The Megyn Kelly Show - ＂Experts＂ Mislead on COVID Origins, and Biden's Afghanistan Baggage, with Josh Rogin and Robert O'Neill ｜ Ep. 366

00:00:00.480 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.640 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Big show today with guests we love.

00:00:18.260 Former Navy SEAL Robert O'Neill, the man who killed Osama bin Laden, is here to react to the killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

00:00:26.420 And whether President Biden has some nerve talking about Afghanistan like it belongs on his list of accomplishments.

00:00:33.820 All right. Plus, we're going to get into the military's recruitment issues and what Rob believes is behind the massive drop that we are seeing this year.

00:00:43.540 Just as we're backing a war in Ukraine, on the Ukrainian side, and our saber-rattling with China and behaving provocatively with respect. 0.63

00:00:53.100 Is this a good time to have the military recruitment dropping?

00:00:56.420 What are we doing about it? Drag shows and woke military and lectures about white rage? 0.83

00:01:01.980 OK, we'll get into it. But first, we begin with Josh Rogan of The Washington Post.

00:01:06.500 He covers foreign policy and national security.

00:01:09.140 He was one of the very first. He might have actually been the first reporter to look into the lab leak theory involving China's Wuhan lab.

00:01:17.960 This is at a time when he was looking at it right in the beginning when you were still called racist for doing that.

00:01:22.960 It was being completely covered up by Fauci and Collins and by most of the media.

00:01:28.380 But Josh saw something, continued to investigate and is one of the few mainstream reporters who you can really trust.

00:01:34.640 He's not biased. He doesn't have an agenda.

00:01:36.620 And he's been taking a hard look from the start on whether or not China has been covering up the real origin of this virus.

00:01:43.380 Recently, our team noticed major news outlets touting two new studies claiming to bolster evidence that COVID emerged from the wild.

00:01:54.380 It started in that Wuhan market. It wasn't from a lab.

00:01:59.420 Really? Unlike the mainstream, we actually took a look at the research and who authored it and who funded it and what we found will infuriate you on a couple of different levels.

00:02:15.520 Josh Rogan, welcome back to the show. How are you doing?

00:02:18.200 I'm doing great, Megan. Thanks for having me on again.

00:02:20.240 Okay, so we see two studies just out. Now they've been peer reviewed. They came out in February 1st and now they've been peer reviewed.

00:02:30.820 So we're supposed to listen to them. And they suggest that COVID began in the Wuhan market and not in a lab.

00:02:39.220 So I looked at this and I thought, okay, who studied? Who are the authors of these studies?

00:02:44.540 One has 19 co-authors. One has 30 co-authors. And my my my eyes lit up when I saw it's all the same people who have been touting the Wuhan market theory as opposed to the lab leak theory all along, except for the very beginning of the pandemic.

00:03:06.220 When many of these same scientists took a look at the virus and its genome sequence and all of that and said, holy shit, this looks like it came from a lab. 0.97

00:03:15.700 This looks like it came from a man, like it was manmade. And then they had a conference call with Fauci and Collins, which was documented by the US Congress pursuant to emails that they get their hands on. 0.50

00:03:26.440 And within 48 hours of that meeting back on February 1st, 2020, these scientists did a complete 180 and said, not only do we within 48 hours suddenly no longer believe in the lab leak theory, but it's racist, it's bigoted, it's wrong.

00:03:46.220 And here they are saying the same bought and paid for manufactured nonsense. And the media, of course, without doing any investigation, just repeats it and touts it and sort of puts the finger in the thumb of the thumb in the eye of those who said, looks manmade, looks like it's probably from that Wuhan lab. 0.57

00:04:08.660 Do I, do I, do I summarize the events correctly?

00:04:12.800 Yeah. And what a damning recounting of events that you, I agree with every word you said, we're two and a half years into this pandemic and we still don't know how it began.

00:04:23.180 And the reason, one of the main reasons we still don't know how it began is because all of the people who have that information, rather than spending all of their time and expertise and our money actually trying to figure it out, have spent it trying to obscure the origin.

00:04:39.060 That's what they're doing here. They're using, abusing science to tell us something that they themselves know is not accurate, which is that they know how this started and, you know, take away the charts and the graphs and the, and the, and the data.

00:04:57.820 And that motivation is an allegation that I'm making based on a mountain of evidence. And you pointed out some of it. They say different things to themselves in private than they do in public.

00:05:08.780 Like they attack anyone, uh, as a conspiracy theorist who doesn't agree with their point of view. And, uh, they are constantly engaged in exaggerating the data and the science that they are so expert in using, uh, to project something onto society, which they is disingenuous, which is that there's a firm evidence that the, this thing emerged from the market, which we simply don't know. Okay.

00:05:32.700 And then they go out into the press and mostly the science press, which is honestly is like a subset of the media, which is sort of the most captured source captured part of the media I've ever seen in my life because they launder this narrative, which is, Oh, we definitely know it came from the market.

00:05:49.920 And if you look at the report itself, it says there's insufficient quote unquote, insufficient evidence. It's in the report that, that they know that where this came from at all. And more, more than that, the paper admits now after it got reviewed that they have no idea what happened before the market. In other words, they don't know.

00:06:08.720 All they're saying is that it was a super spreader event, not the origin of that. We already knew that already.

00:06:13.120 And yet here they are in, in major papers saying that, Oh yeah, this proves that the market theory is true. And the science journalists wrong with that. And it's, it's, it's, it's a pattern for two and a half years and it's, uh, egregious. And this is just the latest example of these people who have a conflict of interest, Megan. That's the, the other thing that I think you're pointing out here is if the lab leak theory is true, we don't know, but we should investigate it. Don't you think?

00:06:35.040 Uh, if it's true, uh, all of these people have, uh, a lot to answer for and, uh, they don't want to answer for it. That's the bottom line all the way up from Francis Collins and Fauci to Anderson and all of these guys who have a clear conflict of interest cannot be seen as independent adjudicators of this issue because, uh, their careers depending on, depend on convincing us one, uh, theory and not the other.

00:06:58.760 That's exactly right. Everything you just said is so smart and I want to pick up on, on a bunch of it. So first of all, about how,

00:07:05.040 these so-called scientists who are just given the pen by science magazine, by nature magazine, just write whatever you want. They do consistently exaggerate what they actually know. And we'll get to the agenda. I mean, the reason they're exaggerating is knowable and we know it. They have an agenda at Fauci and Collins have an agenda. Collins no longer there, but had and have an agenda.

00:07:27.040 And it's all the same. Uh, these guys want to do what Fauci tells them to do. And these studies were funded by Fauci. They were, they were funded by Fauci, by NAISD and by the national institutes of health. Okay. So that's sort of buried in the fine print, but first of all, that that's important. So they're, they constantly exaggerate. You said, okay, so here's what they did. They come out with these two studies in February. First of all, non peer reviewed and just pop them up in science magazine.

00:07:57.040 They wrote initially together.

00:08:27.040 CSEs who's done a lot of, he's done a lot of great COVID reporting. Sure. And he noticed the differences. So that's what they said. Dispositive evidence that it came from a market. Now they say, after it's been peer reviewed, while there's insufficient evidence to define upstream events, meaning they don't know what caused this, the exact circumstances remain obscure. Again,

00:08:50.040 we don't know what caused it. Our analysis indicates that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred via the live wildlife trade in China and show that the Hunan market was the epicenter, no longer unambiguous epicenter, but just epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. So what they, the peer reviewed version of the article basically just says, we have no freaking clue what happened before it infected a bunch of people at that market. But that market seems to have been the epicenter of the pandemic. That tells us nothing.

00:09:18.680 Not only does it tell us nothing. The reason that it's funny, I mean, not haha funny, but like ironic funny is that they already got their first news story from the preprint. The New York Times did a front page article on the preprint, which made the false claims that didn't even survive the review. And again, from just from a journalism standpoint, you've got an un peer reviewed paper that's making a serious allegation. And you're just going to put it on the front page of the New York Times without any serious scrutiny and big flashy headline. Oh, it looks like the wet market did it. Oh, what are you going to do?

00:09:47.880 And then here we are, what, four months later, and it's totally changed. Are they going to put another front page story on the New York Times to tell us that actually none of that was true at all, even by the papers on logic? No, all you see is like, oh, well, we're, you know, we're pretty sure it came from the market, which is, I mean, if you just step back for a second, Megan, because people can get lost in the mumbo jumbo.

00:10:07.640 And, you know, I, I, I find that when I'm trying to explain this to people, it's really important to point them to the experts like Alina Chan at MIT. I mean, she just went to, she's just MIT, but anyway, give her, her, her scientific analysis a look.

00:10:20.380 But the big picture here is that why are they going out of their way to push one or another? Is that what science is now? Is science about, I'm going to decide what happened before I do the research and then find every little bit of evidence that I can to support what I already think and ignore all of the evidence to the contrary?

00:10:39.780 Because what's more important than the data points in this paper, which is like, oh, well, there was a raccoon dog at the market, maybe. And we also found COVID at the market and maybe COVID went through a raccoon dog, but we never found any raccoon dogs who had the, the, that's the logic, that's the argument.

00:10:56.320 And then all of a sudden we definitely know what happened. I mean, it, it, it's an insult really to the intelligence of the American people and the readers and the viewers, because if you just think about it for two seconds, you realize, oh, wait, they're taking tiny bits of data that they're cherry picking and then trying to convince us of something that they must know is a super weak argument. Why are they doing, what's the, what's the scam there? And then the other thing is they're ignoring all the other evidence, which is that, you know, we don't know when the pandemic started.

00:11:25.680 It may very well have started in September. Okay. So they've got an entire field of research or 30 scientists and NIH fund and all this stuff to get you a paper that assumes that it started in December when there's plenty of evidence that's not the case. You know, it may very well have started in September of 2019 or October when a lot of people got sick at the Wuhan military games.

00:11:49.040 And, you know, if you just think about that one, it's like, you see the lie, you see the scam, the, the, the misdirect, the, the shell game. It's like, if we, if you believe every single piece of data we picked and ignore every piece of data that we decided to ignore, then maybe you could think that this is what happened.

00:12:06.080 But the bottom line is that there's zero direct evidence that came from the market. Zero. Not one animal, not one raccoon dog, not one mink, not one. What was that? The other came up with the pangolin. Yeah. Where's that pangolin? Where's the magic pangolin? Where did, what happened to it? How did the virus get from the caves in Yunnan, a thousand miles away to this Wuhan market without spilling over on the way? How is it you didn't find like a string of pangolins and the people that they infected? And how come the, you know, virus happens to have a...

00:12:36.080 Furing cleavage site that was being worked on by...

00:12:39.440 Wait, wait, wait, stand by, because furing cleavage is important. Because I just want to add to what you're saying, because the second study, you know, that we're supposed to so revere, touted by the New York Times, concludes the most probable explanation for the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into humans involves zoonotic jumps. Again, they're saying it came from an animal, from as yet undetermined intermediate host animals at the Hunan market. As yet undetermined. What they mean is we've never found the animal.

00:13:04.980 80,000 plus animals have been examined. Not one had this virus. So they have to admit, as yet undetermined host animal, they haven't found it. And yet we have all this evidence on the other side, including this lab asking for permission, well, I mean, through EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak's group, for money to do exactly to a coronavirus, a back coronavirus, what was done, what appears to have been done to this COVID-19 situation where they inject the

00:13:34.980 the furing cleavage site, which makes it more transmissible, potentially more dangerous. And I'll let you pick it up on a furing cleavage site.

00:13:42.300 Right, right, right. I mean, you're bringing up a really crucial point, which is that the real motivation behind a lot of this sort of, you know, weak research pushed as conclusive evidence is that they want to tell people not to look into the other theory.

00:13:54.700 Right. And, you know, that was easy for the first year of the pandemic because Donald Trump was president and he said it probably came from the lab.

00:14:00.820 So all the people who wanted to stop you from thinking about that, all they had to say was, oh, that's a Donald Trump conspiracy theory.

00:14:07.480 And most of the media was like, oh, we're not going to touch that thing. You know, we don't want to be pushing a Donald Trump conspiracy theory.

00:14:13.540 But then something crazy happened, Megan, is a guy named Joe Biden said out loud on the record in a statement that the lab leak theory is one of the two possible theories and we should investigate them both.

00:14:25.620 And then another crazy thing happened. The head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros, who rejected his own WHO COVID origin studies because he didn't investigate the lab.

00:14:36.480 And he said, we really need to investigate the lab. And why should we investigate the lab?

00:14:39.820 And, you know, baked into all of these news stories about this weak research that cherry picks data on behalf of conflicted scientists who are trying to cover their tushies, baked into every one of those stories somehow is this idea that like, oh, well, this is settled now.

00:14:53.480 We can forget about the lab. But the problem is it doesn't work anymore because, you know, there are now millions and millions of Americans who understand that that that that con game, that shell game, that, you know, let's say we believe everything in this paper, which I don't.

00:15:06.780 We still need to look into the lab because it's another theory. And the people who are telling you not to look into the lab, like the Collins and Fauci's and Daszak's of the world, have retrenched to a new rhetorical position, which is like, oh, well, I guess it could have come from the lab, but we'll never figure it out because the Chinese government won't let us into the lab.

00:15:21.800 And that's a retreat from their previous position, which is that you're a racist conspiracy theorist, if you even mention the lab.

00:15:28.060 But it still serves this their same goal of saying that there's nothing we can do. So we might as well just accept what they say and go about our business.

00:15:35.100 The problem with that, of course, look under the hood.

00:15:36.800 And they don't want to look at the lab, but they really don't want us to look at their work with those labs and they don't want us to look at how American taxpayers funded the work that somehow, you know, was centered around the very similar research to the research at the Wuhan lab that somehow spilled out in the town where that lab was, not a thousand miles away where the bats were.

00:15:57.700 And, yeah, I'm sure that market had a lot of people from Wuhan walking through it.

00:16:01.960 It's natural that a market would be a super spread of a market, a lot of people in the market.

00:16:06.240 But that has nothing to do with the fact that the unique characteristics of this virus suggest, according to people like Anderson, when they were talking privately but not publicly, that it might be connected to the lab in some way.

00:16:18.200 He believed that, you know, so I think we need to check that out.

00:16:21.940 And the problem is no one is checking that out because the Biden administration did a 90 day intelligence review and then concluded they couldn't figure it out and wash their hands of the matter.

00:16:31.660 And the Democratic Congress doesn't want to touch it because they don't want to get in the way of their own base because progressives have concluded that this is now a political issue, which is not it's not a political issue.

00:16:41.740 It's not a scientific million people are dead.

00:16:44.180 We need to know how it started.

00:16:45.400 Peter Daszak, the guy whose EcoHealth Alliance we were funding, Fauci kept throwing money at.

00:16:50.340 That was our taxpayer money funding for this very dangerous research that we were not overseeing.

00:16:54.560 He was one of the first to beg to have the lab leak theory publicly rejected and warned, quote, that that public release of the virus's genetic sequencing would bring, quote, very unwelcome attention.

00:17:10.640 This is the guy doing the most dangerous research.

00:17:13.100 Right.

00:17:13.380 For him.

00:17:13.920 His group.

00:17:14.500 And and to take a look at the players, all the all the same players now are authoring these two latest studies being touted by the media as like putting putting an end to the debate.

00:17:24.140 All these players have been involved in this from the beginning, trying to back up what Fauci and Collins wanted them to say, which is it wasn't a lab leak.

00:17:31.140 It came from an animal.

00:17:32.460 And one of them.

00:17:33.460 And one of them we've talked about this.

00:17:35.140 I did a talking points memo on January 14th about this very thing and got into all the the details we learned from the leaked emails.

00:17:41.560 So here's one of them, Christian Anderson, he's with Scripps Research, a professor, Robert Gary, two R's and Gary, Tulane professor.

00:17:50.560 Both of them on these on these two papers and again, which were funded by Fauci and the NIH, they were involved earlier.

00:17:59.520 And Anderson is quoted in the study as saying, I was quite convinced of the lab leak myself until we dove into this very carefully and looked at it much closer.

00:18:09.340 Does he mean very carefully in 48 hours from that February 1st, 2020, 21st, 2020 conference call with Fauci and Collins?

00:18:19.120 Because just to refresh the audience's memory about how we're being lied to, we're being lied to and the media is complicit in it.

00:18:27.100 Just to refresh you, Feb 1, 2020, Fauci and Collins had a teleconference about origin with 11 top virologists.

00:18:35.440 The next day, Christian Anderson's belief that this was a lab leak was communicated to these guys through a British scientist named Sir Jeremy Farrar.

00:18:46.540 Same for Robert Gary, both of whom are authoring two of the authors on these latest studies.

00:18:51.800 Fauci and Collins' preference that this, quote, very destructive conspiracy needed to be, quote, put down because it could do, quote, great potential harm to science and international harmony

00:19:04.320 is on record. It's all over the emails, black and white. They're not contested.

00:19:09.340 No one's claiming they're fake. Fauci called the lab leak theory a, quote, shiny object and assured colleagues that it would, quote, go away.

00:19:17.020 All right. That's two days after Christian Anderson's belief in it being a lab leak theory was expressed as something between 60 and 80 percent.

00:19:25.960 Two days after that initial teleconference, this guy, Robert Gary Anderson and others did a complete 180 writing an article for Nature saying it was clearly not from a lab, clearly not manmade.

00:19:39.940 And now this guy's the nerve to say in the study. I was quite convinced it was a lab leak until we dove into it very carefully, looked at it much closer.

00:19:47.680 You're a liar, Christian Anderson. You lied. And six months later, after they published that article in Nature magazine, after, you know, the 180, 0.99

00:19:56.840 Anderson and Gary got an eight point nine million dollar grant from Fauci and Collins.

00:20:03.320 And now they're at it again. Yeah, I mean, so what again, what a sort of damning, clear recitation of the events that prove the bias of these guys and prove also their likely intention to deceive us?

00:20:22.840 Because, of course, he says that he changed his mind now when the emails came out now, when he's caught having said it, his explanation is I changed my mind.

00:20:31.780 And don't you change your mind when people when the facts change? But he didn't tell us that that at the time.

00:20:37.000 And that's where the deception is. He didn't reveal at the time that, oh, yeah, when I took a look at this virus, I thought it probably came from the lab.

00:20:44.060 And then maybe I changed my mind later. No. So that two years was the crucial time when this narrative was set.

00:20:50.440 And these guys were in charge of setting the narrative. Their early letters on this, again, with a million different Ph.D., you know,

00:20:57.920 degrees and M.D. and papers and the best schools in the world, blah, blah, blah.

00:21:05.280 Everyone bought it except for the Trump people. And people didn't like the Trump people.

00:21:09.580 And that shaped the narrative that we're still dealing with. That's how the issue got politicized in the first place.

00:21:13.680 The scientists politicized it on purpose, again, to cover their own asses. 0.94

00:21:18.380 And so as far as I'm concerned, they've lost credibility. These scientists have lost credibility on this issue. 0.87

00:21:24.140 Now, there are a lot of other scientists out there who belatedly, to be sure, because they're under a lot of pressure not to do this,

00:21:29.560 have now started to look at the other side of the ledger.

00:21:32.660 And when you that's why Peter Daszak got required to step down from the the COVID, the Lancet COVID origins investigation,

00:21:41.840 because they finally realized he had a clear conflict of interest because there's a good chance it came from the lab.

00:21:46.760 And then that entire study went away. Peter Daszak was on the WHO investigative team.

00:21:51.180 He's investigating himself and his best friends in the Wuhan lab.

00:21:54.580 That was amazing. 60 Minutes had a great piece on that.

00:21:56.940 Who's investigating? Can you imagine if they were like, hey, OJ, we need to find out what happened to Nicole?

00:22:03.180 And OJ was like, oh, don't worry, I'll figure it out. I know her. I knew her really well.

00:22:06.780 Don't you want me to figure it out? You know, I knew Ron, too. Yeah, we were all good friends.

00:22:10.420 I'll get to the bottom of this. That's what that's that's the mentality of putting Peter Daszak in charge of the COVID origins investigation,

00:22:16.560 especially since we later found out a year later that he had proposed putting fur and cleavage sites on back coronaviruses in China.

00:22:25.700 Sometimes he actually talked about doing that.

00:22:28.200 And then here we have a back coronavirus with a fur and cleavage site breaking out in the city where his best friends are in the lab. 0.78

00:22:34.800 But I mean, forget about Occam's razor. Common sense dictates that we should look into that lab and we should look into all.

00:22:41.560 Now, you talked about that eight million dollar, eight point nine million dollar NIH contract, which is egregious.

00:22:47.140 But what if I told you that USAID got a contract for one hundred twenty five million dollars, one hundred twenty five dollars they put out to restart the project of virus hunting in foreign countries?

00:22:56.860 The same project that. Two hundred million dollars before it was called the predict program, which didn't predict the pandemic, which may have contributed to sparking the pandemic.

00:23:06.360 So the NIH is only one part of it. You know, Fauci and friends are going back to the well.

00:23:12.340 But also all of the the huge virus hunting industry, they're itching to get started again.

00:23:17.640 OK, and the Biden administration, despite actually admitting that we don't know how it started and that they care about how it started and that they are trying to investigate how it started.

00:23:26.980 Nevertheless, didn't blink an eye when USAID put out one hundred twenty five million dollars.

00:23:30.860 Now, that's held up right now by a guy named Lindsey Graham, who's the appropriator in charge of that committee. 1.00

00:23:35.880 Then you've got this investigation. You know, that's the other thing.

00:23:38.960 They want this to go away. Well, I'm sorry, but we're not going to be able to let it go away because we have to figure out what happens so we can make sure that it doesn't happen again.

00:23:46.680 And, you know, any disaster in the world, a plane crash, a nuclear meltdown, the obvious thing to do is to figure out what happened.

00:23:52.680 Otherwise, how do you know what to do so that it doesn't happen again?

00:23:55.540 And when Republicans take over the House, their investigation will be reinvigorated.

00:24:00.900 And guys like Peter Daszak and Fauci, if he doesn't retire right ahead of this, which he might, are going to be called to the carpet.

00:24:08.920 And they're going to and if they don't produce the documents, then they're going to face, you know, subpoenas and other pressure to do.

00:24:17.680 Well, why don't we do criminal prosecutions if you can if you can prosecute Steve Bannon for not cooperating with Congress or why not Anthony Fauci?

00:24:25.600 You know, it's like this is the precedent that the Democrats have set and they're going to have to live with it if and when the shoe is on their foot in terms of control.

00:24:32.180 But well, it's interesting because, you know, there's a lot of sort of loose talk about, you know, criminal prosecutions of Fauci.

00:24:38.160 I say, let's do the investigation. And here's the other thing.

00:24:41.060 It's it's it's before we get to criminal prosecutions, why not let the FBI have a crack at the origin investigation?

00:24:46.340 You know, when the intelligence community investigated for 90 days and then said case closed, we couldn't figure it out.

00:24:52.980 There was one agency that had a moderate degree of confidence that the lab was connected to the outbreak.

00:24:58.680 That was the FBI. OK. And because they're forensic investigators, they actually know how to do a forensic investigation.

00:25:04.160 They don't care about, you know, Anderson's paper. They want to just figure out what happened.

00:25:07.880 Something bad happened. So what about that?

00:25:10.320 Let's go back to them. And I think you should have on your show, Senator Roger Marshall, who's written to the FBI to ask them what what why is it that they think it came from the lab?

00:25:18.460 And why what happened with that investigation? So I think this is not over.

00:25:23.180 And this is far from over, actually. And there's no statute of limitation on a million dead Americans back in no statute of limitation.

00:25:29.880 Those cases never get closed. And there's the crime and then there's the cover up.

00:25:34.720 And the cover up is what we're seeing right now when it's ongoing and it involves Americans and members of the U.S.

00:25:41.220 government. And it needs to be exposed.

00:25:44.340 And and, you know, we've talked about this, of course, but just in the news today, it's not, of course, just the deaths.

00:25:49.340 It's the extreme disruption, not just economically, but to children and people's lives.

00:25:54.320 And there's news today on how the the insanity continues here, Josh, you know, even with that.

00:26:00.300 Obviously, there's still covid out there and some are reacting as though we're still in the midst of Delta or we're still in the midst of the original strain.

00:26:07.700 And this is in the news as the D.C. public schools have now made the vaccine mandatory for 12 years old and up.

00:26:16.760 They've made it mandatory. OK, 85 percent Washington Post reporting, 85 percent of all students between 12 and 15 have been vaccinated.

00:26:24.360 But when you look at black children only, that number drops to 60 percent.

00:26:28.320 So the Washington Post notes black kids who experienced disproportionately large academic setbacks during the pandemic could basically be banned from school in huge numbers next year in the name of safety and wellness.

00:26:42.740 Even though these kids have virtually no risk from covid to begin with the the Washington, D.C.

00:26:50.060 public schools are not alone. New Orleans in February added the covid vaccine to its list of mandatory required immunizations for kids five and up.

00:27:00.540 So they're looking at that coming at the beginning of this. And here's where that goes.

00:27:04.220 And just the covid policies in general. Look out at L.A.

00:27:07.400 They had they had said that they were going to make the covid vaccines mandatory and now they've delayed it.

00:27:14.520 And why have they delayed it? They had to. They they said, oh, it was a low transmission in schools.

00:27:20.100 And, you know, some 78 percent of our students 12 and up have already been fully vaccinated.

00:27:23.900 Here's the truth. Half of their students were not showing up.

00:27:27.320 The parents don't want to do this. Only 31 percent of parents of five to 11 year olds have fully vaccinated their children.

00:27:33.400 The vast majority of parents are not going to do this for their five to 11 year olds.

00:27:37.320 And even those with 12 and up are a little reticent because the kids face very little risk.

00:27:42.160 So L.A. school district now estimating tens of thousands of students are missing right now from their back to school rosters.

00:27:47.940 They say it could be more than 20,000 missing.

00:27:52.300 More than 200,000 were chronically absent during last year's school year.

00:27:56.600 That's nearly half of all their students, much due to these unnecessary quarantines for close contacts who are asymptomatic. 1.00

00:28:06.120 We dealt with this in my own school. So all the covid insanity and the loss learning and the social setbacks and so on that the children have served.

00:28:15.160 This is all based on something we still haven't gotten to the bottom of.

00:28:19.740 Who caused it? How is there a person who could be held accountable or a group of people?

00:28:26.960 And most.

00:28:29.240 Frighteningly, are they still in charge right now?

00:28:33.940 Yeah, the economic and social impact of the pandemic is ongoing and just epic, not just in America, by the way, in countries all over the world, you know, and the economic and the cost to our children.

00:28:47.320 I don't have any children. My wife and I are expecting November, so I don't know exactly what I would do with my child.

00:28:53.100 But I would like to think that they would live in a society that has clear and and and well understood standards for taking care of each other's health.

00:29:02.920 I'm pro vaccine. And, you know, I don't I don't I'm you and I may disagree on that, Megan.

00:29:08.460 That's fine. We don't have to agree on everything to agree on vaccine.

00:29:11.300 Just just just not mandates. I'm not pro mandate.

00:29:13.980 But the the greater point that I think we definitely agree on is that the suffering is ongoing and and accountability is is crucial.

00:29:24.200 And without knowing what our government knows about this virus, we can't have confidence in our government to tell us what to do.

00:29:31.260 And what I saw through the course of the pandemic so far is that our government didn't trust us with information and told us what to do without explaining to us why they were saying that.

00:29:44.840 And when they were wrong, they didn't admit it. And that applies to masks.

00:29:47.940 It definitely applies to schools. It applies to social distancing.

00:29:51.760 And when the science changed for political reasons, both administrations, actually, the Trump and Biden administration are reluctant to admit that they might have gotten it wrong because they don't have the courage to level with the American people.

00:30:03.880 And I think, you know, this is a virus that doesn't care about our politics.

00:30:07.880 It treats us all the same. And we need to find the common ground to get together on this thing because it's not over and it's not going to be over for a very long time.

00:30:14.920 That's right. OK, such an interesting discussion. We're going to hold Josh over because his area of expertise, one of them is China.

00:30:22.880 And he just came out with a piece suggesting that the real crisis on Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan will start after she comes home.

00:30:31.380 So thank goodness she did not have her jet shot down. She was not attacked while she was there.

00:30:35.920 She's gone. She's left Taiwan now. But this is not over. And are we prepared for what's coming our way? 0.59

00:30:42.360 We'll pick it up there right after a quick, quick break.

00:30:44.920 All right, Josh. So you wrote a piece that is entitled The Real Crisis, in which you posit that the real crisis will start after Nancy Pelosi comes home.

00:31:00.220 There was not a complete meltdown, at least not militarily, when she went over there.

00:31:04.020 Other tensions were high. And so what do you mean the real problems are going to start after she comes home?

00:31:08.920 And what's China going to do? Right. Well, Megan, for weeks, the Biden administration has been leaking to every reporter in town that this was the most dangerous trip ever.

00:31:18.620 And the Chinese were really going to do something crazy. As it turns out, the sky didn't fall. 1.00

00:31:23.080 You know, we didn't get into World War Three.

00:31:25.920 The Chinese didn't decide to start a war over Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan.

00:31:29.940 They were certainly angry about it. You know, it was certainly inconvenient for the Biden administration at a time when they were trying to downplay the tensions in U.S.-China relationship rather than stoke them.

00:31:41.880 They didn't want Nancy Pelosi to go.

00:31:43.480 They thought that this was a an ego trip for her, a legacy item to add to her her resume. 0.98

00:31:51.280 And for them, the timing was downright inconvenient. So they begged her not to go in private.

00:31:55.660 And then President Biden blurted out that she was going and that the military was against it.

00:32:00.180 Actually, it was the White House, but close enough for Biden.

00:32:03.540 And boom, now we have an international scandal, you know, and that's just bad.

00:32:08.320 That just makes us look like we don't know what we're doing.

00:32:10.880 You know what I mean? Like, go or don't go, but don't have your dirty laundry inside the Democratic leadership laundered by the president of the United States.

00:32:19.120 And then, of course, the Chinese Communist Party is like, oh, that's great.

00:32:22.320 We're going to pounce on that. We're going to threaten everybody, scare the crap out of everybody. 0.97

00:32:26.880 Maybe we can scare us. We're not going either way. We win. 0.86

00:32:29.240 So it was just amateur hour over there, you know, between Pelosi and Biden.

00:32:34.220 And that's embarrassing for America. OK.

00:32:36.520 But at the same time, when push comes to shove, we can't let the Chinese Communist Party tell our lawmakers where to go. 0.78

00:32:42.700 It's not going to work. I'm sorry.

00:32:44.660 That has to be a firm principle that, you know, if Nancy Pelosi wants to go to Taiwan, she gets to go to Taiwan.

00:32:51.000 And that's that. And don't tell her that, you know, at the same time, the reality is that, you know,

00:32:57.500 while they didn't shoot her down and they didn't, you know, do anything crazy while she was there,

00:33:02.860 they're going to use it as an excuse to to turn up the heat on the Taiwanese people. 0.94

00:33:07.940 Right. The Chinese Communist Party always punishes the weaker party.

00:33:10.680 They don't want to confront us. It's much easier for them to wait till Pelosi goes home.

00:33:14.340 She forgets all about it. She got her photo op.

00:33:16.780 And now they're going to torture and punish the Taiwanese people. 1.00

00:33:19.700 And they already did it. They banned 100 Taiwanese export goods in a day just for the sake of it. 0.57

00:33:24.860 They turned off Weibo, which is like that's how like people there communicate.

00:33:28.340 That's like they're it's like Twitter plus your text message and and and WhatsApp altogether. 0.98

00:33:33.900 And they just turned it off for the whole island of 20 million people just said just to be, you know, jerks about it. 0.98

00:33:39.480 You know, and that's just the beginning. So, you know, I support, you know, anybody who wants to go to Taiwan. 0.96

00:33:44.980 I love Taiwan. I've been there. I'm going there again soon.

00:33:49.040 At the same time, it would be nice if the U.S. could get its act together so that when we do send to people,

00:33:54.740 to Taiwan, it's not just, oh, let's make sure her plane doesn't get shot down, that it fits into a strategy to help the Taiwanese people deal with what's menacing them,

00:34:02.440 which is an increasingly aggressive Chinese Communist Party that's acting increasingly crazy and building a crazy war machine in order to eventually attack. 0.62

00:34:11.200 That's what their goal is, is to attack Taiwan when they can manage it. 1.00

00:34:15.020 They can't manage it right now, but they're working towards it.

00:34:17.100 Mm hmm. Yeah. So she she gets her Yas Queen moment and Taiwan is left to deal with the fallout. 1.00

00:34:24.360 I mean, that's really the question. Is Taiwan exactly in a better position today than they were prior to her visit?

00:34:31.140 Right. No, they're actually they're they're much worse off, you know, and they're going to continue to be worse off now.

00:34:36.260 That's not to say it's too late. We have a you know, Congress could pass legislation to help Taiwan,

00:34:42.000 to support Taiwan, to give them more stuff, the stuff they're going to need when China invades.

00:34:46.140 First of all, we could put more of our military.

00:34:48.580 The administration could put more of our military assets in the region.

00:34:51.200 They could sell Taiwan more arms. They could get more involved diplomatically.

00:34:55.580 They're not really doing anything. I mean, they're doing some of it, to be fair, but not enough.

00:34:59.900 And meanwhile, you know, the Taiwanese people are looking 100 miles across the Taiwan Strait at a monster. 0.99

00:35:04.680 And with that's building a thousand new nuclear weapons for what?

00:35:09.420 Why did why does China need a thousand new nuclear weapons? 0.98

00:35:12.000 Oh, yeah. To deter us from helping Taiwan. 1.00

00:35:13.880 You know, they're building, you know, an amphibious landing force for what?

00:35:17.800 Oh, because they're going to land there. OK, so this is happening, people.

00:35:21.740 OK, we better wrap our minds around it. Now, I I get the and that doesn't mean that we're going to have a war.

00:35:27.340 It means that in order to prevent the war, we have to increase our deterrence, that the Ukraine war should have taught us, in my view, that whatever we thought about deterring these totalitarian, murdering dictators, aggressive dictators like Putin and Xi Jinping, we were wrong.

00:35:44.560 We miscalculated. Somehow he thought he could pull it off.

00:35:47.200 Now, Putin failed because the Russian army is a paper tiger, but the Chinese army is different. 0.59

00:35:53.800 OK, and when they failed yet, he hasn't failed yet. He hasn't failed yet. That's a really good point.

00:35:58.560 But at least the Biden administration was wrong in that he was going to win in three days.

00:36:02.500 But that's a separate issue. But to get back to Taiwan, what that should have taught us is, you know, I asked President Zelensky, I was in Singapore, Megan, at this conference and they pipe in President Zelensky onto the big screen.

00:36:12.360 And I got to ask a question. I said, what would your advice be to the people of Taiwan?

00:36:16.100 And he was very clear. He said, you've got to help the small countries before the big country attacks, not after.

00:36:21.900 Once the attack happens, it's too late. So that's why I think that the trip was a prop, you know, again, defend her right to go.

00:36:29.480 Absolutely. That's an important principle. At the same time, to just show up.

00:36:33.180 It's not like she, you know, she didn't sign anything. She didn't bring anything.

00:36:36.960 You know what I mean? She got her name in a building.

00:36:39.680 So and then leave. And now the Biden administration has got to clean up her mess. 1.00

00:36:43.220 OK. And the Chinese are saying, OK, now we've got a good excuse to do all this evil stuff to menace the Taiwanese that we didn't have an excuse for before. 1.00

00:36:50.980 So we actually gave them an excuse. So all I'm saying is that the threat is rising.

00:36:56.840 And let me ask you a question about what you said, because I know Thomas Friedman, The New York Times had a had a piece the other day saying we need to sort of turn help Taiwan turn itself into a porcupine.

00:37:06.420 Like you got to get it now to sort of what you were saying, not entirely.

00:37:09.680 But this he was making the same point of like now's the time to get them armed to the point where the Chinese would recognize it would be folly to go in there and try to take control. 0.90

00:37:18.920 And I've seen others write. That's insane.

00:37:21.960 Just as soon as we start shipping weapons into Taiwan and any increased basis or increasing our military presence in the region, those just act immediately.

00:37:29.320 Those do it now like that. Chinese, they're not entirely rational actors. 1.00

00:37:33.340 They don't seem to be very afraid of us, nor should they be right now.

00:37:36.640 I mean, you can make the argument anyway. We're distracted in Ukraine. 0.57

00:37:39.720 Our military is not what it used to be. We can't even meet our recruiting goals, which we're going to get to with Robin O'Neill in a minute.

00:37:44.920 But what's to stop them? Why? Why if we did something like that?

00:37:49.340 Right. Ship in a bunch of arms to Taiwan now when they just go in now. 0.83

00:37:53.440 Right. Well, they're not ready. Otherwise, I think they would.

00:37:56.420 You know, there's two things that determine when a aggressive totalitarian expansionist dictator attacks his democratic neighbor intent.

00:38:03.520 And capability. They have the intent. They don't have the capability. They can't pull it off.

00:38:06.880 They don't have enough. Literally, they don't have enough ships to land.

00:38:09.760 They don't have enough missiles to flatten the place so that nobody's around to say boo.

00:38:13.960 And they don't have enough nuclear weapons to make sure that we don't come to their defense.

00:38:17.940 So they're building those three pillars. You know what else they're doing?

00:38:20.900 They're siphoning off all of their banks.

00:38:23.060 Why? Oh, so we can't sanction them. It's going to take some more time for them.

00:38:25.940 You know what else they're doing? They're hoarding foodstuffs 20 times what they need in all sorts of greens and cassava and soy and corn.

00:38:37.720 And, you know, Chinese people don't even eat cassava. It's not the point. 0.99

00:38:39.940 The point is that they're making sure that when the conflict comes, that they're prepared, that they're and they're he's doing it as fast as he can.

00:38:47.460 Believe me. So we have a small window.

00:38:50.000 Most people think three years, maybe four, maybe five on the outside to arm the Taiwanese to the teeth so they have a reasonable chance of defending themselves. 0.59

00:38:57.600 Because who knows, A, who's going to be president, but B, if we're going to be able to get there in time and who's going to make that decision.

00:39:03.540 So the only choice to save Taiwan's democracy is to imagine if we had given Ukraine all those weapons that we're giving them now last year, as many people said that we should.

00:39:12.820 Well, maybe, you know, thousands of Ukrainians would still be alive today.

00:39:16.620 And that's how we have to think about. Now, there's big problems with that. Right.

00:39:19.460 There's a risk that you're going to escalate, that the Chinese are so crazy. 1.00

00:39:22.800 I get that. I'm not saying we shouldn't ignore the risks. 0.88

00:39:25.640 I'm not saying we shouldn't do it thoughtfully, but I'm saying the bottom line is, as George Washington once said, preparing for a war is one of the most effective means of preserving the peace. 0.90

00:39:37.100 OK, and, you know, that doesn't make it easy, but it does mean that we have to start now and it does mean the window is closing.

00:39:43.000 Now, we talk about Thomas Friedman's piece.

00:39:44.920 I mean, if I'm remembering it correctly, he said that her visit was reckless.

00:39:48.680 Right. Now, I think that's wrong.

00:39:51.020 I think the Chinese response to her visit was reckless.

00:39:53.920 Now, again, I'm not defending the way that.

00:39:55.640 The Chinese administration handled it.

00:39:56.880 But for her to go, he's saying she shouldn't.

00:39:59.720 We just can't do that kind of thing.

00:40:01.420 I disagree with that.

00:40:02.780 You know, but what did we get out of it?

00:40:04.320 I mean, I he wasn't really making this point, I don't think.

00:40:07.320 But Tucker made this point the other night.

00:40:08.760 And I got it the way he put it.

00:40:10.280 Like, what do we get out of it?

00:40:11.440 You know, Nancy Pelosi is 82 years old.

00:40:13.520 She's almost out of office.

00:40:14.580 Everybody knows she's about to get booted as the House Speaker because the Republicans are likely to win. 1.00

00:40:18.460 So what happened?

00:40:19.360 You know, I think sort of the prediction of like we get very little.

00:40:22.060 Taiwan gets hurt.

00:40:23.120 She gets her Yas Queen moment, as I said. 0.99

00:40:25.120 But like, why?

00:40:27.440 Right.

00:40:27.740 No, I guess, again, sort of what I'm saying is that I think the important nuance is that we have to these trips in and of themselves are important, but not when they're handled badly.

00:40:36.140 So she handled it badly.

00:40:37.580 Sure.

00:40:38.000 And the administration handled it badly.

00:40:39.300 Sure.

00:40:39.400 So we didn't get what we should have.

00:40:41.120 But we the the the the idea of throwing support to Taiwan, including by going there and showing the Chinese that they can't tell us where to go is important, mostly because of what it means to U.S.-China relations, because the more that we space that we give them, the more they'll take. 0.62

00:40:57.800 And their appetite grows.

00:40:59.480 Yeah, but we're already.

00:41:00.520 But let me let me ask you my questions on this, because, you know, way more about this than I do.

00:41:04.580 I know what I read the papers.

00:41:06.660 But it seems like we're already in a very weak position right now to require anything of China.

00:41:12.100 You know, they own half of the United States.

00:41:13.640 They provide us with half of our electronics and our medicines.

00:41:18.220 And, you know, you could go down the list.

00:41:19.940 They're buying up half of our farmland.

00:41:22.460 And we're trying to set up these so-called guardrails.

00:41:25.540 I saw you write a piece about this as well.

00:41:26.980 We're like, OK, let's make the trade at least more economical or more fair.

00:41:30.300 And they don't have to agree to that.

00:41:31.600 And they probably won't agree to it.

00:41:32.580 So it's like, what position are we in right now to do anything to saber rattle with respect to that?

00:41:37.000 We we are military's weak.

00:41:38.680 We're already backing a war in Ukraine.

00:41:40.480 We just lost a war in Afghanistan.

00:41:41.920 We've been publicly humiliated.

00:41:44.520 But this is not a good time to go punching China in the face, is it? 0.91

00:41:49.100 Right. 0.64

00:41:49.300 No, I understand that argument.

00:41:51.100 The problem is that they're being aggressive on their timeline, not our timeline.

00:41:56.700 And sometimes you have to respond to the aggression of a bully, even when it's not convenient,

00:42:01.280 even when you're doing something else in another continent.

00:42:03.500 And, you know, but you're very right to sort of broaden it out to what's going on in the U.S.-China

00:42:07.580 relationship, because that's really the context here.

00:42:09.240 It's not really just about Taiwan, because the Chinese Communist Party is expanding everywhere,

00:42:13.800 not only around the world, but into our own society and on our campuses and in our tech

00:42:18.120 industries and in Wall Street.

00:42:19.360 And, you know, and this is a very complex and and and multifaceted threat.

00:42:26.180 And the military is not really the best answer.

00:42:28.240 Like on that, I think you and me and Tucker could probably agree.

00:42:31.060 It's not a military problem for most.

00:42:33.120 It's an economic and technological and ideological competition.

00:42:36.960 That's what we have.

00:42:37.800 That's the weak part.

00:42:38.720 You know, we have a bunch of hammers.

00:42:40.600 So every problem looks like a nail.

00:42:41.960 But the China threat is not a military threat for most.

00:42:45.820 They're trying to change the international order, you know, to advantage repression and

00:42:51.280 autocracy against their freedom and the rule of law and democracy.

00:42:55.400 And that's the way we live our lives.

00:42:57.240 So that should be really important to us.

00:42:59.260 And it's much more difficult than shooting down a bunch of tanks or drones or something

00:43:04.640 like that.

00:43:05.360 And that's how we have to think about it.

00:43:06.840 And, you know, I know.

00:43:08.040 But let me ask you this joke.

00:43:09.740 Let me ask you this joke.

00:43:10.520 OK, so David Goldman over at Compact wrote this piece saying we're sleepwalking into war

00:43:14.640 with China, which could be the worst calamity that ever befell the human race. 1.00

00:43:18.080 And he talks about how we've wasted six million, sorry, six trillion or more and failed nation

00:43:23.960 building campaigns over the past 20 years while China has been focusing its military

00:43:27.100 resources on surface to ship missiles, modern aircraft, submarines, electronic warfare measures

00:43:31.540 on its coast, saying, quote, if we fight China on its home seas, we'll probably lose.

00:43:35.560 He goes on to cite a 2020 book by Air Force strategist Stanford professor Oriana Schuyler

00:43:40.800 Mastro saying, quote, China's offensive weaponry, including ballistic and cruise missiles,

00:43:45.220 could destroy U.S. bases in the Western Pacific in a matter of days.

00:43:48.440 Recent war games have shown that a military clash between the U.S. and China over Taiwan

00:43:52.640 would likely result in a U.S. defeat with China completing an all out invasion in just

00:43:57.520 days or weeks.

00:43:59.560 They have 1300 state of the art ballistic missiles.

00:44:01.960 They can destroy American aircraft carriers as well as bases in Okinawa and Guam and on

00:44:05.920 it goes and saying Beijing will go to war to prevent Taiwan's sovereignty, but it would

00:44:11.700 tolerate the status quo unless we get too obnoxious about promoting the sovereignty.

00:44:17.000 So do you agree with that?

00:44:19.780 They paint a picture that like we're going down.

00:44:22.280 If we if we end in this battle, we're going down in Taiwan.

00:44:24.520 I know if if any of those things in that what you just read were true, I would agree with

00:44:29.200 them.

00:44:29.500 In other words.

00:44:30.060 But it's such a blinkered description, really unfair description of the situation.

00:44:34.300 We're getting aggressive.

00:44:35.580 Therefore, the Chinese are reacting by menacing Taiwan. 0.99

00:44:38.040 It's wrong.

00:44:38.860 It's not the truth.

00:44:39.800 It's not what happened.

00:44:40.900 The Chinese got more aggressive. 1.00

00:44:42.240 The Taiwanese are scared out of their wits because they don't want to live under the 1.00

00:44:46.440 CCP.

00:44:46.880 They saw.

00:44:47.140 Did you see what happened in Hong Kong?

00:44:48.580 Is that our fault, too?

00:44:49.500 Yeah.

00:44:49.960 The Uyghurs and the genocide in the camps.

00:44:52.200 Did we do that, too?

00:44:52.900 Is that because the China Hawks in D.C. are itching for World War Three?

00:44:56.140 No, it's it's a it's it's just something to say to lull us back into sleep while the threat

00:45:01.660 builds.

00:45:02.060 And, you know, and also everything that you read there is, again, related to the military

00:45:06.520 threat.

00:45:07.520 But, you know, let's say we have I mean, I'm all don't get me wrong.

00:45:10.720 And, you know, a war with China is is the worst case scenario.

00:45:13.540 But if you think about it, the the last worst case scenario is what we have now, which is

00:45:18.280 essentially they don't call it a Cold War.

00:45:20.180 It's not the Cold War.

00:45:21.480 But that's what we're in.

00:45:22.720 That's what they think.

00:45:23.700 If you read what they're slowly taking over the United States of America where we're

00:45:27.420 allowing it.

00:45:28.100 But not to say that all the lessons of the Cold War apply or anything like that, but it

00:45:32.500 is a systems battle and only one is going to win.

00:45:35.540 OK, and that's a battle that we can't avoid.

00:45:37.500 And that doesn't involve ships and it doesn't involve missiles.

00:45:40.720 It involves our economy.

00:45:42.160 And when you see things like the chip bill, chips bill for it, OK, great.

00:45:45.740 But we should have 100 things like that.

00:45:47.260 Yeah, it's tiny.

00:45:48.200 And and so the problem is that all you have is people out there like this guy being like,

00:45:53.300 oh, what, do you want a war?

00:45:54.080 No, you don't want a war.

00:45:54.740 I guess we just got to let the Chinese take over everything. 1.00

00:45:56.760 What are you going to do?

00:45:57.820 You know, and that's essentially the position that the Vichy French had in the 1930s.

00:46:02.180 And how did that work?

00:46:03.180 OK, you can't just look across to the aggressive totalitarian expansionist dictator and say, oh, well,

00:46:09.340 I guess they're so powerful and we don't want a war.

00:46:12.260 So let's just sacrifice our way of life by never provoking them.

00:46:16.240 That's exactly what they want.

00:46:17.360 That's that will have the opposite effect of what you want, because it will embolden them.

00:46:21.060 And then that will only make the situation much more dangerous.

00:46:24.340 So the hot war is the worst case scenario.

00:46:26.100 The Cold War is a less worst case scenario. 0.70

00:46:28.060 But avoiding the problem is not an option.

00:46:30.720 And if we care about the things that we believe in, including freedom, rights, human rights

00:46:33.840 and the democracy that we live in, well, then we're going to have to come together on this

00:46:38.200 thing and not just tell everybody that we just have to let China be China and it's all

00:46:41.840 America's fault because it's not the truth.

00:46:44.440 Josh Rogan, you're so good.

00:46:46.660 It's so great to have you back on.

00:46:47.920 Thank you.

00:46:48.600 Thank you so much for being here.

00:46:50.560 Great to be with you.

00:46:51.880 All right.

00:46:52.160 And coming up, we will have the man who killed bin Laden, Rob O'Neill, on the assassination

00:46:57.340 of bin Laden's successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in Afghanistan.

00:47:03.680 He was in a safe house provided to him by the Taliban, by the very leader, by the very 0.89

00:47:10.220 Taliban leader who wrote an op-ed in The New York Times.

00:47:13.940 OK, that guy who was saying, let's strike an agreement.

00:47:16.800 Too much bloodshed was hiding al-Qaeda's number one man.

00:47:21.720 OK, we'll get into all that with Rob and we'll talk about China and the war threat

00:47:26.520 and the military next.

00:47:31.720 Joining us now is veteran Navy SEAL and one of the most highly decorated combat vets of

00:47:37.320 our time, a true American hero, Rob O'Neill.

00:47:41.300 You may know him as the man who killed Osama bin Laden.

00:47:44.240 He is here to share his perspective on Ayman al-Zawahiri, the military's massive recruitment

00:47:49.200 problems and his new podcast that will be released starting next week.

00:47:56.200 So happy to hear that news.

00:47:57.580 Rob, welcome back to the show.

00:47:59.460 Thank you for having me, Megan.

00:48:00.620 It's always great to be on here.

00:48:01.720 I appreciate you giving some props to my podcast.

00:48:04.220 I'm excited to start that off to have a little bit more of a platform than however many jobs

00:48:09.380 get fired from from tweeting.

00:48:10.560 So this needed to happen.

00:48:14.580 I will download this just as soon as it drops.

00:48:16.560 What's it going to be called?

00:48:17.320 Just like, you know, thoughts from Rob or what?

00:48:19.860 No, we're calling it The Operator Podcast because my book's called The Operator, but

00:48:24.160 it's not calling myself The Operator.

00:48:26.780 It's I think everyone that does anything for a living is an operator.

00:48:30.740 You know, the guys who don't get credit for doing stuff to keep cities running, like the

00:48:34.060 guys who get up at three in the morning to pick up the trash and the plumbers.

00:48:37.500 And then obviously the infantrymen in the army, the people who investigative reporters,

00:48:42.040 people that are out trying to report anything, people that are doing stuff, you know, how

00:48:46.080 about how about stay at home parents that keep the families running and make sure they're

00:48:50.540 up on their education and all that stuff.

00:48:52.220 So it's called The Operator.

00:48:53.540 But again, and not just because of me, I think there's a lot more operators out there.

00:48:57.240 And it's going to be about I'm going to get the bin Laden stuff out of the way, maybe 1.00

00:49:01.200 in the first or second episode.

00:49:02.560 Then, you know, I'm excited to interview people.

00:49:04.460 I love to pick people's brains.

00:49:05.820 I want to see how they're thinking, especially with current current events and everything

00:49:08.760 from from Nancy Pelosi in China to Paul Pelosi in Northern California to whatever's going

00:49:13.640 on in the world.

00:49:14.700 Yeah.

00:49:15.000 Like Paul Pelosi's having a grand old time while his wife's in D.C.

00:49:19.260 and Taiwan and so on.

00:49:20.560 Now, first of all, I like that name, The Operator, because, you know, you call the operator.

00:49:23.540 What does she do? 1.00

00:49:23.960 She helps you like the operators there to help you.

00:49:26.140 That's what a Navy SEAL does as well. 0.98

00:49:27.600 That's what you've been doing for America for a long time.

00:49:30.020 And even after you, you I don't know if we say you left the Navy SEALs, but you retired.

00:49:35.780 Yeah.

00:49:36.180 From that from the military.

00:49:37.280 I don't know.

00:49:37.620 Feels like you're always a Navy SEAL.

00:49:38.720 But OK, let's get to there's so much news that I want to talk to you about.

00:49:42.080 So if first of all, what did you make of Biden's sort of victorious tone when he was talking

00:49:46.940 about, you know, yes, assassinating Zawahiri, Zawahiri, however you want to say it, the new

00:49:52.100 number one after you took out the old number one bin Laden? 0.56

00:49:55.820 You know, it's good.

00:49:56.680 It's a it's a military victory.

00:49:58.220 He gave the command.

00:49:59.000 So you can't take that away from the guy.

00:50:00.160 And it's something that that we liked.

00:50:01.920 We don't want this guy alive.

00:50:03.500 But I just couldn't believe sort of the audacity for him to swagger out there and even mention

00:50:07.800 the word Afghanistan without a look of shame.

00:50:10.960 I know it's it seems like a lot less than just a year ago.

00:50:13.840 We had the worst military blunder or series of blunders in the military ever.

00:50:20.020 And I mean, I can't you know, you know, he did, you know, on paper, gave the call to

00:50:25.900 make this thing happen.

00:50:27.240 And as someone who's basically been wrong in every decision he's ever made, as far as

00:50:31.000 foreign policy in the five decades he's been in Washington, he should be a little bit happy

00:50:34.480 about it.

00:50:34.820 I wish he would have given more credit to the the group of people who found him, the men

00:50:38.760 and women who found the pattern of life of Ayman al-Zawahiri and where he was going,

00:50:42.380 where they knew they would be.

00:50:43.180 And they even took the even even though, you know, the Haqqani Network and the Taliban

00:50:47.340 and Al Qaeda are just ruthless and brutal to us.

00:50:50.720 They took the time to make sure he would be by himself.

00:50:53.100 And they used a missile that a lot of people didn't even know existed, that there's not

00:50:57.720 it's a it's it's designed off a hellfire, which originally was designed to fire from

00:51:02.540 an Apache attack helicopter and destroy enemy tanks.

00:51:04.660 And now they've got it to a point where it'll just cut things apart, split them in pieces

00:51:07.760 and no one inside was even hurt.

00:51:09.400 And which I think is great.

00:51:10.380 You know, I always I would love to minimize collateral damage.

00:51:14.380 I always think that children should never, ever be on a list.

00:51:17.340 And they made a they made a direct effort and it was a complete success.

00:51:21.920 I can't imagine, though, the pain it was to go through to make that happen, because I

00:51:26.840 know even before, you know, I left the Navy in 2012, watching the woke mentality get into

00:51:31.980 places like the CIA.

00:51:33.420 I had guys that were agents in different parts of the world that I won't even mention that

00:51:37.300 were getting out before retirement because I couldn't put up with it.

00:51:39.960 And just that nonsense of what pronouns we use and what we can do, where and how we can't

00:51:43.900 offend and watch out for this.

00:51:45.180 They were able to get this done.

00:51:46.920 And, you know, the buck stops here.

00:51:48.560 The president made the call.

00:51:49.720 So he should be able to say we got him.

00:51:51.760 But, you know, there's a lot of a lot of baggage behind that, too.

00:51:54.280 Mm hmm.

00:51:54.740 Yeah.

00:51:55.000 He didn't want you to do what you did.

00:51:57.560 He had advised Barack Obama not to go in on the mission that you carried out so successfully

00:52:02.220 you and your fellow service personnel.

00:52:04.300 So he he was wrong about bin Laden.

00:52:06.580 This one he was right on.

00:52:08.120 Glad Zahiri is gone.

00:52:09.720 What do you make of the way they did it, though?

00:52:11.020 Because you speak about the you know, this sort of new Hellfire missile offtake offshoot.

00:52:16.040 But there was some criticism by Mark Thiessen and others saying, why didn't we send today's

00:52:22.220 Rob O'Neill in there so we could have gotten some intelligence?

00:52:24.800 You know, I mean, you you told me about all the stuff you guys got during the bin Laden raid.

00:52:28.940 You didn't tell me about all of it, but you told me about some.

00:52:31.220 And we didn't get anything because of the way we did this.

00:52:34.860 Well, this one was a tougher target to take down than the safe house bin Laden was in. 0.55

00:52:40.780 And as I think Trevor knows that on The Daily Show, they should stop calling these places

00:52:43.600 safe houses.

00:52:44.360 They should call them a place where you think you're safe until something happens.

00:52:47.660 But just with how they're surrounded by there's Taliban, Haqqani, Al Qaeda everywhere.

00:52:54.440 There's the police are not on our team.

00:52:56.200 Anyone who was on our team when we were there, if their heads haven't been cut off in front

00:52:59.440 of their families, they're on the side of the bad guys.

00:53:02.160 And just to we don't have bases on the way in.

00:53:04.820 There's nowhere to fuel up.

00:53:06.360 There's nowhere to go.

00:53:07.280 There's not escape and evasion or anywhere to go.

00:53:12.100 And so this is just an easy way to make sure he was off the deck.

00:53:14.440 And, you know, they knew it was him the way I mean, the way they found him had to be

00:53:17.820 somebody got paid somewhere, the almighty dollar or the almighty euro, whatever we were using.

00:53:21.860 Someone knew there was we had a twenty five million dollar bounty on this dude's head.

00:53:24.700 And it just and it goes to show you that someone I'm still amazed that some local on the ground

00:53:32.660 intelligence assets will still work for us because we've proven we don't really have

00:53:35.540 any loyalty.

00:53:36.700 But again, this is just something with it all comes back to and this includes us.

00:53:40.800 We just cannot stay off of our phones.

00:53:42.580 We got to have the phone.

00:53:43.740 And even if Zawahiri wasn't on his phone, I guarantee someone around him was on his phone.

00:53:48.460 Someone's talking about somebody.

00:53:49.820 We it's just they can't.

00:53:50.940 It's like someone had to tag someone on Instagram.

00:53:53.840 You know, hey, look at me.

00:53:54.820 I'm with the new boss or something.

00:53:56.160 And I'm not privy to exactly how they did it.

00:53:58.340 But that's the gist is people.

00:54:00.020 People don't know when to shut up.

00:54:01.540 Probably present company excluded included.

00:54:03.820 Sorry.

00:54:04.120 Well, it's crazy how like the very guy, Al Haqqani, who wrote that op-ed in The New York Times,

00:54:12.500 which led to a lot of blowback on The New York Times, even from its staffers saying,

00:54:16.120 what the hell are we doing?

00:54:17.260 This is pre the the Doha agreement saying, you know, look, we pulled a quote.

00:54:23.720 For more than four decades, precious Afghan lives have been lost every day.

00:54:27.480 Everyone has lost someone they love.

00:54:29.060 Everyone is tired of war.

00:54:30.420 I am convinced that the killing and the maiming must stop, Haqqani wrote.

00:54:34.740 OK, so this guy's saying this Taliban leader, let's let's you know, let's make an end to

00:54:39.940 this.

00:54:40.120 Let's find an end to this.

00:54:41.340 This is the guy who is housing Zawahiri just as soon as we left and they promised we won't 1.00

00:54:48.020 protect anybody from Al Qaeda.

00:54:49.500 We're not going to become a safe haven for Al Qaeda again.

00:54:52.200 Haqqani's like, how about literally this little pink house that I have? 0.99

00:54:55.640 You can come live here with your whole family.

00:54:57.340 You're going to love it.

00:54:58.040 You can walk around like and resume.

00:54:59.720 You can do your terror videos.

00:55:01.640 Welcome to Afghanistan. 1.00

00:55:02.840 And in he moved.

00:55:04.200 Now he's dead.

00:55:04.940 But Haqqani is alive and well. 1.00

00:55:06.440 And the agreement has been breached.

00:55:08.700 What are we going to do about it?

00:55:10.080 And what is all of this?

00:55:11.220 Tell us about our policy.

00:55:13.300 Well, the Doha agreement, we knew there's nothing there except them lying to us.

00:55:17.380 And the word lie gets thrown around quite a bit.

00:55:20.280 He's not big.

00:55:20.860 These guys are really lying.

00:55:21.960 Instead of having diplomats try to do this, they should have had.

00:55:24.540 I was a battlefield interrogator.

00:55:25.980 We would go into Al Qaeda houses in Iraq, Afghanistan, different places.

00:55:29.700 And I was one of the first guys to yank them out of bed as they peed their pants and get into their heads about what they're doing. 0.70

00:55:35.340 And they're going to lie.

00:55:36.400 So they lied during that.

00:55:37.460 The Haqqanis, they've been around since the 70s. 0.99

00:55:40.200 They were the Haqqani network, radical and ruthless. 0.88

00:55:43.420 We were funding them when they were fighting the Soviets in the 80s.

00:55:46.500 You know, our hands are by no means clean on any of this, but we know exactly who they are.

00:55:51.180 They're not going to tell us the truth.

00:55:52.720 And they don't give a rip about human life.

00:55:55.060 These are people that know that, and I'm still not saying they think, they know that when they get martyred, they're going right to heaven to be in their big mansion with 72 houses with a virgin in each and that kind of stuff.

00:56:05.720 They don't care about what happens on Earth.

00:56:07.820 They certainly don't care about the civilians.

00:56:10.560 They don't want the war to end.

00:56:12.460 Haqqani is not just this radical Islamist. 0.98

00:56:15.160 They're also criminals and they love power and they love money. 0.98

00:56:17.380 They can get all of this. 1.00

00:56:18.520 Just get rid of the Americans. 1.00

00:56:19.680 Americans, they know that we don't have the stomach for a long war. 0.97

00:56:23.920 We also don't have the strategies.

00:56:25.060 We don't know how to end a war.

00:56:26.020 The last war we won, I think, was in 1945.

00:56:28.800 And, you know, we unfortunately are the only nation in the history of nations to drop nuclear weapons on another country, which we did.

00:56:35.360 But we don't know how to win it since then.

00:56:36.600 We didn't know what we were doing in Korea or Vietnam.

00:56:38.660 We didn't really know what we're doing in Grenada or Panama.

00:56:40.680 We didn't know what.

00:56:41.380 The first Gulf War, we managed to tell the Shia that, you know, we'll get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and we'll rush right to Baghdad. 0.99

00:56:48.400 And then we didn't.

00:56:49.260 And then he slaughtered a lot of the Shia. 0.99

00:56:51.280 And then right now in Afghanistan, which we had one in 2004, we just stay there for a long, long time.

00:56:56.660 So they just they know that we don't have we're a 24 hour news cycle type of people.

00:57:00.200 And everyone's sick of the war and they're tired of hearing about it.

00:57:02.720 And they're going to forget about Zawahiri next week.

00:57:05.880 And it's just going to it's going to be a no one's going to say never forget until they come across our southern border and attack us ruthlessly again.

00:57:12.240 So Haqqani is going to lie.

00:57:13.520 His whole family is going to lie.

00:57:14.560 And they're they're not living their biggest problem right now, other than ninja rockets coming out of the sky, is it's about 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:57:21.660 That's all that's the only problem.

00:57:22.820 And maybe some doors don't have indoor plumbing.

00:57:24.660 Yeah, the difference was we decided to pretend that we believed them in the Doha agreement and are pulling out and so on.

00:57:31.220 Like we knew what they were going to do.

00:57:32.180 It's not like this is news to any of our leaders that they lie and that they didn't intend to not harbor al Qaeda. 0.83

00:57:37.700 But our president looked at us and told us it was so.

00:57:40.420 And there's to me, that's still bothersome.

00:57:42.640 I still want my president to look at me and say, these are not good guys, but we're tired of being over there.

00:57:47.500 We're going to take some calculated risks.

00:57:48.960 He wanted us to believe that the Taliban was going to abide by its word, that it wasn't going to shelter al Qaeda.

00:57:54.660 Peter Doocy got into this with Kirby, who's both the Pentagon spokesperson and now backup or sort of co-press secretary for Kareem Jean-Pierre, because she's such a disaster. 0.92

00:58:04.520 And then they got pissed off because they're like, why is the white guy covering for the black woman? 0.98

00:58:08.100 It's like it's everywhere, Rob, the wokeness and the nonsense.

00:58:11.040 In any event, here's Peter Doocy trying to get some straight answers from John Kirby on what the hell went wrong to the fact that they were housing Zawahiri in the first place. 0.99

00:58:20.200 Watch it.

00:58:20.480 So we know that the Taliban was harboring the world's most wanted terrorist.

00:58:28.400 You guys gave a whole country to a bunch of people that are on the FBI most wanted list.

00:58:33.160 What did you think was going to happen?

00:58:34.700 I take issue with the premise that we gave a whole country to terrorist groups.

00:58:39.060 I mean, again, I'd I'd I'd I'd encourage you to ask the world's number one terrorist.

00:58:44.020 How is that not giving a country to a terrorist sympathizing group?

00:58:50.000 But if not, giving them permission to have terrorists just sit on a balcony question.

00:58:58.280 I mean, Peter, the way you ask that, it makes it sound like we owned Afghanistan a year ago.

00:59:02.420 It wasn't our country.

00:59:03.560 It was an independent, sovereign state.

00:59:06.460 And the president made a bold decision to end a war that had been going on for 20 years because he believed then and still believes now that our national security interests are best met by meeting the threats of today, not the threats of 2001.

00:59:19.160 And we, you know, I don't want to relitigate the whole war here, but obviously no one anticipated the Ghani government to fall as fast as it did.

00:59:28.160 But we said at the time that as we depart Afghanistan, we're going to keep vigilant.

00:59:34.060 We're going to stay ready and we're not going to let Afghanistan become a safe haven for terrorists who threaten our homeland.

00:59:39.560 And this past weekend, we proved that case precisely.

00:59:43.320 You know, Rob, my first thought is he better watch it because there is no way Zawahiri was the only guy being harbored by the Taliban.

00:59:53.160 And for him to sort of say, hey, we did it.

00:59:55.180 You know, we've done it.

00:59:56.600 We took care of it.

00:59:57.360 We see we've been watching.

00:59:59.080 We took out the guy that it's it's a lot more complicated than that.

01:00:03.260 Oh, it's it's a ton more complicated that someone's going to step up and take power.

01:00:07.460 And he's not going to be as well as famous as Zawahiri, who was not as famous as bin Laden.

01:00:14.120 And eventually, you know, you know, the agency people will keep their eye on the ball, but we're going to forget about them.

01:00:18.900 And Admiral Kirby's got a tough job.

01:00:20.880 He's he's pretty much the only one that sounds like, you know, he knows what he's talking about.

01:00:24.800 But you got to figure when when they're saying we didn't know, nobody predicted the Afghan government was fault would fall as quickly as they did.

01:00:33.820 I wish they would have given me a call.

01:00:35.040 I would have told them that about 30 seconds.

01:00:36.420 That's not a problem at all.

01:00:37.880 If you're I don't care what your special specialization is in defense or mixed martial art, if you can't learn to fight in 20 years, you're not going to stand up to anybody else.

01:00:47.400 And and, you know, Admiral Kirby's trying to to not, you know, tell it like we're not going to lose this country.

01:00:54.140 These are people, Joe Biden included.

01:00:56.720 He's been a senator since, what, the 70s.

01:00:58.520 OK, so these are people in suits.

01:01:01.020 And, you know, God love general officers, admirals.

01:01:02.600 The admirals never been on the ground anymore where there's someone shooting at them.

01:01:05.380 These are people that have had yes men work for them for their entire careers.

01:01:09.480 Joe Biden has had someone tell him exactly what he wants to hear for his entire career.

01:01:13.640 That's why when he gets out there, he can't believe he's still not hiding in the Senate like he did.

01:01:16.780 You know, he now he needs to be expected to make decisions.

01:01:18.800 But these these spokespeople and a lot of these suits up there, just they have someone that wants their job.

01:01:24.860 So they're never going to give them bad news.

01:01:26.720 And that's just the way it works.

01:01:28.580 There are sergeants in the Marine Corps who could have told you what's going to happen.

01:01:34.100 I've trained with these people on the ground.

01:01:35.280 I mean, these are these are people that honestly, when we're say back when we're training them, if we're going to do anything at all tomorrow, say, OK, training starts at 07 tomorrow.

01:01:43.740 They would say inshallah, meaning God willing, if God wants me to be here at seven, I'll be there at seven.

01:01:49.480 Guess what? I guess it doesn't show up.

01:01:50.460 Well, I guess God didn't want me to.

01:01:52.180 So it's it's a different planet over there.

01:01:55.740 It's not like it is here.

01:01:57.060 And the the lies to TV and the stuff that they tell each other, the straight brutality.

01:02:01.420 I mean, if you if you think it's bad here because someone uses some word at a at a at a they them on campus, you should see what they do to women that show that any skin from their ankles underneath their burka. 0.86

01:02:11.660 This is a different place.

01:02:12.820 It's a different time zone.

01:02:14.160 And the people in Washington, you got to figure that.

01:02:16.720 So the beltways in Washington, that's where most reporters are.

01:02:18.840 And the other reporters are up in New York.

01:02:20.600 They all know each other.

01:02:21.540 They only talk about each other.

01:02:22.500 They have no idea.

01:02:23.620 But Afghanistan, here's a good way to describe it. 0.97

01:02:25.680 If you look it up, their time zone is however many hours and a half past ours, because that's as far away from normalcy as you could get there.

01:02:33.940 They're that and a half.

01:02:34.880 So that's why you go in Zulu time. 0.95

01:02:36.480 So at least we we know something is normal.

01:02:39.280 The thing with women is, you know, I mean, I know a lot of people say that's not our concern is a backwards sort of culture that would allow that kind of thing. 1.00

01:02:45.640 But, you know, it's another thing that we were told.

01:02:48.060 We were told by the administration.

01:02:49.620 Oh, you know, they've made promises.

01:02:50.880 The Taliban's made promises on how they're going to treat women while they've been kicked out of public offices. 0.94

01:02:54.460 And they've been kicked out of running businesses.

01:02:55.880 And now there is a mandate that they can only show their eyes.

01:02:58.520 They have to cover their entire body and they have to have escorts wherever they go.

01:03:02.300 And even the Washington Post and not just an op ed, the Washington Post editorial board took aim at Joe Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal in the wake of this news.

01:03:12.780 Right. Like there were some headlines yesterday ripping on more conservative commentators for saying, oh, it was great that Zawahiri was killed.

01:03:18.340 But and mocking those who said, but after, well, you know what?

01:03:21.620 There is a but we need to talk about the but because the fact that he was being given safe haven there to begin with and he wasn't the only one and isn't the only one is cause for concern.

01:03:31.800 Here's how the Washington Post editorial board put it, quote, what was Zawahiri doing on Afghan soil in the first place?

01:03:38.140 Sheltered in a building owned by a top aide, a senior Taliban leader and interior minister Haqqani.

01:03:42.960 This indicates the terrorist chief had Taliban protection.

01:03:46.560 How many more al Qaeda operatives are nestled in Kabul's residential districts?

01:03:51.520 They go on to say after 9-11, the goal was to deny al Qaeda a safe haven in Afghanistan.

01:03:56.040 Now it is back and seemingly safe. And they go on to say the new Taliban regime is no better than the old one. 0.83

01:04:04.040 It's perhaps worse than the one that ruled during the 1990s.

01:04:08.180 This is what Biden's chaotic withdrawal has wrought.

01:04:12.380 That's that's that's a pretty big shift from The Washington Post.

01:04:16.600 Yes, it is. And it would be a glimmer of hope to think that a lot of these journalists are not editorializing in their in their their main story, you know, putting the truth in paragraph 15.

01:04:29.600 I hope they are. I doubt they are. But it almost seems like they're they're they're sort of enjoying they being the reporters.

01:04:36.600 The fact that no one in the Democratic Party is supporting Biden for a second term, which kind of tells you where he is.

01:04:41.800 And they they only need to keep this lame duck going for another two plus years.

01:04:47.220 And that's about it. But if you even if you even claim that you're for human rights, if you could see what happens in Afghanistan, I mean, on a good day.

01:04:56.820 So they don't they don't let girls get educated. Think about the women who got there. 1.00

01:05:00.600 They became doctors and attorneys and judges when we were in power, which they did.

01:05:04.440 And now they're in a place where and it's not just an escort. It has to be a relative and you can't leave the house without a relative.

01:05:10.060 And you're walking behind them. And when they're they're at home, it's not only do they not get to go to school, they don't get it.

01:05:15.320 They don't get to get educated. They don't get to learn. They get to sit in a room.

01:05:19.880 They're in solitary confinement, sometimes with family. And that's that's their existence.

01:05:24.620 Hopefully, hopefully they have the girls grow up to be women who who have children from a neighbor who bought from her bought her from her dad. 1.00

01:05:33.880 That's all they have to look forward to is raising kids. And that's it. And staying inside. It's it's a horrible I mean, it turned from, you know, we we kicked the Taliban's butt. 0.86

01:05:42.140 We kicked Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. We stopped right there. They were the Taliban and Haqqani have always been given safe haven to Al Qaeda. 0.99

01:05:48.440 I mean, I think Zawahiri was in Pakistan the entire time. And if you're worried about why is why is why are they harboring Al Qaeda?

01:05:56.160 I mean, you go to Karachi, where the port is. They're everywhere. Go to the Torquem Gates.

01:06:01.500 That's the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The federally administered tribal area is the only thing they could name it because no one knows what a border is.

01:06:09.600 They don't know where Pakistan and Afghanistan and in China starts. And it's it's it's a different world.

01:06:15.420 If we just went there to we should have gone there and kicked their butts and said, you ever do this again, we're going to kick your butts again. 0.98

01:06:20.940 But instead, we stayed there trying to build roads and schools for people who do not want roads and schools. 0.98

01:06:26.500 And then it doesn't matter what your intentions are or how many languages you speak.

01:06:29.620 If you spend enough time in someone else's backyard, you are the occupier.

01:06:33.580 And it's so it's so backwards again with the with the with the time thing, the time zone thing.

01:06:38.640 They don't they don't know what day it is. They don't care.

01:06:41.560 All they I met guys there when we were when we had I bring up safe house again.

01:06:45.380 We had a safe house that I lived in in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and we were hiring locals because the way to get hearts and minds is to hire locals for if you can hire an electrician, make sure he's a local or a plumber or even chefs and security.

01:06:57.400 The security guys I was interviewing, I was in a back. I remember being in a backyard, a huge opium field, wild opium.

01:07:03.020 And these dudes I'm getting interviewed thought we were the Russians and they didn't know why they were coming to work for us.

01:07:07.820 And then the other guys thought that 9-11 was a direct response to us invading Afghanistan.

01:07:12.660 And those are the educated guys. So we're not going to go in there and give them some Jeffersonian democracy out of nowhere and start making schools.

01:07:20.180 They don't want it. And you can't just force we can't force our way of life on people who don't want it.

01:07:24.880 But now that we that they're learning from us and we're not learning from us, we don't learn from our mistakes.

01:07:30.040 We keep saying this is the way we've always done it. And we think we we made them stronger.

01:07:34.260 The other than a couple with bin Laden and Zawahiri being two of them, pretty much everyone that was in charge is in charge again.

01:07:39.660 Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm delighted to see this guy dead. 0.96

01:07:44.380 You know, my only my only regret is that it was too peaceful. 0.77

01:07:47.920 You know, I mean, dying like that is easy. It's it's a pleasure.

01:07:51.240 I mean, most people would like to die like that.

01:07:53.360 It would be a simple way to die because you get you get torn to pieces, not the way that they would if they had their way with any of us.

01:07:59.700 And I'm talking to anyone listening here. I'm talking to any left or right, gay or straight, black or white person out there listening to this.

01:08:05.640 Any single one of us they caught, they it would take them weeks to kill us because they're going to do in a really, really unpleasant way. 0.91

01:08:11.520 They don't care that you're not at war with them.

01:08:14.520 Yeah, that's right. Not to mention what the Taliban's been doing to little boys, little kids.

01:08:18.720 You know, it's like you'd like to see some torture inflicted on a guy like Zawahiri thinking about the little kids who are on the airplanes that went into the buildings on 9-11-2001,

01:08:26.560 which he was responsible for planning along with bin Laden. So it's like hate to see him die so quickly and painlessly. 0.92

01:08:34.020 But dead is dead. And it's a good thing he's gone. All right. 0.93

01:08:37.420 Let me let me shift gears and ask you about China with our first guest, Josh Rogan, expert on China and all sorts of things.

01:08:42.820 We were talking about China and whether Nancy Pelosi's visit is a good idea is now a good time to be sort of provoking China or favor rattling with China or just upsetting China.

01:08:51.840 And his position was basically can't live our lives that way. China has been infiltrating the United States in many ways, many times.

01:08:57.660 And, you know, we can't worry about provoking them because they're all about sort of this slow takeover.

01:09:03.220 So, you know, like we kind of have to do what we do. However, I was given some pause when I read how strong the Chinese military has gotten.

01:09:11.720 I knew it had gotten strong, but it's like really strong. And ours, which we'll get to in our next segment, is not as strong as we'd like it to be.

01:09:19.700 And we're having real difficulty recruiting new members of it. So before we get to us, let's talk about China, how strong their military is and your thoughts on the Pelosi visit and provocation.

01:09:30.720 Well, China is is very, very strong. And if you look at the file footage, everything from their close in weapon systems on ships that are shooting down planes and missiles to their missile systems, to their Navy and their ships. 0.88

01:09:42.600 And I'm assuming there are a lot of it looks like our stuff. And that's because it is our stuff, because they've got spies all over the place in the United States to include teaching at our universities.

01:09:51.480 So, I mean, they they had a basically the exact same stealth helicopter that we flew into about about Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden within a few months, because our good allies that we give a couple billion dollars to a year, the Pakistanis sold it right to China. 0.77

01:10:04.300 So they've got a powerful military. And again, they don't care about attrition. They'll they'll fight the war of attrition like they have been for hundreds and hundreds of years.

01:10:14.480 Their Navy is strong. They're expanding their fleet by building manmade islands that they're militarizing.

01:10:19.700 And they've got a loyalty that we haven't had in this country, I think, since the greatest generation.

01:10:24.480 It's all about China strong that, you know, they're all about, you know, just talking themselves up. 0.99

01:10:29.300 The president is the emperor, basically. And they really care.

01:10:35.220 And they they've been studying us. They know how to fight us.

01:10:38.440 What's I mean, fortunately for us, we're designed to beat large armies and navies, which we can still do.

01:10:42.760 But we're really heading down a rocky road because they have the land.

01:10:45.800 They have the will. They do have the firepower.

01:10:48.180 And it's almost like one of those. Well, we have defense on ours.

01:10:51.100 You know, they know the U.S. has Reagan is right out there, which is a carrier, which is in a strike group that is that is protected by different ships and frigates and submarines and stuff like that.

01:10:59.120 It's like, well, it's like the question you would ask them, well, what if they shoot one of their anti-ship missiles at the bridge of the of the Reagan?

01:11:06.440 And they'd say, well, we shoot it down. OK, cool. What if they shoot 10,000 of them at the Reagan?

01:11:10.580 Are we going to shoot all of them down? So, I mean, they're they've been they haven't been lying to their youth. 0.99

01:11:15.920 They haven't been lying to their population about what they're going to do in world domination.

01:11:19.780 We were just I don't know why we won't accept it. And it's it's you know, it's everything from who's being paid off to shut up about China.

01:11:26.500 So China's legit. China is probably the biggest threat out there facing us right now. 1.00

01:11:30.260 And the saber rattling thing, it's it's almost spooky to think of how it happened, because it's not like Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, put this on her itinerary.

01:11:39.120 She was she had a call with the White House. Someone heard it and they leaked it, which, you know, there are far too many people with security clearance as far as I'm concerned anyway.

01:11:47.780 And and I've always said, if everyone's special, then no one's special. So you don't deserve to have a top secret compartmentalized clearance, which a lot of people do.

01:11:55.600 But someone from the Democrat Party in the Biden White House heard this and released it.

01:11:58.880 Just who knows why there could be something behind it because they want Pelosi to be shown on her last hurrah as the Speaker of the House.

01:12:05.100 I'm not afraid of China. And I'm the lone woman and person of Congress standing up to the Chinese. 1.00

01:12:10.500 So there's a lot that are scarier about this than just trying to run on their sabers.

01:12:14.520 But they're definitely I mean, they're definitely not afraid of us right now.

01:12:17.600 Why would we like if we wanted to be provocative with China? Why the hell would we use her? 1.00

01:12:22.420 I mean, why wouldn't we demand a full and fair investigation into the court in the covid origins?

01:12:28.880 Right. Like, why would we send Nancy Pelosi, 82 year old Nancy Pelosi over there to go stay one night in the holiday inn? 1.00

01:12:36.180 I don't get it.

01:12:37.340 I don't think that that I don't think anyone could stop her.

01:12:41.480 And I mean, I don't think Nancy, she might be third in line for the presidency, but I don't think President Biden is her boss.

01:12:46.960 And she's going to do whatever.

01:12:48.720 Wait, wait, this is interesting. This is interesting. I actually want to talk about this.

01:12:52.360 I don't believe that somebody could stop her.

01:12:54.340 I realize technically we have, you know, co-equal branches of government, but Biden's not her boss and so on.

01:12:58.900 But like, there is no way Joe Biden, if he were serious about this, couldn't have called her up and said, now is not the time.

01:13:04.740 Right. We we've we're already fighting back, you know, backfilling the war in Ukraine.

01:13:09.000 We can't afford to further alienate the Chinese like we'll get there, but not now. 1.00

01:13:13.760 I believe he could have stopped her. I don't know.

01:13:16.060 I mean, the Democrats are real. I mean, I disagree with a lot of stuff that Democrats do.

01:13:20.180 But what they're really, really good at is party leadership.

01:13:23.080 And I think that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are the ones in charge.

01:13:26.040 I don't I mean, she spent 80 million dollars of taxpayer money. 0.94

01:13:28.980 So she could basically go over there and see the microchip company that they just invested in.

01:13:34.300 It's or distract from her husband's problems. 0.86

01:13:36.920 Oh, yeah. Well, that's happening today, too.

01:13:38.220 We're going to find out about what happens with the new judge that they just replaced at the last second and happened to be a footnote at the end of whatever they're doing.

01:13:44.420 And I'm not an attorney, but I'm smart enough to read the full article, I think.

01:13:48.140 But but I don't think Biden could have stopped her.

01:13:50.160 And I mean, if anyone could have stopped her, it would have been probably Barack Obama and Susan Rice, maybe Ron Klain.

01:13:55.300 But that's about it. I mean, Joe, Joe Biden's what he's got a third dose of COVID the past week and a half because they're trying to think of a way to keep keeping him in a basement somewhere.

01:14:04.720 I don't know. I think there's more to this story.

01:14:06.640 I want to know more because I do.

01:14:07.720 Although there's more to the story.

01:14:08.740 I'm dying to know.

01:14:09.300 And if anyone listened to me, why didn't I didn't know that you could break that news on the on the first episode of The Operator stand by because we have so much more to get to with Rob O'Neill.

01:14:20.740 We are going to get into the important issue of this alarming decline in military recruitment.

01:14:26.740 Do you think it has anything to do with Millie out there talking about white rage and dissing on white families who have been serving the military and serving this country honorably for decades?

01:14:40.880 We'll get into it.

01:14:41.900 We'll get into it.

01:15:11.880 Fear not, because the summer is typically when services recruit the most candidates following high school graduation.

01:15:17.900 So now here we are at in August and political reports that the Army is now at 66 percent of its goal for the fiscal year that ends in less than 60 days.

01:15:27.680 In September, the Navy's at 89 percent.

01:15:30.240 They're still below where they where they want to be and where they thought they would be.

01:15:33.400 And what they are reporting is that the Army has now, for the very first time, offered a quick ship bonus of thirty five thousand dollars in all career fields for new recruits.

01:15:44.220 It used to be twenty five thousand.

01:15:46.600 They've upped it to thirty five thousand.

01:15:48.440 That has helped their numbers.

01:15:49.800 Doesn't get to the root cause of why people didn't want to do it to begin with.

01:15:53.760 What they're saying right now is that in fiscal year twenty twenty, the regular Army got sixty one thousand and change, which was one hundred percent of their goal in twenty twenty one.

01:16:04.520 They got fifty seven thousand.

01:16:06.060 So they lowered the goal, but they met it by about five thousand.

01:16:09.980 And now this year they wanted fifty seven seven thousand new recruits and they're not there and they don't know whether they're going to get there.

01:16:17.580 Having said all this, they testified before Congress they expect to be ten thousand shoulders, soldiers short of the plan to end strength for the fiscal year.

01:16:24.860 The forces are bottom line not going to be as strong as we want them to be.

01:16:27.980 And they are having trouble finding new guys who want to be associated.

01:16:32.120 And it's not just the Army, as I mentioned, there are other branches who are struggling to meet their numbers as well, other than the Marines.

01:16:38.040 And that none of this factors in the layoffs that we've seen in the National Guard and the reserve troops of sixty thousand.

01:16:46.020 We lost who can't go and fight for us now because they wouldn't get the mandatory covid vaccine and absurdity for these best, brightest and healthiest and most fit amongst Americans.

01:16:55.640 Right. They we can't use them now because this is all young men. 1.00

01:17:00.100 Right. They're all whatever.

01:17:01.420 So they can't use the ones we already have and they can't recruit enough to backfill them.

01:17:07.100 Why? There's a number of reasons.

01:17:10.540 The covid vaccine is one of them right there.

01:17:13.240 There are people that would either whether it's true or not, say for religious reasons they didn't want to get the vaccine of their choice, the whole my body, my choice thing.

01:17:22.580 And then, you know, from where I came, it's a Chinese made biological weapon they released on the world to see how we would respond in the military. 0.99

01:17:29.460 In the military, unfortunately, allegedly, allegedly, sure.

01:17:35.220 They in the military, you have to follow orders.

01:17:37.920 When we got in, if we wanted to fight in Iraq, we had to get I got anthrax seven to eleven different times and we got smallpox a bunch of times and a lot of people got sick doing it.

01:17:45.940 But we knew there were orders we had to take them.

01:17:47.980 So the vaccine thing, you know, it's six and one half a dozen the other.

01:17:52.280 Whether you want to do it, how bad you want to fight for your country.

01:17:54.060 But then there there's other stuff that's not necessary.

01:17:57.240 There's the whole you can get a tattoo or not based on a request yet that your chain of command fills out.

01:18:02.380 You can't do it here. You can do it there.

01:18:03.940 Or now you can do it here. Can't do it there.

01:18:06.340 Just dumb stuff like that. 0.96

01:18:08.000 Some guys are just not physically fit. 0.99

01:18:11.240 Some people too much spend too much time with their with their head and their neck bent down looking at their phones.

01:18:16.340 They have no interest in getting out and getting fit.

01:18:18.120 And then a major reason, and I've seen this personally with people who want to join, is that they hear about how woke is taking over, which it is.

01:18:27.260 And it's becoming just such a it just takes up way too much time trying to train people on different woke stuff.

01:18:33.300 That shouldn't matter in the military.

01:18:34.320 They're making too much stuff important in the military.

01:18:36.380 I love that the Marine Corps is maintaining its its numbers because that's what Marines do.

01:18:41.920 And people that want to be Marines are just awesome.

01:18:44.220 And they've always wanted to be Marines in general.

01:18:45.880 But some people just see what's happening in the Army, especially in the Navy.

01:18:48.760 I've seen Navy SEALs that have I don't I know guys that are past 20, but you can do 30, maybe a little bit plus to just retire.

01:18:56.020 Just get out because I'm over it.

01:18:57.140 I don't I don't need to take this sensitivity training before you send me over to fight Al Qaeda if we're allowed to fight them anymore.

01:19:03.100 So there are Marines who would get had been ambushed in places like Afghanistan, gotten really, really long gunfights for even days at a time.

01:19:11.660 And then when they get done, they find they're being charged with war crimes from from their chains of command, things like that.

01:19:17.120 And that's the woke thing's a big one.

01:19:19.840 The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley, getting on there saying he doesn't he just doesn't quite understand white rage.

01:19:25.740 And he's white. So he needs to be told about it, things like that.

01:19:28.040 And just. You know, there's a conversation to be had about all that stuff, but there's also a time and a place for it.

01:19:33.900 And I think with our military, as long as long as we're good to people, as long as we act like good guys and, you know, the good guys and the good women on the battlefield, then it does.

01:19:43.060 A lot of this nonsense online training is not necessary.

01:19:46.800 And a lot of people don't want to do it.

01:19:47.740 I've seen young men be talked out of trying to become CEOs because they heard too much about the sensitivity training.

01:19:52.400 And it's just that we're putting way too much stuff in a room that doesn't need to be filled.

01:19:56.820 Yeah, it's like you. You guys are out on the battlefield, actually shooting bad guys and say, I got him.

01:20:02.260 And you're going to get corrected on. He went by them.

01:20:06.240 Let's get the pronouns correct.

01:20:07.440 He said that. Well, even with I'll get asked a lot about the bin Laden raid itself and they'll say, so did you guys carry cameras on the bin Laden raid?

01:20:15.840 And I said, hell no, because the general doesn't need to know how justice was served.

01:20:20.160 It just was. And all it's going to do, it's the same guy that's sitting on his couch that is correcting Patrick Mahomes on a Monday.

01:20:26.940 Well, if I was there, I sure would have done this.

01:20:28.720 No, you wouldn't have. He would have, you'd have crapped your pants. 0.96

01:20:31.320 That's what you would have done.

01:20:34.140 Some of us have the self-awareness to know that about ourselves.

01:20:37.680 And that's why we didn't sign up for the military.

01:20:40.020 This is I want to get to the fitness thing in a second, because that's interesting to me.

01:20:44.000 You know, the whole fat is beautiful. Fat is fabulous.

01:20:46.080 That's like the new belief in America is like, well,

01:20:49.760 not not like in your firefighter, not in your Navy SEAL.

01:20:53.560 But let's table that for a second, because I want to spend some time on the white rage and General Milley.

01:20:58.400 So we had Victor Davis Hanson on the show yesterday.

01:21:00.700 He's amazing. He wrote a great piece on this and we talked about it just a little, but not enough.

01:21:04.400 And he said this is from his piece about a year ago.

01:21:08.040 Austin and Chairman Milley took time out from assuring Americans that all would be well in Kabul

01:21:11.680 to testify about Congress before Congress about the Pentagon's effort to address white rage

01:21:15.960 in the six month aftermath of the January 6th riot.

01:21:19.400 What was startling about their testimony was the utter lack of data showing any general trends

01:21:26.040 that white soldiers were any more or less likely to practice racial discrimination or chauvinism

01:21:30.600 than other ethnic and racial groups in the military.

01:21:34.020 Goes on to say they seemed entirely oblivious that the U.S. Army depends

01:21:37.800 on generations of family loyalty to the armed forces.

01:21:41.660 Such heritage and legacy considerations have ensured a steady stream of recruits

01:21:45.160 for frontline combat units.

01:21:47.040 In other words, over generations, the same families, drawn from mostly middle class cohorts,

01:21:52.640 have served disproportionately in combat units in Vietnam, the various Iraq conflicts, and Afghanistan.

01:21:57.520 Indeed, if the military was consistent in its racial fixations,

01:22:02.640 it might have noted that white males, the purported targets of the Austin and Milley efforts

01:22:07.540 to ferret out supposed white rage cells died in three wars at roughly twice their numbers

01:22:13.940 in the general population.

01:22:16.720 And here's the last piece.

01:22:18.500 He says, traditional military families are not sending their sons and daughters into the ranks.

01:22:24.340 It is not the danger of combat or the rigor of military life that families fear,

01:22:28.400 but the suspicion that their offspring will be targeted for ideological indoctrination and coercion

01:22:34.200 that is either extraneous or antithetical to military efficiency.

01:22:39.420 Yeah, he's right on the money as usual.

01:22:43.860 And a lot of this has nothing to do with proficiency in the military.

01:22:47.020 Why do you want to complicate things that don't need to be complicated?

01:22:50.520 When I was getting out of the Navy right around 2012, the big thing was repealing don't ask,

01:22:56.580 don't tell.

01:22:57.720 And this is after the Bin Laden raid, about six or seven months after.

01:23:01.320 I'm back in Afghanistan with a room full of people.

01:23:04.060 I'm in there with Navy SEALs, but also combat support.

01:23:07.100 There's men and women there. 0.99

01:23:08.660 And there are people that I know damn well are gay. 0.98

01:23:11.480 And looking around, I'm like, does anyone care if anyone here is gay? 0.98

01:23:16.480 And they're like, absolutely not.

01:23:17.640 All we, we being the person on the ground, all I cared about was if I get shot and I'm

01:23:23.700 wearing all my stuff, can you carry me out?

01:23:25.840 That's it.

01:23:26.800 And it's that simple.

01:23:27.520 And when I went through the front door, I wasn't thinking about George Bush's policies

01:23:32.160 or Barack Obama's policies.

01:23:33.540 I was either thinking about the man or woman in front of me or behind me.

01:23:36.220 Actually, I didn't need to think about the man or woman behind me because I knew behind

01:23:39.900 me was safe because they got my back.

01:23:42.660 And just bringing in this, and it goes back a long way.

01:23:45.860 We're seeing this in every aspect of our life.

01:23:48.240 This is going to education.

01:23:50.380 And what I've seen up close, myself personally, is you only know what you're taught.

01:23:55.520 And if you're taught hate, you're probably going to grow up hating.

01:23:57.840 And it's a shame that we're, we're bringing all this into a military.

01:24:00.600 I just, I wrote a book that way forward with Dakota Meyer.

01:24:03.080 He was, he, I think he was the only, only white guy in his sniper team.

01:24:07.260 And it's, none of it mattered.

01:24:08.700 We don't think about stuff like that.

01:24:09.980 And you don't need to blame someone for something that none of you had anything to do with in

01:24:12.860 the first place.

01:24:13.540 And, and as I mean, a lot of the stuff they're trying to train people and teach them not to

01:24:18.680 do is not happening anyway.

01:24:20.000 And especially in a combat unit, if you're out there doing what the military is supposed to

01:24:24.140 do, or if you're on that ship and everyone from the navigator to the, the people who

01:24:28.140 are, who are tying the knots and the lines of more, the ship and everything, the guys

01:24:31.960 in the tank, the people on the sub, they're not thinking about this, this, this social

01:24:36.660 awareness stuff.

01:24:37.460 And it's just being pushed on everyone at a point where it's what, why are we wasting

01:24:41.200 so much energy on this?

01:24:43.060 The whole, the whole purpose.

01:24:44.260 I mean, you tell me, you've been through it, but it seems to me the whole purpose of

01:24:47.180 military training is to equalize everybody.

01:24:49.560 You know, to get everybody sort of in the same mentality of like, we are equal.

01:24:53.600 We are a team.

01:24:54.320 We work together.

01:24:54.960 Like I'm not really Rob O'Neill from Butte, Montana.

01:24:58.060 I'm a Navy SEAL.

01:24:59.060 I'm a U S Navy SEAL.

01:25:00.580 And so is the guy next to me and the guy on the other side.

01:25:02.800 And this, this messaging does exactly the opposite.

01:25:05.940 It tries to lower the, the, the guys and the gals who happen to have white skin as some 1.00

01:25:11.420 sort of, they need to be shameful because they're full of rage or superiority based on their

01:25:17.320 skin color, which is a lie. 1.00

01:25:19.180 It's bullshit. 1.00

01:25:20.240 And it's really divisive in a group that should not be divided. 1.00

01:25:24.440 They shouldn't be divided.

01:25:25.440 You got to figure the first day of bootcamp, the first day of SEAL training, the first

01:25:29.100 day of any specialized training.

01:25:30.820 The first thing you do is shave your head because there are no individuals here.

01:25:33.740 You're wearing the same uniform because we're all the same.

01:25:36.220 And that, and that's the way we're going to think about it.

01:25:38.200 When we're in hell week, which is five and a half days awake with no sleep, carrying boats 0.88

01:25:42.900 on our head with seven guys, I don't really care what he looks like. 0.98

01:25:45.540 And like I said earlier, I don't care if he's gay. 1.00

01:25:47.600 Is his boat under the head or is his head under the boat? 0.99

01:25:49.920 Can he carry the boat with us and stay with us when we're in combat?

01:25:53.120 As long as he's not hiding behind a rock, well, not for good reason, but cowering and

01:25:58.020 fighting back.

01:25:58.520 I don't care about all the other stuff.

01:25:59.960 It's not going to matter.

01:26:01.020 It's, it is, it is seriously one team, one fight and just adding this stuff in there,

01:26:06.000 you know, at best, it's going to make someone look inward and say, well, maybe this guy

01:26:09.860 does hate me because my skin's different than his is.

01:26:12.020 And that's not the case at all.

01:26:13.000 At least in what I've seen, again, I can't put myself in anyone else's shoes, but I can

01:26:17.240 put myself in a few thousand people's shoes with whom I served in combat.

01:26:20.040 And none of us felt like that.

01:26:21.940 Yeah.

01:26:22.440 The other, the other, uh, theory that Victor had was that the military has really become

01:26:29.000 politicized that, you know, during four years of Trump, we saw extraordinary behaviors

01:26:34.280 from, from some of our top generals and officers like Milley coming out and admitting that he

01:26:40.840 called his Chinese counterpart, uh, around, you know, in the aftermath of the election

01:26:45.180 about Trump, like, you know, he's unstable, but don't worry.

01:26:48.800 I mean, I've got it.

01:26:49.800 You know, we're not going to attack you.

01:26:50.800 Like what?

01:26:51.180 And then some of the op-eds that were written by top generals, um, during the Trump presidency

01:26:56.560 talking about how, you know, they're, um, that I'm quoting from Victor here, uh, Washington

01:27:02.460 post op-ed retired generals, Paul Eaton, Antonio Taguba and Steven Anderson melodramatically

01:27:07.920 without evidence warning the nation of a supposedly impending coup.

01:27:11.720 Should their commander in chief, Donald Trump be elected again in 2024, uh, stuff like that

01:27:17.800 makes the military into a political entity that necessarily rules out at least half of

01:27:24.520 your potential recruiting class, right?

01:27:25.980 It was like these diehard MAGA moms and dads.

01:27:29.540 You think they want to send off their 18 year old kid to go fight for those guys?

01:27:33.700 It's again, politicized because, uh, that's the swamped SDC and that's where the Pentagon

01:27:38.960 is.

01:27:39.360 And so you get a lot of these people that, you know, they're all thinking about their

01:27:44.180 next line of work to, are they going to be, they're going to run for the Senate.

01:27:46.580 They're going to work at Lockheed Martin or Boeing.

01:27:48.020 What are they going to do?

01:27:49.480 And everything from, you know, you know, someone somewhere said something to me about my job.

01:27:55.700 If I don't say this negative about Donald Trump or whatever, we need the military industrial

01:28:00.040 conflicts because, um, we need to keep the contracts going so the people can still get paid.

01:28:05.240 And so I need to, all the lobbying stuff that goes on like that.

01:28:08.340 Someone, I can't take credit for this, but someone tweeted out something along the lines

01:28:13.160 of world war three is don't start worrying about world war three until Paul Pelosi starts

01:28:18.540 investing a ton in Lockheed Martin or something like that.

01:28:21.280 Because other people that make that, I mean, I don't know whoever came with that was really

01:28:23.940 smart.

01:28:24.340 And that's, but I mean, it is, there's so many layers to the onion of, of, uh, when we go 1.00

01:28:30.260 back to Navy SEAL training, we, we, um, master the basics, keep it basic, keep it simple, stupid. 0.99

01:28:36.820 That's our thing. 1.00

01:28:37.520 Keep it simple, stupid kiss. 1.00

01:28:39.080 When, when, when I get asked about, um, you know, any advice in life, um, describe your 1.00

01:28:46.460 life in, in, in, in a, in a phrase, I would say free throws, just the basics get, do it

01:28:51.900 over and over the basics and then repetition, master the basics.

01:28:54.700 There's no reason to make everything complex.

01:28:57.700 Um, a lot of stuff when, whatever you think the answer is, is the answer.

01:29:01.300 And all of this stuff, 95% of the shit you're worried about doesn't happen anyway, but we're

01:29:05.520 so redundant with so many different departments and so many people want that award so they 0.91

01:29:09.160 can get that promotion so they can get the next job.

01:29:11.200 There's just so much out there and like him or not, Donald Trump was against that.

01:29:14.680 He's trying to trim the fat, but God forbid you try to, you know, when's the last time in

01:29:18.340 DC someone said, uh, well, that problem solved.

01:29:20.860 We can disband that department.

01:29:22.180 Not a chance in hell.

01:29:22.880 We're still, we're still taking our shoes off for the TSA because one guy 20 years

01:29:27.160 ago lit his self, lit himself on fire and did it wrong.

01:29:30.560 Yeah, that's exactly right.

01:29:31.960 We're still doing it.

01:29:33.020 You, I mean, your point initially about how we haven't won wars and the disgrace of Afghanistan 0.99

01:29:37.220 being not exactly a morale booster for the current service personnel, nor those we're trying

01:29:43.540 to recruit.

01:29:44.000 It's like, look at the way we got out of Afghanistan.

01:29:45.540 It was a disgrace.

01:29:46.700 Then we had 13 Marines and other service personnel killed.

01:29:49.800 Then we dropped a drone and killed a bunch of people who hadn't actually committed it.

01:29:52.960 I mean, like, then you've got Joe Biden as the commander in chief, who's either asleep

01:29:56.340 or wandering aimlessly.

01:29:58.480 He's not exactly the guy.

01:29:59.260 He's like, I want to go.

01:30:00.000 I want to go take command from that guy.

01:30:01.600 All these things factor in.

01:30:03.480 Um, however, here's the, here's a curve ball for you.

01:30:06.760 Um, okay.

01:30:08.760 This is from, hold on.

01:30:11.020 Okay.

01:30:11.240 This is the Pentagon and the Democrats.

01:30:14.100 Okay.

01:30:14.940 The Gil Cisneros, the Pentagon's chief of personnel and readiness, um, tried to blame the recruiting

01:30:23.120 problems on the abortion ruling on Dobbs.

01:30:28.920 We have concerns that some service members may choose to leave the military altogether

01:30:33.580 because they may be stationed in States with restrictive reproductive health laws.

01:30:39.920 Uh, then, then representative Jackie Spire, Democrat from California added the incentive

01:30:44.500 to women for women not to serve and almost an insidious effort to encourage women to leave

01:30:50.060 the military because these people would like us to believe that abortion has been outlawed

01:30:54.480 in all 50 States in America and it is impossible to achieve.

01:30:58.140 So women are going to be forced to have the babies. 1.00

01:30:59.680 Men are going to be forced to stay at home, taking care of the babies. 0.97

01:31:02.700 No, one's going to be able to have an abortion if they want, if they don't want a baby. 1.00

01:31:06.420 And this is really the problem with those missing 10 plus thousand thoughts on that.

01:31:12.700 Uh, yeah, I was having a great day today.

01:31:14.680 And right now I think I'm dumber than I was when I woke up for hearing that, that, that 0.99

01:31:19.340 is so ridiculous. 0.95

01:31:20.340 The, the, um, you know, again, I'm not an attorney, but I know that if it's not directly 0.70

01:31:24.360 in the constitution, it's referred to the States.

01:31:26.060 That's all that happened.

01:31:26.740 And just today we saw, um, a state vote for it to keep abortion.

01:31:30.800 The last thing on your mind is, uh, where I'm going to get stationed because of an abortion, 0.84

01:31:37.220 uh, law.

01:31:38.800 Now, I mean, don't get me wrong.

01:31:40.060 Maybe if you're a, a young sailor and there happens to be a lot of clubs around, maybe

01:31:45.060 you're thinking about it more or something like that, but I guarantee it's not that woman's 0.87

01:31:49.020 reproductive rights or there's, I, there are no women out there that didn't join the Navy 1.00

01:31:53.720 because they can't get an abortion in the state. 1.00

01:31:55.180 They make it, they don't even know where they're getting stationed.

01:31:57.160 They don't even know where they're going.

01:31:58.220 There's literally not one.

01:31:59.380 This is a lie. 0.99

01:32:00.240 And they're not caring that they're, no, this is ridiculous. 0.98

01:32:02.700 And this is just, again, more politics trying to prove a political point that, um, abortion 0.76

01:32:08.340 has got everything to do.

01:32:09.220 It's like someone's parachute didn't open.

01:32:10.840 That's the most violent case of COVID death I've ever seen.

01:32:13.620 What are you talking about? 0.97

01:32:14.820 This is, you know, not, obviously not you, but this is just some ridiculous stuff that people 0.91

01:32:18.380 are, are just, uh, they're trying. 0.69

01:32:20.700 Yeah.

01:32:21.080 I, I wish I consider myself to have a silver tongue.

01:32:24.800 I'm having a tough time coming up with any way to talk about this.

01:32:27.340 Finding the correct box in which to put that defense.

01:32:30.000 Now, before I let you go, what, what does your shirt say?

01:32:33.080 Cause I can only see the very top on the camera.

01:32:35.100 My shirt says front toward enemy.

01:32:37.660 And this is what it says on the front of a Claymore anti-personnel mine in the military. 1.00

01:32:43.140 And this again is keep it simple, stupid. 0.99

01:32:44.980 This is 800 ball bearings, but behind it are C4 and you want to point it towards the enemy. 0.99

01:32:51.680 What's the easiest way to do this?

01:32:53.260 It says front toward enemy.

01:32:54.660 And on the back, it says back.

01:32:57.540 So I tell people the shirts that I sell, this is not a shirt promoting death.

01:33:01.680 It's simply an instruction manual on how to wear a shirt.

01:33:04.960 Here's the front face the enemy.

01:33:06.620 That's, this is why the windshield in your car is bigger than the rear view mirror.

01:33:09.920 Keep going that way.

01:33:10.820 Face your fears front toward enemy.

01:33:12.520 It's great on a mine.

01:33:13.400 The mines work well.

01:33:14.120 If you can do this, keep moving forward.

01:33:16.220 You're going to do better.

01:33:17.440 You're going to do better with it.

01:33:18.860 And it's such a little plug on RJO apparel.

01:33:22.320 I also made a mug that says you're on mute for when someone's on mute on a zoom call.

01:33:25.960 Just hold it up.

01:33:28.840 RJO apparel.

01:33:29.960 I love it.

01:33:30.560 I'm buying it.

01:33:31.500 And always interested to hear what you know.

01:33:33.760 I don't think you need to buy anything, Megan.

01:33:35.420 I know a guy who couldn't give you the hookup.

01:33:37.760 Okay, excellent.

01:33:38.800 I'll take it.

01:33:39.420 I'm not too proud.

01:33:40.440 What a pleasure.

01:33:41.140 Thank you again.

01:33:41.720 Thanks for your service.

01:33:42.460 Thanks for your thoughts.

01:33:43.100 Absolutely.

01:33:44.400 Thank you for having me.

01:33:44.860 Anytime.

01:33:45.100 I want to tell you that tomorrow we have a special episode we've been working on for

01:33:48.780 some time to prepare for you that takes a deep look at the rise in teens who are detransitioning 1.00

01:33:57.220 from being trans, right? 0.86

01:33:59.540 The mainstream media does not like to feature these folks.

01:34:03.220 They like to pretend it doesn't happen.

01:34:04.620 It does happen.

01:34:05.640 And it's severely traumatic.

01:34:06.980 And it's the reason why the medical establishment should not be pushing transition so quickly

01:34:12.740 and ardently on our young people.

01:34:14.660 We're going to get into it.

01:34:15.380 You don't want to miss it.

01:34:16.420 In the meantime, download the show so you don't miss it.

01:34:18.660 At Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher.

01:34:20.100 Also go to youtube.com slash Megan Kelly.

01:34:22.220 And thank you so much for being with us.

01:34:26.540 Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.

01:34:28.660 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - August 03, 2022

＂Experts＂ Mislead on COVID Origins, and Biden's Afghanistan Baggage, with Josh Rogin and Robert O'Neill ｜ Ep. 366

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