Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dismantle Ben Shapiro's narrative on Russia, citing Ukrainian intelligence that refutes claims of Navalny's political elimination and exposing NATO's rejection of Putin's written guarantee against expansion as the war's true catalyst. They challenge the "soft on Russia" label for U.S. presidents by highlighting NATO growth and treaty withdrawals, while debunking the idea that Putin fights secular leftism; instead, they argue his territorial ambitions mirror historical Russian empires. Ultimately, the hosts contend that ignoring blowback from past interventions drives current conflict, urging a shift from vague geopolitical justifications to market-based solutions for global stability. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Skiing in Salt Lake City00:02:29
Fill her up.
You are listening to the cash humans.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Tears your host, Jay Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
He's Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
What's up, buddy?
We're back from Salt Lake City.
Rob was swooshing up and down those mountains.
Good skiing out there, huh?
That was a dream come true.
Thank you for booking that gig.
I hope we can play there every winter.
That was really cool.
Dude, I had no idea Salt Lake City was such a good market for us.
It was incredible.
This is my first time I've ever been to Salt Lake City.
There's not too many places left in this great country of ours that I haven't been.
But Salt Lake City, I've never hit.
I've never played there over my whole fucking 15, 16 years or whatever it is.
I've been doing stand-up comedy.
And yeah, it was incredible.
The Mormons love us.
The Mormons were dying at Rob's filth up there.
I couldn't believe it.
Repressed ex-Mormons.
Maybe I can specialize with people that have left their faiths.
It was great.
All the shows were sold out and just great audiences.
And yeah, Rob says he says the best skiing you've ever done in your life, right?
Yeah, Park City.
I really, I never thought I'd make it out there to ski because I'm cheap and I don't take vacations.
Hold on, wait, wait, hold on.
Oh, just say that again.
I said, I never thought I'd make it out there because I'm cheap and I don't take vacations, but that was an absolute dream to actually be able to ski those mountains.
Yeah, my father-in-law was a big skier in his day and has two replaced knees to show for it.
But he did say he goes, it's the absolute best skiing in the country out there.
He was like, it's just nothing else compares to it.
So anyway, if you guys want to go ski and go to a great comedy club, go out there to Wise Guys in Salt Lake City.
And really liked all the people there who work at the club too.
Jose and all those guys were great.
Okay, so.
And we got dates.
Chicago coming up.
I got Kansas City and Omaha this weekend.
We got out in the sun in Key West coming up soon.
Yeah, a bunch of stuff.
Go to comicdave Smith.com.
Addressing the Seattle Situation00:09:01
But not Seattle.
And then, yes, that's right.
RobbieThefire.com for all of his dates.
You may notice there is no Seattle date there.
We're working on something to replace that.
But so I guess I should open the show today by addressing this situation, which has, you know, been getting a lot of attention.
And so, yeah, we had some shows booked in Seattle.
There were four comedians, myself, my brother Louis Jay Gomez, my brother Kurt Metzger, my brother Jim Florentine.
We all got dates canceled on us.
Kurt and we all got, we all have the same booking agent.
So we all got sent that same email.
Kurt and Jim decided to go public with it.
I understand why they did that.
I'm not mad at them for doing that or anything.
I don't think I would have.
I think I probably wouldn't have commented on this at all if it hadn't just become this big thing.
Because, you know, it's like the cancel culture thing is such a white hot culture war issue that a lot of big accounts started jumping on it.
I've gotten so many requests for interviews and comments about it.
I've turned them all down.
I'm just not interested in doing it.
I literally just before we started the show, just emailed Fox and friends.
They wanted me to come on tomorrow morning.
First off, they want you to come on at like 5:45 in the morning.
And, you know, like I, I said back to him, I was like, guys, I'm going to talk about on my podcast.
I don't really care to talk about this anymore after that.
I was like, if you guys, if you guys want to talk about the wars or the economy or the election or something like that, you're like, I'm happy to come on.
But I just, look, here, I don't even know what to say.
Here's how I feel about it.
I'm a libertarian.
It's that's their right.
It's their right to not book us or even to unbook us.
It's you have a right to be gay.
And that's, you know, I may not love it, but that's your right to be as gay as you want to be.
I wish it wasn't like this, but it is what it is.
There's the reason why I don't really care to go on all of these interviews.
I got a request from the New York Post.
I got a request from all these different people that comment on it.
And it's like, I just, I feel a little bit weird about going and trying to do a whole bunch of press based on this one woke comedy club deciding they didn't want us at their club.
It just feels like, I feel like if I'm gonna, if I'm gonna advance my career off of something, it should be that people love my comedy act or that I'm saying something in a really great way, that they love the way I break it down on the podcast or something.
And I hate the idea of like playing the victim.
Listen, you know what I'm saying?
Just send those interview requests my way.
I'll be your Phil Heyman.
I'll get in your corner and go, what Dave Smith has to say is just too dangerous.
He knows he's going to wake up the town.
They can't have his words being spoken, parading freedom through Seattle.
They don't want it.
I couldn't even let you do that.
It's just too, it makes my skin crawl.
It's also just like, look, dude, I'm not a victim.
You're not a victim.
We play tons of clubs all over the country.
We have the best job in the world.
I got like such great fans.
I'm just, I'm so happy with my career that I don't, it just seems wrong to me.
And also, it's just not that interesting of a conversation to me.
I mean, cancel culture has some interesting dynamics to it, but this isn't any of that.
This isn't, oh, we were canceled and now we can't work anymore.
So it's none of that.
It's like one club that literally like multiple different offers from other clubs in the area came in because they want to come in and be like, oh, yeah, well, we'll be the club who will work you.
The truth is that this is, it's a unique situation.
This club is like, Kurt Metzger really made me laugh when he said it's located in historic chaz, which is such a funny way to put that.
It's located in historic chazz.
They're one of the most like uber progressive little nooks of this country.
The truth is that for most comedy clubs, if they were, if they would allow people to pressure them to have someone who's not okay by woke standards play their comedy club, they'd be left with like three comics and all their biggest ticket sale sellers would, they wouldn't be able to book anymore.
So of course, all these other clubs are rushing in to be like, hey, we'll be the ones who booked the guys who got canceled from there.
And we're going to try to make that, me and my team, we're going to try to make that happen.
I do apologize to our fans out in Seattle.
Like it sucks.
I know there are people who bought tickets and people are planning to come see us.
I was looking forward to it.
That part of it sucks.
This is life.
Things happen.
Don't go like trashing the venue.
Don't insult the woman who did it.
Listen, I've been in these situations before.
They're complex.
It's not as simple as people like to make it out.
Look, we had a situation like this with the Creek in the Cave years ago.
And this is why Legion of Skanks stopped doing shows at the Creek and the Cape.
And then, of course, the Creek in the Cave didn't make it through the lockdowns and they moved out to Austin.
And I love Rebecca Trent.
I love her.
She's one of my favorite people in the world.
And I've worked with her for many years.
I will work with her in some capacity for the rest of my comedy career.
She's a part owner of Skank Fest.
She's just a very close friend and somebody who I really love dearly.
And she was in a situation.
And look, I wasn't happy with how she handled it back then, but it didn't make her like a bad person or make it like we're not friends anymore.
She was in a situation at the Creek and the Cave where because it's in New York City and it's a comedy club and it was the open micer hangout.
All of the performers there were like woke progressives.
And then she's caught between a rock and a hard place.
And it seemed to me like that's what went on with this, with this club as well.
You know, when you got to run a business in historic chaz, you got to deal with these forces.
You got to fight off junkies on a daily basis.
He can't.
You got a lot going on.
Yeah.
You think stepping in dog shit sucks.
Stepping in dude shit on your way to work every day.
That's rough.
This is so funny to me because I watched Lewis unwrap.
You know, I was hoping it would be scandalous and feisty.
And based off of what you're saying here, and this is why you guys are friends, your thoughts and feelings and attitudes are so similar.
It sounds like you have the same publicist.
Well, it's just, it's honestly like you guys got your talking points as well.
Well, Lewis does have a very kind of libertarian streak to him.
Like he, he's not like me.
He, he's not, what's the word?
Literate, but he like he thinks he has a lot of the same gut instincts as me.
And that's the truth.
I just don't, I don't like making it.
I kind of hate that thing.
There's like a right-wing grifter thing where you would try to like, oh, yeah, I'll go on every show and talk about these wokes or they can't handle it and blah, blah, blah.
Okay, fine.
But I'm just saying, look, of course, it would be a better, saner world if the response was like, if you don't like this comic, then don't buy tickets and their fans can buy tickets, you know?
But again, like I said, this is their right.
I don't really know that I have much else to say about it.
You know, I thought it was kind of funny that the Portland gig is still happening.
So congratulations, Seattle.
You're gayer than Portland.
That's what we established.
Anyway, that's it.
I don't really want to comment on it anymore beyond that.
It's just one of those things that happened.
It's fine.
You know, this is why private property rights work and they solve problems.
And okay, we'll find another club that makes more sense for us to go to.
And then, you know, all you guys were pretty loaded up on dates.
And, you know, so it is what it is.
You know, let them do their little woke thing and see how that works out for them.
That's all I got to say about it, really.
Okay.
So the few days ago, our schedule has been a little bit messed up over the last few days.
I do apologize.
That is all my fault and God's fault.
I mean, I'm not taking responsibility for your stupid bus breaking down while you were skiing.
That's on God, but it's not your fault either.
But anyway, so this is from a few days ago.
Suspicious Timing and Politics00:03:04
Ben Shapiro, our good friend, who does many segments on me.
Always make sure to mention me by name and send his audience over here.
I appreciate that.
He did an episode kind of laying out his foreign policy positions and where how he sees world events and how they've transpired.
And it was just, I thought it was such a great opportunity to kind of contrast his neoconservative view of the world versus the more, say, in our case, non-interventionist libertarians or even the America first or just the I'm a sane person who doesn't want to blow up people and destroy the world, like from that perspective.
Very different from Ben Shapiro's.
I know Ben Shapiro doesn't self-identify as a neocon, but he is a neocon every anytime it matters.
Anyway, let's go through this and respond.
One of the great qualities of dictatorship is that dictators can hold the line even as democracies start to fade.
That, of course, is the theory of pretty much every dictator across history when faced with a democratic rival.
That is certainly the theory of Vladimir Putin today, whether it is in Ukraine or whether it's with regard to him just killing the people who oppose him, people like Alexei Navalny.
And it's becoming very clear this week that Vladimir Putin is now settling all family business.
This is like he has right here already.
Okay, so I don't know if you saw this thing about this Navalde guy, Rob, but it just came out that one of the top Ukrainian intelligence guys said that he died of a blood clot.
This is so, so already you have this scenario where Ben Shapiro doesn't actually know what he's talking about.
This is, he's just deciding that Putin is taking care of all family business right now.
That does not seem clear at all.
And in fact, it was a little bit suspicious, the timing of it, right?
Like it's like the timing, like while the U.S. is debating over this additional $60 billion, Vladimir Putin decides now's the time to do this assassination.
Like it's possible that he's just the dumbest person on the planet, or it's possible that this isn't at all what's going on.
And just like when everybody was jumping on the story about the ghost of Kiev or the story about how Vladimir Putin was dying or the story about how he was about to be overthrown by that militia that he pissed off, people jump on these stories because they suit their narrative.
And none of it's actually clear that that's happening at all.
I got to ask, Alex Mulvaney, I know this is crass, but him dying in prison, I'm not, this is not an endorsement of Putin sending him to a war colony or whether or not he had him killed in that prison or if maybe the blood cock condition was escalated by harsh conditions.
Does that change anything to our relationship with Russia or view of Putin?
Putin, Trump, and Ukraine00:17:49
Is that a reason for more or less warfare?
I mean, the fact that a dictator took out a political enemy, they're trying to turn Donald Trump into a political prisoner here.
They're not having a lot of success with it.
Well, right.
What has Milvane changed in any way?
Yeah, because the Western countries or the U.S. would never kill somebody for a political outcome that they wanted to see.
We would never, you know, like it's anyway, it's all, it's, it's just kind of childish.
Clinton's friends.
Right, right.
The Clintons just have a lot of coincidences.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, brand new sponsor who we're thrilled to have on board, and that is MyPatriot Supply.
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One more time.
That's preparewithsmith.com.
All right, let's keep playing.
What it is that he wants.
And the reason he feels that way is because of a combination of splits on the right in the United States and a combination of splits on the left in the United States, as well as splits in the European coalition with regard to Russia.
When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, there was pretty much unanimity that this was not something that the West could allow to stand.
You couldn't have Vladimir Putin simply waltzing into Kiev, taking over the country, killing Vladimir Zelensky, and essentially setting up a puppet dictatorship and turning Ukraine into a second Belarus.
You couldn't have exactly put it.
Let's just pause it right there.
I mean, it's just pretty funny that it's like, well, I mean, is it acceptable in 2014 when there's a violent street putsch backed by the West that overthrows the democratically elected president, Yanukovych?
By the way, his elections were monitored by the EU and they said they were legit elections.
And so the democratically elected president being overthrown by a violent coup backed by the West and installing a pro-Western regime, is that okay?
So anyway, I mean, I know that's a fact that these guys don't like to grapple with, but yeah, that happened 10 years ago, which is not that long ago.
Anyway, let's keep playing.
Russia directly on the borders of a wide variety of NATO countries, including Hungary and Poland.
I'm sorry, this is going to take us a long time to get through, but it's so funny.
Isn't it so funny?
I mean, we can't have Russia right on NATO's borders.
It's just too, like, you can't even like, how could you say that out loud?
It does like, it's like the jokes, like you see these like memes on Twitter and stuff, but they'll be like, well, if Iran wasn't a hostile government, why would they put their country right next to all of our bases?
Like, wait, what?
Yeah, okay.
Well, like, NATO is the one who has been expanding east.
Okay.
And that NATO expansion, if you're going to say we can't have Putin right on NATO's borders, well, then how would it not be reasonable for Vladimir Putin to be like, I can't have NATO's NATO right on my borders?
And the NATO expansion began way before the Russian war in Ukraine.
So again, this is just, I don't know, this is all silly.
It also, you know, if Ben Shapiro started saying, okay, Vladimir Putin's taking care of all this family business now, and why is he doing that?
What's his mindset?
And then gets into all these things when it's not even clear that he's taking care of family business right now.
So not only are you getting the thing, I mean, maybe, maybe that's what happened, but we have, we don't know that.
We don't know that for sure at all.
And like when Ukrainian intelligence officials are saying we think it's a blood clot, it's reasonable to assume like they would be in they would be incentivized to say he killed this guy.
It's reasonable to assume that that's plausible, that that's what happened.
And anyway, so now he's going off on this whole thing based on what Putin's mindset is, but he's not doing this based on like Putin has said this.
See, anytime one of someone like me, who's been a huge critic of this war from the very beginning, anytime someone like me will say, look, Vladimir Putin has said over and over and over again, these are my issues with the West.
These are my security concerns.
These are my demands.
This is my red line.
And then people will be like, oh, that's just what he says, but blah, blah, blah.
But then they just go, no, this is really what he wants.
But they're not even looking at what he says.
They're just getting inside of his head.
Like, I'm not claiming that like I can read Putin's mind or I know what's in his heart.
I'm telling you what he's said over the years and what's reasonable and what's not reasonable in what he's said.
But Ben Shapiro is just telling you, this is how he, this is what he thinks based on nothing.
Anyway, let's keep playing.
Would certainly threaten former Soviet satellite states like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, all of which are deeply fearful of a Putin-led incursion into their territory, Finland as well.
You couldn't have it because Ukraine actually is a relatively major producer of products like wheat and oil.
And mostly you couldn't have it because Vladimir Putin has interests that are antithetical to those of the West.
And for all of the talk about over the last 25 years about how Vladimir Putin was just on the cusp of moderating, how there was going to be a moment when Vladimir Putin was welcomed into the family.
And that's just the nice point.
With the, as far as the stuff goes, like kind of a similar point that I was making to the coup in 2014 in Ukraine.
But, you know, think about this argument that Ben Shapiro is making, that we couldn't have Russia intervening in Ukraine.
We couldn't allow that.
Because like they make wheat, you know, so like we couldn't allow Vladimir Putin to go into Ukraine.
But think about that argument when at least what Vladimir Putin has been saying this whole time is that he can't allow us to intervene in Ukraine.
And I don't know like how good you are at geography, if you could like picture a map in your head, but Ukraine is a lot closer to Russia.
You know, so like if we're going to sit here in the United States of America and say we can't have him intervening in Ukraine, isn't it totally reasonable then in an if-then statement, if we can't allow that, then it's pretty damn reasonable for him to say he can't allow that.
Okay.
It's like the most basic point, but all right, let's keep playing.
That never happened.
Every single president of my lifetime has tried a reset with Vladimir Putin.
George W. Bush famously looked into Putin's eyes and thought he had a sense of his soul.
And then you had Barack Obama, who literally sent Hillary Clinton, his secretary of state, to Moscow to give them a button that didn't actually say reset, but was supposed to be a reset button.
And then you had Vladimir Putin being offered flexibility by Barack Obama in 2012 in the lead up to the 2012 election.
And then Donald Trump came into the office and the basic assumption was that Donald Trump was going to lead to a warm relationship with Putin.
And now you have Joe Biden, who came into office and was immediately pretty soft on Russia in terms of sort of geopolitical strategy, as George W. Bush once put it.
That take has been proved false.
Sure.
I got a lot to say about this, but go ahead.
That sounds like, what is that, four presidents in a row that didn't really have a fight or a war with Russia?
And I don't remember any hostilities or incredible turmoil between us and Russia for the last 20 years.
He started that conversation with Bush.
That's eight years.
Then he got Obama for another eight.
So that's 16.
Yeah, but the problem.
So that's 20 years of no problems.
But the problem with Ben Shapiro's summary of all of this is that it's just so superficial.
Like he's going, well, Bush said he looked into his eyes and saw that he was a good man.
And Hillary Clinton went over there with her reset button.
And Donald Trump talked about having détente with Russia and being friends with them.
And Joe Biden, I don't even know what he means by this, wasn't at war with him for the first year of his administration or something like that.
And it's like, look, all of that is true, but that's right.
If you only pay attention to what they said and don't cover at all what any of them did, then okay, you could be left with that impression.
But let's go through a little bit more of this.
And this is just some of what was done.
Okay.
What some of what the American presidents have done during all of this time period.
Okay.
George W. Bush also tore up multiple treaties that we were in with Russia.
Every single one of the presidents that he just named oversaw NATO expansions moving east.
George W. Bush also put dual-use rocket launchers into Poland.
His justification was that they were there to make sure that Iran can't nuke Europe with the nukes that they don't have.
But Vladimir Putin saw this as a direct security concern.
He's mentioned it over and over and over, the latest of which was in the interview with Tucker Carlson, but he's talked about this in almost every speech he's given that I've read or listened to over the last 10 years.
Okay, so there's George W. Bush.
And I'm just rattling off some.
We could go on this for a long time.
Barack Obama attempted to overthrow an allied government of his in Syria, and he successfully backed the overthrow of the government in Ukraine.
These are kind of big deals.
We didn't even mention arming the jihadists in Chechnya, but whatever.
So Donald Trump tore up the INF treaty or withdrew from the INF treaty.
Donald Trump sent weapons into Ukraine while they were in the middle of a civil war that was a direct result from the coup in 2014 that Barack Obama and Joe Biden backed.
You can go listen to the Victoria Newland phone call, right?
When she's talking about how she goes, we're in play.
We got to glue this thing.
Here's who's going to be in the new government.
Here's who's not going to be in the new government.
And who do they say is going to get on the phone to give him an attaboy?
She says, Joe Biden, the vice president at the time, who was very involved in the Ukrainian policy, part of the reason why his son got such a sweetheart deal from that bury smooth Ukrainian gas company.
So yes, I mean, Ben Shapiro, if you just want to have the most superficial way, like if your understanding of politics is like, I watch the View once a week, then yes, this would be what you know, that the president said nice things about Putin.
If you actually like read books and know what actually happened, no, they were all taking more and more aggressive, aggressive postures toward Vladimir Putin.
And Putin, during this time, was over and over again asking them to stop, even asking to join NATO at one point.
Like Vladimir Putin, for much of his time, was kind of asking, like, like the other side to all of these, these points is like, he had Hillary Clinton there.
And it wasn't Putin who did it, but it was like Clinton and one of his guys.
And they pushed that button together.
And he met with George W. Bush.
And he was giving us information and offering his services after 9-11.
If you recall, it was Vladimir Putin who warned the United States of America about the Boston Marathon bombers and was like, keep your eyes on these guys.
These are radical jihadists.
And of, you know, we didn't do a good job with that information we were given.
But anyway, it's just, there's much more to this than Ben Shapiro is explaining.
And of course, he's doing this because as all these war hawks do, they start from their conclusion and then they work backward.
The conclusion is we want to support this war.
So now let's work back from there.
Oh, look, all these presidents were nice to Putin and look, it still ended up being this.
But so then as Joe Biden comes back into office, you can't remove it from the context that Joe Biden was the guy, you know, back in 2014 who was kind of the point man on this Ukrainian operation.
So that's something that Vladimir Putin sees too.
And meanwhile, all along, this whole time, he had always maintained, as I've talked about ad nauseum, but there's the net means net memo that you can read yourself, which was a private cable that Julian Assange leaked.
That's the only reason we know about it.
This was not for the public.
This was for this was Burns, who was the Russian ambassador, sending a cable back to the then Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, in which he explains in no uncertain terms that Ukrainian entry to NATO is Putin's red line.
And like, it's the memo is in diplomatic language, but he's basically saying this is his red line and he's not bluffing.
This is the Cuban missile crisis to Vladimir Putin, and he will go to war over this.
And he says in the memo that he doesn't want to because he doesn't want to go to war, but he will.
He will feel like he has to if you if you put Ukraine in NATO.
And a couple months after that at the Bucharest summit, they announced that they were putting Georgia and Ukraine in NATO.
Okay.
And this is the very beginning of real trouble in that relationship.
And essentially, I mean, we can get into more of this later, but this is what the fight's all been over.
And people who pretend it's not are deluding themselves.
It's just, it's the evidence is overwhelming.
And we'll probably get into more of this as we keep playing.
But here, let's go back to Benny Boy.
Time and time again.
Vladimir Putin is a highly intelligent, highly skilled adversary of the United States.
His interests do not align with the interests of the West.
The chief Russian motivation, and this has been true for literally centuries, is territorial ambition.
This has been true since the time of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.
I mean, if you want to go back even further, this has been true.
Let's pause it there.
By the way, I don't care whether it's Vladimir Putin when he opens his 30-minute interview with Tucker Carlson talking about what the Ukrainian relationship with Russia was in the year 1300.
I don't care if it's the Zionists who go back 2,000 years ago and say the Jews were the ones living there.
I don't care if it's Ben Shapiro who's saying Russia's motivation is territorial expansion.
And then he goes back, oh, we can go back hundreds of years or thousands of years.
All of these arguments are ridiculous, just on their face.
It's always when people don't want to deal with the recent history and what's actually been happening there.
You cannot say that because in the year 700, the Russians were an expansionist country, therefore Vladimir Putin's motives must be that.
This would be ridiculous.
And nobody would ever apply this logic to the United States of America or to any of the countries that are their allies.
Oh, well, like, I guess then that must be England's motivation too, right?
I mean, hey, England and France, they're funding the war with us.
Look at their history.
What have they done?
They've been imperialist colonizers.
So then they must be, this is all ridiculous.
It doesn't mean anything.
And no, it's not clear at all that Vladimir Putin's main goal here.
In fact, there's no evidence to suggest that Vladimir Putin's main goal here is to expand his territory.
And in fact, in 2014, after the coup in Ukraine, when they had a plebiscite in the Donbass region, now you can trust this or not.
Okay.
This isn't my point.
Maybe they weren't legitimate.
were not like verified by the EU, not that the EU was the, you know, the end-all be-all, but they did, they held elections and Donbass voted.
Again, maybe you think it's illegitimate.
That's actually beside the point here, but they voted to be part of Russia, to leave Ukraine and be part of Russia.
And Vladimir Putin said no.
So if his motivation really was territorial expansion, he would have taken the Donbass region then when he had the perfect cover, which was, hey, look, they voted.
This is what they want.
It's a large percentage ethnic Russians in that region.
So, hey, and they had already basically attempted to secede from Ukraine.
NATO Expansion Blame Game00:16:06
That would have been the time to do it if this was just his, if that was his real motivation here.
But what he's been saying the whole time and what tracks is that actually it was security concerns.
And that actually he had basically come to a place where the West was going to give him no assurances that his brightest of red lines would be crossed.
And they had kind of already crossed it.
They were already doing NATO joint military exercises with the Ukrainian military and they were already shipping weapons in to Ukraine.
And that he's like, well, I mean, if you're doing joint military exercises and you're shipping weapons in, they're basically a de facto member of NATO.
That is the motivation here.
Vladimir Putin has been explicit about this, as have even Western leaders when they were being honest.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
But anyway, let's keep playing.
The fact is that if you look at Russian history or have any sense of Russian history, Russia's great leaders are always measured by the amount of land they control, which makes a certain amount of geopolitical sense if you are Russia, because again, Russia is a giant step, meaning it is open to invasion from all sides.
And so if you're Russian, one of the things that historically you have attempted to do is expand your borders so as to prevent invasion from all sides.
Now, at a certain point, that defensive justification becomes an offensive strategy in which you're invading sovereign nations that exist all around you and attempting to control top down.
Russia has always been an empire since the time of Muscovy.
And now you are watching as Vladimir Putin tries to expand the boundaries of what he sees as his new empire.
I mean, he himself compared himself to Peter the Great just a couple of years ago after the invasion of Ukraine.
Yeah, let's pause it there.
This just sounds like the dumbest analysis I've ever heard, that the proof that Putin wants to expand is that historically, so like we expanded West.
Can you say the exact same thing about the foundations of America?
Well, yeah, it's like organizing and expanding.
Yeah, like if Trump compares himself to Andrew Jackson, that's not proof that he's going to scalp an Indian.
You know what I mean?
Like this is just the dumbest argument ever.
And even by his own argument, if he's going, well, look, Russia has been invaded many times and they're concerned about that.
It's like, oh, maybe then they'd be concerned about their largest, most important strategic neighbor being a part of a hostile military alliance.
How is that not reasonable?
All right, let's keep playing.
And when you watch the interview that he did with Tucker Carlson, one of the first 35 minutes is dedicated to his idea. of Russian claims to Ukraine, in which he actually sort of makes the claim that Russia has claims to Poland and Hungary as well.
When he says that sort of stuff, we ought to be able to do that.
He's actually spelling out what he actively thinks.
Now, there are a bunch of people on the left who think that Vladimir Putin is doing this because he is offended by the muscularity of the West.
That if only the West had been more conciliatory toward Vladimir Putin, then Russia would not, in fact, be an adversarial force.
Everything that Vladimir Putin does is blowback to the West.
That is the theory of people on the left who are very much vacillating with regard to what Vladimir Putin is trying to do.
And then there are a couple of theories on the right.
And those theories range from the blowback theory, people ripping that off from John Mearsheimer, the foreign policy scholar who I think is wrong about a great many things.
John Mearsheimer has sort of theorized that it's NATO's expansion that drove Putin to invade South Ossetia, for example, in Georgia, or drove Putin to invade Crimea and the Anbas region.
Okay.
So hold on, let's just pause for a second.
And first off, John Mearsheimer is 100% right about all of this.
And John Mearsheimer has forgotten more about Russian history while we're recording this show than Ben Shapiro ever knew.
And you should, I highly recommend people go listen to him and read him.
He is all over this stuff.
Look, the stuff in South Ossetia, there were, so what happened there was this was like a breakaway province in Jordan, and there had been Russian peacekeepers there for years.
And I had mentioned the Bucharest summit in 2008 when NATO announced that both Ukraine and Georgia would become members of NATO.
And they didn't give a timetable for it, or they didn't like officially start the paperwork, but they announced that this was going to happen.
And this was George W. Bush who pushed it through.
And it was Angela McCartle.
Jeez, what am I?
Angela McCartney.
It was Merkel in Germany who like opposed it.
And this is why they weren't actually brought in there.
They just settled on this compromise of announced that they're coming in.
And why did Germany oppose it?
Because they were terrified that it would provoke the Russians.
This isn't like just some abstract theory that Mearsheimer has here.
This is like, look, so anyway, they announced Georgia and Ukraine were coming into NATO.
And then Georgia got ballsy and attacked South Ossetia.
And then Vladimir Putin responded and went to war with Georgia.
To pretend that that had nothing to do with the fact that it had just been announced that they were going to join NATO is ridiculous.
Anyway, let me let him finish his point here, but getting into the idea that there's this, that blowback is somehow a leftist theory.
Let's just let him play because he says a little bit more on that.
Originally in 2014 and then invade the rest of Ukraine in 2022.
What's that theory?
Sorry, pause again.
And did anything else happen in 2014?
Oh, Vladimir Putin.
So the story is that there was a bloody street putsch that overthrew the democratically elected government in the democratically elected president in Ukraine, who had just decided to not join the EU and instead do a deal with Vladimir Putin.
And then he got overthrown in a violent street putsch that was backed by the West.
And then because the people in the eastern part of the country, that was their guy, they tried to break away and were like, screw this, this government's not legitimate.
And then a civil war broke out and Vladimir Putin essentially sent special ops in.
Like this is the story.
This is what happened.
Ben Shapiro's retelling of it is, in 2014, Vladimir Putin sent special ops in.
Like, how can you just leave out that whole other part?
That was pretty big.
And even if the people want to, you know, like the people out there who try to argue that, like, no, it wasn't a U.S.-backed coup.
That was a totally organic, a totally organic revolution paid for by Soros NGOs or whatever, you know, like, it's like, okay, you're right.
It was a totally organic revolution that just happened to have U.S. senators and State Department representatives in the middle of it.
You know, Victoria Newland just happened to be handing out sandwiches to the protesters, but there's no U.S. involvement in that.
Like, okay, come on.
Let's operate in the real world here.
All right.
Here, let's keep playing.
Is coincident with the left-wing blowback theory of American foreign policy that dates all the way back to people like Howard Zinn and Namchomsky?
We'll get some more on Christmas.
Let's pause it here and then you can kind of go through this.
Did you hear from one of his sponsors?
No, I don't.
He's doing well enough for those sponsors.
He doesn't need our help.
But this is just, look, this is the tactic that people use, this like left-right game.
So Ben Shapiro, of course, is speaking to a self-identified right-wing audience.
And so he's like, oh, this is all a bunch of lefty stuff.
Blowback at all.
It dates back to Howard Zinn.
This is the lefties.
And now some of these right-wing people are actually believing the lefties.
You know who coined the term blowback?
The CIA.
Our central intelligence agency.
Those lefties at the CIA are the ones who coined the term blowback.
And what blowback means is that there are unintended consequences to covert American policy.
And what's interesting about it is that because the policies are covert, and so the government's not telling the American people that they're doing them, when the blowback comes, the American people have no way to know.
It's like, why does Iran hate us so much?
Why does the Iranian government hate us so much?
It must be because they're radical Islamists.
But it's like, oh, no, you don't know that our CIA overthrew the government in Iran.
And that's why they hate us.
The idea of blowback is as simple as understanding that there are reactions to things.
It's insane.
It's not a left-wing idea.
It's the most basic human understanding of how human beings work.
Do you think the war on terrorism had anything to do with 9-11?
Did 9-11 make us want to make more of the people willing to support politicians to go on these into these wars?
Of course.
It would be insane to pretend, like if someone were to tell you, they go, no, no, no.
Americans didn't support George W. Bush invading Afghanistan and Iraq because of 9-11.
It's just their, you know, Christian, you know, expansionist mindset.
And look, I could think of examples in the year 1300s where Christians were killing some people.
So clearly that's all it was.
It's like, no, this event, you kill a bunch of people somewhere and that pisses a lot of people off.
And now they're ready to come kill some of your people.
That's essentially blowback.
And the idea that you won't even entertain the idea that expanding a military alliance that was started with the purpose of opposing Russia, okay, that has started many aggressive wars, many of which were not in Russia's interests, that they're expanding that all the way up and encircling Vladimir Putin would, you're just discounting that that would have a reaction.
He doesn't actually care about that.
He's screaming at the top of his lungs that he does care about that, but he doesn't actually care about that.
Let me just in case, because I mean, there's so many sources on this, but let me just, as Ben Shapiro is saying, that there's no, you know, there's blowback is just like some left-wing theory that this is just like, I mean, there's this John Mearsheimer guy, and I think Howard Zinn said something about it,
totally leaving out that like also Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan and lots of people on the right have acknowledged blowback because you're insane not to.
How's this?
Let's hear from NATO's secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg.
I might be mispronouncing that name.
But I don't know if you remember this, Rob, but this was from late last year.
He kind of, you know, every now and then where they say the thing they're not supposed to say?
So here, here, this is the, again, this is the head of NATO who's saying this.
This is the Secretary General of NATO.
Quote, President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021 and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign to promise no more NATO enlargement.
That was what he sent us and was a precondition for not invading Ukraine.
Of course, we didn't sign that.
He went to war to prevent NATO.
Continuing, this is the head of NATO speaking.
It's not the lefties or John Mearsheimer.
He went to war to prevent NATO more NATO close to his borders.
He has got the exact opposite.
So you can see Stoltenberg here is he's still trying to sell the thing and he's saying, well, look, he wanted no more NATO.
And look, now NATO's expanding even more because these countries are scared that he's going to invade them.
So he was trying to make the point that, aha, Vladimir Putin's so dumb and we're so smart because we're getting what we want and he's not getting what he wants.
But he kind of gave away the game while he was doing it, didn't he?
He totally admitted that Vladimir Putin offered.
And look, I know, dude, people will say when you talk about this, are you defending Vladimir Putin?
Why are you, you seem to be disagreeing with the guy who's criticizing Vladimir Putin and correcting the record on his behalf, but it's not a defense of Vladimir Putin because he's still wrong to invade the country.
But this is what happened.
The head of NATO is telling you he just wanted us to promise that his biggest neighbor would not be in our military alliance.
That's what the whole thing was over.
Not territorial expansion, not something that happened in the year 1300.
It was that simple.
The request was, I can't have Ukraine in your military alliance.
They can be neutral, but just promise me you won't put them in NATO.
I need that in writing.
And that here is the head of NATO telling you, and we said, nope, suck on that.
We're never putting that in writing.
Too bad.
And if you're promising to not invade, if we put this in writing, the answer is no.
That's what happened here.
Sorry, might be a bitter pill to swallow if you've been eating up all this propaganda, but that's what led to this war.
And the fucking head of NATO admits it himself.
So it's not just that Vladimir Putin's been saying this for years and it's totally plausible.
I mean, let's get real, dude.
Like just all you have to do is ask this question.
And just asking the question answers the question.
Does Mexico have a right to be in whatever military alliance they want to?
Does Canada have a right?
I'm not saying should they have a right.
I'm saying do they?
What would the U.S. do if Mexico joined a military alliance with Russia or China?
What do you think the U.S. government would do about that?
And we all know the answer.
They would overthrow that government the next day and install a government that we liked better that wouldn't be in that military alliance.
And you could say that, well, I think Mexico ought to have that right and it would be wrong for the U.S. to do that.
Okay, fine.
Fair enough.
Avoiding Nuclear War00:02:39
Maybe Ukraine ought to have the right to join whatever military alliance they want, but we ought to have the right to not join a military alliance with them.
So why is it in America's interest if the biggest nuclear superpower on the country is making a pretty reasonable demand, which is like, no, I can't have your military alliance all the way over here, a demand that we ourselves would make of any other country as well.
Why wouldn't we just, I'm just saying, put it in writing.
You could have avoided this entire war.
Not only could you have avoided the war if you had allowed the negotiation process and not sent Boris Johnson there to kill that, but that you could have avoided the war altogether.
And, you know, people can come back and say, well, Vladimir Putin could have just not invaded and that would have avoided the war too.
And like, yeah, okay, fine.
But he did.
And you got to be honest and say, even the head of NATO is saying he offered you the only thing he was asking for was just tell me you're not going to do this.
Because, you know, basically, what is Vladimir Putin saying at this point?
All the way back in 2008, he's been on record telling the Americans, like, this is the brightest of I'm not fucking around red lines for me.
You can't do this.
And what's he telling them in late 2021 when he sends them this written request to put it in writing that you won't?
He's saying, hey, it sure looks like you're fucking doing the thing that you said.
You know what I mean?
That I said was my bright line.
Can you please put it in writing?
And the head of NATO even says explicitly that this was his condition to not invade the country.
You remember at the very beginning of the war when the whole like Pentagon kept telling us there was going to be a false flag attack and then Vladimir Putin was going to invade and all this stuff?
It's like, oh yeah, they never mentioned this, did they?
They never went, oh, well, here's the thing is he said he wouldn't invade if we would just do this thing and we told him to go fuck himself.
So by the way, he might do the thing pretty soon.
Anyway, let's keep playing for a few more minutes, see if there's anything else worth shredding.
Russia is actually a bulwark against secular leftism.
Now, Russia actively is a highly religious country that is very anti much of the left-wing ideology with regard to, say, gender and sex and sexuality that the West has fallen for.
And so they built up in their minds, a lot of people, the idea that because Russians are socially conservative as a general matter, which they are, that this is somehow what Vladimir Putin represents, as opposed to he has a population that is socially conservative.
And also, that is not his actual ambition.
Right-Wing Conservatism Critique00:03:19
His actual ambition is not in defense of, say, social conservatism.
His ambition is in defense of Russian territorial ambition.
It's a category error, in other words, for many people on the right.
Many people on the right have made that same category error, for example, with Sharia law countries in the Islamic world.
It suggested that because those countries are quote unquote socially conservative, that somehow those countries have a commonality with, say, American conservatism, American Christian conservatism.
Can you just pause it right there?
I don't know who Ben Shapiro is talking about.
I have seen like some people on Twitter say stuff like that.
I cannot think of any influential right-wing person who's said that like, yeah, Sharia law, that's the way to go.
Those guys, this way, you know what I mean?
You have traditional relationships and you don't have LGBTQ plus stuff going on.
I've heard some right-wingers on Twitter say stuff like that.
And yes, I think it's pretty stupid.
Sure.
Yes.
North Korea doesn't have problems with fucking, I don't know, like degeneracy on the streets, but you know, they actually have problems.
That's a whole lot worse than that.
So that's not a good way to go.
We could just have our government stop subsidizing all of this insane stuff and it'll probably clean itself up.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Again, I guess I agree with Ben Shapiro on this one.
I just don't know who he's really responding to.
And the argument that Putin is because he cracks down on the gays, therefore he's like an ally of the conservatives.
I honestly, all I heard was Jon Stewart claim that Tucker Carlson believes this, even though he's never said it.
I don't know who else is actually making that argument.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know.
Show me the prominent right-winger who's making that argument.
Let's keep playing.
Conservatism, American Christian conservatism.
And the answer there is no, they really don't.
Their ambitions are not the same as your ambitions.
And what this really reveals is a schism in the United States broadly written and in the West broadly written Europe as well.
A schism about whether the West has any sense of internal solidity.
What are the values of the West?
Shipping Lanes and Money00:05:40
Because if Putin is able to split the West on the basis of perceived values or perceived anti-Westernism, and that says there are a lot of people in the West who really don't like the West very much on the one hand, and a lot of people in the West who believe that the greater threat to the United States might be their neighbors who disagree with them about social politics, as opposed to people like Vladimir Putin.
Not that Vladimir Putin is a direct threat to people in the United States, like right this instant, but he's a very large indirect threat to people in the United States because geopolitics actually matters.
When you cut off shipping routes, when you destroy the sources of international trade.
By the way, all right, let's just pause it there.
I think, by the way, this always, This is always what the Warhawks have to fall back on.
It's like, well, okay, sure, he's not a threat in any like conceivable way that you could think of, but geopolitics matters.
Shipping lanes.
I always yell that one out.
Shipping lanes.
Huh?
What do we got now?
Trade, right?
That's really important.
Shipping lanes.
Shipping lanes.
That's why.
War.
Because of the shipping lanes.
By the way, I can't tell you how many times I've heard this from the Warhawks.
So let me just say, these, as I just read to you, right?
However you feel, maybe you think Ukraine should be in NATO.
I don't know how you still think that after listening to this show, but probably my audience doesn't really think that.
But let's just say you thought that.
You could still acknowledge that like, I mean, we should have just agreed to not put him in.
Because if you care about Ukrainian defense, that turns out not agreeing to not put him in NATO was not the best thing for the defense of Ukraine.
And in fact, the country's been decimated as a result of your refusal to guarantee that you wouldn't admit them.
Okay.
So this war is a goddamn disaster.
If you care about Ukraine, you should be opposed to this war.
The fact that peace negotiations were thwarted intentionally to continue the war, the fact that we've funded it so they can continue it so more Ukrainians can die has been an utter disaster.
Obviously, what's going on in Gaza right now is just a humanitarian catastrophe.
Every damn day, I see another thing of some baby dying, being suffocated to death under rubble.
It's just horrible.
None of these Warhawks can defend the war in Iraq.
John McCain, John McCain, admitted in his memoir that the war in Iraq was a mistake.
The war in Afghanistan was a 20-year catastrophe that just saw the Taliban have more control and cooler weapons than they had when we launched the regime change war against them.
The war in Syria led to 500,000 people dying and failed to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.
It also led directly to the rise of ISIS.
Libya, just a nightmare.
The country is still in shambles after that.
Yemen was the worst humanitarian crisis in the world for seven straight years.
And oh, by the way, now we've pissed the Houthis off so much that they're picking a fight with our shipping lanes.
Okay.
But see, none of these guys can defend any of these wars when they actually like take on what's going on here.
I mean, they could do what Ben Shapiro is doing here and just bullshit about what happened in this war in Ukraine, but they can't actually take on the issues and defend them.
They can't defend any of these wars, but then they'll go, geopolitics, shipping lanes.
As if the conversation is really about whether we should maintain shipping lanes or not.
Or somehow it follows that if we should maintain shipping lanes, then we also have to go on mass murder campaigns and drop bombs on people and fund every war around the country.
Like there's any connection between the two.
But I'll just leave it with this.
And then we'll wrap up.
Just think, listen, maybe I can't convince everybody who's listening on anarcho-capitalism or a pure stateless libertarian society.
You should be convinced.
They're starting to freeze pretty bad.
God damn it.
How about now?
It seems to smooth out.
Okay.
Maybe I can't sell you on full libertarian anarcho-capitalism or something like that.
But just think about this, okay?
Let's say we drastically reduced the size and scope of governments.
Think about how much more profit there is in business now without all of the taxes and regulations, right?
Businessmen are making a lot more money now.
And think about how much money is on the line having international shipping lanes open.
I think the incentives would probably take care of this.
I think these business interests would be, they'd be pretty incentivized to make sure they paid for some security, made sure they kept some shipping lanes open.
It is such a bullshit, non-existent problem that market forces would solve very quickly.
And think about the enormous amount of monetary burden that taxes and regulations put on business.
If you just removed that, there'd be plenty of money to even just buy people off to give you access to their shipping lanes.
This is all just a nonsense argument.
Sure, I can't defend any of the wars, but shipping lanes?
Geopolitics matters.
Yeah, geopolitics matters.
Nobody's saying it doesn't.
Like it really matters that the West refused to guarantee NATO wouldn't be admitted, Ukraine wouldn't be admitted to NATO.
It really matters, particularly to Ukrainians.
All right, that's our episode for today.
West Refusal Matters00:00:31
Come see us on the road.
Robbie, this weekend, where'd you say you were again?
Kansas City in Omaha, Nebraska, along with Chris Fega.
Gonna be a good time.
Hell yeah.
Go see my guys out there, RobbyTheFire.com for those tickets.
And of course, me and Robbie will be in Chicago.
What was the other one?
The Key West.
Key West.
Key West.
And we're going all around.
Also, we got the theater show in Portland still going strong, and that's a big theater.