Wait, Why is Russia Our Enemy? (Ft. David Sacks)

Hey everybody, a thoughtful and deep conversation with David Sacks about Ukraine.

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Go to noblegoldinvestments.com. One of our favorite guests joins us for this hour is David Sacks, who is from the All In podcast. I love listening to the All In podcast.

It's super analytical and really fair. David, welcome back to the program. Good to see you, Charlie. David, you remain one of the most important and contrarian heterodox voices on the Ukraine consensus.

This was an incredibly frustrating weekend. The first part I want to unpack with you is what form of government do we really have here? The majority of Americans are at least skeptical with the amount of money that we're sending to Ukraine. They certainly want the homeland prioritized above foreign wars. And totally a majority of Republicans, like 70 to 80 percent of Republicans, yet we get opposite action.

Why do you think that is? Well, because we're not a democracy. We're an oligarchy. I mean, the country is run by a collection of very powerful interest groups. And the donors of the Republican Party, the neocons and the military industrial complex all support this war.

And they're completely bought into the narratives underlying it. So I don't think that's why you have this large majority of Congress supporting these endless appropriations, even though the majority of the country does not. Were we a democracy any time in your lifetime or representative government? Well, I think, you know, I think our government contains elements of democracy. It also contains elements of oligarchy. And I mean, this was somewhat by design of the framers.

But so I don't want to say it's like not democratic at all. But the reality is, is that the government's actions are strongly guided by interest groups and donors have a massive outside say in what happens. And I don't really understand why the donors are so obsessed with this Ukraine project. I don't even know that it's necessarily that good for them, but I think they're completely bought into this ideology that undergirds it.

No, that's exactly right. So, David, we recently had a fundraiser for Turning Point. We raised a lot of money and we have very strong opinions that are not neoconservative ones. People still support us for obvious other reasons, other value alignment.

But the issue of foreign aid and Ukraine came up and it's not there wasn't a single defense contractor in the room. There wasn't somebody that was going to make money off of the war effort, but their ideological adherence. And it goes something like this, which is 70 or 80 year old wealthy business person believes firmly in the rules based international order that was established in post World War Two and that we must be a bastion of freedom and democracy abroad. And that if America is not the superpower doling out cash to fight against authoritarianism, then all the gains of their lifetime will be lost. And this is kind of a boomer proxy war. And I don't mean that pejoratively, but if you look at who is primarily the most enthusiastic for what's happening in Ukraine, Russia, demographically, it's people over the age of 65 because they still look at Russia as the Soviet Union, as the evil empire that Reagan warned against.

And there is some fear that if Ukraine collapses, that the entire political project of their life will basically be for naught. Does that make sense? Do you see something similar? Yes. I mean, I think globalist is kind of a nice word for imperialist. I think that somehow this globalist project is basically a it views America as a globe spanning empire.

Yes, of course. And I think and I think I think that's basically I think what happened is that FDR gave us a new form of government in the 1930s 1940s. America basically took over the world and became a globe spanning empire. We don't administer our different countries directly. We don't have unlike the Roman Empire, the British Empire, we don't have governors who who kind of rule foreign peoples. We simply regime change those rulers and we don't like them. And, but in any event, since World War Two, America has basically been in charge of the world minus the Soviet bloc. And then of course, once that fell in 1991, you had this unipolar world order and this instinct to kind of take over the world went into hyperdrive, you had all the forever wars of the Middle East.

And obviously, it's all blown up in our faces. But yet this this instinct and this imperial desire to impose American style rule over the whole world, I think remains this very compelling desire and motive for a certain class of people. And it's really fundamental to to their view of America. I mean, they fundamentally view America as an empire. I mean, again, they don't use that language, but they don't see it as a traditional republic anymore. They see it as more of this woke empire. Yeah, it's the irony is that the more that you push abroad, the more it actually undermines the dollar and destroys U.S. economic hegemony.

And so you're actually destroying if you want us to be an empire, you're actually destroying any ability for us to be strong at all. I mean, we canceled Russia in response. Saudi Arabia joined BRICS, so on and so forth. And we've seen this cascade of effects because of our attachment for Ukrainian democracy.

Yeah, I mean, look, every part of the story is basically either a hoax or a narrative mirage. I mean, Ukraine isn't really a democracy in the way that we portray it. I mean, they've banned opposition political parties. They've banned critical media. You have to get a license from the government if you want to be a reporter. Gonzalo O'Leary was in prison for basically thought crimes for posting YouTube videos that were critical of the government.

And he was essentially killed in prison or at least neglected to the point where he died in prison. Religious figures who are part of the Russian Orthodox religion have been systematically repressed by the Zelensky government. They've canceled elections. So this whole idea that we're standing up for democracy, it's not really, again, a democracy in the way that we would expect.

It's more of an American client government. Then you've got this whole narrative around Russia's motivations. I mean, we can go into this, but I just fundamentally don't believe in the whole Hitler narrative that Putin is really the second coming of Adolf Hitler. If we don't stop him in Ukraine, he's going to take over all of Europe. That's, you know, I think it's insane.

Where does this come from? I mean, it's almost as if World War Two is the only form of history that can apply to today. It's so overused. And I don't I don't think it's it should never be used, but it's either everything is Auschwitz. Everyone is Hitler.

And everyone I don't like is a Nazi. Well, yeah, I think this is the neocon frame on everything is that the year is always 1938 and the enemy is always Hitler and any use of diplomacy is always appeasement. And again, I think it's because this American empire was birthed in World War Two. And so it's almost like we're stuck in that founding moment of the American empire. So, you know, yeah, I think that that whole thing is a narrative mirage. And then, of course, the whole thing is blowing up in our faces. I mean, you mentioned BRICS and the let's not say the decline, but the risk to the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency. I mean, that is clearly we are clearly catalyzing global opposition to the U.S. through this war and through our other actions, our other foreign policy. And, of course, it's bleeding our our treasury. I mean, you have to see this as of a piece with all the forever wars that we've been involved in.

So, of course, it's backfiring horribly, but yet we're still somehow stuck on this this project. I think, by the way, I think I think the whole this whole idea was really epitomized by I think it was a Democratic congressman who said that Ukraine is our border. Do you have that? No, we have Jerry Connolly. We'll play that where Jerry Connolly starts screaming like a lunatic saying that Ukraine is our board.

I must I must have missed the 51st and 52nd senator from Ukraine. I just but they do look at. So please finish your thought, David. Well, well, the thought is just they don't see any national border to be defended. I mean, these very same people are doing nothing to defend the U.S. border, but yet they see Ukraine as literally a part of our border. And the only explanation for this is, again, they only see an imperial border to be expanded, not a national border to be defended. When you're within the sort of globalist, you know, sort of territory, they don't see any interior borders to that.

There are no national borders. It's just part of the empire. And so, again, the only border they see to be to to be defended is this sort of the edges of the empire. I want to play this. It's the aforementioned clip.

Play cut 14, please. Some say, well, we have to deal with our border first. The Ukrainian Russian border is our border.

It's the border between depraved autocracy and freedom loving people seeking our democratic way of life. Do we have a stake in that outcome? Yes. Undeniably, yes. Will we rise to the occasion? Will we stand shoulder to shoulder with our Ukrainian brothers and sisters?

Your reaction? Well, Ukraine has become the central obsession of our ruling elites. It's almost bizarre. I mean, if you go back to, I don't know, 2020 or 2021, was anyone focused at all on Ukraine? Most people, most Americans couldn't find it on a map.

I still don't think they can. And yet it has become the central obsession. It is more important defending Ukraine's border is actually more important than defending the U.S. southern border. They literally don't see a U.S. southern border. They can only see the border of, again, of this imperial project that we're on.

I mean, you've spent a fair amount of time among the elites, David. How do you get to this viewpoint? I mean, our audience, it's so foreign to the working men and women of this country, like teachers, parents, police officers, plumbers, welders, veterans. How does one come to such an outrageous view? Well, I think the narrative or the frame they've convinced themselves about is that the U.S. is bound up in this war of democracy versus autocracy and that we're in this Manichaean struggle for survival between the free world and, again, these autocracies. And it's kind of like a warmed over rehash of Cold War thinking.

But it's fundamentally false. I mean, authoritarianism is undeniably an unattractive feature of governments, but it's a spectrum condition. I mean, different governments have different amounts of authoritarianism and it's unattractive when it occurs in places like Brazil or in the Middle East. But plenty of our allies are authoritarian.

And in fact, the Biden administration is making the United States more authoritarian. So this is an unattractive feature of government, but it's not something that requires us to be in a state of war against some of these countries. And it's very dangerous for us to be in a proxy war with Russia. Even if you don't like Russia, there's simply no reason for us to be at war with them, even via proxy. They've got thousands of nuclear weapons.

It's a very powerful country. And fundamentally, our realist foreign policy interests would dictate in favor of making peace with Russia in order to focus on China, to essentially do a mirror image of what Kissinger and Nixon did with China when we basically sought a reconciliation with China in order to isolate the Soviet Union. You know, our foreign policy interest is to do something similar here in reverse. So, you know, in a whole bunch of different ways, this is just not in our in our interest. It's really lazy and sloppy, shallow thinking from people who are paranoid or drunk on power or who just want to feel important or heroic. That is that is really the summary.

And David, in the next segment. Yeah, please. Well, yeah, I think there's one other aspect to it as well, which is the whole Russiagate hoax that I think our domestic politics spilled into our foreign policy there. Well, and understand that if it was like Belgian gate, no one would have really cared.

The fact that Trump colluded with Russia, they built this up as the adversary of the West. But the question is, is it really? Are you ready to lose weight but not sure where to start? I understand.

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Check it out, MyPhDWeightLoss.com. Subscribe to the All In Podcast. But David, if you were to just ask the elites, who do you hate more, Russia or China? I mean, it's not even close. They'll say Russia. Russia is a smaller population. We should probably be at the very least neutral, if not soft allies with Russia.

We were previously in World War II. Is there something about Russia, their closed borders, their preference towards nationalism over globalism, that makes the U.S. elites hate them so much or at least the, let's say, Western intelligentsia? What is it about Russia that drives them so silly? Well, I think fundamentally they blame Putin for Hillary Clinton's loss in the 2016 election. And you remember it started with the Steele dossier, that whole phony piece of opposition research that was commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign from a British spy. They invented out of whole cloth this narrative, this hoax, that somehow Donald Trump was an agent of the Kremlin. And then when he won and they needed an excuse for their incompetent campaign, they claimed that somehow Russia had interfered in our elections in order to bring about that result.

And ever since then, they have kept hanging new ornaments off of this Christmas tree of a hoax, where you had the Alpha Bank hoax, you had the Hamilton 68 dashboard hoax, where literally thousands and thousands of mainstream media stories were created claiming that the Russians were interfering in our politics, and it was all completely made up. But the American people have now been conditioned to believe that Russia has been involved in interfering and meddling in our politics. And I think that's created an intense Russophobia, and it's created a view that somehow Russia is a direct threat to our democracy. I think the truth of it is that Russia has not been involved in American politics. I don't think they care about our internal affairs, and I don't think they've been meddling in them. If you watched Tucker's interview with Putin, Putin seems genuinely befuddled by American politics.

It seems like he has a hard time figuring us out. In any event, I just don't think that the Russians care about the internal workings of American politics. There is no proof to any of this, but it has created this intense Russophobia. And so I think somehow that our domestic politics have now spilled over into our foreign policy in making Russia enemy number one. But I think that, as you say, if we were to look at this in realist terms, Russia would not be enemy number one. They are not the pure competitor to the United States. China is. They cannot threaten U.S. interests in a way that China can. Again, they've got half our population. They've got an economy that's a fraction of our size.

Meanwhile, China has several times our population, and their economy is roughly the same size as the U.S. In purchasing power parity terms, they are bigger and they can certainly produce more weapons than the U.S. can. So again, Russia is just not the threat they've puffed it up to be. Moreover, we simply have no territorial disputes with Russia.

We have no vital interests at odds with Russia. It just didn't need to be this highly conflictual relationship, but it was made into that by our relentless drive to expand NATO right up to Russia's border, which is what turned a country that wanted to be part of the West. Again, when Putin came to power in 2000, he was very interested in having good relations with the West, and we systematically turned that country, not just Putin, but the entire Russian elite against us with NATO expansion, with color revolutions in their backyard, by canceling nuclear arms control treaties, by putting nukes directly on their doorstep. We did a whole series of things to antagonize the Russians and turn what could have been an ally, like you said, maybe a soft ally into an enemy. So this was very much a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, and people forget Kamala Harris went to the Munich Security Conference right before Putin invaded Ukraine and just read a script given to her by the intel agencies essentially saying we now want to have Ukraine in NATO.

And that was the straw that broke the camel's back. And Putin was like, yeah, OK, like you guys are not getting off this, you know, ever eastward expanding NATO agreement. And David, I want to remind our audience, there was an agreement that NATO would not expand eastward, that NATO was going to stay in its current composition. And we broke that pact.

And we were the ones in the West that lied repeatedly. We put weapons on their borders, you say, and then you have that lunatic Lindsey Graham, another clip we should get a couple of years ago with Amy Klobuchar talking to a bunch of Ukrainian soldiers. This is the year of offense. Oh, yeah, with John McCain. We're going to play offense against the Kremlin.

This is the year that we take them out. I want you to just imagine, again, this is said often, but it needs to be repeated and repeated and repeated. Imagine a bunch of Russian senators went to Mexico City and armed the cartel. Well, no, actually, we wouldn't do anything about it. Never mind. David, can you comment on that element that we have? I've isolated here how we made a series of statements that we contradicted and misled Russia that we're not blameless in this equation.

No, I mean, definitely not. So in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union began to fall apart, Gorbachev agreed to the reunification of East and West Germany. And the promise made to him was that we would not expand NATO eastward. And of course, we violated that on many occasions, we brought NATO right up to their border. And we keep saying that, well, NATO is purely a defensive organization. But from the Russian point of view, it's offensive, and it's potentially hostile, and it's a threat to their security. NATO has engaged in offensive operations.

We bombed Serbia, we killed, I should say NATO engaged in operation against Libya and effectively killed Qaddafi. So from the Russian point of view, NATO is a hostile military organization, and in violation of our promises to Gorbachev, we brought it right up to their border. Again, this is just a mirror image of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The United States was willing to risk nuclear war in 1962 to prevent the Soviet Union from putting nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba, because we saw that as a threat to our security. The American government does not tolerate foreign troops, weapons or bases in our hemisphere. It's called the Monroe Doctrine.

What the Russians have sought to assert is something similar, is that they do not want enemy bases directly on their border. And the tragedy of this whole Ukraine war is that it could have been avoided entirely if Ukraine simply agreed to be neutral. Ukraine did not have to give up its sovereignty, Ukraine did not have to give up territory, did not have to be ruled by Russia. It simply had to agree to be a neutral buffer state between the West and Russia, and that simply was not good enough for the West, which continually tried to expand NATO into Ukraine. Yeah, and it didn't have to be this way. In addition, we blew up a potential peace deal, I think it was Istanbul, where Boris Johnson and Tony Blinken go and obliterate that entire peace deal, because they wanted war.

I asked this question of an elected leader who called me the other day asking for an endorsement, and obviously he didn't get one, but David, you know the answer. How many Ukrainians have died in this war? I think that the total number of Ukrainian couches is at least half a million.

That would be killed and seriously wounded. It's hard to get the exact number because the Ukrainian government doesn't publish it, and that tells you something. But I've seen credible estimates that the Ukrainians have lost about somewhere between 20 and 30,000 troops per month, and this has gone on for slightly over 24 months now. So you add all that together and it's probably in the five to six hundred thousand range. And that is casualties plus deaths. Seriously wounded plus KIA.

It's hard to know exactly again what the split is. There are some people who think there have been over 500,000 KIA, but I'm just not sure about that. Again, I think the number of casualties is about 20 to 30,000 per month, is what Ukraine is suffering. And for what? What do they have to show for that? What do they have to demonstrate it? What they have to demonstrate is territorial loss. They're losing territory. With each passing day, the Russians are taking back more territory. For the first couple of years of this conflict, we were told that the purpose of us arming Ukraine was to evict Russia from their territory.

Well, last summer, we had this counter-offensive that we had appropriated the first 113 billion dollars towards, and it was a total failure. The Ukrainians didn't even make it to the first Serb econ line. They were destroyed in this gray zone. They were impaled on Russian defenses. They were destroyed by Russian artillery. And they lost all of those weapons, the tanks and the artillery that we had given to them in that futile counter-offensive. And by the way, this was obvious within the first two weeks of the counter-offensive.

We saw all of those leopards and all of those other challengers smoking in ruins and minefields. I mean, the Ukrainians did not have an answer even to the Russian minefields, and yet this summer counter-offensive went on for about four months. It was a total debacle, but this is something that the West encouraged Ukraine to undertake. And since then, since the defeat of the Ukrainians in that counter-offensive, the Russians have now been on offense. They've done it in kind of a slow-grinding, classically Russian way, but they are now taking a territory. So David, I was watching MSNBC very early this morning, and David Ignatius, who basically is the press secretary for the Central Intelligence Agency for the Washington Post, he said something really chilling, that the Ukrainian effort is now to go after Crimea. I don't know if you caught this or not, but this goes to show that the West, if they mean this, this could be a trillion or two or three trillion dollar effort to go nowhere.

Play Cut 11. Their strategy is to get powerful new U.S. weapons, including these ATACMS, long-range missiles, that can put Crimea, Russian-occupied Crimea, at risk. Crimea is probably what's most important for them. If the Ukrainians using these weapons through the remainder of this year could really put Crimea at risk, you might have a situation where going in the next year the Russians say, it's time to negotiate some satisfactory end of this war to get what we want. The great thing about this aid package, the miraculous thing that Speaker Johnson and the Congress have done, is to give Ukraine another year of life in this fight, maybe to get to the point where they can bargain from some strike next year.

David. Oh, boy. Well, you see there the obsession with Crimea. I mean, this goes way back to 2014. The Russians took Crimea in response to the Maidan coup that we engineered. We helped topple the democratically elected government of the president of Ukraine, and in response to that, the Russians took Crimea in a bloodless coup.

Now, why did they do that? Because the Russians have a very important naval base at Sevastopol within Crimea. It's the home of the Black Sea Fleet. It's been there since 1784 when Catherine the Great established it, and 80 percent of the population of Crimea are ethnic Russians who would rather be part of Russia than the ultra-nationalist Ukrainian government. And this has been shown over and over again by polling, and yet the kind of ultra-nationalists, and that's a nice word for them, Ukrainians, have had this obsessive desire to get Crimea back.

And you saw this in the summer counteroffensive. The whole idea was to punch through those Russian lines and to sever the land bridge from Donbass to Crimea, and somehow lay siege to Crimea and force the Russians to sue for peace. So this is not a new idea, this whole idea that somehow you're going to put Crimea at risk, and that's going to force the Russians to their knees. It's a total pipe dream.

It's a total fantasy. It's not going to happen. Now, what might happen, though, is as a result of the U.S. giving Ukraine attack-ums, is they might destroy that Kerch Bridge. They might destroy the bridge between Crimea and the Russian mainland.

But still, that will not do anything to change the outcome of this war. I mean, the Russians aren't even using the Kerch Bridge anymore to supply their military. That's happening over land routes now. They have this continuous land bridge from sort of the main Russian territory through the Donbass, through Zaporizhia. They now control all of that territory, so they don't need the Kerch Bridge.

So in any event, this is simply not going to work as a military strategy, but it does reveal this central obsession with Crimea that the Ukrainian nationalists and their sponsors of the West have had now for a decade. Herzog Foundation is part of an education revolution. For those of you worried about the best educational paths for your kids and grandkids, I'm pleased to announce our new partnership with the folks at the Herzog Foundation. They are the trusted source for American K-12 education, with a remarkable suite of different options.

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Portions of the Charlie Kirk show are brought to you in part by the Stanley M. Herzog Foundation. So David, you have a tweet out here on Acts where you say that the Russian military is larger and more powerful than even at the beginning of the war. Tell our audience about that.

Yeah, absolutely. And I was quoting testimony from our general who is in charge of our European command, so this is an official assessment of the U.S. military. It's not just my opinion on the matter. And remember when, I don't know, six months ago they were saying that the Russians had lost 90 percent of their army. Now they're saying it's 115 percent. It's bigger than it was. So they've discarded the old narrative that we are degrading their military, and that was what was in it for us in terms of funding the Ukrainians. Now they've pivoted on a dime and said that we have to support the Ukrainians because the Russian military is bigger.

So there's just no stability to the narratives they tell. But yes, the Russian military is bigger. This is the classic Russian way of war is they start off slow, they start off making mistakes, and then they build up inevitably. And this is how the Russians win wars.

And they have been building up. Young Russians have been volunteering for the military at a rate of 10,000 a week. These are not conscripts. These are not people who are forced at gunpoint into service, like we've seen so many videos of young Ukrainians being rounded up and thrown in the back of vans. These are patriotic Russians who are volunteering for their armed services, and they're being put through training.

They're not being sent immediately to the front lines. They're being put through six months or whatever of training, and the Russian military is getting bigger. In a similar way, the Russians have this huge industrial base that they inherited from the Soviet Union that's capable of producing massive amounts of weapons.

And over the last couple of years, they've been ramping that up, and they're now producing more of everything. More artillery shells, more artillery tubes, more tanks, more drones, more of everything. And so this is, again, the Russian way of war is that they may be slow at the outset, but they ramp up into this huge military juggernaut. And that is what Ukraine is now facing. And meanwhile, it's the West that has depleted its arsenals and is largely out of weapons. We've run out of artillery shells.

We've run out of artillery tubes. We don't produce as many drones or tanks or planes or air defense missiles as the Russians do. And as a result, we can't help the Ukrainians win this war.

We can appropriate this money, but we can't give the Ukrainians weapons we don't have. So I think the Ukrainians are in dire straits. And David, if they would have accepted the peace deal that was at least floated early, less people would have died and there probably would have been more territorial protections for Ukraine than how this will end. I guess I'm asking you to predict, you know, a kinetic war theater.

How is this going to end? Well, just to underscore your point there, there was that peace deal available at Istanbul in the first month of the war, and it didn't require Ukraine to give up any territory. They simply had to agree to be neutral, to not join NATO, and they had to agree to honor the Minsk accords with respect to the Donbass to give the ethnic Russians there some protection because they were being attacked by these Ukrainian ultra nationalists. These were entirely reasonable compromises that we could have made, the Ukrainians could have made. I don't believe it was in American interest to prevent that deal from happening, and yet that's what the administration did because they wanted this proxy war. They thought that they could weaken Putin and challenge Putin. Again, in the famous words of Boris Johnson, we want to challenge Putin, not make a deal with him. And so hence this war continued, and it's continued in a disastrous way. In terms of where I think it's going, the Ukrainians are going to lose.

It's simply inevitable. We can't provide them with enough weapons to win this war. And even if they had the weapons, they no longer have the manpower to use them.

Remember that famous Time magazine story where they talked about how Zelensky had become delusional. The writer was quoting top Ukrainian officials saying that even if the West comes through with all the weapons, we no longer have the manpower to use them. You can see this in the conscription. You can see them rounding up Ukrainians off the streets at gun points to impress them into military service. You can see this in all the Ukrainians who have fled the country. Just a week ago, there was an article in the New York Times talking about how lots of Ukrainians had died swimming across a river trying to flee the country to get into Romania. So they have run out of Ukrainians who are willing to fight. I mean, all the Ukrainians who wanted to fight volunteered at the beginning of the war. So it's just not clear where the manpower is going to come from. And then finally, you got the fact that the Russians now have an ear of superiority.

On a weekly basis, they are conducting the equivalent of shock and awe. They are dropping these huge bombs on the Ukrainians and destroying their military positions and destroying their infrastructure. So this war is going very badly for the Ukrainians and this new 61 billion that's been appropriated. It may prolong the war slightly, but I don't think it's going to change the outcome at all.

Yeah, it's an ongoing tragedy. Here is Anthony Blinken, Cut 44. Ukraine will become a member of NATO. It's a great way to keep this war going. I'm sorry, Antony Blinken.

Play Cut 44. Ukraine, the determination of every country represented here at NATO remains rock solid. We will do everything that we can. Allies will do everything that they can to ensure that Ukraine has what it needs. Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership.

Bill, the bridge. David, you tweeted out about Zelensky just stealing money. By the way, I talked to well-informed Europeans. I have friends in Florence who claim that Zelensky has mansions all across Europe and a lot of oligarchs are buying up yachts and ports of entry. Is there truth to that, David? Are the Ukrainians fleecing the American taxpayer for their opulent lifestyle?

Well, I can't speak to the mansions, but I can give you two data points. Seymour Hersh, the famed reporter, reported based on his intelligence contacts that Bill Burns, the CIA director, had to make a trip to Kiev where he sat down with Zelensky and told him he's stealing too much and that his subordinates were unhappy because he wasn't sharing the spoils enough. So that's data point number one. And again, I'm just relying on Seymour Hersh for that. I don't have my own sources on that. The other data point was in that Time magazine story that I mentioned where a Ukrainian official told Simon Schuster, who's the reporter, who by the way had written a very positive piece about Zelensky a year earlier. He had named Zelensky Man of the Year. So this is not a reporter who was anti-Ukrainian in any way. He was predisposed to being very pro-Ukrainian in any event. What this Ukrainian official said is that people are stealing like there's no tomorrow. And he said this after turning off the tape recorder.

So it was this moment of confiding. I 100 percent believe that. Look, Ukraine has been known for corruption. It's the most corrupt.

It's the cottage industry of Ukraine. There's simply a ton of corruption there. It's this idea that we can flood this country with weapons and cash and not see a huge chunk of it stolen, especially when the Congress opposed Rand Paul's bill. Remember when Rand Paul had that bill to get the special inspector general cigar? You know, SOPCO is the top guy who did all that great work on how our money that was sent to Afghanistan got stolen. Rand Paul said, let's get cigar to go look at Ukraine because he's the best at this. And of course, that was rejected.

So there's a lot of reasons to believe that there's tremendous corruption going on. So, David, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Putin last year. Your reaction to that? Any thoughts you have?

Right. Well, they did that in conjunction with a speech that Kamala Harris gave where she declared that Putin was a war criminal and guilty of war crimes. I mean, look, they were fitting him for the Saddam Hussein jacket. They thought that they were going to implement a regime change operation in Moscow that basically they would crush the Russian economy and that either the people would rise up or the elites would turn against Putin, and then they would put him on trial at The Hague and then execute him. I mean, this is what they thought they were going to achieve at the beginning of the war. I mean, this is how delusional they are. And of course, one of the many problems with declaring in advance that Putin is guilty of war crimes and that in effect, you want to execute him is that he has every incentive to continue this war forever.

He's never going to give up. It's existential for the Russian regime. So why would they ever compromise? This is also what makes it so foolish for Blinken to declare that Ukraine will be joining NATO. I mean, that is what Russia is trying to prevent with its war. So if you insist that Ukraine will be joining NATO, then Russia will continue this war forever if they have to.

And all the while, the American people largely don't support this. I want to finish our conversation here, David, about the changing information consumption ecosystem, which actually gives me hope because this has been a tough conversation because this this whole topic just I find so infuriating. Which is how people are getting their information. Your podcast is doing very well. I want you to talk about the All In podcast.

Rumble is doing very well. David, talk about how people are getting their information, how that is more decentralized than ever, and long term that should eventually manifest in policy change. Well, you do pretty much have to go to independent sources in order to get the truth about this war. I mean, the mainstream media has created this total phony narrative around it. And the only way to really get the truth is to go to independent media shows like yours, shows like ours, to hear people like, you know, Professor John Mearsheimer, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the people who are really explaining the origins of this war.

If you do that, you get the truth about it. But if you don't, you're kind of in this narrative hoax, or narrative mirage, I should say. And by the way, the narrative fallacy of this war is epitomized by that Blinken clip you played, where he says that Ukraine will be joining NATO. Because, on the one hand, what the administration and what the whole mainstream media say, is that this war has absolutely nothing to do with NATO expansion. That is their claim. And then on the other hand, they claim that we won't stop until Ukraine joins NATO.

So which one is it? You know, if this war has nothing to do with NATO expansion, why won't you simply take NATO expansion off the table? That is what the Istanbul agreement required. That is what the Russian government did. The Russians are demanding. So, again, it's it's this totally self contradictory position they have. And if we would simply, if we simply would have agreed to take NATO expansion off the table, we could have awarded this war altogether. But of course, they won't take it off the table because, you know, NATO expansion is the tip of the Empire's the tip of the spear and they are they are obsessed with this idea of expanding NATO to the entire world. It is the GAE, the GAE, the Great American Empire. And how dare you just the way the acronym comes out.

I don't use the letters and they will they will not stop regardless of what lies they have to tell, regardless of what they have to have to put forward. David, thank you so much. I understand the podcast is doing very well, right? It's yeah, we the podcast comes out weekly. It's mostly a business podcast where we talk about current events, markets, technology, but we also cover politics and international current events. And we drop new episodes on Friday. And it's typically a top 15 podcast when we drop a new episode.

Yeah, I listen to it. It's excellent. David, thank you so much. Thank you for being generous with your time. And I believe this is going to wake up a lot of people and educate them and for them. But the people are with us.

That's the promising element here is that I just wish the leaders would listen to the people. Thanks so much, David. Thanks. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always. Freedom at Charlie Kirk dot com. Thanks so much for listening and God bless. Thank you so much.