August 21, 2025 • 50 mins
On this episode of “The Kylee Cast,” Federalist Senior Editor John Davidson joins Managing Editor Kylee Griswold to discuss efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war. Plus, Kylee breaks down the D.C. crime crisis and offers food, leisure, and music recommendations from her New England getaway.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
California continues to be the absolute worst, DC is getting
a little bit better, and Trump works to broker a
peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. All that and more
on the Kylie Cast. Hi everybody, and welcome to the
(00:26):
Kylie Cast. I am Kylie Griswold, Managing editor at The Federalist.
If you'd like to email the show, you can do
so at radio at the Federalist dot com. We always
love to hear from you, and if you're just listening
to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, be sure
to go over and check out the full video version
of the show on my personal YouTube channel or the
Federalists channel on Rumble. Of the two major parties in
(00:50):
American politics, only one is concerned about making America safer
and better, making America great again, which wouldn't be necessary
if it weren't for the other made party doing everything
it possibly can to make America more dangerous in pretty
much every single way. The first example of that this
week was an absolutely tragic case. Perhaps you've seen the
(01:12):
video of an accident where a semi truck driver did
an illegal U turn and killed a family of three
in Florida. Here's the videos it's pretty hard to watch.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
A deadley crash here at Florida getting national attention, including
from the White House. Surveillance video shows a trucker making
an illegal U turn and that's when a minivans slammed
into it, killing three people inside.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
This is obviously a terribly tragic situation, so hard to watch.
Our hearts go out to the family and friends of
those who are killed in this accident. Just absolutely awful.
But this whole thing is made worse by the fact
that the driver of this eighteen wheeler was an illegal
immigrant who obtained CDLs unlawfully from the Deep States of
(02:00):
both Washington and California. And this, of course is happening
just as Gavin Newsom is desperately trying to get ahead
to be a viable candidate for president. He's been cleaning
up or attempting to clean up his record and walk
back his previously held positions on things. He's been trying
to imitate the Trump effect, the way that Trump communicates,
(02:20):
He's been trolling him online. It's just very obvious that
he's desperate to run for president, and then this this
horrible accident that was caused by the failed policies of
his own state, where an illegal immigrant can get a
not only a driver's license, but a CDL to drive
one of the most dangerous vehicles on the road. It's
just Democrat failures all the way down. It's Democrats falled
(02:43):
in every single way, not only because of states like
California giving illegal aliens special licenses to operate these dangerous vehicles,
but the mainstream Democrat parties embrace of illegal immigration and
open borders. Of course, throughout the previous administration, Joe Biden
and Kamala Harris claimed that there was absolutely nothing that
they could do, and that it was actually Republicans that
(03:04):
were preventing Democrats from closing the border. It was such
an absurd lie. And of course the second trum Trump
gets into office, he closes the border. Those border crossings
have dropped dramatically to the point that they are at
record lows. Nobody's crossing the border, and so it's very
clear which party wants the border closed, wants a legal
immigration to end, and which party does not. And of
course it is the Democrat Party and governors like Gavin
(03:26):
Newsom that want to welcome people and not only welcome
them into their sanctuary cities and sanctuary states like in California,
but to bestow upon them special privileges that not even
all Americans get to operate machinery that is deadly and
kills Americans. We learn even more about this situation this
week when we learned that federal investigators actually gave this
(03:49):
illegal alien semi truck driver an English language proficiency assessment,
which he failed, and he failed it miserably. Out of
twelve verbal questions, he answered only two, only two questions correctly,
and he could only accurately identify one in four traffic
signs twenty five percent of traffic signs. And yet the
(04:11):
state of California gave this man, who wasn't even allowed
to be here, a license to operate an eighteen wheeler,
even though he could only identify one of four traffic
signs and answer two of twelve verbal questions correctly. And
in fact, it wasn't just California. Before California, it was
the state of Washington that gave him a license to
drive this vehicle. This is, of course, also an example
of how the evils of blue states, the problems that
(04:34):
blue states produce and institutionalize, bleed into red states. This
horrific accident happened in Florida, where the governor Ron de
Santis actually takes illegal immigration and law and order very seriously.
But then you have a state like California, which is
a sanctuary state. But of course California also doesn't close
(04:54):
its own borders. They can't contain the crime within their
own state, and so what you have is a state
that flouts the law, that does not regard American life
or Americans in general, their rights and their liberties, and
instead they prioritize and give special treatment to illegal aliens.
And then those illegal aliens move all around the country
(05:15):
after they get their safe harbor in California and their
CDLs in California. And so what we end up with
is free states and law and order states like Florida
that bear the brunt of the crime and lawlessness of
states like California. But immigration, of course, is not the
only area where Democrats are making America more dangerous while
Republicans work to make it better. Another ongoing example is
(05:37):
the out of control crime and Democrat controlled Washington, d C.
And Trump's federal takeover of it. This federal takeover of
the District of Columbia happened earlier last week, and although
Democrats in the media are crying foul, the numbers are
actually improving. Crime in DC is actually trending downward since
this federal takeover. But of course Democrats and their media
(05:59):
allies hate it. They are crying foul. They are claiming
Trump just wants more authority and more power, which is
such a ridiculous read on the situation. Here's a headline
from The Guardian, quote Trump's Washington d C takeover is
straight out of a fascist playbook. A piece in Rolling
Stone reads quote, Donald Trump's DC takeover is the usual
Trumpian blend of idiocy, cruelty, and I'm censoring here bs
(06:23):
A New Republic headline says, quote Trump makes wild claim
to excuse his fascist Washington takeover. End quote. The chairman
of the DNC, Ken Martin, said, quote what we're seeing
right now is just a full on attempt by this
authoritarian regime to march us toward full on fascism. And
we have to stand up right now in this moment
(06:44):
as democrats.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
End quote.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
And he's not the only Democrat that's saying this. Mainstream
Democrats like Hakim Jeffreys and Hillary Clinton are both claiming
that crime in DC is at a thirty year low. Meanwhile,
the DC Metro Police Department is actually under investigation for
allegedly fudging their crime statistics to make this city look better.
They've allegedly been doing this by changing the classifications of crime,
(07:09):
so when something happens, they record the crime as something else.
So if they're responding to a violent crime like a
shooting or a carjacking or a stabbing, they might record
it as an injured person being taken to the hospital
or sick person being transported to the hospital, or they
might record it as a theft, which sounds much more
sanitary and less violent than a carjacking. But even with
(07:30):
this manipulation of the data in DC, the numbers still
are not good. There's a great piece in The Federalist
this week from John Lott who points out that the
numbers only include crime that is actually reported to police,
and we know that victims do not often report crimes.
In fact, they report them less than half the time.
Lot says victims only report about forty percent of violent
(07:53):
crimes and thirty percent of property crimes across the country.
That's far less than half. That does not give you
a good indication of what the actual numbers are, how
bad the crime actually is. And Lot also notes that
where criminals are unlikely to face any consequences for their crime,
reporting drops even lower, because, of course, what's the point.
(08:13):
Why would a victim report a crime if the police
aren't going to do anything about the perpetrator. But Lot
also shows that if you look at the FBI's crime data,
the numbers are horrific compared to the national average. Keynotes
that when it comes to violent crime, DC is fifty
four percent higher than New Mexico, which is the most
dangerous state, and two hundred and twenty percent above the
(08:38):
national average. That's for violent crime. For just the murder rate,
DC is one hundred and sixty nine percent higher than
the deadly estate, which is Louisiana, and over five hundred
percent higher than the national average. That's horrific for murder.
When it comes to robbery, DC is three hundred and
seventy percent higher than Maryland, which is the worst state
(09:00):
for robbery, and almost one thousand percent higher than the
national average. But no matter what the stats say, whether
you're looking at the fudged DC crime statistics or the
FBI statistics. The reality on the ground is that DC
residents do not feel safe. You can ask pretty much anyone.
There's running jokes in DC that safeway is actually called unsafeway.
(09:22):
You can't even go into any CBS or Walgreens and
actually just buy anything off the shelf because everything is
locked up behind plexiglass, and I mean like everything, even
really small things, because looters will come in and do
smashing grabs and just leave with a bunch of stuff
and face no consequences for it. The Federalist's DC office
was recently blocked. It had the entrance blocked by a drunken, disorderly, belligerent,
(09:46):
homeless person who was sitting in front of the door,
completely blocking the entrance. And so we had interns, these
young female interns who had left the office to go
get lunch. They came back and couldn't get back in
the office. Then we had other interns that were still
up in the office that couldn't get out. In addition
to it just being like an unsafe situation for young women,
it's also a fire hazard. You need to be able
to get out of your building. And one of the
(10:06):
Federalist employees called the police did not get any kind
of response. Called the police back another hour later, and
the police had no record of the first call because
there was a shift change. So when the police finally
showed up to the Federalist's DC office, he told the
Federalist employee that, well, you know, this is public property,
(10:27):
so there's really nothing we can do, even though this
homeless person was blocking the entrance up against our door,
which is absolutely not public property. That's private property, and
it's a fire hazard. But this is small potatoes compared
to the type of crime that people experience in DC
on a regular basis. I lived in DC for a
few years after college, and shortly before I left the city,
(10:47):
I had come out of church in the early evening.
It was still plenty light outside, still the daytime hours,
and I got into my car, which was parallel parked
in a safe neighborhood, safe neighborhood of Capitol Hill. And
as I get into my car, I look ahead and
there is a double parked car from somebody who must
have been delivering something to a house in that neighborhood.
(11:08):
And I watched a man wrestle a carjacker from his minivan.
And that is a normal. Not normal, It's very abnormal.
It is a regular occurrence in even the safe parts
of DC. I know another woman who I used to
go to church with in DC, and she and her
husband were running an errand I believe it was on
Capitol Hill. He was driving. She had moved to the
(11:29):
back seat to sit next to her baby, who was
also in the backseat, and her husband went into a
store for just a couple of minutes and a carjacker
got into her car while she was in the back
seat with her baby. Just an absolutely terrifying, awful situation
for this young mother. You'll recall a few years ago
there was a carjacking that left a law abiding Pakistani
(11:53):
immigrant dead on the street of DC. He was ejected
from his own car as he tried to wrestle it
from carjackers. And the car jack were a thirteen and
a fifteen year old girl. Two girls, one of which
was three full years away from even being able to drive,
and these girls just brazenly carjacked this uber eats driver's
(12:14):
car and left him dead. And the girls had the
audacity after his lifeless body is lying on the sidewalk
to express concern that their phones were still in the vehicle.
Just absolutely sick, no accountability, horrific, horrific place to be
and live. I also had a situation when I was
living on Capitol Hill where our entire block was surrounded
(12:35):
by police officers. I couldn't leave my apartment that whole
evening because there was a dangerous criminal on the loose
and they couldn't find him and he was just running
around DC and they had narrowed him down to our block,
and so we were just stuck inside because there was
this strange lunatic running around causing mayhem. And that kind
of stuff happens all the time. The Pakistani immigrant carjacking
murder happened right outside of National's Stadium, where the National
(12:58):
Baseball team plays. These should be safe parts of town,
but they're not, because no part of d C is
actually safe. Even Marine Doud of The New York Times
admits that crime is bad and critiques Democrats for going
to war with Trump over cleaning up the city. Because
you have these mainstream Democrats like Hillary Clinton, like Haquem Jeffreys,
(13:19):
like Chuck Schumer down playing the out of control crime.
Chuck Schumer came out and talked about the fact that well,
he feels perfectly safe in DC. What is Trump even
talking about? And it's like, you're a grown man with
a security detail. Of course you feel safe, Others not
so much. But this is a pattern for Democrats. They
have to root against law and order prevailing in DC
(13:41):
because if Trump can show that it's possible to clean
up DC, then he'll also show that it's possible to
clean up other Democrat hell holes like LA and Chicago.
But Democrats are choosing not to and they can't let
Trump have the victory here, so instead they root against
law and order. But cleaning up DC is not even
the only good thing Democrats are rooting against this week.
(14:03):
Of course, thanks to Trump's efforts to broker peace between
Russia and Ukraine, Democrats are also rooting against ending a war.
Here to discuss this with me is Federalist Senior editor
John Daniel Davidson, who had an excellent piece on the
topic this week at The Federalist. John, Welcome, thanks so
much for joining me.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Hey, thanks for having me, Kylie. Good to see you.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Yeah, good to see you too anytime. So, last week
we had Trump meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and
this week, we had him meeting with Vladimir Zelenski in
the White House and of course a whole bunch of
other European leaders. Can you give people who maybe didn't
tune into all of that coverage kind of a thirty
thousand foot view of what those discussions entailed, what the
(14:43):
purpose of them was, and what they accomplished or didn't.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
Yeah, in very broad terms, nothing has changed. I think
our colleague Sean Davis said this earlier this week on
some news program. Nothing changed on the ground, either in
the military or political situation from this time last year.
The only thing that has changed is the US president. Right,
(15:11):
Trump is in the White House now, not Biden. The
war started on Biden's watch. Trump says he wants to
end it. So Trump is putting effort, unlike his predecessor,
into finding a diplomatic solution to this crisis, a peace negotiation,
a political settlement. That's always how this war was going
(15:32):
to end, right, So Trump is using some political capital
and using his very strong position as president of the
United States to make that happen. So first was to
reach out to last week here in Alaska, where I
am meeting Putin at the Elmendorf Air Force Base for
direct talks between the US and Moscow to try to
(15:55):
figure out what kind of settlement could be reached to
bring an end to the fighting. Now, the media made
a big deal about the fact that before the meeting
with Putin, Trump said if I don't get a ceasefire,
I'm not going to be happy. And then of course
there was no ceasefire after that meeting, and so the
media is, you know, as with one voice cried out,
(16:16):
Trump got played and this was a big failure humiliation
for the United States. Well, as Marco Rubio said on Sunday, obviously,
in those discussions between Trump and Putin and their top advisors,
which included Marco Rubio, enough progress was made to justify
Trump and Putin coming out to make joint statements to
(16:38):
the press, a follow up phone call the next day
with Zelenski of Ukraine, and then every major European leader
along with Zelenski flying to Washington, d C. On Sunday
for a meeting with Trump on Monday morning this week.
So clearly, even if Trump didn't get the ceasefire, he
wanted none of what has happened, and since Fridays meeting
(17:01):
with Putin in Alaska would have happened if they hadn't
made some big breakthrough. And we got an insight into
what some of that breakthrough might have been from Steve Witkoff,
Trump's envoy, who was at the meetings in Alaska and
was also in this White House meeting with the European
leaders in Zelenski on Monday. And one of the things
(17:22):
Steve Witkoff has said is that a big breakthrough in
negotiations with Putin is getting Putin to agree in principle
that they would accept some sort of security arrangement that
Ukraine might reach with European powers and the United States.
That was akin to a Article five NATO like agreement
(17:46):
of mutual security. Not NATO membership, but a NATO like
Article five type agreement. That's a huge deal. And the
broad outlines of that of Putin being able to accept that,
as I argued in my piece, were obvious before this
war started. But the fact that Putin is now coming
to the table and saying I'll accept some sort of
(18:07):
security guarantees for Ukraine, obviously on the condition that Ukraine
give up some of its occupy the territories that Russia
is occupying right now in Crimea and in some of
the eastern provinces of the country. And so where we
are now after this meeting on Monday in the White
House with all these European leaders is they want to
move ahead to direct meetings between Zelenski and Putin and
(18:30):
then a trilateral meeting between Putin and Zelenski and Trump
just really cement a peace agreement, bring an end to
the war and have a stable kind of settlement of
the territorial claims and the security arrangements for Ukraine and Russia.
And so that's where things stand now. It's moving very quickly.
And despite what the media says about Trump getting played,
(18:52):
the leaders of Europe were singing a very different tune
on Monday, praising Trump for getting this great breakthrough and
for being the only one who could break the logjam
and bring Putin to the table. And so it's really remarkable,
and we can talk about this if you want, that
the media is so anti Trump, they are actually rooting
against peace in Ukraine as though they want the war
(19:14):
to continue, if only to deprive Trump of credit for bringing.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
It into it, right, which I mean, we've we've really
known that all along I mean Trump is the master negotiator.
We saw this with other peace deals that he's broker
in other parts of the world, and the media are
always always cheering against him. It's almost like this war
in Ukraine had nothing to do with wanting democracy to
prevail or with peace, and everything to do with denying
Trump a victory and just pumping war for democrats and
(19:41):
the neocons.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
Well, it's a small price to pay, you know, A
war in Ukraine is a small price to pay to
get Trump and and you know, and call him a loser,
you know, you know what, what are a couple a
couple thousand more Ukrainian soldiers dead compared to that, right.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
As far as the leftis can, yeah, that's the ultimate goal.
So you write in your piece, you brought up the
territorial disputes and land concessions potentially. You wrote in your
piece quote that Ukraine's current borders are a relic of
Soviet propaganda. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Yeah, this is something that anyone with familiarity with the
history of Ukraine and the Soviet Union is going to
is going to understand. And we actually ran a great
piece by a friend of mine. Mario Loyola, who's at
the Heritage Foundation three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in
(20:36):
February of twenty twenty two, a much longer piece than mine,
where he laid all of this the history of this
out and basically made the argument, Look, Ukraine's borders are indefensible,
They're a relic of Soviet propaganda, and the way to
avoid war is to adjust these these borders and to
adjust the territorial claims so that Ukraine can be a
(20:59):
stable holiday. Essentially, his argument, which I agree with and echoed,
is that Ukraine can have political independence or it can
have territorial integrity, and it can't, but it can't have both.
And what I mean by that is this, Ukraine's borders
as they are right now were invented by Soviet Premier
(21:19):
Khrushchev in nineteen fifty four, and the purpose of creating
this entity called Ukraine in nineteen fifty four was to
make it seem like the Warsaw Pact was this authentic
coalition of strong states, and the reason that Soviet Union
wanted to create that impression is to hold up the
Warsaw Pact to sort of this counterweight Institution to the
(21:43):
United Nations. The West has the United Nations, the Soviet Union,
and the Soviet world has the Warsaw Pact of these
strong Soviet states, and so Ukraine was supposed to be
one of the Soviet states, while the borders were just
an invention of Soviet propaganda to make Ukraine seemed bigger
than it really was, to make it seem more militarily
(22:04):
and strategically important than it really was. And of course
it blended the fact that much of what we call
Ukraine today was ethnically, historically linguistically Russian, and the fact
that the difference between Ukraine and Russia was sort of
fluid for a long time, and it's not like it's
not like we're talking about you know, you know, Germany
(22:26):
and Italy or France and England. Khrushev himself was a Ukrainian,
for example, So the borders that that's where the borders
of Ukraine came from, and why it included Sevastopol and
the Crimean Peninsula and these areas in the east that
are ethnically and historically Russian. And so that was fine
(22:47):
as a piece of Soviet propaganda, so long as Ukraine
remained a Soviet republic and the Soviet Union remained a
viable entity. When the Soviet Union collapsed in nineteen ninety one,
it created this geopolitical problem because now Ukraine was going
to be an independent country, but it had these borders
that made no sense at all and trapped tens of
(23:08):
millions of Russians inside Ukraine, not to mention the problems
with the Soviet nuclear arsenal that was stationed in Ukraine
at the time as well, and so and so. What
the US response to that was, Ukraine can't have these
nuclear weapons because it's not a real country, and so
the weapons were transferred back to Russia. Some vague security
(23:32):
guarantees were given to Ukraine, but no territorial adjustment of
its borders was undertaken at that time. And the thinking was,
as long as Ukraine kind of stays in the Russian orbit,
this is okay. But the moment that Ukraine, at the
prompting I should mention of Obama's CIA and State Department,
decides to turn away from Russia and try to integrate
(23:53):
with Europe and the European Union, this was going to
be a real problem. This is what my friend Mario
by political independence or territorial integrity, but not both. If
Ukraine really wanted political independence, was going to have to
adjust its borders because Russia was never going to allow
the deep sea port at Sevastopol, which is Russia's only
(24:14):
access to a warm water port, to fall into Ukrainian
hands if Ukraine was going to be a European country.
So this whole thing, this whole sort of domino effect
that has been playing out for more than a decade now,
was totally foreseeable if you understand what Ukraine is and
how it got its borders and the significant security imperatives
(24:39):
that are implicated in Ukraine's unstable sort of territorial shape
right now. And so that is the qu that Putin
and Trump and Zelenski are going to have to solve
to bring it into this war.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Right right. That gets to Russia's strategic imperatives, which was
the next thing I wanted to ask you about. You
wrote in your piece that here's the quote, give it
Russia's strategic imperatives and Ukraine's indefensible borders, which you just
spoke about, the broad outlines of a peace settlement are
exactly what they were in February twenty twenty two, before
Russia launched the invasion. As you said, Mario, loyalist peace
(25:13):
laid this out. This was always gonna happen. This was
always going to end in a negotiated settlement. But I
think democrats and neocons can't even handle the idea of
discussing Russia having a real strategic imperative here because to
them it's just Zelensky, good guy democracy over here, and
then you have putin evil dictator, bad guy war criminal
(25:33):
over there. But it's not as simple as that, as
you said, because Russia really does have real strategic imperatives.
And I mean, you talked about the weapons, and you
talked about the land, but what other strategic comparatives are there?
Like why can't neocons and democrats or maybe they just
don't want to, but why can't they wrap their heads
around the fact that there's more to this than just
a good guy and a bad guy. There's real, real
(25:54):
imperatives in play.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, yeah, No, that's a great point that the sort
of the neocons in the world or hawks will not
recognize that Russia has any legitimates strategic interests in Ukraine
or or In in Ukraine's southern or eastern areas. But
the fact is, you know, they may see Putin as
(26:18):
like this illegitimate ruler, and Moscow the regime in Moscow
is like this rogue regime, and that Putin's a murder
and a thug, and all those things are true. Like
I'm not saying that Putin is a good guy, but
I'm saying what I'm saying is from a from a
geo strategic standpoint, from and from a US foreign policy standpoint,
(26:41):
and just historically speaking, Russia has major strategic interests in
the Crimean peninsula. And you can go back centuries to
see to trace the the interests that Russia has in
having access to the Black Sea, access to the Mediterranean.
That's the only way that Russia has access to the Mediterranean, UH,
(27:03):
is through the the southern those southern warm water ports
in Odessa and in Sevastopol. UH. And it will never
give them up. And when when you when you understand
that Russia will never give them up, you also have
to then recognize that, uh, there's nothing the West can
do to compel Russia to abandon these strategic interests in
(27:28):
having access to the Black Sea. And access to the
Mediterranean because Russia is a nuclear power. They they they're
they're the other major nuclear power in the world besides US,
and so that is a just a that is a
historical and present day fact. It's reality. And this I
get at some of this in my piece at part
(27:50):
of the disconnect here I think with the media and
with like Neokon warhawks in Washington is that they love
theory and uh and and doctrine right that they kind
of dream up in Washington and their think tanks and
at their conferences. But the problem with that, which the sordid,
(28:13):
failed history of neo Kon interventions testifies to, is that
the theory doesn't match up with the reality on the ground.
You don't need to be you know, a scholar at
AEI or you know, right think pieces for The Atlantic
the New York Times to understand that the history and
(28:34):
geography have more to do that they bear more directly
on this conflict than theories about popular sovereignty or NATO,
you know, the status of you know, NATO admission in Brussels,
Like those things don't stand up to something as solid
and real as the deep water port at Sevastopol home
(28:58):
of Russia's Black Sea fleet. That port will never move.
That is just a geographical reality that is not amenable
to theories of international politics, right, and so you have
to deal with that. And the way to deal with
that is to recognize that Russia will never give up
(29:19):
that port and they're a major nuclear power. So if
you want to bring an end to the war in Ukraine,
you have to give Russia some of what they need.
You don't have to give them everything, you don't have
to hand them over the whole of Ukraine, but you
have to give them some of what they need. And
you have to give Ukraine some of what it needs
so that it feels secure that they won't have to
(29:39):
be fighting this war every five years and appealing to
the West. And this is the kind of statesmanship that's
based on reality, on historical and geographic realities that the
United States used to practice. We used to have real
statesmen that understood these things and they could actually solve
geopolitical problems. That's why you had things like Teddy Roosevelt
(30:01):
in nineteen oh five going and negotiating a direct end
to the Russian Russo Japanese war in Japan because he
had he and he and the people around him understood
how to deal with real powers that had real interest
in the real world, not some theory about the Biden
and Anthony Blincoln Biden Secretary of State popping off constantly
(30:25):
over the past three and a half four years that
nobody can veto NATO membership. Well, yeah, you know who
can veto NATO membership Russia when it invaded Ukraine, it
vetoed Ukrainian membership in NATO. That's just a reality, you know,
I saw these people have got to get their heads
out of the sand.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know, John, talking about geography kind
of sounds like you're a putin stooge. I don't think
that's the only way to read that though.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
Yeah, that's right. If you mentioned geography, what what are
you a putin stooge? It's right, the weakest, it's the
weakest comeback in this whole discourse. Yeah, but you see
it all the time.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Right, And what do you think this the reason is
that we don't have these statesmen or that you know,
we have such a diconomy between people living in a
fantasy world versus reality. I mean, is it really mostly
largely financial incentives with the you know, military industrial complex.
Is it people wanting to be the savior of the world, Like,
why is it that this is the DC blob is
(31:20):
so primed for war and that this is this is
the like majority opinion in Washington, Like why is this
the norm?
Speaker 3 (31:27):
Well, I think part of it is what you said,
is the profit motive the military industrial complex. You know,
one of the arguments that we have heard over and
over throughout the course of this conflict as it regards
US aid to Ukraine. You hear this from ridiculous neo
cons like Markdeson and Max Boot and other and you know,
(31:50):
some folks at the Wall Street Journal that the aid,
the billions and billions that we're sending to Ukraine, and
it's not going to Ukraine, it's going to US defense contractors.
So it's actually created American jobs program. War is good
for American I know, which is I mean, if that's
your argument, you know, that's you know, you're welcome to
(32:10):
make that argument, but I don't think it's gonna win
over a lot of ordinary Americans who don't see perpetuating
and waging proxy wars abroad is as like a viable
US jobs programs for domestic weapons manufacturers. But so that's
part of it. And I think the other part of
it is after the when the Cold War ended, I
(32:31):
think there was this this shift in in sort of
the academic foreign policy blob in Washington, d C. That
that more or less followed the lines of like Francis
Fukuyama's at the End of History, right, that like, the
big conflicts were over, and the era of grand strategy
(32:54):
in geopolitics is over, and we're not going to have
to you know, we can sort of we have a
blank slate, and we can impose our theories on reality,
and we can impose our theories on peoples and nations,
and there's no need for grand strategy. There's no need
(33:17):
for you know, the kinds of military doctrines and hard
kind of military strategy that prevailed during the Cold War,
because the Soviet Union's gone now and so we can
kind of be, you know, a new world order, as
George H. W. Bush put it, and as Hillary Clinton
put it in twenty sixteen, we can have open markets
(33:37):
and open borders and all of this. To get back
to the point about profit redounds to the benefit of
a post national global corporate elite that doesn't really care
about the interests of nations or the fates of peoples
because they're they're sort of they've transcended all that and
(33:59):
they can and they and they want kind of a
blank slate in the world to be able to, you know,
move capital around the world like pieces on a chess
board for their profit at importing, you know, exupporting manufacturing
to slave labor markets in China, importing cheap goods to
the West. Meanwhile, you know, I mean, so there's a
(34:22):
lot there, right, But I think I think the big
shift is after the Cold War, there was this idea
that we don't have to do grand strategy anymore. We
don't have to worry about things like geography and history
because all of that's over and we can we can
let theory be our guide.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Now, right, right, So what's next? You already mentioned, you know,
Ukraine can have political independence or territorial integrity, but it
can't have both. It sounds like the US will likely
end up giving Ukraine these NATO like security guarantees, although
Trump has said it won't intail boots on the ground,
so hopefully he sticks to that. I'm curious what you
(34:59):
think about those security g guarantees. But Trump is also,
like you said, trying to currently broker a meeting between
Putin and Zelenski and then between or among the three
of them. What do you think about those security guarantees
and how do you think this is actually going to go?
Like is Putin going to sit down at the table?
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Is he not?
Speaker 1 (35:16):
What's next?
Speaker 3 (35:18):
I think that uh, you know, as I argued in
the piece, the broad outlines are pretty clear and they
haven't really changed, and that it will involve some uh,
some kind of transaction where Crimea and some part of
those eastern provinces Donyetes, k Luhansk and some of the
areas that where Russia is occupying. You know, the vast
(35:39):
majority of these provinces along Ukraine's eastern border will be
transferred to Russia or placed into Russian custody in perpetuity,
in exchange for some coalition of the West to guarantee
Ukraine's security, uh, in the form of a treaty, a
(36:02):
binding treaty, that this would be put down. One of
the things I mentioned Steve Whitcoff earlier, one of the
things he mentioned that was part of Trump and Putin's
discussion in Alaska was enshrining some of these things legislatively
in Russia as well, so that everybody is kind of
on the same page, and everybody has agreed that this
(36:25):
territorial settlement will just will be what it is. It'll
be permanent, and the security arrangements will be permanent as well.
I don't think it's going to involve actual US troops
going into Ukraine because I think there would be such
a backlash domestically for Trump that I don't think he
wants to risk that. There's just no appetite among the
(36:47):
Trump and Republican base for sending troops into Ukraine. But
I think it will it probably looks something more like
which is also which won't make a lot of Republicans happen,
but the US bank rolling some sort of a coalition
force to peacekeeping force to go into Ukraine made up
(37:09):
of European soldiers in European military equipment, and that that
would be for a time, that that will be the
reality in Ukraine. As as the peace process, you know,
if they if they go forward with the peace process,
and it's going to happen in stages and each side
is going to have to verify that they're doing what
they're supposed to be doing. There'll be some sort of
(37:30):
European military presence inside Ukraine proper, not necessarily in the
in the territories in question that Russia is occupying, and
that you know, we just saw, I don't know if
maybe it was yesterday, a massive drone attack by Russia
against Ukraine. Russia is trying to push its battlefield position
(37:51):
into the best possible scenario so that when sort of
the lines are frozen, it has the most control over
these territories that I think it wants to have become
part of. It wants to NX into Russia as part
of the peace agreement. So that's what's the settlement is
going to look like. I think Putin has resigned himself
to the fact that there's going to be some sort
(38:13):
of Western European military presence in the parts of Ukraine
that don't get NX to Russia, and that is probably
he probably resigned himself to that shortly after he launched
the war in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Well, everybody should go read John's excellent piece on the
Federalist website. It's called the Ukraine War was always going
to end this way, and I would also recommend that
everyone go back in the archives and read the excellent
piece from Mario Loyola that we both referenced here from
February twenty twenty two in Russia crisis, Ukraine should be
prepared to trade land for independence. If you want more
(38:51):
geography history talk, that's your place to get the lowdown
on that. So thanks so much, John, I really appreciate
your insights and I hope to have you back soons.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Kylie is my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
All right, before I wrap up here, I'm going to
do some quick Kylie's Picks of the week. A few
locations I recommend, some food, some culture, some entertainment, a
little bit of everything. You may have noticed that last
week there was no Kylie cast Abnormal on a Thursday,
but that's because I was completely off the grid in
New Hampshire. It was also my birthday. My husband and
(39:26):
I were traveling to a wedding, a family adjacent wedding
that was in New England, and we had a really,
really lovely time. But I could not do the Kyli
cast unfortunately, because I was nowhere near my studio and
had none of the equipment that I needed. But that
trip did give me some excellent recommendations that I do
want to share with you. So on the food front,
I have a few in New Hampshire. I would highly
(39:50):
highly recommend a donut shop in Conquered I did not
get birthday cake on my birthday, but I did get
a birthday donut at the New Hampshire Don't Company. Wonderful variety,
very pleasant, kind staff, really delicious. They have a good
rewards program, and I was able to get a fluffer
nutter donut, which, if you don't know what a fluffernutter is,
(40:11):
it's a very East coast New England thing. I think
Pennsylvania maybe also claims it as their own, but it's
definitely a very New England thing. And it is a
sandwich that is marshmallow fluff and peanut butter. And the
only reason I really know about this is because my
mom used to send them with me in my lunch
sometimes as a child. RFK Junior would not approve. They
(40:32):
are very very bad for you, no nutritional redemptive qualities today,
but very very delicious and especially delicious when you can
eat them guilt free on your birthday in donut form.
So New Hampshire Donut Company had an excellent fluffer Nutter
Donut would recommend, and they also had other great donuts
too that my family and I did try. They had
(40:54):
an apple cheesecake one and some other just just wonderful flavor.
So if you find yourself in Conquered New Hampshire, definitely
check out New Hampti Donut Company. There's also a really
lovely coffee shop on main Street and Conquered Revelstoke Coffee.
We found ourselves there multiple mornings of the week, just
a really they had excellent coffee, kind staff. But it's
also really unique in there. They have a machine that
(41:16):
self draws pictures, and so you can scan a QR
code and tell it what to draw, and it takes
it a really long time, but then you can watch
it and be entertained by this self drawing thing on
the wall. The one morning that we were in there
was a big elephant picture. A different morning that we
were in there was a scene from the Wizard of
oz And actually the first time we saw the Wizard
of oz one we didn't know what it was because
(41:36):
it was so early in the process. And then when
we came back a couple of days later we saw
the picture was much more developed and just really really
a unique, unique thing and excellent coffee, So check out
revel Stoke Coffee if you're in Conquered, as well other
food recommendations. A different day of our trip, we took
a day trip to Maine, which was wonderful, and my
husband and I have a tradition of when we're up there,
(41:58):
we often will spend an evening in Portland. Portland main
is not a place that I would recommend for anyone
to live. It is exceptionally liberal, lots of androgynous people
experimenting with their gender, a lot of weed, a lot
of other awful things that you find in leftist hell
whole cities. But they have excellent, excellent food and specifically seafood,
(42:21):
and so we started with a drink at Hard Short Distilling.
They are known for their gin specifically, but they also
have bourbon drinks, and their gin drinks were spectacular, wonderful.
I sometimes have low expectations for distilleries because you know,
it's not gin that you're familiar with, so my taste
(42:42):
completely different, or you know, just not be as good
as the tried and true stuff that you're used to,
but the drinks were fantastic. From there, we went to
Duck Fat, which we got their poutine. Oh my goodness.
As someone from Wisconsin, I love a good cheese curd.
I also had low expectations for this because it is
of course not in Wisconsin or Canada. But it was
(43:04):
probably the best poutine I have ever had, Absolutely excellent,
And if you find yourself in Portland, definitely get poutine
from Duckfat. And so that was half of our dinner.
And then the other half of our dinner we went
to get oysters, one of my favorites, and of course
they're excellent in Maine, not so excellent in the Midwest,
so we don't get to have good oysters here very often,
and so we went to Even Tide to get oysters.
(43:27):
We've been there before. It is a restaurant that's pretty
small frequently has very long wait times, but we were
able to get this really teeny like countertop type table
right away, and they're just to die for, the best
oysters I've ever had. Definitely, it's the place in Portland
to get oysters. So if you go, definitely get oysters
(43:47):
from Even Tide. As for places to visit, in New England,
my husband and I took one afternoon to go hike
the Flume Gorge, which is in Franconia Notch. We found
the price to be a little bit steep. I think
it was somewhere around twenty dollars a person, but also
you don't have to pay to park, so that was good.
A lot of the national parks or state parks obviously
(44:09):
require you to pay to park there. We didn't have
to do that, so it kind of even itself out somewhat.
But we spent the afternoon hiking the Flume Gorge and
it was gorgeous, beautiful wildlife, beautiful scenery, these gorgeous cliffs
and hiking trails and super tall trees and just gorgeous waterfalls,
(44:29):
the sounds, the sites absolutely lovely. Of course, fall is
the time when you want to go visit New England,
but we found that this was a perfect activity to
do in the hot days of August because the temperature
in the Flume Gorge drops significantly, so you can get
a nice, lovely cool air hike, fresh air hike through
(44:50):
the Flume Gorge in August, and I would just highly
highly recommend that you do it, knowing though that you
are going to pay a little bit to get tickets
to enter, but the trail are pretty accessible. There's a
bit of varied terrain, but it's not an intense hike.
You're not hiking up a mountain in a way that's
extremely difficult, and in fact, there were many many families
with young children that we saw on the trails, so
(45:12):
definitely a family friendly activity. Check it out if you're
in that area of New Hampshire. We also went up
the coast of Maine and we visited the Nubble Lighthouse,
which is one of the most if not the most
photographed lighthouse. It was just beautiful and we had the
perfect day for it, so I would recommend if you
are driving up the coast of Maine stop, I believe
it's in New York to see the Nubble Lighthouse. And
(45:33):
of course all of the driving through New Hampshire, you're
either getting mountains or you're getting ocean, or you're getting both,
and it's just wonderful. We also got the chance to
swim in Lake Winnipesake, which was especially fun. It's a
beautiful lake, but it was especially fun because our dog
Winnie is named after Lake Winnipesaki, so it was fun
to be able to swim in her namesake in New Hampshire. Again,
beautiful weather for it, perfect temperature, just a lovely day.
(45:55):
As for entertainment, we have not really been watching anything
while we've been traveling, but we did have a lot
of time in the car, so we did listen to
a lot of music. We really enjoy listening to a
primary album when we're traveling somewhere, and then later when
we listened to that same album, it makes us think
of the trip that we were on when we were
listening to that album, and so we did that. Earlier
this year, we took a trip to France and we
(46:17):
happened to be on our trip to France when John
Bellian dropped his new album Father Figure, and so we
listened to that album NonStop in France. And now whenever
I hear it, I just think of France and I
just have to say, I highly, highly recommend this album.
It's hard to know what to even call John Bellion's
genre of music if you haven't heard it. He does
(46:37):
a lot of genre blending. It's very he's very pop,
hip hop, R and B, some alternative rock, some indie pop.
He kind of blends a lot of different styles, which
just makes for a really interesting listening experience. And we
found so all of his old stuff is excellent, really
good stuff. Go in the archives, dig deep. John Bellion's
(46:59):
work is so interesting, so good. But his most recent
album is so conservative coded. It is so it has
so many Christian themes, and I mean, I'm talking everything
from the importance of family and the pitfalls of prioritizing
fame and fortune, and the beauty of marriage and the
(47:21):
hard work of marriage, and the importance of God being
the one who is leading your life, who is Lord
of your life. You'll hear those themes in songs like
Father Figure at the title track Kid Again. There are
several others on the album that are just excellent. But
I want to read you some lyrics from two of
(47:41):
my favorite songs on the album that both have very
overt Christian and conservative themes. One from my favorite song
on the album, which is get It Right. Here are
the lyrics to the Bridge and thanks for loving me
through my selfishness going through old pictures that Dexter flicked.
My life's a shipwreck without you anchoring and leveling. I
know a lot of CEOs with billions and resentful kids. Yikes.
(48:05):
I also know a lot of famous people that are
wishing for an average life, talking tombs on the night
stand at sixty five, the good stuff, babies and sleepless nights,
the craziness of man and wife, the good, the bad,
the dark, the light. I'm with you till we get
it right. God is my witness. I'm with you till
we get it right. Oh, it's such a good song.
The other one that I just love. It's just such
(48:25):
a beautiful parenting song. It's called My Boy, and the
first time I listened to it, it made me tear
up because it's really emotional and really lovely. The lyrics
to that one go, Lord, it's tough to hold my
son and be here in the moment. I need to
keep him safe, tell him which direction this world is going.
I feel the shame for my lack of faith when
you walk the ocean, Eve, bit the apple. My faith
(48:47):
is weak and my trust is broken. I hate the
weakness of owning up to the sins of past. I
hate the weakness of giving up what I used to have.
I hate the weakness of showing my son what makes
me sad. He said, a present father is worth way
more than perfect Dad, and that song ends with a
recording of his son singing Jesus loves Me, and it's
(49:08):
just it's it's really beautiful. The themes of family and
commitment and responsibility and maturity and growing up and marriage,
they're all they just absolutely permeate the entire album. And
so even if what I described as the genre doesn't
sound like your typical cup of tea, you should check
it out just to listen to the wonderful messages of
the album. And if you only listen to two songs,
(49:29):
let them be get It Right and My Boy, because
they are there two of my favorites. So that's gonna
do it for me today. Thank you so much for
tuning in to the Kylie Cast. I'm so sorry I
missed last week, but I'll be back here next week
with more. Until then, just remember the truth hurts, but
it won't feel u
California continues to be the absolute worst, DC is getting
a little bit better, and Trump works to broker a
peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. All that and more
on the Kylie Cast. Hi everybody, and welcome to the
(00:26):
Kylie Cast. I am Kylie Griswold, Managing editor at The Federalist.
If you'd like to email the show, you can do
so at radio at the Federalist dot com. We always
love to hear from you, and if you're just listening
to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, be sure
to go over and check out the full video version
of the show on my personal YouTube channel or the
Federalists channel on Rumble. Of the two major parties in
(00:50):
American politics, only one is concerned about making America safer
and better, making America great again, which wouldn't be necessary
if it weren't for the other made party doing everything
it possibly can to make America more dangerous in pretty
much every single way. The first example of that this
week was an absolutely tragic case. Perhaps you've seen the
(01:12):
video of an accident where a semi truck driver did
an illegal U turn and killed a family of three
in Florida. Here's the videos it's pretty hard to watch.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
A deadley crash here at Florida getting national attention, including
from the White House. Surveillance video shows a trucker making
an illegal U turn and that's when a minivans slammed
into it, killing three people inside.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
This is obviously a terribly tragic situation, so hard to watch.
Our hearts go out to the family and friends of
those who are killed in this accident. Just absolutely awful.
But this whole thing is made worse by the fact
that the driver of this eighteen wheeler was an illegal
immigrant who obtained CDLs unlawfully from the Deep States of
(02:00):
both Washington and California. And this, of course is happening
just as Gavin Newsom is desperately trying to get ahead
to be a viable candidate for president. He's been cleaning
up or attempting to clean up his record and walk
back his previously held positions on things. He's been trying
to imitate the Trump effect, the way that Trump communicates,
(02:20):
He's been trolling him online. It's just very obvious that
he's desperate to run for president, and then this this
horrible accident that was caused by the failed policies of
his own state, where an illegal immigrant can get a
not only a driver's license, but a CDL to drive
one of the most dangerous vehicles on the road. It's
just Democrat failures all the way down. It's Democrats falled
(02:43):
in every single way, not only because of states like
California giving illegal aliens special licenses to operate these dangerous vehicles,
but the mainstream Democrat parties embrace of illegal immigration and
open borders. Of course, throughout the previous administration, Joe Biden
and Kamala Harris claimed that there was absolutely nothing that
they could do, and that it was actually Republicans that
(03:04):
were preventing Democrats from closing the border. It was such
an absurd lie. And of course the second trum Trump
gets into office, he closes the border. Those border crossings
have dropped dramatically to the point that they are at
record lows. Nobody's crossing the border, and so it's very
clear which party wants the border closed, wants a legal
immigration to end, and which party does not. And of
course it is the Democrat Party and governors like Gavin
(03:26):
Newsom that want to welcome people and not only welcome
them into their sanctuary cities and sanctuary states like in California,
but to bestow upon them special privileges that not even
all Americans get to operate machinery that is deadly and
kills Americans. We learn even more about this situation this
week when we learned that federal investigators actually gave this
(03:49):
illegal alien semi truck driver an English language proficiency assessment,
which he failed, and he failed it miserably. Out of
twelve verbal questions, he answered only two, only two questions correctly,
and he could only accurately identify one in four traffic
signs twenty five percent of traffic signs. And yet the
(04:11):
state of California gave this man, who wasn't even allowed
to be here, a license to operate an eighteen wheeler,
even though he could only identify one of four traffic
signs and answer two of twelve verbal questions correctly. And
in fact, it wasn't just California. Before California, it was
the state of Washington that gave him a license to
drive this vehicle. This is, of course, also an example
of how the evils of blue states, the problems that
(04:34):
blue states produce and institutionalize, bleed into red states. This
horrific accident happened in Florida, where the governor Ron de
Santis actually takes illegal immigration and law and order very seriously.
But then you have a state like California, which is
a sanctuary state. But of course California also doesn't close
(04:54):
its own borders. They can't contain the crime within their
own state, and so what you have is a state
that flouts the law, that does not regard American life
or Americans in general, their rights and their liberties, and
instead they prioritize and give special treatment to illegal aliens.
And then those illegal aliens move all around the country
(05:15):
after they get their safe harbor in California and their
CDLs in California. And so what we end up with
is free states and law and order states like Florida
that bear the brunt of the crime and lawlessness of
states like California. But immigration, of course, is not the
only area where Democrats are making America more dangerous while
Republicans work to make it better. Another ongoing example is
(05:37):
the out of control crime and Democrat controlled Washington, d C.
And Trump's federal takeover of it. This federal takeover of
the District of Columbia happened earlier last week, and although
Democrats in the media are crying foul, the numbers are
actually improving. Crime in DC is actually trending downward since
this federal takeover. But of course Democrats and their media
(05:59):
allies hate it. They are crying foul. They are claiming
Trump just wants more authority and more power, which is
such a ridiculous read on the situation. Here's a headline
from The Guardian, quote Trump's Washington d C takeover is
straight out of a fascist playbook. A piece in Rolling
Stone reads quote, Donald Trump's DC takeover is the usual
Trumpian blend of idiocy, cruelty, and I'm censoring here bs
(06:23):
A New Republic headline says, quote Trump makes wild claim
to excuse his fascist Washington takeover. End quote. The chairman
of the DNC, Ken Martin, said, quote what we're seeing
right now is just a full on attempt by this
authoritarian regime to march us toward full on fascism. And
we have to stand up right now in this moment
(06:44):
as democrats.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
End quote.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
And he's not the only Democrat that's saying this. Mainstream
Democrats like Hakim Jeffreys and Hillary Clinton are both claiming
that crime in DC is at a thirty year low. Meanwhile,
the DC Metro Police Department is actually under investigation for
allegedly fudging their crime statistics to make this city look better.
They've allegedly been doing this by changing the classifications of crime,
(07:09):
so when something happens, they record the crime as something else.
So if they're responding to a violent crime like a
shooting or a carjacking or a stabbing, they might record
it as an injured person being taken to the hospital
or sick person being transported to the hospital, or they
might record it as a theft, which sounds much more
sanitary and less violent than a carjacking. But even with
(07:30):
this manipulation of the data in DC, the numbers still
are not good. There's a great piece in The Federalist
this week from John Lott who points out that the
numbers only include crime that is actually reported to police,
and we know that victims do not often report crimes.
In fact, they report them less than half the time.
Lot says victims only report about forty percent of violent
(07:53):
crimes and thirty percent of property crimes across the country.
That's far less than half. That does not give you
a good indication of what the actual numbers are, how
bad the crime actually is. And Lot also notes that
where criminals are unlikely to face any consequences for their crime,
reporting drops even lower, because, of course, what's the point.
(08:13):
Why would a victim report a crime if the police
aren't going to do anything about the perpetrator. But Lot
also shows that if you look at the FBI's crime data,
the numbers are horrific compared to the national average. Keynotes
that when it comes to violent crime, DC is fifty
four percent higher than New Mexico, which is the most
dangerous state, and two hundred and twenty percent above the
(08:38):
national average. That's for violent crime. For just the murder rate,
DC is one hundred and sixty nine percent higher than
the deadly estate, which is Louisiana, and over five hundred
percent higher than the national average. That's horrific for murder.
When it comes to robbery, DC is three hundred and
seventy percent higher than Maryland, which is the worst state
(09:00):
for robbery, and almost one thousand percent higher than the
national average. But no matter what the stats say, whether
you're looking at the fudged DC crime statistics or the
FBI statistics. The reality on the ground is that DC
residents do not feel safe. You can ask pretty much anyone.
There's running jokes in DC that safeway is actually called unsafeway.
(09:22):
You can't even go into any CBS or Walgreens and
actually just buy anything off the shelf because everything is
locked up behind plexiglass, and I mean like everything, even
really small things, because looters will come in and do
smashing grabs and just leave with a bunch of stuff
and face no consequences for it. The Federalist's DC office
was recently blocked. It had the entrance blocked by a drunken, disorderly, belligerent,
(09:46):
homeless person who was sitting in front of the door,
completely blocking the entrance. And so we had interns, these
young female interns who had left the office to go
get lunch. They came back and couldn't get back in
the office. Then we had other interns that were still
up in the office that couldn't get out. In addition
to it just being like an unsafe situation for young women,
it's also a fire hazard. You need to be able
to get out of your building. And one of the
(10:06):
Federalist employees called the police did not get any kind
of response. Called the police back another hour later, and
the police had no record of the first call because
there was a shift change. So when the police finally
showed up to the Federalist's DC office, he told the
Federalist employee that, well, you know, this is public property,
(10:27):
so there's really nothing we can do, even though this
homeless person was blocking the entrance up against our door,
which is absolutely not public property. That's private property, and
it's a fire hazard. But this is small potatoes compared
to the type of crime that people experience in DC
on a regular basis. I lived in DC for a
few years after college, and shortly before I left the city,
(10:47):
I had come out of church in the early evening.
It was still plenty light outside, still the daytime hours,
and I got into my car, which was parallel parked
in a safe neighborhood, safe neighborhood of Capitol Hill. And
as I get into my car, I look ahead and
there is a double parked car from somebody who must
have been delivering something to a house in that neighborhood.
(11:08):
And I watched a man wrestle a carjacker from his minivan.
And that is a normal. Not normal, It's very abnormal.
It is a regular occurrence in even the safe parts
of DC. I know another woman who I used to
go to church with in DC, and she and her
husband were running an errand I believe it was on
Capitol Hill. He was driving. She had moved to the
(11:29):
back seat to sit next to her baby, who was
also in the backseat, and her husband went into a
store for just a couple of minutes and a carjacker
got into her car while she was in the back
seat with her baby. Just an absolutely terrifying, awful situation
for this young mother. You'll recall a few years ago
there was a carjacking that left a law abiding Pakistani
(11:53):
immigrant dead on the street of DC. He was ejected
from his own car as he tried to wrestle it
from carjackers. And the car jack were a thirteen and
a fifteen year old girl. Two girls, one of which
was three full years away from even being able to drive,
and these girls just brazenly carjacked this uber eats driver's
(12:14):
car and left him dead. And the girls had the
audacity after his lifeless body is lying on the sidewalk
to express concern that their phones were still in the vehicle.
Just absolutely sick, no accountability, horrific, horrific place to be
and live. I also had a situation when I was
living on Capitol Hill where our entire block was surrounded
(12:35):
by police officers. I couldn't leave my apartment that whole
evening because there was a dangerous criminal on the loose
and they couldn't find him and he was just running
around DC and they had narrowed him down to our block,
and so we were just stuck inside because there was
this strange lunatic running around causing mayhem. And that kind
of stuff happens all the time. The Pakistani immigrant carjacking
murder happened right outside of National's Stadium, where the National
(12:58):
Baseball team plays. These should be safe parts of town,
but they're not, because no part of d C is
actually safe. Even Marine Doud of The New York Times
admits that crime is bad and critiques Democrats for going
to war with Trump over cleaning up the city. Because
you have these mainstream Democrats like Hillary Clinton, like Haquem Jeffreys,
(13:19):
like Chuck Schumer down playing the out of control crime.
Chuck Schumer came out and talked about the fact that well,
he feels perfectly safe in DC. What is Trump even
talking about? And it's like, you're a grown man with
a security detail. Of course you feel safe, Others not
so much. But this is a pattern for Democrats. They
have to root against law and order prevailing in DC
(13:41):
because if Trump can show that it's possible to clean
up DC, then he'll also show that it's possible to
clean up other Democrat hell holes like LA and Chicago.
But Democrats are choosing not to and they can't let
Trump have the victory here, so instead they root against
law and order. But cleaning up DC is not even
the only good thing Democrats are rooting against this week.
(14:03):
Of course, thanks to Trump's efforts to broker peace between
Russia and Ukraine, Democrats are also rooting against ending a war.
Here to discuss this with me is Federalist Senior editor
John Daniel Davidson, who had an excellent piece on the
topic this week at The Federalist. John, Welcome, thanks so
much for joining me.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Hey, thanks for having me, Kylie. Good to see you.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Yeah, good to see you too anytime. So, last week
we had Trump meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and
this week, we had him meeting with Vladimir Zelenski in
the White House and of course a whole bunch of
other European leaders. Can you give people who maybe didn't
tune into all of that coverage kind of a thirty
thousand foot view of what those discussions entailed, what the
(14:43):
purpose of them was, and what they accomplished or didn't.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
Yeah, in very broad terms, nothing has changed. I think
our colleague Sean Davis said this earlier this week on
some news program. Nothing changed on the ground, either in
the military or political situation from this time last year.
The only thing that has changed is the US president. Right,
(15:11):
Trump is in the White House now, not Biden. The
war started on Biden's watch. Trump says he wants to
end it. So Trump is putting effort, unlike his predecessor,
into finding a diplomatic solution to this crisis, a peace negotiation,
a political settlement. That's always how this war was going
(15:32):
to end, right, So Trump is using some political capital
and using his very strong position as president of the
United States to make that happen. So first was to
reach out to last week here in Alaska, where I
am meeting Putin at the Elmendorf Air Force Base for
direct talks between the US and Moscow to try to
(15:55):
figure out what kind of settlement could be reached to
bring an end to the fighting. Now, the media made
a big deal about the fact that before the meeting
with Putin, Trump said if I don't get a ceasefire,
I'm not going to be happy. And then of course
there was no ceasefire after that meeting, and so the
media is, you know, as with one voice cried out,
(16:16):
Trump got played and this was a big failure humiliation
for the United States. Well, as Marco Rubio said on Sunday, obviously,
in those discussions between Trump and Putin and their top advisors,
which included Marco Rubio, enough progress was made to justify
Trump and Putin coming out to make joint statements to
(16:38):
the press, a follow up phone call the next day
with Zelenski of Ukraine, and then every major European leader
along with Zelenski flying to Washington, d C. On Sunday
for a meeting with Trump on Monday morning this week.
So clearly, even if Trump didn't get the ceasefire, he
wanted none of what has happened, and since Fridays meeting
(17:01):
with Putin in Alaska would have happened if they hadn't
made some big breakthrough. And we got an insight into
what some of that breakthrough might have been from Steve Witkoff,
Trump's envoy, who was at the meetings in Alaska and
was also in this White House meeting with the European
leaders in Zelenski on Monday. And one of the things
(17:22):
Steve Witkoff has said is that a big breakthrough in
negotiations with Putin is getting Putin to agree in principle
that they would accept some sort of security arrangement that
Ukraine might reach with European powers and the United States.
That was akin to a Article five NATO like agreement
(17:46):
of mutual security. Not NATO membership, but a NATO like
Article five type agreement. That's a huge deal. And the
broad outlines of that of Putin being able to accept that,
as I argued in my piece, were obvious before this
war started. But the fact that Putin is now coming
to the table and saying I'll accept some sort of
(18:07):
security guarantees for Ukraine, obviously on the condition that Ukraine
give up some of its occupy the territories that Russia
is occupying right now in Crimea and in some of
the eastern provinces of the country. And so where we
are now after this meeting on Monday in the White
House with all these European leaders is they want to
move ahead to direct meetings between Zelenski and Putin and
(18:30):
then a trilateral meeting between Putin and Zelenski and Trump
just really cement a peace agreement, bring an end to
the war and have a stable kind of settlement of
the territorial claims and the security arrangements for Ukraine and Russia.
And so that's where things stand now. It's moving very quickly.
And despite what the media says about Trump getting played,
(18:52):
the leaders of Europe were singing a very different tune
on Monday, praising Trump for getting this great breakthrough and
for being the only one who could break the logjam
and bring Putin to the table. And so it's really remarkable,
and we can talk about this if you want, that
the media is so anti Trump, they are actually rooting
against peace in Ukraine as though they want the war
(19:14):
to continue, if only to deprive Trump of credit for bringing.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
It into it, right, which I mean, we've we've really
known that all along I mean Trump is the master negotiator.
We saw this with other peace deals that he's broker
in other parts of the world, and the media are
always always cheering against him. It's almost like this war
in Ukraine had nothing to do with wanting democracy to
prevail or with peace, and everything to do with denying
Trump a victory and just pumping war for democrats and
(19:41):
the neocons.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
Well, it's a small price to pay, you know, A
war in Ukraine is a small price to pay to
get Trump and and you know, and call him a loser,
you know, you know what, what are a couple a
couple thousand more Ukrainian soldiers dead compared to that, right.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
As far as the leftis can, yeah, that's the ultimate goal.
So you write in your piece, you brought up the
territorial disputes and land concessions potentially. You wrote in your
piece quote that Ukraine's current borders are a relic of
Soviet propaganda. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Yeah, this is something that anyone with familiarity with the
history of Ukraine and the Soviet Union is going to
is going to understand. And we actually ran a great
piece by a friend of mine. Mario Loyola, who's at
the Heritage Foundation three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in
(20:36):
February of twenty twenty two, a much longer piece than mine,
where he laid all of this the history of this
out and basically made the argument, Look, Ukraine's borders are indefensible,
They're a relic of Soviet propaganda, and the way to
avoid war is to adjust these these borders and to
adjust the territorial claims so that Ukraine can be a
(20:59):
stable holiday. Essentially, his argument, which I agree with and echoed,
is that Ukraine can have political independence or it can
have territorial integrity, and it can't, but it can't have both.
And what I mean by that is this, Ukraine's borders
as they are right now were invented by Soviet Premier
(21:19):
Khrushchev in nineteen fifty four, and the purpose of creating
this entity called Ukraine in nineteen fifty four was to
make it seem like the Warsaw Pact was this authentic
coalition of strong states, and the reason that Soviet Union
wanted to create that impression is to hold up the
Warsaw Pact to sort of this counterweight Institution to the
(21:43):
United Nations. The West has the United Nations, the Soviet Union,
and the Soviet world has the Warsaw Pact of these
strong Soviet states, and so Ukraine was supposed to be
one of the Soviet states, while the borders were just
an invention of Soviet propaganda to make Ukraine seemed bigger
than it really was, to make it seem more militarily
(22:04):
and strategically important than it really was. And of course
it blended the fact that much of what we call
Ukraine today was ethnically, historically linguistically Russian, and the fact
that the difference between Ukraine and Russia was sort of
fluid for a long time, and it's not like it's
not like we're talking about you know, you know, Germany
(22:26):
and Italy or France and England. Khrushev himself was a Ukrainian,
for example, So the borders that that's where the borders
of Ukraine came from, and why it included Sevastopol and
the Crimean Peninsula and these areas in the east that
are ethnically and historically Russian. And so that was fine
(22:47):
as a piece of Soviet propaganda, so long as Ukraine
remained a Soviet republic and the Soviet Union remained a
viable entity. When the Soviet Union collapsed in nineteen ninety one,
it created this geopolitical problem because now Ukraine was going
to be an independent country, but it had these borders
that made no sense at all and trapped tens of
(23:08):
millions of Russians inside Ukraine, not to mention the problems
with the Soviet nuclear arsenal that was stationed in Ukraine
at the time as well, and so and so. What
the US response to that was, Ukraine can't have these
nuclear weapons because it's not a real country, and so
the weapons were transferred back to Russia. Some vague security
(23:32):
guarantees were given to Ukraine, but no territorial adjustment of
its borders was undertaken at that time. And the thinking was,
as long as Ukraine kind of stays in the Russian orbit,
this is okay. But the moment that Ukraine, at the
prompting I should mention of Obama's CIA and State Department,
decides to turn away from Russia and try to integrate
(23:53):
with Europe and the European Union, this was going to
be a real problem. This is what my friend Mario
by political independence or territorial integrity, but not both. If
Ukraine really wanted political independence, was going to have to
adjust its borders because Russia was never going to allow
the deep sea port at Sevastopol, which is Russia's only
(24:14):
access to a warm water port, to fall into Ukrainian
hands if Ukraine was going to be a European country.
So this whole thing, this whole sort of domino effect
that has been playing out for more than a decade now,
was totally foreseeable if you understand what Ukraine is and
how it got its borders and the significant security imperatives
(24:39):
that are implicated in Ukraine's unstable sort of territorial shape
right now. And so that is the qu that Putin
and Trump and Zelenski are going to have to solve
to bring it into this war.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Right right. That gets to Russia's strategic imperatives, which was
the next thing I wanted to ask you about. You
wrote in your piece that here's the quote, give it
Russia's strategic imperatives and Ukraine's indefensible borders, which you just
spoke about, the broad outlines of a peace settlement are
exactly what they were in February twenty twenty two, before
Russia launched the invasion. As you said, Mario, loyalist peace
(25:13):
laid this out. This was always gonna happen. This was
always going to end in a negotiated settlement. But I
think democrats and neocons can't even handle the idea of
discussing Russia having a real strategic imperative here because to
them it's just Zelensky, good guy democracy over here, and
then you have putin evil dictator, bad guy war criminal
(25:33):
over there. But it's not as simple as that, as
you said, because Russia really does have real strategic imperatives.
And I mean, you talked about the weapons, and you
talked about the land, but what other strategic comparatives are there?
Like why can't neocons and democrats or maybe they just
don't want to, but why can't they wrap their heads
around the fact that there's more to this than just
a good guy and a bad guy. There's real, real
(25:54):
imperatives in play.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, yeah, No, that's a great point that the sort
of the neocons in the world or hawks will not
recognize that Russia has any legitimates strategic interests in Ukraine
or or In in Ukraine's southern or eastern areas. But
the fact is, you know, they may see Putin as
(26:18):
like this illegitimate ruler, and Moscow the regime in Moscow
is like this rogue regime, and that Putin's a murder
and a thug, and all those things are true. Like
I'm not saying that Putin is a good guy, but
I'm saying what I'm saying is from a from a
geo strategic standpoint, from and from a US foreign policy standpoint,
(26:41):
and just historically speaking, Russia has major strategic interests in
the Crimean peninsula. And you can go back centuries to
see to trace the the interests that Russia has in
having access to the Black Sea, access to the Mediterranean.
That's the only way that Russia has access to the Mediterranean, UH,
(27:03):
is through the the southern those southern warm water ports
in Odessa and in Sevastopol. UH. And it will never
give them up. And when when you when you understand
that Russia will never give them up, you also have
to then recognize that, uh, there's nothing the West can
do to compel Russia to abandon these strategic interests in
(27:28):
having access to the Black Sea. And access to the
Mediterranean because Russia is a nuclear power. They they they're
they're the other major nuclear power in the world besides US,
and so that is a just a that is a
historical and present day fact. It's reality. And this I
get at some of this in my piece at part
(27:50):
of the disconnect here I think with the media and
with like Neokon warhawks in Washington is that they love
theory and uh and and doctrine right that they kind
of dream up in Washington and their think tanks and
at their conferences. But the problem with that, which the sordid,
(28:13):
failed history of neo Kon interventions testifies to, is that
the theory doesn't match up with the reality on the ground.
You don't need to be you know, a scholar at
AEI or you know, right think pieces for The Atlantic
the New York Times to understand that the history and
(28:34):
geography have more to do that they bear more directly
on this conflict than theories about popular sovereignty or NATO,
you know, the status of you know, NATO admission in Brussels,
Like those things don't stand up to something as solid
and real as the deep water port at Sevastopol home
(28:58):
of Russia's Black Sea fleet. That port will never move.
That is just a geographical reality that is not amenable
to theories of international politics, right, and so you have
to deal with that. And the way to deal with
that is to recognize that Russia will never give up
(29:19):
that port and they're a major nuclear power. So if
you want to bring an end to the war in Ukraine,
you have to give Russia some of what they need.
You don't have to give them everything, you don't have
to hand them over the whole of Ukraine, but you
have to give them some of what they need. And
you have to give Ukraine some of what it needs
so that it feels secure that they won't have to
(29:39):
be fighting this war every five years and appealing to
the West. And this is the kind of statesmanship that's
based on reality, on historical and geographic realities that the
United States used to practice. We used to have real
statesmen that understood these things and they could actually solve
geopolitical problems. That's why you had things like Teddy Roosevelt
(30:01):
in nineteen oh five going and negotiating a direct end
to the Russian Russo Japanese war in Japan because he
had he and he and the people around him understood
how to deal with real powers that had real interest
in the real world, not some theory about the Biden
and Anthony Blincoln Biden Secretary of State popping off constantly
(30:25):
over the past three and a half four years that
nobody can veto NATO membership. Well, yeah, you know who
can veto NATO membership Russia when it invaded Ukraine, it
vetoed Ukrainian membership in NATO. That's just a reality, you know,
I saw these people have got to get their heads
out of the sand.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know, John, talking about geography kind
of sounds like you're a putin stooge. I don't think
that's the only way to read that though.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
Yeah, that's right. If you mentioned geography, what what are
you a putin stooge? It's right, the weakest, it's the
weakest comeback in this whole discourse. Yeah, but you see
it all the time.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Right, And what do you think this the reason is
that we don't have these statesmen or that you know,
we have such a diconomy between people living in a
fantasy world versus reality. I mean, is it really mostly
largely financial incentives with the you know, military industrial complex.
Is it people wanting to be the savior of the world, Like,
why is it that this is the DC blob is
(31:20):
so primed for war and that this is this is
the like majority opinion in Washington, Like why is this
the norm?
Speaker 3 (31:27):
Well, I think part of it is what you said,
is the profit motive the military industrial complex. You know,
one of the arguments that we have heard over and
over throughout the course of this conflict as it regards
US aid to Ukraine. You hear this from ridiculous neo
cons like Markdeson and Max Boot and other and you know,
(31:50):
some folks at the Wall Street Journal that the aid,
the billions and billions that we're sending to Ukraine, and
it's not going to Ukraine, it's going to US defense contractors.
So it's actually created American jobs program. War is good
for American I know, which is I mean, if that's
your argument, you know, that's you know, you're welcome to
(32:10):
make that argument, but I don't think it's gonna win
over a lot of ordinary Americans who don't see perpetuating
and waging proxy wars abroad is as like a viable
US jobs programs for domestic weapons manufacturers. But so that's
part of it. And I think the other part of
it is after the when the Cold War ended, I
(32:31):
think there was this this shift in in sort of
the academic foreign policy blob in Washington, d C. That
that more or less followed the lines of like Francis
Fukuyama's at the End of History, right, that like, the
big conflicts were over, and the era of grand strategy
(32:54):
in geopolitics is over, and we're not going to have
to you know, we can sort of we have a
blank slate, and we can impose our theories on reality,
and we can impose our theories on peoples and nations,
and there's no need for grand strategy. There's no need
(33:17):
for you know, the kinds of military doctrines and hard
kind of military strategy that prevailed during the Cold War,
because the Soviet Union's gone now and so we can
kind of be, you know, a new world order, as
George H. W. Bush put it, and as Hillary Clinton
put it in twenty sixteen, we can have open markets
(33:37):
and open borders and all of this. To get back
to the point about profit redounds to the benefit of
a post national global corporate elite that doesn't really care
about the interests of nations or the fates of peoples
because they're they're sort of they've transcended all that and
(33:59):
they can and they and they want kind of a
blank slate in the world to be able to, you know,
move capital around the world like pieces on a chess
board for their profit at importing, you know, exupporting manufacturing
to slave labor markets in China, importing cheap goods to
the West. Meanwhile, you know, I mean, so there's a
(34:22):
lot there, right, But I think I think the big
shift is after the Cold War, there was this idea
that we don't have to do grand strategy anymore. We
don't have to worry about things like geography and history
because all of that's over and we can we can
let theory be our guide.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Now, right, right, So what's next? You already mentioned, you know,
Ukraine can have political independence or territorial integrity, but it
can't have both. It sounds like the US will likely
end up giving Ukraine these NATO like security guarantees, although
Trump has said it won't intail boots on the ground,
so hopefully he sticks to that. I'm curious what you
(34:59):
think about those security g guarantees. But Trump is also,
like you said, trying to currently broker a meeting between
Putin and Zelenski and then between or among the three
of them. What do you think about those security guarantees
and how do you think this is actually going to go?
Like is Putin going to sit down at the table?
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Is he not?
Speaker 1 (35:16):
What's next?
Speaker 3 (35:18):
I think that uh, you know, as I argued in
the piece, the broad outlines are pretty clear and they
haven't really changed, and that it will involve some uh,
some kind of transaction where Crimea and some part of
those eastern provinces Donyetes, k Luhansk and some of the
areas that where Russia is occupying. You know, the vast
(35:39):
majority of these provinces along Ukraine's eastern border will be
transferred to Russia or placed into Russian custody in perpetuity,
in exchange for some coalition of the West to guarantee
Ukraine's security, uh, in the form of a treaty, a
(36:02):
binding treaty, that this would be put down. One of
the things I mentioned Steve Whitcoff earlier, one of the
things he mentioned that was part of Trump and Putin's
discussion in Alaska was enshrining some of these things legislatively
in Russia as well, so that everybody is kind of
on the same page, and everybody has agreed that this
(36:25):
territorial settlement will just will be what it is. It'll
be permanent, and the security arrangements will be permanent as well.
I don't think it's going to involve actual US troops
going into Ukraine because I think there would be such
a backlash domestically for Trump that I don't think he
wants to risk that. There's just no appetite among the
(36:47):
Trump and Republican base for sending troops into Ukraine. But
I think it will it probably looks something more like
which is also which won't make a lot of Republicans happen,
but the US bank rolling some sort of a coalition
force to peacekeeping force to go into Ukraine made up
(37:09):
of European soldiers in European military equipment, and that that
would be for a time, that that will be the
reality in Ukraine. As as the peace process, you know,
if they if they go forward with the peace process,
and it's going to happen in stages and each side
is going to have to verify that they're doing what
they're supposed to be doing. There'll be some sort of
(37:30):
European military presence inside Ukraine proper, not necessarily in the
in the territories in question that Russia is occupying, and
that you know, we just saw, I don't know if
maybe it was yesterday, a massive drone attack by Russia
against Ukraine. Russia is trying to push its battlefield position
(37:51):
into the best possible scenario so that when sort of
the lines are frozen, it has the most control over
these territories that I think it wants to have become
part of. It wants to NX into Russia as part
of the peace agreement. So that's what's the settlement is
going to look like. I think Putin has resigned himself
to the fact that there's going to be some sort
(38:13):
of Western European military presence in the parts of Ukraine
that don't get NX to Russia, and that is probably
he probably resigned himself to that shortly after he launched
the war in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Well, everybody should go read John's excellent piece on the
Federalist website. It's called the Ukraine War was always going
to end this way, and I would also recommend that
everyone go back in the archives and read the excellent
piece from Mario Loyola that we both referenced here from
February twenty twenty two in Russia crisis, Ukraine should be
prepared to trade land for independence. If you want more
(38:51):
geography history talk, that's your place to get the lowdown
on that. So thanks so much, John, I really appreciate
your insights and I hope to have you back soons.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Kylie is my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
All right, before I wrap up here, I'm going to
do some quick Kylie's Picks of the week. A few
locations I recommend, some food, some culture, some entertainment, a
little bit of everything. You may have noticed that last
week there was no Kylie cast Abnormal on a Thursday,
but that's because I was completely off the grid in
New Hampshire. It was also my birthday. My husband and
(39:26):
I were traveling to a wedding, a family adjacent wedding
that was in New England, and we had a really,
really lovely time. But I could not do the Kyli
cast unfortunately, because I was nowhere near my studio and
had none of the equipment that I needed. But that
trip did give me some excellent recommendations that I do
want to share with you. So on the food front,
I have a few in New Hampshire. I would highly
(39:50):
highly recommend a donut shop in Conquered I did not
get birthday cake on my birthday, but I did get
a birthday donut at the New Hampshire Don't Company. Wonderful variety,
very pleasant, kind staff, really delicious. They have a good
rewards program, and I was able to get a fluffer
nutter donut, which, if you don't know what a fluffernutter is,
(40:11):
it's a very East coast New England thing. I think
Pennsylvania maybe also claims it as their own, but it's
definitely a very New England thing. And it is a
sandwich that is marshmallow fluff and peanut butter. And the
only reason I really know about this is because my
mom used to send them with me in my lunch
sometimes as a child. RFK Junior would not approve. They
(40:32):
are very very bad for you, no nutritional redemptive qualities today,
but very very delicious and especially delicious when you can
eat them guilt free on your birthday in donut form.
So New Hampshire Donut Company had an excellent fluffer Nutter
Donut would recommend, and they also had other great donuts
too that my family and I did try. They had
(40:54):
an apple cheesecake one and some other just just wonderful flavor.
So if you find yourself in Conquered New Hampshire, definitely
check out New Hampti Donut Company. There's also a really
lovely coffee shop on main Street and Conquered Revelstoke Coffee.
We found ourselves there multiple mornings of the week, just
a really they had excellent coffee, kind staff. But it's
also really unique in there. They have a machine that
(41:16):
self draws pictures, and so you can scan a QR
code and tell it what to draw, and it takes
it a really long time, but then you can watch
it and be entertained by this self drawing thing on
the wall. The one morning that we were in there
was a big elephant picture. A different morning that we
were in there was a scene from the Wizard of
oz And actually the first time we saw the Wizard
of oz one we didn't know what it was because
(41:36):
it was so early in the process. And then when
we came back a couple of days later we saw
the picture was much more developed and just really really
a unique, unique thing and excellent coffee, So check out
revel Stoke Coffee if you're in Conquered, as well other
food recommendations. A different day of our trip, we took
a day trip to Maine, which was wonderful, and my
husband and I have a tradition of when we're up there,
(41:58):
we often will spend an evening in Portland. Portland main
is not a place that I would recommend for anyone
to live. It is exceptionally liberal, lots of androgynous people
experimenting with their gender, a lot of weed, a lot
of other awful things that you find in leftist hell
whole cities. But they have excellent, excellent food and specifically seafood,
(42:21):
and so we started with a drink at Hard Short Distilling.
They are known for their gin specifically, but they also
have bourbon drinks, and their gin drinks were spectacular, wonderful.
I sometimes have low expectations for distilleries because you know,
it's not gin that you're familiar with, so my taste
(42:42):
completely different, or you know, just not be as good
as the tried and true stuff that you're used to,
but the drinks were fantastic. From there, we went to
Duck Fat, which we got their poutine. Oh my goodness.
As someone from Wisconsin, I love a good cheese curd.
I also had low expectations for this because it is
of course not in Wisconsin or Canada. But it was
(43:04):
probably the best poutine I have ever had, Absolutely excellent,
And if you find yourself in Portland, definitely get poutine
from Duckfat. And so that was half of our dinner.
And then the other half of our dinner we went
to get oysters, one of my favorites, and of course
they're excellent in Maine, not so excellent in the Midwest,
so we don't get to have good oysters here very often,
and so we went to Even Tide to get oysters.
(43:27):
We've been there before. It is a restaurant that's pretty
small frequently has very long wait times, but we were
able to get this really teeny like countertop type table
right away, and they're just to die for, the best
oysters I've ever had. Definitely, it's the place in Portland
to get oysters. So if you go, definitely get oysters
(43:47):
from Even Tide. As for places to visit, in New England,
my husband and I took one afternoon to go hike
the Flume Gorge, which is in Franconia Notch. We found
the price to be a little bit steep. I think
it was somewhere around twenty dollars a person, but also
you don't have to pay to park, so that was good.
A lot of the national parks or state parks obviously
(44:09):
require you to pay to park there. We didn't have
to do that, so it kind of even itself out somewhat.
But we spent the afternoon hiking the Flume Gorge and
it was gorgeous, beautiful wildlife, beautiful scenery, these gorgeous cliffs
and hiking trails and super tall trees and just gorgeous waterfalls,
(44:29):
the sounds, the sites absolutely lovely. Of course, fall is
the time when you want to go visit New England,
but we found that this was a perfect activity to
do in the hot days of August because the temperature
in the Flume Gorge drops significantly, so you can get
a nice, lovely cool air hike, fresh air hike through
(44:50):
the Flume Gorge in August, and I would just highly
highly recommend that you do it, knowing though that you
are going to pay a little bit to get tickets
to enter, but the trail are pretty accessible. There's a
bit of varied terrain, but it's not an intense hike.
You're not hiking up a mountain in a way that's
extremely difficult, and in fact, there were many many families
with young children that we saw on the trails, so
(45:12):
definitely a family friendly activity. Check it out if you're
in that area of New Hampshire. We also went up
the coast of Maine and we visited the Nubble Lighthouse,
which is one of the most if not the most
photographed lighthouse. It was just beautiful and we had the
perfect day for it, so I would recommend if you
are driving up the coast of Maine stop, I believe
it's in New York to see the Nubble Lighthouse. And
(45:33):
of course all of the driving through New Hampshire, you're
either getting mountains or you're getting ocean, or you're getting both,
and it's just wonderful. We also got the chance to
swim in Lake Winnipesake, which was especially fun. It's a
beautiful lake, but it was especially fun because our dog
Winnie is named after Lake Winnipesaki, so it was fun
to be able to swim in her namesake in New Hampshire. Again,
beautiful weather for it, perfect temperature, just a lovely day.
(45:55):
As for entertainment, we have not really been watching anything
while we've been traveling, but we did have a lot
of time in the car, so we did listen to
a lot of music. We really enjoy listening to a
primary album when we're traveling somewhere, and then later when
we listened to that same album, it makes us think
of the trip that we were on when we were
listening to that album, and so we did that. Earlier
this year, we took a trip to France and we
(46:17):
happened to be on our trip to France when John
Bellian dropped his new album Father Figure, and so we
listened to that album NonStop in France. And now whenever
I hear it, I just think of France and I
just have to say, I highly, highly recommend this album.
It's hard to know what to even call John Bellion's
genre of music if you haven't heard it. He does
(46:37):
a lot of genre blending. It's very he's very pop,
hip hop, R and B, some alternative rock, some indie pop.
He kind of blends a lot of different styles, which
just makes for a really interesting listening experience. And we
found so all of his old stuff is excellent, really
good stuff. Go in the archives, dig deep. John Bellion's
(46:59):
work is so interesting, so good. But his most recent
album is so conservative coded. It is so it has
so many Christian themes, and I mean, I'm talking everything
from the importance of family and the pitfalls of prioritizing
fame and fortune, and the beauty of marriage and the
(47:21):
hard work of marriage, and the importance of God being
the one who is leading your life, who is Lord
of your life. You'll hear those themes in songs like
Father Figure at the title track Kid Again. There are
several others on the album that are just excellent. But
I want to read you some lyrics from two of
(47:41):
my favorite songs on the album that both have very
overt Christian and conservative themes. One from my favorite song
on the album, which is get It Right. Here are
the lyrics to the Bridge and thanks for loving me
through my selfishness going through old pictures that Dexter flicked.
My life's a shipwreck without you anchoring and leveling. I
know a lot of CEOs with billions and resentful kids. Yikes.
(48:05):
I also know a lot of famous people that are
wishing for an average life, talking tombs on the night
stand at sixty five, the good stuff, babies and sleepless nights,
the craziness of man and wife, the good, the bad,
the dark, the light. I'm with you till we get
it right. God is my witness. I'm with you till
we get it right. Oh, it's such a good song.
The other one that I just love. It's just such
(48:25):
a beautiful parenting song. It's called My Boy, and the
first time I listened to it, it made me tear
up because it's really emotional and really lovely. The lyrics
to that one go, Lord, it's tough to hold my
son and be here in the moment. I need to
keep him safe, tell him which direction this world is going.
I feel the shame for my lack of faith when
you walk the ocean, Eve, bit the apple. My faith
(48:47):
is weak and my trust is broken. I hate the
weakness of owning up to the sins of past. I
hate the weakness of giving up what I used to have.
I hate the weakness of showing my son what makes
me sad. He said, a present father is worth way
more than perfect Dad, and that song ends with a
recording of his son singing Jesus loves Me, and it's
(49:08):
just it's it's really beautiful. The themes of family and
commitment and responsibility and maturity and growing up and marriage,
they're all they just absolutely permeate the entire album. And
so even if what I described as the genre doesn't
sound like your typical cup of tea, you should check
it out just to listen to the wonderful messages of
the album. And if you only listen to two songs,
(49:29):
let them be get It Right and My Boy, because
they are there two of my favorites. So that's gonna
do it for me today. Thank you so much for
tuning in to the Kylie Cast. I'm so sorry I
missed last week, but I'll be back here next week
with more. Until then, just remember the truth hurts, but
it won't feel u
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