Overtime – Episode #633: Konstantin Kisin, Michael Moynihan

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Okay, here we are on CNN, and this is our final.

He's co-host of the fifth column podcast, Michael Monahan.

He's co-host of the YouTube show and podcast, Turgonometer, and the author of An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West, Konstantin Kissin.

All right, thank you, gentlemen.

Elon has had to go and save the world, and I think he will.

Okay, here are the questions.

Will Russia's bombing of Ukraine's capital city prompt prompt a counterfeit?

Oh, yeah.

I saw that on the news today.

Horrible.

Saw it on CNN.

We'll start on light, are we?

Yeah, prompt a counter-offensive supported by Western allies.

No, the counter-offensive is coming anyway.

It's nothing to do with the bombing.

The Ukrainians have been planning this for a long time.

They've been waiting for what they call Rasputice in that part of the world, which is mud season, to be over, and also training up their forces with Western weapons, tanks, etc.

So the counter-offensive is coming.

The actual these bombings of the civilians, they're not, all they're doing is strengthening the resolve of the Ukrainians more than anything else, other than of course killing and maiming innocent people.

So the counter-offensive is coming, but it's not because of that.

How does this war end?

Well, I've said from day one that I think the likely outcome is that Ukraine will make some territorial concessions.

which will be Crimea and parts of the Donbass.

And likely that will be in exchange for what Ukraine actually needs, which is long-term security.

And in my opinion, there's no other way of providing it other than either NATO membership or UN peacekeepers on the border.

But I don't think that's going to happen.

So most likely, Ukraine has a successful counteroffensive, pushes Russia as far away as it can, and then makes a settlement that means that what happened in 2014, remember we talked about it earlier when Crimea and parts of the Donbass were first taken, that can never happen again because Ukraine is now part of NATO and is therefore under the umbrella of that organization.

But you see Putin ever making concessions?

I mean, we talk a lot in this country about how long Biden's going to last.

I keep reading that he's sick, Putin.

Is that just a rumor?

Do you have relatives in Russia?

I have relatives in both countries, but nobody really knows.

I mean, I don't know if you know this, they take his poo in a bag and it's kept separate from it.

No one can analyze it.

So the information isn't getting out, let's put it that way.

How do you know that?

So you're saying they take the Putin poo and put it in.

They keep it separate.

When he goes abroad, they keep a hold of it.

Because

how could everybody get it?

It goes down the toilet.

Maybe he shits in a bag.

Maybe that's what we're discovering right now.

On CNN, you can't say bad words.

You heard it here first.

It's not live there, is it?

No, but it's not edited either.

Oh, I forgot.

Okay.

This is new, the CNN thing.

I don't know.

But on the Putin thing,

the sickness we saw in those files that were leaked by that 11-year-old kid in the National Guard in Massachusetts was the intelligence

analysts say that he has cancer and his leg shakes all the time.

And as far as concessions, I mean, the only way that most Ukrainians see this, and you know this from the polling of Ukrainians, they don't want to give up any territory.

Of course.

And the way that this ends is Russia loses.

And he does pull out.

You see that what happened in Kiev?

I mean, they tried at the very beginning of this war to encircle Kiev and cut off the head of the snake, what they thought, and they were routed by an army that at that point didn't even have all the Western weapons that they have now.

And these columns of tanks coming in and being picked off.

But plainly, he could bomb Kiev much more than he has.

That's what we were seeing on the news today.

Well, you know, just apartment build.

It's just pointless.

Well, not pointless if you're a terrorist, because that's...

Militarily pointless, yeah.

Militarily pointless, except for the long-range goal of winning the war and making people just say, uncle.

And that seems to be.

It's terror bombing.

I mean,

the entire point of that.

I mean, look, you know criticize it if you will I mean what we did in Germany in 1943, 44 and 45 was to bomb and say we were going to break, publicly said this, Bomber Harris said we're going to break their spirit and that's something that ended here and now in 1945 the Russians are doing this today.

But that isn't what's happening on the ground.

I remember on the first day of the war I called up one of my friends in Kiev and I said to him, listen, I've talked to some people, you need to get out.

And he said to me, I still remember this conversation, he said, this is different to 2014.

We are not, this is our country.

We're not leaving.

And what is happening in Ukraine now with these bombings, it's only strengthening their resolve.

Well, they're brave people.

They are.

Incredible.

All right, what does the panel think of a recent poll that puts Democratic presidential challenger R.F.K.

Jr., yes, if you hadn't gotten the news, Robert Kennedy Jr., the son of Robert Kennedy, our former Attorney General,

at 19%?

I saw that today, too.

Can he hope to put,

I must say, I'm surprised that right off the bat, he's polling at 19%.

Kennedy name helps.

Yeah.

19%.

Kennedy names.

But another poll at him at 17%.

So they seem to be in line in that, you know, Marianne Williamson is at 9%.

So you have a chunk of people, and when you talked about this in the main show, this 70% of

Americans don't want Joe Biden to run again, 50% of Democrats.

There are people looking for alternatives, and I really wish it wasn't Robert Kennedy.

But the DNC right now is lining up the troops and going to prevent him from doing any damage.

They're not going to have debates.

There's going to be no primary debates.

He's just going to be pushed aside.

If he's running as a Democrat, if he decides to then run as a third-party candidate, you have a parot situation.

And why don't you like him?

Why don't I...

I mean, you said you wish it wasn't him.

Why?

Yeah, I wish it wasn't him for a variety of reasons.

I mean, you know, Kennedy said something in 2013 that, you know, frequent guest on the show, Matt Welsh, just tweeted about, was, you know, he thinks that, you know, climate deniers should be put in jail.

There should be regulations against people denying climate change his past is checkered with this stuff it's not just the vax stuff I don't get into those issues I don't know a ton about it that's not my area of expertise at all you know he said too many nice things about Hugo Chavez in Venezuela as his brother Joe has too it's just a very weird and he's becoming more conspiratorial too the sort of they are censoring me all the time.

I just don't, you're a Kennedy.

Your last book sold 2 million copies.

No one's censoring you.

So I don't like that kind of instinct.

It's not my kind of right,

but they won't treat what he is saying about COVID with

but they should.

Yes,

like many people who've written about COVID, including the U.S.

government, they got a lot wrong.

He might be getting stuff wrong.

Sure.

But he's not a nut.

Yeah, I mean,

he's not a nut, and he's not a nut about COVID either, or vaccines.

The thing about this is that, you know, it's hard to tell these days.

It's hard to tell because you could get kicked off of Facebook, of YouTube, of all this stuff for saying that this came from a lab in Wuhan, not from a wet market in Wuhan, but the lab that did bad viruses that was down the street.

That peak got people, like lots of people, not just like one errant person that was kicked off once.

No, this was very, very common.

That was all these things that you couldn't say then, which are now conventional medicine.

What we know about medicine is always changing on a day-to-day basis.

I mean, just last year, they got metabolism wrong.

They came out with this big report that said, we'd always thought it was slowed down in age, and it doesn't slow in age.

That's kind of a basic part of our health.

And you can read stories like that almost year to year.

They also got depression wrong.

Oh, it wasn't the serotonin.

Okay, I'm not saying it's corrupt, although there is quite a bit of that too.

Somehow when it's the Sackler family with the opioids, it's like, oh, see, corporations and pharmaceutical companies, but when it's COVID, oh no, they must have everything on the up and up.

Okay, but say it's not mostly that.

They were trying and they did a great thing.

They came up with the vaccine, which many people, most people needed, and it saved millions of lives.

That's true, too.

Robert Kennedy may not agree with that, but

your point is entirely correct, Bill, which is I think a lot of people have forgotten how we got to be successful in the West.

And part of that is freedom of speech and freedom of research, right?

Especially in science.

In science, right.

Especially in medicine.

We need people

to be able to talk about the facts.

And when you have some kid who works for Twitter in the Philippines censoring a Nobel Prize-winning scientist in his speaking about his era of expertise, I think we've lost the plot.

Right.

And one final point on this is the number of people that are wearing t-shirts that said, I believe in science.

Science became this thing that was the conventional wisdom coming from the government, from the CDC.

I believe in that.

That's what they're talking about.

You cannot believe in science.

Science is a process.

Science is always changing.

And people thought I could believe in science.

They thought it never moved, and they were surprised when it moved.

And that's the thing.

The left, the far-paranoid COVID left, talks about science like it's religion.

The science, yes,

while they're doing things like wearing masks alone outside.

Yes, the science.

What does the panel think of Steven Spielberg saying he regretted replacing guns with walkie?

Oh, yes, in the walkie-togies in E.T., yeah.

He re-edited E.T.

and now he's regretting that.

And I'm so glad he is.

He's saying movies were made made of a certain time.

They're all going to look weird in the future in some way.

Leave them as they are.

I think it's terrific.

Amen.

Yeah.

I mean the really scary thing is that classic books, and I think this is what precipitated his comment on this, was Roal Dahl, who was a psycho and an anti-Semite, but a good children's book author.

And he has some pretty negative portrayals of people.

It's not the juice.

He doesn't talk about in the kids' book.

And they changed the most banal thing.

Fat.

You're literally.

You can't say fat.

Yeah.

I don't know.

What did they change it to?

It was like nicely shapely.

I don't know.

It wasn't.

Body positive, is what they probably changed it to.

Yeah,

this kind of thing is insane, but they're actually changing books, and that is literally Orwellian, not the good use of the word Orwellian.

We got to make way for commercials.

We're here on CNN.

Thank you again.

We'll see you next week.

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