September 17, 2024 • 26 mins
Robert discusses how the Republican Party came to see Ukraine as an enemy, and plays an argument he had with Rudy Giuliani at the 2024 RNC.
Sources:
- https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/07/29/war-in-ukraine-wide-partisan-differences-on-u-s-responsibility-and-support/
- https://archive.is/VUyw0
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/20/republicans-ukraine-aid-package-congress
- https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/republican-opposition-to-ukraine-is-reaching-tipping-point.html
- https://www.newsweek.com/trump-rnc-chair-whatley-says-ukraine-us-adversary-republicans-1887731
- https://news.gallup.com/poll/643601/americans-say-not-helping-ukraine-enough.aspx
- https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/05/11/russia-to-build-migrant-village-for-conservative-american-expats-a81101
- https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2014/02/10/russians-return-to-religion-but-not-to-church/
- https://archive.is/9UPuP#selection-2869.0-2869.506
- https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-weapons-audit-watchdog-us-congress-biden-9abecd14528b9551ff4ddb6786ad7fda
- https://www.businessinsider.com/no-sign-of-mass-arms-trafficking-from-ukraine-authorities-say-2022-10
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
A Zone Media, Robert Evans here it could happen here,
a podcast about things falling apart, And today I wanted
to take some time to talk about Ukraine, and particularly
to talk about the sort of cultural place that the
Ukrainian resistance against Russia expanded invasion by Russia has taken
(00:23):
in American politics and in American kind of political culture. Obviously,
I am recording this within a few hours of another
attempted assassination on former President Trump, this one by a
guy who, among a confusing milange of other things, claimed
to be a major advocate of Ukrainian sovereignty and that
that was a major reason why he was angry at
(00:45):
the Republicans and angry at former President Trump, and kind
of that at least failed assassination attempt is sort of
in line with a lot of derangement around Ukraine. And
you can find this on the left and the right
in the center. I've come to think that if you're
trying to evaluate sort of how credible someone is as
a geopolitical expert today, one of the best things you
(01:07):
can do is kind of look back to early February
twenty twenty two and see what sort of claims they
were making about what was going to happen, whether or
not Russia was actually going to go into Ukraine and
expand their invasion. And that's obviously, you know, a bigger
topic than I think we're going to get into today.
One of the things that I find really interesting when
I kind of analyze how particularly conservatives have turned on
(01:30):
the Ukrainian cause is how kind of incomprehensible that seems,
just based on the way in which I was raised
by the conservatives in my life to think about Russia
and to think about like Russian military aggression. You know,
I grew up largely in the post Cold War era,
but my parents were both like raised by Cold warriors.
(01:52):
They mostly grew up on military bases, and I still
grew up with an awful lot of the kind of
Cold War shrapnel and my sort of ideological training. You know,
the movie Read Dawn was a big part of my childhood.
You know, some of those early James Bond movies where
the Soviet Unions are still the bad guy. You know,
this was all major stuff for me. So it's been
(02:13):
particularly disorienting kind of watching Philo Russian attitudes infiltrate the
right and US move from this idea of like these
people are one way or the other kind of a
geopolitical opponent of the United States, towards these people are
almost existing in an idealized version of the society we
bring around. It's been a cause of some whiplash for
(02:36):
me and for I think a lot of people who
were raised in that environment and then kind of came
out of those ideological beliefs. And when we look at
the kind of turnaround on the right about this stuff,
one of the people who's been on the bleeding edge
of this has been Vice presidential candidate JD.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Vance.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
And in fact, Ukraine might mark the first place where
Vance really came in ahead of the rest of his
party on an issue they would all ultimately move in
behind him on back In early twenty twenty two, in
the immediate wake of Russia's expanded invasion, Vance told Steve
Bannon in one of his many ill advised podcast interviews, quote,
(03:14):
I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way
or the other now is This paragraph from an article
by Ed Kilgore and New York Magazine makes clear Vance
was swiftly followed by others. Quote then Congressman Madison Cawthorn
parrooted Russian propaganda by saying, the Ukrainian government is incredibly
corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies,
(03:36):
and his colleague Marjorie Taylor Green called the Ukrainians neo Nazis.
Fox News's Tucker Carlson was a constant font of bitter
hostility towards USAID for Ukraine. Now Cawthorne was and remains
now a stooge. But I think it really is kind
of drilling into the precise wording of his claim here,
the fact that he's so focused on wokeness within the
(03:58):
context of a conflict. But it seems much more serious
than kind of the standard American culture war bullshit. A
lot of why we're seeing this has to do with
the fallout over the Russiagate culture war that consumed the
Democrats during the first half of the Trump administration. This
led to the enemy of the enemy as my friends
sort of thinking among the right, and this was stoked
(04:20):
consciously by Russian propaganda efforts. After Trump left office, these
efforts were redoubled, especially after the war in Ukraine became
an existential issue for Putin's regime. A good example of
the more obvious sort of messaging is this Moscow Times
article from May of twenty twenty three, with the title
Russia to build migrant village for conservative American expats. Quote
(04:44):
Timor Beslangarov, a migration lawyer at Moscow's Vista Foreign Business Support,
claimed that around two hundred families wish to immigrate to
Russia for ideological reasons. The reason is propaganda of radical values.
Today they have seventy genders and who knows what will next.
Ria Novosti quoted Bessangorov as saying, echoing President Vladimir Putin's
(05:05):
frequently deployed grievances against Western countries, comparative gender freedom, and
here we see it again, the focus on hatred of
woke as a justification for solidarity with Russia. A sizable
plurality of Americans still support the US sending aid to Ukraine,
and the reality of Russia's invasion is hideous enough that
the bulk of modern Russian propaganda in this country today
(05:28):
seems to focus on the woke issue more than anything
directly relevant to the war. As I write this, one
of the top stories in the country is how a
Tennessee based media network, Tenet Media, hired a bunch of
American influencers like Tim Poole and Dave Rubin and paid
them north of one hundred grand of video to make
Russian propaganda. Now, Pool and Ruben and their fellows claim
(05:49):
to be shocked, shocked that a foreign government was involved
in all and deny acting as unregistered foreign agents or
breaking the law in any way. We'll see how those
claims look in few months. For now, I think it's
illustrative to turn towards a wired analysis of the content
of dozens of Tenant Media videos written by Tim Marshman
and Drove Merota. It shows us the kind of propaganda
(06:13):
that Russia found fruitful, inceeding to an American audience quote.
This analysis does not show that in these videos the
influencers were particularly fixated on the Ukraine War. The word
Ukraine appears in the transcript sixty seven times, about as
often as misinformation, Christianity, and Clinton. It does show the
influencers stressing highly divisive culture war topics in the videos,
(06:35):
which carried titles like trans widows are a thing, and
it's getting all caps out of hand and race is
biological but gender isn't question mark question mark question mark.
The word trans appears one hundred and fifty two times
and transgender ninety eight, So sixty seven times we see
Ukraine appear in these transcripts, as opposed to well over
(06:56):
two hundred times for trans and transgender together. Now, if
you want a snapshot of just how absurd and divorced
from reality the culture wars have gotten, the Russian government
funding a clandestine influence operation considered stoking fears about trans
people to have a higher rate of return than actually
propagandizing directly about the war in Ukraine. As absurd as
(07:18):
this sounds, these tactics have borne fruit, and I think
the reason why it is simple, by building a sense of
solidarity between bigoted American conservatives and what they see as
a similarly conservative Russia. Now, obviously, the reality of the
situation is that Russia is not exactly the country these
people think it is. While it is true that the
(07:38):
number of Russian adults who consider themselves at least somewhat
religious skyrocketed after the fall of the uss Are from
eleven percent or so to over fifty percent today, much
of that is likely just explained by the change away
from an expressly atheistic government. Even today, Pew Research notes quote,
for most Russians, the return to religion did not correspond
(08:00):
with a return to church. Across all three waves of
ISSP data, no more than about one in ten Russians
said they attend religious services at least once a month.
The share of regular attenders monthly or more often was
two percent in nineteen ninety one, nine percent in nineteen
ninety eight, and seven percent in two thousand and eight.
For reference, about thirty two percent of Americans currently attend church, synagogue, mosque,
(08:24):
et cetera on a weekly basis. Now, this is down
significantly from forty nine percent in nineteen fifty eight and
does represent a low for church attendance in US history.
But you can see we still beat the Russians in
at least active religiosity by a factor of like five. Now,
one of the modern bugbears of the right wing in
the US is no fault divorce, which often gets wrapped
(08:47):
up in conversations about wokeness.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Here.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Russia is also not a bastion of good old fashioned values.
I'm going to quote from an article in Russia Beyond
by Nikolay Schevchenko. In twenty sixteen, the ratio in Russian
of divorces to new marriages that year was one to
one point six, meaning that Russians divorce more often than
they marry. In recent decades, over sixty percent of marriages
in Russia ended in official separation. Now, there is precisely
(09:15):
one issue where Russian culture is in reality more in
line with the kind of culture American conservatives claim to desire,
and that is in its treatment of LGBT people and
ethnic minorities. The last years in Putin's Russia have seen
a surge in hate crimes against queer Russians, as LGBT
advocacy organizations have been declared illegal and punished by the government.
(09:37):
This is the Russia our American right wing finds solidarity with,
and we shouldn't forget that right when we're looking at
to what extent do these people see Russia as kind
of embodying the values they would like to bring to
the United States. It has a lot less to do
with actual religiosity, with good old fashioned family values, and
a lot more to do with hate for specific groups
(09:58):
of people. Going to talk about what that means within
the context of US politics, in a little bit. But
first here's some ads. So earlier this year, I headed
(10:19):
to the Republican National Convention, and I had a lot
on my mind there. But one of the things I
was kind of interested in is hearing the way in
which Conservatives talked about Ukraine when they felt like they
were among friends. It was not uncommon to hear Ukraine
referenced in conversations as a geopolitical enemy of the United States.
(10:40):
And this is something I encountered a number of times,
and I wanted to make sure it wasn't just a
fluke of my own experiences there. And I assure you
it was not. Michael Waitely, who Donald Trump picked to
chair the RNC, appeared on Fox News in April and
lumped Ukraine in with China and Iran as aggressive adversaries
of the United States. Now, you know, we can quibble
(11:02):
on that list for a number of reasons, but Ukraine,
a country we are currently arming and training to fight
in our stead, is just kind of absurd to describe
as an aggressive adversary of the United States. Now, that
very month, Congress voted on a foreign aid package, which
caused a massive split in the Republican Party. The anti
Ukraine side was led by voices like Marjorie Taylor Green,
(11:24):
who told Steve Bannon, the Ukrainian government is attacking Christians.
The Ukrainian government is executing priests. Russia is not doing that.
They're not attacking Christianity. Now, like most things, Green says,
this is not quite accurate. The Guardian noted at the
time quote. In fact, according to figures from the Institute
for Religious Freedom a Ukrainian group, at least six hundred
(11:46):
and thirty religious sites had been damaged or looted in
Russia's invasion by December last year. Green received a speaking
slot at the RNC, as did tech investor David Sachs,
who spent some of his time on stage arguing that
o'biden somehow provoked the Russians to invade Ukraine by talking
about NATO expansion. Now, this is a claim you'll hear
(12:07):
on some segments of the left too, and it tends
to ignore that Russia invaded back in twenty fourteen after
a revolution against a Kremlin backed president Yenikovich, threw their
own plans in the region into disarray. Ukraine, to this day,
despite the expanded invasion, is not a part of NATO,
and Biden's administration has been leery not only of pushing
for this, but of supplying Ukraine with long range weapons
(12:29):
to strike inside Russian territory. The fact that Ukrainians and
others did start discussing Ukrainian membership in NATO after almost
a decade of war is certainly not among the things
that we can blame the Biden administration for starting. As
I trolled the RNC talking to attendees about their feelings
on the war, I got a variety of responses. The
(12:50):
most positive believe that Ukraine had been wronged, but that
the war was unwinnable, so the US had to negotiate
some kind of peace. Moore argued that the Ukrainians were
somehow stealing usaid, which they imagined would be put to
better use helping Americans. I found this an illogical position personally,
given that our aid Ukraine has primarily taken the form
(13:11):
of old weapons systems no longer in use by US
troops unless you want to house homeless veterans in Bradley
fighting vehicles. I don't really see how what we've sent
Zelensky is much used to the kind of Americans who
are actually suffering today. The most enlightening conversation that I
had while I was at the Republican convention about their
sentiments on Ukraine came when Garrison and I stumbled upon
(13:34):
Rudy Giuliani, seated at the booth for some streaming network
or another, exiled from the main stage of the event.
I introduced myself to Rudy and we started off just
talking about how surreal the mood was given the recent
attempted assassination of the former president.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
He's a conquering your own history party. We would have
been even without a Saturday. What's Saturday? It's surreal. I
think people shoel the living through history. That image of
him in rallying America, that's give be one of our
ten historical great interest now.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
I included that because it's a fun snapshot of just
how elated Republicans were that week, right before Biden dropped
out and the whole election changed yet again on a dime.
From here, Rudy and I moved to talking a bit
about how badly the Secret Service had fucked up and
protecting Trump, which is not really something I had a
particular disagreement with, although I think Juliani was coming at
(14:30):
it from more of a conspiratorial standpoint than I would.
I think simple incompetence more or less explains everything that
happened that day pretty well. This morphed in fairly short
order into him ranting about how all of this was
Biden's fault and how no one ever gets fired for
incompetence in the Biden administration. He brought up Afghanistan and
that is what led us finally to Ukraine.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
Ukraine would not have happened if he hadn't been a
complete power at oldgraph.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
God isn't now.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Yeah, what proof is very simple, including invaded three times
under the last four presidents. There's only one president he
was scared of.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
It was Trump.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
He invaded under Bush, he invaded under Obama, he invaded
under Biden. He didn't invade under Trump. So don't tell
me he would have invaded under Trump.
Speaker 4 (15:14):
He had a chance to know what he did now.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
I responded by pointing out that Giuliani's time frame was
a little off. Well, but I mean I was there
in twenty fifteen, and my friends who were in the
Ukrainian military were still fighting under Trump.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
You know.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
The invasion, Yeah, was still happening. It was just not
at the current level that it's at. Rudy went on
to blame Obama for not having given weapons to Ukraine
in a timely fashion.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
In fact, Poroshenko, who.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
Is a corrupt pal of Biden's, told me, yeah, they
were my friends, but I didn't get any guns until
Trump came in.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
They wanted me to win with t shootings and steff.
He said, I never knew what side they were on.
Obama never gave them offs. We gave him money.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Now, this is again not accurate. By December of twenty nineteen,
the US had provided Ukraine with about one point five
billion dollars in aid since the twenty fourteen invasion. This
did include weapons including javelin, anti tank missiles and armored vehicles,
which is why they had some of these weapons when
the expanded Russian invasion occurred. Rather than loosening the purse
(16:23):
strings as Russian aggression continued, President Trump withheld three hundred
and ninety one million dollars in aid to try and
get a political favor from Zelenski. We're going to continue
with Rudy Giuliani and my conversation, but first here's a
little bit more ads and we're back. So after Giuliani
(16:53):
made his claim that the United States didn't send any
weapons over to Ukraine until Trump was president, he said this.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
He let Biden handle the money, the last guy in
the world that should be only money to Ukraine now
and Ukraine's gotten.
Speaker 4 (17:08):
Two hundred billion and nobody let us order it.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
This is the acknowledge to be the most corrupt, second most,
third most corrupt country in the world. The fact that
they were invaded by Russia doesn't make them honest. It
makes them the victim. Doesn't make them honest. And you
pour a couple hundred billion in there without controls? What
am I a jackass? I can't figure out what's happening
and you don't win.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
Now much more do you have? You can? That's aw
hundred billion now.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Rudy, like most Republicans on this issue, always describes the
aid we've sent to Ukraine as it's cash. I find
it interesting that he claims Ukrainian corruption is also somehow
to blame for US not auditing the aid we sent. Now,
there are issues with how the US Defense Department has
audited some of the aid going to Ukraine, but those
are issues with the Defense Department. In fact, it came
(17:57):
out in January of twenty twenty four that the United
States failed to audit about a billion dollars worth of
military aid to Ukraine. Now, first off, this is not cash,
as Juliani repeatedly insinuates. It's all weapons, and there's no
evidence that any of these weapons were ever sold to
another country or used outside of Ukraine. They simply weren't
audited the way that they ought to have been because
(18:19):
the Pentagon fired all of the people who should have
been auditing this aid. Right, this is a pretty common
issue with the Pentagon. You can look back to Iraq
and the sheer amount of aid that was sent to
Iraq and then kind of disappeared in the ether because
they just didn't have anyone paying attention to it. Obviously,
because that happened under Republican administration, Juliani isn't concerned at
(18:41):
all about it. But he is deeply concerned about this
kind of fantastical two hundred billion dollars that he believes
has been shotgunned out to Ukrainian mobsters. And here's Rudy again.
As our conversation continued.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
Biden has US consigned to a war without animate in Ukraine.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
He doesn't even dare to suggest an end because he's
afraid of confrontation with Russia.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
So he's just going to get more people killed.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
I mean, there probably isn't an American president that said
more people killed other than a war than bud.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
It's interesting you describe it as them not winning, because
I do have trouble. I know, in the lead up
to the expanded invasion of February twenty twenty two, the
expectation from most of the people in our military and
most people internationally, was that the Ukrainian military was going
to fold in a manner of days. And they're now
back to about seventeen percent of the country under Russian occupation,
which isn't a massive escalation over where it was previously
(19:34):
because they pushed well, because they pushed the Russians out
of Kiev.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
Well, will that end the war? Russia can keep seven
pay percent.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
I don't think the Ukrainians are willing to send the
war that.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
The war is one when you achieve the objective that
has you stopped conducting war.
Speaker 4 (19:51):
They're not even close to them.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
The only way Ukraine says it will stop fighting is
if Russia is pushed out of Ukraine. They haven't been
able to do that. So they're not winning the war.
I mean, nor are they presenting a plan that we're
funding to do that. We're not planning, we're not funding.
We're just endlessly giving them money to keep the status quo.
(20:14):
We do not have a plan to win them or
end it. So I mean when I Tom Towell used
to say the worst thing about American foreign policy under unrealistic,
somewhat left leaning liberals is war without end. When you
go into a war, you've got to be willing to
commit yourself and you've got to be willing to win
(20:35):
it quick, otherwise you're gonna lose it. And you know
when we started, when we started losing wars, that's the
policy we fall.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
But if you compare where Ukraine is at right now
to the wars the United States has gotten involved in
in the century, Iraq, you know, around a decade or
so close to twenty years for Afghanistan. Ukraine is two
years since the expanded invasion, and you know, war, it's
a it's a massive international conflict between a much smaller
(21:06):
nation and a larger one. When I talk to Ukrainians
and they I asked them, what do you think you
need to actually win this? One of the things they
repeatedly say is the ability to strike Russian assets inside Russia.
Speaker 4 (21:18):
Who doesn't give him?
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Who doesn't? Yeah, I'm just wonder more minutes to go.
Speaker 4 (21:23):
Who prevents person?
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Definitely, the Biden administration hasn't allowed that.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
He tells us he wants them to win.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Do you do you think why would you be supportive
under a new Republican administration of allowing Ukraine to strike
inside Russia?
Speaker 3 (21:38):
I would be supportive of sitting down and having a
realistic conversation about a plant.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
First thing I do is audit the money we gave.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Now, of course, Rudy can't support that, so he pivoted
back to arguing that we need to audit Ukraine to
quote find out what happened to the money we gave him,
him being Zelensky. And again I pointed out that we
aren't giving him money to We're sending over weapons. Nevertheless,
our conversation continued. Now, the vast majority of the two
(22:06):
hundred billion that's been sent over, though, is in munitions,
like we're not talking about. Have you have you found
it in the American industry that there has been American
in the American industry.
Speaker 4 (22:17):
You want to find the American military industrial complex. What
I want to think is a lot of weeks of
money in the American.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
But I'm not concerned about money though, because what I
what we happened, The money doesn't get to there's no
javelins winding up outside of Ukraine.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
There's no a gt MS winding up out money.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
They're they're mostly getting weaponry though, they're getting Bradley's, they're
getting Abrams tanks, they're getting.
Speaker 4 (22:44):
Those things.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Where have they sold them?
Speaker 4 (22:45):
But they've been caught three times selling selling Where selling weapons?
Speaker 3 (22:48):
Where I'd have to go back and look, But they've
been caught three times selling plus they.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Have Now this was just a lie.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Ukraine has not been caught selling US weapons. Rudy only
claims they have been because he's consumed a huge amount
of Krimlin funded media that has been arguing since twenty
twenty two that US weapons sent to Ukraine will end
up on the black market. There's no outside evidence that
shows that this has happened. And in fact, Elias Yusef,
a research analyst for the security think tank the Stimpson Center,
(23:18):
recently told Business insider, I don't think we've seen any
real diversion, particularly outside the country of weapons. That article continues.
Pro Russian media has aired similar claims of a mass
diversion of arms meant for the front line, some citing
a retracted CBS report that included a source claiming only
thirty percent of weapons sent to Ukraine made it to
(23:39):
the battlefield. One conspiracy inclined website, purportedly citing anonymous Ukrainians,
claimed the weapons are stolen to such a degree that
Ukraine as of August had already lost the war because
of the black market diversion. Now, in the months since
that claim was made that Ukraine had lost the war
because they had given up all of their weapons, they
took a bunch of those weapons and invaded Russia, punching
(24:02):
a hole through their lines and taking a considerable amount
of territory in the Kursk region, which they occupy to
an extent today. As it's always the case with guys
like Julian, reality doesn't matter here. It's about repeating the
same talking points until you get a journalist ignorant enough
to take them as true. And it's the kind of
thing where if you're not up on all of the
(24:22):
different claims being made on the right and all of
the claims about corruption and money being siphoned off and
taken by mobsters, then you're not going to be able
to properly argue with them, right, Like, if you don't
really know what you're talking about, you might seed the
point to Juliani that there have been at least three
cases of the Ukrainians caught selling American weapons overseas. Now,
(24:44):
when you look into what you see that this is
primarily a claim that spreads on right wing Facebook pages
and there's not really any evidence of a sizeable diversion.
But that doesn't really matter. What matters is in the
moment being able to kind of spread a point out
to the extent that nobody really questions you want. And
I don't know, it's the kind of thing that happens
a lot in politics, and it's the kind of thing
(25:06):
that is probably pointless to really address, right Like me
arguing with Rudy Giuliani got him hot and flustered and
kind of pissed off, and certainly got me frustrated. But
I don't think it accomplished much. And I really I
think kind of the thing that you have to accept
when you're looking at sort of right wing lies about
what's happening in Ukraine or the lies being told right
(25:27):
now about you know, Springfield, Ohio and the Haitian migrant
population over there. There's really very little point in actually
confronting these people directly about the disinformation that they put out,
because it's not really a case where they care about
the truth one way or the other. It's a matter
of you've kind of lost the fight if you care
(25:48):
at all about trying to prove reality to them, you know.
And that's kind of a bummer note to end this on.
But I guess I don't really have anything optimistic to say.
I just thought you'd be interested in my little conversation
with Rudy Giuliani and some of the talking points that
are continuing to spread up along their ride. So you know,
(26:09):
at the very least, maybe the next time you wind
up in an argument this Thanksgiving with your uncle about Ukraine,
you'll be kind of wary for some of the arguments
he's going to bring out, you know, to the extent
that that does anybody any good until next time. I'm
Robert Evans, and this is it could Happen here. If
you want to see these sources for this episode and
do some reading yourself, they're in the show notes, so
(26:31):
just check them out there and we will be back tomorrow.
Speaker 5 (26:38):
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A Zone Media, Robert Evans here it could happen here,
a podcast about things falling apart, And today I wanted
to take some time to talk about Ukraine, and particularly
to talk about the sort of cultural place that the
Ukrainian resistance against Russia expanded invasion by Russia has taken
(00:23):
in American politics and in American kind of political culture. Obviously,
I am recording this within a few hours of another
attempted assassination on former President Trump, this one by a
guy who, among a confusing milange of other things, claimed
to be a major advocate of Ukrainian sovereignty and that
that was a major reason why he was angry at
(00:45):
the Republicans and angry at former President Trump, and kind
of that at least failed assassination attempt is sort of
in line with a lot of derangement around Ukraine. And
you can find this on the left and the right
in the center. I've come to think that if you're
trying to evaluate sort of how credible someone is as
a geopolitical expert today, one of the best things you
(01:07):
can do is kind of look back to early February
twenty twenty two and see what sort of claims they
were making about what was going to happen, whether or
not Russia was actually going to go into Ukraine and
expand their invasion. And that's obviously, you know, a bigger
topic than I think we're going to get into today.
One of the things that I find really interesting when
I kind of analyze how particularly conservatives have turned on
(01:30):
the Ukrainian cause is how kind of incomprehensible that seems,
just based on the way in which I was raised
by the conservatives in my life to think about Russia
and to think about like Russian military aggression. You know,
I grew up largely in the post Cold War era,
but my parents were both like raised by Cold warriors.
(01:52):
They mostly grew up on military bases, and I still
grew up with an awful lot of the kind of
Cold War shrapnel and my sort of ideological training. You know,
the movie Read Dawn was a big part of my childhood.
You know, some of those early James Bond movies where
the Soviet Unions are still the bad guy. You know,
this was all major stuff for me. So it's been
(02:13):
particularly disorienting kind of watching Philo Russian attitudes infiltrate the
right and US move from this idea of like these
people are one way or the other kind of a
geopolitical opponent of the United States, towards these people are
almost existing in an idealized version of the society we
bring around. It's been a cause of some whiplash for
(02:36):
me and for I think a lot of people who
were raised in that environment and then kind of came
out of those ideological beliefs. And when we look at
the kind of turnaround on the right about this stuff,
one of the people who's been on the bleeding edge
of this has been Vice presidential candidate JD.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Vance.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
And in fact, Ukraine might mark the first place where
Vance really came in ahead of the rest of his
party on an issue they would all ultimately move in
behind him on back In early twenty twenty two, in
the immediate wake of Russia's expanded invasion, Vance told Steve
Bannon in one of his many ill advised podcast interviews, quote,
(03:14):
I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way
or the other now is This paragraph from an article
by Ed Kilgore and New York Magazine makes clear Vance
was swiftly followed by others. Quote then Congressman Madison Cawthorn
parrooted Russian propaganda by saying, the Ukrainian government is incredibly
corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies,
(03:36):
and his colleague Marjorie Taylor Green called the Ukrainians neo Nazis.
Fox News's Tucker Carlson was a constant font of bitter
hostility towards USAID for Ukraine. Now Cawthorne was and remains
now a stooge. But I think it really is kind
of drilling into the precise wording of his claim here,
the fact that he's so focused on wokeness within the
(03:58):
context of a conflict. But it seems much more serious
than kind of the standard American culture war bullshit. A
lot of why we're seeing this has to do with
the fallout over the Russiagate culture war that consumed the
Democrats during the first half of the Trump administration. This
led to the enemy of the enemy as my friends
sort of thinking among the right, and this was stoked
(04:20):
consciously by Russian propaganda efforts. After Trump left office, these
efforts were redoubled, especially after the war in Ukraine became
an existential issue for Putin's regime. A good example of
the more obvious sort of messaging is this Moscow Times
article from May of twenty twenty three, with the title
Russia to build migrant village for conservative American expats. Quote
(04:44):
Timor Beslangarov, a migration lawyer at Moscow's Vista Foreign Business Support,
claimed that around two hundred families wish to immigrate to
Russia for ideological reasons. The reason is propaganda of radical values.
Today they have seventy genders and who knows what will next.
Ria Novosti quoted Bessangorov as saying, echoing President Vladimir Putin's
(05:05):
frequently deployed grievances against Western countries, comparative gender freedom, and
here we see it again, the focus on hatred of
woke as a justification for solidarity with Russia. A sizable
plurality of Americans still support the US sending aid to Ukraine,
and the reality of Russia's invasion is hideous enough that
the bulk of modern Russian propaganda in this country today
(05:28):
seems to focus on the woke issue more than anything
directly relevant to the war. As I write this, one
of the top stories in the country is how a
Tennessee based media network, Tenet Media, hired a bunch of
American influencers like Tim Poole and Dave Rubin and paid
them north of one hundred grand of video to make
Russian propaganda. Now, Pool and Ruben and their fellows claim
(05:49):
to be shocked, shocked that a foreign government was involved
in all and deny acting as unregistered foreign agents or
breaking the law in any way. We'll see how those
claims look in few months. For now, I think it's
illustrative to turn towards a wired analysis of the content
of dozens of Tenant Media videos written by Tim Marshman
and Drove Merota. It shows us the kind of propaganda
(06:13):
that Russia found fruitful, inceeding to an American audience quote.
This analysis does not show that in these videos the
influencers were particularly fixated on the Ukraine War. The word
Ukraine appears in the transcript sixty seven times, about as
often as misinformation, Christianity, and Clinton. It does show the
influencers stressing highly divisive culture war topics in the videos,
(06:35):
which carried titles like trans widows are a thing, and
it's getting all caps out of hand and race is
biological but gender isn't question mark question mark question mark.
The word trans appears one hundred and fifty two times
and transgender ninety eight, So sixty seven times we see
Ukraine appear in these transcripts, as opposed to well over
(06:56):
two hundred times for trans and transgender together. Now, if
you want a snapshot of just how absurd and divorced
from reality the culture wars have gotten, the Russian government
funding a clandestine influence operation considered stoking fears about trans
people to have a higher rate of return than actually
propagandizing directly about the war in Ukraine. As absurd as
(07:18):
this sounds, these tactics have borne fruit, and I think
the reason why it is simple, by building a sense of
solidarity between bigoted American conservatives and what they see as
a similarly conservative Russia. Now, obviously, the reality of the
situation is that Russia is not exactly the country these
people think it is. While it is true that the
(07:38):
number of Russian adults who consider themselves at least somewhat
religious skyrocketed after the fall of the uss Are from
eleven percent or so to over fifty percent today, much
of that is likely just explained by the change away
from an expressly atheistic government. Even today, Pew Research notes quote,
for most Russians, the return to religion did not correspond
(08:00):
with a return to church. Across all three waves of
ISSP data, no more than about one in ten Russians
said they attend religious services at least once a month.
The share of regular attenders monthly or more often was
two percent in nineteen ninety one, nine percent in nineteen
ninety eight, and seven percent in two thousand and eight.
For reference, about thirty two percent of Americans currently attend church, synagogue, mosque,
(08:24):
et cetera on a weekly basis. Now, this is down
significantly from forty nine percent in nineteen fifty eight and
does represent a low for church attendance in US history.
But you can see we still beat the Russians in
at least active religiosity by a factor of like five. Now,
one of the modern bugbears of the right wing in
the US is no fault divorce, which often gets wrapped
(08:47):
up in conversations about wokeness.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Here.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Russia is also not a bastion of good old fashioned values.
I'm going to quote from an article in Russia Beyond
by Nikolay Schevchenko. In twenty sixteen, the ratio in Russian
of divorces to new marriages that year was one to
one point six, meaning that Russians divorce more often than
they marry. In recent decades, over sixty percent of marriages
in Russia ended in official separation. Now, there is precisely
(09:15):
one issue where Russian culture is in reality more in
line with the kind of culture American conservatives claim to desire,
and that is in its treatment of LGBT people and
ethnic minorities. The last years in Putin's Russia have seen
a surge in hate crimes against queer Russians, as LGBT
advocacy organizations have been declared illegal and punished by the government.
(09:37):
This is the Russia our American right wing finds solidarity with,
and we shouldn't forget that right when we're looking at
to what extent do these people see Russia as kind
of embodying the values they would like to bring to
the United States. It has a lot less to do
with actual religiosity, with good old fashioned family values, and
a lot more to do with hate for specific groups
(09:58):
of people. Going to talk about what that means within
the context of US politics, in a little bit. But
first here's some ads. So earlier this year, I headed
(10:19):
to the Republican National Convention, and I had a lot
on my mind there. But one of the things I
was kind of interested in is hearing the way in
which Conservatives talked about Ukraine when they felt like they
were among friends. It was not uncommon to hear Ukraine
referenced in conversations as a geopolitical enemy of the United States.
(10:40):
And this is something I encountered a number of times,
and I wanted to make sure it wasn't just a
fluke of my own experiences there. And I assure you
it was not. Michael Waitely, who Donald Trump picked to
chair the RNC, appeared on Fox News in April and
lumped Ukraine in with China and Iran as aggressive adversaries
of the United States. Now, you know, we can quibble
(11:02):
on that list for a number of reasons, but Ukraine,
a country we are currently arming and training to fight
in our stead, is just kind of absurd to describe
as an aggressive adversary of the United States. Now, that
very month, Congress voted on a foreign aid package, which
caused a massive split in the Republican Party. The anti
Ukraine side was led by voices like Marjorie Taylor Green,
(11:24):
who told Steve Bannon, the Ukrainian government is attacking Christians.
The Ukrainian government is executing priests. Russia is not doing that.
They're not attacking Christianity. Now, like most things, Green says,
this is not quite accurate. The Guardian noted at the
time quote. In fact, according to figures from the Institute
for Religious Freedom a Ukrainian group, at least six hundred
(11:46):
and thirty religious sites had been damaged or looted in
Russia's invasion by December last year. Green received a speaking
slot at the RNC, as did tech investor David Sachs,
who spent some of his time on stage arguing that
o'biden somehow provoked the Russians to invade Ukraine by talking
about NATO expansion. Now, this is a claim you'll hear
(12:07):
on some segments of the left too, and it tends
to ignore that Russia invaded back in twenty fourteen after
a revolution against a Kremlin backed president Yenikovich, threw their
own plans in the region into disarray. Ukraine, to this day,
despite the expanded invasion, is not a part of NATO,
and Biden's administration has been leery not only of pushing
for this, but of supplying Ukraine with long range weapons
(12:29):
to strike inside Russian territory. The fact that Ukrainians and
others did start discussing Ukrainian membership in NATO after almost
a decade of war is certainly not among the things
that we can blame the Biden administration for starting. As
I trolled the RNC talking to attendees about their feelings
on the war, I got a variety of responses. The
(12:50):
most positive believe that Ukraine had been wronged, but that
the war was unwinnable, so the US had to negotiate
some kind of peace. Moore argued that the Ukrainians were
somehow stealing usaid, which they imagined would be put to
better use helping Americans. I found this an illogical position personally,
given that our aid Ukraine has primarily taken the form
(13:11):
of old weapons systems no longer in use by US
troops unless you want to house homeless veterans in Bradley
fighting vehicles. I don't really see how what we've sent
Zelensky is much used to the kind of Americans who
are actually suffering today. The most enlightening conversation that I
had while I was at the Republican convention about their
sentiments on Ukraine came when Garrison and I stumbled upon
(13:34):
Rudy Giuliani, seated at the booth for some streaming network
or another, exiled from the main stage of the event.
I introduced myself to Rudy and we started off just
talking about how surreal the mood was given the recent
attempted assassination of the former president.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
He's a conquering your own history party. We would have
been even without a Saturday. What's Saturday? It's surreal. I
think people shoel the living through history. That image of
him in rallying America, that's give be one of our
ten historical great interest now.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
I included that because it's a fun snapshot of just
how elated Republicans were that week, right before Biden dropped
out and the whole election changed yet again on a dime.
From here, Rudy and I moved to talking a bit
about how badly the Secret Service had fucked up and
protecting Trump, which is not really something I had a
particular disagreement with, although I think Juliani was coming at
(14:30):
it from more of a conspiratorial standpoint than I would.
I think simple incompetence more or less explains everything that
happened that day pretty well. This morphed in fairly short
order into him ranting about how all of this was
Biden's fault and how no one ever gets fired for
incompetence in the Biden administration. He brought up Afghanistan and
that is what led us finally to Ukraine.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
Ukraine would not have happened if he hadn't been a
complete power at oldgraph.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
God isn't now.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Yeah, what proof is very simple, including invaded three times
under the last four presidents. There's only one president he
was scared of.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
It was Trump.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
He invaded under Bush, he invaded under Obama, he invaded
under Biden. He didn't invade under Trump. So don't tell
me he would have invaded under Trump.
Speaker 4 (15:14):
He had a chance to know what he did now.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
I responded by pointing out that Giuliani's time frame was
a little off. Well, but I mean I was there
in twenty fifteen, and my friends who were in the
Ukrainian military were still fighting under Trump.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
You know.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
The invasion, Yeah, was still happening. It was just not
at the current level that it's at. Rudy went on
to blame Obama for not having given weapons to Ukraine
in a timely fashion.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
In fact, Poroshenko, who.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
Is a corrupt pal of Biden's, told me, yeah, they
were my friends, but I didn't get any guns until
Trump came in.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
They wanted me to win with t shootings and steff.
He said, I never knew what side they were on.
Obama never gave them offs. We gave him money.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Now, this is again not accurate. By December of twenty nineteen,
the US had provided Ukraine with about one point five
billion dollars in aid since the twenty fourteen invasion. This
did include weapons including javelin, anti tank missiles and armored vehicles,
which is why they had some of these weapons when
the expanded Russian invasion occurred. Rather than loosening the purse
(16:23):
strings as Russian aggression continued, President Trump withheld three hundred
and ninety one million dollars in aid to try and
get a political favor from Zelenski. We're going to continue
with Rudy Giuliani and my conversation, but first here's a
little bit more ads and we're back. So after Giuliani
(16:53):
made his claim that the United States didn't send any
weapons over to Ukraine until Trump was president, he said this.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
He let Biden handle the money, the last guy in
the world that should be only money to Ukraine now
and Ukraine's gotten.
Speaker 4 (17:08):
Two hundred billion and nobody let us order it.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
This is the acknowledge to be the most corrupt, second most,
third most corrupt country in the world. The fact that
they were invaded by Russia doesn't make them honest. It
makes them the victim. Doesn't make them honest. And you
pour a couple hundred billion in there without controls? What
am I a jackass? I can't figure out what's happening
and you don't win.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
Now much more do you have? You can? That's aw
hundred billion now.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Rudy, like most Republicans on this issue, always describes the
aid we've sent to Ukraine as it's cash. I find
it interesting that he claims Ukrainian corruption is also somehow
to blame for US not auditing the aid we sent. Now,
there are issues with how the US Defense Department has
audited some of the aid going to Ukraine, but those
are issues with the Defense Department. In fact, it came
(17:57):
out in January of twenty twenty four that the United
States failed to audit about a billion dollars worth of
military aid to Ukraine. Now, first off, this is not cash,
as Juliani repeatedly insinuates. It's all weapons, and there's no
evidence that any of these weapons were ever sold to
another country or used outside of Ukraine. They simply weren't
audited the way that they ought to have been because
(18:19):
the Pentagon fired all of the people who should have
been auditing this aid. Right, this is a pretty common
issue with the Pentagon. You can look back to Iraq
and the sheer amount of aid that was sent to
Iraq and then kind of disappeared in the ether because
they just didn't have anyone paying attention to it. Obviously,
because that happened under Republican administration, Juliani isn't concerned at
(18:41):
all about it. But he is deeply concerned about this
kind of fantastical two hundred billion dollars that he believes
has been shotgunned out to Ukrainian mobsters. And here's Rudy again.
As our conversation continued.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
Biden has US consigned to a war without animate in Ukraine.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
He doesn't even dare to suggest an end because he's
afraid of confrontation with Russia.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
So he's just going to get more people killed.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
I mean, there probably isn't an American president that said
more people killed other than a war than bud.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
It's interesting you describe it as them not winning, because
I do have trouble. I know, in the lead up
to the expanded invasion of February twenty twenty two, the
expectation from most of the people in our military and
most people internationally, was that the Ukrainian military was going
to fold in a manner of days. And they're now
back to about seventeen percent of the country under Russian occupation,
which isn't a massive escalation over where it was previously
(19:34):
because they pushed well, because they pushed the Russians out
of Kiev.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
Well, will that end the war? Russia can keep seven
pay percent.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
I don't think the Ukrainians are willing to send the
war that.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
The war is one when you achieve the objective that
has you stopped conducting war.
Speaker 4 (19:51):
They're not even close to them.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
The only way Ukraine says it will stop fighting is
if Russia is pushed out of Ukraine. They haven't been
able to do that. So they're not winning the war.
I mean, nor are they presenting a plan that we're
funding to do that. We're not planning, we're not funding.
We're just endlessly giving them money to keep the status quo.
(20:14):
We do not have a plan to win them or
end it. So I mean when I Tom Towell used
to say the worst thing about American foreign policy under unrealistic,
somewhat left leaning liberals is war without end. When you
go into a war, you've got to be willing to
commit yourself and you've got to be willing to win
(20:35):
it quick, otherwise you're gonna lose it. And you know
when we started, when we started losing wars, that's the
policy we fall.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
But if you compare where Ukraine is at right now
to the wars the United States has gotten involved in
in the century, Iraq, you know, around a decade or
so close to twenty years for Afghanistan. Ukraine is two
years since the expanded invasion, and you know, war, it's
a it's a massive international conflict between a much smaller
(21:06):
nation and a larger one. When I talk to Ukrainians
and they I asked them, what do you think you
need to actually win this? One of the things they
repeatedly say is the ability to strike Russian assets inside Russia.
Speaker 4 (21:18):
Who doesn't give him?
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Who doesn't? Yeah, I'm just wonder more minutes to go.
Speaker 4 (21:23):
Who prevents person?
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Definitely, the Biden administration hasn't allowed that.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
He tells us he wants them to win.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Do you do you think why would you be supportive
under a new Republican administration of allowing Ukraine to strike
inside Russia?
Speaker 3 (21:38):
I would be supportive of sitting down and having a
realistic conversation about a plant.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
First thing I do is audit the money we gave.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Now, of course, Rudy can't support that, so he pivoted
back to arguing that we need to audit Ukraine to
quote find out what happened to the money we gave him,
him being Zelensky. And again I pointed out that we
aren't giving him money to We're sending over weapons. Nevertheless,
our conversation continued. Now, the vast majority of the two
(22:06):
hundred billion that's been sent over, though, is in munitions,
like we're not talking about. Have you have you found
it in the American industry that there has been American
in the American industry.
Speaker 4 (22:17):
You want to find the American military industrial complex. What
I want to think is a lot of weeks of
money in the American.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
But I'm not concerned about money though, because what I
what we happened, The money doesn't get to there's no
javelins winding up outside of Ukraine.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
There's no a gt MS winding up out money.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
They're they're mostly getting weaponry though, they're getting Bradley's, they're
getting Abrams tanks, they're getting.
Speaker 4 (22:44):
Those things.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Where have they sold them?
Speaker 4 (22:45):
But they've been caught three times selling selling Where selling weapons?
Speaker 3 (22:48):
Where I'd have to go back and look, But they've
been caught three times selling plus they.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Have Now this was just a lie.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Ukraine has not been caught selling US weapons. Rudy only
claims they have been because he's consumed a huge amount
of Krimlin funded media that has been arguing since twenty
twenty two that US weapons sent to Ukraine will end
up on the black market. There's no outside evidence that
shows that this has happened. And in fact, Elias Yusef,
a research analyst for the security think tank the Stimpson Center,
(23:18):
recently told Business insider, I don't think we've seen any
real diversion, particularly outside the country of weapons. That article continues.
Pro Russian media has aired similar claims of a mass
diversion of arms meant for the front line, some citing
a retracted CBS report that included a source claiming only
thirty percent of weapons sent to Ukraine made it to
(23:39):
the battlefield. One conspiracy inclined website, purportedly citing anonymous Ukrainians,
claimed the weapons are stolen to such a degree that
Ukraine as of August had already lost the war because
of the black market diversion. Now, in the months since
that claim was made that Ukraine had lost the war
because they had given up all of their weapons, they
took a bunch of those weapons and invaded Russia, punching
(24:02):
a hole through their lines and taking a considerable amount
of territory in the Kursk region, which they occupy to
an extent today. As it's always the case with guys
like Julian, reality doesn't matter here. It's about repeating the
same talking points until you get a journalist ignorant enough
to take them as true. And it's the kind of
thing where if you're not up on all of the
(24:22):
different claims being made on the right and all of
the claims about corruption and money being siphoned off and
taken by mobsters, then you're not going to be able
to properly argue with them, right, Like, if you don't
really know what you're talking about, you might seed the
point to Juliani that there have been at least three
cases of the Ukrainians caught selling American weapons overseas. Now,
(24:44):
when you look into what you see that this is
primarily a claim that spreads on right wing Facebook pages
and there's not really any evidence of a sizeable diversion.
But that doesn't really matter. What matters is in the
moment being able to kind of spread a point out
to the extent that nobody really questions you want. And
I don't know, it's the kind of thing that happens
a lot in politics, and it's the kind of thing
(25:06):
that is probably pointless to really address, right Like me
arguing with Rudy Giuliani got him hot and flustered and
kind of pissed off, and certainly got me frustrated. But
I don't think it accomplished much. And I really I
think kind of the thing that you have to accept
when you're looking at sort of right wing lies about
what's happening in Ukraine or the lies being told right
(25:27):
now about you know, Springfield, Ohio and the Haitian migrant
population over there. There's really very little point in actually
confronting these people directly about the disinformation that they put out,
because it's not really a case where they care about
the truth one way or the other. It's a matter
of you've kind of lost the fight if you care
(25:48):
at all about trying to prove reality to them, you know.
And that's kind of a bummer note to end this on.
But I guess I don't really have anything optimistic to say.
I just thought you'd be interested in my little conversation
with Rudy Giuliani and some of the talking points that
are continuing to spread up along their ride. So you know,
(26:09):
at the very least, maybe the next time you wind
up in an argument this Thanksgiving with your uncle about Ukraine,
you'll be kind of wary for some of the arguments
he's going to bring out, you know, to the extent
that that does anybody any good until next time. I'm
Robert Evans, and this is it could Happen here. If
you want to see these sources for this episode and
do some reading yourself, they're in the show notes, so
(26:31):
just check them out there and we will be back tomorrow.
Speaker 5 (26:38):
It Could Happen Here is a production of pool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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