most traction of anything I've ever done.
But for the reason I'm responding to this is also because, well, it's up to about 190,000 views now, 26,000 likes on it.
So again, I get where he's coming from.
I think that's if enough people have seen it, it's kind of worth taking on.
So let's see what he criticizes me for.
Why, sir, am I Shia? Smith in this video.
Flirting with a nuclear conflict with Russia is the most important priority in the history of humanity, is that America and Russia do not go to war.
There's nothing more important than that.
It's a good point.
So actually, whatever Russia does, whatever crime it commits anywhere in the world, whatever happens in the world, whatever terrorist acts are happening on the territory of American allies, by the way, like the Great Britain, I'm talking like the Salisbury incident, this gentleman offers to stay away out of trouble, just to make sure that Russia does not retaliate.
I think I created a skit dedicated to this person, even before knowing about him.
I have not seen this skit that this gentleman is referring to, but I hope it is better than his ability to respond to a point that someone's making.
This is a pretty common tactic that I think we're going to see a lot of throughout this video, but you can hear what I'm saying, and then he responds to something that is not even close to what I was saying.
If he has a response to what I'm saying, I'd be interested to hear that.
So what I said is that the most important priority in human history is that the U.S. and Russia don't go to nuclear war.
I think that's pretty undeniably true because it would be the end of our species if we did.
Now, he takes that as saying that no matter what Russia does, no matter what crimes they commit, we should never do anything about it because, oh my God, what if Putin responds?
But of course, that's not what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that, look, even in some crazy example of Russia invading the UK or something like that, yes, that might be a very big concern.
It would still be a priority that we not go to nuclear war with Russia.
But no, my point is not bend over and let a nuclear power do anything they want to, because, oh my God, they could use nukes.
The point is more like, definitely don't provoke a war on their border and lead us closer to the possibility of nuclear war for no reason.
That's more like what I'm saying.
So if he wanted to take on that, then that's a different point.
But yes, it's a very different thing to say that like if you know that there's nothing a nuclear power could could do that you wouldn't be okay with than to say, hey, if there is a war on the border of a nuclear-armed power that we've had a major hand in provoking and we don't have any really vital strategic interest to care about it, it's probably not worth risking nuclear war over, say, whether Donbass is ruled by Kiev or Moscow.
All right, let's keep playing.
They had a deal worked out.
There's been reported in multiple sources that they had a deal worked out and the deal was basically that Vladimir Putin would pull back.
He would pull back his troops and leave Ukraine under the condition that the very simple conditions that Ukraine guaranteed autonomy for the Donbass region and agreed to never join NATO.
Here, this gentleman talks about the agreement that took place after the Russian occupation of Crimea and Donbass, obviously.
And first and foremost, I would like to ask him, in his opinion, who gave Russia right to decide the future of a foreign country instead of its people?
Like which alliances to join, which territories to give up and stuff like that.
I saw it working in the video games, but in real life, not so much.
I also wonder what kind of multiple sources Mr. Smith is talking about, because I've never heard about them outside of Russian media.
And those that I heard of never mentioned things like autonomy for the Donbass.
However, I've heard about Minsk agreements, which were the prime official roadmap for Ukraine and Russia.
And again, it never mentioned the autonomy of Donbass regions for the very simple reason.
Donbass never asked about its autonomy or independency between 1991 and until the very first day in 2014.
So, you know, honestly, dude, there might just be a little bit of a language barrier.
I understand that this guy, English is not this gentleman's first language, but at the same time, if you're going to make this response video and calling me she, then I don't know, you got to like kind of get this right.
So he's just misunderstood what I was saying.
I wasn't talking about a deal made after Putin seized Crimea.
I was very specific in what I was talking about at the beginning of this war in 2022, that there have been multiple reports that there was a deal that was basically agreed on in principle between Ukraine and Russia that involved autonomy for the Donbass region, Russia pulling its troops out of Ukraine, and an agreement from Ukraine to not join NATO.
This was not reported on by Russian media.
This was reported by Fiona Hill, who last I checked is not a Russian.
She's a UK-American journalist who tends to be a hawk.
She's not like a libertarian peace dove either.
And the reporting was that Boris Johnson from the UK came over and urged them not to negotiate with Russia at all.
Boris Johnson's people confirmed that he went over there and urged them not to negotiate.
So the fact that he's not familiar with this, this was a major, like very well-known journalist who published this in America, not in Russia.
So all the other stuff he's talking about is just, he's just literally didn't understand what I was saying.
And if you go watch the original clip on Rogan, I'm making it very clear what I'm talking about.
So he may have just missed this.
In terms of the other question that he asked, where he said, you know, does Russia, he asked the question, what gives Russia the right to determine what part of Ukraine is ruled by, you know, Russia or whatever, what part of Ukraine has autonomy or something like that.
Well, that would be a reasonable response if I had made the argument that Russia has the right to determine whether the Donbass region has autonomy or not.
But I didn't make that argument.
I'm not saying Russia has the right to do that.
I don't think Russia has the right to fight this war.
If you really want to get into it, I don't think Russia has the right to exist.
But that's not really the question here.
The reality is that Russia does exist and Russia is fighting this war.
And the question is, what's the smartest way to proceed?
What's in America's interest?
What's in humanity's interest?
What's in the people of Ukraine's interest?
What's in the people of Russia's interest?
And I would argue that for in all of their interests, whatever outcome would lead to peace the quickest, that would be the smart thing.
So in other words, I'm not saying Russia has the right to determine whether the Donbass has autonomy.
I would think the people of Donbass probably should have a right to determine that.
But, you know, for example, I don't think America has the right to intervene in like the Mexican civil wars between the police and the drug cartels down there.
I don't think we have the right to send DEA agents into Mexico, but we do.
Now, given the fact that we do, if Vladimir Putin traveled 5,000 or whatever miles from, you know, Russia and was sending in tens of billions of dollars of weaponry into Mexico to on the opposite side of America and fighting a proxy war right on our border that was risking a nuclear conflict between the United States and Russia, I would say it's insane that Vladimir Putin is doing this because it's not in his realm of influence.
It is not his problem.
It is our problem on our border.
And this is an insane, you know, unnecessary escalation and risky thing to do between the two countries with the most nuclear weapons in the history of the world.
So something like 90% of the world's nuclear arsenal is held by the US and Russia.
So again, if I was opposed to Vladimir Putin doing that, you could understand, well, that's not me.
That's not the same thing as me saying that America has the right to intervene in Mexico.
It's just a reality of the situation.
And to not understand this distinction is to fall into a shockingly shallow form of binary thinking, where you either have to think one person is absolutely within their rights to do something, or the other person is in their rights to do it.
Listening to Nazi Dictators00:15:06
Like it doesn't have to be one or the other, I would think, obviously.
And then the point he made there, he was confusing the agreements I was talking about with Minsk 1 and 2.
It might be true that they did not use the term autonomy for the Donbass region, but certainly like strong federalism was a part of those agreements.
So I wasn't exactly sure the point he's trying to make there.
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Let's continue.
And until the very first day in 2014, when Russian citizens like Girkin Borodai Pavlov came to Ukraine and overthrown the official authorities in Donbass.
It's a simple fact.
Donbass never asked about his autonomy before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Osama bin Laden was so clear about why he hated America.
And he's like, look, I hate you because you murder innocent civilians in the Muslim world.
You prop up brutal dictators in the Muslim world.
You prop up Israel who mistreats the Palestinian people.
And you have your bases in our holy land in the Arabian Peninsula.
Then they're like, nah, he hates us because we're free.
Ah, so now we're justifying people who committed the biggest tragedy of the 20th century by murdering thousands of American people.
Pause it right here.
All right.
So now this just took a little bit of a turn.
And I got to say, this is fairly entertaining for me.
I've done a fair amount of these like response videos before.
I don't know if I've ever heard a line quite like this.
And I don't even know where to start.
As he says, ah, so now you're justifying the people who did 9-11, which he said was committed the worst tragedy in the 20th century.
I don't even know where to start with that.
We'll get to justifying in a second.
Okay.
How would you feel if I told you that not only was 9-11 not the worst tragedy in the 20th century, it wasn't in the 20th century at all?
So there's one.
I mean, whatever.
Maybe obviously he just misspoke or whatever, but it's pretty funny in this video that he's like edited up.
You didn't catch that one.
So, I mean, okay, we'll go in reverse order to that.
Obviously, if you ever catch yourself saying something was the worst tragedy in the 20th century, I don't know, you've got a lot of stiff competition.
9-11 was a tragedy, no doubt, but the 20th century saw two world wars in which tens of millions of people were slaughtered.
The reign of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Sitong, and Pol Pot.
9-11 would not even compete for the worst tragedy of the 20th century, but luckily it doesn't have to because it happened in the 21st century.
But of course, even in the 21st century, there is just by no objective measure could you say that it's the worst tragedy of the 21st century.
I mean, the response to 9-11, the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, the drone war in Pakistan, and certainly the genocide going on in Yemen over the last eight years.
And you know what?
The war in Ukraine also are all just objectively bigger tragedies.
Far more people have died in all of those conflicts, not to mention probably about 15 to 20 other ones.
But, you know, just it's just an idiotic, clearly demonstrably false assertion to say that 9-11 was the worst tragedy of the 21st century.
It certainly wasn't the worst of the 20th century.
But all of that aside, because I'm sure like the response from this type of guy to that is that I'm justifying 9-11, right?
Again, this is just like idiotic binary thinking.
I don't know what to say.
And anybody who ever argues like this should be dismissed and held in nothing but contempt.
It's like the idea that if I were to mention, oh, these are the grievances, the stated grievances of Osama bin Laden, that that means I'm justifying 9-11.
I don't know what to say.
It's just incredibly stupid.
And I don't believe that this guy is actually that stupid.
He's just using a particularly despicable debate tactic.
That's all.
You know, it's like if somebody murdered his wife who was cheating on him and her boyfriend, and you said, you know, I think he murdered them because they were having an affair.
And you said, so you're justifying the murder?
What?
It's like, no, I'm explaining what his motivations was.
Oh, by the way, he wrote a letter saying this is why he's killing them because they're having an affair.
And they were having an affair.
It's not justifying it.
And like, fuck you, dude.
I'm from New York City.
Was living like a couple miles away from the World Trade Center when the planes hit those buildings.
I watched people covered in soot walking up Flatbush Avenue after walking over the Brooklyn Bridge.
Like, fuck you.
I'm not justifying that.
I'm explaining that Osama bin Laden's stated grievances against America were that we were slaughtering innocent Muslim citizens, that we were propping up brutal dictators, that we were propping up Israel who mistreated the Palestinians, and that we had their bases in their holy land on the Arabian Peninsula.
That is a fact that bin Laden said that.
It's also a fact that all of that is true.
It's also a fact that 9/11 wasn't justified.
Can you carry all of that around in your brain?
Squeeze, make extra room to fit all of that information in your brain and realize none of it contradicts each other.
None of it is not completely compatible.
So that's just fucking ridiculous.
Let's keep playing.
9-11.
Okay, let's see.
Murdering innocent civilians, just like Russians did in Kremenchuk, in Bucha, in Izum, Lehman.
Czech.
Brutal dictators like the current lifetime ruler of Russia.
Czech.
Prop up Russian chauvinists in Donbass who mistreated Ukrainian people.
Czech.
Military base in annexed Crimea.
Czech.
Learn history before watching Russian propagandists.
I think Mr. Smith still has something to work on.
This, I just don't even understand what the fuck this guy is trying to do.
Like, I just, I don't know.
I think it might be the language barrier.
And maybe you're just not understanding what's being said here.
I pointed out that these were Osama bin Laden's grievances and that we should listen to our enemies.
That he's responding as if what I said was Vladimir Putin's never killed innocent people or supported dictators, which I guess would be a fair response if I had said that, but that's not what I said at all.
I'm not arguing that Vladimir Putin hasn't killed innocent people.
I state in this clip that he has killed a lot of innocent people, and that that's absolutely inexcusable.
So I don't even know what the hell this point is supposed to mean.
But are you denying any of what I just said?
Is it not true also that America props up brutal dictators?
Are the Saudis not brutal dictators?
I mean, like, what we've worked with dictators all around the world.
And if you want to talk about innocent people that have been killed, I mean, put the numbers up in the last 20 years.
Who has had wars that have killed more innocent people?
The United States of America or Russia?
Now, again, before I break your binary brain, that doesn't mean that any of it's justified.
And in fact, none of it is justified.
But this is also reality and the way of the world.
And for us to just pretend that Vladimir Putin is the only bad guy in charge of a government is not a fair or accurate way to assess this conflict.
So again, I don't even know what point he's trying to make.
And is he claiming that it's Russian propaganda that Osama bin Laden had Osama bin Laden's stated grievances?
That this is how he recruited people based off American foreign policy?
Is that now Russian propaganda?
Are you claiming that Russia is in bed with the radical Sunnis and the bin Ladenites?
Because I think Vladimir Putin's probably done just about as job, as good a job of killing them as anyone else.
So this point is just nonsensical and has nothing to do with what I'm saying.
By the way, I mean, talking about how the, you know, the people of Donbass have mistreated other people.
I mean, I think there's also a pretty solid argument that the current Russian, excuse me, the current Ukrainian regime has mistreated the people of Donbass there as well.
But again, these are all governments and none of them are, none of them don't have some blood on their hands.
That's just unfortunately the way of the world.
All right, let's keep playing.
And then if you say that, they're like, well, are you defending Osama bin Laden?
And you're like, no, I'm just saying listen to your enemies.
There's a reason why he hates us.
Okay, let's hear what Putin says.
Genetically modified birds created by Ukrainian and American scientists to kill Russians.
What else?
Nazi regime of Jewish Ukrainian President Zelensky.
Repressions of Russian-speaking people in a country where one-third of people speaks Russian.
And by the way, the reason for that was because they were basically forced to do so during the Russian communist occupation of Ukraine that lasted for 70 years.
What's next?
Putin states that Ukraine was created by Vladimir Lenin.
So this means that Ipatyevsky manuscript dated 1187 mentioning Ukraine was also written by Lenin.
And how about this Polish book published in Krakow 1608 with this big title on the cover?
Obviously, Vladimir Lenin had some kind of kick-ass health and nutrition that prolonged his life for almost 900 years, which is kind of impressive.
On the other hand, probably like Ukraine existed way before Russia even appeared on the world.
I mean, I like it just fine.
I don't know who the fuck are you responding to, dude?
Saying listen to your enemies is not the same as saying everything your enemy has ever said has been correct.
Like, what point does it prove to pull up some ridiculous thing that Vladimir Putin said about birds being used to poison?
Like, what?
Okay.
Yeah, that sounds ridiculous.
Like, all right.
I'm not saying you could also find things that Osama bin Laden said that were absolutely insane and ridiculous.
I'm just saying when he tells you that his motivation for hatred of the West are all of these policies that America has in the Middle East that have killed innocent people, that might be worth thinking about.
So I don't, again, I don't, I'm not like, like, again, this would be, I guess, a response, like he would really be dunking on me right now if I said any of the things that he just attributed to Putin.
Now, the other thing I will say that he gets in there is that, you know, Putin calling the Ukrainians a Nazi regime.
And he goes, well, I mean, they have a Jewish president.
I mean, okay, I wouldn't call them a Nazi regime.
And they do have a Jewish president, but come on.
I mean, anyone being honest here knows that there are Nazi elements in Ukraine and that the Azov battalion was co-founded by an avowed Nazi, as well as several other groups who have now been incorporated into the Ukrainian army there.
So let's not pretend like we haven't all seen the fucking pictures with swastikas and shit on it.
So yeah, all right.
Is it definitely an exaggeration to say that they are a Nazi regime?
Yes, I think they're more of a puppet of the West regime.
But are there Nazi forces within that regime that they absolutely used in the coup in 2014, who have now been like mainstreamed and are now being used in the Ukrainian military?
Yeah, that's just a fact.
So anyway, this is all just like a nonsensical point.
None of this was in response to what I was saying.
This is, you get this a lot.
I've noticed this a lot with the kind of like blue check mark Ukrainian flag in profile Twitter accounts who get real pissed off at me about this clip on Rogan.
A few of them even, this is how I found out about this.
A few of them were sharing this clip like here.
You just got demolished in this, in this clip.
And it's like, all of you guys, you're responding to something else.
It's like you have to pretend I'm saying something totally different than what I'm saying.
And then you respond to that.
And then you feel like you did something, but none of this is dealing with what I actually said, at least not yet.
Let's keep playing.
And if you listen to Vladimir Putin and what he's saying, I mean, look, he's wrong for invading Ukraine.
And I mean, you know me, Joe, I'm the most anti-war fucking person there is, and there's no excuse for that.
Like tens of thousands of people have died.
I'm going to Google all the anti-war protests that Dave Smith participated at, because, like, you know, there must be tons of videos of Mr. Smith screaming to Russian invaders to stop this useless and ugly and brutal war in Ukraine.
Oh, there's none.
I don't know, dude.
Like, how stupid is this?
I swear, I mean, if there weren't, if there weren't like a couple hundred thousand people who had seen this thing, I wouldn't even bother responding to this because it's just so dumb.
But I don't know.
Fast Growing Trees Sponsorship00:02:39
All right.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt again.
Okay.
Language barrier.
When I say I'm the most anti-war guy, you know, just so you understand, I'm not literally saying I win most anti-war human being out of the 7 billion people on the planet.
So I'm just making the point to Rogan, who like, yes, I'm known for being pretty anti-war.
Okay.
That's the point that I'm making.
And that's always been kind of like my number one issue.
I have in other clips that have gone viral on Rogan's podcast.
I've probably, I think, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about this, but probably had clips that more people have seen in America than anyone else on the war in Ukraine, the war in Iraq, Libya, Syria, stuff like this.
That, you know, certainly the one in Yemen.
Oh, did I say Ukraine?
I'm sorry, I meant Yemen on my previous appearance there.
I don't know if I've ever seen anyone really breaking down the war in Yemen and getting as many eyeballs on it.
So, yeah, I mean, the fact that you said that I haven't been at an anti-war protest screaming at the Russians proves something.
Okay.
Great point, dude.
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Leaders' Broken Promises Revealed00:15:50
All right, let's get back into the show.
Let's keep playing.
But to say he was unprovoked is like insane.
It's just only people who know nothing about the history of this conflict would say there was no provocation.
Oh my God, let's hear what this gentleman knows about the history of Ukrainian and Russian relations.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and this was like verbally promised and put in writing, was that NATO would not expand one inch to the east.
Written and verbal agreement.
What was the name of the agreement once again?
Let me Google this.
Two hours later.
You sure there was an agreement made in 1991 during the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Because I found zero such agreements.
The one I found dates back to 1990, not 1991, as Mr. Smith claims.
And this agreement is related to Germany regarding not deploying of non-German NATO forces into Eastern Germany and the deployment of nuclear weapons.
I checked and all those promises were kept by everybody.
I will leave the link in the description for everybody to see.
Maybe I'm missing something or my English language is not that good, but I haven't found anything regarding NATO expansion of NATO.
However, what I found was Gorbachev's statement made in 2014, where he confirms that expansion of NATO was not discussed by that time.
And, quote, not a single Eastern European country raised that issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991.
Western leaders didn't bring it up either.
End of quote.
The link to this interview is in the description.
I also pause it here.
Okay, so just to clear this up, I will also put links in the description here.
So it is true what he's mentioning that there is this, I think it was the Brookings Institute that published this interview with Gorbachev 25 years after the fact, where he said something along the lines of like, oh, yeah, NATO expansion was never discussed.
That is bizarre.
I don't know why the Brookings Institute claims that he said that or why he would have said that.
But that's what you have is one quote from Gorbachev 25 years after the fact saying, oh, this didn't happen.
That might be powerful if we did not have the declassified documents proving that it did happen.
So if you're interested in knowing what you missed here or what you got wrong, I will put in the description of this episode a great piece by Ted Snyder.
It's posted up at antiwar.com.
You don't have to take his word for it.
He links to the declassified documents in the article.
So I will post that.
Here, I'll read a little bit from the piece.
Okay, so here we go.
The same promises were made by the leaders of several other nations.
On July 15th, 1996, now Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who had been looking at the material in our archives from 1990 and 1991, declared, according to Sarot, that, quote, it was clear that Baker, Cole, and the British and French leaders John Major and François Mitterrand had all told Gorbachev that not one country leaving the Warsaw Pact would enter NATO,
that NATO would not move one inch closer to Russia.
I'll leave the article, which has links to the underlying documents in the comment section here.
I'm also going to leave another piece written by Scott Horton with a bunch of links in it that has some even more updated information.
But this is not even really in dispute.
The documents have been declassified over and over.
Minor little figures like the Secretary of State of the United States of America, the Chancellor of Germany, leaders in France and other European and other NATO countries, very high up leaders of NATO, all giving assurances that NATO would not move into former Soviet territory.
So I don't know what to say about that.
Again, I'll leave the links in the description for you guys.
If you're on the fence here, go check out all the underlying documents.
All right, let's keep playing.
I also found the NATO-Russia founding act signed in Madrid in 1997, which confirms that, quote, NATO and Russia do not consider each other as adversaries and that NATO transformation is a process that will continue.
End of quote.
To me, it doesn't really sound that.
So, okay, right.
So, you're basically saying they didn't consider themselves after the fall of the Soviet Union, they didn't consider themselves to be adversaries.
And right, it wasn't until NATO expanded all the way up to Russia's border that they do consider themselves to be adversaries.
That's kind of a point in my column.
All right, let's keep playing.
To me, it doesn't really sound that Russia really opposed and protested against expansion of NATO, simultaneously signing multiple agreements approving this expansion.
But I might be wrong, of course.
And that's why I will leave the link to this document down in the description for you.
What I'm trying to say is that Dave Smith should really learn how to use Google and stop retranslating Russian propaganda, because retranslating Russian propaganda makes you look very, very undereducated.
Because you start with...
Okay, well, if you want to just be a dick about this, I'd say that claiming that 9-11 was the worst tragedy of the 20th century makes you look pretty uneducated.
But all right, I do know how to use Google.
I've just, I just know how to use it a little bit better than you do, evidently.
And so, yeah, you can go check my sources on this as well.
But for some of the shit you've said today, it doesn't just make you look undereducated.
It makes you look like a dishonest hack who isn't willing to have an actual conversation.
You're not actually trying to refute any of my points.
You're just going to say, I'm justifying the invasion or I'm justifying 9-11, even though you played in your clip me condemning the invasion of Ukraine, calling it, quote, horrific and, quote, inexcusable.
But you're still going to pretend like I'm just, I'm spouting Russian propaganda.
By the way, none of the sources I'm going to give you here are Russian at all.
So I don't know what this means.
It's like on the level, as I've said before, it's on the level of like, if you said, I don't think Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, they'd go, you're spouting Saddam propaganda, Iraqi propaganda.
Like, what the fuck does that even mean?
Let's keep playing.
Because you start with sharing conspiracy theories, you finish with bullshit like infected birds.
And probably I think that Churchill during the World War II did a proper thing not listening to Adolf Hitler, who would offer to kill all of British Jews because they wanted to dominate the world and kill everybody else.
All right, let's pause it there.
Yeah, you invoked Hitler.
So I guess you get some points for that.
Okay, I know.
Everybody's Hitler.
That's always the great, the great comeback argument to anyone who's anti-war.
But no, Hitler.
All right.
And again, when he says you start here and then you end up invoking poisoned birds or whatever, like, I just don't know.
Who are you arguing with, dude?
You're arguing with something Vladimir Putin said?
Okay.
He said something stupid that has nothing to do with any of the points I've made.
Let's keep playing.
Then in 2014, there was a coup in Ukraine that was completely led by the West.
The coup is an act of violent overthrowing of a ruling power by an army or a political party or a regime, religious organization, crime ring, different kind of organization, but it's still an organization, movement.
If it's done by the people, it's not a coup.
It's a revolution.
In Ukraine, it was not done by a party or a specific movement or a religious organization, not even an army.
It was done by hundreds of organizations of people, aka the Ukrainian people.
I made a separate point.
All right, let's pause it there.
So he's saying that this wasn't a coup, it was a revolution.
And what he's laying out, I'll more or less accept the difference between a coup and a revolution.
He says the difference is that this was done by the Ukrainian people.
You know, what generally speaking, we'll call something, if a small group of people were to say, overthrow a democratically elected government, we'd call that a coup.
But if the entire people overthrew it, we'd usually call that a revolution.
So I don't know, just for examples, if a group of 20 people overthrew a government, we'd call that a coup.
If 80% of the people supported some popular movement and were out in the streets, that would be viewed typically as a revolution.
And where exactly that cutoff is between whether it's a coup or whether it's a revolution, I don't know exactly if there's a technical definition, but that's more or less what, you know, the gist of how we look at these things.
So let me read you something here, okay?
And this was written in 2014.
Moreover, the protests themselves are not particularly representative of the views of a broader Ukrainian polity.
The claim that, quote, the movement as a whole merely reflects the entire Ukrainian population, young and old, end quote, found very little support.
In this, as in virtually every area of political opinion, Ukrainians are pretty clearly divided.
Surveys taken in the past two months in the country as a whole range both in quality and results, but none show a significant majority of the population supporting the protest movement, and several show a majority opposed.
Recent surveys provide suggestive findings that quite large majorities oppose the takeover of regional governments by the opposition.
The most reliable and most recent survey show that the population is very divided.
The protests, the protesters' inability to garner greater support is surprising, given the fact that Yanukovych's popularity is far below 50%, although he is still apparently the most popular political figure in the country.
So just to be clear, there was absolutely, and just so I can tell you guys here, this was posted on Vladimir PutinDaily.com.
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
This is from the Washington Post.
This is reported in the Washington Post by Keith Darden and Lucin Way.
Okay.
These are two Western reporters.
This is not Russian propaganda.
This is coming out of the Washington Post, saying that at the time of this revolution, there was absolutely no polling to indicate that this was in any way supported by the majority of the Ukrainian people.
And in fact, Yanukovych was still the most political, the most popular political figure in Ukraine at the time.
Kind of makes sense, seeing as how this was only a few years after he had won a democratic election verified by the European Union.
So, no, I'm sorry.
You're just wrong in your assertion that this was the Ukrainian people who led a revolution.
It's just not true.
It's not what happened.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, let's keep playing.
I made a separate video on that.
Please check out the link in order to learn why Russian propaganda called the revolution of dignity in Ukraine the coup.
All these George Soros-funded NGOs were funding the militias on the ground who were overthrowing the government.
I worked in multiple NGOs like that prior to service in the army.
One of them was called the Municipal Budget Reform Project in Ukraine.
Another one was called the Heating Reform Project in Ukraine.
Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't remember any NGO that would be called a revolutionary army of Ukraine or coup funding project of Ukraine.
I don't think there was anything like that.
Thingless.
All right, pause it.
So, is his argument actually that?
So, my claim is that George Soros-funded NGOs were funneling money into the militias in the street.
And his claim is that that's not true because none of them were called the we're leading a coup in Ukraine organization.
Is that actually what he's saying?
I mean, is the claim true or false that George Soros-funded NGOs were funneling money into the resistance of the Yanukovych government?
It's true, and I will throw links in the description verifying that this is in fact true.
You guys can also here, I'll also throw in the speech from December of 2013 at the very beginning of the protests when Victoria Newland was bragging about how we were supporting these protests and how we had sent in billions of dollars to pro-Western groups through the years, including the current one.
You can also go watch the video, which I think most of you have at this point, of Gideon Rose, who was the editor of Foreign Affairs, the magazine publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, expressly talking about on the old Colbert show how our goal here, our goal, the Western goal here, was to steal Ukraine away from Russia.
You can also go listen to Victoria Newland's famous F the EU leaked phone conversation there where she's talking about who will be allowed in and who won't be allowed into the new government and all of this stuff.
I mean, to deny that there was enormous Western influence in this coup is just to deny reality.
So, let's keep playing.
Thing is, reptilians funding revolutions in different countries is a conspiracy.
Oh, okay.
So, so, okay, so reptilians funding different forces inside of a revolution.
Torture and Preemptive Invasion00:12:49
That's a conspiracy.
Yeah, you're right, dude.
Like, that's, I mean, I didn't say reptilians.
Obviously, he's saying that to make fun of me.
You're right.
That's just a conspiracy.
Oh, you, what do you think?
You think the West funds coup attempts?
Oh, come on, that's just a conspiracy.
They would never.
We never have.
We've no regime change is not something that America does, right?
Just doesn't happen.
Is it a conspiracy that there was a regime change in Libya?
Is that a conspiracy?
The one that Obama and Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates all admit to doing, that they bragged about doing and spiked the football.
Is that one a conspiracy too?
Is that when Hillary Clinton said, we came, we saw he's dead?
Was that what?
Just a conspiracy.
Is she a conspiracy theorist?
I mean, like, what is what a ridiculous way to not be able to like actually take on someone's argument and just try to dismiss them?
Uh, yeah, that never colored revolutions are just like that's not a real thing, they don't happen anywhere.
It's not to mention, you know, the regime changes in you know, for Libya, but also uh in Iraq, the attempted one in Syria, the one in Yemen, the one in Egypt.
The one, I mean, like, how many do you need here?
Is that none of these happened?
They're all just made up.
All right, let's uh let's keep playing.
Friend countries is a conspiracy, but the armed militants that came from Russia and organized the coup and captured establishments in Ukraine is a fact.
And people trying to justify those invaders are propagandists.
They are not anti- Okay, no, um, people who claim that anyone who explains the history of a story are justifying what happened, those are the propagandists.
And yes, Vladimir Putin sent special ops forces essentially into Donbass in 2015.
I don't think anybody's denying that.
It was in direct response to the Western-led coup in 2014.
The people in Donbass and the special ops people, uh, whatever their version of special ops in Russia is called, they basically came in and said, Oh, yeah, well, if you're going to overthrow that government by seizing these government buildings, then we're going to seize government buildings here and not recognize this new government.
No one's denying that Vladimir Putin did that.
So, okay.
I'm not even claiming it's justified.
I'm just saying it was a response.
Um, so I don't know.
This is propaganda, whatever.
Let's keep going.
They were protesters, no matter how hard they try to call themselves this way.
The Ukrainian government was kind of siding with Russia, or at least a lot more pro-Russia.
And then we overthrew that government and installed the pro-America government.
Aha, so I thought for some reason that President Yanukovych, that corrupted dictator that we had in Ukraine, was removed because he was stealing millions of dollars from Ukrainian citizens.
He promoted corruption.
He kidnapped journalists.
He was killing protesters just like President Putin does, right?
But now I see that I was wrong.
He was removed only because he was allegedly pro-Russian.
Also, I thought that the new government was installed in Ukraine through the democratic elections that we had in 2014 and 2019.
But now it seems that I was wrong.
Obviously, those people were installed by the evil Americans that influenced the brain of Ukrainian electors.
Probably they were selling Ukrainians some special type of Coca-Cola and cheeseburgers.
That seems legit.
Let's pause it.
Let's pause there.
I mean, I don't know.
What do I even need to say?
I mean, how at this point, just how obvious is it that the guy's just not even arguing with me?
It's all he's capable of doing is taking on ridiculous straw men.
So I, again, he's just saying things that I never said.
I never said that Yanukovych was overthrown exclusively because he was pro-Russian.
I'm saying objectively, he was more pro-Russian than the government that followed and the West sided with that government.
And that doesn't mean that they're controlling the minds of the Ukrainians who are out in the streets.
I'm just saying they're funding them.
Like, what are you fucking talking about, dude?
And yeah, okay, there were elections in 2014 and 2019.
That's true.
There was also an election in 2010, like I said, verified by the EU.
What about that one?
Now, Yanukovych, he refers to as a dictator.
Okay, so you're saying he was elected, but he became a dictator.
And what was the reasoning given for that?
Because what?
He cracked down on opposition media and has had protesters arrested because he killed innocent people.
Okay.
Put your boy Zelensky up to that test.
How does he fare?
How's Zelensky doing?
Didn't he just ban the biggest opposition parties to his own government, to his own party?
Didn't he just ban them?
I'm pretty sure he just nationalized a bunch of the fucking news outlets as well.
I guess that's okay.
That doesn't make you a dictator at all.
All right, let's keep playing.
Imagine, take it from our point of view, if like Russia was coming over here and overthrowing the pro-America government in Montreal and installing a pro-Russia government there.
And, you know, like this would be seen as, would you call that an unprovoked?
Oh my God.
Watching Dave Smith is a freaking torture, I tell you.
Because why the U.S. doesn't attack Mexico or Brazil for being sovereign countries, self-sufficient countries with their own armies?
They pose a threat, right?
Potentially.
There is no such thing as a preventive invasion.
There were only two men trying to convince their citizens about a preventive invasion.
Those were Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin.
This is a torture.
I mean, dude, if you think this is torture, like listen to yourself.
There were only two men who sold preventative invasion, Hitler and Putin.
That's it.
Let me introduce you to my friend George W. Bush.
Okay.
He literally sold America on a preventative invasion of Iraq.
That was what the whole war was sold on, was that we have to invade them to prevent them from using their weapons of mass destruction that they don't have in their alliance with Osama bin Laden.
That was never real.
What does this even mean to claim that only Putin and Hitler, this is unique to them to invade countries preemptively?
Okay.
Now, as far as his example, which he, again, I don't know if anyone can listen to this here, but I was making, I was like, put the shoe on the other foot.
How would America react if Putin was interfering like right on our border, sending in, pouring in weapons and all of this stuff?
Which, by the way, no one's going to fucking deny that, that even if you're going to make the argument this guy's making with the that like this wasn't a coup, it was a revolution or whatever bullshit he's saying.
Well, Donald Trump sent in a bunch of weapons to that new government, right?
So that just think about that.
How would we react if Putin was flooding weapons into Mexico or Quebec or something like that right on our border?
Now he just takes that and says, well, how come America doesn't attack Mexico and Canada?
I mean, they're sovereign countries.
I don't understand how that's a response to the point.
Let's use a better analogy.
Let's say, hypothetically, the Soviet Union allied with a little island a few miles off the coast of our country.
Let's call that Cuba.
Do you remember what we did?
Oh, yeah, we invaded the country in the Bay of Pigs.
Now, the invasion failed, but that was our response to invade their country.
All right.
And then ultimately, Jack Kennedy pulled back and didn't want to do it.
But we did attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro several times after that.
And when Russia put missiles on Cuba, Jack Kennedy said that he would blow up the world if those missiles didn't turn around.
That was his response was to say what?
That we will exactly what Putin's saying, that we will go to nuclear war over this.
And do not think we're kidding.
Just as Vladimir Putin said a few weeks ago, this is not a bluff.
We will use nuclear weapons.
So that's what we did in that scenario.
So I don't know what your point, that Mexico and Canada or Brazil exist and we're not invading them.
Okay, let them go ally with Russia and start making weapons deals with them and see what the fuck you think America would do.
Please, we'll invade countries halfway around the world if we think they're allying with the wrong people.
Do you think for a second if one of our countries, if a country on our border was allying with Russia, do you think for a second that we would take that and not invade and overthrow that regime?
How anyone could even argue this with a straight face is beyond me.
So tell yourself all you want to that it's torture listening to me, but I'm fucking right about all this shit.
All right, let's keep playing.
This is a torture, guys.
I mean, this gentleman is obsessed with this fear of Russia so much that he wants to tolerate their crimes, justify their invasion, condemn his own country.
Worst thing that can happen is to make Putin angry.
Here in Ukraine, we have a saying, I would never take a shit within the same field with this idiot, because apparently coveredness and stupidity are contagious.
I literally give no damn on what he said next.
I'm sorry, guys, but it makes me very, very sad that 140,000 people support what he said.
Well, I guess my advice to you would be to stay mad and I don't give a shit.
And that saying sucked as much as this response video did.
As you can tell, just at the end, it's just nothing but like cheap insults and not, I mean, I don't know.
I've never seen a response video as weak as this.
I don't think he landed one blow.
It's all just blatant strawman and strawman and completely mischaracterizing what I was saying.
I don't think he took on a single argument that I was actually making.
So I don't know.
I'll share all of the links in the description, everything that I mentioned on the show, proving my case for this.
But I'm sorry.
This guy at the end just ends with, I'm obsessed with fear of Vladimir Putin or something like that.
Goes, dude, your country is the one who's begging for American weapons to deal with the guy.
Don't tell me I'm fucking terrified of him.
I'm simply saying that I do not think this is a fight we should be involved in.
That's all.
I don't think we should be interfering with countries on Vladimir Putin's border.
I don't think it's worth risking nuclear war.
I root for the freedom of all people.
I root for peace for all people.
I hope that the killing in Ukraine stops.
It probably would have stopped by now if we weren't pouring weapons into the country.
But do you think that do I think that it's worth risking nuclear war to protect the Donbass region from being in Russia rather than that it's worth risking all of humanity to make sure that Donbass is ruled by Kiev, not Moscow?
No, I don't.
Period.
Don't tell me how I'm obsessed or I'm scared.
I'm saying I have no dog in this fight.
I'm not involved in your conflict, and I don't want my tax dollars being used to, you know, enrich the CIA and Raytheon so they can send weapons over to Ukraine.
So, if you want to make a response video where you actually tackle one thing that I actually said and not just misconstrue it all or claim that I'm justifying 9-11 or justifying the invasion by Putin, even in the clip you played, I explicitly make it clear I'm not doing those.
And the only reason why I had to like, um, why I had to like say that to like make that point is because I know there's idiots like you who will try to pretend that that's what I'm saying.