So this is from a few days ago, 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, and I appreciate that. He did an episode kind of laying out his foreign policy positions and 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 neo-conservative 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 neo-con, but he is a neo-con any time 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 the week where he has the ability to build a set of people. Okay, so I don't know if you saw this thing about this Navalny 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, already you have this scenario where Ben Shapiro doesn't actually know what he's talking about. 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 of 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 is the time to do this assassination. Like it's possible that he's just the dumbest person on the planet, or is 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, this is not an endorsement of Putin sending him to a work 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? Is that a reason for more or less warfare? It's just the fact that a dictator took out a political enemy. They're trying to turn Donald Trump into a political predator's here. They're not having a lot of success with it. What does it mean to change 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. Anyway, it's just kind of childish and silly. I'm looking for the Clinton's friends. The Clintons just have a lot of coincidences. Alright guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, brand-new sponsor who were thrilled to have on board, and that is my Patriot supply. 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Start preparing at PrepareWithSmith.com. 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 that because it would put- 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 push 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 on it. Russia directly on the borders of a wide variety of NATO countries, including Hungary and Poland. Okay, 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 like you can't even like, how can 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? Wait, what? Yeah, okay. Well, like NATO is the one who's 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 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. And he's going to assume that that's plausible, that that's what happened. And anyway, it's 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, 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 said over the years and what's reasonable and what's not reasonable in what he 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. But certainly threatened 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. 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 then just one more point. With the, as far as the stuff goes, like kind of a similar point that I was making to the, the, the coup in 2014 in Ukraine, but you know, think about this argument that Ben Shapiro's making that we couldn't have Russia intervening in Ukraine. We couldn't allow that because, because like they make wheat, you know, so like we couldn't allow the 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. You could like picture a map in your head, but Ukraine is a lot closer to Russia. And also like, if we're going to sit here in the United States of Americans and say we can't have him intervening in Ukraine, isn't it totally reasonable then? And 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. Just like the most basic point, but all right, let's keep on. 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 I have Joe Biden who came into office and was immediately pretty soft on Russia in terms of sort of geopolitical, strategically, as George W. Bush once put it. Now that that take has been false. Sure. I've 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. Yeah. Well, he started that conversation with Bush. That's eight years. Then you got Obama for another eight. So that's 16. Yeah. But the problem is a Trump that's four. 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 gay talent with Russia and being friends with them. And Joe Biden, I don't even know what he means by this. Wasn't it 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 it all what any of them did, then you'll get 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. With 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 when 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. He's talking 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 up on this for a long time. Barack Obama attempted to overthrow in allied government of his in Syria and he successfully backed the overthrow of the government in Ukraine. These are kind of big deals. They didn't even mention an arm in the jihadist in Chechnya, but whatever. So Donald Trump got us 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 that. She goes, we're in play. We got to glue this thing. She says, there'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 ad a boy? 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 barista, my 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. They're 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 I 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 it there's much more to this than Ben Shapiro is, is, you know, 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. 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, it 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 at nauseam, but the 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 and NATO. And a couple months after that at the Bucharest summit, they announced that they were putting Georgia and Ukraine and NATO. Okay. And this is the very beginning of real trouble in that relationship. And essentially, though, I mean, we can get into more of this later, but this is what the fights all been over and people who pretend it's not are diluting themselves. It's just it's the evidence is overwhelming. And we'll probably get into more of this as we keep playing. But yeah, let's go back to Benny boy. It's 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. And if you want to go back even further, this has been true. Okay, it's 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 2000 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 um 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 there, therefore Vladimir 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, I guess then that must be England's motivation to, 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. 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, they 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. These were not like verified by the EU, not that the EU is 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. 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 and 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. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, Oxygen Health Systems. Now you can jumpstart your health and wellness with a hyperbaric oxygen. Benefits include a boost in energy levels, decreased inflammation, anti aging benefits, improve your memory and your overall brain function and it increases melatonin for better sleep. Owning a home hyperbaric chamber from oxygen health systems is now within your reach and oxygen health systems chambers integrate progressively advanced technology with amazing new features. Fits comfortably in your home. The Lux Air hyperbaric chambers from oxygen health systems is unique in the industry and considered the Tesla of portable hyperbaric chambers. Take advantage of the $500 savings on Lux Air hyperbaric chamber today at oxygen health systems.com and make sure to use the promo code problem at checkout one more time. That's oxygen health systems.com promo code problem at checkout. 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 in 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 if a rising and expanding. Yeah, like if if Trump compares himself to Andrew Jackson, that's not proof that he's going to scalp an Indian. You know what I mean? This is 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. Like, how is that not reasonable? All right, let's keep playing. And when you watch the interview that he did with Tucker Carlson, where the first 35 minutes is dedicated to his idea of Russian claims to Ukraine, 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 actually didn't actually stoned 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 blow back 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 Miraschimer, the foreign policy scholar who I think is wrong about a great many things. John Miraschimer 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 that on Basir region. Okay, so hold on, let's just pause for a second. And first off, John Miraschimer is 100% right about all of this. And John Miraschimer has forgotten more about Russian history in 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 it was the NATO announced that both Ukraine and Georgia would be would be come members of 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 McCordle, a geez, what am I? Angela McCordle. It was Merkel in Germany who like opposed it. And this is why they weren't actually brought in there. They just they settled on this compromise of world 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 Mirasheimer has here. This is like, look, so anyway, they announced Georgia and Ukraine were coming in to NATO. And then Georgia got 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, we'll get it. 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. That theory again, is and did anything else happen in 2014? Oh, Vladimir Putin. See, so the story is that there was a bloody street push that overthrew the democratically elected government in in the democratic, critically 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 push 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 we're like, screw this, this government's not legitimate. And then a civil, a civil war broke out and Vladimir Putin essentially sent special ops in like this, this story, this is what happened. Then 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 it, you know, like the people out there who try to argue that like, no, it wasn't a US 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 US 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 US involvement in that. Like, okay, come on, let's 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's in a non Chomsky. We'll get some more on this. And then you can kind of go through this from our 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's in. And so this is the lefties. And now some of these right wing people are actually believing the lefties. Do you know who coined the term blowback? The CIA are 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 note 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 in say it's not a left wing idea. It's 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 tell 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 it, 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 interest, that they're expanding that all the way up at 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. Here, 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, 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 Meersheimer 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. Now, how's this? Let's hear from NATO's secretary general, Jen's Stoltenberg, I might be mispronouncing that name. But I don't know if you remember this rub, 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 toward to prevent Nathan continuing this is the head of NATO speaking, was not the lefties or John Meersheimer. He went toward to prevent NATO more NATO close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite. So you can see Stoltenberg here is he's, 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 Ahov Vladimir Putin 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 all for 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 oh, he just wanted us to promise that his biggest neighbor would not be an 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 don't 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 the 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 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 US do if Mexico joined a military alliance with Russia or China? What do you think the US 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 US to do that. Okay. Fine. Fair enough. Maybe Ukraine ought to have the right to join whatever military alliance they 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, you know, 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 wars, 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 want 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 a 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 today. They never went, Oh, well, here's the thing. As 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 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. That Russia actively is is a highly religious country that is 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've 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. 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, maybe on the right have made that same category error, for example, with sharia law countries in the Islamic world. It's suggested that because those countries are quote unquote socially conservative, that somehow those countries have a commonality with say American conservatism, American Christian conservatism. All right, you can just pause it right there. So 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 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 a 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, but that's not a good way to go. We could just have our government stop subsidizing all of this insane stuff and they'll probably clean itself up. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is small batch cigars. Many years ago buying cigars online wasn't as easy as they've made it with small batch cigars. Well, you could find a great selection. You never knew how the cigars were treated before they arrived on your doorstep. 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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 gaze. Therefore, he's like an ally of the conservatives. I honestly, I all I heard was John 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 who's showing me the prominent right way or who's making that argument. Let's keep playing. Servitism, 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 writ and in the West broadly writ Europe as well. A schism about whether the West has any sense of internal solidity. What are the values of the West? 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 the 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. And he cut off shipping routes when you destroy the sources of international friends. By the way, let's just pause it there. And I think by the way, this always this is always what the war hawks 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. 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 war hawks. So let me just say these, as I just read to you, right, however you feel, maybe you think Ukraine should be a 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 them in because if you care about Ukrainian defense, that turns out not agreeing to not put them 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 war hawks 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 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 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 a anarchal capitalism or a pure stateless libertarian society. You should be convinced that 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, make 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 Ukraine wouldn't be admitted to NATO. It really matters, particularly to Ukrainians. All right, that's
