Pathological Gigantism and the Demise of the West | Senator Mike Lee | EP 346

Should accept yourself just the way you are. What does that say about who I should become? Is that just now off the table because I'm already good enough in every way? So am I done or something? Get the hell up! Get your act together! Adopt some responsibility! Put your life together! Develop a vision! Unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within. Be a force for good in the world, and that'll be the adventure of your life.

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We are getting dragged into the bandsaw like one inch of cloth at a time, right? And there's movements forward incrementally towards the abyss with the continued provision of more and more sophisticated weaponry to the Ukrainians. We're spending money like a drunken sailor, and facilitating an endless degree of criminal enterprise, and also funneling money into the military-industrial complex at a heretofore unprecedented rate. We have no vision for victory that's laid out, that's realistic in any real sense. And we also have no vision for what might constitute peace. It's hard for me to see how this doesn't culminate in at least a significant regional war and, heaven forbid, a World War. That's why we've got to turn this around.

As far as why it's happening, the only thing I can speculate here is that for whatever reason, it's popular. It's popular with the American people. Many see it as a conflict between good and evil. The problem with this narrative, this story that allows the effort to be so popular, as popular as it has been so far, is that I don't think the Americans are being told the whole story. I don't think they're being adequately advised as to the risks.

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Hello everyone, I have the pleasure today of speaking with Senator Mike Lee from Utah. Mike and I have spoken before on my podcast. We've got to know each other a little bit as a consequence of being involved in various endeavors, and I thought he would be an excellent person to help me think through, well, what I'm interested in, not least today, is how to understand the situation in relationship to Russia and Ukraine because I don't understand it.

So Mike, I'm going to ask you some questions about that situation. What's been disturbing me most particularly, I would say, is that I don't understand what it is that the West is aiming at precisely. You know, when you're aiming at victory—because that's hypothetically the aim here—you need to specify what a victory would look like. And so I've been trying to game that in my imagination. It's like if we got what we wanted, whatever that might be, what would that look like in any realistic sense?

And so what I see being emitted from the Biden administration, and for the people who are beating the pro-war drum hard—and that would include my idiot government in Canada—is a very banal form of dimwit flag waving, which is: "Well, the Ukrainians are great Democrats, and we're supporting democracy, and we're on the side of freedom." And I heard a fair bit of that in about Afghanistan, and I heard a fair bit about that relationship to Iraq, and it isn't obvious to me that that worked out particularly well. And I don't buy the shallow moralizing flag waving.

And Ukraine is this country that is so corrupt that it's almost beyond comprehension, and so the idea that there's an easy pathway to democracy there is utterly preposterous. Which isn't to say that no, I'm without my qualms, let's say, on the Russian side. Russia's being a very troublesome country for a good 150 years, and probably before that. And so it's not like the situation is straightforward. But here's what I've been walking through in my imagination, and you can help me maybe clarify where my thinking is inappropriate.

So the hawks that I've talked to on the American side have basically laid out the most reasonable case for war for me, I suppose, and have claimed, for example, that it's in our best interest in the West to keep Russia relatively weak militarily to minimize the threat they might pose now and in the future. And this war gives us an opportunity to do just that: to cull their conventional forces and to keep Russia back on its heels, which is a different proposition than expanding democracy in Ukraine. And so I have some problems with that approach conceptually because I think that's what the Allies did to Germany after World War I. We attempted to weaken it and then to keep it weak, and that was not a good idea.

And you know, history doesn't repeat but it rhymes, as they say. And so I think it's dangerous to weaken Russia, partly because Russia has natural resources that we actually need, especially natural gas, which produces the ammonia that feeds four billion people. And they produce ammonia, and they produce food—high-quality wheat in particular. And so a devastated Russia doesn't seem to me necessarily in the long-term interests of either the West or the planet.

And then on the alternative side, well, let's say Putin is deposed because he loses this war in a conventional sense, and a new leader emerges. The probability, as far as I'm concerned, that we'll get a new leader in Russia in the midst of chaos who's better than Putin is virtually zero, given the historical precedence. And then if we reduce Russia to something like a state of chaos—which also could happen—and the country fragments, in the worst-case scenario, then we have a situation where we have a fragmented Russia with 25,000 nuclear weapons floating around, let's say, and that also seems like a rather dismal outcome. So like what the hell is our plan for victory here, as far as you're concerned?

Look, I think starting out, at least from the U.S. perspective, the idea was first to deter Putin from invading. Once he invaded, the idea was to weaken him and cause him to decide relatively quickly that it wasn't worth the effort and to retreat with good reason. People in the United States and in many other countries want to make sure that we stop Vladimir Putin. He's a bad guy. He's someone who has ambitions that aren't good, and so everyone sees in him this bad person, which he is, who could do a whole lot of bad things.

The problem is I think we're long past the moment where what we're doing is going to do anything to stop him from aggressing. If anything, we've made it worse; we've driven him into the arms of China. That loving embrace, that alliance that has resulted from it economically, with energy in many respects—ultimately, I think militarily—that could create a much bigger problem than existed prior to the beginning of this war. And so look, he is a bad guy. I wish he would go away, but I'm not sure that the U.S. involvement in it is necessarily going to endure to the benefit of the American people.

And I think we've lost sight of that precisely because of the factor you described. I don't think there is a coherent, cogent game plan and end result of peace that we're trying to get out, nor do I think that what we've done so far has brought us peace. Quite the contrary, it's continued the effort.

Okay, so you brought up the China argument. So here's a way of conceptualizing that. I mean, China has its problems to say the least. They're facing a demographic collapse. Their real estate market is—to call it shaky is to say almost nothing. They're actually facing, by Chinese standards, quite the rebellion on the home front. I mean, things don't look that bright for the Chinese Communist Party. And having them ally with Russia, I would say, seems to be something that could be in their favor economically because it also gives them access to the immense resources of Russia.

And if you think China is a good ally of the West, then you've got another thing coming. Anything that's done to help them survive in their current form—the CCP in particular, the Chinese Communist Party—is definitely not in our best interests. So having Russia establish an alliance with China that helps China limp along into the future, I mean, that's a country that supports North Korea, which is about all you need to say about the Chinese Communist Party. And so that seems like a dim-witted strategy in the long run, especially because China is at least as much of a threat now—it's more of a threat in any reasonable sense than Russia should be. I mean, talk about systems out of alignment. We're not allied very well with the Russians philosophically, let's say, but we are absolutely not aligned with the Chinese.

So that seems like a preposterous endeavor. And it's an uneasy alliance between the Chinese and the Russians. It's not a natural alliance. We really have to force both the Chinese and the Russians into a corner in some real sense in order for them to be able to hammer out something approximating an agreement. So that seems rather dim-witted.

So, and then let's also talk about the cost of war. So first of all, how much money do you think the U.S. has poured into Ukraine so far? 113 billion dollars to date. 113 billion dollars is an enormous sum of money. This represents a sum of money that's, I think, between 20 and 25 times what Ukraine typically spends on defense in a typical year. This is a sum of money roughly double—nearly double—of what Russia spends on defense in a typical two-year period.

And I believe it's even 30-40 percent larger than what Russia spent on defense last year, given that, you know, they had a significant war effort going on. What concerns me there, Jordan, is that we're getting into this with our funding and with our contribution of weapons. If we're going to get involved through what could barely be described by some, or perceived by some, as a proxy war, we need to understand what our objective is.

And if the United States—well, we're supposed to have a declaration of war before we get involved in that. This becomes especially important, especially important when you're dealing with a near-peer nuclear-armed geopolitical adversary. These guys have got nukes, and to say they've got nukes is a vast understatement. They've got a lot of nukes, and so we've got to be really, really careful when approaching that monster, and I don't think we're showing caution in that regard.

Okay, so a couple of things there. The first thing, we might want to make these numbers reasonable or realistic for people. So 113 billion dollars is 1,200 dollars per full-person family in the U.S. So that's what every family in the U.S. is now spending 100 a month on the Ukraine war. Now, now, now, there's an additional problem with that too because Ukraine, by everyone's standards—including such reliable sources, let's say the New York Times—everyone knew perfectly well before we started flag waving how corrupt Ukraine was.

And now, 113 billion dollars has been dumped into that economy with what I presume has been an extraordinarily lack—extraordinary lack of oversight. And so my sense is strong that God only knows what proportion of that money has been funneled into truly reprehensible criminal enterprises. And if you think it's none of it, then you're naive beyond comprehension. And so, and when my—when the government spends money like a drunken sailor, which is what it's doing in Ukraine, you can be bloody sure that most of that money isn't ending up where it's supposed to.

It certainly didn't on the COVID front, for example. I think 40 percent of COVID government claims for subsidy were fraudulent—something like 40 percent. And if it's only 40 percent of what we're spending in Ukraine that's going to criminals, that would be a bloody miracle. It's probably more like 95-5 percent. And then there's kickbacks to what Eisenhower described as the military-industrial complex, which he warned about back in, what, 1960? Was it '63? Something like that? A little earlier, pointing out—close, something late '50s, early '60s—pointing out that that emergent collusion at the upper echelons between, let's say, defense contractors and government was what he believed would pose the most signal threat to the stability of, well, American democracy certainly, but also the world in the decades moving forward.

And so some people are making an awful lot of money off this war and that they might consider that extraordinarily advantageous in the short term, but we're facilitating criminal enterprises on a scale pretty much unheard of in the past, and we have no idea exactly what our money is being spent on in relationship to the furtherance of the military-industrial complex. And so that's also a negative consequence of the war that this false, you know, democracy flag waving masks, and that strikes me as additionally naive over and above the fact that we're flirting with—like, as far as I'm concerned, we're already in World War III.

The issue is how far we're going to take it. The notion that this is a war between Russia and Ukraine—it's just—is there anybody who believes that? And then you also pointed out something that people should be jumping up and down and screaming about in the United States, which is that, well, there's no declaration of war here. And so—

But you're in a war! And so how the hell did that happen? Well, we're pretending it's not a war. Well, I don't know if that's sufficient reason to bypass the constitutionally mandated requirement that war is declared by Congress. Yes, it's one of the things that changed in our form of government after we left the United Kingdom. One of the things that we made sure was that the people's elected representatives in Congress, and not the chief executive, would have the power to take us to war.

Now, to be clear, Congress did appropriate this money, so it's not as if Congress were bypassed in deciding to send money to Ukraine. My point is not that it happened entirely by the executive. It is rather that what we're doing is tantamount to war. It has many of the same consequences as war. And so I fear that we're not adequately debating and discussing, as Congress funds these endeavors, the fact that this puts us in a de facto position of war.

And then to your point about the corruption, the possibility of waste, fraud, abuse, and other corrupt developments with this money—last weekend Zelensky was quoted—I don't speak Ukrainian, so I'm relying on interpreters—but he was quoted as suggesting it was somehow dangerous for Americans to question how that 113 billion dollars was being spent in Ukraine. That that's dangerous? Well, I think that suggestion that it's dangerous is itself beyond dangerous, and we ought to be very, very leery of anybody who describes it that way.

Okay, so when this money is spent, we're talking about a tremendous amount of money. What exactly—you know, it's not like there's bales of money being sent on aircraft transport to Ukraine. The money is being spent on goods, services, military equipment. Who exactly are the recipients of this money? Like, it's not the brave Ukrainian people. It's not like there are Americans on the ground who are handing out dollar bills to starving Ukrainians in the streets, right? Which is, I suppose, the naive image of the same kind of flag waving, pro-democracy idiocy that we're seeing the propagandists generate.

Where do you think this money is going, and does anyone know?

Yeah, so it's outlined in the legislation. We don't know the particulars of exactly where it's going, but the generalities of it are laid out in the three or four pieces of legislation that have been passed in order to keep the funding going. In some instances, the money goes to the U.S. military in order to acquire weapons so that they can send weapons over to Ukraine, and in other instances it goes to other U.S. agencies that are providing some form of relief or another to the Ukrainian people. It's spread out in myriad ways, and I think some of those expenditures are more defensible than others, but in the final analysis, it is a huge sum of money, and that's money—if it has the ability to be corrupted—

Even where it's not cash, in some instances they're getting money; in other instances, they're getting material. But regardless, that material has a value attached to it, and so that's not to suggest there's no corruption possible there.

Right, right. So if you had to make a strong case for the kind of NATO involvement—because it's obviously not just the U.S., although the U.S. is the primary mover here, probably followed by the UK, I would say that's how it appears to me—if you had to make a strong case for what NATO is doing, what would the case be? I mean, we talked about the necessity of deterring Russian aggression, especially in relationship to Ukraine.

It's—do you believe that it's reasonable to assume that Russia presents a credible threat to the integrity of the NATO alliance or the West outside this specific case of Ukraine? And I mean, we should point out that Ukraine and Russia have been integrally tied together for the entire history of both countries. There's less separation there than there is between Canada and the U.S., and we're two countries that are very tightly tied together.

So the relationship between Russia and Ukraine is not of thoroughly independent sovereign states with an immense history of political and cultural difference. So the involvement of Russia in Ukraine is unbelievably complex and vice versa. But we might say, well, Russia is an expansionist state in the style of the Soviet Union and therefore poses a potential threat to the integrity of Eastern and Western Europe. And of course, the Russians made all sorts of incursions into Eastern Europe, so there's some historical precedent for that. But—and so we could say, well, you could make a case for keeping that threat at bay. Is there another case that can be made for our involvement in this war?

Yeah, so look, the mindset of the objectives of NATO here—there has been a legitimate viewpoint that suggests that if Putin moves into Ukraine, if he takes over some or eventually all of Ukraine, or even just part of it, that this could reflect the fact that he's hell-bent somehow on expansionist ambitions and that that expansionist ambition is going to spill over into other NATO countries. So Ukraine isn't in NATO, but it is, as some describe it, NATO adjacent. And so there is concern that this could spill over into those countries. I get that, and I understand that we have an obligation as the United States to defend our NATO allies and protect them.

The problem with that is it's at once very speculative. We don't know that to be the case, and as you point out, there is a lot more history between Russia and Ukraine, especially parts of Ukraine—a lot more of a cultural, historical connection in some cases, a linguistic connection between Russia and Ukraine than there is a lot of these other countries. But secondly, we could just as easily, it seems to me, be bringing about the very thing we're trying to avoid.

Now, I don't count myself as an expert in this area by any means; I'm just trying to outline the two viewpoints because the other viewpoint is also valid. Which is that, if we get involved in this, if we fund a proxy war against that same adversary, Russia, we could be inviting more of the same, especially if, as I suspect, I don't know that the United States has the intestinal fortitude to go into a full-blown war with Russia. And if it doesn't, then what happens? Then what have we done? Have we provoked Russia to become even more expansionist?

Could that undermine the security of our NATO allies even more than just staying out altogether would have done? I don't know the answer to these questions, but the fact that they're not being seriously asked and debated and discussed in the halls of Congress is deeply troubling to me, as is that whenever anybody—including me—raises questions like this, we're immediately tagged on Twitter, for example, as Putin lovers, which is absurd and preposterous. I have a distinct loathing for the man; I think he's awful.

But it's because he's awful, not in spite of it, that I've got real concerns about our involvement here. I'm not sure it's going to do anything like what those advocating it believe it will do for us or our allies, for that matter.

So Putin, as well, this is an additional complication. Putin is actually quite popular among Russians, as far as anybody can tell. And part of the reason for that—and I've read a lot of his speeches over the last 10 years trying to understand how he thinks—because my sense of people generally is that they do what they say they're going to do. It's very hard to generate a facade of continual lies for decades, to say one thing publicly and even privately in speeches, and then to go off and conjure up an entirely new theory of the world and operate within those confines.

Putin is popular partly because he's been presenting this war against Ukraine as a defense of the traditional values, not only of Russia but also of the West. And because Putin is no fan of, let's say, the woke idiocy that grips the West—and that's a sentiment that's echoed quite profoundly among the Eastern Europeans who would otherwise be our staunch allies, and who generally are. And so that's the drum he's been able to beat to keep himself popular in Russia.

You can be cynical and say that that's merely maneuvering, propagandistic maneuvering on Putin's part. But I think the simpler explanation is that he actually believes that the West have become untrustworthy on that front, and aren't—and he isn't interested in the incursion of that kind of ideology into the Russian sphere.

So I'm not exactly sure what to make of that. And then the notion that we're enabling the very conflict that we're trying to avoid brings me back to the problem I had at the beginning of our discussion, which is I can't figure out what the hell constitutes our victory here. It's like even if we do win, what in the world does that mean? We want a permanently weakened Russia on the Eastern front? And do we want them so weak that they start to lose their integrity as an economy? And then what do we do on the energy front, for example?

Or on the fertilizer or food front? And I don't see—as you just said—I don't see anybody talking about these things with any degree of seriousness. It's actually quite jaw-dropping to me that what we are getting is something like governance by single Pixel tweet. You know, we're in it with the freedom-loving Ukrainians until the end. It's like, well, what do you mean the end here? I don't understand what a Russian loss would look like.

I mean, if the Americans were on the other side, there's no damn way—there's no way you guys would lose. Like, you might not win. And maybe no one will win, but you certainly wouldn't lose. And am I missing something here, or is this discussion as shallow as it appears?

Your comment that when you—whenever you say anything that questions the story that's being laid forth about the war, you get immediately labeled, you know, as a satanic Putin worshiper, so to speak—all that is to me is evidence that this debate is being handled at a very juvenile level. That's what happened in World War I, by the way—I mean, people reacted incredibly stupidly as World War I unfolded and got their arm caught in the bandsaw, let's say, and tore the entire continent apart for four years for basically no gain whatsoever.

That's right. So it looks to me like that's the right historical analog here, and you know that's—

That's exactly right. I think we have a very high potential here of everyone losing a lot.

And what disturbs me greatly is that I have yet to hear anyone articulate to me any sound argument for what the end looks like, how this culminates in making the world a better place, in added peace to the world. What—you certainly don't hear that within the U.S. government. I haven't heard that, nor do you hear peace talks going on. Let's find a way to resolve this so that we have as few people dying at the end of the day as possible. And we don't hear that at all.

What you do hear—it hasn't been that long since you heard Zelensky and other people in his government talking about things like, you know, this is going to end with our tanks—Ukrainian tanks—on Moscow's Red Square. Now that raises all sorts of questions, like how is that going to happen? Whose tanks will those be? Will those be American tanks? I—that's certainly not a vision shared by Americans. I don't think I've ever heard our president or any of my colleagues in the Senate or counterparts in the House of Representatives envision that kind of outcome.

I don't know what victory looks like under their plan, and that's deeply concerning because if you don't have an end in mind, you're going to be taking in all sorts of strange directions. I guarantee you Putin's got an end in mind, and it's not favorable to us.

Well, so what do you suppose Putin would be willing to settle for? And what do you think he could sell his people as a sufficient victory if peace talks were to proceed now? I also know, by the way, as far as it's possible to know these things, and I've been told by very reliable observers who should be in a position to know that there were peace negotiations on the table last March and that those were scuttled primarily on the American side by the Biden administration. So that's rather disturbing.

And so it would also be very useful for me to be able to conceptualize something approximating what the West might accept as terms for peace. Given that, as you pointed out, the ultimate extension of the war in the direction that Zelensky's more extreme statements have indicated, well, it's just a non-starter.

First of all, many people have tried in the last 200 years to advance their tanks all the way to Moscow, and that tended to end very badly for anyone who tried to do it, and that happened a minimum of three times. And the same thing happened every time. And then we should also point out with 100 percent certainty that there isn't a chance in hell of Ukrainian tanks, say, made in the West, ending up in Red Square without the Russians doing everything that's in their power to make absolutely certain that that never happens.

So yeah, no, so go ahead.

Well, I'm interested in the fact that there seems to be virtually no negotiation whatsoever on the peace front. You know, this should be Biden's number one concern as far as I'm concerned. It's like, what the hell are we doing here in the West? Why aren't we negotiating for peace? You know, on our terms, let's say, because I think the Russians are in a bit of a corner with 100 percent purposeful intent.

And then, so let's talk about that. Why aren't we negotiating? Negotiating—

And then let's also talk about how this war escalates as it moves forward, and when it actually moves from a proxy war—which it is now—to whatever we now are willing to define as an actual war. So let's start with the why. Are—do you know of any negotiations that are occurring in good faith on the peace front? And if not, like why not?

No, I don't, and it's perplexing. You know, in the early months of this conflict, there was speculation in Washington. I don't know how much truth to it, but there was some speculation in Washington that a negotiated peace could look something like formal recognition by the West of the Russian occupation from eight or nine years ago in Crimea and then perhaps a partial partitioning of parts of the Russian-speaking areas of the Donbas region, and that there would be perhaps not formal recognition there but a negotiated ceasefire of Russia's occupation of some of those areas.

But no one has been talking about any of those outcomes for many months. If there are peace negotiations going on—which I really hope they are—they are—I haven't heard any of them. I haven't heard about them, and they're certainly not inclined to talk about them in public, and that's one of the things that's most concerning about this.

Is that you're picking a fight with a huge bear, and look, people were fond in the United States of saying, you know, Russia's economy can't support a full-blown war. Yeah, well, that's true. But as you pointed out, there's no end to their nuclear stockpile, and their weapons do pose a formidable threat to the entire world should they choose to use them.

That's why we've got to be so careful here. So to enter into that without a strategy for achieving peace, for a resolution of it, is a fool's errand if ever there were one.

Right. So, okay, so here's what we've established so far: We're spending money like a drunken sailor and facilitating an endless degree of criminal enterprise and also funneling money into the military-industrial complex at a heretofore unprecedented rate. We have no vision for victory that's laid out, that's realistic in any real sense. And we also have no vision for what might constitute peace.

So then you again have to throw up your hands and think, just what the hell is going on here? And I really can't understand it, as much as I try. I—like what in the world are we doing? Is it truly as shallow as posturing morally in this opinion-poll-driven way that says, well, once again, we're champions of democracy and freedom? And, you know, we're putting our military might behind these wonderful freedom fighters, which as I said, are ingeniously certain supply in Ukraine.

It's hard for me to believe that we can possibly be that preposterously shallow and stupid, but—and venal and greedy as well—but it does seem to be the simplest explanation for what's going on.

How do you see, like—the other thing I'm seeing is that we are getting dragged into the bandsaw like one inch of cloth at a time, right? And there's movements forward incrementally towards the abyss with the continued provision of more and more sophisticated weaponry to the Ukrainians. Now, at some point, that becomes war.

And I suppose that the point of no return is reached when there's movement of NATO troops on the ground. It's something like that. How do you see this—if this doesn't cease, if it doesn't move towards peace—even if the Ukrainians do advance and the Russians retreat, so we're winning—how do you see this war escalating in the most realistic sense over the next few months?

Well, look, the early hope was that Putin would get bored or Putin would get frustrated or he'd get worried and then that he would withdraw. I don't see any of this happening right now. And so I unless the United States and other serious outside actors who have played a serious role in it so far dedicate their efforts to trying to resolve this, trying to achieve a peaceful resolution, I—it's hard for me to see how this doesn't culminate in at least a significant regional war and, heaven forbid, a world war.

That's why we've got to turn this around. As far as why it's happening, as far as why there continues to be U.S. support for it in the absence of a peace plan, the only thing I can speculate here is that for whatever reason, it's popular. It's popular with the American people. They see—many see it as a conflict between good and evil. Russia is the villain; Ukraine is the innocent victim, the virtuous victim, and the United States is the hero.

It can, from a vantage point thousands of miles away, use its immense force, its immense resources financially and militarily, to try to influence this supposedly without a single American life being put at risk. The problem with this narrative, this story that allows the effort to be so popular, as popular as it has been so far, is that I don't think the American people are being told the whole story. I don't think they're being adequately advised as to the risks.

You know, if you go to a doctor, you go to a surgeon who proposes a surgical intervention of some sort, usually there will be a series of benefits and risks that the doctor would weigh out with you. Going to war should involve nothing less than that, certainly. And I don't think the American press is reporting on what the risks are.

Many politicians are very content—in fact, they're really eager to continue to perpetuate this villain-victim-hero paradigm because it sells. It swells; it rings a certain populist chord within us. But I think over time, that's going to fade. It’s going to fade because, among other things, we've got problems here that are becoming apparent.

You know, Jordan, last year alone in the United States, just 2022, we lost 110,000 Americans to fentanyl poisoning. That fentanyl is being manufactured in Mexico, being flooded across our borders by the drug cartels as they traffic humans and, with them, drugs, including fentanyl. 110,000 Americans died of that last year.

Looked up a UN report recently. You know how many civilians have been killed in Ukraine since this conflict started? If the source from the UN is accurate, it’s less than 8,000 since this war started. And so it's not to say that that isn't tragic. It's not to say that they are the same—they are not; they're very different. But I think the American people are starting to see, number one, that there are grave risks to what we're doing in Ukraine, and that unless we decide not to, we're going to get drawn into a massive war.

Yeah, well, it's a—okay, so you have a convenient distraction hypothesis there. I mean, one of the things that really uphold me in recent weeks, you know, I was remembering that speech that Biden gave in front of the red stage—you know, with the military people behind them—and not creepy at all, not creepy at all, no, no, no, no.

Well, and I have some insiders in the Democrat Party talking to me about why such things happen, and I know that Biden's idiot advisors were playing with this. I mean, this is so preposterous, but it happens to be the case with this dark Brandon idea, the propagandistic idea that Biden has been seen by people as relatively ineffectual in the sort of classic masculine sense, and it was time to crank up the imagery in relationship to his shadow side, like his sort of militaristic tough guy shadow side.

And if you go look up Darth Brandon on the web, you can see all these memes that people have produced putting him forward as kind of an action hero, and this is exactly what I saw with him posturing in Ukraine. He was wearing his black trench coat and his, you know, military Ray-Ban sunglasses with reflective coating, and there's a nice air raid siren going on in the background, and it looks to me like shallow narrative drama of the sort that you just described.

And then that makes for a very convenient distraction when there were important things that should be being dealt with that aren't being dealt with. And I do believe that the people who posture and strut in front of the world stage and who think image is everything are willing to do whatever they need to do to put forward the right image, independent of the material reality.

That brings me to a specific question I had for you too: You know, I was surprised, actually, when I reached out to you to talk about the Russian war that you would actually speak—not because I don't think you have the courage to, because I think you do—but I don't see there is anything in this for you, at least in the short term, except loss, as you already pointed out.

If anybody at the moment stands up and says, "Hey guys, I don't know what the hell we're doing here, but something's rotten in the state of Denmark," all you get out of that is the kind of abuse that's generally reserved for people who are being straightforwardly traitorous, you know, because we've already decided who the good guys are here, and it's us. And you know if you're anti-war in Ukraine, you're pro-Putin. And God, you could hardly—that’s as bad as being pro-Hitler, let's say, or being pro-Stalin. And so why in the world are you willing to talk about this?

So yeah, there's a lot to lose by talking about it. There's far more to lose by not talking about it. Look, Jordan, I can't know what I know and not say something because what we stand to lose if we say nothing and if we continue down our current path is so much greater than whatever discomfort a politician can endure when people scream things that aren't true.

This really is a significant problem. And I don't mean to minimize in any way the threat that Vladimir Putin may pose to the world. I actually feel the way I do not in spite of the fact that he's a villain, but because of it. Because he's a villain, because he's got nuclear weapons—more than anybody else in the world in terms of counting up the number of weapons, the number of warheads—we've got to be very careful.

And because he's a villain, we've got to make sure we know what we're doing if we're going to fight for Ukraine on its behalf to the point where we're committing ourselves essentially in order to defend our own honor. Now that we've sorted into this, if we're committing ourselves to war, we need to be clear about that with the American people. Otherwise, this is going to cost a lot of lives.

Okay, so on the GOP side of things, are you a lone voice in your depiction of the danger that's associated with the escalation of this war, or what's the situation on the Republican side in terms of attitude towards this war? Is there anything approximating a consensus? How much of the Republican Party is more hawk-like? What's the situation on the ground on the Republican side?

There's a small handful of Republicans, but a growing number of Republicans who are starting to express concerns. A few of us in the Senate—probably two or three dozen, maybe four dozen in the House—who have started to express concerns about it. And I think the number is building because people realize what's at stake.

Well, what's surprising though, Jordan, is the number of Democrats who are not raising these questions. I've got allies who I've worked with for years on the Democratic side. Issues dealing with the war powers—I've teamed up with Democrats. I’ve teamed up with some very unlikely allies, like Bernie Sanders. We’ve run measures under the War Powers Resolution. The first time the War Powers Act was successfully invoked by passing a resolution, you know, in that case to get us out of the undeclared war in Yemen was with me and with Bernie Sanders. But this time around, I don't see any Democrats in the Congress—not in the House, not in the Senate—who are at least not publicly raising the concern saying, "Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this."

I hope that will change. I frankly expect that to change, but I haven't seen it yet.

We'll be right back. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series Exodus. So the Hebrews created history as we know it. You don't get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper. It's going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert.

See that there's something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest ethical spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny. I want villains to get punished, but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That's such a Christian question.

Well, you'd think the lefties would at least be worried about government-corporate-military-industrial collusion, right? At minimum. Now we've seen this weird shift on the left too because we've also seen the left radically support big pharma, which is definitely not something I ever thought I would see in my lifetime.

It's so utterly preposterous. But independent of the other risks that the war presents, the risk of dumping 113 billion dollars into the hands of the corporate—the corporate part of the military-industrial complex—you'd think would be something that would raise the hackles of, let’s say, people like AOC and Bernie Sanders. And as you said, there's been radio silence on that front, or perhaps even the opposite of that, like full-fledged support for the brave Ukrainian Democrats and those on the side of democracy in Ukraine, let's say.

So that seems a bit preposterous. Now, you and I also talked about the fact that there are material risks in the escalation of this war to the integrity of the American state. You know, you're not a big government advocate, and anytime there is a war, what you generally see is not only a tremendous amount of tax money dumped into the hands of the corporate side of the military-industrial complex, but a huge growth in government bureaucracy and overreach that's very seldom rolled back.

So where do you see unfolding as a danger on that front? The modern nation-state, by necessity, when it fights wars, it necessarily needs to consolidate as much power as possible. And so that concentration of power tends to cause the government to become larger, taxes to be more intrusive. And I can use the word taxes here broadly because in the United States, the way we finance our government, more government spending ends up producing a backdoor invisible tax because we've just been inflating our currency, and people are making the same amount of money, but it buys less.

And once that happens, in order to fund a war, when the war ends to the degree it ends, government tends not to recede. The taxes tend to be in place, at least for quite a while. And the general levels of government funding might retreat some, but never do they return to pre-war levels. There was a Harvard professor named Roger Porter who wrote a book about this about 30 years ago called War and the Rise of the State, and I think we're seeing it on display.

So yeah, that is another concern—that as we do these things, we become accustomed to spending this much money for Ukraine, some of which is funneled through this or that entity within the State Department or the U.S. aid program or some other program through the Department of Defense. Some of those funding levels might go down, but I doubt they will ever retreat to the levels where they were prior to this particular conflict, and that's a deep concern.

It might also explain why some progressives are more inclined to be supportive of this, along with the fact that it happens to be their president, a Democrat, who's in office at the time. If this were Trump doing this, I can only imagine there'd be many of them, at least, who would be calling bloody horror over it.

Yeah, well, Trump in his recent statements has come out very bluntly because, after all, he is Trump, on the war front, claiming such things as if he had been president, this wouldn't have happened, which I think is a somewhat credible claim, but also that if he was president—which is a non-zero possibility—that he would end the war in 24 hours.

You know, and I'm not remarking on that because I necessarily regard the 24-hour claim as valid, but I am remarking on it because Trump has come out very bluntly as opposed to this war and also highlighting its dangers, and so that's an interesting development. I don't know what's happened with the other people who've thrown their hat into the Republican primary ring so far on the foreign policy front. Do you have any sense of that?

They've been fairly quiet on this war as far as I can tell. I think he's the only one so far who has raised a lot of concern as bluntly as he did. I believe Governor DeSantis has expressed some concern with it. I don't know exactly for how far he's delved into it, but this is an early indication of where I think the Republican Party is going—to be expressing, as Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have both done, expressing skepticism about our involvement in this conflict.

Okay, okay. So let's go back to the peace issue now because I've been trying to figure out what might constitute the broad low-resolution outlines of an acceptable stalemate or even—well, we could even aim for a productive peace with Russia over the long run and with the Ukraine integrity involved in that. That would be a lovely stretch goal, let's say.

But what you laid out was something like recognition of Russia's dominion over Crimea. And now, so everyone who's watching and listening knows that in eastern Ukraine, the majority of the population are Russian native language speakers. Now Ukraine—in terms of language—is quite allied semantically with Russia. So, but there are a lot of Russian speakers, particularly in eastern Ukraine, and the Russians have claimed that they have been targeted, they have been the targets of persecution for their linguistic minority status within the broader Ukraine.

And that that's been a problem. And that part of the reason Russia made its incursions into Ukraine was to protect its people. It really regarded as citizens in the broader sense. Now you posited that one possibility on the peace front would not only be the recognition of the Russian possession of Crimea—which happened about nine, ten years ago—but also that some of the territories that are subject more to territorial dispute in the East might be placed on the negotiating table with regards to Russian sovereignty.

And you can imagine a situation where the deal was, well, why don't we open up the discussion to something like a true plebiscite or referendum and let the people in those areas vote for who they would rather be allied with? And if the U.N. could get its act together and act something like a true objective arbiter—which strikes me as highly unlikely, given the dysfunction of the U.N.—but in any case, then the people of the Donbas region, for example, could exercise their right to self-determination, and that could be part of the negotiating strategy.

Now do you think that that tentative vision of what might constitute a peace plan—do you think that that's—to put forward something like that—is indicative of the kind of weakness that might embolden Putin? I mean, if we're trying to be critical about that notion, it could perhaps. And as I said, when we talked about that a few minutes ago, this was speculation that occurred during the first two, maybe three quarters of 2022. Speculation on that front has died down since then, particularly in the last month or two, as you've seen Ukraine making increasingly bold, sometimes unrealistically bold, assertions about what it wants to do.

For example, Ukraine has been talking about the fact that it now wants to take back Crimea completely and it wants to completely purge all of Russia from anything that, you know, until fairly recently, was considered Ukraine. Most of my colleagues, even those who were very supportive of this conflict and of what we're doing with regard to the conflict, don't regard that as realistic. Russia is now so heavily invested in Crimea that that seems unlikely—I wouldn't want to rule it out, but my point is this: Given how aggressive I think it's worth probably ruling out—

I mean, there isn't a chance that Russia will allow Crimea to be retaken by Ukraine without pushing this right to the brink.

Right. I certainly don't see it. And now that Ukraine has been, has gone into this posture of being very aggressive, talking about taking back Crimea, pushing them out off the Donbas and everywhere else, and then sending tanks to Moscow's Red Square, if all of a sudden Ukraine were to do an about-face and say, “Okay, never mind, we'll give you recognition of Crimea,” now let's talk about what else you would need to do.

Perhaps Russia could see that as a sign of weakness and then become further emboldened in its efforts. That's why I think this is so unfortunate, and I think one of the reasons why Zelensky has felt so comfortable being so bold in this is that he's seen the gravy train. He's seen the immense support from the United States, and I guess somewhat understandably has assumed, "Okay, they're with me. I've got the world's greatest superpower behind me, so I can afford to be bold."

But being bold in that circumstance might just ultimately work to everyone's disadvantage.

Okay, so I want to flip this now a bit into a more metaphysical domain. So I've been recently—completed a seminar on the biblical Book of Exodus with a group of scholars in Miami, and that's available on The Daily Wire Plus platform. The first eight of those and the last nine will be released very soon. And one of the things we talked about, given that we were discussing the book of Exodus, was the nature and the meaning of the Ten Commandments.

And one of the most mysterious commandments, but also one that I think is incredibly germane at the moment, is do not take the Lord's name in vain. Now, you know skeptics listening might say, “Why in the world are we talking about such arcane matters?” But the reason we are is because I think you can make a very strong case that the commandments constitute part of the set of implicit and explicit a priori axioms that govern the polity of free western states. And in any case, they're elementary moral rules.

That's one way of thinking about it. Do not murder, for example. That seems reasonable. Do not envy what your neighbor has—so no covetousness—which would be a good thing for envious people to contemplate for a very long period of time. But this do not take the Lord's name in vain—it's very interesting, one, because people generally mean think that means don't swear, you know, don't say, “God damn” or something like that. And that isn't what it means. What it means is do not assign holy motivations to things you're doing for your own nefarious purposes.

That's what it means, and I think that's the cardinal sin of our time, and that's what people do when they claim unearned moral virtue. So moral virtue is very hard to establish, and you can take it out of the religious domain and say that your moral virtue is actually the same as your social reputation. Now, it's a little more complicated than that, but if you're a good person and you act productively and generously and reciprocally, then you get a reputation for doing so.

And that reputation is of incredible value. It means people will trade with you; they'll interact with you; they'll trust you. It means that if you run a business, that your customers regard you as reliable and will spread your name around in a positive way. And that's brand value. Fundamentally, every business person knows how integrally important to their economic success brand value is.

That's earned moral virtue, honored moral virtue is what you attempt to garner if you're narcissistic, psychopathic, Machiavellian, and sadistic—and that's the dark tetrad group of personality traits. And what I see happening continually on the political front at the moment—and I would say this is particularly the case on the left—is that there's a battle for the acquisition of as much unearned moral virtue as possible.

And I think that's what's happening in this situation is that we can collapse the situation in Russia and Ukraine into this simple narrative, which you just described, which is, you know, heroic Ukrainians, embattled by demonic tyrant supported by equally heroic allies—that those being the, you know, shallowly pro-West, pro-war Westerners—and that's a good distraction for more serious issues. You mentioned the fentanyl crisis, and that's only one of many things we might be attending to carefully if we were wise.

And it also enables everyone to stand up and wave flags and be heroic and virtuous without doing one bit of the effort necessary to actually undertake that in their life. And I think that is a compelling motivation for the acceptance of these three-pixel narratives.

So, and that just seems to be happening continually, and so we're walking ourselves ever more blindly towards an incalculable abyss, proclaiming all the way that we're only doing what good people would be doing, because after all, we're the good people, and we have, you know, nobility, democracy, and God on our side.

So, well, what do you think about that? Well, as I mean, you're a religious man, you're a metaphysical thinker to some degree, what do you think about that as a set of metaphysical presumptions? You think that bears any relationship to our current circumstance?

Without question, it does. Look, biblical teachings—and certainly the Ten Commandments—are instructive. They're anything but arcane or esoteric or outdated—in addition to, regardless of one's religious worldview, many of us as religious people also regard them as eternal truths that are important to our eternal progression and salvation. But even if you didn't, if you look at those Ten Commandments—including those that you just described—they also outline a formula for happiness because they prescribe the manner in which you interact with your fellow human beings.

There's no more evil that can come from humans than when they view themselves as virtuous and their actions in a particular cause as so unmitigatedly right that everyone else must be wrong. And when they're confronting a fellow being or a multiple fellow beings or a huge nation of them as undeserving of virtue, there's no more evil that can come in this world than when that paradigm comes into play, when that contrast comes into play.

And so that's one of the reasons why I had not heard before that particular analysis of taking the Lord's name in vain. When you add that to other commandments, biblical commandments, including, you know, covetousness, for example—admonitions against theft, against adultery, against killing—those all kind of have a consistent theme in them. And so yeah, I think that can come into play in circumstances like these. In fact, I think that's what drives most wars. People start to think of themselves as virtuous, assign immense, unmitigated virtue to their own cause, and assign evil to their adversary. And that's how people get involved in massive conflicts.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, well that's the two dimensions of unearned moral virtue. The first is we're all good without any effort, and so that's pretty damn convenient because it actually turns out to be an extraordinarily difficult endeavor to actually be good because the devil's in the details, and you have to set your house in order from the levels of the personal all the way up through the levels of the social to actually be good, and that requires a lifetime of commitment.

But also, falling into that narrative also gives you a very convenient place to put Satan himself. So instead of having to scrub your own conscience and determine where you might be, let's say, falling short of the glory of God, you can say, "Well, no, all the evil is aggregated conveniently in the body of our enemy," and this would be Putin in this particular case.

You can heap nothing but derisive Hellfire and scorn upon them, and then you're scot-free on that front too. And so all that's a little too convenient. I do think this interpretation, by the way of taking the Lord's name in vain, I think it is in keeping with the original intent of the formulators of the commandments because I've looked at a lot of different translations and we beat this idea to death in this seminar.

And this notion that, well—and you could—it makes sense conceptually too, right? I mean, you can't imagine that there could be a greater evil than doing the easy thing for you and then claiming that that's actually ordained by omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence itself.

That's right. And I certainly think your conclusion makes a fair amount of intuitive sense, particularly if I don't understand you to be saying that blaspheming is also not a bad thing. I think blaspheming, desecrating the name of God is not something that he smiles upon, but I also think there's a lot of truth within what you're describing.

And this can come into focus. I like the framework that you put together when you think about something like a national social credit score, like what they've been doing in China, or with an ESG score as is starting to exist in the corporate world. If you can assign yourself a number under something that purports to be an objective standard, that can dramatically accelerate the degree to which you assign virtue to yourself and other people like you and provide an equally dangerous mechanism by which you can assign evil to others.

And that's why it's so important, as long as we're within the realm of biblical teachings, to also remember admonitions about looking first to remove the beam from your own eye before trying to remove the mote from your neighbor's eye.

Right, right. Well, but I—and I also think that this easy moral virtue that we're describing does lift that burden from people. Right? And I can understand why people want that burden lifted because if it is a beam in your eye—and a beam, by the way, for people listening, is essentially a log—the biblical injunction there is you might want to be assured to begin with that you're a hell of a lot blinder than you think, and that your assignation of evil to nothing but your opponents is so unbelievably corrupt on your part that you can hardly imagine it.

And that's a very shocking thing to realize in yourself if you ever do realize that. And it's no wonder people want to avoid that. But I really do think it's the moral conundrum of our time. You know, because you pointed out, you talked about ESGs and social credit scores and so forth because we're also doing the same thing on the broader metaphysical front.

So for example, there is a panoply of environmental and economic concerns that beset us. For example, we've overfished the oceans terribly, and there's a variety of things we're doing environmentally that are less than wise—a multitude of complex problems that beset us—that would require some diligent effort and sacrifice to set right, as well as wading through the cognitive complexity necessary to actually detail out the problems. Something that people like Bjorn Lomborg are particularly good at doing.

And instead, what we do is we collapse all of the apocalyptic threats into a single threat. And so that's the threat of environmental disaster. We collapse the multitudinous causes of environmental disaster into a single variable, which is carbon. And then we collapse all the necessity for pursuing more moral virtue into doing nothing but being opposed to carbon.

And then we proceed merrily along our way. And there's something truly and catastrophically dangerous about that. Particularly when one of the consequences—and we started to see this unfold in Europe—is that not only do we put idiotic virtue signaling policies in place that raise energy costs for everyone, falling most heavily on the poor, we make energy much more unreliable than it has been in the past.

We increase our dependence on tyrants, the tyrants who control the fossil fuel industry, let's say, outside of the West, and we actually increase the amount of pollution we're producing. And so that's pretty much failure on all fronts, including those defined by the people who are putting forth these propositions.

We see this on the ESG front too. Environment—what is it? Social and governance. This idea that capitalists have a moral—that there's a moral imperative for capitalists to subsume their capitalist enterprise to a broader stakeholder vision, which is essentially a vision of state media and corporate collusion.

And that virtue is then defined as that. I see that happening on the ESG front is that there are no shortage of people who've gained the capitalist system out there. Those are the sorts of people that, you know, Russell Brand and Joe Rogan and Bernie Sanders, in his better moments, object to.

They've gamed the damn system 100 percent. They've accrued a tremendous amount of wealth through mechanisms that are essentially corrupt. They're guilty as hell about it and now they're looking for an easy moral out. And some of that's genuine attempt to deal with the guilt they actually have and should have, and some of it's just for show, but it's extraordinarily dangerous.

We can make it for you into that—was it yesterday that a resolution was passed? Tell me about the resolution that was passed with regard to ESG policies in the Senate and the House yesterday.

Right, yes. So there was a regulation put out by the Biden administration trying to move ESG forward in the way 401(k) accounts—retirement accounts are managed. And there is a process under something called the Congressional Review Act that allows us to pass a resolution disapproving of it. It's called the resolution of disapproval.

That if passed by both houses and submitted to the president—if unless it's vetoed by the president, then the regulation in question gets taken down. So both houses passed it. It’s passed it, and it'll now have the president's desk. The president is widely expected to veto that resolution, and we—in all probability, with the virtual certainty—will not have the two-thirds supermajorities in both houses necessary to override that veto.

This illustrates a problem within our system of government in that we've allowed executive branch regulations to make new law. And then the way the Congressional Review Act is written, Congress has to undo it with the acquiescence of the same president whose administration put out the regulation to begin with.

In our system of government, no one can make law. You cannot make federal law under Article I, Section 1 and Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution without Congress passing the same piece of legislation in the House and the Senate, and then presented to the president. So we need to flip that. We need to take away the ability of the executive branch to make new law, new policy tantamount to law within the executive branch.

But this was a good exercise with regard to ESG. What we've signaled is that a majority of the House and a majority of the Senate oppose ESG—at least oppose forcing ESG onto the American economy through things like this.

Okay, so just so people who are listening are clear about this. So large companies—Vanguard, BlackRock, etc.—who aggregate pension funds primarily, but more than that, so that would be the pension funds that all of you listening and watching are dependent on—are almost all of you, your own personal pension investments—they have decided to subordinate the interests of the companies whose enterprises these funds are invested in to the demands of the climate apocalypse, essentially.

So the notion is, "Well, the environmental catastrophe that besets us is so severe that mere fiduciary interest, which would be growing your pension, is not sufficient. You have to adopt the net-zero Paris Accord goals, and your corporations have to devote themselves to that." And then in addition, it's not only on the environmental front; it's also on the social front, which means that corporations have to buy into the entire diversity, equity, and inclusivity movement, which is essentially a radical left-wing movement or they're not doing their duty properly at the highest moral level.

Now, the problem with that is that the responsibility of investment funds is to grow the—is to preserve and grow the investments of the people who are, for example, going to be dependent on their pensions. And that that shouldn't be subordinated to any other interest. Now, the ESG pushers have said, "Oh look, we can have our cake and eat it too because if we invest responsibly, whatever the hell that means, we're actually going to see greater returns."

Now there's no empirical evidence for that whatsoever. In fact, the CEO of Vanguard in the last two weeks—Vanguard was doing—was pushing the ESG cart assiduously, just like BlackRock. The Vanguard CEO came out and said that there's no evidence whatsoever that ESG investment outperforms non-ESG investment over any stretch of time.

And so that whole story is starting to fall apart, but people should pay very close attention to this because your financial future is at stake here. The ESG pushers—Vanguard somewhat less so now, BlackRock, State Street, etc.—own 25 percent of the biggest 500 companies in the U.S. These are major league players.

And so the fact that they're gerrymandering their financial responsibility in a very crooked and underhanded way—aggregating the votes of all their individual shareholders into their own hands and using that to warp and demand the structure of the market—this has real-world consequences for virtually everyone or anyone who has a pension. We might as well just go with that.

And certainly many, many investors other than that. And so that's another example of this—the pathology of this proclivity to pursue unearned moral virtue. You have these great fund managers who are guilty about their crookedness, and so they're trying to atone in a false way by pretending to ally with this radical leftist narrative, which is insanely preposterous to begin with.

They're doing that in a way that's destructive to the financial interests of the people they're supposed to serve. And they're doing that, well, instead of doing the hard work of actually trying to put their moral houses in order. Anyways, that was pushed back against a bit in the last week by—now, how many Democrats were in favor of the disapproval measure in the Senate?

I think it was two or three. I'm going to have to check the final vote tally. Yeah, there were two or three who were with us on that one, and I'm not sure about in the House of Representatives. I assume they were a small handful over there as well, but there were some, which is very interesting.

Yes, that there were any. Right. And so they're seeing this thing that you're describing, which is that these fund managers are subverting the interests of investors—from truck drivers to teachers, from surgeons to service station attendants—people who have put their retirement money into a fund and are expecting a return, or getting less of a return than they would otherwise get because they're betraying their fiduciary obligation.

But do not fear! They probably say to themselves, "We're virtuous." They assign this unearned moral virtue to themselves in doing it and therefore say not only is it not wrong for us to do this, it would be wrong for us not to do this. And people who don't do this are themselves wrong, and so we must crush them.

That's what ESG is about. It's not just about them wanting to assign virtue to themselves; it's about wanting to crush anyone who doesn't do that. You see, because if you don't crush them, then they will beat you in the competitive race because they understand that what they're doing is not going to make them competitive in the free marketplace of ideas.

Right now, you tangled up the Chinese social credit system in this discussion, and so I figure we should unpack and elaborate on that. So one of the things that gives a company competitive advantage, for example, with regards to being prioritized for loans under the ESG framework is that they're—their activities are regulated so that they minimize such things as their carbon footprint, their so-called carbon footprint, and they abide by these diversity, equity, and inclusivity mandates that are radically leftist in the most fundamental manner.

And people still might say, "Well, I don't have time to think about this," even if it has to do with my pension. But what people should think about is that this is going to start to affect them personally on the personal front very, very rapidly because if corporations are held to account on the moral front for their environmental footprint, let's say, and their failure to comply with the radically leftist dictates of the DEI apparatus, there's no reason at all to assume that that's not going to be extended to typical citizens.

And the probability is very high that it's going to be. So for example, if we put in place digital currencies, which we're trying to do very diligently at the moment—and that's already happened to some degree in the form of credit cards because they're a digital currency of sorts—then what will happen—and this is already happening in places like China—is that all of your individual spending is going to be assessed for its concordance with these apocalyptic environmental goals and your compliance with such things as the DEI ethos.

And that if you don't abide by those norms, you will be punished, but through taxation—first of all, through moral warnings, but then through taxation. That's as certain as the sun will rise tomorrow. And there are already plans afoot in all sorts of different domains on the international governance front to ensure that consumers do bear the brunt of their anti-environment consuming decisions.

And that'll mean less meat; it'll mean a lower number of calories per day; it'll mean something approximating rationing because that's already being contemplated in places like the UK. It'll certainly mean radical limitations on private transportation ownership, whether that's a gas fossil fuel-powered car or an electric car, because people who are pushing this already know that we don't have the power grid to support widespread distribution of electric vehicles.

It'll mean that you won't be able to travel by air except insofar as you exceed your quota for air travel. And people might think that's all conspiratorial, but they could go and do their own research and find out very rapidly that it's not conspiratorial at all.

And so that's all part of this problem of the demand by the top-down globalist utopian types to accrue to themselves unearned moral virtue. It's like we're going to regulate your behavior to assuage our guilt. And that's an absolutely appalling sin, let's say to put it very bluntly. And so it was heartening to see that some Democrats even are starting to alert themselves to the fact that, you know, this might not be in anyone's interest.

Our entire system is built up on the idea—in fact, the American experience from the beginning has been built around the idea that dangerous things happen with the excessive accumulation of power in the hands of the few. That's true in government especially; it also has its own manifestations in the business world.

That's why American antitrust laws are built up around consumer protection; they're built up around ensuring consumer choice because when consumers have options, there is competition, and competition tends to bring down prices and increase quality. When any of those things are destroyed—that is when the levers we have in place to control to protect us against the dangerous accumulation of power, either in government or in business—the common man and the common woman suffer, and ultimately all of society suffers.

What you have with the ESG movement is something that could easily combine the worst of the accumulation of power in business and the accumulation of power in government into one. So they understand that they're running—working against the clock. They're on a collision course with reality unless they can somehow get government to strap on the ESG effort and to make it the government's own because otherwise, ESG in the United States could face a demise as a result of antitrust actions.

Because ultimately, the ESG agreements presuppose agreements not to compete. You've got entities saying, "We're not going to compete in this way for these customers. Let's all agree that we're not going to do that," and exclude anyone who doesn't. That's illegal. In fact, that carries potentially criminal penalties under antitrust laws.

And then they could also face lawsuits from shareholders whose value has been diminished as a result of a betrayal of their fiduciary obligation to their investors. Both of those things could find their antidote in government, again, taking on the—taking on the objective of ESG and mandating it through reporting requirements, immunizing it in one way or another, refusing to go after people who have engaged in agreements not to compete. And that's why this vote yesterday was so important.

It was one of the first volleys in the war about incorporating ESG into government, strapping it on the apparatus of government and forcing it on the American people even though it is likely to be vetoed. I think that veto is going to lead to a lot of change because I think a lot of Americans are tired of this thing. People who in the past maybe even voted consistently Democratic are being frustrated by this, as well they should be.

So over what time span is this process going to unfold? I think it'll happen over the next two years. I think it'll end up being a big topic of discussion between Governor DeSantis, President Trump, and the other Republicans running for president. I think all of them are going to latch onto this and present it to the American people as, "Hey, we know you don't want this. We know you don't want your entire fate decided by this awful combination of a few big corporate titans on Wall Street and a small handful of executive branch bureaucrats in Washington."

So let's do it a different way: Let's let the free market work, and let's let our system of government work so that power isn't dangerously combined in the hands of the few.

Right, well, that's a true fascism—that union. Yes, corporate and government and media interests at the very pinnacle of power. It's what fascism means; it's the definition.

Right. Well, if Antifa was the real thing, that's what they would be—or that would—that's what they would be opposing right now. And so, so how about the veto? How much time will that unfold in relationship to Biden?

He's got 10 days. 10 days to veto it. I suspect it won't take him long.

Okay, okay. So that's coming down the pipeline very quickly. Well, one of the presidential candidates, Vivek Ramaswamy, has made much of his career out of battle against ESG corporate-government collusion, right? He set up the Strive funds, which are analogs of, I think, the BlackRock investment strategy, essentially, but with issuing entirely any ESG governance requirements, and he's had a fair bit of success with that in the free market and is certainly making that central to his platform for presidency.

So I'm going to release a discussion I had with Vivek on this channel. This is definitely going to be a hot topic. It's too bad because it's quite arcane. It's hard for people who are not centrally involved on the economic or financial or political front to understand why something as apparently mundane as whatever constitutes ESG might have real-world consequences for them.

It's hard to make it a, you know, a trenchant point in the imagination of Americans, but it's a good thing to try to alert people to just exactly how dangerous this is and exactly what's at stake for them—the subversion of their savings to a radical anti-human environmentalist apocalyptic agenda allied with this radical leftist approach to the amelioration of social problems—equity, diversity, and inclusivity. Make no mistake about it, ladies and gentlemen, that's precisely what ESG mandates do, and that's exactly their purpose; their conscious purpose, and that is exactly their outcome.

And so, okay, so Mike, please go ahead.

And the American people are not dumb. They may have a lot on their hands, chances, a lot of things to accomplish, and therefore not a lot of time to delve into exactly how ESG works or what it is, but they're not dumb, and they're smart. And they intuitively know that it's not a good thing to have a small handful of corporate elites making decisions that will make life more difficult for them, making life more expensive and less lucrative in terms of any investments they may have.

And so they get that, and they also get the fact that these big business elites who are being facilitated—who want to be facilitated by a government that wants to help them in making the people less poor—American people don't take kindly to that. And that's why I think we win this at the end of the day. But it's going to require some effort and some explanation as to how this works.

Right, well, DeSantis has been pushing hard back against ESG with a certain amount of success. And there's other states that are starting to join in that fight. The Association of Chief Financial Officers—State Chief Financial Officers, I think there's 28 states involved in that enterprise—they're also vociferous critics of the ESG movement, and so there is gathering impetus on that front, so that's a good thing to see.

So what's—what are your plans for action at the current moment? How are you setting your priorities, and how would you describe them to the people who are watching and listening?

Look, my priorities always stem ultimately from a desire to restore the Constitution’s twin structural protections. Twin structural protections—one operates vertically. We call it federalism. It defines the relationship between our national government, the federal government of the United States, and the states and their political subdivisions, like cities, towns, and counties.

The other is horizontal, and it defines the relationship between the executive branch, headed by the president, the legislative branch, where I work—Congress—and the judicial branch that interprets the laws headed by the Supreme Court. We've drifted far since the mid- to late-1930s in this country from both the vertical protection of federalism and the horizontal protection of separation of powers.

We have done that as part of this effort to consolidate government power into the hands of the few. What it's done is it's taken power away from these states and localities and moved it to Washington. And then within Washington, we've taken lawmaking power, the power to set federal policy, embodied in law, and hand it over to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats or, in some cases, the president himself.

All of this has endured to the benefit of the wealthy, the well-connected, the political class, but it's been harmful to everyone else. You know, as of a few years ago, a disproportionate number of the wealthiest counties in the entire United States were suburbs of Washington, D.C. This is an area that manufactures nothing. There are no gold mines here. It's not a technological innovation hub necessarily.

The money is here because the power is here, concentrated in the hands of a few elites. So to that end, I've been pushing for years a reform that I'm going to push aggressively in this Congress—a series of reforms sometimes known under the banner of the REINS Act that would require that anytime an executive branch regulation—in effect, a law put out by an executive branch bureaucrat—for that to take effect, if the REINS Act were to be passed, it would have to first pass both houses of Congress and then be signed into law by the president.

Otherwise, you're circumventing the whole process. I'm going to be pushing that over and over again. I'm going to be subdividing it out, incorporating many REINS acts into other legislative provisions—whether we're talking about a farm bill or a general appropriations bill or something else.

I want to see executive branch authority subjected to a review by Congress and to not take effect absent Congress enacting it into