911 - Red Dawn feat. Radio War Nerd (2/24/25)

All I'm gonna make is a jumble.

All I wanna make is a jumble.

We think about

tambes.

All I wanna

Hello, everybody.

It's Monday, February 24th, and we've got some choppa for you.

On today, Felix and I will be turning our attention to the world of war once again, armed conflict, as it proceeds apace in this human comedy.

And joining us to discuss this, we couldn't think of two better guests from Radio War Nerd.

It's Mark Ames and John Dolan.

Mark, John, welcome back to the program.

Always a joy to have you.

Thanks.

Oh, thanks.

It's great great to be here.

Yeah, it's always a pleasure.

It's our honor.

Well, okay, like to kick things off, obviously, like, probably the biggest news in the world of war is the fact that the war in Ukraine is now entering its fourth year, but with, as you mentioned, sort of a surprise twist.

Basically, that Ukraine's biggest patron is now seems to be switching sides.

So to begin, let me just ask, like, what are the current prospects for an end to this war in Ukraine?

And what does the end of that war look like for the principal actors?

Ukraine, Russia, the EU, and the United States?

God.

Well,

I think we could say this, that every year after the first six months, every month and every year has been exponentially worse than the previous year for Ukraine and for the Ukraine cause.

Now, it's a little, it's the Ukraine war, it's one of those, you know, theory of relativity things.

The Ukraine war looks different to Washington and to whatever's left of Joe Biden's mind and things like that than it does to Ukrainians who are suffering from this war and fighting this war.

So from, you know, Biden's point of view, if you remember that harrowing Time magazine interview, maybe the only one he did in like the last two years of his presidency that...

was published last year.

Time was asking him, you know, the war is going pretty badly and what are you going to do?

And is this going to be a problem?

And he snapped at them.

What do you mean it's going badly, man?

You know, he's like, Russia's been degraded.

They've lost 300,000 killed, man.

And he was like, he was just all of a sudden he came alive and this number of all the dead that have been killed.

So to him and to DC, the war was looking, I guess, in some ways, almost better and better because more Russians were dying.

But in terms of how it ends, it ends badly for Ukraine, absolutely badly for Ukraine, broken apart.

However, this war ends.

This is not going to end the way that all the cheerleaders were saying with the orcs defeated, Russia broken up into 100 states.

And they were really saying this.

And, you know,

is Ukraine going to take Crimea and like Rostov and Voroniev and parts of Western Russia?

There was a lot of pundit anxiety about should Ukraine stop short of the Crimea?

And I think that got settled pretty quickly.

Yeah.

So, you know, Ukraine has just, Ukraine has been used.

I mean, it's used by Russia to send a message to the U.S., NATO, and used by the West to kill Russians.

And it's paying the price, except for really

the people on our payroll who just got cut off by Trump.

And, you know, but they've made out pretty well.

So they're screwed.

Europe,

well, okay, let's start with Russia.

How does Russia end?

How does this war end for Russia?

Put it this way, it looked really bad for Russia in 2022.

By September of 2022, I mean, the initial invasion went poorly.

The initial plan to try to bring, to send a message to the West through Ukraine that Russia meant business and to listen to Russia and to, you know, not advance NATO into Ukraine and keep advancing West.

That was all failing badly.

And they should have done a deal early on.

I mean, the West should have because Russia was not in a great position in the early months of the war when Boris Jordan

flew out and killed that deal that Ukraine was about to sign.

And then maybe in September, October of 2022.

And since then, Russia, Putin has turned, has snatched, snatched, I don't know, you know, defeat from the jaw from victory from the jaws of defeat because it looked so bad.

It looked so dire for Russia by September, October of 2022.

Russia was under sanction and

had lost enormous amounts of manpower and armaments and seemed to be getting isolated.

And

things were looking really badly.

No one could imagine that they could turn it around.

And they have.

And even Biden's top military people were saying last year that Russia's military now is bigger and stronger than it was when the invasion started.

So the whole purpose of Biden's purpose, I don't know how well that's worked out.

And Russia has reoriented its economy to China.

So Russia, I...

Russia is going to, Russia's going to achieve, it seems like, at least some of its strategic goals.

Like Ukraine is not going to be a NATO.

And that is a huge, huge strategic victory for Russia.

Ukraine is not going to be in NATO and rump Ukraine is not going to be in NATO because that would require the Europeans and the U.S.

to go to war for Ukraine.

And, you know, Hexeth, I mean, we were coy about that until Trump came to power and Trump just made it explicit, we're not going to war for Ukraine.

And then the Europeans, after Hexeth's speech, said, we need to be Europeans and we'll stand up and not since 1939, da-da-da.

And then they all had to put it on the line, would you send peacekeepers?

And the Poles, who have been the loudest, you know, most militant for this war, came out publicly.

The prime minister said, No, we're not sending peacekeepers.

And Macron, who was the other one calling for more direct action, came out and said, France will not send peacekeepers.

So, you know, Ukraine has Keir Starmer,

but

that's about it right now.

You touched on it a little bit, but it is, I mean, like the main story really with a lot of this is sort of like how resilient Russia was to the sanctions.

And not just resilient, how it really like fucked the West more than anyone in the end.

But

one thing I thought was pretty interesting,

you did touch on it, is just given how horribly it started out for them, this turned out to be something they probably never really dreamed of at the start, which is...

They got to sort of test and refine their military against like not all of the best western technology but a lot of it yeah they got they got to have the they got to develop like a proof of concept on how they would use their air force against like western air defenses like that they were doing where they would just they would just have like mi-31s fly way higher than anyone else and just

rip through everyone with those kinzals i i'm probably up the pronunciation but the air launched yeah the air launched uh ballistic missile They probably didn't really anticipate that in February.

Well, I mean, all of these weapons, and America does produce some very good weapons, but they've never gone against anything like near-peer, let alone Russia.

And the idea,

the idea in the first six months of the war that was very popular, pushed out of Ukraine, but also very popular with Europeans and in Washington and London, is that the Russians, like because they conducted the war so incompetently, incompetently early on, there was something genetic there, and they would never adjust.

And actually, this, you would have to have never read a single history book in your life to think that A, Russians start off wars well, and B,

and B, that they don't learn and adapt and wind up.

They're closers.

They're fourth corner players.

I mean, like, if I could compare them to anyone, it would be like Jake Lamada if you fight.

Yeah,

I actually saw this fight with a Russian against some incredibly sculpted-looking workout king from the U.S.

And the workout king was just jumping up and down before the fight, and he just couldn't be contained.

He just was dying to get across the ring.

And this Russian looked like he'd just gotten out of bed and he was flabby and tired.

And

he sort of

waved to the crowd, like, I got to hang over, leave me alone.

And

this American sculpted guy ran across the ring and just knocked him down with the left hook.

And

he slowly got up and he just had all these prison tattoos all over him.

Okay, you want to be like that?

I think I know the exact fight you're talking about.

Yeah.

That's Alexander Emilianenko versus James Thompson.

Right.

Brother of the Emilian Yanko who was big.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Fedor's brother.

Fedor,

among, like, people think consensus, probably best heavyweight of all time.

Alex had like the, yeah, really scary prison tattoos.

Fedor and Alex had a falling out because Alex had a pretty nasty criminal conviction in Russia.

Alex, I don't know if this will shock you.

His fighting career had to go on hold because he had hepatitis C in 2015.

Well, you haven't finished up what happens.

I mean, I'm assuming he then

accordion.

Yeah,

not a one-punch thing, just like a one-minute,

very damaging series of blows of all kinds, and the guy is down.

Yeah.

That's so pretty no more.

But to Felix's point, to Felix's point, like,

so when they first introduced, for example, the High Mars, in that first month, and I think this is back in 2022, it's a very good, you know, weapon system.

And at first, it was causing enormous damage.

It helped Ukraine a lot, sort of prepare the ground for what wound up being their big breakout a couple months later in August, September of 2022.

But within two months maximum, the Russians had figured it out.

And it just has not been nearly as,

it hasn't been a wonder weapon certainly since then.

And this is the case with every single new weapon system.

And so that is also a problem for America and the West because now these weapon systems, I mean,

NATO and the US are all about wars that are won in weeks.

They don't have a, there's no...

There's no plan for like a three-year war, you know, based on production.

And so a lot of these weapon systems now have been tested by the Russians Russians and they can share that now with the Chinese, with the

North Koreans, of course, with

whoever else is interested.

And

I do think that's a problem.

Ukraine's military is large.

It's much larger than any of the other continental Europeans.

So this, I mean, this is a very formidable military was.

A lot of their best soldiers, best units have been killed or, you know, turned into amputees.

And

they are actually not nearly as good a fighting force as they used to be.

And they're beset by horrific levels of corruption and abuse and

poor morale and exploitation.

Well, you have to go back to

NATO.

And what I particularly think of is years of NATO commissioning painters to do sales paintings for its new weapons system.

And they would always show a kind of clean war in which Russian armor columns became the patsy, you know, the bad guys who were easy to wipe out in a Western.

And Russia played to that stereotype early on.

They tried armored penetrations of Ukrainian lines, and they didn't have the infantry to support it at that time.

And they they got picked off in what was at least a humiliating way.

It may not have been significant in a strategic sense, but it was deeply humiliating.

And they

fell back and decided, well, we got all these

artillery shells and we're just going to, we got mines, we got artillery shells, we got more of them than they do.

And we're just going to grind them up.

And do you think it was, John, do you think it was that like a sort of a shift in tactics away from like an active war about you know like a blitzkrieg to like seize territory make it to kiev and then like as soon as the war became about a grinding war of attrition that's where the russians began to find success like what what accounts for this shift in uh initially disastrous invasion of ukraine and now one in which they seem to be uh having the upper hand now well there are a lot of wars as Mark said, in which

Russia didn't do well in the early going.

And actually, there's a history of wars like that in the U.S., too.

If you think about the course of the Civil War,

yeah, the Union got there, got rinsed for like the first two and a half years of the Civil War.

And this is often the case with a highly motivated, smaller

opponent.

But what happened is that even under McClellan, who was possibly the worst commander, Union Army.

He didn't even.

Sean, he never did anything.

He was great at like logistics, but he just simply wouldn't attack the end.

He just stayed stayed put.

Yeah.

Then he got like scarlet fever or something.

Well, he got yellow fever, I think.

But

he finally wrote a tearful letter

when he was backed up against the Potomac,

protected by like 12 gunboats and 120,000 troops, saying to Lincoln,

these are perhaps my last moments.

You better not free the slaves or you'll upset somebody sign the former George McClellan soon to be dead.

But anyway,

even while he was

being a coward, Lee in the Seven Days Battle had to send a lot of troops against him to, because Lee knew that he was a coward.

But those soldiers were probably the best soldiers in the Confederacy.

They had swarmed to

the Richmond and South Carolina areas from all over the South.

And

they kept dying.

And I don't think it's fully understood how much of an impact that had.

It didn't matter that their commander was a coward and a fool.

the Union people had a coward and a fool for leader.

I mean, Lee was a good commander, as good as anybody could get, but he still had to send troops up against increasingly entrenched enemies.

And

the South had a smaller white population.

They absolutely refused to recruit African Americans.

And

sooner or later, it was going to tell on them.

So, you know, these wars have a certain course.

The bigger country, the more mobilized country tends to grind it out.

Yeah, and I would say, I mean, one of the major turning points of the war that was not appreciated at the time properly and not predicted.

In fact, I remember Michael Kaufman, one of the big pundits, kind of, you know, NATO pro-Ukraine pundits, said there was no way this would happen right up to the day it happened was Putin's announcement in September 2022 of what they called partial mobilization.

That changed everything since then.

Russia went in there with a very small force for an invasion force of a large country like Ukraine.

And

things didn't work out well.

And as soon as they realized, well, okay, this needs to turn into the kind of war that Russia has tended to do well in, which is a nutritional, broad-front war where production and manpower are going to win.

So that meant they had to, he didn't want to do it.

They still call it the special military operation.

You go to jail in Russia if you call it a war or an invasion.

But they did a partial mobilization, which was very successful.

And they've also offered tons of money because the sanctions have not worked, which is a real shock.

I mean, this is another technology we need to talk about that was tested and beaten.

Sanctions, which is economic war, work really well against weaker,

kind of one or two resource-based, you know, divided

or sort of not very strong states and smaller ones.

The sanctions have not worked.

When they were first announced, Biden bragged it was going to turn

the ruble to rubble.

And it didn't.

He's got a silver tongue.

How did he lose?

Exactly.

And

what happened instead is that because Biden, and I know he did this without a PhD, you'll never believe this, but he managed to alienate both China and Russia at the same time and make it in China's interest by shooting down balloons and sending his people to Taiwan, make it in their existential interest to back Russia as much as they possibly could.

Otherwise, it was clear China was next.

That was a brilliant move.

You know, you definitely want to put all the enemies together

in your big war plan.

But that's a big technology that was tested and it failed and so we didn't have the levers we thought but as you said it blew the blowback is from the sanctions really blew back on european countries i mean we just saw the afd you know this nazi adjacent uh party um just doubled their score from 2022 before the war started.

And I think they polled AFD voters and they all said because cost of living increases.

Yeah, Mark, do you remember speaking of incredible Biden heard the phrases that like you know if we had a fair media um there'd be no more democratic party would be the brandon party right and everyone would be in it yeah uh putin's price hike

the greatest piece of political messaging that's right i have ever heard yes putin' price hike they pushed that hard and people just they didn't know what they were talking about because He was, they were also talking up this war like it was the greatest moral crusade since World War II.

America was back.

George Packer and the Atlantic, like this war,

we're the good guys and Ukraine embodies all of the great values.

It was like we were finally going to wash away the sins of the last 20 years and the global wars and terror and all the shit we've done all over the world through this just beautiful great war in Ukraine.

And it would be one that would like no Americans would die in.

Finally we get to be the good guys without sacrificing anything or risking anything really on our own behalf.

But like we're fighting Russia, our old adversary.

But like, Mark, on a recent episode, you said that like a lot of

the war in Ukraine has to be kind of understood in like in the in the context of the domestic politics of the United States of America and like this sense of nostalgia, this sense of revenge.

I mean, like, I can hear people already getting angry because like Ukraine's its own country.

It's not that America is not, we're, we're only just bystanders in this.

But, like, could you talk a little bit more about what you mean about how, like, the Ukraine war is like, it has to be understood through this filter of like how the United States sees itself?

Yeah.

Um, but you know, and first of all, I should just say, like, Ukraine has the right to defend itself.

It was invaded, and they have the right to defend itself.

And I've always had that position.

I've, you know, I don't know about you guys.

I mean, I know because we talk about the war, there were times when I was accused of being a NATO shill, and times many times I've been accused of being a Putin shill, and whatever.

It's just a lot of the discourse around it has been really stupid.

So leaving that aside, but we cannot pretend that the reality is for America, Ukraine and its war is a proxy war.

And it works on many levels.

So it's primarily a proxy war to...

weaken a major rival, Russia, which became a headache for, you know, a regional problem for the U.S.

Empire.

And they wanted to kneecap it, hobble it down.

It was very clear when Biden came back into power.

He worked, he and Blinken worked with their counterparts and Sullivan, their counterparts in Zelensky's administration to reverse what Zelensky was voted in to do, which was end the low-level hostility that was going on in the Donbass and come to a final peace deal.

That's why people voted him in with 75% of the vote.

Zelensky flipped within, well, when Biden came to power, he said, here's what we want you to do, and we're going to back back you all the way.

Heat things up with the Russians,

you know,

and we're going to get you a better deal, and we're going to show the Russians they can't boss us around.

So, but you know, Ukraine also was directly involved in the sort of the MAGA versus the center split within this country and the kind of elite factional split.

And this,

you also mentioned how it was a severe miscalculation by Zelensky to

essentially

not hedge his bets on this upcoming presidential election that just happened.

Because now, with Trump, like, I mean, now we get this attitude from Trump and his State Department that Ukraine should really show some gratitude to us.

And by the way, we'll also have all of their oil and rare earth minerals.

First of all, does Ukraine even have any rare earth minerals?

I keep hearing about they're going to give us their minerals.

And I'm just wondering, like, what would a

mean?

I, you you know, who knows if there really is or how, I mean, this whole rare earth thing, it's just like, it's just rocks.

It's more rocks, you know.

Like, do they have oil?

They have some lithium, but the Russians are about to take it.

You know, lithium seems to matter.

They have coking coal, which matters for their metallurgical industry, which is big in Ukraine, but a lot of it is in Russian hands now.

And the coking coal, which is used to process all the metal industry in the rest of Ukraine, that has now fallen into Russian hands, 90% of it.

So,

you know, I don't know, but it's pretty clear that what Trump is doing is punishing Ukraine, punishing the Europeans, but really punishing Ukraine.

It's kind of in a similar way that Putin punished Ukraine to get at

the West.

Trump, well, Trump's punishing Ukraine because he's personally pissed.

I mean, if you go back and look at, well, first in 2016, and we talked about this in in the last show, in the 2016 election, Ukraine is where the Democrats got Russia Gate going.

Right?

Ukraine is where the whole Paul Manafort scandal happened.

It was this nice phone call.

Yeah, and Siri Lishenko came up with the black box, the ledgers.

The phone call is 2019, but even in 2016, Manafort, if you remember,

Trump's campaign manager in 2016, had to resign

because a Democrat Party-aligned and USAID-funded Ukrainian deputy claimed to have proof of these ledgers showing bribe money paid by Yanukovych to Paul Manafort.

And that's why.

So Trump's campaign was supposed to be over in August because his campaign manager had to resign because of ties to Yanukovych and Russia.

And so that's where the problems first start.

And then 2019, they tried to get him on RussiaGate, right?

The Mueller report comes out in 2019.

They can't impeach him over it because there's no collusion, even according to the Mueller report.

So then they go to basically UkraineGate, which is the phone call, where Biden, or Trump calls up Zelensky,

this new president, Jewish comedian in an anti-Semitic country, you know, calls him up and says, you know,

I want help from you to dig up some dirt on Hunter Biden, former Vice President Biden's son, because we know he was up to dirty stuff there.

Hunter Biden, after the Midon Revolution in 2014, Hunter Biden was hired by Burismo, this huge gas company,

to basically lobby his dad

because of criminal charges and potential sanctions that hung over this company.

So Hunter Biden is brought into the board and paid $83,000 a month in a country where the average wage at the time was between $200,000 and 300 a month and uh and you know it just so happens that biden um leans on the president to fire the prosecutor general who is corrupt but the thing that that is the problem is he's pursuing a case against burisma which is where hunter biden is getting his money from and Daddy Biden, when he's vice president, succeeds in getting the prosecutor general thrown out of office.

And that is a scandal and should be a scandal.

But so he, so Trump calls up Zelensky after he becomes president and says, you know, you've got something I want.

I got something you want, which is like a couple hundred million dollars in aid.

Let's do a deal.

And this call is listened into by this guy, Alexander Vinman, who's on the National Security Council, who is Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian.

And he's scandalized by that because it is, you know.

He was already a hero with the Biden people, right?

And in the sense that

true blue officers were heroes in the McCarthy era with

Democrats of the time.

And

they had him already there as someone who could be trusted.

But there is something about this I don't understand, and I probably should, but Zielinski had so much time to hedge his bets, and he never seemed to do that.

Couldn't he have just said, I think they're both fine, upstanding people.

I kind of tried to, but I don't think, i look i don't think the uh sort of i don't know the centrist establishment in america allowed him there was no there was no being good to both sides one side was evil nazi putinist right and the other side is democracy freedom right and and so you're a traitor if you and he did still though he did sort of try to hedge his bets he tried to keep a neutralist position as much as he could in 2019 i'm saying

john when you say you're sort of ventriloquizing of what Zelensky should have said, brought to mind a novel I know you're a big fan of, Charles Bortis' True Grit, where Maddie refers to Woodrow Wilson as the finest Presbyterian gentleman of our generation.

Yeah, you can't even say that about Trump.

What church is he attending now?

With Zelensky's personal calculus, I think one thing that is kind of important here is that, like, you know, obviously, like, Trump is hugely vindictive and like incredibly personally petty, you know, on the scale that

people aren't used to for like a world leader.

But Biden also is too.

Biden is like a

frightening.

Yeah.

Yeah.

At some point he's between Gaza and Ukraine.

His focus was entirely on we've killed a lot of people.

And it was really frightening.

He started to resemble Grandpa from Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

He wasn't very sentient anymore.

But what he did dream of...

He can still bring that hammer down between someone's ears.

The motor function worked, and it's just vindictiveness and blood.

But yeah, that.

And also, I mean, you know,

let's be honest, they were vindictive against Trump.

I mean,

they kind of violated their unwritten rule that you don't arrest a president.

They have their reasons or, you know, charge him with a felony and convict him.

And it's it's not that Trump isn't guilty of all kinds of crimes.

I mean, they got him on kind of the lamest ones, but you know, most presidents in theory should be guilty of tons of crimes.

But it's, it, it like didn't, yeah, Biden is incredibly vindictive.

I agree.

But if you remember, you know, I went back to this.

The impeachment is called, the impeachment papers that were delivered to the Senate, it's called the Trump-Ukraine impeachment papers.

You think he doesn't remember that shit?

You know, like, yes, to him, Ukraine, which then becomes like the cause celeb for the whole liberal, globalist,

you know, whatever's in Marxist establishment in their minds, like to him, Ukraine is the very opposite of that.

Ukraine is the source of all of his problems.

But like a corollary to that is that Russia has become something of a cause of its own on the sort of international right, a sort of like a fashion turn, if you will.

I mean, outside the like, you know, hardcore Nazis fighting Russia in Ukraine,

what do you make of the like global right wing or like the Western right-wing's fascination with Russia?

Do they see Russia as like

a counterweight to what they regard as kind of like the global liberal order that also happens to be a country full of white people?

I think it helps if you don't know, if you can idealize Russia, if you haven't...

don't know Russians and you've never spent time there.

I don't mean that they're bad.

I just mean you can create, you can invent in your mind this, I don't know, perfect white anti-globalist nation if you actually haven't been there and seen, you know, hung out with them.

And they're just people, right?

But so I think I don't know where the hell it comes from, except that, except that

all the people that they hate hate Russia.

So therefore, Russia must be good.

It kind of comes down to that.

Because Russia's, at least like the big cities, I mean, it's, I mean, it's liberal.

It's liberal in the kind of European sense, right?

So it's not into like, it's not woke, but it's liberal.

So it's not like it's, it's, um, I don't know, whatever their Turner Diaries fantasies are.

It's like, it's nothing like that.

And so I'm not sure where they get it from.

It's just that Putin is hated by all the people that they hate.

And you, and you, and correspondingly, Ukraine is

beloved because of the people.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Even though Ukraine has, it's kind of weird i mean it must be tough to be a nazi right because it's like oh the biggest nazi place is ukraine but ukraine and and actually it's tough for ukrainian nazis they um there's a great sub stack uh events in ukraine which just collates all of how ukrainians themselves talk about ukraine and all the telegram channels and all this stuff and um and and a lot of this is also kind of translating bits from like the fourth reich and the votan jugin like all these different ukrainian telegram channels that are huge and cater to the the neo-nazi and nazi adjacent crowd and they're always complaining they're like god damn it we have to suck it up with these eu liberals and all these soros grant feeders here because they're the ones that basically like we need we need these awful globalist liberal marxist lgbtq people to kill russians which is our first thing but god do we want to kill them too we just have to let these

russians it's driving us crazy it's a tough time to be a nazi

well i i this one i want to get into i mean it's like it's a tough time to be in ukraine period i mean it's a nightmare and uh mark you touched on something earlier that i wanted to get to which is the issue of morale morale

among the Ukrainian public.

Because

whenever you see someone

from the West saying, hey, gee, it kind of seems like this war needs to come to an end, you get an angry chorus of people saying, no, like the West has nothing to do with this.

Ukraine's its own country.

They have their own agency.

It is for them to decide how long they want to fight this war, not you.

Which is like, yeah, I definitely agree with that in principle.

But I know the government and like a lot of the Western-backed NGO network in Ukraine, they want to keep this war going.

They want to fight to the last man.

But like this is the same government that has also like banned opposition political parties and elections for like the last couple years.

Like does the Ukrainian public, like how does the people of Ukraine feel about continuing to fight this war?

Because I bring this up because like it's one of these things that like when I come across it on like a social media feed or I become aware of it through a news article, it just freezes my soul with like how frightening and nightmarish it is.

But like just the phenomenon of like the press gangs that are just like going around on the streets pulling pulling people into vans off the street and then they're down to like basically like the crippled and the alcoholics and sending them to these hospitals

if you haven't seen the uh the video of uh the hari krishnam membership being press ganged en masse for the truck

what

oh what god

yes yeah oh my god i mean like but like the this phenomenon of like squeezing like the last dregs out of like the men who are left alive in this country to like send them straight to the front with like almost no training to just die, basically.

I mean, it's a it's it's almost unspeakable to imagine how frightening and not just how terrible that is.

Like,

how do you think the people of Ukraine feel?

Like, did they want this war to keep continuing, like outside their government?

I mean, like, in certain, I mean, I'm sure it's like, it's very divided, but like, what is the appetite to continue this war among Ukrainians themselves?

My best guess is we can't know because

Ukraine is under martial law and people get press ganged or go to prison or something, you know, for speaking up against the war.

So it's hard to know and polls are conducted under those wartime circumstances where it's dangerous to give your opinion.

But even polls, now that...

that sort of um in the last few months that some official ukrainians have come out and said you know we do need to start talking about ceasefire talks or negotiations or peace.

Suddenly, the poll numbers shot up, which says to me that people were waiting for permission to

say that, yes, we want peace and we're willing to give up territory for peace.

But I think a much starker number is the number of desertions in the military.

And I think officially the number was something, this was last year though, about 80,000.

But unofficially, and by this I mean what Ukrainians and military analysts themselves have been able to judge up, the numbers are more like about a quarter of a million desertions.

That is massive, massive.

And that's why they have manpower problems.

Like right now, the Ukrainians don't have huge munitions problems.

They probably will over time if Trump cuts them off.

They have almost parity, it seems like, with artillery.

I just heard people who are near the front lines.

They have

parity with drones, which are increasingly huge part of the war.

The problem is their units are just full of holes because, and the reason there's so much mass desertion is because the commanders treat them like absolute shit.

They rent-seek off them.

You have to pay money not to be put in the front lines where you die.

And if you don't pay money,

you're put in the front lines.

And then all of these units, I mean, there are some better ones that don't do this, and the Nazi ones tend to be better, less corrupt in some ways.

That's a grim thought.

Isn't it?

I know.

What the Nazis do is they shake down other people, but they don't shake their own people down as much, as far as I know.

At least it's an ethos.

Exactly.

So

really,

I think, you know, that is the fact that they can't, that they would, that they know how explosive it would be to mobilize 18 to 25 year olds, not just because there's a serious demographic problem there, and that's true, but because it could cause an explosion.

It could cause a political explosion.

That wouldn't happen if you had people lined up and if you had high morale.

The problem is from the top, from the systemic structure of this government to the leadership, from Zelensky's office down to the...

you know, to the generals, the command, the strategy, this guy, Sirsky, who we appointed as his commander-in-chief, who's a crap general, who's hated by everybody.

He was called like the butcher of Ukraine.

You know, all these Russian generals are called like the butcher of Syria, the butcher of this because they killed other people.

Sirsky's called the butcher of Ukraine because he kills his own people.

He sends his own people to die.

So it's, yeah, he's

absolutely awful, but he's a loyalist.

And, you know, you had like units.

This, this actually even came out in Ukraine's Koprovdo, which is was funded by USAID.

So I don't know how much they're going to be doing, but

like the problem of

like, I don't know, exploitation within military units is so bad.

They've been suppressing these stories.

And the Western media still suppresses it, but the Ukrainian, not as much.

Where you had this one

large formation where the dad was at the top, pulling all the money.

You forced all your grunts to pay you money.

You pay them whatever your salary is, pay you money.

If you want to be further from the lines, you have have to pay more money.

And then his son was like the enforcer.

And there were people who weren't paying up.

And the son wanted to make an example of one of them.

So he crucified him and took a photo of it.

This was published in Ukrainska Pravda of this grunt who wasn't paying up to show it to the other grunts that, you know, this is what's going to happen to you if you don't pay up.

The number of stories about, you know, soldiers left to die, no one will, commanders won't risk

having one of their APCs put in any danger.

So they'd rather just let like five grunts die near the front.

Like I've read story after story of like that.

So if you ask me, like the war is unpopular because, well, the war is broadly unpopular because people do not trust or believe.

uh or have faith in their leaders and the in the people running the show it's not that they are welcoming the russian expansion or or or Putin.

They would rather just be left the hell alone.

I mean, and you add to that, like, another factor, which I learned about through your show, is that, like, this phenomenon of a certain class of people in Ukrainian society, those linked to the sort of Western-backed NGOs, have somehow managed to be exempt from being drafted into the military.

I would imagine that that inspires an unbelievable amount of hatred and anger among people who are, you know, losing family members and loved ones by, you know, every every day.

Absolutely.

The class structure of this war, it's like

an exaggerated version of a class structure of a lot of wars.

But

it really.

The U.S.

Civil War,

the 20 slaves rule in the Confederacy.

If you had 20 slaves, you could be exempt from military service.

And if you had 20 slaves, you were very rich.

I mean,

it's automatic.

So it's equivalent to saying the very rich don't have to serve in the ranks.

And that infuriated

Southern soldiers who were otherwise very, very willing to fight for the Confederacy.

But you know, the other thing I thought has been oddly muffled in the Western press is losses.

I mean, how many have died?

You could not get

a

reliable estimate on this until the New York Times published one toward the end of last year.

And

they say, and it's probably a conservative estimate given the Times biases, that

105,000 soldiers have been dead or mangled.

That is, the word is irretrievably lo irreversibly lost.

And if there are that many who are mangled and not serviceable anymore, there must be hundreds of thousands who are out of combat.

I mean, put it this way, in the Wall Street Journal in the summer of 2023, so this is a month into that disastrous counteroffensive.

And this is one of the kind of contingent points in the war that really sank Ukraine.

This, you know, NATO-advised counteroffensive.

Just go right into those minefields.

I was actually looking back at some of the New York Times Times articles, and they were quoting U.S.

and U.K.

officials who advised the whole strategy for the counteroffensive of walking through the minefields.

They said the success of this depended on the Ukrainians willing to take very high casualties.

It turned out they just weren't up to the task or something like that.

He's like,

there was that lack of gratitude that Trump is talking about.

So, but in the Wall Street Journal article, a month into the counteroffensive, and it was a three-month just bloodbath, they reported that, so that would have been you know a year and three months or four months into the war there were 50 000 ukrainian amputees

and that's a year over a year and a half ago and the war has gotten a lot bloodier since then for ukrainians think about i mean it's it's there

it's so bad man it's so depressing and like in in in the western press in the american press like you know in in now in 2025 like i you still see like op-eds and voices that are saying america u.s credibility is on the line here, or it would be a mistake to abandon Ukraine.

But at the same time, you can kind of tell that they're preparing their readers for a kind of an inevitable defeat.

But like, I'm interested in this idea of U.S.

credibility, because it seems like,

I wonder what you guys make of the Trump administration and their kind of open acknowledgement that the United States is not in the credibility business anymore.

You know, like,

it's like, you know, like, like, we're like the power that we have is considerable, but we don't need to be

moral force that overrides the world.

And like our behavior and our empire is justified by that moral force.

Because frankly, and the experience of Gaza this past year with the Biden administration, it's not worth our time to pretend that we have credibility.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

And the democratic establishment's response to that is like open-mouthed.

Wait a minute.

But they can.

Yeah.

I mean, I think what the Trump people are saying is no one's going to invade us.

So what is the purpose of all this?

Like, they, you know, people, no one's going to invade the U.S.

That's kind of their basic way of looking at it, I think.

I mean, it's not like I wouldn't get our hopes up that, you know, the Trump administration is going to somehow be the anti-imperialist administration, but they do seem less.

No, they just want to return to like an earlier form of imperialism rather than like kind of the post-World War II liberal hegemony.

Yes.

Yeah.

Trump's favorite guy is McKinley.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know.

He's that's his, he keeps talking about him.

I don't know who told him about it, Kinley, but he loves him.

I know.

It's very strange.

But yeah, I think,

you know, there's this amazing quote.

I think it was Dean Acheson who said, well, this is, I don't know, maybe similar prestige.

Prestige is the shadow cast by power.

And

that's a really kind of fascinating, weirdly fascinating quote.

Americans usually don't have interesting quotes like that.

I think John, I said it once on our show.

And John, you said that it was almost Maoist sounding.

Yeah.

Which is kind of cool.

But you know, that assumes that every way you designate credibility is on the line is equal, and it's not equal.

This was a stupid war to put credibility or prestige on the line for.

It was rooted in a lot of really bad assumptions, stupid assumptions, and a lot of really like malevolent assumptions, which is, well, whatever happens, at least we'll kill a lot of Russians and bog them down.

And

so, I, you know, will the war end up?

Like, if Trump ends it, Trump doesn't have his own, put it this way, Trump doesn't have his own prestige and credibility at stake.

Ukraine's victory is not tied up with Trump's prestige, right?

At all.

The very opposite is true.

So his credibility is not going to be hurt.

Although I could easily see what's going to happen is like the centrist liberal establishment in this country they're going to cry stabbed in the back theory at at Trump if and when the Ukraine war is ended on bad terms for Ukraine I don't know if that'll hurt him I don't know if he cares but I think it will I am sort of curious to see if they'll attempt to do like

a sort of replay of what happened to Biden with Afghanistan.

But

there was something I wanted to ask both of you that I was kind of curious about because I've seen a few people ask about this or speculate about this, but that this idea that the Biden team's plan, not really Biden specifically, because I don't think you could yank this concept out of him, but like more the Sullivan and possibly Blinken type people in the administration, that their idea was basically that like...

They were setting things up for Ukraine to just be like a 20-year-long insurgency that would bleed Russia for like a generation.

Right.

The javelins were perfect for that, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That dream has been around DC for a long, long time.

And it is

an ocella corridor dream, a DC dream.

And it meant that not just Biden, but the liberal establishment that people I knew had dinner with occasionally became frightening, really frightening.

Like I, a friend of mine walked out on a a dinner party after they started talking about how delicious it was that

thousands of Russians were dying in this war.

And I think there's some kind of upper-middle-class bubble in the U.S.

that has never really moved on from the Cold War, even though a lot of these people weren't even children when it was going strong.

John, when I interviewed the filmmaker Alex Cox, he brought up the fact that he had read a profile of Jake Sullivan, in which Jake Sullivan said the movie Red Dawn is his favorite movie of all time.

And then he plays punching his fist in the air going, Wolveries!

I mean, that's a great movie, but man, that's right.

I love Red Dawn too, but I'm basically basically the political worldview around it.

Let me, I should not be the national security advisor because I like Red Dawn.

Let's just be absolutely clear.

Yeah, much less I, because

I was deadly, dweebly serious about that.

But as your friend pointed out, Mark, like, well, that's Dolan because he's got this fucked life.

I'd like to become Secretary of Education because I like the movie Equilibrium.

But hey, getting back to your very first question, if you don't mind me bringing this, I'm curious what you guys think because I always listen to your show and I, you know, big fan of you guys.

I'm curious what you think um how you think this war ends what it looks like in the us

um how do you how do you like the the political fallout or like more on the yeah institutional side for like the blob um well maybe both actually yeah um that's a really good question it's a tough i mean yeah i like for

i've been really interested by like specifically like sullivan mcgurk blinken basically all these people who you know how like biden always talks about how he was friends with Scoop Jackson, and that's how he learned to like love Israel and all this bullshit.

And that, like, a lot of his administration was this, like, pantomime of Scoop Jackson and, like, Dean Rusk, and all these, like, Cold War liberals with the, you know, the actual, like, meat and bones of the administration.

It at times seemed like, you know, a kid putting on his dad's suit, but with like, you know, like Dean Achinson's suit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Model UM stuff.

Exactly.

Yes.

And like in the best of, like, not even the best, in like a baseline average world, the result of this would be like a mass demoralization of this line of thinking where they're like, oh my God, everything was going our way.

We fucked everything up.

Everyone hates us.

Everything we tried to do backfired literally everything.

Is this the end of like, you know, liberal intervention is liberal, like liberal institutionalism post-cold war but in actuality um what we actually see every time someone suffers not just a loss but a humiliating loss is they come back 10 times more delusional and insane yeah so i think i think in like the next democratic administration which the current administration seems dead set on saving the life of the democratic party yes no one is trying harder than the trump administration because the democrats aren't trying at all yeah yeah they're they're they're tying off a vein shooting fentanyl into it gun to their head a rude goldberg device putting a

putting like a plastic bag over their head knocking them into the pacific ocean and and like putting stones in their pocket and the republicans are doing everything in their power to you know replace the fentanyl with pure black tar just do anything save them uh it's amazing

I think, yeah, in like five years, it's going to be like,

we need to give a hydrogen bomb to fucking Estonia, you know?

Yeah, to Kayakalis.

Yeah.

Just to, just to add on to like, what my, what, what my impression of this is, just to like, to, to add on to what Felix says, like, I just like, going back to something I said earlier, like, I think they're going to be.

They're going to be stung by it, but they're going to kind of pretend, like they do with everything.

They're just going to kind of pretend that it never happened.

But at the same time, I think that they're actually kind of secretly relieved,

especially in the new kind of like Trump world order, like where I said, where like the U.S.

can be an empire overriding moral or democratic principles, because I think for liberals, especially, the cost of that is just too high for them.

And I'm speaking specifically about the war in Gaza.

Like when the, when

Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine, that wasn't like Hillary Clinton was making public statements like, if Vladimir Putin doesn't want to be called the war criminal, he should not bomb hospitals and schools.

And then like, well, and then we realize, well, you know, like, I mean, they're real, sometimes you have to bomb hospitals and schools.

Sometimes you have to just indiscriminately kill civilians if it's you know to our benefit.

And I think the right, it's easier for the right because they've never claimed to have been on the side of morality, democracy, or virtue of any kind.

Uh, so I think for the

liberal establishment, yeah, like I think for the liberal,

and they're right because, like, the liberal establishment, like it is a scam to them, like, I mean, and it's, it's, the scam is ceasing to work for them.

Yes, and I think that they're they're privately are kind of relieved that they have to stop justifying American power in the terms of like democracy and human rights.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point.

And so they're going to be able to like scale it down a lot, but they're still going to try and find a way.

I mean, it means a lot to that class to be the moral leader.

It means, you know, in that Acela corridor class, it means a lot to them.

to be able to believe that somehow they are better, different and better.

And it doesn't mean that, of course,

the Trump faction has just pure contempt for that.

They think it's a scam and they think it's aimed at them.

And they're right.

You know, in a lot of ways, they're right.

It is aimed at them, too.

And so, you know, they'll find a way when they get back in power because Trump will and the Republicans will screw up so much, they'll force the Democrats against their will to retake power.

And when they do retake power, they'll find a way to be like, we're great again.

Our long nightmare is over.

And the same.

I mean,

I think also it'll be part of their kind of like their continued,

their growing distrust and hatred of like the voting public in America from letting them down.

That's been their main answer that I've seen.

And like, because they're going to be confronted with the reality that when this war does come to an end, like Americans mostly won't care one way or the other because it doesn't really affect them.

And I think like that way,

the average American, be they Republican or Democrat, does not think that like

Ukraine is the most important thing to fight for in the world today.

No, in fact, nor do they want to see their tax dollars going to fund it.

One of the ironies about this is that there's kind of a demarcation in the liberal or mainstream American mind about what people matter.

And

it was very clear that...

Palestinians didn't matter, but you could have figured that out from sampling American opinion anytime during the past few decades.

So it wasn't really a surprise.

But I don't think Slavic lives matter much to those people either or ever have.

And that includes Ukrainian lives.

Like

it made it very easy to say, well, that's a sacrifice we're willing to make.

John, do you remember when during like the sort of first three months of the war when like everything media-wise, marketing-wise, was sort of it was working in sync for the Sullivan, Biden-type people.

And the ad campaign they came out with, where it's like, you know, this is what it would look like if the fucking Eiffel Tower got bombed.

And that was always so insane to me because the subtext is like, well, you might not care now, but like, what if this happened to real Europeans?

What if they were?

How would you feel if the Eiffel Tower got bombed?

To an American audience, they'd be like, sick.

That's awesome.

going

back to going back a little to what Will said I think you're right in that like not just this but like after Gaza that it just it's going to have to be more naked but I also think like I don't know this administration has been incredibly instructive for me because the depth of cultural memory in America and just the Western world in general has been so fucking ravaged by our mode of media consumption that anything that happened six months ago, it might have as it should, it might as well have happened in the 11th century.

Yes, totally.

But the

Trump campaign, this go-around was so interesting to me because it was a billion different things

going in a billion different directions.

But there was a lot of this national conservatism shit

where it's like, you know, Josh Hawley and like, you know, we're, we actually like the CFPP.

We, you know, we were going to go after payday.

We like Lena Kahn.

She's, we would keep her.

Yeah.

And it it was this like pantomime of like like a mid-century conservatism that's never really existed in america but like you know like all all forms of uh american reactions just a past that never really existed and a future that you can't attain melded together and in practice we get super austerity the dumbest program of austerity i've ever seen in america like worse austerity than like maybe Hoover and done it at a more reckless pace.

And like, I, the head of the CFPB is this, like, Christian soy jack guy who follows OnlyFans models on his official account.

And he's, he's hawking a payday lender from his official government account.

And it's just so naked, but also so, so far in the other direction.

Project 2025 guy, Russ Russell Vaughan.

Yes.

And he was like, he was like, previously, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was strangling working class Americans by preventing them from getting these great loans on offer.

That's right.

Yes, I saw that.

That's insane.

And like, and this is a company that got dinged by the Financial Protection Bureau because it was just like, it was just

defrauding people.

It was just shit.

Well, one thing I would have to say, having lived in Kentucky a bit, and I don't know how many people, but like a lot of people from the base that that's drawn from are used to getting scammed and ripped off by people.

Like they're, I don't know, it's a different, it's a different type of getting ripped off.

It's that kind of low rent rip off and scamming that is a lot more endemic to that culture.

And, you know, New York, California, liberals rip you off in other ways and scam you in other ways.

But that kind of low rent scam is like, oh, well, he must be one of us.

Yeah.

But I think we're going to, everyone is going to be like that.

We've talked, we've talked a lot about how like, There are these swings and micro swings in American culture now, how we're, we're currently like in an anti-woke moment that is rapid like quicker than the woke stuff it's predicted it's wearing out its welcome yeah part of the micro swings will be that like each major party will

like the the micro the swing will be part of like the campaign as in you will campaign on like national conservatism uh to the base i guess and then you know, like Project 2025 to

the Evangelical Institutional class, and then, you know, as a moderate to like Pennsylvania voters.

When you're actually in power, it's like Silicon Valley is super austerity with no plan.

For Democrats, it's going to be, we're going to restore honor and dignity.

And I have a lot of normal Democrats in my life.

The line I keep hearing is, we're going to rebuild.

We have before.

Wow.

And, you know, the rank and file believe that in some cases.

And the line from whoever the next Democratic democratic president will be it will be echoes of this like cold war liberal institutionalism but in practice it will be more naked than ever similar to what happened with the trump people and that that will make these cultural and political swings much quicker and much more violent but also will i think diminish participation in them ultimately yeah that's interesting i i think one thing um

yeah that that's one thing a couple things that you know what you're talking about brought up One is that, yeah, here,

when the Ukraine war is wound down, this greatest crusade since 1945, moral crusade for democracy and all this stuff, it'll just be a puff of smoke, except to, you know, a small group of people to whom it did mean everything and they look bad, but they'll move on to something else.

But in Europe, and so that can go away without a lot of damage.

But in Europe, I think it's going to be different.

I think the Europeans have been very suicidal.

I mean, they have sucked, like the war has been actually pretty good for the U.S.

economy, for fossil fuels and for the arms industry and for things that we make.

Actually, it's probably been more of a boon for Europe, especially Germany, when they lost that

30-year-long contract at a fixed price, a fixed amount of cheap Russian gas, and had to go out in the market every day and buy their gas.

It's just like their industry was already suffering from some problems, and it was like the push that kicked them over the ledge and they've been really suffering.

They just committed suicide so that Biden can brag to time that he killed a lot of Russians.

It's absolutely bizarre.

And when this war ends and they realize they've convinced themselves or had the Estonians and the Poles convince them if we don't stop them in like Velika Nova Silka, which it took them two years to take, then the next day they're going to march into Berlin and Paris.

And

when they realize that that's not going to happen, that that didn't happen, that I think could be very destabilizing for the establishment political class.

Well, what do you make of these calls that I've been seeing in Europe to like have the EU formed their own united military to like because I mean you mentioned at the beginning that like when a push comes to shove, they're like, Are you sending peacekeepers to Ukraine?

They're like, Nope, nope, nope.

But you're right, they're still, they think the Russian bear is going to overtake them.

What do you make of these calls to like have a unified EU military?

I think John and I were Russia.

Yeah, talk like John, like, I mean, you don't just then say, okay, what are they going to have?

Like, those Ukrainian vans going around throwing French kids in cars.

First of all, do they think that?

Do they think that?

Exactly.

And I don't think they do.

I think

they're just flat out lying.

They're making up this threat.

If Russia can't take Kyiv, it can't take Berlin.

I mean, that's pretty clear.

So I think this has been a chance for the European governing class almost to detach itself purposely from

the people.

And it's expressed a kind of hate for the people, much like the United States governing class has in the past couple of years.

They wanted to be distinguished from this in that they still feel the enthusiasm for...

I don't know what you'd call it, like conference politics

that everybody else got really sick of long ago yeah i i um i just think they're gonna look at the costs

and and the time you can't just put together an eu army that is in any way a threat like that could do anything but like i don't know maybe move um goods to the ukrainians you know maybe that's what they plan to do but they're still vulnerable but you can't just create an army and have them up and running in a couple months like john said you know recently it's not like the 18th century militias or something.

Like, it takes, you have to create institutions, and

it takes a long time.

Yeah, just coming up with shell production for the basic artillery shells that are the main weapon of the war in the trenches.

They've had to revive factories in Copenhagen that produced shells long, long ago, like 50 years ago.

And they're back in business, but you know,

it's going to last for a few years, maybe.

And then what becomes of those factories?

It's not really clear that it's going to do anybody any good.

They tried to get the entire EU, or at least the EU above a certain income level, like the main players, on the same multi-role, like 4.5th generation fighter jet, the Eurofighter Typhoon.

And it almost worked but then fr of course there was a falling out with france and they made their own plane out of spite but they're gonna unify like yeah they're gonna make a unitary military like okay yeah no i mean if they look i do think this this russia's invasion did stir up some deep European fears and other feelings, not very pleasant, you know, old European feelings that were supposed to have been put away after 1945 in a lot of places.

But

I think there's, I don't think they're like kind of inventing this fear.

I think, at least with the governing classes,

the fear, like they've whipped each other up into a frenzy and they also, you know, police each other and make sure they're all whipped up into a frenzy at all times.

Otherwise, like you're you're maybe have the Russian disease.

But they don't really believe it because if they really believed it, if anybody really believed that today, you know, Bakhmut, tomorrow, Berlin, we would have gotten involved directly in the war.

And the war has been going badly for Ukraine since January, February 2023.

So two years now, very badly.

And if you really thought, you know, you would have done like what the Allies did after Poland was invaded.

You would say, okay, I'm putting actual skin in the game.

And we keep saying over and over, we will not put like physical skin in this game.

We'll help the Ukrainians put all their skin in the game, but we're not going to do it.

And that's because I think, you know, ultimately they know, but certainly their populations know, that Europe is not threatened.

Russia is not going to invade them.

And I think that that is going to cause a real,

because the Europeans have actually sacrificed, particularly Western Europeans have sacrificed their beloved, you know,

high standards of living to a certain degree.

I think it's going to really cause another level

problems for the kind of establishment political parties and media and that whole class.

Like it's gonna,

I would think it'd be problematic for them.

One of the last things I wanted to ask you about is like the last group of people that I think are going to be negatively affected by the end of this war is the rise of this class of like

what they refer to themselves as SIGINT analysts or open SIGINT analysts.

Really, a collection of wannabe war nerds who have become all experts on armed conflict.

And of course, they're all, you know, extremely pro-NATO and anti-Russia.

I mean, and they were really feeling themselves for like the last couple of years.

But

one by one,

they've sort of clammed up and moved on because, you know, they're not actually fighting this war.

They're just posting.

But like, what do you make of the phenomenon of these kind of like, you know, the classic war nerd type, the armchair signals analyst and their role in this conflict?

The open source intelligence.

Open SIGINT.

Yeah.

A lot of them, a a lot of their funding, weirdly, a lot of them went quiet when the USAID money got pulled.

But that whole phenomenon kind of goes back to Bellingcat.

Like they're the ones that popularized that.

And then, of course, it turned out Bellingcat gets all this money from the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Endowment for

the Contras, whatever they really are.

And

they're just such an awful group.

And, you know, one of the things, again, that really kind of showed who these people really were was

as soon as the war, Israel's war in Gaza started, they all, all of them sided.

It's like those accounts like Nexta and,

you know, those different like Polish right-wing run accounts.

They all sided with Visigrad.

Visigrad 20.

Yeah, Visigrad 20, exactly.

My favorite account.

Yeah, these huge, great account.

You know, yeah, they all were just, you know, know the terrorists killed the terrorists and you know um covering up for israel's crimes and and calling like protesters in the west against the genocide calling them hamas terrorists all these osint accounts were just like violently anti anti-palestine and pro-Israel so that I really they lost because you know no matter what that war did make

it made a lot of liberals queasy in one way or another.

So that kind of hurt their credibility.

But yeah, their value, I think, more than anything

was

in the first year of the war, year and a half, in both massively amplifying and exaggerating how poorly things were going for Russia and how well great it was going for Ukraine.

And then more importantly, perhaps, like NAFO,

in suppressing anybody who went out of line who was not completely...

Yeah, I think that's a really good point that it was a lot like a church congregation.

And now it's like a church congregation whose second coming didn't quite happen.

But for a long time there,

they were policing the congregation for signs of doubt.

And you could pay pretty heavily in online terms if you expressed any of that doubt.

But the interesting thing to me is, and Mark and I were talking about this before,

there's no original, as far as I know, Western

free inquiry about some of the facts of the war that are being fiercely, let's say fiercely downplayed, downplayed by an elephant's foot.

Like,

what are Ukrainian casualties?

Yeah.

I mean,

there are sources in the Russian sphere that try to cover that, but I haven't heard any brave Western inquiries about that.

Yeah, all these OSINT accounts, and somehow they can't come up with casualty figures because that whole,

what it is, is propaganda, obviously.

It's propaganda to give people the immediate impression that

actually

neutral citizen journalists and citizen

open source intelligence followers and that they're giving us unbiased views, but none of them, nobody is trying to give us numbers on casualties.

And I saw even Tom Massey, you know, that sort of Ron Paulish Republican guy, he's like, he's the only person in Congress who's actually openly complained about it.

He said even in their intelligence meetings, they're given prop, he said, we're given just propaganda.

on casualties.

Like the Congress Intelligence Committee, they will not give us casualty figures.

And he kept complaining openly about this over and over.

You know, so they're keeping it not just from us.

And this is our media.

I mean, we have so much media resources geared towards that war, towards finding out how bad things are going for Russia, how many, how the ruble is going to turn into rubble and all their problems there, and how many have died.

I mean, we...

we want to say it's close like to half a million or something.

And at least we want people to believe that.

I don't believe that, but it has been bad.

But they will not tell us the casualty figures.

And this is a huge, like in three years,

this is supposed to be a war about freedom versus authoritarianism, freedom of press versus censorship, democracy versus dictatorship.

And our own press, and the, you know, the Ukrainians will talk about it some, but we're the ones who, like, our press is deliberately keeping from us by deliberately not inquiring into this, what are the casualty figures?

And, you know, we can guess why, why, because it's going to be a bummer.

It's going to be a bummer for all of us.

And it's going to make it clear that the war has gone badly.

And it's going to disgust people, too.

And the job, I think, of the media and the Osenbros and all this has been to keep up morale in the home front where all the money and armaments come from

and keep that flowing to the Ukrainians.

Because the Ukrainians, you can just press gang.

You can just grab them off the street and throw them, you know, in a van, beat them up and throw them in the front.

But you can't do it with the Westerners, what you have to do is lie to us.

Mark Ames and John Dolan, I think we should leave it there for today.

But I want to thank you both for joining us again on the program.

And I would encourage all our listeners to check out Radio Warner if you haven't done so already, available on Patreon.

We'll have a link in the show description.

Once again, Mark and John, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, guys.

Always a pleasure.

Really appreciate it.

I just have

a bit of something to announce at the end of the show today.

If you're in New York City on March 2nd, Sunday, March 2nd, this is coming up, I will be part of a fundraising party for Zoran from Bayer at

the club 101 on Avenue A.

Hesse and I will be doing a live Oscars watch party on Sunday night.

So we'll have a link to tickets for that if you'd like to come out and have some fun and donate money to Z for Zoran, Z for NYC.

All right.

Until next time, everybody.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.