Joe Biden continues to maintain he had no clue Afghanistan was about to fall, but his own State Department had a report predicting just that. The White House desperately seeks excuses, and the left continues its attacks on Ron DeSantis over blocking NATO troop withdrawal mandates. Meanwhile, video emerges of toddlers being pulled over the airport wall by American forces because people are so desperate to get their kids out of Afghanistan ahead of the Taliban that they are handing their own kids, like small babies, over to the American military. Meanwhile, the Taliban spent the day yesterday celebrating, because after all, it was the anniversary of the independence of Afghanistan. According to the New York Times, Kabul was many things on Thursday. The chaos at the airport was matched by calm in other parts of the city, and businesses were trying to get on with their lives. The president of the United States is supposed to address the nation on Friday, apparently. As the U.S. tries to ramp up its troubled evacuation in Afghanistan, Biden is expected to speak at 1:00pm in Washington, where he's expected to defend the pullout from Afghanistan while promising not to abandon the Afghans who risked their lives to make it there. And, of course, as we'll see in just one moment, he walks back that promise pretty clearly, as he says, "Well, as you'll see, I mean, as I mean... well, as a promise." Ben Shapiro's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Don't like big tech and the government spying on you? Don t like Big Tech? Visit ExpressVPN? Don't Like Big Tech and the Government Spy on the Government spying on You? Visit Vimeo. Subscribe to Vimeo and get 20% off your favorite streaming platform? Vimeo is sponsoring the show, and Vimeo gets 10% off the first month, too! Subscribe at Vimeo, and get a FREE ad-free version of the show wherever you get your ad is listening to the show. Vimeo embeds embeds that embeds the show on the show? Vimeo Vimeo vidscope. com/Vimeo? Subscribe Vimeo? v=1V0.fm&t=1Pt=3P5QYQYUYQ&qid=3Vimeo=1QPQ&tA&q=3q&qref=1AQ&s=1M&qA&f=3
00:00:00.000Joe Biden continues to maintain he had no clue Afghanistan was about to fall, but his own State Department had a report predicting just that.
00:00:06.000The White House desperately seeks excuses, and the left continues its attacks on Ron DeSantis over blocking mask mandates.
00:00:26.000Well, first, we begin with the latest from Afghanistan, where the situation continues to be just awful.
00:00:32.000We now have tape of toddlers being pulled over the airport wall by American forces because people are so desperate to get their kids out of Afghanistan ahead of the Taliban that they are handing their own children, like small babies, over to the American military.
00:01:43.000There were some signs of Taliban restraint.
00:01:45.000But also clear evidence its members patrolling the streets were not afraid to wield force.
00:01:48.000In fact, there is a story from CNN.com about a photographer who was basically got the hell beat out of him by the Taliban.
00:01:55.000And then when they realized he was a reporter, they started trying to take selfies with him.
00:01:58.000So everything is well organized over there.
00:02:00.000The president of the United States is supposed to address the nation on Friday, apparently.
00:02:05.000As the United States tries to ramp up its troubled evacuation in Afghanistan, Biden is expected today to address the furor over the sluggish process, stymied by mayhem in Kabul and delays in Washington, that threatens to strand thousands of Afghans desperate to flee the Taliban takeover.
00:02:21.000He's defended the pullout from Afghanistan while promising not to abandon the Afghans who risked their lives.
00:02:26.000Well, I mean, he's walked back that promise pretty clearly, as we'll see in just one moment.
00:02:30.000The United States has rushed troops and diplomatic reinforcements to Kabul in recent days to speed up visa processing for Afghans.
00:02:36.000American commanders are negotiating daily with their Taliban counterparts to ensure the evacuees can reach the airport because we are pathetic.
00:02:45.000When we say negotiating with the Taliban, we mean begging the Taliban.
00:02:48.000The British and the French have been sending out military patrols to go pick up their citizens and bring them to the airport.
00:02:53.000The United States, however, is hunkered down behind the walls of Kabul Airport, fearful that if the United States walks out, the Taliban will attack them, and then Joe Biden will have to overturn his promise to get all the troops out by August 31st and insert more troops into Kabul, turning a disaster area into a full-scale conflagration, all because the man is a moron.
00:03:13.000Thousands are waiting fearfully outside the airport gates, according to the New York Times, where Taliban soldiers have attacked people with sticks and rifle butts.
00:03:20.000As Afghans clutching travel documents camped outside amid Taliban checkpoints and tangles of concertina wire, anxious crowds were being pressed up against blast walls, with women and children being hoisted into the arms of U.S.
00:03:34.000The Taliban's unpredictability and history of brutality have set off a rush to escape, especially among Afghans who worked alongside U.S.
00:03:39.000and NATO forces. That of course is no surprise given the fact that so many people are going to be left there murdered. I mean that is the Taliban are apparently going door to door according to Daily Wire. The Taliban are intensifying their search for Afghans who help the United States and have a list of people they intend to quote-unquote question and punish which is code for murder according to a Thursday report from the New York Times based on a document prepared by the United Nations.
00:04:04.000The development seems to complicate assurances from the Biden administration that the Taliban are somewhat reformed from their previous iteration.
00:04:10.000Biden seemed to hint at a changing interpretation of the Taliban's newfound commitment to freedom in his recent interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos.
00:04:18.000Meanwhile, the Taliban are also going door-to-door seeking Christians.
00:04:21.000They are searching through phones for Bible apps to make sure that there are no Christians in country.
00:04:26.000According to the Daily Wire, Afghan Christians are reportedly fleeing to the mountains in a desperate attempt to escape the Taliban who are going door-to-door trying to kill them.
00:04:33.000Things are going great, in other words.
00:04:36.000An underground church that partners with Frontier Alliance International has reported that the Taliban are targeting Christians for death.
00:04:41.000According to FAI, the Taliban has a hit list of known Christians they are targeting to pursue and kill.
00:05:06.000If they find a young girl and the house was not marked, they'll execute the entire family.
00:05:10.000If a married woman 25 years or older has been found, the Taliban promptly kill her husband, do whatever they want to her, and then sell her as a sex slave.
00:05:16.000This is according to, again, the Frontier Alliance International, a Christian NGO.
00:05:21.000Meanwhile, US-allied Afghan forces are completely in hiding, according to the New York Times.
00:05:26.000Thousands of Afghan security force members managed to make it to other countries over the past few weeks as the Taliban advanced.
00:05:31.000Others managed to negotiate surrender and went back to their homes.
00:05:34.000Some kept their weapons and joined the Taliban.
00:05:36.000They were all part of the sudden atomization of the national security forces.
00:05:39.000The United States and its allies spent tens of billions of dollars to arm, train, and stand against the Taliban.
00:05:44.000Tens of thousands of other Afghan grunts, commandos, and spies who fought to the end, despite the talk in Washington that the Afghan forces simply gave up, have been left behind.
00:05:51.000They're now on the run, hiding and hunted by the Taliban.
00:05:54.000There's no way out, said Fareed, an Afghan commando, in a text message to an American soldier who fought with him.
00:05:58.000Fareed, who agreed to be identified by first name only, said he was hiding in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, trapped after the regular army units had surrendered around him.
00:06:08.000Militants are threatening to arrest or punish family members if they can't find the people they are looking for, according to former Afghan officials.
00:06:14.000Most spoke on condition of anonymity to protect friends and loved ones still hiding in Afghanistan.
00:06:19.000The Taliban is combing through records of the Ministry of Defense and Interior and the headquarters of Afghanistan's spy service, drawing up lists of operatives to search for.
00:06:27.000There are more and more reports militants are exacting swift and fatal revenge when they are found, which of course is not exactly a shock.
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00:08:02.000Alrighty, so meanwhile, the United States has planned to get people out, continues to be not much.
00:08:07.000According to Jackie Heinrich, who is writing for Fox News, she's the White House correspondent.
00:08:12.000She says that sources have told her the State Department is looking for non-military ways to stage and move Americans and others in Kabul as an alternative to military forces being deployed into Kabul for rescues.
00:08:22.000So I guess we're going to, you know, just send randos into Kabul to try and bring Americans through the gauntlet that has now been created by the Taliban around the Kabul airport.
00:08:30.000The State Department did not dispute this information.
00:08:31.000They said, quote, Our first priority is the safety and security of the American people.
00:08:35.000We will continue to uphold that commitment.
00:08:37.000The State Department, above all of the other departments, is the one to blame.
00:08:40.000The State Department is a disaster, disaster area.
00:08:42.000Meanwhile, John Kirby over at the Pentagon, he's the spokesperson, he was asked, you know, you keep saying that we're trying to get our people out, and yet we have not deployed any military patrols to go pick up Americans who are stranded in Kabul.
00:08:53.000Why is it that the Brits and the French can do it, but we cannot?
00:08:58.000If the British can take their paratroopers and they can get in vehicles and go get their people and get them to the airport, why can't the U.S.
00:09:06.000If there is a deal with the Taliban to provide safe passage, why is it left to the Americans outside of that ring to get there on their own?
00:09:15.000Why can't we send vehicles to go get them?
00:09:18.000We have not seen any great impediments to the safe passage that the Taliban have agreed to facilitate.
00:09:26.000Americans are getting through those checkpoints, and they are getting onto the base on the airfield, and they are being flown out of Kabul.
00:09:33.000Okay, that is not exactly what we are hearing from on the ground, where we are hearing that many Afghans, certainly the Afghans are stuck in Kabul, but many Americans are not willing to run the gauntlet because they're afraid of walking outside their front door.
00:09:44.000And the Taliban's mercy lasts as long as the Taliban's mercy lasts.
00:09:47.000I mean, let's face what's going on here.
00:09:48.000The reality is when we say we're negotiating with the Taliban, what we mean by that is we're bribing them.
00:09:52.000This is going to come out over the next six months, I promise you, that the United States is sending pallets of cash to the world's worst human beings because Joe Biden couldn't keep it in his pants when it came to withdrawing from Afghanistan.
00:10:03.000I mean, that really is what's going on here.
00:10:06.000According to Defense One, evacuation operations at Hamid Karzai International Airport are starting to normalize, but with the stark reality that U.S.
00:10:13.000movements, including any troop extension past August 31st, now must be negotiated with the Taliban, the Pentagon acknowledged on Thursday.
00:10:20.000John Kirby said, quote, I think it's a fundamental fact of reality of where we are, that communications and a certain measure of agreement with the Taliban on what we're trying to accomplish has to occur.
00:10:28.000About 7000 people, a mix of Americans, Afghans and other foreign nationals have left Kabul on U.S.
00:10:32.000military aircraft since noncombatant evacuation operations began last week.
00:10:37.000has flown about 12000 people out of Afghanistan since July.
00:10:41.000However, We've still got thousands and thousands of Americans who are still stuck in Kabul and tens of thousands of Afghan allies who are stuck in Kabul.
00:10:49.000At a State Department press conference Thursday, spokesman Ned Price acknowledged processing has been slow but was improving.
00:10:54.000He says there are 6,000 people at the airport right now who have been fully processed by our consular team and will soon board planes.
00:11:00.000In the meantime, however, there are planes that are leaving literally half empty.
00:11:06.00020 planes were expected to depart overnight on Thursday.
00:11:08.000The state will double the number of consular officers on the ground by Friday, says Ned Price.
00:11:13.000We'll have the capacity we need to process as many individuals as we can fill the flights.
00:11:17.000The evacuation has more of a rhythm in the last 24 hours, he said.
00:11:22.000troops have opened and manned more gates at the airport, allowing faster processes of evacuees.
00:11:27.000And the crowds that swarm the tarmacs have been pushed out, but there are currently more airplane seats than there are passengers, which means that the processing is not going all that well.
00:11:36.000would like to move between 5,000 and 9,000 people per day.
00:12:26.000They were selling flights for essentially $2,000.
00:12:28.000According to Politico, even though U.S.
00:12:32.000officials tell NatSecDaily and others that evacuation flights from Kabul will be free, people trying to catch a plane in the Afghan capital say differently.
00:12:39.000One person said State Department staff were seeking large payments up to $2,000 from American passengers and even more from non-U.S.
00:13:08.000Now we're going to make the flights free.
00:13:09.000But it took the press discovering that they were trying to charge people trying to escape Afghanistan $2,000 in order to leave for that to become an issue.
00:13:27.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a June 16 summit meeting with President Biden, objected to any role for American forces in Central Asian countries at all, senior U.S.
00:13:37.000and Russian officials said, undercutting the U.S.
00:13:39.000military's efforts to act against new terrorist dangers after its Afghanistan withdrawal.
00:13:58.000Pakistan cut a deal with the Taliban to kick us out.
00:14:00.000And Russia is denying us the ability to build any bases or have a base anywhere nearby.
00:14:05.000The previously unreported exchange between the U.S.
00:14:07.000and Russian leaders has complicated the U.S.
00:14:09.000military's options for basing drones and other counterterrorism forces in countries bordering landlocked Afghanistan.
00:14:15.000That challenge has deepened with the collapse over the weekend of the Afghan government and armed forces.
00:14:20.000The exchange also indicates Moscow is more determined to try to maintain Central Asia as a sphere of influence and to expand cooperation with the new American president over the turmoil in Afghanistan, former and current U.S.
00:15:05.000That would limit the time for conducting reconnaissance or carrying out strikes over the country, because the drones basically run out of fuel.
00:15:11.000So this is all going really, really, really well.
00:15:14.000The good news is that Joe Biden is enamored with it.
00:16:32.000They let the addled old man figure out what the policy would be.
00:16:35.000A policy that he had locked in from 2010 and on, even though the war in Afghanistan has radically shifted since 2010, given the fact that we radically downscaled our troop commitment in Afghanistan post-2014.
00:16:45.000The United States has not had more than 12,000-13,000 troops in the country at any time since 2014.
00:16:52.000And at the time that we left, we had 2,500 troops officially in country to provide, again, a base from which to fight terrorism.
00:17:00.000But Joe Biden, at least, he has sort of these moments of refreshing honesty because every so often it breaks through.
00:17:06.000And Joe Biden did this interview with George Stephanopoulos.
00:17:09.000Would you have withdrawn troops like this even if President Trump had not made that deal with the Taliban?
00:17:12.000I would have tried to figure out how to withdraw those troops, yes.
00:17:56.000Okay, so when he says there's no good time to leave Afghanistan, the answer to that is right, which is probably why we should have left some skeleton troops there at a minimum.
00:18:06.000By the way, there's news breaking this morning that the situation in Afghanistan is getting worse.
00:18:10.000According to Sasha Ingber, who's a national security reporter for Newsy, previously at NPR and National Geographic, a source says, situation in Afghanistan is rapidly deteriorating. We've had Americans get beaten throughout the night. One of them, an American woman, was beaten twice, even though she was carrying a U.S. passport.
00:18:25.000There are reports of sheer chaos breaking out again in Afghanistan.
00:18:30.000For all the talk about how this thing is starting to lock down, it continues to be chaos at the airport in Afghanistan.
00:20:07.000Can you explain the rationale for why President Biden went against the advice of military commanders who recommended leaving 2,500 troops on the ground in Afghanistan?
00:20:18.000Well, I think that's an overcharacterization of every military leader, and I don't think they've all provided their point of view.
00:20:25.000No military commander wants to stay forever.
00:20:27.000They insist that this is not some, insist this is not the time to leave, some opponents of his decision.
00:20:33.000Oh, so I was told that there was no opposition to that by Joe Biden right then, right?
00:20:38.000He doesn't recall anybody saying that to him.
00:20:40.000We now have reports from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, from pretty much every major media publication saying that Joe Biden was told by everyone, up to and including, by the way, Lloyd Austin, his Secretary of Defense, as well as The wonderful Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
00:20:54.000He was told by everyone this was a bad idea.
00:20:56.000And he went ahead and he did it anyway.
00:20:59.000And he has decided that his bad foreign policy ideas need to be... As Barack Obama once said about Joe Biden, don't underestimate Joe's ability to screw things up.
00:21:07.000Yeah, well, the American people did, and now we're gonna pay for it in a pretty serious way.
00:21:12.000We'll get to more of this in just one second, because we now have the breaking story that the State Department overtly informed Joe Biden this was gonna be a disaster, like weeks ago.
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00:22:48.000There's an internal State Department cable that warned that Kabul would collapse in July.
00:22:50.000and Afghans who worked with US and NATO is rapidly becoming a chaotic humanitarian airlift.
00:22:56.000Just complete chaos breaking out over there.
00:22:58.000There's an internal State Department cable that warned that Kabul would collapse in July.
00:23:01.000According to the Wall Street Journal, an internal State Department memo last month warned top agency officials of the potential collapse of Kabul soon after the US.
00:23:10.000's August 31st troop withdrawal deadline in Afghanistan, according to a U.S.
00:23:13.000official and a person familiar with the document.
00:23:16.000The classified cable represents the clearest evidence yet that the administration had been warned by its own officials on the ground that the Taliban's advance was imminent and Afghanistan's military may be unable to stop it.
00:23:25.000The cable was sent via the State Department's confidential dissent channel.
00:23:28.000and warned of rapid territorial gains by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of Afghan security forces and offered recommendations on ways to mitigate the crisis and speed up evacuation.
00:23:40.000Now, the reason I mentioned the significance of that date is because five days earlier, Joe Biden had gone on national television and assured the American people the Taliban would not take over the country and this would not look like the Saigon.
00:23:53.000As of last weekend, some 18,000 Afghans who applied for the U.S.' 's special immigrant visa program, as well as their families, remained on the ground in Afghanistan.
00:24:10.000The cable was sent to our wonderful Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and the Director of Policy Planning, Salman Ahmed.
00:24:16.000Blinken received the cable and reviewed it, according to people familiar with the exchange, who added that contingency planning was already underway when it was received, and that Blinken welcomed their feedback.
00:24:26.000State Department spokesman Ned Price declined to address the cable, but told the Wall Street Journal, Blinken reads every dissent and reviews every reply.
00:24:33.000The existence of the confidential State Department cable adds to an expanding debate involving the White House, Pentagon, and intelligence services over what U.S.
00:24:40.000officials understood about assessments of Afghanistan's stability.
00:24:45.000Again, it is very clear at this point that Biden was warned eight ways from Sunday.
00:24:49.000It is very obvious to anyone who is watching that this was a disaster area unfolding.
00:25:36.000So in this interview with George Stephanopoulos, he was just fully delusional and in umbrage mode.
00:25:41.000So at one point, by the way, he mentioned that he said, we don't have any troops in Syria, which is weird since we have 900 troops in Syria.
00:25:47.000But I mean, the man can be forgiven that since he doesn't remember what he had for breakfast this morning.
00:26:14.000You're the President of the United States.
00:26:17.000He's knocking on wood that no one's been, you know what could ensure that no one gets killed over there?
00:26:21.000If you hadn't abandoned the country without any plan whatsoever.
00:26:24.000That would ensure that nobody got killed.
00:26:26.000Or, if you said to the Taliban, listen, you let all of our guys in, or American air power is going to start going after you.
00:26:32.000Maybe all fun and games for the moment, but just remember, we still have the most powerful Air Force on planet Earth, so you let all of our people through right now, or the bombs start falling on the heads of your soldiers.
00:26:45.000When he says that people aren't being killed at Knock on Wood, here is CNN yesterday.
00:26:50.000Since the Taliban seized Kabul on Sunday, 12 people have been killed.
00:26:53.000That, according to the Reuters news agency.
00:26:56.000Taliban fighters toting machine guns and a soundtrack of gunfire are fueling this unease and anxiety among Afghans.
00:27:04.000Look here, CNN photographer capturing these images.
00:27:07.000Huddled masses outside Kabul airport's east gate.
00:27:10.000Rows and rows of men, women, and children clustered together, waiting on a way out that for some may never materialize.
00:27:16.000And by the way, a lot of people are pointing out people who don't want to Take in some of these Afghan refugees.
00:27:21.000Again, if you're a translator with the American Armed Services and you have American soldiers who are vouching for you, it seems to me that your case to be brought into the United States as a refugee is pretty good.
00:27:31.000But in any case, if you're talking about this, a lot of people have been saying, look at how many men there are in these photos.
00:27:35.000Right, because those are the ones who worked as the translators.
00:27:37.000There weren't a lot of women who were working as translators for the American Armed Services in Afghanistan.
00:27:41.000In any case, Biden's just lying when he says nobody's been killed.
00:27:44.000No, a lot of, I mean, people fell from airplanes, dude, on tape, on tape.
00:27:49.000But remember, Captain Empathy over here, he's never been empathetic toward this sort of stuff.
00:27:54.000I mean, if you go all the way back, like to the actual fall of Saigon, Remember that Joe Biden actually said by the actual fall of Saigon that the United States had no obligation to evacuate a single member of South Vietnam, like not a single person.
00:28:10.000Hundreds of thousands of people got into boats to float off the coast of Vietnam to escape the onrushing communist hordes.
00:28:16.000And Joe Biden said this, quote, I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals.
00:28:22.000Other than perhaps an estimated 1,800 diplomatic personnel assigned to foreign embassies in Saigon, the United States has no obligation to evacuate one or 100,000 in one South Vietnamese.
00:28:32.000As I read the language of the bill, the evacuation of Americans in South Vietnam conceivably could be endangered because of the provisions also permitting the evacuation of untold numbers of foreign nationals.
00:28:40.000So this goes back 40 years for this jackass.
00:29:10.000This is contrary to every report we were receiving from on the ground.
00:29:14.000We have a relatively large cadre of consular officers on the ground in Kabul right now.
00:29:20.000They are in regular and constant contact with American citizens.
00:29:23.000I can tell you that they have received, as of a couple hours ago, a small handful of reports from American citizens who weren't able to reach the airport for whatever reason.
00:29:54.000According to the Washington Post, a chaotic and dangerous dynamic at Kabul's airport showed few signs of relenting Thursday as thousands of people attempting to board flights faced beatings by Taliban guards, the crush of heaving crowds, and interminable spells in the dust and heat while waiting to escape Afghanistan.
00:30:08.000Several people said Thursday they'd received confusing signals from the U.S.
00:30:11.000about how exactly they were supposed to leave, citing emails from the State Department urging them to go to the airport, only to find there was no one to receive them or to answer their questions on how to board flights.
00:30:20.000We arrived at 6 a.m., said a 39-year-old librarian, a dual U.S.-Afghan citizen who came with his wife and two kids after receiving an email invitation from the State Department.
00:30:30.000There is no person to address our concerns.
00:30:32.000And now we are learning that the Taliban is targeting journalists who report on the chaos.
00:30:36.000The German broadcaster Deutsche Welle said a close relative of one of its journalists had been murdered by Taliban fighters.
00:30:42.000The relative was shot as militants went house to house searching for the journalist in Western Afghanistan, according to the news organization.
00:30:50.000And, um, you know, Clarissa Ward and her crew are now inside the airport.
00:30:54.000But she's saying that, again, inside the airport, it is not a lot better than it is outside the airport.
00:30:58.000The Pentagon spokesperson, by the way, Ned Price, he can't, or John Kirby, rather, he can't even say how many Americans are even in Afghanistan at this point.
00:31:05.000How many American citizens remain in Afghanistan?
00:31:10.000The State Department would be a better place to go for an estimate of how many Americans are in Afghanistan or in and around Kabul.
00:31:15.000That is not a figure that the United States military would know.
00:31:20.000And I think, as you also know, not every American citizen in another country... There's no obligation that they register their presence.
00:31:30.000And that you can have a perfect, accurate count.
00:31:34.000Okay, in order to make anybody believe that the Biden administration has any level of control, the Biden administration has now been put in the position of becoming the PR wing for the Taliban.
00:32:06.000They went out there and they said that there was a moderate wing of the Iranians, and we were emboldening the moderate wing of the Iranian government, and then we spent years defending the Iranian government.
00:32:25.000I mean, they want to be legitimate players on the world stage.
00:32:28.000We became the PR wing for the Iranian mullahs, even as they fostered terrorism around the region, even as they murdered tens of thousands of people in places like Syria and Lebanon and Yemen.
00:32:41.000It was the United States and Barack Obama's administration who were soft-peddling the evils of the Iranian regime.
00:32:46.000Now we're doing the exact same thing with the Taliban.
00:32:48.000Because you see, in order to make Americans believe everything is going to be okay in Afghanistan, we have to believe that the Taliban are a different sort of Taliban.
00:32:57.000But maybe they're going to be better this time around.
00:33:00.000Now, is there any evidence whatsoever, like at all, that they're better this time around?
00:33:04.000They're literally just shooting people.
00:33:05.000They're going around and hunting journalists.
00:33:08.000They pledged the same thing in 96 when they first took over Afghanistan that they have now, which is pardon for everybody.
00:33:13.000And then by pardon, they mean you will be dead.
00:33:15.000I mean, that's basically what they mean.
00:33:17.000But you've now turned the White House of the United States into a PR wing for the worst people on Earth, the same way that Obama did with the Iranians.
00:33:25.000So here, for example, is the president of the United States, Joe Biden, saying, you know, The Taliban, they're probably going through some sort of existential crisis right now.
00:33:32.000You know, they have to decide whether they want to be part of the international community.
00:33:37.000The answer is no, and they are not going through an existential crisis.
00:33:40.000The West is going through an existential crisis because the West has no idea what it believes.
00:33:44.000The West doesn't know what it stands for, aside from the evils of supposed inherent white supremacy embedded in all of our institutions and Transgenderism.
00:33:54.000The West has basically very few principles to which it is certainly committed at this point.
00:34:00.000We don't know why we stand for the things we stand for.
00:34:02.000We are going through an existential crisis.
00:34:04.000The Taliban are going through a victory dance because a bunch of regressive barbaric cavemen from the 8th century just defeated the most powerful military in the history of the world.
00:34:14.000By the way, for the second time, right?
00:34:15.000Because they did this to the Soviets in the 80s.
00:34:18.000So now they're proclaiming victory on the exact same thing, even though really the two instances shouldn't be comparable.
00:34:24.000The United States was holding the line in Afghanistan with 2,500 troops.
00:34:28.000The difference is the Taliban have a 1,000-year time horizon and we have about a 20-year time horizon in the United States.
00:34:33.000We get bored after 20 years and we're like, oh, well, this is an endless war.
00:34:36.000You know what an endless war means to the Taliban?
00:34:37.000You know what an endless war means to the people in Afghanistan?
00:34:41.000Afghanistan has essentially been in a state of war since at least 1979.
00:34:46.000So an endless war to them does not look like an endless war to us.
00:34:49.000And so they can declare victory after having their asses kicked all over the map for 20 years because they outlasted us.
00:34:55.000But in any case, Joe Biden has now become the PR wing for the Taliban.
00:35:01.000I think they're going through sort of an existential crisis about do they want to be recognized by the international community as being a legitimate government?
00:37:04.000In a second, we'll get to what Joe Biden's calculus here is.
00:37:06.000Because it's pretty obvious what his calculus is.
00:37:08.000Why he's doing all of this and what his angle here is.
00:37:11.000Because you look at this and I look at this and we say this is the worst foreign policy disaster of the last 40 years, at least since the fall of Iran in 79.
00:37:18.000Maybe since the end of World War II, considering it's so self-inflicted.
00:37:21.000I mean, at least when Iran fell, we really had very little to do with it.
00:37:24.000When it comes to this, we are the complete cause of it.
00:37:27.000I think it's the worst foreign policy disaster for America.
00:37:31.000Man, honestly, I'm hard-pressed to think of a worse foreign po- The end of Vietnam was not even as much of a foreign policy disaster as this is.
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00:40:45.000So what does Biden think that he is doing here?
00:40:47.000According to Reuters, Biden basically thinks he's going to wait it out.
00:40:50.000Reuters says President Joe Biden is brushing off criticism of his administration's chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal because he and his aides believe the political fallout at home will be limited, according to White House allies and administration officials.
00:41:00.000That, of course, is not a giant shock, considering that he said 10 years ago that uh F that with regard to whether there would be consequences for withdrawal Nixon and Kissinger got away with it which is an amazing thing considering that neither Nixon nor Kissinger were actually responsible for the Vietnam withdrawal.
00:41:15.000Gerald Ford was president at the time Nixon had been gone for a while and it was the Democratic Congress that actually caused the Vietnam withdrawal in the first place but the idea here is that he's just going to be able to outlive this.
00:41:26.000Joe Biden will just outlive this, right?
00:41:30.000I am not nearly so sanguine, particularly since it seems like this administration is still trying to figure out whether or not they're going to leave people behind.
00:41:37.000Breonna Keillor over at CNN, she actually asked directly the White House communications director, This would be Kate Bedingfield.
00:41:46.000She asked her directly, are you prepared to leave people behind in Afghanistan?
00:41:50.000And Kate Bedingfield said, we're doing everything we can to get as many people out who want to get out before the August 31st deadline.
00:41:59.000That's the Taliban setting that deadline, right?
00:42:01.000I have a feeling that if you leave a bunch of Americans there, Kate and Joe, I have a feeling that the fallout may not be limited.
00:42:06.000I have a feeling that people are going to be kind of pissed if you leave thousands of Americans in Kabul because you were so stupid that you left them in the hands of the Taliban.
00:42:15.000Meanwhile, the British and the French somehow are sending their paratroopers in to get people out.
00:42:19.000I have a feeling Americans might not take particularly kindly to all of that.
00:42:22.000One of the things that has fascinated me about the situation in Afghanistan right now is the media coverage thereof.
00:42:29.000Because the media coverage has been really good, like really accurate, quite good, hypercritical of President Biden, everywhere from like the European press to the American press.
00:42:40.000Why are the media, and this is literally the first time in my lifetime that a Democrat has done something egregious and the media have been all over it.
00:42:48.000Even when Bill Clinton was getting caught in the Oval Office with his pants down, the media were like, oh, well, you know, boys will be boys.
00:42:55.000Even when it was Barack Obama completely botching things in Iraq to the extent that ISIS rose, it was, well, you know, that was really the consequence of a bad Iraq war and he can't really be blamed.
00:43:04.000And after all, it was Biden who was going to go, it was Obama who was going to go in and fix the problem.
00:43:08.000This is the first time I've ever seen, I think in my entire adult lifetime, Where Democrats do something so egregious that even the media are forced to look at it and go, this is horrifying.
00:43:57.000And we heard President Biden say yesterday in his comments to ABC News that this is not a failure.
00:44:03.000And I think a lot of people outside that airport, particularly those taking the kinds of extreme actions we're just talking about, would like to know, if this isn't failure, what does failure look like exactly?
00:44:15.000Okay, and you're hearing the same thing from Jay Tapper over at CNN.
00:44:17.000You're hearing the same thing from MSNBC's Kelly O'Donnell, who says Biden is pretty obviously ducking the press at this point, which he pretty clearly is.
00:44:24.000Does the White House have a good explanation so if the president now says chaos was inevitable?
00:44:31.000Then, are they acknowledging that he misled us?
00:44:34.000So was that mislead a month ago on purpose?
00:44:37.000Because they didn't want to offend the Afghan government?
00:44:39.000Well, they're not acknowledging that discrepancy yet.
00:44:42.000We've had no opportunity, no briefing, no ability to get a real sense of that.
00:44:47.000What they are saying is that they had planned for and expected that there could be a fall, but the timing has been what they've been focused on.
00:44:55.000That it wouldn't be as precipitous as we have seen happen.
00:44:58.000Okay, everybody acknowledging this is a mess.
00:45:00.000The New York Times' Jonathan Martin, he says, yeah, it's pretty clear that the Biden administration is lying to us.
00:45:04.000You have the president talking about chaos being inevitable.
00:45:07.000Sure, the chaos was inevitable if you're talking about a Taliban takeover of Kabul, if you're talking about a dangerous situation and just the crumbling of humanitarian and human rights.
00:45:16.000But it was not expected to be chaos when you're talking about evacuating embassy staff at the very last minute, evacuating and trying to figure out what to do with the Afghan staffers at the very last minute.
00:45:24.000That was not predicted and that should have been handled.
00:45:27.000He said the opposite the previous month, and I think that's the big challenge for him politically is that he has a paper trail of statements literally, as Joe Biden would say, saying the opposite than in fact what happened.
00:45:39.000And I think there's no willingness on his part to acknowledge his previous statements here and sort of eat that.
00:45:46.000My first time in my adult lifetime that the media are actually covering this stuff accurately.
00:46:12.000All right, meanwhile, the situation with regard to COVID has continued to be the narrative that Joe Biden hoped props him up.
00:46:18.000And so, so much right now is Joe Biden blowing things in Afghanistan and then turning and wheeling and trying to clock somebody over COVID.
00:47:11.000There's no end point for the Democrats.
00:47:13.000And so Democrats continue to try and manufacture this idea that they know how to deal with COVID.
00:47:19.000And the Republicans are obstructing that in the hopes that the American people will blame Republicans for, number one, Joe Biden's failure to set any sort of actual reasonable metrics with regard to COVID, number two, Democrats' broad-scale desire to lockdown and mask people for the end of time, and three, to distract from his gigantic, enormous, historic, world-historic failure in Afghanistan.
00:47:39.000And so they're going to go right back to the COVID drawing board.
00:47:41.000So Ron DeSantis has become their target of opportunity.
00:47:44.000They've hated DeSantis since the beginning of the pandemic because he presides over the oldest state in the country outside of Maine, which again has seven people in a moose.
00:48:11.000This is Michael Osterholm, the former Biden advisor, saying this.
00:48:14.000There's people like Scott Gottlieb pointing out that cloth masks are not particularly effective against Delta because the viral load on Delta is much, much higher than the viral load on the Alpha variant, B117.
00:48:51.000There's no evidence that masking in school is particularly effective.
00:48:55.000First of all, kids are not good at wearing masks.
00:48:56.000Second of all, most of the kids are wearing cloth masks.
00:48:58.000Third of all, if you want to mask your kid with an N95, I suppose you're free to do so, although there are a lot of studies suggesting that mask masking around kids is not good for their mental development, and that there may be physical consequences to kids breathing in their own carbon dioxide all day.
00:49:12.000But, putting all of that aside, Ron DeSantis has not handled things poorly.
00:49:16.000We are seeing upticks in virtually every state in the Union.
00:49:18.000Florida, it looks like, by the way, already has seen its peak in terms of cases and deaths, according to Worldometers.
00:49:23.000You can see the case numbers are already declining over the last week or so.
00:49:26.000The death numbers have been declining pretty steeply over the last week or so in Florida, despite the media focusing incessantly on Florida.
00:49:31.000Not Louisiana, which is an actual large-scale rolling disaster, but Florida, because Louisiana has a Democratic governor, Florida does not.
00:49:38.000But DeSantis, Was ripping Biden and the Democrats hope to redirect toward COVID because again, they don't want anybody talking about Afghanistan.
00:49:45.000Here is a Ron DeSantis slamming Biden.
00:49:48.000I think Trump was right to say we needed to come home from Afghanistan.
00:50:26.000So Joe Biden's idea is let's redirect toward COVID.
00:50:30.000And let's do it with policy that is never ending.
00:50:33.000The masking of children has become the point du jour.
00:50:36.000This is the thing that Democrats and the left would love to talk about, is masking kids.
00:50:40.000So, Anthony Fauci, who can always be counted on to take a series of conflicting decisions, and can also be counted on to do so with great confidence.
00:50:47.000Like, he'll take two positions that are in complete conflict with one another over the course of a year, and then he will say each with equal confidence.
00:50:53.000So here he is saying it's time to mask up kids again.
00:50:55.000Can he cite a study like one study showing that mandatory masking of children has been effective?
00:51:02.000The answer is he cannot, because those studies do not exist.
00:51:04.000The answer is he cannot, because those studies do not exist.
00:51:06.000There is no evidence that masking of kids is effective.
00:51:10.000Because, thank God, the Delta variant is no more deadly for kids, as far as the data that we have seen, than was the Alpha variant, which means it is highly not deadly for kids.
00:51:18.000Again, I'm going to say to you, the CDC statistics on age, okay?
00:51:27.000Okay, according to the CDC, a grand total, this is updated as of August 18th, 2021, two days ago, the grand total of people in the United States under the age of 18 who have died involving COVID-19, involving COVID-19, right?
00:51:41.000Not just of COVID-19, involving COVID-19.
00:52:00.000Since August 11th, a grand total of seven children, people under the age of 18, have died of COVID-19 in the United States, out of a cohort of 73 million.
00:52:08.000Okay, no, we are not seeing a radical exponential spike in death rates for kids.
00:52:14.000But if the left can convince you that your kids are in danger, they can continue to focus in on an issue where they think they have a winning hand.
00:52:20.000Because then they get to claim that Republicans just don't care if kids die.
00:52:23.000Here's Anthony Fauci doing this routine.
00:52:26.000Masks are an important thing for the mitigation of the transmission and the acquisition of infection.
00:52:33.000They are very important, particularly when you have a highly, highly transmissible virus in the form of the Delta variant.
00:52:42.000And that's the reason why, when you talk about the extra added degree of protection, even in a school system where you may have vaccinated teachers and some of the children may be vaccinated, you want to wear a mask To protect the children so that they could continue to be in school, in person, in classes, so that we don't get the deleterious effects on the child of, again, keeping them out of school.
00:53:08.000You want to do that, but you want to do it safely.
00:53:12.000Okay, so he says, we have to make sure that we mask all the kids because otherwise the kids might get sick.
00:53:17.000Okay, now, number one, kids who are getting sick from COVID, as a general rule, and I'm talking statistically, do not get seriously ill from COVID.
00:53:25.000Okay, so then he says, we have to make sure that we don't shut down schools, right?
00:54:29.000What we are really doing here, and everybody knows it, is we are masking up the kids to protect the teachers or to make people's faint-hearted parents feel better about themselves.
00:54:48.000361 kids dead over the course of the last year and a half.
00:54:52.000Every one of those is a tragedy, but 361 kids under the age of 18 have died in the United States from COVID over the course of the last year and a half at the same exact period of time.
00:56:06.000Because it allows them to do the political thing of suggesting that Republicans are the worst people in the world.
00:56:10.000So here, for example, is Don Lemon doing just that.
00:56:11.000Again, completely data-free, just nonsense.
00:56:15.000How is it freedom to force children who are too young to be vaccinated into schools where they could be exposed to a deadly virus surrounded by people- Pause it for a second.
00:56:35.000But this Claude is saying this sort of stuff to scare the hell out of parents.
00:56:39.000I know this is happening because in my own community, there are a bunch of parents who are freaked out about COVID hitting their kids when the stats do not bear it out.
00:57:33.000When people aren't scared of the virus, it doesn't matter if you have a mandate, they don't mask up.
00:57:37.000And when it comes to COVID, when it comes to the Delta variant, cloth masks ain't doing the job.
00:57:41.000You need an N95 or a KN95, according to best available data.
00:57:45.000By the way, in Sweden, they never masked kids.
00:57:48.000According to Martin Koldorf, who's a professor at Harvard Medical School, quote, with open schools and no masks for ages 1 through 15 in Sweden, there were zero COVID deaths among its 1.8 million children during the first wave.
00:58:00.000Teachers had a lower risk than average of other professions.
00:58:03.000So we knew early on that schools are safe without masks.
00:58:07.000And we also know that the UK didn't really mask.
00:58:11.000According to Fortune.com, as Delta infections spiked, COVID cases in schools actually fell.
00:58:19.000For parents wary of sending their kids off to school, here's a rare bit of comforting data.
00:58:22.000Fewer than 1 in 100 school students and staff in England tested positive for COVID-19 in June.
00:58:27.000There was no mask mandate in the schools at the time.
00:58:31.000This came as Delta variant cases were peaking across not just England, but the whole of the UK.
00:58:37.000And again, Other countries are not super crazy the way that we are apparently.
00:58:42.000Here's the head of the UK Department of Education or an advisor named Dr. Susan Hopkins talking about why kids don't need masks.
00:58:49.000In looking at it, we've talked to educationalists, public health and clinical specialists, and the consensus view is very strongly to not advise school children at primary school age to wear face coverings.
00:59:02.000One is that they can have difficulties wearing them and keeping them on all day, and the second part of that is that it's really important that they can see facial expressions in order to develop their communications and language skills.
00:59:44.000Now, according to the New York Times, it turns out that's crap.
00:59:47.000Tara Parker Pope says COVID precautions have turned many parts of our world into a giant salad bar with plastic barriers separating sales clerks from shoppers, dividing shoppers in nail salons, and shielding students from their classmates. Intuition tells us a plastic shield would be protective against germs.
01:00:00.000But scientists who study aerosols, airflow, and ventilation say much of the time the barriers don't help, and probably give people a false sense of security.
01:00:06.000Sometimes the barriers can make things worse.
01:00:09.000Research suggests that in some instances, a barrier protecting a clerk behind a checkout counter may redirect the germs to another worker or customer.
01:00:15.000Rows of clear plastic shields, like you might find in a nail salon or a classroom, can also impede normal airflow and ventilation.
01:00:22.000Under normal conditions in stores, classrooms, and offices, exhaled breath particles disperse, carried by air currents, and, depending on the ventilation system, are replaced by fresh air roughly every 15 to 30 minutes.
01:00:32.000But, if you erect plastic barriers, that can change airflow in a room, disrupt normal ventilation, and create dead zones where viral aerosol particles can build up and become highly concentrated.
01:00:42.000Says Lindsay Marr, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, and one of the world's leading experts on viral transmission, quote, If you have a forest of barriers in a classroom, it's going to interfere with proper ventilation of that room.
01:00:53.000Everybody's aerosols are going to be trapped and stuck there in building up, and they will end up spreading beyond your own desk.
01:00:59.000OK, so just to get this straight, over the course of the pandemic, we went from masks are bad, according to Fauci, to masks are not only good, but the best.
01:01:07.000Two, we need plastic barriers, super important, too.
01:01:09.000Plastic barriers may, in fact, make things worse.
01:01:12.000Two, we have to have six feet of distancing, but also six feet of distancing comes from absolutely nowhere.
01:01:17.000Like if you ask the CDC where six feet of social distancing comes from, they have no idea.
01:01:21.000It's a standard that comes from nowhere.
01:01:24.000It's the science because Don Lemon says it's the science.
01:01:27.000And by the way, anybody who is worried about getting a vaccine, a Moderna vaccine, if they're young, right?
01:01:32.000If anybody who actually looks at their own risk factors and says, listen, I think I'm young and I'm healthy, I'm probably not going to get super sick from COVID-19 because just the odds are in my favor.
01:01:43.000And, you know, I'm not super comfortable with, like, the Moderna vaccine.
01:01:46.000Those people are apparently anti-vax crazies, according to everybody.
01:01:51.000today, federal health officials are investigating emerging reports that the Moderna coronavirus vaccine may be associated with a higher risk of a heart condition called myocarditis in younger adults than previously believed, according to two people familiar with the review.
01:02:02.000The investigation, which involves the FDA and Center for Disease Control, is focused on Canadian data that suggests the Moderna vaccine may carry a higher risk for young people than the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, especially for males below the age of 30 or so.
01:02:14.000you The two people who described the investigation spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.
01:02:21.000Moderna did not respond to a request for comment.
01:02:24.000In a statement, the CDC said its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has and continues to review reports of myocarditis and pericarditis following COVID-19 mRNA vaccination.
01:02:33.000CDC, FDA, our vaccine safety partners are actively monitoring these reports.
01:02:37.000One individual said the Canadian data indicates there might be a 2.5 times higher incidence of myocarditis in those who get Moderna compared with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
01:02:47.000So again, this is not an anti-vaccine point.
01:02:50.000I still think that all factors being taken into consideration for nearly everyone, the vaccine is a good idea.
01:02:57.000At least for people who are not children.
01:02:59.000But people who are looking around and saying, I feel like I'm not being told all the risks, I mean, that's not totally irrational, especially, again, if you are very young and if your risk factors are very low.
01:03:12.000Again, to go back to those CDC death data by age, it's not just that this thing is very not deadly for kids.
01:03:18.000This thing is not particularly deadly for adults who are under the age of 30.
01:03:23.000If you look at the actual statistics from the CDC across the course of this entire pandemic, The entire pandemic.
01:03:31.000More people in the United States aged 18 to 29 have died of pneumonia than have died of COVID in the same period.
01:04:20.000But the left has to keep this alive, and they must keep this alive explicitly for political purposes.
01:04:26.000And now, more than ever, they have to keep it alive for political purposes, because as we exit the summer and we enter the winter, and the Delta spike shifts from the seasonally hot states like Florida and Texas, and shifts into the Midwest and maybe into the Northeast, you're gonna start seeing all the COVID talk start to fade just a little.
01:04:44.000It can't be quite as political as it's been.
01:04:46.000And right now is the time to make hay for the Democrats.
01:04:49.000They have to make hay right now because their president is completely destroying America's foreign policy.
01:04:53.000And it turns out that their push for tyranny at home is not all that popular either.
01:04:57.000Alrighty, we'll be back here a little bit later today with an additional hour of content.
01:05:00.000First, you cannot forget to end your week by checking out The Andrew Klavan Show.